If the President goes ahead with his half-serious offer to declare Thursday a holiday for the benefit of anti-martial law activists, we can expect some colorful sights again at this year’s commemoration of the declaration of martial law in 1972.
The dominant color will be red, of course, as the Left parades the colors of an ideology that has long shrunk to just two countries in the world: Cuba (but wait until Raul Castro starts getting real chummy with the newly-reopened US Embassy in Havana) and North Korea (at least until the pudgy little peacock at its helm is overthrown by a combination of US/South Korean artillery and air power and a China-inspired palace coup, our base-case scenario).
Not far behind will be the yellows, whose colors are fading even faster than the reds. At least the Left can boast of giants of the peasant and working-class struggles, like Crisanto Evangelista, Pedro Abad Santos, the Lava and Taruc brothers. Who hoists the yellow colors—Cory and Noynoy Aquino? Eeew.
Trying to keep up at the very end of the line are the nearly-forgotten military adventurists like the Magdalo, whose braggadocio has been deflated like so much hot air by a series of failed coups over the years. Intellects diminish while egos inflate the farther back the line you go, until you run up against the likes of Trillanes and Alejano, our own versions of “the mouths that roared.”
This motley crew is now throwing up one “multisectoral group” after another, like the “Movement Against Tyranny” or the latest one, “#Tinig Pilipinas.” The same tired threnody of xenophobia, class envy, and victimhood is simply repackaged into catchier slogans. The older the wine gets, the shinier the wineskins become. You can almost set your watch by the reliability of this chronology every 21st of September.
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The latest development involving the beleaguered PNP almost surprised me out of my seat. But you can bet that the boys and girls with their placards and streamers either missed it or willfully ignored it.
I’m talking about the decision of the redoubtable head of Metro Manila’s police, NCRPO Director Oscar Albayalde, to relieve no less than the entire police force of Caloocan City.
Yes, all 3,500 policemen from that now-notorious city are now looking for assignments elsewhere. But this doesn’t include the suspects behind the killings of teen-agers Kian, Carl, and Kulot, as well as other monitored crimes like robberies committed during household raids. Unluckily for them, reassignment will be the least of their worries.
So far not a single policeman from elsewhere in Metro Manila has volunteered for replacement duty in Caloocan. This can be ascribed to the natural solidarity of men (and women) in uniform with each other. But the problem can be fixed by simply identifying likely replacements and then ordering them to obey orders.
Even during the martial law years, I don’t remember a similar case of such draconian discipline of an entire police force en masse. Of course, the extent of the rot inside the Caloocan organization probably justifies the severity of an action that is simultaneously preventive, reformative, and punitive.
Our hat goes off to P/Director Albayalde. Since the vast majority of drug-related crimes take place in Metro Manila, he deserves our best wishes.
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Another kudos, albeit hedged, goes to the much-maligned LTFRB on their latest attempt to properly regulate transport network vehicles like Uber and Grab.
It may be recalled that this agency started by suspending the operations of Uber for a month, went on to urge commuters to use other TNVs (in blatant violation of the law), and then ended by imposing a very steep fine of P190 million on Uber before they could do business again.
The real loser in every single move they made was the riding public, who’re supposed to be the first object of LTFRB’s loyalty as a government agency. To this day I still can’t figure out what drove this agency to such irrational behavior: hubris, thick skin, peanut-sized brains, or all of the above.
However, they may have finally redeemed themselves with their latest decision: To increase the pricing on taxicab meters so that taxicabs can effectively charge the same as the TNVs.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will happen next. Like lemmings, the riding public will migrate en masse to TNVs, whether it is Uber, Grab, or other new operators who can offer the same quality of service: Clean and new vehicles, clean and polite drivers, on-time pick-up without ever being turned down, even the convenience of credit-card payments.
The only way the taxicab operators can hold on to their business is to improve their own operations and clean up their act. It will be a repeat of the “cellular wars” decades ago, when fossilized landline giant PLDT lost its shirt to mobile operators like upstart Smart and then Globe and Sun.
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There is, however, a big caveat in all of this: The LTFRB must NOT unreasonably restrict the freedom of the TNVs to add vehicles and drivers and expand operations in order to meet rising demand. Otherwise the purpose of the entire reform is defeated. The riding public will end up stuck with the same shoddy taxicab service, BUT at much higher cost.
Despite past evidence to the contrary, we don’t think LTFRB would be that hare-brained, ham-handed, or short-sighted. Even God in His heaven above can’t possibly think we deserve such a fate.
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