Impunity impresses

You can view last Tuesday’s (October 28) The Explainer on line on YouTube. Incidentally, apropos of the assertions made by my guest, former Senator Eva Estrada Kalaw, the son of former Senate President Jovito Salonga, Steve Salonga, sent me the following e-mail:

I viewed your program this evening with Tita Eva Estrada Kalaw and the NP youth as panel.

In the interest of historical accuracy, which I know is of utmost importance to you, may I say:

1. It is true, Tita Eva was guest candidate of the LP in the 1971 senatorial election, and won with the rest of the Plaza Miranda victims who swept that election.

2. However, she was certainly a Liberal Party member when she contended for the Presidency of the Liberal Party against Sen. Salonga. She, along with Evelio Javier, John Osmena, Lito Atienza, Lorna Verano Yap, Sally Perez and Art Defensor, stood for a party merger with NP President Doy Laurel who at that time had launched the UNIDO party as a merger vehicle with the LP. Sen Salonga opposed the merger and ultimately won the party presidency in a convention brokered by Judy Roxas. I was present through all this, though I can understand Tita Eva’s lapse of memory. It has been more than 25 years since and these are now all water under the bridge.

Thank you for a most entertaining show. I really appreciated your courtesy to Tita Eva despite your better knowledge of the actual facts and circumstances on the matter. Best regards and more power to you and The Explainer, I remain

Sincerely yours,

Steve B. Salonga

My column for today is Ambulance to St. Luke’s. Obviously, I think Bolante is malingering. Besides the tell-tale absence of an oxygen mask, scuttlebutt is that according to a stewardess on the flight, Bolante was quite jolly on the flight. Most telling of all has been the absence of a proper medical bulletin, which suggests the doctors who have to affix their names to any statement either found nothing wrong with the patient or are disinclined to lie to the public. The extent of their medical intervention seems to be administering Benadryl.

While the fate of Bolante’s interesting, the whole thing is a sideshow in a larger production; and the most useful approach to Bolante’s St. Luke’s confinement is how it’s related to the larger game plan of the administration.

Here, another St. Luke’s visitor comes in handy. When The President’s husband dropped by the hospital, the Senate sergeant-at-arms people denied he met with Bolante, even though the coincidence is just too delicious to overlook.

Chalk it up -Atty. Arroyo’s visit- to being a calculated act of defiance and contempt for public opinion. Who brazened it out? The President’s husband. Who fell over themselves observing and commenting on his visit? The country. Who, then, despite his enfeebled medical condition, is the man with real power? The President’s husband, not his critics all barking for Bolante’s release to a Senate uncomfortable with reviving old investigations.

Indeed, the whole handling of Bolante’s arrival should be viewed from our “malakas at mahina” culture. It was a naked show of strength, for a society that confuses impunity with either virtue or legitimacy. From the moment he arrived to the time he was whisked into his hospital suite, the executive department controlled the choreography of the whole event; the best the Senate sergeant-at-arms could do was tag along (as scornfully pointed out by Politicians are from Uranus), the best the media could do was scramble to keep up, the only thing the public could do was watch. No wonder A Simple Life can say it’s all a circus, pointing to the performing monkeys while ignoring the ringleader.

That same attitude was present in the way the Palace reacted to the members of the Catholic hierarchy that -sorta, kinda- lashed out at the chief executive and all her works in a press conference on the eve of Bolante’s return: Palace: Chacha answer to bishops’ call for change.

This was followed a couple of days later by the President’s ambassador-at-large, in his capacity as a big business pal of the President, appealing to the prelates not to rock the boat: PCCI’s Dee ‘scolds’ CBCP head .

After all, the Palace’s pals have every reason to want to the status quo to be preserved: there is so much yet to be engulfed and devoured.

Consider yesterday’s Inquirer editorial, Amateur hour, concerning the bid of San Miguel Corporation for the Government Service Insurance System’s bloc of Meralco shares. The whole thing’s something that The Warrior Lawyer tackled as well:

In a bear market, with stock prices tanking, why would SMC pay more than a 100% premium for a stake in Meralco ? Granted that it’s a block sale, but still, San Miguel could have gotten a better deal, and helped the stock market index rise, by buying over the counter. It would have given the market, and the economy as a whole, a boost at a time when it most needs it.

Many are skeptical, and see a political and financial motive behind the sudden sellout by the GSIS…

Indeed, many believe San Miguel was convinced or coerced, whichever, to play the role of white knight. SMC essentailly saved Meralco from the continuing take-over threats of Garcia. Malacanang appeared to have been a key player, as Garcia, one of GMA’s most rabid attack dogs, backed down immediately, although with his usual bluster. But the shotgun wedding of San Miguel and Meralco is a done deal.

The Lopezes need all the help they can get at the moment. In a two-part article in BusinessWorld (October 22 and 23 issues) Bernardo V. Lopez (no relation, I suppose) chronicled the travails of the teetering Lopez empire, which he predicts will go the way of Lehman Brothers due to over-borrowing and its foreign partners saying adieu. The Lopezes have been selling their businesses, even the more profitable ones, like the Northern Luzon Expressway (NLEX) concession bought by Manny Pangilinan’s Metro Pacific, to raise cash. The family is not willing to hand over its crown jewel, Meralco, to the grubby paws of Mr. Garcia.

What’s in it for San Miguel scratching the GSIS’s back and vice-versa? The President isn’t the only leader gaming out multiple scenarios, all at the same time. While the name of the game remains constitutional amendments, some sort of preparations need to get started for the 2010 presidential elections if they take place.

Scuttlebutt is that in November, the results of an NPC-commissioned survey will be released, focusing on Senators Legarda and Escudero. In my Plurk timeline, I recently posted the results of a Pulse Asia survey commissioned by UNO:

Pulse Asia Sep. 27 (commissioned by UNO): President: Noli 19% Erap 17% Villar 17% Chiz 13% Loren 13% Ping 9% Mar 6%

Senators: Jinggoy 54% Mar 51% Pia C. 46% Bong R. 42% Drilon 40% Miriam 39% Recto 36% Jamby 35% Koko P. 33% Serge O. 32% Jun Magsaysay 31%

Sotto 29% Enrile 27% Gordon 24% JDV 24% Mike D. 22% Binay 20% Failon 19% Lapid 18% Pichay 18% Guingona III 17% Biazon 17%

Barbers 12% B. Fernando 12% Atienza 12% Satur O. 5% Casino 3% A. Tamano 3% L. Maza 2% Harry Roque 1%

The above is interesting because it puts forward the UNO list of prospective candidates and/or those it considers the ones to beat.

Patricio Mangubat says Bolante’s (and the Palace’s) options are two:

Two things going for Bolante—either do a Neri or do a Lozada. Should he choose to do a Neri, he may be casting his lot with a Godmother whose term ends one and a half years from now. His insurance policy has an expiration date of 2010. He may enter into a compromise agreement with the new administration, which may involve biting the hand that fed him. Should he decide to stick with his co-mafia members, most notably the First Golfer Gang (FGG), he should be ready with his millions to massage the irate public and those who handle his cases. Otherwise, he may be in for a lot of trouble and possible long jail time.

Or, he could do a Lozada and possibly escape detention by doing a Chavit. This can only happen if those groups (read: civil society and other democratic forces) succeed in ousting Gloria before 2010. The reversal of his fortune depends on the success rate of civil society’s anti-Gloria campaign. These groups should do their thing quick; otherwise, Bolante’s incarceration is just a phone call away. The head of the FGG will just order his functionary at the Office of the Ombusman to write a warrant.

No coincidence, then, that the Ombudsman has suddenly expressed interest in Bolante’s case: Ombudsman gives Bolante 10 days to file counter-affidavit. There you go.

And in the end, it’s the waiting game that serves the Palace’s interests best. It’s been carefully nurturing the impression it’s push to amend the Constitution is unstoppable; therefore, nothing should derail it. It couldn’t control the timing of Bolante’s release from jail; it can orchestrate when and how he eventually offers up his “testimony.” As disapolitikal put it,

Constant distraction provides a dark refuge to those who have embraced the darkness.

And the dark cloud, for now, is looming Charter Change.

Overseas, these reports brings me to a theme I’d like to return to at some future time. We aren’t alone in having an overaged, over-cynical, political class going great guns to maintain the cozy status quo, and cheering them on are the very, very, many who are dependent on them. See Malaysia’s Sclerotic Political Reality and Indonesia at the Crossroads (Sigh) Again and for comparison, The X Generation Arrives in Taipei.

The political representatives of Generation X, here at home? Chiz Escudero, Mike Defensor, Teddy Casino. ‘Nuff said.

Chasing Bolante

(Video taken by Arbet Bernardo)

After a gathering of bloggers, together with Blog@AWBHoldings.com, BrinkNotes, and Billycoy, we decided to check out the action at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The road leading to NAIA Terminal I was lined on either side with vehicles and there was traffic on the ramp going up to the terminal. So we went straight then made a U-Turn and proceeded away from the vicinity of the airport. At that time AM Radio was reporting that Joc-Joc Bolante had been brought out of the Northwest Orient Airlines flight he’d been on, in a wheelchair.

You could hear the pandemonium at the airport and then, within a few minutes, the reporters breathlessly announced that he’d been placed in an ambulance and that ambulance was leaving, probably bound for St. Luke’s Hospital in Quezon City. By this time, we’d gone past NAIA Terminal III, around the rotunda, and were headed to Edsa; more or less at this point, we encountered the ambulance, escorted by motorcycle cops, a PNP car, and a horde of media vehicles, zooming down the opposite lane.

We went on to Edsa, headed to Makati; the radio reported that the convoy had gone into Fort Bonifaco, then ended up on the Skyway, then turned onto Edsa. By this time we, too, were on Edsa, having gone through the tunnel, and we were in the vicinity of the Rockwell exit when we heard that Bolante’s convoy had just gone through the tunnel, too. I pulled over, turned on my hazard lights, and decided to intercept the convoy.

In a few minutes we saw the flashing lights of the ambulance and soon enough, a motorcycle cop heralded the arrival of the rest of the convoy. Then, a police car.

From that moment on, we became part of the convoy and, for a time, managed to keep apace with the ambulance itself.

Despite what seemed attempts by the police to shake off the media vehicles, we managed to keep up with the convoy as it zoomed down Edsa, at one point seemingly poised to go up the Greenhills flyover, then indicating it would enter Camp Aguinaldo or go down Santolan and then enter Camp Crame, and then trying to leave the media vehicles behind by squeezing through one of the Cubao lanes and then abruptly turning on to P. Tuazon and then ending up on E. Rodriguez, the street of St. Luke’s.

The YouTube video above, taken by Blog@AWBHoldings.com as I was driving, chronicles the last few minutes of the chase, and the removal of Bolante from the ambulance and into St. Luke’s, the President’s hospital of choice. He hopped out of the car and got a fine video of Bolante being brought out of the ambulance, all I managed, from the driver’s seat, was to take some snaps:

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The corpus delicti.

AM reporters said that as Bolante was wheeled out of the plane, he was clutching his chest, first with one hand, then the other, obviously demonstrating that he was experiencing some discomfort. What I found odd both from the reports and from seeing him brought out of the ambulance on a stretcher, is that the medics (if there were any on the ambulance) never even bothered to administer oxygen to Bolante, which is an elementary precaution taken in such situations when the patient may be experiencing heart problems.

As it turned out, the Manila International Airport Authority, together with the National Bureau of Investigation, were able to scramble an ambulance, an escort, and whisk Bolante away, with some pretty good chances along the way to either bring him to government facilities (the Philippine Air Force HQ, then various camps), or pull some other switcheroo if they’d managed to shake off the media vehicles. Even if that wasn’t there intention, the operation brought him to a private hospital where access to him could be controlled, and while Bolante’s being guarded by a security detail from the Senate sergeant-at-arms, he is under the authority of his doctors who can delay his being handed over to the Senate.

There is adequate time and opportunity for the Palace to be reassured he will toe the party line.

See Et Cetera Et Cetera for a parallel account of the car chase, as well as a sober appreciation of the dilemma presented by Bolante’s return.

(the rest of my Chasing Bolante pictures are on Flickr). See Bolante in Senate custody at hospital: Will answer charges in proper forum–statement.

The fugitive

My column today is Bolante’s great escape. For details, check out Newsbreak’s Timeline: Joc-joc Bolante and the Fertilizer Scam and CA upholds decision to freeze Bolante’s bank accounts and the Arroyo Corruption wiki and Rotarians urge Bolante to come out and tell the truth (not to mention Jun Lozada weighing in, too).

The Warrior Lawyer points out that besides Bolante, former Agriculture Secretary Cito Lorenzo has some explaining to do, too.

So tomorrow, Jocelyn “Joc-Joc” Bolante’s due to arrive. It seems a caucus of senators, meant to help the Senate President decide whether to instruct the Senate sergeant-at-arms to serve a warrant of arrest on him or not, ended up cancelled.

As it is, former Senators Franklin Drilon, Sergio Osmena III, and Ramon Magsaysay Jr. are holding a press conference, tomorrow, at 2 p.m. at the Club Filipino, to point out that their report did not write finis to the Bolante investigation.

Whoops, hold the presses! Latest (6:42 p.m.) is that Senate President Villar has directed the Senate sergeant-at-arms to serve the warrant of arrest on Bolante upon his arrival. The Drilon-Osmena-Magsaysay press conference has been canceled, as a result…

The scuttlebutt has been plentiful concerning how the Palace will handle the return of the fugitive. Bolante’s lawyer, Tony Zulueta, is supposedly identified with the President’s husband. But you don’t have to believe that to see the fingerprints of the Palace all over the place: what was submitting a motion to the Supreme Court on Office of the Solicitor-General stationery all about?More interesting was scuttlebutt that retired General Palparan was going to be sent to meet and greet Bolante upon his arrival; this has been overtaken by reports that the National Bureau of Investigation will send agents to “meet” Bolante and “escort” him to the NBI or the Bureau of Immigration where he can be “debriefed.” Mixed messages here -is it to help him or keep him on good behavior?- made all the more complicated because Federal officials in the USA won’t just escort Bolante to his Manila-bound flight, but, it seems, accompany him to his destination to make sure he won’t sneak back into America.This means not only will Bolante have to come home, but that the public will know when and where he’s arriving -which makes whisking him away a ticklish thing to accomplish. He just represents an inconvenient truth at this point, much as the Palace thinks it has all its ducks in a row and that it has the political momentum to finally achieve the constitutional amendments it wants.

Blogger Barangay Kidlatan is of the opinion that Bolante and impeachment are related, something others seem to think, too. Of course they are related, but whether the former will actually breathe life into the latter is what seems to me a bit of a stretch.

So I don’t know if I agree with Mon Casiple when he says,

Now, throw Jocjoc Bolante into the brew and a possible insider impeachment witness has appeared on the horizon, in addition to all the others. The impeachment–a quixotic proposition before–suddenly now seems plausible.

It’s like pinning any hopes at all on former Speaker de Venecia’s posturing concerning the impeachment complaint. It’s posturing, calculated on the premise that he’ll never really get called upon to deliver testimony against the President (and knowing too that the Palace won’t be as bold as to actually call his bluff).

The dilemma, it seems to me, for much of officialdom is whether they should make hay while the sun’s still shining, or bite the hand that feeds them in the hope of juicier tidbits from a new dispensation. Those interested in the presidency are more interested in coalition-building and part of their coalitions-to-be would include the dregs of the present dispensation. So they will sniff around for maximum barking time but refrain from any real biting.Yet there are officials aplenty, to my mind, who’ve never had it so good, and so, why not keep the party going?

There are many, many, more in the ranks of officialdom who know they will never be senators, much less presidents, whose ambitions only extend to their little fiefdoms, and if there’s a lightning rod in the presidential palace to distract public attention, so much the better, and why curry favor with a new regime if the old one can be given a new lease on life?But that may be getting too far ahead of the story, unfolding as it is. Bolante’s coming home.Might he not sneak off, if his flight has a stopover somewhere? Who knows.

Senate President Villar is agonizing, apparently, over whether he wants a showdown with the Palace on one hand, or to let sleeping dogs lie and arm his opponents in the upper house with another issue on which to base a plot to unseat him.

The Senate President seems to have realized public interest’s been piqued on this one, and the Senate has to continue what it began.

Everyone in the political class is waiting to see whether the public, once more, growls disapproval or shrugs the whole thing off.

And of course, the best laid plans of mice and men … well, whatever plans have been hatched, there’s always the possibility an underling botches the job, and creates a new P.R. problem.

Meanwhile… For the first time ever, trading was temporarily suspended in the Philippine stock market.Overseas, as the American presidential race enters the home stretch, see the electoral math over at RealClearPolitics and Electoral-vote.com. Democrats agonize over their success, the Republicans form a circular firing squad amidst news of an electoral bloodbath. And, Benjamin Pimentel’s convincing argument of The Philippines as a Red State. Egads.

Looking South: Are there really “outsiders” in the Mindanao issue?

Today, the Second Mindanao Bloggers Summit is taking place in General Santos City. I was supposed to attend but my illness over the past week required my staying home. I’m glad they decided to invite The Jester-in-Exile instead. You can follow the proceedings on Ria on Tumblr.Here is what I intended to say at the blogger’s gathering.

You tasked me with “Looking South: An Outsider Pundits about Mindanao Politics, History and Commentary.” Let me begin by asserting there can be no outsiders in a Mindanao overwhelmingly composed of outsiders. And that furthermore, it is in embracing being outsiders that the true potential of both Mindanao and the Philippines will be realized.

Bluntly speaking, the period from 1935 to 1960, the first twenty-five years of our modern nationhood, were supposed to be; this was the chance to integrate Moros fully into the body politic; this was the time when the policies that made today’s Mindanao possible, for better or worse, were laid in place. The infrastructure was planned and implemented then: harnessing the hydroelectric capacity of Maria Cristina falls was mapped out in 1936, requiring a junket of nearly the entire legislature to Mindanao to instill in them the desirability of development; and contemporaneous with that scheme was another, which has yet to be implemented -a railway network, again first mapped out in 1936.

The late Max Soliven used to recount the slogan of the Commonwealth years, “Go South, Young Man!” itself borrowed from Horace Greely’s exhortation, “Go West, Young Man!” as a manifestation of American Manifest Destiny. And how an entire generation of privileged young men heeded that call, to turn frontiersmen in Mindanao. It was a national summoning up of the will to undertake something totally alien to us now: nation-building.

Along with that unrecoverable urge to consciously contribute to the building of a new nation, was something else completely unrecognizable to any Filipino except those who, perhaps, arrive to see Mindanao’s vast open plains and rolling landscape for the first time- the sense of vast, empty spaces, of a wilderness that so many at the time, not only Filipinos but say, the Japanese who colonized Davao and established ramie plantations in the 1930s, saw as practically begging for settlement.It is no coincidence, I think, that the basic infrastructure of Mindanao was laid down, from bridges to roads to ports, airports and even cities like this very city, GenSan, in the period from 1935 to 1960.

It is no coincidence that at this time the integration of the Moros into our national politics was accomplished, beginning with the writers of the 1935 Constitution taking into account the views of the traditional Moro ruling families for a kind of limited democracy in their domains: the Sultan sa Ramain pleaded for their traditional notions of authority to be respected, which was bitterly opposed by Christian politicians like , who wanted a general plebiscite in the area; the irony is that this is used, today, to promote the fiction that Moros somehow were not a party to, the formation of the present-day Philippine state.They were. And they even fought for that nation as the guerrilla movement in the Moro areas during the Japanese Occupation shows.

But the sad truth was the experiment in political integration began to show its limitations early on, the chief symptom being the 1949 elections that first put forward the concept of the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees, not to mention the dead, voting in places like Lanao: that election gave birth to the term “lutong macao.” It’s latest manifestation was the controversial results of the senatorial race in these same areas last year.

The next quarter century, 1960-1985 was supposed to be the coming of age of Mindanao and indeed, it began well with the election of Emmanuel Pelaez as Vice-President of the Philippines in 1961.But that opportunity, instead was squandered: murder and mayhem afflicted Christians and Muslims both; the late 60s, much of the 1970s, a great deal of the 80s, was spent with the shadow of military conscription hanging ominously on young Filipinos wherever they were. Instead of coming into its own, Mindanao descended into chaos: Climaco being gunned down, showing no self-respecting Christian leader could flourish on one hand, Mohammed Ali Dimaporo being the new breed of buccaneering Moro politico on the other. The AFP riding roughshod over everyone, Christian and Muslim alike, the heroism of individual soldiers tarnished by the barbarity of some our commanders.

The biggest casualty of all was the notion of a society and a country where all ethnicities could coexist in peaceful co-habitation.

My experience of Mindanao began in the late 80s and to the 1990s with close friends from Davao, who themselves had been sent to Manila by anxious parents worried over the violence in their city; and so it was as much through their eyes as through my own, that I discovered the optimism of Mindanao in the 1990s, when, finally, peace seemed to have returned, prosperity was nigh; there was something dizzyingly excioting about winding one’s way from Davao to GenSan in the early 1990s, at a time when the policy of the national government was both to maximize the benefits of the Moros splintering over ideology while maintaining the peace. Cielito Habito claims that Ramos entered office to see 6% of the national budget devoted to Mindanao and raised that percentage to 33%; but that the ratio has once more settled at 6% for Mindanao. Maybe what he told me was self-serving; I do remember the optimism of this city and it seemed, all of Mindanao at that time.But it was not to last.

Turning a blind eye to the MILF’s growing strength however had its limits as war re-erupted during the Estrada years, to great national acclaim. Peace was then restored and a brittle one maintained until the current president pulled the BJE-MOA seemingly out of thin air, causing national panic and possibly setting back the cause of peace by another generation.

I’d ask you to read Herbert Docena’s Towards a memorandum for self-determination which lays down the case for a divorce of Moros from the Philippine body politic. Together with the writings of a Mindanawon historian, Patricio Abinales (see his Re-constructing Colonial Philippines: 1900-1910) and Zainudin S. Malang’s Examining the Nexus Between Philippine Constitutionalism and the Mindanao Conflict, the increasing intellectual vigor -compared to the increasing cluelessness and ignorance of their Christian counterparts condemned to living in a perpetual present by our crumbling educational system- points to two problems, side-by-side and overlapping from time to time.

There is Southern, Moro Mindanao, with its twin problems of the failure of its own ethnic leadership and the cunning ability of non-Moros to make chumps of the Moros, on one hand, and the identity of Northern Mindanao, Christian, also suffering from misgovernance on both the local and national level, on the other. The former is an ethnic problem with religious characteristics; the second, the problem of old frontier towns wrestling with the problems of the frontiers finally being closed yet the institutions for stability not yet being fully in place.

The old -for the aspirations of Moros as articulated by its more radical intellectuals, leaders, and Christian sympathizers, derive their legitimacy from a particular assertion of antiquity- ever clashes with the new -the rambunctious impatience of the frontiersmen and women of Christian Mindanao.And government finds itself increasingly catering only to the professional political classes while ritually proclaiming they derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed -who are both liability and asset to these political classes, whether Moro or Christian.

Since while essentially undemocratic, our leadership has to go through the motions of deriving consent from the governed, the energies of our governors is increasingly diverted towards creating more manageable -whether by guns, gold, or goons- political real estate, regardless of where the true, rational, developmental interests of the population lies. Both Christian and Moro political leaders have increasingly carved up Mindanao into small, often bizarrely-shaped provinces, for the purpose of gerrymandering: political convenience camouflaged by shallow excuses that it’s for democracy or development.This increases the vested interests of our leaders in maintaining the status quo at all costs, regardless of the costs in opportunity to the electorate that, by increasingly being fragmented, increasingly becomes powerless. And yet that electorate comprises a culture old enough to have well- if broadly-defined, political characteristics.

Let me propose that most Filipinos are patriots but not nationalists, and that generations of intellectuals from Rizal onwards have been suspicious of patriotism and more interested in instilling nationalism – hence the obsession of the latter and the leaders they influence with both the rights and obligations of citizenship (“active citizenship”) , while most citizens themselves are interested only in rights, hardly ever on obligations, and roused only when rights are trampled (we can call it “reactive citizenship”).

So intellectual and political writers have been exploring, slicing, dicing, dissecting in every which way, the question of Mindanao, including the theoretical pros and cons of according Moro areas either Commonwealth status or outright independence; while it took one simple question -BJE-MOA, yea or nay?- to lead Filipinos in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao to erupt in alarm and indignation: “is the President giving away our national territory?” What the pundits had analyzed to death over decades was reduced to a simple slogan -”Sellout!” pithy yet ferocious yet representing everything, in a word, the public feared and cared about. And by public I include significant portions of the Moro population, too.

I believe there is more that unites us than divides us. The slogan “sellout!” that greeted the BJE-MOA deal had at its core the belief that officialdom couldn’t be trusted to keep the interests of constituencies at heart; dig deep enough, and it is a suspicion and resentment that burns brightly in the hearts of many Moros, too. Yet theirs is a resentment different from those of their Christian fellow citizens, in that they are better able to articulate a past than their Christian peers. The provenance of that past is a separate question neither relevant nor the proper place to delve into here.

There is, though, a danger in bringing up the past, and that is: not only whose past, but how far back do you want to go? From Butuan, the riches of our ancestors have been dug up and there is a point where the Hindu golden artifacts of our ancient ruling classes gave way to golden artifacts of an Islamic nature; so why not Shrivijayan supremacists and not just Muslim supremacists, since it can be argued either by extermination, intermarriage, or conquest, the sultans and datus of old shifted from Hinduism to Islam just as one day some of them would shift from Islam to Christianity -but the essential difference between today’s Moro royalty and yesterday’s principalia, with many descendants still populating our political elite-Or do we look forward, and not back to the past; do we celebrate the supposed vulgarity and genuine frontier spirit of Mindanao -both Muslim and Christian- as more fully expressive of the wanderlust and entrepreneurial spirit of our common ancestors?

The Ilonggo, Cebuano, Capampangan, Tagalog and Ilocano migrant to Davao and General Santos City has more in common with the Moro merchants who have built flourishing ferry companies between San Carlos City in Negros and Toledo City in Cebu, and who supply the country with pearls, gemstones and dibidi, dibidi.

All -Christian and Moro- have shown disatisfaction with the latter-day sultans and datus called presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, mayors and councilors in their home towns, and have packed up and pitched camp elsewhere, bringing with them, in a sense, freedom: freedom from old loyalties, from the old obediences that made us a submissive people.

Your so-called Imperial Manila has not been, as Nick Joaquin, an authentic Manileno pointed out, a Tagalog City since after World War II; it’s no isolated bit of trivia that its first elected mayor, Arsenio Lacson, was an Ilonggo. I do not dispute, as the Chinese saying so eloquently puts it, that “The mountain is high, and the emperor so far away,” but let us get to the true meaning of this saying, which I suggest is at the heart of the issue of an Imperial Manila. As Martin Wolf wrote,

“The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” This well-known saying captures what so often happened. When the emperor was weak, it became difficult to reach decisions. Officials looked after themselves and their families. Infirmity of purpose, corruption and an inability to protect the empire itself ensued. Sooner or later the dynasty fell, to be replaced by another, often after a period of chaos.

Christian and Muslim alike, we are living in a period of chaos. Crumbling infrastructure, a galloping population growth rate, a grasping political class increasingly alienated from the electorate whose opinions can be discounted: all are signs of a decadent not just political, but national, culture. If that culture persists, then I do agree that its inevitable consequence will be a divorce between Moros and their Christian kin, as Docena points out:

Supposing the Moros do succeed in getting greater self-rule, how the Moros will govern themselves is to be a continuing contest among Moros: it could well be that the rich and landed Moros, many of them already with the MILF, will only be replacing – or conniving with – current Filipino rulers in oppressing the Moro people. But just as Filipinos – to quote former Philippine President Manuel Quezon – should be able to choose “a government run like a hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans,” so should the Moros.

We will ever prefer our native corruption to foreign claims to superior government; else we would, as many Filipinos have, simply pack up and leave if what we truly prefer is to exchange native for migrant status.Yet preference for native filth is different from actually wanting to wallow in that filth.

We would, all of us, prefer cleanliness to being dirty.So how do we make our political surroundings more sanitary? Is there a solution?Perhaps, but the most difficult to accomplish, for it it is one based on attitude.

Only a combination of secularism -knowing there are Christians and Moslems both interested in the equality promised by a secular state, and who oppose the shackles of theocracy in any form- and also, embracing the opportunities brought about by the waning of what I like to call the Old Obediences enforced by church, club, and school, the old institutions that instilled the old values of a far smaller and pre-colonial Philippines- can bring us forward and end the strife of the past.If we are left with what we have now, and what we have had even before the coming of European colonizers, a society where each person was expected to know their place, and where the mores of ancient days remained a heavy weight on everyone’s shoulders, then we will only have what we have always had: internal migration, internal escape from one province to another, so that Cebu and the rest of the Visayas sends its migrant workers to Manila, and international migration.

Again what unites us, Moro and Christian alike, Mindanawon, Bisaya, and whatever ethnicity you come from in Luzon, is the desire to escape: escaping the choking and uninspiring realities of the local in pursuit of national and international self-fulfillment. Which is why the insistence on autonomy, when articulated by professional politicians, inspires misgivings in me, because it seems merely gerrymandering writ large.But the latter day sultans and datus, even as they war against each other as their ancestors warred against each other, will firmly remain in control so long as a Mindanowon can say to someone from Luzon, you are an outsider; it is the local that strangles the viability of the national, it is the local that has imprisoned the national.

A national orientation built on the fundamental premise that it was a search for individual prosperity that brought people to this part of the planet in the first place, is itself the only escape from the feudal ties that bind.

Everything new has its limits, of course, as does everything national: the Senate, on the whole, has produced more statesmen than the purely local House of Representative with its scions of bandit chiefs- but it, too, is degenerating into a not-too-bright collection of celebrities; yet it is better than the House, up to now; and all that the bandit chiefs can propose is the Senate’s abolition, which is literally cutting off the pointed nose to spite the sour face. Which survey was it, that had Mindanawons preferring the abolition of the House to the abolition of the Senate? There lies true wisdom and an appreciation of what truly ails this country.

You see, something has happened over the past 25 years that the policy-makers and the politicians and even media,I think, haven’t quite grasped. Just as the “Sold North,” the solid Ilocano ethnic voting bloc long an influential part of our politics withered away and vanished, so, too, has the ethnic isolation of provinces and regions begun to disappear.

I am sure many of you know many examples: Aurora Province is increasingly Ilocano and not Tagalog, Quezon Province is increasingly Bicolano and Batangueno, to give two examples closer to home, for me; Manila is Bisaya, and everywhere, from Cebu to Manila to Dagupan City in Pangasinan to Baguio, there are Moro enclaves where generations of locals only heard of Moros in fables.

Purity is the last refuge of bigots, chauvinists, and supremacists of every kind; the hybrid on the other hand is the survivor, the true champion in the game of life. The increasing reality of our nationhood is seen in GenSan and throughout Mindanao: the products of mixed marriages, multilingual, multiethnic, who are creating new cultures based on commingling of their parents’ cultures.

These are the people whose enterprise endures and transcends the best and worst that the inbred and degenerate dregs of our ancient cultures can dish out: the gerrymandering, warlordism, feudalism, transactional politicking and freebooting that unites the Moro and Christian political professionals -including the professional rebels who look to Allah, or Marx for guidance, who are in cahoots with those classes.

Mindanao taught me two basic things. First, a positive attitude is much more attractive, because creative and not destructive, than a negative one. Second, that the new is to be embraced, though a reverence for the best aspects of the old never discarded.

Set aside the idealogues, and in truth, the solutions have been mapped out and put in place here, in Mindanao, just as they have been in many parts of the Visayas, in Bicol, in Ilocandia and other places in Luzon. If only our leaders both in and out of power would listen -and perhaps, leave well enough alone.

Well, they won’t, not unless you tell them to; and as it was for Rizal, so it is for you: divide-and-conquer will triumph over you, unless and until you come to the conclusion as his generation did, that there is more than unites us, than can possibly divide us; and that in finding common cause lies the path to a simple but wonderful reality to which we should all aspire.

You and I should be free, to look for prosperity, and find self-fulfillment, wherever and whenever we can, unbound and unlimited by notions of religion, ethnicity, and why not, even citizenship. You should be able to find true love, as many, including surely many of your parents did, never mind if one is Tagalog and the other Tausug, or one is Cebuano and the other Ilonggo, one is Christian, the other Moslem, whether once born in Pampanga and now living in Cagayan de Oro.

If the Filipino family is both the bulwark of our civilization and in many ways, circumscribes that civilization, why can’t we see what is all around us? A truly Filipino family, one that incorporates the best of our various ethnicities, yet not bound by the limits of dogma, one that finds comfort, success, and contentment, irrespective of where one’s ancestors first saw the light of day.

Vote in the Filipino Voices poll

I am currently in sickbay right now and thus cannot write a long post. I urge you, though, to contribute to what could be an embryo primary process by participating in the Filipino Voices poll asking who your choices are in 2010. This is something that deserves widest publicity, and I urge you to not only vote but also to spread the word.

Apology not accepted

(Above, prewar Philippines Free Press editorial cartoon)

Today is Blog Action Day, with the theme of Poverty.

I am republishing an article I wrote in two parts, the first when I was still in college, the second, a decade later upon rediscovering what I’d written a decade earlier…

Apology not accepted

YOU were standing by the jeepney stop in front of the Faculty  Center. How you got there, I don’t know. It was early afternoon.

The weather was pleasant. I was in one of my endless sophomore years. You had on one of those simple dresses of 1940s cut, which the modest of means never gave up wearing long after the originals which had arrived during  Liberation had out served their usefulness. I think your dress was  a pale yellow; I know it was scrupulously clean, and I wondered  whether you used Superwheel or Tide, or Perla and starch.

Funny. It was a pleasant afternoon but you had one of those little  collapsible umbrellas, the most inexpensive kind, made of the  thinnest nylon the manufacturers could inflict on their consumers.

A slight breeze lifted a wisp of your white hair, which you patted  back in place. You had a half-smile -did I imagine the twinkle in  your eyes, perhaps? You looked like a woman with a sunny  disposition. Perhaps it was just the softening effects of age.

When you were young, your family and friends probably told you  that they found you pretty, because of your fair complexion. Did  you marry? Were you courted, in school? And what did you do over the years, I wonder. What sort of jobs did you hold?

Students hurried past you; occasionally  particularly indiscreet  passers-by stared at you, but you just stood there, looking  around. You must have been used to being stared at, because of  your skin. I have never managed to find out what your skin  disease is called -if can be properly called a disease; maybe  medicine has a more exact term for what you had. I’ve seen  pictures of people -all elderly, if I recall correctly- with the same  affliction. Little globules  (of what? solid flesh? skin with something underneath?) covering every inch of the body.

Globules in the shape of lumps, others in the shape of small nuts which seem to have sprouted on the skin, ready to fall off. Growths whose composition I have always wondered about -growths which reduced you to a mass of protrusions and made  you a sight for the idle to gawk at.

Disconcerting, how your affliction managed to shock without  provoking disgust. Or maybe i’m wrong. In remembering the day  I saw you I might be retroactively censoring my real feelings. Yes,  I was disturbed. How can you live with such a disease, with such  disfigurement, made all the more startling because no one can  fathom its origin. You have no scars. You’re missing no limbs,  you have nothing that can be attributed to the effects of a birth  defect or some tragic experience. Although of course having your  body covered in strange lumps and bumps must constitute a tragic experience in itself.

From the little I know -mainly from the testimony of an old man in  a news article I clipped and since lost- you were not born “that  way” (what a phrase!). What provoked the growths? The  depredations of age gone more completely awry than usual?

Then you went up to me.

“Can you spare some money,” you asked, gently.

Flustered, I said no.

You smiled. And said. “I’m sorry.”

I said, “it’s ok.” And then I walked away.

The feeling one has when one’s soul wants to vomit: why did you  say sorry to me? You should have said, “apology not accepted”.

***

YUKIO Mishima once wrote, “I came out on the stage to make an audience weep and instead  they burst out laughing”.

Since you apologized over my apology, I have encountered many who remind me of you, though none exactly like you. Just the other week, and what has it been -a decade?- since we briefly met, I saw a man with no legs, sitting on the sidewalk by the wall of Camp Crame leading to the LRT, holding a plastic cup.

He was looking up at another man, dressed neatly in a kind of dutifully-washed-and mended polo shirt. The man was engaging him in conversation. Was the man a writer, perhaps, or simply someone on his way to work, engaging the man with no legs in conversation?

People rushed past. They gave the two troubled looks. What is more disturbing: to see a man with no legs begging on the pavement, or a countryman pausing to converse with him, man to man?

I saw that scene only briefly. We only see such scenes briefly, if at all. Just the other day, there was the scene, awful, and heart-breaking if only we weren’t so used to it. The parade, my writer’s mind tells me to call it, of the dispossessed. In front of St. Paul’s College, Quezon City, there is, day in and out, a man in his early fifties, piteously deformed; almost, it seems, a Thalidomide baby condemned to advanced years. He has become such a fixture that surely every person passing him by day to day has come to memorize his every twitch, his slack-jawed fatalism. On some days, a sign hands around his neck. Over the holidays it said, “Merry Christmas, God Bless you.” I gave him coins once. He tried to say thank you. Part of me was glad he was incapable of mouthing the words.

But of that parade, and they come in every shape, age, sex, and size -there is the blind old lady, with white hair, clothes of charitable origin, whose gaping eye sockets mercifully cannot see what her seeing-eye guide, probably a granddaughter, sees minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. The knock; the look of muted pleading; the counter-knock from the impatient, saying, “your petition is dismissed”; the shuffle on to the next vehicle.

Yesterday there was a man. He was missing a hand. He did the ritualized shuffle, too. Knock, plead, suffer rejection, shuffle on to the next, repeat. Around him and ahead of him swarmed children doing the same thing. One child was particularly passive; she knocked on one window, was rejected, sat on the sidewalk and sulked. Some others made it a game. One little girl got no coins, though a motorist handed her some crackers. She smiled the smile of a Pacquiao.

That man, though. One motorist was particularly curt. The man reacted with a look of rage. I have seen that look of rage more often now, than ever before. I never used to see it. He was not even given an apology. But as for his condition, he could at least express his hate.

circa 1994 and 2004. It is 2008, and they are still there, in front of St. Paul’s.

Defanged

Alice Poon pens an essay on the Anatomy of Greed, which closes with:

Perhaps what we really need in this age of unrestrained greed is to somehow find a way to rebuilding the moral foundation in our societies, even if it means, in part, putting in place more stringent, preventive regulations. While I keep an open mind on free-market principles, I do tend to agree with Eichengreen’s point that you cannot eliminate greed as it is human nature. The answer to this problem may lie in the saying of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”

Last week in The hidden agenda, I proposed that the ruling coalition is interested in taking amending the Constitution as far as it will take them, and that furthermore, they have begun to pay off the political debts of 2007 and started investing in whatever 2010 brings, by passing a 2008 budget even more bloated by patronage than the 2007 budget was; and they are well on their way to passing the 2009 budget which will be a campaign budget, too. In They’ve never had it so good, I’d pointed to Manuel Buencamino’s satirical column which contains a basic truth: surrounding the President is a large coalition which has it good and wants to keep it that way.

My column today is Declawed but still impressive. Ellen Tordesillas in an SMS disputes my assertion that Hairy Roque jumped the gun and by so doing, tipped off the Palace:

Harry did not leak the impeachment story. Besides, there was no need or agreement to keep the plan to file a secret. Ito ang nangyari. Joey de Venecia had his own media contacts. Apparently they were told abt it. Harry and I were together whole morning friday in the court martial hearing of lt raymundo, the officer who is being detained for sharing wd other officers erap and 2004 fraud dvds.

I learned abt the impeachment when gil cabacungan and anthony taberna called harry abt it. I think they learned abt it fr joey’s camp. When I learned abt it, I called up na rin our office…

This may be so and to be sure, it’s also quite possible that Joey de Venecia did his own leaking to the press (to create his own drama). It’s equally likely that both sides did their leaking. But if you look at how the story broke -see Impeach raps set vs Arroyo, again: Complaint to be filed Saturday, Sunday, Monday- it was Hairy Roque who went on the record. So at the very least he tried to beat JDV3 to capturing prime time. To my mind the operating principle ought to have been, don’t do the Palace any favors. Even if they obviously knew when the deadline was, no sense in telegraphing moves. Keeping a discreet silence opens up opportunities for them to do something dumb.

As it was, it seems Oliver Lozano tried to mail in an impeachment complaint, but even a normally accomodating House couldn’t let that through as a way to beat the complainants to the starting line.

As it is, the House will have to go through the motions of killing the complaint, and that can open up opportunities for mischief on the part of the President’s ruling coalition. If the Palace and the House leadership can kill it quickly, it has time on its side. The energies of both the opposition and the administration are focused on passing the budget, and with it, being able to fund a campaign for amending the Constitution.

Passing the budget means the House and Senate will then be embarking on vacations due to the November holidays and then soon enough, it will be Christmas, another long break. This leaves little time or room for anything else except ensuring the Supreme Court adopts the House’s argument that the Senate has to vote jointly with it on proposed amendments -which then triggers a plebiscite next year, defusing, too, the momentum for the presidential campaign for 2010.

The game plan was there for all to see: pretending to engage the Senate in friendly talks on amendments in May;  floating “consultations” and posturing over the need to “bite the bullet” in August; floating the President might get a new lease on political life in September while asserting the the effort, boosted by “consultations,” was economics-oriented and moving forward, etc., etc.

And the game plan remains, its three-pronged approach remaining the same, too:

1. Get the Supreme Court to authorize the House swamping the Senate by means of everyone from both chambers voting together;

2. Possibly sweeten the deal by having the President step down, somehow, prior to 2010 so as to avoid being too obvious a beneficiary and boost the chances of a plebiscite win;

3. If all else fails, and foreign governments are too distracted and the armed forces, no longer having the generally-respected and professional current Chief of Staff in charge (he was one of the few generals who returned the President’s proferred cash gifts), remain easy to command, then emergency rule.

The only imponderable here is whether the President’s allies consider it a safer bet to keep the President at the helm or try something riskier in these economically uncertain times. Sniffing around leads them to impeachment, of course, as the best means to change the dynamics of the game without totally wrecking the system.

Here’s where the impeachment charges could have helped but now, because of what they contain, won’t help.

You can find a summary of the charges in Ralph Guzman and Tonyo Cruz. Here is the impeachment complaint against the President of the Philippines:

Let me say that I consider the charges meritorious as they stand. However, since impeachment is primarily a political, and not a judicial, process, the impeachment complaint lacks the two charges that would have given it a fighting chance in the House.

First, taking the President to task over her handling of the BJE-MOA, although the lawyers seem to think it would be hard to do so. But charging her with irresponsibility and deceit, and in a sense, the political and diplomatic equivalent of reckless endangerment, would certainly have sparked interest with a public generally offended and alarmed by the deal. It would have put the deal’s critics in the House on the spot, including members of her coalition. The President certainly showed an awareness of how combustile things had become, at the height of public panic over the BJE-MOA.

The problem is that while public opinion was -and remains- hostile to the deal, the deal itself, in its particulars and objectives, enjoys the support of Bayan and Akbayan. So neither party, out of loyalty to their party programs, would support BJE-MOA-based charges. A large chunk of Civil Society feels the same way, that the deal itself has merit and should remain a fundamental basis for peace in Mindanao.

Adel Tamano, for his part, agrees with my point on the BJE-MOA but insists on a distinction about the President’s use of her pardoning power:

great article toay esp on the point of the moa advocates. just a slight correction though, i have been interviewed on the teehankee pardon and i have categorically condemned it. some may disagree but the pardon power was properly used in the erap case and utterly misused with teehankee.

Which brings me to what I believe should have been the second main charge in the impeachment complaint, charging the President with betraying the public trust by the manner in which she has exercised her pardoning power. Both the Warrior Lawyer and The Philippine Experience make the case for this charge.

Stripped of these two charges, the impeachment complaint remains sound but unexciting. Not in terms of people not thinking the charges are without merit, but rather, their knowing the charges don’t have a ghost of a chance in the House.

And yet from unexpected quarters comes support for the current incarnation of the charges.

Christian Monsod (skeptics will say perhaps having had a “conversion experience” of his own due to Meralco’s recent bruising battle with the government) issues an appeal not to give up on impeachment, and I must say I’m glad he said what he did.

His point of view is motivated by a desire to avoid People Power, speaking to, and for, a constituency that has begrudgingly tolerated the President not out of support for her, but fear over the institutional damage People Power might cause; but along the way he brings up some intriguing possibilities:

“For me, it’s not necessarily true that impeachment is impossible because during the time of President Estrada, all the numbers were in his favor but he was still impeached because many congressmen had a conversion experience and they voted for impeachment,” Monsod said in a radio dzMM interview.

He said that another option would be if a majority of Cabinet members would declare that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of her office, which would then allow the vice-president to take over the presidency.

Under Article VII, Section 11 of the 1987 Constitution, the vice-president could take over the presidency if the two houses of Congress, voting separately, would affirm the Cabinet’s declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of her position.

Monsod, however, said this option would be much harder than impeachment, which requires only a third of the votes in the lower house.

The former COMELEC chairman rejected calls to oust the President through another bloodless revolt, which he said could weaken the democratic institutions in the country.

“For me, we must work within the framework of the Constitution. Otherwise, it will lose its effectivity. As I said, democracy is about institution-building of the right kind of institution, but if we keep removing our presidents, and this would be the third if we do it, I believe it weakens our democracy. It does not strengthen it,” he said.

He suggests the President try feeding her husband to the dogs. Hope springs eternal.

I do happen to think that Monsod reads public opinion correctly, in that dismay over the results (not the actual removals, though) of Presidents Marcos and Estrada has cooled the ardor of many for People Power; and that the public has, for various reasons depending on the sector one belongs to, adopted a more institutional approach to things. But Monsod obviously thinks the public mood is turning sour and that sourness will once more make some sort of direct action against the President and her people a tempting option.

The cause for the curdling of public opinion? The economy, stupid.

The President loved taking credit for the economy even if some of the problems she took credit for fixing were of her own making, or some of the thing considered positive (like BPO) was more due to serendipity and entrepreneurial success than her actual leadership. But that being said, I’m skeptical of those who are already suggesting she is going to face problems if the global economic situation starts confronting us with the situation we’d all dearly never wanted to see: Filipinos overseas having to go home, and our overseas umbilical cord pumping in less financial nutrients into the body politic.

The reason can be seen in the surveys, which showed a slight improvement in the President’s unpopularity. Keeping things pretty quiet has a way of taking the edge off a not very nice present.

This craving for calm, or at least, more of the usual instead of adding to life’s uncertainties, will, for a time, actually strengthen the President’s position. The middle class, disenchanted with People Power, won’t want a taste of what’s been happening in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. The upper class will start thanking God for an armed forces and police in the President’s pocket if it starts hearing rumors of an increase in violent crimes and starving, desperate people running amok. The poor will happy, and for good reason, for anything from anyone that helps put food on the table and keep the more predatory among their peers in check. Everyone with the smallest bit of property to protect will batten down the hatches and think dark thoughts of marauding gangs of their fellow citizens.

And of course the more nakedly ambitious will want a maximum of opportunity to take the current leadership to task while minimizing the chances that they will have to -prematurely- take over the reins of government. In Demolition derby I did suggest that the clearest and most present danger to the President isn’t in terms of the opposition per se, but disgruntled former and ambitious current allies.

But as I pointed out in my column today, the bull run, so to speak, the President enjoyed in terms of e-VAT funding her patronage (remember the observations of the now laid-off, as it turns out, Bear Sterns analyst I quoted three years ago?) is over. She’d previously avoided Marcos’s cardinal error of muscling in on private enterprise; but in the end neither she nor the coalition that supports her could avoid it. Today utilities, tomorrow the world!

Even if the President’s ambitions have been limited to stepping down in 2010, proving her critics wrong, and then staying out of jail to avoid going down in history on par with Marcos and Estrada (dear old dad’s and her own nemeses, respectively), keeping things together until then requires lots of cash. And the sources of that cash show signs of drying up. But the cupidity isn’t decreasing in official circles, as the Inquirer editorial Predatory budgeting recently pointed out.

So you must muscle in and what provides your muscle is a combination of thuggery and financial wizardry: you create a Department of Energy police on one hand and start floating combining the investment funds of the GSIS and SSS on the other. This is potentially, a political bonanza while troubling to the more responsible and sober in the government (if it’s true the BIR Commissioner was ultimately eliminated because of the Finance Secretary’s ire, then DOF sends query to GFIs bodes ill for both Romulo Neri Jr. and Winston Garcia: it will be another intramural the President will have to referee; not to mention others like the DBP, said to have an exposure of $100 million to Lehman Bros. collapse).

And you hope that you can continue to wing it.

Meanwhile, see Salve Duplito’s Money Smarts blog for how OFWs are coping with the global economic crisis.

Overseas:

As the world waits to see what happens today in stock markets and the banks (so far, markets pulled back from the brink, cheered by the British and European government’s bank support plans), here’s what Nouriel Roubini had to say over the weekend:

The New Yorker publishes an eloquent editorial endorsing Obama. Meanwhile, see Chris Weigant who does the electoral math and proposes the possibility of an Obama landslide. This Electoral College graph and the Real Clear Politics electoral vote map are handy, too.

Let me close with this magnificent special commentary by the great Kieth Olbermann:

Requiring perspicacity from those dulled by gluttony?

This week’s episode of The Explainer (which you can watch on YouTube) focused on some terms being bandied about in the news, and focused on Warren Buffett’s views concerning the financial meltdown in the USA:

You can also read the transcript over at CNBC.com.

Buffett and many others leveraged their personal influence and prestige to help swing Congressional approval for the bailout bill. This Politico.com story on it reveals the pressures (including fears it represented political suicide) brought to bear on some legislators. Additional behind-the-scenes stories given by opponents-turned-supporters of the bill:

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said that a single conversation caused her to change her mind. She spoke Thursday with California state treasurer Bill Lockyer who told her that if the state’s fiscal situation continued on its current path, California would be unable to pay teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers, cops and other essential employees after October 27. Short term credit had become unavailable, he told her, and needed to be loosened up.

And the earthiest analogy of all:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) had a more colorful way to make the same point, quoting LBJ: “It’s like wearing dark pants and p—ing down your leg,” he said before the vote. “It gives you a warm feeling, but no one knows you did it.”

But what followed the passage of the bill was not what American legislators expected, but the opposite: instead of stemming the tide of fanancial panic, the panic continued. And continues. Meanwhile, the confidence of the region is being sapped (see the Bloomberg story on Singapore announcing it’s in a Recession). Observers like AlphaTrends are now pointing out the markets may take decades to recover, based on past experience:

Now as everyone tries to come to grip with what’s going on, the political headlines are, to some, dangerously diverging from the economic headlines. Impeachment season is once more, upon us, and observers like Cocoy are upset that politics is taking center stage:

Don’t get me wrong.

I’d love nothing more than the President getting her day in court. I’d like to see bullet-proof charges presented that would send her and her family to jail but given the lack of numbers, given the current global challenges and the opportunity such upheaval can do, is a tactical move (a play for impeachment) that important as opposed to taking the greater strategic gain?

Why are we not talking about how to best leverage these opportunities?

Because leveraging these opportunities is impossible given the mentality that thinks politics and the political process is, somehow, expendable. It is not. While I do think that we can view this harsh view of the ongoing troubles in Thailand as a cautionary look in the mirror, so to speak:

Every public institution and organization in Thailand is now compromised by this inter-elite conflict and the losers, as usual, are the poor: workers and small farmers. The monarchy has failed to defuse the situation. The queen has openly sided with the PAD mob. The courts are practicing double standards, attacking Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai/People’s Power Party corruption while ignoring illegal coups, mob violence and corruption by opposition politicians and the military.

The military as always is on the side of the conservative royalists. The police are unable to act and the government lurches from crisis to crisis. The majority of academia is hopelessly compromised by its support for the coup and their support for decreasing the democratic space. Democratic principles have been thrown out the window by professors who teach “democratization” and the need for “the rule of law.”

Even the People’s Movement has shown itself not to be up to the job. Instead of building an independent political position at the side of the poor and oppressed, sections of the NGO movement supported the coup, the military constitution and the PAD. Rosana Tositrakul, the so-called NGO Senator, elected from Bangkok, has joined into ultranationalist fanaticism, especially over the ancient Khmer temple on the border with Cambodia that was almost conflated into a border skirmish. 

Perhaps being a politically, at least, more pacific people than the Thais (though some time ago Mong Palatino pointed out that no, it’s not as peaceful as we think, it’s simply that those inclined to take arms have quietly melted away into the hills, and their numbers are growing, restoring hope in “great street battles between te urban proletariat and the defenders of the ruling order” -a confrontation devoutly to be wished, incidentally, not just by the NPA but by the Palace itself), and having preceded them in getting into the whole mess of what happens when you frustrate populism (kick out Estrada, kick out Thaksin, replace both with a facade of constitutional democracy but with the population both cases convinced that yesterday’s democrats proved today’s putschists, though masquerading as People Power -thus making impossible distinguishing where People Power ends and power-grabs begin. 

While the battle lines have been drawn since 2005, the Palace continues to profit from the equity of the incumbent. It has been successful in propagating the line -and all successful propaganda has at its heart a kernel of truth – that no one has their hands clean since Edsa Dos and the public can’t be budged to take the plunge,considering the conservative forces who’ve decided to opt for the status quo- I do think that those piously pleading for reason, not emotion, and who think it’s even remotely possible for the leadership to look beyond their noses have to be taken to task for their making this lack of foresight not just possible, but inevitable.

Let me set aside the question of impeachment, for now, and tackle the example of the ratification of the JPEPA. The Senate ratified the RP-Japan trade agreement by a vote of 16 to 4. Two years have been spent wrangling over the treaty (see CenPEG’s Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA): Some Contentious Issues for the cons and Solita Monsod’s On JPEPA: Let’s stick to the facts for the pros), but aside from the merits and demerits of the actual treaty, it was a showdown between two coalitions. Essentially, the arguments every administration has made since the beginnings of our republic (see Primer on the plebiscite, October 21, 1939)  have continued to win out. There’s a reason for this, and it goes beyond proponents of such things being better-connected, better-funded, etc.: it is easier to sell optimism than fear. Particularly if the status quo leaves so much to be desired (consider: if oppositionists perhaps clarified their optimism in the future instead of fear/alarm over the present, might the Palace’s own fearmongering, deftly combined with pushing its own pipe dream propaganda, have worked as well as it has?).

The point is that if public relations, political discipline, governance and policy-making have all been reduced to a science by the current leadership, then it doesn’t make sense to express the hope it will start acting with foresight and reason, much less stray beyond the cozy confines of what has kept it in power and is keeping it in power -and will keep it in power for the foreseeable future. Not least because the only things that might jolt the leadership out of its cozy situation without leading to “great street battles” (something most people seem quite allergic to) have been so thoroughly neutralized over the past few years. 

The Palace has proved itself adept at finding ways to prop up the constituencies it’s built. From a combination of bad-luck, poor judgment, and yes, more self-respect than its opponents have (that is, taking their own principles far too seriously, hence engaging in soul-searching and infighting when the other side has perfected pragmatic stop-gap governance and the Three Monkeys Act) the broad opposition to the ruling coalition has only achieved a stalemate that means it’s lost. And will continue to lose unless Divine Providence intervenes (the way some groups are hoping the current economic implosion will result in creative destruction).

This might well happen but even if you’re hoping for an economic asteroid to wipe out our political dinosaurs, it is an eventuality that most people are hoping will not happen, or are wondering if it’s worth it. Certainly, not a situation they will just roll over and accept.

Which brings me to Cocoy’s question, much as I do agree with many of his observations. The point is not success but rather the futility of expecting foresight much less reforms from the current fat cats. The necessity is not in a cost-benefit analysis of impeachment, but rather, the reality of it’s being a political exercise, precisely at a time when the future is so uncertain and that every opportunity to flex political muscle -however atrophied- provides an opportunity to ensure having a fighting chance in whatever the future brings. 

The opponents of JPEPA may have, behind the scenes, assumed failure; but they flexed their muscle both to achieve partial success -it did force the executive to renegotiate at least some things, rather than continue its supine attitude towards the deal- for its more moderate critics and reinforced solidarity among its more hard-line opponents. 

Of course it did the same for the administration and its allies in this particular case. “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” as Bobi Tiglao said early on; it has added one more feather to the cap of the ruling coalition while provoking frustration, hand-wringing, and the soul-sapping underdog’s defiance on the part of the opponents of the deal. And it underscores the pragmatic lesson the past few years have have taught: for now, the current incarnation of the administration coalition, remains the game to beat.

While I myself view political parties as unhealthy and that we should work towards Making political parties obsolete, Randy David in his column today has the opposite view, expressing misgivings When civil society becomes political.

But these are two ends of an argument with a vacuum in the middle -the large portion of the middle class, at least, that continues to think that if only purged of “politics,” governance might actually redound to the public interest.

You do the Math

The President’s pardoning Claudio Teehankee Jr. seems to have caused great offense. And yet first of all, it is an act that is irreversible. It is also an act that represents a net gain, politically, for the President regardless of its effects on public opinion.

If it is true, as the Justice Secretary claims, that the pardon was granted essentially upon the request of the convict’s brother, the President’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Manuel Teehankee, then the political context of the pardon becomes clear. Ambassador Teehankee has been a close and valued subordinate of the President, previously floated as a potential successor to the present Justice Secretary. The ambassador and his family also surely knew that they had a bigger chance of securing executive clemency now, than at any time previously or in the future: it involves a crime which accords absolutely no mitigating circumstances for the convict.

The Catholic hierarchy, too, is bound to the Church’s position of opposing the death penalty, and so cannot take the case too far -it would risk reopening the death penalty debate. The Church is too invested in opposing the Reproductive Health Bill, counts too much on the President being their ultimate bulwark in terms of exercising her veto power, not to mention doing her part to mobilize opposition to the bill in Congress.

The law-and-order types are also politically negligible now or in the near term. They failed to elect a law-and-order candidate for the presidency; they are not mobilized in Congress, on the local level, and will not be a swing vote in the Palace’s political projects: passing the 2009 budget and amending the Constitution.

The upper and middle classes will vent their spleen but nothing shows that they will divorce themselves from the President between now and 2010 (and who knows, even beyond). Those from these classes too stupid to have stayed out of jail in the first place can celebrate the release of Teehankee as a sign of potential presidential favors to come.

The poor, more often than not unjustly imprisoned, will continue to clamor for executive clemency and be supported in their appeals by the clergy.

So she pleases a subordinate she holds in high regard; she proves to her supporters up and down the line that she will bail them out; she knows sectors like the Church need her now more than ever, and those against her move have been against her anyway.

And public opinion? This, too, shall pass.