NDF: NAPOCOR sale stinks of Arroyo's puppetry to foreign monopoly capitalists

Rubi Del Mundo
Spokesperson
National Democratic Front-Southern Mindanao
February 13, 2005

There are plentiful reasons why GRP President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should not only be impeached but also ousted from power following her puppet regime's all-out sale of the country's natural resources and state assets, especially the state-run National Power Corporation, at the banquet of foreign monopoly capitalists.

GRP opposition senator Nene Pimental is laudable in carrying the battlecry of having the utterly corrupt Arroyo impeached on the basis of using state trust funds to boost her election kitty last year.

The National Democratic Front Southern Mindanao, however, believes that the wholesale privatization of the National Power Corporation to foreign investors is only one of the major justifications why Arroyo should not only be impeached but outrightly ousted from office.

In the recent weeks, outgoing GRP energy secretary Vince Perez has foisted the threat of El Nino and the power crisis in order to railroad the full sale of Napocor, jack up electricity rates and enforce new taxes. Perez has been induced by the voracious and opportunistic Lopez family to "predict" a power crisis in the next two years. GRP's Perez has particularly used the purported dwindling power resources in Visayas and Mindanao to sustain his invented claim of a looming power shortage in the country.

Through the utterly rotten Electric Power Industry Reform Act, the US-Arroyo regime intends to make it more palatable for foreign bourgeois compradors to seize full control of the P1 trillion-worth Napocor at the expense of the Filipino people.

The Arroyo regime's gameplan is patently obvious and familiar. Gen. Ramos in the early 1990s used the same excuse to enter into onerous and juicy contracts with Independent Power Providers. To this day, the Filipino people are still paying for the debts incurred in these contracts.

Purportedly to "save" Napocor from further "collapse," the regime is bent in pursuing higher electric rates, the swift privatization of Napocor and more tax impositions on the people to pay off its ballooning debts.

The Filipino people are already seething in anger over the outrageous tax burden and the regime's other measures that strongly favor imperialist and big bourgeois compradors. They are provoked to rise up in utter disgust against the rabid US puppet Arroyo regime.***

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