angelo reyes: selective memory

THE POVERTY OF WORDS
Theodore Te

Listening to the public hearing called by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to investigate the toxic deal entered into by the Ombudsman and the Special Prosecutor with former AFP Comptroller Carlos F. Garcia, I realized the poverty of the English language in expressing the sense of anger, outrage, and disbelief that I felt while listening to Angelo Reyes, former AFP Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense, and a former comptroller Jacinto Ligot publicly claiming convenient memory loss in relation to charges that Reyes and other AFP Chiefs of Staff received retirement money running to as high as Fifty Million Pesos and monthly stipends of about Five Million Pesos.

“Angry”, “Enraged” and “Appalled” fail to scratch the surface in describing the emotions running through me as I listened to a public airing of dirty linen in the AFP hierarchy by its former budget director. There were no words then and there are none now, at least in the English language, to describe the anger, the rage, the utter sense of disbelief at the moral depravity of these “officers and gentlemen” in their cavalier treatment of people’s funds.

Handing out the people’s money to Generals to welcome them into the fold or send them off into yet another cushy job was apparently a way of life for them, and the monies that they handed out were not petty cash. These ran into the tens of millions, and not for one occasion but were given monthly! In what government manual these comptrollers saw the justification for being able to hand out money like that I will never know; I work for the government and I have yet to see a government manual that will allow me to hand out the people’s money like it was a personal expense account.

Never mind that the money that was being handed out could have been used for soldiers’ welfare; never mind that it could have gone to basic, minimum, and much needed protective gear and equipment like combat boots and field rations; never mind that it could have gone to housing, let alone better housing; never mind that it could have gone to better use for our soldiers in the field.

Mind only that the money lined the pockets of those few, those exalted, those influential, those connected enough to make it to the top tier of the AFP hierarchy; mind only that they think they are “entitled” to this money because they have stars on their epaulets while our soldiers gaze at the stars in open battle fields wondering when the wars will end; mind only that even as their pockets, wallets and bank accounts are filled to bursting with these amounts that they conveniently forget receiving such amounts.

The King’s (or Queen’s) English is such a beautiful language, yet on this occasion I find it so poor, so mendicant, so totally insufficient and inadequate to express what I, and I am certain many others, feel while listening to an account of plunder that would stir even the most jaded of hearts to anger.

Filipino is a much more beautiful language. It conveys feelings, emotions, passions and desires with greater profundity than English. Reflecting on how I felt, I thought that perhaps nakakagalit, nakakapoot, nakakapanlumo could better capture what was stirred in me by the revelations at the hearing yesterday.

I do not profess expertise in either English or Filipino and thus may correctly, under these circumstances, profess to be a “man of few words.”

And so I sit here, trying to conjure up words like nakakagalit, nakakapoot, nakakapanlumo to express how I feel more profoundly than being “angry”, “enraged” or “appalled”; and the realization strikes me that while these filipino words indeed scratch the surface, they nonetheless fail miserably at conveying the depth of anger of a soul reduced to simmering silence by the stark poverty of words.

“big bad blogger”

Jagged Jaded Journalist and the Big Bad Blogger
Danilo Araña Arao

On a slow news day (Sunday), a journalist opts to write about an irresponsible blogger who allegedly conspired with a public relations firm to extort money from a restaurant owner.

It would have been a good story, except for three things: (1) No names were given; (2) minimal details were given on the circumstances behind the restaurant owner’s allegations; and, to make matters worse, (3) the author used only one source (i.e., the restaurant owner named Georgia) in writing her article.

In an article “Please Don’t Give Blogging a Bad Name” published in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine last January 23, journalist Margaux Salcedo interviewed an anonymous female restaurant owner who fell victim to a so-called Big Bad Blogger (BBB) and an unnamed public relations (PR) firm that offered to make BBB stop writing negative reviews about her restaurant “for a price.” The full text is available online at http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/sim/sim/view/20110122-315972/Please-Dont-Give-Blogging-a-Bad-Name.

Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t waste your precious time by calling your attention to an article which is better off ignoring. But the reactions of many bloggers on Salcedo’s article prompt me to give my two cents on the issue as there are angles that need to be discussed in the context of standards of responsible writing.

Bloggers have every reason to demand that Salcedo name names and not hide characters behind catchy aliases like BBB. If divulging the identity of the blogger and PR firm is impossible, then it is the responsibility of the journalist to explain why this is so.

At this point, I only need to briefly analyze the form and content to make better sense of the article’s shortcomings. In terms of content, the article provides very limited information and context. As regards the article’s form, Salcedo’s diction needs to be analyzed: For example, the use of the phrase “big bad blogger” gives the impression that the blogger in question is indeed being paid by a PR firm that, in turn, allegedly tries to coerce the restaurant owner to give money.

Salcedo is actually not sure of the connection between BBB and the PR firm. What more can we make of this paragraph written by Salcedo which is full of speculation? “Maybe Georgia is overreacting to a negative review. Maybe The Firm was only claiming to have relations with Big Bad Blogger for their own sinister purposes, unbeknownst to Big Bad Blogger. Or maybe the suspicions are true and Big Bad Blogger bows to the highest bidder. Whatever the case, one thing’s for sure: Georgia is now afraid of the blogging community. And this fear resonates among other restaurateurs who have had the same experience.”

In reading Salcedo’s article, “one thing’s for sure” (to borrow her words): Her uncertainty is due to lack of in-depth research as she failed to get the side of BBB and the concerned PR firm. Even if the journalistic output is packaged as a column article (Menu) in the Sunday magazine, it must be stressed that columnists need to share opinions based on research, particularly multiple sourcing.

A single-sourced article like Salcedo’s, not surprisingly, presents only one side of the story, important details of which are even wanting. There was no effort, for example to get the circumstances behind the restaurant owner’s reaction to the alleged negative review written by BBB.

Unlike some bloggers who argue that the article puts blogging (especially food blogging) in a bad light, I would rather reserve my judgment until more details are provided. While I share their assertion there are indeed irresponsible bloggers in our midst, I don’t think a badly-researched journalistic article like Salcedo’s serves as evidence of this.

The article mainly serves to titillate rather than inform, which can be perceived as “jagged” in the sense that it is of rough quality (or, simply put, a rough draft that should have been improved by meticulous researching and rewriting). One cannot be blamed if Salcedo is also described as “jaded” because of perceived exhaustion to unearth significant data.

Indeed, it is the jagged, jaded journalist who created the big bad blogger on a supposedly slow news day. The basic challenge for bloggers and other concerned readers is to objectively criticize it and not engage in subjective, knee-jerk accusations that do nothing in raising discourse to a higher level.

EDSA 2 as a scripted event

Raul Pangalangan

YESTERDAY, THE 10th anniversary of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s oath-taking at EDSA came and went virtually unnoticed.

I’m not fond of conspiracy theories to explain historical events. So when I say that EDSA 2 was deliberately engineered, all I mean is that though the public outrage was genuine and not staged or faked, it was fostered by events that were deliberately calculated to provoke such outpouring of indignation.

Consider this. Had the impeachment trial been allowed to take its course, it was clear that—given the political alignments in the Senate then—President Joseph Estrada would have remained in power. The constitutional threshold of two-thirds of the senators needed to convict Erap was quite formidable; in other words, assuming a full Senate line-up of 24 senators, a minority of nine votes can effectively veto an impeachment. Erap knew that already in November 2000 when he gave his allies in Congress the go-signal to send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. Let the case go to trial, let the impeachment charges be heard fully, and let Erap be acquitted in a proper proceeding. That way, Erap remains in power completely in accordance with law. Stated otherwise, once Erap is acquitted, it will be too late to oust him through People Power.

In order to unseat Erap, it was therefore imperative not to let the trial be completed. People Power must take place before the impeachment court adjourns. In other words, the anti-Erap forces desperately needed a trigger to abort the trial and shift the arena from the proverbial court of law to the court of public opinion. Providentially for them, the pro-Erap senators furnished that trigger on a silver platter: the now famous “second envelope” that 11 senators voted to suppress. The evidence was supposed to show that Erap was the owner of the questionable “Jose Velarde” bank account. (Ironically, when the envelope was eventually opened, its owner was not Erap.)

This was the perfect moment to incite rebellion. One, it was a legal issue clothed with moral overtones. The pro-Erap Senators insisted on bank secrecy laws. The anti-Erap senators deprecated that as mere legal technicality (remember the term “legal gobbledygook”?) that shouldn’t hinder the search for the truth. Two, this logic, once embraced by the public, is the same logic by which they can countenance another EDSA. In other words, if you can sell this idea to the public, namely, that moral imperatives trump legal niceties, then you have laid the rational groundwork for a repeat of People Power that relies precisely on that reasoning.And three, appealing to the pragmatic side of the Pinoy, if Erap can get 11 senators to suppress the second envelope, that is a preview of how they will vote at the end of the trial. Why wait till then when you already know how they will vote?

There was a second reason it was important to provoke EDSA 2 when it happened.  If the EDSA logic was indispensable that we must read the rules liberally so that the law will not stand in the way of the truth, that logic would soon begin working in Erap’s favor by the next stage of the trial. That logic worked against Erap only during the first stage of the proceedings, namely, the presentation of evidence by the prosecution. The next stage would have been the presentation of evidence by the defense, which should have transpired sometime around February 2001. All of a sudden it would be Erap’s turn to claim to cast off technicality so that he can tell his story. The shoe is then on the other foot. That would’ve placed the Erap haters in a moral quandary when Erap takes his turn to invoke all the lofty principles invoked by the prosecution. In other words, if as I assume EDSA was a rational event, the flip-flopping between rules and truth-seeking will actually expose the anti-Erap crowd’s partisan side that was hidden in their lofty rhetoric of accountability and anticorruption.

Foreign observers couldn’t explain EDSA 2. Was it impatience on our part, they asked? But we are otherwise a patient people, they said. Was it part of a morality tale? Probably, they answered, given the presence of Cory Aquino and Cardinal Sin. But the “more disturbing, albeit most plausible, theory … involves a conspiracy. …. Was this a revolution of the Filipino people-or of a few hundred thousand Filipinos prompted by a few hundred powerful individuals?”

In May 2001, I noted in the Supreme Court Centenary Lecture Series the “constitutionalawkwardness of EDSA 2” that “had barely, pushed People Power within the pale of constitutional legitimacy.” Commentators abroad were more condemnatory: It was either “mob rule or mob rule as a cover for a well-planned coup [b]ut either way, it’s not democracy.’’ Others agonized that the end, namely, the restoration of public accountability—was betrayed by the means, namely, the weakening of legal institutions. That seemed like a Faustian bargain even then, and much worse today. Would the “hooting throng” have gathered at EDSA 2 had they known what Arroyo would wreak upon our country?

cha-cha crazy

there they go again, chattering about charter change, as if it were even do-able, what a waste of time.   read fr. joaquin bernas’s Finally a new Constitution in 2011?

In my view, one major obstacle to attempts to revise the 1987 Constitution is structural. It has a built-in unintended obstacle to change. And I do not know how this can be overcome this year.

Inmany respects the 1987 Constitution consists of significant borrowings from the 1935 Constitution. Unfortunately, however, the provision on the amendatory process is a carbon copy of the provision in the 1973 Constitution. Year after year since 1987 this has been the major obstacle to change. Why so?

The text says: “Any amendment to, or revision of, this Constitution may be proposed by: (1) The Congress, upon a vote of three-fourths of all its Members; or (2) a constitutional convention. . . . The Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of all its Members, call a constitutional convention, or by a majority vote of all its Members, submit to the electorate the question of calling such a convention.”

The provision is one formulated for a unicameral legislative body but it is now meant to work for a bicameral Congress. This was not a tactical product designed by an evil genius. It is merely the result of oversight. But the oversight has spawned major problems.

First, must Senate and Housecome together in joint session before they can do anything that can lead to charter change? The 1935 Constitution was very clear on this question: Congress could not begin to work on constitutional change unless they first came together in joint session. The 1987 Constitution is non-committal.

Second, since the text of the Constitution is not clear about requiring a joint session, can Congress work on constitutional change analogously to the way it works on ordinary legislation, that is where they are and as they are? I have always maintained that Congress can, but this is by no means a settled matter. There are those who believe that the importance of Charter change demands a joint session.

Third, should Congress decide to come together in joint session, must Senate and House vote separately or may they vote jointly? The 1935 Constitution was very clear on the need for separate voting; the present Constitution is silent about this. But I am sure that the Senate will not agree to a joint voting where their number can be buried in an avalanche of House votes, an avalanche of votes which can mean the abolition of the Senate! How will this issue be settled? Howsoever the matter might be settled by agreement of the majority of both houses, someone in the minority will run to the Supreme Court to challenge the decision.

What about a constitutional convention? But the business of calling a constitutional convention is fraught with the same problems. Should Congress choose to call a constitutional convention, must the two houses be in joint session? And if in joint session, should they vote separately?

Briefly, constitutional change in 2011 or later can happen only if the members of Congress can agree to work in harmony and if the Supreme Court will not throw a monkey wrench on how Congress decides to do it. Can the members of Congress rise above self-interest and work together harmoniously? Or are we waiting for an extra-constitutional change?

i like it, this obstacle not designed by some evil genius, rather an oversight of cory’s constitutional commission.   it means that charter change can happen only if and when our legislators get their act together, and that’s just so NOT in any one’s agenda.

extra-constitutional change?   another edsa, he means?   but a successful edsa, a successful revolutionary government, one that brings about deep-seated change, is soooo not in the stars, not until a true leader rises, one in the mold of rizal or bonifacio but wise to the ways of the world today and highly-biased for the filipino.