Opinion Today May 18, 2002

This is to comment on the CODE-NGO / PEACe bonds issue and Today’s bad news (May 7 issue, frontpage) that the “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is “alsopossible for other NGOs.”

The “good fortune” of CODE-NGO is as much about the Camacho connection and the Arroyo government’s debtor mentality (so what else is new) as it is about CODE-NGO and whether it deserves to call itself an NGO in the light of its strikingly profitable relationship with government.

What’s in a name? In this case, plenty. Historically and ideologically, “non-governmental” in NGO means precisely that: not governmental, or distinct / different from government, and, even, critical of government (from Macapagal to Arroyo) for economic policies and development programs that over the decades have not brought the promised prosperity but instead have wrought widespread and worsening poverty along with environmental decay.

NGOs did not just crop up with the Aquino administration, as many columnists and the new breed of NGOs such as CODE-NGO seem to think. NGOs have been around since the martial law period when they were known as cause-oriented groups. Their leaders and members were mostly activists and oppositionists who, rather than collaborate with the dictator, went underground, but not to jointhe armed revolution and die for Joma Sison, rather, to do grassroots work, stepping in to deliver basic services where government was absent or to compensate for failed development programs, and help ease rising poverty in the countryside.

Unlike social workers of the fifties and sixties who were into dole-outs (that is, the immediate if short-term relief of food, water, clothing, and health needs of poor communities), cause-oriented groups of the seventies (who were either hippies or activists in the sixties) were into long-term goals – they did not want just to dole out fish, as a Chinese sage advised, they wanted to teach people how to fish – and they were guided by ecological principles, in step with the global movement for environmental protection.

Also, Filipino NGOs tried to get to the root of the problem of poverty. How can a country so rich in natural resources fail to feed, shelter, and nurture its people? Research by thinktanks revealed that the rising poverty (20 million “poorest of the poor” then, 40 million now) was / is the consequence of years, decades, of rampant logging and dynamite fishing, mining and quarrying – among other destructive commercial operations sanctioned by the government for the benefit of the local elite and multinational corporations – that continue to destroy our archipelago’s ecological systems and deprive increasing millions of kaingin farmers and fisherfolk and indigenous tribes of vital resources and life-support systems.

Do-gooders indeed, NGOs started out spending their own money (and later the money of like-minded donor friends and foundations) for the cause of the poor. Without thought of personal monetary gain, NGOs shelled out for consciousness-raising workshops, community organizing, networking, and livelihood projects meant to empower people in communities to become the stewards of their own environment and the engines of their own development. The peaceful revolution of 1986 which saw the ouster of the martial law government was a combined effort of these activists in “rainbow coalition” with leftists and Coryistas. At least this is what I gathered from the sidelines in1984 to 2001, as editor of the journals and papers of the late environmentalist and original NGO volunteer Maximo “Junie” Kalaw on NGOs and the movement for sustainable development.

With the ousting of the dictator in 1986 and the rise of environmental criteria in the public realm, NGOs multiplied even more rapidly, as did NGO funding from many international aid groups eager to help the fledgling Aquino administration. Unfortunately, much of the money came with strings attached. Too soon Kalaw was saying no to millions of dollars in U.S. aid. and being accused of blocking development.

The particular aid package had two components: $20 million for NGO environmental projects, and $75 million for government to create a National Resource Management Program that would more efficiently open up the forestry sector to more foreign investors. For Kalaw, going along with the two-handed scheme would have meant that Haribon Foundation (the first and largest environmental NGO) and Green-Forum Philippines (the largest umbrella organization of NGOs in the eighties), both of which he led, not only would be condoning government’s unsustainable development strategies; worse, it would mean changing identity from a purely non-government to a government organization (GO) or, at best, NGO ng GO, or NGONGO, how freaky.

The same conflicted situation obtains in the case of CODE-NGO’s Peace bonds. Certainly it was a remarkably creative capitalist coup, the way Marissa Camacho et al, using their connections, managed to exploit the government treasury and the banking system to make more than a billion pesos out of thin air for poverty alleviation. But there is nothing heroic or evolutionary about it because it changes nothing in the long-term. Bottom line is, it is just another two-handed scheme of the rich – helping the poor and, at the same time, shafting them by helping get government even more deeply into debt that eventually the poor will be made to pay. Fact is, the rich in this country, including the church, have long been mired in (as Kalaw put it) “the internal contradiction of donating to the poor with one hand and contributing to their poverty with the other.”

But had the intrepid Camacho spared government and fixed her sights instead on the ruling class (her own class) for funding – had she worked on the richest of the rich families, the oligarchy that pushes government around and controls the country’s resources – now THAT would have been really radical. And had she managed to convincethem, NGO-style (like, you know, consciousness-raising), that there is simply no two ways about it: one way or another, it’s time to share the wealth, if not by paying higher wages and investing in the domestic economy, at the very least by coughing up substantial sums to NGOs for poverty alleviation (also known as damage control), now THAT would have been awesome and she would deserve canonization – Santa Marissa, patron saint of NGO volunteers, heroine of the poor, mabuhay ka!

Unfortunately it’s not going to happen. Not while the civil society movement is disparaged and dismissed as “uncivil” and/or “evil” by Erap forces. And surely not until the NGOs that lead the civil society movement get their act together and get back not only on the non-government but on the non-profit non-elitist track.

October 9, 1999 Inquirer

I was looking for a winner who would not sell out to foreign interests and, in 1998, Joseph Estrada was not only the most likely to win the presidential elections, he also seemed to be the least likely to sell out, going by his vehement No! in 1991 to the continuedpresence of US military bases and US intervention in our economic affairs and, later, his avowed love for the masses.

I thought the No! was rooted in some sense of history and the slogan “Erap para sa mahirap” came from a real and informed bias for the poor. I thought that even if later it were all that could be said of him, it would be good enough, mabuhay si Erap! I even thought his sanggano ways were made to order, perfect for staring down the Americans and bullying them into giving us better terms all around.

Instead, horrors! it’s us, the nation, that he’s bullying around, ramming the VFA down our throats last May, and now fast-tracking changes in the 1987 Constitution that would remove what little protection we have against foreign predators, all in aid of globalization. It’s the mother of all sell-outs and our heroes must be turning in their graves.

My only consuelo (de bobo) is that, had I not voted for Erap, he would have won anyway. Given his popularity with the masses, there was no avoiding or preventing an Erap presidency.

I suppose we are meant to suffer this chapter in our history (the economic and political and intellectual pits) seeing as it is only consistent with, and the logical outcome of, recent chapters that saw the nation opting for a professional housewife, and then a professional soldier, for President, never mind that she was a political neophyte, never mind that he was an intellectual lightweight, we didn’t want anyone too brilliant and sophisticated, not another Marcos for sure.

Well, now we have a professional actor, an intellectual featherweight, reciting a globalist script, which tells us that he is not pala the man of the masses he made / makes himself out to be (artista talaga) but a man for the rich, that is, the business community here and the business cartels abroad.

Times have changed, the President says, since the early nineties when he said no to the US bases — then, we needed to get the Americans out; now, we need to get them (and other foreign investors) back in. It’s the only way, he says, of raising the money for the infrastructure that we need to be globally competitive, which, he promises, would redound to the benefit not of the rich but of the poor.

Unfortunately, the promise is basedon the myth that the gains that free trade and globalization would bring to the business community would trickle down to the masses and improve the quality of their lives. In fact, the trickle-down theory has long been discredited. After four decades of foreign investors and their export-oriented “development plans,” the country has little to show for it other than a few million rich and relatively rich vs. 50 million poor people and a ravaged environment.

Contrary to Erap’s propaganda, Charter change and globalization will not usher in a new economic order that would alleviate poverty by distributing wealth more equitably. It would only (if more intensively and easily) continue with the same economic order, the one dictated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the US government and its cronies (American transnational corporations), that has been exploiting our natural and human resources all these years for the profit of a privileged minority while marginalizing the majority of Filipinos.

What’s a million or so jobs that globalization might bring when millions and millions of Filipinos are unemployed and under-employed and the population ever increasing? What’s so great about high-tech infrastructure when it’s obvious that only the rich (and some of the middle-class) minority would have any use for most of it?

Anyone who reads, anyone who has a sense of the larger picture, particularly of globalization as an imperialist scheme to keep the United States and the European Community rich and powerful and (countries like) the Philippines poor and beholden, cannot but snort and fume at the President’s agenda and propaganda — twisting things around (just like Marcos used to do) and dismissing anti-chachasectors as either communists or anti-poor.

So what’s Erap really up to, what’s the “hidden agenda”? Many suspect that he’s just paying off political debts, fulfilling promises he made to the businessmen here and abroad who financed his campaign and who would profit from an open economy. As many suspect that he’s after the removal of term limits, which would allow him (or his chosen few) and his multi-extended family to run again and again and again for spurious re-election a la Marcos, with and for the perpetual support of the biggest imperialist of all time, supercop America.

Erap denies it all, of course: the VFA was a done deal, thanks to FVR, and he has no interest in a second term, the job is too stressful. If true, it might also explain why he is in such a desperate rush to open up (down) the economy — at least then, there would be some growth, never mind how limited and skewed in favor of the rich and famous, during his watch. At least he would have something to show for his six years in office, which could, in the final analysis, be all he’s after – to exit in a blaze of glory, never mind who gets burned.

Anything for a rave review. Artista lang kasi.

Inquirer Commentary 25 July 1998

Filipinos are a superstitious people. We see meaningful relationships between apparently unconnected events that happen to occur at the same time or in close sequence: the number 13 and the Estrada presidency, the chandelier and the inaugural, the chandelier and the number 13. It comes from an intuitive grasp of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity which, going beyond science (cause-and-effect), “takes the coincidence of eventsin space and time as meaning something more than mere chance” and which is the very principle underlying the use of the I Ching and astrology (among other occult arts) in making sense of “the essential situation prevailing” for any one person or group at any moment in time.

This is why we continue to be disturbed by the story of a Palace chandelier crashing to the floor just a few seconds after President Estrada passed beneath it. The President had just taken his oath that noon in Barasoain. He had just arrived in Malacañang that afternoon and was on his way to swearing in the new Cabinet officials when the chandelier crashed. Happening as it did in the first few hours of the new administration, it changed the quality and temper not just of the rest of the day – hitherto happy and hopeful – but of the rest of the presidential term.

Clearly, a warning. If it were not an attempt on the President’s life, then a warning of danger, of sinister human forces at play. If an accident, then of forces less menacing but quite as startling and disturbing. The message is, expect the unexpected, a pattern has been set.

The National Bureau of Investigation has since declared the crash an accident caused by faulty electrical wiring, but of course we refuse to drop it. Perhaps because we’re not convinced that that 70-kilo chandelier was not more securely attached to the ceiling than by electrical cables.

Unfortunately, no photographs or videotapes of the fallen chandelier and the hole in the ceiling have been released, which makes you wonder what’s really going on. Surely there were media around, surely pictures were taken. And yet media have been (and continue to be) kind enough to desist from printing or showing them until now. Perhaps it was not an accident after all, the investigation is still ongoing, better for media to cooperate with government and not alarm the public?

Would that media had been as prudent about declaring Estrada the 13th President of the Republic – which has proved just as scary, the number 13 being associated in the minds of Catholics with the Last Supper and the subsequent betrayal of Christ by Judas.

Estrada is the 13th only if we count all the presidents starting with Aguinaldo, including Quezon and Osmeña of the Commonwealth period, and Laurel of the Japanese occupation, and continuing with Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal, Marcos, Aquino, and Ramos.

But why count Quezon and Osmeña when we were openly still a colony during their terms of office, and why Laurel when he was merely an appointee of the Japanese invaders? And if we’re going to count Aguinaldo, why not the Supremo Bonifacio? By my count, including Bonifacio and discounting Quezon et al, Estrada is the 11th president. And if we count them all, Estrada is the 14th.

Again, you wonder what the media are up to. One moment they’re playing fast and loose with numbers, sorry na lang si Erap, the next moment they’re playing down a crashed chandelier, kawawa naman si Erap? It would help if we could get our facts straight so that we know what we’re really up against; only then can we focus our energies on countering the negative vibes, whether through prayer or political advocacy.

It would also help to keep in mind that the chandelier missed Erap, which was damned lucky – sinusuwerte talaga. And that in the horoscope of June 30, high noon, the Sun, symbolizing the government, occupies the Midheaven, the highest point in the chart, which augurs well for the republic, indicating a government that has the power, against all odds, to withstand opposition and fulfill its promise of Erap para sa mahirap.

Of course, what’s lucky for the masses won’t be lucky for the privileged few who have long enjoyed the care and protection of government. As some astrologers and feng shui experts already have said, the chandelier is symbolic of the rich, and shattered lights signify shattered illusions.

It’s the rich, the people who can afford (and who like) chandeliers, who will be most affected by the radical changes that President Estrada would need to institute to lift up the impoverished masses.

It won’t be easy, as current events reflect – change never is. But if the rich could rise to the challenge of reinventing themselves for the sake of the nation, and if Erap stands fast, guided above all by considerations of the common good, he could well be right: This could truly be the greatest performance of his life.