Thank you, Mr. President

I received texts from friends about the latest faux pas of President Noynoy Aquino all with dire predictions and warnings. At first I wanted to cry and be angry, but after some thought, I changed my mind. Thank you Mr. President for your humor, this was the funniest joke yet. This was it! Nothing could beat the presidential statement on constitutional reform as proof that his matuwid na daan is not to be taken seriously.

 If you are not in active circles in social media you are missing a great deal of humor and laughter. That is a pity because according to experts, laughter prolongs life. It is impossible to put the illustrations in a column but you can guess what they are if I give you some titles like Voices — Cocaine? Grass? Speed? Shabu? Or the tyranny of the rabble? Or Kapit sa Patalim (an old one used in the fight against Marcos dictatorship).

But here are some opinions that were expressed in words. This comes from a blog called “Crossroad Philippines,” The fight to oppose P-Noy’s second term, it’s now or never.

With just three weeks after the palace invented an “extend P-Noy term campaign,” do you believe that there are pressing needs and reasons to push for the term extension? Are there bandwagon calls, or public cries expressed on rallies radio and TV programs, petitions or whatever form that led the president to take out his credibility to buy it?

Is it not really fantastic for the president to throw his hat in it? Isn’t he looking pretty much idiotic to let himself be carried away by that ‘staged’ clamor? Of course whoever plotted the idea are driven by fear and taking that desperate move to extend the president’s term as some self-preservation effort….

To push the campaign into fruition with only a suspicious clamor from paid netizens and fearful party mates is an exercise in futility while risking not only his family’s legacy but the tearing apart of the entire nation.

Reactions to Aquino’s announcement brings anxiety to the people, the decent and the thinking class, but revelry for his allies who would unfortunately work tirelessly for the resurrection of PDAF and DAP. It would also cause the clipping of powers of the Supreme Court that would pave the way for the conjugal dictatorship of the executive and the legislature, of course with the ever blind allegiance of the fourth estate.“

“The Filipino people paid for democracy with blood, sweat and tears. They will not accept the false article of self-serving popular initiatives as a real example of democracy. Let this be the litmus test of all who seek to be President: an oath — here and now — that nothing they do shall benefit themselves, whether running the country, upholding the laws or changing the Constitution when necessary.

We the citizens must therefore make sure that we demand these from our leaders.

Bukod pa rito mahalaga rin ang mapangalagaan natin ang proseso ng halalan. Ang dapat lamang pangambahan ay ang dayaan at dagdag-bawas. We should respect the people’s choice.

Finally, to the man I supported in 1992, my friend, our President, Fidel V. Ramos, I say:

No work is ever finished, and good work is hard to let go. But you made your name in history even before you became President, when you joined the people’s fight for democracy, and stood by me in its defense,” so spoke Cory Aquino.

Beautiful words resurrected from a speech she gave at the time when we were first pushing for constitutional reform through a people’s initiative. But are these words true?

President Cory’s speech was a sham. Sometime after that I did go into the Congress archives and found a piece of paper that said President Cory certified (meaning giving an urgent order to Congress) for an enabling law for people’s initiative at the end of her term when she would not have been able to run again. Here are excerpts from a column I wrote on January 2007 about this: “ Yes, but the façade of democracy and the rule of law must be maintained. Congress did finally come around to pass an enabling act, R.A. 6735 and the accompanying rules and regulations from COMELEC 2003.

But it was not to give voice to the people through a more orderly way of proposing Charter change rather than massing at EDSA which would increasingly be prone to violence.???

President Cory certified the bill and pushed by her allies before her term ended. The scuttlebutt is that the plan of using a peoples’ initiative to prolong her term was mercifully dropped considering her limitations for the country’s leadership.

It was in her time that the model was set for the uses of people’s initiative on how to overcome term limits. Even then it became obvious that the country was being hampered from carrying out a program of government more attuned to progress or one that could match the consistency and stability of other countries in the region.??Term limits may have been the rallying cry against the failed Marcos regime which misused his long rule.

We were caught in a bind. Term limits were too long for a bad president and too short for a good one. Neither could a program for a stable economy be helped by a musical chairs of government through flawed elections that so deteriorated we ended up in time governed by an incompetent actor.???

The theory of people’s initiative is simply to give ordinary citizens the capability to participate directly in decision-making. …We looked around us and the countries that have galloped to prosperity were parliamentary governments. They elected party programs. At the same time these governments were able to cope with the speed of global changes…

As it developed, people’s initiative is a mixed soup of high principle citing people’s sovereignty as enshrined in the 1987 Constitution, as well as political and governance frustration of term limits. Arrayed against it is an oligarchy of power brokers determined to keep the status quo that they dominate. …People’s initiative is a form of direct democracy and direct democracy is increasingly being thought of as the democracy of the future. It covers a wide-ranging theory of civics around the sovereignty of the people as lodged in the assembly of all citizens. This is different from a representative republic where sovereignty is held by a subset of the people, the subset most often chosen by election.

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And finally, the last word.  Bayanko.org.ph campaign for Constitutional reform is not for the sake any president. It is to change the system. This has been going on for years through several administrations. The difference is the present effort uses technology to crowdsource through a website. It has never been more urgent than today with an incapable and mendacious government.