Candidates for 2016 elections
What is happening to our country? As of last count, there are already so many who filed their candidacy for various posts for next year's election. Qualified or not, shameless or not, you name it - all types of candidates have filed their papers for 2016 elections!
If you want to know more about the candidates, you can tune in to YOU TUBE shared by Rappler and be inspired, entertained, embarrassed or dismayed by the range of candidates and their proposed plans for our people and our country.
Can you imagine about 22 candidates for president and it is not yet even the last day of filing for candidacy! Miriam Santiago's announcement that she will run for president was unexpected and soon, we will know the impact of this announcement. On the other hand, Duterte confirmed that he will not run for president. His supporters are hoping he will agree to run for vice president.
There are so many vice presidential candidates as well. Is there an over-all agenda behind the separate filing of candidacy of so many aspirants, especially for the vice presidency? Is there a sinister scenario of last-minute switches so that even those not elected to the highest positions of the land will end up ruling this country? Let us pray that these evil schemes are not real and will not prosper.
While others have been very loud and open about their candidacy, in the Consulate General in Chicago, Walden Bello, former Party List Representative representing Akbayan, quietly had a swearing in ceremony with Consul General Generoso D.G. Calonge last Oct. 12.
Bello, in his statement, showed his serious intention to run for Senator in 2016. To help guide us all about candidates for national posts, allow us to quote highlights of Bello's statement when he filed his candidacy for the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines issued from Madison, Wisconsin as follows:
"When I resigned from the House of Representatives last March in protest against President Aquino's double standards in his good governance policy and his refusal to accept command responsibility for the Mamasapano tragedy, I thought I was saying "goodbye to all that." I was looking forward to a quieter life devoted to researching and writing a book on one of my favorite subjects: the current crisis of the global capitalist economy."
"Over the last three months, however, an ever widening network of groups and individuals has snowballed into a movement to get me to run either for the presidency or the Senate. That draft has proven to be implacable and irresistible. I have accepted their challenge to run for the Senate."
"I am running to promote an electoral insurgency against politics-as-usual, injustice, inequality, and corruption. I am running because people demand a representative with high ethical standards, who'll go to hell for them, and who won't bullshit them like most politicians do. I am running because I hate power and the only ones you can trust with power are those who hate power. I am running because I can no longer stand by and allow our people to be constantly fooled, betrayed, and devoured by the very people they elect to public office. I am running because we need to dismantle this awful system of traditional politics in which our people are trapped."
"I am running to oppose a foreign policy that makes our poor country hostage to the machinations of aggressive superpowers. I am running to help liberate our economy from neoliberal policies imposed by a global capitalist system that has condemned our people to greater poverty and inequality even as it enriches our greedy elite and foreign corporations. I am running to end the criminal debt slavery, to which our sellout elite is complicit, that turns over 34 per cent of the annual government budget to insatiable foreign and domestic banks and creditors."
"I am running on a platform that will, among other things, promote security of tenure for workers; complete agrarian reform; promote and protect the rights of women, indigenous peoples, and the LGBT community; protect the rights and advance the interests of our millions of OFWs; create jobs and expand housing for the urban poor; bring peace to Mindanao by passing a Bangsa Moro Basic Law that truly promotes the autonomy and aspirations of the Moro people; expand educational opportunities for our youth instead of enriching the country's greedy creditors; enhance rather than destroy the environment; and provide decent, adequate, and functioning mass transit for commuters victimized by plundering private monopolies and bungling technocrats."
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