Category: noynoy

de quiros, aquino, edsa

conrado de quiros is sounding like a broken record these days, insisting that “edsa” &  “people power” and “good vs. evil” are the themes to work on if we want to see noynoy aquino again racing ahead of the pack like after his mom died.

and so a guy asked him daw:

“DON’T you think that transforming the choice into a moral one is a little too high for the masa to grasp? Don’t you think the better tack would be to talk about gut issues (malapit sa bituka)?”

the noted columnist’s reply is so last decade:

Not at all.

To begin with, you would not be transforming anything. You would not be raising or reducing or reshaping anything. That was exactly how the masa saw the choice from the very start, when Cory died and Noynoy Aquino announced his intention to run: the choice was a moral one. It was not a gratuitous choice between presidential candidates, between Noynoy and Villar (Villar never even figured in the equation), between what the candidates had to offer. It was a desperate choice between the GMA curse and the Cory legacy, between Noynoy (or what he represented) and Gloria (or what she is), between life and death.

It was a choice between Good and Evil.

The fact that Noynoy got more than 60 percent showed this wasn’t merely a middle-class or elite sentiment…

yes, but that was then, we were in grief, we were emotional and romantic, we wanted more of cory and ninoy (not of gma) and noynoy seemed like the next best thing.   but this is now, we have been through a lot since cory died — killer floods, the ampatuan massacre, the murder of the rh bill, and now the illegal arrest and torture of 43 ngo health workers — and some of us are looking for answers to many questions beyond who-what is good who-what is evil, according to whom?   dams are good in times of reasonable rain, but evil in times of excessive rain.   due process is good, but why is it that the law is more protective of the rights of indicted evil-doers?   and where is due process for the health workers accused of being bomb-makers?   is the military good or evil?    is contraception good or evil?   it’s all too muddled to work as a winnowing concept and yet de quiros thinks the world of this good vs. evil theme.

For a long, long time, GMA was seen as the worst leader this country has ever had after Marcos, or for some even before Marcos. Yet all that it elicited from the public was cynicism and text jokes. It was only after Cory died and Noynoy arose in her wake that the cynicism turned into a revulsion for an intolerable situation and the text jokes turned into an epic desire to change things.

For the Aquino camp, that means it’s not just enough to harp on the hell that the GMA curse is, or the heaven that the Cory legacy can be, it needs to harp on the hell that the GMA curse is and the heaven that the Cory legacy can be, at the same time. For the Aquino camp, that means that it’s not just enough to harp on Villar as the embodiment, continuation or extension of GMA (literally or in a kindred way) or Noynoy as the inheritor, keeper, and perpetuator of the Cory legacy, it needs to harp on the one as the disease and on the other as the cure.

but what is this heavenly change that cory’s legacy will bring about through noynoy?   mababaw ang kaligayahan ni de quiros.

Who cares about Noynoy’s plans for education? Simply removing the monsters whose very existence teaches the young that lying, cheating and stealing are rewarded and whistle-blowing, telling the truth, and being courageous are punished is an entire curriculum unto itself. Who cares about Noynoy’s plans for economic development? Simply stopping a reign of corruption stops poverty completely literally in that there is no mahirap where there is no korap, and completely spiritually in that nothing impoverishes a country more than an utter lack of moralidad. Who cares about Noynoy’s plans for national security? You arrest the usurpers who made the country home to desperation and insecurity, and line them up against the wall, or its legal equivalent since we don’t have the death penalty anymore, though we can always make an exception, and we will have more security than can be guaranteed by the armed forces or the insurance companies.

but we should care about a presidential candidate’s plans for education; the curriculum problem goes beyond / goes deeper, it’s not just ethical and moral but academic and pedagogic and even a problem of language.   and we should care about noynoy’s plans for economic development because de quiros exaggerates, stopping corruption will not stop poverty “completely literally”: it would only mean a little more money for health education and dole-outs for some but not nearly enough to make a sustainable difference in the lives of the many many poor, not while the oligarchy reigns and the debt policy rules.    and we should care about noynoy’s plans for national security because current policies discriminate against pinoys (think vfa) and civil society (pro-poor ngos) and do nothing to secure our environment, and our very lives, from deadly trash and irresponsible land use and destructive mining and rapid reckless deforestation.

in another column, de quiros waxes nostalgic about edsa and people power and the cory magic.

The Cory magic hasn’t lost its magic, it has simply not been used. Or the Cory magic hasn’t lost its magic, it has simply been lost on the people who held it in their hands but never knew what they had. The Cory magic is Edsa. The Cory magic is People Power. The Cory magic is the glimmer of hope piercing through the dark of despair.

I said last year that the Noynoy camp had a tremendous advantage in that the opening of the year presented two Edsas, January being Edsa II and February being Edsa I. Both resonated with good triumphing over evil, a concept GMA has been at pains to make people forget, which is why she has tried to hide the very thing—and people, who were Cory and Jaime Cardinal Sin—that brought her to power. Both stood to unleash the Cory magic in all its glory.

January came and went, and not a single statement on Edsa, or about Edsa, issued from the lips of the Aquino camp. We’re on the second week of February, and not a single statement on Edsa, or about Edsa, has issued from the lips of the Aquino camp. We’re on the fifth month after Noynoy declared his intention to run, and not much, if not not a single statement, has issued from the lips of the Aquino camp about their cries of anguish and anger from the pit of the land, about the glimmer of hope piercing through the dark of despair, about the people and their power.

The Cory magic is not something that works by itself, it works only by being used. The Cory magic is Edsa, the Cory magic is People Power, the Cory magic is people drawing the line, demanding change, commanding change, shouting at the top of their lungs, “tama na, sobra na, palitan na.” You do not invoke these things, you do not conjure these things, you do not say the magic words that unleash these things—there is no Cory magic.

ah, yes, EDSA.   de quiros makes it seem like we are back in 1986 and the choice is simple, black and white, good vs. evil, cory vs. marcos.    indeed “tama na, sobra na, palitan na” were magic words back then, but it was clear kung sino ang dapat palitan at sino ang dapat ipalit, the opposition being united behind one cory (doy did a mar upon the clamor of the people).   eh hindi naman ganyan ang sitwasyon ngayon.   ang daming choice.   maliban kay mar, walang kandidatong kusang nagbibigaydaan kay noynoy, each one thinks himself/herself as the good one vs. the evil one.   and maybe all of them are right, all in their own small ways.

if the object was were to beat gma’s annointed and everything evil she stands for in the may elections, and if the strategy was were to go by, be guided by, the EDSA tradition, then villar erap gordon gibo jamby perlas bro.eddie and jc, should have, one and all, when cory died, humbly nobly happily rallied behind noynoy as the one opposition candidate.   of course it didn’t happen because there was no clamor to that effect.   the real clamor is for CHANGE but noynoy is only promising small change — to stop corruption and streamline the system, the very system that needs changing.

truth to tell, it’s jamby madrigal and nicanor perlas who are running on platforms of CHANGE, and noynoy and the rest should be giving way to them, i.e., if we are to go by EDSA.   but the people aren’t ready, pinagiisipan pa nila, pinagtatalunan pa, kung sino ano ba talaga ang paniniwalaan, ano nga ba yung tama na, alin ba ang sobra na, paano ba papalitan, atano ang ipapalit.   clearly people power continues on “hold” while seeking to level-up beyond good vs. evil.

cowards all

it’s not only manny villar, who has been called a coward for refusing to answer questions re the c-5 extensions that allegedly benefitted his real estate empire in the millions, billions.   i don’t even think that snubbing the senate is as much a matter of cowardice as of some kinda guilt, or why won’t he take questions in the proper forum?   “is manny villar blameless? is the pope protestant?”

by cowards all i mean all five leading presidential candidates noynoy villar erap gibo and gordon, for not having the audacity, the daring, to think big and brave and to talk the radical changes that are implied in the promise of good governance.

this is not just a failure of the candidates though but a failure too of the electorate for not demanding more of these guys, which in turn is a failure of the media for inadequately informing and inspiring themselves, and the people, to ask demand clamor shout-out for changes beyond an end to corruption.   particularly changes in a system that was designed, in the first place, to benefit the few elite and NOT the manymanymanymanymany poor, as we should all see by now if only we hadn’t become too lazy to read and think and be critical, and  if only we would stop trusting in these candidates’ motherhood statements na kunyari they have the best interests of the poor at heart, because they don’t; rather they’re quite willing to play along with the same forces, inside and outside, that gloria arroyo (not to speak of past administrations, including erap, all the way back to the commonwealth) has been playing along with, to the detriment and degradation of our land and our economy, our people and our sovereignty.

they are cowards all, these leaders who don’t have the courage to stand up to the catholic church on the RH bill and sex education, never mind that 7 out of 10 filipinos want need deserve it.   cowards all who won’t stand up to the U.S. of A. on the chauvinist imperialist VFA and the IMF-WB-imposed “development plans” that over the decades have rendered the country nowhere near “developed”, rather turned us into the basket case of the ASEAN, basket-case meaning no legs of our own to stand on, no arms to work and feed ourselves with, how humiliating, how depressing.

they are cowards all.   afraid, not of going to hell if they defy the church’s stand on RH and sex education, just afraid of losing votes that the church allegedly commands.   cowards all.   afraid of espousing any kind of deep-seated change not because it’s undoable but out of fear and disinclination to defy and displease uncle sam, paano na ang campaign contributions, aray, paano na ang “special” fil-am relations, lol, how colonial the mentality pa rin.

it bears repeating what the journalist tony abaya of manilastandardtoday wrote back in august 2009 in response to rumors that noynoy might run: that what the country needs is a forward-looking president, a truly revolutionary president, someone with the attributes and visions of lee kwan yew, mahathir mohamad and gen. park chung hee:

… it is someone who has the qualities of these three foreign leaders that the Philippines badly needs in order to overcome decades of consistently poor governance, restore our badly battered self esteem, and draw for us a credible vision of what we want our country to be.

We need someone like Lee Kwan Yew who was/is personally incorruptible and at the same time was/is so conversant with economics and international relations that he could speak ex-tempore and defend his policies before an assembly of multinational CEOs and diplomats and made/make solid sense, whether they agreed/agree with him or not.

In addition we need the strong sense of nationalism of Mahathir Mohamad who in the 1980s drew a vision – Malaysia Vision 2020, that sought and seeks to transform Malaysia into a fully industrialized country by the year 2020 – that he was able to convince the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious people of Malaysia to embrace as worthy of their national loyalty, beyond the narrow appeals of their tribes and ethnic groups. No mean feat, considering the catastrophic demise of equally multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Mahathir’s nationalism also expressed itself in his readiness to fearlessly fire back at other countries, other world leaders, as well as international agencies whenever he felt they were trampling on the national self-interests of Malaysia.

We also need the single-minded determination of Gen. Park Chung Hee to transform his impoverished, resource-poor and inconsequential Republic of Korea from 1961 to 1979 (when he was assassinated) into a fully industrialized country that is now one of the ten biggest economies in the world.

… this is what the Philippines needs, a leader who can start and lead a revolution, a peaceful one, as much as possible; a violent one, if necessary.

anything less is just not good enough.  hindi na lang ako boboto.

oh and what’s this BS about villar NOT belonging to the elite just because he started out poor, unlike noynoy and gibo?   c’mon, rene azurin, you can do better than that.   by any reckoning, villar and the tsinoy taipans who all started out poor are very much a part of today’s elite, the irresponsible filipino elite, that wittingly or unwittingly collaborates with foreign powers, keeping the masses poor and marginalized.

ninoy’s LP would have welcomed satur & liza

i’m not crazy about manny villar but he scores pogi points (with me anyway) for welcoming leftist lawmakers satur ocampo and liza masa as senatorial candidates of the nacionalista party.   this, even if villar knows (i’m sure) that the NP wasn’t satur’s and liza’s first choice, or even second, more like a last resort, and only after much ideological soulsearching re the bongbong marcos connection.   read jojo robles’s Missing out on history, referring to, who else, the LP’s noynoy aquino.

The latest significant political event is the decision of leftist lawmakers Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza to go mainstream by joining an established party in their historic run for the Senate, after serving three terms in the House as party-list representatives. Of secondary importance is the decision of the Liberal Party of Noynoy Aquino not to take in the two, allegedly because of the demands made by various leftist groups to distribute the land on which the Aquino family’s Hacienda Luisita stands to the farmers who work its fields.

… Villar’s NP was not the only party that was in talks to include Ocampo and Maza in their Senate lineups. Both Chiz Escudero’s Nationalist People’s Coalition (whom Ocampo and Maza supported early on) and the LP (when Mar Roxas was still its standard-bearer) had also wanted the two to become part of their own slates.

When they filed their certificates of candidacy, in fact, both Ocampo and Maza indicated their party affiliation as “independent.” Both said at the time that they were still undecided about which party to join, and that they were still in talks with leaders of these mainstream political groups regarding the compatibility of their respective platforms and other issues.

Of course, the virtual breakup of the NPC ticket with the withdrawal of Escudero from the presidential race and his resignation from the party (plus the decision of Loren Legarda to run as Villar’s running mate) effectively ended talks between the two prominent leftists and the coalition founded by tycoon Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco. Villar and his group eventually filed their certificates, but left two slots vacant for Ocampo and Maza.

As for the two leftists’ plans of joining the LP ticket, that was decided during a meeting last month in Makati between them and party leaders Aquino, Franklin Drilon and Florencio Abad, among others. During that meeting, according to Ocampo, a “relaxed” Aquino declared his displeasure over the leftists’ efforts to have the land that his family owns distributed to the farmers there.

Over dinner, Aquino recalled a protest action staged several years ago by leftist groups who wanted the Luisita land given to the farmers outside the house of his mother, Cory.Noynoy apparently still harbored a grudge against the leftist organizations that have been blaming Mrs. Aquino for exempting her family’s plantation from her showcase land reform program and the death of militants during the Mendiola massacre outside Malacañang early in her term and at the plantation itself.

In a media forum shortly after the meeting, Ocampo recounted that he advised Aquino not to take the Luisita issue personally, since it had been festering even before he was born. However, Ocampo stressed that if Noynoy Aquino also became president, he would have the obligation to resolve the problems at the hacienda, which was “corporatized” through a stock distribution program instead of being divided among its tenant-farmers.

* * *

Ocampo, however, said that the Cojuangco family plantation was not the only stumbling block to their entry into the LP senatorial slate. They also noticed that Aquino and the other LP leaders did not seem too interested in taking in them in, allegedly because of the vast number of candidates who wanted to join Noynoy’s slate and the fact that decision of who gets in or not was not solely the standard-bearer’s to make.

“[Aquino] was silent about whether we would be included among those they would consider. There was nothing categorical like that. There was no statement that we could be considered,” Ocampo told reporters at the Serye forum. Instead, according to Ocampo, what they were told was that the applicants for the remaining slots in the slate were already too numerous as it was.

“They said there were many falling in line, more than double the number of slots, and there were special groups lobbying to be accommodated,” Ocampo recalled. Apparently, the LP had already found its “token leftist” in Rep. Risa Hontiveros of Akbayan, another party-list group that has broken away with Ocampo’s Bayan Muna, Maza’s Gabriela and the other left-leaning organizations that have gone “aboveground” in the House.

… Yesterday, in announcing the first-ever endorsement by the country’s major leftist groups of a presidential and vice-presidential tandem, Ocampo called the partnership a “mutual adoption” of platforms. Makabayan, he said, wil adopt the NP’s platform while the NP also agrees to accept Makabayan’s program of government.

… Of course, this is not really the first time that left-leaning organizations have attempted to barge into the elitist old boys’ club that the Senate is sometimes known to be since the ouster of Marcos. In the 1987 senatorial elections, the Left fielded an entire Senate ticket under the Partido ng Bayan coalition, but none of its candidates won.

What’s significant is that the Left is now attempting to win in the Senate through a “traditional” party like the NP, after shopping around for suitable groups among the current opposition field. This time around, after their long experience of harnessing the party-list system, the leftists seem to believe that they’re finally ready for political prime time.

It’s unfortunate that Noynoy Aquino and his traditionally bourgeois collection of yellow-clad supporters may have missed out on this major political development. And to think that he’s supposed to be the candidate who’s hell-bent on changing the status quo.

and, really, this antipathy towards the left is soooo NOT ninoy.   read The Filipino as Dissident from ninoy’s Testament from a Prison Cell.   is noynoy in denial about ninoy’s connection with joma sison and ka dante?   if ninoy were alive he wouldn’t think twice about having satur and liza run for the senate as LPs.   RAs and RJs welcome.   mar roxas, before he slid down, was on the right track.

noynoy, etta, luisita

read this open letter by akbayan’s etta rosales to for senator benigno aquino 3rd in the manila times today but can’t find it in the online edition.   googled it instead and found  ellen tordesillas‘ blog post.

Dear Noynoy,

I write you as friend and former colleague in Congress re Hacienda Luisita, an issue that involves not just your family and the farmers of Tarlac but, of larger import, the issue of land and the crisis of food production threatened by climate change. I make this an open letter to include in our conversation the people who have clamored for you to run for president.

November 16 marks the day when seven farmers of Tarlac were killed initially and scores injuredby security forces that attacked protesting farmers pressing to open the gates of the Hacienda. It is therefore no surprise that the issue has surfaced in a broadsheet and will continue to be the subject of media reports to get your position on the matter.

The following points may be helpful for us to consider.

We are all committed to seeking a peaceful and just solution to the issue of Hacienda Luisita farmers. This is in line with the spirit of social justicedefined by international law on human rights, the 1987 Charter and tenets of the newly passed CARPER law (although some of its provisions remain controversial, as they represent views from recalcitrant landed interests).

Perhaps we can address specific issues on the ground and resolve them from a rights-based perspective, the underpinnings of governance that ensures government for all and not just for a few.

One, while you may not have been aware, it is true that Hacienda Luisita Inc. issued a letter stating that all occupants must vacate the land end-October. This triggered strong emotions from farmers who had occupied the land as a matter of survival, which occupation followed the paralysis of organized production with the tragic killings of November 16 and shortly after (a total of fourteen farm workers were killed).

Two, it is equally true that some of the occupying farm workers did rent out the land they occupiedto those who were financially capable of using the land for crops they wanted to plant. It must have been a matter of survival – they had nothing to eat, they had zero income, they had no capital for production. Renting out was a way of making both ends meet while the land reform question remains pending. One can readily conclude that it mattered less to the farmers that the renters were insiders or outsiders, farm workers or not. To provide food and shelter for the family was paramount.

Three, the issue of Stock Distribution Option (SDO) as an agrarian reform scheme precedes CARPER; it was in Section 31 of the original CARP. We now have to deal with the new law.

Four, SDO likewise preceded your run for the presidency; you inherited a problem that needs to be resolved peacefully but with dispatch for the common good. This is especially urgent in the light of the emerging food crisis where climate change has affected not just Philippine rice fields but also fields from Vietnam and Taiwan, traditional sources of imported rice.

Five, when farmers lack capital to produce crops, they will not hesitate to reach out to outsiders to rent their lands. Sending notices to the farmers to rid them of non-SDO members does not alleviate the hardship. It merely exposes the problem of the dearth of capital and support services.

Six, the only guarantee that support services can be provided the farm workers is after the land has been fully and completely awarded to them by the DAR. And this is at least a possibility under the CARPER framework.

Seven, AKBAYAN is committed to the call for land redistribution in Hacienda Luisita and we hope that our current alliance with the Liberal Party will hasten and facilitate the enforcement of this call. We look forward to a meaningful and long-term solution to Hacienda Luisita anchored on social justice, human rights and an ecology-based system for sustainable development.

Your friend as always,

Etta P. Rosales
AKBAYAN Chair Emeritus