By Herman Tiu Laurel 02/03/2012
I was
happy with Eric Espina’s regular 50-minute GNN (Global News Network)
public affairs show last Tuesday, where he had a special and very
interesting guest. Former national security adviser Norberto Gonzales
appeared for the first time since the end of the Edsa II regime that
extended beyond the normal term of an administration. With a
self-conscious and put-on soft-spokeness to sound wise and fair,
Gonzales commented on what he says are growing ills of society. Playing
ostensibly unaware or “dedma” that he was part of nine years of
governance that had aggravated those very problems, he seemed to
discount any personal responsibility and, in a very deft way, blamed
“The System,” saying, “I see a lot of good leaders in the country but
they have to accept corruption because of the ‘system.’” He mouthed this
as if the “system” would persist if there were no people sustaining or
feeding on it.
This column has been a dedicated critic of the
“system,” too; but it also recognizes that the rotten system would not
have survived one more day if there were no avaricious powerful forces
commanding morally and intellectually weak opportunists manning it. What
is the system that prevails in this country today? It is one which
everybody describes as corrupt; it is one that spawns deep and growing
poverty, leading to heightened internal conflict and criminality, and
culminates in a decaying society.
By saying that no person is at
fault, Gonzales would like to fool the people into thinking that the
“system” is an evil computer brain that operates by itself and runs
every corrupt operation that is causing government and corporatist
corruption, poverty, moral collapse, jueteng, drug smuggling, the
passage of corrupt laws (such as the Electric Power Industry Reform Act
or Epira), or billing power and water consumers with price gouging
rates, ad nausea.
By blaming the system, Gonzales is merely
entertaining delusions of having no personal responsibility at all —
despite being one of the closest and most powerful confidants of Gloria
Arroyo, whose nine years of governance were marked by massive swindles —
from the Epira, the expanded value added tax (eVAT) expansions, the
Impsa/Fertilizer/NBN-ZTE and countless other scams, the 2004 massive
election cheating, the first Basilan massacre in 2007, the Angelo
Reyes-General Garcia looting of the military’s coffers, the MoA-AD
(Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain) deal with the Malaysians
and the US, to a litany of grave deeds that resulted in the highest
hunger and poverty rates in the country beginning 2006. All these
continue to this day and are aggravated by the present Malacañang
occupants who have the same policies as Arroyo.
Thus, if we were
to go by Gonzales’ logic, even the present BSA III government he
criticizes should not be blamed for the many crises now arising.
After
all, wouldn’t the “system” be to blame for the Luneta hostage massacre
in 2010 and not BSA III himself or the city mayor who treated him to
siopao at Emerald Garden while the hostage taker was running amuck?
Or,
was it simply a computer glitch that made our GDP (gross domestic
product) growth fall to a disastrous 3.7 percent for the whole of 2011?
Was it merely a glitch in the system of the PCOS machines in the 2010
elections that prompted UP and Ateneo IT experts to discover extraneous
software apparently used in the machine counting and the duplicate sites
in transmission?
At the risk of getting too far ahead in history,
we only need to go back to Edsa II in 2001 when the Constitution was
trashed. Did the Rule of Law go to the trash bin all by itself, leading
to the Rule of Force and then of Money, as evidenced by the approval of
the Epira and other pro-Big Business laws by Congress?
Voicing
real concern for the Filipinos’ travails should not be soft-spoken
anymore but an explosive burst of indignation. The rotten system
persists because there are rotten people who sustain it by
collaborating, abetting, and aiding it in order to attain selfish
aspirations of power and opulence amid growing want. One only needs to
look at the some military generals’ family, some Nynoy justices, or
Congress, who have used power to profit massively; or those who have
endorsed manifold evils, like what Lacson did in condoning the 2004
Comelec fraud, or Congress taking pork barrel and corporatist money (for
the Epira); or the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas pushing unnecessary
debt; or the Department of Energy and the Energy Regulatory Commission
giving free rein to oil and power companies to plunder consumers
massively, ad infinitum.
Who are those rotten people manning the
“system?” From Malacañang decision makers to Congress and the Senate, to
the top honchos in the judiciary, to the generals in the military and
police hierarchy, to the top execs of the Makati Business Club, to the
top operators of “civil society,” all these comprise the core of the
rotten system. But are there alternatives to these? In other words, are
there still good people around to man “a healthy system?”
I can
think of countless of them working selflessly, like Mang Naro Lualhati
and Jojo Borja among many others in the crusade against electricity
plunder; Alan Paguia sacrificing for Rule of Law; Bono Adaza opposing
constitutional abuse in the Corona impeachment case; many Freedom from
Debt Coalition members who are fighting debt slavery; our Sulo group
volunteers; the Tribune; and millions of ordinary Filipinos who ONLY
need new, fresh leadership to break through.
Listen again: It’s the rotten people that keep the system rotten.
(Tune
in to 1098AM, dwAD, Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5
to 6 p.m.; watch Destiny Cable GNN’s HTL edition of Talk News TV,
Saturdays, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11:15 p.m., on “RP’s
geopolitical challenge;” visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our
articles plus TV and radio archives)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20120203com6.html
