The measure of victory

Not a few opinion writers have speculated and even attempted to pass of as profound and factual analysis some fantastic pieces of fiction writing about what the mainstream Left is thinking or doing in light of the twists and turns of events leading to the 2010 elections. One thing they are agreed on, the forces identified with such progressive party lists as Bayan Muna, Gabriela Women’s Party, Anakpawis, Kabataan and several new ones now coalesced under the Makabayan banner are joining the electoral fray in a big way and, like it or not, are a force to reckon with.

If anything, the emergence of the Left as a distinct and formidable force in the electoral arena since 2001, when they successfully elected three party list representatives to Congress, is bound to challenge the candidates for national office to raise the level of the campaign to a clash of platforms, issues and track records, rather than a contest of personalities, resources, lineages and backers.

The participation of the Left in national elections may force the candidates, including and especially the opposition, to put their mouths where their hearts (or pocketbooks) really lie; i.e. to declare and elaborate what kind of change they truly stand for, explain why they are to be believed and how they can deliver on their promises. The Left will hope to turn the elections from another periodic political circus into a nation-wide educational campaign to raise the people’s political awareness about what needs to change and how.

The traditional, elite-dominated elections has hitherto been all about "sino ang ipapalit" rather than “ano ang ipapalit”. One popular notion that persists is that what matters most in a candidate is his or her “character” because no matter one’s stand on the issues, the character will determine the elected public official’s performance. This flies in the face of the reality that even the most saintly of presidents must come to terms with a political system that runs on patronage, political debt, and powerful vested interests geared to maintaining an iniquitous social system.

Certainly, the depth and breadth of the social, political and economic crisis that has descended on this nation is inescapable. All the presidential contenders, except perhaps for administration candidate Teodoro who is forced to defend the Arroyo regime’s odious nine-year record, must profess to be for change. Yet several weeks after most if not all of them have announced their candidacy and started campaigning, a clear and comprehensive elaboration of what change it is that they stand for is still nowhere to be seen.

So far, it has only been Chiz Escudero who has started to present a categorical stand on such issues as contractualization, oil deregulation, the traditional party system and a candidate’s independence as well as the prosecution of Mrs. Arroyo and cohorts for plunder and other crimes against the people. But his recent break from the National People’s Coalition, his long-standing political party, could seriously hamper his candidacy unless he acquires or can quickly build an alternative machinery to carry out a viable campaign.
On the whole, what the public has been treated to so far is the worn out and nauseating appeal to emotions, personality hype and, inevitably and invariably, attacks on the personalities of opponents rather than an engagement on platforms and issues. Should the political discourse remain on this subterranean level, our people can expect little by way of meaningful change to emerge from this so-called democratic exercise -- no matter who wins.

Of all the Presidential contenders, it is Noynoy and his camp who deliberately rides the wave of popularity and mystique and parries attempts by his rivals to engage him in a more cerebral contest. Noynoy ignored Teodoro's challenge to a debate; his rah-rah boys' reply to Villar's reference to Noynoy's lackluster record is that what matters in this elections is not one's track record of achievements, but one's spotless record of no wrongdoings. It is reminiscent of the long-ago "No-talk-no-mistake" campaign strategy of Genaro "Gene" Magsaysay, who likewise aspired, unsuccessfully, for high office by banking on his famous brother's genes. Noynoy's recently released star-studded television ad ironically gives us a preview of what a Noynoy presidency could be -- glossy and promising on the surface, but utterly lacking in substance.

In contrast, Villar's and Teodoro's ads so far project them as achievers par exellence, with Villar highlighting his plebeian origins and his purportedly pro-poor, pro-people investments. But neither one has confronted, much less proposed, comprehensive solutions to the real issues of systemic and widespread poverty especially in the countryside, foreign domination of a weak and backward economy, and a bureaucracy of crooks and plunderers from the ruling classes that bleed the national coffers and the people's meager earnings dry.

The Left for its part will certainly endeavor to raise the level of the campaign because it will articulate its own vision and program for change -- “tunay na pagbabago”. It is real and substantive, not false or cosmetic, because it is concrete, consistent, extensive and far-reaching. To wit: uphold national independence against the dominance and dictates of the imperialist powers headed by the US; realize democracy through the empowerment of the working people and respect for human rights; develop the economy through national industrialization and land reform; promote a national, scientific and mass culture; protect the environment from imperialist plunder and destruction; and pursue an independent foreign policy for world peace and development.

It is not a farfetched possibility that the Left could deliver the swing vote. In the 2007 elections, the opposition senatorial candidates were able to preserve their lead in no small way through the Left's nationwide machinery manned by dedicated volunteer poll and canvass watchers. Whoever wishes to gain the support or endorsement of the Left now cannot avoid taking a clear stand on, if not making a firm commitment to, the progressive and patriotic principles and measures in the Left's platform.

Any serious student or observer of Philippine politics would see that by bringing to the public’s awareness the urgent and basic issues confronting our people and rejecting the crass, self-serving and personality-oriented electoral campaigns currently being conducted, the Left and the Filipino people as a whole stand to gain no matter who wins or loses.

Only the narrow-minded mental contortionists would stretch and strain to try to explain the Left's conduct and intent with the pre-conceived notion or conclusion that the Left could not possibly do anything right and walk away victorious from this forthcoming electoral exercise.

The Left cannot be faced with any dilemma in dealing with the vicissitudes of any and all of the candidates' fortunes. Its emergence as a significant force that cannot be ignored in the national electoral arena at this time constitutes incontrovertible proof of that.

The Left's final measure of success in these elections is by how much more adherents would have been added to the goal of freedom, genuine democracy and social justice – the change we need and truly deserve. #

The curious case of Chiz Escudero

Yesterday, Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero, a popular contender in the May 2010 presidential elections, resigned from his party, the National People’s Coalition, in a clear bid to distance himself from NPC Chair, business tycoon and putative presidential kingmaker, Mr. Danding Cojuangco. The announcement sent shockwaves throughout the electoral arena. Other candidates and their respective camps, as well as political pundits of all stripes, will have a field day analyzing the underpinnings, implications and possible scenarios generated by Mr. Escudero’s bombshell decision until he makes his final announcement of his political plans in the coming weeks.

I first met Mr. Escudero when I, together with other victims of human rights violations under the Marcos dictatorship, sought a dialogue with members of the House of Representatives over a bill that would respond to the victims’ demand for justice and restitution. He was then a first term representative from Sorsogon. I ended up berating the cocky lawyer-congressman for seeming to trivialize the victims’ plaint and attributed his apparent lack of concern to the fact that his father had been one of Marcos’ loyal Cabinet members. Back then, he already struck me as somewhat of a jaded politician despite his youth.

In time though, Mr. Escudero has become a curious case, not unlike the hero in the fanciful film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, who started out physically old and emotionally naïve, then inexplicably grew younger as he matured.

Sen. Escudero’s decision stands out because it is a refreshing departure from the display of political opportunism that has so far suffused the campaigns of the both the administration and the front running opposition candidates. It gives a premium to independence on substantive issues over patronage and finance/machinery/logistics, the so-called winnability factors.

Most broadsheets failed to mention or underplayed Sen. Escudero’s amplification of what he meant by taking an independent stance from the vested interests locked into his membership in the NPC, or any other mainstream political party for that matter. He pointed to the fight against corruption: what if those he needed to run after were members of his own party? Or, the political godfather himself, Mr. Cojuangco?

Sen. Escudero reiterated his rejection of the pork barrel system in Congress that undergirds and reinforces patronage politics, including Malacanang’s hold on Congress by the Chief Executive’s power to disburse the coveted “countryside development funds” of both congressmen and senators. He said that his membership in a party with a host of Congress members weakens his position.

He highlighted his stand against the contractualization of labor as part of his commitment to uphold the rights of ordinary working people. He categorically said he is against oil deregulation and pointed out how the small fry like jeepney drivers are strictly regulated when it comes to hiking passenger fees while giant oil firms are free to fix the price of fuel according to the dictates of profitability.

He also mentioned upholding the dignity and integrity of the work of government employees like soldiers, police and even ambassadors who are made to act as footstools of political bigwigs rather being allowed to do their job of giving service to the people unhampered.

Rather than safe motherhood statements about government reform, alleviating poverty and caring for the disadvantaged, Mr. Escudero concretized his position by taking on existing policies and ways of doing things. In the process he gave notice to big business, foreign and domestic, to his fellow politicians especially those who have yet to be made accountable for their corruption and other crimes against the people, and most of all to the people whose support he courts, where he stands on issues.

According to the senator, he left the NPC because he has come to realize that anyone who is planning to seek higher office should owe his loyalty not to any party but to the country and the people. Such lofty rhetoric is not original. We’ve heard it before and have learned to take such claim with a huge grain of salt.

Yet Mr. Escudero’s decision appears to go against everything a politician in this country learns as he makes the climb to the top; that is, to make sure one has the backing of those sections of the ruling elite who matter – the ones with the big bucks, the clout and the organizational machinery to get you where you want to go. Of course, one knows the quid pro quo.

To be sure, the scuttlebutt is that Sen. Escudero failed to get the kind of financial support that he was asking for from Mr. Cojuangco, thus the resignation. (A fantastic figure of 5 billion pesos was reported by one broadsheet unabashedly rooting for another presidential candidate.) This is supposedly the real reason for the senator’s junking of his party and his patron.

Even if we are to believe the imputed motive and alleged circumstances surrounding Sen. Escudero’s resignation, we do not necessarily come to the conclusion that his decision to go independent is an unprincipled one. In fact, it is an astute one. For why should the senator carry the onus of a Cojuangco anointment, by an unrepentant Marcos crony now reputedly the favored Arroyo crony who is helping to money launder the Arroyo family’s plundered billions, if it were not equivalent to a sizeable campaign kitty? He may as well not go by the rules as far as his presidential bid is concerned.

The possible return on this high-stakes gambit for Sen. Escudero is being able to take the moral and political high ground and possibly capturing the imagination of those among our people, the youth most especially, who are still looking for an alternative to the tiresome array of politicians cast in the same old, traditional (aka “trapo”) mold.

The many permutations of running mates or presidential and vice-presidential tandems made possible by Sen. Escudero’s exit from the NPC certainly indicates either (1) there is no fundamental difference in the different candidates’ stand on important issues; (2) they can easily compromise their stands (i.e. there is wide maneuver room for opportunism); or (3) both of the above. Witness how the Lakas-NUCD-Kampi lost no time in extending an invitation to Sen. Escudero to be the administration’s veep candidate. The Nationalista Party headed by its standard bearer Sen. Manny Villar has once more given him the moist eye despite an earlier rebuff.

Will Chiz Escudero squander this once-in-a-lifetime chance to wage an “out-of-the-box” candidacy over the better-oiled and media-hyped campaign of his rivals? Or will he take a stab at making history and achieve the biggest upset this country has seen in an electoral contest? #

*Published in Business World
30-31 October 09

Solutions or band-aid?

Who was it who said that the best way to ensure that nothing gets done is to create a committee? The Arroyo government’s announcement of the formation of the Special National Public-Private Sector Reconstruction Commission tasked “to study the causes, costs and actions needed to be taken in the wake of Ondoy, Pepeng and last year’s typhoon Frank” and “to seek fresh aid to fund the reconstruction (of damaged infrastructure)” appears to be headed precisely in that direction.

Going by the Arroyo regime’s track record in seeking the truth, upholding accountability and making money, this project is bound to turn into another whitewash, a fund-raising enterprise masquerading as an investigation and reconstruction commission.

Apart from attempting to deflect responsibility for the lack of disaster preparedness on all fronts, government is deliberately turning a blind eye to the real causes of the widespread destruction that took place and the lingering after-effects.

The favorite scapegoats are the so-called squatters living precariously on the banks of rivers and canals draining Metro Manila’s flood waters. The real culprits –the multinational logging and mining firms that denuded the forest cover critical to retaining the water brought by torrential rainfall and typhoons; the land grabbers disguised as real estate developers that build on esteros, riverbeds and other public spaces – are not targets for demolition. They have protection from officialdom, the bureaucrat capitalists from municipalities all the way up to Malacañang, who abuse their authority to amass immense wealth.

Landlessness and dire poverty are the main causes of migration to the cities; add to this, militarization of the countryside. People seek jobs and a way out of their stultifying and oftentimes perilous existence in the rural areas only to end up living in the urban fringes and wastelands, close to whatever livelihood they manage to scrape together to survive. Once they nestle in a place no matter how hazardous, they resist relocation especially when there are no job opportunities, no schools and other physical and social infrastructure in sites provided by government.

The very same desperate straits and lack of alternatives caused people to clamber to their rooftops when the floodwaters rose, even though doing so was fraught with discomfort, danger and uncertainty: it was the only remaining option to stay alive. It’s the same phenomenon on a macro level pushing Filipinos to do the dirtiest, most dangerous and cheapest-paid work overseas since government, instead of creating jobs at home, has made the export of labor its quick-fix to the chronic unemployment problem as well as the steady source of dollar earnings.

The rural poor eventually end up as urban poor. Most do not have regular-paying jobs but make a living hawking on the streets, driving pedicabs, washing other people’s laundry and doing all sorts of odd jobs – the millions of unemployed euphemistically described in government statistics as the informal sector. They live a hand-to-mouth existence and have absolutely no “safety nets”: social services are absent or inadequate and inaccessible. They are the ones most vulnerable to natural calamities because apart from being forced to live in high-risk areas they have little by way of fallback, economic and social.

Why are there no jobs? Why are there no social services such as housing? Why is the cost of living skyrocketing so that hunger and disease has become endemic?

The Philippines is so backward economically that there are no good jobs either in agriculture or in industry. Landlessness and abject poverty is still the basic condition of the people who work the soil. In the urban centers, an industrial sector that could process the country’s abundant natural resources has from the start been doomed to stunting and inevitable decline. The national patrimony, such as forest products, minerals, oil and gas deposits, are auctioned off to foreign companies whose main activity has been extraction and export.

Chronic shortfalls in foreign exchange to pay for imports from fuel to capital goods to consumer products are covered by incurring more foreign debt at usurious rates and laden with onerous terms. Government too has become hooked to borrowing in order to have spending money for bloated and wasteful expenditures, corrupt contracts and to wage costly counter-insurgency campaigns.

Denationalization and deindustrialization policies have been persistently pursued by post-colonial governments held captive by foreign monopoly capital interests. These peaked in the eighties with the liberalization, deregulation and privatization policies imposed by pro-“globalization” imperialist financial institutions, multinational corporations and big capitalist powers led by the United States of America.

Debt servicing and not social services has been the top priority of every government. The rationale for government’s privatization binge is to trim its budget deficit. The result is that hospitals, schools and housing projects have become fee-for-service arrangements where those who can’t afford to pay are simply left out. The same is true for public utilities such as water, power and transportation; these have been taken over by private, in particular foreign, interests. Government’s reason for being – public service - has been severely undermined in the name of “globalization”.

A glaring example of how privatization cum corruption has resulted in another gargantuan tragedy is the recent flooding in Pangasinan. The irresponsible and criminal release of millions of tons of water from the San Roque dam was beyond doubt the immediate cause of the flooding. But prosecuting the dam managers and instituting “protocols” to regulate the release of water are not enough to prevent another disaster from happening. As pointed out by experts, the dam itself, sitting as a catch basin to two other heavily silted dams and purportedly designed as flood control, power generation and irrigation mechanism all at the same time, is itself an invitation to disaster.

Before its construction, the prospective dam had already displaced thousands of farmers, mostly indigenous peoples, from their lands. With no benefit in return, the project was opposed from the start by the people most affected by it. The same goes true with those who had built their homes in hillsides and riversides made prone to landslides and flashfloods by the unabated denudation of forests and mining activities. Their opposition to these environmentally-degrading activities has invariably gone unheeded by both local and national governments.

Indeed, the wisest thing to do now is to sift through the debris of death and destruction in search for the "causes, costs and actions needed" to restore and rebuild the lives of the millions who have suffered from the calamities. But unless we unearth the real causes, unless we are prepared to pay the real costs of overhauling an iniquitous, exploitative and oppressive system, all courses of action will simply be a band-aid till the next disaster happens. #

*Published in Business World
16-17 October 2009