I am aghast that these senators whom we knew at the U.P. years ago are part of the regime’s counteroffensive to save a morally bankrupt leadership that has long deserved to be banished and replaced. But from the looks of it the whole political system may well undergo major surgery if not interment.
BY ELMER A. ORDOÑEZ
The Other View / Sunday Times
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VIII, No. 3, February 17-23, 2008
Truly sickening to see another round of cover-up, dissembling, and brazen denial on the part of Palace functionaries to counter damaging testimony by a witness on the ZTE deal. Sandwiched between GMA loyalists was Jun Lozada who finally screwed his courage to the sticking place and told everything he said he knew about the broadband scandal at the Senate investigation. Administration senators tried their best to discredit the beleaguered witness but they failed.
I am aghast that these senators whom we knew at the U.P. years ago are part of the regime’s counteroffensive to save a morally bankrupt leadership that has long deserved to be banished and replaced. But from the looks of it the whole political system may well undergo major surgery if not interment.
We know that any change at the top would be superficial, for we have a history of that kind of change from EDSA I (when one set of rapacious oligarchs was replaced by another set of elites equally capable of pillage and repression) to EDSA II (when a president charged and convicted of plunder gave way to another who is now the object of ouster moves because of more serious charges including corruption, electoral fraud, and abetting a military held responsible here and outside the country for extrajudicial killings, abductions, and disappearances of activists, media persons, church people, lawyers, and innocent civilians).
Hence, genuine social change is directed at dismantling the feudal social relations that have institutionalized political patronage, wholesale graft and plunder, and subservience of leaders to vested interests, local and foreign.
Genuine change seeks to abolish the coercive and ideological state apparatuses of the ruling class and install people’s organs that would look after the interests of the many and not just of the few,
At this stage people will settle for constitutional succession even in the unlikely event of the incumbent’s resignation. The Makati Business Club indicated that they can live with the takeover of the vice-president who, to many circles, has little credibility as a national leader. But it seems the climate of corruption under GMA has become so insufferable that anyone else as president would be a relief. Was this the mood of the protesters during the EDSA II not anticipating another mess they were getting the country into?
People who have experienced years of martial law are also wary of putschist attempts (like rebel soldiers staging a coup) unless perhaps the putschists would readily give way to a rapid transition to democratic processes of choosing the government. But from historical experience military leaders like those in Burma and Pakistan tend to make themselves permanently in charge.
What is envisioned here for now is a modest alternative to the neocolonial state of the ruling elites – an electoral democracy whose leaders are chosen in clean and honest elections not on the basis of personalities but on political platforms distinct from one another, where government and institutions work for the welfare of all and not for a privileged few, where the armed forces are professional and subordinate to civilian rule, where basic freedoms and civil liberties are inviolable, and where national sovereignty and social justice are paramount.
How to get there may well be what this renewed rising and protest is all about. Sunday Times / Posted by Bulatlat
