Killers of PDSP leader NPA hit squad—NSA Gonzales

THE New People’s Army hit squad specially formed to assassinate top targets including President Arroyo, National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales and other cabinet officials may have been responsible for the ambush in San Pablo City, Laguna that killed provincial board member and city councilor Danilo Yang and his two companions last week.

Citing military and police intelligence reports, Gonzales bared this yesterday to his slain party mates’ sympathizers who attended a mass for the victims at the city cathedral while others joined a march that culminated in a program at the city plaza to condemn the killing.

The national security chief was referring to the NPA’s Special Operations Group that reports directly to the top leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

“Ako ang dapat na pinatay. Ako talaga ang gustong saktan. Ako yan e,” Gonzales said.

The national security chief vowed that the victims’ killers would be made to answer for their crime even as he stressed that “we will not stop until the brains of the killing themselves are brought to justice.”

Gonzales said Yang was killed because of his vital role in the Partido Demokratiko Sosyalista ng Pilipinas which the Malacanang official heads. Yang had been the party’s top leader in Laguna and was its new general secretary at the time of his murder. Those killed with him, former barangay captain Romulo Barcenas of Santiago 2 and his bodyguard Brando delos Santos, were also members of the party.

Yang had been in the order of battle of the NPA special operations group since 2004. Gonzales noted that other PDSP leaders, including Jesuit priest Fr. Romeo Intengan, are in the group’s hit list.

“We are high in the list of their targets because the PDSP has been very committed to fighting anti-democratic forces trying to destroy Philippine society,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales urged his party mates and Yang’s other sympathizers to put their anger at his brutal murder to constructive use “by carrying on his struggle for a society where peace reigns and where all citizens have the means to live in dignity.”

“This is the best way we can honor the heroism of our departed colleagues,” he said.

The Brgy. Bautista killing was preceded by other attempts on the life of Yang and attacks on his supporters in Laguna. On December 30 last year, three unidentified men tried to shoot dead his bodyguard in the city proper. More than a year ago, his leader in Brgy. San Gregorio was killed in her own house by unidentified assassins.

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NSA Gonzales condemns killing of PDSP leader

NATIONAL Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales yesterday condemned the killing of the second highest officer of his party, Partido Demokratiko Sosyalista ng Pilipinas general secretary Danilo Yang, by unknown assassins in Laguna Wednesday night.

Yang, also a Laguna provincial board member, was killed with two of his aides in Brgy. San Juan Bautista, San Pablo City, when five unidentified men ambushed them during a program in celebraton of the barangay fiesta. A fourth companion of the victims was wounded.

Gonzales noted that Yang was warned by army intelligence about two weeks ago of possible attempts on his life by the New People’s Army.

The PDSP leader had been in the order of battle of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the NPA since 2004 because of his vital position in the party and its efforts to educate communities on the true character and modus operandi of the communist group.

The national security chief observed that there has been a rising number of political killings like Yang’s.
Gonzales appealed to all democratic political parties and other democratic organizations in the country to join the PDSP in its fight against terrorism of all types and against politicians’ collusion with terrorist communists.

Gonzales described Yang as one of the pillars of this fight. “He has been very active in exposing the terrorist character of the CPP-NPA. He is certainly a great loss not only to the PDSP but also to this cause,” he said.

Yang, a PDSP community organizer and political officer since his youth, rose to become a board member of Laguna in 2007 after topping the election for the councilors of San Pablo City and later the provincial league of all city and municipal councilors.

Killed with Yang were PDSP members Manolo Barcenas (Brgy. Chair of Brgy. Santiago 2, San Pablo City) and Brando de los Santos (security staff).

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Danilo “Danny” R. Yang

Nasawi sina Ka. Danilo “Danny” R. Yang, Ka. Manolo Barcenas, at Ka. Brando de los Santos sa isang emboskada sa Barangay Bautista sa San Pablo City kagabi, 24 Hunyo 2009.

Si Ka. Danny Yang ay No. 1 Konsehal ng San Pablo City at Pangulo ng Councilors’ League ng Laguna. Si Ka. Manolo Barcenas ay Barangay Chair ng Barangay Santiago 2, San Pablo City. Si Ka. Brando de los Santos ay security ni Ka. Danny.

Napuruhan ang isang tumambang sa kanila, at may dalawang sugatan na ngayon ay tinutugis ng AFP at PNP.

Makabayani ang buhay nina Ka. Danny, Ka. Manolo at Ka. Brando, ganoon din ang kanilang pagyao.

Ipanalangin natin ang kanilang walang hanggang luwalhati sa piling ng Panginoong Diyos.

Ipanalangin at alalayan natin ang kanilang mga iniwang mahal sa buhay.

Itaguyod natin ang kanilang pakikibaka, hanggang sa tagumpay.

“Tandaan ninyo: malibang mahulog sa lupa amg butil ng trigo at mamatay, mananatili itong nag-iisa. Ngunit kung mamatay, ito’y mamumunga ng marami.” (Juan 12:24)

“Sa mga tapat sa iyo, Panginoon, ang buhay ay di nagwawakas, kundi nagbabago lamang; pagkasira ng tirahang makalupa ay naghihintay ang tahanang makalangit sa kabila.” (Prepasyo I para sa mga Yumao)

Danilo “Danny” R. Yang

Nasawi sina Ka. Danilo “Danny” R. Yang, Ka. Manolo Barcenas, at Ka. Brando de los Santos sa isang emboskada sa Barangay Bautista sa San Pablo City kagabi, 24 Hunyo 2009.

Si Ka. Danny Yang ay No. 1 Konsehal ng San Pablo City at Pangulo ng Councilors’ League ng Laguna. Si Ka. Manolo Barcenas ay Barangay Chair ng Barangay Santiago 2, San Pablo City. Si Ka. Brando de los Santos ay security ni Ka. Danny.

Napuruhan ang isang tumambang sa kanila, at may dalawang sugatan na ngayon ay tinutugis ng AFP at PNP.

Makabayani ang buhay nina Ka. Danny, Ka. Manolo at Ka. Brando, ganoon din ang kanilang pagyao.

Ipanalangin natin ang kanilang walang hanggang luwalhati sa piling ng Panginoong Diyos.

Ipanalangin at alalayan natin ang kanilang mga iniwang mahal sa buhay.

Itaguyod natin ang kanilang pakikibaka, hanggang sa tagumpay.

“Tandaan ninyo: malibang mahulog sa lupa amg butil ng trigo at mamatay, mananatili itong nag-iisa. Ngunit kung mamatay, ito’y mamumunga ng marami.” (Juan 12:24)

“Sa mga tapat sa iyo, Panginoon, ang buhay ay di nagwawakas, kundi nagbabago lamang; pagkasira ng tirahang makalupa ay naghihintay ang tahanang makalangit sa kabila.” (Prepasyo I para sa mga Yumao)

2010 ‘chaos’ worries national security chief

FEARS of possible election chaos in 2010 should challenge the Commission on Elections to prepare for the dire possibilities, National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales yesterday said.

Gonzales stressed that installing a credible election system and ensuring a meaningful election in 2010 are among the most urgent needs of the nation today.

He noted, however, that worries about possible poll automation breakdown are serious. The national security chief is glad that Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile has expressed this concern.

“The poll body should have back up plans. I hope that it is considering and addressing every bad scenario that can happen in 2010,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales said his own fear of failure of full automation prompted him to vigorously push for the open election system proposed by former Comelec chair Christian Monsod and information technology experts.

He noted that some modern countries have shifted backward from fully automated to semi-automated elections like OES.

Gonzales maintains that OES is not only the most practical election system and the one most fit for the nation today but also the most transparent.

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Chief Justice Puno: ‘Social volcano’ on verge of eruption

Article posted June 12, 2009 – 09:46 PM
MANILA, Philippines – Chief Justice Reynato Puno on Friday warned that the country’s “social volcano” is on the verge of eruption, and called for Filipinos to heal the wounds that divide the nation.

Puno made no mention of what those wounds were, but the Supreme Court will likely be a deciding factor in diffusing tensions caused by the burgeoning political crisis that has gripped the nation.

Opponents of the constituent assembly resolution passed by the House of Representatives
last week are expected to question before the Supreme Court any attempt to call for a plebiscite ratifying Constitutional amendments passed by the assembly.

Public anger is growing over widespread perceptions that congressional allies are maneuvering to prolong President Gloria Arroyo’s stay in power. A wide array of groups converged in Makati’s financial district last Wednesday in the biggest political demonstration this year.
________________________________________
Isang bansa na hindi sinusunod ang mga batas, isang bansa na sirang-sira ang moralidad dahil sa corruption
– Chief Justice Reynato Puno
________________________________________

Organizers have promised more to come if the House insists on pursuing Charter change through a constituent assembly when Congress opens in July.

“Nararapat na pigilin ang napipintong pagsabog ng isang social volcano sa ating bayan (We have to prevent the social volcano from erupting),” Puno said in a speech at the 111th Independence Day celebration at the foot of the Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan City.

Elsewhere in the speech, Puno compared the country itself to a volcano that was ready to explode: “Isang bansa na gaya ng isang bulkan ay tila handa nang sumabog.”

“Let us heal the land, hilumin natin ang sugat ng pagkakawatak-watak,” Puno continued. “Wag na tayong nagbabangayan, wag na tayong nagi-insultuhan, ‘wag na tayong magbabatuhan ng putik (Let us heal the wound caused by disunity. We should stop quarreling, stop insulting each other, stop mudslinging).”

Puno avoided any specifics that would indicate what his sentiments were on Charter change, but he had strong words for the corruption and law-breaking he says are rife in Philippine society.

“Isang bansa na hindi sinusunod ang mga batas, isang bansa na sirang-sira ang moralidad dahil sa corruption(A country that doesn’t follow the law, a country with broken morals because of corruption),” Puno said.

In addition to heading the third co-equal branch of government, Puno has often used his position as a pulpit to call for a moral regeneration in society, even naming public personalities who could lead a “moral force movement.” Some analysts have interpreted these statements as trial balloons for a potential run for the presidency.

Political leaders since the time of Ninoy Aquino in the Senate in the early 1970s have evoked the image of a “social volcano” as a way of calling attention to growing public unrest.

A prominent opponent of the House con-ass resolution, Akbayan Rep. Risa Hontiveros, actually beat Puno to the metaphor recently, asserting that “the social volcano that this injustice and arrogance will create will explode in their face,” referring to her pro-constituent assembly colleagues in the House.

The one occasion in the last decade when the so-called social volcano was said to have erupted was in the aftermath of former President Joseph Estrada’s arrest in 2001, when his mostly urban poor supporters marched to Malacanang and rioted during the attempt to disperse them.
- Amita Legaspi and Howie Severino, GMANews.TV

NSA Gonzales backs up Puno’s ’social volcano’ warning and ‘call for transition government’

14 June 2009

NATIONAL Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales yesterday said he agreed with Chief Justice Reynato Puno that the country is “like a volcano that is about to erupt.”

“It is good that no less than the country’s Chief Justice himself sounded off the warning about our critical national situation,” Gonzales said. Puno made the remark in his Independence Day speech at the Bonifacio Monument earlier this week.

Gonzales also supported Puno’s call for unity to save the country. He said only fundamental reforms for societal transformation can lift the country from its present state and this requires national unity.

Gonzales said he did not take Puno’s call for unity as that for the administration and the noisy segment of the opposition to come together. Instead, he believes it was a call for the entire government and key societal institutions to get their act together in saving the country.

“The call of the time is for the three major branches of government, supported by key pillars of our society like the Churches, civil society and mass movements, to agree to a transitional government respected by the armed forces,” the national security chief declared.

Gonzales said the country is like a volcano because the people have long been yearning for societal transformation that will uplift their welfare but this yearning remains unfulfilled.

Gonzales has been advocating for transitional presidency since 2003, saying only a transitional presidency can carry out the fundamental reforms the country needs to move forward. He has said he is concerned that a routine 2010 election will only perpetuate the country’s long-existing sorry state.

“Judging from our present crop of presidentiables, we will just have more of the same elite and bad politics in 2010,” he has said.

“It is time we put an end to our recurring political crisis by really pursuing societal transformation. A transition government now can start this undertaking,” Gonzales said.

According to the Malacanang official, among the fundamental reforms which a transition government should undertake are electoral reforms to truly empower the people to choose their leaders and shift in the system of governance to free the nation from very costly elections and from paralyzing stalemates among institutions and political forces.

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Authentic Change by Charlie Avila

The more we change,
the more we stay the same…
Or, should we not go for authentic change?
by Charles Avila (May 6, 2009)

Culture and Underdevelopment
More than twenty years ago an Atlantic Monthly article was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the United States. It became the subject of controversy and attention in the Philippines by its very title – “A DAMAGED CULTURE: A NEW PHILIPPINES?”
It was a time, right after Edsa I, when people thought a New Philippines had dropped down on them from heaven, or, in the very least, weren’t they now building one? The evil Marcos was out, the saintly Cory was in, and the worldwide march of democracy went on, right? The bloodless dethroning of Marcos gave Filipinos new dignity and pride and worse amnesia than they had ever had. Take away Marcos and everything would be fine, most people thought.
We plain forgot that most of the things that now seemed wrong with the economy–grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cahoots with the government — had been wrong for decades, before there was a Marcos in Malacanang.

“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. . . . Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.” The words were Ninoy Aquino’s, uttered long before Marcos’ martial rule.

Many Filipinos just didn’t like it when this article of James Fallows said that “in a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order.”
Of course he did not deny that Edsa’s four days of courage “demonstrated a brave, national-minded spirit”, and “revealed the country’s spiritual essence.” But to him, nonetheless, the episode seemed “an exception, even an aberration.”

What seemed deeper was the damaged culture that led to a “tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local elite’s willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers”, old and new — all reflecting a feeble sense of national identity and a contempt for the common good.

By contrast, the countries that surround the Philippines became the world’s most famous showcases for the impact of culture on economic development. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore–all short on natural resources, but all had inched their way up through hard study and hard work. The Philippines, for its part, illustrated the contrary: that culture could make a naturally rich country poor.

Twenty Years Later
Liberal Democracy returned to the Philippines, in a big way. As if to make up for all the years when they could not vote, Filipinos got into one election after another and prepared for yet another almost nonstop. Election disputes returned as well and long recounts dragged on. Today, into the third year of a three-year term, some congressmen may yet be lucky to be able to take their seats in the House of Representatives. And there is no lack of politicians and columnists who still cannot accept that the incumbent President actually won in 2004.
Many a friend of yours may have asked you lately: what’s coming up? Exactly a year before the next E-Day and it already seems like elections 2010 may go the way of 1986 – an occasion and not necessarily the cause of regime change. For starters, we can’t even agree on how we will count the votes a year from now.
The Marcos years spanned twenty years of our history: 1966-1986. Before that era we had, right after independence, twenty years of elite or liberal democracy, 1946 – 1966: call them now “the pre-Marcos years” – as there is likewise every reason to view the twenty or more after Edsa, from 1986 to the present, quite simply as “the post-Marcos years” – a phase when we were somehow struggling to avoid the absolutely wrong path to development without ever finding the right one. Indeed, these years cannot be seriously dubbed as the Aquino or the Ramos or the Estrada or the Arroyo years but more accurately just “post-Marcos”, because every major policy change, style of governance adoption and development successes or failures have always been referred back to or were compared and contrasted with the Marcos decades.
It takes humility and stark honesty to admit that two decades of elite or oligarchic ‘democracy’, such as the years before Marcos, had to lead inevitably to ‘constitutional authoritarianism’ or dictatorship. The path our nation took after WWII, prepared for by long decades of foreign domination, had to be merely that at best – a prelude to strong-man-rule. History has time and time again demonstrated this iron law: without social democracy or the empowerment of the majority populace, the rule of the few or elite democracy will merely lead to strong-arm rule. That is what happened. Isn’t that where we are again? And is it really all that bad?
Taking the “mock” out of democracy
Yes, there will be an election next year. Do voters know what they’re doing? Many say, “No, but it doesn’t matter.” How could it not matter? Well, it is argued, the public’s errors cancel out with some sectors overestimating and others underestimating the bad or good effects of any given policy or personality, to the point that one can say the average voter’s beliefs is right and true – on the average.
Now this is not bad, if one’s ideal is a society of mediocrity, but certainly not comforting if you look at the body of historical evidence showing that voters, like moths to the flame, gravitate to the same mistakes. Their mistakes do not cancel each other out; they, in fact, compound.
Thus we again find ourselves irked by the obligatory belief that elections are crucial to a “democracy” when they are but the number one sign of the “mock” in that English term. Is it right to equate democracy with voting? In reality, the ballot box does not automatically ensure democracy. On the contrary, it can be used as a tool to defeat the will of the majority – in other words, to kill democracy. This is why you cannot be lukewarm to the advocates of an Open Electoral System or OES with the COMELEC now.
Let’s comfort ourselves by not talking about the Philippines – for a change. In countries like Chile, elections held in the past were as dangerous as they were promising. Although a dictator lost by a landslide, he disregarded the results and continued to be dictator. The election informed him both where his supporters lived and the greatest concentrations of his political opponents – making it so much easier for his Death squads to do their job.
In El Salvador, the same U.S. that is so concerned about the imperfections of Philippine democracy today, pumped in more than $5 billion to prop up a dictator whose death squads assassinated over a third of the country’s mayors. In Colombia, a left-wing party found its presidential candidate murdered. In Guatemala, more than 150,000 citizens were murdered when the CIA helped to topple the democratically elected President way, way back.
Well, to begin with, we remember that Greek democracy, after which the Western democracies were patterned, ran on slave labor – as did early American democracy centuries later! The majority of the Greek population – the slaves and Greek women, were prohibited from voting! So, in the sense that modern peoples use that word democracy, Greece did not have one because much less than half of the population had the right to vote.
In many other countries today including the Philippines, democracy still does not reflect the will of the bottom majority. Although the 90% majority of the people have the right to vote, the top ten percent – the elite – adopt methods to subvert the democratic process quite successfully as a rule. Or is anyone both naive and absurd to assume that the bottom 90% voluntarily choose to have tiny minorities own more wealth and power than the majority populace? Obviously, this kind of democracy does not reflect the will of the bottom 90%. But the elite successfully uses some methods to ensure that wealth and economics constitute the real power and controlling forces as they always have – thanks to a given notion of ownership.
In the first place, getting elected is costly business. “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide,” Joseph P. Kennedy quipped, as quoted by his son John F. Kennedy. When Senator Joker Arroyo’s spending of millions upon millions of campaign funds was exposed to be second only to Pichay’s, many people immediately remarked, “And we thought he was clean.” People correctly presume a politician ends up “grateful” to the moneyed few through the need for election campaign support – unless, of course, he was a plunderer to start with.
Before elections, the elite can subject the entire population to months of intense political conditioning in which individuals and policies that pose a threat to their power are systematically discredited. Because of their ownership of media, the elite are able to coordinate and synchronize the various newspaper and TV networks. Seeing and hearing the same news on different networks and in different newspapers automatically lends an air of authenticity and credibility to the information. Those who don’t own media have the option to lease media space-time through the expensive services of publicists who, though often marginally literate, are often highly skilled bribe-givers.
Most people are vulnerable to “first impressions.” This is the secret behind “photo opportunities” and “30 second sound bytes”. The technique is especially valuable when used exclusively through carefully prepared official news releases, followed by newspaper and TV station editorials, thereafter followed immediately by opinion poll surveys. Supportive reactions are fed back to viewers and listeners almost immediately. The ease with which these polls can be rigged by those who have money is not always obvious. For example, if only three callers phoned in, two supportive and one in disagreement, the station could announce that the poll showed that twice as many viewers supported politician X, his policy, etc., as opposed it.
Cheating at the polls by buying key officers per precinct who expertly drop the extra ballots for favored buyers is well known but hardly prevented and corrected to date. Every precinct has extra ballots to spare. The extras are usually determinant. And if the COMELEC will have its way, the automated cheating in Muslim Mindanao, sans paper trail, will be foisted on the nation as a whole.
Of course when all else fails, bodily killing can be resorted to. Anyway we will always have enough church people to order an oratio imperata or mandatory prayer – for “clean, honest, violence-free and credible elections.”
Access and conscience
Violence is, more often than not, local and localized. Taking office has become such big business. Our elections have increasingly become more about who – which families – get to occupy the lucrative “positions of service”. Who will corner how much of the “national capital” in a given local area?
Of course ordinary people know this truth quite instinctively. Never is their concern about programs and policies, for, rightly or wrongly, most people believe that the various parties do not even contemplate change along those lines. The main concern, rather, is about access. Is the prospective voter convinced he can still approach the candidate after electoral victory? How can he be sure of that? Is his immediate “leader” close enough to the candidate so that when the time should ever come for a politician’s intervention in his personal problems –there will be no hassle: they will be recognized?
And so, just to make sure – he submits his name to the leader. He takes the money for electoral services rendered and votes. He votes according to his conscience – one that has been formed not to betray the giver of money and gifts.
Many moral leaders who urge people to vote according to their conscience are often disappointed. They forget they are only facing the consequences of having neglected their own duty to form the conscience of the voter these many long years past. In that regard, the fulminations of an Archbishop Cruz will be no match to the humble stubbornness of Juan de la Cruz. The latter, in going against the Archbishop’s instructions, was only following his conscience.
If the voter’s leader or shepherd was diligent enough the voter should have been coached which other candidates to include in his ballot – senators, party list rep, vice-governor, councilors, the works – a very long list. Poor national candidates without resources – how will this particular voter deal with them? How will he even get to know them?
Massive stultification
The last elections, year 2007, with a little more than a hundred fatalities, was not the bloodiest in recent history. There was also much less spending than usual – because it was not a presidential election. There were definitely fewer rallies. But the real winner was TV – indubitably. The channels were raking it in. The multi-million peso smile characterized the anchors and the actors, some of whom have now joined the rest of their colleagues as the new trapos.
Who can blame Manny Pacquiao, the most famous victim lately of our damaged culture? He can beat all the world challengers in boxing to a pulp but why is he not happy? He needs an election victory badly. “You call me the people’s champ? Show me you’re not kidding. Vote for me!”
As a result of electronic media hegemony, there are now no brakes on the massive stultification of the Filipino voter – making it harder to distinguish between real and reel. Of course, even this will also peter out later, but for now we will fast become mere objects and not really the subjects of Philippine history-in-the-making.
Many continue to blame abiding poverty for the vote-buying electoral institution. And most people presume that elections next year will again not be honest. Touché. In the past they were shocked with the revelation of “dagdag-bawas” tactics which were worse than vote-buying. They were election-results buying or coercing. In the former, many voters became hand-out “beneficiaries” but in the latter only election officials did.
Senatorial hara-kiri?
Granted that all elections are local, yes, next year’s is nonetheless also national, posing an urgent challenge before us: what kind of Senate do we like to see – canine, obstructionist, critical, collaborative, independent? What would be good for the country?
It is often recognized that the good of the nation can ill afford gridlock in governance and its immediate negative impacts on people’s welfare. They are confident the House of Representatives will always tend to be critically collaborative, if not downright cooperative. But the Senate?
From the root word “senex” or “elder”, thus a council of elders – the Senatus Romanus was originally a deliberative governing body – not legislative – merely deliberative. It did not propose legislation; though magistrates with the Senate body, such as Consuls, did. How many senators were there? The initial senators or advisory council, traditionally instituted by the mythical Romulus, was composed of the heads of leading families – the patricians – and numbered a hundred.

Centuries later, in another land, the United States Senate, named after the ancient Roman Senate, although legislative in function, was designed, too, as a more deliberative body than the House of Representatives, calling for its members to be “less than the House of Commons…to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy.” According to James Madison, “The use of the Senate is to consist in proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch.”
And still much later, in still another land, Article VI, Section 2 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution created a Senate to be composed of twenty-four Senators elected at large. Smaller in composition, the body could be a training ground for national leaders and possibly a springboard for the presidency – not, as the name should have implied, a council of elders. Only “in da Pilipins” could one boast of being such a young senator – “a young elder” – in a body where, completely bereft of shame, mother and son, sister and brother, cousin and cousin, father and son claimed membership almost as natural right, certified legitimate by a process known as Philippine elections.
Are you a popular movie actor? A famous basketball star? A well-exposed news anchor? Hey, you may be ready for the Senate!
In any case, it should have followed that Philippine Senators, having a national rather than only a district constituency, would have a broader outlook of the problems of the country, instead of being restricted by narrow viewpoints and interests. With such perspective, the Senate was expected to be more circumspect, or at least less impulsive, less abusive and less corrupt than the House of Representatives.
Were they? Are they? The Philippine Senate gets almost one and a half billion pesos annually for its regular operation. At one time (2005), it had an allocation of 1.336 billion pesos. Aside from that, each senator was allocated 120 million pesos in pork barrel, totaling 2.880 billion pesos. Thus, the Senate consumed 4.246 billion pesos in one year. How much did the taxpayers pay the Senate for the job of passing wise laws? One billion pesos per law, because of 2,051 bills filed in the Philippine Senate that year, it only managed to deliberate and pass four (4).
What was their excuse, what were they so busy about? Appearing before electronic media conducting more than 300 inquiries and investigations “in-aid-of-legislation”, and doing so – it was learned later – without the benefit of Duly Published Rules of Procedures required by the Constitution. And since only four bills were passed by the Senate, it only means that the investigations-in-aid-of legislation conducted by the Senate did not actually result in the enactment of meaningful laws.
Isn’t it time to make short shrift of this ultra-expensive anomaly – the Philippine Senate? Next year it should be wise to vote only for those who will likely agree, when the time comes, to vote to abolish the Senate – in other words, those likely to agree to kill themselves as Senators via charter change and perhaps rise again later as parliamentarians.
The impotence of electoral power
The Philippines is a country where no candidate ever loses but merely believes he got cheated of victory. Among serious agents of change, whether of the electoral or armed variety, it is the idea of “capturing state power” which motivates tenacious struggle. Unfortunately, the same idea often merely maintains the illusion that the state is the repository of sovereignty and autonomy and all power when, in fact, as the song goes, “It ain’t necessarily so.”
More people know better, namely, that in the networked world of global and domestic capital, the state is “merely a node in a web of power”, woven between all kinds of agencies, banks, exchanges, corporate headquarters and multilateral institutions.
But you can’t put change agents down. As they witness the destruction and despair wrought by a money system that engulfs every area of people’s lives, all the more urgently do they desire change to come about.
They acutely feel that our social conditions are distressful. Poverty and outright destitution are prevalent and widespread. At least a third of our labor force is unemployed or underemployed. Hunger, malnutrition and diseases stalk the land.
There is grave loss of the value of life forms and ecosystems. Unchecked degradation is the fate of our water, air, and land, of mountains, plains and coasts, of both city and countryside.
Our culture is terribly damaged. Deleterious traits ranging from personal individualism to family-centered exclusivism hinder the attainment of the common good.
And at the core of our multi-systemic malaise is the political system of our present world that has become extremely dysfunctional. Seemingly unchangeable on account of its being the tradition of the decades, this “traditional politics” of our particular world merely worsens our economic, social, cultural and environmental ills. In our most desperate moments people could only pray ever so hard for better and more sincere leaders.
But it has been the same down the decades the past century: the wealthy and socially influential always end up gaining direct or indirect control of state power and holding captive the branches and agencies of government to further their private individual or family interests with very little or no regard for the common good. Often they do this with effective collaboration and assistance of merely profiteering foreign interests.
Quo vadis, Philippines? We can’t go on in the same direction where each time we need political change we have to either shoot our self in the foot with protracted parliaments of the street or wait even longer for the next election – when most other competitor countries simply make a motion of no confidence and bring about the needed change – as often as possible, if need be.
Public trust in both administration and opposition has hit rock bottom. How, then, can Tweedledum or Tweedledee ever hope for real public support? And now it’s not only they but the very media that report on them which are perceived and denounced as corrupt and untrustworthy. What a problem we’ve got, and we wonder why we become the butt of jokes and contempt just about everywhere abroad simply because we are a country that cannot get its act together.
“Well, we can get our act together,” Secretary Norberto Gonzales’ ‘socdem’ (social democratic) comrades say, “and this is how we’ll do it.”
A Revolutionary Mood
First is to recognize the people’s mood today. Whether we use the term or not, whether we know it or not, the majority of Filipinos are already in what is called a revolutionary mood. This simply means that, given our appalling situation, an ever greater majority of us, from all walks of life, desire radical changes and thorough-going reform in our world. It is a widespread desire to move urgently from Third World status to a First World level of our own type. We cannot accept “more of the same”. We want authentic change.
This widespread desire for real change is increasingly being taken up by more and more organized groups struggling not anymore for a mere change of leaders, but for accession to political power and control of the state in order to effect a change of systems, a change of worlds – from Third to First. If we open our eyes not only to the usual signs but also to the out-of-the-ordinary and the extra-routinary we may see this widespread desire for change embodied in significant groups representing majorities who will no longer consent to be governed the usual trapo way. More and more of us, therefore, are now moving precisely to stop the trapo madness. In that case this is no longer just a revolutionary mood but a revolutionary situation.
If the aspirations of those working for change are not adequately met, a revolutionary crisis will surely come to pass, resulting in a change of systems for better or for worse. Our political situation, however, already fraught with revolutionary characteristics, is rendered even more complex and dangerous because of armed insurgencies, some of which, unfortunately, are inspired by extremist and fanatical ideologies contemptuous of human rights. Time and again, in waging war against the government and the citizenry they perpetrate atrocities and crimes against humanity.
A Typical Third World Country
A country characterized by a backward economy, an unjust society, a damaged culture, a degraded natural environment, and a dysfunctional politics – was often referred to as a typical Third World country. These days, after the Cold War, we see more and more the term “less developed” or “underdeveloped” country, in contrast to the countries of the “developed” world. But “Third World” remains and the Philippines today is one such country in contrast to the more developed countries of the “First World”.
Our inability during our colonial past to put up the required physical and economic infrastructure left us with a backward and impoverishing agriculture and a failure to enter the industrial mode of wealth creation – two features the presence or absence of which determine whether a given economy is still “Third” or already “First” world. For instance, we adopted the kind of land distribution that often led to land destruction and never bothered to go for rural development and rural industrialization.
Quite honestly, many Third Worlders, by and large, suffer from historical amnesia and consequently lack historical sense. In a damaged culture, indolence and contentment with mediocrity compete as characteristics with disregard for law and an attitude of entitlement and impunity. Socdems particularly dislike this because, for them, a paramount social value is equality (the other two being liberty and solidarity).
An aversion to efforts to learn comes side by side with inability to focus, with distractedness, with having a short attention span, and an ability to address tasks mainly in fitful and sporadic styles. The mindset is pre-scientific and consequently impressionistic, imprecise, and impatient with systems and theory and the details that these entail. The attitude is imitative and derivative and often tendentious to extreme subjectivism and relativism. And the “social intentions” from top to bottom are often unabashedly self-centered with very little concern for the country or the common good.
To the socdems, democracy is nothing if the many do not assert themselves. Of course. The ruling and rich few never part with their privileges voluntarily. Whenever they’ve done so, they did so because of pressures coming from the power of the many – from social democracy.
Therefore, to achieve social democracy, and abrogate any semblance of a master-slave relationship in a given society and thus eliminate oligarchy and mass poverty, it is not the exploiters but, rather the exploited, the poor and the disadvantaged who, ironically, must bear the greater challenge for the liberation of both sides from the existing unjust structures. To achieve a new order from out of the old, it is the power of the poor which is the bearer of the new. Hence, the socdem formula: organize!
The myriad numbers of small farmers and laborers have one clear advantage in the society’s power equation – there are so many of them. In society which is founded on and maintained by the principle of democracy, the social sector which has the most numbers should be the most heard and followed. But is it? Not necessarily – because the advantage of numbers is clearly a conditional advantage. And the condition is social organization. If the many remain divided, isolated from one another, and disorganized, the following will continue to happen: the ruling few will dominate the many, use them as cheap labor, exploit them in benefits-sharing, transmute them into a bought army of voters who constitute the silenced majority of a formal democracy, systematically deny them access to the capital and patrimony of the nation, and then mis-represent them in all the affairs of state, effectively to pursue policies and programs which militate against their welfare and interests.
Needed: a First World Philippines Initiative
We need a social initiative, a team of leaders, and a program that concretely expresses and pursues the vision of a morally upright, frugally prosperous, healthy and educated country.
This initiative must draw out participants from all parts of the country and from all sectors of the population: the Christian churches, the Islamic communities, other faith communities, the indigenous peoples, the democratic political and social groups and movements, government bureaucracy, academia, the scientific community, business, the professions, civic organizations, the media, artists, the military and police forces.
We do not only need a new leader but a team of leaders of a new kind, who will embody and elicit the conscience, character and competence of our people and facilitate their consensus to pursue a common vision and program. We need a team of leaders who will help us overcome our weaknesses and build up and apply our strengths.
This new breed of leaders should be rooted in the life and aspirations of our people, particularly of the farmer, fisher folk and worker masses, the middle class, patriotic businesspersons, bureaucrats and the uniformed services. They will emerge from or be linked with authentically democratic political parties and social movements.

They should be committed to the defense of democracy and be mindful of the basic securities for the survival of our nation. They must seek to imbue people with love of country, patriotism, nationalism as shown in their proven readiness to risk life, health, and property so that our nation may survive and our people may enjoy freedom, justice, security and prosperity.

This new breed will be guided and inspired by an authentically humanist world view and embody the religiously plural character of Philippine society.

They are conversant with and supportive of the potential and the necessity of science and technology for the recovery and development of our country and always aware of advancing the revolutionary transformation of Philippine society for the common good.

Over the years we have allowed our politics to degenerate into its present despicable state. Our options are clear and simple. We can either let the present situation prevail, or we can take the challenge of creating a new political order to effect fundamental societal transformation.

We should build a national consensus, based on the people’s deep and widespread desire for change, to affirm First World Philippines as our shared vision, and mobilize the various areas and sectors towards a non-violent, democratic struggle to pursue electoral reforms anchored on the primacy of an informed conscience vote and thus enable our people to freely elect the leaders that they need.

Building a First World Philippines requires that most if not all citizens join in carrying out specific tasks for nation-building, the more important of which can be grouped into the following six points:
Renewing and strengthening the state
Effecting fundamental political reforms in the political system and structure of government
Promoting our basic securities as a nation, namely, defence, internal security, food security, water, energy, environment
Alleviating and eventually eliminating poverty
Protecting the welfare and advancing the interests of overseas Filipinos worldwide
Carrying out a foreign policy that integrates the promotion of both national interest and the universal common good.

A new global economic context
“A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression” is a newly published book by a longtime University of Chicago professor and father of the free-market-based law-and-economics movement, Judge Richard Posner. He is author of some 40 books, the most frequently cited federal appeals court jurist, and, in the view of The Wall Street Journal, one of America’s most original and clearheaded thinkers. In other words, he is Capitalism’s guru, par excellence.
Well, what does Posner have to say? “Although financiers bear the primary responsibility for the depression,” he writes, “I do not think they can be blamed for it — implying moral censure — any more than one can blame a lion for eating a zebra. Capitalism is Darwinian.” In his view, “The role of bankers is to operate banks, which is inherently a risky business. It’s not to save the economy.” So, there! The confession is that very smart bankers misunderstood their own interests. In a capitalist system, if you can’t trust self-interest, what can you trust? But to date capitalism has not yet found an anti-dote for Greed’s blinding effect on genuine Self-Interest.
He said the causes of the systemic collapse include failures of information at many levels: “Even though the financial industry has more information bearing on the likelihood of a depression than the government does, it has little incentive to analyze that information.” Then, incredibly, Posner high-handedly asserts that if we could agree that the private sector is responsible but the government gets the blame, we can move on to prevention.
So now, even capitalism’s staunchest supporters recognize that it cannot function unless government plays a crucial regulatory role, which heretofore they had always denied. Is the world turning “socdem”?
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Australia’s socdem leader was probably more clear: “From time to time in human history there occur events of a truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place. The significance of these events is rarely apparent as they unfold: it becomes clear only in retrospect, when observed from the commanding heights of history. By such time it is often too late to act to shape the course of such events and their effects on the day-to-day working lives of men and women and the families they support. There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time.”
In Rudd’s view, which has become that of many, the global financial crisis has demonstrated already that it is no respecter of persons, or of particular industries, or of national boundaries. “It is a crisis which is simultaneously individual, national and global. It is a crisis of both the developed and the developing world. It is a crisis which is at once institutional, intellectual and ideological.”
George Soros had said that “the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock … the crisis was generated by the system itself”. Rudd agrees: “The current crisis is the culmination of [many years of] domination of economic policy by a free-market ideology that has been variously called neo-liberalism, economic liberalism, economic fundamentalism, Thatcherism or the Washington Consensus. The central thrust of this ideology has been that government activity should be constrained, and ultimately replaced, by market forces.”
As the crisis spreads across a broad front, not for the first time in history the challenge again lands in the laps of social democrats to save capitalists from their own system. The ideology of the unrestrained free market has landed us in this mess. It will now be easier to agree that the social-democratic state offers the best guarantee of preserving the productive capacity of properly regulated competitive markets. It will be increasingly accepted that government is the regulator, that government is the funder or provider of public goods and that government offsets the inevitable inequalities of the market with a commitment to fairness for all. And it is the challenge for social democrats to put such governments in place.
“The time has come,” says Rudd, “off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes.” For so many decades, neo-liberals were so convinced of the ideological righteousness of their cause, so blinded by their unquestioning belief that markets were inherently self-correcting, that they refused even to recognize the severity of the problems that emerged – until the current systemic collapse.
Given all this on a global scale, why is the Philippine economy still growing – or is it? In the current crisis, it may seem only tall buildings collapse. The Philippine economy, admittedly underdeveloped, is not one such tall building. We certainly do not export as much of our production as our erstwhile more dynamic neighbors have been doing. What we’ve been exporting are warm bodies that sends back to us billions upon billions of precious foreign exchange that fund the SM malling of the nation.
Said the economist Cielito Habito: “The numbers tell the story: Our total exports were 42 percent of total GDP in 2007, but this same ratio was 231 percent in Singapore, 110 percent in Malaysia, and 73 percent in Thailand. Only Indonesia (at 29 percent) had a smaller export/GDP ratio than the Philippines among the Asean-5.
“But note this: If we subtract imports to get net exports, the ratio to GDP was 29 percent in Singapore, 20 percent in Malaysia, 7.6 percent in Thailand, and 4 percent in Indonesia, whereas in the Philippines, the ratio was a miniscule 0.46 percent! That is, while our total export sales as a percentage of GDP exceeded that of Indonesia, their exports had much higher domestic content (i.e., lower import content) than ours, and thus must have produced more jobs for Indonesians per dollar worth of exports.”
We can yet be the best Third World country around. Is that what we really want? Change is inevitable. But the more we change, the more we stay the same. Or should we not go for authentic change?