Article on mining and corruption in the Phillipines:
From Jeff Berwick, Stockhouse.ca:
While corruption exists in all governments, and all governments by nature are vile and corrupt, the Philippines has been a front runner in this area for decades.
The more government you have, the worse things get, and again the Philippines here leads the way.
The Philippines has 17 regions, 79 provinces, 117 cities, 1,501 municipalities and 41,982 barangays. A barangay is the smallest political unit into which cities and municipalities in the Philippines are divided and is the basic unit of the Philippine political system. It consists of less than 1,000 inhabitants residing within the territorial limit of a city or municipality and administered by a set of elective officials, headed by a barangay chairman or punong barangay.
And with elected officials for every 1,000 citizens, the amount of corruption and bureaucracy per capita in the Philippines is off the charts. But they even take it quite a bit further than most countries in terms of violence.
In most countries, your elected officials will lie to you, steal from you and ruin your economy, but in the Philippines they take it up a notch, they will kill you.
Since the fall of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, 81 journalists, none of them from the West, have reportedly been killed in the Philippines. Of that total, 44 have died since President Gloria Macapgal-Arroyo took office, leading press freedom advocacy group Reporters Without Borders to rank the Philippines as the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, outside of Iraq.
And it isn't just the journalists who get killed for making the public aware of the corruption, there is a large amount of infighting and killing amongst the government itself over who gets to control what and which bribes go where.
In the latest series of attacks, two members of the Philippine army's 7th Infantry Battalion were arrested in connection with the September 16 killing of Pablo Glean, a longtime enforcer for Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay. He was gunned down while sipping coffee at a gas station in Metro Manila.
Violence at the provincial, municipal and lower levels has included attacks against governors, mayors, council members and many candidates of various political parties.
The army sometimes employs death squads to suppress "left-wing" opposition, like farmers and students.
Socialist opposition party Bayan Muna has reported that 104 of its members have been killed, allegedly by army death squads, since Arroyo took office. So far in 2006, 27 of its members have been killed.
If you think this sounds like typical gang warfare, it is. Governments are essentially just gangs, although many in society ignorantly support them, they are essentially thugs who wield power at the threat or action of violence and it is played out at its most violent and base level in the Philippines.
By far the biggest problem holding down most Filipinos, 40% of whom are below the poverty line, is their government.
If great changes cannot be made in the amount of bureaucracy and corruption in the Philippines I do not like the future for this country and its people.
The only area I have and will continue to invest in this country is in mining companies exploring or producing in this region. The resource potential in the Philippines is large and has been greatly held back by bureaucracy, bungling and interference by NGO's, the Catholic Church and environmentalists.
But while the amount of red tape and difficulties here is a challenge they can be overcome by those willing to put in the time and effort.
From a tourist's perspective, the Philippines is home to some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet. My favorite location in this regard is the idyllic setting on the island of Boracay with white sand beaches that were so soft they felt like powder.
Boracay allows you to see the beauty of the Philippines and its government corruption all in one place as well. One evening I had dinner at a restaurant on the beach in Boracay a table away from the Marcos' family, famous for embezzling somewhere in the vicinity of $5-25 billion during the days of Ferdinand Marcos' presidency.
What a country.
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