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Empire at home

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Empire at home

Contribution to the International Conference for Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

Quezon City, Philippines
19 July 2013

PANEL 1. Economic, political and social crisis globally and in the Philippines, and implications on peace and human rights in the Philippines

By KATHRYN POETHIG, M. Div, PhD.
California State University, Monterey Bay

Empire is in the details

Despite so many books on US Empire, there is little focus on how people in the United States see the connection between their nation, power, and the rest of the world. Catherine Lutz argues in “Empire is in the Details” that we have to understand the cultural effects of Empire at home and its entangled relationship to Empire abroad, this linked to geopolitical macro analysis.1

American anti-militarist feminist Cynthia Enloe tells us to have a feminist curiosity, to connect IR analysis of “hard power” (geopolitical, nation-state based analysis) to the margin – women, youth – in places where hard power intersects with their ‘soft’ inconsequential power (this is not Joseph Nye’s the soft power of diplomacy). Enloe does this brilliantly in Nimo’s War, Emma’s War where she juxtaposes stories of Iraqi women with American women in the military.2 She uses their stories to refract gender and geopolitics– how the conflict spills into a beauty salon in Baghdad or the changed life of the wife of a disabled US soldier.

I teach Global Studies at CSU Monterey Bay to children of Mexican migrant agricultural laborers in the remnants of Fort Ord. We still drive by crumbling barracks, our department’s offices are in the former ordinance building, so we confront history and transitions of US militarism, Mexican transnational labor, and the new impact of globalization in every classroom. Empire shows up everywhere at “home”.

This is my job – to help Gen X, Y, Z connect the dots between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the context of global power asymmetries. This is not the world of their grandparents, and hardly the world of their parents, some of whom are still working in the fields as they head to college. They have lived out in a different way the notion of globalization as the increasing the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital and people. They know that we are all inextricably connected -distant events can be significant elsewhere, and local events can have global consequences. 3

They experience the world as polycentric. They travel over the border in many ways – phones, secret bodies, and Skype. But their political consciousness is different than the activists of my generation, maybe disempowered, maybe just different. They live in a world of information overload and willed ignorance.

Some of our students visited and participated in the Occupy sites in San Francisco or Oakland. They helped to “occupy” affluent Monterey. They latched onto the meme “we are the 99%”. They spoke of being already entrapped in thousands of dollars of student debt. Working two jobs to stay in school. Some living at home, but most were also ambivalent; wanted to succeed, felt they had no power to change anything and didn’t relate to the mechanisms of change available to them. These are the working class citizens or green card holders of the Empire.

Let me turn for a moment to their 21st century US Empire in an era of globalization.

They live in a US Empire slogged in debt, losing its wars (some students are vets from Iraq and Afghanistan), a nation now in overreach, and leaking secrets all over the place while it tries to gather more. While America is still a singular superpower, its economic, military and political dominance has also been perforated with interlocking dependencies, the myth of a Westphalian sovereignty, where rulers had power over their states, was a fiction in the first place, as any “post colonial state” knows.

Manuel Castells would say in the last thirty years of globalization, the world of nation-states (space of places) has been replaced by a world of networks (space of flows).4 Networks have no centre, consisting of nodes and linkages. He argues that this “network society” of global capital structured around financial and information flows are a brand of capitalism unlike its predecessors. Castell’s notion of network state is a response to political challenges of globalization, for which the European Union is a good example. Just one economic crisis affects the whole.

This modern state-centered political system is under considerable stress. As Susan Strange argues, the global economy affects state power – the state is in retreat.5 Thus states areless effective on security, economic stability, law enforcing — matters that the market has never been able to provide. States must also seek to manage and control new technologies and technical systems that skirt borders.

They are unable to effectively manage within their borders increasingly cross-territorial problems such as computer viruses, drugs, human trafficking, terrorism, and the bird flu.

Human rights and peace regimes have also dramatically changed in what they mean and the institutions that monitor, support, and fund their practices. Since 1945, there is an increase in multilayered global and regional governance. International government organizations have increased: from 37 to 300 within 70 years. In 1907 there were 371 International NGOs; by 2000 there were 26,000. Furthermore, there is increased legitimacy of international law (ICC) and human rights, but also new forms of humanitarian – and militarized – intervention.

Empire of Surveillance

The US military has globalized in new ways since September 11th 2001. “National Security” has, since the Cold War, become the overarching interest with which the U.S. approaches the world. The 21st century’s “war on terror” broadened to cover covert operations, rendition, surveillance, and drone missiles.

In the last decade, new layers of security, secrecy, and cyber capability suggest a new kind of arms race disproportionate to the threats of terrorism. The U.S. intelligence community’s bloat has been staggering. As Dana Priest writes,

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. 6

American military is taking on humanitarian action while policing is more militarized.The Washington Post documents some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies that work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence. Almost one million people hold top-secret security clearances, and as we well know from Edward Snowden, not all are comfortable with what they monitor.

Empire of Ignorance

Let me return to my students again.

In my feminism-militarism class, students must fill in a map of the Middle East, to identify Afghanistan and the seven countries bordering Iraq. Few know where to find the two current wars that will cost the U.S. alone an estimated $3-4 trillion.We talk about the history of Iraq, its women’s movement, we distinguish between Sunni – Shia, the relationship of pilgrimages sites in Iraq to the Shia of Iran. We try to unpack the Orientalist notion of barbarian irrational Other and turn the mirror on ourselves through Abu Ghraib.

They have not seen the world carved up into US Military Commands like the sections of an orange. Or, even though they are going to college on a former military base, and likely live near one, realize that there are 4,135 military installations in the US, at least 800 globally. Most do not know that U.S. spends more money on its military than the next 17 countries combined – 48% of the global pie.

How can this be possible, this will to ignorance in such a space of information flow and militarism? This ignorance is not my students alone, it belongs to all of us, it is institutionally useful. Lutz argues that this “will to ignorance” is produced by 65 years of the national security state. Furthermore, the empire’s redistribution of wealth has made possible an “anesthesia of affluence.”7 Spivak calls non-innocent ignorance or “sanctioned ignorance.”8

There is, as Bruckner so eloquently argues, a dangerous “temptation of innocence” when entitled societies feel victimized.9 Monika Sturken states that, “the disavowal of the United States as an empire has allowed for the nation’s dominant self-image as perennially innocent.”10 She maintains that Americans are “tourists” of their own history. As Tourists of History, Americans are detached from their/our own complicity in America’s imperial violence elsewhere. They (we) respond to domestic terrorism at the WTC and the Oklahoma Federal Building, the recent bombing in Boston with an increased culture of paranoia and fear,11 and turn to a frenzied need for consumer comfort, a “complex relationship of mourning and consumerism and the economic networks that emerge around historical events, including events of trauma.”12

This is absence of the messy, horrific implications of military violence in American social imaginary is what Slavoj Zizek a Slovenian philosopher would call American fantasia, the inability to grasp the REAL.13 Zizek reflects on the increased virtualization of our daily lives in advanced capitalist states. America’s utilitarian de-spiritualized universe de-materializes “real life” and transforms it into fantasy. In his early Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he flipped the standard logic that the “real” crashed into American society when the World Trade Center collapsed. Instead, America woke up to its fantasy — third world horrors as spectral now at home.

This capitalist fantasia breeds paranoia. Sturken notes an increase of security systems in houses. More recently, we are alerted to an increase in gun purchases, what has been called a “civilian armaments boom”. All this is evident in the case of Trayvon Martin, African American teenager, who was shot by George Zimmerman in “self defense”. Zimmerman was recently acquitted due to “stand your ground” laws of Florida.

These are stories we tell that link the domestic to its international logic: two men in a gated community awash with foreclosed homes whose stories link us to matrix of militarism, paranoia, perforated rights, and divided rage. It’s a case in which we see the logics of national security (stand your ground as pre-emptive strike), fear of hooded invaders, killed as they resist arrest, because of this “civilian armaments boom”. The Empire abroad is the mirror image of the Empire at home.

Conclusion

When we consider Empire in the details and connect it to its superstructures, the inconsistencies of our analysis is more evident, and the messy lives of “the people” and their dignity is honored. As an anthropologist, Lutz is arguing that more ethnographies should

listen both to those who benefit and those who suffer in the imperial relationship; to develop comparisons of the United States with other empires – btw capitalism and commodification, to consider its malleability, weaknesses and self-images.6

But the ISMs have already done this – meet people whose lives are contorted by structural, political and physical violence. Ask how these intimate localities can be set in – empirical tales of empire.

As Hardt and Negri remind us,“…truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will.”

NOTES

  1. American Ethnologist Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 593–611, p 587.
  2. Cynthia Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War, University of California Press, 2010)
  3. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
  4. See Manuel Castells’ Information Age trilogy: The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Second edition 2000); The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Second edition 2004); End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. (Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Second edition 2000). See also his latest Aftermath: the cultures of the economic crisis. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2012)
  5. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State?. The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  6. Dana Priest, Top Secret America, Washington Post, July 19, 2010
  7. Lutz, Ibid. p 587
  8. Gayatri Spivak notes this sanctioned ignorance is a result of the “epistemic violence” of imperialism which obfuscates the Western dominance which brought about what she calls “the worlding of the West as the world” in which Western interests are naturalized as global concerns. Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues. (New York & London: Routledge, 1990). She goes on to say that American exceptionalism and Eurocentrism are ideologies that place their citizens as the centre of the world, who must citizens must ‘help the rest’ and that “people from other parts of the world are not fully global” Spivak, A Conversation with Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak: politics and the imagination, interview by Jenny Sharpe, Signs” Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(2) 609-24.
  9. Pascal Bruckner, The Temptation of Innocence – Living in the Age of Entitlement. (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000).
  10. Marita Sturken, Tourists of history: memory, kitsch, and consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 7
  11. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
  12. Sturken, 4.
  13. Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. (New York & London: Verso, 2002).

Neoliberalism and Imperialist Crisis: Impact on human rights and peace

ICHRP Secretariat
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Neoliberalism and Imperialist Crisis: Impact on human rights and peace

Keynote Speech at the International Conference on Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

Quezon City, Philippines
July 19, 2013

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle

We, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, express our warmest greetings of solidarity to all the participants of the International Conference on Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines. We express special appreciation to those who earlier joined the International Solidarity Missions to various regions of the country in order to observe  the human rights situation, interact with the people and report to this conference.

For their success in organizing this conference and the International Solidarity Missions, we congratulate the International Coordinating Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights) and the Ecumenical Voice for Human Rights and Peace (EcuVoice).  Like the Peace for Life network, we are proud to have cooperated with them in promoting the said events and encouraging participation.

We support this conference as it aims to assess, analyze and evaluate the current state of human rights and peace in the Philippines, understand the roots of the problems of human rights violations and the civil war, seek solutions to these problems and arrive at unity on a plan of coordinated campaigns and actions to demand and help realize respect for human rights and attain a just peace.

As keynote speaker on the opening day of the conference, I wish to discuss the impact of neoliberalism and the crisis of global capitalism on human rights and peace in the world and in the Philippines in general terms.  I am mindful of the fact that the keynote speaker tomorrow shall focus on the human rights situation in the Philippines and shall speak about it in  greater detail.

I. Neoliberalism as Attack on Human Rights

The concept of neoliberalism or “new liberalism” was put forward in 1938 by a group of bourgeois intellectuals, which included Alexander Rustow, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  They defined it as upholding “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state.”  And they presumed and misrepresented monopoly capitalism as the free competition capitalism that existed in most of the 19th century.

They adopted from Adam Smith the idea that the invisible hand of self-interest in the free market results in the common good. But they obscured or denied his idea that labor power is the creator of new material values and social wealth. They also believed that the economic freedom of the entrepreneurs spells political freedom for the entire society. In effect, they imposed the class interest of the monopoly bourgeoisie on the working class and the rest of the people.

They considered sacred and inviolable the right to private property in the means of production and put this at the core of the rule of law.  They vigorously opposed state ownership of any means of production and state intervention in the economy. However, they considered the state as an instrument to provide the private capitalists with the means and opportunities for profit-making and capital accumulation , including the expansion of money supply and credit, tax cuts, contracts with the state, subsidies, investment guarantees and other incentives.

The concept of neoliberalism arose at the time of the Great Depression, when the crisis of overproduction in monopoly capitalism had given rise to fascism and the imminence of World War II. But the neoliberal intellectuals deliberately ignored the reality of monopoly capitalism and the class struggle between the big bourgeoisie and the working class. They took the supraclass petty bourgeois viewpoint of standing above and against both fascism and socialism and in effect made monopoly capitalism the golden mean.

In the aftermath of World World II, Friedrich Hayek (author of the notion that socialism is the “road to serfdom”) regrouped the neoliberal intellectuals and politicians.  Together they became quite active in the anticommunist crusade during the Cold War but remained marginal relative to other bourgeois intellectual trends, until the US monopoly bourgeoisie adopted neoliberalism as the systematic way to scapegoat the unionized workers and the government, respectively, for wage inflation and for social spending as the cause of the phenomenon called stagflation.

Milton Friedman, who described himself as a monetarist and free marketeer, was the most prominent economist pushing for the adoption of neoliberalism as the official economic policy of US imperialism. He called for unfettered “free enterprise” and a self-regulating “free market” and for allowing the monopoly bourgeoisie a free hand to accelerate profit-making and capital accumulation. Together with the other neoliberals, he prescribed  wage freezes  and cutbacks on social spending as the solution to the problem of stagflation.

Friedman harped on the notion that solving the problems of stagnation and inflation and growing the economy was just a matter of manipulating the money supply and interest rates. He played the starring role in the academic and media campaign to attack Keynesian economics and to blame the working class for wage inflation and for supposedly unsustainable government social spending.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan adopted the neoliberal economic policy in the US and Margaret Thatcher  did likewise in the UK. This policy became known respectively as Reagonomics or supply-side economics and Thatcherism. While it blamed the working class and government social spending for stagflation, neoliberalism obscured and denied the real causes of stagflation, which were the worsening crisis of overproduction as a result of the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan; and the rapid rise of US military expenditures due to stepped up military production, overseas deployment of US military forces and the wars of aggression in Korea and Indochina.

Reagan and Thatcher used neoliberalism to attack the working class and the rest of the people and violate their human rights.  They and their successors in power have engaged in forcible executive actions and pushed legislation to press down the wage level, suppress the trade union and democratic rights of the working class and cut back on government social spending. They have reduced taxes on the corporations and individual members of the monopoly bourgeoisie and provided them with all the opportunities to make superprofits and accumulate capital.

They have carried out  the flexibilization of labor or destruction of job security by replacing tenured jobs with temporary and part-time jobs; the liberalization of investment, trade and finance; the privatization of public assets; deregulation at the expense of the working class, women, children, the society at large and the environment; the denationalization of the economies of the underdeveloped countries; and the increase of overpriced contracts in war production and guarantees and subsidies for overseas investments.

The entire world capitalist system has followed the neoliberal  economic policy set by the  US and UK. Even the social democratic, bourgeois laborite and neorevisionist parties have succumbed to the neoliberal economic policy. This is given the fancy name of “free market” globalization. It is in fact imperialist globalization, allowing the imperialist firms and banks to do their utmost and worst in exploiting the working class in the imperialist countries and all the  working people, especially in the underdeveloped countries.

Following the neoliberal policy dictates of their imperialist masters, the puppet states have treasonously surrendered political and economic sovereignty and natural resources to the imperialist powers under the signboard of globalization. In the case of the  Philippines, the Marcos fascist dictatorship and succeeding pseudo-democratic regimes have escalated the exploitation of the workers and peasants.  They have also escalated repression in a futile attempt to stop the rising resistance of the people.

In pursuing the neoliberal policy, they have engaged in gross and systematic violation of human rights.  They have violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,  the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other related conventions.  They have violated those human rights embedded in the Geneva Conventions, its protocols and related conventions under the rubric of International Humanitarian Law.  They have wantonly violated the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, which has been mutually approved by the Manila government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippine in 1998.

The neoliberal economic policy has come to be known since 1989 as the Washington Consensus (coined by economist John Williamson) because it has been designed and enforced by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the US Treasury Department, joined by the World Trade Organization since the 1990s. The Washington Consensus imposes on the underdeveloped countries the following prescriptions supposedly for development: fiscal policy discipline, redirection of public spending away from industrial development and self-reliance, tax reform to benefit foreign investors at the expense of the people, market-determined interest rates, competitive exchange rates, import liberalization, investment liberalization, privatization of state enterprises, deregulation and legal security for property rights.

Under neoliberalism, otherwise known as market fundamentalism, the monopoly banks and firms accelerated superprofit-taking and accumulation of capital in the centers of global capitalism. As a result, the crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation by a few has recurred at a rapid and worsening rate.  In a futile attempt to override the recurrent crisis of overproduction and the tendency of the profit rate to fall, the monopoly bourgeoisie has resorted to the tricks of finance capitalism and in the process has spawned a financial oligarchy with absurdly inflated financial assets.

But the repeated expansion of the money supply and credit, the creation of derivatives in astronomical amounts and the generation of one financial bubble after another in order to raise the profits and overvalue the assets of the monopoly bourgeoisie have resulted in recurrent and ever worsening crisis of overproduction. More than one hundred economic and financial crises of varying scales and severity have occurred in the world capitalist system in the last three decades of neoliberal economic policy to the increasing detriment of the working classes and the people worldwide.

The severest crisis has burst out since 2007. It is comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s with far more destructive political and social concomitants and consequences for the entire world. It has generated state terrorism or fascism and furthered imperialist wars of aggression. It has exacerbated the suffering of the broad masses of the people under the terrible conditions of global depression and the intensification of exploitation, impoverishment, oppression and all kinds of degradation. The gross and systematic violation of human rights has spread on a global scale.

The imperialist powers and their puppet states have proven themselves futile at solving the ongoing supercrisis because they cling dogmatically to the neoliberal economic policy. They believe that so far in history this is the best policy adopted by the world capitalist system to give the monopoly bourgeoisie and the financial oligarchy the opportunity to rake in superprofits and accumulate capital. They wish to perpetuate this scourge to humankind. It is therefore the compelling duty of the people to fight against this policy and against the system that has imposed it on the people.

II. Imperialist Crisis Leads to Repression and Wars

The New Deal and Keynesian policy did not really solve the crisis of the world capitalist system, which took the form of the Great Depression and which led to World War II. State-led pump priming through public works  to provide employment, and stimulate consumption failed to put the economy in equilibrium, with the recovery of production.  It was war production that revived the US economy and enabled the US to become the most powerful economic and military  power.

In the aftermath of World War II, the US emerged as the No. 1 imperialist power.  It had ground for capital expansion because other capitalist powers had suffered economic devastation. Thus, it could maintain a high standard of living from 1945 to 1975.  It continued to engage in war production and justified it by launching the Cold War against the socialist countries and national liberation movements.  It maintained US military bases and forces abroad and supplied weapons to allied and puppet states under various regional and bilateral military alliances.

The US imperialists sought to encircle the socialist countries and engage in military intervention against national liberation movements and countries assertive of national independence. They instigated military coups and propped up military fascist dictatorships in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They perpetrated wars of aggression against the Korean people in the early 1950s and against the Vietnamese and other Indochinese peoples from the 1960s to the 1970s.

Using aggressor troops and weapons of mass destruction, the US imperialists perpetrated the most massive and the most brutal violations of human rights..  They perpetrated massacres of genocidal proportions, at least three million people in Korea and at least four million people in Vietnam.  Through direct aggression and proxy wars, they also massacred people in various countries.  They used puppet fascist regimes to massacre people in large numbers.  The most infamous case was the massacre of three million Indonesians by the US-directed military fascist dictatorship of Suharto.  To this day, justice has not been rendered to the victims and their families. The US has persisted in carrying out so-called secret wars that have murdered more than six million people.

In the 1970s, the problem of stagflation beset the US economy.  It was due to the rapid capital expansion of countries previously devastated during World War II and the ever rising costs of the arms race with the Soviet Union, the space and military research and production, the deployment of US military forces abroad and the wars of aggression.  But the US imperialists put the blame on the working class for supposed wage inflation and on social spending by government.
After adopting the neoliberal economic policy at the start of the 1980s, the Reagan administration proceeded to speed up the production of high-tech military weaponry and continued to give market accommodation to the manufactured exports of Japan, Europe and the so-called newly-industrializing countries.  Towards the end of the 1980s, the US had become the No.1 debtor inthe world and had undermined its manufacturing capacity in tradeable goods.

It was gleeful over the social turmoil in China, the fall of revisionist regimes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years of 1989 to 1991.  It spread the notion that the end of the Cold War would result in peace dividends for the US and humankind.  But since then the opposite has occurred.  War expenditures and wars of aggression have increased at a rapid rate.

Driven by hubris as the sole superpower and being able to use the NATO at will, the US has unleashed wars of aggression in the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia in order to take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union, bring down recalcitrant regimes like those of Saddam and Milosevic and tighten control over the sources and supply lines of oil and gas.  The US and the NATO have instigated and supported schemes to overthrow regimes like those of Qaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria and to further manipulate the situation in the Middle East for the benefit of the US and Israel at the expense of the Palestinian and Arab peoples.

Within the UN Security Council and the multilateral agencies like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the imperialist powers collude against the proletariat in their own homegrounds and against the oppressed peoples and nations in the underdeveloped countries. But as the crisis of the world capitalist system worsens, they tend to contend with each other and engage in alignments and realignments of varying scales.  For extended periods, the US has collaborated with China and Russia under the auspices of neoliberal economic policy.  But it is now confronted with increasingly independent initiatives of the latter two countries jointly or separately.

The US is most reliant on its major allies in the European Union and Japan in economic matters and on the NATO in security matters.  China and Russia are promoting their own economic bloc, together with Brazil, India and South Africa in the BRICS. They have also initiated the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and have consolidated their bilateral partnership in matters concerning security and energy.

The US is concerned that its close partnership with China might erode as the crisis of global capitalism worsens and as China takes initiatives independent of the US.  Despite its deep involvement in other parts of the world, it has made a pivot  or strategic shift to East Asia and emphatically in the direction of influencing developments within China.  Using the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the US is putting increased pressure on China to privatize its state-owned enterprises. It also encouraging the pro-US democracy movement to counter and challenge the nationalist position of the top leaders of the state and ruling party who still wave the Red flag to legitimize their rule.

In its drive for increased military presence in East Asia, the US is maneuvering to further entrench itself in the Philippines economically, politically and militarily.  It is engaged in actions that violate the national sovereignty of the people and the territorial integrity of the country.  It is stepping up its efforts to violate economic sovereignty and do away with the nationality restrictions in order to grab the national patrimony of the Filipino people and exploit the natural resources and other business opportunities.  Worst of all, it is complicit with the reactionary puppet regime in unleashing military campaigns of suppression and in perpetrating human rights violations on a wide scale.

III. Impact on Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

The neoliberal economic policy of imperialist globalization is a vicious attack on the national sovereignty of the Filipino people and on the full range of their human rights as a people, including the  working class, peasantry, indigenous people, the intelligentsia, women, youth, children and others. The US  has imposed the neoliberal policy on the Philippine client state  to negate its political  sovereignty and denationalize its economy..

The main thrust of the policy is to denationalize the economy and further make it a captive of the US and other imperialist powers. At the same time, it is a sweeping attack on the national and democratic rights of the people.  It runs counter to the people’s struggle and aspirations for national independence, democracy, development through land reform and national industrialization and a patriotic and progressive culture and solidarity with other peoples.

The neoliberal economic policy has resulted in the sell-out of the national patrimony and the removal or drastic erosion of all nationality restrictions on foreign monopoly capitalism in the exploitation of natural resources and in the operation of businesses. It has allowed the plunder of the forest, mineral, marine and other natural resources of the country by foreign monopoly capitalists and by the bureaucrat big comprador-landlords.  It has ruined the agricultural production of domestic food staples in favor of foreign-owned plantations for the export of fruit as well as for biofuel production.

It has displaced the peasants and the indigenous people, with the use of bulldozers and military and police forces.  It has aggravated landlessness among the tillers. It has lessened the land area for local food production and land reform.  Widespread and unlimited mining involves the export and permanent loss of nonrenewable resources and the frustration of the people’s aspiration for national industrialization.  The frenzied plunder of natural resources is ruining the environment on a wide scale, poisoning the rivers and marine life and causing soil erosion, destructive floods, landslides and drought.

The neoliberal economic policy dictates the extreme plunder of human resources and violation of human rights. It has pushed the contractualization and flexibilization of labor by eliminating job tenure, forcing the workers to accept the status of temporaries and part-timers.  The objective is to press down the wage level, deprive the workers of social benefits and further impoverish them to allow the superprofit taking of multinational firms and big compradors.  To accomplish this objective, the foreign and domestic exploiters suppress and violate the right of the workers to form unions and all other basic democratic rights.

The neoliberal economic policy has had the effect of aggravating and deepening the  pre-industrial and semifeudal character of the economy.  The economy is agrarian and yet does not produce enough food for itself because of dumping by other countries, smuggling and reduction of agricultural land.  Even then, it  remains dependent mainly on raw material production for export. The  semi-manufacturing or reassembly of  semiconductors and other electronic products for reexport yields little income because it has high import content and is low-value added.

In more than three decades, the export of cheap labor has grown and has become the biggest source of foreign exchange income.  But the total of all export incomes do not offset the high costs of imports. The trade deficit and foreign debt have mounted from year to year.  The total export income always falls below the superprofit remittances of the multinational firms, the stashing away of foreign exchange by high bureaucrats and big comprador-landlords, the luxury imports, the high cost of high rise buildings and the imports of fuel, food and other basic necessities.

The reexport of electronic components and other low value-added semimanufactures has drastically fallen because of the crisis of global capitalism.  The export of cheap labor has begun to decrease as a result of the crisis and reactionary current against migrant workers, especially in capitalist countries. The Aquino reactionary regime still hopes that it can continue to conjure the illusion of economic growth by relying on portfolio investments in the stock market, business call centers, casinos, the mining operations all over the country and private and public construction dependent on foreign loans.

To enable the multinational banks and firms and the local ruling class of big compradors and landlords to exploit the broad masses of the people and violate their economic, social and cultural rights, the reactionary regime uses the coercive apparatuses of the state to discourage and suppress  even lawful petitions and protests, especially those of the militant legal mass movement.  And of course it uses the full force of reactionary power, with the support of foreign interventionist forces against the armed revolutionary movement of the people.  In the process, it  violates the civil and political rights of the broad masses of the people, exploited classes, organizations and individuals.

It is not true that democracy has been restored in the Philippines after the fall of the Marcos fascist dictatorship.  What has been restored is the illusion of democracy still under the auspices of the same imperialist power and the same exploiting classes that the Marcos fascist dictatorship served through an open rule of terror.  Behind the facade of democracy, one antinational and antidemocratic regime after another has followed the Marcos fascist regime.

Every reactionary regime has been directed by US imperialism to run a surveillance state and to carry out campaigns of military suppression to seek not only the destruction of the armed revolutionary forces but also the intimidation of the broad masses of the people.  The surveillance state in the Philippines is part of the global system of surveillance run by the US. The Filipino defenders of human rights can very well present and denounce the human rights violations.  They deserve the highest appreciation, protection and support for exposing these violations on a national scale as well as on an international scale.

Every regime has engaged in gross and systematic violations of human rights.  These include enforced disappearances or abductions, illegal open arrests and detention on trumped up charges of common crimes, torture, selective murders and massacres, demolition of homes and eviction of the urban poor to make way for the real estate corporations,  the forced evacuation of peasants and the indigenous people to make way for mining companies, export-oriented plantations, so-called special economic zones and free ports” and other forms of land grabbing; destruction of sources of livelihood, and other forms of deprivation such us the military occupation of school premises and community centers in the course of so-called counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the current Oplan Bayanihan.

Even as they are determined to accomplish the new democratic revolution through people’s war, the revolutionary forces and the people led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) have agreed to engage in peace negotiations with the reactionary Manila government (GRP) and have authorized the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) to form a negotiating panel for the purpose.  Despite the obstacles imposed by the GRP side, the NDFP and the GRP succeeded in forging ten major agreements from 1992 to 1998, a period of only six years.

The Hague Joint Declaration defines the framework of the peace negotiations. It sets the objective of addressing the roots of the armed conflict through negotiations and comprehensive agreements on social, economic and political reforms. It declares national sovereignty, democracy and social justice as the mutually acceptable guiding principles.  It makes the assurance  that no side shall impose on the other any precondition that negates the character and purpose of peace negotiations.

The substantive agenda is set in sequence: respect for human rights and international humanitarian law, social and economic reforms, political and constitutional reforms and end of hostilities.  The method for producing the comprehensive agreement on each item is clearly provided.  Reciprocal working committees prepare the draft agreements, whichthe negotiating panels polish and finalize for the approval of the GRP and NDFP principals.

The mutual approval of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law was a resounding success in 1998.  Before this, important agreements to strengthen and smoothen the negotiation process were bilaterally approved. These included the Joint Agreement on Safety  and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), the Joint Agreement on the Formation, Sequence and Operationalization of the Reciprocal Working Committees, the Ground Rules for the Meetings of the Negotiating Panels and the Joint  Agreement in Support of Socio-Economic Projects of Private Development Organizations and Institutes.

But the hand of US imperialism became increasingly obvious in fouling up the peace negotiations from one regime to another.  The Estrada regime resented the NDFP objection to the US-RP Visiting Forces Agreement.  It reacted by terminating the JASIG and the peace negotiations in 1999.  The Arroyo regime initially appeared to be enthusiastic in resuming the peace negotiations  with the NDFP in the first half of 2001. However, the regime aligned itself with the so-called war on terror policy of the US, received orders to adopt and implementthe so-called counter-insurgency program Oplan Bantay Laya and made representations to the US, European and other foreign governments to designate the CPP, NPA and the NDFP chief political consultant as terrorists  in a malicious attempt to blackmail the NDFP towards capitulation and pacification.

Until its term ended, the Arroyo ruling clique paralyzed the peace negotiations by insisting that the US and other foreign governments had the “sovereign right”  to make judgments and undertake sanctions against Philippine entities for alleged criminal acts within Philippine territory.  In late 2010, the succeeding regime of Benigno S. Aquino III re-appointed as presidential adviser on the peace process the same Arroyo factotum who had been most vociferous in espousing the supposed right of the US to intervene in Philippine affairs.

The first formal meeting of the negotiating panels of the Aquino regime and the NDFP in Oslo in February 2011 became the occasion for the regime to attack The Hague Joint Declaration as a “document of perpetual division” and to misrepresent as precondition the NDFP demand for compliance with the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees.  At that time it became clear that the Aquino regime was not really interested in peace negotiations.

Nonetheless, the NDFP reiterated the offer of truce and alliance previously made to the Arroyo regime in 2005 in order to counter the repeated GRP demand for an indefinite ceasefire.  The offer was premised on forging first a general declaration of common intent to realize national independence and democracy.  The GRP demand for indefinite ceasefire had long been intended  to effect the capitulation and pacification of the people’s armed revolution and put aside the remaining three items in the substantive agenda of the peace negotiations.

Since April this year the Aquino regime has announced that it has terminated the peace negotiations with the NDFP and is undertaking a “new approach”.  Obviously the approach is for the regime to ignore the NDFP Negotiating Panel; scrap all previous agreements between the two sides; and rely on brute military force under Oplan Bayanihan in a futile scheme to destroy the revolutionary movement. The Aquino regime calculates that its so-called internal security and peace  plan is going to be effective because of its psywar pseudo-development component, which involves dole outs from the graft-ridden Conditional Cash Transfer and PAMANA funds and the staging of fake localized negotiations and fake mass surrenders.

Behind the all-out war policy of the Aquino regime against the revolutionary movement are orders from the US to carry out Oplan Bayanihan within the context of the US pivot or strategic shift to East Asia.  The US wishes to tighten its control over the Philippines and use it to realize its strategic objective vis a vis China. It is now putting pressure on China to make further economic and political liberalization and is encouraging the pro-US elements within the bureaucracy of the Chinese state and ruling party to gain initiative over the bourgeois nationalists  who are still waving the Red flag as a way of legitimation.

The US is hell-bent on further entrenching itself in the Philippines and making the Philippine reactionary government more than ever dependent on US military power. In connection with Oplan Bayanihan,it is goading the Aquino regime  to engage in provocations and counterprovocations vis a vis China over the sea west of the Philippines.  In this context, we can understand why the Aquino regime has terminated the peace negotiations and we can anticipate the escalation of counterrevolutionary violence and human rights violations.

Concluding Remarks

We, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, wish you the utmost success in identifying, examining and analyzing the social, economic and political and geopolitical context of escalating violations of collective and individual human rights in the Philippines. Your conference is a means of concentrating your political will and deciding what you must do. We look forward to the General Declaration and Resolutions of your conference.

You must uphold the  rights of peoples to national self-determination and liberation in the face of the economic, political and social crises due to  neoliberal globalization and the drive of the US to maintain global hegemony. You must defend and promote the economic, social and cultural rights and the civil and political rights of the people against the intensification of exploitation and oppression by the US and the local exploiting classes.

You must  define and stress the anti-imperialist and democratic common grounds for the Filipino people and the people of the world in confronting the forces that violate human rights and in striving to develop, expand and consolidate the movement of international solidarity for upholding, defending and advancing human rights and people’s rights and for promoting and realizing a just peace in the Philippines.

We  look forward to the holding of the first general assembly of the International Coordinating Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines. We are confident that the results of this assembly will encourage the conference participants to join the international network for promoting and supporting the cause of human rights and just peace in the Philippines.

You must assess and evaluate the various domestic and international human rights solidarity campaigns concerning the Philippines since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. Thus, you will be able  to draw up a plan for an international solidarity campaign for peace, human rights and people’s rights in the Philippines. We look forward to your campaign  plan . And we hope that such campaign will culminate in the next international conference in 2016, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle is ever willing and ever ready to cooperate with you in all initiatives to uphold, defend and promote human rights and help realize a just peace in the Philippines and in the whole world.

Thank you.

 

Fighting for human rights and peace when it is already the Law

ICHRP Secretariat
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Fighting for human rights and peace when it is already the Law

Keynote Speech at the International Conference on Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

Quezon City, Philippines
July 19, 2013

By JEANNE MIRER
President, International Association of Democratic Lawyers

I want to thank the organizers of this important conference for the gracious invitation to address you today. I am the President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers or IADL. IADL from its inception in 1946 has fought for the rights of peoples throughout the world to live in peace with human dignity. We were founded to promote the goals of the United Nations Charter and through the common action of lawyers, side by side with the peoples of the world we work to promote these important goals.

I have been a peoples’ lawyer for forty two years and the organization in the United States in which I work is the National Lawyers Guild or NLG. The NLG last year celebrated its 75th anniversary. The NLG was instrumental in the founding of the IADL and has always supported its work.

I have always felt especially close to our friends in the Philippines and the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers since as a college student in the late 1960s I studied the American War against the Philippines. I was interested in studying the contending forces in the United States which lined up for and against the US effort to become a colonial power, replacing Spain as the overlords of the Filipino people after purchasing the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars. I studied the efforts of the Anti-Imperialist League to try to stop and end the war, and their efforts to expose US atrocities in the execution of the war. At the time I was searching for the roots in American history of the American war against Vietnam, and saw many parallels between the two wars and how the Anti-Imperialist League had not been able to hold back or defeat the forces of expansion. But as the internal logic of capitalism requires expansion and growing profits, the forces for expansion had the upper hand. Also, one cannot underestimate the role racism played in both the United States’ wars against the Philippines and Vietnam, but one thing is certain, ever since the American war against the Philippines there has been an ever growing military industrial complex which today is the largest in the world and which through the hundreds of military bases around the world is able to protect the economic interests of the United States and multinational corporations. This military industrial complex also increases the likelihood that throughout the world international, and intra national disputes will turn to military options as a first rather than last resort.

This year, 2013 is the fiftieth anniversary for two important events. Both of which I experienced. The first is Bob Dylan singing “Masters of War” which was published in 1963 and is his homage to the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. Some of the most relevant verses come to mind:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

* *.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

The second is the fiftieth anniversary of the historic 1963 march on Washington which attracted hundreds of thousands of marchers, which I attended as a teenager, and in which Martin Luther King delivered what has come to be known as his “I have a Dream” speech. This march occurred 100 years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln which freed the slaves, only to see that charter of freedom, and the 13th Amendment which enshrined it become a hollow promise, with the advent of Jim Crow laws and de jure segregation. Before Martin Luther King turned to the hopeful and forward looking portions of his speech, in which he articulated a hope and dream for a non-racial and non-racist future, he discussed the reality of racism in the United States: He said:

“One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds”.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

I have been reflecting a lot lately on these two aspects of the 1960s struggles and what might be called anthems of the American anti-war and civil rights movements.

There is no question but the United States is the largest supplier of arms to the world and that all of the industries which profit from supporting a large military, and never saw a war they did not want to fight, are some of the first to criticize the peoples’ movements for economic justice where the demand is made for the government to provide basic economic human rights such as decent work, housing, health care and food and education. But, in Masters of War, we do not hear that as a matter of law both the threat of or the use of force in settling international disputes are actually illegal under the United Nations Charter, or that even taking up arms in self-defense is legally limited only to instances where it is necessary to repel an armed attack or in the absence of an armed attack, that the threat of armed attack is so “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”. In “Masters of War” Dylan does not acknowledge that Article 26 of the UN Charter commits the world to work toward disarmament.

There are similar types of omissions from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That is, although by 1968 Martin Luther King, had denounced the American War against Vietnam, and had become a champion of the struggle for economic justice as well as civil rights, and was assassinated the night after marching with striking sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee, in his 1963 “ I Have A Dream” speech, referenced only the Declaration of Independence. He did not acknowledge the existence of such important declarations as the 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia where the International Labor Organization had declared: (a) labour is not a commodity; (b) freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress; (c) poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere; (d) the war against want is required to be carried on with unrelenting vigor within each nation, and by continuous and concerted international effort in which the representatives of workers and employers, enjoying equal status with those of Governments, join with them in free discussion and democratic decision with a view to the promotion of the common welfare and that all national and international policies and measures, in particular those of an economic and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective;

We know the Declaration of Philadelphia was a source for inspiration of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR. The UDHR declares both civil and political rights and economic social and cultural rights to be the basic rights everyone has a right to enjoy, and which declares the fundamental human rights all persons, have a right to expect. But there is no reference to the Philadelphia Declaration or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the “I have A Dream” speech.

Why did Bob Dylan in “Masters of War” omit any mention of the right to peace in the UN Charter, and why is there no mention of the UDHR in Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech? It is true that the United Nations at this time was somewhat paralyzed by the Cold War resulting in the general population not paying much attention to it, especially after the UN General Assembly initiated the “Police Action” on the Korean Peninsula in 1059. It is also true that in 1963 the United States was just emerging from the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period, and Martin Luther King was always suspected of being a communist, and was spied on by the FBI for most of his life and that reference to economic human rights would have likely been considered subversive. And while I know songs or speeches do not cover everything, I am quite sure that a major reason why neither Dylan in “”Masters of War” did not mention the UN Charter nor did Martin Luther King in his “I have a Dream” speech reference the UDHR or other international human rights instruments, is that in the US and most likely all countries of the world, these documents and the rights and duties they spell out have been made to disappear so that the people do not know of their existence and/or that their governments have ratified these documents. Knowing that one’s government has committed through ratification of the UN Charter to respect international law to peacefully settle international disputes or to implement basic human rights can be a major and powerful boost to people in their day to day struggles for human rights and peace in world. It is precisely for this reason why I believe there is a conspiracy of silence about them. The rights and duties required under the UN Charter or in basic human rights documents are not even taught in law schools, which begs the question of how can peoples’ lawyers articulate these rights to the people or try to enforce them in the domestic courts or international agencies if we ourselves remain in the dark?

What can we do to change this state of affairs and lack of knowledge? In early 2011 the International Committee of the National Lawyers Guild put on a webinar entitled: “Human Rights 101 Using International Instruments to Work for Economic Social and Cultural Rights.” The audio recording and the power point are still available on the web at:

http://www.nlginternational.org/webinars/humanrights-mirer.mp3 and

http://www.nlginternational.org/webinars/humanrights-mirer.pdf

While this webinar and power point are more specific to the United States situation as the US has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, I would like to go over some of the information from this webinar as part of this speech so as to familiarize you with topics which you will likely hear throughout this conference.

It is important therefore to consider the basic human rights treaties from the perspective of their role in promoting peace and also what has happened in the world order which has undermined the progressive realization of basic human rights.

The Universal Declaration although signed and executed in 1948 reflects the recognition in the 1945 United Nations Charter of the direct link between promoting and protecting human rights and ending the conditions that lead to war. The preamble to the UN Charter recognizes that the peoples of the world have the right to live in peace. It is important to quote the preamble:

WE THE PEOPLES (emphasis on the people not states) OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

  • to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

  • to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

The Charter begins with these inspirational and aspirational words embracing human rights as fundamental to the promotion of social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. One of the first actions of the UN was to identify these human rights and they did so through producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was not a treaty but a relatively short, inspirational and energizing document usable by the people and designed to be the foundation and central document for an international bill of human rights. It was the first document to combine both civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights in one indivisible whole. The Universal Declaration connected the issue of realization of all human rights to the cause of peace and states that a common understanding of these rights is of great importance to their realization. This is evident in the Preamble to the UDHR which states.

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

The UDHR is set forth in 30 Articles as follows:

Article 1 reflects the inspirational nature of the project. It proclaims in ringing terms that:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.

Article 7 follows up this theme by saying that all are to be equal before the law and have a right to protection against any form of discrimination.

Articles 3 and 25 are probably the core of the substantive provisions in the Declaration. They give every human being the rights to life, to liberty, to security of person (Art 3); and to an adequate standard of living (Art 25). Articles 1, 3 and 7 constitute the UDHR’s core civil and political rights. Article 25 is the core of the economic and social rights. The right to an adequate standard of living is interesting in that it specifies as part of it the right to health and well-being not only of a person but of his or her family, but also the right to necessary food, clothing, housing and medical care, and the right to social security (also covered in Art 22). Article 23 also spells out the right to work under decent conditions of work, and for workers to form trade unions to protect their interests.

Article 28 is one of the most important Articles in that it states Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in with the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

The UDHR brought the world into the modern era of rights by introducing and/or reinforcing at least five key concepts:

  1. All human rights have both negative and positive components (i.e. they address both what government should and should not do);

  2. Human rights include the economic and social sphere, in particular issues of education, housing health, work, food and social security;

  3. Rights are universal, transcending national borders, and their legitimacy is no longer dependent on national recognition;

  4. Prohibitions on discrimination in the protection of human rights extend both to the purpose and the effect of government action and inaction; and

  5. Human rights are interdependent and cannot be viewed in isolation.

When the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration the resolution included a provision that called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration, and “to cause it to be displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions without distinction based on political status of countries or territories.”

As I have said, this obligation to publicize has been virtually ignored and at least in the United States, the rights contained in the UDHR and subsequent human rights instruments have remained largely invisible to the people. The same can be said for the two major human rights treaties which were written to implement the rights in the UDHR: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. (ICESCR).

The covenants were simultaneously adopted on December 16, 1966 and put forward for ratification by member states. Enough member states had ratified them as of January 3, 1976 that they went into effect. The overwhelming majority of countries in the world have ratified both the ICCPR and the ICESCR. This includes the Philippines, but does not include the United States which has only ratified the ICCPR. I want to focus primarily on the ICESCR as it is the deprivation of basic economic human rights which makes the day to day struggle for survival the primary focus of peoples’ lives making it difficult to exercise their civil and political rights.

The Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights has five parts.

Part 1 (Article 1) recognizes the right of all peoples to self-determination including the right to “freely determine their political status” to pursue their economic, social and cultural goals, and manage and dispose of their own resources. It recognizes a negative right of a people not to be deprived of its means of subsistence and imposes an obligation on those parties still responsible for non-self-governing and trust territories (colonies) to encourage and respect their self-determination.

Part 2 (Articles 2 – 5) establishes the duty of State Parties to use and devote the maximum of its available resources to using progressively realize the rights contained in the Covenant. It also requires the rights be recognized “without discrimination of any kind as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. The rights can only be limited by law, in a manner compatible with the nature of the rights, and only for the purpose of “promoting the general welfare in a democratic society”.

Part 3 (Articles 6 – 15) lists the rights themselves. These include rights to

• work, under “just and favorable conditions”, with the right to form and join trade unions (Articles 6, 7, and 8);

• social security, including social insurance (Article 9);

• family life, including paid parental leave and the protection of children (Article 10);

• an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and the “continuous improvement of living conditions” (Article 11);

• health, specifically “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (Article 12);

• education, including free universal primary education, generally available secondary education and equally accessible higher education. This should be directed to “the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity”, and enable all persons to participate effectively in society (Articles 13 and 14);

• participation in cultural life (Article 15).

Many of these provisions include specific actions which must be undertaken to realize them.

Part 4 (Articles 16 – 25) governs reporting and monitoring of the Covenant and the steps taken by the parties to implement it. It also allows the monitoring body – originally the United Nations Economic and Social Council – now the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to make general recommendations to the UN General Assembly on appropriate measures to realize the rights (Article 21)

Part 5 (Articles 26 – 31) governs ratification, entry into force, and amendment of the Covenant.

The heart of the ICESCR appears in Principle of progressive realization. Paragraph one of Article 2 states: Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures.

The duty to take steps to progressively realize the rights in the Covenant is not a hollow duty. It is a continuing affirmative obligation. It also rules out deliberately regressive measures which impede that goal.

The Treaty Body responsible for interpreting and enforcing the provisions of the ICESCR is the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. The Committee has issued in General comment 3 a full description of what taking steps to progressively realize the rights in the Covenant.

The principal obligation of result reflected in article 2 (1) is to take steps “with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized” in the Covenant. The term “progressive realization” is often used to describe the intent of this phrase. The concept of progressive realization constitutes recognition of the fact that full realization of all economic, social and cultural rights will generally not be able to be achieved in a short period of time. In this sense the obligation differs significantly from that contained in article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which embodies an immediate obligation to respect and ensure all of the relevant rights. Nevertheless, the fact that realization over time, or in other words progressively, is foreseen under the Covenant should not be misinterpreted as depriving the obligation of all meaningful content. It is on the one hand a necessary flexibility device, reflecting the realities of the real world and the difficulties involved for any country in ensuring full realization of economic, social and cultural rights. On the other hand, the phrase must be read in the light of the overall objective, indeed the raison d’être, of the Covenant which is to establish clear obligations for States parties in respect of the full realization of the rights in question. It thus imposes an obligation to move as expeditiously and effectively as possible towards that goal. Moreover, any deliberately retrogressive measures in that regard would require the most careful consideration and would need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources.

This last sentence, regarding retrogressive measures comes from Article 5 which prohibits States, groups or persons from taking any action or activity aimed at the destruction of any of the rights or freedoms recognized in the present Covenant. That is, once a State has recognized a right contained in the Covenant, in law or practice, and has implemented it, it cannot legally be revoked, nor can a State which may have protected a right to a degree higher than called for in the Covenant, remove that right based on the fact that the Covenant provides lesser protection.

Furthermore, the principle of progressive realization has an affirmative obligation not to discriminate in the provision of these rights on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

The enacting of anti-discrimination provisions and the establishment of enforceable rights with judicial remedies within national legal systems are considered to be appropriate means.

Since 1966 there have been many more important international and regional human rights instruments debated and promulgated in addition to the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, parallel to but on a completely different track was the rise of powerful multinational corporations and international financial institutions which arose out of the Bretton Woods agreements and were supposed to stabilize the world economy, but in fact have been doing the bidding of former colonial powers, large nations and multinational corporations. The International Labor Organizations’ 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia is still operative and still holds that fighting the war against want must be pursued with vigor and the world’s economic and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective, and as Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights still requires the development and maintenance of a social and economic order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration can be fully realized, yet International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been requiring States to distort their economies and the labor and human rights protections in these documents by conditioning loans and other financial resources on so-called liberalization policies which are part of the neo-liberal economic order which we are suffering with at this time.

This has resulted in a highly undemocratic international economic order. In May 2013 the IADL held a conference in Paris aimed at promoting a new democratic international economic order where we described the current undemocratic international neo-liberal economic order as being dominated by large multinational corporations which seek “liberalization” of laws protecting people in order to promote economies based on the market rather than human rights and needs of people, which includes the right to a healthy environment. We described the main pillars of the neo-liberal economic order to be: (1) deregulation of corporate activities including financial services, (2) privatization of public services such as education and prisons etc.; (3) de-unionization of the workforce, (4) casualization of the workforce with precarious workers i.e temporary, contingent or contract workers; and (5) free trade agreements aimed at protecting direct foreign investments by corporations to the detriment of indigenous rights. We pointed to the massive transfers of wealth upwards into to fewer and fewer wealthy hands both within countries and between countries with growing levels of inequality in both developed and developing countries. We noted the massive public debts owed to international financial institutions and private investors, especially by countries in the South. We also noted the unrest among the people suffering under these policies are dealt with by repression using, among other things, anti-terrorist laws that many countries passed or imposed after 9-11. They are also dealt with by surveillance and the type of national security state revealed by both Bradley Manning and now Edward Snowden.

We also emphasized the militarization which accompanies this economic order reflecting the powerful corporate military industrial complex and a foreign policy based on military intervention in countries which possess resources the United States and the western former colonial powers and their major corporations seek to exploit.

We pointed out that media corporations promote celebrity and spectacles as news and do not seek to educate the people about the nature of the current order and differences between people based on class, race, gender, religion, and citizenship status, and other characteristics are exploited in order to divert attention away from the fact that these divisions are a result of and exacerbated the economic order. Most importantly, we pointed to both an ignorance of and lack of respect for law and legal obligations, especially international law and international human rights (including labor) law and growing impunity for violating international law. We noted wars of aggression have been fought by superpowers without accountability. Corporations are engaging in illegal land grabbing and other illegal actions in developing countries without accountability.

What does all this mean for us at this conference and our friends throughout the Philippines? As understand it, the Philippine government has a policy designed to warm the neo-liberal heart, a policy which stems from the Presidential Decree under Marcos which has been accepted since known as the automatic appropriation for debt service which requires external debt to be paid before any other budgetary appropriation can be made. This provision was unsuccessfully challenged in 1991 when the Philippine Supreme Court said the policy did not contravene the Philippine Constitution which assigned the highest budgetary priority to education.

But, the Philippine constitution in Article II Section 2 has an inclusion clause whereby the Philippines adopts the generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the land… The inclusion of international law would mean the human rights treaties such as the ICESCR which the Philippines has signed and/or ratified as well as the UN Charter and the ILO Constitution which incorporates the Declaration of Philadelphia are part of the law of the land.

I understand that this automatic appropriation for debt service has impeded the Philippine government from living up to its obligations under the ICESCR specifically the obligations to devote the maximum available resources progressively realize the rights contained therein, or to realize the rights under Philippine laws which have been passed to ameliorate the suffering of the Filipino people. The Filipino people have been promised rights under their laws and their constitution as well as International Human Rights treaties they have ratified, but as long as the law which allocates a large portion of the Philippine treasury to pay debt service, that promise is illusory. They have been given the type of bad check, as Martin Luther King stated was given by the United States to African Americans which came back marked insufficient funds.

It is time we say that human rights trump property interests such as service on external debt. It is time that we learned to use human rights law to challenge policies like the automatic appropriation for debt service policy to ensure that the Filipinos can make the Philippine government actually devote maximum available resources to progressively realize basic economic human rights as articulated in the ICESCR and the UDHR. As Martin Luther King stated, we must reject gradualism as the answer. We must embrace the fierce urgency of now. It is time to judge policies which govern the Philippine government’s ability to fight the war on want by accepting laws only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder achievement of this fundamental objective, and to accept laws only in so far as they comply with the command of Article 28 the UDHR to allow everyone to enjoy a social and economic order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration can be fully realized.

These same arguments regarding the primacy of human rights law apply throughout the world, in all countries, including those which do not have a policy of automatic appropriation for debt service which siphons funds away from meeting human rights obligations. We must fight to make economic interests adhere to human rights principles. In so doing we can re-write the words to “Masters of War” and inscribe into the history books how the peoples’ fight for human rights allowed us to become the Masters of Peace.

Mrs. Edita Burgos speaks about her son Jonas at the Human Rights Conference

ICHRP Secretariat
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Mrs. Edita Burgos speaks about her son Jonas at the Human Rights Conference

At the opening of the International Conference for Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines on 19 July 2013, Mrs. Edita Burgos speaks of her ordeal as a mother searching for her missing son, Jonas, abducted by the Philippine military — a case akin to other enforced disappearances in the country.

“Paradise” for the wealthy, “purgatory” for those who have less — Prof. Gill Boehringer

ICHRP Secretariat
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“Paradise” for the wealthy, “purgatory” for those who have less — Prof. Gill Boehringer

Click image to watch video of ANC interview with Prof. Gill Boehringer.

Gill-Boehringer_screenshot

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