Category Archive for: pangyayari

komentaryo

#SONA2019: Unpacking Duterte’s propaganda strategy

It’s a ruse. At the State of the Nation Address of Rodrigo Duterte last Monday, there was silence about charter change. Not even a peep about federalism, nothing at all about easing of economic provisions in the current 1987 Constitution. This is as deathly a silence as we can get from Duterte — and we all know he thinks nothing of murder.

This is why we should talk about the SONA, and not just in isolation, but in relation to the bigger picture that is Duterte’s propaganda strategy. That is after all what keeps him winning. It is what keeps him in this position of power.  And we need to get our shit together about this propaganda if we are to even make a dent against it.

Of course three years in and we now know that Duterte propaganda strategy #1 is: use the President’s big mouth to distract the public. But from what? And given this knowledge, what do we do next other than raise our fists in anger?  (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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George Ty’s estate: How the wealthy can get away with anything

It surprises me that no one seems to care — or is there a news blackout? — on the crisis of the George Ty estate. After all, we’re talking a conglomerate that has its hands dipped in insurance (AXA Philippines), transport (Toyota), banking (Metrobank), and real estate development (Federal Land), not to mention education (Manila Tytana Colleges) and energy (Global Business Power Corporation). GT Capital also has major stakes in Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC), which builds roads and tollways.

And while one might like to think that these are private businesses anyway, and therefore none of us should care about what happens to it, that would be small-minded of us. Obviously, this means thousands of jobs on the line. We should also be looking at all the public projects of GT Capital, the ones that it was able to get traveling with Duterte on his official visits to countries like Japan. And let’s not even start about the thousands of Metrobank and AXA Philippines clients, the properties being developed by Federal, the subscribers of Global Business.

It’s also a surprise, that for a President who insists that he is against the abusive rich, the wealthy, the elite, and whose propagandists insist that he wants to tax the rich more than the poor, that Duterte has fallen silent on the Ty’s estate-in-crisis.

George Ty died with a net worth of $3.4 billion dollars as of a June 2018 publication. That’s approximately P174,589,025,357.36 pesos, read: P174.5 BILLION PESOS given current exchange rates. But as of this report, whoever’s holding Ty’s will is  is only declaring his estate to be worth P3 BILLION PESOS.

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Why this silence surrounding George Ty’s estate-in-crisis?

I rarely — if at all — care about the movements among big business and oligarchs, except when they are in cahoots with government and China to push for anti-people policies, and of course when the issue at hand is one that is about oppressing workers, demolishing the urban poor, and / or violating basic rights. And in this country, we’ve got a lot of that.

But this bit about what has happened since George Ty’s death in November 2018, via Vic Agustin’s Money Go Round column in the Inquirer, piqued my interest. On the surface, and admittedly, it was this narrative of two wives — one Filipino, one Chinese — that made it hard to ignore. (One wonders why Mother Lily isn’t making this into a Mano Po film yet, harhar.) But a bit of research on Ty, and one realizes that what has actually hung in the balance since Ty’s death are far more important: (1) thousands of Filipino jobs, (2) billions of pesos in people’s investments and savings, and (3) the national and global business conglomerate of the ninth richest man in the Philippines.

Even more surprising? If not suspicious, is how it seems like it’s being kept quiet, this whole Ty Estate crisis. Because after it filled mainstream news in February 2019, suddenly there was complete silence about what’s been going on. Save for Agustin’s June 2019 piece, there is practically nothing. No credible status update about Ty’s estate, a silence that puts at risk everyone that works and invests with GT Capital, but also puts at risk the credibility of the whole Ty conglomerate.

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China, Duterte, and Philippine democracy

No, I don’t think Duterte is scared of China.

I think that he and his men entered into agreements with China, they signed on for projects and the Belt and Road Initiative, and now cannot even take a stand against whatever aggression our fishermen experience from the Chinese in West Philippines Sea. Government (i.e., the Philippines) is so deep in China deals that it has become difficult to even speak. Utang na loob is one of the more effective forms of silencing for Filipinos after all, and China — cunning as it is — doesn’t even need to invoke it; they just know someone like Duterte would feel so indebted there would be no way he would be able to take a stand.

Government propagandists call it “diplomacy.” But let’s assess this situation for what it is: Duterte put all his eggs in the China basket, and now he can’t even find his balls.

Here’s the ironic part though: China has realized that it doesn’t matter that they hold Duterte by the balls. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t mean they can do all that they want with and in the Philippines. What it’s up against is the rest of us. And Philippine democracy — no matter how it’s been discredited and put into question by the success of Duterte propaganda — still has its balls intact. (more…)