Get Real : A Perfect Place to Start Anti-Graft Drive

By: Solita Collas- Monsod
Inquirer News Service Editor's

Note: Published on page A12 of the January 8, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE CHAIRMAN of the Board of Trustees of the corporation gets a P100,000 monthly "allowance." The Treasurer of the Board and the Chairman of the Management Committee each get P70,000 a month, also in "allowances." These, aside from their per diems of P20,000 per board meeting, and all fixed by various resolutions of the board.

Must be a pretty profitable, private corporation, yes? Well, we're talking about the APO Production Unit Inc., which does printing for government offices, particularly security printing. But whether APO is a private corporation or a government-owned or -controlled one depends on whom you are asking, and for what purpose.

Gerry Sicat, one of the original incorporators of APO (it used to be called APO-Neda) says that it is a government instrumentality. So does the Department of Justice in an opinion (No. 52, S.1975) rendered by the late Catalino "Mac" Macaraig when he was acting justice secretary. So does the1997 Manual of Procurement of the Commission on Audit ("the APO is not aprivate entity but a government instrumentality").

The chairman of the board of trustees was the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) Director General for many years, until Neda asked that APO be either attached to another agency or privatized. Since then, the chairman and members of the board have been chosen by the President of the Philippines (not a direct appointment but expressed in an "It is my desire..." letter that is carried out).

On the other hand, when he was the Ombudsman, Aniano Desierto dismissed a case brought against some APO officials by the labor union on grounds thatthe Ombudsman had no authority to rule since APO was a private entity. He apparently changed his mind later and considered it a government instrumentality, but I'm not clear on this.

More recently, I have been given to understand that the Privatization Management Office assumes that it is a private corporation that was taken over by government (based on the fact that it was under the AssetPrivatization Trust, or APT) because it was unable to pay its debts to the Philippine National Bank. Which brings us to the second issue. Is APO so profitable that it can afford such largesse to its board of trustees? And there, the answer is unambiguous. It has been losing heavily (although its labor union says it would be profiting, if it were run properly instead of being treated as a milking cow).

I asked Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin what she knew about APO, and she told me that: the latest APO financial statements she saw showed heavy losses and an industry study shows that APO is one of the highest-cost printing enterprises. Not to make too fine a point about it, APO is in deep s__t financially. And this has been going on for a long time. It borrowed heavily to buy new machines and equipment (importing them tax free, as a government entity), and as early as 1987, was already deep in arrears, and was never able to get out of it, in spite of the heavy demand for its services. By the time it was transferred to the APT in 1996, its accumulated unpaid loan account amountedto P210.896 million.

Why has it not been able to turn itself around?

An example, taken from the findings of a Commission on Audit (COA) special audit, makes the answer obvious (one has to read all the COA special audit reports to fully appreciate the extent of mismanagement): checks amounting to P16.6 million were issued to two non-employees who were allegedly close relatives of the APO internal auditor as payment for their "fair incentive" commissions for 1996 to 1998. That's a lot of money.

However, the commissions were paid for sales to government agencies (e.g.,Philippine Postal Corp., Bureau of Internal Revenue, National Statistics Office, Department of Trade and Industry), which are really captive markets. No special effort is required to get these orders, particularly because the National Printing Office doesn't have comparable equipment. But guess what? The board of trustees at the time apparently allowed commissions to be paid anyway.

There were additional complications. It seems these two relatives who earned the P16.6 million over a three-year period were full-time employees in a private company and had separately applied for and received from the Social Security System salary loans for P9,000, duly deposited in their savings accounts, during the period when they were supposedly earning all those millions. Neither of their bank accounts showed any deposits of the checks they supposedly received as commissions.

Pretty damning evidence, if you ask me. Yet, the internal auditor involved still holds the same position up to now. As a matter of fact, all but one ofthe seven APO officials charged long ago with irregularities are still very much in power and holding the most crucial positions: general manager, accounting, auditing, sales.

Just last year, the general manager was again the subject of the same kind of complaint by the labor union, a complaint which, it seems, was dismissed by the Board of Trustees, even as some members of the board were not furnished a copy of the reply of the general manager.

Is it any wonder that the company is in a deep financial mess?

Yet in spite of this, the Board of Trustees gives itself allowances that would make a private corporation envious.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has called for "urgent change." She has also pledged to "take executive action to break the culture of corruption. " Well, APO is a perfect place for her to start.

AUPWU Manila, VCA Holds Dialogue Re: Casuals, Representation Issues

The All UP Workers Union Manila and the Vice Chancellor for Administration Dr. Arlene A. Samañiego holds a dialogue today at around 9:00 AM regarding the status of casuals in the the U.P. Manila's Central Administration, the Academic Units and the National Institutes of Health and on representation right of the union.

The following issues/measures were clarified/agreed upon:

1. All casuals in the campus will be given a one (1) month renewal appointment for the month of January 2005 only as a temporary measure to have a continuous service of all casuals (without gap in service) while the National Budget and or a 2005 Internal Operating Budget has not been approved. Meanwhile all units will be enjoined to already prepare for budget clearance, the five (5) month appointments (February - June 2005) of all casuals under them.
2. There will be no termination that would happen during the transition period except with cause, such as those serving their respective administrative penalties and with unsatisfactory performance evaluation. On such cases, it is understood that the casual concerned had already been forwarned in advance of non-renewal of appointment.
3. All casuals were normally given with six (6) months appointments.
4. The Administration will renew the representation right of the union in the Advisory Board of the UP Manila Creche and Learning center.
5. The representation right of the union on all other committees related to employees welfare and benefits in which it was not yet given such right will be looked into by the Vice Chancellor, such as the Personnel Effectiveness Audit Committee, the UP Manila committee in-charge of studying the implementation of DBM Circular 2004-3 (Conversion of Positions Performing Staff/Non-Technical Functions; and other similar committees.
   
   Months earlier, the chapter had already allerted the National Executive Board on the existence and on-going work of such committee that exist at the UP System but without even consulting the union as embodied in our CNA.
6. The union seeks to have representation on such committees in order to advance the interest of the rank-and-file administrative employees even in the formulation of internal guidelines in our campus especially on the fact tha the government will be using such Circular/s to retrench employees; or euphemistically - streamline the bureaucracy.
   
   Our previous blogs already expresses the union's position on such "double speak" by the government under Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

New Features Added on our Web Log Pages

Beginning today, December 13, 2004, we have added a chatter box at our web log pages: "The UP Workers" and "Sa Ospital ng Bayan" (URL: http://aupwu.blogspot.com and http://aupwumla.blogspot.com, respectively). This is to encourage our constituency in the hospital, the constituent university and the UP System to post their comments, reactions or suggestions online. And also as a mean for online chatting.

Words of caution though: "Please limit your chat topics to work-related and union-related issues."

The chat box maybe found near the counter box at of the default page of each wep log pages, at the left narrow module for "The UP Workers" and at the right narrow module for the "Sa Ospital ng Bayan."

It also include provisions for universal reosurce locator (url) for our constituents who have their own web pages, web logs, xanga, etc., by which the union may respond to their queries and comments or simply we may able to know them better by visiting thier own web sites.

Travesty of Human Rights

Streetwise
by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo

Today is human rights day. Two nights ago, Marcelino “Ka Marcing” Beltran, president of Alyansa ng Magbubukid sa Tarlac, a survivor of the Hacienda Luisita massacre last November 16, was gunned down outside his house in barangay San Sotero, Sta. Ignacia, Tarlac.

Today is his birthday; the peasant leader would have turned 52.

Just three days earlier, Ka Marcing gave a team of lawyers his eyewitness account of that infamous day when striking farm and sugar mill workers, their families and supporters, were mowed down at the picket line by automatic gunfire, resulting in the confirmed deaths of seven and the wounding of more than a hundreds others. He was articulate, fearless, agitated, his words tumbling from his mouth as he narrated how he miraculously escaped the hail of bullets even as he helped carry the dying and the wounded to safety, away from the bloodthirsty police, military and private security forces who relentlessly pursued the fleeing strikers and rallyists with their guns, truncheons and boots.

Ka Marcing had no enemies save those he wittingly or unwittingly created by his unswerving leadership of the militant peasant organization in Tarlac as well as the larger alliance of peasants and farm workers called Alyansa ng Mag-uuma sa Gitnang Luson (AMGL).

Given this background and the circumstances of his death, it is reasonable to assume that his killing is intimately related to the latest labor disputes and festering land problem at Hacienda Luisita.

To date all that the Arroyo government has done about the massacre is to wash its hands of any responsibility. The undisputed fact however is that it was DOLE Secretary Pat Sto. Tomas’ assumption of jurisdiction over the labor disputes in a so-called “strategic industry” such as the Cojuangco-owned sugar plantation and mill, her return to work order and her deputization of both the police and the military to break up the picket line provided both the legal cover and the overwhelming firepower that triggered the massacre.

The latest statement of Mrs. Arroyo on the matter is revealing in its emptiness: “The labor department is doing its best to obtain a fair and peaceful settlement of the Hacienda Luisita dispute. Labor problems must be solved at the negotiating table. All parties must act responsibly so that tragedies can be averted.”

Completely oblivious is she, the President, to whom all Cabinet secretaries are directly accountable, and the Commander-in-Chief, the sole authority with the power to call out the troops in case of an outbreak of so-called “lawless violence,” to the facts of the matter. That management had engaged in unfair labor practices by illegally dismissing nine of the officials of the United Luisita Workers Union (ULWU) and replacing the union president with a man they had handpicked. That management then refused to negotiate with the legitimate leadership of the farm workers union and was deadlocked on the demands of both the farm and azucarera workers. That the PNP had earlier attempted three violent dispersals using truncheons, water cannons and tear gas but were turned back by the sheer number and assertiveness of the strikers and their supporters.

Witnesses’ testimonies and video footages of the Hacienda Luisita carnage point to premeditation and intent to kill on the part of the government security forces, private security guards and a number of eskirol. But all these are apparently mean nothing to Mrs. Arroyo and her cordon sanitaire who knows what it is that she wants to hear.

It appears that Mrs. Arroyo wants only to hear excuses and to find scapegoats for her government’s disastrous policies and overall criminal complicity with the greedy, heartless and ruinous ruling elite in this country and their rapacious foreign partners.

She is especially fond of using the New People’s Army (NPA) and other revolutionary forces as whipping boy for everything that is wrong with her government and the ruling system. In her speech on the occasion of human rights week she couldn’t resist taking a snipe at the so-called human rights abuses of “insurgents and terrorists” rather than taking a critical look at her government’s own human rights record. She takes the lead and provides the cue to her Cabinet who think nothing of pointing to the communist rebels as the masterminds and provocateurs whether it be cases of labor and peasant unrest, violent dispersals of protest mass actions, indiscriminate bombings and other alleged terrorist acts up to and including opposition to new, onerous taxes and unconscionable debt servicing in the face of unprecedented financial crisis, protest over massive use of government funds for Mrs. Arroyo’s reelection bid and assorted “destabilization plots” such as the ones hyped by her own generals to cover up rampant corruption in the AFP.

The President’s latest charge that the NPA are “illegal loggers” and, ergo, are mainly responsible for forest denudation and the wasteland that has become of several provinces in Luzon in the aftermath of the typhoons that hit the country is ludicrous except to the most rabid anti-communists like her who will believe anything evil of the revolutionary movement. The President’s propensity to blame the NPA for anything and everything that bedevils her regime ironically shows up the inutility of her brand of governance: it takes a major catastrophe for her clueless DENR Secretary to finally raid a handful of sawmills with illegally cut logs; for her to set up a new anti-illegal logging task force with an initial P100 million budget to determine who have been scalping the already bald mountains; and for Malacañang to declare a suspension in all logging activities minus the ones exempted by the DENR secretary.

The bad habit of passing the blame to an entity, the NPA, that the government cannot run after except through vilification and psywar campaigns and failed counter-insurgency programs, results objectively in a situation where the real culprits get away with their high crimes. Those who are really culpable can only include the Arroyo government, one that has not exhibited the moral courage to admit its failures nor the political will to institute the barest of genuine reforms. Worse, it is a government that looks the other way when the perpetration by state forces of gross human rights violations is fast becoming a hallmark of its insecure rule.

As President and Commander-in-Chief, Mrs. Arroyo’s hands are bloodied by the murders of the Hacienda Luisita protesters, the assassination of Ka Marcing Beltran and all other leaders of the exploited and oppressed masses, and the unabated killings of human rights workers.

Similarly, she must also be held accountable for the devastation and massacre of entire communities by her government’s criminal negligence in allowing destructive commercial logging to go on unabated until the mind boggling man-made catastrophe that followed the fury of nature’s typhoons.###

Uncle Sam Has His Own Gulag

Behaving like the Soviet secret police won't make America safer, Eric Margolis says.

By ERIC MARGOLIS

12/05/05"Canoe.Ca" -- The Lubyanka Prison's heavy oak main door swung open. I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB's notorious Moscow headquarters -- a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name. When they referred to it at all, they called it "Detsky Mir," after a nearby toy store.

After interviewing two senior KGB generals, I explored the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin's secret police, on which the orders were signed to murder 30 million people.

Descending dimly lit stairs, I saw some of the KGB's execution and torture cellars, and special "cold rooms" where naked prisoners were beaten, then doused with ice water and slowly frozen.

Other favoured Lubyanka tortures: Psychological terror, psychotropic drugs, prolonged sleep deprivation, dazzling lights, intense noise, days in pitch blackness, isolation, humiliation, constant threats, savage beatings, attacks by guard dogs, near drowning.

Nightmares from the past -- but the past has returned.

According to a report leaked to the New York Times, the Swiss-based International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture against suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second Red Cross report was delivered to the White House last summer while it was trying to dismiss the Abu Ghraib prison torture horrors as the crimes of a few rogue jailers. According to the report's allegations, many tortures perfected by the Cheka (Soviet secret police) -- notably beating, freezing, sensory disorientation, and sleep deprivation -- are now routinely being used by U.S. interrogators.

The Chekisti, however, did not usually inflict sexual humiliation. That technique, and hooding, were developed by Israeli psychologists to break resistance of Palestinian prisoners. Photos of sexual humiliation were used by Israeli security, and then by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib, to blackmail Muslim prisoners into becoming informers. All of these practices flagrantly violate the Geneva Conventions, international, and American law.

The Pentagon and CIA gulags in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan have become a sort of Enron-style, off-the-books operation, immune from American law or Congressional oversight.

Suspects reportedly disappear into a black hole, recalling Latin America's torture camps and "disappearings" of the 1970s and '80s, or the Arab world's sinister secret police prisons.

The U.S. has been sending high-level anti-American suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and, reportedly, Pakistan, where it's alleged they are brutally tortured with violent electric shocks, savage beatings, drowning, acid baths, and blowtorching -- the same tortures, ironically, ascribed to Saddam Hussein.

Protests over this by members of Congress, respected human rights groups, and the public have been ignored.

President George W. Bush just named Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, his nation's highest law officer. As White House counsel, Gonzales wrote briefs justifying torture and advised the White House on ways to evade or ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Grossly violating the Geneva Conventions undermines international law and endangers U.S. troops abroad. Anyone who has served in the U.S. armed forces, as I have, should be outraged that this painfully won tenet of international law and civilized behaviour is being trashed by members of the Bush administration.

Un-American behaviour

If, as Bush asserts, terrorism suspects, Taliban, and Muslim mujahedeen fighters not in uniform deserve no protection under the laws of war and may be jailed and tortured at presidential whim, then what law protects from abuse or torture all the un-uniformed U.S. Special Forces, CIA field teams, and those 40,000 or more U.S. and British mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan euphemistically called "civilian contractors"?

Behaving like the 1930s Soviet secret police will not make America safer. Such illegal, immoral and totally un-American behaviour corrupts democracy and makes them no better than the criminals they detest.

The 20th century has shown repeatedly that when security forces use torture abroad, they soon begin using it at home, first on suspected terrorists, then dissidents, then on ordinary suspects.

It's time for Congress and the courts to wake up and end this shameful and dangerous episode in America's history.

Copyright © 2001, Sun Media Corporation

Butas na Batas ng Gubat

ni: Tata Raul G. Funilas
UP-Diliman
Disyembre 2, 2004

Dumayo ang bagyo ng siklo’t
Tinahak ang landas ng Pilipinas,
Mabugso ang nabuyong alimpuyong
Nagwasiwas at naglaglag ng mga patak;
Hinahalo ng umaalipatong ipu-ipo
Ang wasak na gubat na umiiyak.

Bumaha ang luhang saganang sagana,
Hindi naawat ng mga nautas na ugat
Niyong kahoy na pinulpol ng ungol
Ng mga tampalasang halimaw na humalihaw
At gumanot sa panot na panot nang bundok.
Niyong mga nagkamal ng makakapal na yaman

Nalunod at inianod ang punggok na himutok,
Nawasak ang pangarap sa butas na batas ng gubat.

© 2004 Bulatlat ■ Alipato Publications

SC Reversal on Mining Act is Treason: KPNE

PRESS RELEASE/December 1, 2004
Reference: Clemente Bautista, 09185539682

The Supreme Court reversal on Mining Act is Treason, PGMA's hand seen in court's decision.

The Kalikasan People's Network for the Environment (KPNE) charged as "treason" the act of Supreme Court justices who voted to reverse the court's earlier decision on the constitutionality of the Philippine Mining Act. It also hit the SC for being blind to the fact that nowhere in R.A. 7942 as well as in existing mining agreements of the government with foreign mining firms is it guaranteed that the government retains control of mining operations as mandated by the Constitution.

"The SC acted in blind haste, most probably succumbing to the treasonous agenda of the Arroyo government to sell-out our mineral resources to rapacious foreign transnational mining firms in a desperate move to revive a moribund industry whose collapse is directly the result of an anti-Filipino mining policy of a pro-mining TNC government," Clemente Bautista, KPNE National Coordinator, said.

"This only goes to show that we cannot rely on this government to even uphold the remaining nationalist provisions of our Constitution. This government is totally bereft of a moral authority to govern for and in behalf of the Filipino people," he added.

Bautista said that the SC decision appears to be in line with the latest moves of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in lowering the initial capital requirements for Foreign Technical and Assistance Agreements from $50 million to $4 million.

Gerardo Gobrin of the Kalipunan ng mga Katutubong Mamamayan sa Pilipinas (KAMP) stressed that not only will the SC decision result into a flood of mining TNC operations in the country but in human rights violations against indigenous peoples and peasant settlers, where most mining applications are located, as well.

The KPNE also warned of more devastating natural disasters like flashfloods and landslides once the government's thrust to revitalize a liberalized mining industry as a result of the SC decision takes full swing. Bautista, however, warned the government, saying the people will not take this sitting down. "As the government and the elite in the mining industry and mining TNCs celebrate, they might as well brace for a stronger resistance from an enlightened citizenry who have had enough of the duplicitous and treasonous agenda of the government."