Tuna, terrorism, and ‘till we meet again’

Ambassador Bobby Romulo, our former Foreign Affairs Secretary who was assigned as the official "note taker" of yesterday morning’s Palace conference, later described it as a "Feel-Good" meeting. And that’s what it was. Nothing portentous was decided at that intimate gathering, but GMA charmed the whiskers off Colin Powell – and Powell, as always radiating charisma and chutzpah (even in the teeth of setback at home in the foreign policy debate), would have done the same thing to GMA, if she had whiskers.

The President quipped to Powell that "we should have served you a tuna sandwich for breakfast so you could taste how good our tuna is."

Powell, for his part, cheerfully exclaimed: "Gee, I never learned more about tuna in my life than on this trip!"

After he took off for Washington, DC at about 2 p.m. yesterday aboard his State Department Boeing 757 jet, with his entourage of 47 officials and staffers, I’m almost sure they passed around sandwiches inflight, made of tuna – from Ecuador.

This trip apparently was not characterized by the kind of "tunnel vision" of which carpers and critics accuse the United States, but of "tuna vision" in which we were assured by Colin that America would continue munching on Philippine tuna, whether exported there in tins or pouches.

Indeed, the new legislation recently passed by US Congress amending taxes on tuna didn’t seem to have – despite Trade and Industry Secretary Manuel "Mar" Roxas’s intemperate outbursts against it – discriminated against Philippine tuna. The original draft of the law had been much worse, crafted as it had been to favor tuna exports from "friendly Ecuador", but – before too late – the White House and more sympathetic members of US Congress had discovered that it would seriously affect our tuna exports from Mindanao, one of the areas the US particularly wants to help.

We hear that even President George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice spearheaded a kind of "lobby" to get Mindanao tuna back on the preferred list. US Secretary of State Powell promised President GMA that the status quo would be preserved, and that the Philippines would at least retain its share of six percent of US tuna "requirements".

Sus, so much ado about tuna! But it makes big bucks for our fishermen and our exporters. By all means, we must protect and expand our tuna industry. (Japan, for one, buys a great deal of tuna, air-speeded, from us. If you’re curious enough and have a good alarm clock you can wander down to the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, at the wiching hour of 4:30 or five o’clock in the morning, and see those shipments of huge tuna fish being delivered by Japan’s own fishing fleets, or by air express from surrounding countries.)

Our own tuna fleets range as far south as Papua New Guinea in search of tuna. Our drawback, it seems, is our hidebound lack of imagination and innovation. It’s time we developed more efficient ways of packaging, shipping and marketing the hundreds of tons of tuna which daily, for instance, are landed in GenSan (General Santos City).

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Before meeting with the "bigger group" in Malacañang, the President and Powell conferred in an "inner circle" discussion. The participants in the tete-à-tête (a French term, incidentally, which GMA’s dad, President Dadong Macapagal used to mispronounce kapampangan-style, as titi-a-titi), were our new Secretary of Foreign Affairs Blas Ople and Ambassador to Washington Albert del Rosario, while Powell had US Assistant Secretary of State Jim Kelley and US Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr.

As expected, Powell assured our Chief Executive of the $55-million "counter-terror aid" earmarked by US Congress for Manila from the just-approved $28.9-billion Supplemental Anti-Terror Budget (half of this big amount will go to America’s own Department of Defense).

It was no surprise either that he declared the US has no plans to reopen any American bases in the Philippines. (Just come in and buy supplies and other services from us, fellows, but not in locally-counterfeited US dollars.)

As for the controversy over the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement, I’m told that not a word was breathed about the MLSA. Oh, well. Something will be hammered out, all of us are sure, after the usual huffing, puffing and posturing are over.

Everybody, indeed, got what he wanted out of the Powell visit, even the usual Leftists, radicals, "nationalists", and assorted protesters, who got their anti-American ranting and Uncle Sam-bashing off their chests – and assailed the US Embassy gates, with our cops obliging them by trying to shove them back with riot shields and the usual kicks, counter-kicks and scuffles – all this "anti-imperialist" mayhem mainly posed, I guess, for the benefit of the cameras of CNN, BBC and other international television media.

Gives the impression abroad that hordes of snarling Pinoys and Pinays are vehemently opposing the "return" of the American colonial masters, et cetera. Sige na, if it makes those habitual demonstrators happy. But if they claim their actions will "snowball" into an upsurge of kick-the-Americans-out sentiment, susmariosep. In their dreams! The mood in this economically-depressed country is: "Yankee, come back. Bring dollars." To which some Yanks may reply: "Sorry, but we’re going broke in Wall Street. Why, we’re arresting and handcuffing our own CEOS and Finance Managers for corporate fraud – even though we haven’t been able to arrest and handcuff Osama bin Laden!"

In truth, who had the more devastating effect on the US economy – bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists, or the CEOs and Finance bosses of Enron, WorldCom, and other firms whose fraudulent exaggerations and indiscretions are coming to light? In July, investors pulled an estimated $47 billion out of equity mutual funds in the US, described by financial media as "the largest net monthly outflow in history". (Investors had already pulled $18 billion from equity mutual funds the previous month, in June, as the stock market continued to fall.) It is a situation even more dismal than what obtained just after September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the "terrorist attacks" on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, investors pulled far less – namely, $30 billion – from equity mutual funds.

Right now, WorldCom’s former CFO (Chief Finance Officer) Scott Sullivan and the firm’s former controller David Myers are under arrest, taken into FBI custody and accused of conspiring to hide P3.9 billion in expenses through improper accounting in 2001 and 2002. (This accounting fraud boosted the "earnings" of WorldCom, America’s No. 2 long-distance and major Internet carrier, instead of revealing the company’s losses, with its profit margins sagging since July 2000.. Sullivan, whom Wall Street once lionized, now faces seven counts of fraud, which – according to US Attorney General John Ashcroft — could get him "up to 65 years in prison" if he’s convicted. That, I must say, I’ve got to see. Even in democratic USA, "the rich are different". They somehow manage to get off the hook.

It’s true that currently in the docket are such big shots as Arthur Andersen’s David Duncan, the lead auditor of Enron, who’s already pleaded guilty to "obstruction of justice" while his company, Andersen, was subsequently convicted of the same charge.) The founder of Adelphia Communications, John Rigas, his sons Timothy and Michael, and two other executives, are under arrest for bank, securities and wire fraud. Samuel Naksal, former chief executive of Imclone Systems is being charged with "insider trading".

Even powerful AOL-Time Warner is under criminal investigation. America-on-Line (AOL), in particular, is being interrogated about its revenue claims before its 2001 merger with Time Warner (parent company, by the way, of CNN).

Also under investigation are Computer Associates, Global Crossing and Qwest.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who has a propensity for the piquant phrase and the bon mot, described the malaise accurately when he almost off-handedly ascribe the current troubles as an offshoot of a climate of "infectious greed". Yes, Mr. Greenspan: But weren’t you the one who first stroked and praised the aggressive CEOs of the USA as heroes of the economy and imbued them, in your earlier prose, as possessing almost godlike qualities? Sanamagan, naturally those corporate high-flyers began to believe in their own . . . uh, divinity and deluded themselves into thinking they were loftily above blame.

Now CEOs are falling like ten-pins in a bowling alley. There’s that old expression about someone being "damned by faint praise". Those CEOs didn’t even have to be damned by too much praise. They just lied like hell, and – P.T. Barnum was right – there was always somebody "born every minute" to play the sucker. Unfortunately, these were the pension fund and other investment managers for millions of pensioners, retirees, employees – and the usual, pathetic widows and orphans.

The back-to-back exposés of widespread corruption in corporate boardrooms not merely in the United States, but in Europe, as well as elsewhere in Asia (in Russia, as here, it’s "business as usual") should not be consuelo de bobo for us. But they serve to remind us of the infirmity of human nature. If crime is not punished, criminals – finding it profitable – will flourish.

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This is equally true, on a more personal and immediate level in this distressed country of street crime. The President should stop posing with arrested kidnappers, "captured rebels", the corpses of gangsters gunned down, and indulging in the assorted, laughable "photo opportunities" her spin-doctors and image-builders keep dragging her to. Nobody’s fooled into believing that she, as anti-crime Czarina, was personally responsible for nabbing those cretins or shooting down those rats. Give us a break, Madam President! Those cheap publicity stunts won’t lift you up from Number Three in any future IBON or other poll survey to Number One. They, in fact, make you look "phoney" or greedy for re-electionist publicity.

Susmariosep, that silly photo taken by the President’s propagandists of GMA thumbing through sheaves of intercepted "fake" dollars made her look, at first blush, like she had been "paid off" by the Americans. Gee whiz, it’s true enough that "one good picture is better than 10,000 words." By the same token, one bad picture is worse than 10,000 bad words. Those are all bad photographs, Mrs. President. They do you no good.

When all is said and done, results – not propaganda shots and press releases – are what count. Why, even in Cebu, our friend Choy Torralba just informed me, gangsters are intercepting motorists and holding them up in broad daylight. This never used to happen before.

This is the real challenge: To make the Filipino feel safe again — in his own home, in his own car, or when aboard public transportation. Do you know that in Metro Manila, women office workers and other employees deliberately dress down before they head home? After office hours, female employees and personnel repair to the office comfort room, or some private place, to switch from their smart office attire or uniforms into faded t-shirts and jeans (maong) being careful to conceal their watches and jewellery, and try to appear as drab as possible? This is because they fear being set upon by hold-up men in FX, taxicabs, jeepneys, public buses. Every day, to put it succinctly, they go home in fear.

At this stage, GMA’s recently much-touted "war against crime" looks cosmetic. Not until the time comes, if ever, that the gangsters are the ones quaking in fear – not their threatened victims – will GMA’s "ratings" go up.

Don’t play the ratings game, for that matter, Madam Commander-in-Chief. Surveys are like horoscopes. People read them for enjoyment, even if they think they don’t necessarily come true. It’s only just before election day that "exit polls" begin to count. In the meantime, you can feel the public pulse by discovering what the man or woman in the street wants most. And this, not surprisingly, – besides freedom from hunger – is freedom from fear.