Category Archive for: kapitalista

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.

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Meralco’s heartlessness #OldNormal

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…)

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George Ty tales: One estate, two names, five children

It’s become interesting the reactions I’ve gotten for deciding to talk about George Ty’s estate controversy. Some have come in the form of links and screencaps from anonymous sources; some are asking questions about who his real wife is. But my favorite is a long-ish comment on this page telling me basically that I’m making a mountain out of molehill, that it’s all much ado about nothing, my questions about why George Ty’s declared estate is but a fraction of his P700-billion-peso net worth before he died. According to this comment, it’s all very simple: George Ty had time to transfer his estate to his different children and business interests, and therefore the declaration of but P3 billion is all possible, and legal, and above ground.

But see, here’s the thing: I’m not even asking about possibility or legality. I’m asking about why it’s even allowed. I’m asking about why it’s even being done. After all, just because something can be done, doesn’t make it right.

Here’s the other thing: telling me not to look into something just makes me want to dig deeper into exactly the same thing. And in the case of George Ty, it’s a wonder what simple Google searches yield, given what is a seeming news blackout from around February 2019 to the present. Layer this with being told this is a non-story, and so many sources sending questions and screencaps, and one cannot help but think that there really is more to this than meets the eye.

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George Ty’s estate, Ramon Ang’s airport, Dennis Uy’s city, Ayala’s casino: Duterte sides with the wealthy

You know how Duterte propaganda has lived off this idea that he is angry at the rich? That he is against the elite? That he is against their abusive ways, and anti-people policies? This is how refusing to give the Lopezes of ABS-CBN their franchise is justified; this is how the Prietos of the Philippine Daily Inquirer lost their power. This also sustains the idea that Duterte is pro-poor, para sa masa, si Tatay Digong kakampi ng mahihirap na Pilipino.

We have of course disproven this, regardless of what his base believes. He himself has admitted that majority of those killed in his drug war are poor — because the rich addicts are using other drugs anyway, and the wealthy who run the cartels, the drug manufacturing, the drug imports, he has no power to jail them.

But there’s an even more obvious, more blatant, display of Duterte siding with the rich: and it’s in his utter silence about issues that involve his oligarch, taipan, crony allies. Let us count the ways, shall we?  (more…)

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Duterte chooses charter change #CongressPH #NoToChaCha

Duterte, his men, and his children have circled the wagons, and we should all know better than just to watch it happen. At the very least, we learn from it. Because this is the first time that the process is on the surface — we are being shown the action, and we are allowed to infer the unfolding, and we have seen how the crisis was resolved, so they can all move towards the conclusion — that of Charter Change, which is at the heart of this (now resolved) fight for the House Speakership.

The show was interesting enough of course, even as it was a dead-end for nation. The battle was always only among Duterte’s men, with all three, Alan Peter Cayetano, Lord Allan Velasco, and Martin Romualdez pledging loyalty to the President. Of course Romualdez is more of a Gloria Arroyo (and Marcos) ally; Velasco seems to have come out of nowhere but is supported by Duterte propagandists; and Cayetano, well, is only loyal to himself — but all of that doesn’t matter when they’re united for the common Duterte cause.

Unity has been such a part of the plot that Duterte and his men put together, and the audience almost doesn’t matter: we aren’t supposed to care. After all, we all know that Duterte controls Congress, and will give him everything on a silver platter. But this battle for the house speakership was taking too long to get resolved, and in the meantime, we were being given too much information about how corrupt, how greedy, how power-hungry the men who surround Duterte are — his children included.

So what did this battle for House Speakership reveal?

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