We voted for Duterte for his platform of change and he won by the millions. He captured the masses because of their desire for change. We may differ with each other on other issues or how we will do it but we must agree on change. Let’s concentrate on that. If change is the principle we can agree on, then we must be single-minded about it. I remember during an advocacy meeting with farmers , one of them came forward to say “Gawin na ninyo ang dapat gawin. Hindi nagpapalit ang aming buhay kung ito ang ating sistema. Umaasa kami sa inyong mas marunong.” Simple. It was useless to him about parliamentary federal government in English and he could not understand how it will be done. I never forgot him because one of the arguments of those against constitutional change is that people don’t understand it. But this farmer understood it in the way he thinks and expresses himself.
The change we want is how to include the masses or marginal sectors in government. I don’t want to use the term class struggle but that is what it is. Unless the elite concede some of their power and wealth for the well-being of the nation, they will be hanging their own necks.
This is the classic result of the abuse of power and wealth by one class.That is why we need a new system of government that will change the relations between government and the people and elite with the masses.
We also need to tap competent people as it was done in Singapore. As Lee Kuan Yew said, if he could say in one word why Singapore succeeded, he said “meritocracy.” Competent officials will not thrive in a presidential unitary system of government which is all about graft, money and an organization fueled by money. Worse as we have now found out with the De Lima case, money also comes from drugs. Unless stopped it will be the drug lords who will decide elections with government officials beholden to drug lords.
The election of Duterte although near miraculous, is only the start. We must be reminded it is only the beginning of a long fight ahead. Now we must all help to achieve what we set out to do in voting Duterte. He has said many times that he needs all our help. I think he should not have put a time limit to do what he needs to do. Six months? Six years? That is why the yellowtards, as the Aquino and Co are called in Facebook, are encouraged to destabilize his government.
MISCELLANY: We can draw examples from East Europe when they organize new governments.
“Although Ukrainian democracy has made some progress since the 2004 Orange Revolution, significant problems remain. This article compares the difficulties facing post-Orange Revolution Ukraine to those encountered in East Central Europe in the early 1990s and maintains that Ukraine will have a harder time overcoming its challenges because its starting point and inheritances are different. That is, Ukrainian democracy must overcome many of the infirmities created during its initial decade of post-communism, and that these make establishing effective democratic governance in today’s post-post-communist period arduous. Among the difficulties are designing effective institutions, managing the post-Orange Revolution coalition, removing entrenched corruption and weak respect for the rule of law, and coping with a less hospitable external environment. Events since the Orange Revolution bear out the argument that the events of 2004, while getting rid of a leadership with dubious democratic credentials, are merely the beginning of a process to bring a successful democratic government to Ukraine.” From Peter Kropotkin on Revolutionary Government.
“Of all the most important systemic and fundamental constitutional reforms that must be implemented in order to improve the Philippines, Federalism is the reform that has the most solid support among most ordinary Filipinos. Particularly in the Visayas-Mindanao and even in the Solid North, Bicol, and Muslim Mindanao regions, Federalism is widely appreciated and understood even by ordinary plebeians and proletarians to be of utmost urgency in order to fix the Philippines.
Sadly, there are members of the Philippine Elite who tend to be stubborn and uninformed. They are articulate and eloquent so they are able to pretend to be “in-the-know” by obfuscating the issues with their sophistry and casuistry and are dangerously able to convince other people to become just as ignorant and as anti-reform as they are. For instance, the Monsods – Christian and Winnie Monsod – have repeatedly over the years continued to keep mouthing a lie that some people have unfortunately mistaken to be true. This lie is that “Federalism will empower Warlords and Political Dynasties.” – from Correct Movement
According to former Philippine Speaker Jose de Venecia only 80 of world’s richest men own 60% of world’s wealth. The former Philippine speaker was an active supporter of the shift to parliamentary federal government in the Philippines.
He believes that we can draw the best elements of capitalism and socialism. He also suggested a meeting of warring forces of Iran and Saudi Arabia in Mecca.
He gave the speech as the newly elected President of the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP). He asked governments and parliaments “to combine forces to tackle the almost incredible but all too real problem of the richest one percent (1%) or 80 of the world’s richest individuals owning sixty percent (60%) of the wealth of the world, or the same amount shared by 3.5 billion who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale.”
“In the Philippines, the income and social gap is so great that like Disraeli’s Britain in the 1840s, the rich and the poor among us have become virtually ‘two nations’.”
In 2011, the richest Philippine families accounted for 76% of our country’s gross national income. The two richest families alone together held 6% of our entire economy” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, February, 2016)
“The two nations situation, the incredibly huge gap between the rich and the poor, still exists in many countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and a number of cities in Europe and North America.”
He pointed out that in IAPP, “we observe that inequality is an unavoidable result of market operations. Inequality is the price of capitalist dynamism. Left to itself, rapid economic growth accelerates income inequality.”
But inequality, though unavoidable, de Venecia pointed out “can be mitigated – made less painful – by government activity and by parliamentary action. And it is right that the state and parliaments should do so – because economic insecurity, if left to itself, will steadily erode social order and eventually generate a backlash against the economic system as a whole.