Buffet republic

By Inquirer MANILA, Philippines--Diosdado Macapagal spent his vice presidency campaigning n on-stop, because President Carlos P. Garcia wouldnât give him a job. Back then, the basic unit of our government was the barrio, and Macapagal never hesitated to boast that he had visited nearly every barrio to shake hands with nearly ev ery voter. To be sure, obsessive attention to voters, in retail and wholesale t erms, is the mark of any successful politician. But Macapagalâs personal touch proved incapable of overcoming the challenge mounted by Ferdinand E. Marcos, wh o believed above all else in the ability of political machinery to overcome all odds. Marcos renamed the barrio the âbarangay,â and this latter-day rajah ensured tha t the barrio captain of old would become the barangay chairman of today, the pe tty âdatuâ on whom money is periodically showered by Malacañang. Marcos distru sted the traditional party machines and wanted to build personal ties between h is supreme chieftainship, and the village chiefs he created and made dependent on his good graces. It is no coincidence, then, that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo governs with a combination of her fatherâs retail obsession and Marcosâ wholesale penchant for bribing all opposition into submission. She roams the country with her fath erâs zeal and holds cash buffets in Malacañang in a truly Marcosian manner. At the apex of the patronage pyramid, she knows as well as her legionaries in the House of Representatives do, that the bedrock of their shared political machin ery are barangay officials. Which is why the true story of the recently concluded barangay elections is tha t they were about cash, political infrastructure, or, put another way, providin g for the future of the President and her people. By now we are reasonably cert ain that the congressmen and governors plied with cash in the Palace a few week s ago were lining up for doles they could give out, in turn, to their barangay machinery. The supposedly nonpartisan nature of barangay governance be damned. It was payb ack time. The President owed the congressmen, who owed the barangay officials, in turn. All would pay their debts, since after all, payment would come in the form of public funds. To repeat: The barangay elections were a partisan exercise, with partisan goals in mind. Instead of giving adequate time for the reform of the obviously flawe d and highly corrupt barangay system -- including, as we pointed out, the essen tially useless, except for dynasty-building, Sangguniang Kabataan (Youth Counci l) -- the President solidly supported the insistence of the House of Representa tives to go through with the elections, despite the Senateâs initial reservatio ns. Nothing would be allowed to delay the payback. The first dividends were immediately encashed by the President when she showed that more congressmen supported her than her erstwhile ally, Speaker Jose de Ve necia. Then we saw it in the way governors tried to gang up on Pampanga provinc eâs Gov. Ed Panlilio, who exposed the cash distribution in the Palace. We will see in the coming months, the additional dividends the President expects to ear n from her cash buffets, whether in terms of blocking a new impeachment effort or in simulating grassroots support for Charter change. Everything -- the lavish spending on posters, marching bands, motorcades, the v iolence and intimidation, the bribing of voters -- that has characterized the b arangay polls is as nothing compared to what they represent. They are part of a continuing and increasingly brazen process of governing, not in the exercise o f the will of the people, but according to the Golden Rule that whoever has the gold, makes the rules. With a new generation of young dynasts in the Sangguniang Kabataan, with their fathers, mothers, uncles and in-laws in more senior barangay positions, with th e congressmen having paid off their local leadersâ debts and by so doing, incur ring new debts of gratitude and themselves grateful, in turn, to the President, everything is in place. Ritual calls for barangay reform will be made, and eve n if they have become an exercise in futility, we support those calls. However, we should all be aware that the entire political class benefited from this exe rcise, and this is what sets apart their interests from the broader public.