Drowned in beer

The press had two opportunities to ask the presidents of the Philippines and United States about the significance of their meeting. The “prestigious” (as our President put it) representative of the Philippine media asked a slum book question. The American media person ignored our President altogether and asked about what’s being called the “Beer Summit.” There wasn’t even the online buzz created by Shrub’s maladroit effort to be hospitable by mentioning what a good cook his chef was.(see the transcript)

There wasn’t the easy banter we saw during the President’s previous Oval Office appearance (see President Hee Hee and President Ha Ha from June 25, 2008, as well as the Reuters transcript) although fashionistas will probably note the President wore the same (lucky?) dress. I suppose much will be made about the contrast between Bush’s fulsome praise for the President -”I congratulated the President on her strong stand on counterterrorism -more than strong stand- effective stand on counterterrorism, as well as laying out a vision for peace”- and the more moderate references by Obama to “I am very pleased that President Arroyo has made such good progress on dealing with counterterrorism issues.” But that might be more of a difference in style than of policy substance; both the Bush and Obama statements focused on the same points, indicating no real change in American policy towards the Philippines.

That policy no longer views the Philippines as a lynchpin of American policy in the region but still considers the country, both from the perspective of sentimental ties and emerging policy, as a reliable ally that needs to be reassured it can count on tokens of favor from time to time. The meeting then, is a reiteration, perhaps not to the President herself, but the country, that the traditional relationship is not about to be set aside, and that the country retains a place in the emerging scheme of things.

An American I talked to last night gave me what seemed the most sober and reasonable perspective on the meeting between the two chief executives. While the American asserted that a study of American diplomatic history would reveal high-level meetings between heads of state to be much more businesslike, but boring, than the public assumes, it was the regional context of the meeting that I found more interesting and even convincing.

For some time now the conventional wisdom is that the position the Philippines traditionally used to enjoy in the region has been taken up by Indonesia. As far back as 2006 I recall, during a conference in Washington DC, Americans referring to the President of Indonesia as “Asia’s new Magsaysay.” Where the current Democratic administration differs from its predecessor is its declaration that it intends to be more engaged in South East Asia. But that engagement carries with it a hierarchy of interests, and if in Asean, in terms of alliances, Indonesia is now a very high priority, while Burma is the biggest problem, the Philippines and American engagement must be taken in the context of where it could be situated in terms of that hierarchy of interests -as an adjunct to Indonesian concerns, the Asian and Middle East confrontation with radical Islam, and, along the way, an emerging detente with China.

On the one hand, the United States seems inclined to withdraw its front line to Guam, what with widespread expectations that its Okinawa bases will soon be closed; South Korean bases, like the Japanese bases, have proven more politically problematic than they may have been worth, militarily, but problems with North Korea (itself, arguably, a proxy for China to confront the United States in the region) will perhaps keep outright bases there more viable in the near future. At the same time, the United States, together with Japan, has interests, together with Australia, in not allowing China to have absolute supremacy both militarily and economically, in the region. Being able to project American naval and air power seems more important now, than maintaining actual land forces outside the Korean peninsula; beefing up the capacity of Asean nations to patrol their own waters and engage in counterterrorism more proactively and effectively, seems more beneficial and less politically-problematic, than having Americans on the ground to act as magnets for attack. Okinawa and the Philippines have proven how horny or undisciplined GIs can cause far too many headaches at a time when the Americans are out to foster a more positive impression than they earned during the Bush years.

Anyway, how does this play out vis-a-vis the Philippines? According to the American, the US government has devoted a lot of face time to engaging the Indonesian President, and has encountered the leaders of at the G20 Summit, the American president’s expected to swing by some regional capitals before or after the 2009 Apec CEO Summit in Singapore, but that Manila will not be included in the list of stopovers.

There’s a practical reason why Manila can’t be stopover in November -it’s when the campaign officially begins for the 2010 elections, and it would be impolitic for President Obama to be seen either implicitly or explicitly favoring either the President, her coalition, or any of the contenders for the presidency, because whoever ends up winning will have to engage the United States anyway, and vice-versa, but it would be unproductive, knowing Filipino sensitivities, to be seen endorsing or withholding endorsement from any candidate who might want to take advantage of the Obama visit.

This presents a problem, though, in terms of the new American administration policy to reengage Southeast Asia, which includes the country’s oldest regional ally, the Philippines. Regardless of administration, the United States would be foolish to ruffle feathers in Manila or cause Manila to lose face by what might be projected as a snub. On the other hand, the United States has been seen to be aggresively courting regional leaders like the President of Indonesia while the President of the Philippines was left flailing around trying to secure face time with the American president. She did not get it before, she will not get it later, so best to give her what she wants, now.

Which is what the President received. Unfortunately, domestic politics bumped her visit from the airwaves and the papers; CNN didn’t even mention the visit except parenthetically:

On the meeting’s being dubbed the “Beer Summit,” Obama said, “It’s a clever term, but this is not a summit, guys. This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day, and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other, and that’s really all it is.

“This is not a university seminar. It is not a summit. It’s an attempt to have some personal interaction when an issue has become so hyped and so symbolic that you lose sight of just the fact that these are people involved,” he said.

He said he would be surprised if the media makes the meeting out to be more important than his meeting Thursday with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, president of the Philippines, but “the press has surprised me before.”

Surprise, surprise.

I was less convinced by the American’s assertion that the Department of State is very jealous of its prerogatives and that Filipino speculation that messages had been delivered to the President from the White was unwarranted, because State wouldn’t allow the Defense Department or someone like the CIA chief to convey a policy message concerning elections, etc. Maybe during the Bush years this would’ve been possible, but now now. But then again personally it seems conceivable that the Americans did as they say they did -send Defense Sec. Gates and Panetta of the CIA to focus on counterterrorism matters, which may or may not have included negotiating what columnist Jarius Bondoc said might’ve been the Obama agenda: asking the President to take in some prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.

Yesterday, I asked former Senator Kit Tatad how one should go about analyzing the Arroyo-Obama meeting. He said, look at her bodylanguage right after the meeting concludes, before she’s had time spin things. Unfortunately, the only impression I got was of the President being jetlagged. But then that’s been reported, anyway. If there’s anything to parse about the Oval Office meeting, it was that the American president emphasized the importance of the Philippines, reiterating its current ranking in the scheme of things, with a sop to the country’s amor propio by the essentially meaningless designation of the Philippines as “coordinator” of his upcoming Asean tour. That merely reinforces the traditional Asean view of the Philippines’ place in America’s scheme of things as the most reliable cheerleader of Washington.

There was a marked contrast between the Oval Office cultivation of the President as America’s fair-haired girl during the Bush years; Obama was far more reserved, though preserving every requirement of extending official courtesy to the President. So we shall have to see what the behavior of the President’s people will be like, when she returns, to see whether the President left the White House with a feeling of relief, exultation, or mounting dread.

The Long View: Shadow boxing

The Long View
Shadow boxing
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:36:00 07/30/2009

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo saved the genuinely popular for last—Manny Pacquiao, the ultimate human prop in her State of the Nation Address—not only out of a genuine, shared affection and admiration for the Pinoy pug, but because she wanted everyone to identify our country’s prize Lightweight-Featherweight-Superfeatherweight-Superbantamweight-Flyweight-Lightwelterweight-Champion with herself. Thus making her (in her own mind, at least) the No. 1 pound-for-pound chief executive of the country just as “Pacman” is the No. 1 pound-for-pound boxer in the world.

To take the boxing analogy to its logical conclusion, perhaps we should ask ourselves what boxing champs could have taught the President by way of announcing their retirement from boxing. More often than not, they announce the next one will be their last bout, or they simply say, it’s time to go, goodbye, thank you, I love you, fans.

Such a statement was what people were expecting from the President when she addressed the nation and Congress.

It is remarkable that instead, she basically declared she was going to treat her potential successors as challengers. But none of them is going head-to-head with her, and so the belt she wants to hold on to until the very last second of the very last minute of the very last hour of the very last day of her presidency isn’t hers to defend anymore, is it? Not least because she supposedly stopped being the defending champion once she claimed the title of president in 2004.

Well, fine, she also says people repeatedly tried to mug her, but that her Fists of Determination saved the day, in and out of the ring. But that’s the point, even if you accept her take on events: the title belt could’ve been taken away from her, sure; but never by means of a title fight, because under current rules our presidential slugfest is fought only once every six years, and every title holder gets to keep it for strictly six years—unless the referees take it away for things like, say, fixing the fight in the first place. But then she gave all the referees black eyes.

So even if the President, in her own mind, is a prizefighter, then last Monday’s performance was a case of prancing around the ring, engaging in shadow boxing. She says she intends to keep on swinging until the bell rings marking the end of her fighting career in 2010. Against whom? And for what? Either she’s punch drunk or she isn’t going to retire and is in training to win another title belt in another weight class.

Now before I end up like Ronnie Nathanielsz—publicly criticized by the Pacman for being uninformed—I will leave the boxing analogy and focus on the President and the adoring fans packed into the Bastusang Pambansa last Monday. It was supposed to be the Big Goodbye, the Fond Farewell, the Swan Song; instead, it became a despedida where the guest of honor lingers by the door, refusing to leave, trapping all the guests at the banquet hall—even if half of them already have indigestion. You know everyone—from guests to waiters to janitors—are dying to go home and prepare for the next party, but the big shot won’t leave. Instead, the big shot proposes that everyone go to an after-party or, worse, that the waiters and everyone stay on and keep the buffet tables filled because everyone’s going to continue partying. But then again the guest of honor knows never again will everyone who is anyone be under one roof—so it’s best to make the most of it.

The practical question confronting the ruling coalition is precisely this: It took so long, and required so much effort, to build it up that it seems a pity to watch it disappear, as it must inevitably disappear, once the current boss bows out and another takes her place. The ruling coalition has to start disintegrating come Nov. 30, when presidential candidacies are formally announced, because its members may be fat and happy under the President but they have no intention of being lean and hungry under the next dispensation.

The President, instead of announcing she will take the lead in grooming a successor who can lead her partymates to victory, not only mocked her potential replacements, but basically said everyone in her coalition will have to continue courting her favor because she fully intends to be the boss. This means the next three months, when her coalition should be concerned with figuring out who will be its standard bearer, will be spent leaping out of the trenches in charge after charge in pursuit of Charter change.

No wonder some of the President’s own allies have leaked that the Frankenstein coalition is “leaving the door ajar” for a possible Villar-de Castro, Escudero-de Castro, or Villar or Escudero with Teodoro as veep tandem.

This seems more of speculation in aid of implanting the kiss of death on the current coalition outsiders, rather than a reflection of desperation because the coalition lacks “winnable” presidential and vice-presidential candidates. It simply wants to take everyone down a peg out of spite, with Pampanga Rep. Mikey Arroyo as the spite-mongerer in chief, with his assertions that Villar and Escudero have had back-channel negotiations with his mother to get her support.

Much as they float on a cloud of sycophancy while in power, presidents are ultimately disposable, because there’s only room for one at a time while every president needs a coalition to either to get into power or sustain them once there. The President likes multiple scenarios, but all require the incumbent to foster a political Stockholm Syndrome where her Frankenstein, instead of seeking freedom, falls head over heels with its creator and views her bowing out of office as death for both.

And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s Teodoro as the son of Frankenstein to take care of the Bride of Frankenstein.

The 2009 State of the Nation Address in three brief sentences

1. Don’t count me out.

2. Cha-Cha is a go.

3. we will mobilize vs.certain presidential candidates.

And also, after oh, say half a century of being out of common usage, the word “pussyfoot” is now back in circulation.

The Long View: Sic transit Gloria

The Long View
Sic transit Gloria
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:10:00 07/27/2009

Today is supposed to be marked by the President’s swan song: her final report to Congress and country about her stewardship. It should be about looking back—to an administration that is, right now, at eight years and six months, already the third-longest in duration in our history, and the longest, if you accept her legitimacy, in purely constitutional terms. This requires some explanation.

President Marcos, who held office 20 years, 1 month, and 26 days, did so for exactly eight years as a constitutional president; after Dec. 30, 1973 he continued to hold office by means of the self-coup (martial law) he undertook on Sept. 23, 1972. President Quezon, who held office for 8 years, 8 months and 17 days, was constitutionally president also for eight years, until Nov. 15, 1943, when his term was extended by fiat of the Congress of the United States. In both cases, both presidents exceeded the eight-year limit imposed by the 1935 Constitution by means of arguments that the Constitution had become inoperative or defunct.

No one expects anyone else to ever match Marcos’ stay in power; even if the President becomes the one who will take our country “to First World status by 2020” (itself a slogan that betrays the ruling coalition’s ambitions) or 11 years from now, this would make her stay in office 19 years, 5 months and 10 days—which still allows her to retire without the dubious distinction, among the many others she’s already reaped, of outlasting the Dictator’s hold on power.

As it is, on Oct. 7, 2009, she will undoubtedly become the President with the second longest stay in office; and if she’s already the President with the longest constitutionally ordained stay in office, it also makes her the President with the biggest number of State of the Nation Addresses under her belt as a constitutional president. This again requires some explanation.

President Quezon delivered the first State of the Nation Address on June 16, 1936, even though the National Assembly sworn into office on Nov. 15, 1935 was called into special session 10 days later; the special session was devoted to the passage of three crucial pieces of legislation: Commonwealth Acts No. 1 (the National Defense Act), No. 2 (creating the National Economic Council, today’s NEDA), and No. 3 (establishing the Court of Appeals); but as the National Assembly hadn’t even yet fixed the dates of its session as provided for under the 1935 Constitution, there was no formal beginning of the regular legislative session.

And so it wasn’t until mid-1936 that the constitutional requirement for the President to inform the Assembly of the state of the nation could be complied with; and even then, the dates of the State of the Nation Address varied: on Oct. 18, 1937 and Jan. 24, 1938, for example. Quezon delivered five State of the Nation Addresses; the one that should have been delivered with the shift of the start of all terms of office to Dec. 30, 1941, which meant the new session of the restored bicameral Congress would have been in January 1942, never took place because of World War II.

After the war, State of the Nation Addresses always took place in January. President Marcos, during his constitutionally kosher two terms, delivered six State of the Nation Addresses, including the 1970 one that kicked off the First Quarter Storm and the much less eventful 1971 address; he would have delivered one in January 1973, but maneuvered the abolition of Congress before then, to forestall any legislative challenge to martial law. When he finally got around to reestablishing the legislature, this time as the Batasang Pambansa, he delivered eight more (1978-1985), but they are of a dictatorial piece.

In contrast, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has remained in power under the same Constitution and the official assertion of normal government eight times and, today, for the ninth and final time; a formidable body of work, if the nine State of the Nation Addresses are considered as comprising a whole.

Colleague John Nery however points out the President’s addresses aren’t of one seamless piece; her first two were “still part of the national narrative” of Edsa II, celebrating People Power and the clamor for deepening democracy and reform. Nery says by her third address, she’d embarked on a war footing; her victory address, in 2004, was supposed to unveil her 10-point agenda for governing but was hijacked by the kidnapping of Angelo dela Cruz.

Since 2005, her essentially ad hoc approach to the State of the Nation Address has been reflected in the addresses being primarily campaign speeches—whether to encourage efforts to amend the Constitution, or to keep supporters bedazzled by prospects of public works.

Throughout, the President has always emphasized, whatever rhetorical gimmicks she resorts to in any given year, that the country should abide her because she has kept the economy on an even keel. She has also minced no words in pointing out she fully intends to serve out her full term. This is the carrot and the stick; all else is tactical—to keep her critics divided, and her coalition fat and happy.

Though some might ask, particularly as the President is poised to conclude her current six-year term, that the term was first proposed in 1935 and restored in 1987 on the assumption that a chief executive with a fairly long term, but disqualified from re-election, would concentrate on governing rationally and with genuine statesmanship.

And this is where the “vision thing,” which she really attempted only once (with the idea of a Strong Republic) and its subsequent, conspicuous absence once the President, who obviously lacked the temperament and the capacity to communicate grand ideas, abandoned even pretending to be capable of being motivated by a vision, comes in.

It is what could have given her stay in office cohesion, and ultimately, relevance, as the country prepares to achieve one of its dearest wishes—to see her go. Instead, her legacy is of survival, yes; but beyond the public works, little else of enduring value.

Among Ed falls for it

And so it came to pass: SC approves recount for Pampanga governorship. Whether or not the high court’s decision to reverse it’s earlier status  quo ante order reflects the dynamics of the new majority, the reality on the ground is that Panlilio’s administration will now be even more bogged down in the recount case, which leaves his many provincial enemies free to plot his downfall.

But then as today’s headline puts it, Gov.-priest ready to leave Church: Group backing Panlilio for president launched Sat. For some time now I’ve been skeptical of plans for Panlilio to run for the presidency. This is utter folly and reflects poor political judgment. In my July 11 Free Press commentary, A perfect plan, I argued that Governor Panlilio, who announced he was prepared to challenge her, in reaction to rumors the President was contemplating a run for the House in 2010, was falling into a trap. If the President ran for the House, it would displace her son; he would have to seek another post; that post, it seems, would be the governorship; but if Panlilio challenged the President by contesting her run for the House, not only would Panlilio lose to her, but he’d also relinquish the governorship to -who else- the President\’s son, who would run as the unifying candidate for the Pineda-Lapid factions in the province.

A win-win for the Macapagal-Arroyo-Pineda-Lapid coalition, whichever way you put it.

As Mon Casiple recently put it,

The 2007 elections have brought us some surprises. The victory of Among Ed Panlilio in Pampanga, the reelection of Grace Padaca in Isabela, and the election to the Senate of military rebel Antonio Trillanes are often cited as harbinger of a new trend of reform voters (translate that to anti-trapo voters).

There are indications that this trend will be a factor in the 2010 presidential elections. I don’t think however that this has grown to a point where it can be decisive in electing a presidential candidate. The reason is that it is still on a spontaneous, nebulous awareness stage and not yet reflected as a purposeful, organized movement.

The appearance of new faces based on this, while providing fresh alternatives to jaded voters, will–on the short run–confuse, divide, and ultimately dissipate the impact of this reform factor. There simply are too many candidates, with too few votes, to win. It will also matter that the major presidential candidates will exert their own efforts to woo reform voters.

It is an irony that Prof. David’s tack to run for a congressional seat–even if portrayed as a Don Quixote initiative–may have more chances of winning (sans electoral fraud and violence). Independent reform candidacies at the presidential level simply does not have the critical mass to win by themselves at this time.

It seems more politically prudent -and politically inconvenient, for the President and her people- for reform candidates to consolidate their gains in the local level, for now. This is particularly important because reformists have to concentrate on supporting a viable senate slate in 2010, for there is a great danger in the administration coalition recapturing the senate. At the same time, the enclaves of reform that already exist, have to be preserved, lest they fall back into the hands of the usual suspects.

As the President’s inability to dislodge Jesse Robredo and Jejomar Binay proved, there are also limits to the national government\’s -and the President’s, in particular- power to frontally attack enemies. If the reformist local executives all suddenly succumbed to the temptation to go national -before a constituency was prepared, because capable of being mobilized, to support them- it would mean the elimination of those reformist politicians from the political landscape just at the point they\’d be most needed, for example, if the President were to herself surrender to the temptation to cut the Constitutional gordian knot by proclaiming a revolutionary government.

Faced with what seem to be -for now- insurmountable obstacles legally and in terms of timing, to shift the form of government to a unicameral parliamentary system by 2010, in recent weeks the drum-beating for Charter Change has given way to calls for the President to explore the possibilities of a revolutionary government -an autogolpe, in other words, reviving a scheme high in everybody’s minds in 2006.

On July 16, Alex Magno pushed forward the idea that there is a gordian knot, that only extreme measures can cut it, and by implication that the President’s destiny is to be a new Alexander; Carmen Pedrosa argues that Washington might be poised to accept such a move, instead of, say, supporting efforts to oust the President if goes for broke before the end of her term:

Therefore, those who hope that the same would happen to President GMA if she pursued Charter change are off the mark.

To a certain extent, though we’re on opposite sides, I agree with her. The reason is not that I think the unicameral, parliamentary system beloved by Pedrosa and Co. has either a genuine majority behind it (I do not think it does: see Parliamentary democracy in the Philippines would be a very bad idea for arguments), or that it would be better for the country (it would be better only for the current ruling coalition and it’s backers, period), but that at it’s heart, it has an idea that remains dangerously seductive: and that idea is, a New Society.

As for the seductiveness -and enduring qualities- of that idea, please see my column from December 26, 2007, Assessing Adrian. The seductiveness of the idea can also be gleaned from the willingness of those who might otherwise be expected to be irreconcilably at odds with each other, to not just talk, but possible achieve a meeting of the minds. See Politics in agenda of CJ Puno and Bert Gonzales in Newsbreak:

Gonzales and Puno seem to agree on some things. For one, the national security adviser believes in the chief justice’s warning that the country’s “social volcano” is about to erupt. “It is good that no less than the country’s chief justice sounded off the warning about our critical national situation,” Gonzales was quoted in reports.

He continued: “The call of the times for the three major branches of government, supported by key pillars of our society like the churches, civil society and mass movements, to agree to a transitional government respected by the armed forces.”

It seems to me, that if Fr. Intengan, Newbsreak’s source, isn’t lying, then there has to be a reason the Chief Justice would be OK with being mentioned as being willing to play footsie with the National Security Adviser. After all, even within opposition circles, the Chief Justice has been informally mentioned as having an open mind to the idea of a revolutionary government; something I used to think was more a case of wishful thinking and probably a case of misunderstanding the Chief Justice, on the part of oppositionists claiming to be in the know. Now, I’m not so sure. It may be that what the Chief Justice thinks is that the opposition cannot gain power, in which case, the cycle could possibly be broken by the President, in what could be portrayed as an act of supreme political will -and political redemption.

The reason the Chief Justice might think this way is because he is, after all, a man of faith, and so his default position is to consider anyone capable of a Road to Damascus Moment; but also, because he, like Gonzales, Intengan, the generals in the cabinet, and so forth, were all molded, in one way or another, by martial law: and the combined assumption that a New Society was, indeed, called for in 1972, but the only thing that went wrong was that Marcos didn’t fully internalize his own propaganda. They, on the other hand, remain true believers.

As Patricia Evangelista put forward on January 25 in In the court of the crimson king:

He is the man who represented the Marcos government in the martial law years with Marcos’ solicitor general Estelito Mendoza, his mentor. He is the man who defended the 1973 constitution that extended the term of Ferdinand Marcos. He acted as both solicitor general and minister of justice in Mendoza’s stead at a time when many were lost and killed in the same fashion that those he stands for now were lost and killed.

So the lesson here is for those, like Magno, who formerly belonged to the Left; for those, like Pedrosa, formerly anti-Marcos but frustrated by the failure of Charter Change under Ramos and Arroyo; for the Chief Justice, who earned his legal spurs defending the New Society; for the military men in the Cabinet who helped enforce martial law and were the beneficiaries of that system: the time has come, to revisit Marcos, because they can out-Marcos the Great Dictator.

And this applies not just to those who lived through the New Society, but those who came after. The value of a trial balloon is that it not only gauges opposition to the idea, but also, helps sound out if a constituency exists in support of the idea. This is particularly true for official trial balloons, made by allies (who can be dismissed as speaking without authorization), but which enables a government, with far better means to weigh public opinion, to see who is for or against their idea.

Which brings me back to a point I’ve been making for some years now -let’s not underestimate the President’s constituency. Leandro Lojo’s commentary, A dangerous alliance, from March 1, 2008 provides a good summary of those who comprise a constituency for the President:

These people never outgrew the martial law era. They believe that the only way to express patriotism and love for country is by screaming their lungs out in the streets while holding a placard with a defaced picture of the President. These misguided idealists have arrogance running through their veins as they believe that they have a monopoly on righteousness. Whatever they do, they do because it is in the best interest of the nation. Well, since when did spray-painting a U-turn sign on Commonwealth Avenue with bold black letters that read “OUST GMA” [“OUST GLORIA MACAPAGAL-ARROYO] become part of promoting the nation’s interest?

They have so much hate against the government that they have become allergic to rules. Their ideas push them to believe that the government and the people running it are perpetually bound to oppress the poor and enrich themselves. They make this eternal call for change, yet they don’t change—or better yet, they don’t want to change. These people waste resources, time and energy by burning effigy after effigy. They believe that only through noise, disorder, turbulence and confusion can a new society be born—descending slowly and graciously from the heavens, like the New Jerusalem, with angels singing in the background. Yes, that’s how blind they are.

In their minds, they are catalysts of change. In reality, they are plain and simple anarchists. They should start looking for jobs and become more productive.

On the other side of this alliance are the politically motivated personalities, hypocrites to the bone. They are using scandals and controversies to become more popular, and their end-goal is to get the highest political position possible. And they have been quite successful. Last year, we saw young congressmen rise to the Senate based, not on merit and achievements, but on controversies they had destructively stirred.

They are populists because it’s the only way they can climb the political ladder. They can’t enact strategic legislation, which will provide long-term benefits, such as developing the transportation system, increasing exports, improving revenue collection and assisting businesses, because all these entail short-term sacrifices, which might cost them their positions—a risk they are unwilling to take.

All they do is complain, and they complain with a fiery passion to make the people believe in the fantasies they are selling. They are polemicists, criticizing without presenting solutions and alternatives. They speak only words that are pleasing to the ears of the masses. When they face political dilemmas, their decisions are based on what would profit them politically, not what is right and just. They are slick talkers, and if you’re not careful enough, they can easily deceive you.

This is a dangerous alliance, as it seeks to plunge society into chaos. They want our society to lose any semblance of stability so that they can create a new order. But even they themselves have no idea how it will function.

But I am not afraid. They cannot achieve anything unless we let ourselves be used by these political clowns for their own blind and selfish goals. They can make as much noise as they want, but they need many more warm bodies to join their ranks before they succeed in destabilizing our society. I have already counted the many curious, naïve, gullible, ignorant and politically immature countrymen who are neither misguided idealists nor hypocrites but will take part in this political adventure, and they still won’t make it.

I can hear the noise, but I still can’t feel the heat. After each and every protest rally, the crowds would fizzle out, the streets would be left empty and dirty, and the leaders of the carnival would be eating a fancy dinner while most of the gullible people they drew into the activity would be walking home. Every demonstration sends a clear and strong message to the whole world that while countries across the globe are taking measures to strengthen their exports, develop their industries, attract new investors and ensure their competitiveness in a fast changing, globalized world, we are busy playing on the streets of our financial district.

In the manifesto above is every single one of the government’s talking points; and it is a latter-day retelling of every argument used by those who supported the New Society to justify martial law in 1972.

To be sure, people change; but that is why things never happen exactly the same way, twice; but the political thinking of people tends to be set quite early on; and for all of the above, the formative years for them, was martial law. And I\’m willing to bet that if you sounded them out, privately, to a man -and woman- they’d say: the New Society was the right solution, and one that ought to be really tried, because Marcos failed to do it properly.

So, for now, this is the trial balloon du jour: it is one, mind you, not being shot down as actively as one might have assumed. And I think this is giving those who have hit off on a revolutionary government being the tidiest solution a pretty good feeling indeed.

The Long View: Worth dying for?

The Long View
Worth dying for?
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:27:00 07/15/2009

4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.

6. Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.

8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called “divine manipulation of the threads.” It is the sovereign’s most precious faculty.

—Sun Tzu

SENATOR Francis Escudero once marveled at how the Palace swiftly co-opted every opposition effort to secure signatures for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s impeachment. Within an hour of any conversation with any congressman inclined to support impeachment, the Palace would be on the phone to negotiate a reversal of that representative’s pledge to support impeachment, whether explicitly or conditionally. Escudero says more often than not, the sheepish—and apparently, sheep-like—representative would call him back and announce a change in stand.

The sword is a double-edged weapon. Once the sword-wielder survives the cuts that come from initially clumsily handling the weapon, he will eventually become an expert swordsman. Intelligence—and the faulty handling of it—was a double-edged weapon for the President, but she and her people have refined their skills and continuously improved their use of it. And surely it has enabled the President and her people to take the measure of friends, foes and the public.

Sun Tzu advised, “If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.” There, in a neat maxim, is one of the strategies of survival all these long years since 2001 or even 2005.

Whether it’s true or not that a Cabinet-level official met with the Iglesia ni Cristo and the Jesuits to “push the idea of a revolutionary government” to be headed by the President, it’s well worth noting that the national security adviser (who has Cabinet rank) publicly floated the idea back in June. Norberto Gonzales suggested that the President head a troika composed of both Houses of Congress, the judiciary, and the Church—adding he’d contacted leaders of the Catholic and various Protestant churches.

History never repeats itself exactly. Even if one detects a Marcosian provenance in Gonzales’ scheme, it’s with a modern-day twist. In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos threatened the Supreme Court with the possibility of declaring a revolutionary government, which would leave justices without jobs. He padlocked Congress while promising constitutional convention delegates (provided they voted for his draft of the constitution) and congressmen seats in a new national assembly provided they supported the New Society. Wave a stick, but dangle a carrot.

The Gonzales scheme impales the carrot on the stick. Jobs for the boys, instantly! Everyone will be happy because they will all have a seat in the revolutionary government.

Conveniently, Gonzales wasn’t charged with sedition or conspiracy to bring down the government. That’s not a surprise, is it?

What is surprising is the Pollyanna-like attitude displayed by too many that the President either wouldn’t dare, or that even if she did, the public wouldn’t stand for it. Honduras has contributed to this rosy-tinted view of things. The real lesson, it seems, is that Honduras’ ousted president came to power at the head of a particular, Center-Right coalition, but strayed away from it, and his straying away, together with his clumsy attempts to perpetuate himself in office, alienated both public opinion and his original political allies, so they threw him out.

The global outcry hasn’t put Manuel Zelaya back in office—or kept him in office, as the Americans admitted when, on the day of the coup, the State Department said it had warned the military against overthrowing their president but had been ignored.

President Arroyo, on the other hand, has consolidated her political supporters into a super-party that has sidelined the party veterans who had formerly wielded enough residual political prestige and power to (somewhat) limit her options. She has maintained the loyalty and support of a quarter of the population—a chunk that few of her rivals can muster on their own. This reservoir of loyalists has been repeatedly ignored and underestimated by her foes.

She has consolidated her grip on power by cultivating the police, purging the Armed Forces, cowing the bureaucracy, fattening or frightening big business as the case may be, plying the clergy with love offerings, enticing strategic segments of the media, plying the masses with basic services, and all the while keeping track of who is against her, and what they have at their disposal to resist her, while quietly reducing her critics’ ranks.

So if she were to impose emergency rule, or martial law, who is to say it wouldn’t merely be another step toward a revolutionary government, which in retrospect, might have been the more politically rewarding course to pursue in 2001? More importantly, who, or what, could stop her if she did? It is not whether anyone would die to defend her, but rather who would die to oppose her? And those who are willing to die—would the public hail them as martyrs, or consider them either as fools or vermin?

Then again in a revolutionary situation, who would even report the death toll? We would only hear the “silent majority” hailing the President’s “political will.” As Queen Amidala put it, “So this is how liberty dies—with thunderous applause.”

The Bolivarian Temptation: An illiberal democracy?

America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea. —Simon Bolivar

In The General in his Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has the exhausted Liberator sighing, “…I’ve become lost in a dream, searching for something that doesn’t exist.” For Filipinos of a certain age the more relevant novel may have been his The Autumn of the Patriarch. ( Incidentally, The (Former) General in his Labyrinth by Mohsin Hamid is an interesting experiment in interactive storytelling.) That novel was in keeping with the corrupt and corrosive times of the dictator’s fall; but perhaps more relevant today, where reformists are bedeviled by the Sisyphus-like problems of the nation, is the story of embittered exhaustion in Marquez’s Bolivar Novel.

Last Sunday, in its editorial, Democratic Haste, the Inquirer pointed out that neither side in the Honduras coup comes out lily-white; but that the onus may lie heaviest on the politicians who had public opinion on their side up to the moment of the coup, but who, in proclaiming they acted to preserve democracy, set back the democratic process.

In our own minds, at least for those of a certain age, the era of martial law hangs heavy still; hence the habit of looking at current events through the prism of events in the 1970s. The visit of the CIA Chief has been invested with, perhaps, greater political significance than it deserves. Manila Bay Watch for one, thinks it is suggestive of the weakness of the President, or, to be precise, her pining for signs of American interests, period.

But this can’t stop observers here at home from trying to find possible precedents in the goings-on in Honduras. And they are, after all, striking.

The Economist reported the situation and the fallout as follows:

The toppling of Mr Zelaya took the region by surprise. Honduras, although small, poor and ravaged by corruption and violent gangs, has seemed a more solid democracy than, for example, neighbouring Guatemala. Mr Zelaya, a Liberal, alienated the leaders of the country’s main political parties last year by joining the leftist Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, an alliance led by Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chávez. Yet Mr Zelaya’s policies have been only mildly social-democratic, such as an increase in the minimum wage.

The cause of Mr Zelaya’s downfall was his attempt to emulate Mr Chávez by organising a referendum to call a constituent assembly. He seemed to hope that this would enable him to remain in power, perhaps by changing the constitution to allow him to stand for a second term in an election due in November. This embroiled Mr Zelaya in a conflict of powers. The Congress and the courts both rejected the referendum.

But Mr Zelaya would not be stopped. He issued a decree for a consultative poll on Sunday, asking Hondurans whether they wanted presidential-election ballots in November to include a question about holding a constituent assembly. And he ordered the army to distribute ballot papers (which by one account came from Venezuela).

When the head of the armed forces, Romeo Vásquez Velázquez, refused to carry out the directive, the president sacked him. The Supreme Court reinstated the general, and an independent electoral tribunal ordered the ballots to be confiscated. In response, Mr Zelaya himself led a group of supporters to an airforce base where they carted off the ballots.

But hours before voting was set to begin, the army seized the president—“arresting” him for defying the Supreme Court, they said. The president of the legislature was quickly installed as Mr Zelaya’s successor. Though several hundred supporters of Mr Zelaya protested in the streets, Tegucigalpa was mainly quiet, as the army imposed a curfew. There were no reports of casualties.

The story is unlikely to end there. The coup was swiftly condemned, not just by Mr Chávez, whose ambassador (along with those of Cuba and Nicaragua) was briefly roughed up by troops, but also by the United States, European Union and Organisation of American States. Barack Obama called on Honduras “to respect democratic norms”, and the administration said it would not recognise the new government. “It brings back nightmares of a period we thought was over in this region, one full of blood and abuses of power,” says José Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch, a campaign group.

Mr Zelaya was unpopular, thanks to Honduras’s economic troubles, violent crime and corruption. But the new government will find itself friendless.

How does Honduras enter the domestic picture, then? It is relevant in the questions the Honduran experience raises in terms of political questions that have arisen in recent years.

1. How is democracy to be defended? At the point of attack, or when the forces are gathering to attack it?

2. By what means is it to be defended: within the flawed institutions that exist, or by applying pressure from outside?

The residual strength of institutions capable of resisting the administration’s attempt to dominate things, is running out. The Senate, for example, could end up with an administration majority in the 2010 elections. The Chief Justice retires in 2010, too. These two institutions, then, would be hard-pressed if, by some major feat, the President gains a new political lease on life as the undisputed leader of the administration coalition even under a new president.

But even before that, there is the possibility of other forms of presidential mischief. Basically, these all revolve around the administration being able to either create, or take advantage of, terrorism to provide a pretext for emergency rule, or the elections ending up a failure because regardless of whether or not the planned computerization is flawed, or actively being subverted, the public cannot or will not fight such efforts tooth and nail and make the elections credible regardless of the Palace’s intentions.

All these suggest a kind of public exhaustion which only fortifies a kind of child-like faith in Washington solving the country’s problems. And so, much has been made of Leon Panetta’s visit to the President. But in the absence of more tangible signs of American intentions, we can glean what the Obama administration might do, from the way it handled Honduras.

The United States condemned the ouster of the Honduran chief executive; The Toronto Sun reports United States officials pushing the line that they’d tried to dissuade the Honduran military from acting (immediately, mind you: this report is from June 28, the day of the coup):

The officials said that the Obama administration in recent days had warned Honduran power players, including the armed forces, that the U.S. would not support a coup, but Honduran military leaders stopped taking their calls.

The officials briefed reporters by phone Sunday on condition of anonymity, under ground rules set by the State Department.

So dissuasion seems to be the name of the game: but action only when the chips are down and always calculated in a manner that harmonizes with global opinion.

Joel Hilliker frames the goings-on in this manner:

South America, to take another example, is rife with anti-democratic democracies. Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, supposedly democracies, have all been rigged by autocrats. Colombia’s president is trying to strike term limits from the constitution in order to maintain his grip on power.

Honduras was treading the same dark path. Manuel Zelaya, a close ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, was elected president—but he has since grown fond of classic big-man tactics. He disagrees with the Honduran constitution, which says his current term should be his last. He sought to shred it and try to repeal term limits through a popular referendum—following a greasy pattern established by Chávez (and copied by Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales). His thugs strong-armed and threatened citizens into supporting it. The whole process, besides being reprehensible, was against the law, which says the constitution can only be amended by Congress. The Honduran Supreme Court appropriately ordered the illegal referendum canceled. Zelaya, ignoring both the court and the constitution, continued to prepare for the sham vote. The military expressed its opposition to his lawlessness by refusing to distribute the ballots. Zelaya responded by firing the chief of the army.

These are not the actions of a democracy-lover. They’re straight from the despot’s playbook. The Hondurans know it, which is why Zelaya’s approval ratings are in the basement.

The Supreme Court felt justified in removing the budding dictator from office. It ordered the military to detain him. Soldiers captured Zelaya early Sunday morning and exiled him to Costa Rica. Later that day, Honduras’s Congress formally stripped him of office “for repeated violations to the constitution” and installed congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as interim president until November elections. It’s not your typical military “coup” when the military bows to the legislature, which installs the president’s constitutionally mandated successor, who vows to proceed with free and fair elections in five months as already scheduled.

Yes, Zelaya had managed to spook virtually the entire government—judiciary, military and legislature—with his slide toward tyranny. They united to reestablish the integrity of the constitution and the rule of law.

A kind of Bolivarian Axis? In Green Left, there’s this counter-assertion:

The great fear, from the point of view of imperialism and of the oligarchic ruling classes in Latin America, is that Zelaya will become embedded and tied to the mass movement and its class interests, unleashing a “Bolivarian” upsurge from which they will never recover.

That is the source of their demonisation campaign against Chavez, Morales, Ortega and Cuba.

But the US and Latin American ruling classes’ great fear can only be our great aspiration — to unite the mass resistance in Honduras and across the region into an unbeatable force, and to use the attack on the Honduran people’s elected government by the military “gorillas” to score major advances towards popular, democratic rule in Honduras.

To move beyond formal, restrictive "representational" democracy (where we get to vote every five years or so about how long the slave drivers’ whips should be) to participatory democracy that takes us out of servitude and towards real self-government and self-determination.

The Obama government does seem more inclined to take the soft approach and not the hard line one of its predecessor; the cynical would call it subverting Socialism by undermining it by means of reopening ties so as to foster commerce, for where there’s commerce, there Socialism begins to transform. A more Socialist but moderately so, Latin America, after all, would be no more obnoxious than the welfare state democracies of Europe.

But this leaves the remaining Cold Warriors -and in this, the current Republicans are proving less pragmatic than say, their idol Ronald Reagan- unimpressed; while Obama swiftly -and succesfully- left Hugo Chavez blustering about the USA, only for the Americans to embrace his cause, leaving him muttering impotently about invading Honduras -something liable to be as unpopular as the Honduran coup itself- thereby un-demonizing the Americans, there remains the problem that the Latin American Right remains the traditional allies of the Americans; and with that Right comes the instinct to solve democracy’s problems with the sword.

This is a problem related to the second point above: how is democracy to be defended? By a pre-emptive strike, as in Honduras this year and what was essentially proposed here, at home in 2006, by soldiers who wanted to march out of their barracks to bring down an increasingly despotic government?

But that sort of pre-emptive strike is undemocratic itself; and public opinion in Honduras and the Philippines immediately recognized -and rejected- this kind of argument.

The famous photograph of Augusto Pinochet -a man, said Posthegemony, who "produces effects rather than arguments" and whose "ideological deficit" produced the candor that marked a man who didn’t even bother to argue his own innocence, a case of "the general has no clothes, but he is happy to parade naked."

As he himself put it, in in an interview,

The former dictator… confided in an interview with the former Santiago mayor and journalist Maria Eugenia Oyarzun that he obscured his eyes on purpose in a famous photograph taken just after his 1973 coup against president Salvador Allende. Pressed to explain the menacing image, with its folded arms and chin jutting out under black lenses, General Pinochet said: "It was a way of telling things. Lies are discovered through the eyes, and I lied often."

A Nietzschean strongman -"pure will without the confusion of intellect -how happy, how free!"? The question is relevant in that there’s the debate on whether Filipinos are, by nature, conservative, and thus, inclined to the Right; and it ties into the Right-wing appeal to authority, institutions, mobilized by the government in recent years. That it can mobilize, for example, the threat of Communism -and count on indifference, in certain sectors, to the liquidation of the Left- points to a reservoir of public opinion that genuinely exists, much to the frustration and alarm of the Left. The preservation of public order, the conspicuous displays of presidential piety, all these play to the conservative gallery. The kind that happily applauds those who reach for a revolver the moment an argument breaks out.

A "juridical democracy," and not a substantive one -but substantive for whom?

While some have argued -recall my linking, in the past, to Rethinking Pinochet (and Franco) in Scriptorium- that authoritarian dictatorships such as those of Franco and Pinochet gave way to democracy, totalitarian government never did -they had to fall, and fall hard, for democracy to be restored. Marcos was authoritarian in that he -unwittingly, to be sure- allowed the public to "restore democracy by the ways of democracy," as Cory Aquino famously put it. As Scriptorium dares to argue,

To begin with, we must understand that the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is not fundamentally that the former is Rightist and the latter Leftist, as Kirkpatrick herself seemed to think (Nazism is as totalitarian as, and in fact copied from Leninism; and Titoism is as authoritarian as Somoza), though it is relevant as we will see later. Nor is it necessarily the degree of coercion imposed; for as Walter Miller asks in A Canticle for Leibowitz, when murder is answered with murder, does it matter whose axe is bloodier? Rather, I think, the difference lies in the motive for and scope of the coercion, whether it’s for a “conservative” or a “progressive” purpose. Thus:

A government that seeks to effect radical change, either forward to a progressive utopia (e.g., Communism) or backward to a lost golden age (e.g., Nazism), will be driven to use comprehensive coercion against all sectors that oppose the change. Where the change is sought by a small, Bolshevik-type cadre, the process will entail a struggle between the pro-change minority and a majority composed of groups that either oppose the change per se or desire different changes. The minority must endeavor to force these social groups to toe the line, thereby creating a society that is more or less totally controlled by a single social faction. Hence totalitarianism.

On the other hand, a government that seeks to stop change, or to have limited or gradual change, will only need to use limited coercion. For unless most of society is united in desiring change justified by a widespread social myth (e.g., in 1789 France), the various social groups with their several objectives would easily reach equilibrium with a non- or limited-change government; for such a government, because it does not pursue an all-or-nothing agenda, can compromise with most sectors. So this government will generally let the sectors alone, reserving its ire for those with irreconcilable agendas who defy its authority to rules the whole. Hence authoritarianism.

It’s obvious, then, why the latter would more easily transition to democracy, whose very essence lies in the principle of subsidiarity, that individuals and groups should be allowed in reason to make their own choices. Subsidiarity would directly conflict with the radical-totalitarian program, for it would allow groups to opt out of the State-mandated change; and it’s inconsistent with the total social control demanded by radicalism. However, gradual-authoritarian governments would tend to preserve the relative autonomy of social groups if only by default; and it is these groups that tend to lead the fight for democratic structures.

The contrast then, is one of scale? Tens of thousands arrested, hundreds of desaperecidos, but never in total numbers equaling the concentration camps of those with ambitions of refashioning society as Lenin, Hitler, Mao attempted? For all these regimes functioned on the mobilization of state power to crush class enemies, not individuals or even specific movements, but broad categories of their own people. Returning to Scriptorium-

Thus, the reason a Rightist dictatorship more easily leads to democratization is that the preservation of social groups (families, faith-communities, etc.) is often a major part of the often vague conservative/moderate stance of Rightist autocrats. This vagueness is another reason, of course, for it means that Rightist autocrats usually have no definite program that they seek to impose on society, often settling for ad hoc solutions that seem vapid compared to the clearly drawn (but sometimes too abstract) blueprints of Leftists. This means that the Right often imposes more limited coercion than the Left with its systematic program, and is thence less totalitarian and more vulnerable to democratization.

I think part of the reason for the demonization of Rightist authoritarian leaders has been their apparent association with or similarity to the Nazi government. This is, however, a taxonomic mistake, for the Nazis were reactionary rather than conservative, and notwithstanding their frequent equation in polemical literature, reaction and conservatism are not the same: Reaction wants a radical change back in time (e.g., to the pure Aryan past), while conservatism wants preservation of present forms. Reaction, then, is closer to revolution and has the same transformative agenda; and indeed, both often use the same restoration and better-tomorrow motifs, as witness Marx’s nostalgia for primitive communism and Hitler’s drive to build a 10,000-year paradise under the Reich.

But that is only if the choice is down to one between authoritarianism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. We aren’t at that point.

What troubles me is that there may be too many pinning their hopes on omens and portents from Washington, because of defeatism. and here, I think, the past is useful in terms of examples from the more recent and more distant past.

In 1986, Marcos thoroughly controlled the Comelec, no one doubted there would be monkey business, and some actually believed even in a clean election there was a chance Marcos would win. But the cheating was not only exposed, but resisted on the ground; and in 2004, the cheating ended up exposed; in 2007 it was almost derailed in the ARMM. I don’t see why it couldn’t be actively forestalled in 2010. Public opinion is primed to reject any tinkering around with the Constitution before 2010; and even if it were to get to the point of a plebiscite, would be so heatedly contested as to present graver risks to the administration than if it simply tried to retain the cohesion of its coalition going into 2010, and beyond.

The Long View: The next proconsul

The Long View
The next proconsul
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:01:00 07/12/2009

There will, undoubtedly, be a lot of sniffing around for signs concerning Washington’s message to the President in the wake of CIA chief Leon Panetta’s Palace visit Sunday. Babe Romualdez, for one, is widely considered a kind of oracle concerning Washington’s intentions and he framed the issue by pooh-poohing the Palace’s statement that it was an ordinary meeting. To be sure, the Palace was forced to react to a scoop by The Daily Tribune which first broke the story of Panetta’s visit, subsequently fleshed out by the Philippine Star which prides itself on its being in-the-know as far as the US Embassy and Washington are concerned.

The Press Secretary waxed cryptic—“His visit is self-evidently related to the ongoing war on terror of which the bombings here may well be a part”—blathered Cerge Remonde, adding that it was upon the request of the Americans and what’s more, was scheduled a month ago. Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro on July 9 confessed himself out of the loop, saying he didn’t know the agenda, though reporters failed to ask why he seemed content with not knowing or preparing for such a high-level visit. But then Remonde was contradicted by the Department of Foreign Affair’s own spokesman, Ed Malaya, who did say it was purely a “courtesy call” but that “the visit is unrelated to certain developments in Mindanao.”

What developments? Romualdez firmly framed the meeting in terms of an unfelicitously phrased comment by Joseph Mussomeli—remember him? Formerly of the American Embassy in Manila and now detailed to Afghanistan, he said that Mindanao is a “Mecca” for terrorists and might just become the next Afghanistan: Romualdez emphasized that Mussomeli wouldn’t “dare say such a thing without a go-signal from the State Department.”

According to Romualdez, a month ago, when US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the country, the American commitment to Mindanao remained more in terms of development, the military component being limited to “intelligence sharing, training and coordination.” In that context, a Panetta visit coming on the heels of Gates’ would’ve indicated maintaining the status quo. Which is precisely what’s piqued interest in Panetta’s Sunday stopover: the bombings in Mindanao have changed the situation on the ground.
The charitable conclusion’s that the DFA reflects the state of things a month ago while the Press Secretary’s statements reflect the Palace’s desire to portray itself as a key front. Hence the rumor mill’s obsession with the possibility of the President sounding out the Americans for carte blanche in Mindanao.

But Romualdez also framed Panetta’s visit in terms of American official concern over the drug trade being connected to terrorist training. And in this regard, he drops some broad hints about big drug syndicates with connections to very powerful people. The whole narcopolitics angle has been brought up before, as a game-changer, together with gambling lord money, in local politics.

Romualdez estimated the drug industry as a billion-peso-a-day one: that’s P365 billion a year or $7.5 billion. Enough to warrant American attention? The American DEA in 2006 estimated the value of the Columbian drug trade at $1.5 billion a year; Time Magazine in 2008 mentioned a $25 billion-a-year trafficking industry in Mexico; and an American naval officer’s proposed 2005 thesis estimated the global drug trade at $300-500 billion, although the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) estimated the world illegal drug market to range between $45 billion and $280 billion.

The thing is, an administration that perpetually brags of its near-total dominance in the lower house, and governorships and mayorships, would necessarily end up saddled, by sheer force of probabilities, with more than its fair share of gambling and drug lord-funded allies. Surely an inconvenient thing to look into going into an election year.

Nicholas Kralev, in the July 10 Washington Times (a right-leaning Moonie-owned paper), reported a State Department rumpus caused by the Obama administration supposedly being poised to exceed the 30 percent informal quota on political appointees to ambassadorships. The report says Manila and Lima will go to political appointees rather than career diplomats—Harry K. Thomas Jr., until recently director-general of the Foreign Service, and Kristie Kenney’s putative successor, seems no longer headed here.

Much will hinge, for those obsessed with Washington and Roxas Boulevard-watching, to see if the State Department ends up announcing the posting of an otherwise meaningless political appointee, possibly with an eye toward commerce, or whether the next US ambassador will possess credentials within the national security establishment or is a known protégé of a national security bigwig. If the former, then Washington is less concerned about politics and more about preserving or expanding business here; if the latter, they think something’s afoot—or deserves, at least, someone capable of keeping a close eye—on Mindanao, Manila or both?

There used to be a saying in the 1960s that the three most important people in the Philippines were the US ambassador, the head of the Lopez family and the President of the Philippines—in that order. That perception endures somewhat, though since the closing of the US bases Manila, while undeniably a plum post for careerists, has long dwindled in importance in the strategic scheme of things.

As it is, the Panetta visit can’t be separated from John Negroponte’s unannounced December 2005 visit, when he nipped a planned declaration of martial law in the bud, on the eve of Virgilio Garcillano’s testifying in the House—when, quite possibly, the Palace expected all hell to break loose.

Philippines Free Press commentary: A perfect plan

Philippines Free Press, July 11, 2009

A perfect plan

By Manuel L. Quezon III

PERCEPTION, some say, trumps reality in politics. For that reason, when a politician told me a couple of weeks ago, that large billboards had begun to adorn the second district of Pampanga, bearing the photos of former President Diosdado Macapagal, his daughter President Macapagal-Arroyo, and her son, incumbent Rep. Mikey Arroyo, together with the acronym “PM: Pamlyang Maasahan,” I thought to myself it matters less if any such billboard even exists, and more that people say such billboards have been erected.

Onofre Corpuz, in his book “The Roots of the Filipino Nation,” observed that “[I]t is still a truism in modern-day Philippine politics that no President of the Republic gains anything by interfering in contests between provincial political ‘chieftains’. Nothing romantic in that; but then the legacies of great events are often found in the mundane and in the pragmatic considerations of leadership.” But other observers have pointed out that one of the great levers of power for presidents, is the ability to referee local contests; but it is a risky undertaking, only for the most daring chief executives.

Mrs. Arroyo has never been one to reflect –in public, anyway- on her philosophy of power, if she has one at all. All we have to gage her approach to the presidency -and power in general- is how she’s actually wielded that power. Her approach has been described as “transactional leadership,” and as far as that goes she isn’t particularly different from her predecessors in leaving local politics alone so long as local leaders toe the party line, which is to support her presidency. Inducements to toe the party line are offered in cash and kind, and again, this is not remarkable departure from past administrations, except, perhaps, in her attention to detail, which admirers and detractors alike concede can be breathtaking.

What is different, though again, not unprecedented, in that it harks back to the national divisions over the question of the continuation in power of President Marcos in 1972 and 1986, is how national politics and politicians have been pitted against local politics and politicians on the question of the survival of the present dispensation.

The President made good use of the argument that the rise and fall of administrations shouldn’t be decided by rallies in Manila, which is a flawed argument. In the first place, national capitals are a microcosm of the nation; and second of all, it usually only in the more liberal atmosphere of a national capital that the public can more often than not, fully express itself in opposition to the powers that be (try holding a rally under the noses of a provincial warlord!). Flawed as it was, the argument was a powerful one, and played up the President’s strength –she knew how to take care of the provincial leaders.

The limits of that strength, however, were demonstrated in 2007 when Lakas-CMD and Kampi proceeded to compete with each other, locally, which limited their opportunity to compete, as a ruling coalition, against the President’s critics, particularly in the national arena. In which case, while Lakas and Kampi both edged out opposition rivals locally, they were left where they’d been prior to 2007: controlling local governments, the House, and the Presidency, but bogged down in the Senate and lacking a firm hold on the Supreme Court.

The 2010 elections could, conceivably, end the battle of attrition in which all sides have been bogged down since 2005. In the first place, the Supreme Court will be dominated by appointees of Mrs. Arroyo. In the second place, with the President’s term about to end, the ruling coalition could, conceivably, recapture the Senate, while maintaining its dominance in local politics and the House. It would be, in 2010, where it’d hoped to be, in 2007. Except for one thing: the President, precisely, would be out of office, and she, for one, besides being at the mercy of a potentially vindictive successor, by being out of the presidency, might provoke the typical realignment of forces that accompanies the election of a new president, regardless of where the former ruling coalition actually stands.

But if the ruling coalition were to go into 2010 with a plan that would maintain the cozy local and House arrangements in place since 2001; if that was fortified by recapturing the Senate; and with an obliging Supreme Court in place –and finally, with former President Arroyo still in a position of power, say, as Speaker Arroyo in the 15^th Congress, the possibilities would be delightful, indeed, for everybody concerned –in the current ruling coalition, at least.

The President could, of course, run for the Senate, but it might galvanize her opponents and besides, deprive the coalition of a senatorial slot with which to repay past favors to supporters; on the other hand, a congressional race would be much more manageable. It would also solve a pesky problem, in local Pampanga politics.

In 2007, “Among Ed” Panlilio was elected Governor of Pampanga because the Lapids and the Pinedas fought each other, and the President couldn’t –or wouldn’t- broker unity among her local allies. In 2010, there’s the possibility that the President’s son, Rep. Mikey Arroyo, might be persuaded to run for governor of Pampanga, allowing the Lapids and Pinedas to coalesce and reclaim political control of the governorship. This would also enable the President to run for the position currently held by her son.

Governor Panlilio, so far, has played, perfectly, into the hands of those who want him out of office so business can go back, to shall we say, “normal.” When Randy David announced he might contest the congressional seat if the President runs for it, Panlilio then made noises about some sort of “search committee” to find a suitable candidate –and then suggested if one can’t be found, he’d consider running for congressman. The inevitable result of this sort of talk would be to alienate a reform constituency already galvanized by the idea of a David vs. Arroyo showdown.

Besides which, if Panlilio –who was already previously flirting with the idea of running for senator or even president- decides to run for congressman, he has no potential successor for governor, and so control of the capitol would return, almost certainly, to either the Lapids or Pinedas or both, under Mikey Arroyo. And Panlilio could still face a debacle at the polls, going head-to-head against Mrs. Arroyo.

But then again –if Panlilio seeks a new mandate as governor, and David runs for congressman, challenging the President, could she possibly lose?

Notes for a prospective article on the emerging politics of a national identity (in progress)

Propositions:

Since 2005 the political situation has been kept at an impasse by the skillful playing off of the provinces versus “Imperial Manila,” and yet Metro Manila (more properly: the expanded NCR) has an opinion quite similar, politically, if not outright identical, to the other large urban centers with the possible (though not certain) exeption of Cebu City.

Yet the reassertion of the provincial basis of power of the administration was done by pandering to, but keeping from achieving anything tangible, of two parallel urges emerging from the provinces: Federalism and a Bangsamoro Commonwealth (minimum) or future State (maximum aspiration).

Hence,entrenching the impasse.

If instincts of the political class is to preserve baronies, could it be the provincial barons are themselves finding their old powerbases fading? Former answer was to gerrymander; but that possibility is running out of territory to further subdivide? While in essence, Federalist urge would reconsolidated subdivided territories, under broader regional-ethnic-linguistic lines?

Assumptions of Federalists and Bangsamoro are themselves challenged by demographic changes due to massive internal migrations taking place, and shifts that in turn are not only changing landscape built up over past 75 years (to consolidate the national territory as much narrowly defined by Filipinos and Americans both), but over centuries. But this could also be a return to the much more fluid approach of prehispanic times, before the definition of provinces and their component peoples as fixed, by the Spanish.

But the return to a more fluid flow of people also challenges the political challenges and advocacies of those calling for Federalism, etc.

Essentially, then, Federalism, Bangsamoro are challenges/proposals from Civil Societies themselves increasingly decimated by both internal and external migration; the political class prefers territorial supremacy for its membership but the cultural/political mechanisms for control are challenged by new residents not bound by old fealties, traditions, even language or economic activity.

The clear contrast between national political opinion and practice and provincial/local opinion and practice suggests the emergence of a truly national approach and cohesion of mores for the first time and it may be on the ascendant.

I. Organic versus Artificial Identities

See The Voyage of the Balangay. Possibility this experiment could have Pan-Malayan cultural impact on par with voyages of Hokule’a.

From Tracing the Migration of Our Ancestors.

Refer WMP area to Spanish “Greater Philippines” map and

II. Regional orientations

Blue: discoveries of prestige goods, suggesting cultural orientation/trade:

1. Luzon = China

2. Visayas = Thailand

Red: Eric Casiño on main trading routes, Manila-Moluccas-Malacca.

1. Luzon-Palawan-Mindanao-No. Borneo = Malacca

2. Luzon-Bicol-Leyte-Samar-CARIAGA-Eastern Mindanao = Moluccas

3. Northern Mindanao-North Borneo (Dapitan, Butuan hub?)

Yellow: theoretical cultural orientation of main geographic devisions.

1.Luzon = China

2. Visayas = Polynesia/Oceania

3. Mindanao = Brunei/Indonesia

III. Organic Identity versus Defined Borders

Spanish definition of the Philippines (“Greater Philippines”):

Rough approx. based on discussion with Spanish historian, on Spanish territorial conception/definition of the Philippines. See my notes in A Primer on Philippine Territorial Claims.

IV. Potpourri polity versus Territorial Definition

Definition under Malolos Constitution:

Article 1. The political association of all Filipinos constitutes a nation, whose state shall be known as the Philippine Republic.

Refer to Blumentritt’s ethnological map:

Moro areas in green; Christian/lowlander areas in pink; Uplander/”Non-Christian tribes” (today’s IP’s) in yellow. Areas in green declined to be inegrated into Philippine Republic; areas in yellow claimed as integral by Pink areas, nucleus of emerging nation-state. Note: American political arrangements would merge yellow and green but segregate from pink. See Abinales: Re-constructing Colonial Philippines: 1900-1910.

V. Territorial Consolidation and Expansion versus Regional/Ethnic Autonomy

“New World Order Map.” Potential post-war reorganization of region. Note expansion of Philippine territory to include Moluccas, etc. Refer to Quezon efforts to negotiate an “Indonesian Empire,” map above (1943) corresponds to dates of such a proposal eventually vetoed by Dutch and British (find reference in Who’s Who in World War II edited by John Keegan which mentioned it); see Harrison diary entries.

VI. Centrifugal forces

A. Moro Nationalism:

B. Ethnic Chauvinism: A Country of Our Own: Partitioning the Philippines by David Martinez (vide: Destroying Our Nation Through Federalism)

VII. In contention: Internal and External Migration

The old territorial-linguistic identities are challenged by:

1. Migration abroad

2. Internal migration

Of these, the former much more studied than the latter; also, the former is far more in the public consciousness as a phenomenon than the second.

I. Impact of migration

A. internal

-Quezon: Ilocos/Bicol migration, exodus of Tagalog population

-Depopulation of Ilocos

-Inquire from Dodong Nemenzo:

*changes in linguistic map of Visayas: shifts in Cebuano/Ilonggo speaking areas.

*Cebu now 10% Muslim

*Mindanao: increase in Ilonggo-speaking vs. Cebuano-speaking areas

*ARMM: dispersion of Muslim groups to other areas of Cebu, Manila, Baguio, Pangasinan; dimunition of Bangsamoro image among Moros who fled violence and fellow Moro warlords

B. external, i.e. OFWs and permanent migrants

*depopulation accompanied by cultural/ethnic chauvinism or efforts at linguistic preservation

-Pangasinan language concerns of Popoy de Vera

-U. of Hawaii Ilocano language advocacy

-Observation of priests at U. of San Carlos Recoletos: Cebu has 1st generation of primary Tagalog speakers

C. Urban vs. Rural Divide

-Rigoberto Tiglao 1980s Marxist critique: country’s now fundamentally urban

-Yoly Ong: Urban centers/cultures, Luzon-Visayas-Mindanao: fundamentally similar in political opinion

-Expanded NCR: represents amalgamation of all ethnic groups, with large Visayan component particularly in Metro Manila itself (see Nemenzo comment that Visayan influence is best seen in changes to Filipino/Tagalog grammar in Metro Manila and hence, national media); ironically, this has triggered, as much as a national public opinion has been created, the political consolidation of provincial political leaders and their machines in 2004-2010.

Tie this in with Cariño map, and Spanish historical map of “Greater Philippines.”

VIII. Questions/Tensions:

Are we returning to fluid, geographically-dispersed organization?

Is Federalism proposed organic reflection or not?

Is unitary insistence/resistance reflection of modernity or anachronistic?

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