Philippines: Cha-cha Armageddon

This is from the Daily Tribune (Manila)
As usual the Tribune is ratcheting up the rhetoric against the Arroyo government. It is true though the Arroyo seems bound and determined to introduce charter change even though there is tremendous popular resistance to it at this time. However, she still has lots of support in the house if not in senate. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will let her take a joint vote on issues rather than separate votes which would doom her plans.


Cha-cha Armageddon
EDITORIAL

12/05/2008
Gloria Arroyo may soon find that barricading herself in Malacañang with all the container van shells she can muster would not stop the public outrage against her inveterate aspiration to tinker with the Constitution to allow herself political perpetuity.
The building protest against Charter change (Cha-cha) and the last ditch move for political perpetuity would be a battle between Gloria and her cabal and likely the rest of the Filipinos who have made it known not only once, but much too many times, their opposition to amending the Constitution.
It would be a sort of a biblical Armageddon in which the final battle between the forces of good and evil will be fought.
And everybody knows who the evil is.
While Gloria’s House coven was hastily disposing of the impeachment charges against her, the Cha-cha train was already starting to move with the filing of resolutions calling for it, along with moves to form a Constituent assembly with the Supreme Court (SC) being asked to rule on whether the proposal for Congress to vote as one on the Con-ass proposal falls under the Constitution.
Gloria and her House cabal are confident that the SC will be ruling in their favor — meaning the high court will rule that the Senate and the House are to vote as a single body — mainly because by then, the SC will be packed by grateful Gloria appointees.
The current Cha-cha supposedly is a move to amend economic provisions in the Constitution to allow a more liberal investment climate but on the wings is the proposal to install a parliamentary or a federal system of government and the abolition of the Senate, which will usher the eligibility of Gloria under a parliamentary/federal form of government.
The mere idea that the minions of the Palace seem not to discriminate whether the issue is to put up a parliamentary or a federal system just so Gloria is given a loophole to political perpetuity gives away the true intent of Cha-cha.
The Constitution is constantly under siege during Gloria’s presidency and for good reason since most of the circumstances that led Gloria’s assumption to power were not exactly constitutional.
Already, among the most charismatic figures in the country, former President Joseph Estrada and evangelist Brother Mike Velarde have indicated mustering their followers to assemble protest actions against Cha-cha.
The Palace has been gingerly piloting the Cha-cha Express denying that Gloria has any extraordinary interest in it while her allies and her offspring in the House are moving heaven and earth to crank up the movement to full steam.
Both Estrada and Brother Mike have warned that efforts to ram through Cha-cha using the sheer force of numbers in Congress would be complemented with a show of numbers on the streets.
Gloria has seduced most in Congress into doing all her biddings to counteract her nearly complete loss of support from the people who supposedly elected her to the presidency in 2004.
It was the same controlled Congress that proclaimed her into the second stolen term in the dead of the night on June 24, 2004.
In the eight years of being in power, Gloria has proven herself to be a dismal president and leader to the country but she had perfected the politics of patronage and accommodation which are pivotal to her in maintaining her adhesive cling to power.
Having acquired two stolen terms, Gloria appears poised to stretch her luck and try for number three to infinity.
The willingness of members of the House to be used as tools in fulfilling an insatiable lust for power gives credence to an emerging call to have it, instead of the Senate, dissolved if ever the time comes that a credible effort to reform the Constitution is made.
Clearly the equation, as in sometime ago in the country’s dark history of strong-arm rule, are the people against Gloria and her cabal in Congress in the clash over Cha-cha.
A battle between good and evil.
Thus far, evil has been winning. But for how long?