While the nation appears glued to the screen watching the lynching of the country’s second highest official, gardeners wonder why … and what’s likely and feasible.
The Overkilling of Vice-President Binay
VP Binay and The Gardener – August 21, 2014
He probably never ever thought that someday all these might come into the light for all to see and judge. No, surely not in a liberal democracy with its rule of law and the primacy of the technicalities of the law that could cover up, put in doubt, and even annihilate any evidence-filled charges and innuendoes; not in a country where the oligarchy had become ever stronger, even with the onset of technological progress.
He probably thought one only needed to “join them” in order later than sooner to “beat them.” But the exclusivist oligarchy could only mutter over its shoulders, “Who he? Where did he come from? He doesn’t have our looks and habits. Can he pay the dues? Where will he get the requisite gargantuan sums for that?”
The old feudal lords and modern capitalists did not quite know how bureaucrat capitalism works. They were clueless about its velocity and reach. In the small rich city of Makati, for one of no rich background to jump to the level of the super-rich, all one had to do as Chief Executive was to make sure that nothing moved without his gain. That was first. Secondly, he would make sure that he was never removed. He would then be in a position to accumulate his gains.
Term limits meant nothing to one who decided early on to continue his ruling presence through his spouse, son and daughters. Anybody against dynasties? He was, too, but not now, not anymore. There was no law against it, only a toothless constitutional provision. He was going to fight to the top under the present system. The present system required of him more than a lot of money to fund the electoral contest. So, logically, by hook or by crook, he would accumulate those funds using his position.
While he made everyone in his core group hope that they too would have their turn someday at the Mayorship so long as they served him very well now, it only became clearer in more than a quarter century of rule that, like some natural cycles, this one too was endless: one Binay following another, laden with happiness and (lately) tears: Mother Elenita – former Mayor; Son Junjun – incumbent Mayor; Daughter Abigail – Congresswoman; Daughter Nancy – Senator of the Republic; founding Father and former Mayor Jojo – Vice President and Housing Czar.
Before the oligarchy knew it, an “unwelcome” member, really a gate-crasher, was on the verge of heading the whole ruling class. Was he not now only a breath away from the Presidency? Was he not by far the leading contender for Number One, should there be an election, having left the oligarchy’s Mar Roxas light years behind, politically buried in the common graves of Yolanda’s Tacloban? To the oligarchs and the middle classes the continuing Binay story has been quite instructive indeed.
Safely, one remarked, whatever the Binay counter-tales may turn out to be, he has already lost the “A” and “B” crowd while remarkably retaining the “C” and “D” majority populace – not just according to formal surveys but, as well, in the informal pulse-taking by activists and gardeners alike.
What explanation can one offer for this? Is this the C-and-D’s penchant for “class struggle?” (“He came from us, he looks like us, he ‘steals’ to share with us and not for himself alone, unlike so many others.”)
They can’t be serious, not if they see and hear all that’s coming out of the Senate investigative subcommittee. But, of course, they don’t. The majority C-and-D have no time to spare for the Blue Ribbon Committee, in part because they don’t see “Blue;” they see a committee of accusers and judges rolled into one role tightly and totally wrapped in Yellow Ribbon, not blue.
The Hyatt Ten Et Al…
This group of undertakers doing their utmost to bury Binay can’t be all that satisfied to date. For one, with everything at their command, they find it is still not that easy to bury Binay alive. How many times have they come close to putting the spouse in the slammer. If they succeed he might just run amok and that could be the end of him. But there he is, challenging the soldier-investigator to a verbal duel outside the Senate premises. He is not six feet underground.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, Binay’s political death is not about to resurrect Roxas from his Tacloban grave.
Thirdly, because of the Roxas impossibility, they have had to play with the idea one time lately of extending PNoy’s term – by what means and in what way were never spelled out.
The Constitution is clear as to his term limits. Even should the Constitution be amended by some “Hocus PCOS” feat, the amendment would still not apply to the incumbent President.
Declaring a revolutionary government for the purpose would more than risk getting a real revolution complete with AFP institutional support against him precisely for betrayal of his oath to defend the Constitution. This last line may qualify for ‘Believe it or Not’ especially because PNoy believes, rightly or wrongly, that Voltaire Gazmin alone at DND (Department of National Defense) and General Purisima at PNP (Philippine National Police) would be more than enough to prop up any regime he heads.
Fourthly, the elimination of Binay and Roxas and the improbability of PNoy’s term extension can now more credibly lead to a Marcos return, according to PNoy’s politically astute Uncle Joe (Peping Cojuangco), currently a non –person in the second Aquino administration.
Contradicting the Uncle is the President’s group that says Marcos can’t win because his money is not in place and will never be allowed to return to this country under his control, and the Marcos stigma is still too much to wash off. A friend who heard this gently remarked that these guys sure believe what they want to and sing the tune that they care to; for their comfort after all, they are just whistling in the dark.
Fifthly, and more importantly, is that aside from the beneficial opportunity for Marcos that the lynching of Binay affords, there is another one – the most radical of all: the option that wants a new start, an overhaul of systems and subsystems, a non-personality approach to social change; this is the new path offered by the National Transformation Council. Led by moral leaders from the Catholic, Muslim and Protestant faiths, this transformation movement is fast gaining strength in the true nature of significant movements – to be born not in the Rome of mainstream media but in the provincial Bethlehem of direct witness and face-to-face assemblies.
The National Transformation Council
The National Transformation Council (NTC) is a revolutionary council initiated by the moral leaders of this country in response to a moral crisis whose effects if not stanched in time would certainly lead to national destruction. It is an effort of a non-violent nature, neither illegal nor unconstitutional in character but creatively restorative of a severely damaged constitutional order. The people’s day-to-day experiences of a failing state abetted by an administration chemically clean of any sincere regard for the rule of law provided the motive force for this revolutionary movement.
In their Lipa Declaration the Council intoned: “Far from preserving and defending the Constitution, as he swore to do when he assumed office, the incumbent president Benigno Simeon Aquino III has subverted and violated it by corrupting the Congress, intimidating the Judiciary, taking over the Treasury, manipulating the automated voting system, and perverting the constitutional impeachment process.”
Logically exploding the bombshell, the Council said: “Therefore, faithful to the objective moral law and to the universally honored constitutional principle that sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them, we declare that President Benigno Simeon Aquino III has lost the moral right to lead the nation, and has become a danger to the Philippine democratic and republican state and to the peace, freedom, security and moral and spiritual well-being of the Filipino people. We further declare that we have lost all trust and confidence in President Benigno Simeon Aquino III, and we call upon him to immediately relinquish his position.”
Starting out with this Declaration at Lipa (Luzon) in August 27th, the NTC met again in Cebu (Visayas) October 1st and, next month on November 11th all of Mindanao will gather their delegates at the ancient city of Butuan, to be followed November 25th by the Southern Tagalog Assembly at Imus and on the birthday of Ninoy Aquino, November 27th, at Clark, Angeles City, Pampanga. The delegates of the 25th and the 27th may also join the grand assembly in Metro Manila on November 30th, Andres Bonifacio Day.
The NTC has noted that the lynching of Binay has temporarily diverted national attention from the two most important issues confronting the country today: the Hocus PCOS and the DAP-PDAF.
To the first issue: can there be democratic politics in an electoral setting where people do not know – cannot know – what happens to their votes, whether freely given or freely bought? That’s precisely it: everything’s wrong with the Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS). For two straight elections now, voters could not know what happened to their votes. Voters did not see how their votes were counted. The BEIs (Board of Election Inspectors) could not verify what they signed for. The result is therefore merely a de facto but not necessarily a de jure (legitimate) government.
We should automate only the canvassing and transmission at municipal/city, provincial and national levels; we should count manually at the precincts for full transparency!
The Source Code was supposed to be provided to political parties six months before the electoral exercise. This was never done and there is not now any intention to.
The machines (the Optical Scanners) should be tested by the COMELEC in the presence of the BEI’s. This was never done and there is not now any intention to.
Each PCOS machine should have an electronic signature, naturally, so it can be identified as the one assigned to a particular precinct. Otherwise, an outside machine could overtake the legitimate one in the transmission of their desired results, which surely happened in the past two elections. The electronic signature requirement was never done and there is not now any intention to.
And of course the BEI’s should have their own password or signature for validation. This was never done and there is not now any intention to.
The law requires an accuracy rate of 99.995%, or only one tolerable error per 20,000 marks. The best showing by the PCOS, in the July 24-25, 2012, dry run in Congress, was 557 errors per 20,000 marks.
No wonder then that the PCOS that was now shown to be vulnerable to internal manipulation could only yield fraudulent results. Consider this: contrary to traditional voting preferences due to regionalism, religion, and economic class, the 2013 senatorial race showed a 60-30-10 trend for administration-opposition-independents— uniform in all provinces, districts, cities, towns, and precincts. Because of the absence of the aforementioned safeguards, the electronic process could easily be hijacked and programmed for such results by the powers-that-be, as in fact happened in 2010 and 2013 and will inevitably happen from here on unless scrapped by revolutionary will forthwith.
Consider, too the following: had the Comelec completed the canvass in the last election, which they conveniently stopped without justification, there would have been “more ballots cast than total number of voters.” To hide or prevent this, the Comelec had to stop and did stop the precinct count at 56% and the canvassing at 42%. No wonder it also had to lower the number of ballots cast from 38,998,998 to 31,568,679.
Because there is no longer any doubt regarding the deceitful and fraudulent character of the 2010 and 2013 elections due to the “hocus-PCOS” electoral cheating machines, the National Transformation Movement declared at Lipa that “until we have a fraud-free electoral system, we should refrain from holding any farcical election. But once we have it, we should encourage the best qualified men and women in the country to participate in the open electoral process so that together we could put an end to the stranglehold exercised by the corrupt and incompetent political dynasties upon our elections.”
At Lipa they declared clearly that the role of the NTC is to: “Assume the urgent and necessary task of restoring our damaged political institutions to their original status before we begin to consider electing a new government under normal political conditions. The role of the council will not be to succeed President Aquino, but solely to prevent the total destruction of our political system, and to rebuild and nourish its institutions back to health so that all those interested could join the political competition later, without the dice being loaded in anyone’s favor.
“Like a crew whose task is to put everything in order before a commercial carrier, which had earlier developed some problems in midair, is cleared again for take-off, the council’s duty will be only to repair the battered tripartite system [legislative-executive-judicial] and to make sure that the people are once again able to freely and intelligently elect their own leaders.”
This seems inevitable now: the more people understand what their moral leaders are saying, the bigger the numbers who will vote with their feet and join the transformation movement. The Armed Forces of the Philippines, as the constitutional ‘protector of the people and the state,’ will understandably extend its protective shield to the Council, and not allow itself to be used in any manner to undermine the Council’s purely transitional and non-partisan role, nor to allow any armed group to sow violence, disorder or discord into its peaceful ranks. The combined energies of Moral Leaders and Armed Forces will ensure that the Will of the People and not the machinations of an abusive few will yet rule this long-suffering nation and lead it to a morally founded dispensation of justice and prosperity for all.
To the second issue: if you have grabbed power by “Hocus PCOS,” you will most likely do everything to corner all the money available in the contest to withstand any and all challenges to that power; hence, the necessity of stone-walling all criticisms of DAP-PDAF.
Again, the overkilling of Binay has temporarily succeeded in taking away national attention from this second issue.
There is a direct order of the Supreme Court to file criminal charges against all the lawmakers and members of the executive department and the Commission on Audit who were involved in the grave misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), both of which the court had unanimously declared unconstitutional.
But, of course, if the government obeyed the Supreme Court Order, which it will not, it would mean “Palitlahat!” [Clean slate, Change all.]
In the 2014 budget there was a total of P 1.106 trillion mostly lump sum amounts out of a Total Expenditure Program: of P 2.268 trillion. The 2015 budget is incontrite, unrepentant; “we can throw away the Rule of Law because anyway we hardly care for it at all.”
The Cebu Assembly shouted with Lipa to compel President Aquino to step down at the soonest possible time. They also decided to immediately organize the equivalent of a government in waiting; cause the immediate filing of criminal cases against all the senators and congressmen, members of the cabinet, the Commission on Audit and the various government agencies involved in the misuse of the PDAF and the DAP from 2010 to date, and to use whatever public pressure is necessary to make all those involved in these cases to immediately vacate their respective positions.
“Invoking the aid of Almighty God the most gracious and most merciful,” and reposing their trust and confidence in the Filipino people, they prayed that all these may come to pass soon. Many gardeners were active in the assemblies. On to Butuan, Imus, Clark and Manila! FINIS