GMA asking ASEAN to cooperate on ‘terror’? Even our Senate doesn’t!

Columnists like this yokel find themselves struck in a rut. We keep on scolding, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. We might as well replay our old sermons again and again ad infinitum and ad nauseam like the "Hello, Garci" tapes.

Once again the media, especially the usual radio-TV stations are announcing a "coup." Once more the US is declaring that Washington is against it. Perhaps someday a coup might really take place – totally surprising those who "announced" it. Will it take place tonight or tomorrow? Stupid things sometimes happen, but right now it’s not likely.

It’s not really difficult to mount a coup, or mutiny, or military takeover. There are always enough Messianic nuts or ambitious putschists-who-would-be-Consuls, or kings, or whatever. But after any coup succeeds, what do the "victors" or the junta, or the jerks with tommy guns do next? Most capitals of the world would cut the Philippines off immediately, we’re not that important to them or to their economies. Why should they deal with a bunch of tinpot dictators in ill-fitting uniforms? The despot Marcos at least had the sheen of some legitimacy, as an elected President, when he masterminded his own military takeover under cover of martial law.

A kudeta? A military mutiny? Imagine every street-corner sergeant or cabo (corporal) ruling their neighborhood barangays. A junta would merely be waiting for the next stronger group of military wannabes or "saviors" to overthrow it. A revolving door government, whether in dress uniform or mufti, is the last thing we need.

Those who persist in planting those coup-coup rumors are villains in our society, for they have no patriotism, only ambition for themselves. Even if they’re only joking, or merely wish to be irritating, they give the outside world – whose investment and goodwill we need – the unsavory impression that Filipinos are both mentally and politically unstable. Another Haiti perhaps, not in the Caribbean but in the Pacific, plagued by voodoo politics.

We Filipinos may not take those annoying coup rumors seriously any more. The boy has cried wolf far too often. But what I fear is that neither do other countries take us seriously – any more.

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For all the hyped-up press releases emanating from the Palace and from the GMA Road-show in Kuala Lumpur, one wonders what those endless, repetitious "summits" of leaders are truly accomplishing. Week after week, La Presidenta packs up and flies off to another "summit," meeting among the conferees many of the same foreign leaders and heads of state she met someplace else (as in Busan, South Korea) less than a week and a half before.

The way the number of "summits" is escalating, more and more nations are running out of a traveling bag, by Presidents, prime ministers, and sultans on the run. I think we ought to endorse a study of how decisions are made affecting politics and the economy when reached under the influence of jet lag.

No sooner was the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit over, than GMA had to step out of her hotel room to rejoin her 10-fellow-ASEAN partners, plus other leaders, for the East Asia Summit sponsored by Malaysia, whose main aim, it appears, is to keep out the United States. First there was the Sunday Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area Summit (BIMP?).

In the conference ongoing, the ten members of the ASEAN have been conferring with the representatives of Japan, South Korea, China, India, Australia and New Zealand. They can brag that the conferees represent more than half the world’s population. One is puzzled, though, how such a huge and amorphous group can ever reach a collective decision. Oh well. Lofty speeches and too much talk often get lost in translation anyway.

I notice that President GMA, in a reprise of what she said in the UN Security Council, called on ASEAN leaders to more broadly cooperate with other countries and regional groupings to combat terrorism.

I hate to have to say it, but that’s just another round of jaw-boning. How can La Presidenta speak about the anti-terrorist fight when she can’t even get the Senate and House (the Senate particularly) to pass an anti-terrorism law? Congress is adjourning for the holidays it seems, without getting that vital measure passed – while the Senators are bent on terrorizing GMA instead. Now Senate President Franklin Drilon Jr. and Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson are piously asserting for the nth time that the Palace must investigate the ISAFP (Intelligence Service Armed Forces of the Philippines) for having wire-tapped the President, or "confess" that she herself had ordered the wire-tapping. Gives you a sense of what you used to exclaim when you arrived when a movie was half-through in the old days. After running through the rest of the movie and then going on to view the beginning and first part, you got to a point when you realized, "This is where I came in." Nowadays, you usually have to view a movie on schedule, from beginning to the end. The Drilon-Lacson zarzuela on the ISAFP wire-taps, or alleged wire-taps, reminds me though of "this is where I came in." We’ll be moaning over Garci and those wire-taps, as the old Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev so colorfully put it, till the shrimps learn to sing.

As for the mock-horror over the "revelation" that the so-called girl friend of TSgt. Vidal Doble (a certain Marietta Santos) could so skip blithely in and out of the top-secret precincts of the ISAFP to witness the spy operation in which Doble and 13 other agents had bugged GMA kuno, and Garci, salamabit. Everybody knows that "intelligence" and "agent" are becoming an oxymoron. In this archipelago of bahala na, do you know anybody who can keep a secret?

Whether Doble double-dealed by tapping his commander-in-chief, and sold the tapes for P2 million to NBI agent Samuel Ong (where did he get the money?) is either truth or science-fiction. Since nobody believes anybody in this mess, we’ll never get to the truth. For that matter, nobody believes Garci any more, so why was there so much fuss over getting him back?

If you ask me, it was wrong for Garci to have disappeared months ago. It was a mistake, on the other hand, for him to have reappeared. His original ploy of getting away or going underground into hiding had almost succeeded. He was on the verge of being forgotten, an expiring issue, a "scandal" of which the public had grown tired. Remember the old saw, full of ancient wisdom: Out of sight, out of mind. Then, sanamagan, he resurfaced. Just in time to spoil everybody’s Christmas – including his own.
Just a minute: let me correct myself. Not everybody’s Christmas. Most of the people seem to have tuned out of the irritating, repetitive Garci story. Who cares about Hello Garci? For most folks, intent on enjoying Christmas, it’s Goodbye.

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As for the war against terrorism being urged on ASEAN by GMA – ASEAN can’t even prevent its own member-state Myanmar (Burma) from keeping the pro-democracy heroine and Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under insolent lock and key – she proposed that RP, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei regularly hold joint patrols in border areas affected by kidnappers and Islamic militants. C’mon. The areas most affected by kidnappers and Islamic militants are in the Philippines.

While we insist on holding high-profile peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels, signing draft agreements with them in Kuala Lumpur, terrorist training camps continue to operate within their claimed "territory" in central Mindanao – threatening neighboring states like Indonesia and Singapore with Mindanao-trained bomb and terror specialists of the JI stripe.

While singing the Anvil Chorus of peace, the MILF goes on recruiting and training – not for the next Southeast Asian Games, surely, but for some armed sport quite obviously.

Are you blind? The Three Wise Monkeys of Nikko temple in Japan were known for "See No Evil, Hear no Evil, and Speak no Evil."

We are no wiser than those monkeys.

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There was a fascinating item on the front page of yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. A four column headline said: "China Overtakes U.S. as High-Technology Supplier."

The item, datelined Beijing by David Lague, quoted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European OECD, as stating that after almost a decade of explosive growth in its electronics industry, "China has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest supplier of informational technology goods," which include "laptop computers, mobile phones and digital cameras. . ."

The report shows that China’s exports of information and communications technology increased by more than 46 percent to $180 billion in 2004 from a year earlier, easily outstripping for the first time US exports of $149 billion, which grew 12 percent from 2003.

The Paris-based OECD also disclosed that China has already "come close" to matching the US in the overall value of its trade in information and communications technology – China’s combined exports and imports of such goods soared to $329 billion in 2004, from $35 billion in 1996. In the same period, this type of US trade expanded at a slower rate from $230 billion to $375 billion.

What did anybody expect? To take one specific example, Joseph Lim from Manila (who’s our compadre, husband of Dr. Elena Lim) spends most of his time in Shenzen and Xiamen. His factories in Shenzen have 4,000 employees, if I’m not wrong. But it is in Xiamen that Joseph is a junior partner of the Chinese government, with a small percentage of ownership, but a much greater gross output. In the Xiamen plant, no less than 20,000 workers turn out cellphones – one of whose most popular brands is "AMOY-sonic." (Amoy is the old name of Xiamen, and most Filipino-Chinese taipans are descended from immigrants from that coastal city, or the surrounding Fujian – i.e. Fookien – province).

Imagine 20,000 workers producing AMOY-sonic cellphones daily by the gross ton. That’s the sweet smell of success.