Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

Leni and the Liberals

Duterte has made unity easy. He, along with the Marcoses, make the enemies of 2022 clear.

The vision for 2022 elections is also easy to unite on: unseat Duterte, block Marcos, stop the attacks on the people, recover from the incompetence and corruption, and take back democracy. The first step was always to build the broadest, widest coalition of anti-Duterte block-Marcos actors, that could in turn unite a majority of citizens, who are then empowered and emboldened to work on pushing for the candidate we all can believe will work on the vision for a better 2022.

VP Leni is certainly one of those candidates. Were Ka Leody not running, she would be alone in the uncompromising stand against the Marcoses getting back in power, and against the violence and incompetence of Duterte. Isko remains a distinct possibility if we are going to go beyond his budget-Duterte rhetoric and discuss instead what he is capable of doing, given the platform he is running on. But VP Leni, especially given everything she mapped out in a talk with The Rotary Club on October 14 is far far ahead of this pack, if we are thinking saying the right things for middle class support, and if we are thinking of who is on our side.

BUT the promise of unity is not one she can make, the notion of “independence” that she carries nothing more but an act. A symbolic act she admits, but now being revealed to be an act and not much else. Yet.

This has little to do with who she included in her slate—I can accept as strategic the need to build a slate that can beat the Cayetanos and Tulfos of this world, and therefore the need to have Binay, Escudero, Legarda on that list.

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komentaryo

Grace #Halalan2022

Talking 2022 means talking about the elephant in the room that is Grace Poe.

It is clear to anyone who has a sense of how elections are won and lost, who has as starting point Duterte-Marcos’s massive propaganda machinery, who looks at surveys critically vis a vis one’s own political biases, that the only way to win this is to bring together the business sector, the middle classes, and the mass vote behind one candidate.

It was clear, since the 2019 Senatorial election results, that this would be Grace.

And no, you’re not talking to a Grace Poe fan. Search through this site and my social media accounts and you’ll see that I have had the worst opinions of her in terms of where she stands on oligarchs, at the same time that I have been impressed by how she takes the side of the transport sector and commuters in the Senate inquiries she’s led. This doesn’t make me two-faced. It makes HER a Senator, and it makes me a citizen who agrees as much as I might disagree with the people in power.

But that IS the thing isn’t it? The right to vote is tied to a sense of our responsibility to nation, not to the people we vote into positions of power. We are not their fans, or their followers; positions of power aren’t Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts. This is about citizenship and about having a sense of what nation needs at any given point, relative to the decisions that our leaders make for us, in our names, using our funds, regardless of whether we voted for them or not.

No one seems to see this anymore, and this is no surprise. Duterte propaganda has pushed even the most sane, most rational among us to turn to fanaticism and troll discourse, which is easy to fall prey to on social media, where people across Left to Liberal leanings have enjoyed deeper echo chambers. Yes, you will get leaders, from VP Leni to Makabayan talking about uniting the opposition, but none of that matters when their actors are first to engage in divisive, DDS-like behavior on public platforms.

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kultura

Toni, Bongbong, history and #Halalan2022

Here’s the thing about Toni Gonzaga: she is a symptom as she is the condition itself, a very critical condition of lies, falsity, and disinformation at a time when murderers are condoned and the corrupt are shameless, when the plunder of resources has been normalized, as has the violation of basic rights, at a time when algorithms run our social media lives which, given this pandemic, is pretty much the life that we live.

Here’s the thing with Toni Gonzaga: this is ALL on her. She—as with other content creators, celebrities, influencers, you and me who do social media—is making decisions about what content to put out into the world, and SHE is solely responsible for those decisions. There is no one else she can blame for what is put on her accounts and her channels, there is no network to hide behind, no producer or manager to point a finger at.

At this point, we are seeing these personalities for who and what they are. And as Toni said: she’s got nothing to hide. And to some extent she’s never hidden that she is a Marcos loyalist—she’s just more shameless now, right on the month of Martial Law commemoration, in utter disregard for the thousands killed, the thousands more who live with its trauma, and the millions plundered by the Marcoses that all of us have suffered for.

Maybe this is the pandemic effect on her: I got nothing to hide, I got nothing to prove. Here, see me as a Marcos loyalist! I don’t give a flying f*ck. You only live once.

Here’s the thing with Toni Gonzaga: she knows, she has seen, how she will not be held accountable. (more…)

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…)