Those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it as the cliche’ goes. This is what Raul Fabella is saying. Fabella is a National Scientist for Economics, an honor bestowed upon him by the late President Benigno C. Aquino III.
Most of his kind are now singing the same tune; democracy is threatened again because a Marcos is about to become President again. The sins of the father are the sins of the son. Our future as a country is again in peril because we have not learned from the lessons of history. Everyone stops short of calling the majority of Filipinos dumb.
The garden variety Pinoy belongs to the D and E economic classes. It used to be that the classification was only up to the letter D but it has not been expanded to E. This means the ranks of the poor have increased. But ask an economist and we have been doing relatively well, growing at an average of 6% per annum but it is a consumption-driven economy fueled by the remittances of our best export, the Filipino worker.
Ask any economist and he or she will tell you that we have not followed the usual development model. Ask any economist why and he or she will certainly avoid citing the history of Philippine economy. But the truth is, we are where we are now economically because like most Filipino children of the poor, our economy is/was nabansot.
Why?
We have the distinction of being the only American colony in the region and our American colonizers blackmailed us into submission with regard to parity rights. Americans enjoyed equal rights as Filipinos even if they were not citizens up to 1973. If this amendment was not inserted into the 1935 Constitution, the US would not have released monies for the reconstruction of the damage wrought by World War II which was the product of the hegemony of both the US and Japan at that time.
It does not help that our leaders at that time also sold us out for their own benefit. Manuel Roxas, the first President of the Third Republic, did the American’s bidding. He was Douglas MacArthur’s fair-haired boy.
If you were a foreigner, other than an American, would you invest in the Philippines where your rights were not at par with the Americans? Of course not.
The elites in the country, also did not bother to put up manufacturing concerns. They focused on rent-seeking businesses and agriculture, still in the primary export crops of sugar and coconut products. The post-war period had the rich focusing on rebuilding the fortunes they lost during the war. Life was not as hard as it is in recent times because the population of the country then was only 18 million. We are 110 million strong today.
Did it ever occur to you that we have been in political conflict since the time Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was elected President in 1965? Benigno Aquino Jr. was elected Senator in 1967. The story of Marcos and Aquino began that time and continues up to today. But it is only in 2016 that the narrative was broken with the election of Rodrigo Duterte at that time. The naysayers then led by the opposition also predicted that his Presidency would be an economic disaster. It has not turned out that way. Had the pandemic not gotten in the way, Duterte would have presided over six years of consistent economic growth, while undertaking economic reforms and a focus on infrastructure development.
The opposition is again engaged in fear-mongering about a Marcos Presidency. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be no different than this father. He will bring the country to economic ruin. He will go after the companies which his father’s dummies ran off with. He will be bad for business. He is not an economist. Cronyism will make a comeback. Our democracy is in grave danger. He will be a dictator like his father was.
And so on and so forth until they all lose their collective voices, the litany will never end.
Subsequent regimes were either incapable or unwilling to punish Ka Ferdie’s co-blood suckers. As national artist, F. Sionil Jose (may he rest in peace) once put it with utter venom, “This is what ails us all — we do not ostracize them, we do not punish them -— no, we anoint these vermin instead.” It seems we are once again embarked on our vaunted tradition of anointing vermin: number crunchers maintain the May 9 vote will, absent cataclysmic events, hand the presidency over to one whose only claim to fame was a conviction for tax evasion. He keeps mum as to what he will do apart from protecting his family and recoating his father’s legacy. Since, according to the old adage, “The apple does not fall far from the tree,” instead of punishing, he may well reward his father’s centurions with a burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. That will reunite in death what in life was a glorious brotherhood of plunder and lies.
The burden of prosecution fell on the victors. The same personalities who are cast as the opposition since 2016. But they lorded it over from 1986 to 2016. Is the Filipino to blame for this? An in-depth survey of political popularity has revealed that Apo Lakay was never as hated as he was painted out to be by the Yellowidiots. I wonder what F. Sionil Jose would say if he were alive about the looming Marcos return to Malacanan. Would it have given him a heart attack? Unfortunately, Manong Frankie is no longer with us so we will not be able to know what his opinion is.
Perhaps there would not be a Marcos return if only the Yellowidiots put patriotism first in 1986 and had the best interest of the country and its people in mind in drafting the new constitution. It was not exactly new. It was just a rehashed version of the 1935 Constitution with safeguards in place for the declaration of martial law. The President does not have the sole power anymore. He shares it with the Legislative.
But other than that, it is still the same old system which favors the rich and discriminates against the poor. Just look at how long our election cycles is and the amount of time wasted on the campaign. Countries with parliamentary form of governments spend only a maximum of three weeks as the campaign period. In our case, the first half of 2022 is over when a new President is sworn in, with a campaign that actually began a year before the actual election day.
Democracy is strange that way: it sometimes commits suicide. People can vote freely to put on their shackles. In 1932, the highly educated democratic Weimar Republic voters handed Adolf Hitler and his goons the mantle of power. It was democratic suicide. “Uncle” Adolf ran with the scepter into the unthinkable horrors of death, destruction, and gas chambers. In 2017, the world’s so-called bastion of democracy, the USA, the public voted freely to hand the scepter of power to Donald Trump who only narrowly, by the grace of God or sheer luck, failed to engineer the execution of US democracy.
Are we committing suicide by voting in another Marcos as President? Biden beat Trump in 2020 and two years later, the US is in proxy war with Russia that has the rest of the world reeling from its effects. Germans voted Adolf Hitler into office because he represented their hope that their pride was to be restored from the castration wrought by the Treaty of Versailles on Germany with its onerous war reparations.
Fabella lays the blame on the Filipino people when it should on the Yellowidiots who did nothing when they were in power. You have to wonder at the sheer twist of fate with the book-end Presidency’s of Cory Aquino and Noynoy Aquino which only served to highlight to Filipinos how fucked up their administrations were.
It is about time that the Yellowidiots become responsible for the consequences of their actions. It is the Filipino people judging them and wanting to put an end, once and for all, to the Aquino versus Marcos narrative.
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