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Truly sickening to see another round of cover-up,
dissembling, and brazen denial on the part of Palace functionaries
to counter damaging testimony by a witness on the ZTE deal.
Sandwiched between GMA loyalists was Jun Lozada who finally screwed
his courage to the sticking place and told everything he said he
knew about the broadband scandal at the Senate investigation.
Administration senators tried their best to discredit the
beleaguered witness but they failed.
I am aghast that these senators
whom we knew at the U.P. years ago are part of the regimes
counteroffensive to save a morally bankrupt leadership that has long
deserved to be banished and replaced. But from the looks of it
the whole political system may well undergo major surgery if not
interment.
We know that any change at the
top would be superficial, for we have a history of that kind of
change from EDSA I (when one set of rapacious oligarchs was replaced
by another set of elites equally capable of pillage and repression)
to EDSA II (when a president charged and convicted of plunder gave
way to another who is now the object of ouster moves because of more
serious charges including corruption, electoral fraud, and abetting
a military held responsible here and outside the country for
extrajudicial killings, abductions, and disappearances of activists,
media persons, church people, lawyers, and innocent
civilians).
Hence, genuine social change is
directed at dismantling the feudal social relations that have
institutionalized political patronage, wholesale graft and plunder,
and subservience of leaders to vested interests, local and foreign.
Genuine change seeks to abolish
the coercive and ideological state apparatuses of the ruling class
and install peoples organs that would look after the interests of
the many and not just of the few,
At this stage people will settle
for constitutional succession even in the unlikely event of the
incumbents resignation. The Makati Business Club indicated
that they can live with the takeover of the vice-president who, to
many circles, has little credibility as a national leader. But it
seems the climate of corruption under GMA has become so insufferable
that anyone else as president would be a relief. Was this the
mood of the protesters during the EDSA II not anticipating another
mess they were getting the country into?
People who have experienced years
of martial law are also wary of putschist attempts (like rebel
soldiers staging a coup) unless perhaps the putschists would readily
give way to a rapid transition to democratic processes of choosing
the government. But from historical experience military leaders like
those in Burma and Pakistan tend to make themselves permanently in
charge.
What is envisioned here for now
is a modest alternative to the neocolonial state of the ruling
elites an electoral democracy whose leaders are chosen in clean
and honest elections not on the basis of personalities but on
political platforms distinct from one another, where government and
institutions work for the welfare of all and not for a privileged
few, where the armed forces are professional and subordinate to
civilian rule, where basic freedoms and civil liberties are
inviolable, and where national sovereignty and social justice are
paramount.
How to get there may well be what
this renewed rising and protest is all about.
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