Tag: Duterte

2020 Ended at the Greenhills Hostage Crisis

January 26, 2021 by
2

I am writing this on the 1st of January, 2021, to be sure that the chaotic and fickle-minded 2020 had no more punches to throw. I have conjectured that while we had to trudge through 365 days last year, it had already ended on the 2nd of March, Monday, at Greenhills Shopping Center, when Archie Paray, 40, held his former employer’s office hostage. Afterwards, the gears that had been set in motion could no longer be stopped. That was our last train out of the pandemic, Duterte, his unsure men, and the lockdowns. We missed it.

This does not mean, in any way, that I am charging any more crimes to Paray and his employers than they are already accused of. Besides, the pattern for 2020 had already been set as early as January: when Taal Volcano spewed towers and towers of ash and COVID-19 entered our shores and the President couldn’t be found, when Bato’s US visa was cancelled and Teddy Boy Locsin Jr. made an ass of himself in front of protesters at the DFA, when the US under Trump almost declared war against Iran, when Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash.

But March 2 was a point of no return. By March 6, Friday, there was superspreader event, also in Greenhills, traced to a person making use of the prayer room on top of the parking lot of Unimart. Now with nine months of pandemic experience under our belts, we can imagine the butterfly effect that the event set into motion, and understand 2020 better.

Survey says: Fear

October 10, 2020 by
S

If there’s anything none of us should be arguing about at this point, it’s the climate of fear as fueled and nurtured by Duterte.

Pre-pandemic, we saw how Duterte and his people’s manipulation of the law could keep Senator Leila de Lima in jail on trumped-up charges. We’ve seen this government unseat Chief Justice Sereno because Duterte considered her as “enemy.” We’ve witnessed Duterte get away with massive violations on our rights, where random statements like, say, “arrest istambays” will mean the warrantless arrests of citizens the following day. Where Presidential fury and finger-pointing is enough to get people removed from their positions, business owners divested from their own ventures, critics or perceived enemies arrested or killed. Let’s begin counting the dead bodies from organized Left organizations, and the drug war dead.

The pandemic was just what Duterte needed to further clamp down on our rights, lock us down in our homes, and ensure our silence. We were afraid of the virus, of course and expectedly, but this government was not satisfied with just our fear of getting sick in a time and place with no reliable healthcare system. They wanted to bury that last nail into the coffin of possible resistance, and what better way to do it than by passing the Terror Law and throwing the ABS-CBN shutdown our way?

After all, if a cultural monolith like ABS-CBN could be shut down by this government based solely on Duterte’s pettiness, what can it NOT do? In the course of the Congressional inquiry on the franchise, we also realized that much of it had to do with the content of the network’s shows—and they weren’t just talking about news coverage (!!!), but about the portrayal of politicos in soap operas and teleseryes.

And what is the Terror Law and the contingent soundbites from military officials about regulating social media and the President about cracking down on dissent which government equates with terrorism? What else could the push of the MTRCB to regulate Netflix, and of the FDCP to have all film, advertising, and digital content pass through its office, be about? What could all of these be but the multifarious ways in which this government tries to restrict what we say and what we create, online and beyond? And if they don’t push through with these policies, then at the very least it has made us quake in our boots a little more and has distracted us from the incompetence and corruption that permeates government.

If we, in our cloistered, privileged, middle-class to wealthy spaces, can feel this fear; if we acknowledge that a major stressor the past seven months has been both the virus and the incompetent and violent governance, complete with a President who randomly drops shoot-them-dead orders, and military officials deciding on our lives with not a smidgen of compassion. If we can be afraid, what more the majority in the vulnerable communities?

Illegal and extra-constitutional #RevGov

August 22, 2020 by
I

Just some quick notes here.

1. The people advocating a revolutionary government are in effect calling for a self-coup, or an “autogolpe” in Spanish, where a legitimately elected leader illegally dissolves the other branches of government and assumes extraordinary powers for himself.

2. A power grab is a power grab, regardless of who the beneficiary is. Remember that a President is not the same as the government. Government is a balancing of the powers of the three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. The different branches are supposed to act as checks and balances for each other.

If, and that is a big IF, a President accedes to the proposal and declares a revolutionary government and dissolves the legislature and controls the judiciary, that is still clearly a power grab.

“A RevGov could also happen if the insiders—the people in actual and constitutional control of the government actively assisted by the military (or the military officials themselves)—set aside the constitution, sweep out the incumbent officials, install new ones, and run the government according to their will and ways,” warned former SC Justice Artemio Panganiban in 2017, when President Duterte was still openly flirting with the possibility of declaring a revgov.

Since then, Duterte seems to have dropped the idea.

The Anti-Government SONA

August 4, 2020 by
T

In the absence of a feasible and laudable plan to re-open schools, I am imagining how homework for many students would be when they are asked: What did you take from the President’s State of the Nation Address?

This exercise is often perceived as perfunctory in civics classes but has the deeper purpose of completing the feedback loop, making sure that the population, especially the young, is aware of the State’s plans, at the very least. Knowingly or not, teachers assigning homework related to the SONA actively take part in the State’s project of “nation-building.”

The role of the annual SONA is no different from sales rallies where company executives show up for their salespersons on the ground to deliver a rousing speech, just to be sure everyone is on the same page. In not so many words, Erap’s best sales pitch was when he exited through Commonwealth Avenue after his speech and met with protesters in the pouring rain; GMA’s was her bringing of three kids onstage and the myth of the bangkang papel. These proved to be effective talking points for their respective administrations’ annual push forward.

This year’s SONA was special. Stripped of the usual trappings and the faux Hollywood vibe, we see the SONA now for what it is. We expected a masterplan for the coming months, formulated for both Legislative and Executive branches, to address the fatal and colossal pandemic. But we got no categorical answers from Duterte. With the twice-a-week feed of “Late Night with Rodrigo Duterte” and the illusion of micro-management it brings, it would have been great to hear a New Year’s resolution of sorts, upon which we could anchor the next three to six months. So while this show of incompetence is not new, it was still disappointing.

21 Questions for 2020 SONA

July 26, 2020 by
2

by Mike Alcazaren

1. What happened to the Jee Ick-Joo case?

2. What happened to the missing 11B worth of shabu found in Magnetic lifters?

3. Why did the Navy settle for the inferior radar system in the “frigate scandal” if the correspondence SAP Bong Go sent was just to “report about a complaint” for the failed bidder?

4. What ever happened to the investigation of the PCSO scandal? STLs were shut down and reopened without any resolution shown.

5. Will the PhilHealth issue go the same way?

6. How much did Sarah Duterte’s law office make for that Mighty Corp. billion peso tax settlement? How is this even not a conflict of interest?

7. Why then do we need a Philippine Anti-Corruption Committee when they have done absolutely nothing substantive to fight corruption? The only thing they are known for is that one of its members asked the NBI to investigate VP Leni for “competing” with Duterte on COVID relief efforts.

8. Why do we need Mocha Uson as OWWA undersecretary? What non-troll, social media propaganda value does she add for the OFWs? Really? I mean really?