Tag Archives: #Eleksyon2019

komentaryo

How We Lost The 2019 Elections #Halalan2019

If there is a lesson to be learned from the outcome of the 2019 elections, it is this: the Duterte machine — guns, goons, gold, plus propaganda — is a success, by ALL counts, and it doesn’t even matter that chief propagandist Mocha didn’t get a seat in Congress.

It has succeeded because we were all oblivious to, decidedly ignoring, all the signs that this leadership would move hell and high water to get the Senate and Congress it needs to continue, Presidential ill-health and worsening poverty and discontent notwithstanding. To be clear: the election results are not a referendum on Duterte — there was enough irregularity, questions of fraud, massive vote buying to disabuse us of that (— it’s so bad Duterte himself has pretty much admitted to fraud.)

But the fact that they were able to get those Senators proclaimed despite all those irregularities, with nary-a-difficult-to-ignore public outcry, that is the referendum we should be looking at. It is also the “referendum” of the past three years. The truth is, beyond the count, we had let Duterte and his people get away with “rigging” this election, so to speak, ensuring a win, no matter how well the opposition(s) campaigned and how much money they put out (think Bam Aquino and Mar Roxas).

Talo na tayo sa eleksyong ito bago pa man tayo bumoto, bago pa man magsimulang magbilang ang COMELEC. We were losing long before campaign season, long before people even declared their intention to run. In fact, by the time we realized there was a slate we could all get behind, we had already lost. How? Let us count the ways.

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Incredible Elections #Halalan2019

Were we cheated in this elections? I don’t know. Are these elections credible? Not at all.

It’s not even just the results. It’s the irregularities we have heard and / or experienced, it’s the reports of broken down vote counting machines and faulty SD cards, and reports of voters’ receipts coming out with names they didn’t shade on their ballots, it’s the massive vote-buying on the ground that the police admitted to before election day.

But I think what makes this election incredible is not just what happened on the ground (and what was happening long before campaign period — we’ll get to that in another essay). It’s what happened when the precincts closed, and our votes were to be counted, transmitted from the vote counting machines all over the country to the COMELEC server and the transparency server in Manila. (more…)

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Last three weeks #Pagasa2019

Throwing back to articles written during and after the 2016 Presidential campaign, because I realize these are the words I go back to, this is still why I think we need to get our acts together, beyond the partisan politicking and the moralizing elitism. And I think, three years since, that we’re getting there. We have three weeks to go, and a lot of ground to cover for the five candidates that represent change in the Senate: #22Colmenares, #23DeGuzman, #25Diokno, #36Gutoc, and #59Tanada. We gotta do better than 2016 because no one else — least of all the Liberal Party with all its cash and machinery — is doing better.  

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Ir/relevance
May 22 2016

If there’s anything the campaign season and election results might teach us it’s how irrelevant we are to the outcomes of political exercises such as choosing our leaders.

And I mean us, the middle to wealthier classes who are on social media, writing and reading and speaking in English, our minds swirling with foreign books and films and TV. I mean us, the Martial Law babies of the 70’s, who grew up on Marcosian history but also came of age in the years post-EDSA ’86, and the democratic cultural and political space it allowed us. I mean us, who claim freedom, invoke it, live off it, but do not know a life where we fight for it with our blood, do not know to struggle with freedom from hunger, need, want.

I mean us, artists and writers, performers and creatives – cultural workers all – who, in this most divisive and critical of elections could’ve, should’ve, would’ve been the voice of reason, the voice that balances what is good with what is delusion, what is bad with what is worse, never speaking in terms that are white and black, good versus evil, because we know the pitfalls of archetypes and stereotypes, we can read spin from a mile away, we can see every shade and tint of gray.

We are skilled at distance, at seeing bigger pictures, at telling larger narratives. It keeps us sane, above the fray, disengaged even when we are in the midst. Our politics is beyond the elections, we like to believe, because the real work for nation happens after it, in the six years of necessary struggle with new leaders, in this perennial resistance we nurture because we are aware of our systemic dysfunctions, those that are never fixed, because rarely admitted.

Let it be said that during election season 2016, our partisanship and our biases got the better of us. Let it be said that too many fell into the black hole of namecalling and trolling, of taking a moral high ground that is precisely what has won this election for candidates we thought would never get into power. (more…)

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Is this still a whiff? Bato and Diño, FDCP and tax rebates

It was bad enough that Bato dela Rosa had the gall to have a film made about his life — after all, it was under his leadership at the PNP that we saw THOUSANDS of Filipinos killed in a bloody drug war that he insisted was necessary because his god … este, his President believed it to be so. Of course a film that is blatantly propaganda via hagiography is nothing new. Neither is the admission that this film is about getting him a Senate seat. Let’s not even get into whether or not he has the credibility and credentials for it (and no, Jimmy Bondoc, insisting Bato’s loyalty to the President is enough is just idiotic, also: anti-nation).

Let’s just talk about the fact that he is already an administration candidate, which means that he already has the benefit of using government resources for his campaign. And then he makes a film about his life, which he need not declare as a campaign expense, even when he himself admits it’s supposed to help him win the elections. Imagine? It’s like getting campaign ads aired without having to declare it as part of your campaign. It’s getting away with spending millions on your campaign without having to declare any of it. 

But it gets worse. Enter Liza Diño’s Film Development Council of the Philippines.  (more…)

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Populism, the Liberal Party, and a new campaign strategy: Winning VS Duterte

I did not vote for Mar Roxas in 2016, though I did vote for Kiko Pangilinan, Risa Hontiveros, and Leila de Lima, as I did for Bam Aquino in 2013. I didn’t campaign publicly for any of them. In fact the only person I publicly campaigned for in 2016 was Neri Colmenares. Given short memories, it bears repeating that I was heavily critical of the Liberal Party government of Noynoy Aquino. I thought that there was an undercurrent of elitism with which the governance operated, and this revealed itself slowly but surely throughout the six years, in policies, in actions (or lack thereof), and often from the mouth of PNoy himself, sometimes of his Cabinet members. I thought it problematic that they equated social media noise and traction with public opinion; I thought they enabled entities like Rappler to earn from, build upon, false notions of wisdom-of-the-crowd. Information dissemination and transparency were fantastic though, and I miss it terribly now.

It seems like years ago, doesn’t it? An administration like Duterte’s can make us feel this way, with just a little over two years of suffering. This is a governance of chaos-by-design, of disinformation and lies, of destruction and distractions, of literal and figurative violence. It’s exhausting to be critical because nothing is going right, and we are kept in the dark about what exactly is going on. Two years in and there’s still no clear platform for governance, and certainly no clear vision. A constant: Duterte’s rhetoric of violence and vitriol, half the time hyperbole, the other half lies, which we’re told by his men we shouldn’t take seriously. Other constants: incompetence from inflation to traffic to food crises; and Duterte’s threats to leave his post, from letting a military junta take over to declaring a revolutionary government, to railroading charter change and federalism in Congress.

The current state of the nation is enough to build a campaign versus Duterte in the 2019 elections. We know that the more non-Duterte Senators and House Reps there are, the bigger the chances that the people will be represented instead of silenced in Congress, the lesser the chances of any anti-people Duterte law being railroaded. Those of us who might be critical of LP should know it’s time to set those concerns aside for the bigger picture, the more urgent task.    (more…)