Inching closer to nuclear warfare

Batas Mauricio

CORPORATE governance, corporate ethics, and corporate responsibility were the topics that I discussed in a lecture I delivered for officials of the Bhutan National Bank who attended a one-week seminar on “corporate governance” at the International Academy for Continuous Education in Quezon City.

I did the lecture upon the invitation of IACE president Aries Balanay, the incumbent president of the Rotary Club of Intramuros, and of IACE chairman of the Board, Susan Balanay, the mother of Aries. For almost three hours, I dwelt on the Philippine experience on corporate governance, ethics, and responsibility.

In the end, one Bhutanese participant declared his conformity to my thesis that all laws and regulations dealing with corporations and how they should discharge their duties and responsibilities to their owners, board directors, officers, and employees would be meaningless, without the government having the capacity to monitor compliance with those rules, and without sincerity and honesty permeating the corporation’s stakeholders.

As in almost every other areas of life in the Philippines, there are laws and statutes that prescribe the norms of conduct that corporations must comply with. These laws and statutes are there not only to instill order and smooth relations and transactions, but more to assure that the pursuit of business, in general, is a fruitful and beneficial exercise.

Among others, there is the Corporation Code of the Philippines, the Revised Code of Corporate Governance of 2009 from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the various decisions of the Supreme Court as well, dealing with corporate governance, ethics, and responsibility expansively and exhaustively.

Unfortunately, however, compliance with these statutes is often shrouded in shambles, on account of the fact that the government does not have the capacity and the wherewithal to monitor each and every corporation that has been allowed to do business in the Philippines. This is sad because, as past experiences have shown, unscrupulous persons were experts in hiding their nefarious activities through corporate fronts.

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Day after day, it looks like the world is getting closer and closer to a nuclear warfare which could very well be the spark that could ignite the end of this world as we know it. The key to this is North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, who appears to be enjoying his capability to explode nuclear weapons despite threats of military action from the US.

On Sept. 3, 2017, Kim Jong-Un was reported to have carried out the detonation of a powerful nuclear missile, after having launched a series of missile explosions that included a missile that flew over Japan. In all likelihood, the nuclear denotation of a powerful nuclear missile would not be the last for North Korea.

So far, US President Donald Trump has responded only with messages on Twitter, denouncing what Kim Jong-Un had been doing. The question, of course, is, how long will Trump confine himself to mere Twitter messages, especially since North Korea now has the power to send a nuclear missile to the US mainland? It is clear that all options at negotiations and deterrence have run out, leaving military response as the only available solution.

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com