Erap

The President's men have been circling the wagons around him in a great show of activity and "loyalty" but apparently this has created only a siege mentality rather than a sense of urgency that it's imperative to institute changes in style of governance as well as keeping importuning friends in line.

The President is ill-served by those who don't dare tell him that self-reform should be part of any move to improve the way the administration does things. As always, there's always a convenient "fall guy" to blame. For instance, in the case of the debacle at the Philippine Stock Exchange, the "villain" being fingered is Chairman Perfecto Yasay Jr. (outgoing?), who is being blamed even for "the so-called BW insider trading scandal" which, Malacañang alleges, "took place under his watch."

What contributed to the President's ire was the highly-critical editorial in The Asian Wall Street Journal, the daily bible of businessmen worldwide, headlined "Manila's Market Scandal." In the March 10 (Friday) editorial, which we quoted in this corner the other day, the Journal said that "the Philippines is yet again a contender for the title of sick man of East Asia."

The newspaper pointed out that "while the rest of the region is enjoying an economic recovery fuelled in part by investors' dreams of the new economy, an insider trading scandal has dragged down the Philippine Stock Exchange and tainted its reputation with foreign money managers. Considering that the country initially weathered the Asian financial crisis better than its peers, such a reversal represents a cruel blow to ordinary Filipinos who might have benefited from accelerated investment and growth."

What must have irked the President was the next line which averred: "President Estrada must bear primary blame for this disappointment."

He rang me up yesterday to say that the Asian Wall Street Journal had got it wrong. Investments, Erap declared, are coming in. He asserted that "the stock market is only one small measure of investors' confidence in a country."

In a letter to Editor Reginald Chua of the Journal (by the way, Chua used to be based in Manila), the Chief Executive averred that "the Philippines' record as an investment destination (we have never expropriated any foreign investment) and its long-term outlook are the better measures of investors' confidence."

The President's morale was further dented, it seems, by a poll survey, just out, which said that his rating had dropped from five percent to one percent. We can't comment on this survey, since we haven't seen it in its entirety nor examined the questions which "weighted" its conclusions. But -- to cheer up the President, though only somewhat -- I have to point out that even ex-President Ramos fell to one percent in mid-term, before his stock began rising again. FVR is now remembered for the climate of "stability" leading to near "Tiger" status that he finally created.

Can Estrada pull off the same "magic" trick? He must recall that General Tabako had the ability to be poker-faced (a great plus in politics as in poker) and always played his cards so close to his chest that even his nearest daily associates could never be sure what cards he might produce. In contrast, Erap lets it all hang out -- he's so guileless and impulsive that he simply blurts anything out the moment it comes to his mind. For this reason, if ever he decides he needs to reverse field, it looks to one and all that he's urong-sulong, pa-ekis-ekis, or yo-yo.

The President still has to learn to curb his impulsive -- and, concurrently, over-generous -- nature. And he must never forget the injunction of the late American President John F. Kennedy: "We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad."

A hundred letters to the Asian Wall Street Journal, no matter how eloquently put and well-written, won't budge the critical editors from their disbelieving stance and their contention that "even if Mr. Estrada wanted to mend his ways, he has so little credibility that it's probably impossible for him to resurrect the reputation of the stock exchange and its regulators."

The way to refute that dismal conclusion is to resurrect the Stock Exchange, cleansed and revamped from top to bottom, and free of manipulators and insider traders. Simply passing a "new" Securities Act of 2000 won't be enough. Just as Jesus, with a length of rope as a whip, drove the money changers out of the Temple, Pareng Erap must chase the money-grubbers and name-droppers out of the Palace. If this can be done, pronto, it will transform the landscape, if not in a wink, in a reasonable period of time.

Only then will the Doubting Thomases of the international (and local) media begin to believe, and our people themselves started to accept that a "new day" has dawned.

In the hour of deepest despair, when he took over the helm of a depression-racked nation in 1933, a 51-year-old ex-Governor of New York, the new President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delivered one of the most stirring speeches of all time, the unforgettable one in which he told his discouraged people that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

He opened his speech with an attack on "the money changers" (familiar?) who had been driven from the temple (what are they in the PSE, indeed, but money changers?). Then he rallied the nation to action.

Erap, of course, is not Roosevelt. But the millions who voted for him must have seen in him something, a spark of leadership, a ray of hope. The people are not blind. They may make mistakes, even grievous ones -- but it is leaders who fail to keep their promises who ultimately betray them. This is the kind of "betrayal" Mr. Estrada must repudiate.

Forget Yasay. Forget the poll surveys. Focus only on what must be done for the Filipino nation. FDR concluded his speech in 1933 with the line that the people "have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it."

And, oh yes. In his last sentence he said: "We humbly ask the blessing of God . . . May He guide us in the days to come."

If things get back on an even keel, the President plans to go on a state visit to the People's Republic of China. This is tentatively scheduled for May 26. After Beijing, the Chief Executive will visit London and Paris. (The trip to France will subsequently be reciprocated by French President Jacques Chirac, I'm told, who has long been planning to visit Manila. If he comes, insiders inform me, he will bring along with him the Club de Trente, i.e. the 30 leading industrialists, financiers and manufacturers).

These preparations seem to indicate that a state visit or even just a "working visit" to the United States is now out of the question. US President Bill Clinton probably was sincere when he invited our President to go to Washington, DC when the two met last September at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Auckland, New Zealand. But the situation has changed dramatically since then. For one thing, the Presidential election campaign is now in full swing. Moreover, Mr. Clinton is disappointed that his last major diplomatic offensive -- that of getting Israel to return the disputed Golan Heights (overlooking Galilee) to Syria in exchange for a "peace deal" between Jerusalem and Damascus -- has stalled completely. Clinton would do well not to force the issue -- a precipitate surrender of the strategic and fruitful Golan Heights might lead to an angry Israeli population toppling Prime Minister Ehud Barak from power, and that would roil the desert even more in that troubled part of the world.

Neither is this writer convinced of the wisdom of Mr. Clinton making a swing through South Asia, meaning India in particular. It might have been a breakthrough in the traditionally chilly relations between Washington, DC and New Delhi if Clinton had confined his trip to India. (For years, the Indians resented America helping their hostile neighbor, Pakistan, and were thus drawn into the Soviet orbit). Now that a fresh, friendly relationship was on the brink of being forged -- with Moscow internationally in decline -- why did Mr. Clinton ruin it all by calendaring five days in India, then agreeing (under intense importuning by Pakistan's Military Dictator General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power from the elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif last October) to a four-hour stopover in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital?

Pakistan doesn't deserve a Clinton visit. Musharraf is a military despot who has put the deposed Prime Minister Sharif on trial for his life, and will probably hang the unfortunate fellow. The general has put no timetable on a return to democracy, and, therefore, a Clinton "call" on him would only help "legitimize" his tyrannical rule. Worse, last Friday, in broad daylight, the defense lawyer of Sharif, Atty. Iqbal Raad, was brutally gunned down by three gunmen along with his two associates in his Karachi law office. This is pure terrorism, suspiciously smelling like a State-sanctioned murder. Clinton must rethink his plan and cancel his Pakistan "stopover" as a signal to General Musharraf and his military bandits that this bullying carnage must stop.

Pakistan's very name is translated into "Land of the Pure." What does this make of those who don't profess Islam -- like us Christians -- "impure"? Pakistan and its client-state Afghanistan, run with an iron hand by the Pakistani-sponsored fundamentalist Taleban, are both meddling shamelessly and actively in the Moro rebellion in our islands of Mindanao. Afghan tactical trainors and Pakistani mullahs and preachers are in Mindanao aiding the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and I wouldn't be surprised if the newly-rebellious "radicals" of Nur Misuari's Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), many of whom were given government-issued weapons under the Ramos Peace Plan, were incited by these agitators and imams to go back to outright insurgency.

The tide of Islamic "fundamentalism" and fanaticism, which is sweeping the world and being renewed in this season of The Haj (the annual religious pilgrimage to Mecca), is terrifying. Yesterday, in the International Herald Tribune (Monday, March 13 issue) I saw a photograph captioned: "An estimated 200,000 Islamic fundamentalists joined a rally on Sunday in Casablanca (Morocco) to protest plans by the government to improve women's rights." The photo showed hooded, chador-clad women in the forefront raising their hands. Imagine that: Women demonstrating against "women's rights"!

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Russia's Acting President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, to urge him, among other things, to ease up on the assault on the Muslim Chechens. Putin took the Blairs to an opera called War and Peace, based on Leo Tolstoy's immortal novel, but the war in Chechnya went on unabated.

The Russians are determined, it appears, to crush the Muslim Chechens so that rebellion and Islamic "terrorist" attack will not raise its head again. However, the rest of the world isn't as cruel and ruthless in battle and boot-heeled "occupation" as the Russians, whose mentality is derived from a merciless Tatar legacy. And the Muslim fanatics know that.

We Christians are wimps, and deserve only (in their minds) to be deceived, hoodwinked, led around by the nose, and then annihilated.

The stunning victory of the government's ruling party, the Partido Popular in Spain, shows you how wrong poll surveys can be.

Before the elections last Sunday, the pollsters predicted that the party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar might not win, since it was "ahead of the Socialists by just 4 percentage points, a small margin in a country that is notoriously difficult to survey." Those words were taken from an article on the front page of yesterday's Herald Tribune headlined: "Victory Not Assured for Spain's Aznar."

The Financial Times of London, another prestigious daily, also ran a five-column story headlined: "Uncomfortable Prospects" (Friday, March 10). The subhead said: "Jose Maria Aznar has enjoyed a successful term as Spain's Prime Minister. But his rightwing party will be lucky to secure another absolute majority in Sunday's election."

Now, the reporters and editors have egg all over their faces. Aznar and his Popular Party colleagues brought the Socialist-Communist coalition, led by Joaquin Almunia, down to a crashing defeat, their worst humiliation in 21 years. Aznar's center-right (some say "rightists") Popular Party can now rule Spain without seeking any coalition partners. The sheepish pundits and opinion writers are now stammering that Spain's "one million undecided voters" decided, on election day, to back Aznar and the center-right. I think they decided much earlier than that: When the Socialists teamed up with the Communists, this brought back shocking memories of how the Marxist "Republicans" murdered priests and nuns and destroyed churches during the Spanish Civil War. They saw such a period of violence and anarchy in prospect -- and they rejected it.