the audacity of chiz

nagulat ako kay chiz.   nagulat ako nang sabihin niyang he’s out of the nationalist people’s coalition, that is, out of the shadow of party bosses playing traditional politics.    napa-wow ako sa kanyang declaration of independence, at sa wari ko ba, as i watched him declare himself a free man, free to serve the filipino people as they deserve and not as a political party dictates, i swear his aura changed, gumaan at umangat, at nagkaroon ng ibang kislap ang kanyang mga mata, no kidding!   it must be, like, you know, liberating?

before this, since ondoy, i’ve been saying to anyone who asked kung kanino ba ako na i will campaign and vote for the candidate who will promise to clean up not just the government but also the environment, and one who has the character and the personality to impose and implement a zero waste policy nationwide, which would mean radical changes all around that should shake up the system.   to my disappointment, i’ve heard nothing like this from manny, gibo, noynoy, erap, or chiz.   BUT to the credit of chiz, he was is the only presidentiable who has  concrete proposals re the relocation and rehabilitation of flood victims to alleviate  suffering.   This one in particular was an unexpected surprise:

Sen. Francis Escudero asked landlords to help in rehabilitation efforts by donating land to be developed into relocation sites.

“If they have a hundred hectares, perhaps it will not be too much to ask for them to donate 10 hectares,” he added.

i wondered of course what danding would have had to say to that.    it might even explain the rumored limited funding by npc.   but whatever triggered offchiz’s decision to bolt the party, it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he bolted.

While Escudero’s resignation surprised many, a lawmaker from the militant Bayan Muna party-list group welcomed the move.

It is “a major political development in the presidential race. His move to bolt the NPC is a welcome move that should develop his capacity to take on many people’s issues in performing his duties to the people,” Rep. Satur Ocampo said.

Ocampo dared other aspirants to also take the stand of Escudero.

Rep. Mong Palatino of Kabataan party-list group said that the senator’s move could usher in “platform-based politics” in the 2010 polls.

this is even bigger and braver than mar roxas sliding down to vp.   suddenly noynoy isn’t such a sure thing.   audacious chiz is looking smelling talking good.   the game continues to change.   noynoy has some catching up to do.

lila shahani’s open letter to FVR

this was posted on a Facebook page with the hope that we may “all find the courage to be just as honest at the next family barbecue!”   (haha, indeed! thanks, patty ;)

14 October 2009

Dear Uncle Ed,

I was very relieved to hear that you were all safe and sound in the wake of Ondoy and Pepeng. But how devastating that our people had to go through two such onslaughts (particularly in Pangasinan, Ilocos and Manila — all of which remain very close to our hearts) one after the other! I hope and pray that the flooding eventually subsides and people are rehabilitated safely. And if Napocor and the San Roque people are in fact partially responsible for the terrible flooding in Pangasinan, I sincerely hope that they are made to face their day in court.

I thought I would write you because I’m concerned about some things that have been happening at home. I am not sure who you will endorse for president but I know that it will most likely tip the balance again, much in the way that your endorsements have done in the past. I have never felt the need to write you before, although I have always carefully observed your decisions through the years.

And I certainly had questions — questions about human rights during the martial law years, military logging under the Marcos administration, the signing of IPP contracts after the power crisis (and the high cost of electricity for consumers), the San Roque dam, PEA/Amari, the Fort Bonifacio conversion/privatization program, the VFA, the Centennial celebration, the endorsement of Joe de V and the continued support of GMA until the bitter end. I was relieved to learn that you had been cleared of any wrongdoing in the PEA/Amari case, but always wondered whether your decision to endorse Joe de V (which was after all a party decision as well) was inextricably linked to it.

Why am I bringing all this up now? Only to say that, as your niece, I have had many questions about your decisions through the years, but none that ever made me feel the need to engage with you at length. To begin with, ours was not a particularly discursive relationship. More importantly, I always felt the need to give you the benefit of the doubt, and trusted that you had the best interests of the Filipino people at heart.

And there was certainly ample evidence that you had done tremendous things in your lifetime. Not only were you a hero of EDSA 1: you had had a brilliant military career and were arguably one of the best presidents the country has ever had. Winning by only a small margin, you turned what might have been a costly liability into the success of pluralism. With liberalization and deregulation during your term, FDI increased and the economy as a whole remained strong, even throughout the Asian financial crisis. In fact, privatization, revenue generation through a VAT on luxury goods and services, working with the communist and Muslim insurgency, and focusing on OFW rights (particularly in the case of Flor Contemplacion) — were all hallmarks of your administration, and certainly the kind of decisions my Fletcher professors would have applauded. Indeed, the suggestions of corruption were minimal, seen in the context of all your positive contributions and in comparison with preceding and succeeding presidents. Without a doubt.

But I finally had to break my silence after having watched the Ondoy aftermath with horror, realizing that our government was as much to blame for the colossal loss of life and habitation in the country as was climate change. As an engineer, you know that the flooding was also due to poor civil engineering, urban planning and zoning; lack of waste management; lack of education and corruption.

The thought of your supporting Gibo (or even a Villar/Escudero tandem, for that matter, in the event that Gibo has become too unpopular since Ondoy) was finally enough to make me put pen to paper. Without a doubt, Gibo is “incomparably competent,” but then so were Joe de V and GMA, Uncle Ed — and look what happened. I understand that you supported GMA because you wanted macroeconomic stability in the country above all, particularly in the apparent absence of any viable alternatives.

But I think the sweep of history speaks for itself: competent candidates with strong party affiliations are not necessarily going to be good leaders, nor will they necessarily be what the people want. Because they lack a certain basic honesty, and I suspect the people sense that. If Gibo were sincere, why would he stay with Lakas-CMD, particularly now that the merger with Kampi has been honored by the Supreme Court? Surely the ruling party has been discredited at this point, in view of everything GMA has done? There really is no need to enumerate anymore: I think, by now, we’re all pretty familiar with what those things are.

Even Obama was reluctant to have an audience with her, and overseas Filipinos continue to refuse to send money to the Ondoy victims through their embassies and consulates, so deep indeed is their distrust of the government! Moreover, his performance in the post-Ondoy relief effort has hardly been stellar, as you must have already noted. Gibo is also undoubtedly backed by Danding (despite the alleged rift), which suggests that the two things that very much impede progress in our country — monopolies and oligarchy itself — will ultimately remain unchanged. This is ostensibly the reason why many young people remain wary of Chiz/Loren or Villar/Escudero. As for Manny V, his meteoric rise to power is nothing short of impressive, to be sure, but his proclivity for engaging in back-room deals has certainly not gone unnoticed. In short, what we see in these candidates appears to be more of the same — a position, I might add, we can no longer afford, and certainly not at this critical moment in our nation’s history.

Of course Erap’s decision to run will split up the opposition even further, which certainly strengthens the ruling party’s hand. But perhaps my biggest fear about Gibo (apart from the very real possibility that, in subtle ways, the ruling party might cheat) has to do with the fact that charter change appears to be imminent, in which case, if GMA runs for Congress in the meantime, it is not entirely inconceivable that she could become our next Prime Minister. To be sure, you would be granted the same type of soft power you’ve been granted during GMA’s administration, but is it really worth it in the end, Uncle Ed? Do you really want to go down in history as the guy who saved GMA after “Hello, Garci” and who continued to hand the country down to its unscrupulous elite from one administration to another? Isn’t the respect of the young — and of history itself — the most important thing, at the end of the day? In my humble opinion, the best way to refurbish the fading Eddie brand now is to do the right thing and heed the will of the people.

Noynoy, of course, is less than perfect: we all know that. His record is remarkable only in its lack of remarkable achievements, and he certainly isn’t a particularly brilliant thinker or charismatic speaker. But he has never been tainted by any suggestions of corruption and does not appear to have the propensity to throw his weight around. He is apparently thoughtful, respectful and humble, and we can only hope that his lineage will encourage him to sacrifice for the country the way his extraordinary parents did. Because of this inimitable heritage, he is now the one candidate with the potential to unite the opposition against the ruling party. For his part, Mar is no slouch, moreover, and the Liberal Party appears to have some progressive elements.

The point is: the people are clearly tired, not just of the “bickering,” as you say, but of the trapos themselves, and are willing to bet on someone who falls very far outside the standard mold (Noynoy is, if you will, a reluctant Cojuangco, something many respect and appreciate). At any rate, I sincerely hope you will consider my thoughts — the thoughts of a young Filipina who loves her country immeasurably — when you make your decision.

But none of this changes my love and respect for you, Uncle Ed. I’m just sorely disappointed and hope that, for once in my life, you might actually recognize that I’m old enough to make my own assessments. Nor does this mean that I’m not a “team player.” Because my definition of teamwork is not that you command the team and everyone is thereby obligated to obey you. Instead, team members should be able to have different view points, while still working together for the greater good of the collective whole. In fact, democratic exchange within the team can often enhance the quality of its collective decisions on the whole.

I sincerely hope that you place the country over any other considerations and choose the candidate who is really best for the country, and not in terms of who might further consolidate the tremendous power you already wield.

I hope you won’t be offended by what I have written (and hope you understand if I decide to include some of these ideas in my new blog) but, at 42, I think I’m finally entitled to my own opinion, Uncle Ed. You are after all the only father figure I have ever had (although you may not know it) and I’m writing you the way I would have written my own father, had I just been given a chance.

Please take care of yourself.

Love always,

Lil

THE CALL OF HISTORY

Satur Sulit

It is never too late to re-invent a country
A man or a horse maybe too old for changing
But a country inherits the life of the ages
What daily we renew potentially forever
It depends on the energies we are able to harness
When things take a turn and history beckons

environment 9: sustainable devt

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AS
SPIRITUAL AND REVOLUTIONARY PRAXIS

Junie Kalaw

Toward the end of this century as of the last one, dramatic changes have taken place under the impact of, among others, the industrial revolution, two world wars, struggles for political independence, the internationalization of economics, and the globalization of mass media.  These forces have had shearing effects on the fabric of political and economic society, some appearing first as part of the solution, even a boon (like pesticides), and only later as a problem.   Through all these changes and upheavals, the structures of oppressive domination have persisted on different levels occasionally changing external form but otherwise entrenched firmly enough in society to continue denying Filipinos and other Third World populations their freedom and autonomy.

Today’s Revolutionary Conditions

Poverty remains the Philippines’ major problem, aggravated by the depletion of our natural resources, the impending breakdown of our life-support systems, and the high rate of our population growth.  With our remaining forests down to less than 800,000 hectares, only 20% of our coral reefs in good condition, 18 major river systems biologically dead, 13 provinces severely eroded, fresh-water reservoirs drying up, and the population requiring 40% more food by the year 2000, we face a critical situation and time is not on our side.

The deterioration of the Philippine environment is traceable to economic activities designed to support the consumption needs of other countries.  Ecological footprints of the development of industrialized countries are to be seen not only in our degraded ecology but also in the waste that is exported back to us.   This historical trail of international trade based on the exploitation of our natural resources by former colonial masters has piled up ecological debts that remain uncompensated.   Sadly, this system of “ecological colonialism” has been institutionalized in the present international economic order.

Highlighting the crisis are new perspectives from ecological economists like Herman Daly and Robert Goodland.  They see our economic system as an open system functioning with the closed system that is our planet’s biosphere.  With the current global economy amounting to about US$32 trillion, we are consuming 40% of the primary production of terrestrial photosynthetic energy from the sun.  This means that in one doubling time, we will be using 80%, a condition that with its attendant waste may exceed the “carrying capacity” of the planet.  Thus it is posited that there is no room for aggregate economic growth and that sustainable economic growth for everyone is not possible.  This raises such issues as the rights of poor countries to their equitable share of remaining clean space, access to their own natural resources, access to information and technology, and bargaining power in markets.  Further, inasmuch as the relationship between rich and poor is a function of power, there is nothing to stop the rich from using this self-same power to maintain their wasteful consumption patterns and perpetuate an inequitable system.

Revolution Based on Reconciliation

Pope John Paul II in Rome calls it a “moral crisis,” the lack of a “morally coherent world view.”  A lumad datu in Mount Apo ascribes it to a foreign belief system that has exiled God to the heavens so that we no longer see God in the trees, streams, mountains, and animals, nor in our fellow humans.  The reference is to the same fundamental gap between our personal ethics and the system’s ethics, and the need for a systems ethics which translates personal decisions in to decisions for the common good.  More concretely, it is the gap between what is an honest living for loggers and what is good for the environment and the common welfare.   The gap is widened not just by plain greed but also by a moral and ethical blindness to, and lack ofcomprehension of, the norms for a just and sustainable functioning of bigger systems.

At its worst, the gap renders futile church teachings on honesty and love for the poor on account of its inability to translate doctrine in terms of land reform or equitable wages or conservation of forest and marine resources.  In the end we realize that we have not yet found our wholeness.  We have yet to manage successfully the integration of personal and social transformation.  The exception was the EDSA Revolution, when a critical mass of Filipinos got their inner and outer values together and created the spiritual and political space that made the sharing of pan de sal across military defenses an operative Communion of the People, and that produced transformative political change, but which, unfortunately, we were unable to sustain.

Nowhere is the fundamental gap between personal ethics and systems ethics more dramatic and disastrous than in the policy of equal access to the benefits of creation.  Whereas in an ecological system life flows, sustaining and fulfilling the lives of all in a process we can call “ecological justice,” in the current system control over and access to life-giving natural resources are awarded to a privileged few — a situation which has produced the poverty and resource depletion that imperils our life-support systems.  Moreover, we have cast the responsibility and accountability for these effects to the impersonal free enterprise and market systems.

The conflict between our economic system and nature’s ecological processes has been a fundamental cause of the destruction of our ecosystems.  While natural systems consist of organic unities such as families, communities, cultures, and ecosystems, we manage to evaluate and reward our economic activities according to functional sectors and enterprise organizations.  We gauge national development by adding the production of these sectors and industries into a gross national product (GNP); not measured are local community welfare and ecosystem enhancement.  This has resulted in a big normative gap between the welfare of corporations, both transnational and national, and the welfare of local ecologies and communities.  The bridging of this gap requires more than just environmental protection measures or community projects by business enterprises.   It requires a whole re-orientation of the way we do business and a re-discovering of the true essence of hanapbuhay, a truly Filipino concept that searches for the life-flow, like the Kalinga concept of wealth that is based on the enrichment of life rather on a life of personal enrichment.  We cannot relegate this revisioning to our economists and government planners alone.  We need to take responsibility for our country’s economic development models, policies, and practices, and to participate in the political processes that will enable us to create a just and sustainable future not only for ourselves but for the generations of Filipinos to come.

Politics, whose primordial function is to serve the welfare of the whole, is the human activity that should be most spiritually informed.  Most efforts at political reconciliation have as their objective the consolidation of power under the ruling regime.  Thus, one presently sees accommodations being made with the forces of he past dictatorship under the pretext of hastening the healing of the nation.  What needs reconciliation and healing is not the gap between contending politicians with vested interests but the gap between their interests and the welfare of the people, between the welfare of the state bureaucracy and the welfare of the environment and local communities.   This requires the relocation of authority from the ideologies of political parties to the reality of the interdependence of life in an ecology; the re-vesting of power from the centralized bureaucracy of state, party committee, and church to persons in communities; the affirmation of the subsidiarity of parts and the ecological and spiritual solidarity of wholes; and the establishment of a local citizenship and a global polity.

It is a reconciliation that needs to find a new concept of security and management of changes in the shift from national security based on militarization and armaments to a “natural” security based on securing clean water, fertile soil, fresh air, and food.  It requires a fundamental re-orientation of power from one based on the accumulation of goods and information to one based on the capacity to make goods and information flow, where power becomes something one does not hold on to but something ope opens up to for the life process to flow in service to others.

Such a reconciliation gives witness to the great lesson of ecology that all life is interconnected and echoes the teachings of all great spiritual traditions that the governance of communities is a sacred task, whether we call it the Christian Mystical Body, the Moslem Uhma, or the Kalinga ili.

Conversion and Renewal

Christian churches are now seeking an alternative to the ruling anthropocentric model of man subduing the earth.  The new theological understanding of creation spans a spectrum of interpretations: the sacramentalist model, where everything is a manifestation of God; the stewardship model, which argues for the sustainable use of power, knowledge, and natural resources; the creative model expounded by Matthew Fox, where God is ever “birthing and nurturing creation”; the Franciscan model of kinship of “brother sun and sister moon”; and the evolutionary model of Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry.  They all have broadened the praxis of faith to include “justice, peace, and Integrity of Creation” and redefined “a spirituality that integrates our faith and our daily lives and all of Creation.”

Here at home, in defense of what we Filipinos call lupang hinirang (beloved country), the Philippine Independent Church recently announced its advocacy of a total ban on commercial logging for 25 years.  Following the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter “What Is Happening to Our Beautiful Land?” and the involvement of bishops and parish priests in blockading logging trucks on Bukidnon, picketing DENR offices in Nueva Ecija, and apprehending illegal loggers in Cagayan, there is clearly an escalation of activism among Christian churches and a growing concern for the integrity of life on earth.

A more concise expression of the revolutionary message of the Gospel has yet to be made by any church group in the Philippines, but it is important to remember that the times call for a new conversion.   In the past, conversion was brought about by mediation between people and the Divine, or between people and other people.  Today’s need is a mediation between people and nature, a mediation we call “sustainable development.”  It is a conversion that comes from revelations through nature, revelations that link polarities into higher levels of integration and renewal, revelations that affirm the integrity of God’s creation whose truth lies beyond contending ideological positions and is encompassed in an ecology.  It will come from re-remembering what our indigenous Filipinos knew about the sacredness of the land, our lupang hinirang.  It will come from re-experiencing the tradition of nurturing the Earth, our tipan sa Mahal na Ina.  It will come from responding to the biblical revelations to be stewards of the earth.  A conversion where “carrying capacity” becomes the operative term for compassion, and the patterns of community life a metaphor for wholeness.  It will require the devolution of power away from its institutional sites in the bureaucracies of state, party, and even church, and into people in the communities as the locus of the Mystical Body.   It will empower people to participate in the creative act of sustainable development by witnessing the Spirit that runs through all life.

This kind of conversion will gain its meaning from the operationalization of sustainable development strategies, programs, and projects.   It will need to find expression on the level of communities, affirming their cultural identity while cherishing diversity by upholding (1) indigenous rights to ancestral land, (2) equal rights for women, (3) social equity through agrarian, aquatic, and urban land reform, and social forestry, and (4) an ecologically sound economic system that is community-based and exports only ecological surplus or excess carrying capacities.  It will practice the sustainable utilization of natural resources, clean production technologies, and the proper recycling and disposal of waste.  It will come from governance that is based on moral values translated into public good, a democratic participatory process, a system called Pamathalaan — Pamamahalang nakatindig sa sariling taal at nakahandog kay Bathala.

In the final analysis, sustainable development depends on the personal conversion, commitments, and communion of everyone.   It needs a conversion that translates into personal choices regarding what to consume and what lifestyle to live.   In a post-modern age, it will mean making a conscious choice from among the diversity of options brought about by modernization.  Many of these options will be offered by expert systems where people have little control over processes, whether these be biogenetic systems that program the sex of our offspring or communications systems that tell us we are what we consume.  They will involve matters disembedded from space-time locality so that we no longer directly experience the consequences of our actions.  Such will be the landscape of a “post-modern revolution.”  The future will therefore need the wisdom of our historical traditions, the moral anchors of our faith, and our living communion with all people and God’s creation.

Enviroscope, Haribon Foundation Bulletin, December 1993