Philippines Navigates Political Turmoil Amid Economic Stability Concerns

I woke up Tuesday morning to news of a big rally to support a senator facing plunder charges, and who supports Vice President Sara Duterte. While the rally appeared peaceful enough, it creates another destabilizing event at a time when the global economy is still unstable and awaiting a resolution to the four-month old Middle East war that unfortunately US President Trump appears to be flip-flopping on, while our current government and economic officials try to keep our economy on track. In my Monday column, I expressed hope that the private sector and economic officials were finally trying to sync their actions and keep the economy humming. I actually failed to include in my column at the start of this week, my positive observation that some local government and DPWH officials are earnestly working on addressing the decades-old flooding problem along Araneta Avenue that regularly gets submerged in more than six feet of dirty, garbage-laden creek water that makes that area impassable during heavy rain. I noticed that several massive flood-control tunnel projects had finally been completed, and further along down near the intersection of Del Monte Ave, similar massive groundwork was also being done. It seemed to validate this current administration’s determination to rectify the damage inflicted by flood control corruption projects that started all the political destabilization. I had hoped that we could at least stay on an even keel while geopolitical events continue to roil in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe between Ukraine and Russia, in Sub-Saharan Africa and even in our own backyard of Southeast Asia in Myanmar. I was even thankful that because we are an island nation we would, at least, not be easily invaded and involved in localized conflicts in our region. I guess those behind the surprise gathering early Tuesday morning along EDSA need to capitalize on the global turmoil to further their own local agenda and effect another political upheaval after the Senate merry-go-round just a couple of weeks ago. To hell with economic stability, let the entire country suffer instead. Just focus on strife. Sanay naman mga Filipino dyan. We are so used to this up and down, one step forward, two steps backward. Scare away foreign investors by making it appear that the current government is unstable. Just this Monday, at the Monday Circle breakfast forum at the Westin Manila Hotel in Ortigas, our topic was focused on national security. The discussion included national security and the foreign players involved, and the more insidious economic effect that has already crippled our economic growth. Our speakers were Prof. Joshua Espeña, a tenured lecturer in International Relations and Strategic Studies at PUP. He holds a PhD in Political Science and was a scholar at UP Diliman. He has done some work with the AFP’s Office for Strategic Studies. Our other guest speaker was Regine Cabato, a freelance journalist who has done work with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and has worked for The Washington Post and has likewise done some work for the BBC and American networks ABC and CBS. My takeaway from the discussion with both Professor Espeña and Regine was simply an affirmation that the Philippines is an unfortunate pawn in the race to gain economic dominance and control vital mineral resources that over the years we have been either clueless or brainwashed into thinking should not be disturbed to preserve our pristine environment, while being carefully conditioned to rely on foreign imports. Perhaps in the past, when the technology was not yet available and extraction and production methods were crude and harmful both to humans and the environment, it seemed logical to just import better quality coal from our neighbor Indonesia, while labeling our wet coal from Semirara Island as environmentally harmful. It was okay to mine our gold, silver, nickel and copper resources, but local and foreign environmentalists warned us about the danger of putting up processing plants to refine our nickel and copper minerals. Just sell it to foreign refineries, to the Indonesians and Chinese, pretty much like what the United States was doing, thankful that the Chinese were willing to sacrifice the health of some of their people to refine the vital minerals, and actually build what is now their powerhouse status in cornering the rare earth minerals, which apparently is extracted from unprocessed nickel of which we are the second biggest producer. We likewise opted not to develop and fully harness our then plentiful geothermal resources and instead relied on powering our industries with the cheap crude oil from the Middle East. It is during my lifetime that I personally saw and even wrote about these events, always hearing about the need to protect our environment and let the dirty refining work be done by other countries. I was part of that generation that was “brainwashed” into believing that American-made goods were of better quality, that Philippine-made goods were inferior and that we really don’t need to produce our own since we could always rely on the US-made products, and eventually on Japanese products and then on the cheaper Taiwan-made products, and eventually on the plentiful and cheap China-made goods, but never on “made in the Philippines” products. It turns out, as our Monday Circle speakers made me realize, even then the US “influencers” were already doing their work on us, perhaps not in the same way that the current and future generation is being convinced. Nowadays, the Chinese influencers are likewise using even more sophisticated ways to get us to rely on them while we tragically still fail to rely and protect our own resources instead of just selling our precious marine, agriculture and mineral resources to countries that are happy to keep us dependent on them. Source: Philstar Business