The big lie: ‘Charter’s restrictions have limited foreign capital inflow’

THE move to lift the Constitutional restrictions on foreign investment in public utilities and media is based on false arguments repeated over and over again in the Hitlerian fashion of the “Big Lie.”

These lies have persisted because the powerful foreign firms that control our telecom industry and public utilities have been lobbying for the removal of those restrictions.

Lifting the restrictions would only legitimize their violation of our Constitution for the past two decades through corruption, and entrench themselves in a position of control over our public utilities, forever, so to speak.

Sadly, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez seemed to have believed this Big Lie, based on his statements in a forum with Japan’s big businessmen in Tokyo recently. I don’t think President Duterte, with his strong sense of nationalism, would follow the cue of Dominguez, who is after all, the sole big capitalist in his Cabinet.

Duterte so far has only said that the Charter should be amended to change our political system to a federal one. Dominguez is trying to piggyback his pro-foreign capitalist agenda on Duterte’s plan.

Dominguez’s uncritical faith in foreign investment, so typical among our ruling elite, is based on ignorance, or feigned ignorance of the indisputable fact that it