Supreme Court on trial; Corona for high court / Our economy slumps further

Of course our Supreme Court knows it’s on trial. But does it give a damn? Maybe if it’s made to understand that unless it heeds the collective conscience, and treads as at no other time in the past the moral pathways to justice, then it just may do the right thing. And what is that? First, decree that the Plunder law is constitutional and efforts on the part of Joseph Estrada’s lawyers to argue otherwise is a sick and silly joke. Second, reverse the Court of Appeals ruling that the Kuratong Baleleng massacre case is dead and gone. If we may be grammatically perverse, it ain’t dead and it ain’t gone. Sen. Panfilo Lacson must be held accountable.

But first the Plunder Law. If the Supreme Court rules it is unconstitutional, we might as well forget People Power II, and all the months and years civil society fought to overthrow the scandal-ridden presidency of Joseph Estrada. In effect, a negative court ruling would eventually lead to the acquittal of Erap Estrada. First, he goes out on bail, trala. Second, the charges against him will be reduced to simple graft cases, and these could take years and years, or less because Mr. Estrada can easily buy off corrupt justices in the Sandiganbayan.

The repercussions would be alarming.

The Supreme Court is the ultimate symbol of justice in the Philippines. If the perception should be that it has betrayed its trust, that it has not only sided with Estrada but given him the wide, open door to undeserved freedom, then God help the court. And, also, God help democracy and the republic. It will, I think, be the last straw and the people will once again take to the streets, but with a venom that the first and second EDSA lacked. Where scores were not settled before, scores will certainly be settled this time and this is what I have always feared. The people taking the law into their own hands.

But John Locke in his Second Treatise predicted this. When the Social Contract between ruler and ruled is grossly violated, and the people can no longer have any recourse to justice, then theirs is the tramp of elephants on a stampede, their wild trumpeting filling the night. Then it will be as Thomas Hobbes predicted in his turn, the "fight of every man against every man," the Leviathan where life would be "short, nasty and brutish."

What makes the Plunder Law controversy, if controversy it is, and not just the nitpicking of Estrada’s highly-paid lawyers, border the absurd and the ridiculous is that the Plunder bill was signed by Joseph Estrada, Rene Saguisag, Lorenzo Tanada among others when Jovito Salonga was Senate president. Now Estrada and Saguisag, with the demagogic assistance of a shyster lawyer or two, now claim they did not know what they had signed and – in wild and wooly retrospect, oh no! – they made a mistake.

Stuff and nonsense! An erstwhile BIR official, M. Manalili by name, was convicted under the Plunder Law, is now in prison, and the judge did not find the law unconstitutional. The Plunder Law became the Plunder Law precisely because Ferdinand Marcos plundered this country with a greedy abandon that knew no satiety, stashing billions abroad, and the cry across the archipelago was – Never Again! So Estrada is accused of plundering the nation with the kind of legerdemain that bested even Marcos and he will be let off scot-free? That Plunder Law must remain in the books.

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It is in this connection that we are highly, even enthusiastically, endorsing the proposed appointment of Renato Corona to the Supreme Court.

First, the man is honest and scrupulous even to a fault. I have never seen his hand in the cookie jar unlike another nominee who should have played that lead role the movie "Cabaret" where he danced merrily and scandalously to the jingle of money, money, money. The only two times that I have met him, Rene Corona impressed me as a man of integrity, lacking the covetousness I see often flickering in the faces of people who talk the corridors of power. Corona was and remains the chief of staff of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, a position he has fleshed out with considerable merit and dedication. GMA made the right decision here.

It’s time our courts are purged of corrupt judges and justices for whom a TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) is a passport to being a millionaire and the smell of shabu a waft to partnership or fruitful collaboration with drug lords as Chief Superintendent Reynaldo Acop himself admitted during the Senate hearings. Maybe I couldn’t do this ten or fifteen years ago. But today, I swear, I can look almost every judge or fiscal in the eye, even some justices, and tell him or her, he or she is corrupt. Just ask a few embarrassing questions, and those eyes flicker like loaded dice.

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Now where does Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho get all that optimism – assuming media reports are correct – that "the tragic events in the US could open up opportunities for the Philippines." Camacho talks about supplying skilled Filipino manpower and construction materials to take advantage of the $40 billion rehabilitation and reconstruction fund that President George W. Bush has allocated.

I will not say that Secretary Camacho is mad, but I will say he does not know his history, the crazy billiard-ball effect of a shadow war America has never fought, the effects of a slumping US economy on the world, particularly an impoverished country like the Philippines with a begging bowl this big and this empty. Tens of thousands of employees in the US airline industry and Boeing are being laid off, more tens of thousand are due to lose their jobs. Dow Jones and the Nasdaq are on the swoon, domestic and international tourism are on skids. Europe, Japan and the rest of the world are crouching with slit economic stomachs in the shadows.

And there is more. As the many nations employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos as domestic help or mid-level occupations start shedding them off because their economies go into reverse, these Filipinos will return to the Philippines to simply swell the ranks of the unemployed here. Percentage of unemployed is about 14 to 17 percent, underemployed 20 to 30 percent. All the Philippine government can offer them is sympathy. All the church and churches can proffer is prayer and novenas, and lighted candles to Divine Providence.

Meanwhile we are on a roller coaster ride to social, political and economic disaster. This is what President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and our leaders do not understand, for they hear not the coming rumble of great historic predatory waves. All they see is the year 2004, the expected presidential elections they expect to ride to victory, and the big bundle of campaign money they have to collect in the billions to win less than three years from now. They are hallucinating for events will overtake them.

How can we go on and pretend that our economy and our political system can hack it until 2004?

Already, our Balance of Payments deficit has plunged to a US$606 million deficit during the first semester of the year from a $205 million surplus during the same period last year. If you don’t hear a crack or a series of cracks like the anteroom being torn apart, I do. Direct investments the first six months of 2001 totaled $844 million compared to $1.6 billion for the same period last year. According to Business World, the outflow of portfolio investments almost doubled to $872 million this year from only $484 last year. The country’s current account went down to a surplus of $1.23 billion. This is 65.9 percent lower than the previous year’s level of $3.62 billion. This is an ICU fever chart as any doctor will tell you.

So, Secretary Camacho, how do you get to ride your gilded chariot?

And I haven’t even returned to the drugs scandal yet, the creep of white crystalline powder that is full on the way to poisoning our youth, well on the way to corrupting our police and various government agencies. And what surprises me is that GMA has not even launched a purge in the Philippine National Police. If there are still decent elements in the PNP, then they should stand up to be counted, and denounce the many criminals in their organization. GMA, if she has any moral armature, should plunge into the PNP with an avenging sword. That is the least we expect of her, not the moist eyes glued like a novenaria to the presidency in 2004, not the offer of the cream of our Armed Forces to fight alongside America in the latter’s shadow war against international terrorism. As we and everybody else has said earlier, let’s get the Abu Sayyaf first.

The nation cannot go on not only in fear of its police, but in the deeper fear that our uniformed men with the badges are leading us to a narco state where the vestal gods are Baal and Bacchus.

Somehow we cannot help but feel puny and utterly at sea, morally without anchor, emotionally without a mother nation when we look at America these days coming together, binding each other’s wounds, reaching out as far as the heart, the soul and the hand can reach, singing God Bless America with tears running down their cheeks, proud of their libertarian heritage, never more united than they are today. We? We can’t even reach out to our poor. And we don’t care. Even if they should starve to death.