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FPJPM calls for national support for Bagong Katipunan program

By Alejandro Lichauco

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07/12/2007

The Makabansang Aksyon ng Taongbayan (Mata), a lead organization in the Fernando Poe Jr. for President Movement (FPJPM) has called for national support for the anti-globalization program issued by the Bagong Katipunan, a dissident faction within the AFP.

Mata, a people’s organization which the late John Moldero, former governor of the Cordillera’s Mountain Province, founded to promote the presidential candidacy of FPJ, has called on both the administration and the opposition to “craft a program of national unity based on an explicit repudiation of globalization as a development ideology and the full embrace of nationalism as espoused by our national heroes and as reiterated time and again by the late Claro M. Recto.”

The declaration, which was signed by Mata president Noble Bambina Perez, stated that it agrees with the diagnosis of Bagong Katipunan that the “republic is dying” and that at the root of the nation’s social and economic crisis is the subservience of the nation’s political leaders to international interests. It challenged both the administration and the opposition to join the Bagong Katipunan’s call for an overhaul of the electoral system and to declare the nation’s independence from the international interests, led by the US-IMF-WB-WTO Group and multinational banks, whose policies have kept the nation backward and impoverished.

The Mata declaration in fact went beyond the Bagong Katipunan program by challenging the GMA administration and the opposition to declare a walkout from the WTO and to repudiate the nation’s foreign debt.

This government walked out of the Iraq war, it said, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t walk out of the WTO.

In espousing repudiation of the foreign debt and a walkout from the WTO, Mata stressed that these are absolute preconditions to winning back the nation’s sovereignty and independence which American imperialism stole from Bonifacio’s revolution. Unless we reacquire that sovereignty and independence, there’s absolutely nothing which any Philippine government can do to improve the lives of Filipinos and to move ahead toward NIC, or newly industrialized country, status.

The Mata declaration noted that regime change by itself doesn’t necessarily translate into something better for Filipinos. Every change of government since Marcos has only worsened the nation’s plight, it said. The Mata declaration is significant because for the first time, a program has been issued by a dissident faction within the AFP. In fact, the declaration is tantamount to a call for civilian and political support of a military-based alternative program of government which, among others, calls for the cancellation of elections and the establishment of an extra-constitutional government that would institute the necessary changes which can’t be achieved under the current political system.

But beyond that, the declaration highlights the call, initiated by a military faction, for the rejection of globalization as a philosophy of development — a politically significant development by itself.

One recalls that it was Mata, then under the leadership of Moldero, which called on all civil society groups to unite behind an anti-globalization program launched by FPJ at the University of the Philippines.

Globalization, the Bagong Katipunan program had declared, has wiped out the nation’s local industries and agriculture, virtually echoing what FPJ said when he launched his presidential candidacy.

In an interview, Mata head, Noble Perez, said she sees in the Mata declaration, taken together with the declaration of the Bagong Katipunan, the beginning of a nationwide revolution against globalization and the dictatorship which the globalists have exercised in the country.

“It was the dream and vision of our founder, the late John Moldero, that through Mata’s initiative, the nation would be launched in a revolution against globalization as a development ideology and way of life,” Perez said. Mata fully agrees, she continued, with the description of globalization made by the Bagong Katipunan... that it is a “masked evil” which should be done away with. It is in fact “a curse which hangs on all of us and any effort to transform this nation must begin with the eradication of that evil,” the Mata head stressed as she cited the last words of Moldero to the organization on the eve of his tragic accident as he motorcycled his way to the Batasan to hear GMA’s Sona (State of the Nation Address) a year ago.