Advice also for Aquino

Commentary

by: Denis Murphy

February 12, 2012

Three years ago former US President Bill Clinton wrote an article in Time Magazine 

(June 24, 2009) advising newly elected President Barack Obama to follow the priorities of America’s Depression era President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whether Obama followed the advice or not, the readers can judge for themselves. May I suggest that the advice Clinton offered Obama may also be of use to President Aquino.

At the beginning of the article, Clinton talks of the bond Roosevelt created between the ordinary working men and women and himself.

“My grandfather was a dirt farmer with only a sixth-grade education. During the Depression, he eked out a living selling blocks of ice. But in those days, even though he was poor, he knew someone special: from listening to the fireside chats on the radio, he knew Franklin Roosevelt. And he believed that Roosevelt knew what his life was like – and cared about it too.

“I grew up listening to my grandfather’s tales of what it was like to live through the Depression and the war and what Roosevelt meant to him. When I was President, in another time of change and uncertainty, I often looked at the portrait of FDR in the Roosevelt Room and remembered my grandfather’s stories. Roosevelt had a deep personal connection to ordinary citizens.”

When Roosevelt died in 1945, ordinary people in tears lined the railroad tracks that led back to his home in Hyde Park, New York to watch the train carrying his body pass by.

I have only one personal memory of President Roosevelt. On a cold and overcast day many years ago in the Bronx, we were playing in the Church schoolyard when someone shouted, “The President’s coming down the Concourse (the main road of the Bronx).” We ran up the hill just in time to see the flashing lights of motorcycles and police cars coming toward us. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been our president all our lives, but we had never seen him. We heard cheering, but it rose and fell in a strange way. The car came slowly because the president was campaigning. Then it was in front of us. We pushed toward the car and had a good look at the old man inside. He looked much older than his pictures in the papers or newsreels. His face was drawn and gray and he sat back in the chair like a man on his sick bed, all alone in the back seat of the limousine. We waved and shouted. He seemed to see our group and he waved at us. Even as young boys we knew he was dying. People had grown silent along the way when they saw how sick he looked.

Clinton claims Roosevelt “got the big things right.” When he came into office during the Depression, he saw that the ills of the country could not be addressed without more aggressive involvement by the government. He ran for president as a fiscal conservative, promising to balance the budget. But unlike his predecessor, he quickly realized that, with prices collapsing and unemployment exploding, only the federal government could step into the breach and restart the economy.

Clinton recalls that Roosevelt surrounded himself with brilliant people, people who may have been far smarter than he was himself. He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes to remind us that sheer intellectual brilliance is not everything: “Roosevelt had a second-class mind, but a first-class temperament.” This gave Roosevelt, Clinton says, the power to inspire others with his passion and to form a team that could work together.

Finally, according to Clinton, Roosevelt had the confidence to give up on projects that weren’t working, admit his failure and begin in another direction. He believed in experimentation, but he didn’t deny the evidence of failure when it came in. A president, claims Clinton, needs an appetite for experimentation and the determination to keep what works and scrap what doesn’t.

Do these suggestions of Bill Clinton have some usefulness for President Aquino?

Can and should President Aquino follow Roosevelt’s example and bond closely with the ordinary poor and middle-class people of the country? Should he build his political power base, as Roosevelt did, on this union of ordinary people and the president? Is there any other firm foundation for President Aquino on which to build? Will the poor and middle-class support give him the ability to make the basic reforms needed in the country? Will such a union allow him to escape from the limitations of our elite-dominated bureaucracy?

Has President Aquino decided on all the “big things” that must be done in his term of office? It’s clear he wants to eliminate corruption. What else are his goals? After corruption, what are the next three crucial things that need to be done?

Has the present government experimented sufficiently with new solutions? Have we taken a fresh look at old problems in the hope of finding new workable solutions? Perhaps we should be more creative. There are no magic formulas, but new situations call for at least a look at new solutions.

Finally, does the President have the most qualified and unified staff possible? Even ordinary people now talk about political skirmishes inside the administration’s top people. This isn’t supposed to happen in a presidential system of government where the President is free to choose the staff he wants.

Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 which was a grim time for his country.

Unemployment had reached 33 percent. Hoovervilles, the settlements of the poor and unemployed were, like our urban poor areas, growing everywhere. They were named scornfully after former President Herbert Hoover. Farmers like the Jody family of “Grapes of Wrath” lost their land to bad weather and venal banks. A popular song of the day was “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” Roosevelt’s portrait is fittingly on the dime coin now as if to remind us he gave the poor what they most needed, that is, his comradeship.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.

A trip to Cavite

Commentary
By: Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

We left Project 4, Quezon City, very early that Sunday morning to attend a funeral in Cavite. We saw many impressive infrastructure projects along the way, but they left us wondering about their long-range usefulness and their skewed sense of the common good.

We were on Edsa just before dawn when the flyovers, elevated railroad and underpasses began emerging from the night. They were more impressive than ever as they loomed up. It was easy to be awed by their size and the great engineering skill it took to weave railroad, flyovers and tunnels into smooth working harmonies.

The trouble is, however, that such infrastructure doesn’t work. It will never end our traffic problems, because there are simply too many vehicles and not enough road space. We will continue to use our money unwisely unless we find a way to limit the number of cars.

We drove to the end of Edsa and on to the reclaimed land area off Pasay and Parañaque. Turning left to Macapagal Boulevard (which already has potholes that can injure a car’s chassis), we headed south.
The sheer size of the reclaimed area is breathtaking when compared with the size of our urban poor homes. In one survey done of 800 families in Parola, Manila, we found the average floor area for a family was 13 sq m, but many families had only 8 sq m. Here the idle reclaimed land stretches away as far as the eye can see.

The buildings now standing include the Mall of Asia and clusters of condos. There is a Catholic church and a mosque with poor families camped around it. The newspapers report that hundreds of hectares of this land will be given to gambling casinos and support services. Society must ask: Are Pagcor’s gambling casinos, and more malls and condos the best use our society can find for one of Metro Manila’s last truly large and empty areas? What of the poor? Is there no place for them on this reclaimed land? It would seem so. Government has tried to remove the only poor people on the land at present, the Muslim families around the mosque.

Why can’t some hectares be devoted to fields where poor children can run and play on grass, something most poor children have never experienced? Can 10 percent of the idle land be given to housing the poor? People should ask if gambling casinos are a good way to lessen corruption. They would seem to guarantee that corruption increases in society.

We drove on to the Coastal Road and eventually came to the latest section of the road that is built over water. It is over the water because fishermen and their wives with the help of Urban Poor Associates protested to the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank that the road they were then planning would run straight through the fishing villages. The IFC agreed.
The resulting road is first class. There is a beautiful view of Manila Bay, but there is no place for people to walk, jog or ride a bike alongside the road. Why not? Would it have cost so much more to give the people a chance to feel the breezes, see the lovely sunsets, breathe the fresh air?

When we looked to the left from the road some 100 or so meters to the shoreline, we saw that the houses of the fishermen were as miserable as ever. To the right we could admire the beauty of the bay, but to our left was the same old squalor of the fishermen and their families. The money to upgrade the homes could have been part of the World Bank-IFC loan.
We drove through Maragondon where Andres Bonifacio was tried and found guilty. On a previous trip to Maragondon and the trial house we heard Prof. Xiao Chua of La Salle University claim that Bonifacio’s critics have turned him into a man of violence with few thoughts for the full development of his people. Not so, Chua said, and he talked of his several writings. Along with land and housing, the poor, it seems, have been stripped of their prophets.

The country has had some sad experiences recently in its infrastructure building efforts in addition to its failure to end traffic problems. There were the North and South Rail projects. Some 90,000 families were evicted and relocated, but nothing has apparently been done in the North, and in the South. Five years after relocation began, there is only a commuter train that runs on the old tracks to Alabang and back. Many, if not most of the public-private partnership projects, submitted now to the government for approval are for infrastructure and will involve evictions and relocation. Such proposals should be closely scrutinized.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.

Past and Present Suffering

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:19:00 05/11/2011

PHNOM PENH—Despite its tragic past, Phnom Penh remains a lovely city with wide, tree-lined streets, non-invasive traffic, pastel-colored homes, and the small birds that fill the city with their chatter and song in the early mornings. Very much a part of this peaceful setting are the elderly monks walking along under the trees, barefoot and holding their umbrellas against the sun. The traffic moves at 20 kilometers per hour and there are no horns. I asked a Filipina living there, why the traffic went so slowly and she said it’s because of all the motorbikes: the car drivers’ fear they will injure the bikers if they go faster. In return, it seems, for this kindness the passenger tricycles run almost silently and the young women move along gracefully on their motor bikes. All such beauty goes unnoticed in Edsa’s chaos.

It might seem as if this city, which suffered terribly during the Pol Pot regime, had vowed to have a deep compassion for all its people, including the bikers and the poor. If we are compassionate in small things, we may learn to be compassionate in large matters, the people of Phnom Penh might have thought.

Many seem to have learned that lesson, but not all. The last of 4,000 poor families are now being forcibly ejected by the government and Chinese and local business interests from their homes around Boeungkak Lake. This lake, once a favorite recreation area, is filled now with dirt and sand. There will soon be luxury homes there. Right now it looks like the desolate areas near the ruined reactors of Japan.

Recently we met five women from the lake who will be evicted. They have 19 children among them and are indistinguishable from the women of Metro Manila who are also threatened with eviction—along the R-10 Road, the esteros, Manggahan Floodway, Lupang Arenda and other sites. The Cambodian women have the same fears as the Filipino women about their children’s schooling and family jobs. They don’t know for sure what will happen. It is not a pleasant sight to see real fear for their families in these mature hardworking women’s faces. Eviction brings back too easily the fears of the Pol Pot era.

Those were terrible times in Phnom Penh. I may have met the parents of these women in 1980 when I was able to visit Phnom Penh after the Vietnamese army in 1979 drove Pol Pot out of power. When I was there with Fr. Jorge Anzorena and Francisco “Bimbo” Fernandez the people were returning from the rural areas, “the killing fields” of Cambodia. They had been driven there by Pol Pot, and had suffered terribly. Many were traumatized by their experience. We were told not to talk to people about development, even about cooperatives, since such words sounded like words Pol Pot had used. It seemed the people were half afraid that the hated dictator might just be sitting just around the corner listening to their conversations.

Manila has had its own share of suffering. Some 100,000 Filipinos died in the last battle for Intramuros. A small shrine dedicated to the memory of these people stands within easy walking distance of the Manila Cathedral. Compassion for the poor is very often absent; the government still evicts families in an illegal and often violent manner.

Compassion is an Asian virtue. It is cultivated in a special way by Buddhism, but is also at the heart of Christianity.

People who have suffered greatly like the people of Hiroshima, Warsaw, Rwanda, Intramuros or Cambodia should be respected and allowed to get on with their lives in peace. They have suffered enough. To continue to treat them poorly is a form of profanity, for God has taken its place among them in their suffering.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl. net.

Palawan: beauty and tragic stories

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 07:22:00 07/15/2010

Filed Under: War, history, Massacre

WE WENT to Palawan for the fish and forests and a look at the world as we would like it to be. We found a great deal of that with the help of Bishop Pedro Arigo and Fr. Robert Reyes. I even met, at the end of a long day of snorkeling, a green fish with the Irish flag’s colors on its sides.

We also found the world as it actually is. The island hasn’t escaped the reach of human greed. There are 534 applications pending for mining projects in Palawan. We were told at least 80 of these will be granted. Eighty open pit mines will go a long way to polluting the waters of the island, the forests and beaches. Also Malaysian ships stop illegally in southern Palawan, load up with valuable logs and bring them back home, all with the concurrence of local officials.

We thought there might be less violence in a place so beautiful, but we found that isn’t so. During World War II, for example, Americans, Filipinos and Japanese committed terrible crimes, some of which were so gruesome people are reluctant to talk about them. The stories of these events seem to be connected with one another. Some are clearly historical; others may be not.

The story began for us when Bishop Arigo told us of the massacre of American prisoners of war by the Japanese army in 1944. He told us of the monument to the dead soldiers in downtown Puerto Princesa.

In December 1944 Japanese soldiers, fearing Gen. Mac Arthur’s troops were coming closer, decided to kill the prisoners they kept. They herded the soldiers into air raid shelters, poured gasoline on them, then set them afire. The soldiers who tried to escape were machine gunned, bayoneted or simply clubbed to death. Eleven managed to escape, one at least by diving into the bay.

The site of the massacre is now in the middle of a lovely park, shaded by old acacia and mahogany trees where children play and older students do their homework. In the center of the park, where the air raid shelters were located, there is a monument to the dead: a stone platform holds a statue of an emaciated, bearded prisoner of war struggling to free himself of the barbed wire that coils around him like a snake. The sculptor, Don T. Schloat, was one of the survivors.

For some unknown reason, there has been almost no mention of this massacre in the American or Filipino media, though it is said that what happened there was the massacre of the largest number of American soldiers ever at one time.

Bishop Arigo and the citizens of Puerto Princesa celebrate Mass each year at the monument to pray for the dead soldiers and all who suffered during the war. A person sitting in that park today, listening to the birds and children, cannot imagine the men on fire racing from the air raid shelter to the safety of the bay.

The story continued, according to other narrators, after liberation when Filipino guerrilla fighters and American soldiers rounded up some 300 Japanese sympathizers and dependents (Macabebe) and the few Japanese still left in the city and took them one night to a spot on the highway about 35 kms. to the north of the city and slaughtered them all.

Drivers, including the bishop’s, still blow their horns when they pass that spot. Others throw coins. When we asked the bishop’s driver, Norman, why he blew his horn, he said he didn’t want to meet the woman in white who is sometimes seen at that spot.

We went out along the road to the 35-km mark to see what that area was like. The highway makes big sweeping turns there high above Honda Bay. A driver coming fast downhill might easily misjudge the distance and break through the retaining wall. The ground falls off sharply from the roadside. The tops of tall trees are even with the road. Below is thick underbrush. It is a place the Mafia might pick to get rid of bodies.

We found a group of women, old and young, selling vegetables. Yes, they said, Japanese soldiers were killed near here after the war. Sometimes headless Japanese soldiers block the road, so people cannot pass.

Not everyone in Puerto Princesa believes this story, and yet the drivers still show respect for the dead and seek to appease their ghosts. A lady in white is seen. A laborer who stole a box from that area is said to have brought on many accidents.

On our last day, we saw in a history of the war one final part of the story. Shortly after the war started, 16 Japanese living in Palawan were arrested. They were sent south to a camp near Puerto Princesa in the custody of the police. On the way, they disappeared at Km 37 and were never seen again. Older people in Palawan are reluctant to discuss the role of Filipinos in these stories.

There is unrivalled beauty in Palawan, but be ready for old horror tales, blowing of horns in strange places and women in white.

(Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net)

A Pinoy ‘New Deal’

Inquirer.net

Inquirer Opinion / Columns

Commentary : A Pinoy ‘New Deal’

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: October 18, 2009

MANILA, Philippines-In the days after Ted Kennedy's death, when people discussed his role in American political history, the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt often arose. At first it was just talk, comparing him and Kennedy, but then by some strange providence of the Lord, the man himself came back from the shadows of history. He was seen in Washington, D.C. being pushed about in his wheelchair. The former US president, father of the New Deal program that saved America’s poor in the Great Depression of the 1930s and polio victim, was back from the grave for a brief while. He seemed to enjoy every minute of his return.

He met with President Barack Obama in the White House and with Ted Kennedy’s family. Kennedy was often called “The last of the New Deal Democrats,” that is, those Democrats who worked in season and out of season almost exclusively for the poor.

Then Roosevelt surprised everyone by asking to meet with the candidates for the Philippine presidency. I was in Washington, so I was asked to help gather the candidates. We met in the Philippine Embassy in Washington. There were eight candidates, seven men and a woman. We sat in a semi-circle around his wheelchair.

I told the candidates the little I knew of the former president and his New Deal: When he entered the White House in 1933, some 30 percent of American workers were unemployed; thousands of small farms were foreclosed monthly; unions were beaten down and ineffective; and Wall Street reeled out of control. Roosevelt turned this situation upside down. He started Social Security for the old and handicapped, strengthened labor unions, saved the small farms, created jobs, controlled the banks and financiers, and effectively restored the American people’s faith in their country.

What I didn’t tell the candidates because I didn’t know how the old president would react was that critics say he brought class struggle between the rich and the poor into American politics. He said he was simply restoring justice.

“Yes,” said Roosevelt, when I finished, “and anyone of you can do the same for the Philippines and even more. I know something about the Philippines. I signed the law that created the Commonwealth. I oversaw MacArthur’s return. It wasn’t all his doing, was it? But you know all that history better than I do, so let’s talk instead of what may be more relevant, namely, our program of government in the 1930s that came to be called the ‘New Deal,’ and its usefulness in today’s Philippines. What was it, or better, what is it, since ideas are timeless? The New Deal comes down to this: we gather state power for the benefit of all citizens, but especially for the poor and handicapped. I think the Philippines needs something very much like it.”

I could see he was enjoying himself. “I have a test,” he told them, “that will help me judge who among you is most likely to introduce a New Deal-type program in your country. I’m looking for someone who is clever, passionate for the poor and lucky. I’m dead, but I can still help that person and I will. Here is the test.”

He told us there was going to be a great flood in Manila in a month or so. Hundreds of thousands would be affected. The poor living along the waterways would be blamed for the flooding and many would be banished. The rich—government officials, developers and loggers—who really did the damage would not be touched. There would be widespread hunger. Then he asked, “What will you do as a candidate when this flood occurs?”

The candidates took a few minutes to think and then one after another they told him what they would do. Roosevelt listened and at the end said, “I’m disappointed. I don’t see anything like a New Deal political analysis in your thinking. For example, who’s to blame for the floods? The poor or the rich and powerful? Don’t let them blame the poor. Blame the rich and let the poor know you are on their side in the controversy, and will be on their side as president.”

The candidates were taken aback by his criticism. “Well, what would you do?” one of them asked.

He answered, “Do you agree nothing will change unless the Philippines gets a government that acknowledges its existence to the 60-70 percent of the voters who are poor and near poor, and makes them its special and favored constituency?”

The candidates nodded in agreement. Roosevelt was happy now that he had his audience agreeing. He put a cigarette in his long black cigarette holder and lit it. Strange, though, we couldn’t smell the smoke. He went on: “In the case of the floods, I would go to the affected people and ask them what they want me and my partymates to do for them in the flood crisis. When they tell us what they want, I’d go and do it, at least, I’d try. I’d fight government efforts to evict the squatters. I’d be in the courts and in the front lines when the police came to evict them. I’d picket with the poor outside the grain bodegas if there were no food.”

He said, “Some will accuse you of electioneering, but the poor won’t and their allegiance is all you need. You must, however, be sincere. The poor will spot faking.

“I’d make sure the poor people are aware that I know what their problems are and that I really care what happens to them. In the meantime before the election, I’d spend my money to bring in earth-moving equipment to clean up the city streets and to remove the mud from the homes. I’d buy new clothes for the children and the women. The men, too, of course, but women and children first. I’d work alongside the men in the mud. I’d treat the poor women as the saints they are. We are in a democracy in the Philippines and in a democracy the majority rules, but it must be aware of its power and take advantage of that power. In democracies reform comes through the ballots of the poor.”

The candidates were writing everything down feverishly.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net.