Jinggoy’s Nightmare, The Nation’s Awakening

Before Jinggoy Estrada opened a new door in his life, literally his detention cell at the refurbished custodial center of Camp Crame, he encountered an emotional storm. He was going to leave his family, sleep in bed alone for an indefinite number of days that can go into months and years, shirk an enviable life of luxury and power, and go through the thorny road of trial for the capital crime of plunder. Those gave him nightmares.

On June 23, came the moment of truth: no big talk was going to hold back detention anymore. The indicted named Sexy was going through the unsexiest pose of them all: fingerprinting and mug shot at the police camp. No amount of showbiz drama and body language choreography could make up for the disaster that waited to damn his movie-fashioned political career.

In the day of his surrender to the Philippine National Police, as he came into the glare of media at his house in the Corinthian Gardens, the senator’s eyes swelled. He held back tears, but could not. His jaws quivered as he answered questions. Yes, he was still defiant. He was going to yield to the authorities with head unbowed, he said, because he had done nothing wrong. But he struck a distant mien from that brave stance, once, on the podium of the Upper Chamber for a privilege speech denying having anything to do with the Priority Development Assistance Fund scam. He had immensely softened.

It was a nightmare indeed, but one that would be his nation’s awakening. Was it ever possible for personalities like him and Senator Bong Revilla to be so humbled? Was it ever foreseeable in the near future for powerful political figures like them to go down from their lofty perch and go through the police criminal procedure? Was it ever imaginable to see top government officials and movie idols of their level lose clout and be forced to take the finger print and mug shot, and later shamefully locked up?

That used to happen only to folks in the lower rungs of society. But they happened to Bong and Jinggoy, capped by their iconic images melting in the public esteem. And the people, who have been used to viewing the law as a spider web where only the small get caught but the big ones pull through, were starting to view power – specifically where it resides, differently.

There were things that were hard to believe in the country, not the least the high and mighty going to prison. But Bong and Jinggoy are where they are now, probably because they did not thought such could happen. They must have always believed as the people did in the past that no crime can be attached to them, that they were beyond the arm of the law, and out of reach of punishment for violating it. Indeed, there was an era when these were so. But the recent nightmares of the two riveting figures in Philippine politics today signify such may no longer be the case.

The incarceration of the two top vote-garnering senators begs the question: Could it have happened if the people have not awakened? Could it have passed if public consciousness remains as it was? What have recently unfolded in mass media about their fate were once untenable. But they happened, because the people would no longer settle for less. It had become impossible for the Department of Justice to merely sweep aside the news of the P10 billion heist of the people’s PDAF money, not conduct an investigation, and avoid filing the merited charges.

It has become impossible already to halt without any logical conclusion the course of getting into the truth of the Janet Lim Napoles racket, the connivance of senators and congressmen, and the modus operandi of corruption in the halls of power. The overarching interest of the people not only on the truth, but in seeing things done compelled it to go all the way, eradicate the source of the evil, and do justice to the aggrieved. The awakened citizenry would no longer permit anything short of them.

This was the new reality that slammed the effort of Jinggoy and Bong to wriggle out of their mess.  Politicians and celebrities were losing power, because the people have begun to regain it. Once, their word was bible truth. Now, most of it are either dismissed or taken with tongue in check. The people know better to trust the politicians or take them by their word.

Part of the nascent empowerment is the amount of information accessible by citizens, coming to them no longer through the traditional mass media, but alternative media at their fingertips, the cell phone in the age of social networking. Ordinarily gullible segments of society have caught up with the phenomenal advancement in the modes of information delivery available.

If Bong and Jinggoy can only find it in their brains to stop their self-delusion, they will find out that it is hard to override anymore the tide of awakening that has met with scepticism their denials and obfuscations of criminal liability on the PDAF scam. The citizenry is getting truths long hidden from it from sources other than that of traditional authority. Simply put, it is getting them on its own, with big help from the ceaseless upgrading of information and communication technology.

The people are getting information in amounts unheard of before. With these, they weigh, they think, they analyze. They form their own conclusion. Most of the time what comes out of the mouth of politicians are no longer given any weight. They are heard not to be believed, but to believe the opposite. Because of what the people know of the corruption that assail their daily lives, they won’t go for other outcomes than that the public thieves in the guise of public service are meted the brand of justice that they deserve, or at the very least subjected to the course of justice to ferret out the truth. And when the thieves simply say, “We did not steal,” all the more that they invite lynching.

Up to now, senator Jinggoy insists that he is just being persecuted for being in the opposition. Hence, his predicament is allegedly all about 2016, the administration’s plot to eliminate the imagined formidable challenge he and his peers in the opposite camp will mount in the presidential race. He either has come around to believing the deception or is clueless of the fact that the people do not believe that angle. Even his camp takes caution at giving credence to the political persecution theory, or personalities like Vice President Jejomar Binay and other stalwarts of the United Nationalist Alliance would have already rallied behind him. What got him and Bong Revilla was not politics of the powers-that-be, but power already in the hands of the people. That power is information.

Hopefully, the new door that Jinggoy has opened would lead him to change for the better. The nation is awakening. His fate would have been unthinkable yesterday. But today it’s become the compelling thought. 

Ang Krimen Sa Mga Matataas Es Mor Pan En Da Pilipens

The Napoles Gang hits the august chamber.

Kahit sa paggawa ng krimen, iba pa rin talaga dito sa ating bansa. 

Nagdudumilat na ang mga ebidensya, deny to death pa rin at saksakan ng drama ang may sala. Kung makapagtalumpati ang mga naaakusahang mandarambong na nasa itaas at makapangyarihan, animo'y api. Preskon dito preskon doon, pana-panahong painterbyu sa media na iisa ang sinasabi, "Pulitika lang ito!" Totoo nga mga kagalang-galang, pinupulitika niyo lang ang isang napakabigat na pagkakasala sa sambayanang Pilipino. 

Ni hindi man lang kayo makapagbigay ng matinong sagot ika nga direct to the point. Puro pakyut, paawa epek, na para bang: "Ah ang masa, mga fan lang namin yan, sunod-sunuran at paniwala lang ang mga yan kung ano'ng aming sasabihin." Ang pang-iinsultong ito ay bulag o nagbubulag-bulagan sa karumaldumal na krimeng ginawa laban sa masang pinagkakautangan (inaamin din naman nila) ng tagumpay kung nasaan man sila ngayon. Ninakawan na ng katakot-takot na halagagang sana'y ikabubuhay ng maayos ng kanilang mga pamilya, pinapatungan pa sa ulo ng mga kasinungalingan, at ginagawang tanga. Yan ang kasamahang palad ng mamamayang nagluklok sa kanila sa rurok ng kaluwalhatian.

At pati ang Diyos sa itaas idinadamay. Aba, ayon sa nakasulat sa T-shirt ng isang akusado, "God is on my side." Ang panginoon ay nasa panig ng inaakusahang magnanakaw? Papano yong ninakawan? Hanep, di manlang seguro nanginig! Palibhasa, tagos sa buto ang pagiging pulitiko at pagkakagaling sa showbiz, dinadaan nalang ang pagkakasala sa samabayanang Pilipino sa mga palabas at padrama para makalimutan. At may hypnotic sound effect pa. 

Pero ganoo't ganun man, nasa kulungan na yong orihinal na kompositor ng musical scoring sa drama sa senado, patunay nga seguro na hindi pumapanig si Lord sa pandarambong at panloloko sa kanyang mga minahal na anak. Kaya lang Lord, napakaliwanag pa rin ng di pagkaparehas ng hustisya sa bansa. Para sa mga mayayaman at matataas na pagkatao, tunay na may espesyal na trato kumpara sa nakararami.

May isang tatay na hindi matiis na wala manlang sumayad na pagkain sa tiyan ng kaniyang mga nagugutom na miyembro ng pamilya, sa kaarawan pa man din ng isang anak. Siya'y nagnakaw ng isang bandol ng instant noodles sa palengke. Huli kaw, dampot agad ng mga masugid na alagad ng batas, pantsak sa kulungan, wala nang imbe-imbestiga. Sa mahigit na dalawang taon, at sa awa ng diyos na kapanig daw ni Senador, nandoon pa rin yong mamang hinugot at biglang nawala sa kanyang pamilya. Walang maipyansa, walang abogadong gustong mag-aksaya ng panahon para tapunan ng kahit katiting na pansin man lang ang kaso.

Pero ang mga damuho na nangulimbat ng daan-daang milyon sa kabang-yaman ng mamamayan, kailangan muna ng napakahabang panahong pag-iimbestiga, paglilikom ng trak-trak na ebidensya, at pinakamasusing pag-aaral, animo'y gumagawa ng doctoral thesis sa isang kurso. Sa wakas, naisampa na ang kaso, kailangan pa uli ng halos isang taong pagrerepaso. Sa wakas uli, naiangat na sa korte, hindi pa rin basta-basta magagawan ng aresto, kasi rerepasuhin pa muli kung totoo ngang may "probable cause." Samantala, sangkaterbang mosyon naman sa korte hanggang sa pinkamataas na hudikatura ang iwinawasiwas ng mga abogado ng mga akusado mapigilan lang ang ultimong kahihinantnan, pagkakulong ng walang pyansa. Naks!

Maghambing kayo. Ano ang pagkakaiba ng isang bandol ng instant noodles at sampung bilyong pisong ninakaw sa mamamayan? Ang una ay di dapat pamarisan. Pero ang huli ay pinagkakaubosan pa ng pera sa pangangandidato mula sa pagkakapitan ng isang barangay hanggang sa pagkasenador ng buong kapulohan magaya lamang. Ika nga: Ten billion is ten billion! Sabi pa ni Jinggoy, "Everybody is corrupt." Pero iilan lang ang mangangarap maging isang small-time magnanakaw ng noodles sa palengke.

Pero kung kabigatan na rin lang ng krimen ang pinag-uusapan, maliwanag naman yata sa sikat ng araw. Ang isang bandol ng noodles ay wala pa segurong P200, sisiw sa mata ng madla. At ninakaw ito sa isang pribadong negosyante, isang maliit na pagkakasala laban sa isang mamamayan dahil sa sobrang kagipitan. Ang P10 bilyon ay lahat-lahat. Ito'y makabubuhay ng libo-libong katulad ng pobreng nakulong. At ito'y ninakaw sa 90 milyong Piilipino. Dahil sa pagnanakaw nito, ang ilan ay natulak na rin na magnakaw sa kadahilanang sila'y winalan ng pagkain sa kanilang hapag ng mga hinayupak na kurakot sa gobyerno. 

Di ba maisip ng mga tiwaling pulitiko at opisyal, sampo ng kanilang mga sibilyang kasabwat sa pangraraket, na ang pangungulimbat ng halimbawa P10 bilyon o higit pa sa kabang yaman ng mamamayan ay katumbas na rin ng tinatawag na crime against humanity? Pero gayun pa man, di hamak na ang layo sa buhay ng karaniwang mamamayan ng buhay na nag-aantay sa mga mandarambong sa bayan, loob at labas ng kulongan.

At heto ang panghimagas sa unang hain pa lang ng putahe ng hustisya. Habang isinasagawa ang paikot-ikot na daan ng pagbibigay katarungan sa bayan, nandoon ang pagsasabay rito ng mga privilege speech ng mga naakusahan, pagsasalita sa media, at kuno'y mga pasabog ng isyu, na iisa ang layunin: ilihis ang diskusyon sa totoong isyu ng kanilang krimen. Magtiis na lang sa walang solusyong pagkakapiit sa bilangguan kayong mga wala ng kung ano-anong mayroon ang mga akusadong ito. Maski isang di binayarang siopao lang ang nasiba ninyo sa tindi ng gutom.

Sa bandang dulo, kagaya ng pagkahaba-habang prosesyon ng Nazareno na sa simbahan pa rin ng Quiapo ang tuloy, kung matuwid ang hustisya sa likod ng mga harang nito, nanduo't nag-aantay ang kulongan. Pero ibahin nyo silang mga nasa itaas at kilala. Tingnan mo nalang ang magagarang kuwarto na inihanda ng gobyerno sa custodial center ng Crame. Di hamak na hinde naman kayang upahan ang mga silid na kagaya nito ng isang karaniwang sahurang manggagawa sa ating bansa. 

Isang natatanging lugar pa rin ang naghihintay sa kanilang mga nasanay sa naglalakihang mansyon at maluluhong pamumuhay, na tinustosan ng pera ng taumbayan. Ikumpara mo sa mga nagsisiksikang boarders ni Big Brother sa Kampo Karingal at Manila City Jail, change them. Ibig sabihin: IBAHIN MO SILA!

What Do We Care About Troubled Iraq?

The state of Iraq is falling apart, if it has not yet. This is the grim scenario that the world is witnessing today. In an unexpected turn of events, jihadis in the style of Al Qaeda and Sunni militants raising the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have overrun a vast portion of the country.

The ISIS juggernaut has captured major population centers one of which is the second largest city Mosul, grabbed strategic industrial and military facilities, and moved with lightning speed within striking distance of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The cataclysmic events that saw also the big city of Tikrit, hometown of former President Saddam Hussein fell into the militants, accompanied by the meltdown of the Iraqi armed forces, happened only in June.

Why is it important for us thousands of miles away to keep an eye on these developments? We have our own problems, what do we care? We should for two reasons.

First, there are Filipinos working there. The safety of our very own nationals in the hapless though oil-rich land is an overriding concern. Seeing to it that overseas Filipino workers get out of there in one piece is second nature to our human instinct at self-preservation.

On the other hand, there is also the economic interest. The dollar remittances our OFWs send help keep us afloat. They contribute to our national survival and, if you please, to the yearly growth of our Gross Domestic Product. The instability in the large oil producing country will disrupt the inflow of a vital commodity to our shores, dollar currency.

If the situation gets worse, there will be a big problem. The precariousness of the condition of our overseas workers in the midst of war engenders national anxiety, besides the government having had to address the edginess of their families. This automatically sends everyone into a crisis mode.

Meanwhile, a vital lifeline from export labor will be cut off. The severance of that lifeline aggravates the fact that the repatriation of our overseas workers, as the Iraq government itself scrambles in disorder for the safest exit, is going to be a logistical nightmare.

Of course it is beside another telling effect: added numbers of balik-bayans to our unemployed labor force. Hundreds if not thousands of jobless will pour back to the country needing work that pays as much as they get in Iraq. That is quite a huge headache. And this is still just about Iraq.

Analysts predict the likelihood of the conflict spreading all over the region. The conflagration can spill beyond Iraq's borders and gobble up countries in the Middle East where the bulk of our workers abroad are stationed. The widening of the Iraq conflict to the whole of the region poses a hell of a problem for our export-labor-dependent economy.

Second, the cataclysm in Iraq is not far from what happened to us more than a century ago. It brings some historical flashbacks worth taking stock of. Those were when we lost a nation just as we were about to win a revolution against colonialism.

Nation building is for the native inhabitants of a country themselves to do.  But purporting to teach how to govern ourselves, American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century took that away from us riding on our struggle to oust colonial rule. The Americans did not mind that our revolutionaries were already churning out a state by and for Filipinos, and we would be the first in our parts to declare independence from foreign domination. They took the chance of the weakening of a rival world power, Spain, to wedge in.

Since then, the country would not only lose nationhood and independence, but get stuck in prolonged underdevelopment.

The coming of the US forces offered self-proclaimed native leaders among the ilustrado (nascent landlord-bourgeoisie) class the opportunity to help themselves to the bounties that the new turn of events could offer. They have never really trusted the masses, and thought the struggle to liberate the country from superior aliens was nothing but an exercise in futility. They lost no time in betraying the anti-colonial revolution and capitulating to the new colonialist, the vaunted great North American nation.

Under the auspices of another foreign power, allied Filipino opportunists and traitors took over national leadership. But they did so as lackeys of the new colonial masters. They would repeatedly impose on the people the tragicomic irony of sacrificing national interest to an aggressor up to foisting on Filipinos its subjugating way of nation building deceptively for them.

Like in Iraq, under invasion by the US about a decade ago, the way was the way of war. It meant the Krag-wielding Yankees in the new American age storming a country that has just won freedom from foreign rule. It meant then US President William Mckinley's quaint dream about the "assimilation" of overseas territories to promote democracy, if by force of arms. The democratic dream ended up, as the emerging Filipino nation did, in the exploitation of one country by another country, the subjection of the latter by the former.

The same act of aggression was what would surface in Iraq more than a century later, three decades away from unleashing its genocidal bent on the Vietnamese people in the late 60s and the first half of the 70s. For this reason, Iraq's current existential bind does and must concern us. Like our being in constant war with ourselves, such traces back to the country's destabilization and molestation by an alien power.

What happened to Iraq, when George Bush ordered the American armed forces to bomb and shoot down the defenseless country, happened to us around 1900 when the Yankee contingents swarmed in on the Philippine isles and started shooting at Filipinos, expressly to pacify them. Whatever euphemism is used to deodorize the putrid act of war, it is nothing but naked foreign intervention. 

Victory would be snatched by imperialism professing to teach self-government, just as our freedom fighters were winning a revolution for self-determination, Because of the intrusion, the continuation of the Filipino nation that had been united by revolutionary struggle was aborted. The paradox was that the violence was presented as something that had to be done to introduce the new democratic country to nationhood and democracy. Over the years, such propaganda has not changed, in Iraq 2003-2011 as was in our land when the forces of foreign aggression crushed our people's aspiration for independence.

Once more, the self-professed champion of democracy and nation-building took it upon itself to occupy the defiant nation of Saddam Hussein and remove its existing government. The United States emblazoned into the posters of the aggression the rhetoric about wanting the Arab state to get rid of a dictator and have the citizenry savor western freedom.

The initial reasons for the war was Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and his links to Al Qaeda. These turned out to be pure deception. The pretexts and the democratic rhetoric could not for long hide the fact that the adventure was truly to inject American enterprise into the Muslim heartland, and cash in on its coveted oil wealth.

But after the US's Coalition of the Willing barged in and executed Saddam, his bombed-out country entered an era of social fragmentation and endless antagonisms. The war mission would be rephrased over time, from getting rid of fictional WMDs and Al Qaeda to nation building. Ironically, the US succeeded in smashing what was holding the country together against the challenge of radical Islamism, Baath Party rule.

After a previous unholy alliance to bring war to the US's arch enemy Iran, alliance partner Saddam would himself be targeted for standing in the way of America's Middle East ambitions. But in his removal, the victim would be the whole of Iraq. So much for American-style nation building and exporting of democracy.

Saddam's elimination opened the floodgates to what the US and its allies had feared, the flow of jihadi groups and militant fundamentalist sects aiming to gain foothold on a piece of territory where they can finally hoist the dreamed-of Islamic state. Was the reverse karma? What else? Eleven years since the US invasion, the country would be bristling with lethal weapons in the hands of deadly Islamic radicals and its American-sponsored institutions attacked at will by them.

To sum up, the US got what it manifestly aimed to prevent. It unleashed an endless war that rived Iraq along sectarian and ethnic divides and weakened its defenses against Muslim extremism. The US aggression, instead of bringing security, destabilized the nation. Destabilization paved the way for the influx of Al-Qaeda-type militants poised to rule the country.

This is a lot to think about as President Barrack Obama positions the recent US pivot to Asia. While the US economy and military establishment still reel from the fallout of the war in Iraq, America would begin refreshed military, political and economic overtures to our region. The experience in Iraq could only send shivers at what the much ballyhooed pivot bodes. Are we in for another destabilizing intervention?

America is intensely training its sights on the emerging markets of the east. Not the least is the Philippines which has become a fast rising economy, mainly because it has began to wiggle out of the constricting imperialist impositions of the past and explore new economic relationships particularly among neighbors. Let there be no mistaking it, the enticingly fresh attention is for America and its exclusive interests alone.

Do we need a reinvigorated and larger US presence once again? We need that like the Krag that once decimated our forefathers.

The renewed turbulence in Iraq urges us to review history, specifically at the time when the powers of the northern hemisphere were reshuffling the division of the world into each one's sphere of interest, a time when foreign intervention postponed our independence and subjected us to a new type of colonialism. Did we progress because of foreign intervention, or despite it? Weren't our chance of a new Filipino century just embroiled in subservience to alien dictates, protracted insurgencies, self-defeating social conflicts, and a state busying most of the time with suppressing its citizens rather than making the country progressive?

The Filipinos did not sacrifice so many lives in the fight against Spain. But they would pay a cost of 600,000 lives in the resistance to US imperialism, as with Vietnam more than half a century later. As if that experience was not enough, the nation would lose more in the internecine uprisings against the tyranny of the new ruler, when the Japanese declared war on the US and besieged the country for being part of the American lake, and in the latter nationalist struggle of the awakened middle-class, the intelligentsia, the workers, and peasantry.

Wherever it goes, the US brings the curse of war, the slavery of nations, and the stench of death. This was so before. This is still so now. And tragically other peoples, not the least the Iraqis and we, pay the biggest price.