Manila Times update on Dipidio, page-23

To recommend an acquaintance with the history of the political economy of the Philippines in order to understand it contemporaneously and be met with the characterisation of its current, elected, president as a "capricious despot" simply proves my point.

I might not understand Duterte but I would never broadcast my ignorance by making such a claim.

It is often the case that those who wish to criticise slice and dice the words of others and attribute to them things they simply did not say. Once again I have to deal with such unsophisticated manipulation of what I actually write.To state it plainly, you state a claim I never made about OGC:

"Rather, you make the claim that they have instead "shield[ed] themselves behind local political forces that can dissolve in an instant".

Please, try to read what is on the page, not what you want to manufacture. I refer you to what I actually said:

"Too often foreign investors like to shield themselves behind local political forces that can dissolve in an instant.They dissolve very often because the foreign company simply does not understand them."

Reality might be a bitch, but so is the actual evidence of the text itself.

I never even suggested that OGC was not 'clean', just argued that they have failed to manage their relationship with the local communities affected by their activity. The 'evidence' is that bitch reality itself: the existence of an organised protest movement against the miner and the fact that after two years of 'oh so masterful' lobbying they have not been able to renew the FTAA.

I love it when I get the chance to use the word disingenuous, So, you disgenuously claim that:

"Had they been initially successful in obtaining the FTAA renewal, would you have asserted that they were masters of the political landscape in the Philippines (rather than 'particularly unsophisticated')? "

But they didn't get the FTAA renewed did they? This problem did not just emerge in the last 2 years did it? It has festered for over a decade hasn't it? https://www.theage.com.au/national/mine-guard-to-be-charged-over-village-shooting-20080328-ge6wh2.html. Yes, that is from the Melbourne Age.

Personally, if the FTAA was renewed I would have been more stupefied than inclined to see as OGC masters of anything except mining.

But according to your analysis it was "fundamentally unpredicted/able confluence of opportunistic and corrupt forces". Sounds like the penetrating analysis of a public relations hack to me.

Why would the Neuva Vizcaya governor take such drastic action? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fa2wy2DLmI&feature=emb_logo. Don't ask us to swallow the trope of those "corrupt forces" you conjured, please. Padilla, hmm that's a name I've heard before. Why couldn't OGC address real issues as they arose, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUn8Ybg_M_0&feature=emb_logo and simply compensate those affected by their mining activity? But they have won awards, haven't they? So these protests (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNixz4yrF48) from 2014 are what? This document (https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/OceanaGold-Report.pdf) is a tissue of falsehoods? Surely, such an award winning company is being unfairly targeted by leftists when articles such as this (https://www.bulatlat.com/2019/08/24/oceanagolds-wealth-is-misery-for-kasibus-farmers/) appear in the results of a simple Google search.

Its 2020, the age of public relations supremacy is over. OGC can't hide its mistakes and believing some public relations svengali that they can, will be (as it has been in this case) counterproductive, to say the least. I believe in mining and consider it a real source of economic growth and employment in developing countries. I want OGC to have its FTAA renewed. But should I just swallow the shallow and manifestly self-serving material spewing out of the company when I can just Google their name and be presented with an entirely different picture of the world? Now, believe me, Filipinos see the world they live in, not the world presented in Facebook posts where an older foreign man is sitting at a table surrounded by, amongst others, pretty young Filipinas. If you know anything the local impact of such a juxtaposition you would fire the public relations specialist who thought such pictures would portray a positive image of the company. Unsophisticated? Amateurish? I'll stand by that assessment of how OGC is handling this mess.

Don't pretend something doesn't exist when it does and you can't conceal it. It's so elementary, it should hardly need stating. Its 2020 remember, I am not being "unnecessarily cynical and unhelpful", I am simply being a realist in a world that is now difficult to hide from. For example, this happened: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/indigenous-peoples-didipio-denounce-illegal-searches-security-forces-Oceanagold, did it not? In 2009! Award winning indeed. The interests of "balance" would surely embrace the reality of the historical record, would it not? If OGC had fixed these problems, over the long course of at least a whole decade, they simply would not be in the position they find themselves today.