What are we in power for?

The political systems in the Philippines throughout history were used as a means to favor members of the ruling elite. This practice was taken for granted as just the way life is until Philippine governance shifted into the American experiment on democracy. After World War II, a senate president attained notoriety when in a moment of candor, he went on public record as saying: “What are we in power for? We are not hypocrites. Why should we pretend to be saints when in reality we are not?” That lucidity remained an operational constant in the Philippine politics, with slight modification in the economy of the Marcos years with the legitimization of “crony capitalism” and “Imeldific kleptocracy.” Joseph Estrada and Chavit Singson would take the practice to the proletarian level amassing the proceeds of a nationwide network of Jueteng operations abetted by what was referred to by a 1997 U.S. Congressional Budget Office report as the most corrupt institution in the country, the Philippine National Police.

The use and abuse of political power in the social domain is as original curious Adam in Eden, so there is no novelty here in the extent of its practice. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” we like to quote. We, however, often think of this in terms of dictators and totalitarian governments. In our time, after David Korten’s 1995 publication of “When Corporations Rule the World,” unregulated corporate power that follows its own internal design without external accountability parade before our eyes with familiar company logos. Incredible power resides in money centers, which now command the allegiance and loyalty of governments and their agencies.

It is no wonder that the three major religions from the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula took a dim view of bankers and moneylenders. Money (which is different from wealth but that’s another dichotomy to explore some other time), corrupts and it corrupts absolutely.

The obscenity of monetary wealth stalks even quiet Irene Marcos-Araneta today. She is reputed to have access to a Swiss account worth $13 billion. Of course, the Imeldific Mom, not unlike the above-quoted senate president, earned herself an indelible niche in history for foolishly boasting in public that “we own practically everything.”

In the United States today, corruption and unregulated power has become the language in the Capital city. The spectacle of Enron, WorldCom, Haliburton, and their ilk was earlier dismissed as aberration in a perfectly well-oiled economic system. We were led to believe that the system was fine, but that there were exceptionally bad apples that managed to get into the pork barrel.

Now, it appears that system itself, what President Ike called the Military-Industrial complex, is well and alive, particularly in the contracting of services needed in the war zones. Add to that a Congress where its members begin at the low end of a million dollars just to get elected, and we have what, thanks to Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff, today’s corporate set-up in the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. With interlocking interests, decisions are made not on the basis of democratic needs but on the promise of profitable rewards, for corporations and the policymakers.

Authentic mandates have become secondary to the glitter of non-residual incomes. Even the office of U.N.’s Kofi Annan was not spared the scandal of using the Oil for Food program for monetary gains. As the Watergate sleuths made clear, track the money. It is no surprise that corporate heads has since been indicted for corrupt practices even in the administration of humanitarian aid.

We need not go very far. Consider the decision to let a trailer homebuilder construct units to aid Hurricane Katrina victims. Now we have thousands of rotting homes sitting in some open field in Arkansas, paid for with public funds but unusable even if they can be delivered to their intended recipients. Even aid personnel qualifying post-Katrina people for assistance, could not resist the temptation to dipped their fingers in the proverbial public pie and managed to hack in imaginary figures into their systems, proceeding to receive the benefits out of the deception.

Campaign contributions have since come to support the magisterial life styles of a manipulative few. The United States has left behind constitutional republicanism and turned to corporate oligarchy. This is a system whereby a board of directors selects the chief executive officer. The CEO presides over shareholders meetings, which is as democratic as the family gatherings of the Cosa Nostra. While it was funny to call George W. Bush the President-select, there is a sense in which the Supreme Court, acting as a corporate board of directors, selected the President of the United States in the 2000 election. In turn, the new CEO appointed new members of the board. The people’s electoral franchise has become symbolic, for management holds a majority of the proxies. On any important issue, the CEO and the Board never ever permit themselves to lose. The intransigence of the White House on the transfer of port facilities to a Dubai-based company, now that the stealthy and clandestine change is in the public eye, might just reach a ‘high noon’ as even members of the President’s own party are calling it foul play. I suspect however, that shadow President Dick Cheney will not be losing sleep over the matter!

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote more than a century ago that the remarkable thing about Americans is that they spend half of their waking time finding ways to participate in the decision-making process that affects their lives. Tocqueville might just have been engaged in wishful thinking, or his research methods were deficient. There is hardly any evidence of what he writes about in the contemporary American scene. In fact, we do not participate. We hire a lobbyist. For the CNMI, $10 million worth of assets, in fact, for a number of years; and only so that we could get the Feds off our backs while we exploited labor and played footsies with immigration! We were Abramoff’s first big client.

Bill Moyers, erstwhile Press Secretary to LBJ, has a speech called “Saving Democracy.” The text may be accessed at: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0224-20.htm. In a humorous but serious tone, he lays out a profile of the workings of congressional corruption. It is particularly of interest to us since he says a great deal about the Marianas and the lobbyists.

PaganWatch folks have made it clear that money consideration must not be the only virtue to be considered in the mining of minerals in the Commonwealth. It is a measure of our bottom line mystification that we applaud the obvious. For indeed, as with every aspect of life in the Commonwealth, the tyranny of the economic must not be allowed to dictate the terms of our political deliberations and cultural celebrations. Our acquired propensity to ask first, “How much will it cost?” before any other consideration, might now take a back seat. We might begin deciding again on the merits of our choices first, before we consider the financial implications it entails.

Otherwise, we are at the mercy of the moneybag. Right now, we have left them with the power. They had not been hesitant to wield it.

* * *

Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School