BPM: A company union / House hoodwink continues

Well and good, a broad segment of top-level Philippine society has just emerged to monitor government as a whole. Its resolve is to help form a "no-nonsense and broad-based national agenda for reform, unity and progress". The founders literally toll the bells and call themselves unashamedly the Bangon Pilipino Movement (BPM). If we take the name literally, we are served notice the entire nation will be bestirred to wake up (bangon) and realize that our salvation lies in mounting the moral barricades of BPM. The BPM covenant states the "silent majority" can no longer stay silent. The silent majority? I always assumed we, the people, were the silent majority, not the oligarchy and its hired hands.

The members represent luminaries of business, moderate labor, cloying religion and academe. We take this as a sign that those who possess a big stake in the present system have finally realized the situation is critical (as we have been saying for many months). And unless they move with a warning dagger in their hands, the entire power edifice they have built up since World War II could crumble very soon. Their reform agenda emphasizes "undertaking decisive measures to curb smuggling, tax evasion, graft and corruption, and other forms of economic plunder". Great, if they can do it.

I would have been impressed if BPM came to life a year or two ago. It was already clear at that time that the utter fragility of the system had already opened up huge cracks and a lava flow of filth was struggling to get out. It is hard to accept sermons on morality from such BPM members as El Shaddai’s paramount shepherd Mike Velarde and ECOP’s Donald Dee, and former PCCI president Miguel Varela. They buttered up the administration of Joseph Estrada, whose presidency will go down as one of the foulest chapters ever in our history. They still smell of the Estrada regime until today, a gooey, rancid smell of cheap and tawdry perfume.

Brother Mike Velarde particularly washed the feet of Erap Estrada almost daily in his El Shaddai basilica. And this amid spreading reports then that he had grown enormously rich because of his political intimacy with El Bigote. He was the Spiritual Adviser no less, and look what this brought to the nation. A great majority of the members of BPM I never or hardly saw during the big street demonstrations of People Power II two years ago. Now they would mount the pulpit and belch the spiritual musculature of the Sermon on the Mount. Oh Brother Mike, no, you don’t.

But, still and all, we should give them the benefit of a doubt.

We take for granted that the BPM is against a military takeover of the government and that is to the good. Although they have been silent on this issue. The targets of their indignation, it seems, are the nation’s politicians, both in Congress and Malacañang. Together, these politicians aggregate the Big Circus making a mockery of our Republic. In the Senate just several years ago, Erap Estrada strode in big and pompous as Nero and Henry VIII combined. It was a waste of time, a waste of the people’s money – Estrada to a Senate hearing with 500 police escorts. Bejesus! Not even Herr Adolph Hitler had that many escorts. In the House just the other day, 126 congressmen approved the proposal to amend the 1987 Constitution, when that was the last thing this deeply divided nation needed today.

Hellooo.

Big Business occupies pride of place in the BPM. I wonder. When the final toll is taken on graft and corruption, the private sector, I think, steals just as much as the government does, perhaps more. the government, according to official figures – better still members of the government and their assigns – pocket P22 billion annually in graft. I would venture that in tax evasion alone, Big Business occupies several caves of Ali Baba. And we are not even talking about capital flight.

It is also surprising that in their covenant (at least the portions published), BPM fails to level its moral cannons at the judiciary. Why gentlemen? Many men in the robe have done you a lot of favors? Like TROs? Of course, the BPM could not dwell on the nation’s population problem. That would have brought them in contention with the high priests of the Roman Catholic Church. I still submit one of the greatest evils, if not the greatest, plaguing the nation today is a bloated population of 80 million, half of which are on the verge of starvation. If they finally explode in one way or another, heaven help this country.

Still and all, okay.

Even if the BPM operates as a company union, we are glad they are now awake to the ground shuddering under our feet. Where before they were largely silent and indifferent, or even arrogant and supercilious, they are now addressing many of the major issues as a part of the ongoing national dialogue.

And they should not attempt to silence this dialogue as an excuse to achieve "national unity". As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. stated in a special Newsweek issue: "Debate is presumably the essence of democracy." The role of dissent, he said, is "even more vital". Happily, Schelsinger brought up America’s controversial conquest of the Philippines. William James, the great American philosopher, had this to say: "Our conduct there has been one protracted infamy against the Islanders, and one protracted lie towards ourselves." Schlesinger also recalled Mark Twain’s comment on US acquisition of the Philippines: The American stripes should have "the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones".

In conclusion as the war in Iraq approaches, Schlesinger held up a fist to George W. Bush. He said: "No administration has a right to send young Americans to kill and die in serious wars without the most frank and uninhibited national discussion. Let us not restore the imperial presidency."

This is basically the concept of Freedom Force: Get the nation moving to the sprawling public plaza that was the Greek agora and there start lighting huge, spreading bonfires of debate and discussion on what ails the nation. Only after can we find the solutions. There ain’t no such thing as "national unity" on this matter.

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The huge hoodwink the House would now impose on the nation is its 126-2 vote to amend the 1987 Constitution. To hear Speaker Joe de Venecia and his stalwarts state it, Cha-cha is the nation’s call, the citizenry’s call, posterity’s call. Hello again. It is their call. Almost 80 percent of Filipinos surveyed by Social Weather Stations, or four out of five Filipinos, are against Charter change today. Now, who’s kidding who? Statistically, the truth has finally come out. The majority members of the House, the citizenry’s opposition notwithstanding, are out to hold the republic up, pick its pockets, and rifle the constitution with the derring-do of Long John Silver and his voracious pirates.

They have no sense of shame, no sense of delicadeza, no sense of patriotism.

It is now evident, with the House vote and the survey results, that they are out to burgle the Constitution and load their caravan up with a loot that even Ferdinand Marcos would have envied. That’s why Imee Marcos today feels very much at home in the House. They have certainly sensed the nation has gone against them. But so what? They can always postpone the day of redemption. If and when that comes, they want to make sure they have stolen all the gravy they want, all the power positions, all that Limahong ever craved, all the thieving Mongolian emperors ever desired.

This is the mode of political existence in this dear land we preciously call the Republic of the Philippines.

Poor President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. In so many speeches, she said repeatedly her dream was for a "strong republic" to emerge. With Joe de V and company, the strong Republic has become a mirage. A ravished republic is the like lier outcome. What we shall get, if Cha-cha should even prosper, is mass rape, its victims rolling bestially like raped nymphs in yonder Niniveh, forever nailed to the Lotus Land of Might-Have-Been.

Events in the Philippines today are moving with a speed we hardly experienced before. They come one after the other. At times, they come together. And when they come in a cloudburst, like PGMA announcing she ain’t running in 2004, we are all confused and bewildered. What really happened? Was this her personal decision, discontinuing what appeared like her unrelenting quest for the presidency in 2004? Meaning, she was just sick and tired of politics, of power, of pelf? Or did other events, other circumstances slam on her with tidal force? Was a great power involved in her decision, a power that could manipulate her if the circumstances warrant?

I don’t know. We don’t know. All we know is that many of us are on the ropes like a fist-fighter hit on the chops, and wondering what hit us. Nothing is graven on the ground anymore. Everything moves or is set to move.