Fortress establishment

(Last of two parts)

The political floodwaters continue to rise twenty-seven days after the May 10 elections. Congress remains a big mess seeking to sort out who won and who lost in a rickety 48-year-old Philippine demcracy now twirling like a crazy top. The government and the opposition are still at loggerheads. As the waters rise, the phenomenon is that the Filipino people haven’t risen at all from their wretched existence. They remain chained to grinding poverty despite the politician’s florid electoral pledge the May 10 elections would bring them a "new dawn".

What is strange is that the Roman Catholic Church and Big Business appear to have forged an alliance in support of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. In a recent cluster of paid advertisements in the nation’s leading dailies, they pooh-poohed opposition accusations "massive cheating" marred the elections. GMA was a sure winner over Fernando Poe Jr., the ads declared subliminally. No names were of course mentioned.

What is again strange in the bollixed-up elections is that in the public perception, FPJ was the presidential bet of the poor, the masses. In fact, FPJ at the outset crackled like a house afire with a survey lead of 12 per cent over GMA. It was at the homestretch, according to surveys, that he started to falter because of doubts about his citizenhip. And a diminishing war chest.

On June 30, the elected president and vice president are scheduled to be proclaimed.

A flurry of paid avertisements in the the leading newspapers strongly gives the impression the Church and Big Business have joined forces to expedite the victory of the incumbent, President Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo. GMA’s main rival, Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ), still offiicially in the running, has been given short shrift by the Church. Curiously, he was the presidential candidate of the poor, "the masses", and was mobbed wherever he campaigned.

The official tally for president and vice president is scheduled to be concluded before June 30. On this date, the elected president and vice president will be proclaimed. And yet on this date and after, a huge pall of doubt and uncertainy as to whether the presidential elections were clean and honest and not plagued by "massive cheating" is expected to remain. I am not relieved at all by government assurances that just days or just weeks after June 30, "the nation will return to normalcy". It won’t. The gaping wounds of the election will remain for a long period of time.

Huge street demonstrations against GMA could explode.

This probably explains why the Church played a spearhead role in support of GMA. Very few dare defy the Church openly. Before the recent retirement of the sick and aging Jaime Cardihal Sin as archishop of Manila, prominent politicians of every stripe hied to his office, sought his blessing, and reverentially kissed his ring. The Cardinal was top potentate, the second most powerful figure in the Philippines after the president.

But welcome as Church support may be, it presents a clutch of problems to GMA, if indeed she remains in Malacañang after June 30.

And also if the Church would seek to reassert its old and traditional role as primus inter pares in the political and social life of the Philippines, whose population is predominantly Catholic. It was only when America bought the Philippines from Spain for $25 million in the Treaty of Paris at the turn of the 19th century that the power of the Church began to slip a little. But it remains formidable.

Philip Bowring, writing for the International Herald Tribune last June 2, made the Church issue obvious. He asked: "Is she strong enough to take on the elite, and the notoriously corrupt bureaucracy that eats out of its hand?" My answer to that is an emphatic no. Take on the Church? Take on the big barons of business? Without their aid and support, GMA wouldn’t be cocksure at all she won the elections. And she knows what gratitude is.

Apropos the Church, Bowring writes: "It remains the obstacle to solving what is the resource poor nation’s biggest single problem – its birth rate. It is plain enough that much of East Asia’s success in raising living standards has been achieved by drastically reducing birth rates.The Philippines has the highest rate east of Pakistan."

Would GMA, purportedly a devout Catholic, have the guts?

She would not have the guts, not at all. GMA has always remained faithful to the Church on the population problem and family control. With the economy razed to the bone, a current population of 84 million, if not controlled and reined in drastically, will swell to 100 million in just eight years or less. This would be a population of famine proportions. Filipinos, high and low, will be fleeing the country in the millions.

The population issue will "take an effort of will, on the part of GMA to solve," states Philip Bowring. I just don’t think the Church will confer on GMA this will. Through the decades if not generations, it has tenaciously held on to the "rhythm method" blessed by the Vatican as the only moral device to cope with population increase.

I don’t get it.

With the exception of that brief historic period where Jaime Cardinal Sin crossed political swords with the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, the Church in the Philippines had been largely quiescent and conservative since the end of World war II. It didn’t have a sterling record either of helping the poor, of boldly encouraging the "rule of law", of housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and near naked .

Suddenly, the Church has taken the cudgels openly for President Gloria Macapagal-Arrroyo. And, in the taking, bonded with Big Business whose ranks are reportedly riddled with the biggest tax-evaders and influence-peddlers in the counry. It is also no secret that a cluster of big-time crooks and criminals are frequent visitors to, if not denizens of, Malacañang Palace.

Her husband, Miguel (Mike) Arroyo, a lawyer and businessman, is a frequent and favorite target of this kind of criticism.

So why? Those paid advertisements never mentioned the poor and the oppressed, actually the Church’s main flock. "Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven."Is this a novel Church strategy to reimpose its once predominant power in the face of new dangers to this Christian country? Like international terrorism whose shadow overhangs the Philippines? Like the Muslim rebellion in Mindanao? Like the CPP-NPA whose armed insurgents in the countryside are bristling menacingly again? Like a proliferation of born-again Catholics and Christians now spreading like locusts all over the country. Like a democracy in full swoon?

Or was it a nameless fear of FPJ, a naïve and unlettered high school dropout,taking over the government and gunning the poor against the rich?

Again, so why? Another answer is that the Philippines is bereft of that indispensable class in any democratic socieety – the intelligentsia. These are the men and women of academe and learned tradition who dig deep intellectual foxholes and afflict the mighty. But in this our country, they prefer to remain silent or uncommitted. We don’t have muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens, cultural critics like André Malraux, erudite political columnists like Walter Lippman, biting ones like H.L. Mencken, giants of the genre like George Bernard Shaw, saber-rattling economists like Paul Krugman. Before their drawn swords,the mighty kept their distance. Our lowly education was certainly not up to producing a vigorous intelligentsia.

But back to the elections and the Church reaction to it.

I just cannot fully agree with the bishops and Big Business that massive cheating did not figure at all in the last elections. I believe the cheating was massive or close to massive except that the cheating was more high tech, the electronic details hidden under a huge clump of what looked like clumsy bureaucracy. Prime example was the Comelec’s admitted disenfranchisement of over 900,000 voters all over the country.

More fine-tuning and investigation, I believe, will reveal about two or three million were actually disenfranchised. If this isn’t big cheating, I don’t know what is. The government’s use of what could be billions for GMA’s campaign,peeled ever so clumsily and raucously from the government’s coffers, like health, transport and fishermen’s programs, already look and smell like revolting rip-offs.

That not massive cheating?

The Church and Big Business – as patriotism demands – should have been more assiduous in seeking to flush out and destroy caves presumably hiding evidence of government cheating. Thus is democracy served. But they flicked their fingers cavalierly at what they described as "isolated cases of cheating". It was evident from the proliferation of ads that the Church had already made up its mind about a GMA victory.

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