We are supposed to be prosperous and merry today as we have wished in the Yuletide season.

We are supposed to be assured of abundance after collecting at least 12 kinds of rounded fruits on our tables and lighting pyrotechnics for two purposes, to attract good fortune and drive away demons.

Fine and good. That’s true only in the fantasy world. Christmas and New year is all in the collective mind, a superstition that provides momentary escape. It is even anti-historical: no messiah, much less a Hebrew, was ever born on a manger in December.

We don’t want to be pessimistic but we have to say that the year 2009 will not be a walk in the park for majority of Filipinos and peoples worldwide even.

In the past Christmas, the occupant of Malacanang let known her wish for her critics for an end to politicking and that she’d only concentrate on the economy to cushion the blows of the global financial meltdown which is expected to hit this land in 2009 after the battered economies, mostly rich countries, throw out migrant workers to their home countries.

When hordes of OFWs trickle back home, that means disaster not just for individual families but as well, the country in general considering the fact dollar remittances constitute the single biggest source of foreign exchange that keep the Philippines afloat.

It appears that Malacanang tenant doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. She wishes to end politicking to enable her to concentrate in beefing up the economy but at the same time, stokes public outrage by resurrecting charter change.

We thought the scheme was already buried for good last month after Malacanang backed out in response to millions of Filipinos flooding the streets simultaneously nationwide to oppose any move to rewrite the constitution before 2010.

However, two days after the year 2009 opened, the press headlined Malacanang lackeys in the Lower House agitating for charter change anew via constituent assembly, that is, by legislators constituting themselves into the exclusive club to rewrite the constitution.

The speaker of the Lower House, a certain Prospero Nograles, is out to railroad the constitution itself. The organic law provides that the national legislature may move to change the constitution via constituent assembly with a vote of two-thirds majority with two houses voting separately similar to any act legislation.

With a hostile Senate, the tenant’s hope of perpetrating her corrupt and criminal rule is dashed outright. Her only way out is for both houses voting together where she is assured of crushing the Senate by the sheer overwhelming number of her lackeys in the Lower House.

Last December 10, 2008, 58th anniversary of International Human Rights day, Ilonggos, over 4,000 of them, jointly organized by the Jaro Archdiocese and cause-oriented groups, marched the streets of Iloilo City to denounce intensifying human rights violation by the Arroyo government and her scheme to perpetuate her misrule beyond 2010 via the constituent assembly.

But it appears she and her ilk are strangers to the word “shame” just as she sweeps under rug the dust of her government’s continuing assaults against the people, mostly leftist activists, that to date totals 900 plus murdered and 200 forcibly disappeared since 2001 by her military and police minions.

By resurrecting the obsession of the tenant to stay in power beyond 2010, she and her groveling accomplices in the Lower House categorically send the message that 2009 will not be an era of peace and prosperity for Filipinos but another dark chapter in our history given the unbroken record of Arroyo and gang in pulling off monumental thievery and human rights violations.

The year 2009 will still remain an era of escalating hunger and political repression that inevitably forces more Filipinos taking to the streets, if not the hills. this year is nothing new, after all.

One Response to “2009 nothing new”

• 1
  danny
  January 5th, 2009 21:26

  “We thought the scheme was already buried for good last month after Malacanang backed out in response to millions of Filipinos flooding the streets simultaneously nationwide to oppose any move to rewrite the constitution before 2010.”

  Millions????
  Last time I checked, the rally at Makati was attended by a mere 7000 people. Extrapolating this figure to “millions” even allowing for hyperbole is a bit much.

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