MANILA, Philippines -- Last week, I was watching Korina Sanchez interview two swine farmers on ANC’s Korina Today. They were being forced to pay for deficient piglets and breeds different from what they were promised and which a swine fund was supposed to have paid for.
These were straight-talking piggery farmers, not smooth-talking investors or losing bidders for a project. They knew the nitty-gritty of running a swine farm. These were ordinary, hardworking folk being defrauded of the honest living they have been trying to make for their families. They felt aggrieved. They had been robbed. They had been cheated.
For the ordinary Filipino family, the swine fund diversion (and more recently the rice problem) are issues that hit too close to home. We have let pass the high-flying bribery and fancy corporate or technological frauds. They all involved big money: $470 million for the hydroelectric power plant with the Argentine firm Impsa; P1.1 billion and a P600-million overprice for the Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard; P1.3 billion for the Comelec computerization; P729 million for the fertilizer fund which was diverted with a little help from fugitive Agriculture Undersecretary Jocjoc Bolante; P28 billion in the bloated Northrail Project; and $329 million for its copycat project, the ZTE broadband deal.
There was no public outrage until ZTE came around -- and that only because of the dramatic “Back off!” scenario told under oath by Joey de Venecia and by the bungled kidnapping of Jun Lozada. Even that indignation was on the wane -- but for Jun Lozada’s nationwide speaking tour -- until the flickering embers were fanned by the two recent scandals.
UP law professor Harry Roque has exposed the diversion of some P600 million of a P2.5-billion swine program to fund the campaign chest of pro-Arroyo senatorial candidates. Strangely, Malacañang has given its tried-and-tested response to these periodic crises of confidence. Faced with Roque’s exposé, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Sergio Apostol says: So sue us before our favorite ombudsman. When Roque proposes to impeach the ombudsman, the House Speaker threatens to throw it out like it did the Lozano complaints.
When Senator Francis Escudero asks for a Senate inquiry, Apostol invokes the bank secrecy laws. Escudero and Roque remind him that we are not dealing with bank deposits here. I too remind him that the bank secrecy laws didn’t seem to bother him when he wanted to open Erap’s bank records during the impeachment trial.
Finally, Malacañang asks us to trust our institutions, yet the Commission on Audit, the constitutional watchdog agency that was supposed to have unearthed the scam, hasn’t and won’t.
The rice problem also shows how big issues come home to roost. You can’t raise the price of rice in adobo country without risking an uprising. The poor queue up under the sun for government-subsidized rice. Rice retailers complain that if they replenish their stock, they would be harassed for hoarding. Rice millers and wholesalers, on the other hand, worry that, unable to sell their inventory, they will suffer losses due to spoilage. Finally, we all worry that the subsidies do not necessarily target the hungry and desperate because it is government that decides who gets to buy cheap rice.
Finally, face-to-face with the crisis, Malacañang merely points the finger elsewhere. For both the swine and the rice issues, they blame the weather. Climate change triggered storms in the United States and China and drought in Australia, causing the worldwide rice shortage. El Niño caused extremes in weather, from dry summers to monsoon flooding, that fostered the spread of the swine flu and hog cholera that hit Central Luzon.
But the real sleight of hand is the one that says that these problems are so serious that we mustn’t rock the boat. I saw an exchange in an e-group in which a well-meaning activist said in so many words: Let’s not dwell on politics and Arroyo’s legitimacy deficit. Instead, let’s face the day-to-day reality of migrant workers: their paycheck shrunk by the dollar devaluation, the rising cost of basic commodities, and as we approach the new school year, the steep tuition fees. “Isa-isa lang at mahina ang kalaban.”
This logic is ominous. It means that the worse the problems get, the more we must rally round President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. And since things look like they’re about to get worse, it looks like we must further entrench the President. There was even careless talk about granting her emergency powers, which is just the formal albeit insensitive expression of this reasoning. The more exposés, the more we need her.
There is an even finer twist to this logic. It is a bourgeois luxury to speak of changing leaders while the poor starve, to speak of revolution while millions worry about the next meal. The affluent can afford to dream, the poor, they merely survive. We face a practical, economistic turn in Philippine political discourse, and therein lies the power and perils of the rice and swine crises.
We might revel in the thought that finally we have found a cause that will translate the larger debates about Mafia-politics into sensible bread-and-butter issues. Truly, for the Pinoy, it can’t get better than the political equivalent of the adobo-and-rice combination. But Malacañang’s spinmeisters have been so sharp and adept that it can dull the political impact of these crises by transforming them from threats against the ruling cliques into invitations for them to rise to the challenge. In other words, the real danger is the coup on our logic, the hocus-pocus on our minds. But then again, when your children starve while others party, perhaps you stop thinking and thence revolutions begin.
