Chapter 6: G&B

 

•  In First year of President Aquino's Administration, symptoms of popular disenchantment were already perceptible in the military and the civilian sectors.
  
  
   These symptoms were manifested through acts of widespread protest especially in the grater Manila Area.
  
   The hardliners, for instance, chastised other leftist for failing to understand the pressure that pre-determined Mrs. Aquino's unabashed sell-out.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  Vice President Laurel recalled that an exchange of letters between two camps... Laurel said Pilar Victoria, that President Cory did not simply turn, right, but that she had always been ideologically circumscribed by the politics of the right.
  
    Laurel said Victoria concluded that the critical collaboration scheme of some left-leaning groups smacked.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• President Aquino also failed to convince the left that she was serious in her reformist rhetoric... The series of attacks against the left -- The Mendiola Massacre, the Olalia murder, the kumander Dante ambush, the Lean Alejandro assassination - did not seem to bother the President...
  
   Laurel said the nonchalance with which Mrs. Aquino responded to these brutal crimes only manifested her token accommodation of the left. Ironically, Tadeo, Olalia, Dante, and Alejandro were willing to talk and negotiate above ground.
  
   Olalia - had some good and interesting ideas about effecting better labor-management relations worth listening to.
   Buscayno; the former head of the NPA, explored the possibilities of change by dropping the armed struggle.
   UP Student leader Alejandro staked his revolutionary vision on electoral contest with unfeeling centrism, President Cory merely rebuffed them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  Over the right, according to Laurel, the scrounging for the spoils was more vicious. Joker Arroyo fought tooth and nail with corporate vanguards.
  
  
  
  
  
  
   Arroyo complained that members of the business community were continuously badgering Malacañang for concessions, sometimes bypassing him, in order to strike secret deals with President Aquino.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  President Cory Aquino's Cabinet was also perpetually divided over the debt issue. It could not work as a team...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  Dr. Benardino A. Perez, former undersecretary for policy planning & International Science relations in the Aquino administration recalled in an interview... that what proved to be the most destabilizing and paralyzing...
  
    Former Trade Secretary Luis Villafuerte, who was also on the committee, told this writer earlier that despite the buck-passing and confusion that followed when Aquino abolished the 1973 constitution and wrecked the entire Marcos bureaucracy, the committee nevertheless produced 18 volumes of documents on how to reorganize the Aquino government and make it responsive to the people.
  
   The Aquino bureaucracy swelled to 1.6 million employees from Marcos' 900,000 (1986) plantilla positions...
  
   As a result, the government's budget for personnel services in 1986 of only Php 22.6 billion had grown more than three times to Php 74 billion in 1991.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  As revealed by Senator Enrile on September 22, 1990 there were 34 cabinet secretaries, 188 undersecretaries, and 900 assistant secretaries in the Aquino cabinet.
  
   By comparison, it was, and may still be, the biggest cabinet in Southeast Asia or probably the world.
  
   Despite this huge bureaucracy, the Aquino government failed to present a national agenda for the country's major problems.
   Critics from her government have characterized it as "a government by trial and error" or as an "adhocracy" or one that resorted to day-to-day damage control instead of formulating short-term and long-term...
  
   "Adhocracy" - are corporate executive and public administration expert defines the word, means a government that resorts to "patch-work" and "last-minute" solutions.
  
   To be more specific, her government drew up a counter insurgency plan only after then Vice President Salvador Laurel, Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile, Col. Gregorio Honasan called the Aquino administration's attention to the lack of such a plan.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
•  Among the issues raised by the farmers before the Mendiola carnage was the control of Hacienda Luisita by President Aquino's family which was later exposed by Senator Enrile on the floor of the senate.
  
   Enrile said the Cojuancos, taking undue advantage of the awesome powers of the presidency, made sure that the hacienda was not subdivided among the farm tenants through midnight decree, Executive Order No. 229 issued by the President herself, it allowed absolute control of the hacienda to the prejudice of the farmers.