Superlative greed

DEAD WRONG. That is Clark Development Corp. EVP Philip Jose Panlilio for saying that “CDC salaries are competitive, if not the most competitive in the region and even in Metro Manila in both the public and private sectors.”
Panlilio was ruing over the rejection by the CDC union of the P3,000-increase offered to the workers by the government corporation.
Yeah, Panlilio is dead wrong.
CDC salaries are not merely competitive: they are superlative, by degree of comparison with those obtaining anywhere else in the country.
Consider the daily minimum wage: P287 for Central Luzon, P362 for Metro Manila, and P541.62 for CDC.
The lowest ranked CDC worker gets P7,462 monthly. The minimum wage earner in the region gets P6,620.
Then the other CDC perks – monthly: P1,000 rice allowance, P1,000 cost-of-living allowance, P1,500 personal economic relief, hazard pay of P500-P750 depending on the degree of exposure to danger; annually: P8,000 clothing allowance with a P500 annual increase up to year 2010, P5,000 cash gift, 13th and 14th month pays, and Provident Fund benefits.
Still more: P80,000 health care program coverage to include the dependents of CDC workers, and a life insurance of P650,000.
Superlative, indeed!
So what have the CDC workers extraordinarily done to merit the P7,000 increase they clamor for in their daily noontime black-shirted protest assemblies?
On a cost-benefit ratio – that is the amount of manhours they spend in their jobs and the (in)effectiveness of their performance ranged against their pay – it would be safe for a functional job analyst to venture that CDC workers would be below par the standard of just compensation as clichéd by some wag in that aphorism: “If at the end of the day, the salary you receive is equal to the job you perform, then you are an honest man.” Or some such quotation.
So, there may be a lot of investments getting to Clark. So should the CDC workers get more than their share of the income from these investments? Now, have we forgotten that the CDC is a government corporation? That its income become part of the national wealth that is supposed to fund public services?
Given the labor situation in the country, the P3,000 increase offered by the CDC management to its workers is already scandalous, nay, iniquitous! For the CDC union to ask for more is GREED, capitalized as a sin.
Ay, using the jargon of the probinsiyanong Intsik, the P3,000 offered makes “moderate greed.” So the P7,000 demanded is immoderate, nay, superlative greed?
If there is a workforce in Clark that merits a raise in their salaries, it is that of the Clark International Airport Corp. As they stand now, a CIAC manager’s pay is on the level of a CDC assistant manager’s. And unlike, his CDC counterpart, the CIAC mid-level boss does not enjoy free housing at Clark.
There clearly is some inequity there. Given that Clark is aviation- driven and therefore its full potentials for development are in CIAC hands. In the very able hands of President and CEO Chichos Luciano and EVP and COO Alexander Cauguiran, if I may assert.
Back to more lamentations from Panlilio – the CDC EVP, not the Reverend Governor – “Giving in to all demands of the members of the union at present will be detrimental to the operations of the corporation and the Freeport including its locators and the community at large and that will include all the workers especially the rank and file.”
Not so dead wrong is Panlilio here. But he could have been more right if he simply said that giving in to the union will spark a revolution inside Clark and in all labor fronts – a revolution of raised expectations and demands, finding precedence with the CDC surrender to its union.
If CDC workers get this much, what will prevent other workers, both in government and in private, in and out of Clark, from demanding the same?
Workers, unite! The red flags unfurl! Troop to the picketline! Bangon sa pagkakagupiling…Bangon kauring alipin…

Unholy Week

“ONLY THE SICK, the vain and the faddists still fast during the Holy Week.”
So the preacher-poet of Que Sio, Que Tal told me. And come to think of it, he is right. Fasting, and abstinence too, are not the only Holy Week practices that have gone to oblivion.
Less a mark of religiosity than a sign of (old) age is that feeling of indignation at (mal)practices of not a few of the faithful (?) during these supposed to be the holiest of days of the year.
The kids instantly scoff at every incantation of “No, we did not do those when we were younger” when – aghast! – in-your-face with patently irreligious acts passed off as sublime spirituality.
Maundy Thursday’s self-reflection induced by the soft, angelic Cant Gregoria before the Blessed Sacrament in a dark corner of the village church is pierced by the flash and whirr of digital cameras and myriad ringtones of mobiles toted by the throngs doing their visita iglesia rounds.
The object of their faith: not the body of Christ exposed in the santissimo sacramento but the monumento where the little golden ciborium is mounted.
Last year, of the many paparazzi, I took note of two Saudi-looking wives, read: jaundice-gold ornaments hanging all over them, prodding their little daughters to move further back to the monumento to get a more panoramic view. Beholding the photos, how papa would have drenched with tears the Arabian sands at this saintliness of his little darling! Oh God!
Then, there was this gay-looking gaily dressed quartet – I have noticed them for the past three Jueves Santos without fail – focused on the monumento from different angles while furiously scribbling notes and sketching on small notebooks like judges in some contest. Come now, have we a monumento competition going on? The most nature-inspired, the most futuristic, the most, err, gay?
Did those “visitors” ever come to pray if only for a minute? I very much doubt it. They – like the many others who barely bended their knee – had to rush to six or twelve other churches to complete their rounds of seven or 13. For the indulgencia to be granted.
In the scheme of things currently practiced however, the seventh or thirteenth church visited makes only the penultimate stop. The final – and longest – stop for the faithful is always Jollibee or McDonald’s. There in their own santissima cena, they feast on fries and burgers, spaghetti and chicken to stock on physical strength in anticipation of the requisite Good Friday fasting and abstinence.
Ah, how they fast and abstain from meat in the true (?) Catholic way – only one full meal on the day of days – a lunch of crabs and lobsters, prawns and oysters! Ah, Epicurus be praised!
Good Friday. My morning jog at the acacia-canopied village square has to take detours through the grass as the lane gets swamped by a horde of shirtless flagellants preparing for their penitential rite.
The plak-plak sound at the strike on the backs of penitents of the bundled bamboo strips at the end of their abaca whips provided the cadence to my jogging pace.
This struck me as a paradox of the faith: not a few of the Kristo wannabes imbibing marking demonyo for strength to carry their assorted crosses, or survive the bleeding under the burning summer sun. Yet a number puff on cigarettes.
With their backs “bladed” literally, or scratched with wooden brushes having broken glass for bristles, the magdarame start – to the rhythmic plak-plak – a procession of blood, the cross bearers in front and a multitude of their families, barriomates and usiseros bringing the rear.
Last year, being an election year, not a few of the flagellants sported arm bands and headbands prominently displaying the names of candidates. “Penitential” politics be damned!
Later in the day, after reverently hanging at the cathedral’s iron fence their black veils and crowns of woven vines of cadena de amor, the flagellants’ new spirituality gets further renewal with bouts of spirituous devotion to San Miguel, not the archangel but the blue one called GSM. Truly, bilog ang mundo. Maging sa penitensiya ng mga tao.
Black Saturday, the faithful flocking the churches for the Easter Vigil are nowhere near in force and in determination with those at the cathedral of compulsive consumption – SM, its two-day closure “in oneness with Christendom’s observance of the holiest of days” only serving to further whet the shopping appetite of its own hordes of fanatical believers.
From the abyss of the apostasy of my youth, I wrote a poem that ended thus:
“comic calvary,
a joker made of jessie.
pray, wail,
god is doomed
in the damp darkness
of nietzsche’s tomb.”
No. God is not dead, Zarathustra. Christians have only put other gods before him.

Money laundering

JAIME CARDINAL Sin was once quoted as saying he would accept money from the devil himself and use it in the pursuit of good. It is not an exact quote but the idea or the spirit is there.
The dearly lamented Sin was responding to a mediaman’s query on the morality of accepting donations from gambling. The “moralists” of course were quick to take the cardinal to task for adhering to Machiavelli’s dictum of the end justifying the means.
The successor to the House of Sin made a similar pronouncement yesterday. That so long as the money goes to the poor, there is nothing morally wrong for the Church to accept donations from government agencies such as the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office. Maybe, even the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.
It is charity that they dispense, so what is wrong with accepting it? So long as it is funneled to the poor.
“If the donations go into private pockets, then that would be evil, even if the donor is a saint. But if the donation ultimately ends up with the poor, there is no evil.” So went Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales’ exorcism of the money from government.
Come to think of it, ain’t that one novel, and very noble, form of money laundering?
Government donations to the Church were (mis)construed in some political and media circles as the determining factor in the pastoral statement of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines that did not demand the resignation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
But even staunch Arroyo critic, Bishop Deogracias Iniguez of Caloocan, did not see any wrong in the Church accepting donations.
“There’s no problem there, it’s good that the PCSO is helping with the people’s needs.” So was Iniguez quoted as saying, and he admitted that his diocese also received PCSO donations.
Some weeks back, Bayombong (Nueva Vizcaya) Bishop Ramon B. Vilena admitted receiving P1.6 million from the PCSO for the construction of a hospital for indigenous people.
Indeed, what’s wrong with accepting government donations? It is “clean money.” The receiver knows where it’s coming from. It is not given under surreptitious situations. It has a defined end – to help the poor.
Now, where it given under the same condition as that of the P500,000 that the Reverend Governor Eddie T. Panlilio received, then that would be a totally different case. (What happened na nga pala to that money? Still in the keeping of the Panlilio’s putative administrator?)
Indeed, what’s wrong with accepting donations from gambling? If these are meant to uplift the poor?
A few years back, the CBCP said “the form of gambling that is organized, widespread and systematic, whether legal or illegal, is not desirable.”
Clear there. Not desirable. But neither forbidden.
I remember a Tagalog essay on jueteng that I wrote in May 2005 t the time Senator Aquilino Pimentel called Pampanga as the “Vatican of jueteng.”
It started: Ang sino mang walang bahid ni katiting na dungis ng jueteng ang maunang maghagis ng tambiolo, pitsa’t papelitos.
It went on to discuss the pervasiveness of jueteng in the province to wit: Nagsusumigaw ang katotohanan sa Pampanga, ang jueteng ay higit pa sa bisyo o sugal. Ito ay relihiyon.
All sectors of society involved and benefiting from jueteng were touched, the Church not excluded, thus:
Ang simbahan. Ah, ang simbahan.
Sa nayon kong irog, retablo sa altar presyong abot milyon, kay Ngongo donasyon. Ilan pang kapilya’t mga simbahansa ating lalawigan nabuo’t natayo, pinagmimisahan, panginoon ng jueteng ang pinasasalamatan. Pagawa’t donasyon pa rin nitong panginoon ang maraming altar, upuan, luhuran, pati kumpisalan. Ano ang masama dito? Ano ang imoral? Ang tumulong sa simbahan? Ang bigyan ng kalinga ang maraming naghihirap nating kababayan?
Dirty money is laundered clean with the detergent of goodness. To the poor. As theirs is the kingdom of heaven, so even Belzeebub’s money gets holy when used for their end.
Amen.

Legacy

"LET US work hard together for the good of the nation and for our party’s victory in 2010, when by the mighty hand of Lakas and the blessings and support of the Filipino people, I shall pass on the torch of national leadership in a milieu of tranquility, justice, hope and economic well-being for our beloved countrymen.”
With that statement spoken at Monday’s national directorate assembly of the Lakas-CMD, has President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo delivered her legacy speech?
Don’t know really but GMA said so much and meant little with that simple paragraph. As I gleaned from friends in the café society at SM City Clark.
As she’s passing the torch, so she’s stepping down in 2010. After completion of her term, of course. Clear and precise. As her December 30, 2003 “I-will-not-run” promise?
Doubting Thomases, begone. Let the President be. She’s had many an epiphany since 2003. Didn’t she once say, for some small lapse in judgment, “I am sorry”?
There is some cocky sureness that the merger of Lakas and Kampi which GMA endorsed during the assembly will not only win in 2010 but will dominate Philippine politics in “a two-decade period.”
Why, the usually God-invoking GMA did not even need to ejaculate “Providence” to ensure victory and domination, confident of “the mighty hand of Lakas” and the “blessings and support of the Filipino people” as the only requisites.
My favorite coffeeshop philosopher was quick to translate those phrases to “the mighty hand of the military” and the “blessings of the Comelec, ala Garci.” With these, will anyone find any need for God, asked he. You, malicious you.
“Our merged party (Lakas-Kampi) will be a colossus that calls to mind Mahathir of Malaysia, whose decades- old dominant political machinery, supported by key business groups, provided the underpinning for Malaysia’s development.” Ironically, on the same day the President said this, her model – Malaysia’s United Malays National Organization – suffered an embarrassing electoral debacle.
Opposition leader and former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim made a spectacular political comeback after being sacked in 1998, tortured, tried and convicted in court – for sodomy, among others – and imprisoned. Anwar is a friend of the pardoned Erap Estrada. Some foreboding signs here?
The President’s take on 2010 is “a milieu of tranquility, justice, hope and economic well-being for our beloved countrymen.”
Truth – so instantaneously pointed out by a Lozada-loving academician – is not factored in GMA’s express legacy. It is not in her milieu, as she is not in the milieu of Truth, he smirked.
Tranquility? It means the peace of the cemetery, retorted an old aktibista into his third espresso.
Justice, hope? Tell that to Edith Burgos and the kin of the hundreds of desaparecidos and the victims of extra-judicial killings. Again, the aktibista speaking.
Economic well-being? Didn’t we just read from the papers last week the 2006 Official Poverty Statistics Report that said four million seven hundred thousand families – a full 26.9 percent of the total number of Filipino families – were poor in 2006?
“At the average of five individuals per family, that number, staggering as it is, would directly translate to an even horrendous 23,500,000 persons or over 25 percent of the national population.” The Punto! editorial even said.
So what economic well-being was GMA talking about?
Well, it is still over two years to the end of her term in 2010. Maybe, just maybe, GMA could still wield some miracle. We just got to trust her.
Is that a tall order? Trusting her, I mean. Maybe I should talk to Candaba’s Jerry Pelayo more often.

Our good shepherd

“IF WE really pray together, (we would discern that) one cannot monopolize truth. Truth begins in the heart, the sanctuary of our conscience.”
Thus spoke the Most Reverend Paciano B. Aniceto, archbishop of San Fernando, at the thanksgiving Mass in celebration of his 71st birthday on Sunday.
He could well be speaking of that sector of society that has arrogated unto itself all possession of truth. But, no, the archbishop’s sermon encompasses all the faithful, their individual politics undistinguished.
In the presence of Her Excellency, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the Reverend Governor Eddie T. Panlilio, Congressman Dong Gonzales, City of San Fernando Mayor Oscar Rodriguez, and a host of other politicians and local leaders who were allowed through the stringent security measures imposed by the Presidential Security Guard at the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary, Apu Ceto shone as the shepherd truly worthy of his flock.
To Apu Ceto, there never are black sheep. He has faith in the goodness inherent in anyone, even among those who have gone astray. I should know, I was once Apu Ceto’s most prodigal child, converted by his faith in his God and his belief in me, notwithstanding my frailties.
“We need to purify and change. If we follow that process, we will have a peaceful and just society with integrity. You should watch and pray that you don’t fall into temptation.”
The temptation of corruptive power – for those in government, that which deny the people of their right to live with human dignity. Apu Ceto may well have meant.
“Our country is at a crossroad. We are a divided people, eternally quarreling, bickering. Some media contribute to this. We are falling into the pit.” Apu Ceto warns.
But instead of taking his flock to the streets of protests to foment greater divisions, Apu Ceto, pointed them to the way that he has always embraced:
“We are asking the Lord to permeate every strata of society. Families and leaders should work so there is a holistic approach in the search for a real, authentic, common good, for the progress and development of our people.”
Ora et labora. Pray and work. Christian life at its most essential.
“Let us pray together, discern together so that we could know the will of God for the Filipino people.”
Apu Ceto laid down anew, the very ground upon which the sprang Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines pastoral statement on truth. That which, Apu Ceto lamented, made the shepherds “unpopular.”
He cautioned those that found cause for impatience, if not disbelief, in the pastoral statement: “The Church is a sign of contradiction but it comes from a position of strength because the center of evangelization is Jesus.”
Oh, how conveniently have we Christians forgotten the very paradox of our faith: of spiritual strength in human weakness, of the triumph in the Cross, of being born in dying.
“We have to give the precise mission of the Church, we do not respond to external pushes only. Intrinsic in its nature and mission, the Church must define society, not society defining us.”
Apu Ceto has spoken. And eloquently. Now, were the more loquacious – and mediaphilic – of our churchmen as discerning as him...

Of truth, and lies

“WALK FOR TRUTH & INTEGRITY.”
So screamed the streamer held by the Reverend Governor Eddie T. Panlilio along with the Reverend Auxiliary Bishop Roberto Mallari, the Reverend Father Mon Torres, a slew of reverend sisters and brothers as they marched for the prayer rally last week in San Fernando.
So many reverends there that I nearly genuflected upon beholding their picture.
Of Bishop Bobet, Father Mon, the sisters and brothers I give the utmost reverence. They indeed walk tall for truth and integrity. The clerics I have long known for their devotion to their calling. Bishop Bobet was in infima to my poetry class at the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary.
Of the Reverend Governor, I have my respect. For his priesthood. Of his politics, I have my doubts.
Hence I find him the odd-man-out in that picture. If there is one man who has no business walking for truth and integrity, it is Governor Panlilio.
The truth about the governor is not an established one. The lie about him is pervasive.
What is the truth about his winning the governorship?
Panlilio would not stay for an answer. His battery of lawyers barricading the due course of action resorted to by his rival with a heap of legalities that ran up to the Supreme Court.
So what has Panlilio to fear, if indeed he won – by the grace of God Himself – the elections? If Truth be by his side, nay, in his own persona, how can he lose?
As John Milton’s Areopagitica has long affirmed: “And though all the winds of doctrines were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple, whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?
“For who knows that Truth is strong next to the Almighty. She neds no policies nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victoritous – those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power.”
So, why not Panlilio allow himself to “grapple” with Baby Pineda? If only “to ferret the truth” as her lawyer asked.
What is the truth about the contributions to Panlilio’s gubernatorial campaign?
Panlilio would not say. Neither would his Kapampangan Marangal Inc. So where is their honor here?
Willie Villarama came out in the open asking why his contributions and those he solicited from friends were not included in the list of campaign donors and their respective contributions submitted by Panlilio to the Comelec.
Madame Lolita Hizon, the most visible financier of the Panlilio campaign, has also asked why her contribution was so conspicuously missing from the Comelec list?
So where is Panlilio’s truth here?
Gall, indeed, has he for “walking for truth and integrity.” Isn’t truth blasphemed, integrity desecrated here?
No, I would not succumb to the temptation of asking Panlilio the truth about all those nasty allegations about his vow of celibacy. That is thoroughly between him and his God.
I take my leave of truth – and lie – with the essayist Montaigne: “If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, it is as much to say as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.”
“For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man.” As Bacon interjected.

Discernment

QUICK WERE media in damning the pastoral statement of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines – “Seeking the Truth, Restoring Integrity.”
The newspaper that made the Reverend Governor made the two proverbial monkeys out of the CBCP: “seeing no evil” and “hearing no evil.” Earlier it denigrated the bishops as “spiritual and moral illiterates” because they were “unable to read the signs of the times.”
Shudder. The paper impacted in us the biblical story of King Belshazzar. Yes, the banquet-loving royal who in a spirituous celebration of his father’s grand larceny – Nebuchadnezzar’s ransacking of the gold and silver out of the temple in Jerusalem – found himself confronted by a man’s finger writing on the plastered wall MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.
Yeah, that which has since become the idiomatic “handwriting on the wall” that none of Belshazzar’s enchanters and Chaldean diviners was able to, well, divine.
It took the Jewish exile Daniel to read the writings thus: “MENE, God has numbered the days of your reign and put an end to it. TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. PARSIN , your kingdom has been divided…” (Daniel 5: 26-28).
Taking the story to contemporary times: Belshazzar fleshed in President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the enchanters and diviners in the CBCP, and the prophet Daniel in the newspaper.
Hallelujah! Spirituality and morality – out of the “illiterate” CBCP – are now that paper’s monopoly.
I take my hat to that letter writer, Dr. Antonio Ledesma, Ph.D, in Thursday’s Inquirer who asked if the Imperial Manila-centered paper’s “reading of reality is in truth better than the bishops’ who receive data on what is happening in every corner of our country from a nationwide network of grassroots organizations, research centers and professional analysts.”
I am especially taken by the Philo-Doc’s quote of Dr. Joaquin Navarro Vals, once director of the Vatican press office, thus: “The problem is that the logic of the Church and that of media are different. The logic of mass media is conditioned absolutely by daily events. On the other hand, the logic of the Church looks at events over a long period of time, where every particular event is seen as part of a holistic context, implying that one does not separate moral teaching from a man and woman’s life.”
Daily events. As in history in a hurry. That is the media perspective. That is bound to collide with the oh-so-slow process of discernment obtaining in the Church.
But in the quest for truth, how will haste fare?
I am reminded here of the great American journalist Walter Lippmann who long ago discerned “news” from “truth.”
“The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”
As the “divergence between news and truth stemmed from the exigencies of the news business, which limited time, space and resources,” it was Lippmann’s conclusion – wrote the Edward Jay Epstein in Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism – “ that if the public required a more truthful interpretation of the world they lived in, they would have to depend on institutions other than the press.”
There, the primacy of the Church as an institution of wisdom that comes with age, as bastion of faith, comes most naturally.
The Reverend Governor’s creator should go into some soul-searching discernment, and discover what it has oh-so-arrogantly arrogated unto itself.
Biased news. Feckless views. Shame.

Good governance defined

THE REVEREND Governor Eddie T. Panlilio – his rabid fanatics’ warped minds should be disabused – is not the man who popularized the tenets – not “tenants” as stupidly press released – of good governance. He is simply the man who mouths “good governance.”
Just because Panlilio’s byword is “good governance” does not mean he is the paladin of it.
Just as one swallow does not a summer make, so mere word does not good governance beget.
So, it was during Panlilio’s watch that the quarry revenues soar to the high heavens. So he is already the embodiment of good governance? To his myrmidons called local (un)civil society, unarguably. But not to the rest of the thinking, discerning people of this province, not excluding Madame Lolita Hizon and her Conscience bloc, Rene Romero et al, and, of course, Que sio, Que tal.
The honest – sorry, I don’t believe it was miraculous – collection and accounting of the quarry revenues is a component of good governance, yes. To make it the be-all and end-all of good governance is making a short shrift of that virtue.
Other than the improved collection of quarry taxes, what has Panlilio wrought for the people of Pampanga?
Of the 71 funded projects in the second half of 2007, one – and only one – the rehabilitation of the Romana Pangan District Hospital was bid out, and has since commenced. That was revealed at the Panlilio-sangguniang panlalawigan dialogue yet.
By this time, how many na kaya? With the all-too-rigorous-standards in project planning and bidding, it is safe to assume that many of the 70 projects on-stream have remained in that state of limbo.
It is great to see the millions of pesos that pour almost daily into the capitol coffers. But of what value are these millions if they remain there?
Money is not an end by itself. Even our Christian tradition holds that. So money, even saved, means nothing. For money earns its value only in its usefulness.
In good governance, that usefulness is in the service of the people.
Which leads us to the man who best defines good governance hereabouts. Why, it’s no other than Mayor Oscar Samson Rodriguez of the City of San Fernando.
Had Oca his own rah-rah boys, his transformation of the city coffers – from near-empty to almost bottomless – would have been hailed as nothing short of “miraculous.”
But Oca has no need for chorus boys. His deeds speaking for themselves. The legal doctrine of res ipsa loquitur incarnated here.
Where the capitol vainly attempts to bring down from the clouds its Ateneo-crafted agenda for governance, Oca has long been pursuing – and fulfilling – the city’s development agenda for the Fernandino.
Where the capitol heavily relies on its twin towers of – forgive me my dear Sonia Soto – cli_oral arrogance, Oca has long put in place the working, achieving Multi-Sectoral Governance Council.
All the achievements of the city in Oca’s term, splendidly tremendous as they were, would have meant less without the declaration of the City of San Fernando as “Proficient” and now on the road to “Institutionalized” in the most stringent standards of measurement of the Public Governance System of the most prestigious Institute for Solidarity in Asia. For that is the very stamp of good governance.
Oca is the personification of his own article of faith: Magsilbi Tamu. By that, Oca is good governance defined.
All others who arrogated that term unto themselves are no more than usurpers or pretenders.

Mouthfuls

JUST ABOUT everybody who’s anybody is out to grab the attention of the Filipino these past few days. Their soberly noble undertones amped in a mouthful of the sublimely ridiculous.
Like deposed, jailed, convicted and pardoned former President Joseph Estrada saying Edsa Dos was a mistake and people were ‘ashamed to celebrate it because they have realized that it was wrong.”
Duh, no matter his vaunted machismo, it would be the height of masochism for Erap to hail EDSA Dos as a liberation of the Filipino people. He being at the losing end of the exercise.
Then, Erap again calling the Macapagal-Arroyo administration “illegitimate.” So, as some wag put it, if that were the case, then Erap’s pardon granted by GMA was a bastardization of the legal process, err, of a presidential prerogative. Ay caramba, hijo de mal gran pu…
Then there was the world-travelling former President Fidel V. Ramos saying to GMA’s very face at the kick-off ceremonies for the 22nd anniversary celebration of EDSA Uno the Libingan ng mga Bayani that the EDSA sins were back.
“It is customary nowadays to denigrate or minimize the importance of the EDSA events – perhaps because the greed, the apathy and the corruption we brought down during those days are once again making themselves felt,” so Ramos declared before an unemotionally stoic GMA.
Ay, how wrong of El Tabako. The EDSA sins are not back. As they have never left the Filipino nation, in the first place.
How soon can he forget President Cory Aquino’s Kamag-anak Inc.
How conveniently has Ramos turned amnesiac with his own PEA-Amari deal, the independent power producers, the billion-peso Expo Filipino scam that forced his successor Erap to mothball the once prime attraction at Clark.
How easily FVR glossed over the cardinal sins of Erap that launched EDSA Dos.
Ramos should take note of what they say of too much travel. With all that crisscrossing of international datelines, with jet lag and cross-cultural immersion, travel addles the brain.
Then there were the prelates who, after counting to a hundred the number of Mass-goers with the once-sainted Cory and the now-messiahnic Lozada pompously beheld “people power.”
My, my, there were thousands more at the pro-GMA rally staged by the Kongreso ng Mamamayan at the Liwasang Bonifacio than those the anti-GMA forces could muster in all their sites combined. And theirs – the latter’s – is “people power?”
Aye, there is yet another bastardization, a hollowing of the once hallowed phrase.
Mouthfuls amounting to nothing. That was all there was in all those loose talks from supposed-to- be voices of erudition.
Ironically, the strongest, the most-telling statement that came out in the past few days was neither vocal nor verbal.
It was that simple walk of the generals down EDSA to their headquarters. Called a march of unity – it displayed where real power resides. It showed that whatever declarations of, nay, pretensions to “people power” of the so-called civil society, the opposition, even the Church, it can never be without the military.
Sovereignty resides in the people, yes. Civilian authority is always supreme over the military, yes again. So who wields that authority? Neither Cory, Fidel nor Erap. Neither the Church nor civil society.
For ill or good, it is still Glory be.