"I wonder who Pnoy's speechwriter is. Must be Obama's." - C.J. Chanco
To be caught in the middle of a wall of riot shields and a wall of people pushing back is an exercise in political clarity. It rids all doubts as to whose side of the 'tuwid na daan' one is really on. We were at the front lines twice today - once in the morning and again early this evening at Camp Caringall, in an attempt to save nine protesters who were illegally detained by QC police earlier in the day. Malacanang commanded no less than 2,000 police officers, from as far away as Bulacan, to block a mass of protesters more than twice their size, and far more diverse (and representative of society), than the people who make up Pnoy's cabinet: women, students, farmers, trade unions, environmentalists, priests and nuns, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, international delegates from France, Mexico, Australia, Bolivia, Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the United States and elsewhere. When this many people take to the streets to contest Pnoy's State of the Nation Address, a hell of a lot of B.S. must be up on offer. For to believe what he says is to summon forth the temporary magic of cash transfers, public-private partnerships, deregulation, liberalization and the other central tenets of neoliberal dogma - while slashing wages, demolishing the homes of tens of thousands of families, resisting all efforts at land reform, militarizing our streets and failing to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice. To believe what he says is to take the complements of international creditors regarding our 'thriving, competitive, growing economy (now almost on a par with China's)' on blind faith - to accept the recommendations of those responsible for the global financial crisis, and to turn a deaf ear to the cries of our own people. Meanwhile, GDP soars while poverty is as bad as ever. To believe what he says is to believe that young people ought to abandon their dreams, and live instead within the limits set by the dictatorship of the free market, and the demands of the 'global economy', an economy reigned over by men in suits and ties and billion-dollar bank accounts -- backed by Uncle Sam's drones. To believe what he says is to believe all this country needs is an educational system like everyone else's and wages as low as everyone else's to be 'globally competitive'. To believe what he says is to believe that all a family of five needs to live fully and with dignity is a government-loaned shack in the middle of nowhere, a job at a call centre (preferably contractual); large-scale mines, not real agrarian reform and sustainable development; SM malls, not thriving local industries and small businesses; meagre monthly dole-outs, not stable employment with decent wages. This is not the 'tuwid na daan'. It's incompetence and impunity, plain and simple. Patchwork solutions for systemic crises. Rose-tinted statistics skewed to make even Tondo look good, at least in the eyes of Wall Street and the World Bank. It's a badly veiled attempt to cover up the failures of broader economic policy with band-aid solutions, or worse: an open admission of political abandonment of the genuine welfare of our people. I wonder who Pnoy's speechwriter is. Must be Obama's.
