When Gina Lopez burst on the scene like some sort of environmental berserker, quite a few people applauded her passion and New Age enthusiasm. Keen watchers of the insider game in government viewed it as an interesting example of good cop, bad cop. A zealot can always be neutralized by the bureaucracy, as she quickly found out when the Executive Secretary, in typical bureaucratic style, blandly put the implementation of some of her decisions on hold.
DITCHAY ROXAS: I just heard that Gina Lopez was not confirmed this morning. That very slight glimmer of light at the end of this fucking dark tunnel has just been diminished even further. Yes she is not perfect. Yes she is an oligarch and bourgeois as hell. Yes she isn’t technical nor legalistic. Yes she is an imperfect human being like all the rest of us but goddamn it she carries a torch for the country and our people, a torch of hope and light that glows from a distance and brightens the horizon. We live in a world that is crumbling, an environment that is dying, and one of the very few in government who has the guts, the heart and the vision to do something about it gets tossed out like rotten fruit by maggots eating at the flesh of our gangrenous society. May they wallow in their stinking rottenness!!!
c’mon, mr. president! you promised. a war on drugs. and. on. mining. pinaasa mo kami, sir!
Carol Pagaduan-Araullo
On Wednesday, three progressive Cabinet members — Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Gina Lopez, Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo, and Agrarian Reform Secretary Rafael Mariano — will be up for confirmation by the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA).
They have been twice bypassed by the CA and subsequently twice reappointed in the interim by President Rodrigo Duterte. But because the current CA has approved a rule that a Cabinet member may only be bypassed three times after which the CA will have to reject or confirm the concerned official, it appears that Wednesday will be the final showdown.
The upside to having a President like Rodrigo Duterte is that we are finally weeding out the elitists among us. And I don’t mean those who think that Duterte is so bastos, is so not a statesman, is so not President-material because not disente. No, this is beyond just some good ol’ Liberal Party campaign elitism. This is its more evil, less apologetic, more insidious twin. Elitists who even imagine themselves to be pro-poor, because they feel for them and wish to empower them, because they speak of the plight of the poor and the inequality in society.