By Manuel L. Quezon III Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 03:30:00 02/26/2009
In the same roundtable held in Singapore in December, 1971, Onofre Corpuz made some tart observations about the state of Philippine institutions. Concerning Congress, he said, “The legislative process is virtually untouched by rationality, professional craftsmanship and civic spirit.” Pointing out that political parties had neither party discipline nor party responsibility for public welfare or government management, and blithely appropriated nonexistent funding for what would turn out, as a result, to be nonexistent programs, he further pointed out that most congressmen “dedicated themselves to giving government officers a bad time, pressing to take actions in violations of laws and regulations.”
Corpuz outlined what he felt should be the basic concentration of government: “to contain revolutionaries; to cope with rising prices and steer the country towards increased production; to redistribute the national income along the lines of less inequality; to attend to all tasks while the political and governmental systems undergo reassessment and possibly some fundamental restructuring to accommodate new social attitudes and sentiments.”
There, in one sentence, was the justification and formal aspirations of the New Society; there, in that sentence, remains the national debate on what ought to be done.
It is also interesting that Sixto K. Roxas pointed out (this was in 1971, mind you) that the Philippines had reached the end of a process that had begun in the 1930s but which had reached its limits: shifting populations from relatively crowded areas like Central Luzon to homesteads and government-sponsored colonies in the hinterlands, mainly in Mindanao. But the idea of a frontier was no longer tenable and this explained why tensions had begun to erupt anew between Muslims and Christians in Mindanao.
This is an observation that, it seems to me, still isn’t forefront in the consciousness of officials, who still think there remains adequate space to defuse social tensions by simply moving the poor from one place to another.
Roxas also noticed that excess populations from rural areas had migrated to urban slums. At the time, he believed that these urban slum populations might be easily mobilized because an absence of serious efforts to ameliorate their plight would lead to social tensions. Ferdinand Marcos’ and subsequent administrations attended to this by means of resettling informal settlers on government land and legislation favorable to such settlers.
But in the end it took May 2001 for an urban insurrection to manifest itself, not with the Left as the vanguard but instead in defense of an imprisoned populist ex-president. In 2005, former President Fidel V. Ramos justified his rescue of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration by warning of the probability of a resurgence of an urban insurrectionary spirit, resulting in mob rule and the plundering of middle class homes by the poor. The Arroyo administration deftly countered Ramos’ insistence that an immediate shift to parliamentary government and the cutting short of the President’s term was the solution by flooding urban poor areas with patronage.
These policies, however, have taken their toll on a sector of the population that long ago lost the power to elect governments, but which had the capability to bring them down: the middle class. While the very wealthy and well-connected have long figured out how to deploy their resources to delay or deflect measures meant to redistribute wealth, the middle class lacks the political, financial, and legal clout to do so. And so, every major attempt to defuse social tensions - agrarian and urban land reform, for example - hits the middle class most of all. The rhetoric of government trying to mobilize populist opinion hits them the hardest, as well.
The result is a sense of alienation and even desperation, with otherwise hardworking and responsible citizens being called upon to make sacrifices they consider their employers and employees somehow exempted from making. Seeing their fairly modest farms subjected to land reform, finding their property rights in urban areas diminished, and receiving lip service from politicians uninterested in their small numbers as voters, the middle class formed in the American and early independence eras voted with their feet: migrating abroad. Embittered and disillusioned, those who have remained are more interested in preserving their middle-class status than in political action on behalf of a political culture that has marginalized them.
When the prospects of work abroad opened up opportunities for Filipinos who had never been middle class and who, by means of working hard, themselves became middle class, society as a whole perhaps failed to notice the gutting of the old middle class and its replacement by a new one, which never went through the socialization that made the old middle class advocates of both liberal democracy and People Power. Instead, the remnants of the old and the growing new middle class are more deeply wedded to preserving property rights at all costs, and less demanding of reform but more insistent on “law and order” at all costs than ever before.
But this development ignores, too, the rise, or return, if you will, of a permanent underclass of the very poor, who are essentially unemployable domestically or abroad, unless by means of patronage by officials of the state: increasing, in turn, demands, both formal and informal, on the resources of the state, which must be derived from the middle class which has fewer options to evade obligations to the state unlike the wealthy.
Which suggests, and which is why I refer to, 1971. And why we seem poised for a restoration, and thus, the complete rehabilitation and vindication, of the New Society.
By political revolution I understand a people’s movement aimed at producing a violent change in the organization. and operation of the three public powers: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. If the movement is slow, gradual or progressive, it is called evolution. I say people’s movement because I consider it essential that the proposed change answer a need felt by the citizens in general. Any agitation promoted by a particular class for the benefit of its special interests does not’ deserve the name (of political revolution or evolution).
But let me suggest that it is equally valid to define a revolution as simply the replacement of one government, with another, against the will and in defiance of the institutional processes, of the government that falls. This means that whether that forced change is peaceful or violent, the process is the same: a the government that falls and by so doing, has its institutions repudiated.
Mabini said that by instinct and temperament, most people prefer change through evolution rather than by revolution, but that if development is blocked by the government, then a revolutionary situation arises:
But evolution is not possible where the social organization is not adjusted to it, just as a plant grows and flourishes only in suitable soil. When the government takes measures for the stagnation of the people, whether for its own profit or that of a particular class, or for any other purpose, revolution is inevitable. A people that have not yet reached the fullness of life must grow and develop because otherwise their existence would be paralyzed, and paralyzation is equivalent to death. Since it is unnatural for a being to submit to its own destruction, the people must exert all their efforts to destroy the government which prevents their development. If the government is composed of the very sons of the people, it must necessarily fall.
There continues to be a debate concerning public approbation of martial law. It is said Marcos himself was surprised by the docility of the public and the manner in which he successfully rounded up the opposition, padlocked the legislature, and cowed the courts. Metro Manila -his own political creation, a throwback to the Greater Manila established as a temporary wartime measure- erupted in protest by 1978, the famous noise barrage on the eve of the elections for the Interim Batasang Pambansa; yet 1981 would mark his apotheosis as dictator and his proclamation of a New Republic, officially burying the old Third Republic; by 1984, however, close to a third of the Batasang Pambansa was oppositionist, with bailiwicks in Batangas, Cebu, and places like Cagayan de Oro City. He was unpopular in large swathes of the sugar-producing regions, and the coconut-producing ones, where his efforts to establish monopolies under Benedicto for sugar and Cojuangco for coconut had spectacularly ruined those once-lucrative industries.
Still, opposition, perhaps, percolated upwards and not downwards until Marcos’ economic mismanagement eventually led to a pincer movement, with the majority and the elite both edging towards the same conclusion: the dictator had to go.
Marcos’ mistake was to galvanize opposition among those with a means to oppose him, by eventually seizing and engaging in extortion, the property of those who left well enough alone and had never engaged in politicking in the manner of his wealthy opponents.
To be sure, he’d already alienated the majority of people much earlier than that, as demonstrated by the noise barrage in 1978; but in 1983 he finally lost the middle class and in 1984, when he famously threatened the Makati Business Club, he finally lost the upper class as well. He lost major urban centers, too: Baguio, Cebu, Davao became even more firmly esconced as anti-Marcos bailiwicks of the opposition.
Over the past few years, I heard veterans of the Marcos era express the firm conviction that sooner or later (and sooner rather than later) it would duplicate Marcos’s mistake and start muscling in on the corporations of its enemies, then muscle in on the corporations of its critics, and finally, start gobbling up the corporations of the uninvolved; at which point, the tide would turn against the government. This is, incidentally, a mistake Estrada made, surrounding by many of the same crowd that had porsued similar tactics during the Marcos era.
This is significant because of how tightly intertwined our society is; the upper class relies on the middle class for its mananers and they manage the masses who are employed; and all are tied, up and down, by ties of church, club, and school, the whole compadrazgo culture strengthened by the rituals of births, graduations, weddings, and funerals. Declaring war on a so-called oligarch is a declaration of war on a cascade of families belonging to the middle class and the masses. Which is why the goings-on among the higher political and business echelons of this country are avidly followed by everyone else -each one having a stake, major or minor, in the outcome.
This administration hasn’t engaged in Marcosian engulf and devour tactics with one exception, the Lopezes; with all others, it has bared its fangs in public while showing every inclination to reach a mutually-profitable accommodation in private. But what sets it apart from the dictatorship is that instead of engulfing and then devouring, it seems to have hit off on a novel scheme: to leave everyone pretty much alone, and instead, carve out new financial territories for itself and its friends. In this case it left only one traditionally entrenched opponent, the Lopezes, while leaving everyone else, hostile or not, alone. Transco, for example; and even its assault on Meralco has been better camouflaged by restricting most of the action to the boardroom, the use of government shares as a battering ram and when that was thwarted, the sale of those shares to San Miguel Corporation which then floated, for public consumption, the rather tantalizing possibility that San Miguel can lower electricity costs by engaging in data transmission through electrical lines: establishing a new monopoly on virgin commercial territory and incidentally, driving a wedge in the otherwise united front presented by the existing telecoms companies.
History is never repeated; circumstances neither emerge nor combine in the same way at different times; for this reason, one argument perpetually put forward as some sort of mitigating factor in judging the present administration’s political maneuvers has always left me skeptical: the President is no Marcos, the times aren’t at all like Marcos’s time, you do not see, for example, the outward manifestations of the New Society and its methods for thought and crowd control.
But of course. Every generation learns from the one that came before. And even the same players learn from the past.
According to some accounts, the Palace is hedging its bets and going slow on Charter Change, because of the public perception that it is in bad odor in Washington; one interpretation goes as far as suggesting the Palace is spooked by the possibility of Washington tacitly blessing a coup should any effort to prolong the President’s stay in office proceed. Others suggest that the Palace all along prefers to be in “legacy mode,” all the better to improve its chances in 2010, while maneuvering for a succession it can control.
The same accounts suggest that a modus vivendi between the President and Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. was ratified in Qatar, and that the President’s visit to San Miguel Corporation’s headquarters was the public manifestation of this agreement. At the very least, it kills two birds with one stone (knocking the Lopezes off their perch in Meralco, and placing the capstone in the carefully-built electric, power, and energy fiefdoms the administration’s made possible), while keeping all others, including Charter Change, at the very least on the back burner and in play.
To come full circle, though, as the Inquirer editorial Veto power suggests, the ultimate lesson might be, that if a revolution, and its acceptable manifestation in our country, People Power, is to succeed, it requires, at the very least, the repudiation both of the government People Power topples, and of its institutions including its constitutional rationale.
Transcript of presentation given in February, 2008 given at KAS workshop.
It used to be that you get your paper in the morning to find out what people are saying and how media is treating it; or watch TV in the evening to get your news about the day.
But today, you get your news online not just in the morning or evening. An online newspaper is constantly uploading. The headline in Inquirer.net, for instance, changes every hour. People are now thirsty for news all the time, and get easily bored. An hour-old news is dead news. You step back twenty years ago, everyone would get the newspaper and find out what happened and position themselves.
Now, what has been said 30 minutes ago gets updated in less than an hour. Even news broadcasters or announcers have changed their way of delivering the new. They used to deliver with a poker face and good diction you have the likes of Harry Gasser. Now, you want it a little more intimate. Even CNN anchors have changed their style and started pretending they are not robots. I myself started out in a newspaper column – finely crafted and came out only twice a week, but people would not remember anymore what I said two days ago. This is where blogging comes in. This was what brought me to blogging – the immediacy that the people crave.
Media cycle is constant, and the intent and message should come out in a timely fashion. But one shocking data is that number one read column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer is “Dollywood,” although the number one columnist is Conrado de Quiros. Ten people will read “Dollywood” to De Quiros’ two or three.
Today, the concern is to have a niche market and not anymore the broad audience because of the way online things are, where you can immediately know the updates.
Online, you are dealing with people pretty obsessed with what’s going on. If you deliver your message in a timely fashion you can attract them even if they don’t remember most of the things you’ve written. They start coming back if you are consistently writing and providing information. It’s almost like building a group of cadres – a small circle whose members have their own interests, more likely interested in politics, are sophisticated, and are literate. You don’t really aim for Juan de la Cruz but the guy who has to get a report for the chairman of the board, or a mid-level manager whose boss belongs to Manila Business Club who has 30 minutes to spare.
A blogger queues into what interests him, writes or blogs about, and channels his or her influence in homes that have access to his or her blog.
A blog is nothing more than a website arranged according to a date, like a diary, in contrast to, for example, BPI (Bank of the Philippine Islands) website that does not change.
What I have is a political blog, which is often composed of many things, not only texts, because pictures count for a lot. For example, I went to the President’s website and got two photos of exactly the same event taken exactly at the same moment, but with different captions. And these photos and their captions say a lot about the state of things. Why would the same event be described differently?
A blog reflects an opinionated viewpoint. It reflects the blogger’s personality. Then there is what you write. Some are one line entries and very effective, or very brief bits of gossip. Others are very lengthy, as I tend to be.
It helps when you have links. I use a lot of links in my blog. The importance of links is when you are engaged in battle for credibility. Links are in a sense footnoting, so that you don’t need to write a very long explanation but you have proof. A link goes to your original source of information.
What people do today is pretend they are very busy and what they want is for you to chew for them. As a blogger, you want them to know that this is what others are saying, or what others are blogging about. In blogging, you open yourself to responses, including criticisms or negative remarks. What separates old media and old politics is that in the latter, after delivering your speech and walking out of the venue, you get heckled. Today, you have to open yourself up to crude, crazy attacks or the most pointless debates in your blog. This is a kind of political engagement most people are not used to. This is uncontrollable, unpredictable, and sometimes, a waste of time and resources.
I have no pretenses that I am an objective reporter. But the challenge is to become a trustworthy source.
There are times that you don’t need long entries; you are running around and still want to engage your readers. For this purpose, I use Twitter, some sort of blog with 120 characters or less.
For example, I want to blog on what’s happening in the rally. I could be on Ayala Avenue and send twitters on what’s happening.
Through my twittering from the Senate during Lozada’s testimony, it enabled me to talk about what’s happening.
How does this apply to you?
You can create your blogs, involving different media – texts, links, quotes, and photographs.
Media focus on an event in a particular way, but as bloggers, you can present the event in your way. By doing so, you can either bypass or complement the media.
There was this Filipino guy, who called himself Disney Cute, who was the first to have photos of the Ayala explosion, 30 minutes after the incident; the AFP and everyone else wanted to buy his photos.
How do you find out if any of these efforts is worth it? Technocrati is a great site because it immediately picks up what people are using and you would know who belongs to your network of readers, and what their interests are.
I know many people who belong to organizations, and they constantly search if everyone is talking bout them
I find out if my blog is being read through people who are mentioning me and whose blogs have links to me. But there are also days when no one gives a damn with what I say. My readership is driven by events because I am a political blogger.
To find out if you are being read, you can use Blogsearch.google.com. You can search for the name of your organization or even the name of your enemy, and what most people have read.
When in a conference or seminar, you can immediately find out if your speaker has a blog and know what he has to say about issues being discussed. From your network, text schmoozing, you can find out what people you know have to say. For example, ABC Malacanang reporters are allowed to keep a blog, and I go to one of its reporters’ blog. There is tremendous amount of inside information that has been validated over time.
You can get your message out in as many formats and avenues as possible, because you don’t know what will strike gold. You have to cover all bases, which could lead you to potential allies.
A blog is popular because of its intimate nature. You cannot attract any other way. But it is also very good for intelligence gathering.
The main thing with political blogs is that the engagement can only get bigger. A political blog is not dying like the traditional. It is not micro and does not require you to bribe. Blogs give citizens a fighting chance vis-a-vis bigger media groups, as well as in gaining audience and support from donors.
By Manuel L. Quezon III Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 23:48:00 02/22/2009
IN December 1971, some of the country’s leading analysts met in Singapore and discussed the Philippine situation. Sixto K. Roxas, who had played a prominent role in the Macapagal administration, said that the average Filipino was 40 percent better off in 1960 than in 1950 and furthermore 75 percent better off in 1970 than in 1960. This accounts for the nostalgia many people who can remember the ’50s to the ’70s feel for that era in our national life.
What’s happened since then?
For one thing, we’re far more plentiful. We went from 37.9 million in 1971 to 55.8 million in 1986; and from there, climbed to 71.8 million in 1996 and then 85.5 million by 2005, with a population expected to reach 93.7 million by 2010.
With that comes all sorts of problems of adjustment, where the majority are fully used to conditions that make for little privacy while the minority used to keeping the majority at arms’ length find it increasingly difficult to do so, and who themselves, as the managerial and political class of this country, still operate from the assumption everyone knows each other when this cannot and should not be the case any longer.
If we try to answer the same question Roxas addressed, we can refer to the Human Development Index (HDI) which was devised, according to the online reports of the 1st Asia Economic Forum of the University of Cambodia, “as one means to facilitate making comparisons between nations on their relative states of development.”
The result is what it calls a” “three-dimensional” indicator of a country’s overall achievement in helping its citizenry have: a long and healthy life; a depth of knowledge and understanding about the world around them; and a decent standard of living.”
The Asia Economic Forum broke down our region into four clusters. Cluster 1: Australia (HDI Rank 3), Japan (11), New Zealand (19), Hong Kong (22), Singapore (25), South Korea (28) and Brunei (33). Cluster 2: Malaysia (61), Thailand (73), Philippines (84) China (85). Cluster 3: Vietnam (108), Indonesia (110) and Mongolia (114). Cluster 4: India (127), Burma (129), Cambodia (130) and Laos (133).
The AEF observed a “general upward trend in HDI values over the past almost 30 years.” And pointed out that there were the following major points of interest: “the “Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea) clearly became part of Cluster 1 over the period prior to 1995; the Philippines has progressively dropped since 1975 to a relatively low position in Cluster 2; and Mongolia has transited from Cluster 2 to Cluster 3 over the period 1985-1995; whilst China has done the opposite since 1995.”
In other words the average Filipino, if you adopt the HDI, has been experiencing a progressive deterioration from 1975, four years after Sixto Roxas made his observations, until the present.
Since the AEF situated the Philippines in terms of our neighbors, our rankings have been dropping even further, from 84th when the AEF looked at figures, to 90th out of 177 countries with data as of 2005, the last reported findings of the UN.
In terms of HDI value, we’re 90th, between Ecuador and Tunisia. If you look at the measurements that comprise the HDI, we’re also 90th in terms of life expectancy at birth, between Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Cape Verde. In terms of adult literacy rate as a percentage of those over 15 years old, we’re 46th, between Thailand and Singapore. If you look at combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrollment ratios, we’re 54th, between Bulgaria and Dominica, while looking at GDP per capita, we (at $5,137 per person) are between El Salvador ($5,137 per person) and Azerbaijan ($4,945 per person).
Per capita income leads us to the question of poverty, the statistic that matters the most to most people: one report by Leland Joseph R. dela Cruz of the Ateneo’s Social Development Program points out that if you ask people to rate themselves, twice as many people consider themselves poor as are actually defined as being poor by official government definitions.
This is the real problem governments have: on one hand, they have to undertake policies based on some sort of objective measurement of what constitutes poverty and health and so on; but voters, upon whom governments depend to stay in power, essentially make subjective judgments that official statistics are powerless to dispute. If you define yourself as impoverished, no amount of official drumbeating will convince you otherwise.
The National Statistical Coordination Board figures indicate that poverty among families actually fell from 1991 to 1997 while for individuals it fell steadily from 1988 to 1997; both figures started to climb until the manner in which they’re computed was redone in 2000, making a statistical clean break. Since then, poverty figures improved between 2000 and 2006, when they increased, basically returning to 2000 levels, wiping out the gains in between.
Which brings me to the point of this column. Very few citizens will look at the period from 1971 to 2009 from a holistic point of view, not least because the majority of the citizenry has no memory of this period; and much can be said concerning the period from 1986 to the present. Many more, though, of voting age, will have clear memories of the period 2000 to 2009, and for that period, one can argue that public perception agrees with the statistics. Things are getting worse, whatever gains have been made have been eroded, and so forth.
What I wonder is, do people recognize that one possible major difference between 1971 and 2009, and especially 1986 and 2009, is that social mobility has become impossible for an emerging permanent poor underclass in our country? And that people somehow realize that a fixed portion of our population has no hope of ever escaping poverty?
By Manuel L. Quezon III Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 01:05:00 02/19/2009
Is there widespread, genuine, public outrage over the foot-dragging of the administration in the face of a Supreme Court order for it to obtain custody of convicted rapist Daniel Smith? And does that outrage, if it exists, support the outright abrogation of the Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement? The former, after all, is required for the latter, setting aside the intrinsic merits of the case for abrogating the VFA. After all, all politics is local.
What proponents of abrogation have going for them is the obviously checkered track record of the present dispensation when it comes to honoring its international obligations. The more malicious could say it’s genetic: President Diosdado Macapagal changed our Independence Day in a fit of pique over the US Congress’ own foot-dragging over recognizing the benefits due USAFFE veterans. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself, after basking in Bush’s warmth after hopping on to the Coalition of the Willing, hopped off willy-nilly over public outrage over an OFW being taken hostage in Iraq (where Filipinos insisted on going even after the government imposed a travel ban to the country). At the time, much as I had opposed joining that coalition in the first place, I expressed misgivings about suddenly backing out when we could have done so in a less precipitate manner. One consequence of that decision was cozying up to China, and that coziness in turn garnered the country a black eye because of the World Bank’s findings concerning collusion among Chinese and Filipino contractors and their political godfathers.
Since the President has a zigzagging record when it comes to international commitments, it would be logical to think it within the realm of possibility that given enough domestic pressure, she might be convinced to junk the VFA, since her efforts to attract attention from the new American administration haven’t been paying off.
But it might be more reasonable to suggest that what we’re seeing is mere saber-rattling: attracting attention by means of making aggressive noises - which might force America to grant concessions to an administration starved of attention. And also, since all politics is local, there are other benefits to fostering the impression there is a domestic crisis of confidence in the Philippine-US alliance.
Notice how all the headlines the Palace considers problematic have been sidelined by the chest-thumping of administration senators who know they aren’t in a position to actually do anything about the VFA. And who also probably know the President may be pretending to be scared stiff by their rhetoric but won’t act on it to immediately cancel, say, the forthcoming Balikatan military exercises in the Bicol region.
There is a genuine - and formidable - constituency lobbying for the abrogation of the VFA, consisting of feminists who’ve set aside their factional differences in support of “Nicole,” the various factions of the Left, traditional nationalists, and so forth. These are, however, groups the administration has never been warm towards; in fact, the administration has devoted a tremendous amount of time and resources actively fighting them by every means, fair and foul. These are also constituencies that are more effective in national rather than local terms and thus accounts for the posturing of administration senators but who will not be a major factor in whatever plans the administration has when it comes to 2010.
Organized and militant as these groups may be, their sustained opposition to the VFA, even if amplified by the media, isn’t necessarily proof of widespread public outrage. From the very start, the just cause of “Nicole” sparked hostility on the part of many of her countrymen, who hypocritically refused to support a fellow citizen on the basis of their judgment of her allegedly loose morals (and her being a woman). Add to that a significant number of Filipinos who preferred to take the side of a crude and lewd US Marine on the simple principle that America can do no wrong, and you had, at the very least, a country divided over the Smith case.
Consider the other constituencies that, conceivably, constitute a large, even majority percentage of the population of the country, regardless of their feelings concerning the case. Hoteliers and entrepreneurs in Subic and Clark who earn from American R&R; the two-thirds (?) of the population that at the time of the closure of the US bases, would have voted to keep those bases; the Moro factions who appreciate USAID efforts in Mindanao and who consider the Americans an ally in their Bangsamoro aspirations; the citizens who have expressed support for the Balikatan exercises; the Armed Forces that is dependent on American logistical support; and even veterans and US visa holders who might panic over the consequences of a sudden cold war between Manila and Washington and the abandonment of the tangible signs of alliance.
All might argue that if our very own defense secretary says the country could do better - pointing to a less ambiguous VFA with Australia, and here it’s interesting to note the administration chest-thumpers haven’t brought up abrogating that treaty - then by all means Manila should immediately move to renegotiate unclear provisions since the new American dispensation would be amenable to such things.
The main problem is that the US Embassy has an undue advantage – possession of Smith is nine-tenth of the law -precisely because the President and Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno made it possible, which shows any agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if the attitude of our own officials is a weasly one to begin with.
At this point no national consensus on whether to junk our entire alliance with America exists. The headlines are being cluttered with an artificial construct favorable to the administration. It will use it to its own advantage and no one else’s.
My column today is Guns, goons, and gold. Basically, it seems to me more and more obvious that we have a shrinking liberal democratic constituency in Metro Manila and other urban areas of the country, while the rest of the country has been subdivided among warlords fueled by racketeering in smuggling, narcotics, and gambling.
Late last night I returned to Deceive and conquer: why Arroyo will stay in power, blogger Scriptorium‘s marvelous 2007 analysis which has stood the test of time. Unfortunately, the blogger never got around to penning Part II of his analysis, although I suppose his entry on the Chief Justice, The Supreme Court and Philippine politics, comes close; and so I’d like to present an extensive extract from it by way of an introduction to the rest of this entry. Scriptorium writes,
Because of the relative political uniformity of the governing class, we had not felt the politicization of the Court immediately after 1986, but the years since, particularly the controversial accession of the President in 2001, have vastly increased the Court’s profile and the importance of its individual members. This has increased even further in succeeding years due to the polarization of Philippine society between supporters and opponents of the increasing centralization of the patrimonial system.
The supporters, whose offices control government monies, count in their camp the advocates of a patrimonialist democracy on the model of Tammany Hall and, more classily and less cleanly, the Roman Republic. On the other hand, the popular base of the opposition (as distinguished from its politician wing) is composed of non-patrimonialists, among them the urban middle class and the Catholic Church, whose alliance comprises the political Center that guards the Constitution with its Liberal-Social-Christian Democrat orientation; and the Left, both the social democratic and the national democratic factions.
However, as we pointed out earlier… the urban middle class is increasingly enfeebled by social forces, while the loss of her paramount leader and the weakening of her middle-class allies have weakened the Church politically (as we saw when the movement to extend compulsory agrarian reform was defeated in the landlord-dominated Congress, despite vocal support by the Church and a bishop’s actually joining the farmers’ hunger strike). As for the Left, it is too divided between the various hues and sub-hues of revisionists and reaffirmists. This leaves, as the main institutions of Liberal-Social-Christian Democracy, the noisy but fangless Senate and the passive but powerful Supreme Court. The Court in fact has waged a subtle campaign over the past few years to strengthen democratic institutions and human rights, like when it sponsored efforts against the killing of Leftist activists.
Enter the movement to revise the Constitution and create a federal, parliamentary, and unicameral government, which would get rid of term limits, separation of powers, and the gadfly Senate, the main barriers to smooth patrimonial government. With the ambiguity of the provision on constitutional amendment (which, because it was copied from the unicameralist 1973 Constitution, doesn’t say whether the 2 house of Congress would vote jointly or separately), the 1987 Constitution must be interpreted by the Supreme Court to determine whether the Senate can block, as it will certainly try to block, the proposed revision. This makes the decision of the Court critical, and its internal politics much more significant.
His description of the Philippines as a patrimonial democracy is a precise reference to a Sociological term, Patrimonialism:
“a type of rule in which the ruler does not distinguish between personal and public patrimony and treats matters and resources of state as his personal affair.”
The smooth functioning of patrimonial politics requires political competition to be confined to elites and mass political action to be suppressed or at least strictly controlled… Particularistic policies that are the hallmark of patrimonialism can hardly reach ” or benefit ” directly the masses of voters whose support parties and politicians require for their political survival. Rather also in Indonesia – they offend widely-held notions of equality and fairness. Hence, effectively patrimonial parties are forced to appeal for or mobilize support on the basis of “communal affiliation”, personality the (in the case, for example, of Megawati, “inherited”) charisma of their leaders or the moral authority of village heads and/or the coercive capabilities of the military or police…
An interesting note, yet again, is what an Indonesian told me, which was that when the decision was made to directly elect the President of Indonesia, the Indonesians looked at the Philippines and settled on runoff elections to avoid what they believed to be the greatest post-Edsa liability of our system, that is, electing minority presidents. Consider Webber’s description of the Indonesian political pros finding their well-ordered political lives destabilized by more independent-minded voters:
The post-Suharto elections have produced growing signs, however, that the traditional structures and relationship patterns on which successful election campaigning along these lines depends are breaking down. Parties and leaders that are widely perceived to have “failed” in office and/or been very corrupt have been severely punished. Thus, the PDI-P’s vote collapsed between the 1999 and 2004 Parliamentary elections by almost half and its candidate Megawati was comprehensively defeated in the presidential elections. Despite having by far the best party “machine”, the Golkar did much less well in the 2004 Parliamentary and presidential elections that it had hoped and anticipated. Despite the party leadership’s support for Megawati in the second round, voters who identify with the party voted massively instead for Yudhoyono, who defeated Megawati by more than 20 per cent and ran his campaign with a “loose”, but extensive “network of grassroots organizations”, pitting “‘people power’ against Indonesia” traditional mighty party machinery of the Golkar and PDI-P’s … Political parties and leaders steeped in patrimonial traditions seem likely to face harder times in Indonesia: “The assumption that money politics and a strong party machinery are enough to deliver votes no longer holds” … Within many of the established parties, the pressure for internal reforms and more accountable leadership is intensifying. There seems to be a growing chance that the pressures of electoral competition will force parties and politicians to make a break with inherited patrimonial norms and practices. Polyarchal… democracy may thus possess the capacity to propel Indonesia away from its patrimonial political legacies towards a more liberal-democratic political future.
The party machines failed Jose de Venecia in 1998, they didn’t keep Estrada in office in 2001 and didn’t quite hold the line as much as should have been expected for the President in 2004 and in the legislative elections in 2007. The dilemma faced by Indonesian party stalwarts is one similarly faced by their Filipino counterparts, as Scriptorium pointed out.
And here’s something else Scriptorium wrote in his entry on why the President will stay in power, and it has to do with the military:
Lastly, the military will not move against the President. First, it has never moved without a clear opposition-Church-middle-class alliance (the initial 1986 coup and the Oakwood mutiny fizzled out for lack thereof), and such an alliance, as shown above, is presently impossible. Second, the years after 2001 have led to a re-emphasis not on the military’s activist tradition but on its ‘professionalism’, interpreted in the narrow Prussian sense of allegiance to the State. Third, the military leadership has a vested interest in the continuity of the GMA government, especially since her regime, in membership if not in structure, has to a large extent become a civilian-military complex. For one, retired officers now populate appointive posts; and, though the custom of appointing them began under FVR, the present practice is to appoint indiscriminately, whereas FVR at least sifted for true officers and gentlemen like Rodolfo Biazon, Renato De Villa, and Arturo Enrile.
Over the weekend, a text went around advising people to expect a “Retired Military Manifesto” to be posted at General Danny Lim’s blog. The text came from an operator in the camp of former President Estrada, which has been proposing an Estrada-Lim-Puno Triumvirate. As of this writing, the manifesto hasn’t appeared on line. But it does indicate a kind of burning desire to stay relevant as the country seems poised to finally take the plunge and head towards presidential elections in 2010.
Enter the movie Valkyrie, which I saw last week. In Valkyrie, General Ludwig Beck advises his fellow conspirators, “Just remember this is a military operation: nothing ever goes according to plan.”
A year ago, in The seven year itch, I pointed out that those who felt the President had to go had fallen into a trap: the idea that political events can be made to proceed according to a formula: unpopular president + explosive revelations + economic downturn + angry prelates + an appeal to past greatness, based on shared values + get enough people on the streets + officer corps defects = regime change. And yet, as Beck pointed out, “nothing ever goes according to plan.” The politically adroit either plan for all contingencies, or marshal their resources to strike when opportunity arises or as contingencies unfold.
In Cory Aquino: An Intimate Portrait by Friends, there’s a piece contributed by Teodoro Locsin Jr. in which he recounts how Aquino left nothing to chance and didn’t rely on only one plan:
I had just spoken to – well, I suppose I still can’t say the name of this businessman who had just talked to the US ambassador about sending in warplanes. Things weren’t going too well for our side.
I was walking across the sward fronting the Palace over to the office I retained in the Guest House after being fired from the president’s staff – I kept it to the last day of her term.
Amid sharp sounds of gunfire and shelling from not too far away, a presidential security guard, crouching as though he were approaching a helicopter, came up to me. He said the president wanted me at the Arlegui house. I hadn’t told her yet what the businessman, the US ambassador, and I had been up to. I thought it might be about the same matter, but then again it might be about something else. You never knew with her. Cory Aquino never allowed current circumstances to dictate her agenda.
The door opened and I was shown into a parlor rather too sumptuously decorated for both our tastes. “I just had to have you try this cake,” she said and, turning to the maid, added, “give him a generous slice. Maur made it.”
I must say I could not disagree, and I always spoke my mind to her. The cake was just properly moist, excellent in every respect. Most of the thick curtains were drawn so flying glass would not hurt the children, she casually explained, except over the tall window that threw sunlight on the tea table between us. It was afternoon, that time of day.
Meanwhile, the arrangements she had secretly put in place long before, without telling any of us, even her closest advisers, were about to go into effect. Key and hitherto unknown combat officers whom the rebels assumed would side with them would suddenly turn their men and guns on the rebels. In retrospect, I can only compare – but only in respect to the quality of shared aplomb – that placid setting in the soft morning light to the one of Al Pacino standing godfather as the priest intoned, “Do you reject Satan? Do you?” and his men quietly went to work.
This revelation -over a decade after the events described- brings up the interesting problem of trying to learn from, or at least react to, events whose actual circumstances we still don’t clearly understand or fully know.
When the President’s own husband recounted their strategy for bringing down Estrada (see my entry, Mike and Joe: The Second Battle of the Books, where I reproduced Mike Arroyo’s interviews with Nick Joaquin) soon after the events concerned, he did so in a moment of celebratory candor. What strikes me as interesting is that a few years after that, the President’s enemies and former allies seem to have failed to take into account how the tactics that toppled a government in 2001 could have helped keep the successor government in office.
Consider events of more recent vintage, namely 2005. The President had achieved that rare thing, the election of a Vice-President who was her running mate. And yet, as her enemies closed in on her, there was obviously the possibility that the Vice-President would get it into his head that the time had come to step in and offer himself up as a successor. Surely matters must have seemed headed in that direction when, at the height of the unfolding crisis, the Veep flew off to Hong Kong.
One version has it that the Vice-President, upon returning from Hong Kong, was met by a general close to the President and was sternly warned that his life was on the line. Another version, strenuously denied by former Senate President Frank Drilon, is that when the Veep showed signs of being willing to take on the mantle of the presidency, Drilon et al. demanded they should be the ones to select who would be the Executive Secretary -faced with the possibility he’d be a figurehead president, the Veep balked and went home.
Consider, too, that even as all the building blocks of People Power were put in place, the old pros who’d decided to bring down the President failed to bring in an ex-President, Fidel V. Ramos. Faced with being inconsequential, the crafty FVR decided to throw his support behind the President and saved her job.
Consider, as well, 2006, when the armed forces was faced with the dilemma of turning its back on some of its most respected officers and remaining loyal to the President, or turning their backs on their commander-in-chief and betraying what Scriptorium calls their Prussian-style loyalty to the State. One version has it that the Chief of Staff was inclined to support the withdrawal, and that everyone else was poised to fall in line, when negotiations broke down because General Esperon asked for assurances that he wouldn’t be investigated for his possibile complicity in electoral fraud in 2004. The hotheads allegedly refused and denied a win-win solution, Esperon then countered the moves of the hotheads and this caused the Chief of Staff to waver. (Interestingly enough, Ramos in the same book shrewdly notes, in the book on Cory Aquino, in a kind of pointed aside, that no act punishable by the anti-coup law took place in 2006.)
Now we have to consider the background behind the supposed inclination of the top brass of the armed forces to seriously consider, instead of immediately dismissing out of hand, the plan to withdraw support from the commander-in-chief. One could argue that the military was essentially more democratic and civilian in orientation than civilians like the President and her close advisers, as they sought ways to stay in power.
The background to the 2006 attempt to withdraw support is thus the foiled plan to impose martial law in 2005. According to Ellen Tordesillas, the plan was as follows:
A Malacanang source said that in October 2005, when Arroyo was shaking from what the people heard in the “Hello Garci” tapes, she and her hardline advisers were almost ready to impose martial law. They would call it by some other name but the effect would be the destruction of democracy and in its place an Arroyo dictatorship.
The plan, the source said, was to explode a bomb at the Senate at 5 a.m.. Casualties would be avoided with the early morning timing but the explosion in one of the three branches of government would give Arroyo justification to declare martial law. Exactly like the fake ambush of then Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile which was used by Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law in 36 years ago.
A businessman in the Arroyo’s circle of ”hawks” asked if the defense secretary (Avelino Cruz) and AFP chief of staff (Generoso Senga) were into the plan. They were not.
When Cruz and Senga were told about it, they objected. A visit by John Negroponte, then the US Director of National Intelligence, who conveyed American disapproval of the martial law option, forced Arroyo to abort the plan.
Newsbreak’s Glenda Gloria in 2007 looked at the foiled martial law plan and the 2006 declaration of a state of emergency as follows:
July to December 2005 was the toughest time for the President. Nearly half her Cabinet left her, she felt under attack, and most of the power blocs surrounding her reinforced that siege mentality. “Each time somebody opposed her, she felt that person wanted to bring her down. She would defend a decision by saying, “but they’re attacking us,” recalls a Cabinet official.
The First Gentleman had been forced into exile and the President’s other pillar, her brother, had turned overnight from a “dove to a hawk,” notes one of the private advisers of the President. Buboy Macapagal soon became the “shadow string-puller in the Palace,” as one senator puts it…
We have it on good authority that Macapagal and Gonzales tried to persuade the President to declare martial law during this period. This move culminated in a visit of Gonzales to Washington, D.C. to drop hints about it to Philippine Ambassador Albert del Rosario, who opposed the idea, according to a friend of Del Rosario’s. (Del Rosario was sacked in June 2006.)
There was a series of top-level meetings about extreme measures to save the President (i.e., media and Left clampdown, arrest of “corrupt” politicians), says an insider, but in the end the idea flopped largely because the security forces – the police and military leaderships – displayed enough body language that said they didn’t have the stomach for it.
Martial law further divided the shadow Cabinet. Drilon had by that time stopped attending the group meetings, but the extreme measures likewise didn’t sit well with Cruz and Villarama, among others.
Buboy Macapagal, too, had stopped attending the meetings, aware that some of his former allies now disagreed with him. The big three businessmen, however, remained influential with the President.
Executive Order 464, which banned Cabinet secretaries from appearing before Senate probes without Palace approval, also divided her official family. Presidential adviser Gabriel Claudio cautioned that this “was a declaration of war,” knowing this would create problems for the chief executive. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez and Gutierrez, who was then presidential legal counsel, saw nothing wrong with it, however…
Then came the foiled military coup in February last year. The President declared a state of emergency and, when agitated Marine soldiers tried to barricade their headquarters on February 26, considered shutting down the Lopez-owned ANC cable TV station, which was covering the incident live.
It took a phone call to the President from “someone” in the Iglesia ni Cristo for the hotheads to cool off, says the same Cabinet official. The discovery and subsequent defeat of the coup toughened the view that by this time had begun to run through all the loyalist groups.
It went like this: she’s survived the worst because her opponents are weak and the public doesn’t care. This allows us room to push hard for changes and look even beyond 2010. We had become very comfortable with power, the Cabinet official concedes.
It’s been said that even when the President decided to proclaim a state of emergency in 2006 -using language literally cut-and-pasted from Marcos’s martial law proclamation in 1972- two factions in the cabinet pretty much squared off, with one faction saying it essentially granted the President martial law powers, while another faction, to which the then-Secretary of National Defense Avelino Cruz Jr. belonged, publicly stated there were all sorts of limitations to the President’s powers during a state of emergency.
Returning to Scriptorium, he pointed out that the President took care of “the activist Marines, who were then fed to the cannons in Jolo.” And there they and all officers inclined to insubordination continue to languish.
In a footnote, Scriptorium points to two new blocs that have political potential, as of now, still untapped:
Two special cases should be mentioned: (a) the urban poor, which first became a cohesive bloc as the mass base of former President Estrada, but was neutralized by the suppression of the pro-Estrada protests of May 2001; and (b) organized labour, which has tremendous potential power but whose organization and numbers are exerted for economic and not for political ends. The political mobilization of these groups, as partially occurred for opposing sides in 2001, would end the unchallenged hegemony of liberal-patrimonial politics in the Philippines, but is not likely for the moment.
The question is whether these two “special cases” will matter in a 2010 electoral scenario.
The British historian Robert Evans, in Why did Stauffenberg plant the bomb? Argues that the Count, always contemptuous of parliamentary democracy, a romantic nationalist, an unreprentant aristocrat,
There can be little doubt, however, that this would have brought huge military advantages to the Allies, and that the war would have come to an end several months sooner than it did, with the consequent saving of millions of lives.
That alone was justification enough for Stauffenberg’s act. In failing, he failed comprehensively. The war continued: millions more were killed. Anti-democratic, elitist and nationalist, he had nothing to offer the politics of the coming generations, still less the politics of today. In the end, too, for all the desperate heroism of Stauffenberg and his fellow-conspirators, Germany’s honour was not rescued. The conspiracy encompassed only a tiny minority of the German people. The vast majority continued fighting to the end. Most were shocked by the news of the assassination attempt and relieved at Hitler’s survival. As a moral gesture, Stauffenberg’s bomb was wholly inadequate to balance out the crimes that had been committed in Germany’s name and with the overwhelming support, or toleration, or silent acquiescence, of the German people. As the Catholic schoolteacher turned army officer Wilm Hosenfeld noted on 16 June 1943, more than a year before Stauffenberg’s attempt: “With this horrendous murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought an indelible shame upon ourselves, a curse that cannot be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty together.”
Certain academics have an “unappealing habit” of dismissing the 20 July plotters as reactionaries, “while earnestly extolling the self-sacrifices of the underprivileged Communists,” to quote historian Michael Burleigh. But there are no heroic Communists in Valkyrie, and shouldn’t be: most Communists opposed to Hitler, after all, were Stalinists, who simply wanted to replace one murderous dictatorship with another. The honorable Resistance, in contrast – ranging from social democrats to conservative aristocrats – were fighting to rescue and preserve Western civilization.
The thing that kept bothering me while watching Valkyrie, was that so many cast members had appeared as villains in Conspiracy, yet here were some of the same actors, playing Germans yet again, but this time, with most of them as “good” Germans.
Conspiracy happens to be one of my favorite historical films. Informing it is the concept of the “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt made famous in observing Eichmann,played in the film by Stanley Tucci. The film should be required watching for anyone interested in producing results from a meeting. But also, to see how what is legal is not necessarily what is right.
In their blogs, The Marocharim Experiment mulls on the implications of building fences (and not between good neighbors) while The Construct mulls over responses to his entry. This is of course a question of whether one thinks we are all in this together. Recall how, in 2005, Fidel V. Ramos justified his support of the President and what he believed was a golden moment to pursue parliamentary government, by saying he pondered the sight of urban poor communities from his penthouse office, and wondered what would happen if those communities simply got it into their heads to enter the gated communities in their vicinity to loot and pillage to their heart’s content. As the established upper and middle classes find their prosperity on edge, and as a new middle class arises from overseas work, and as the growth of the population means there is now an increasingly permanent underclass without any hope of anything but the most basic subsistence, the Fear of the Other is not only getting pervasive, but has proven itself capable of trumping the appeal of the Left.
Consider, for example, some public reactions to the saturation drives of the armed forces in Central and Northern Luzon under Palparan -how they appreciated the sudden disappearance of drug dealers and drunks, pickpockets and snatchers; similar expressions of appreciation were reported in the wake of military and police saturation drives in urban poor communities in Metro Manila. And how fencing off, and gating off, communities has been in place since the end of World War II. Recall, further, that even as the Diliman Commune took place, residents of the area banded together to form vigilante squads to hunt down rebel students.
Perhaps most troubling, then, is that U.P. is finally returning to a state of harmony with the preferences and attitudes of our broader society.
Additional readings in random ruminations, who was pickpocketedand made this film:
By Manuel L. Quezon III Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 01:30:00 02/16/2009
BEFORE elections, there’s a noticeable increase in bank robberies and an escalation in instances of general mayhem, from snatchings to drug deals gone sour. The lifeblood of politics being money, which serves as the great leveler (all obstacles can be overcome by piling on the cash), and the traditional source of campaign contributions, businessmen, being in short supply, candidates have to find alternative sources of funding for their campaigns. Essentially, as Filipino businessmen have discovered they can go on vacation during the campaign season, and thus avoid having to donate money to politicians, the more enterprising among our politicians have taken to raising campaign funds by means of robberies or accepting funds from gambling lords and drug dealers.
This was explained to me by professor (and administration acolyte) Alex Magno, who told me in 2007 that the reason businessmen can afford to ignore and actually evade the politicians is that they are no longer at the mercy of the politicians the way they used to be. The era of currency controls is long gone, for example; and the old sugar bloc (divided into the faction of planters and millers) that lavishly funded politicians is gone too.
Magno breaks down the primary sources of political funding as follows: (1) Drug money; (2) Gambling money; (3) Quotas on customs and the Bureau of Internal Revenue; (4) The Philippine National Police.
According to Magno, politicians are really in a lose-lose situation: Elections are getting even more expensive, but there simply isn’t enough money coming in to finance them. So, he says, the real kingpins in politics are those with illegal funds who now play the role the big businessmen used to play. But on the other hand, it’s obvious that big businessmen who still bankroll campaigns – the Eduardo Cojuangcos, Razons, Aboitizes, Lucio Tans – happen to be in industries where their businesses remain vulnerable to government regulatory pressure.
When proposals were made for government to actually subsidize political parties, the idea was so thoroughly entangled in the administration’s push for Charter change that neither Charter change itself nor other proposals to reform the political system got beyond the fierce partisan divide of administration versus opposition, which was in many ways a showdown between administration proponents of a Malaysian-style one-party parliamentary system and the public’s preference for the presidential, bicameral system. When public opinion showed itself firmly for retaining the presidential and bicameral system, administration-led efforts to actually reform the political system fizzled out.
The administration’s unquestioned dominance in the lower house and its far-from-negligible bloc in the upper house certainly give it the means to propose and pass legislation conducive to making political candidacy less expensive, opening up local and national government to new blood.
A first step could have been to revive the campaign ad ban, taking big money out of the media equation by allowing only ads for political parties, and free of charge. A second step would have been to give political parties a fighting chance by reinstituting bloc voting, where voters can vote a straight ticket, providing an incentive for candidates to campaign as a team. The third would have been to pass legislation challenging the Panganiban formula which currently makes the party-list system a joke. And the fourth would have been to pass some sort of political dynasty legislation (the simpler, the better: say a rule as simple as having only one member of any given family in local government, the legislature or the executive at any given time).
But since the administration was engaged in a zero-sum game, when it failed to get what it wanted, it refused to consider incremental changes to the existing system. The political opposition happily went along with quietly dropping campaign reform since both sides are salivating over the reconfiguration of forces that will take place once everyone’s assured the President will only seek a get-out-of-jail-free-card-style accommodation instead of staying on as prime minister.
Either way, all sides now have to raise their campaign kitties and every headline suggests that effort is well underway. All the headlines – the so-called War on Drugs, the Legacy scam, the World Bank contractor issue, the government stimulus plan, the fight over control of Meralco, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant revival proposal – suggest, at the very least, mixed motives on the part of the prominent participants in these headline-grabbing issues. What they have in common is that they indicate the revenue-raising potential, politically, of these schemes, for the politicians and parties – in reality, the political factions – involved.
Guns, goons and gold – the infamous three Gs of our politics – have never gone away. But the warlord culture that arose after World War II has entered the boardroom besides further mutating into competition between politicians who are either funded by the triads or who head them themselves. Warlordism has very little patience when it comes to public opinion and thus, zero tolerance for free speech, since these are the best antidotes our society has been able to devise against the terrorism that the three Gs represent.
Which suggests that Metro Manila, where media’s concentrated, is literally an island where democracy, much diminished, still survives: the hard question must therefore be asked. Are criticisms of “imperial Manila” actually protests against the principle that public opinion matters, and instead a thinly disguised advocacy of warlordism? For the collusion between warlords and the gangsters has squeezed out liberal democracy on the ground and crowded it out in the corridors of power in the national government.
The VOY contest is a well-established one, involving as it does, elimination rounds in the provinces conducted under the auspices of various Rotary Club districts. The students generally spoke very well, but what struck me were some observations made by fellow judge Butch Dalisay on the sidelines of the competition.
I asked him how the students compared to, say, his generation and the oratorical contests they participated in. He immediately brought up the Voice of Democracy competitions of his youth, and observed that the schoolchildren of today speak better. But he was troubled by what he felt to be a lack of curiosity about the world on the part of the kids, and said he couldn’t shake off the impression that the otherwise impressive rhetorical ability of the kids masked a lack of depth when it came to issues, and the real world.
For example, even as the kids generally bewailed the depressing lack of genuine service among today’s leaders, and condemned corruption, and violence and the degradation of the environment, Dalisay said he was constantly waiting for the kids to exhort their audience to take up a good book, or read the papers, or watch the news, so as to be better informed of the many issues swirling around them.
The Volvo contest, on the other hand, is the first one ever, and included a camp activity. For my part let me suggest that the parameters of the contest betrayed excessive caution on the part of the sponsors. But then again, being a privately-sponsored contest one really can’t quibble with the overarching limitation of the contest’s definition of leadership:
It advocates the development of youth leaders who shall embody the character of true leadership ” that with both integrity of heart and excellent skills that is rooted in God-centeredness and exemplified by accountable and responsible stewardship ” and who shall articulate the voice of leadership that would move and inspire, innovate and instigate leadership transformation among the youth.
That overarching parameter, I suppose, doesn’t bother schools like the Ateneo de Manila in the least, though for people like me, who are trying to focus the public’s attention on the need for a more secular approach to national problems, chalk up another win for those who advocate religious supremacy in all things.
Contests like these help provide a glimpse into the minds of young people, how they process information, and to what extent they’re armed with the tools necessary to become not just reliable employees, but active citizens. For some time now, I’ve believed that an active civic sense is what needs to be fostered, because we’re paying the price for the manner in which nurturing that civic sense was effectively abandoned by educators.
Here are the questions to which I should like every reader to give his close attention: what life and morals were like; through what men and what policies, in peace and in war, empire was established and enlarged. Then let him note how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.
A couple of years ago, at a forum in Jose Rizal University, former Senate President Salonga, asked by a student what would get the country out of the logjam it’s in, thundered, “what this country needs is not Charter Change but character change!” and received a tremendous ovation in response.
Every seems agreed on that point, but then seems stumped on how to accomplish that change. Organized religion seems to be moving more effectively towards a “God-centered” solution to all things. The best proof of this is the stir which the present Chief Justice himself caused, but that’s for another entry (for now, let me point you to another piece, The scientific imperative).
Anyway, here are the three winners of the Volvo competition, which have helpfully been uploaded to YouTube.
The winner of the competition, John Xavier Valdes of the Ateneo de Manila:
The first runner-up, Regina Isabelle Rananda of Miriam College:
And the second runner-up, Christian Earl Castañeda of LaSalle Greenhills:
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They are remarkable performances, each and every one (and so were the rest, on the whole).
Hopefully, in the future, the VOY competition will also consider posting the performances of their winners on line. The winners of the Allied Bank-sponsored, Rotary-led competition, go on to represent the country in public speaking contests overseas.
For now, let me close with a look at the University of the Philippines.
I’ve been following the campaign of one blogger I know, Brian “Bong” Ong, with interest. He and his group belong to one of the groups contesting control of student government. And while Bong and friends may be having colorful clashes with the Left and the Frats, two observations interest me. The first is that none of the competing groups seem particularly attuned to the “real” concerns based on the existing demographics of the student body, and the second is that, as Jester-in-Exile spent today venting on Plurk, the parties are all suspiciously silent on the issue of fraternity violence in U.P.
Anyway, I’ll leave it to Jester to focus on everyone tiptoeing around the question of fraternity violence, and point, instead, to the issue that apparently concerns most U.P. students at present, and that is the dilemma of the Jumping Jologs (see the bottom part of my July 17, 2007 entry for links concerning the etymology, etc. of Jologs). See Raeining and The Daily Inquibbler as well as bottled brain and rokirode and Eternal Dreams for details on the issue at hand, caught on video by thisiscoy.net:
I believe it was a defining moment for the UP community. We have always regarded ourselves as the future leaders of the country, the advocates of democracy, and the protectors of our fellow Filipinos especially the masa. Last night was different though. It was clearly us versus them. The educated versus morons. The burgis versus the masa. This criticism shares the same play on semantics of labeling as the April-May 2001 protests with – EDSA versus “the May 1 Siege”. It’s still the same rift between the middle and lower class.
This event, I think, will come under great scrutiny of the University officials. In the advent of crimes committed to members of the academic community by “outsiders (the Veteran’s Bank robbery, the rapes, the thefts and robberies), I think that they will be considering ‘closing’ the University and limiting its access to UP people. Sure, we’ll be like Ateneo or any other cono private campus, but check the demographics today. What’s the difference?
Must-reads are the entries of Smoke (who also delves on Orcs being another term for Jologs) and The Marocharim Experiment on the whole thing, from a more sociological perspective.
But as for my friend Bong Ong, his party -and all the parties on whom the Jester-in-Exile would rather wish a plague on all their houses- the finer points and the thrill of engaging in collegiate politics and the disputation of political dogmas, has been intruded upon by the outside world.
Addendum, 2/16/’09
From radicalchick comes the following, explaining why The Construct has it wrong (and most commenters, beginning with the rambunctious being Punks, and why it was a matter of incompetence on the part of the organizers), and what sets apart U.P. from its neighboring schools:
the whole ‘close the university’ conclusion is dangerous. because we are under a U.P. administration that has consistently been trying to make the University more exclusive to “U.P. people” that is, only U.P. students and employees: imposing a no-i.d.-no-entry policy, putting up gates and closing many of the university’s entrances and exits. and while we presume that this makes things safer for us who own cellphones laptops and mp3 players, it glosses over the fact that in the process, the members of the bigger U.P. community are being disenfranchised. if you are part of any of the communities (Krus na Ligas, Areas 1 2 and 3, the Hardins, among others), if you’ve been allowed to build businesses in this area (the talyers along many of the minor roads, the Bonsai Garden, for example), if you’ve lived here all your life but are not enrolled or employed by the University, why must you be disenfranchised from the spaces of U.P.? this is as much yours as it is theirs who hold I.D.’s and form 5′s.
truth to tell, the blogsphere’s classist consensus can and will be used by the University admin to continue its project of oppressing its own in the name of security. and in the end, all it will do is highlight difference among U.P.’s many sectors, and allow for the U.P.’s ‘educated’ to deem their security as more important than the oppression of so many others who are part of the community.
this community is what makes U.P. different from Ateneo, demographics notwithstanding. it is this community that we learn to be mindful of, that we deal with everyday, that we do become dependent on. we live with them, we breathe the same air, we are in fact one and the same.
i don’t doubt that the punks could’ve started throwing stones at the people inside the Sunken Garden, and that they had the capacity to actually take down those walls. i do not question the truth that many of the people there - and i’m sure they weren’t ALL u.p. students - were scared shitless. but i also don’t doubt that this was the organizers’ fault as Thumbbook has said.
It is the dilemma, therefore, of the culture of the gated community, with all that it implies.
Agence France-Presse reports San Miguel: Not taking over Meralco which seems to be believed by no one. Whatever the news that emerges going into what’s expected to be a showdown for control of Meralco during it’s May stockholders meeting, the rise in Meralco share prices has become newsworthy in itself. In his column, Butch del Castillo has this to say:
Yesterday it hit P85, a 52-week high, at the close of trading. Stockbrokers are saying that Meralco shares may even rise further to P90 each by next week and retest a historic high of P105 in the next couple of months if the current trend holds.
It was only late last year when San Miguel Corp. (SMC) bought the entire 27-percent stake of the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) for P30 billion. That was followed by the acquisition by a group headed by Inigo Zobel of another 7 percent of the voting rights in Meralco. Since then, Eduardo Cojuangco, Ramon Ang and two other nominees have been named directors of the utility’s 11-man board.
Considering that the equities market has been generally weak and sluggish for several months now, the upshot of Meralco shares on the stock exchange is nothing short of amazing.
To stockbrokers in the know, however, the share’s bullish behavior was not totally unexpected. They say what’s going on are only the rumblings of a looming proxy war between SMC and the Lopez group for control of the giant utility.
“This is the runup to Meralco’s annual stockholders’ meeting scheduled for May 26, 2009,” one broker says matter-of-factly.
Although there is no official confirmation from either side, recent developments on the PSE trading floor indicate that there is definitely an ongoing scuffle to amass as many Meralco shares as possible.
Right now, the two groups officially control roughly 34 percent each of Meralco. The Lopezes, through First Philippine Holdings, own 33.4 percent of Meralco. SMC holds exactly 34 percent, including the 27 percent it bought from the GSIS, plus the 7 percent that was lately acquired by an allied group led by Zobel from other government agencies…
The BusinessMirror quoted Gilbert Lopez, research head of Credit Suisse Group AG, as saying investors are speculating on a proxy fight between the Lopezes and the new entrant, which is SMC. “One of the two groups must have a clear edge to control the utility.”…
Obviously, both sides are playing coy and figuratively playing their cards close to their chests, but the stockbrokers know better.
A Bloomberg tally shows that 7.58 million shares changed hands as a block at midtrading the other day at P80 per share. Before that, three blocks totaling 16.7 million shares were bought and sold in three trading days.
What is clear from these developments is that certain groups are feverishly piling up as many Meralco shares as may be available in the open market a full three months before Meralco’s annual meeting.
As speculation would have it, most of the buying is being done by the SMC group headed by SMC chairman Cojuangco. The speculation is based on the well-known fact that of the two groups, it is the Cojuangco-Ang-Zobel team-up that has the kind of cash hoard that would be needed to buy up all the loose Meralco shares in the open market.
But whoever is doing most of the buying is certainly doing a swell job of helping to perk up the market, in general, and Meralco shares, in particular.
The Philippine Stock Exchange couldn’t ignore the movement of Meralco’s share price; but in the end, not much seems possible to do . While personally, the Meralco and San Miguel moves are of direct relevance to me (since I have a show on ANC and I own some San Miguel shares), what’s more relevant to this blog is the way big business and government seem joined at the hip in this particular case. Some of government’s losses have been made up by San Miguel acquiring government shares (helping buttress the bottom line of the government at a time when Moody’s gives RP no credit upgrade; the government is going to be hard-pressed to have cash on hand for patronage and running the government: see Government spending P7B to hire “temps“ and State workers set rally vs layoffs ); on the other hand, government’s hostility to Meralco is also well served by San Miguel’s possible hostile takeover of Meralco.
If, for example, the interests of Eduardo Cojuangco are served by a cozy relationship with the present administration, could it then possibly be a sign of a confluence of interests that extends to the 2010 elections?
The administration, unlike its enemies, has the resources (money and manpower) to keep game plans running on parallel tracks, to see which will prosper. Among its many options remain Charter Change, emergency rule, and holding presidential elections as scheduled in 2010. But the last option, if it’s to be viable, requires sinking in resources now, and reaching an agreement with potential candidates sooner rather than later. These potential candidates -and their backers- themselves have different options running on parallel tracks (the Cojuangco interests, for example, would be interested in the prospects for Charter Change, and in elections in 2010, and perhaps, apprehensive of emergency rule, and must consider which option to invest in most effectively). The more these tracks converge, the more it would seem logical to pursue an existing, and lucrative, relationship as far as it will go.
Much as I thought 2004 marked the passing into history of the Marcos era and its henchmen, I may have underestimated both their staying power and their ability to groom a successor generation (Enrile is at his apogee, and not nadir, as a public official; Cojuangco seems headed for new heights of economic and political influence; Ronnie Puno seems entrenched as ever; and Francis Escudero seems the Second Coming of Ferdinand Marcos himself).
I’ve had a hunch for some time now that the real news -the real political news- is taking place in the business pages, where reporters and pundits both are least well-equipped to report and comment on things.
The other day, in Has the payoff begun? the Inquirer editorial cautioned against moving too quickly and too slowly on the case of the collapsed rural banks owned by Celso de los Angeles. The editorial points to the messy interlinked interests of the parties involved, in particular, the Speaker and the House of Representatives and the PDIC and even the Monetary Board (which has to authorize loans to bail out the PDIC as it bails out depositors in de los Angeles’ rural banks).
But an entry in Stuart-Santiago (reacting to a Dan Mariano column) points to another possibility altogether: that de los Angeles is undergoing a hatchetjob at the hands of the big national banks, and was the victim of a campaign to spook his depositors. The possibility of intraindustry rivalries is something worth considering.
On another note, compare the two views on the LPG shortage in the columns of Rene Azurin and Dean de la Paz. Actually, both believe that the shortage was more along the lines of a hiccup in the market.
Azurin says what happened was this:
I tried to ferret out an explanation. What I’ve come up with is simply a tale of market forces acting as they might be expected to act in a deregulated competitive environment.
To begin, high oil prices throughout most of last year caused the benchmark Saudi contract price for LPG to peak in July 2008 at $940 per metric ton. As can be expected, local LPG demand in that month was at its lowest - about 76,000 MT – as households restricted their use of LPG and switched to other available fuels like charcoal and kerosene.
But, after peaking in July, the Saudi contract price for LPG suddenly dropped steeply and hit its lowest level in November 2008, around $330 per MT. Expectedly again, the suddenly very low LPG prices stimulated demand as households switched back from other fuels. Local demand in November and December was estimated to average around 96,000 MT per month, the highest levels so far experienced.
Despite the sudden spurt in demand, however, there was enough supply to meet the surge because importers had already increased their importations. From an aggregate importation averaging 47,000 MT per month from January to October 2008, the six importers brought in 67,000 MT in November and 66,000 MT in December. They upped this further by importing 81,000 MT in January 2009. When you add beginning inventories of about 35,000 MT and Shell’s local production of about 10,000 MT per month - Petron had an emergency plant shutdown in December – one arrives at the conclusion that Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes was absolutely correct in telling congressmen and the public that aggregate LPG supply was still adequate to meet total demand.
Why then was there a perceived shortage? Apparently, consumers who experienced difficulties in getting LPG were customers supplied by certain independent refilling plants mostly supplied by Liquigaz. Liquigaz supplies about 35% of the local market and is the largest importer of LPG but buys its supplies from the spot market. Presumably, in September and October 2008, Liquigaz (like any astute trader) tried to take advantage of projected falling prices by delaying the placing of its orders until LPG prices had hit expected lows. This - coupled with unexpected disruptions in LPG flow from Russia to Europe that upset the delivery timetable of Liquigaz – caused Liquigaz to be unable to fully supply its refilling plant customers during the critical December-January period.
This is why LPG dealers and retailers dependent on Liquigaz-supplied refilling plants were screaming shortage. In the battle for market share, Shell, Petron, Total, and other importers who had available stock naturally supplied only their own refilling plants and dealers, and refused to supply others. Customers of the LPG brands of Liquigaz refilling plants could therefore buy LPG but only if they were willing to shift to another brand or to another dealer. There is no supply shortage if some dealers and retail outlets have no stock, but others do.
Despite the problems that arose from its decisions, Liquigaz was of course justified in timing the placing of its orders to try and maximize its profits. Similarly, in a deregulated, competitive environment, Shell, Petron, Total, and others were justified in their refusal to supply those who were not their regular dealers in order to try and grab market share from rivals.
In a deregulated, competitive environment, government authorities like the Department of Energy and the Department of Trade and Industry cannot make output or pricing decisions for industry players. In fact, a policy of deregulation “to ensure a truly competitive market” requires that government authorities ensure that the industry participants are actually competing and not colluding with each other. In the current situation, not sharing supply with rivals so as to grab their market share is indicative of competition. Sharing supply with rivals so that market shares remain unchanged might be evidence of collusion.
While de la Paz says this is what happened:
In the run-up to December, global oil prices fell sharply and such crashes in values affect how oil companies manage inventory. Hoarding would have been stupid. In a temporary regime of falling prices, it would be imprudent to store large quantities as they would be forced to sell at lower prices than that from which inventory was accumulated. As a seasonal increase in demand of 50 percent is rather expensive given falling prices, the oil companies kept inventory at its economic quantity levels to sell at reasonable margins.
Because the LPG producers kept lower inventories, the burden to respond to the increased demand fell on importers. Of these, there is only one that can supply the inventory slack.
Importers service refillers from whom most of the lower-income market relies and where prices are more elastic. Without the same kind of distribution network owned by the major oil companies that produce LPG, a distribution problem can occur leading to marketplace shortages readily felt by those sensitive to incremental costs.
True shortages ensue severely aggravated officials threatening to prosecute dealers that sold over an imaginary price parameter that did not reflect true costs and the effect of prudent inventory management.
In such a situation, by importing only as needed and gradually raising prices to reflect economic realities, the shortages were soon alleviated in markets serviced by the top three suppliers. In niches serviced by refillers, shortages could still be felt as these outside the mainstream distribution networks.
In this rather revealing episode, if there is one thing evident, it is that we really need officials who understand the profound vagaries of the business and do not aggravate it by appearing clueless, running after scapegoats and imposing unrealistic demands.
Both seem to suggest that the current Secretary of Energy is not up to scratch.
The Warrior Lawyer comments on the Supreme Court’s decision on who gets custody of that convicted American soldier. The Inquirer editorial, Time to talk, says the Philippine government ought to be negotiating from a position of strength on this one, as it can call the bluff of the new American administration. But it seems the government is inclined to drag it out, doing Uncle Sam a favor even before it’s been asked for one.
Eventually, the President tried to make the most of a perfunctory, courtesy conference at the State Department, which was remarkable for Hillary Clinton’s focus on domestic politics.
The best picture of where the administration’s at, however, might actually be this one:
In power, but going around in circles.
An administration in perpetual survival mode actually surviving, but reduced to going through the motions of governance without actually resolving anything. Meanwhile, everyone is a little more tired, a little more cynical, a little more out of ideas, and running out of options. The President has taken to trying to sound oracular:
“When we were abroad we were hearing strange, huge numbers that just depress the people, but really are very far from what the situation really is,” said Arroyo, who returned Sunday from a weeklong swing through Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United States.
The administration has managed to consolidate its power to the extent that when things go wrong, it has no one to blame for its problems but itself. It has to keep several balls up in the air; this takes energy, and attention; it also makes for frayed nerves. It’s quite a juggling act, but the longer it’s kept up, the more that everyone expects one of the balls to fall.
That is highly ironic reward for political longevity.
Take two examples.
The first is a gut issue: fuel and food.
Recently, Uniffors blogged about hearings on the LPG supply problem:
So who or what is behind the shortage?
Arnel TY, president of LPG Marketers Association, said the problem started last December when the Big Three- Shell, Chevron, and Petron- started buying LPG from Liquigaz instead of relying on their own supplies.
The Big Three said they were caught flatfooted by the sudden increase in demand.
Didn’t they have any projections?
Well, they said it was difficult to make an accurate prediction because the independent refillers and dealers buy on the spot market.
Petron said, “We are continually selling to allied refillers; They are assured of their regular volume because they follow the rules of the industry. But the demand of independent refillers is hard to project.”
In other words, there would be no shortage if everyone signed up with the Big Three. That’s the golden rule. They wish.
And so what Ty said with regards to hoarding – that it was easier for the Big Three to connive to withhold LPG from the market, to control the supply as it were, than it is for thousands of independent refillers and dealers to do so – makes sense.
And Reyes is blaming the independents, accusing them of hoarding.
In her blog, Marichu Lambino points out that the best that Angelo Reyes can do is to keep reiterating his desire for a departmental army, for emergency powers:
What the Energy Secretary probably meant when he asked for police power is what most people think of when they refer to what police officers do when they make arrests, searches, seizures. That’s not police power. It’s called law enforcement. You don’t need more legislative enactment for that, all the references you need are the Rules of Court and criminal statutes.
The Energy Secretary can on conditions of a valid search, conduct raids of all LPG dealers or the oil cartel in order to arrest the artificial shortage, he can strike fear in the hearts of the greedy and the hoarders in order to avert a full-blown crisis. All he has to do is ask his lawyers how to go about it (i will not give the procedure here); he has to do it as a campaign, not piecemeal; he has to have all the legal bases covered; he has to be swift and discreet.
It’s called: Doing your job. But in this government, no one is doing their job, no one is enforcing the laws, it’s a field day for crooks, fixers, the greedy and the incompetent.
The second is the problem of everyone having to tighten their belts while more and more of officialdom gets caught with their snouts in the trough. Yesterday, the Inquirer editorial, Exposed, examined the ambiguous feelings of the public, when it comes to whistleblowers and their revelations -and what ends might truly be served by their exposes. This ambiguity -or unwillingness to take risks- served the purposes of the administration and helped foil the ambitions of its enemies. But having been so thoroughly and consistently whipped, the administration still keeps getting into hot water, and it’s running out of conspiracy theories with which to deflect serious scrutiny.
And what seems to be the growing ability of the public to separate posturing from real action. Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who is of course casting a moist eye on re-election in 2010, has taken to appearing so hot-headed as to be an “unreliable” ally for the President.
But is she? Every time she throws a fit, the story centers on her, and whatever peppery thing she has to say; but it detracts from connecting the dots (to the foot-dragging of the Ombudsman, for example) and relentlessly focusing on what the Senate has shown and which the House tried to whitewash -that allegations of conspiring contractors won’t go away and leads pretty high up, indeed.
Add to this the ongoing mess involving the failure of rural banks, a connected pre-need company, and the sort of cozy collusion that had congressmen trying to exonerate contractors put on the hot seat by the World Bank.
You can see where this is all going: officialdom going around in circles, tripping itself up as everyone gets exposed as being hand-in-glove with other racketeers.
Here at home, I have to agree with Bong Austero’s view that there seems to be too much self-defeating doom and gloom while not enough focus is being made on what opportunities have arisen or what, really, the big picture is, concerning jobs:
The People Management Association of the Philippines conducted a study in the second and third week of January to get a quick pulse of the employment situation in the country. PMAP is the national association of human resource managers – the people in charge of hiring and firing. The sample of the study was limited, with only 177 companies participating, but it was statistically valid. The study pointed out that – although information from member companies in the electronic and export sectors confirm news reports of heavy layoffs, the survey showed that for the companies represented in the survey, layoffs are limited to 10 percent of respondents. In short, the layoffs and downsizing do not comprise a general trend.
In fact, 60 percent of the respondents of the study revealed that their companies may increase headcount this year. Of this, 43 percent said the increase in manpower would be due to growth in business while 39 percent said it would be due to more aggressive business strategies. Unfortunately, the dark cloud cast by our prophets of doom seemed to have spooked most business organizations. Actual hiring is being done cautiously, with 48 percent of total respondents saying they are only doing replacement hiring for critical positions and a further 10 percent freezing hiring for regular positions.
According to the study, the most optimistic sector seems to be business process outsourcing, with 10 of the 13 company respondents saying they may increase headcount in 2009 due to business expansion. However, four companies out of the 13 respondents say they are also only hiring for critical positions at present. A proportionally bigger number of outsourcing companies among the respondents are also giving lower salary increases this year, compared to 2008 (6 out of the 13).
Fifty-two percent of respondents say projected salary increases for this year is 6-10 percent. This proportion of respondents is lower than the 64 percent last year who reported giving actual increases of 6-10 percent. About 30 percent say that they are currently giving lower salary rate increases to respond to more difficult times. Employees in about 25 percent of respondent companies in manufacturing, 30 percent in outsourcing and 17 percent in services are also not being asked to render overtime work. Less than 10 percent of respondent companies (8 percent in manufacturing and 6 percent in services) have resorted to shortened work hours.
To sum up, there a number of companies directly affected by the global recession but this is a minority – more of an exception at this point rather than the trend. Second, majority of business organizations in this country are on an expansion mode due to business growth and aggressive business strategies. However, and this is the sad thing, most companies are being cautious and are deliberately holding off their expansion programs and consequently, their hiring programs, thanks to the prophets of doom in this country.
TESDA is, ideally, a very important government agency; in visionary hands, it could help jump-start competitiveness and be a force for social mobility.
But instead, it’s turning into a patronage vehicle for “titoboboy.com.ph” and whatever campaign he has in mind for 2010.
But then TESDA isn’t alone in merely politicking instead of problem-solving; or put another way, the only problem it’s trying to fix is whether or not Syjuco can win election in 2010.
I do believe that we’re pretty much adrift, because our whole system of keeping track of economic activity in any but the haziest of ways, has broken down. So everyone’s a blind man describing the elephant. The merry-go-round whirs around, but it’s all a blur.
Observers on the outside, though, seem to think it’s all lunacy.
Originally found here, the graph includes the Philippines, in yellow, with its steep climb. A discussion of what this means can be found in The Unlawyer.
