This was yesterday. For far too often, when articles are about negativity, like this piece on the Cult of Noynoy Aquino, people fail to put our time within the proper context. People forget that just last year, our national life seem locked in a perpetual circle. Have you forgotten our questions, “how do you break the deadlock? How do you break the anxiety of people that there is no hope.”

The same crowd that patronizes the ideas spewed by “the Cult of Noynoy Aquino” comes rushing forward expelling forth whats wrong with the country but refuse to understand it or to advance what we can do to fix it. They say violence erupted in Luicita, but fail to put in context the twenty years of failed comprehensive agrarian reform program. The same crowd blame wealthy landowners, but fail to account that it isn’t just the landowners who have gamed the system who are at fault. The farmers too and the Left are to be blamed.

I wrote last year, Better Political Parties, Not more Impeachment. and today, history seem poised to crown The Juggernaut Noynoy Aquino even as Aquino brings great hope and trepidation.

Today, some quarters can not believe that Noynoy Aquino is poised to become president. Why him? Did you by any chance start to grow political parties? Did you by any chance prepare for 2010? Did you by any chance remember what it was like just last year?

Do you by any chance see what Manny Villar can do? As I wrote in Manny Villar’s Platform, “The doubt in my mind starts off like this: Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo also knows what’s wrong with the Philippines and knows how to fix it, just as Villar does and who is just as capable as he is. The doubt in my mind is this: what makes Manny Villar different from Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?”

Rochelle Chua made me realize in her post, “Get to Know Nicanor Perlas,” what a good guy, Mr. Perlas is. At the same time, as much as I admire Mr. Perlas’ intelligence and passion for the job, his stance on Nuclear Power is something I think was one of the biggest mistakes of the past 20 years.

Then again, there is something inexplicable about destiny.

So, do we Trust, more than platforms?

Today, Lila Shahani captures in “Lernaean Hydra: the battle against imputing and its many layers“, our stark reality. Very important is her analysis on the Amaptuan case and international options regarding it, so I urge you to read her piece.

There there is Dean dela Paz’s the list of the absurd. It is very important to note:

the World Bank’s (WB) Department of Institutional Integrity stated in a report previously furnished the Finance Department that as much as US$ 45 million was lost through bribes channeled to a “cartel” allegedly behind Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) projects.

The usual suspects were implicated including those at the very top and “relevant local media”. As absurdity would have it, rather than call government officials and relatives to account for the losses, it was the World Bank that was unceremoniously browbeaten.

Then Ding reminds us that it is Time to Junk the Killer Ro-Ro RP nautical highway experiment. For a nation with a lot of water around us, we sure are a nation of terrible sailors.

Recently the Jester-in-Exile wrote about “Elections, Pixels, and Pesos: A look at online campaign finance,” which basically deals how green the grass is online.

Oh, and I had fun reading Manuel Buencamino’s Aldo the Alligator.

And today, this in an age where people struggle with Globe Billing Problems and iPhone 3Gs.

We’ve talked about yesterday and, today.

This is tomorrow and it is full of possibilities, of plans within plans on the road to 2010, and myriad challenges like The Clear and Present Danger of Congresswoman Arroyo looming over the horizon.

Tomorrow must be about Risa Hontiveros and her stance on RH Bill and the Labor Code. It is about Budget Reform, which is TG Guingona’s Main Advocacy. It is about Mar Roxas’ Freedom of Information Act.

Earlier, I posted on blogwatch about The Five Freedoms of Filipino Running Code. It is about the future of Internet in the Philippines. It is important I believe that our Presidential Candidates know more about Internet Rights. In my humble opinion, these Five Freedoms can be used as foundation upon which to build a more perfect digital life.

On the forefront of what tomorrow will bring is that elephant in the room called 2010. Much rides on it.

Turn the clock a bit, in 2006, novelist Brad Meltzer wrote issue 0 of Justice League of America and it was titled, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” In its opening pages we find Batman and Superman talking about forming the League.

It went something like this:

“That’s my point, Clark. Martians and Magic Green Rings to fight aliens who turn you into trees… that’s not— I don’t think that’s the fight I’m meant to fight.

“It’s a new world, Bruce. It’s not just ours anymore. Besides,” Superman argued, “when the threats get that big, sometimes it takes more than a Utility Belt and a solid right hook.”

Batman stood pondering Superman’s words.

And that was it, Superman thought. In all our time working together… it was the first time I saw Bruce scared. It wasn’t the aliens. Or the diamonds. Or even the Mach 6. It was just the simple and unavoidable realization that there were bigger things on this planet than him. And that’s what terrified Batman. I could see the sweat below his mask, the way he kept readjusting his cowl. But as he’s done everyday since he was eight years old, instead of being ruined by his darkest and most ruthless fears… he embraces them.

That’s what we need to do. That’s what 2010 must be about.

Instead of our darkest and most ruthless fears ruining us, we have to embrace them. Make no mistake, the threats of tomorrow are real. I borrow these words from Lincoln, let us bind our nation’s wounds, and continue the work of nation building and we must face tomorrow with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the light, with charity for all and with malice toward none.

This opus by Maestro Joey Velasco is certainly not your traditional Yuletide scene.

But I’m sharing it this Christmas day as it perhaps evokes our collective hopes after a years of disasters and murderous tragedies.

The children embody our hopes and our dreams for the coming year.

More important.  it is this generation with its abiding energy, creativity, and vision which can and will rebuild Philippine society.

May this scene also remind our politicians  and leaders that it is the youth and our poverty-stricker brethren that they are sworn to serve, and serve honestly and passionately.

Maligayang Pasko at nawa’y maging Manigo Ang Bagong Taon!!!

Transparency International ranked the Philippines number 139 on its Corruption Perception Index.

As a corollary take a look at this screenshot I took of the Global Competitive Report 2009-2010:

Global Competitive Report Philippines 2009-2010

The next administration must focus on Corruption. That everything else must take a back seat. Education. Health Care. and anything else you can think about must play second fiddle to fighting and defeating Corruption. That everything the next administration must handle, at its core ought to be about fighting corruption no matter how indirect it is. The Philippines’ knack for pulling self out of the brink may run out. If the next administration somehow misses the boat to fix Corruption at this juncture, it is not inconceivable to find the Philippines in a much deeper spot than it already is. This is the challenge of the next president of the Philippines.

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my thanks to @Solstitial for transparency international link.

Perhaps, this nostalgia for a cleaner time is even more palpable coming off the heels of Arroyo’s eating habit in America.

Filipinos and Aquino scion have something in common: they can’t have a break.

At times, it might seem to be that the political landscape is no better today than it was pre-EDSA. People, heartbroken have no one to believe in. Time and time again, our politicians have squandered opportunity after opportunity to raise the quality of living; to raise our people to be better than who they are now. Presidential priorities amidst our brave men in uniform’s sacrifices, being what they are. Why not lease aircraft, instead of buying it, as @LaTteX on Twitter, yesterday put it? Why not really arm our brave soldiers well? Why not answer the question of Mindanao?

Like this series of tweets from @caffeinesparks and @LaTtEX discussing Arroyo’s “need” for a new plane (read it from the bottom up:

The reality is that the State of the Filipino Nation is such that the government, even if it wanted to, can’t ensure continuous growth. The modest growth of the Filipino nation isn’t sustainable. Bloomberg recently quoted Roberto Tan on the Philippines’ plan to sell $2 Billion of dollar and yen debt to fund the country’s budget deficit:

“We have a lot of funding options available to us given that the emerging borrowing for next year is lower,” Tan said by telephone from Davao City, in southern Philippines. “We can pre-fund part of next year’s requirement by selling samurai bonds before year-end. Global bonds and official development loans are always there.”
The $167 billion Southeast Asian economy is set for a record budget deficit this year and a shortfall in 2010 would be the 13th in a row. A slowing economy and lower tax revenue have prompted the government to issue more debt. The Philippines raised $750 million last month by selling U.S. currency bonds, adding to $2.25 billion sold earlier in the year.
“We can do the samurai this year or next year,” Tan said. “There’s no rush.” The Philippines is in talks with 10 banks to sell yen-denominated debt in Japan, he said.

Post Aquino burial, the camp that belongs to Erap Estrada is viewed no better than the camp of Gloria Arroyo. Bitterly, our people still lump them together. It explains why no one wants another people power ever again. Give power to either group and they’ll do the same old thing. The odd thing though, an election in spite of having the same names and faces is still seen as a method to kick politicians out and ushering in a different set. Trouble is, the maxim of garbage in, garbage out works too for elections and not just people power.

Take Manny Villar asking veteran WowWowee host Willie Revelame to become a senator under his party is a classic Filipino politician move. Willie, for the little good and little entertainment he gives is, unknowingly, the poster boy of what a Filipino politician is, as viewed by ordinary Filipinos.

We certainly can’t disagree that Villar’s record in the senate showed he was for “An Act to Institute the Policies on the Suppression of Trafficking in Filipino Women; And to Establish a HIgher Standard of Protection and Rehabilitation of Victims Of Trafficking, Sexual Servitude, and Exploitation Including Commercialized Transnational Marriages, and Migration for Entertainment, Providing Stiffer Penalties for Its Violations and For Other Purposes” as well as “An Act Establishing the Office of Research on Women’s Health,” an “Act Creating National Women’s Business Enterprises Policy and Prescribing Arrangements for Developing, Coordinating and Implementing a National Program for Women’s Enterprise”. Among a long laundry list that his website published.

How about these tweets published during Cory Aquino’s funeral? Do they give you pause about another candidate?

Mar Roxas

Whether or not you spew indignation, Mar Roxas is for Free of Information Act (SB 109). He was also primary author of an amendment to the Magna Carta for MSMES through Senate Bill 1646.

I wrote about why Escudero shouldn’t be president here, and you can see the quality of his mind here as he asked about how to solve Metro Manila traffic.

Make no mistake, Escudero intends to run. Hearty’s Haven posted her Meet & Greet: Chiz Escudero and the Senator’s reply when asked if he was running. Escudero unequivocally said he would run:

Do you plan & want to run for presidency?

Yes. I want and plan to run for presidency. I have not submitted my application yet but I intend to do so. If I lose the election, I plan to quit politics altogether, that is my promise to my wife.

What has Escudero done in his years in the Senate? His sponsored bills passed into law include “An Act Increasing the Maximum deposit Insurance Coverage, and Strengthening the Regulatory and Administrative Authority, and Financial Capability of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC),” and his filled bills pending in committee is substantial in quantity.

Are the antics of Villar, Roxas and Escudero (and by extension, every other politician) for the unwashed masses? That this is the only for them to be voted?

Anyone who has lost a parent knows the ache never really goes away. How much more difficult is the battle to overcome grief when your parents are as loved as Ninoy and Cory?

Who would answer? Kris Aquino-Yap had always struck everyone as straight-forward, frank. Though Mrs. Aquino-Yap’s bubbly nature had many to dismiss her. We joke that at least a Kris Aquino State of the Nation wouldn’t be boring, that at least we could look forward to candid interviews of the President by entertainment show, The Buzz. Maybe Boy Abunda would assume the post of Executive Secretary. Just as we underestimate Erap, I don’t think Kris is as “shallow and stupid” as people chalk her to be. Rating her “star power” is obvious. What “dirt” is there to pull from her that hasn’t already made into light? Her life already an open book and if she dared mount a campaign, it will be a juggernaut, hard pressed to be defeated. That’s all on her own, without adding her family legacy.

Noynoy Aquino is being called to step up. Quiet and unassuming, the senator has his resume on his site, citing the laws he authored and sponsored. Senator Aquino’s platform continues the legacy of his parents:

“I am determined to continue the fight started by my father and my mother to see that democracy takes root and is strengthened in our country. This cannot happen in a government that serves the interest of the powerful few. We must strengthen the institutions of government so that they truly serve the interests of our people.”

In the light of attempts to weaken our democracy, I therefore stand to;

1. Strengthen the Senate as an independent branch of government;





2. Continue to hold government to account for its excesses and misgovernance;

3. Resist Charter Change if done to serve the selfish interests of the few and if the process circumvents that prescribed by the constitution;

4. Oppose all attempts to impose a repressive government, and more importantly; and

5. Be the voice of the powerless and the oppressed, those who do not have access to our government and are, thus, victims of injustice.

The Aquino scion’s best trait is a lack of interest in power. In a nation of power hungry politicians that is like a cool gentle rain amidst a dry open desert. That and their legacy is most potent now is the best opportunity for one of them to ascend. Perhaps it isn’t the most opportune time and perhaps in a larger sense, shouldn’t the Filipino stop drafting the Aquino Family for another tour? Has the Filipino asked enough of them?

“The Filipino is worth dying for,” is the Aquino Family motto. The clear and present danger for any Aquino scion is the same trap that their mother fell into. Filipinos expected Cory to do all the work for us. The Filipino has not integrated in his DNA that the Permanent Revolution of People Power is an endless opportunity for self-discovery and redemption. An Aquino back at the palace, more so than any politician raises the expectation for that Aquino to fix this broken nation by themselves, even higher. In the event that Gloria Arroyo would arrogantly pursue extending her term of office through extreme means, the door will open wider for an Aquino to step up. If that day should come, will one of them heed the call?

There is much uncertainty on the road to 2010. The Palace’s unrelenting attempt at keeping power is a threat whether it is through constitutional amendments via constitutional assembly or extreme ways like emergency rule. The lack of a candidate who is sincere and capable is another. More than that, the Filipino expectation that their leader is a messiah is as valid a concern today, as it was when Cory was president; when Marcos was dictator. How else can we expect to explain the Filipino’s disappointment towards their leaders? In such an environment, how can there be a permanent revolution of people power? How then do we explain that all leaders are but human?

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1. Flickr allows a slide show/streaming of images off their site. The Embedded slide show is a search of “Aquino Funeral”. As such, terms of service for flickr applies and I intend no slight on your intellectual property.

2. I took screenshots of @LaTtEX and @cafeinesparks tweets from my tweetdeck.

3. My profuse thanks to the awesome @brevity for the use of her Mar Roxas photos.

3. i do not own the images on that scribd of Mar Roxas tweets. My ambivalence to use the tweets stem from question of image ownership. I don’t know who owns either. I sent an @ tweet to @brevity for permission, if she owned it.

That said, I decided to quote it in its entirety. I use the following reasons:

a) The image is a fact.

Lawyer Brock Shinen’s article “Twitterlogical, The Misunderstanding of Ownership”  focuses on a salient point: facts are not copyrightable. And facts are what tweets are mostly about – from talking about the weather, to communicating what one had for dinner the night before, to complaining about the morning traffic. Whether one expresses them in a funny or unique way does not make a difference. Yes, one can potentially protect a particular expression of a fact, but one cannot then prevent other people from writing about the same fact.

from here.

b) the image is in by no means used in any commercial manner. There is no advertising on Filipino Voices (at the time of this post).

c) a retweet is a social contract that allows the twitter to spread the said tweet and that by tweeting it, the original twitter has given his followers the right to distribute with proper attribution. I am quoting the tweet in its entirety, including all the RTs.

If you are the owner of the said images and would like me to take it down or include a more direct citation, please feel free to direct message or @ reply me on twitter, and I shall oblige.

A few days ago, we were remembering yellow, remembering Cory. As the nation buried Corazon Aquino, the generation that I belong to got a taste of Power Power. We grew up never knowing the atrocities of Marcoss, and were either fledgeling to remember or too young to have lived through People Power. As we buried Cory, I heard songs of that generation. They were beautiful compositions that perfectly capture not just patriotism but that era in our nation’s history. I thought, as Lea Salonga beautifully sang “Bayan Ko” (My Country), Filipino does lend itself perfectly to poetry, more than English ever could.

Why then, for far too long has People Power for us, was this useless exercise of street protest?

Ricky Carandang makes sense, doesn’t he? He wrote in his eulogy for our fallen President Cory:

It has become fashionable these days to blame you for all of that. Because you didn’t do enough to prevent your revolution from being dismantled from within.

the people who say that fail to see what 1986 was really about. It wasn’t about you saving us from the Regime and everyone living happily ever after. You did your part everytime you were called upon to do so. The problem was we expected you to do it all by yourself while we stood on the sidelines. We didn’t realize that we had a role to play too and that one person would not be able to do it alone. You didn’t fail. We did.
That was the lesson of people power that you tried to teach us. It was a lesson we have still not learned. And now you’re gone. Today we weep not just for you, but for ourselves.

How then do we reconcile a public that privately grumbles and remain behind closed doors at their disgust while they watch the news or read the daily paper?

A few years ago, @mlq3 wrote about an immoderate threat when representatives fail the people. In largely the same vein, Sparks wrote about Civilizing Philippine Politics. They write from the heart. Their passion as do many across the different strata of our society is clear as is their sentiment. After all, every well-meaning Filipino is equally outraged, equally passionate, equally disgusted at the madness, the decadence, the decay of our society.

Arroyo’s recent US$ 20,000 dinner is just one of many, if not least in a long line of atrocities to the Filipino people that not only she, but Filipino politicians in general have done. They have been destructive to our aims.

How then do we fix it? Is a call for Transparency at this juncture a first step?

@rom on twitter (not the plurker) had asked me: “@cocoy and yet none of these politicos are transparent enough. WHY? That is the question.” And @rom added that there should be a campaign for transparency. This sentiment echoes across strata of our society. Again, spot on is Sparks’ The Return of Delicadeza:

I am afraid the past few months, if not years, has resurrected the call for delicadeza. I hear it now in response to the National Artist controversy and most recently the 1 million Peso dinner of President Arroyo and other government officials in New York. I am hesitant to attribute the death of President Aquino to the belated calls of propriety, of what is just and fair, especially of high-profile leaders of the country. But remembering Cory and her sense of delicadeza, I suppose it is not out of place to compare.

More importantly, I think the call for delicadeza is a sign that as a collective, we have allowed our leaders and each other to push beyond limits of basic decency. That is, beyond bounds of what is proper, what is just and what is fair.

If we talk of morality, let us talk of these values. I personally, shy away from talk of god. The deity is such. And we, we are human.

Romany of the House of Smoke aptly douses cold reality:

Well, what did I really expect? That politicians would keep their grubby, self-serving, paws off of the public upwelling of love for Cory Aquino? HAH! Pipe-dream!

She goes on to say:

Ironically, it’s the blatant lust for power – evidenced by the readiness to prostitute genuine public sentiment for their own selfish ends – of these people who are making a campaign platform out of GMA’s evils that is precisely making me think that, were they to assume the Presidency, they would be just as likely to blow twenny thousand dollars for dinner.

Maybe that’s why we’re not hearing too many cries of indignation yet. Maybe they’re still figuring out how not to sound too hypocritical about it. LOL. Y’see, all these politicians know that the Filipino people normally accept that there are certain privileges available to some in society. We have no huge problem with inequality per se; the rich do what the rich do, while the rest of us, well we do what we do. The problem arises when we have our faces rubbed in the equality of it all. And then comes the outrage; the righteous anger; and the choruses of “with so many people starving, how can they spend so much on food!” and “OMG! have they no shame?!” and countless variations and combinations of those two fundamental sentiments. Very Animal Farm-ish.

Since Gloria has gone and rubbed our faces in it, it should be open season on her. But see, the pols know that they’ll have to do Le Cirque now. I mean, since Gloria did it, it’d be a matter of pride and social status for the next president to have Bollingers at that fancy restaurant. So they have to tread carefully on this, always with an eye out for the possibility of them being in the next Philippine contingent to sit in that restaurant – either as President or as President’s sycophant.

Cory’s passing made us remember our better selves. Romany said what everyone has always known. Institutionalizing transparency is a first step in encoding unto our nation’s DNA, what Sparks call “values”. Our nation needs to institutionalize delicadeza: the values Cory Aquino herself lived as a public official.

Delicadeza is a dimension of People Power. It is the standard by which Corazon Aquino aimed for. Though others around her failed, it doesn’t mean, she failed.

With elections looming over the horizon, the two biggest clear and present danger to the Philippines’ democracy is 1) a continuation of Arroyo’s regime, in however form it takes and 2) we elect the same fools to every level of society. Take this guy who The Marocharim Experiment had called out for the great dishonor of even thinking of renaming EDSA in favor of Cory.

We must expect our leaders to be of higher quality. One iota of Corazon Aquino’s sincerity can take them a long way. We need serious and sincere leadership going forward. If “The State of the Filipino Nation”, “Number-crunching, Lying and Arroyo’s SONA”, “The Recession We Ignore”, (and even before Arroyo’s SONA) “Nielsen’s Report on Filipino Consumer Confidence, Concerns and Spending”, has not given you pause that tomorrow’s challenges are real and daunting, what then? Would you read those posts not as critic, but as a call for action?

This is true too:

President Aquino asked for our Filipino community to help the Philippines not just by sending money remittances and balikbayan boxes to the Philippines but in a more politically sophisticated way:

“You can help by becoming a strong political force in your adopted country and using that force to influence your adopted country’s attitudes towards your mother country. Follow the lead of the Jewish-Americans who, despite being a small minority, form an indispensable pillar of a strong and independent Israel. Surely they are no stronger, no smarter, no more imaginative or dedicated than you are. They may be more organized, more politically oriented, more helpful to each other. And certainly they work hard at keeping America’s interest in Israel alive at all levels of society—in business, in education, in government, in the arts and sciences.

And so must you with respect to the Philippines. You must guard the image of the Filipino that the February Revolution burnished so brightly. You must guide those joining your ranks so that you enhance the image of Filipinos here. All impressions of you, American though you might be, will hark back to the Philippines.

Strive for political power in this country. Unite. Learn from the new Philippines how people, acting together, have made the difference at home. You too can make a difference here, for your own betterment and that of generations to come.”

Cory also asked us to educate ourselves and our youth about our history and our provenance, our heroes and our pride: “Be proud of your roots. Do not let your children or your grandchildren forget that they came from a land that produced Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini, and yes, Ninoy—men who could stand shoulder to shoulder with the best that this country or the world has produced.”

Isn’t it?

Every moment we pander, is a moment of missed opportunity for the Filipino. The mistake of post People Power, as Ricky Carandang pointed out, was that we expected our problems to be solved by Cory Aquino. We expect the same of our leaders now.

Corazon Aquino is dead and we will not see her like again, not for awhile. Delicadeza, the values, the ideal, the standard that is People Power, she did not take to her grave. We saw it there, living with us as we the people gave her a hero’s send off.

We can not leave our destiny in the hands of our leaders. We expected it of Cory as we expected her successors to lift the people out of poverty. We expected them to answer everything for us; to open doors for us. There is a dimension of People Power we’ve not tapped. It involves entrepreneurship, the kind that is honest. The kind that build jobs and the kind that send kids to school. It is as equally important as the dimension that simply means to be better citizens as much as we enrich our civil liberties; to strengthen our democratically established institutions. Another dimension is in protest of the shenanigans our leaders impose upon us because they will always seek ways to get around the system, to benefit them. Still another dimension is greater civic involvement to build better political parties, to actively participate in an election, to elect our chosen representatives. And another, we be citizens, employed to raise up families and to live.

Teddy Locsin gave a beautiful eulogy for Cory Aquino:

From the moment I came in from the airport and reported for duty, and she gave me in return the same smile she gave me on her deathbed, I never noticed… Not when I was with her in the campaign when she corrected me for not looking at the people I was waving at… Nor when I was with her in the presidential limousine looking intently, for her benefit, at the crowds at whom I waved… I never noticed anything. Except that I was with the only person that I would ever want to be with.

I certainly never noticed that I had left my anger behind. I don’t know how it happened. Except that Cory Aquino ennobled everyone who came near her. I have tried to say it publicly but never could finish. If you saw me as I felt myself to be, anyone would fall in love with me. I saw myself in that hospital room, a knight at the bedside of his dying sovereign, on the eve of a new Crusade, oblivious to the weight of the armor on his shoulders for the weight of the grief in his heart.

And because she always doubted my ability to be good for very long… Indeed, when my wife told Ballsy that I prayed the rosary at Lourdes for her mother’s recovery, Cory said, “Teddy Boy prayed the rosary? A miracle! I feel better already.” Because she doubted my capacity for self-reformation, she made it effortless for me by being herself. I did not notice that I was doing right by serving a woman who never did wrong. I am not sure how to take this moral self-discovery. It is so unlike myself. But if it will bring me before her again, I am happy.

Our sovereign is dead. Just as she did in her life, and we the people didn’t notice: she embodied People Power and continuously asked of us, moral self-discovery. Would it be too far to hope Cory prays for our nation’s self-reformation? We must embody the values she lived in life, that she aspired her knights and subjects to be during her presidency and expected those who have succeeded her in that office to hold.

Maybe we are Teddy Locin. One day, we will not know when we’ve left our anger behind.

This is the Permanent Revolution of People Power.
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1. image is from here and used under fair use.
2. a post “The Permanent Revolution of People Power” appeared on Filipino Voices before this. I wrote that but deleted that one because I found it incoherent when I reread it a few hours after posting. Consider this, Version 3.

So here goes the privilege speech:

Mr. Speaker, ang isang dahilan kung bakit kada taon marami tayong classrooms na kinakailangan ay dahil napakaraming nasisira sa kakulangan ng supisyenteng pondo para i-maintain at i-repair lang sana ang mga classrooms na ito.

Secondly, Mr. Speaker, we should and we propose that the curriculum be restudied. Mr. Speaker, I know that this will generate a lot of debate but I hope that our colleagues will listen for awhile. Sa ngayon, umaabot sa nine to eleven ang subjects ng ating mga estudyante sa elementary at high school. Nakukuba na ang ating mga estudyante sa kakabitbit ng napakaraming libro. Subalit ang tanong ko ho: Ito ba ay angkop pa rin sa pangangailangan ng ating bansa sa ngayon? Ang kanila po bang pinag-aralan ay nagagamit nila sa kanilang buhay sa labas ng paaralan at magagamit kapagka sila ay naghanap ng trabaho?

I can only cite myself as an example, Mr. Speaker, but mula po nung natapos ako nung high school hindi ko pa nagamit ang Calculus, hindi ko pa ho nagamit and Trigonometry, hindi ko pa ho nagamit and Algebra, IYUNG GEOMETRY, SA BILYAR KO LANG NAGAMIT. At iyong mga ibang itinuturo ay marapat sigurong ituro sa kolehiyo kung nais maging inhinyero ng isang bata. Iyong mga ibang itinuturo, marapat sigurong ibigay na lamang nating sa kanila sa kolehiyo o bilang elective pagdating ng high school.

This isn’t about defending the current state of education in the Philippines, which has been discussed time and time again by The Jester-in-Exile and blackshama (update: must read, btw those two articles, which show insight into education). This is about building and designing the future and Mr. Escudero seemingly, in spite of his youth, doesn’t have the understanding, imagination nor courage to do it. To a certain extent, so far, none of those thinking of running or planning to run seem to have it as well.

If you’ve been reading my posts for quite sometime, you’re probably so sick of me quoting Sir Ken Robinson’s TedTalk on why schools kill creativity:

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel round the world; every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects, everyone. It doesn’t matter where you go. You think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are Mathematics and Languages, then the Humanities, and at the bottom are the Arts, everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system too. There’s a hierarchy within the Arts; Art and Music are normally given a higher status in schools than Drama and Dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches Dance everyday to children the way we teach them Mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think Math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they are allowed to, will do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully what happens is as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say, ‘what is it for? Public education‘. I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output… Who really succeeds? Who does everything they should? Who gets all the Brownie points? Who are the winners? I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education, throughout the world, is to produce university professors, isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top and I used to be one, so there! You know, and I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, you know, another form of life. But they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience, not all of them, but typically they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. You know, they look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know, it’s… don’t they? It’s a way of getting their heads to meetings. If you want real evidence of out of body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it; grown men and women writhing uncontrollably off the beat, waiting to end so that they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability and there’s a reason; the whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th Century, they all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is reasoned on two ideas; number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you had probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music you are not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, because you won’t be an artist. Benign advice. Now profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of human intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance and the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatised and I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history, more people. And it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about; technology and it’s transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything, isn‘t that true? When I was a student if you had a degree, you had a job if you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games. Because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA and now you need a PH D for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

(emphasis, mine).

We live in the 21st Century and though sometimes it doesn’t seem like so, the world is moving towards a technological and digital universe. War is being fought via remote control, flying UAVs, governments are attacked left and right using the Internet. That is just the beginning. Everything we do from shopping to communicating with each other is done in a digital universe. Whether or not it is medicine, public service, architecture, even cruise ships are seeing massive transformation. And behold they use math and computers and the basis, the infrastructure of those things run on things like Calculus and the hard sciences. Music has its basis on Math, as well. We need literature and an understanding of sciences. They go hand in hand. They’re not mutually exclusive.

The sciences also make us less superstitious and in my humble opinion makes us more religious, if we choose to see it that way.

Not surprisingly too, the future of digital media, require tomorrow’s graduate to be verse not just in the technical aspect but in the creative side, the arts as well.

The point is, if we make education simply geared towards making employees to find jobs that is doing our people a great disservice. That’s not education at all. Schools become factories. I’m well aware of the stark reality: jobs to feed the family. That’s not an excuse for making people smarter, nor opening whole new worlds.

I’m also well aware that all men are created equal, meaning having equal rights, but not all men are exactly created the same way. Some are smarter. Some are faster. Some have a talent for cooking. Some have a talent for other things. If we do not shift Education to be geared at making a person, we’re creating generations of slaves. We’ve got to see Filipinos for the boundless possibility that they are: human beings.

Tomorrow is about a total human being: a creative intelligence. We must reconstitute our conception of the richness of the Filipino capacity. So I ask you this: If all Filipinos would disappear tomorrow, would it make a difference, at all?

I don’t think our politicians whether Escudero or the rest of them realize this. I hope I’m wrong but a vote for Escudero, in particular, as well as every candidate running for public office, so far, is a vote against Geekdom. It is a vote for a dumber Philippines. It is a vote for making future Filipinos the underclass of the world. That’s just gut wrenching. Filipinos are better than that. There is so much more out there. There is a rich Filipino capacity, we should have the willpower to unleash it.

Oh, before you comment below, If you haven’t had a chance to read ‘em: Benign0 wrote about Platform, plez and Primer asked “President Panilio?” and I think both are must reads going into the next presidential election.

The problem of Philippine democracy isn’t that during an election voters can be cheated. I’m not saying that isn’t happening or that it isn’t evil at all. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t go out of our way to ensure the sanctity of the ballot. For the same reason getting young people to vote isn’t the answer. I’m just saying neither is a magic bullet. Both solve entirely different problems. I’m saying is this: the problem facing Philippine-style democracy is the quality of candidates up for election isn’t exactly the best of the best.

Democracy is like a road. High quality paved highways are awesome: no pot holes to go through. The ride is smooth and great. Our Democracy is like EDSA. There are parts like those close to Makati where the roads are better (not perfect, just better). There are parts of EDSA where there are potholes and you just curse.

Now imagine the Philippines is like a car. And right now, the Philippines is a Kia. it is a car that gets us from point a to point b, just like any Toyota or Honda or Mitsubishi or Ford, etc. The Kia gives “decent speed and mileage”. It breaks down every so often but the parts are cheap and affordable and it is a car that Filipinos can afford to drive.

Since our analogy is a car, the politician is the driver. We the people sit behind as passengers while we pay our driver to shuttle us around. But our current crop of politician is just a lousy driver. He is reckless like EDSA bus drivers. More than that, the guy comes in late in the morning and is absent so often. When you ask the driver to get us to a location faster, he doesn’t think and make bad choices— so bad, we wind up in traffic.

You’ve been there right?

We can’t just fire the guy. Labour laws prohibit just firing someone without cause (i.e. Military take over, EDSA 4.0, etc). But it just so happen that the guy’s contract is up.

Your name is Joe: Joe Rizal. Your 18 year old daughter Maggie is so fed up with the guy that she’s now interested in helping you choose the next family driver (first time registered voter). Your wife, Sarah, is equally interested, as is your 21 year old son, John and your mother Jane and father, Adam who both live with you.

The current driver, Mike is also up in running to continue his service. You ask other people to submit resumes. You asked friends and co-workers to give you recommendations.

When everyone interested had submitted their intent, you call for a family meeting. Maggie likes Chiz because he is young and can sing and dance. Jane likes Manny, who is religious, is hardworking and has a family. Adam likes Mar, who is young, who he thinks gets him and is about to be married. John on the other hand doesn’t like the current crop of candidates so he says you should just retain Mike. And Sarah, wants to Anna the only female candidate.

Before Mike came into the Family’s service, you always voted. You wrote your choices in a piece of paper and your maid Esmaralda would count the votes.

There was an incident a few years ago that John, being so influential would look at the votes first and if he didn’t like the outcome would switch ballots to favor his choice.

When you and Jane found out— there was hell to pay. So the family, years later decided, to hire Charlie, the next door geek to write a piece of software that lets the family cast their vote in a secure and safe manner. And Charlie did. Since none of the family members were anything good in computing, it would take the hiring of another equally good hacker to game the system. [election automation, in case you weren't paying attention].

The night before the election, you (Joe) would pace back and forth. Majority rules, correct? and with one vote each, yours is the deciding vote.

Charlie’s software solves the problem of election cheating. Yet Joe thought, it doesn’t solve the problem that you have: you don’t know who to vote.

Joe doesn’t trust any of the candidates to drive his daughter to school safely.

Joe thinks Chiz and Mar are all sound and fury. They don’t check the break fluid, or if there is water in the radiator before they drive. They don’t care if the tires don’t have the right pressure. Certainly Chiz and Mar are at least half a degree better than the bus drivers in Edsa but they only know how to drive and not how to maintain.

Joe thinks Manny is so conservative and yet on the road he is as bad a driver as Mike. He is arrogant and judgmental. He drives like the bus drivers in Edsa, but yells at them for being bus drivers. On the other hand, he does know how to check the engine to make sure it is running. Every so often, at least.

Keeping Mike, Joe thought, would be disastrous. His health can’t stand another six years of Mike driving his family around. Mike is that stressful for Joe.

So Joe thought about it really deeply. All the candidates are really bad drivers. Some are slightly better than others, sure he really hasn’t found the candidate that he wants. Joe paced again. He was getting some money from work because of a promotion. Finally, he could sell the Kia and get a SUV. Would it matter if work gave him the money for an Expedition or money for a Mercedes Benz Stirling Moss or for that matter, keep driving a Kia if the man behind the wheel, was reckless?

Charlie’s software doesn’t help him get better candidates, right? It solves a different kind of problem: ensuring fair election. ensuring nobody gets cheated.

A car, new or old is just a mechanism to get his family gets from point a to point b. Safety because of good driving and day to day maintenance resides in the driver.

I think that’s the same problem the Philippines is facing in 2010 and beyond. That’s the point we’re missing with insisting first on automation or getting young people to vote.

Again: I’m not saying we shouldn’t automate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t get young people interested to vote. I’m saying those things are separate. I’m saying even if both threads are working properly that we get near absolute, no cheating in elections and that we get near majority of our young people to vote in an election, if the choices they have is garbage, and they can only elect garbage, we should still expect garbage. to put it simply: garbage in, garbage out.

In my humble opinion, the revolution that we need is to make political parties that mimic in some degree what the Internet is and what the social web is. That is, it should be be small pieces loosely joined.

Why small pieces?

Anyone willing should be a member should join. Its membership should include janitors as much as professional politicians. It should include teachers, as much as it includes athletes. It should include rich as much as the poor. It should include celebrities as much as university professors, as much as prima ballerinas and prostitutes. And their aggregate choice should determine who their candidate is for any given position. Their collective organization raises money for a campaign and vet candidates.

I am well aware it is strange and weird and totally left field. I am well aware of the cynicism we all know too well. I know it is easier said than done. I will admit, scary and stupid as it is: If you ask me how to kick it off— I wouldn’t know how or where to begin. I can only tell you that this is just what I know. It is in my most humble opinion that this, among all possible choices to begin to right this nation, even before we consider rewriting our constitution, and even before automation, even before we encourage young people to go out and vote, we must improve the choices we present our people. Taking the political party from the existing closed and elitist network that exist now and making it open, free, and engaging for people to participate in is disruptive, and more importantly a first, and a significant cog among many to get this country moving in the right direction. And then maybe, we can have a country that is liberal in what it receives and conservative in what it says.

visual representation of the Internet

Imagine packets of photons crisscrossing the planet. These packets become waves as it goes up to satellites in geosynchronous orbit and as it comes down to Earth and as packets travel across submarine lines beneath oceans, to networks of fiber optics and copper wires until finally it lands on your wireless router, broadcasting email, video, mp3s, facebook, twitter and google. Whole businesses rely on the Internet to deliver services. And on a more personal level, the Internet has transformed society, making the world smaller. The Internet has transformed everything from Commerce to Philosophy. Take for example The Great Book Blockade of 2009 and the controversy of ConAss, we’ve used the profound disruptive power of the Internet to drastically project our grievance, our indignation, our disappointment and our anger when no other vector would allow us to propagate. The disruption has been phenomenal and continuing and powering Great Change.

About sixty years ago, a man named Albert Einstein, yeah that guy who won the Nobel for the Photoelectric Effect asked a political and economic question and wrote an essay based on his question, “Why Socialism?“. Oh yeah, we’re talking about the guy everyone knows about. He was a zionist and he proposed a World Government but we got the United Nations instead. His most widely recognized work— that even those outside the scientific community would know is general and special relativity.

E equals m c squared for us simple people.

The genius Einstein, if you didn’t know or haven’t guessed by now, was a socialist (from ‘Why Socialism?’):

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

Einstein was hardly the first nor the last scientist to be socialist.

Fast forward today— and recently, a piece appeared on Wired about a new socialism and how this is powering the very Internet that we use. This article spoke about global collectivism and how the power of community and collaboration that is Web 2.0 is spurring the disruption of norms, of businesses and a whole new paradigm has emerged that uses meritocracy as basis. In my humble opinion, in a symbiotic relationship, the New Capitalism is a wrapper application for this new socialism. This Tao– deeply borrowing from hacker ethic even as it traces it lineage to the counterculture and MIT of the 1960s, marries many characteristics of Socialism and Capitalism.

The mobile and collectivism has inspired many and great ideas. Twitter— that massively simple communications tool is so effective at what it does that when it is really needed actively harnesses the group. It has conveyed not only what the collective is thinking about in the off hours our brain is off— with things like Star Trek and American Idol but it has been an effective delivery system from the Mumbai attack to the great book blockade to #conass. The collective passes information, links, thoughts, commentary and a collaborative consciousness uses this.

When applied to software development this has had a profound effect. The wheel doesn’t get reinvented all the time. Programmers get to stand on the shoulder of giants. Linux boxes running those services are made from the collective understanding that the Source is freely available for anyone to read, use, edit and more importantly is demanded to be shared. Can you imagine companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard are investing millions into shared Linux development— where the output is not only shared amongst themselves but with potential rivals?

This open source/hacker ethic powers the very infrastructure of the Internet from Domain Name Servers that convert your entered “www.google.com” into phone-like binary numbers that actually direct us on the path of what we seek from Email to WebServers. In the poetic words of the Internet Engineering Task Force:

“A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.”

The same can be said of Filipino Voices for example. Here is a collective— a collectivism driven to provide news, political and social commentary and to raise the discussion and debate to a higher level of intelligence. The former, we really do pretty well and the latter, I’ll leave it up to you to decide, “how fare we?”

And this is the socialism that Wired mentioned on the Internet. Information is freely given and available to anybody. It has had such a transformative effect on our daily lives that it has created billions of dollars worth of industry and this philosophy continues to drive innovation and creates new vectors of expression. This “new socialism” is founded on the principle of Transparency, of Peer Review, and an Open Society. This is a society that creates a Mutually Assured Dependence.

But what we’ve learned from Software Development is that these freedoms are best applied on the foundation-level like the hard core Operating System level. These freedoms are best applied to engineering solutions. These freedoms are least likely to succeed when one needs to apply creativity and art. Linux fails on the desktop, user interface, user experience level where as Mac OS X succeeds by breeding Open Source and their own proprietary user interface and experience. Simply put, the principle of “too many cooks” apply when you go to the higher level stuff.

That is why a New Capitalism is a wrapper application for this New Socialism. A wrapper application is software that works only with another fully developed software and enhances it in some way, profound or otherwise. A Re-imagined Capitalism makes the New Socialism possible.

An alternative revenue stream allows for Linux to be developed. Linux development continues because for every dollar earned by companies that need linux— IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and many others, they give it back to fund the Linux Foundation. The same can be said of other software development. There are alternative revenue streams that provide the fuel needed to grow. Google allows a free web email like gmail. Gmail, and other products are fueled by Google’s massive advertising business, which is based on the Search Engine business.

I’ve blogged before about The Virgin Principle and how Capitalist Philanthropy can be an important ingredient in building a better society. I believe we can draw insight from the lessons of New Socialism and a Re-Imagined Capitalism and how they have affected business and software development and into building a better Philippines. No matter what it says in our constitution, no matter what press release we give, at our society’s core, we’re not really transparent. We’re not really truly free. We’re not really open. In fact, I think we’re pretty closed, conservative and locked in. We’re ruled by our fears and our insecurities. That much is evident in a society In mortal dread of a democratic plebiscite.

I am convinced that the only one way to eliminate these grave evils is to learn the lesson of the Internet: namely through the establishment of a transparent, open society and accompanied by a responsible capitalist economy that is driven by creative intelligence can Filipinos achieve a just and humane society.

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• Internet image ownership is here, used under creative commons copyright.

An advertising campaign like Ako Mismo, which in its basic, most simplistic way is saying, “stop being apathetic!” doesn’t resonate much with the blog crowd. I’m sure you’ve read the vicious pieces written about this campaign.

What irked people the most is the fact that it wasn’t signed, as if the proponents of this advertising campaign were ashamed to be associated with this call for civic duty. If this advertising was a means to use the entire country as one gigantic focus group to determine what people want then I’m sorry to say, that’s a load of crap. You shouldn’t be in any position of leadership, if you don’t know what’s wrong or got the balls to lead.

Those of us in our 30s and 20s, many of us in the blogsphere and a lot of people in their homes grumbling at the nightly news or peeved when they read the Sunday paper or you, dear reader aren’t apathetic. The same goes for every barber in town. We are disgusted by the pathetic, cumbersome and selfish antics of those in power. Like addicts we can’t get enough of the drama. An example of this angry train of thought is by Martin Perez who wrote:

And this is the dangerous game being played by Ako Mismo. By promising a movement of change and what not, they play on the hopes and dreams of many. Now they will have to follow through on that. For making good on promises is what they should do. We should do. I should do.

Ako mismo, pero paano sila?

Oh, wow! BREAKING NEWS! When have people NOT promised a movement of change, and failed to follow through on both sides of the aisle, whether administration and opposition, whether civil society like the lot of Jun Lozada? Haven’t we all played a part on ruining the hopes and dreams of Our People?

That’s the naked truth isn’t it?

The feel good mantra of Ako Mismo was negatively taken because people feel that they’re already doing their part. Whether in the personal lives, in their professional lives and in the way they try to feed their families as best they could. And like a woman who has her heartbroken too many times, people get tired of trusting. Who can blame our people when the air of deceit is prevalent? Where honesty and openness can hurt you faster than a speeding bullet or blog comment. People are disgusted by the pathetic, cumbersome and selfish antics of those in power.

That said, we’re not really a very open society are we?

This whole crap about Martin Nievera singing the national anthem badly reeks of minutia. Some people like it, some people don’t. That’s art isn’t it? Music is an expression of the soul. Mr. Nievera didn’t bastardize it, didn’t he?

Set aside that our ears were hurt when Mr. Nievera sang the anthem. Is that why people rarely sing it? Because we can’t sing? Anyway, I digress, why should Martin Nievera be punished? Why are we even talking about this non-event? Because Mr. Nievera broke the law.

People are correct in saying that the law must be followed. That the law must be obeyed. I’m no lawyer but does it even matter since he wasn’t the Philippines when he sang it? Is it also important that the spirit of the law be of equal importance in this matter? Does the spirt of the law mean it in such away that our national anthem isn’t bastardized?

Imagine this: Araneta Coliseum is packed. The air is energized, almost restless in anticipation. Lights go off. The crowd starts to yell. It is all about to begin isn’t it?

Stage right: slowly blue lights come on as a cloud of smoke is popped. Stage left: red lights on and more smoke! a second later, center stage rises. An electric guitar is singing the opening to Lupang Hinirang real slow. It is quickly joined by the lead guitar, bassist and drums. Back part of the stage is lit and it is a video of the Flag in all its glory, proudly flying.

You know the words: “perlas ng silanganan, alab ng puso” and yet no words are sung, just instrumental and hmmm from the backup singers, then it goes to a crescendo— they stop for one, two seconds and Ely sings and the crowd joins: “Ang Mamatay ng Dahil, sayo!!”

Is that disrespecting the Flag, and our Anthem or is it our pride and our joy and our creative and free expression as guaranteed by the Constitution that is being celebrated? Is that not an expression of love of country?

So I have to ask: just because we have a law doesn’t mean it is right. So why aren’t people saying we should change the law rather than oppress Free Expression?

It feels like there is a conscious effort to stifle reason and creativity. There is this negative air that wants to stay trapped in an endless cycle of mediocrity. Take this whole insane matter on books.

If this whole minutia about Martin Nievera singing irked you then this whole blockage against books speak volumes of something seriously rotten with this country and I’m not talking about just politics:

McSweeney’s, Robin Hemley wrote:

Over coffee one afternoon, a book-industry professional (whom I can’t identify) told me that for the past two months virtually no imported books had entered the country, in part because of the success of one book, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. The book, an international best seller, had apparently attracted the attention of customs officials. When an examiner named Rene Agulan opened a shipment of books, he demanded that duty be paid on it.
“Ah, you can’t be too successful in this country,” I said. “If you are, then people start demanding a cut.”

Let me be an airhead for a moment and say: that that last line of comment would be a nice tweet.

Seriously, it’s true isn’t it? It speaks volumes of how this country is. Not just the politics. Going back to the whole notion that this country is apathetic really is like fool’s gold. The dynamic of this country revolves around “The Cut”. From the smallest organ to the top. In my humble opinion, that’s an economic problem, which is caused by politics. Yet as simple as it sounds the underlying disease is far more complex.

Everyone wants their cut!

See, for all our anger and pain against say, at Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whenever a new scandal erupts, and we want her out? It is like cutting the head of a hydra. A new one would just spring out. And just maybe it could be far worst than the devil we know.

That’s just one aspect isn’t it? That’s the national politics that irks many, especially when you’re living in Manila. But don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean it isn’t horrible or wrong.

When you look at Philippine politics, there are two dimensions of it. The aphorism that all politics is local holds true doesn’t it? So why are the same crowd gets voted in, say for Congressman? When the husband is done with his term, the wife or the kid steps in. And why are certain families in control of various provinces?

Why are voters going for these kinds of people? Is it because they somehow profit or benefit? One would assume that they do, right if they are buying their local official’s kool aid? Is it because nobody else is interested or can’t run for lack of any sort of organization? Is it a problem of a lack of any sort of real, stable political party?

The Baron in City Hall can’t reply. The Duchess at the Provincial Capital rarely has an answer. The Upper and Lower House of Lords are too busy taping their reality show on television. The Empress, after nearly being in power for almost a decade has little progress to show for. And when the crown is passed on, Indonesia and Vietnam are healthier than the Philippines.

That’s not really the problem isn’t it? The problem really is that Maria Clara is working hard to feed her family of four. She’s in some old person’s home in Israel. Maria is washing an ancient lady’s excretions and tucking the old lady in bed. That’s her job. Juan dela Cruz is in Binondo pulling a hand trolly filled with supplies for the neighborhood store. Day in and day out he is slaving away, and in May 2010, they’ll be asking, “Where’s my cut?”

By May 2010, Manny Villar, Manny Pacquiao and maybe the contest would also interest Manny Pangilinan. These people would be on their knees, as if humbled. “We’ll Show you the Money (your cut), if you vote for us”. Guess maybe that’s why Mar and Korina are a team. Koring is miser in English, correct? So we’d assume their future government wouldn’t be wasting too much money?

Let’s zone out, shall we? Because by fall of 2010, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, right? There will be a new season of “The Senate at Work,” which is guaranteed to be aired on all the cable news channels and all the TV stations. Hey, you can’t stop a hit! We will watch intently as Miriam Santiago is on television grilling official after official on why they’re not doing their jobs or on some scandal involving school breakfast that just broke. Do you remember that time she dared to jump off a plane and when called out, yells at the top of her voice, “I lied!?” We laugh because, well, her catch phrases are funny. We’ll hope she’ll have funnier lines in future episodes. Who said reality television is farce?

That said, we’ve never really answered the question, “where’s my cut?” Have we?

Logic would dictate that given limited infrastructure and technology, the answer would be no.

But couldn’t we use the tools we already got?

What if a politico could leverage existing infrastructure? Meaning SMS. What if, as a first step, campaigns took a page from Social Networking and Web 2.0, copy the twitter phenomena and influence the conversation not just on Friendster but via SMS? What if political campaigns begin and build communities? Would it be creative destruction?

As you ponder those questions, razorfish’s Digital Outlook 2009 is an interesting read:

“The last decade has been a time of radical change and reinvention for the media ecosystem. 2008 was no different.

Perhaps the most shocking change in the media and advertising industries was the pace at which digital and Web-based tech-
nologies began to penetrate the mainstream and displace traditional forms of advertising.”

Ain’t no reason things would be the same, right?

Are politicians interested in conversing with the masses?