Filipino voters should develop a critical mind and analyze whether their electoral choices fit the bill, and ensure that they will never allow clowns and fraudsters to sit at the Batasang Pambansa and the Senate, where they are supposed to craft laws and not end up in dogpiles scrambling for pork barrel, or grandstanding as they criticize their own legislative proposals, which Sen. Bong Go did, with his consultant at the lectern talking on his behalf.
Watching glassy-eyed as they watch glib orators bloviate, they gobble up the never-ending expletives, the bluster, the worthless promises and the meaningless prattle by speechwriters. When the election period ends, and the winners are proclaimed, the voters end up poorer than ever, campaign speeches being vacuous, amusing at times but never educating anyone. This is a tragedy that the electorate must never allow to happen. But the tragedy struck twice by electing Duterte in 2016 after inheriting the image management schema of Cambridge Analytica and using stolen Facebook data on millions of Filipinos. Facebook is as corrupt as its clients just as Elon Musk’s X is a champion of white supremacist ideas, apartheid and paramnesia.
“No one will place the truth in your mind; it is something you must discover for yourself,” wrote Noam Chomsky, castigating voters who elect popular characters who punish the people, as they did when they elected Donald Trump last year. At least in America, they have this anachronistic thing called the Electoral College, which permits a loser to win. Here in the Philippines, there is electoral dysfunction, when the electoral process can be controlled by a cadre of computer programmers and determined by bogus IP addresses, sending manufactured results barely minutes after the polling precincts close.
As early as 1988, when Duterte was thrust into Davao City politics, many sensible residents knew that he was not the sterling public servant he was purported to be. They knew he was glib, a clown and an outsider in the city’s elite, despite his father being a Marcos pal, a Cabinet member and one who controlled a “small” but significant bureaucracy that provided the bureaucracy with everything it needed, from paper clips to typewriters, aircon units to land vehicles, and these supplies cost hundreds of millions pre-1986. It is not true that Rody Duterte was born poor as his father wielded political power in the badlands of Davao City after it shook off its tag as merely a huge abaca plantation peopled by Japanese agricultural workers. What city denizens say is that Rody was not highly regarded until his mother, the late Soledad “Soling” Duterte refused a political role in the city. Rody was thus promoted, a three-point shot as it were was delivered in the early days of the Cory Aquino administration. It also afforded him the chance to hit back at his critics and promote the idea that to solve all social ills, the policy must be: Kill, kill and kill. It sounds like the ideology of a failed politician and a jilted lover.
For sounding tough and failing to explain the thousands of killings in Davao City, then Commission on Human Rights (CHR) chief Leila de Lima lectured on Duterte to do something about the gangland-type of executions in his turf. It didn’t mean anything to then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who added the title “anti-crime czar” to then Mayor Rody Duterte. The slight was never forgotten by Duterte, who used his expertise in manufacturing evidence and gathering false testimonies to tag de Lima as a “drug queen” and had her jailed for seven years. Paraded by foreign media as “The Punisher” for the wrong reasons, Duterte was never the punisher of the Ampatuans, who had their own mansions in Davao City and whose gunmen reportedly killed their prey right at the operating room. Duterte promised justice but it never came.
Glamorized as the strongman whose time had come, media messages and support from various political factions, including the Marcoses, as well as survey-upon-survey pointing to the ineluctable result that Duterte would squash his rivals, who numbered a lot, and changed the Philippine political landscape. The admitted death squad protector earned the right to broaden his reach and implement the bloodiest “drug campaign” in the country’s history. Voters lapped up his stories about ridding the country of crime in one quarter to half-a-year and roared when he promised to turn the waters of Manila Bay red with the blood of criminals. He talked about wiping out grafters while refusing to tackle the largescale looting of Davao City’s finances by way of confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) and big infrastructure projects that never solved recurrent floods or mitigate the contamination of the city’s water supply. To cap it all, profitable waste management projects were implemented to the delight of his cronies.
In time, the traditional politicians gravitated around Duterte, creating supermajorities in the two houses of Congress to guarantee that every kind of legislative proposal that Rody wants, Rody gets. This idea of supermajorities is a stinking, miasmic political hellhole. It is an assembly of people cut from the same cloth, the grafters who call themselves honorable, who do not understand what a platform means and why laws should hew closely to the political, economic and social needs of the Filipino people. An absolute majority is an occasion for backroom deals, an event that allows whoever holds power in Malacanang to distribute grease, and the bicameral conference committee (BCC) is the worse organizational form of an automated teller machine (ATM) that the president employs.
Supermajorities are the Philippine edition of the fantoccini, an Italian puppet show, as what congressional deliberations really are. Authoritarians, like those who fancy themselves as having descended from Alexander the Great, Lapu-Lapu Genghis Khan or Hannibal, create straw men to destroy or delude their people into accepting his hallucinations. “If you want to control a people, create an imaginary enemy that appears more dangerous than you, then present yourself as their savior,” Chomsky also said, and that is exactly what happened during the Duterte incumbency. Duterte treated the Covid pandemic as mere flu and banning tourists from Wuhan was “nakakahiya” to his Chinese backers. He dismissed the virus as something he could “assassinate.” The pandemic and his financial mismanagement caused the national debt to more than double, and under his watch, the multi-billion Pharmally scam was crafted and executed, to the delight of his economic adviser Michael Yang, a Chinese citizen. The Duterte sting ran for six years. Now is the time for him to show that his mojo works at the International Criminal Court (ICC.) (DIEGO MORRA)
