Gloria’s options (two parts)

by Lito Banayo

Malaya, Part I

She has been president of the country for eight years, two months and four days. No one other than Ferdinand Marcos has presided over the nation’s continuing misery longer than Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, daughter of the man Marcos defeated in the elections of 1965.

In her first three years, five months and nine days of the term to which Joseph Ejercito Estrada was elected in 1998, she survived several crises of corruption. First was the IMPSA sovereign guarantee extended by her through a Department of Justice opinion, where seven million dollars allegedly changed hands under the table. Two million dollars of such unexplained monies were traced to a Swiss bank by Swiss federal authorities. The money trail was furnished the Office of the President. The Ombudsman slept for years on the case. Finally, last year the Ombudsman filed a case against the then Secretary of Justice, a case that the Sandiganbayan, protective of “due process” for the accused, dismissed. Clearly the Ombudsman filed a case meant to be lost.

She was accused by Pacifico Marcelo of wanting to take over his telecoms company, 55 percent or so of it, in exchange for upholding his franchise. Her own Assumption friend and palace confidante, who came from a family of honest genes, was appalled at the display of power for corruption so early. But Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was protected in the Senate by Joker Arroyo. Marcelo fled on a slow boat to China. The Assumption friend died of illness later.

The new management of the Public Estates Authority appointed by her took over an almost finished project of the deposed president, the yet to be named “central boulevard” that was parallel to congested Roxas Boulevard which leads to the international airport. From 650 million pesos, the cost of the project instantly ballooned to 1.1 billion pesos, half a billion more, explained away as for re-scraping the foundation of a portion of the 2.2 kilometer boulevard, plus landscaping and lighting. Half a billion pesos scandalously more. She found little scandal though. She is so proud of it she had it named after her father, Diosdado Macapagal, the once-remembered “poor man from Lubao,” and short bridges spanning sewerage outfalls are named after mother, and grandfather. It is the most expensive boulevard in the universe, meter for meter. Ask Guinness. Or Ripley.

Panfilo Lacson exposed the shady money laundering activities of one Jose Pidal, using the bank secrecy act to transfer monies to a fictitious account named after an ancestor from Iloilo. Who was Jose Pidal? Weeks later, a nervous middle-aged man heretofore unknown except in Negros and the joints of San Francisco during the martial law era stepped up to the plate and claimed he was Jose Pidal, dubious signatures and all. Again, Joker Arroyo came to the succor of the First Family, and upheld the alleged Jose Pidal’s “right to privacy.” Curiously, records now hidden by the Bureau of Internal Revenue show that in the years when Jose Pidal earned hundreds of millions, his income tax payment was an amazingly low ten or so thousand pesos each year. The alleged Jose Pidal is now a congressman representing the descendants of the benighted sacadas of his family haciendas, but now he is “proudly”, Ignacio Arroyo y Tuason, chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources of the House of the Bought.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, with Rizal’s monument as witness, declared before fooled and relieved people that she would no longer run for election, in order to slay the “divisiveness” of which she was a part. Eight months later, before her cabalens in the now decrepit Centennial auditorium in Clark, whose airport she also named after her papa Dadong, she declares she would seek re-election.

What followed was a campaign unrivalled in the breadth of shameless spending of government resources, from Road Board funds to military funds suspected to have been “converted” by a general now in prison, and whose family now languishes in American jails, and of course, the infamous Joc Joc Bolante fertilizer scam.

She was proclaimed by Congress, “winning” by more than a million votes over the king of Philippine movies. Everyone thought the king lost because the opposition could not unite behind him, and he had a hopelessly disorganized electoral operation. And so for about a year, people grudgingly accepted Gloria, while FPJ sulked into anonymity, until unfortunate death took him away six months after he “lost.” On June 6, 2005, Gloria’s own press secretary pre-empted the discovery of a taped conversation between her and a shady character known as “Garci,” unfortunately a commissioner of elections under the equally shady Benjamin Abalos. In those conversations, apparently tapped by ISAFP to ensure Garci made no double-cross, she was heard asking him to ensure she won by no less than a million margin, at one point muttering, “yung dagdag…yung dagdag.”

Ten members of her cabinet resigned a month later, unconvinced about the sincerity of her televised “I am sorry.” Cory, bishops and civil society asked her to resign, but she was saved at the last moment by the reluctance of her Vice-President as well as Lakas stalwarts FVR and Joe de V. An impeachment case was lodged in the House of Representatives, thwarted months later when the chamber was converted into her “House of the Bought”.

In February 2006, during the anniversary of Edsa One, soldiers led by Scout Rangers Regiment Gen. Danilo Lim tried to launch a massive withdrawal of support, thwarted only by the clumsiness of believing that others with stars on their epaulets understood what honor and patriotism meant. Lim, along with Marine General Miranda and several others, are now in military jails, awaiting court martial proceedings that have taken the longest time. She survived, and how!

Meanwhile, the stealing goes on, as brazen as brazen could ever be. Even the World Bank was appalled, such that it blacklisted contractors who always win, courtesy of the corrupt DPWH and protectors in higher places. An “immoderately greedy” scheme to earn 200 million dollars in “tongpats” was foiled only when Panfilo Lacson delivered a privilege speech denouncing the shameless ZTE-NBN broadband deal which was first exposed by a losing proponent, Jose de Venecia III, son of the Speaker of the House of the Bought, soon decapitated because he could not control a “wayward” son whose scruples were assailed by the awesome greed. The drama of the Senate hearings kept the entire nation in tenterhooks, while they saw a “commissioner,” no less than the Comelec chair, Abalos, nervously twisting in the wind of his own lies. Then a coward, Romulo Neri, invoked “executive privilege” to cover up the whole truth about a mysterious presidential visit to China while her husband lay in almost fatal state, and a signing of an agreement in the wee hours, like “a thief in the night”.

Thereafter, another witness, Jun Lozada, Romulo Neri’s fix-it guy, was abducted at the international airport, taken for a joy ride that could have been fatal had it not been for an alert media. Once more, civil society called for her resignation. But she did not budge. Another impeachment complaint was thrashed, courtesy of her House of the Bought. By the votes of “her” associate justices, Neri’s executive privilege was upheld, and the concealment of truth in the guise of “national interest” has become the law of the land. To say it is “the law”, because what the Court decides is law, is to accept infallibility from a bunch of incompetents or the intentionally blind, likelier both.

Under her amoral watch, all the institutions of government and formal democracy have been destroyed. The legislature is a pathetic parody of checks and balance, with only a handful of senators and another handful of party-list progressives having the courage of their convictions. The rest are either cretins or bought, many of them both.

The judiciary is for sale, but for certain rare exceptions, including a Chief Justice who valiantly tries to stem the tide. And the biggest buyer almost always leads to the stinking palace beside the stinking river. Quasi-judicial bodies such as the Commission on Elections have become commercial houses, apart from being a seasonal purveyor of voting fabrication. Another quasi-judicial body, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been quietly commercial likewise, until Mar Roxas and Philip Piccio unearthed their collusion with a big-time crook with big-time connections behind a Ponzi scheme called Legacy. The Bangko Sentral, upon which reposes the fiduciary trust of the benighted land, is likewise compromised.

The military is for sale, honor seemingly thrown out of the window. Some of their generals were bought along with Hello Garci, while promotion to higher rank has become a function of blind loyalty and the willingness to bow to an illegitimate commander-in-chief. Ditto for the police. Values learned at the Philippine Military Academy are conveniently waylaid, because the polity is ruled by lying, cheating and stealing. (I almost threw up when SND Gilbert Teodoro recently addressed the cadets of the Academy, and exhorted them “not to tolerate lying, cheating and stealing”. Hello? What of your president, whose endorsement you seek for your presidential dreams?)

Even the religious institutions are compromised. A Jesuit priest is oblivious to all the chicanery as he partners with a pseudo-ideologue in upholding their queer dogma of justified killings at the altar of national security. They hardly flinch while extra-judicial killings occur left and right, and the country has become, under their combined amoral watch, as the most dangerous peace-time country in the world. Beaten to the distinction only by strife-wracked Somalia, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Iraq. What a country!

Not to forget our bishops, oh, our lords of grace! When the conscience-stricken cabinet members who later became the Hyatt Ten asked her in the wake of Hello Garci to “save her government” by exiling Mike Arroyo and firing Ephraim Genuino of his and her Pagcor, she acceded to the first, but no, no, no, no, no to Genuino. “He takes care of the bishops for me,” she said without batting an eyelash. But then again, members of the same group once heard her say, during those critical days, “I am beyond shame.”

The economy is supposed to be her ace. She is after all a textbook economist, a professor at that. But in the years preceding the 2004 elections, she racked up the national debt several times over, and after she was “elected” by Garci and her generals, she imposed a “comprehensive tax reform program” (read that as E-VAT) on helpless citizens so they could pay for her over-borrowing, and “save” the moribund economy she herself created. It was indeed saved, acquiring for her dubious international distinction, and making the economy “grow” by figures she crows about at every opportunity. But the human misery index keeps growing, and poverty is hardly addressed. Basic services from health to education go to pot. Cronyism and regulatory capture of the domestic economy have come back with a vengeance, and the same old faces who were cozy with Marcos are now cozier with Papa Dadong’s little daughter.

Poverty and hopelessness has been kept from exploding in a society of extreme contrasts simply because an escape valve allows the miserable to go on a diaspora towards greener pastures in parched deserts or dreary cultures. They have become the new vaca lecheras (milking cows), whose annual dollar remittances keep their families and extended kin alive, and the local economy register consumer-led growth, buying mostly, imports from Yi-wu and Shenzen, Thailand and Indonesia.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has survived most every threat to her political survival by the sheer combination of nimble brinkmanship, tough personal decisions, and transactions with crucial sectors such as the military generals, Church bishops and other religious leaders, legislators, local government leaders, business oligarchs, even “bought” media. She has done all these through the absolute amorality of “lying, cheating and stealing”. There are no limits, moral or real, to what she is capable of, and willing to do for continued power and the largesse that she and her family can get with it.

The transactions have also led to governance held hostage by selfish interests, from legislators craving far more than their usual pork, to positions for incompetents out for quick bucks, to a bureaucratic leadership led by appointees also out for quick bucks, especially as the constitutional deadline of 30 June, 2010 draws nearer and nearer. As that deadline approaches, both Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her circle of power dread the coming of reckoning

Gloria’s options (Part II)
Malaya

As the end of power approaches, Gloria, her family and her minions fear not so much the end of happy days as they are of possible prosecution for crimes against the people. Some of the more glaring crimes I described yesterday.

They have long counted the happy days, minus investment losses if at all, and have programmed the looting schedules. Scorched earth is a good description. They are trying to sell everything that can be sold, in the guise of a privatization policy, both crown jewels and baubles. With a P1.4 trillion budget and an economic “stimulus” program that a good bishop labelled “steal-mulus,” they have fortified their armory for pillage.

Her appointees in cabinet and below are preparing to get elected in 2010, whether as senators or congressmen, so as to afford some mantle of protection for whatever sins they may have committed. Note that only a few have moist eyes for local government posts, because such positions are vulnerable to presidential pressure. If the elected president in 2010 runs after them, for reasons political or justiciable, they would not have the same kind of leverage that a seat in the legislature provides.

But end-days are most horrible to contemplate from the vantage point of the current holder of supreme power. The Constitution secures a sitting president from prosecution for all crimes, but immunity lapses when presidential power is gone. As it was with Joseph Ejercito Estrada, who was hauled off to jail by hundreds of policemen on April 25, 2001, three months after he was toppled.

In the latter half of 2007, publisher Dante Ang, close to the first couple (as of that time at least), told me he would suggest to his principal that in 2010, she not publicly endorse any presidential candidate. Instead, she could just give each of the “serious” candidates a billion pesos each in contributions, and more to the two top contenders. If he said this in jest, he was deadpan. Of course I did not ask the stupid question of where the billions would come from.

These days the story in the House of the Bought is about how Joe de V was approached by Mikey the son and Martin, a nephew of Ferdinand Marcos, who tried to “persuade” Manong Joe to “just be consistent with his long-held penchant for the parliamentary system.” They were not so interested in the number of votes, if at all other than his own that Joe could add to their 178 signatures. They just wanted a patina of credibility, oxymoronic as that is, behind the multi-millions that they would have to put up to “buy” the margin between 197 and 178. Plan W is cha-cha, and the surreptitious conversion of government from presidential to parliamentary.

Joe de V now says that he was offered the speakership back, if only he would go along with walang kamatayang cha-cha. But he claims to have rejected them outright. Speaker Nogie fears his days are numbered, and if Joe de V does not bite, there is always Louie V or Martin R or whoever, to take up the leash. The Senate keeps saying they will not dance along, and tell us not to worry. But the game plan is not to get the senators to join a rump constituent assembly, but to have the numbers that would precipitate a case in the Supreme Court.

If a challenge, as it clearly will, is lodged before the high tribunal, there will only be three non-Arroyo appointees in the Court – Chief Justice Reynato Puno, Associate Justices Leo Quisumbing and Consuelo Ynares-Santiago. The earliest Gloria appointee to the SC, Antonio Carpio has been showing independence and has refused to toady up to her. By June of this year or thereabouts, it is reasonably expected that only four, perhaps five votes can be counted upon not to pander to Gloria’s desires. And if defeat stares him in the face, not because of the preponderance of reason or principle, but because interpretation of constitutional fiat has become a function of pressure, “pera-pera” or both, then expect the chief justice to resign. He is not likely to relish the “Puno Court” being remembered in history for this perfidious decision.

And unless popular upheaval follows such resignation, then Gloria would have her way – a submissive Court granting imprimatur to a constituent assembly without the Senate. Expect some senators to then acquiesce, rationalizing submission to the operative law of the land, interpreted by the Court.

Now let me tell you a story:

A once-corpulent gentleman held a meeting early this year with two generals. He impressed upon them the plan to cha-cha, and wondered loudly about the probabilities of street demonstrations and protests, especially if the priests and pastors denounce what to him was “necessary to preserve the gains of the economy amid global recession.” Further he asked about the ability of “her” uniformed men to control the situation. From what I gathered, he was not too re-assured with the answers he got. Plan X would be about “controlling the situation” to the point of precipitating disorder that would justify emergency rule.

So if civil society is able to muster enough strength in the streets, there will always be the police under Versoza (or his replacement), and the military under Gen. Delfin Bangit to be counted upon. Which is why cha-cha’s final push is so timed that public reaction will be reckoned with when there is a new CS-AFP and students are on vacation. And the Doña will have appointed two more new justices to the Court.

Would the realization that they will be robbed of their right to change the present leadership on May of 2010 drive the people into the streets in another display of people power, enough to get the soldiers to withdraw their support, as in Edsa 1 and Edsa 2? I am not a seer. In any case, that is Plan X.

If such should come to pass, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo with iron will and beyond shame is able to survive, never mind the billions and billions of public monies she would trade in transaction after transaction, with the generals, with Congress, with the lord bishops of the numerous Church and denominational pastors, then she shall reign, forever and ever, or until the Lord above deigns it in his infinite mercy to end her mortal existence.

But if she and her advisers think twice, and are unwilling to push the envelope to the brink, unable therefore to cha-cha-cha, then the elections of 2010 will perforce have to push through. Thus will a menu of options present itself.

She could opt for the Dante Ang formula, but maybe Mike would rather she did not – “sayang” the money. So she would anoint someone, maybe Gilbert Teodoro who fawns upon her (Plan Y-1). Or maybe Noli de Castro, who after all leads in the surveys, albeit marginally (Y-2). Who knows what the surveys will tell come September or October?

Some of her advisers are pushing for a Noli-Jinggoy tandem (Plan Y-3). It will be billed as the “Unity” ticket, acceptable to those Tony Abaya describe as the “screaming masa” and Justice Renato Corona (Reynato Puno’s likely replacement if he resigns) calls the “unwashed, the foul-smelling.” In a multi-cornered fight, that lumpen-attractive tandem just might win.

She could also bet along with new best friends, Danding Cojuangco and Ramon Ang. If it’s Chiz they prefer, and Chiz has respectable numbers, why ever not? There will always be a convenient reason for the young Chiz to rationalize his “submission” to the party, his “acceptance of the need to heal the wounds of divisiveness ” (Y-4D). The young Escudero can be relied upon to find the right words at the right moment.

If Erap allows Jinggoy to team up with Noli in a “poor man’s ticket”, that is the end of the father’s quest to retake the presidency he lost. That is also the end of a putative Erap-Loren ticket. But if Jinggoy does not bite, there’s always Vilma Santos-Recto, the husband of E-VAT Recto.

Would Manny Villar then run, and lose his billions? Maybe, and claim to be opposition. Gloria fears him not. If the revelations about C-5 and Taga cannot do him in, he is always open to transaction, at the right time (Y-5V). But then again, since the Philippines is such a “small town” where secrets and side deals cannot be hidden from public attention, the variables of Plan Y require that some potential “trouble-makers” be first neutralized.

Last February, a governor of a dirt-poor province (still depressed despite billions poured into it by both Erap and Gloria, because funds went to deep pockets and not to projects) who is one of the occasional mouthpieces of the Doña and her cabal, was shopping for a “special operations” trickster against, whaddayaknow – Mar Roxas! Surely the reason is not personal. Neither does it have anything to do with Mar having a Liberal Party candidate against him. All the politicos in his dirt-poor province are with Kampi or Lakas.

And in November last year, Gloria’s regime finally requested the US government, then under her friend George Bush, for the extradition of Cezar Mancao and Glenn Dumlao, eight years after the supposed murders of Dacer and Corbito, seven and a half-years since Mancao, Dumlao and Aquino were charged as participants to the crime.

The reading in the stinking palace is that Mar is not too easy to transact with, and in any case, will listen to those “traidores” in civil society who constitute his core support. And Ping has never been transactional (I have many stories about the efforts of La Gloria’s minions and emissaries, all rejected).

So for a quantum of caution against “flies in the ointment,” Ping is now the object of late-told diatribes, late-extracted “confessions”, with Erap becoming “collateral damage” instead of prime target, so that in the end, transacting with Erap can be facilitated.

See Plans W, X, and Y with all its variables? Every variable must be controllable, as per the Doña’s economics-trained mind and Machiavellian amorality.

But what if despite all the devious plans, a Ping or a Mar (now seemingly low in the surveys) should upset the applecart? Here comes Plan Z:

There is the computerization deal that non-techies Melo and his Comelec are pushing through. The same conglomerate that has bagged the Land Registration Authority computerization deal with Judge Bienvenido Ulep (a once-corpulent man’s nominee) and the Land Transportation Office computerization deal (which former LTO chief and now DOTC Asec-for-nothing Reynaldo Berroya presided), is touted as best-qualified to supply some 80,000 counting machines.

For 11.3 billion pesos, we just may wake up on Election Day to find machines that do not work, machines that jam, laying the predicate to a declaration of “failure of elections.”. No president or vice-president is elected. No senators are elected. No congressman or governor or mayor and their army of “sabits” in councilors and board members are elected. The Constitution says that in such an event, “Where no President and Vice-President shall have been chosen or shall have qualified, the President of the Senate or in case of his inability, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall act as President until a President or Vice-President shall have been chosen and qualified” (Art. VII, Sec. 7, Para. 5)

Enter the “protectors of Gloria”. This is Plan Z, where Plan Y blends in.

“Ala-Berde”, old-time Manilenos would say. “Gulo” most everyone else would exclaim, which is “gubot” among the Bisaya. All hell breaks loose.

Tony Blair, in his expensive Manila debut, was asked, “When does a leader know it’s time to step down?”

Without much effort, Blair replied, “When you’re no longer doing the right thing – when it’s just a job”.

But Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is a “workaholic.” She loves “the job,” never mind the “right thing.” She will hold on to the job, forever and ever, if she could.

W, X, Y, Z. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. And Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, husband of Jose Miguel Tuason Arroyo, daughter of Diosdado and Eva, brother to Diosdado Jr. aka Buboy, mother to Mike and Luli and Dato, and lola to various little others, is not about to croak any swan song.