Category Archive for: pulitika

komentaryo

Boycott!

published in i magazine, The Investigative Reporting Magazine of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Vol. X, Nos.1-2, January-June 2004

No, this isn’t about apathy and a lack of interest in my country’s affairs. Nor is this simply about how the roster of candidates and their non-platforms have so stupefied me, I can’t bring myself to even think of voting. While the start of election season has seen me going through varying degrees of dismay, disgust, and distress, it’s not just these that have made me decide not to take part in the May elections. Truth is, long before GMA flip-flopped on her decision not to run, ever since EDSA Dos when the unified mob that stood up against Erap decided to go their separate ways – some on home, some with Cardinal Sin to pray, some with the Left to Mendiola – I have been finding many reasons not to vote, not least of which is the worsening poverty alongside a ballooning foreign debt, and the escalating presence of America in our land.

But the main reason goes beyond government and politics into the state of our minds. I’ve decided not to vote because over the last three years I’ve realized that we – the so-called “educated”, the middle to upper class “intelligent” and “enlightened” sector, the ones who read and write essays like this, including politicians – are actually all in over our heads, unable to make sense of our political and economic troubles, and incapable of working together towards real change. Worse, we actually think we are doing enough for the nation while blindly we accept and promote the Establishment’s propaganda that we need to celebrate our democracy with the vote even when the choices for president are all questionable.

How can we be at fault, you may ask. After all, we are the print and television personalities who fashion ourselves (or are fashioned) as “intellectuals” (sometimes academics) and who make it our business to be critical and to look out for the nation. We are the entrepreneurs who provide jobs, and the individuals who build NGOs to help neglected sectors. We stood up to the Marcos dictatorship and stopped tanks in 1986, then again marched to EDSA in 2000. We would like to think that we work and live for self AND nation. The question is, are our efforts getting the country anywhere near the goal of a happier prouder democracy?

Nowhere near, I would say, considering that even Inquirer’s Conrado de Quiros only goes as far as saying that we are responsible for the ignorant masa, but doesn’t tell us what he thinks we should do about it. Talk shows, like ANC’s Talkback with Tina Monzon Palma can only ask questions like “do political ads affect your vote?” as if the answer isn’t obvious. And on GMA 7, Debate’s Pareng Oca and Mareng Winnie are still stuck, still asking if a candidate’s personal life is important, as if there weren’t other, more important, questions begging to be asked.

The middle and upper classes happily go their separate shallow ways, content to do some good for some marginalized sector or other, but not to work on the flawed system to which it belongs. We’ve become so swift to label each other (communist! rejectionist! sell-out! even, fascist!) as though this were the be-all and end-all of any person, never mind that his or her proposed solution to a national problem may have merit. And for fear of being ourselves labelled, lest we lose our readers/fans/supporters – even present and future jobs – we have become very careful of what we say, and who or what we endorse, in public. It’s self-censorship at its best.

This is why we can celebrate democracy at the same time that we allow government to trample on it by disallowing rallies. We can moan about the how big the foreign debt is, but we can’t bring ourselves to insist that something be done about it. We say we’re pro-Pinoy yet we refuse to demand a pro-Pinoy platform of our presidential candidates. Worse, we do not seem to care, if we’ve noticed at all, that most of these candidates have charter change, specifically, changes in economic provisions, in their agenda, which should be freaking out serious pro-Pinoys!

Rightfully so, we are critical and wary of the wholistic solutions espoused by the extreme Left (communist rule) and the extreme Right (military rule), yet we in the middle have yet to come up with a coherent alternative, a political and economic strategy that would institute radical changes not only in the way we use and share the nation’s resources and do business among ourselves (Christian and Muslim alike), but also in the way we share our resources and do business with the rest of the world. And when someone actually comes up with something important, a must-read, like Walden Bello’s recent two-part essay “Thetragic consequences of doctrinaire economics” (posted on www.inq7.net, Dec. 24, 2003) on the Philippine economy and what we have been doing wrong compared to the rest of tiger Asia, no one prints it, no one reads it, no one takes it up for discussion.

Like Joel Rocamora, I thought for a while that maybe we could unite behind one candidate (my bet was Roco) and actually beat FPJ. But common sense and reality tell me otherwise. As de Quiros says, along with ABS-CBN and GMA 7 ads, voting is a personal thing. To vote is an act of conscience, an act of citizenship and freedom. Unfortunately for this country, this only really means voting for who we personally think will do something for us as individuals and our corresponding ideologies. It’s about self-centered concerns, and it means helping put in the highest position of the land someone who does not truly measure up.

A boycott may not solve anything, but would voting? The fact is, we need more than an election to save us from our troubles, and we need more than an “enlightened” electorate to get a good president. That we cannot even get ourselves a nationalist candidate is a reflection of how little we have come to demand of our leaders, and of ourselves. Too often, we have become like the politicians we complain about – we’ve started to believe our own propaganda and think we are doing enough.

In 1992 I campaigned for Salonga in the first ever election I was interested in. I was too young to vote, and he lost, but it was the only election I felt good about.

Having voted for Erap in ‘98, and participated in an EDSA that did nothing but put GMA in power, I refuse to put my country through the consequences of another of my mistakes. I owe it to my country not to vote. I will not settle for some “lesser evil”.

ComeMay 10 and enough registered voters boycott the exercise (which turn-out statistics would reflect) it would at least send the message to the President-elect that he or she has the vote and confidence of the inadequately informed and the politically naive only. *

komentaryo

Afraid of ABS-CBN

Published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “Talk of the Town Section” editorial section, January 11 2004

For most of the past two weeks, newscasts, newspapers, internet publications, and email inboxes have been bombarded with expressions of disgust and dismay at how the elections seem to be shaping up – tragedy, farce, theater of the absurd – between a Panday presidentiable and a political party named K-4, between a Captain Barbell senatoriable and the return of the EDSA Dos Most Hated.

Worse, the two top vice-presidentiables (one of whom would take over should the winning president go the way of Erap) are both media personalities of ABS-CBN 2, which is owned by the Lopezes, who also own Meralco, cable TV, and Bayantel, among others. And now that Noli de Castro has teamed up with GMA and Loren Legarda with FPJ, it’s not surprising that there are screams of “Sell out! Sell out!”. I, on the other hand, stare at my bloated Meralco bill in exasperation. For no matter who wins, the Lopezes will have one of their very own up there in the corridors of power to protect their varied business interests.

If it weren’t so offensive – and scary – I’d say it was brilliant. Here we have a big business conglomerate that is not only creating TV personalities and making money out of them through the ratings game, they are also having them run for public office, inevitably (it would seem) to serve as their loyal puppets once in government. What a clever way for the Lopezes to acquire political power without any of the Lopezes themselves running for office.

Of course, de Castro and Legarda deny brokering behind-the-scenes deals between their presidentiables and the Lopezes. Even the Lopezes deny it, saying that both de Castro and Legarda have minds of their own and make their own decisions – they are, after all, credible ABS-CBN current affairs people.

Really now. Then why is it that no ABS-CBN personality tackled the issue of Meralco overcharging its consumers? One saw (sees) Kris Aquino saying that it’s soooo easy to get your money back, and that this is kagandahang loob, in the same way that Ces Drilon has said that making the Lopezes give the masa their money back is something that’s anti-business. Noli himself has said that there’s nothing wrong with the Lopezes as they own legitimate businesses, conveniently forgetting – as does his interviewer from ABS-CBN – that Meralco, for one, has been found guilty of overcharging consumers, which makes it an abusive, if legitimate, business.

Unwittingly or not, this is what the Lopezes have created through ABS-CBN: media people who wear, and profit from, the cloak of “public service and current affairs” but who are obviously equipped, and only allowed, to serve the interests of big business and the cows they hold sacred. They’re also allowed to peddle clothes on billboards along EDSA, just as they are allowed to make commercials on TV. Nevermind that this contradicts the whole idea of credibility. I often wonder if these “public servants” have even read the basics of Philippine history and politics as exposed by Renato Constantino in 1973, or current books on media by the PCIJ, or NatSits (national situationers) on the economy and society by academics who dare dispute government propaganda. I seriously doubt it, as the questions they ask about issues betray them.

De Castro and Legarda are no exception. If anything, they are prime examples of how a media giant can create talents who believe and know nothing but their own propaganda. At least GMA 7 has yet to put together propaganda for Jay Sonza who’s running for senator. At least FPJ’s the big boss who creates propaganda for himself. De Castro and Legarda have bigger, more powerful, bosses above them to whom they’re beholden for all the good propaganda they’re getting – propaganda that, in fact, gives them the guts to run and allows them to win.

The fact is, “Kabayan” isn’t any different from “Captain Barbell” and “Ang Panday” in the sense that all three are on-screen personae that are carried over into real life, not necessarily by the audience. ABS-CBN itself uses “Kabayan” to refer to Noli, a classic example of how it uses its current affairs arm to sell its own-never mind how this contradicts the station’s claims to objectivity and public service. And unless we all consciously campaign against an ABS-CBN government, believe you me, we will get one in the future, with everyone from Noli to Loren, Remulla to Korina, Edu to Dennis Padilla, Herbert Bautista to Aiko Melendez, Boy Abunda to Kris Aquino in the top positions of the land. And we can all watch our Meralco bills, among others, bloat like there’s no tomorrow.