Joke February 14, 2007

I’VE ALWAYS LIKED AND RESPECTED JOKER Arroyo. It’s not because he is a Bicolano. I don’t particularly like or respect the other Bicolanos who have been thrust into the limelight over the years, except for Raul Roco.

Joker I’ve liked and respected in the same way that I’ve always liked and respected Nene Pimentel. Despite drifting to the “Dark Side” at some point in their lives, they’ve kept a good deal of the “Force” inside them—in the form of defending human rights. That was how they made a name for themselves to begin with, as human rights lawyers. No, more than that, as people whose hearts burned with the libertarian fire.

Imagine, therefore, my profound dismay when I heard Joker last week, defending his decision to join GMA’s ticket. It’s bad enough that he did join it.

He would have been better off running as an independent and preserved whatever patches of believability still clung to his claim of being a maverick. Even if he wins this battle, he will have lost the war. Some defeats are luminous victories, some victories are crushing defeats. One would imagine that our natural trajectory is to commit mistakes in our youth, as we sow our wild oats; and grow wisdom in our age, as our thoughts turn toward bequeathing a good name to our children, if not to justifying our lives to our Maker. Alas, in this country the opposite happens.

It’s bad enough that Joker enlisted in GMA’s cause. It’s worse that he defended it the way he did.

In the past, he said, he’s crossed swords with GMA, particularly when she declared emergency rule, when she supported Cha-cha and when her government got involved in shady deals. But he has had no reason to give up on her. On the contrary, he has had every reason to be bullish about her. “No one can deny that the country is moving forward. The political choice in the coming election is to trip up the country or help it along.” The opposition, he said, has nothing to offer. All it has done is try to impeach GMA. While at that, “one has yet to hear the opposition denounce attempts by military adventurers to topple the government and set up one outside the Constitution.”

How can anyone who has ever been a human rights lawyer possibly be confused about the direction in which this country has moved? It is not forward, it is downward. At the very least, it’s no small irony that a day before Joker said this, his boss had just walked out of a press conference because our reporter, Gil Cabacungan Jr., kept asking her why the effects of her touted economic growth had not reached the hungry. In fact, Gil didn’t just ask a perfectly legitimate question, he asked the only question worth asking. Growth that happens explosively in only one part of the body is not called progress, it is called cancer.

But far more than that, how can anyone who has ever been a human rights lawyer possibly not see the killings? Or, indeed, the mayhem that is happening right in a Bicolano’s own backyard? The deaths caused by the superstorms from the Pacific are nothing compared to the deaths wrought by the evil wind from Malacañang. One has yet to hear the opposition denounce the extra-constitutional plots of adventurous military officers? One has yet to hear Joker denounce the extrajudicial executions by murderous state-sponsored cutthroats. The killings are not just a vicious trespass against human rights and civil liberties, they are an abomination against any decent community, never mind democracy.

And still that is nothing. One has yet to hear the opposition denounce attempts by military adventurers to topple government and set up one outside the Constitution? One has yet to hear Joker denounce the actual act by a presidential aspirant of stealing the vote and setting up a government outside the Constitution. How can anyone, human rights lawyer or not, possibly ignore the “Hello Garci” tape? The fact that it was illegally obtained may only prevent us from using it to jail GMA. It may not prevent us from using it to not hail her as President. The only reason no one, opposition or not, is denouncing any attempt to oust this regime, by coup or by Cory, by military strike or by People Power, is that this regime is a coup regime. One wrought by ballots rather than by bullets, one wrought by Garci rather than by guns. It has been defended by guns ever since, which brings us back to the killings.

It was Joker who rose brilliantly to damn the Erap government in the impeachment trial for having betrayed the public trust. Where is the Joker to damn this regime, brilliantly or sullenly, for never having had it in the first place?

All the opposition has done is to try to impeach GMA? I may not be a fan of the opposition, but if that is all it has done, then we owe it an eternal debt of gratitude—that is all that needs to be done. Not cross swords with GMA over details, but cross her out for having no right to rule. The issue is not performance, it is legitimacy. People who are not elected have no right to rule. People who try to do something about it are not being destructive, they are being constructive. People who fight injustice are not pulling the country downward, they are pushing the country forward.

If Cory had been “negativistic” when she heroically fought to bring Marcos down, Edsa would never have happened, and Joker would never have been executive secretary. If Joker had been “negativistic” when he fought heroically to bring Erap down, then Edsa II would not have happened, and Joker would never have ended up a GMA minion. Ah, but how soon people forget who they are and what they did.

The political choice in this election is to be a principled alternative or to be a huge joke. The latter brings tears to the eyes, and not from merriment.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=50214

Footnote to a farce 02/13/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- I never got to comment on it last week, what with one thing and another happening. But it’s too important to let pass.

That was the House of Representatives’ ethics and privileges committee’s decision to suspend Alan Peter Cayetano for 45 days. The vote, to nobody’s surprise, was 35-3-1. The lone abstention came from Butz Aquino who probably said it best: “I don’t want to have a part in this kangaroo court.”

Cayetano was suspended for accusing Mike Arroyo, also called the First Gentleman (well, we also call Raul Gonzalez justice secretary, Norberto Gonzales national security adviser, and Ronaldo Puno and Benjamin Abalos guardians of clean elections) of harboring deposits in a bank in Munich.

The only good in this is that it will probably catapult Cayetano upward in the voting charts. Who knows? Maybe it might even make him No. 1 when the smoke clears in May, assuming this country is able to thwart the advance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as I wrote about yesterday. Cayetano’s suspension has yet to be approved by Congress in plenary session. What can I say? I most ardently hope it does, if only to give Cayetano more free advertisement than Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s expensive ads paid for the charity sweepstakes office that now litter the NBA games on Basketball TV like debris after a super storm, do for the administration candidates. The equation is simple: Jose Pidal’s enemy is Juan de la Cruz’s friend. I can only plead earnestly with our congressmen: Please oppress Cayetano some more.

That is the only good thing about it. Everything else stinks.

To begin with, the ethics and privileges committee is so only in that Mike Arroyo represents gentleness, first or last, and Raul Gonzalez dispenses justice, legal or poetic. Look at the creatures that infest it and ask yourself if most of them have even heard of the word “ethics,” much less grasped its meaning. You can only be certain they have heard of the word “privileges,” clinging as they do to them with all their might.

While at this, the entire premise of Mike Arroyo’s suit against 43 journalists (last I looked) is that he is not a public official, he is an ordinary citizen. Therefore journalists may not simply claim good faith when they attack him, they must pay for the trespass in cash or kind. Well, if he is an ordinary citizen, why has the House ethics committee moved heaven and hell to try to remove one of their own from their ranks as though he were an absolute contamination because he dared raise as a matter of fundamental national interest the possibility he is not just a crook but a most unpatriotic one? If I recall right, a Muslim congresswoman attacked an ordinary citizen, in the form of a representative of a catering outfit, with a knife in the very premises of the House complex for inadvertently contaminating her soup with bits of pork, and she never met with any sanction.

Which brings us to Cayetano’s “crime.” Did he make a mistake in identifying the deposit? Probably. Does he have the right to get a waiver from the First Gentleman, one that applies to all possible deposits abroad? Absolutely. It’s not just he who has the right, the entire Filipino nation does. Ping Lacson did issue such a waiver when he was on the hot seat, and, as he pointed out to me in a text message last week, even went on to file a couple of bills that would make such a blanket waiver compulsory. The bills went unheeded but he vows to revive them if he gets back to the Senate.

At the very least, Cayetano’s mistake is an honest one. At the very most, his motivation is a laudable one. Contrast this with a humongous crime that remains unpunished to this day. That is an incumbent president calling up a Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioner right in the middle of canvassing and asking to win by a million votes over a nearest rival. That mistake is a thoroughly dishonest one, having as it does the gravest consequences and its perpetrator having as she did full knowledge and full consent, which are, if I remember my catechism right, the requirements for mortal sin. And its motivation sucks, its perpetrator simply wanting power at any cost. Yet Congress’ ethics committee never ruled to suspend its perpetrator from power, it promoted her to dictator.

But in the end the worst thing about the fate Cayetano has met in the hands of his inferiors (they are by no means his peers) is that they make a farce of elections. Frankly, I don’t know why we’re going ape about the May elections. Frankly, I don’t know why we’re betting feverishly on the candidates like the loud and drunken crowd in off-track betting stations. We already have the killings and the cheating that are making a mockery of elections. But added to that, you can get voted into office and lose it anyway on various ruses by a corrupt and ruthless administration.

We’ve already seen the attempted ouster of Jojo Binay as mayor of Makati City and the actual ouster of Pasay City Mayor Pewee Trinidad and other elected public officials. We’ve already seen the attempted ouster of Legaspi Mayor Noel Rosal, with fake ballot boxes suddenly materializing in the Comelec premises and the Comelec ruling that a rival candidate actually won the vote. And now we see a representative suspended by Congress for a crime against the people, the people defined as Mike Arroyo. Different tactics, same result. In this country, it’s not enough to be voted by the voters to hold office. You have to be voted as well by the Department of Interior and Local Government, Comelec, Congress, and whomever they’ll think of next.
You don’t get murdered or cheated in the polls, you’ll get massacred afterward.

Cayetano’s fate in the hands of his colleagues razes down the entire concept of an elected official. But then why expect them to appreciate the concept of an elected official? Their big boss is not.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=49073

Apocalypse 02/12/2007

The reason Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is President today owes to one other reason than that she asked Garci to make her win by a million votes over Fernando Poe Jr. and that her minions carried out a massive switching of ballots in Tawi-Tawi and neighboring districts. The latter borne out by the fact that the tallies in many precincts were either not signed by the public school teachers or carried signatures that bore no resemblance to human hand. I am not exaggerating. Look at the “thumbprints” in some of those tally sheets and ask yourself if they were made by thumb or paw.

But like I said, the reason GMA is President is not just because she did that. It is also because of something equally important, if not more so. That is that the so-called opposition, represented in great part by the FPJ camp, bungled things monumentally. The way the FPJ campaign was conducted remains an object lesson in how to lose without really trying. How anyone can possibly manage to not get the most popular candidate on earth—more popular even than Erap, who won over his nearest rival, JDV, by the kind of landslide you see only in Ormoc and Infanta—to dominate an election, it takes talent of the vastly negative kind.

The point is this: GMA became President not just because she cheated but because she made her victory over FPJ plausible.

Until the Garci tape came out a couple of years ago, by the grace of God and Ong, I myself thought GMA might have won the elections. That was so because she ran a more efficient, if epically corrupt (Joc-Joc Bolante, the PhilHealth card, the PCSO and Pagcor ads), campaign. Or conversely, because her main rival, or his handlers, ran theirs to the ground.

Had the FPJ camp been half as competent as Erap’s, the cheating would have been patent and intolerable, and would have driven FPJ’s legions into the streets in violent protest. As it was, well, all Kiko Pangilinan had to do was say, “Noted,” and that was that.

Well, folks, it’s happening all over again.

Truly, people who do not heed their history are doomed to repeat it. Hell, people who cannot stop, look and listen for the history train are doomed to be run over by it. Two developments are particularly scary in that respect.

The first is that the cheating machinery isn’t just in place, it is well-oiled and ready to spring into action. Only recently I got a text message that said: “What are the bishops doing about the Comelec officers in the ‘Hello Garci’ tape that have just been promoted? They are: Francisco Pobe, Renato Magbutay, Ray Sumalipao, Remlane Tambuang.” Good point. And should be addressed not just to the bishops but to everyone: What the hell are we doing about them?

Yet that is nothing compared to something even scarier. Look at the placements of public officials. You have Ronaldo Puno as head of the DILG, you have Benjamin Abalos as head of the Comelec, you have Hermogenes Esperon as AFP chief, and now you have Hermogenes Ebdane as the new defense secretary. What do they have in common? They are the people believed to have engineered the massive cheating in the last elections. Puno as mastermind, Abalos as chief executor, and Esperon and Ebdane as implementers in the field. The two Hermogeneses specifically appear in the “Hello Garci” tape.

They are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But here’s the bigger rub. A massive hoax is about to be sprung upon an unsuspecting electorate while the so-called opposition is self-destructing right before our very eyes. I’ve always thought, and said, that the May elections will go the route of the American elections last year and our own elections in 1971. The issue in the last American elections, though not a presidential one, was George W. Bush, because of the Iraq War. The issue in the 1971 elections, though not a presidential one as well, was Ferdinand Marcos, because of the Plaza Miranda bombing. The issue this May will be Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo because of the “Hello Garci” tape.

Or so I thought. One would imagine with the elections shaping up that way, the “opposition” would put up a united front and make the contrast between them and GMA a lot starker. Or put the distance between them and her a lot longer. Or one would imagine that they’d get their act together and register their opposition to GMA’s illegitimacy and dictatorship a lot more stridently.

But no, the opposite is happening. Instead of creating a broad united front, the opposition has divided itself into the Erap people and the non-Erap people, with the Erap people getting favored treatment in UNO. JV Ejercito’s decision to make way for Sonia Roco is far too little and probably far too late. The rest of the pack, disgusted by that turn of events, but with their own political ambitions flailing at them like a whip to a horse, have gone their separate ways, many of them making their own pacts with the devil. Or joining the administration camp or groups allied with GMA. What thoroughly idiotic things to do.

What it does is not just to confuse the issue, turning an election that would and should have been a judgment on GMA, the way the American elections of 2006 and the Philippine elections of 1971 were, into a farce. It reduces a historical watershed into a choice between relative bastards and opportunists. Indeed, what it does is render the cheating that is about to be sprung on this country invisible. At the end of the day, the administration can claim—with much believability—that the opposition candidates lost, not because the Four Horsemen wrought an apocalypse upon them but because they shot themselves in the head.

It’s bad enough that we’re back to the rule of a tyrant. But for people to fight it armed only with stupidity! Onli in da Pilipins.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=48856

Footnote to doomsday February 8, 2007

FRANKLY, I don’t know why the Democrats are limiting their choices only to people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for 2008. Of course, I’d like nothing better than to see the first woman president of America. About time it had one. And given that Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House, has broken the barriers, Hillary seems to have a good crack at the White House. And, of course, I’d like nothing better than to see the first mulatto become president of America, which would break an even bigger American taboo.

But there is better. It comes in the person of Al Gore. I don’t know why he shouldn’t be shoo-in.

It’s not just because he will be fighting a Republican foe laboring under George W. Bush’s jagged shadow. It’s also because hindsight has shown that Bush did not just lie about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he lied about the votes he got in Florida. Gore should have been US president way back in 2000. I don’t know why he can’t get a bagful of sympathy votes for that alone. Surely the American voters know how to pay back someone they owe, and owe big?

But far, far more than that, it’s because Gore has not just become the biggest thing in America of late, he’s become the biggest thing on the planet of late. That is because his crusade to save the planet from its biggest scourge, which is its annihilation by man-made global warming, has just been given a terrific push by the recent report of a UN panel of scientists saying global warming is real, global warming is dire, and global warming is here. There are no ifs and buts about it: The planet is dying even as we speak.

Of course, that report comes well before the American presidential election of 2008, but it is not likely to be forgotten -- neither by the American voters nor indeed by the citizens of the world. The reason for it -- a most frightening one -- is that there will be no lack of terrifying reminders of it over the next couple of years. The report predicts that in the immediate future, we are going to have intolerable heat waves and droughts along with storms, hurricanes and cyclones of mind-boggling fury. And further on in that future, unless something drastic is done to stop it, another Ice Age. The super storms that hit this country late last year, packing winds of more than 200 kph, already gave a hint of the shape of things to come. As does Hurricane Katrina, which flattened out New Orleans a couple of years ago. If the report is to be believed, things won’t get better, they will get worse.

That makes Gore not just the most winnable president of the United States, that makes him the most relevant one. That makes Gore not just the most tenable president of the United States, that makes him the most important one. What is at stake is not merely America’s ability and authority to lead the world to progress, what is at stake is America’s ability and authority to lead the world to survival. What is at stake is not just the future of America, what is at stake is the continued existence of humankind.

Of course, George W. Bush’s people have been quick to spin the report and conscript it to their cause. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the report confirmed what Bush had been saying all along about “the nature of climate change, and it reaffirms the need for continued US leadership in addressing global climate issues.” Well, Bush does share one quality with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which is the ability to lie through his teeth. And which, as in these parts, has been imbibed by his lieutenants.

The Republicans, in fact, had been harshly condemning Gore for making the predictions he did, which they are now claiming as their own. Bush’s father, George Sr. said of Gore then (Gore had been campaigning for saving the earth way back): “This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American. This guy’s crazy.” Well, Bush Sr. must know something about crazy that we don’t. He offered a toast to Marcos for his adherence to democracy.

This guy’s crazy? Well, Gore was crazy enough to be saying -- well before it became popular to do so, indeed when it was the political kiss of death to do so -- that there was no doubt about the reality, immediacy and direness of global warming except the doubts Exxon et al. were trying to spread about it, in the same way that the cigarette companies tried to spread doubts about the ironclad medical finding that smoking caused lung cancer. Gore was crazy enough to be saying -- well before it became relevant to do so, indeed when it was the political kiss of death to do so -- that America was the number one polluter of the earth’s atmosphere, and that unless it curbed its carbon emissions, it would plunge the planet into a state beyond resuscitation. Gore was crazy enough to be saying—well before any American politician dared say it, indeed when it was the political kiss of death to do so -- that if we want to stop the earth from being murdered, let’s compel his country to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

What’s crazy for the Bushes, of course, is the sanest thing in the world for the rest of the world. Indeed a completely literal life-and-death agenda for it. One can only hope that what has been a kiss of death for any American politician, not to speak of presidential aspirant, will turn out to be the breath of life for Gore’s future—as well as that of the human species. In the end, the American elections of 2008 are of monumental concern not just for the American voter but also for the citizen of the world.

The UN report reaffirms the need for continued US leadership in addressing global climate issues? There’s only one way that can be true: with Gore in charge.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=48135

Again, terror 02/07/2007

MANILA, Philippines--RICARDO Blancaflor, director for legal, public information and advocacy of the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, writes to try to dispel my terror over the current antiterror bill they are proposing in Congress. Let me take up his points one by one:

“The threat of terrorism is real and ever present. It is not a concoction of the imagination or wild speculation. It’s real, it’s everywhere, with the public exposed to imminent danger unless we put terrorists in check, disrupt their plans and arrest and prosecute them before they can kill the innocent and wreak havoc on our security and economy.”

I agree absolutely, taking only minor exception to the word “threat.” Terrorism is not just a threat in this country, it is a reality. It is everywhere, it is in the very heart of Malacañang. It exists in the horrendous, if puny, form of a president who spoke to Garci about forcibly winning a million votes over her nearest rival and kidnapping a public school teacher who witnessed the cheating. Can anything be more terroristic than that conversation between Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Garci? The Abu Sayyaf only beheads victims, the current non-elected government has beheaded democracy, democracy’s (fountain)head being the vote.

We’re not just in imminent danger from terrorists, we’re being massacred even as we speak. Count the number of political activists and provincial journalists murdered in this country. Truly, we must check this vicious terrorism. That is not done by the antiterror bill, that is done by People Power.

“Terrorism is an extraordinary crime that necessitates extraordinary remedies in today’s extraordinary times. The Super Ferry and Valentine’s Day bombings could have been avoided had we had an antiterrorism law that could’ve kept the suspects behind bars.”

Not at all. Terrorism is an extraordinary crime that necessitates only the very ordinary remedy of common sense. If you hear a public official in a surveillance tape asking a shady character to plant a bomb in a schoolhouse or church, would you go on to appoint that public official as the head of national security on the ground that the taped conversation was illegally gotten and everyone has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty? Certainly not. If you can’t jail the fellow and throw away the key, you can at least put him under preventive suspension and keep him under a watchful eye. Well, we heard a president ask a shady character to plant a bomb in the very foundations of democracy, and not only did we not put her under suspension or behind bars -- or freeze her bank deposits, as the antiterror bill proposes -- we made her president of this country. No, you do not need extraordinary remedies for extraordinary crimes, you need only plain, simple, ordinary common sense.

Just as well, the most ordinary exercise of law enforcement and due process should do the trick. What idiocy that if we had an antiterror bill, we could have kept the suspects that wreaked the Super Ferry and Valentine’s Day massacre behind bars. If we had law-enforcers that simply did their jobs and given the courts the evidence to convict the suspects, they would have been behind bars. You cannot replace stupidity and incompetence with force. That is rewarding the undeserving. No, more than that, that is putting a gun to your head.

In fact Blancaflor’s reasoning is an old, and discredited, one that has been resorted to again and again by the police. Each time crime riots because they are busy extorting tong from businesses, if not kidnapping the Chinese, they ask for more guns and more powers to deal with the “emergency.” And when the “emergency” gets worse because the added guns and powers merely help them extort more from businesses, if not kidnap more Chinese, they ask for still more guns and powers. Ad absurdum, ad nauseam.

We have all the laws we need to stop crime and terrorism. It’s just a question of using them rightly. All the antiterrorism bill does is jack up terror.

“The proposed antiterrorism law is our government’s response to the challenge of trying to win the war on terror without losing our democratic values and ideals….”

Too late. A ruler who rules without a mandate, who excuses the violence done to the voters as a lapse in judgment, who prevents witnesses to the cheating from testifying without her consent, who has outlawed the very thing that brought her to power, which is people power, who has made lying, cheating and stealing supreme virtues apart from national policies, and who is killing journalists and activists right and left, is in no position to defend democracy. There ain’t any left.

“Our civil rights are not absolute. Such rights depend upon the survival of the government…”
False. Such rights depend upon the survival of the nation or republic or state or citizenry. Government is not any of those, least of all this one. Arroyo’s survival is not the survival of the nation, republic, state, citizenry, democracy or even government. Arroyo’s survival is merely her own.

“It is only the terrorists who should be afraid of the proposed antiterror law.”

Hahahahahaha! Tell that to the kin of the dead.

“The most dreadful terror, however, is the possibility of being consumed by our own biases and paranoia -- which see everything this administration does as always linked to political expediency and the quelling of legitimate political dissent.”

Paranoia is not just seeing what is not there, it is not seeing what is there. I have a better idea for Blancaflor to contemplate. It comes from Upton Sinclair and is quoted by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth.” All he needs do is substitute “seeing” for “understanding.”

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=47912

There oughta be a law 02/06/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- I always make out in talks, whenever a question about corruption is raised, that there’s a fundamental difference between our corruption and that of other Asian countries. It’s not that ours is bigger. Other Asian countries, or closer to home, Southeast Asian ones, have more astronomical levels of corruption. Transparency International lists Ferdinand Marcos only second among the all-time crooks of Asia. The dubious honor of being first belongs to Indonesia’s Suharto. Marcos stole “only” $15 billion, Suharto stole $35 billion.

But you look at Indonesia and the Philippines today, and you are going to weep only for the Philippines. Indonesia hasn’t quite reached such levels of desperation that it has to export its people wholesale to survive. That’s not simply explained by the fact that Indonesia is bigger and richer and can tolerate higher levels of pillage.

Quite simply, though Suharto stole more, he never took the money out of Indonesia. He plunked his loot in all sorts of businesses there, big and small, multimillion and penny-ante. Marcos stashed his loot abroad, in Swiss and other banks. At the end of the day, Suharto remained in Indonesia, ready to face, or buy off, his detractors. At the end of the day, Marcos fled to Hawaii to enjoy the bitter fruit of his murderous labor, such as he could with lupus and Imelda, whichever made living more unbearable.

That is the difference between corruption here and other Asian countries, which explains the abject state we’re in. Other Asian countries at least have patriotic crooks; we have treacherous ones. The blood money of other Asian tyrants go on to employ the citizens of their country; the blood money of local ones go on to employ only a few Filipino maids and chauffeurs in America.

That was the first thing I thought of when I read about this business of Mike Arroyo signing a waiver allowing the HypoVereinsbank in Munich to divulge his accounts, if any, to the ethics committee of the House of Representatives. He did this to counter Alan Peter Cayetano’s allegations that he held accounts there and apparently to comply with the lawmaker’s demand for him to sign a waiver to ascertain it. Cayetano is unimpressed by the gesture and says that is not exactly, or entirely, what he is asking for. What he is asking for is a waiver that will free not just this particular bank in Munich but all foreign banks to reveal the First Gentleman’s deposits upon request by Philippine authorities. What he was trying to determine, Cayetano said, was whether there existed “a pattern of corruption and money-laundering by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and members of the First Family.”

I leave others to debate the question of who has scored the more points in this latest round of the ongoing bout between Arroyo and Cayetano. My point is simply this: Why should signing a waiver allowing foreign banks to disclose the deposits of Filipino public officials—and their families—upon request of Philippine authorities be voluntary or optional? Why should it be done out of the goodness of one’s heart? Why shouldn’t it be compulsory or a requisite of public office? Why shouldn’t that be something candidates explicitly or implicitly agree to when they run for any position in this country, from barangay councilor to president?

Frankly, I don’t know why no representative or senator has yet filed that as an urgent bill. Henceforth, every Filipino official, elected or appointed, agrees to have his assets abroad scrutinized without legal impediment from him. Or more to the point, henceforth every Filipino official, elected or appointed, agrees to waive his right to secrecy in bank deposits abroad. That should be written in the oath of office public officials must swear to before they occupy their positions. Which, of course, should apply to the members of their immediate families as well. For obvious reasons: A public official’s loot may not be laundered by his or her spouse or children.

The logic is simple: At the very least, even if those deposits are well-gotten (although the notion that Filipino officials could possibly harbor legitimate wealth in Swiss and other banks is about as believable as the notion of military intelligence or Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s capacity for honesty), what is a Filipino public official doing not using that money to improve the lot of those he professes to serve? At the very most, if those deposits are ill-gotten -- which they almost axiomatically are, notably where they carry the name “Jose Pidal” or variations thereof -- then their depositors should be shot by firing squad in, well, not in Bagumbayan, that would be sacrilege. Those deposits do not just represent corruption, they represent treason. Those deposits do not just represent a betrayal of public trust, they represent a betrayal of the nation.

We have a proposed anti-terror bill that proposes to terrorize the citizens by freezing the bank deposits of suspected terrorists. Why can’t we have a saner anti-corruption and anti-treason bill that simply obliges public officials to disclose their deposits in foreign banks by waiving their right to secrecy there? What can be more a matter of national security than preventing the remaining wealth of this already much ransacked country from being smuggled outside and frittered away by crooked traitors or treacherous crooks? What can be higher treason than plucking food from the mouth of the hungry to bet on Manny Pacquiao’s fights? What can be a worse act of terrorism than planting a bomb at the heart of this country’s survival?

Will Mike Arroyo sign a waiver allowing all foreign banks to disclose any deposits he might have made with them? That shouldn’t be a matter of choice, that should be a matter of course. By God, by law and by golly.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=47682

Pandora's box February 5, 2007

MANILA, Philippines--FE DOLOT, president of the Legazpi City Public School Teachers and Employees Association, had an urgent letter to the editor last Friday. In her letter, Dolot attests to the genuineness of the vote count in Legazpi after the May 2004 polls. In that count, Noel Rosal won as mayor with 44,792 votes while his nearest rival, Michael Imperial, lost with 33,747 votes. Rosal is currently the mayor of Legazpi.

What compelled Dolot and her group to write that letter is that Rosal's legitimacy has been challenged by Imperial and has been upheld by the Comelec's Second Division and then by the Comelec en banc. The case is now pending before the Supreme Court.

What happened was this: After the May 2004 elections, the counting of the votes for mayor was done in full view of the public and duly signed by the teachers. The count produced the results above. No one complained about any irregularity in the counting. No one among the watchers, including the representatives of the candidates, said the teachers called out the wrong names from the ballot forms. The counting was clearly, transparently, unassailably aboveboard.

Now comes the curious part. When the ballot boxes got to the Comelec, Imperial challenged the count, claiming that many of the ballots were fake. When the Comelec Second Division opened the boxes, lo and behold, its members did in fact find a host of fake ballots. How in God's, or Beelzebub's, name those things got in there, only they know. The public school teachers at least are absolutely certain the fake ballots were not there when they turned the ballot boxes over to the Comelec. They know that for a fact because all the ballot boxes bore their signatures certifying them to be authentic. The fake ballot boxes the Comelec "discovered" in their premises did not carry those signatures.

And still comes the curiouser, or more ingeniously devious, part. The fake ballot boxes did not contain votes for Imperial, they contained votes for Rosal! So, putting on the face of stern benignity, the Comelec Second Division and en banc, in sync ruled to blot out the obscenity--the fake ballots--from the face of the earth. And, lo and behold, Rosal ended up with 30,517 votes and Imperial with 32,660 votes. Ergo, by the Comelec's reckoning, Imperial is the rightful mayor of Legazpi City, a matter the commissioners have now laid out before Solomon, also called the Supreme Court, to adjudicate. Ah, but truly, they add whole new meanings to the word "commissioner."

Dolot laments in her letter: "The ballots that were counted by the division were obviously tampered with as they did not bear our real signatures as members of the BEI. This prompted us to file an affidavit with the Comelec Second Division questioning the spurious signatures on the documents, but it never gave us, some 110 teachers, a chance to be heard."

I can understand the teachers' wrath. The Comelec's decision to uphold Imperial's challenge makes them out to be either incompetent or crooked. Either they are too stupid to allow such humongous wrongdoing to get past them or they are too bright to improve their plight by selling principle. Public school teachers in this country have nothing in life but their good name. To have that taken from them too, they have every right to go to war, or write letters to the editor, whichever delivers them first.

But Jesus Christ, between the public school teachers who counted the votes before the burning gaze of the voters of Legazpi and Benjamin Abalos' cohorts who unearthed the fake ballot boxes amid the shadows of their tomb, beyond the gaze of human eye, whom will you believe? That's a no-brainer.

Seemingly a local issue that affects only local politics, it is in fact a matter of life and death, and one that should transfix our gaze. Two things particularly make it infuriating.

The first is: Why is it so easy for the Comelec (or indeed Congress) to discover machination in vote counts whose honesty the teachers themselves swear to upon their children's lives, while they find it next to impossible to espy any ghost of wrongdoing in vote counts whose rottenness everyone, from priest to general, from God to Gudani, is loudly condemning?

The second is that it makes a mockery of elections. In the same page where Dolot's letter came out last Friday was another letter by a Rudy Coronel that bitterly, and completely rightly, protested the firing of elected officials by the Ombudsman. It was a good reminder that in this country it is not enough to win elections to hold office. You have to snarl and claw as well throughout your term to fend off enemies who mean to grab your office by hook or by crook. Ronaldo Puno's dismissal of officials he does not like is horrendous enough as it is, and I myself cannot understand why we, the public, have not gone to the streets to exorcise that deviltry. That is an ice pick shoved into the heart of democracy. Henceforth, elected local officials may exist only at the sufferance of one of the most insidious and obnoxious characters to crawl out of this planet.

The Rosal-Imperial case pours gasoline into that fire. Henceforth, the ultimate arbiter of who should govern this country is not the Filipino Voter, it is the Alien Comelec. Forget campaigning among your constituents, just remember to campaign among the commissioners. Forget the voters' votes, just remember the commissioners' commissions.

Rosal is removed from office by this act of malice and maliciousness, elections become nothing more than a costly exercise in self-flagellation. The boxes from Legazpi that the Comelec Second Division opened were not just ballot boxes that contained fake ballots, they were a Pandora's box that unleashed an army of evil upon this land.

They get away with this, heaven help us.

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