Cost of leaving November 9, 2006

THE Asian Development Bank has issued a warning: Migrating is hazardous to health. The national health at least. It is urging both the public and private sectors to implement measures to counteract the ferocious brain drain that is impoverishing the country as a result of the swelling flood of overseas workers.

"Brain drain has an impact on foreign direct investment as capital will flow only into economies with perceived adequate supplies of skilled labor in key sectors." Quite apart from that, there is the matter of the ability of the country to produce. "One of the greatest concerns about brain drain is that the continued migration of skilled workers reduces overall productivity."

This isn't the first time the ADB has warned about this. Some months ago, it said the same thing when government was congratulating itself about the peso strengthening against the dollar. It rightly attributed the cause of it to the remittances coming from the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), which have grown enormous because the exodus of Filipinos abroad has gotten enormous. That is the same reason the peso has gotten even stronger today: OFWs flood this country with dollars near Christmas. The ADB warned then, as now, that the country's reprieve was also the country's death sentence. Not unlike dope helping to see an addict through the day but causing horrendous long-term harm, if not a lethal one.

It's time we took the warning seriously. As with most toxic elements, the effects are more likely to come sooner than we think. It's the same thing with the environment, the effects of the ravaging of which we're already feeling, or reeling from, in terms of fiercer storms, floods and mountains crumbling even as we speak.

It's no longer just ordinary workers we're exporting, it's skilled ones. Indeed, it's no longer even just skilled workers we're exporting, it's professionals and specialists in their fields. It's nurses and doctors, or doctors who metamorphose into nurses at their points of destination. I do know many people from various walks of life -- doctors, flight attendants, print journalists, TV reporters, lawyers and even bankers -- who have left for the United States and are doing blue-collar jobs there. They probably figure wearing a blue collar elsewhere is better than wearing a dog collar at home.

Like I keep saying, I can't blame people for wanting to leave this country. It's not just that the prospect of greener pastures abroad can lure anybody, Filipinos first among them, into wanting to luxuriate in them. It's that the grass at home has grown brown and sparse and full of cow dung. It's not just that Filipinos are being drawn by a magnet to something they're prone to being magnetized to begin with. It's that they're being driven resolutely by their circumstances to abandon this country and leave it not completely figuratively to the dogs.

I know I have felt that way in moments of utter frustration. Who wants to live in a country where thugs are free to seize government and screw the citizens anyway they please in the smug expectation they can always count on those same citizens to say God is trying us like Job, let's just move on or move away? Until I realize that if I did that I would be one of those citizens -- or who are still pleased to call themselves citizens -- that are creating this situation.

I can't blame people for wanting to leave the country, but I can blame those of us who do in great part for the country going to the dogs. Easy to understand the reason, but just as easy to see that whatever the reason, the exodus is slowly snuffing the light out of this land. I don't know the answer to the problem. I can only point to the enormity of it in the hope that the specter of an impending disaster can alarm us sufficiently into wanting to do something about it.

The ADB proposal for the public and private sector to put up incentives to encourage Filipinos to stay, even if it could be done, may not even be a finger to plug the hole in the dam. The reason for this is that the entire public and private policy environment today is actively driving Filipinos to work abroad. Every institution in this country is being bent not just to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's will but also to supplying the world with more and more Filipino workers, which are probably just two sides of the same coin.

You see that in the entire educational system existing no longer to educate but to provide skilled workers abroad, notably nurses or what are euphemistically called "caregivers." Vilma Santos did a magnificent job of showing the humongous irony of that word in a movie, Filipinos who give love and care to others abroad depriving their own loved ones at home of them in the process. Whole wings of nursing departments have sprouted even in the snootiest of academic institutions, whose snootiness in any case has faded over the years from their own professors leaving to teach in Singapore and elsewhere.

You see that in English being espoused not as a language of learning but as a language to enable Filipinos to bag jobs abroad. Gloria Arroyo has been exceptionally eager to promote that (that was her speech in the graduation ceremonies she got heckled in by a student).

And you see that in the survival of the economy now resting nearly completely on the earnings of Filipinos abroad. All the economic accomplishments government is trumpeting, such as there are of them, owe to Filipinos working abroad. Without the OFW dollars, the peso would now be Japanese money, in the World War II sense of the term. Without the OFW dollars, Gloria Arroyo's value would be less than Mickey Mouse money. Ah, but that Minnie Mouse, or the Dark-side version, should be lording it over this country! But that's another story.

Or tragedy. And better left for another day.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=31406

No Nuremberg, this November 8, 2006

THE verdict was scarcely electrifying. After nine months, Iraq’s High Tribunal finally sentenced Saddam Hussein to hang for crimes against humanity, specifically the slaughter of 148 people in one town in revenge killings after an attempt on his life in 1982. Nor was the result electrifying, Saddam’s fellow Sunnis fomenting more violence on their already violence-torn country in response to it.

If the people who produced, directed and acted on this movie thought it would move the world to tears, they have another think coming. That is what US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, for one thinks, or says. “[It] demonstrates the commitment of the Iraqi people to hold them (Saddam and his co-defendants) accountable. Although the Iraqis may face difficult days in the coming weeks, closing the book on Saddam and his regime is an opportunity to unite and build a better future.”

What arrant nonsense. If the trial itself, not to speak of the verdict, moves the world to tears, it is only to tears of frustration and anger, not to tears of joy or gratitude. This does not restore the moral order of the universe, it unhinges it, sending humanity’s concept of right and wrong spinning out of its orbit. To paraphrase Khalilzad, this verdict -- and indeed the trial itself -- demonstrates the commitment of the Bush administration to exculpate itself and justify a bloodbath of its making. Although it may find a cause for much toasting in the next few days, using Saddam as scapegoat will only rouse more unrest in Iraq and cast a pall on the rest of the world.

Oh yes, the United States is every inch involved in this. To say that the trial is a purely local affair, a quest by the Iraqis themselves for justice from a madman, is to say that the trial of Macario Sakay and company at the dawn of the previous century was a purely local affair, a quest by the Filipinos themselves for justice from rebels and insurgents. The US occupation of Iraq today, as much as the US occupation of the Philippines then, belies that.

On the face of it, I have no problem with Saddam being found guilty of war crimes. Who likes Saddam Hussein anyway? Who doesn’t believe (apart from his loyal fanatics) that he is a thug and a mass murderer? But I have one very huge problem with the credentials of the people trying him. I have one very enormous problem with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s engineering this -- to quote Ramsey Clark, Saddam’s counsel -- travesty.

This is no Nuremberg. Nuremberg wasn’t just about the depth of atrocity wreaked by the Nazis, it was about the relative decency of those who sat in judgment over them. Of course, there were complaints then about the hypocrisy of the Western powers presuming to do so, they being just as guilty of slaughter, not least the US with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But at best the complaints were debatable, and at worst they were non-comparable. When the trial finished, the world did not just sigh with relief, it wept with the realization that justice can be, and had been, done.

Nor is this the Slobodan Milosevic trial, the second time the world moved to punish people who had committed crimes that cried out to heaven for appeasement. The United Nations-sponsored trial at the Hague was as close to heaven as the victims’ kin could get on earth. Even though Milosevic escaped justice by dying in his cell (officially from ill-health, though his lawyers claimed he had been poisoned), the world again sighed with relief and the victims’ kin wept in the realization that justice had been done.

There is nothing of the spirit of those two landmark trials in this. At the very least, why the United States never lifted a hand or even voiced a protest when Saddam was doing all these things in the 1980s adds selective perception to selective justice. Maybe because at the time the United States was busy arming Saddam to fight off Ayatollah Khomeini who had the temerity to oust the US protégé in Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi? Enough to ignore the fact that Saddam was also turning his murderous energies toward the Kurds and wreaking genocide on them?

At the very most, where is the justice in crucifying a vicious thug with a villainous-looking beard for wreaking a bloodbath on a town but not a bigger thug with a clean-shaven but cretinous-looking face for wreaking an even bigger bloodbath on a whole nation? Saddam got back at his presumed assassins and their families and their families’ families out of pique. Bush deliberately and systematically lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to his countrymen, to his allies and to the world (one is tempted to add “to himself,” but I doubt he knows the difference between lying to himself and not) and with the aid of his British poodle, Tony Blair, brought the apocalypse upon an unsuspecting country. Osama bin Laden razed the Twin Towers, and Bush got back at Saddam.

What to do when the leader of a backward country butchers a hundred or so civilians? Hang him. What to do when the leader of the most powerful country on earth butchers thousands of civilians on the basis of a lie? Say, “Ay mali.” [“Oops, wrong.”]

The verdict on Saddam does not shout justice, it shouts justification. It means to justify the American occupation of Iraq, notwithstanding the deception it was founded on, by reminding the world what a bastard Saddam is. And what a service Bush did the world by invading his country, raining bombs as smart as Bush is on the residents of Baghdad, and unleashing policies of mass destruction on a world the American Caesar (of the Las Vegas variety) barely understands and a people he couldn’t care about. Of course, Saddam is a bastard. But there’s a bigger bastard halfway across the globe, and there’s no court trying him.

What, you just punish him by beating him in elections?

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=31171

Not very modest proposal November 7, 2006

ON the face of it, there’s nothing scary about Presidential Political Adviser Gabriel Claudio’s warning that the administration will thrash the opposition come election next year. That is more bluster than threat. The opposite is more than likely to be true. But that presumes we will count the votes right. That’s the truly scary part.

The administration does have superior political machinery, but that machinery isn’t given to organizing or campaigning. It isn’t even given to acts of vindication or revenge, especially after government got a sound beating from the Supreme Court on the Charter change issue. That machinery is given only to cheating. That machinery is eager to get back at the opposition not by means fair or foul but by means foul or worse.

We have seen how that machinery was put to work in 2004: it was used to siphon off all monies from government offices to pay for billboards -- yes, the same ones they now want to put down -- and an unrelenting barrage of TV ads, and to give fertilizer funds to congressmen overseeing urban jungles. Ask that big joke, Jocelyn Bolante. It was used to ransack even money of overseas Filipino workers, a good portion of the fund of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration being used to buy off voters through the PhilHealth cards that had Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s grinning face on them rather than the forlorn ones of their beneficiaries. It was used to manufacture votes in the Central Luzon area, including Metro Manila, to give Arroyo an artificial lead.

And when all that still failed, Arroyo called up Election Commissioner Virgilio “Garci” Garcillano.

That machinery has not been dismantled. That machinery exists intact, and can be employed with the same ferocity to produce the same results. We count the votes right next year, and the opposition will very likely trample all over the administration the way the Liberals trampled all over the Nacionalistas in 1971. But that is like saying that if we had counted the votes right in 2004 Fernando Poe Jr. would have, if not routed Arroyo, at least had her biting his dust. What was done before can be done again. No, more than that, what was done before demands to be done again. Getting away with murder is an open invitation to murder again and again.

What’s to prevent it? The Commission on Elections (Comelec), which played the role of conspirator rather than arbiter during the last elections, has not been revamped. No one even knows whether the canvassing will be computerized or not, which is openly courting nasty surprises at the end line, the kind Benjamin Abalos and company sprang on the unsuspecting public the last time around. I haven’t heard any furious discussions about plans to stop cheating. I have not heard any demands from the opposition for an international delegation to monitor the elections the way Cory Aquino and company did during the snap elections of 1986.

More than this, as I said some weeks ago when Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos and Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz were predicting there would be no more “Hello Garci’s” because the military would no longer be used in elections, why should that be so? The generals did not call up Garci, Arroyo did -- and she hasn’t been punished. The only way crime stops is when it is punished. Crime gets rewarded, it will riot like weeds in an untended garden. The fact that Arroyo remains president assures there will be massive cheating in next elections. Look at the nurses and see if cheating has not become the accepted norm in this country.

Which brings me to my completely immodest proposal. That is for the elections next year to be held not just as regular senatorial elections but to be turned into a presidential election. No need to call for snap elections if the problem is time and money. We can always turn the regular elections next year into a special one to resolve the problem of a fake president.

I recall that One Voice was saying at one point that the elections next year could be turned into a referendum on Arroyo. Well, we just count the votes right and those elections will be a referendum on Arroyo, whether we like it or not. But more than that, a referendum presupposes a judgment on performance, and the problem is not performance, it is legitimacy. You can never reconcile a “Hello Garci” tape, as vicious an assault on decency, never mind democracy, as you can get, with a legitimate president. It is not enough that the elections next year be turned into a referendum on Arroyo, it is imperative that the elections next year be turned into an occasion to vote for a real president.

I don’t particularly care whether we can actually do this or not. I do particularly care that we -- the elements that made Edsa People Power I and II, the institutions of society that still believe this country has a future, and ordinary citizens -- demand to have this. Our collective voice will be heard, our collective will will decree its realization. Heavenly trumpets have been known to shatter the walls of Jericho, and you can’t get more heavenly than defending freedom.

At the very least, a loud and universal call for special presidential elections next year will let it be known that we are serious about doing something about screwing the voters. No, more than that, about the deceitfulness and lying that are spreading everywhere in this country faster than karaoke. In the end, none of the safeguards against cheating will matter if there is no public vigilance against the threat and no outrage against the commission.

At the very most, well, that is the start of punishing a crime. Arroyo continues to rule this country without having won the elections, we will never have clean elections ever. That is like expecting clean elections during Ferdinand Marcos’ time.

* * *

Tonight, Tuesday, Nov. 7, Stop the Killings Bar Tour, 7th leg, at Capones, G/F Fraser Place, Valero St., Salcedo Village. Lyn Sherman, Session Road and Mojofly play. Let slip the hounds of music, rein in the dogs of war.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=30933

Ghosts of elections past November 6, 2006

MY ATTENTION WAS DRAWN TO SOMEthing Gabriel Claudio, the presidential adviser for political affairs, said last week. He told the opposition not to gloat over the defeat of the people’s initiative petition for Charter change as the game wasn’t over yet. The administration, he said, was all set to get back at the opposition by thrashing it in the elections next year. “Whether the elections are senatorial or parliamentary, the administration will have the advantage of a nationwide political machinery eager for vindication or revenge.”

Can this happen?

Well, if we can keep the elections reasonably clean—and that is one humongous if—the opposite is more likely to. Claudio is whistling in the wind, a (futile) effort to keep spirits up amid the Halloween horrors along the way. As things stand right now, the administration looks headed for a debacle of epic proportions, the likes of which have not been seen since the senatorial elections of November 1971. For the benefit of those who do not read their history and have been repeating it like a bad karma, what happened then was this:

Those elections were preceded a few months earlier by the bombing of the Liberal Party miting de avance at Plaza Miranda on Aug. 21, 1971. Two grenades were lobbed onto the stage which carried the weight of the entire Liberal slate, excluding Ninoy Aquino. Thankfully no candidate died, although several were hurt; and Jovito Salonga, the most badly wounded—his body peppered by more than a hundred pieces of sharpnel—cheated death only by the skin of his teeth. It would be one of this country’s richest ironies—some might even say, it is proof of the existence of God—that Salonga, whom no one thought would live long from his near-fatal wounds, has outlived most of his contemporaries. Everybody naturally attributed the villainous deed to the villainous Ferdinand Marcos.

Its result was the massacre of the administration party, the Nacionalista, at the polls. Only one Nacionalista senatorial candidate managed to squeeze through. Salonga, who never campaigned as he was recovering from his wounds in a hospital well up to election time in November, ended up No. 1. Salonga, of course, had been a consistent top performer in senatorial elections, but his prodigious lead over all the others had sympathy vote writ large all over it. As well indeed as the runaway victory of the Liberal Party candidates.

As far as I know, only twice in our postwar history have we transcended the so-called “personality” or “ward” or “trapo“ politics and voted on the basis of principle rather than money or charisma. That was the first, the “snap elections” of February 1986 was the second. It takes that intense a drama or shocking a tragedy to lift us off our rut, or up our butt. After that, Marcos seriously began to lay down the brickwork for martial law, which had hitherto just been one of his options. He realized that even if he could change the Charter to allow him to run again, his future at the polls—given particularly that Ninoy waited in the wings—was dim.

The parallels are there for history to repeat itself, this time as blessing rather than as curse. The elections of 1971 were about Marcos, the elections of 2007 will be about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Both were/are preceded by an event that has rocked or shocked a nation that is no stranger to violently shifting tectonic political plates or to political Halloween, or Friday the 13th—take your pick of B horror movies. The elections of 1971 were preceded by the Plaza Miranda bombing, the elections of 2007 are preceded by the “Hello Garci” tape.

There are differences, of course. The interval between the mayhem is longer today than it was then—close to a couple of years this time as compared to only a few months then. And true enough, this country’s memory is short. And as drama or shock value goes, few things can top bombing a stage that’s propping up pretty much the entire opposition slate. It looked almost like the ending of “The Godfather,” with Michael Corleone wiping out his Family’s enemies to a man. But as gravity goes, the “Hello Garci” tape goes deeper than the bombing of Plaza Miranda. Marcos was at least the legitimate president when he was presumed to have committed the crime of trying to vaporize his enemies. Gloria is not: Her crime precisely is not being so.

The people may have gotten exhausted from having exerted themselves once too often to get rid of a bad president, they’ve reconciled themselves with just trying to survive a fake one. But they haven’t stopped being pissed off. Never mind the surveys, just go to your local neighborhood store or wet market and listen to the talk there. And this forgetful country has no lack of reminders of what exactly the “Hello Garci” tape means. The bones of the dead are piling up, the abuses (such as attempting to unseat the completely legitimate mayor of Makati) are coming faster, and as everyone knows—this one the Social Weather Stations has given a patina of scientific truth—the poor are hungry. You steal votes, you’ll steal food.

It takes passion and energy for people to go out into the streets to oust a tyrant or a fake leader. It takes only, to paraphrase Claudio, a public eager for restitution and justice to drag carcass to the nearest polling booth to blot out a scourge in their lives. The 2007 elections will be about GMA in exactly the same way that the 1971 elections were about Marcos. We count the votes right, they will have the same results.

As I said, that is one very big if. But that’s another story, best left for tomorrow.

* * *

We’re back in Makati. Stop the Killings Bar Tour, 7th leg, Tuesday, Nov. 7, Capones, G/F Fraser Place, Valero St., Salcedo Village. Lyn Sherman, Session Road, and Mojofly will sing your blues away.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=30717