What The Binays Should Have Said

The Dasma fiasco has confirmed, yet again, what many perceive to be the prevailing attitude of this family towards authority and rules. Having said that, the situation was not entirely irreversible. It is safe to say that the aftermath could have been handled better.

Here is a statement which the family could have issued after the incident hit the news --

The report of the Philippine Daily Inquirer was in some portions inaccurate, and utterly false in the rest. Mayor Junjun Binay and Senator Nancy Binay attended a gathering in Dasmariñas Village. It was already late in the evening, and all they wanted was to get home soonest. The Binays take their roles as public servants very seriously such that they wanted to get enough rest and sleep in preparation for the following workday.

Believing that there were no peculiar restrictions in the egress and ingress of visitors, the Binays proceeded to the Banyan gate to exit onto McKinley Road. They were surprised when the guards refused to let them pass, despite several pleas from Mayor Binay himself.

The matter would have been resolved sooner and the convoy would have turned back to pass through the Palm Avenue gate had it not been for the arrival of more armed guards. At that point, the Binays felt threatened, prompting the Mayor to call the police for assistance.

Contrary to reports, the guards were not arrested. They went to the police station voluntarily to explain their seemingly threatening behavior towards the Binays, which was completely unprovoked. In the end, the matter was settled as a complete misunderstanding, after they explained the arrival of more guards and apologized.

All parties consider the matter resolved in everyone's favor. It is rather curious why this has surfaced only now and in such bad light, when what clearly transpired was a terrible misunderstanding and not a malevolent altercation initiated by the Binays, as what the Inquirer would like to portray.

Corruption, Climate and Congress: Preying on Philippine Resilience and Faith by Diane Desierto

*The text below was written by my good friend Diane Desierto. We need to be constantly reminded that while we have a seemingly bottomless reserve of faith and resilience, we must not solely rely on it. This is such reminder, that with faith and resilience must come responsibility and accountability.

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Corruption, Climate, Congress: Preying on Philippine Resilience and Faith

Anyone born, bred, raised, and educated in the Philippines instinctively knows what it really means to 'weather' through adversity, and literally getting up to rebuild again.  It's a cycle we live with every year  - a cycle more terrible to recover from given the economic inequalities across the 7,107 island archipelago.

We are used to more than twenty of the world's worst storms coming through every year.  Floods devastate whole cities and communities everywhere.  And every year, we do our best to rebuild, to understand sorrow, to find a way to make peace with loss, to find reasons to survive and to thrive, and to always look to 'what's next' in terms of what we can do for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief operations, community reconstruction efforts that take years.  Anyone who's ever seen the unrelenting tenacity, hard work, adaptability, resourcefulness, optimism and faith of millions of Philippine nationals working abroad should realize that all of THAT comes from somewhere.  As with any other of my countrymen and countrywomen, I have also lost, also grieved, also made peace, also had to rebuild.  It's an art form we learn from birth.

Today's rampage by the "world's most powerful typhoon", Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda in the Philippines) is only beginning to be felt, and initial reports on the ground indicate that the deaths, damage, and devastation in the Visayan provinces of Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Bohol will be another one for the books.

As I write this, the rest of the country has been riveted for months - and most lately this week - following the Senate hearings on the massive cabal of corruption involving the misuse and misallocation of taxpayers' funds, through the middleman operations of Janet L. Napoles and her dummy corporations and non-governmental organizations, by Legislative representatives receiving the PDAF (Presidential Development Assistance Fund), formerly known as the CDF (Countrywide Development Fund).  Petitions challenging the constitutionality of these Executive disbursements to Congress are pending before the Philippine Supreme Court. Reading the Commission on Audit reports, news reports and testimonies of ostentatious lifestyles led by Napoles and her ilk, and the narratives stated in the petitions filed before the Supreme Court, it is chilling to see how billions of taxpayers' funds have been systematically siphoned off for years to dubious NGOs. It appears to be a continuum of corruption - from Marcos-era plunder and the Presidential favoritism towards cronies' dummy corporations, to the pending charges against the former President Macapagal-Arroyo for plunder and widespread corruption, and apparently, to the status quo where corruption is institutionalized, where corruption is our normal.

We know tracing the paper trail and recovering public funds already lost to this cabal will take generations.  It has been around forty years since Martial Law and to date the Philippine Government has not had a successful record recovering plundered public funds that plunged the Philippines from Asia's No. 2 economy (second only to Japan) in the late 1960s/early 1970s, to its present middle-income state.  This year the Philippines posted the highest economic growth rate in Asia (even outperforming China), with stellar performances by the stock exchanges, becoming a creditor (rather than a debtor) to the International Monetary Fund, posting record investment levels, and other favorable indicators that might point to a steady recovery and climb back to the economic prestige the country occupied forty years ago.

What disturbs, discourages, disenchants, and solidifies massive dissent from the alleged decades of Congressional misuse of public funds, for a country such as the Philippines, are all the opportunity costs completely lost to this corruption.

OUR LOST PUBLIC FUNDS could have paid for the best technologies for early warning systems against storms, for building better seawalls, for constructing the best protective system against the expected arrival of over twenty of the world's worst typhoons, hurricanes, and storms every year, and for providing the best system for humanitarian assistance, immediate and targeted disaster relief operations, countless evacuation centers.  OUR lost public funds could have been spent towards our regular reconstruction efforts, for rebuilding our schools, our communities.  While natural disasters are not directly preventable (climate change has its own stamp on the frequency of these disasters), their consequences can be remediated, mitigated, and allayed.  The technology exists at a price - Honolulu, Venice, the Netherlands are but three places around the world where anti-flooding systems, early warning mechanisms, and other disaster coping mechanisms are well in place - but corruption has made accessing those technologies lost opportunity costs.

OUR LOST PUBLIC FUNDS could have gone towards creating durable employment opportunities for Philippine workers and professionals - so that we wouldn't have to be part of this diaspora serving the rest of the world when we could be serving at home.

OUR LOST PUBLIC FUNDS could have gone towards improving our public health and educational systems across the board for all cities and communities in the archipelago - so that the real consequences of the gross economic inequalities between the powerful North including the resource-rich capital Metro Manila and the rest of the country, would not entrench the historical grievances of the Southern provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao.

There are ten thousand uses for our lost public funds.  But while the Senate may continue its hearings, cases are filed, and the cogs of media turn their wheels towards each scandalous revelation after another, we all know we're not getting our lost public funds back.  Not in this generation.  Probably not in our children's children's generation either.

In the meantime, Filipinos and Filipinas born and bred and raised will continue to live out our cycles of loss, adversity, and rebuilding.  All at the price of our country's best, ablest, and most hardworking leaving our families to find ways and means to help our communities rebuild.  Everyone will again note our typical "Philippine resilience and faith" in how we deal with this every year.

What galls the rest of us from this seeming Congressional cabal of corruption orchestrated by specific elites is how particularly predatory this is on the tremendous, but ultimately limited, reserves of Filipinos' and Filipinas' resilience and faith.  We *know* these disasters will come every year, we *know* what it would cost to have the best technologies already available in the world to mitigate the disasters and ensure swift reconstruction and remediation, but we DON'T take these steps because we can't afford them, we don't prioritize them, and we look to these acts of nature as force majeure beyond the realm of human ingenuity or intervention.  Every political platform makes the grandiose promises to the electorate of ridding corruption - pointing to Marcos and his cronies as if they had the monopoly of this privateering enterprise - but not a single administration has ever committed to making an integrated natural disaster prevention, remediation, and reconstruction system our country's highest national security priority.

Mr. President, members of the Philippine Senate and the House of Representatives, there is a limit to our prayers, our endurance, our strength.  You have little over three years remaining to solve the most pernicious evil to face your constituents and citizens by removing and reforming the institutional structures and lack of oversight that makes corruption possible, but you should acknowledge that, as hard as you concentrate governmental resources towards police efforts, you will not be able to find every corrupt actor and send them to prisons - the wheels of the legal and justice system turn far longer when we don't have the public funds to equip our courts, our law enforcement agencies, our schools and private citizens' community watchdog efforts. You will also not be able to recover the full measure of our lost public funds.

Thus, while we seek to make accountability the defining pinnacle of our postcolonial and postdictatorship Constitutional system, and while targeting corruption through the Senate blue ribbon committee, House, Ombudsman, Department of Justice investigations will certainly unravel the narrative of systemic and widespread corruption, the Executive Branch still has to govern.  You have around three years left (realistically two years) before the next cycle of political campaigning and electoral lobbying starts.  You CAN leave a concrete legacy by taking the bold and constructive steps to develop an integrated national natural disaster prevention, remediation, relief, and reconstruction program now.

Corruption, much like these natural disasters, may be inevitable - but they are not beyond human intervention, ingenuity, and resolve.  While it may take generations and several lifetimes over to deal with both, Philippine resilience and faith doesn't mean that we have to stand by silently and take all of this as an inevitable expectation of futility - NOT when we elect, empower, and enfranchise our governors with the highest mandate to lead and to act for the Filipino people everywhere, at home and abroad.

We can have resilience, we can keep the faith, but we need you to act and be accountable.


Prof. Dr. Diane A. Desierto (JSD, Yale)
University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law
Honolulu, United States of America

Elizabeth Angsioco: My Civic Hero

*Beth is a finalist in Rexona and Rappler's Do More Awards. I am sharing with you my nomination essay.

From time to time, we all come across stories of how women are treated as second class citizens, or sometimes even less, in various situations. A number of us will be so moved as to take action in order to change this. Still fewer will see this action through until fruition. Beth does all this on a daily basis, and for the most part of her life. She lives and breathes women empowerment. She has devoted her life to alleviating the plight of women, especially those who live in abject poverty and who have absolutely no means to make their voices and choices be heard. One of her great achievements, if not the greatest, was when she became instrumental to the passage of the much-needed Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10354), which had been languishing in Congress for more than a decade. While there may have been days when she felt the burden of swimming against the tide heaviest, she never lost steam. Her persistence and relentlessness were what pushed the legislators and RH supporters outside Congress to stand up against long-standing religious resistance and traditional thinking, and give it a final push towards passage. Today, Beth continues to fight, everyday, so that each woman stands a chance in fighting for herself.

I am in awe of Beth's relentlessness and persistence in pushing for a cause. She gets an idea, develops a method and makes sure she succeeds in achieving the selfless and compassionate objectives of her actions. She never lets go and loses hope because she knows that it is worth it to give her all, to put in everything she has. That seemingly tireless fighting spirit inside her, that is what is inspiring. For a petite woman, her spirit and her energy make up a humongous individual inside that tiny shell. It is an honor to know Beth. And it is such a privilege to draw inspiration from her.

The cash prize and the recognition will do wonders for the women Beth and her organization are helping. It will not only be a recognition of Beth and her resounding ideals and valiant efforts, but also of the value of the women she has been helping. Winning the Do More Award for Civic Hero will affirm the self-image of the women who have been so lacking in self-worth and confidence as a result of abuse and discrimination. The recognition will emphasize to them that Beth had been right all along -- that they are individuals of value, that they have a voice in this society, and that they can DO MORE to live better, more productive lives.

READ BETH'S SHORT PROFILE HERE!

VOTE FOR BETH HERE!

A Decade of Decadence

Panfilo Lacson delivered a speech in March 2003, ten years ago, calling for the abolition of the pork barrel. He detailed how the thieves divided the spoils among them; how the opportunists, both public and private, pocketed money paid by taxpayers, meant for the citizens of this country. He practically begged his fellow legislators in the Upper House to do what was best for the country and to actually fulfil their sworn duty to put the interests of the people over their own.

Ten years later, the legislators remain deaf. It is as if the Lacson privilege speech did not happen. It is as if they did not hear anything on that fateful day in March 2003. Ten years later, the greed and audacity in misusing the pork barrel have gone worse beyond belief.

Below is the Lacson privilege speech delivered during session in the Senate on March 11, 2003:

No Different

They met online. 13 years ago. Both bored out of their wits, looking for distraction from monotonous work. They resorted to the Internet for entertainment, recreation, any form of relaxation that it afforded them.

While other people met in cafes or restaurants for the first time, Sam and Gina (names changed to protect their privacy and identities) met in a chat room. Call it cyber blind date, if you will. As in any other blind date, it was awkward at first. Neither of them knew the other, much less their interests, hobbies, greatest hopes and dreams. They forget now what the first topic was. But each vividly remembers how, after only a few minutes of chatting with each other, both of them instantly fell into the rhythm of the familiar, like they had known each other for ages. What began as one-hour midday chats during lunch break (having cyber lunch dates) became nightly heart-to-hearts, often extending until the wee hours of the morning.

Thieves

We see them everyday. Everywhere we turn. Myriad reasons why we question the government, why we distrust people who possess, nay brandish, political power, why we look with suspicion at every public officer. Epaliticians. Kotong cops. Wang-wangs. Fixers in government offices.

But these are small-time; nothing compared to the massively corrupt who go scot-free, whistleblowers and tons of evidence notwithstanding.

LAYA

Emosyonal. Emosyonal daw ang mga Pinoy. Masyado raw nagpapaapekto sa mga bagay-bagay na nakikita, nababasa o napapanood nila. Mabilis maniwala, kahit hindi naman makatotohanan ang mga ito.

Nitong mga nakaraang araw, sunud-sunod na naglabasan ang mga balita tungkol sa mga biro, mga satire, at works of fiction na agad-agarang pinaniniwalaan ng karamihan sa atin. May mga nagrereklamo, nasasaktan, nagpapakita ng mga matitinding reaksyon sa mga nababasa o napapanood nila at may mga naninindigang sila ang tama, at mali ang kung sinumang sumulat o nagbitaw ng biro, ng satire, o ng fictional work.

Nariyan sina Dan Brown, Vice Ganda, Professional Heckler, SoWhatsNews, at Pol Medina,  Jr., na ilan lamang sa mga tumanggap ng batikos dahil sa kanilang mga isinulat o sinabi tungkol sa iba’t ibang paksa sa pang-araw-araw na buhay ng mga Pinoy. Napakatinding batikos na umikot sa iba’t ibang bahagi ng lipunan. Walang pinili. Mayaman, mahirap, nakapag-aral, mangmang, bata, matanda, girl, boy, bakla, tomboy, butiki, baboy.

Hold Your Horses

Restraint. A word that is absent in the vocabulary of many individuals. At times, including mine. We always get carried away, especially when it comes to judging people. It’s the easiest thing to do: judge. Ride your high horse and look down on supposedly lesser beings. And go to great lengths just to drive home your point. Exaggerate. Be hysterical. Lie.

Such is the lynch mob mentality many times evident especially on social media. Lurking in the shadows. Waiting for the next target. Ready to pounce anytime.

Imagine a lynch mob. Only blind.

Chris Lao. Amalayer. Charice. Nancy Binay. And now, Vice Ganda.

To establish context, below is the complete transcript of the segment of Vice Ganda’s jokes on Jessica Soho.

Paano kaya kung nag-bold na rin si Jessica Soho? Ang launching niyang pelikula, “Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Sobra”.

Napanaginipan ko nga rin ‘yang si Ms. Jessica Soho, nagpapatimbang. Nakakatawa no’ng nagpatimbang kami. Umakyat si Jessica Soho sa weighing scale. Pag-akyat ni Jessica Soho, tumunog ang weighing scale: “One at a time. One at a time. One at a time.” So bumaba ulit si Jessica Soho. Nagalit. “Ay, baka sira. Ay ta-try ko ulit.” So umakyat ulit ng weighing scale si Jessica Soho. Tumunog ang weighing scale: “Please don’t play with the machine. Don’t play with the machine. One at a time. I told you one at a time. Don’t play with the machine.” Ay! Nagalit si Jessica Soho. “Ano ba naman ‘to?! Last try na talaga!” So umakyat ulit si Jessica Soho sa weighing scale. Tumunog ang weighing scale: “You weigh 180 per kilo.” So ayaw niya nang magpatimbang.

Ang hirap nga naman kung si Jessica Soho magbo-bold. Kailangan gang rape lagi. Sasabihin ng rapist, “Ipasok ang lechon!” Sasabihin naman ni Jessica, “Eh nasa’n ang apple?”

Nakakatawa nga eh. May boyfriend daw dati si Jessica. Narinig ko lang naman sa mga hindi mapagkakatiwalaan. Ninakaw daw nung boyfriend yung panty ni Jessica. Tapos pinalabhan. Nung dinala sa laundry, ang chineckan comforter.

Si Ma’am Charo tuwang-tuwa pag kabilang channel yung niloloko ko. Bumalik tayo sa Channel 2.

At the outset, let me tell you that I am not, nor will I be, defending Vice Ganda. He can very well do that on his own. And his team of lawyers and supporters. But let us get a few things straight.

Eleksyon Sa Mata Ni Class D

Naku. Alas-singko na. Magpapakulo pa ko ng Laki Mi. Teka nga.

Uy, Jay, gising na. Maligo ka na. Lunes na Lunes, late ka na naman.

Ay tanga. Halidey pala. Eleksyon ngapala.

Wala ngapalang pasok, tol. Sige, tulog ka pa. Bangon ka na lang pag nagutom ka na. Iiwan ko yung Laki Mi sa mesa.

Asan na ba yung yosi...ayun. Aray ko putang ina. Lagi na lang akong napapaso dito sa kalan. Buwiset.

Hindi masyadong mainit ngayon ah. Salamat naman. Pero wag din sana umulan. Hirap naman maglalakad papuntang Burgos para bumoto, tapos uulan. Hasel. Maputik. Isusuot ko pa tong maong bukas sa trabaho.

Mas ok ang maong pag di madalas labhan. Malambot. Masarap sa balat. Wag lang umabot sa puntong sobrang dumi na mangangati ka na.

Hoy, Obet. San ka? Burgos?

Aga pa kaya. Sarado pa yun. Ah, watcher ka ngapala. Magkano bigay ni Kap?

Aba malaki ah. Di mo man lang ako sinama.

Sus. Hindi na. Magdadahilan ka pa. Sige na umalis ka na. Baka ma-late ka na. Mabawasan pa kita mo. Hahaha!

Ingat, pre. Aasahan ko yang pa-shot mo ha. Manalo, matalo ha.

Hahaha! Gago. Kyut ka jan.

Yung Laki Mi.