Another Edsa people power—not anymore

CANBERRA—The call for another Million People March (MPM) to protest the abuse of the congressional pork barrel fund was shut down before it could take off.

There are no takers. The frustrated faceless organizers of the Aug. 26 march would have nothing to do with it. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, the driving force of the most successful people power movements in the country—Edsa I against the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, and  Edsa II against Joseph  Estrada in 2001—would not touch it like dirt.

“Ours is an expression of solidarity,” declared the CBCP president, Archbishop Jose Palma of Cebu, in a pastoral statement supporting calls for the abolition of the pork barrel system in both the legislative and executive branches of government. “Let  the people join, but we are not organizing that. It’s about time that people manifest their own convictions.” The bishops said they “preferred that the government find other ways to ensure the delivery of genuine public service instead of continuing with the widely abused Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).”

Palma explained that the Aug. 26 rally at Luneta, was an initiative of the lay people and the “Church is fully behind it.” But the bishops’ statement made clear they would not provide active leadership on behalf of civil society to mobilize mass support for the clamor for the scrapping of the pork barrel, with the zeal and passion Jaime Cardinal Sin showed when he called the people to take to the streets to protect the military rebels from the tanks of Marcos’ loyalist army after their leaders, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Vice Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Fidel Ramos, withdrew their loyalty from the regime in February 1986.

The farthest the bishops went in denouncing the pork barrel system was to criticize the government’s plan to turn Janet Lim-Napoles—the alleged mastermind in the diversion of P10 billion from the PDAF of five senators and 23 congressmen to her group of NGOs, reportedly with their complicity in exchange for kickbacks—into a state witness. The bishops also denounced the “special privileges” given to Napoles after her arrest, saying that “because it is the people’s sentiment that she is at the heart of all these anomalies, she is supposed to be responsible… and by law she should be punished.”

What in effect the bishops are telling the public is that if people want to join another leaderless MPM march on Luneta, they have to do it at their own risk and they should not expect another

Edsa-type People Power Revolution with the Church’s intervention.

There is no discounting the fact that weeks after the Aug. 26 march, the public outrage is still running deep, but the intensity appears to be waning as the Aquino administration has managed to deflect public fury by, first, beginning to make a criminal case against Napoles and her legislator-

accomplices; and, second, by seeming to heed the clamor for the PDAF’s abolition, while offering the nebulous scheme that in effect would replace it. President Aquino described it thus: “We will create a new mechanism to address the needs of your constituents and sectors in a manner that is methodical and not susceptible to abuse or corruption,” a statement that at the moment amounts to nothing more than empty shibboleths.

With these developments, it is not hard to see why civil society reformists who promoted the Aug. 26  MPM protest have become so disenchanted with the government’s double talk response to their demands. They now realize the futility of another march. The turnout at the march—between 80,000 and 100,000, according to police

estimates—fell far below the ambitious expectations to match the millions that packed Luneta on Feb. 16, 1986, when Cory Aquino held an indignation rally declaring that President Ferdinand Marcos cheated her in the Feb. 7 snap election and calling for a boycott of products and services of companies controlled by Marcos cronies. The huge crowd intimidated Marcos. He knew this crowd had been primed to turn into a lynch mob.

Mr. Aquino noted the bubble in the Aug. 26 march. True, there was outrage, but the rage was not directed at him, he was not directly implicated in the fraud. No one clamored for his resignation. He knew he could buy time by offering mechanisms to replace the pork barrel system and shifted the blame to scapegoats—the “collusion among a former president ready to trade favors just to remain in power, legislators and members of the bureaucracy who were willing to conspire, enabled by a passive and indifferent citizenry. All these factors put together make the PDAF prone to abuse. We need to make sure this system can no longer be abused.” Only he has clean hands—that is the implication of this statement.

The fatal flaw of the Aug. 26 march is that it had no hate object. How can a mob lynch a system of disbursing slush patronage fund, no matter how corrupt?

The President has to create enemies to clean up the dirty stables of the pork barrel system. Even if he succeeds in sending every politician linked to this fund diversion to jail, it’s not wishful thinking to imagine that after the purge there would be only a handful of legislators left, whom to distribute the pork barrel to.

But at the hearing of the Senate blue ribbon committee inquiry on the P10-billion pork barrel leakage last week, Commission on Audit Chair Grace Pulido-Tan testified that the misuse of the pork barrel funds “continued well into the Aquino administration, with the same implementing agencies and same legislators.”

How does one explain this discrepancy?