Bulatlatan
Written by: Ka Dennie Mapatalang
Published: Bulatlatan, March 1, 2010;
Source: Bulatlatan snapshot at the Internet Archive;
Markup: Simoun Magsalin.
At last, Ang Bayan came up with a clearer political stand against Right opportunism within the life-and-death struggle for national freedom and democracy.
Says its February 26, 2010 editorial: Elections “are not genuine democratic processes and do not reflect the people’s real interests. They are virtual circuses for the people’s entertainment. They exploit the people’s poverty and beguile them with money and other material things in order to win their votes. The exercise of suffrage is used as an adornment to make the process appear democratic. For as long as the people are made to pin their hopes on reactionary elections, the vast majority will continue participating in these exercises.”
We would, however, point out what the great proletarian teacher Chairman Mao Zedong taught us the application of the mass line. For a Party guided by the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the constant task of the proletarian vanguard is to unite the “small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.” Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Vol. III
But what do we see in practice? Supposedly progressive electoral parties aligned with the Left such as Bayan Muna hitched its wagon to a die-hard electoral party of bourgeois compradors and landlords, the Nacionalista Party of Manuel Villar.
Proletarians cum turncoats Satur Ocampo, Liza Maza and the whole lot of Bayan Muna and the so-called Makabayan alliance and the party organizations supporting them are uniting the “intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements” not with the proletarian vanguard but tailing the comprador-landlord party!
Look at Ocampo’s statement: “What clinched the alliance was the positive response of Sen. Villar and his party to the people’s issues that we presented to all the presidential frontrunners. Of all the serious candidates for president, it was Sen. Villar who engaged us in earnest discussions on a common platform and program. The result is a document titled ‘Response to the People’s Concerns’ that will serve as our basis for working with the NP in the 2010 elections and beyond, hopefully under a Villar presidency.”
What the tandem is doing is to convince the intermediate and backward masses that the landlord-comprador Villar who collaborates with Bongbong Marcos has agreed to a platform calling for the confiscation of landed estate and free land distribution among the masses of poor peasants? Ocampo and Maza must be delusional!
This is simply not lagging behind the consciousness of the backward sections of the masses, but worse, a capitulation to a reactionary diehard. And having done that, is dragging the advanced section not to march forward but to march in step behind the intermediate sections.
But even the AB editorial promotes Right opportunism. Says the article, “It opens up opportunities for the forging of alliances with parties and candidates who are against the Arroyo clique and puppet rule and who are ready to cooperate in advancing the people’s basic interests and alleviate their heavy burdens.”
The contention is that Villar is more anti-Arroyo than, say, the landlord Aquino and his family who publicly called for the puppet Arroyo’s resignation and removal from the presidency. Where was Villar in 2008 during the mammoth rallies against the corruption of the US-Arroyo regime over the ZTE-NBN deal?
The AB editorial said “parties and candidates even from the opposition who have committed serious crimes against the people must be exposed and lambasted. Those who blatantly advocate policies that trample on the people’s rights and interests must be exposed, so with parties whose programs are worthless and do nothing but hoodwink the people. Parties that will further impoverish the people and attack their revolutionary movement once they gain power must be condemned.”
So, where is the exposure that AB, the Philippine Revolutionary Web Central, Bulatlat and the other Right opportunist blogs like that of Mong Palatino of Villar’s landed interests? The veteran united front cadres Ocampo and Maza have corrupted the upcoming new blood of revolutionaries into following them down the road to perdition of Right opportunism and capitulation.
Where for example is the exposure, let alone the opposition, to the 450 hectares of prime land near the Ninoy Aquino International Airport that the landlord Manuel Villar has acquired, as well as the additional 5,500 hectares landgrabbed from mostly agricultural lands in various parts of the country?
Documents obtained by the liberal bourgeois newspaper the Philippine Daily Inquirer exposed the conversion of many Villar landholdings from prime agricultural to residential use was landgrabbed without the required clearance even from the pro-landlord Department of Agrarian Reform.
How anyone in his right mind would expect a bureaucrat capitalist like Villar with assets of $2 billion in 1996, according to Forbes magazine, would go against his landlord and comprador bourgeois class interests?
On many occasions, Villar’s C & P Homes disregarded land conversion laws and outrightly converted acquired landholdings into subdivision projects. A source close to Villar admitted that in DAR surveys “(Villar landholdings) were in fact agricultural at the time the CARP law was enacted” and that “in real property tax declarations filed prior to June 15, 1988 by the original landowners, the Villar housing projects were previously declared as agricultural.”
C & P Homes insiders insisted “there’s no need to secure a DAR clearance because we already have substantial compliance (with the other requirements). All we do is strengthen secondary documentation, not the primary one which is the DAR clearance.”
“We made it a point to complete the documentations, like the waivers of farmers. Kung wala nang tenants, in effect wala na ring complainants,” the source added.
Another executive of a Villar firm said they had devised a number of sophisticated schemes that “allowed us to go around the laws.”
One of them is by executing a deed of absolute sale (DAS) with the original landowner but leaves blank the exact date of the transaction. The document will neither be notarized nor presented to the Register of Deeds for registration and issuance of the land title.
Either the landowner or an attorney in fact (usually a Villar lawyer or a senior company official) will file with DAR an application for conversion of the particular land. Once the conversion order is secured, the DAS is brought out, dated accordingly and presented to the Register of Deeds for the corresponding transfer certificate of title or TCT.
Or securing the “cooperation” of the municipal assessor, municipal planning and development officer and the town’s register of deeds in changing the description of the agricultural property and declare it instead as residential, commercial or industrial, and pay the corresponding real property tax.
In the Visayas and Mindanao where C & P Homes Inc. is called Communities Philippines Inc., the Villar real estate empire is slowly flexing its muscle with several housing projects.
Once president of the puppet republic, Villar would impose a class dictatorship of his faction of the reactionary ruling class that the great Lenin described as “unlimited power based on force and not on law.” Arch-bureaucrat capitalist has shown a propensity for violating even the laws of the ruling classes of landlords and compradors against his ruling class rivals and against the basic revolutionary classes and sectors.
It’s not too far-fetched to imagine Villar’s use of counterrevolutionary force of the reactionary state against progressive forces that would make Arroyo’s impunity on extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances look like Girl Scout activities.
For helping bring to power Villar, the Right opportunists and capitulationist Judases all the way from Utrecht to their Makabayan cohorts would have completed their morphing from revolutionaries to full-blooded counterrevolutionaries. They would have incurred blood debts on their hands.
Ka Dennie Mapatalang