[Newspoint] The Easter Sunday sideshow

On Easter Sunday, everything about that occasion – “all the beautiful things related to Jesus Christ,” as one entry puts it – was befouled by a spectacle of conspiracy: presidential rivals Isko Moreno Domagoso, Panfilo Lacson, and Norberto Gonzales appeared together at a press conference broadcast live and announced they were uniting. 

But for all the words they mouthed on that day, and have since been mouthing in an attempt to deal with the consequent backlash from the show, they remain unable to make themselves understood what exactly they are uniting for and why – how, in the first place, they can be united competing for the same vote.

Anyway, what comes across sensibly is something so obvious it need not be said: They are united against Leni Robredo. But Domagoso insists on saying it, and doing so in a tone that seems to suggest that it was not his group’s intention to dissimulate, and that if anyone didn’t get it, it was their own fault. 

Yes, he says, he for one is asking Robredo to pull out of the presidential race. 

There you have it straight from the bloodied mouth of your brave pugilist as he lies prostrate, barely conscious, telling his opponent to give up. I can only put it all down to antipathy of the sort aroused among bad losers and inferiors: Domagoso’s, Lacson’s, and Gonzales’ combined numbers in the polls, indeed, don’t even approach those for Robredo’s. And by character, track record, and any other essential measure of public leadership, they scarcely compare, too, as affirmed by Robredo’s outstanding performance as minority vice president. 

Sidelined from Rodrigo Duterte’s gangland-style presidency and starved of budget, she drew, with creative sense, on the groundswell of volunteerism and philanthropy she inspired, a phenomenon that has continued to grow in dimensions and ardor. The numbers of fervid bodies that turn up, neither bribed nor herded, at her rallies, where they can be counted reliably, put to shame what even Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the front runner in the polls, is himself able to muster. In fact, for a target, no one is more deserving than him.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is the son of the dictator. With his widowed mother, he now presides over the wealth, put at 10 billion dollars, that his family stole from the nation during his father’s 14-year regime of torture, murder, and plunder. 

The courts convicted him of tax evasion, but ruled that he didn’t do it willfully. And so, he roams free (and so does his mother, herself a graft convict – in her case, she is thought too old for jail). Going along with the idea that he didn’t mean to skip tax, the Commission on Elections has allowed him to run, even as he continues to refuse to pay his obligations of more than P200 billion, fines included, and still running. So much for inadvertence.

He has held public office. During his father’s Martial-Law regime, he was a provincial governor, a local dictator himself, and until six years ago, in freer times, a senator, with nothing to show for it. He has been caught making fraudulent claims to achievement. He lied even about his academic attainments, and had to be set straight, publicly, by the schools he had dragged into his widely propagated fabrications.

He refuses to join the presidential debates, accusing their organizers and moderators of being biased against him. He only talks to the press for mutual indulgence. But even in settings controlled for him, he manages yet to say nothing, at best. One word from him is unforgettable, but only because it peppers his speech, not because of anything sensible that can be made out of it. That word is in fact his battle cry: unity.

Come to think of it, it’s the exact same word that issued, in similar senseless fashion, as a refrain from the lips of our Easter trio. If you’re looking for a connection here between Marcos and the trio through that word, I’m afraid it’s just the solitary swallow that does not a summer make. But in the right places you might just uncover a deeper and wider conspiracy than Domagoso et al cooked up for Easter; you might just find their links to the highest levels of that conspiracy.

Lacson was identified with the most notorious enforcers for the Martial-Law regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and, in the current Duterte presidency, he possibly found an answer to a nostalgic longing: an openly proud Marcos idolater, Duterte has fallen short of officially declaring martial law himself, but all the same has ruled autocratically, and, as did Marcos, keeps a claque of cronies himself. 

Senator Lacson has always voted for his pet bills. One of these he even chose to sponsor, being understandably close to his heart – the Anti-Terrorism Act. Notwithstanding its failure to define the crime it is punishing, among other flaws, the law passed Congress and the courts upheld it. Now in force, it hangs as a sword of Damocles above the heads of those on the political left, which happens to be the only noble position to take vis-a-vis a draconian regime like Duterte’s.

Domagoso himself sings the praises of both Duterte and the elder Marcos. In the early years of the Duterte presidency, he served as one of many undersecretaries – for social welfare and development in his case. He has kept a high profile, largely by self-promotional effort, since his election as mayor of Manila. His presidential draft was perhaps the most expected among the contenders. 

His experience as an actor has served him well. His trick is to shine the light on the nice aspects about him and conceal the potentially disadvantageous ones. (But who doesn’t? you might say. Anyway…) He likes to say that he was dirt poor once, but not that now he lives in unexplained luxury. He boasts about making his city solvent again, but underplays his borrowings and keeps the terms of the sale of high-ticket city properties from scrutiny. 

One issue that hounds him in the campaign, because it puts his self-claim as champion of the poor in dispute, has to do with his appropriation of money left unspent from donations for his mayoral run. He diverts attention from the 50 million pesos he pocketed to the 9 million pesos he paid in taxes. 

The issue also incites suspicions that connect his picking on Robredo to campaign donations. He needs to take votes from her to justify staying in the race and spending donations and asking for more. Naturally, these proportions increase with the grade of the elective office the candidate is contending for and his or her chances. The proportioning may not apply in the case of savings from donations, but, donations being necessarily much larger for a presidential than for a mayoral run, it’s not hard to imagine how proportionately larger sums may be retained for appropriation. It’s electoral kickback. 

As for Gonzales, he’s probably the easiest to suffer of the three, although serving a president like Gloria Arroyo probably tainted him worse than he deserves. He was her security adviser.

In the post-Marcos dictatorship, Arroyo was president the longest, three years by accident, the next six by cheating. She stepped up from vice president to serve out the remaining term of Joseph Estrada, who had been impeached, convicted, and jailed for plunder. She pardoned him during her regular term, the one for which she rigged her own election. 

After her presidency, she was charged with plunder herself. She spent the next six years mostly in hospital detention, with a neck brace that came off promptly upon her release by Duterte, a mayor from the provincial south coming to the presidency with a streak of narcissism and a reputation for death-squad justice. She supplied him in turn with an operating system topped with a Supreme Court she had packed during her long reign — the same court acquitted her for a ceremonial, if, for all intents and purposes, legal wiping of the slate. 

She also lent Duterte some of her political operators, some of whom now sit in his Cabinet. She may also have introduced him to China, the patron that had got her in legal trouble for a patently lopsided deal between its telecommunications firm ZTE and her government; the deal would have pushed through if not exposed. Under Duterte, anyway, China got an even better deal – control over the strategic and resource-rich West Philippine Sea.

No mistake about it, Arroyo and Duterte are the mother conspiracy, and the Easter trio a mere sideshow, indulged for whatever it can do to ruin Robredo. As for the prospect of a Marcos presidency, it should suit the conspirators that Marcos is neither keen nor capable of governing, that he merely wants to hold on to his inheritance from plunder. His running mate, Sara Duterte, is the true surrogate, in the wings – her father and Arroyo badly need one to be able to escape accountability.

But their blood pressure is only bound to rise higher and higher as the day of reckoning draws near and Leni Robredo and her yet growing righteous army breathe hotly down their necks. – Rappler.com