Not quite Marcos redux

NOW ANY society in which most of the people are poor is always in danger of having its political authority corrupted and dominated by the rich minority.
In the Philippines, the real power lay back of the shifting factions, in the hands of a few rich families strong enough to bend Government to their will. This oligarchy intervened in government to preserve the political privileges of its wealth, and to protect its right of property.
This intervention of wealth in politics unavoidably produced corruption. And when this practice seeped through the whole of society itself, the result was moral degeneration. So the Philippine political culture equated freedom with self-aggrandizement, and the politics of participation, so essential in a democracy, with the pursuit of privilege.
Oligarchic “values” permeated society all the more easily because the rich controlled the press and radio-TV. The press particularly became the weapon of a special class rather than a public forum. The newspapers would noisily and endlessly comment on the side issues of our society, but not on the basic ones: for example, the question of private property.
The oligarchic propaganda was that somehow, with the election of “good men” – good men who please the oligarchs – mass poverty would come to an end. The search for “better men in politics” and not institutional change; a “higher political morality,” and not the restructuring of society – this was the oligarch’s ready answer to the question of change.
AS TIMELY as today’s paper, that was written over 30 years ago in a slim volume titled Revolution from the center authored by one Ferdinand E. Marcos.
There can be no mistaking whom Marcos was hitting at: the Lopez family that owned the power that was – and still is – Meralco, and the glory that was – and still is – ABS-CBN. Which “the state” confiscated after the declaration of Martial law in September 1972. (Of course, as in anything that Marcos took away, the succeeding revolutionary government of Cory Aquino gave back. The Lopezes, including a new generation of them, returning to the country from their comfortable American exile to reclaim everything they previously owned, and – if we believe the allegations – even much, much more.)
This long-forgotten part of Marcosian lore came déjà vu with what could be President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s opening salvo in an as-yet-undeclared war against the Lopezes – the “tough legal fight” for the control of Meralco.
Unlike Marcos though, GMA is neither going thongs and leather by her lonesome nor impacting all the power of the state against the Lopezes. She is enlisting some other power players in her campaign.
Rightly so, to project a broad-based front against a powerful enemy and avoid the issue’s reduction to purely personal vendetta against a perceived conscientious dissenter to her administration.
“Please be there with all your legal luminaries because this is going to be a tough legal fight and you will be the beneficiaries, your workers will be the beneficiaries, your consumers will be the beneficiaries, the Filipino people will be the beneficiaries,” GMA enjoined the Federation of Philippine Industries and the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industries Inc.
Her casus belli wisely couched with populist appeal: the bid to lower the high electricity rates.
So how will GMA fare against the Lopezes?
The venerable Amando Doronilla in his Analysis in Monday’s Philippine Daily Inquirer made a bleak but rational and historically-based projection that do not portend well for GMA.
Wrote the erudite Doro: ”The oligarchy scapegoat is no longer the same as it was during Marcos’ and (the elder) Macapagal’s times. The Lopez oligarchy and Meralco’s structure have changed since the demise of the Lopez patriarch, Eugenio Lopez Sr., who, in his time, called the political shots with his sugar bloc in Congress.
“The heirs of the defunct Lopez “oligarchy” have embedded themselves in post-EDSA corporate structures, less overt in their political interventions than their Grand Old Man. They have changed colors, but Ms Arroyo is fighting the Lopez family with the weapons that Marcos and Macapagal failed to crush the Lopez dynasty.
“Above all, she does not fit into the armor of a populist. She is not her father’s daughter. As a sedulous ape to Marcos’ authoritarian model, she is a clumsy and pathetic protégé.”
So GMA is historically pre-ordained to fail against the Lopezes?
Underestimation, like assumption, is a parent to failure.
So who would have thought that GMA could survive – much less surpass – all those thrown her way – from “Hello Garci” to the Hyatt 10, from the Magdalo to the ZTE-NBN?
The war against the oligarchy bears watching.