Katrina Stuart Santiago

in November 2010, i blogged about Lucio Tan getting away with the plan to lay off regular Philippine Airline workers in favor of outsourcing services, with the Department of Labor and Employment siding with him. now, almost a year since, PNoy proves himself an Hacienda Luisita heir, and actually says the PALEA workers who are on strike might be held liable for economic sabotage.

the President is saying that these regular employees who have served PAL — and therefore the public — for years are to be blamed for making the company that’s retrenching them lose money? here for the world to see, the mind of a President who mouths his matuwid na daan rhetoric at the same time that he sacrifices 2,600 workers’ lives and their families’ lives for who exactly?

Lucio Tan, the most notorious crony capitalist.

good job PNoy. good job.

(repost with minor edit from November 2010)

Lucio Tan wins again! or why that San Mig Light will taste infinitely better now

because in whose mind would it be normal and rational, just and fair, to lay off 2,600 employees favouring one of the richest Filipinos of 2009. really, now. Lucio Tan’s net worth then was at $1.7 billion dollars. that’s P78 BILLION PESOS. This year, he’s second richest in the land, with a net worth of $2.1 billion dollars, that’s close to P90 BILLION PESOS (89.67 to be exact).

according to DOLE, the rich are to be pitied because business is down, and therefore we must allow them to retrench workers.

This is also a man whose tax evasion cases were dismissed on a technicality during Erap’s time – Tan was a crony of Erap’s and earlier of Marcos. It explains, doesn’t it, how he got away with evading taxes that amounted to P25 billion pesosin 2005, which in 2000 was estimated to be at P25.27 billion (yes, I refuse to let go of that .27 billion).

i know i digress, here, but i think this digression points to the Department of Labor and Employment’s (DOLE) inability to see Tan as bigger than his current oppression of workers in Philippine Airlines. it points to how DOLE in fact seems to be treating Tan as its very own crony, siding from the beginning with PAL, even having meetings with its officials, as if it is PAL that is aggrieved in this situation.

let’s be clear here: we should feel no pity – at all – for Tan and his PAL management. they are not the oppressed here. and if you think otherwise, you should read up. or maybe try being an employee for once, and then talk to me about oppression.

because oppression is when you’re issued a gag order that disallows you to talk about your salary – not because it’s big mind you, but because it’s lower than most other pilots. in August, 27 pilots resigned because they wanted better wages. but this resignation was also about taking a stand against the way they were being treated by Tan and PAL management.

before this, 11 co-pilots had been forced to resign by PAL management because they wanted these pilots to fly planes under Air Philippines and Aero Filipinas – both owned by Tan. the point? these pilots would be hired as contractual employees, which means their wages would be cut in half, low as it already is in PAL.

as bad as this kind of treatment? some pilots aren’t forced to resign, but they are forced to take on flights for Air Philippines on top of the flights they do for PAL. that’s being employee in two companies! correction, that’s forced employment in two companies both owned by he who is called the “most notorious crony capitalist” Tan.

and no, this isn’t just about the pilots. flights have been undermanned, which can only mean overworked flight attendants with the same pay. female flight attendants are also being force to retire at 40, versus 60 for male employees; a maternity leave also means no pay and no benefits. ground crew also hear of theirimpending forced resignations in order to be re-hired on a contractual basis in Tan’s various spin-off companies.

but it can only get worse. Tan and PAL management did want to work on these spin-off companies so they might gain more profit, but this wasn’t in the form of hiring old workers on a contractual basis; it was to outsource employment which makes imperative the termination of 2,600 workers.

this is what’s in the news at this point, the DOLE decision being released as it was on November 1. the irony would be nice were it not tragic, too. and just reason for anger.

you ask why didn’t PAL employees hold a strike earlier? why did they wait for things to be so bad, to come to a head, to pile up like this? a history lesson might be in order: 12 years ago in retaliation against striking workers, the PAL management terminated 600 pilots and almost 2,000 members of the cabin crew. and yes, that case of wrongful termination is still in our courts.

so you see, Lucio Tan has gotten away with murder in this country, in so many ways, and too many times. governments have let him kill, time and again.

it might be good to remind PNoy that his mother, seeing as she is always invoked by him and his sisters, never dealt with Lucio Tan – in fact Cory was seen as hostile towards Tan, thank goodness.

and just in case this isn’t enough to convince PNoy that his delegation of this job has fallen on horrible hands. read the DOLE’s justification of its decision, it’s so naive – or maybe just blind – to the workings of a capitalist empire like the one Lucio Tan’s creating for himself. DOLE believed PAL when the latter said it has been suffering financially the past two years, though a look at PAL’s own milestones shows that it has done nothing in the past two years but to acquire and to expand. it sure doesn’t look like a business that’s suffering. Cebu Pacific might have beaten it already, but that doesn’t mean it’s in the red.

oh and just so you know, in 1998 PAL also used as excuse financial difficulties to defend its downsizing of operations and termination of employees. but too, maybe all it takes is to imagine how far Lucio Tan’s money – the one that’s declared in and everything else extraneous to those richest man in the Philippines numbers – could go into spending on PAL employees’ wages or just making lives better all around.

but too, there’s an even easier question to ask: if Lucio Tan is second richest man in this country, howthef*#@! can the same man have a business that’s going under?

ULOL.

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. but also the fact that as the evening ends with a quick goodbye, that split second that it takes you to unbuckle the seatbelt and give me a peck on the cheek, the swiftness of that moment is in slow motion: the wall of the squatters area further down sounds brighter, the lights of the korean plaza feel like an intrusion, the darkness of your building a foreboding. of this pending goodbye, the one that stretches to 5, 10, 40 minutes at a time, where the conversation is never about us as it is about the world outside. words suffice for what isn’t ours on that street: the deaf-mute understands what he sees as we are silent on his unsaid; the friend on the phone teases within hearing distance; the policemen behind your building surprised at our temerity/daring/guts to sit at the neighborhood bakery in front of the contained slums. we talk like we’re in front of expensive milkshakes, cups of coffee and pate, cheap banana bread, 15-peso footlong sandwiches, it’s all the same. as we have that same conversation in the car, right before you get off, as i need to get home, and that stretch of time that it takes for us to be uncomfortable, saying goodbye, not for the moment, but for a particular kind of distance, one we do not articulate. we talk like old friends even as this is farthest from the truth: the old, the being friends. here, take a conversation and run away with it. please take a conversation and run.

the more i listen to PNoy, the more i realize that his communications team, all three heads of it, seems to be just clueless about how to handle his public speaking, how to strike a balance between being (pa-)cool and young, and creating an image of credibility and respect. case in point: at the investiture of Fr. Jett Villarin into the Ateneo Presidency, the premise of PNoy’s speech was his being Atenista, his personal relationship with Fr. Jett its context. this apparently meant going back to the time when they were members of/working with the Sanggunian ng Mag-aaral (the Sanggu) of Ateneo during Martial Law.

Hindi man po masyadong halata, talagang mas ahead po talaga si Father Jett sa akin nang nag-aaral pa kami (ganoon ho talaga ‘pag kayo ang may tangan ng mike, puwede kayong mag-author’s license), at ilang beses ko din siyang nakasabay tuwing may mga aktibidad ang atin pong sanggunian ng mga mag-aaral. Naalala ko nga po nang may nag-imbita sa amin na maging—at ito nga ho, lumalabas ang edad namin—maging founding member ng League of Filipino Students. Batch po namin sa sanggunian iyan.

Noong kami po ay nagtatalo kung sasama o hindi dito, ang aming faculty adviser, si Ginang Tina Montiel, lahat ho kami, may agam-agam. Tama ba na papasailalim tayo sa kanilang tinatawag na Executive Committee kung saan, may diktadura na nga sa labas ng ating pamantasan, sasama pa kami sa isang organisasyon na didiktahan rin kami? Naalala ko pa ang aming pangulo noon, si Budge Orara, na kung saan natapos ang botohan ay biglang humalakhak, pagkatapos ng pagkaseryo-seryosong boto—dahil unanimous po ang aming desisyon na hindi tama sumama sa League of Filipino Students noong mga panahong iyon.

Hindi namin ganoong kakilala ang isa’t isa pero talaga naman pong hinubog kami ng Ateneo na talagang, kung tutuusin, iisa ang pananaw at talagang tama ang depinisyon at nagkakasundo sa kung paano ipapaliwanag kung ano ang mabuti, ano ang tama para sa ating mga kapwa mag-aaral.

these statements, while couched in banter and familiarity, is replete with layers of carelessness, almost as if it’s a private exchange among friends and not a public statement being made by the president of this country. so on the one hand, he was paying tribute to his alma mater in this speech; yet in the process of doing this as casually as possible, he creates the impression that Ateneo molds <students> who have the same views about the world, hold the correct definitions, are one in explaining what is right and what is just. fine, he was talking about his time in the Sanggu, but really? he just put into question Ateneo’s credibility as a liberal university, as an academic institution that holds critical thinking and discourse in high regard. i’d like to think — in fact i know — that PNoy’s statement is a disservice to all those Ateneo teachers who engage students in the task of asking the right questions, instead of creating a generation who don’t know to be critical.

that PNoy was talking about the Sanggu of his time’s unanimous decision not to join the committee that would form the League of Filipino Students (LFS) during Martial Law was this speech’s bigger more glaring mistake. again, in a tone that might be used for a dinner with friends, PNoy ended up not just putting into question LFS as an organization, but in fact, Ateneo itself and its refusal to get involved in nation at a time when this was what was required of the youth. and they refused because they had apparently been molded into thinking that to be part of LFS would be to fall into the hands of another kind dictatorship which, in the context of the Marcos dictatorship, was apparently unacceptable.

the parallelism of course is downright offensive: to have made such a sweeping statement about LFS and made it seem like it was equal to the Marcos regime it fought against, proves not just PNoy’s lack of a sense of history, but really his (and his people’s) carelessness, where this President falsely accused an organization that continues to exist of being a dictatorship. and then to add insult to injury, or just add to the carelessness, Edwin Lacierda says about the demand for an apology:

“No, the President will not issue an apology over a factual matter and for an organization that criticizes this administration incessantly, it should shed its onion-skin features,” Lacierda said in a text message to Sun.Star. “If it can dish out criticisms, [there is] no reason why it should not be able to take criticisms.”

no, Mr. Lacierda, you are wrong. what PNoy said about LFS was farthest from being factual, in fact it was an opinion, turned false accusation, couched as it was in an unjust parallelism. and when you carelessly articulate that LFS just has “onion-skinned features” <sic> and should be able to take criticism since they dish it, you also inadvertently point out how this was PNoy — this was the president of this nation — power tripping and taking a jab at an activist student organization that’s critical of him.

so anyone who criticizes the government is now fair game in PNoy speeches? how is that just, or fair? how is that respectable or responsible? or is it that what matters to this government is for PNoy to comfortably deliver speeches, never mind that there’s a tendency for him to seem like a loose cannon making careless insinuations and tactless assertions?

how very Kris Aquino of him.

it’s been quiet here, which isn’t to say that it’s been quiet where i’m at. been finishing up an MA thesis that’s gone on for too long, and is more about closure to a life lived in the academe more than anything else. while that’s happening, i’ve had more interesting conversations than usual, including conversations about art and the state of things in this country, ones that are kept off the record, unspoken of. sometimes it’s limited to Facebook, other times it just refuses to engage in decent debate and discourse, distinct from the personal.

yet there are many things to write still, conversations to be had. but it seems even brave statements of distrust and disgust, even ones that are relevant and worthy of discussion, become feed and fodder for the personal. here lies our un-critical dead end: we are a sensitive bunch of people, very few of us can handle criticism. yet in times of controversy, or just given the space to do it (blogs, newspaper columns), everyone becomes a critic in this country, everyone will claim the title.

which is fine too, were we all working with a sense of what criticism requires, what it entails, what it must necessarily work with. in recent conversations, forced to answer questions about the work i do, the blogging and the writing, and therefore my life in general (hah!), i realized that much of what i had to say reverted back to my sense of what’s relevant and important, to a sense that what i say is secondary to that text that’s in front of me, which is also always a text that’s about nation. i will never claim that i get it right all the time, or even half the time; but i will say that i come from a very clear sense of myself as spectator in the context of the tragedies and sadnesses that are in this space we all inhabit, that any cultural text necessarily sprouts from, no matter how removed these might be.

and just in case it isn’t clear, i’d like to think that any critic is a writer first, because every critic lives off of words, too, lives off of choosing the right words for capturing how she has experienced a text. and as with any writer, the only way to have the words to say, and to have a sense of what’s relevant to discuss, is to be within the enterprise of culture in this country, half the time suspending one’s notions of taste and order, the other half suspending all judgement. all the time it requires this sense of how things are never black and white anymore, that these are gray times, where notions of power and oppression are interspersed/diluted/interlaced with things that are prettier or tastier or just downright addictive.

it’s because of this that i find generalizations to be painfully unfair, if not just usually absolutely wrong. after the success of Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, this generalization was dropped —

Before it got made in the mainstream though, Ang Babae sa Septic Tank won over the less-forgiving indie film crowd, comprised mostly of hipster students and educated artsy folk who are used to seeing gritty, neo-realist dramas and have the tendency to be just a tad pretentious.

i’d like to find out where this indie film crowd hangs out, just because this girl’s got it all wrong about the indie, and the indie film, and even just the idea that there’s a crowd. had she read up on the indie, watched the indie for the past decade or so too, she’d know that this “crowd” doesn’t exist, the hipster students she’s so critical of are a recent aspect of it (and the hipsters are everywhere), and the neo-realist dramas that tend to be pretentious aren’t at all of the indie as a category, but of a kind of Pinoy film in general, indie and otherwise.

in direct contrast to such misinformed generalizations is something as honest as pinoy drama rewind which does movie and TV reviews, as well as episode recaps of contemporary soaps and seryes. this might not be the kind of critical blog that’s celebrated, but it sure as hell’s got more going for it than the misinformed being given space(s) in broadsheets like the Philippine Star. in the latter we just perpetuate the notion that all it takes is space to write and an amount of yabang. in the former, there is an effort at actually and truly coming to terms with the cultural products that we create and live with in this country, and there is a sense of humility more than anything else.

one that we should all learn from, critic and writer, young and old, in broadsheets and online, alike.

we don’t. but let me give you some proof.

Enjoy Division is a group exhibit not just with a wonderful title, but which had a curatorial note by Antares Gomez Bartolome that the Light&Space Contemporary gallery decided to put down.

the said note was critical of Malaysian curator Adeline Ooi’s assessment of Philippine contemporary art which looked down on us, i.e., “We already know you were conquered by the Spanish, sold to the Americans, raped by the Japanese and totally fucked over by Marcoses” but which praised artists influenced by Roberto Chabet. (that article was up at businessworld which now requires you to pay to see its archives. bleh.)

since Light&Space Contemporary’s censorship of the curatorial note, artists of Enjoy Division have decided to take down the exhibit.

it seems about right that they do, given the fact that there is no intelligent response from the gallery — at least none that’s been made public — other than what’s here.

via @Antares Gomez B. on Facebook (August 29)

Dear Light & Space Contemporary,

I am posting this essay for purposes of establishing a dialogue. Kindly reply with your reason/s for taking the essay down. So far, all I have is a forwarded message from Buen Abrigo, one of our organizers, who received a message from you. It reads: “Ano ba nangyari? tinangal namin yung writeup nyo, sablay sya men, sabihin nyo sa writer nyo, d namin susuportahan yung writeup, di pwde i publish gamit anglight and space. Maganda sana at solid yung show pero panira lang yung writer, gusto mo magusap tayo mamaya para malinaw sa inyo kung bakit d approve yung writeup.”

it’s interesting here how a show is judged as “maganda at solid” extraneous to its a curatorial note. the next step would’ve been for the gallery to explain their reasons for saying yes to this exhibit to begin with — what exactly did they think it would be about? — because they seem to be surprised about that note, when it could only be an integral part of the process of putting up that exhibition. of course it’s entirely possible that the process is different for this gallery, and that they were really truly surprised, then maybe the question should be: why? what was so wrong about an essay that critiques a foreigner’s take on Pinoy art?

and really, how do we deal with the notions of the curatorial note being separate from the exhibit it curates? though maybe let’s start by talking about the difference between the curatorial note and its writer: sablay yung write-up? panira yung writer? ganda.

via @Antares Gomez B. on Facebook UPDATE (August 31):

During our exhibition group’s meeting yesterday evening, we decided to ask the gallery for a written explanation for their decision to ban the essay. We received two text messages from them.

“Right din ng gallery na tanggalin ang mga bagay na negative or nakakasira sa gallery at sa mga tao na involved dito, ayaw namin makisama sa drama nyo kay ooi”
-Pow Martinez 30 Aug 2011 9:43pm

“Pwede naman palitan yung exhibit text nyo na walang name dropping na negative na sinasabi.”
-Pow Martinez 30 Aug 2011 10:08pm

We decided to ask if these two messages constituted the official statement of the gallery as they were rather general and vague.

We then received a telephone call from Pow Martinez where Buen Abrigo explained that the works could not sacrifice the essay, that the works were the manifestations and elaborations of the essay’s sentiment and vice versa, and that the criticism of how certain parties are distorting and exploiting (the making of) art history was integral to the exhibition’s concept.

The reply was that the gallery did not agree with our concept. “Lame” was the word.

We have since decided to withdraw our works from this so-called alternative space.

Despite our disappointment with the gallery management, we take heart that the exhibition was able to highlight the ideological lines that divide the milieu we are part of, lines that help determine the breadth, pitch, and span of critical art production and discourse.

and so it becomes clear: as far as the gallery’s concerned: (1) no curatorial note can say anything negative and/or namedrop, and (2) responding to a foreign curator’s statements about Philippine art is “drama” that’s negative. and yes, we got that loud and clear, it’s the gallery’s right to take down a curatorial note, BUT keep the exhibit that goes with it as if it stands on its own. got it.

on Enjoy Division 1 via Antares Gomez B's Facebook

on Enjoy Division 2 via Antares Gomez B's Facebook

so you know, there is actual debate and engagement with the strategies/tragedies/ concepts/ideologies/fictions that create this art world, and then there’s murahan at personalan, walang paliwanagan. and there are mafias and cliques and friendships, a refusal to change the way things are, and the general disregard for and distrust in criticism, even when they dish it against critics who engage them in intelligent discourse.

right here is why i never agreed with the idea that the one great thing to come out of the conservative controversy that was poleteismo is that people will start talking about philippine art. because the censorship of Enjoy Division’s curatorial note was infinitely more offensive and should resonate for anyone who writes — anyone at all — and as such demands involvement from those who joined the fray of kulo’s closure.

but the national artist and the high-and-mighty writers of this world don’t seem to care about art anymore, even when it’s been trampled upon by a foreigner with false grand statements about Pinoy art, even when it is censored in light of protecting one way of viewing art making in this country.

we prove in the end that post-poleteismo, and save for the grand couple of weeks when everyone was suddenly an art critic in this country and no one complained, the issue of censorship in the arts and the systems that allow it — without the noise of the penis — will only fall on deaf ears.

tunay na nakakadismaya.

Click here for Antares Gomez Bartolome’s curatorial note.