It's the economy, stupe! A nation really woebegone - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

There he is these days, the president imploring the Virgin Mary to save him, to save his tottering regime, the once movie-handsome face tumbling into open-mouthed sorrow or what appears like sorrow. The latest is Joseph Estrada beseeching Our Lady of Piat in Cagayan to rescue him from the turbulence swirling around him. Whence? From the Senate where impeachment proceedings begin to look like a noose, the probable executioner bearing the unlikely name of Valhalla. From the streets where tens of thousands boom "Erap, Resign!" like the crackle of thunder on the stampede.

The president nonetheless continues to communicate with media.

He said after praying to the Lady of Piat: "Kailangan yun para swertehin tayo" ( I need that to give me luck). Our Lady of Piat is known in song, story and fable as the patroness of luck and hope, bestowing miracles on the selected and the chosen. The president said he prayed to the same Lady during the 1998 campaign for victory in the election. And won. It was like traversing the Champs Elysee in a blaze of glory. Erap Estrada felt like Napoleon Bonaparte back from the wars entering the Arc de Triomphe.

Now the bonhomie was gone, the swagger, the aura of impregnability. To his critics, he would say mag-presidente, muna kayo. To others: pupulutin lahat kayo sa kangkungan. To media: Panay kasinu-ngalingan at katarantaduhan. May araw din kayo! Now he looked chastened. Now he sought "spiritual guidance and moral fortitude, to muster enough courage and strength to endure the anguish that the impeachment trial brings to me and my family." The president seeks solace among the poor, the way the Marcoses did, the way Imelda did.

I don’t know if the president knows he is battling insurmountable odds.

The poor cannot save him. They have no army, no ideology, no weapons, no stomach for marching in the streets unless they are the poor of the organized Left. The poor are the superstitious poor, the ignorant poor, the improvident poor, victims of a society that has chosen to maintain them on the borderline of starvation. Despite his abject failure to help the poor (Erap para sa mahirap), the man remains a celebrity, a colorful soaring balloon in the wind, an icon, somebody to touch, to see, to tap the ground with excited feet when he is around. We Filipinos are suckers for celebrities.

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And so there is the cutting irony of Mr. Estrada’s existence.

His sorties to the neighborhoods of the downtrodden cannot help him except publicity-wise. They will demonstrate but only if he pays them. He can pray, he can undertake pilgrimages to grottoes of the Virgin Mary. But I doubt very much that at this stage, any god or goddess in and out of Mount Olympus, any muse, any celestial minstrel can pull Joseph Estrada out of the quagmire. His tragedy is that as president he has misread the nation, misfelt the national pulse, and sought only the grasp of presidential vaudeville and not the substance of presidential leadership.

This was his life as a movie actor. A constant straining to climb an imaginary mountain littered with enemies out to kill him. This was a lordship of make-believe. Truth came out of the barrels of pistols, not from a mind that read books, that sought mental excellence, that swept history with a keen and inquiring intelligence. The richly pomaded pompadour helped, the mustache, the boots, the whir of avenging fists, the use of kanto boy Tagalog still evident in his statements today. Bakbakan. Kangkungan. Ubusan. Todasan. Tamaan ka sana ng kidlat.

And so we cut to the core and center of the Estrada tragedy.

It’s the economy. From the beginning, the economy eluded his grasp. He had the best economic advisers but they worked by day and not by night. By night a group of advisers took over and prevailed – the Midnight Cabinet. They made decisions by hook and by crook, largely by crook. We always wondered where Malacañang got those hundreds of millions – billions? – that underpinned the leadership’s lavish lifestyle. Each mistress lived like the Queen of Sheba, their progeny behaving like the heirs of the Tudors. Corollas and Hondas and Lancers had disappeared from palace grounds. In their place, you saw Mercedeses and BMWs and Expeditions.

When I was a cabinet member, I had in succession two second-hand cars that didn’t last long and broke down until I got myself a Nissan. The first car I had, a so-so black wagon whose model I forget, was a rolling coffin. Its side-doors swung open with every surly turn on the road, and we hang on for dear life. Maybe that’s the big difference. The life-style. There was little good food at Malacañang and ours at the press office was carinderia fare. We ate what our employees ate. Only once in a while did we go out to Guernica’s at Malate to savor Spanish cuisine.

Under Cory Aquino, the economy despite the fact it was a near-corpse after 20 years under Ferdinand Marcos managed to come alive. Except that Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan and his right-wing military rebels (RAM) – without any popular support – made grab after grab at the Cory government and dismally failed. But after six or seven failed grabs, the economy, about to reach stable ground, went into a tailspin. Honasan, the failed caudillo, has learned his lesson and now is a senator of the realm.

Under Fidel Ramos, there were no more coups. And so the economy abandoned one crutch after another. There was a big difference between Ramos and Estrada. Ramos was a demon for work as he was a demon for study. He labored by day, by night, sometimes almost until dawn, a soldier turned politician turned economist turned world traveler endlessly in search of foreign investments. At the end of 1996, the Philippines came close to being Asia’s next economic tiger. So Newsweek reported in a cover story.

Then came Joseph Estrada. It was like a man from Mars landing in Malacañang. Food and the production of food for the poor were atop his agenda.

This didn’t get anywhere. Contrary to what Mike Toledo reports today from Malacañang, bits and pieces came out that midnight was showtime in Malacañang. Up to four. It was business with a wicked profile, Bacchantes and bacchanal. While Fidel Ramos and his men had focus, Erap and his buddies had hocus-pocus, tinkering with the economy like a pack of playing cards. The result was the economy became afflicted with lupus. What we didn’t know then and we know now – to the eternal regret and outrage of Joseph Estrada – was that Governor Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson, a summa cum laude member of that midnight group, would eventually betray the president.

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Chavit had the credentials, the insider’s knowledge, knew where the bodies were buried, where the deals were made. He not only had the smoking gun. He had the jueteng bomb. Money had been flowing to cronies by the hundreds of millions, by the billions, cronies with monosyllabic family names, exempli gratia (Atong) Ang and (Dante) Tan. There was a cabinet but hardly any cabinet meetings. And so the national economy turned and twisted, hiccupped and coughed, and soon it was on crutches, bleeding, a corrida bull dying at noon. A horse shot at the forelegs.

And that’s where we are now.

Whatever President Estrada and his apologists might say, he is finished politically, the trust and confidence in his administration gone forlornly to the winds. Never to return. Ergo, the longer he stays in the presidency, the worse the economy becomes, a snake beheaded twisting to death. He and his advisers, like Titoy Pardo and Ronnie Zamora and Danding Cojuangco, must know this. They know the shadows have caught up with Erap Estrada, shadows that have the embrace of a dozen pythons and the sting of the North Wind. Why then do they hang on? Why then do they counsel the president to hang on?

For Filipinos these are the worst of times. We have a president under impeachment for the first time in history. We have the worst of poverty in our geographical region of the Planet Earth. We are once again the Basket Case of Asia. In the Payatas tragedy, we had the world’s first garbage slide burying hundreds under unspeakable stink. For the first time in the Olympiads, Filipino athletes failed to win a single medal in Sydney. Again, a first in the Philippines, we had a president gifting his mistresses with mansions. In Abu Sayyaf, we had the first bandit gang kidnapping a cluster of foreign nationals and holding them ransom to millions of dollars atop a Sulu forest hideout with the world looking on via television.

Also a first, the Der Spiegel weekly of Germany chastised our president and his close aide Robert Aventajado for allegedly pocketing respectively $8 and $2 million of the total $20 million in ransom money paid by foreign governments and some private foreign organizations. Also a first, the president is accused by the impeachment prosecution of forging the signature of a Jose Valhalla on a P142 million Equitable-PCIB check, squirreled in a secret account.

Good god, all we have is a prayer.