GMA resign: The cry of the sore losers!

For our special guest on tonight's talkshow on Straight from the Sky, we have with us, Cebu City's only elected woman councilor, the honorable Joy Pesquera, who gives us an insight of the workings of the Cebu City Council especially with the current issues happening in Cebu City today. Councilor Pesquera also gives us her views as to the current political turmoil happening in this country from a political woman's perspective... after all, this political turmoil seems to be directed against Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who is also a woman. So see her tonight on SkyCable's channel 15 at 8:00 p.m.

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Rep. Clavel Asas-Martinez has been declared a "persona non-grata" by her own fellow Cebuanos... that's how ugly politics has become! Funny that Rep. Martinez and Bayan are both asking GMA to resign. Now wasn't Bayan the beneficiary of Rep. Martinez pork barrel in an issue which was exposed months before the elections? Indeed, dirty politics spawn illicit relationships. I rest my case!

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With the nation suffering from another political turmoil, we should stop, ponder and ask ourselves... who's to blame for this latest political crisis that continues to plague our nation? We have analyzed ourselves to the point of national paralysis... and how many times have we heard people cursing or chastising Congress or the Senate for the current woes we are in. Come now, is it really the fault of our Congress or should we think deeper and start pinning the blame on the Filipino electorate who sold their votes? As we've said so many times before... "The Authority of Government Emanates from the People"... this is written on the Cebu Capitol building to remind our public servants who placed them there!

But we know just too well how public servants react when they have tasted the nectar of political power... they think they're so great, so honest so dignified, yet as we've witnessed these politicians in the past week, they're the exact opposite of what we think our political leaders should behave in public. When Rep. Clavel Asas Martinez crossed the line, virtually joining the opposition's chorus that Cebu cheated in the last elections, she made herself a pariah to many Cebuanos. People here are murmuring to themselves, saying: "as if she didn't also cheat in the last elections!"

If there really is no clean and honest elections in this country, all this can be traceable to a Congress that refuses to fund the election computers for Commission on Elections because they know too well what a clean and honest elections would do... give our people the real score as to who really won during the elections which means losers can't cry foul anymore!

In the last presidential elections, almost all surveys showed that Pres. Arroyo would only win by a small margin and indeed, a million votes is not much of a margin. That's due to the fact that there were just too many presidential candidates, which didn't give anyone a significant majority. But elections are won by the candidate who garners the highest number of votes. So if Pres. Arroyo won by a hundred votes against Fernando Poe, Jr. she still wins the elections. But she did garner a million more and that was not acceptable to those against Pres. Arroyo and God knows, there's a lot of them, who are still bitter over their defeat a year after elections.

Now it seems that these losers have banded together, Sen. Panfilo Lacson, Raul Roco and Bro. Eddie Villanueva demanding the ouster of Pres. Arroyo. These sore losers would love nothing better than to see Arroyo fall. We call this in Cebuano... "panabla" or getting even... even though we know that political instability would also bring down the economy of this country. Yes, whether we believe it or not, Bloomberg Television just reported a couple of days ago that the Philippine economy rose to a high of 4.7 percent, despite this political instability, but warns that our political problems could spell disaster to our economic growth.

At this point, we urge the Arroyo Government to go full speed ahead on political reform, like the holding of the Constitutional Convention to push for a shift from our present unitary form of government into one that is federal and parliamentary so once and for all, we can do away with that ugly out-of-the-bottle-genie called EDSA, which for all intents and purposes was an extra-constitutional exercise. EDSA was perfect against a strongman like Marcos, but when our democratic processes are working, EDSA is of no use to us. But it is more than obvious to us that certain church leaders, the communists and other ugly politicians no longer want to follow the constitution. Hence, it is time to get rid of the 1987 Constitution and create a better one or face the inevitable... Balkanize the Philippines!

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila's columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com.