The Battle Royale among Pinoy elites in Chief Justice Impeachment Trial

Tomorrow, the elite groups of this small country will again battle it out for supremacy. The first group led by the President wants to leave a legacy--they want to be the first ones who successfully impeached a sitting Chief Justice and thereby, " restore and strengthen the integrity of the Highest Court of the Land". The other, well, tries to portray itself as a "defender of Philippine democracy", while looking at the people behind this group, they are far from being democrats or even defenders of democracy. 


The focus is the Chief Justice, whose properties are being systematically bared before the public to see--an obvious tactic meant to send a strong message--desist now, resign now, before we even contemplate of turning all these properties into sequestered assets. It's a ploy meant to weaken the Chief Justice's resistance. " Resign now or face the bleak prospect of you and your family without any single property."--that's the message of those who want nothing more than see a Chief Justice humiliated before a blood-thirsty public.


While hundreds of families flee raging floodwaters in Davao del Norte and Compostela, and people in both the urban and rural areas are busy, hard at work, trying to scrape the bottom of their rice bowl for a few morsels of rice, these elites busy themselves with comparing notes--who among the Justices amassed great amounts of wealth just by writing several pages of decisions. Is it the Chief Justice who got at least 40 or so properties under his name or the names of his family during his decade long stint in the judiciary? Or is it Justice Carpio, who reportedly owns several properties which were not at all listed in his own SALN?


As they say, when times are rough, fellow thieves meet among themselves and discuss who among them got more than others, so that others may follow suit.


Kidding aside, in reconstructing a system, such situations like these occur as part of a disruption in the normal course of business. These disruptions are necessary in order to correct the obvious flaws of a system. 


This impeachment trial is just one stage of a long process of crystallizing a cacique type of change within the bureaucratic superstructure.


The thing that we need to wait, is after this Chief Justice is formally ousted through a verification of his impeachment. When the Senate affirms the findings of the Lower House, that the Chief Justice, did, indeed, committed these alleged infractions against the Constitution, power will revert back to the people, doctrinally headed by the Chief Executive. The Chief Executive will then exercise his powers of appointment. 


When this point comes, we will now know the real motivations of this impeachment move--we will see whether or not this administration is really committed to changing things for the better or changing things only for the pursuit of interests by a faction of this country's elites. 


When we learn that it is only for the interests of a few that this exercise was made, then real change and a revolution would definitely happen.

The True Faces of Dissent today

FV is back. Let me repost what I wrote there some minutes ago.

A shadowy group, which named itself S4, (which sounds like that famous all-male Taiwanese rock band some years back), is now a subject of intense discussion among coffee shop habitues for some time now. The group, described as an organization composed of former Arroyo associates and anti-Arroyo personalities, says that what we have right now is a digital presidency. The group believes that the previous election was rigged and that the true expression of the Filipino’s voice was suppressed during that democratic exercise. Hence, it wants the Armed Forces of the Philippines to intervene and protect the welfare of the Filipino People.

The group posted their views in a full-page ad recently.

Malacanang just brushed it off, saying that the AFP is solidly behind the new administration. Other legislative allies of the present dispensation also came out from the woodwork and denounced the group.

The reason why I am writing about the group right now is simple–where did the idea of using the word sovereignty came about? I mean, sovereignty for me is a heavy word with a heavier meaning that losing it in an election seems more than an illusion rather than fact.

Sovereignty means losing the legal authority to govern a state. You either lose it through invasion or through subversion. Is the group saying that we lost our sovereignty when the wrong guy was elected into office?

What we lost is not sovereignty since we, the Filipino People, the true sovereign, still reigns supreme. If at all we lost something last 2010 elections, is initiative.

Initiative in the sense that our Constitution gave us the democratic way out of a hopeless governance, and only to end up catering to a more hopeless dispensation. We lost the chance to really elect a government that is as serious as the Masses in seeing real change happen in these lands.

I heard Linda Montayre, the convenor of the group in an interview over RMN yesterday that the reason why they are slowly re-appearing in the public sphere is simply their desire to really see real change happen in our country. The question is–under whose idea or ideological platform?

Is the group an expert in what the Masses think and want? What is the Filipino dream, do they know?

Montayre claims that the new administration is the same one with a more refreshing face. That a few days before the elections, both the old regime and the incoming one met in one meeting and decided to once again team up for the sake of bourgeois democracy. In Montayre’s mind, the elites won that elections, not the masses.

If at all there was a conspiracy to maintain the old order between Aquino and Arroyo, this is expected since they belong to the same deceitful group that bartered the true spirit of EDSA. Their forebears were the traitors of the First National Revolution who killed the embers of the Katipunan and want nothing more than elite-led democracy to rule these lands. They again re-appeared in History when they snatched the initiative towards radical change in 1986.

The masses are intelligent. They know and feel that nothing has changed. In fact, the steady stream of Filipinos leaving our shores is proof positive that the Masses expect nothing to change. That the straight road that Noynoy spoke of, is nothing but an illusion, a masterstroke, to deceive those among us who still cling to that hope of change.

Now the only question that remains–is this the only reason why a group such as S4 would spend a quarter of a million pesos for an ad just to say that we live in a digital democracy ruled by a digital president with digital cabinet men? Is there something new to what they are telling us?

None.

The same faces of dissent that have hugged our newspapers and our airtimes for decades are the same ones that continue to shout and tell the world of how damned we are. Yes, we know we are damned, yet no one seems interested anymore in going to the streets to do something about it. No one has the strength to even pick a stone and throw to the new Judases sitting in Malacanang. We only have our pens and our laptops to say that we are disgusted by the way the administration has paved the roads, purportedly straight, but in fact, crooked and as twisted as a Rubick’s cube.

And the reason is simple—those who shout hell were formerly its occupants. Where are the true angels that will rouse the Patriots from their stupor and thereafter, smash the Establishment with their righteous might? Where are the true Patriots who committed their lives to the Cause of True Democracy? Are they so star-struck and so misty eyed by the illusory words of the Inaugural that they already forgot the ideals they so promised to pursue under the banner of the Bagong Katipunan?

If at all, we need change, we need it to re-define the Filipino Soul, then later, societal change.