My Stint In Capoocan, A Changing Community

BIMBO CABIDOG

Years ago, a new acquaintance asked me to help in their municipality’s planning for comprehensive medium-term development. I have used the buzz words CMTD many times in conversation and seminars where I shared inputs. But wow, to know a local government unit take them seriously and actually want me to be part of the planning process was beyond joy. It was an offer I could not refuse (apologies to Michael Corleone).

So I came on the scheduled activity-launching conference. You cannot overhighlight my blush at the presence of village chiefs (in full force), their leader – the ABC president, the mayor, and the LGU’s designated Technical Working Group. The latter was composed of local heads of offices. I felt butterflies in my stomach. I had to forget about me, to stand before them.

My acquaintance really opened a door to three gold nuggets: an opportunity to grow, an official privilege to participate in local history, and an exciting time to live. Her role (not exactly her position) was vital to her town’s government machinery being revved up to a new direction. I was just vital at being maybe a replica of The Nobody, unsure if my kind truly has the right to earn a living. She made it sure, however, that the stint meant monetary gain.

Well, no pretence, I wasn’t exactly up to that. My professional credentials were not worth a second thought, simply because I had none. I had only some sort of talent at speech and at standing before an audience without melting, a product of trying it all those years living on the edge and God’s pity. Yes, I got skills in fiercely critical political-economic analysis from the University of Hard Knocks.

Anyway, a measure of currency for a man’s worth wasn’t what I was after. I just sought to pay my rent, settle monthly bills, and above everything bring food to the table. What I sought wasn’t pay but wherewithal. And hey, the self-esteem booster was great.

I spent days there. The days became months and years. The place offered a bailiwick to my dreams for me, community and country. I just found myself one day caring for the people, their futuristic visions, the collective directions their barangays take. I participated in their change until I felt already belonging to them, more than I belonged to the only town I called home.

Capoocan, the municipality I am referring to, was at the crossroads of two divergent ideas. One was of departure from the past. The other was of permanence. No few among the local folks resisted change. They clung dearly to their economic fiefdoms, their traditional political turfs, and their old rule. But the ground was shifting underneath. This was of the people being introduced by a rapidly changing world to new ways of living and of marshaling their fates.

As the ground shifted, the resisters would themselves be swept away. Not just a handful lost foothold, not of course by revolution, but by attrition. Old means burst like old wine skins full of the new spirit. Once you take the new, you close the past for all times. And you sweep the clingers to the leftovers of history.

It was at this dynamic period of a community on the cusp of fresh developments that I grounded my fantasies at social transformation. I entered it not presuming knowledge or far better know-how, but as an avid learner from the masses. You have to be a participant of change to learn.

Sometimes, amid discouragements I kept answering myself: you know how it is in this sphere, with the overused and abused traditions for everyone’s self-aggrandizement. I then honed my teeth in the politics of local governance. I also negotiated the tricky intricacies of electoral politics, handling one campaign or two. I was lucky to have my learning curb, no PhDs.

An arena of engagement with so much for everyone’s personal advancement and egotistic fill would surprise if it has no intrigues coming from various points 380 degrees. Yet, I was still surprised to be hit by one. And that hit profoundly one’s ego and bat for a career. But my survivor instinct taught me how not to fight and steered me out of troubled waters.

Include the above in the lessons. Development is not merely propelled by theoretical dialectics. It is impelled by contention in real fields of battles. It is about people at odds with each other, persons challenged to do best by their opposites.

Fear of saying goodbye to a sole means of living as always would soften my rockbound stances. I compromised on lifelong doctrines. I yielded high ground, not only by inch but by square kilometer, for at the back of it all was uncertainty. Piecework wages and talent fees proved occasional. From one deal to the other, I had to deal all over again.

In the long intervals of unemployment, I slammed into literally hungry years. For the family, hunger would become a fact of life, not to speak of electricity repeatedly being cut off for unpaid arrears, and a landlady at pains how to evict five prospectively homeless mortals with six months of forgone rentals.

But Capoocan has been more than an on-and-off engagement. It was a job that you care with all your life, because it is you. It runs in your bloodstreams, since you saw a society blighted by an oppressive order and deprived of development. It awakened every morning since your eyes began to see people brutalized by exploitation. You take a rest. But you always await one more nostalgic round of the good fight.

Comprehending Poverty

BIMBO CABIDOG

When we say our goal is to eradicate or reduce poverty, what do we mean? Sorting this out may already crystallize half of the way to get there. Comprehending poverty is important.

Poverty remains a global concern. Circa 2000, member states of the United Nations convened (for three days) the largest gathering of world leaders in history. The summit ratified eight UN Millennium Development Goals. First of them was the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

For the first time, the issue of global poverty figured in the agenda of states. The cut-off for the fulfillment of the UNMDG was set at 2015. But for sure, four years thereafter, poverty continues to be a pervasive reality in many locations all over the world.  

The current world population is estimated to be 7.4 billion. Estimates also show the number of the poor throughout the globe to have been reduced to 10%, down from 36% in late 1990s. But despite the noted decline, billions of people especially in the southern hemisphere still could hardly meet basic needs.

The international poverty line is presently set at $1.90 per person per day. This is the amount of income or consumption an individual needs to meet the bare minimum requirements of existence. Incidences of folks living below the said threshold remain obstinately high among low-income countries and regions affected by conflicts or political upheavals.

Income of the bottom 40% among countries in East and South Asia has been reported to grow by 4.7% and 2.6% per year from 2010 to 2015 respectively. The impressive statistics nonetheless does not offset the steep social inequalities and lopsided concentration of wealth in a tiny few to date.

In 2015, more than a quarter of the world’s population survived on $3.20 per day, nearly half on less than $5.50 per day. International non-government organizations observe that those who own around one half of the globe’s resources and wealth are a handful they could fit in a bus.

The reality underlies the conventional definition of poverty as “pronounced deprivation of wellbeing.” It relates wellbeing to command over commodities. The poor are therefore those who do not have enough income to live on a sufficient amount of needs expressed in monetary terms.

The conventional view is inadequate, narrowly focuses on individual experience, and misses out on the social character of the problem. It is especially blind to the question of injustice. It is now recognized that being poor is not just living below the threshold of consumption socially necessary for humans.

The broader view is to consider wellbeing as the capability of the individual to function in society. This was particularly argued by Amartya Sen of India. Thus, poverty is to be deprived of wellbeing by not having the capability to function in society in various ways.

Approximately eight out of nine folks are said to fall under the broader approach, while merely one in eight is said to fall under income-poverty. The former highlights the imperative of much stronger and more inclusive growth specially for still developing societies.

Another study reflects on poverty as an ill-being that is local, specific and multidimensional. It also pertains to the various aspects by which a person is incapable of functioning in society, such as lack of access to education, clean water, health care and housing, or basic social services. Disenfranchisement, alienation, and exclusion in governance form part of it.

Determination of the various measures or dimensions of poverty are important to:

1. Keep the poor in the governance agenda
2. Identify them so as to target them for appropriate and highly responsive interventions
3. Monitor and evaluate policies, projects and other initiatives along this line
4. Evaluate the agencies, institutions and organizations intended to help the poor

In this regard, poverty indeed has no simple solution. But strategies at poverty eradication/reduction adopting a multidimensional approach can have meaningful indicators to focus attention on. It can, not only in quantitative but graphic terms, define what success is.

The multifarious dimensions of ill-being must be set as standards in measuring results of anti-poverty initiatives. On the other hand, making them disappear and income or consumption to solely stand out, ultimately ignores the socio-political context that sees poverty as an issue of justice, which in fact it is.

Deprivation of wellbeing is the outcome as well as manifestation of regimes of production and market that squeeze or bleed by a thousand cuts the laboring masses. It is a symptom of the malaise spawned by an economic relationship where particular classes in society prey upon others.

The above postulate of course warrants another longer discussion. This discussion shall end on what poverty in its various manifestations entails, for example: hardship, economic marginalization, powerlessness, vulnerability and social insecurity.

Without further elaboration and details of the mentioned dimensions or manifestations, poverty may already be comprehended as a broad malaise rooted in social injustice and the prevailing economic order. It is an issue not only of social equality but of social equity. Solution shall be charted accordingly.

The Present State of Lawlessness and Disorder

BIMBO CABIDOG

Hit and run at the West Philippine sea, victimizing Filipino fisher folk

When superior reason is forced to give in to the reason of superior force, madness reigns. This is now how the country is being ruled, Duterte-style.

In the judiciary, judges side not with justice, but with tyranny that has no use of the law anymore except as toilet paper. They sampled this abhorrent dictum by putting Senator Leila de Lima in jail with a fabricated case with ex-convicts in prison as false witnesses.

Authorities, who should uphold and protect the rights of the people, listen to the righteousness of might, not the might of righteousness. Whatever they are meant, rights no longer mean anything, for the law has no force. Force is the law.

The rule says that the law may be harsh, but it is the law. Dura lex sed lex. No more. The law is not law if it can’t be enforced. It does not allow ending human life whether by application of justice (there is no death penalty), or by extrajudicial means. But does its long arm yet catch those who do so? Today, they just freely and with impunity commit murder.

The President handles the Constitution as a sheaf of scratch paper. He threatens with jail or harm whoever dares to question his crazy ululations.  In many instances, he himself has been heard explicitly urging to kill. Do the institutions of justice hold him to account?

Tens of thousands are already dead in the wake of his war on drugs. Many of them were mere victims of what state authorities would wave off as collateral damage. But even the ones who were killed for being suspected to use or deal drugs were themselves pure and simple victims of the heinous crime of murder.

Under the barbaric campaign, families, relatives and friends of the dead now chafe in extreme grief. They are pained yet by a thirst for justice that they know to be merely wishful thinking. Has one felon been meted the fullest extent of the law? Law enforcement agencies and courts sweep or try to sweep the commission of the capital offenses under the rug.

The carnage for sure is palpable. It is continually being brought to the public eye by the lenses of the intrepid media. But the supposedly independent and co-equal magistrates who should look after it look the other way. The senators and congressmen shamelessly squelch investigations.

They have been mandated by the constitution to check abuse by Duterte. But they themselves have castrated their offices as co-equal entities to his. They have subsumed their authority to the rule of the pretentious strongman. They grovel before him and chorus Amen!

On the other hand, the unfortunate subjects who become recipients of extreme prejudice by the current regime are not even held to account anymore in the legal sense. They are just grabbed in the guise of Tokhang and summarily executed without due process.

These are the times now, sadder than during the dark years of the dictatorship, more tragic to the nation than the ruin and plunder wrought by Ferdinand Marcos, his dogs of war, cronies, and sycophants. All the social-reform, democratic, and economic gains of the past 33 years of post-Marcos recovery are now rushing down the drain to the gutter.

Contemporary historical revisionism (thanks to the vestiges of rapacity that are back with consummate vengeance) paints the period of one-man rule as a golden age. Yes, it was the golden age, not only of the suppression of the democratic rights of the people, but of the castration of the economy which saw three straight years of negative growth towards the end.  

It was the golden age of Ferdie’s and Imelda’s conjugal “kleptocracy” that shipped tons of gold and currency out of the country into hidden deposits abroad. But Duterte himself has gone to glorify that woebegone era, because he wants to copy Marcos.

Still, recent facts cannot be revised or denied. From a basket case, the sick man of Asia that was the Philippine economy during Marcos’s authoritarian plunder, soon after, went into high gear achieving levels of growth that made it Asia’s rising star three decades later. The country tamed its unruly public-borrowing and debt-service binge and put its fiscal balance sheets in order.

And for the first time, the former basket case even loaned $1 billion to global financial institutions signifying an enviable foreign reserves standing. For the first time also, it got investment grade from international credit ratings agencies. Now, it is on the verge of throwing all these to the wind.

The country used to be admired for its genial and well-mannered citizens. But those traits are also fast eroding. In public, the current leadership spews profuse mouthfuls of SOBs, FYs, other cusses and expletives almost every time he mounts the podium.

Duterte proudly talks about having two wives and two mistresses while yet flirting with others. He blurts misogynistic quips at will, jokes about rape, and exhorts soldiers to shoot female insurgents in the vagina. It seems that his audiences just love the charlatan.

As if the loathsome repertoire isn’t enough, one time he further spiced his sexist streak with the brag of lasciviously assaulting a housemaid in his adolescence and going to the bathroom to relieve. Taking cue from the maddening applause of his audience, he goes on from shelling libidinous dirt to vitiating decent individuals who merely points out flaws in his governance.

He calls stupid or idiot personalities of erudite learning just because they take a contrary view to his, like Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio. He behaves as if he is the only one who is, and will always be correct, in the whole solar system.

His rambling, discombobulated, incoherent and ungrammatical speeches are notorious not only for their nonsensical thought, but for unabashedly graphic sensuousness and insulting taunts against just any perceived opponent. Yet, he – potty mouth and all, just mesmerizes audiences.

Perhaps, the children who are taught at an early age good manners and right conduct are confused. But judging from how the people continue to give him high approval rating, here is a country that is turning to the love of vomit.

Here is a nation that is tending to lose not only its morals, but its soul. Alas, here is a nation losing its very nationhood.

The height of lawlessness and disorder is for citizens not to honor anymore their Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. This just happened when the president acted like a vassal of the People’s Republic of China siding with its rulers in the dispute of jurisdiction over the Philippine’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

He has not only sided with China but outdid the Chinese leadership in thrashing his own country’s constitutional provision on the eploitation of the West Philippine Sea exclusively by Filipinos. He imagined his counterpart Xi Jinping treating the basic charter of the country he is president of as merely good for wiping asses. Then he proceeds to take the position.

Yet, the president does not only mock the constitution he was sworn to protect, he consigned to the garbage can the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as well as the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration that affirmed the country’s jurisdiction over the length and breadth, features and resources of the West Philippine Sea. He dismisses as senseless the international covenants that uphold and protect the nation’s territorial integrity.

In the past three years and first half of the Duterte presidency, the Filipino people have endured historically the worst violations of their time-honored laws, their national sovereignty, and human rights. All these were to give in to his whim. All these were to yield to his lust for absolute rule even if it already shreds the very charter that put him in power. All these were to kowtow to his thinking of being always right.

He has not acted within the bounds set by law, nor fulfilled the functions and obligations mandated by his assumption to the highest office of the land. Three years were a uniquely long period to endure such tyranny in this day and age. But there is an incipient groundswell of forces who consider it time to call on him to take the proper thing to do: resign!