pls allow me to share ms Patricia Evangelista po, tyvm patrick
----- Forwarded Message ---- From: Moonglow <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, February 21, 2010 3:12:17 AM Subject: [OFW-News] OP ED BADLANDS By Patricia Evangelista Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 22:55:00 02/20/2010 Filed Under: Elections, Eleksyon 2010, Politics, Inquirer Politics MANILA, Philippines—There is fear and loathing in Manila, but the boys on the red-swagged platforms are grinning through the sweat. The honorable Lito Lapid still rises high on the reelectionist surveys, a bright, beautiful example that God watches out for fools, drunks and the occasional action star. The armies are out on the streets, the gun-toting, flyer-flapping, hand-pressing soldiers of fortune banging out the tune of the Filipino Dream from the back ends of pickup trucks. Three months to election, and democracy waves its limp hand. Count the numbers, open the gates, condoms and communion, the VFA and martial law, survey points, airtime minutes, grin and bear it, smile and take it. He said, she said, pro-poor, pro-governance, anti-abortion, for the nation. This is the Philippines, welcome to 2010. Down Jose Abad Santos Avenue, on the way to Pampanga, the five-foot posters of Lilia Pineda tart up the highway in plastic candy pink, a full month before the local campaign period—“I will remove those if there are issues.” In Laguna, Flawless’ endorser Angelica Jones pitches again for provincial board member, sacrificing much for the service of the people she loves—“I have no love life, no boyfriend, no night life, all because I want to help the people.” And in the congested streets of Quezon City, another television darling takes up the challenge of public service, zips up her cleavage and on national television announces with wide-eyed sincerity that she is for private armies and against premarital sex—“My sexy films are all R-18.” She knows little about the state of the nation or the dead in Maguindanao—“I get depressed watching the news.” Ara Mina, ranking high in the polls of Quezon City. Abra, policeman ambushed while protecting a mayoral candidate. Nueva Ecija, two alleged supporters of a reelectionist congressman shot by the civilian guards of rival. Isabela, three supporters of a mayoral candidate shot and wounded after a brawl over election paraphernalia. Cotabato, a Filipino-Chinese businessman running for city council shot dead while driving his children. Manila, presidential candidates get hot and heavy over who gets to use the color orange. The hero’s son has his miniskirted girl on the front page, they say it’s the greatest love story ever told. The potshots roll, and Richard Gordon—“they call me Dick”—pats his running mate on the arm—“In spite of his visage, he’s a good man.” Bayani Fernando announces he supports censorship of local television—“They never should have allowed ‘The Rights of a Child’ to air, it will spoil the children,” and admits he is running with Gordon “because everyone else had a vice president.” The issues are disappearing in the face of the grand debate. Not whether the government should subsidize artificial contraception, or if foreign ownership should be extended. The fight is waged on airwaves and on headlines: who is poorer, which is Robin Hood, what man stands for 90 percent of the voting block? “If you claim to be pro-poor,” says Gordon, “show it. But what is happening? The poor are becoming poorer. Once they are in power, they forget their promises.” Manny Villar, who claims to have swum in a sea of trash, now in the process of buying up large chunks of Malacañang. Of the billion supposedly spent on advertising before the campaign period, Villar is said to have spent more than half. The poor boy who did good is one of the nation’s highest advertisers. Joseph Estrada, who says he has played impoverished men in 90 percent of his films, now claims to have absorbed the feeling of the poor. Mar Roxas, still on his bicycle, picking up banana peelings in the markets of Manila. And then the newest challenger, Loren Legarda, who claims that like her running mate Villar, she too was not born with a silver spoon. “He comes from the slums of Tondo, I grew up in the floods of Malabon,” says the private-school educated former Pond’s commercial model. “The use of actors—you had to pay P30 million to endorse you—is an insult to the Filipino intelligence,” says Sen. Jamby Madrigal, who aims blows high and low at Villar. Madrigal, who had insulted the Filipino intelligence in past senatorial elections, now succeeds in insulting Judy Ann Santos, the woman who may have single-handedly endorsed the green-coated lady all the way into the Senate. “I spend my own money,” says Villar. He owes no one but himself, he says, and if he wins, he will owe nothing to no one—far more than the other candidates can say. And yet Malacañang must be worth more than the monthly paycheck, if the hard-headed businessman and “industry leader” who fought his way from the bottom is spending the fruit of his subdivisions on half a billion in advertising out of the goodness of his heart. And so the poor take center stage, the one time every six years their needs and aspirations take on biblical importance. Boom goes the drum, bang goes the gate. Points climb, points fall. Dirt is flung, propaganda floods inboxes, and the boys from the other side say Dolphy is a bad man. Manila 2010, the soap opera carnival of grand promises and bright dreams, three months more of angels hiding tattoos and jingles blasting into midnight. The dead keep dying, the poor stay poor, but promises come rampaging on loudspeakers in a nation where hope springs eternal. ~ NO IMPROVEMENT Editorial The Philippine Star Updated February 21, 2010 12:00 AM Photo is loading... To no one’s surprise, the results of the latest survey on corruption, conducted among business managers by Social Weather Stations Inc., showed that the government has made little headway in efforts to stamp out the problem in the past three years. Malacañang said it preferred to look on the bright side of the survey: a decline in solicitations of bribery involving seven transactions, as reported by businessmen. But despite the decline, the figures are hardly encouraging: 60 percent of managers said they were asked for bribes in at least one of seven transactions, and 90 percent believed corruption was most prevalent in the national government. Among the agencies, the Bureau of Customs obtained the worst rating, followed by the Department of Public Works and Highways and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. All three have been consistently ranked as the most corrupt agencies in previous surveys. Receiving “bad” ratings were the Land Transportation Office, the Office of the President, the House of Representatives, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Presidential Anti-Graft Commission and Department of Transportation and Communications. Obtaining the highest margins of worsening corruption were the Bureau of Customs, the BIR, DPWH and the Office of the President. This gives an indication of why the government has made little headway in the battle against corruption. Without leadership by example, how can Cabinet members and bureau heads be expected to clean up their act? When top government officials are seen to be reaping huge benefits from corruption, it can be impossible to crack the whip on crooked employees in the lower rungs of government. An agency head who has amassed a fortune from corrupt deals cannot drive away fixers from his office or stop penny-ante extortion by his underlings. The survey results showed that corruption is a two-way affair. The number of business managers who reported bribery solicitations fell from the previous year, with most of those polled noting the futility of the effort. A third of the respondents could not name an agency that could be trusted to handle complaints of corruption. Forty-six percent said it was standard practice not to report bribe solicitations; 48 percent said reporting was not worth the bother; 51 percent were worried about reprisal; 50 percent said they could not prove their complaint or did not want to spend on the pursuit of a complaint; and 32 percent said they did not want to betray anyone. These attitudes, as much as venal public officials, have also allowed corruption to flourish. Unless everyone is willing to change, the next survey on corruption will reveal similar results. ~ FIRST PEOPLE POWER REVOLT ACHIEVED WHAT IT AIMED TO DO Sunday, 21 February 2010 00:00 BY RENE Q. BAS, EDITOR IN CHIEF Manila Times The seemingly increasing number of Filipinos who are declaring the EDSA People Power Revolt a failure are wrong. It was a great success—as those who participated in the February 22 to 25 1986 drama that electrified the world felt. The success of an activity should be judged according to its aim. And the aim of the military mutiny of Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, Vice Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos and those few officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines who were loyal to them was to save their lives by bringing down the Marcos dictatorship which, they discovered, was about to do them in. The aim of Cardinal Jaime Sin, who rallied the nuns and the seminarians to save the lives of the military mutineers, was also to rid the country of the Marcos Regime and get Mrs. Corazon Aquino, whom the prelate and most Filipinos believed had won against Ferdinand Marcos in the snap election, to take power in Malacañang. Those nuns, seminarians, students and the mainly middle-class families who drove to EDSA from their subdivisions, were driven also by one aim: to drive the Marcos dictatorship out. This was the only aim behind which those who participated in the EDSA 1 revolt in person and through their prayers were united. Yes, there were grand expectations of what would happen next. But these would swim in people’s imaginations later. The truth is that the leaders—at least some of them—of the military element in the EDSA 1 revolt had completely different aims from those in Corazon Aquino’s heart and mind. These aims of Mrs. Aquino, as subsequent interviews and reports would show later, were really similar to those in the heart and mind of those she brushed away among the EDSA revolt players—like the journalists Francisco Tatad and Mrs. Monina Mercado, who jointly wrote the first book about EDSA 1. Tatad’s and Monina Mercado’s aim was—their prayers were—for moral, Godly governance, with Jesus and Mother Mary to be on top of everything, to at last happen in our country. This was also what the soon to become the revolutionary president of the Philippines prayed for, along with her friends—Cardinal Sin and the nuns. Other players in the EDSA 1 revolt had other ideas, most specially the military faction of Gringo Honasan, who became critical of then-President Corazon Aquino and even mounted coups against her government. Others had ideas to serve their political ambitions, to enrich themselves and recover the empires they had lost during the Marcos dictatorship. In addition to ridding the country of the Marcos dictatorship, EDSA 1/the Cory presidency also achieved one thing that must not be taken lightly. It restored electoral democracy, reestablished the ideal that each person’s human rights and dignity must be respected. All the rest—the birth of a new country and the emergence of a more noble Filipino, a more high-minded set of politicians and officials, a more prosperous society, a country no longer teeming with poor people, etcetera—were not among the original aims of the actual EDSA 1 revolt. If many Filipinos now think of EDSA 1 as a failure, it is because people expected too much from it and the “Cory magic.” In the heat of the revolt, in the intoxicating passion of the brave nuns and girls holding rosaries and giving flowers to Marcos’s soldiers who could have been shot—if the setting were China or Haiti—were thinking of the difficulty the Cory regime would face rebuilding shattered institutions. None thought that the rebuilt national order would have a new 1987 Constitution based on the principle of pluralism. None had an idea that when a Cabinet is made up democratically of left-of-center and right-of-center pro-business people, the corrupt and the incompetent would end up having its wormy way. No one on February 22 to February 25 thought there would ever be a Kamaganak Inc., or that in the conflict between the technocrats and the people-oriented members of the future Cory Cabinet, one excellent person would not be able to bear the frustration and kill himself! Nobody in those days of the actual People Power Revolt had an inkling that some of the closest people to Mrs. Aquino would use the new regime to get back their virtual empires that the Marcos regime had sequestered—without paying back debts they owed in pre-martial law years from the Philippine National Bank and the Development Bank of the Philippines. Even in its earliest days, the Presidential Commission for Good Government was already a mess—with enough corrupt people in it to frustrate Sen. Jovito Salonga, its first chairman. Good governance was given lip-service in the Cory regime by those whose aim was to serve themselves and not justice and the common good. They were betraying Cory herself and those who had pure hearts in the Cabinet, like Rene Saguisag, Joker Arroyo, Jess Estanislao, etc. Some miscreant Cabinet members got fired. Others stayed on, their corruption undetected or tolerated. But these are the inescapable wages of democracy and pluralism. And the disadvantage having a Cory for president, the gentle and saintly Cory now being proposed by some adulators for beatification— who never claimed to be nothing more than a simple person who knew her mathematics and her French but was mainly a housewife. Rene Saguisag, an outstanding Filipino, was offered a seat as a Supreme Court justice and refused it. He was elected senator but did not pursue his political career because he had no money to launch a reelection campaign and he had developed qualms about staying on in a milieu very far from the odor of Thomas More’s virtues. There were not too many Rene Saguisag’s in Cory’s Cabinet. There have been much less in that of President Gloria Arroyo. We should not blame EDSA 1 and the Cory presidency for the abominable depth our politics and governance have plumbed. We should give these words of former Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines president, Archbishop Oscar Cruz, retired head of the Lingayen-Dagupan See. “At one point in our history, we badly needed change and we got it—through People Power, without violence, at the EDSA revolution. What we did in 1986 was an unfinished revolution. The reform of political life and processes is a necessary complement to the 1986 event. The odds we faced then were greater but we prevailed. 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