In a pre-dawn crash early this year, the American minesweeper USS Guardian smashed into 1,000 square metres of Tubbataha reef, ravaging one of the last remaining marine biodiversity hotspots in the world on Philippine sovereign territory. Recent estimates of the damage pull up the figure to up to four times that (a).
The reef is a Unesco World heritage site, part of the ecologically-sensitive Pacific Coral Triangle, and is off-limits to all poachers and military vessels.
The US Navy, Philippine Navy and the Philippine Coast Guard have begun to salvage what remains of the ship, though full dismantlement should have begun by the first week of February.
Sheer logistics and rough weather have made this impossible. To date, the ship, in its same hull-wrecked and stranded state, remains where it first ran aground. Some have floated (pun unintended) the idea of allowing nature to take its course (pun also unintended), with the ship sinking to the seabed to lay the foundations of a new coral reef, perhaps in time becoming the latest tourist attraction for prostitute-seeking, scuba-diving American tourists – and then, perhaps, the damage would pay for itself.
US authorities are obviously dead-set on salvaging the hundred-million-dollar-plus vessel whatever the cost, and Donald Trump, Jr. is in complete agreement (more on him later).
Damage to the reef, according to the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park Act of 2009, ought to incur a fine of about Php 24,000 ($600) per square metre for both legal sanctions and restoration efforts.
The US government has so far been fined Php 38 million – though that figure, if the Law is to be obeyed to the letter – which in this country is rarely the case wherever America, her allies among the local elite, and all associated interests are concerned – should jump to around Php 100 million, with the latest estimates of reef damage pegged at 4,000 square metres or more.
Yet this amount fails even on its own terms, excluding as it does further sanctions on the USS Guardian’s unauthorised entry into an internationally recognised marine sanctuary, its failure to pay mandatory conservation fees, and its destruction of natural resources and obstruction of law enforcement. Tubbataha park officials seeking to investigate damage to the reef were initially barred entry from the ship by American navy officers in the wake of the ‘accident’.
These violations amount to major criminal offences and appropriate punishments should, according to law, range from imprisonment of navy officials to confiscation of all equipment and vessels involved in the incident.
The fine is also miniscule compared to damages paid after a similar incident involving the American guided missile cruiser USS Port Royal which wrecked 890 square metres of coral reef off the coast of Honolulu in 2009. The US Navy at the time paid $15 million – or about Php 610 million – to the state of Hawaii to settle claims and pay for reef restoration.
Photos by AFP Western Command, from
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/62155/commander-of-uss-guardian-expresses-regret-on-tubbataha-reef-damage
At any rate, no amount of money can ever compensate for damage to a coral reef ecosystem that took centuries to grow or, for that matter, the US Navy’s clear breach of both national and international law.
In the face of an incident symbolic of decades of US militarism and the ravaging of the country’s sovereign territory and its resources – the government’s response has been, at best, mellow.
Referring to America’s response to the accident, President Aquino noted in a press conference before his elite peers and his media sycophants at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “I think they are showing that they respect us as a sovereign state, and we’d like to thank them that they are respecting our sovereignty and are very careful about our sensitivities’’.
While recognizing the need for the US Navy to “comply with our laws’’ and acknowledging that a mere apology was inadequate, Aquino accepted the same apology and dismissed calls for further sanctions against the American government beyond token fines.
The USS Guardian was hardly mentioned at all at a meeting between an American delegation of lawmakers and Philippine officials on Tuesday, and the Department of Foreign Affairs was silent on why the issue was never brought up. On the agenda was a further tightening of military and economic ties between the two countries to counter China’s growing ‘threat’ – real or perceived – in the region.
Central also to the discussions, with considerable irony, were environmental issues and the future impacts of climate change, a dilemma for which both China and the United States share equal responsibility as the world’s top carbon emitters.
This is a clear case of double standards and is in stark contrast to the government’s hard-line position on Chinese vessels and small fishermen who traverse the country’s seas for a living and are regularly hunted down by security officials and subject to extortion or harassment.
In response to the incident, activists, environmentalists and left-leaning groups have so far issued the following demands:
– immediate payment of all mandatory fines as well as additional compensation in the form of Tubbataha reef restoration, investments in marine conservation, and additional fines at least matching those paid after the USS Port Royal-Honolulu incident;
– criminal charges to be launched against everyone involved in the incident, including US Navy officials;
– the incident to be brought to international attention as subject to international law and the United Nations;
– and more broadly, for an urgent and critical reassessment of American military policy in the region as a whole and the country’s role in furthering its aims. Alongside this, an urgent halt to all military ties with the US, including the suspension of all military exercises and the RP-USA Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
Trumping the Planet, Jr. Edition
As if to sprinkle salt on this latest blunder of US imperialism, Donald Trump, Jr., son of billionaire real estate magnate and casino tycoon Donald Trump, delivered the following salvo on Twitter late January:
Centuries of marine life reduced to an insignificant cross section of an insignificant reef on an insignificant former colony’s territory. Indeed, perhaps the damage was insignificant. Yet more weighty than the ‘paltry’ damage wrought on one of the last surviving reefs of its kind in the world is the symbolic significance of Trump’s comments.
For in the sociopathic worlds of the benevolent elite who lord over us all, Coral Reefs – and the millions of years of evolution, ecological majesty, and sacred life that they represent – are, of course, worth far less than military warships designed for no other purpose than to kill, maim, and destroy.
Capitalism endures no sacred cows.
To understand the psyches of the likes of Trump, who constitute a transnational capitalist class without precedent in human history, we must first understand the broader structures of power at work which reward barefaced greed and allow such individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of the vast majority; a class whose nomadic elite set up tents in every country in search of the most profits at the least cost, whose interests are defended by all agents of imperialism – the state, the military, the judiciary of nearly every country in the world- as they float, guiltlessly, above the rest of impoverished humanity.
When you’re as rich and powerful as Trump, in other words, you get to trump the rest of the universe into doing your bidding. Ethics are a non-issue for those at the top. The System is rigged in their favour and they have no need for the rest of us, against whose protests they proclaim: let them eat cake.
In the words of George Monbiot, describing the comfortable lives of the detached elite in England, where inequality has reached levels unseen since the Victorian era:
“Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement” (b).
Entitlement, in this case, amounts to the possession of the planet itself. Should the son of a billionaire real estate magnate expect anything less? Should his class ilk and the country he represents – whose fortunes are tied to a system bent on possessing, valuing and devaluing the resources of this good Earth for the few – expect anything less?
This is hardly the first time American foreign policy has gotten its way at the expense of 99% of humanity – and it certainly won’t be the last.
US Empire and the ‘Pivot to Asia’
The US Navy, perhaps by far the most technologically advanced oceangoing fleet the world, has blamed the incident on faulty navigational equipment. Allegedly en route to Indonesia from Japan, and having first stopped by Subic bay to refuel, the Navy has yet to give a clear answer as to why a military ship was patrolling the region in the first place.
The incident is an indication of America’s imperialist ambitions in Asia that underpin rising tensions with China. It also highlights the Philippine government’s own submission to the whims of its former colonial master in the region, and its willingness to serve as one of America’s ‘buffer’ states – a cordon of nations that includes Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, among others – against China’s growing political and economic clout.
The ruling elites of a former colonial overlord and its pet colony have once again converged against an imaginary foe, a scapegoat and release valve for a global economic crisis of their own making.
An unquestioned commitment to the neoliberal creed (c) that has wreaked havoc on the working class has survived administrative shifts from Bush and Arroyo to Obama and Aquino. The latter having both run on platforms of ‘change’, their socio-economic and military policies have changed little in concrete terms from those of their predecessors. While cutting social spending, privatising crucial public services, bailing out the banks, and embracing austerity on the grounds ‘that there is no money’, they have diverted billions toward building up their military might in a mutant Keynesian attempt to stimulate the global economy.
America consistently outspends all other top military-spending nations combined:
“The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007.
Externally, these are necessary expenditures of world empire. Internally, they represent, as Michal Kalecki was the first to suggest, an imperial triangle of state-financed military production, media propaganda, and real/imagined economic-employment effects that has become a deeply entrenched, and self-perpetuating feature of the U.S. social order. (d)”
Obama, in his commitment to follow closely on the heels of Bush amid masterful political doublespeak, has presided over a renewed bout of global war-mongering and unprecedented violations of the civil, political and economic rights of US citizens even as he seeks to cloak himself with a veil of progressive rhetoric (e). The evidence against his lies is overwhelming: from US-backed conflicts in the Middle-East, to America’s leading role in the renewed scramble for Africa, to his promotion of his Bush-era torture-supporting chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan to CIA director , to unmanned drone strikes that have killed thousands of women, children, alleged insurgents and American citizens in Pakistan, Mali, Yemen and elsewhere.
With ceaseless assaults on those least able to cope with the current socio-economic crises, elite interests tussling over increasingly scarce resources, and militaristic responses to an economic downturn akin to the 1930s, conditions are ripe for another global conflict– this time to erupt in Asia.
(a) Dinglasan, Rouchelle. GMA News. “US warship’s damage to Tubbataha Reef worsens to over 4,000 sqm” <http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/293155/news/nation/us-warship-s-damage-to-tubbataha-reef-worsens-to-over-4-000-sqm>
(b) Monbiot, George. “Another Country” <http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/28/another-country/>
(c) Hart-Landsberg, Martin. “Neoliberalism: Myths and Reality” <http://monthlyreview.org/2006/04/01/neoliberalism-myths-and-reality>
“Neoliberal Myths: A Critical Look at the Mexican Experience” < http://monthlyreview.org/2002/12/01/neoliberal-myths>
(d) Foster, John B., Hannah Holleman and Robert McChesney. “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending”<http://monthlyreview.org/2008/10/01/the-u-s-imperial-triangle-and-military-spending>
See also: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database <http://www.sipri.org/databases/milex>
(e) Eagleton, Oliver. “Obama: the Unreported Truth” <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/obama-the-unreported-truth/>
The Washington Post. “Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists”. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html>
