Saturday, April 20, 2013

Philippine Mafia in Politics - the Circus is back in town




The Philippine politicians (and mundane media people) call our political clans a Dynasty.

I beg to disagree. The right term is Mafia.

The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid 1800s in Sicily, Italy. Their common enterprise - protection racketeering. Every clan claims sovereignty on a territory where it operates various rackets ranging from money laundering to prostitution. A mafia engages in any illegal financial trade.

With that said, I vehemently disagree with calling our political clans a dynasty. Based on etymological definition, a dynasty is a sequence of rulers from the same family. However, dynasties are akin to affluence, influence, prominence and monarchical in class.

Most of our political clans have no class. Through some devious means, they have cajoled themselves into fame and fortune by using and usurping power through various ways.

The Estradas and Ejercitos are an example. By the power of the sperm of Erap, aside from bastardizing the political scenery, he has even put real-life bastards into political positions. And the restless masses go into a frenetic chant for Erap, Estrada or Ejercito.

Every three years, Philippine politics becomes a cavalcade. It's like waiting for the circus to come to town where the spectators eagerly await for all the clowns, acrobats, magicians and animals to give the best performance of this once in a lifetime show.

This year promises to be a repeat performance for all the mafias in the political arena in the Philippines. And nothing surpasses our show where celebrities and those mentally challenged or should I say, incompetent, have nothing better to boast than their wealth, their family name, their movie accomplishments, their endorsements and other quad media commercials, or that they're in the Philippines' top taxpayer list.

Let's stick to the obvious. Those that run for politics in this country do it not for love of nation but for propagating the spirit of creating a business enterprise where the children eventually inherit the earth, where the businesses in the local government units or the country are run by them or their relatives, where the promises during a campaign are left at that - empty promises. After the election, they go back to doing what they best do - steal, cheat, and lie. They have no cerebral capacity to even run a household but promise to run the senate!

Those who toil day and night and have the BIR check our income tax returns to the last digit (like me) don't even see the taxes we pay at work. The poor are still poor or poorer. The roads are dilapidated. There are more taxes in the form of expanded value added taxes. The streets are riddled with traffic enforcers who don't do anything except run after number coding cars. Public transportation is the pits in this country. It's not really what is right that's implemented but whom you know that gets their individual economies running.

This coming election is just another farcical exercise in futility. Unless every Filipino exercises the true meaning of a democratic election and intelligent electorate, we just go through another three years of some mafia or clown running this country.

In the end, we're actually to blame. Media in the Philippines, in all its true sense of owing it to the public has its own share of conflict of interest. After all, it's the money in the end that matters to all.

And that's why it's time to either migrate or prepare for a revolution.

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