Level the playing field

A lot of people are uncomfortable if not outright leery of Gen. Jose Almonte. He is often described as shadowy and sinister. I guess that’s because he breaks the usual mold expected of our military officers. Gen. Almonte is not your run-of-the-mill general. Even as he has seen action in the field, including Vietnam, the general is happiest fighting his battles in the battlefield of the mind.

He served as Vice Chancellor of the Philippine Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of the Philippines and he survived that academic environment, one that is naturally hostile to the military. In fact, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the academic experience.

His military training has provided the basis for the General’s strategic thinking. But he went further than his brother officers in the military establishment by immersing himself in the humanities, helping him gain valuable insights into human nature. And the General is a good student of Philippine history, something that enabled him to view current developments in their proper context.

I normally view military officers, specially those who get involved in civilian politics, with suspicion. But I had long ago gotten over the fact of General Almonte being a military officer. I have come to appreciate him as an important social thinker for our times. I have also been able to feel the inherent sincerity of the man, his patriotism and his intellectual capacity.

Still, I must confess I have never thought a military man could be anything like General Almonte… one who didn’t worry that using his brain will risk a court martial. It is rare to have a military officer who thinks boldly and is not afraid to express himself. While the young ones are genuinely patriotic and ready to die for the country, many officers end up exhibiting blind loyalty to their civilian superiors and in many cases end up just as corrupt.

In this sense, General Almonte is a pleasant surprise. He can infect you with his idealism… his belief that this nation of ours could be a whole lot more progressive, not just in the economic sense but socially too. But he knows it would take an upheaval in social values to attain this Pinoy Shangri-la. He believes we must first of all, level the playing field and allow the common tao to exercise the political power every Pinoy theoretically possess.

In a sense, General Almonte is probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated public servant we have had in our time. Yet, he did try to explain himself in a number of speeches that sound and read like scholarly treatises on the state of our nation. A number of these speeches have been gathered in a very readable and thought provoking book published by the Foundation for Economic Freedom and will be launched August 16 at Club Filipino.

The General’s message is simple but not easy for our ruling elite to accept. When he says in the title of this book that we must level the playing field as a necessary precondition to getting our house in order, he says so with the lessons of our history and the realities of our society in mind. The Filipino elite, he says, must listen to its conscience. We cannot go on like this and expect to join the ranks of our tiger economy neighbors in the region.

Our problem, the General observed, is that “ we as a people have divided into two nations — and become a country at war with itself.” Geography and history may have conspired to make us such, but unless we are able to address this situation, the future could be bleak. That explains why Ate Glue is getting blue in the face proclaiming spectacular economic growth has occurred yet the masses are complaining that they have not as yet felt the positive impact of that growth in their lives. Ate Glue is talking about one country, the masses are talking of another.

“Market reforms so far have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding people’s access to decent jobs, primary health care and basic education. And because of weak policies, the poor delivery of public services and the regulatory capture of strategic industries, the relative cost of doing business continues to be higher in our country than in other parts of Asean. In 2005, we attracted barely one percent of the net foreign direct investment that entered emerging Asia .”

There were a lot of things that the General said needed changing in our national life if we want to be more than what we are today. A sense of nationhood, for instance, an ability to see beyond one’s self, one’s family, one’s group, one’s class would do us wonders. I have only experienced one moment in our nation’s life wherein people thought not of themselves and their interests but of the common good and that was during EDSA 1. Alas, it was just one brief shining moment.

General Almonte is particularly critical of our political culture that “has produced a democracy that emphases the family over the community, and private gain over public good — a political culture where our sense of civic entitlements has been stronger than our sense of civic responsibility.”

The General laments a series of missed opportunities for us. Mr. Marcos could have used his martial law rule to bring us the economic growth that Singapore got under Lee Kuan Yew. But because Mr. Marcos was a captive of our society, he enriched his family and friends instead and left the nation plundered. Tita Cory could have used her revolutionary powers after EDSA 1 to recreate society, but she proved too much of a creature of the agrarian landlord class to which her family belonged.

The General provided the ideological underpinnings of the Ramos regime but one can sense an element of frustration as well in FVR’s failure to accomplish the agenda the General talks about in his speeches. He kindly attributes the failure to time running out on FVR but you get the feeling it was more than that.

I suspect FVR himself has not totally bought into the General’s dream. FVR seem to have lost his way in the last year of his term. Even with the General by his side to guide him, FVR proved too human in the exercise of power. After a good start, it was same old, same old for the Filipino nation instead of the promise of Almonte’s vision of a Pinoy Shangri-la.

How else can one explain such scandals as IMPSA and NAIA3? These two scandals that plagued the Estrada and now the Arroyo administration had their genesis in the last years of the FVR era. I am almost sure that if General Almonte had been more successful in selling FVR on his dream, neither of these two scandals (and PEA-Amari too) would have happened. Only shows the General was not the all powerful Rasputin his critics thought he was… one who always got his way.

There is a lot of sense in General Almonte’s appeal to the ruling elite to take the lead and bear the costs of putting our house in order because “it is meaningless to be rich and powerful in a nation that fails.” And while we all hold our future in our hands, the General feels “the character of the President becomes the defining element in our nation’s future.”

I know the General is too old to be the Filipino Lee Kuan Yew but his vision based on his analysis of what ails our nation is a good prescription for our future. Can a civilian leader lead us to this future or do we need a man on horseback to whip us into one nation and make us all behave as we should?

I share the General’s warning that the chief source of danger arises “from how lightly the politicians seem to regard the possibility of military interventionism… the chain of command may continue to hold — but we also know that specific officers and specific units — in the elite fighting outfits — continue to be aggrieved… the Arroyo administration has imposed no more than an essentially artificial stability on the political situation — and this kind of stability will never withstand intense pressure.”

Our civilian politicians have thus been warned. Everyone who loves this country should read the General’s book, share his frustration of what we have become and take up the challenge of what we could be.

Military intelligence

Rick: “‘Military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms.”

Mike: “No more than ‘civilian worker’.”

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]