by Agustin Martin Rodriguez
The real title of this essay should be “Why, Despite My Commitment to the Effort to Build a Just Nation for the Marginalized, I Will Vote for Noynoy.” But the title above is shorter.
I try not to tell anyone that I will vote for Noynoy. I am deeply embarrassed by that fact because it could really be seen as a betrayal of my commitment to the marginalized and oppressed for whose liberation I have committed my adult life. I do believe that anyone who considers herself not just a liberal but a committed worker for the liberation of the marginalized from their marginalization should have serious qualms about voting for Noynoy Aquino. This is because he doesn’t genuinely understand the travails of our people and he is too entrenched in his class’ world view to ever understand or desire to genuinely liberate the downtrodden.
I say this mainly because of his attitude and non-action in relation to the Hacienda Luisita issue as much as anything else. What he says every time this issue is brought up is something like their family does not own a controlling share of the hacienda; or that his family is not involved in the management of the hacienda; or that it is a complex issue. What is this complex issue? It seems simple enough from the perspective of justice and fairness. That land was supposed to be distributed to its tenants because it is morally theirs anyway. The family patriarch Jose Cojuangco “acquired the plantation from Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas in 1957 on a dollar loan guaranteed by the government ‘with the view of distributing the hacienda to small farmers.’”[1] Therefore the land does not genuinely belong to the family because the hacienda land was purchased in bad faith and clearly the tenants should long have been its owners. Now that the Cojuangco family has built an empire and a vast fortune from the land meant to be distributed to small farmers, maybe they can do right by way of the farmers and the government that backed their acquisition of the land. They also owe that land to the farmers because the Cory Constitution recognized, as a social justice principle by which this nation stands, the need to redistribute land to the landless because it is what justice demands and it is what long term development for all needs. But when it was their turn to do right by the people, the family subverted land reform by imposing some Stock Distribution Option (SDO) and Land Use Conversion scheme thereby further depriving these farmers of the opportunity of controlling productive assets that they have been systematically deprived of all their lives. The family and corporation not only immorally deprived their own tenants of their constitutional right to land reform, but they also converted so much of the land that was supposed to be distributed into highways, golf courses, and subdivisions so that there will be so much less to distribute. That’s simply bad faith and could be interpreted as malicious disregard of what the tenants are fighting for. And then there is that hard to ignore matter of the massacre and the systematic murder of the grassroots leaders who were fighting for workers’ rights and were trying to break the family’s desperate hold on the land. It seems a little too coincidental that these leaders were killed when they were about to engage in some significant action against the interests of the Luisita management. They say that the organizations of the far left are mainly responsible for these assassinations but the coincidence is just so uncanny that it makes me wonder if this family isn’t too caught up in the traditional haciendero role.
All that said, what does this have to do with Noynoy? If indeed he didn’t have anything to do with these incidents, and it seems that he didn’t, and knowing that there are people in his family that are determined to keep their wealth even at the cost of justice and the well-being and development of many other lives—why hasn’t he completely divested himself of their family interests in this vast reminder of the continuing injustice that keeps this country so poor? Why doesn’t he say something like I’m powerless to change my family’s ways, that corporation is beyond my control, but it has caused so much bloodshed and continues to cause misery, it was acquired in bad faith and was maintained through a system of oppression and deception, I want nothing to do with it. I will not gain from it, and I will as a man of some influence and power work to restore that land to right. Why can’t he do that? Why hasn’t he said anything like that? Maybe because he thinks that his family and his class do have a right to their riches and the national resources that they monopolize. I think he doesn’t see the social justice issue with regard to Luisita because he is blind to the way the elite have built an economic system that allows them to utilize national resources for their own benefit and a political system that supports their right to monopolize. He doesn’t seem to get it at all. He thinks that our nation’s poverty is mainly caused by corruption and if we eradicate corruption, we will eradicate poverty.
Anyone who has studied poverty and development in this country understands that our lack of development and massive poverty is rooted in injustice. The reason the poor are poor is because they have been marginalized by those who control the nation’s resources from effectively using these resources to build good lives according to their own aspirations. Haciendas are the clearest examples of this. For decades, the Filipino elite, not to mention foreign corporations, have systematically deprived small farmers of their land, sometimes of their ancestral domains, through illegal titling of pasture lands or forests, by aggressive occupation, through outright coercion, and mainly by deceptively trapping them in a cash economy they did not understand nor were they interested in engaging in. The ancestors of many of the marginalized today come from communities of people who were deprived of the land where they cultivated the kinds of lives that allowed them to flourish as people. But because they stood in the way of the elite’s need to acquire and consume, they were deprived of the site of their human flourishing and their children and their children’s children have been used as ill-paid and exploited generators of wealth.
The tenants of Hacienda Luisita are the progeny of these peoples deprived of the place of their human flourishing. They are the inheritors of the unjust marginalization of their ancestors. The owners of Luisita, those who amassed great wealth from its consolidation and exploitation, are the inheritors of the fruit of the injustice inflicted upon the people. By their continued ownership of this land, they are depriving generations of hard working farmers of the opportunity to regain a place to possibly rebuild sites for their human flourishing where they determine what they are working for and what good it will serve, not to mention whose good it will serve. By insisting that they have a right to the land, the tenants are only affirming a principle enshrined in the Constitution and the CARP law. They are only trying to get past the hacienda’s owners’ skillful legal and political maneuverings in order to restore to them land that needs to be restored to the marginalized in order to begin the long task of uplifting the exploited and making them productive and empowered citizens of our nation.
By allowing the land to be reformed, to be restored to the deprived, the beneficiaries from injustice will be able to restore themselves as well to their potential as creative people. They will free themselves from being participants and captives to a destructive and unjust system that conditions them to be unjust people who can easily cause the death and suffering of others. Thusly, they will be freed to realize their potential for heroism, self sacrifice, and justice. This family has amassed wealth beyond what is just, what is healthy for them, and what is necessary for many lifetimes. The wealth they have amassed can be invested otherwise. They should free themselves from this evil from their past and move on to a clean start or to actually serve the nation.
When Noynoy speaks about the hacienda and their holdings, there is no hint that he understands why the farmers have a right to this land. There is no sense that his family’s wealth was amassed through injustice. There is no indication that he understands that the poverty of the marginalized is the fruit of acts of violence committed upon them by an aggressive and exploitative class of Filipinos to which he belongs. This is why he believes that corruption is the major cause of poverty. It makes it seem that we only need to rid our system of parasitic politicians and so much money will be freed for good government programs to help the poor. But corruption is only one symptom of the problem. If you rid the system of corruption you will only make the nation a better site for the goings on of mainstream business, much of which deprives the poor of their capacity to be genuinely productive participants in economic development. We will not have been able to ensure that the marginalized are empowered to engage society creatively because the elite will still have the monopoly of the resources and opportunities to shape this nation as it serves them. Thus, if Noynoy becomes president, I have no hope that he will understand the roots of poverty and that he will be able to address this effectively and decisively. And that’s why I say that anyone who has a deep concern for the liberation of the marginalized will have a hard time justifying their support for Noynoy.
However, there is this. His closest competitor has even less sense of the plight of the poor and it will be even more doubtful that he will do anything significant for them. Villar, despite his deceptive claims to be of the poor, was clearly not. They were probably even one of those families in Tondo that exploited their poor neighbors. Worst of all, he is a predatory businessman who will probably work to strengthen the position and interests only of the business class at best and strengthen and propagate his own interests at worst. Plus his style of being a politician leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Good grief! How badly handled was that Noynoy is psychologically “sablay” campaign? Gibo seems to be a good technocrat but I have my doubts about the integrity of a man who was able to serve under such a corrupt and blatantly self serving administration. Perlas gets it but doesn’t have the political suave to push reforms through. The leaders from the religious right don’t give me confidence that they understand democratic and plural systems. Gordon is a manager but he has too much of a middle class sensibility to understand the injustice of poverty. The rest are not worth seriously considering.
So what does Noynoy have that wins my reluctant vote? Simply this: there are people in the Liberal Party who do get it. With my vote for Noynoy I am casting a vote for the progressives in the Liberal Party who now seem to have the upper hand over the majority of trapos who populate it. Although the Liberal Party is still a traditional political party that is held together mostly by the self-interest of politicians whose sole interest is their political flourishing, there has been a group of rather progressive—very progressive by way of the standards of traditional politics—who have been leaders in recent moves to reform the political and electoral system. In the last decade, the Liberal Party has actively worked to build itself a functioning policy arm and tried to organize some of its constituents into active participants in formulating policy. They have tried to build the party membership. This group has also been active in pushing for reforms in our laws to ensure that political parties build actual constituencies, that they be more policy and platform oriented, and that they have adequate sources of funds so that they are not beholden to any interests during elections. Leaders of the party also worked hard for crucial social and economic reforms such as CARPER and the strengthening of local autonomy as well as people’s participation in governance. Mar Roxas was even an important leader in the WTO negotiations representing the interests of the developing world. Of course there are still the majority members who are mainly aligned with the LP and Noynoy because they can smell Malacañang on him and the party. But the significant minority that defines policy and spells out the agenda for reform do get the need to go deeper into the country’s ills than merely rooting out corruption.
So, the long and short of this is I give Noynoy and Mar my vote because I have hope in the Liberal Party. Don’t get me wrong, I still think they are too much oriented toward the traditional political view of politics and society to be able to take us to the just and sustainably prosperous nation that we aspire for. However, for a traditional party with enough good people, they could just bring about significant reforms and open the space for the work of genuine empowerment and liberation to flourish.
The real title of this essay should be “Why, Despite My Commitment to the Effort to Build a Just Nation for the Marginalized, I Will Vote for Noynoy.” But the title above is shorter.
I try not to tell anyone that I will vote for Noynoy. I am deeply embarrassed by that fact because it could really be seen as a betrayal of my commitment to the marginalized and oppressed for whose liberation I have committed my adult life. I do believe that anyone who considers herself not just a liberal but a committed worker for the liberation of the marginalized from their marginalization should have serious qualms about voting for Noynoy Aquino. This is because he doesn’t genuinely understand the travails of our people and he is too entrenched in his class’ world view to ever understand or desire to genuinely liberate the downtrodden.
I say this mainly because of his attitude and non-action in relation to the Hacienda Luisita issue as much as anything else. What he says every time this issue is brought up is something like their family does not own a controlling share of the hacienda; or that his family is not involved in the management of the hacienda; or that it is a complex issue. What is this complex issue? It seems simple enough from the perspective of justice and fairness. That land was supposed to be distributed to its tenants because it is morally theirs anyway. The family patriarch Jose Cojuangco “acquired the plantation from Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas in 1957 on a dollar loan guaranteed by the government ‘with the view of distributing the hacienda to small farmers.’”[1] Therefore the land does not genuinely belong to the family because the hacienda land was purchased in bad faith and clearly the tenants should long have been its owners. Now that the Cojuangco family has built an empire and a vast fortune from the land meant to be distributed to small farmers, maybe they can do right by way of the farmers and the government that backed their acquisition of the land. They also owe that land to the farmers because the Cory Constitution recognized, as a social justice principle by which this nation stands, the need to redistribute land to the landless because it is what justice demands and it is what long term development for all needs. But when it was their turn to do right by the people, the family subverted land reform by imposing some Stock Distribution Option (SDO) and Land Use Conversion scheme thereby further depriving these farmers of the opportunity of controlling productive assets that they have been systematically deprived of all their lives. The family and corporation not only immorally deprived their own tenants of their constitutional right to land reform, but they also converted so much of the land that was supposed to be distributed into highways, golf courses, and subdivisions so that there will be so much less to distribute. That’s simply bad faith and could be interpreted as malicious disregard of what the tenants are fighting for. And then there is that hard to ignore matter of the massacre and the systematic murder of the grassroots leaders who were fighting for workers’ rights and were trying to break the family’s desperate hold on the land. It seems a little too coincidental that these leaders were killed when they were about to engage in some significant action against the interests of the Luisita management. They say that the organizations of the far left are mainly responsible for these assassinations but the coincidence is just so uncanny that it makes me wonder if this family isn’t too caught up in the traditional haciendero role.
All that said, what does this have to do with Noynoy? If indeed he didn’t have anything to do with these incidents, and it seems that he didn’t, and knowing that there are people in his family that are determined to keep their wealth even at the cost of justice and the well-being and development of many other lives—why hasn’t he completely divested himself of their family interests in this vast reminder of the continuing injustice that keeps this country so poor? Why doesn’t he say something like I’m powerless to change my family’s ways, that corporation is beyond my control, but it has caused so much bloodshed and continues to cause misery, it was acquired in bad faith and was maintained through a system of oppression and deception, I want nothing to do with it. I will not gain from it, and I will as a man of some influence and power work to restore that land to right. Why can’t he do that? Why hasn’t he said anything like that? Maybe because he thinks that his family and his class do have a right to their riches and the national resources that they monopolize. I think he doesn’t see the social justice issue with regard to Luisita because he is blind to the way the elite have built an economic system that allows them to utilize national resources for their own benefit and a political system that supports their right to monopolize. He doesn’t seem to get it at all. He thinks that our nation’s poverty is mainly caused by corruption and if we eradicate corruption, we will eradicate poverty.
Anyone who has studied poverty and development in this country understands that our lack of development and massive poverty is rooted in injustice. The reason the poor are poor is because they have been marginalized by those who control the nation’s resources from effectively using these resources to build good lives according to their own aspirations. Haciendas are the clearest examples of this. For decades, the Filipino elite, not to mention foreign corporations, have systematically deprived small farmers of their land, sometimes of their ancestral domains, through illegal titling of pasture lands or forests, by aggressive occupation, through outright coercion, and mainly by deceptively trapping them in a cash economy they did not understand nor were they interested in engaging in. The ancestors of many of the marginalized today come from communities of people who were deprived of the land where they cultivated the kinds of lives that allowed them to flourish as people. But because they stood in the way of the elite’s need to acquire and consume, they were deprived of the site of their human flourishing and their children and their children’s children have been used as ill-paid and exploited generators of wealth.
The tenants of Hacienda Luisita are the progeny of these peoples deprived of the place of their human flourishing. They are the inheritors of the unjust marginalization of their ancestors. The owners of Luisita, those who amassed great wealth from its consolidation and exploitation, are the inheritors of the fruit of the injustice inflicted upon the people. By their continued ownership of this land, they are depriving generations of hard working farmers of the opportunity to regain a place to possibly rebuild sites for their human flourishing where they determine what they are working for and what good it will serve, not to mention whose good it will serve. By insisting that they have a right to the land, the tenants are only affirming a principle enshrined in the Constitution and the CARP law. They are only trying to get past the hacienda’s owners’ skillful legal and political maneuverings in order to restore to them land that needs to be restored to the marginalized in order to begin the long task of uplifting the exploited and making them productive and empowered citizens of our nation.
By allowing the land to be reformed, to be restored to the deprived, the beneficiaries from injustice will be able to restore themselves as well to their potential as creative people. They will free themselves from being participants and captives to a destructive and unjust system that conditions them to be unjust people who can easily cause the death and suffering of others. Thusly, they will be freed to realize their potential for heroism, self sacrifice, and justice. This family has amassed wealth beyond what is just, what is healthy for them, and what is necessary for many lifetimes. The wealth they have amassed can be invested otherwise. They should free themselves from this evil from their past and move on to a clean start or to actually serve the nation.
When Noynoy speaks about the hacienda and their holdings, there is no hint that he understands why the farmers have a right to this land. There is no sense that his family’s wealth was amassed through injustice. There is no indication that he understands that the poverty of the marginalized is the fruit of acts of violence committed upon them by an aggressive and exploitative class of Filipinos to which he belongs. This is why he believes that corruption is the major cause of poverty. It makes it seem that we only need to rid our system of parasitic politicians and so much money will be freed for good government programs to help the poor. But corruption is only one symptom of the problem. If you rid the system of corruption you will only make the nation a better site for the goings on of mainstream business, much of which deprives the poor of their capacity to be genuinely productive participants in economic development. We will not have been able to ensure that the marginalized are empowered to engage society creatively because the elite will still have the monopoly of the resources and opportunities to shape this nation as it serves them. Thus, if Noynoy becomes president, I have no hope that he will understand the roots of poverty and that he will be able to address this effectively and decisively. And that’s why I say that anyone who has a deep concern for the liberation of the marginalized will have a hard time justifying their support for Noynoy.
However, there is this. His closest competitor has even less sense of the plight of the poor and it will be even more doubtful that he will do anything significant for them. Villar, despite his deceptive claims to be of the poor, was clearly not. They were probably even one of those families in Tondo that exploited their poor neighbors. Worst of all, he is a predatory businessman who will probably work to strengthen the position and interests only of the business class at best and strengthen and propagate his own interests at worst. Plus his style of being a politician leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Good grief! How badly handled was that Noynoy is psychologically “sablay” campaign? Gibo seems to be a good technocrat but I have my doubts about the integrity of a man who was able to serve under such a corrupt and blatantly self serving administration. Perlas gets it but doesn’t have the political suave to push reforms through. The leaders from the religious right don’t give me confidence that they understand democratic and plural systems. Gordon is a manager but he has too much of a middle class sensibility to understand the injustice of poverty. The rest are not worth seriously considering.
So what does Noynoy have that wins my reluctant vote? Simply this: there are people in the Liberal Party who do get it. With my vote for Noynoy I am casting a vote for the progressives in the Liberal Party who now seem to have the upper hand over the majority of trapos who populate it. Although the Liberal Party is still a traditional political party that is held together mostly by the self-interest of politicians whose sole interest is their political flourishing, there has been a group of rather progressive—very progressive by way of the standards of traditional politics—who have been leaders in recent moves to reform the political and electoral system. In the last decade, the Liberal Party has actively worked to build itself a functioning policy arm and tried to organize some of its constituents into active participants in formulating policy. They have tried to build the party membership. This group has also been active in pushing for reforms in our laws to ensure that political parties build actual constituencies, that they be more policy and platform oriented, and that they have adequate sources of funds so that they are not beholden to any interests during elections. Leaders of the party also worked hard for crucial social and economic reforms such as CARPER and the strengthening of local autonomy as well as people’s participation in governance. Mar Roxas was even an important leader in the WTO negotiations representing the interests of the developing world. Of course there are still the majority members who are mainly aligned with the LP and Noynoy because they can smell Malacañang on him and the party. But the significant minority that defines policy and spells out the agenda for reform do get the need to go deeper into the country’s ills than merely rooting out corruption.
So, the long and short of this is I give Noynoy and Mar my vote because I have hope in the Liberal Party. Don’t get me wrong, I still think they are too much oriented toward the traditional political view of politics and society to be able to take us to the just and sustainably prosperous nation that we aspire for. However, for a traditional party with enough good people, they could just bring about significant reforms and open the space for the work of genuine empowerment and liberation to flourish.
[1] http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20100310-257749/Agrarian-reform-Long-on-promises-short-on-performance. accessed 29 April 2010. PDI MARCH 10, 2010, I-TEAM REPORT: THINK ISSUES
Agrarian reform: Long on promises, short on performance, By Fernando del Mundo, Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:11:00 03/10/2010
Posts
