The center cannot hold.
Over the weekend, Senator Panfilo Lacson announced he was quitting as head of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee. In the days preceding, he found himself at the center of controversy over how the corruption hearings were going.
In the last hearing, we were treated to explosive testimony from a former Marine who served as security detail for Zaldy Co. He described how tens of millions in cash stashed in suitcases were delivered to the former congressman and to the homes of former speaker Martin Romualdez.
This was followed by a massive effort to douse that testimony mainly on the technicality of faulty notarization. But that was testimony made in person, under oath and on the Senate floor. And the story linked all the other parts of the building narrative that plunder was undertaken with the connivance of the most powerful politicians.
Lacson was constrained to announce that Romualdez and Co, the emerging Batman and Robin in this story of massive corruption, were to be summoned to the hearing. The next thing we heard was that the Senate hearings will be suspended indefinitely supposedly to give way to budget deliberations.
That was like a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse was submerged in water – enough to douse the fire and avert an explosion. For every action, there was an equal reaction: powerful forces were in motion to kill an explosive story.
After this episode, Lacson shifted the conversation rather abruptly. He began talking about budget insertions made by the senators. That, in turn, prompted an unexpected reaction: five senators threatened to quit the majority bloc. That threat might blow up the precarious Senate presidency of Tito Sotto.
Lacson had to eat his own blunder. He quit the Blue Ribbon chairmanship in a desperate bid to save the Sotto leadership.
That may or may not suffice. We will see what happens in the forthcoming plenary sessions.
There were more revelations about humongous insertions made by the senators themselves. Those revelations have brought the chamber to the brink of implosion. The investigators, it appears, now need to be themselves investigated. But by whom?
Over the last several days, the implicated senators began playing sophomoric word games with the public. ‘Amendments’ were not ‘insertions’ we are told. The objective here is not clarity but obfuscation.
We are told that amendments resulting in billions of pesos earmarked according to the whim of politicians is completely legal. But this is exactly the anomaly that brought about the massive corruption on infrastructure projects: legislators playing gods, directing where public investments should go.
By earmarking public funds for their identified projects, legislators become ‘funders’ in the language of those involved in the actual looting. As ‘funders,’ they are entitled to as much as 25 percent in commissions – considered as ‘obligations’ of those stealing public funds. This is at the very heart of the scandal now razing our institutions and causing public trust to evaporate.
No doubt, the Senate is well on its way to imploding. The blades are out. The veneer of civility is wearing thin.
So desperate have things become that one senator has called for ‘snap’ elections that excludes all incumbents. Senate President-at-the-moment Tito Sotto says this will be an invitation to chaos.
But, Mr. Senator, the country is already in chaos. There are people calling for the early establishment of a ‘revolutionary government’ to enable the nation to slip out of a bankrupt constitutional order designed to plunder.
When a horse breaks a leg, it is considered an act of mercy to put it out of its misery with a bullet to the head. All the legs of our badly designed constitutional order are broken.
What is happening in the Senate is merely the most imminent breaking point in a long fault line. After this chamber implodes, other meltdowns could happen.
What is unfolding before our eyes is the whole system of patronage, where institutions shelter their members and the powerful protect their underlings, is cracking up. Public vigilance is unmasking the hypocrisy of the ruling elite. Scandal is paralyzing the ability of the powerful to shelter their corrupt underlings.
It is simply that the system of patronage that masqueraded as a democracy has now become unsustainable. The system of corrupt politics bled our nation dry. The nation now has no more blood to give.
We are in a classic revolutionary situation. But, as the theoretician Antonio Gramsci put it, the old order is dying; and the new one could not yet be born.
Therefore, we find ourselves in a historic purgatory. The ruling elites, including the most pretentious ‘reformers,’ have lost all credence. They struggle to remain afloat by putting the others down. In the end, the whole nation drowns: the failed government complements the failed economy.
All the corruption that has happened takes a toll on all of us far more profound than what conventional accountants can measure. We suffer the daily grind in the most brutal circumstances in a society founded on meanness. We have difficulty envisioning a hopeful future for our people.
The first sentence above comes from that poem by William Butler Yeats called ‘The Second Coming.’ A fuller quote reads: ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’