Category Archive for: bayan

Survey Says: Fear

If there’s anything none of us should be arguing about at this point, it’s the climate of fear as fueled and nurtured by Duterte.

Pre-pandemic, we saw how Duterte and his people’s manipulation of the law could keep Senator Leila de Lima in jail on trumped-up charges. We’ve seen this government unseat Chief Justice Sereno because Duterte considered her as “enemy.” We’ve witnessed Duterte get away with massive violations on our rights, where random statements like, say, “arrest istambays” will mean the warrantless arrests of citizens the following day. Where Presidential fury and finger-pointing is enough to get people removed from their positions, business owners divested from their own ventures, critics or perceived enemies arrested or killed. Let’s begin counting the dead bodies from organized Left organizations, and the drug war dead.

The pandemic was just what Duterte needed to further clamp down on our rights, lock us down in our homes, and ensure our silence. We were afraid of the virus, of course and expectedly, but this government was not satisfied with just our fear of getting sick in a time and place with no reliable healthcare system. They wanted to bury that last nail into the coffin of possible resistance, and what better way to do it than by passing the Terror Law and throwing the ABS-CBN shutdown our way?

After all, if a cultural monolith like ABS-CBN could be shut down by this government based solely on Duterte’s pettiness, what can it NOT do? In the course of the Congressional inquiry on the franchise, we also realized that much of it had to do with the content of the network’s shows—and they weren’t just talking about news coverage (!!!), but about the portrayal of politicos in soap operas and teleseryes.

And what is the Terror Law and the contingent soundbites from military officials about regulating social media and the President about cracking down on dissent which government equates with terrorism? What else could the push of the MTRCB to regulate Netflix, and of the FDCP to have all film, advertising, and digital content pass through its office, be about? What could all of these be but the multifarious ways in which this government tries to restrict what we say and what we create, online and beyond? And if they don’t push through with these policies, then at the very least it has made us quake in our boots a little more and has distracted us from the incompetence and corruption that permeates government.

If we, in our cloistered, privileged, middle-class to wealthy spaces, can feel this fear; if we acknowledge that a major stressor the past seven months has been both the virus and the incompetent and violent governance, complete with a President who randomly drops shoot-them-dead orders, and military officials deciding on our lives with not a smidgen of compassion. If we can be afraid, what more the majority in the vulnerable communities? (more…)

It’s a question we ask more and more now, I think more sincerely and honestly than we ever have, of friends and family, even of Facebook contacts and acquaintances. It’s never seemed more important to ask people: how are you? As opposed to “what’s up?” or “what are you doing these days?”

Because we all know what’s up, and regardless of what we’re doing, we all know that on a very basic level, we’re all just trying to survive. The pandemic takes its toll on the best of us, and on this fifth month since a lockdown was first declared, I think the mental toll is one that’s almost paralyzing.

Almost. Because privilege teaches us that some are luckier than others—we are luckier than the majority who did not only lose jobs during the two-month lockdown, but also had their communities taken over by police power, were disenfranchised from government assistance packages, silenced by fear, and disregarded by policy. Yes, we are all victimized by the Duterte government’s lack of an efficient, sufficient, and scientific Covid-19 public health response, as we all are by its Cabinet filled with incompetent and unkind officials, but as with many (all) things, social class difference puts things in perspective.

No, this is not a treatise on gratefulness, as much as it is a promise of solidarity. (more…)

Many things surfaced in the midst of this Covid-19 crisis. There’s the violence of inequality and the blindness of privilege. There’s the lack of vision and planning for a massive public health emergency that any government should’ve known was coming early in the year. There’s government’s incompetence and violence, the President in-over-his-head (yet again!), his men grasping at straws and deciding that going deeper into debt is the answer to our woes. There are Duterte’s cronies and allies, getting away with keeping their businesses intact and operational, probably even earning from this crisis, and now all set on getting a tax cut while thousands of small businesses will go under, and thousands of Filipinos go hungry.

There is also the fact that big business will abuse the people. It’s not a matter of when, but a matter of how. And the past four years this Duterte government has stood by and watched these abuses happen; during the lockdown it did nothing about construction workers left by developers to fend for themselves at construction sites, grocery workers walking inhumane distances to and from work, medical workers with no way to get home from hospitals.

With government turning a blind eye to these abuses, it’s no surprise that a business like Meralco will take this already difficult time and think: how do we make money in this time of crisis, when most everyone is taking a hit? (more…)

Here’s something that’s become clearer now: Duterte’s rhetoric—that one that’s been sold as a personality quirk, that cracks inappropriate jokes, that same one that shifts towards violence every chance it gets, that dismisses important issues by saying it’s fake news, that evades critical demands of nation by delivering empty soundbites and/or talking about the drug war over and over again, or his perceived enemies like media and America—this Duterte rhetoric is government’s communications policy.

Sure, it might not be written anywhere, but it is the rhetoric that Duterte’s men and women have used, especially when faced with questions from a populace now unable to contain its dismay and disgust. Keeping us preoccupied with soundbites also means we lose precious time for piecing together the parts of the various crises we face.

We see this strategy being used for the COVID19 crisis.

Click here for the rest of it on Disquiet.ph.

I’ve written before (and often) about the Duterte strategies that have kept him and this government afloat. When I did so, he was still awake most of the time, and not disappearing on us in times of tragedy, there was no major public health concern like COVID19, no volcanos exploding, no communities losing their homes and livelihood while the President slept.

We are undoubtedly in worse times now, and yet we still don’t get it.

Proof of that pudding? When Duterte declared the cancellation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). And what did we see? The members of the Left, supporting Duterte on this declaration, asserting that it is “just and necessary”, and the Liberal stalwarts putting it into question by highlighting this government’s pivot to China. On social media the rhetoric is vicious, where the discussion is limited to “tuta ng Kano” o “tuta ni Duterte”; where anyone who even so much as refuses to stand with Duterte on his VFA declaration is seen as a US-ally, or as an enabler of US Imperialism.

Probably the worst example of how terrible things are is Walden Bello attacking retired Justice Antonio Carpio for being on “the wrong side on the VFA issue.” But one must ask: is the Duterte side, the right side to be on?

(more…)