Category Archive for: gobyerno

komentaryo

More heads should roll: The IATF, Duterte, and StaySafe #CovidCorruption #CriminalNegligence

In June 2020, news reports told the story of how Stay Safe became the “official” contact tracing app of the government, and therefore the country: it was purportedly the hand of retired Hello Garci general Hermogenes Esperon (one of those accused of helping rig the 2004 elections for GMA) who scheduled a presentation of StaySafe before the IATF.

On June 8, former DICT Secretary Rio recounted what a friend had told him straight from someone in the IATF: “I am also open to other apps for contact tracing. Marami lang kasing kakilala si Staysafe na members ng IATF.”

MultiSys, the developer of the StaySafe app, insisted that Rio was politicizing the decision that the IATF had made. But here’s the thing: it is obviously a political decision when: (1) the app will not work for a majority of the population who are not on 3G phones, (2) the app will not work for a majority of the population who cannot afford to be online all the time, and (3) the app, despite its uselessness and violation of privacy requirements still remains as the official contact tracing app of the IATF.

Patronage politics is obviously at the heart of this decision, and the makers of StaySafe and the IATF are just banking on us not seeing it as clearly as we should have last year.

After all we were busy surviving this pandemic, a task made more difficult by the fact that the Duterte government itself has refused to give us credible and reliable contact tracing. (more…)

komentaryo

Criminal negligence? The IATF’s contact-tracing app #StateSurveillance #StaySafe

We were promised a bombshell last week, during yet another late Monday night gibberish session with Duterte. But the real deal happened a day after.

An aside: there are no bombshells to be dropped when your own comms team deletes the part where you say you won’t run if your daughter will, and then your own daughter discredits you and destroys your party’s credibility, but of course she herself is part of that circus. End of aside.

The real bomb was exploded in the Senate inquiry of the Department of Health, which might be borne of the Commission on Audit reports, but in fact has been an opportunity for us to understand better why we are in such deep pandemic shit at this point, not just given Covid spread, but more importantly, Duterte’s failed public health response.

Between Senator Joel Villanueva asking about contact tracing as the weakest link in Covid response, and Senator Pia Cayetano asking specifically about the StaySafePH App, we heard DOH Secretary Duque—he with the least amount of credibility, and the most kapal-ng-mukha—admit that the Stay Safe App is practically useless.

“I think it’s very limited, almost no impact,” said the DOH secretary.

Now Duque might be the man who just admitted that the government’s official contact tracing app is useless, but a little research and you realize that for this one it’s not just Duque’s head that we should be calling for. It’s the men in the IATF itself—the task force that’s supposed to address Covid-19 and ensure our survival—as it does lead straight to Duterte.

Former DICT Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. had dropped that other bomb as early as April 2020, two months into this pandemic. (more…)

komentaryo

The Propaganda War: The case of Nayong Pilipino and the mega-vax center

It seemed, oddly enough, just another battle between big business and government, and a cultural and heritage institution that has the last of the few remaining green spaces in the metro. We’ve seen many of these throughout Duterte’s leadership, and often enough these stories die down quickly and the next thing we know big business has destroyed biodiversity and risked the lives of communities in the name of say, an unnecessary monstrosity of an airport in the middle of Bulacan (hello San Miguel Aerotropolis).

But this one wasn’t going to go away because unlike all the other stories, there was pushback of the government office concerned. And it is this kind of pushback that we haven’t had the past five years, when even the grapevine has been shut down, just like mainstream media.

And with elections so close and so many projects getting railroaded, it’s important to look at instances like this one and realize how the propaganda war is being waged by Duterte allies in big business in exactly the same way that government has waged it. The same strategies of soundbites and bullying, confusion and distraction, containment and damage control. All dependent on mainstream media complicity, of course, and a majority’s decision to not ask the difficult questions, or evade the parts that might actually give us answers.

After all, it only takes the next trending issue to erase this from our semi-conscious state, which makes it easy for projects to be railroaded. The next thing we know Duterte has unilaterally approved the project and threatened anyone who gets in its way.

(more…)

komentaryo

The propaganda war: Lessons from the ABS-CBN closure

It’s been a year since the ABS-CBN leadership decided to sign off. This was probably it’s only power move throughout the four years that Duterte had vilified them every chance he got, even when he had Gina Lopez as DENR Secretary, and even when ABS had paid up whatever it owed in taxes, and returned the cash the President insisted they owed him for an advertisement that didn’t air during the 2016 presidential campaign. And yes, this was an important power move, considering that all of us were witness to how its main commentators tried their hardest to bite their tongues on live free radio, and how news coverage was less about delivering the news as it was also about making sure not to step on too many toes.

To be fair, this wasn’t just the state of ABS-CBN news and public affairs under Duterte, as it is the state of mainstream media that has the widest coverage across social classes. In a country where a majority are not reading anything written in English, and a majority of those online are on free data, it should be pretty clear by now that for all the hashtags we can get to trend, and all the “unities” we think we’re doing here, we are in an echo chamber like no other. And no, we’re not winning anything in these echo chambers.

Just like we couldn’t win the battle to keep ABS-CBN on air.

(more…)

komentaryo

Privilege, pantries, and the poor

Let me start by saying: yes, government is responsible for this state of affairs. For the hunger. For the need and want. For the crisis that we are in, one year in this Covid-19 pandemic, with no free mass testing, no proper contact tracing, no reliable assistance for the most vulnerable, no real support for our healthcare system. One year of a Duterte government completely and utterly refusing to deliver a compassionate, competent, science-based response; one year of Duterte saying “wala na tayong pera”; one year of periodically hearing him say “wala na tayong magawa”; and this first four months of 2021 where the narrative about vaccines has been about richer countries getting our share, when in reality, it is Duterte shoving Sinovac down our throats instead. The past month of Duterte promising: things will get worse. At the same time that he says: I don’t know if we can vaccinate everyone. And also: We have done everything we can.

Yes this governance is the worst we could possibly have, especially in the midst of a public health crisis that at this point is also a socio-political-economic crisis. Yes, we want a better leader, and we work on it for 2022, but we would be glad if we could get one sooner, via a resign movement or an oust movement, both of which can only help us in building a real case against a continuation of this Duterte leadership (in the characters of a Marcos and Pacquiao).

But standing clear on the faults of this government, demanding accountability, insisting that we deserve better, does not absolve us of responsibility. It does not mean we can just do anything and be deemed faultless, it doesn’t mean we will not make mistakes.

We might be on the side of democracy, freedom, and rights, but that doesn’t mean we’re doing everything right.

This is even truer now, given the community pantries with long lines, as well as the narratives that it has created space for, the notions of the poor that it has lived off. In the course of the pantry’s virality, what has been dissolved is its core of community, what has disappeared is a basic grounding in what the poor need, who is responsible for this state of affairs, and the truth that the goal of any relief operation—and this is what the pantries are—is to make itself obsolete. What we have refused to say is that there is a virus, with variants that are not only more dangerous, but also which spread the virus quicker.

These erasures are not minor ones, and it is wrong to think that these do not matter. When what you do can be taken against you, you want to make sure that you do things better than the Duterte side. The pantries have failed at this, no matter how we silence the criticism against it.

(more…)