EDSA and the curse of CJ Corona

I’ve added 34 years in my life (I’m now 68 years old), this means that at the time of the EDSA Revolt, I was only 34 when we went to the streets in Fuente Osmeña because of that huge rally by the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO), the only political party I ever joined thanks to my lawyer Atty. Raul M. Gonzales who was UNIDO secretary general back then. Later he became Justice (DOJ) secretary under president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. I was with him in Fuente Osmeña as he was together with UNIDO stalwarts led by Sen. Salvador “Doy” Laurel. Yes, it was that time when Tita Cory was with us on stage and when things went bad in Manila, she was housed at the Carmelite Convent, proof that she wasn’t at EDSA in the early days of the Revolution.

I do write something about the EDSA Revolution yearly, but like my mentor, the late Sir Max V. Soliven and I shared the same thoughts that the EDSA Revolution was an unfinished revolution. Indeed, the Philippines already had a constitution after our first Constitution of 1935. We were then having the 1973 Constitution, which gave the nation a parliamentary system of governance. Unfortunately, then President Ferdinand Marcos refused to become our first titular president, where the power of the state should have gone to the Prime Minister… at the end of the day, Prime Minister Cesar Virata didn’t have any political power in that constitution.

This was discussed with the UNIDO that Sen. Doy Laurel would become Prime Minister, while Tita Cory would become the titular president and we would finally have a real working parliamentary system of governance. But those pro-Cory groups refused this strategy and when she took office, she became a dictator in her own right, having a Freedom Constitution and eventually had 49 people hammer the 1987 Constitution that hasn’t helped the nation, which is why we still need a genuine political change. We are a presidential system but our political parties belong to a parliamentary form of government, which is why we need to usher a new Charter change.

Indeed, because the Filipino people didn’t get the real change after the EDSA Revolt, slowly as the years passed fewer and fewer people attended the EDSA People’s Power celebrations. Thirty-four years later and after Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s three years in office, I would have thought that netizens who demanded for Duterte to resign or a more vocal group that wanted him ousted would have flocked to the EDSA celebration in huge numbers that would have sent fears in the heart of the Duterte government.

That anti-Duterte rally in Quezon City last Saturday had a very poor attendance of less than 200 people. Rally organizers composed of members of the Kilusan Kontra Tsina, the Oust Duterte Movement, Bunyog, and the Coalition against Federalism in the Philippines mistakenly thought that they would gather thousands of people in that rally. By 3 p.m. there were only a couple of hundred people there. How pathetic! To think that their Facebook pages boast thousands of members. All must be fake!

So ask yourselves… how come EDSA is no longer celebrated by the Filipino people despite the fact that they made this day a holiday? My ten cents analysis on this is simply… 34 years ago, Filipinos only read newspapers and listened to the radio or TV, which were often run or owned by people who are politically allied with the powers that be. Today the Filipino has a social network page and gets more information that he gets everyday. The ordinary Filipino can detect a fake news or news that only supports a few groups for their profit making business.

The EDSA Revolt supported only the Aquino family and the Liberal Party. They even grabbed the Yellow Ribbon as their symbol. Notice that during his time as president, P-Noy  never wore the Philippine Flag on his chest but yellow ribbons, which had no official title or meaning in the Philippine government. Today, the so-called Aquino trolls or Yellowtards who still fight and question Pres. Duterte have become so irrelevant that in the 2019 mid-term elections none of the political opposition won.

I call it the curse of the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona whom then PNoy removed from his office because he wanted to exact the Aquino family’s revenge for his court’s en banc decision declaring Pres. Cory Aquino’s of stock distribution option (SDO) signed in 1987 as unconstitutional. Thus, the 6,453-hectare Hacienda Luisita which was supposed to have been turned over to the farmers in 1967 can now be finally owned by the farmers.

In 2003, approximately 5,000 Hacienda Luisita farmers petitioned at the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to revoke the SDO, claiming that it has only made them poorer. The DAR granted the petition, but the Cojuangcos contested it at the Supreme Court but has now lost this land. This is why PNoy took revenge on CJ Corona and ousted him.

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