A Performative Nation in a Hollow Republic: The Philippines as a Comfortable Cage

A Performative Nation in a Hollow Republic:
The Philippines as a Comfortable Cage

In this continuing past, the Philippines finds itself caught between the promises of nationhood and the reality of its contradictions. Nationalism, democracy, freedom, and pacifism—examples of ideals long invoked as attributes of the Republic—persist more as symbols than as living principles. They are rehearsed in ceremonies, slogans, and civic rituals, yet often fail to take root in the hard ground of social justice, sovereignty, and solidarity. What remains is a nation skilled in performance but uncertain in substance, a republic that exists more in form than in strength.

This hollowing has produced a peculiar atmosphere: one of resilience mistaken for power, contentment mistaken for freedom, peace mistaken for justice. Filipinos are taught to endure rather than to transform, to take pride in survival rather than in sovereignty. The result is a “comfortable cage,” where dependency and compliance are softened by rituals of pride, where the nation appears vibrant on the surface but remains bound to the very structures that prevent its emancipation.

A web of unresoved questions

For sometimes, Filipinos remain caught in a web of unresolved questions: which value should truly stand at the core of our identity as a people? Is it nationalism—the proud assertion of sovereignty rooted in centuries of resistance? Is it democracy—the promise that's reclaimed, fragile yet celebrated as the people’s triumph? Is it freedom—the word most cherished, yet also most misunderstood, often collapsing into individualism? Or is it pacifism—the instinct to endure, to keep peace even at the cost of justice, a habit born from survival through conquest and crisis?

After decades past, these questions remain unsettled. Years like 1898, 1946, 1986, heck even 2001 was supposed to provide clarity, a moral compass to guide nation-building. Instead, it opened a space where ideals jostle with one another, competing for primacy but never reconciling into a coherent vision. Each generation inherits the same unresolved debate: nationalism is invoked but rarely practiced, democracy is praised yet constantly undermined, freedom is prized but shallow, and pacifism sustains resilience but also breeds paralysis.

In this unsettled state, the Filipino identity itself seems suspended—torn between competing ideals, unable to decide which truly deserves to be the foundation of a nation still struggling to define its place in the world.

When nationalism is meant to display

Nationalism is often invoked during moments of crisis. It appeals to the Filipino’s shared history of resistance—our forebears’ defiance against Spain in 1896, the unfinished revolution interrupted by American colonization, the guerilla struggles against Japanese occupation, and the collective courage that toppled a dictatorship in 1986. Each time, nationalism flared up as a unifying cry, a reminder that the nation could stand together against oppression.

Yet outside of these moments of upheaval, nationalism has become largely ornamental. It is performed in parades, ritualized in flag ceremonies, and repeated in slogans, but rarely translated into the hard work of economic independence, institution-building, or the pursuit of genuine sovereignty. Instead, it has been hollowed out, reduced to symbols of pride disconnected from deeper change. 

At times, nationalism even becomes consumerist—a marketing label attached to products branded as “proudly Filipino” regardless of who profits from them, or a corporate slogan that substitutes for real investment in the nation’s future. It is also channeled into vicarious victories: the euphoria over beauty queens, athletes, or singers who “put the Philippines on the map” often becomes a substitute for addressing structural failures at home. Overseas labor, meanwhile, is celebrated as the “modern-day heroism” of OFWs, yet this rhetoric masks the uncomfortable truth that labor migration reflects the country’s lack of self-sustaining opportunities. Pride, in these instances, risks becoming a cover for dependence rather than a step toward self-reliance. 

Thus, nationalism comforts but does not confront. It offers sentiment rather than strategy, performance rather than program. It celebrates fragments of cultural pride but avoids the difficult, necessary work of shaping an economy and politics that could stand on their own.

In the end, nationalism remains ornamental: a display of pride that consoles a people with symbols while leaving the nation vulnerable to dependence, division, and drift.

Democracy: still fragile, shallow

Democracy, meanwhile, was the great promise of EDSA: a collective voice reclaiming power from tyranny, a nation insisting that sovereignty resides in the people. It was supposed to be the corrective to dictatorship—a return to institutions, accountability, and participatory governance. In the euphoria of 1986, democracy was imagined as the foundation of renewal, the system that would finally allow Filipinos to chart their own future.

Yet in practice, democracy here remains fragile and shallow. It has been captured by personalities and dynasties, reducing politics to a family enterprise where surnames matter more than platforms. Campaigns are dominated by celebrity appeal, regional loyalties, and patronage networks rather than programmatic visions of change. Elections—while regular and often lively—become spectacles of popularity, money, and manipulation. The people participate, but rarely decide in meaningful terms; choices are structured by entrenched elites who monopolize both resources and narratives. In recent years, this fragility has deepened. The rise of social media has made disinformation a powerful political weapon, spreading lies faster than truth and reshaping public opinion through engineered narratives. Instead of fostering informed citizens, the digital sphere often amplifies division and manipulation. Political discourse, once confined to rallies and debates, is now waged through algorithms and troll farms, drowning out reason with noise. 

At the same time, nostalgia for strongman rule has crept back into public life. Disillusioned with the slow grind of democratic institutions, many Filipinos long for decisive leadership—even at the cost of accountability and rights. This yearning reveals the shallow roots of democracy: when institutions fail to deliver justice and prosperity, authoritarian solutions regain their appeal.

Thus, the democracy born decades oast still struggles to mature. It has given Filipinos the form of choice but not always the substance of power. It risks becoming a stage where old elites and new demagogues alike perform under the guise of democracy, while the people are left with spectacle instead of sovereignty.

Freedom: a celebrated word "taken for granted"

Freedom is perhaps the most celebrated word in the Filipino vocabulary, the legacy of 1986 and earlier struggles for independence. It is spoken of with pride, remembered as the people’s triumph over tyranny, and held up as proof that the nation could reclaim its destiny. Freedom is seen as the highest prize of the Filipino spirit—something for which generations sacrificed their lives.

But in practice, freedom here too often collapses into individualism. It becomes less about collective empowerment and more about the pursuit of personal survival, comfort, or expression—even at the expense of community. For many, freedom means “minding one’s own business,” carving out a private space of safety or opportunity while leaving the larger social fabric frayed. It is prized, but responsibility is neglected. This tendency has deepened in the contemporary era. 

Civil rights, like Freedom of speech and the press, once a hard-won right, is now exercised carelessly in a digital landscape flooded with misinformation, harassment, and polarized noise. The ideal of free expression, meant to safeguard truth and accountability, is frequently twisted into the freedom to spread lies or attack others without consequence. The democratic promise of a marketplace of ideas is undermined by the unchecked power of algorithms that reward outrage over reason. 

Even political freedom risks being hollowed out. Voting is celebrated as the ultimate exercise of liberty, yet when elections are driven by patronage, dynasty, or disinformation, choice becomes an illusion, worse, driven by the material perks than as exercise in the right to choose. Freedom here is procedural, not transformative. 

Economic freedom, meanwhile, is heavily emphasized, especially in a government whose continuing past has meant reinforcing the feudal order with capitalist efficiency. The landlord has simply become a “manager,” wages remain low, yet prices are still unaffordable. The push for “foreign investment” often requires immense concessions to foreign interests, reducing sovereignty to bargaining chips. And yet this is paraded as progress, as if “economic freedom” under these terms is the ideal the people should accept. In truth, this is the freedom that the current corrupt order wants—one that benefits elites while sacrificing social justice. It has also become synonymous with mobility: the right to seek work abroad, to migrate, to find opportunity wherever it may exist. While this has given many families a lifeline, it also reflects a painful paradox—that Filipinos often find their sense of freedom not at home but in leaving the country. The state celebrates this migration as “heroism,” but in reality, it reveals a society unable to sustain its own citizens. 

Thus, freedom in the Philippines often functions as escape rather than engagement. It allegedly "liberates" the individual but weakens the collective. It offers the semblance of dignity, but without the discipline and responsibility needed to strengthen community and nation. In the end, freedom remains cherished in rhetoric but dangerously incomplete in practice—an inheritance treasured, but not fully understood or nurtured.

Pacifism: another word for choosing silence and compliance?

Pacifism, finally, runs deep in the Filipino psyche. It is the instinct to avoid confrontation, to endure hardship with patience, to keep the peace even at the cost of justice. It comes from a long history of survival—centuries of colonization, repeated cycles of disaster, poverty, and political upheaval—that conditioned the Filipino to “make do” rather than to fight back. This instinct has created the much-praised trait of resilience, celebrated in media as the ability to smile through calamity. But behind the smile often lies resignation.

In everyday life, this pacifism appears in the refusal to “interfere” with others’ problems, even when intervention could mean solidarity. It manifests as the habit of choosing silence in the face of abuse or corruption, rationalized as “ayaw ko ng gulo” (“I don’t want trouble”). While this instinct preserves harmony, it also enables impunity: wrongdoers thrive because few dare to challenge them. In politics, the same pattern holds. Filipinos often endure the failures of government with gritted teeth, adapting to dysfunction rather than demanding accountability. Leaders exploit this patience, knowing that outrage will eventually fade into acceptance. 

The rhetoric of peace is used to soften resistance, while citizens are told to be content with “resilience” instead of real reform. Even in foreign relations, this pacifist instinct has consequences. The desire to avoid conflict has made the Philippines pliant to stronger powers, especially the West. Whereas Nationalism, stripped of strategic will, is reduced to symbolic gestures, while in practice the state concedes immense ground to foreign interests—whether in trade, military agreements, or resource exploitation. “Keeping the peace” becomes the excuse for dependence. Just imagine: to say “proudly Filipino made” often means products assembled by Filipino hands but under brands owned by multinationals and local oligarchs. Labor remains cheap, wages are kept low, and authorities preach “industrial peace” while suppressing workers who demand fairness in pay and workplace conditions. 

In matters of national defense, the contrast is stark. While the Philippines runs toward the West for protection, neighbors like Vietnam and Indonesia—and even the so-called “rebel province” Taiwan—have rolled up their sleeves to build credible self-defense. They “protect the peace” on their own terms, while the Philippines too often delegates its sovereignty, content to be shielded by others if not claiming "it is their problem" as basis to justify their imagined peace.

What is celebrated as a peaceful character can, in truth, become a dangerous complacency. Pacifism sustains survival, but it also breeds compliance. It allows systemic injustice to persist unchallenged and reduces sovereignty to accommodation. The Filipino prides themselves on endurance, but endurance alone does not build a nation. Until this instinct for peace is transformed into active solidarity—peace rooted in justice, not silence—pacifism will remain a strength that doubles as a weakness.

"A Comfortable Cage"

Altogether, these contradictions create an atmosphere that suffocates genuine nation-building—a comfortable cage whose atmosphere is that of performativism, contentment, and dependence. It is the air the Filipino breathes daily: rituals of pride and resilience, slogans of democracy and freedom, ceremonies of peace and harmony, all projected outward as if to convince the world, and ourselves, that the nation is strong and whole. Yet beneath the surface lies an inconvenient truth: the country’s strength is fragile, its independence compromised, its ideals hollowed out.

Nationalism exists, but too often it is nationalism that bends to the whims of the oppressor. It survives in parades, mottos, and “Filipino pride” moments, while the economy, defense, and culture remain entangled in dependence on foreign powers and local elites. 

Democracy is performed with enthusiasm—ballots cast, speeches made, candidates cheered—but it is democracy stripped of substance, where dynasties monopolize power, money buys loyalty, and justice is unevenly applied. It is a democracy that entertains, but rarely emancipates. 

Freedom, celebrated as the crowning legacy of revolutions and uprisings, has become a thin veneer for exploitation. It is invoked to justify the free flow of capital, goods, and labor, but in practice it means the freedom of oligarchs, landlords, and corporations to profit—while ordinary Filipinos remain shackled by poverty and precarity. 

Pacifism, lauded as peace-loving resilience, too often masks passivity and dependence. It is the instinct to endure instead of resist, to avoid conflict even at the cost of dignity. The rhetoric of “resilience” and “keeping the peace” has become a tool to pacify demands for justice, ensuring that exploitation remains unchallenged. 

Taken together, these ideals—once the promises of a renewed nation—now risk becoming shadows of themselves. They soothe, but they do not empower. They inspire, but they do not transform. The Philippines presents itself as a nation of proud, free, democratic, peace-loving people, but the lived reality reveals a harsher picture: a people asked to be proud without sovereignty, free without justice, democratic without equality, and peaceful without strength.

Until these contradictions are confronted—not with rituals, but with real structural change—nation-building will remain stalled in this limbo: trapped between the story the Philippines tells about itself, and the truth it cannot escape.

Of Walls and Wails: The Unbroken Yearning for Justice in Palestine

Of Walls and Wails: The Unbroken Yearning for Justice in Palestine

Whereas the Jew stands before the Western Wall, whispering with fervent devotion, “Next year in Jerusalem,” the Palestinian Arab faces a different monument: the cold, gray concrete of the West Bank barrier and at Gaza strip, a jagged scar slicing through ancestral lands. This wall, bristling with barbed wire, stands as a mute witness to dispossession, its every block a testament to homes, orchards, and fields wrested away by the Zionist project decades ago. As a writer who has walked these lands as a pilgrim, this writer have stood before this barrier and felt its weight—not just of stone and steel, but of lives interrupted. In its shadow, one can almost hear the quiet, unyielding cries of those yearning to return, their voices rising like prayers, not from ancient shrines alone but from the hearts of the displaced. 

This concrete barrier, for many, has become a new Wailing Wall, its surface a canvas of anguish and defiance. Graffiti and murals—declarations of freedom, pleas for return, demands for dignity—scar its expanse, each spray-painted word a sacred cry as potent as any whispered at Jerusalem’s ancient stones. These are not mere slogans but the weight of generations denied their place, a secular yet hallowed echo of “Next year in Jerusalem,” urgent and unyielding. The wall is more than a physical divide; it is a monument to absence, to longing, and to a human will that refuses erasure. 

In Gaza, this same longing finds a fiercer voice, piercing the blackouts and enforced silences that seek to smother it. The UN’s declaration of famine, gripping 2.1 million souls since late August 2025, lays bare the scale of suffering. Yet the Palestinian multitudes—deemed expendable in the occupier’s ledger—roar for justice with a ferocity that drowns out crafted narratives. Every iron sword, brandished as “defense,” rusts under the flood of righteous anger. In Gaza City, where 51 lives were snuffed out in 48 hours of airstrikes on residential havens between September 19 and 20, 2025, and 85 more fell in the days that followed, the dispossessed refuse to forget each crater, each sniper’s taunt from the watchtowers. A UN commission’s searing verdict names this not mere war, but a systematic annihilation of Palestinian life, etched in rubble and resolve. 

Should any soul ask, “Is this biblical?” let no scripture’s verse obscure the raw truth: the starved, the cornered, the dispossessed do not yearn in vain. As Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 2025, from a U.S.-imposed video-link exile, “We will not break.” From the West Bank’s graffitied barrier to Gaza’s bombarded streets, the cries for justice—whether whispered in prayer or scrawled in defiance—are the pulse of a people who endure. The walls, both ancient and modern, bear witness not to myth but to the living, who demand the world heed their flood of hope and rage. 

Policing the Lens: Press Freedom Under Threat During the September 21 Protests

Policing the Lens: Press Freedom Under Threat

During the September 21 Protests

The events that unfolded during the September 21 protests in Manila are more than just a cause for concern—they reflect a deep and dangerous disregard for the very freedoms that authorities are sworn to uphold. Reports and images from the ground reveal not policemen “maintaining peace and order,” but rather forces acting with intimidation and hostility toward those documenting the truth.

Several photojournalists were reportedly ordered by authorities to “stop taking pictures,” with one officer even brandishing his baton toward a photographer while issuing threats. Such actions are starkly at odds with the constitutional guarantees of free press and free expression—rights that are most crucial in moments of civic unrest and public dissent. Instead of ensuring accountability, these acts of obstruction and intimidation cast a chilling effect, sending a message that truth-telling is punishable when it displeases those in power.

Authorities, in their eagerness to “restore order,” appear to have forgotten that the law not only grants them authority but also limits it. Their duty is not to suppress, but to safeguard rights—even, and especially, in times of protest. Yet what has been on display is the opposite: a display of power that prioritizes image over integrity, and control over accountability.

It is unsurprising that such incidents “tarnish the image” of law enforcement. But the greater danger is that these actions betray their sworn role, reducing them from protectors of peace to enforcers of fear. The deployment of tear gas and even the reported use of live ammunition against protesters—dismissively labeled “rioters”—further underscores the peril of unchecked power.

The right to protest, the right to document, and the right to speak freely are not privileges to be granted or withdrawn at the whim of those in uniform. They are fundamental human rights. And when authorities treat the press as enemies and peaceful assembly as a crime, they reveal themselves not as guardians of law and order, but as adversaries of democracy itself and as consolidators of entrenched interests in power. 

“After Dragged Through the Streets: The Riot the Elites Ignored”

 “After Dragged Through the Streets: The Riot the Elites Ignored”

In the aftermath of the Mendiola clash, a deeper truth emerged. The state and its surrogates had painted the detained protesters as “paid actors” or “used pawns,” stripped of agency, dismissed as expendable. The police swept through the smoke-choked streets like a merciless tide, dragging protesters into vans as onlookers whispered and pointed fingers. The riot was over before the world could catch its breath, yet none of the so-called organizers, none of the social media saviors, lifted a finger to help. 

It was not their supposed “users” who came to the rescue. But instead, were activist-lawyers—quiet, fearless, stubborn—someone who had spent years fighting for human rights. Risking reputation and security, these lawyers cut through red tape and fear, saving one rioter from the maw of the state. In that moment, politics, loyalty, and ideology meant nothing. What mattered was principle: no one deserved to be abandoned to a corrupt system. 

The irony was brutal. The detainee might have been a supporter of Duterte or some "gangster", someone easily dismissed by liberal opinion-makers and Marcos Loyalists, heck, even Duterte Supporters  as a pawn or a troublemaker, even a "communist". But in that moment, politics, party loyalty, and ideology meant nothing. Principle alone mattered: no one deserved to be abandoned to a corrupt system. 

No one should be surprised. The events at EDSA was filled with the well-off, the respectable crowd, the ones who still say “just stick to the topic” while sipping coffee and scrolling their feeds. But Luneta and Mendiola were different. These weren’t polite rallies with themed shirts and photogenic sound bites. These were the angry, the dispossessed, the ones who want to tear out the roots of the system — and its ringleaders, whether they sit on the throne or rant about their own relevance in leadership.

Corruption and injustice here aren’t subtle. They’re blatant, like neon on a rainy night. And in the smoke and stones of the street, irony and provocation become weapons. What Limonov once called outrageousness and detachment isn’t just theater anymore — it’s a survival tactic, a way to puncture the liberal-conservative establishment and its ritual hypocrisies

Meanwhile, the liberal elites were fast to proclaim: “We weren’t there. We were at EDSA!” And they were right. The posh activists, the boardroom radicals, the "armchair revolutionaries", had indeed stayed far from the mud and blood of Mendiola. The class divide was glaring. They refused the poor. They refused the “uneducated,” the “non-tax-payers,” the “squammies” and “addicts.” They feared the force the poor could become, a force capable of shattering the very order the elites cherished—the gated villages, the polished boardrooms, the matcha lattes and the self-proclaimed "civil society".  Their comforts and privileges are built on the broken backs of the poorest Filipinos. That is why they fear the poor—and why the poor will one day sweep them aside. 

To be fair, it’s easy to see why the critics play it safe. It’s their discretion, their livelihood, their families. But to downplay the riots is cringe. These are not just “paid pawns” or “supporters of Duterte” being ferried to jail; they are human beings risking arrest and death in full view of a state that does not blink. The question of who funds them or what they believe becomes secondary when batons swing and bullets fly. 

Some even seem to be daring the state to finish them — a kind of reckless courage echoing Jakarta or in Kathmandu. In Mendiola, among the banners and makeshift shields, a few waved Straw Hat Pirates flags as if declaring, in the open, “yes to death.” It was gallows humor and defiance at once, a performance that made their point clearer than any speech: they would not beg for legitimacy from the people who had already stolen their future.

The legal rescue of a single rioter also exposes a deeper hypocrisy. Corruption is not only theft of public funds. It is the corrosion of public morality: the manipulation of citizens for political theater, the calculated abandonment of those very citizens once cameras are off. Saving even one life in such a system is a quiet rebellion, a refusal to participate in the politics of disposal. 

Such moments pry open the question of legitimacy. If the supposed defenders of the people are absent, and the critics of the regime still show up for the vulnerable, the familiar binaries of left/right, pro/anti, Duterte vs. opposition no longer hold- but rather the people against the system, the society against the order. And the act of defense on the side of the oppressed becomes a moral challenge to the architecture of the system itself. The riot’s story shifts—it stops being about disorder and becomes about disclosure. It reveals that corruption is a totalizing system that weaponizes loyalty, breeds cynicism, and discards lives. Their privileges were built on the backs of the broken, and they knew it. That is why they feared the poor. That is why the poor would, one day, sweep them aside. 

The act of saving one life was more than legal maneuvering. It was a spotlight on the rot beneath the surface. Corruption was not just stolen funds; it was stolen morality, the manipulation of citizens for political theater, the abandonment of those same citizens when the cameras turned away. 

In the end, the riot’s story shifted. It was no longer only about chaos. It became a mirror. It reflected the failures of a system that uses human beings as props, discards them at will, and counts on the silence of the privileged. If even one person could be saved amid the carnage, it begged the question: who truly defends the people, and who only plays at it? 

The answer was simple, sharp, and unmistakable: not the elites. Not the ones with safe EDSA protests. Not the ones sipping lattes in climate-controlled offices. The defense came from those who dared to speak truth to power—and, when the time came, to stand in the gap.

"When the streets are writing their own statements"

"When the streets are writing their own statements"

September 21, Manila. The air smells of tear gas and sweat, the ground littered with broken placards and gravel. Seventeen youth — some barely out of childhood — are dragged into vans, wrists twisted, faces shoved down. Riot shields drip with spit and rain. Sirens wail like an animal. This is not the kind of protest the middle class writes think pieces about. This is something older, rawer, nearer to the bone.

The observers in the crowd notice the same thing: these are not campus activists in neat uniforms, nor professional agitators rehearsing chants. They are street kids, informal settlers, the working poor, and the newly jobless. Their slogans are scattered — mostly foul mouthed statements against the corrupt — but the unity is unmistakable: fury at a system where the powerful are untouchable and the poor are disposable.

Their rage did not arrive like a storm; it brewed like rot in a closed room. In families without work. In schools without teachers. In alleys where the water rises higher every monsoon while billions are siphoned into pork. When the police sweep children off the streets for “clean-up,” when bulldozers crush shanties to clear land for condos, the lesson is burned into memory: fight or be erased.

A social myth to be?

Veterans of past movements watch and whisper from the edges of the crowd. They recognize the posture, the clenched fists, the makeshift shields. It is the echo of the First Quarter Storm without its discipline; the ghost of barricades without the cadres. In the 1970s there were structures — parties, fronts, networks, mentors who channeled rage into strategy. Now the structure is gone, but the rage has returned, naked and unmediated. People should also remember some even born after EDSA or even lived during the May 01 riots led by former supporters of Joseph Estrada- and that rage, although raw, shows the discontent hidden underneath the masks.

Georges Sorel once argued that social myths are more potent than any policy paper, that great uprisings are not born from platforms but from images so vivid they seize the imagination and drive people to act. “Myth,” he wrote, “is not a description of things but an expression of a determination to act.” And here, in these uncoordinated young protesters, that principle is alive in its rawest form. They have no manifestos to wave, no ideological catechism to chant — but they have the living myth of their own dispossession, repeated daily in hunger, in eviction, in humiliation at checkpoints.

These youth possess something harder and sharper than an official narrative. They carry necessity like a banner. Their weapon is hunger, their engine humiliation. They are the children of demolished shantytowns, of vanished jobs, of classrooms without books. They are myth in motion, even if they do not name it as such. The sight of them rushing police lines with nothing but stones and plastic shields is itself a mythic image, echoing uprisings from Manila to Marseille, from the barricades of Paris to the streets of Tondo.

The older generation knows this energy, but they also know its dangers. Without direction, myth can scatter into riots, burnout, or co-optation. With direction, it can topple regimes. In the absence of formal organization, these youth have turned to symbols — black ski masks, antifascist tactics, Straw Hat Pirate flags from "One Piece" — not as decoration but as placeholders for the myths they have yet to forge. Like Sorel warned, it is precisely in such improvised images that the seed of collective action can take root.

Expect them to be accused

Online, the commentary splits. Some accuse these folks of being planted agitators. Some call them criminals. Others just sneer. All of it misses the fact that the anger is real, not rented. It has been earned over decades of plunder and betrayal. These young people are not anomalies; they are the inevitable by-product of a system that criminalizes poverty while rewarding theft by the bigwigs. To be frank, this write-up is for those who dismiss them. For those who roll their eyes at the barricades and broken glass. For those who sneer from air-conditioned cars, who share memes and think it counts as analysis. For those who call them names.

They’re called gangsters — as if being in a gang makes their grievances less real. But what is a gang to a boy who grew up watching his father beaten by enforcers of an absentee landlord? What is a gang to a girl whose home was bulldozed before sunrise with no relocation, no compensation, only the taste of dust and tear gas? When a community lives under constant state violence, gentrification, and poverty, that same violence becomes their grammar, their weapon, their survival code. The gang is not glamour. It’s geography. It’s a line drawn against erasure.

They’re called squatters — as if migration and land-grabbing in the countryside don’t force the poor into the city. As if eviction from ancestral land, collapsing farm prices, and drought caused by mismanaged irrigation do not push people to ride the bus to Manila with nothing but a plastic bag of clothes and a list of relatives who might take them in. Communities grow on the only land left — railways, creeksides, reclaimed ports, rooftops. And when the state clears them with police and hired goons, calling it development, it is not progress. It’s aggression by another name, backed by real estate money, rolled out under banners of “renewal” and “modernization.” They are not illegal settlers. They are displaced citizens.

They’re called uneducated — as if fluency in policy jargon is the only valid form of resistance. Politics and social studies stripped from schools. Teachers underpaid, classrooms overcrowded, entire generations taught to memorize without question. Yet these kids have learned politics from the barricade, the checkpoint, the hunger line. Their textbook is the demolition notice taped to their door. Their lectures come from the fire hoses and the shields. Their graduation is surviving another eviction. Unlike those who learned politics in seminar rooms, they have no safety net of NGOs or tenured professors. They are living the syllabus in real time.

They’re called addicts — as if coping through substances erases systemic neglect. But look closer: the same police who crack down on them often run the trade in these neighborhoods. The same politicians who condemn them on the floor of Congress protect the syndicates at budget hearings. When the state strips a person of work, home, and dignity, substances become anesthesia, a pause button from a life of constant shock. This is not an excuse; it’s an indictment of the system.

Those who fight corruption but condemn these kids’ fury should revisit what corruption does at street level. Corruption is not just an envelope under a table. It’s a busted drainage project that floods their homes. It’s a ghost relocation site that never materializes. It’s a health clinic without medicine, a scholarship fund swallowed by a district office. Listen first. Learn. Then talk about tactics. This isn’t a plea for charity. This isn’t an excuse for every stone thrown. It’s a demand for clarity. Before calling them gangsters, squatters, uneducated, addicts — remember who built the conditions that made the barricade their only microphone.

If one wants less chaos, build less desperation. If one wants less fury, build less injustice. If one wants less confrontation, build more dignity. Because until then, the streets will remain their classroom, their courtroom, and their only stage. The ruling class and its apologists misread this at their peril. These young fighters are not the product of seminars or soft launches; they are forged in eviction zones, detention centers, and hunger lines. They have learned to run, regroup, and charge. The truncheon blows only teach them to duck faster, to scatter smarter, to come back harder.

Expect them to fight back

Georges Sorel warned that “the power of social myths does not lie in their truth, but in the passions they inspire.” These youth have no official myth, no manifestos etched on fine paper — but they have something stronger: necessity, humiliation, and memory. Their myth is survival. Their creed is hunger. Their weapon is the knowledge that nothing more can be taken from them. Each water cannon is a baptism. Each arrest a lesson. Each bruise a badge. In the absence of leaders, they are learning leadership in fragments — through whispered signals, borrowed banners, and improvised barricades. They are building, unknowingly, the discipline they’ve been accused of lacking. 

And if they ever gain direction — if a movement arises to guide rather than exploit them — then Manila’s glittering towers will not be tall enough to hide behind, and its marble lobbies will not be thick enough to muffle the sound of their footsteps. The rage now seen as incoherent will become a single voice. The scattered stones will become a hammer. Sorel also wrote that “violence can awaken the deepest energies of a people when legality has been corrupted beyond redemption.” These youth are the proof of that warning. They are not the end of the story; they are its opening chapter. Ignore them and the next chapter will be written not with slogans but with something far heavier. 

Nowadays, solidarity is no longer a slogan. It is a necessity. To stand with these youth is not to endorse every tactic but to recognize their humanity and their claim to a future. It is to see that their battle is not just with police lines but with the entire architecture of dynastic privilege, crony capitalism, and civic neglect.

Every baton strike, every arrest, every meme ridiculing them is another strike of the hammer. Sparks don’t disappear; they accumulate. And as Sorel warned, when myth and rage converge, the streets become the forge of history. This is the first draft of a new struggle. The poor are teaching themselves to fight back in the only language left to them. Today they throw stones. Tomorrow — if nothing changes — they will throw something harder.  The streets are writing their own manifesto now. The only question is who will read it, and who will pretend it’s not there until it’s too late.

Again, as said in the earlier writeup, "Expect chaos. Expect it to happen." No amount of "the need for a peaceful setting" can avert the growing anger like what happened, and expect that if the powerful continue to ignore it, that chaos will no longer be a warning but a beginning.  

"After all the Scandals, Expect Chaos, and Expect this will Happen"

"After all the Scandals, Expect Chaos, and Expect this will Happen"

On September 21, under a punishing sunand the shadow of riot shields, seventeen young protesters were arrested. Stones flew through the air. Shields cracked. Sirens screamed. This was not the orderly choreography of a licensed rally but a convulsion, a street-corner warning shot. 

Observers noted the faces first. They were not seasoned cadres, members of civil society, nor college activists with banners. They were the urban poor: thin, wiry teens, street kids, displaced families’ sons and daughters. They were angry — furious — shaking with a rage older than they were. Some shouted slogans for Duterte. Some cursed Marcos Jr. But it hardly mattered. The common denominator was rage at a system that lets the powerful loot, kill by negligence, and hide behind bodyguards, while the poor are beaten, arrested, and jailed for lesser crimes. 

Witnesses saw the pattern: the same ferocity that rises when shanties are torn down and families driven to sidewalks, the same desperation that appears when police round up children as part of a “clean-up.” Even as the truncheons rose, even as they were chased and slammed to the ground, the young fought back. 

To older activists, the scene was a ghost of decades past — the fire of the First Quarter Storm in 1970, minus the discipline and direction once provided by organized progressive groups. In the 60s and 70s, youth movements were structured; now the anger is raw, scattered, improvised. These young protesters are not reading manifestos. They are living them. 

The episode also functioned as a stark message to the political class. The rage of the poor has been simmering for decades, under a crust of patronage and neglect. Corrupt politicians, dynastic clans, and their technocratic partners may dismiss the unrest as noise or provocation. But the facts stand: their policies and their theft have bred a generation with nothing to lose. This is what decades of broken promises and economic betrayal look like in human form. 

Online, elitist remarks condemned the young protesters as criminals. Some claimed they were “plants” meant to incite violence. These remain theories, not facts. What is certain is that their anger did not come from nowhere. It germinated in jobless homes, underfunded classrooms, and flooded streets where public money disappears into pork and shadow budgets. 

Their methods may differ from those of older movements, but their anger mirrors the same broken system their elders once tried to change. And even amid chaos, new symbols emerged: black ski masks, Straw Hat Pirate flags from One Piece, gestures borrowed from European antifascist street theater. It was a strange collage — anime bravado, urban survival, and political desperation — but also the first draft of a new language of rebellion. 

Observers noted that what these youth lack is not courage but compass. They have energy but not infrastructure, rage but not roadmaps. Without guidance, their power risks being crushed, co-opted, or left to burn itself out. With guidance, it could evolve into a movement capable of challenging entrenched corruption and dynastic rule. 

In the end, solidarity requires more than slogans. It demands standing with the angry and the dispossessed, even when their tactics make the middle class uncomfortable. It means recognizing that this generation’s fury springs from the same injustices older activists once faced. And it means offering direction before that fury either collapses or erupts into something no one can control. 

September 21 was not just a clash; it was a signal flare. Ignore it, and the anger will deepen. Mock it, and it will harden. Meet it with sincerity, guidance, and solidarity, and it might become the force that finally tips a corrupt order into reform. 

The streets have spoken — ragged, masked, furious. They have said, in a language older than laws and newer than hashtags: expect chaos. Expect it to happen. And expect that, with courage and clarity, chaos can be transformed into change.  

Against the Rhetoric of Deceit: Fighting the Continuing, Corrupted Past and Reclaiming a Nation's Tomorrow

Against the Rhetoric of Deceit:
Fighting the Continuing, Corrupted Past 
and Reclaiming a Nation's Tomorrow

It has been weeks since the latest corruption scandals came to light, adding yet another chapter to the long and troubling history of systematic thievery perpetrated by bureaucrats and politicians in the Philippines. These scandals are not isolated incidents; they are emblematic of a larger, entrenched pattern of abuse that continues to erode the trust and welfare of ordinary Filipinos.

Cycle of betrayal

Driven by relentless profiteering, these scandals involve allegations of corruption, mismanagement, and glaring irregularities in government-funded public works projects—most recently in flood control initiatives. The revelations are alarming, especially when viewed alongside previous controversies such as the misuse of confidential and intelligence funds by the vice president, and those from the past administrations like the scandal involving the "war on drugs" funded by gambling operations, the Pharmally procurement fiasco, and a slew of other schemes that highlight the pervasive misuse and abuse of the people’s hard-earned money and trust. Each case serves as a stark reminder that the machinery of governance, intended to serve the public, has too often been hijacked to serve private interests.

Call it repetition if you will, but the pattern is undeniable. Despite officials insisting on “differences” or distinctions between each case, the fundamental reality remains: the abuse of public trust is systemic. Billions of pesos allocated for flood management have allegedly been siphoned off through “ghost” projects, substandard construction, and the cornering of contracts by a small circle of favored contractors. The consequences are not abstract; they manifest in communities left vulnerable, livelihoods destroyed, and citizens bearing the cost of negligence and greed.

It is no surprise that these patterns echo the past. Previously, the focus of corruption may have been roads, bridges, and other infrastructure; today, it is flood control and public works. Yet the outcomes are disturbingly similar. Many of these overpriced, under-executed structures fail to withstand natural forces, leaving the very people they were meant to protect exposed to risk and disaster. What is particularly disheartening is the suggestion that these projects were driven more by superficial pride, political showmanship, and opportunities for kickbacks than by a genuine desire to serve the public.

The politico-bureaucratic delusion

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the Philippines is far from a poor nation; it is a plundered nation. Systematically plundered by those entrusted with its care, citizens are told to accept this theft as “discipline” or “development.” They are fed a vision of the future, one framed in rhetoric, glossy reports, and ceremonial inaugurations. Yet the reality that unfolds is a cruel reflection of the past—a cycle of mismanagement, deception, and exploitation that is at once both tragic and farcical.

For the people, the cost is tangible. Communities bear the brunt of flooding and disasters that could have been mitigated. Families lose homes, crops, and livelihoods, and the social contract between government and citizenry erodes further. For a nation of immense potential and resources, it is deeply pitiful that its trajectory is continually undermined by the very institutions and individuals tasked with its protection.

Unless systemic reforms are enforced with genuine accountability, transparency, and public oversight, the Philippines risks remaining trapped in this cycle: a nation rich in promise, yet systematically impoverished by corruption; a society longing for progress, yet shackled by those who see governance as a personal cash register rather than a public trust.

As an observer, been hearing numerous statements ranging from the need for accountability, blaming the culprits, to that of accusing the entire system for that systemic bullshit: that despite news of "economic recovery" and the likes these corruption scandals in various forms and from past administrations shows that the politico-bureaucratic problem of graft and corruption boils down to their relentless pursuit of greed and interest. These interest seekers, be it from Marcos and Duterte camps been showing clearly that they've "fooled" the people with their rephrased yet hollow promises of reform, transparency, and progress. They package self-interest and opportunism as patriotic duty, cloaking personal gain in the language of national development. Whether through infrastructure projects, procurement contracts, or fund allocations, the pattern remains disturbingly consistent: a cycle where public resources are diverted to serve private pockets, and the citizenry bears the burden.

What makes this even more cynical is the performative nature of these acts. Press releases, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and carefully curated media coverage are deployed to convince the public that action is being taken—action that is often superficial, temporary, or misdirected. In reality, the structural rot within government institutions allows these schemes to persist, regardless of who occupies the presidency or the halls of Congress. Accountability becomes a spectacle rather than a principle, and whistleblowers or investigative bodies are often sidelined, pressured, or co-opted.

It is not just a question of individual culpability; it is a question of systemic failure. A system that rewards patronage, tolerates mediocrity, and incentivizes self-serving behavior will inevitably produce corruption at every level. The repeated scandals—whether under past administrations or the present—are evidence that graft is baked into the political and bureaucratic culture. Citizens are told to believe in “recovery,” “growth,” and “nation-building,” yet the recurring betrayal of public trust exposes these claims as hollow.

The consequences are tangible: substandard infrastructure, mismanaged public services, stalled economic programs, and the persistent inequality that leaves ordinary Filipinos vulnerable to disasters and economic shocks. Meanwhile, the political elite continue to maneuver within a system that protects them from meaningful repercussions, turning governance into a theater where appearances matter more than substance.

For observers and citizens alike, the lesson is bitter but clear: reforms that only skim the surface will never suffice. The issue is not merely who is in power but how power itself is structured, distributed, and monitored. Without a genuine commitment to transparency, enforcement of the rule of law, and an empowered civil society that can hold leaders accountable, the cycle of corruption will endure, undermining not only economic progress but the very trust that binds a nation together. 

The will to act and fight to reclaim the future

For now, the protests continue to loom over the nation, raising the persistent question: are these movements directed against corruption per se? Against the specific culprits involved? Or against the system itself, which has long affected both camps that once professed unity yet have shown little regard for genuine reform? The continuing past—one that has benefited corruption, entrenched social injustice, and vassalage to foreign and domestic interests—has, in effect, “raped” the nation of its youth and its supposed future.

It is not surprising, then, that the people are determined to “take back the future” from those who claim to stand for the future, yet are busy perpetuating the same patterns of the past. As Ramiro Ledesma Ramos once observed, “A people that has lost its direction and courage is ripe for exploitation”—a stark reminder that without vigilance, ideals are hollowed out by opportunists.

In a parallel reflection on revolutionary struggle, Mao Zedong wrote: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” While his context was different, the essence resonates here: systemic change, if it is to be real, demands more than protest slogans and performative measures; it demands the courage to confront entrenched power structures and reclaim agency over the nation’s trajectory.

The question remains: with such words, will the people take them seriously and evenly counter the rhetoric of those who wish to fool them? Mao’s statement was starkly honest—political power resides in the will of the people, especially those equipped to manifest it. Yet there are always those who beg to disagree be Mao's statement or others like him, insisting that there is no need to change the system, framing corruption and injustice as merely matters of individual morality.

No. Even figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. challenged this notion. Gandhi reminded the world that, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world,” emphasizing that moral reflection alone is insufficient without deliberate action to alter unjust structures. Malcolm X insisted, “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary,” underlining that systemic oppression cannot be dismantled through words alone—it demands courage, strategy, and the willingness to confront entrenched power. Martin Luther King Jr. added, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied,” warning that patience without action is complicity, and that systems built on injustice cannot be reformed by passive morality alone.

The lesson is clear: morality alone will not dismantle the apparatus of corruption. Appeals to conscience are inadequate when the system rewards greed, manipulates institutions, and protects the powerful. Real change requires the collective will, the organized action, and the courage to confront not only the individuals who perpetrate corruption but the structures that enable it.

The Filipino people, witnessing decades of repeated betrayal, now face a choice: to remain passive in the face of the continuing past, or to assert their collective power to ensure that promises of reform are more than empty rhetoric. The challenge is not merely to call out corruption, but to dismantle the structural enablers that allow it to flourish, so that the nation’s future is not stolen by those who claim to safeguard it. 

“When Words from an Educator Betrays the call for Integrity”

“When Words from an Educator Betrays the call for Integrity”

In the face of public outrage over the controversial flood control projects, one would expect the leaders of state institutions to speak with clarity, courage, and moral conviction. Instead, Bulacan State University President Teody San Andres recently offered words that raise more questions than they answer. Framed as prudence and deference, his statements reveal a deeper tension between duty and capitulation—a tension that threatens to redefine what it means to “protect the people.” In an era when corruption and mismanagement dominate headlines, silence and submission are no longer neutral; they are choices that carry consequences. This is the moment when a university, tasked with shaping minds and morals, must decide whether it will stand for truth—or stand aside. 

In a recent interview with Pacesetter, San Andres spoke at length about the controversial flood control projects now under scrutiny. His words, calm and measured on the surface, betray a deeper inclination—one that leans toward submission to power rather than courage in the pursuit of truth. 

“Actually, let us now invest everything to our political leaders in Congress and the Senate about the decisions regarding that anomaly in terms of the flood control… Our task as the president of this university is to protect my people and to improve more on educational capacity of individuals,” San Andres explained. He added that he would “respect whatever the result” of the politicians’ investigation might be. 

But one statement that sounds cringy to those who expect that an educator, what more a civil servant should side with the people but turns out to be otherwise: "I really understand the sentiment of the leaders, the students, and the other entities. But of course, we are public servants that we need to protect the government and to protect my people." 

To be frank, these statements reflect more than prudence; they reflect capitulation. To entrust “everything” to political leaders—the very same authorities now facing allegations of corruption—is not stewardship of the public; it is submission to a system under scrutiny. To couch that submission in the language of protecting the people transforms noble words into a form of moral compromise. Protecting the people does not mean shielding the government. And yet, that is precisely the message these words convey. 

Universities, especially state universities, are not mere appendages of political authority. They are laboratories of civic conscience, training grounds for critical thought, and moral communities where the search for truth is inseparable from the defense of justice. The mission of education extends far beyond course content; it includes the preparation of students to navigate, challenge, and, when necessary, confront real-world injustices. By urging the academic community to defer to political authority and to “respect whatever result” emerges, San Andres risks teaching students to value compliance over conscience, loyalty to power over allegiance to truth. 

Not surprisingly, those who side with him and others alike will claim this is a “Manila matter,” or a "matrer that only politicians should address and not everyone else", insisting that local institutions have their own rules and traditions, separate from the so-called standards of Manila-based higher education. It happened tho during the "Red Scare" when institutions had to gave up "radical leaning" books and literature to authorities to show compliance despite assuming to be for academic freedom and progressive instruction as that of Manila-based institutions. This argument, however, only underscores a troubling philosophy: the deliberate separation of school and society. 

By “emphasizing academic excellence” at the expense of social consciousness and civic relevance, the university risks becoming an island detached from reality. When words echo those of a paid government employee rather than a civil servant attuned to the call of the people, the institution’s mission is distorted, and its moral authority eroded. 

Again, to condone or enable a process tainted by corruption is not protection—it is complicity. To stand back quietly while politicians decide the fate of public resources under scrutiny is to abandon the very citizens the university claims to serve. A state university is meant to cultivate informed, engaged citizens, not passive observers of wrongdoing. Capitulation masquerading as prudence is no protection at all. 

Protection of the people requires courage. It demands vigilance, moral clarity, and, when necessary, confrontation of those who betray public trust. Silence in the face of corruption is complicity. Standing idly by, waiting for verdicts from the very system under scrutiny, is an abdication of the university’s mission. Protecting the people sometimes means standing against power, not beside it. Anything less is a betrayal of both conscience and citizenship. 

Universities are meant to prepare students for life as informed, responsible citizens, not to groom them for submission. To educate is to illuminate reality, not to hide behind institutional decorum. To defer blindly to authority in the name of protection is to invert that mission. In the end, protecting the people is not about preserving political structures—it is about defending truth, demanding accountability, and refusing to let corruption define the society that the university exists to serve. 

In the delicate balance between duty and deference, the scales have tipped. The question now is not what the politicians decide—but whether those entrusted with education will stand for truth or stand aside. 

“The Great Trillion Peso Shakedown": Of Congress, Funds, Corrupt Bureaucrats, and the People’s Growing Backlash

“The Great Trillion Peso Shakedown": Of Congress, Funds, 

Corrupt Bureaucrats, and the People’s Growing Backlash

In 2025, the Congress finds itself at the center of one of the largest corruption storms since the abolition of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) a decade ago. What was once touted as a “new era” of clean budgeting has unraveled into a return of pork-barrel politics under new, more technical names—budget insertions, phantom or “ghost” projects, and misallocated infrastructure funds. 

Recent disclosures reveal just how deeply entrenched this corruption has become. Finance Secretary Ralph Recto admitted that up to 70% of government funds intended for flood control projects may have been lost to corruption—amounting to P42.3 billion to P118.5 billion gone astray between 2023 and 2025. In a separate review, the President’s administration found that from 2022 onward, P545 billion allocated for flood control projects included numerous projects that were never built, substandard, undocumented, or otherwise unaccounted for. Alarmingly, only 15 out of more than 2,000 accredited contractors claimed about 20% of that budget. 

On the ground, the fallout is obvious. A P55–60 million river wall project in Baliuag, Bulacan—listed in both the National Expenditure Program and the General Appropriations Act—has yet to show any construction activity more than six months after its scheduled start. Meanwhile, some very small municipalities have received flood-control allocations worth billions—far beyond their absorptive capacity—fueling suspicions that political patronage and private kickbacks are at work rather than genuine public need. 

President Marcos Jr. has since ordered a freeze on new flood-control project funds for 2026 and instructed agencies to first exhaust the P350 billion allocated for 2025 before proposing more. Civil society groups, church leaders, and business organizations are calling for an independent investigation, warning that unchecked budget manipulation threatens not just infrastructure delivery but also public trust in government itself. 

These cases show that while the names and mechanisms may have shifted away from the old PDAF model, the core problem remains: vast public fortunes being redirected through questionable budget insertions and ghost projects. The consequence is not just financial loss but erosion of public trust, stalled infrastructure, and real harm to communities subject to flooding and neglect. 

The 2025 scandal underscores a painful truth: systemic corruption in Congress thrives on opacity and technical jargon. It is not enough to abolish a fund or rename a mechanism. Without radical transparency—open budget data, mandatory auditing of projects, and consequences for both legislators and contractors—these practices will simply evolve into new forms. 

The current crisis should be treated as a turning point, not another passing controversy. Citizens deserve an end to the shell game of “clean budgeting” masking old habits. Congress, if it is to redeem itself, must embrace genuine oversight and accountability, not merely rebrand the pork barrel. The public, for its part, must demand more than platitudes: real reforms, full disclosure, and leaders who will prioritize service over self-enrichment. 

The Mechanics of a Quiet Comeback 

Despite constitutional checks and repeated reforms, budget manipulation remains Congress’s most enduring soft power. In the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA), watchdog groups estimate at least ₱142.7 billion in last-minute “adjustments” — much of it for “hyperlocal” flood-control and road projects, inserted after the main budget hearings had concluded. This mirrors the “congressional insertions” of a decade ago, only now under new technical labels and more sophisticated paper trails. 

Flood control, in particular, has become the prime example of how legitimate priorities can be exploited. Independent auditors and civil-society coalitions estimate that up to ₱1 trillion in such allocations between 2023 and 2025 has been overpriced, duplicated, or left unimplemented. Some towns with fewer than 50,000 residents have received flood-control allocations running into the billions — far exceeding their absorptive capacity and often routed to politically connected contractors. 

The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) have both faced criticism for their limited disclosure of project lists and contracts. Only a small fraction of contracts are publicly posted with full cost details, and many of the implementing agencies do not update their online transparency portals beyond the bare minimum required by law. This lack of visibility allows insertions to escape scrutiny until after funds are obligated. 

The mechanics are subtle but effective:

• Hyperlocal projects (short stretches of drainage, small retaining walls, or isolated road segments) make it easy to divide funds into dozens or hundreds of small contracts that rarely draw national attention.

• Thinly capitalized contractors can be used as pass-throughs for larger political or business interests, masking the ultimate beneficiaries.

• Technical jargon and “realignments” obscure who requested a project or why costs ballooned between proposal and implementation.

This is not mere inefficiency. It is an entire system designed to redirect state resources away from national priorities — climate resilience, large-scale infrastructure, health, and education — and toward private or political gain. The opportunity cost is staggering: every peso siphoned off from flood-control or road funds means fewer evacuation centers, delayed railway construction, and underfunded public hospitals. 

The persistence of these practices also undermines the government’s credibility on fiscal reform. In late 2024, the Marcos administration announced a “Budget Modernization” drive promising line-item transparency, yet by mid-2025, analysts noted that project clustering and “catch-all” categories had increased rather than decreased. This suggests that rather than dying, pork-barrel logic has adapted — moving from obvious lump sums to a granular, hyperlocal format that is harder to detect but no less costly. 

Unless Congress voluntarily opens its internal budgeting process and allows real-time public scrutiny of insertions and adjustments, this quiet comeback will continue to siphon off resources and erode public trust. The question is not whether the system is broken, but how long voters will tolerate its reinvention under new names. 

Congress Under Fire 

The resignation of Martin Romualdez from the House Speakership has become the most visible sign yet that Philippine politics is entering a volatile new phase. It’s not just a single scandal but an entire architecture of influence and budget manipulation now under national scrutiny. His departure underscores a crisis within a crisis — an internal rift inside the ruling coalition, with rival factions maneuvering for control of the House and its lucrative budget powers. 

Romualdez’s leadership had faced intensifying criticism over allegations that favored contractors were being steered to priority projects, especially in the flood-control and road sectors. Senators themselves have been drawn into parallel investigations over similar practices, and although all accused lawmakers deny wrongdoing, the pattern of allocations and the breadth of the inquiries are striking enough to shake public confidence in the legislative branch. 

On the floor of the House, Romualdez announced his resignation during a plenary session, framing it as an act of transparency and accountability. He stressed that stepping down was not an admission of guilt but rather a way to allow the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) to pursue its investigation without interference. In a political culture where resignations are rare, his move was interpreted both as a tactical retreat and a sign of how deeply the controversy had begun to bite. 

Yet the damage goes far beyond any single politician or scandal. Every peso lost in post-approval budget insertions is a peso unavailable for classrooms, health centers, or disaster protection. Every ghost project erodes public trust and reinforces the perception that Philippine democracy is a transactional system incapable of delivering on its promises. 

The political fallout, meanwhile, is reshaping the coalition math in real time. Romualdez’s exit gives the Duterte bloc an opening to consolidate power, even if the House majority remains broadly under the Marcos camp. At first glance, it’s tempting to dunk on Romualdez as he leaves the Speaker’s chair. But a step back reveals a more complicated picture: Philippine politics today would arguably look even darker without his earlier consolidation of the House. 

Consider the turbulence of 2023. Then-Deputy Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Vice President Sara Duterte were rumored to be plotting to hijack Congress — weaponizing the budget and even floating impeachment to fast-track Sara’s path to Malacañang. That coup only failed because Romualdez built a majority coalition that blocked it. The same majority also cracked open Duterte-era scandals, from the misuse of “confidential funds” to suppressed data on the drug war’s human toll. Without Romualdez’s bloc, those probes would never have seen daylight. 

Seen this way, Romualdez’s resignation is not only a personal reckoning but a pivot point for the Marcos administration and for Congress itself. It tests whether institutional reform can survive leadership changes, or whether old patronage networks will simply regroup under new names. For citizens and watchdogs, the stakes are clear: without sustained scrutiny, the resignation may be remembered less as a moment of accountability and more as the opening move in yet another power reshuffle. 

The public now faces a choice: treat this as another Manila soap opera or as an opportunity to demand genuine transparency, not just from one Speaker but from the entire House. The difference between those two paths will decide whether the 2025 corruption crisis becomes a turning point — or just another entry in the long history of Philippine political scandals. 

The Duterte Dimension 

Any honest discussion of the 2025 corruption crisis cannot stop at flood-control contracts or obscure budget insertions. It also has to address the unresolved controversies surrounding Vice President Sara Duterte and her allies. Although her office denies wrongdoing, the still-fresh debates over her confidential and intelligence funds in 2023 and 2024 — then totaling more than ₱650 million in a single fiscal year — remain a powerful symbol of how public money can be shielded from scrutiny under the guise of “national security.” Those allocations became a flashpoint in the House and Senate, prompting calls to abolish or strictly limit confidential funds for non-security agencies. 

For many ordinary Filipinos, the confidential-fund issue is inseparable from the broader culture of patronage and impunity. It sent a message that while Congress and public works agencies may hide their spending in “hyperlocal” projects, executive officials could do the same under the veil of secrecy. In that sense, the scandals on both ends of government reinforced one another: the legislature normalizing insertions, the executive normalizing opaque lump sums. 

The controversy also aggravated the already tense rift between the Marcos and Duterte camps. House leaders loyal to Speaker Martin Romualdez used the confidential-fund hearings to put pressure on Sara Duterte, while Duterte allies accused the Marcos camp of using budget power as a weapon. The antagonism only deepened as investigations into the drug war and online gaming operations gathered steam. While the legal details of those probes are still contested, the fact that international law-enforcement agencies — including Interpol — have become involved signals that the stakes have moved beyond partisan maneuvering into matters of cross-border accountability. 

Nor is this purely about confidential funds. The same networks of contractors that flourished under the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure drive — a period marketed as a “golden age” — now appear in audit trails linked to the 2025 scandal. Names such as Discaya, Wawao, and other politically connected contractors reportedly handled projects from 2016 to 2025 spanning flood-control, highways, and bridges. Many of these projects were later flagged for overpricing, duplication, or noncompletion. In effect, the public-works gravy train never really stopped; it merely changed branding, proving that the country’s largest infrastructure initiatives can also become its largest opportunities for rent-seeking.

At the heart of this is a larger question about how Philippine politics handles the legacies of power. The Duterte administration’s “war on drugs” left thousands dead and was allegedly financed in part by taxes and protection fees from Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs). Those claims are now under review by multiple agencies, adding another layer of friction to an already combustible political landscape. As the Marcos administration attempts to project a reformist image, the unfinished business of the drug war and its funding sources keeps the specter of past abuses alive. 

In practical terms, this means Sara Duterte cannot escape scrutiny even if the immediate headlines focus on Congress. Her confidential-fund controversy, her proximity to local power brokers, and the investigations into the Duterte-era security apparatus are all part of the same accountability ecosystem. For citizens watching from the outside, it reinforces the perception that “pork” is not only a legislative vice but a systemic one spanning all branches of government. 

If the Philippines is serious about breaking the cycle of corruption, then public oversight must cover the executive as rigorously as it covers the legislature. That means real-time disclosure of confidential and intelligence funds, independent auditing of security-related expenditures, and clear criminal liability for officials who divert or misuse them. Otherwise, the country risks swapping one form of unaccountable spending for another — and any reform of Congress will remain incomplete. 

A Country on the Edge of Outrage 

Civil society is no longer content to be a passive audience to congressional spectacle. Across Metro Manila and provincial capitals, NGOs, civic networks, and church groups have mobilized, demanding that budget insertions, procurement deals, and contractor lists be posted in real time. The planned “Trillion Peso March” on September 21 — timed to coincide with the anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law — signals that the patience of taxpayers is wearing thin. The echoes of the 2013 Million People March, which helped topple the old PDAF system, are unmistakable. 

Social media has amplified the pressure as sites like X, Facebook, and TikTok into de facto watchdogs. Viral explainers and “follow the money” infographics circulate widely, making it far harder for lawmakers to quietly bury insertions in obscure budget documents. In a country where trust in mainstream institutions is brittle, this networked outrage is fast becoming the new opposition. 

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has tried to seize the initiative by creating the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI), chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Andres Reyes Jr., with former DPWH Secretary Rogelio Singson and fraud examiner Rossana Fajardo as members. While the move is welcome, Filipinos have reason to be skeptical. Past commissions — from the Fertilizer Fund scandal to the NBN-ZTE probe — raised expectations but often failed to deliver indictments or systemic reform. 

What’s different this time is the regional context. In Nepal (2015–2020), mass anti-corruption protests forced high-level resignations and re-wrote procurement rules for post-earthquake reconstruction. In Indonesia, the 2019 street protests over weakened anti-graft laws galvanized students and civic groups to challenge entrenched patronage networks, leading to new oversight mechanisms in public works contracts. These examples show that sustained, nonviolent pressure can break through cultures of impunity, but also that such movements come with risk: leaders must navigate between lawful protest and the temptation to escalate into confrontation. 

Many Filipinos watching these events abroad are drawing their own conclusions: if neighboring countries can challenge entrenched systems, why can’t the Filipino people? The question is no longer whether outrage exists — it clearly does — but whether it can be channeled into a durable reform movement rather than a passing spectacle. 

This is the knife’s edge on which the Philippines now stands. If the “Trillion Peso March” becomes merely cathartic, Congress will ride out the storm as it has done before. If it crystallizes into a sustained demand for open budgets, independent auditing, and criminal prosecutions, it could mark the most serious challenge to congressional patronage since the PDAF was struck down. Either way, the coming months will test whether the public’s anger is powerful enough to break a cycle of scandal and reinvention that has survived every reform in the last thirty years. 

Why This Matters 

The current crisis is not just another corruption story. It is about whether Congress can still be trusted to handle public money without turning it into political capital. The legislature is supposed to wield the “power of the purse” to safeguard taxpayer funds and ensure that spending reflects national priorities. Instead, it has become the arena for manipulation — a structural defect that undermines every national goal from disaster resilience to education reform. 

The damage is cumulative and measurable. When billions of pesos earmarked for flood-control or classrooms vanish into thin air, the consequence isn’t abstract — it means deeper floods, delayed school openings, overstretched hospitals, and infrastructure that collapses at the first typhoon. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have repeatedly noted that every peso lost to leakage or graft in Philippine public works produces a ripple effect of lower GDP growth, weaker investor confidence, and higher disaster-recovery costs. Corruption at this scale is therefore not only a moral outrage but also a brake on economic growth, public trust, and climate preparedness. 

For this reason, public oversight must be more than a slogan. The government needs to publish project data in real time, enforce independent auditing, and apply strict penalties for contractors and officials involved in irregularities. Budgets must be open enough for citizens, journalists, and watchdog groups to cross-check allocations, contractors, and timelines. This also means empowering the Commission on Audit with more staff and more teeth — automatic referrals to the Ombudsman, permanent bans on corrupt firms, and whistleblower protection for insiders who expose irregularities. 

More importantly, voters must link these scandals to political accountability at the ballot box. Without electoral consequences, the incentives for lawmakers to exploit insertions and ghost projects remain stronger than the incentives to govern honestly. Nepal’s post-earthquake reforms and Indonesia’s anti-graft protests both showed that public pressure combined with voting power can shift policy, but only if outrage is sustained long enough to translate into political cost. 

And here is the hard truth: if the public treats each scandal as a one-off, Congress will simply adapt and rename the pork barrel yet again. But if citizens demand not just new labels but new rules — including the recovery of stolen assets, the blacklisting of guilty contractors, and the prosecution of complicit officials — then this moment could be remembered as the point when the cycle finally broke. 

The 2025 scandal should therefore be treated not as another headline but as a turning point. It is an invitation to rethink how public funds are protected, who benefits from budget decisions, and how ordinary people can reclaim the “power of the purse” from political dynasties. The patience of taxpayers is not infinite; without credible reforms, civic frustration will look for stronger outlets, as it has in neighboring countries. 

The question is not whether Filipinos have a right to be angry — they do — but whether that anger can be harnessed to build institutions strong enough to keep public money public. That, ultimately, is the real test of democracy.  

“There's no Clean Hands in a House of Corruption”

“There's no Clean Hands in a House of Corruption”

“Today, with a full heart and a clear conscience, I tender my resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives. I do this so that the Independent Commission on Infrastructure may pursue its mandate freely and fully — without doubt, without interference, and without undue influence...”

Thus spoke Leyte first district Congressman Martin Romualdez as he walked off the Speaker’s rostrum, his words heavy with solemnity, his posture measured like a general laying down his sword. But beneath the polished rhetoric lies the grit of political maneuver, intrigue, and betrayal — all hallmarks of Philippine politics in the twilight of the Marcos-Duterte partnership.

Romualdez, first cousin of the President and once presumed heir to the ruling coalition’s legislative throne, fell not with a bang but with a bow. His resignation, framed as an act of sacrifice for “accountability and transparency,” came at the height of furor over the 2025 General Appropriations Act — branded by critics as one of the most corrupt spending bills ever passed. The storm had long been gathering. The name of Romualdez, and of his ally former appropriations chair Zaldy Co, became synonymous with questionable public works allocations, pork-barrel whispers, and opaque amendments.

The cracks were visible much earlier. A year ago, the House dared to probe Vice President Sara Duterte’s confidential funds, a move that detonated the alliance between the Marcoses and the Dutertes. The investigation, once tentative, spiraled into the first impeachment of a sitting vice president in decades. It was only a matter of time before Romualdez, seen as the chief architect of the inquiry, was himself targeted.

Now, in a move meant to steady the ship, Isabela Congressman Faustino “Bojie” Dy III assumes the Speaker’s chair. Dy, a Marcos loyalist but not a Romualdez intimate, vows “not to defend the guilty and not shield the corrupt.” His words land like a cold rebuke to his predecessor. But whether Dy is reformer or caretaker remains unclear.

The narratives surrounding Romualdez’s departure swirl like cigarette smoke in a backroom caucus. His loyalists insist he resigned to protect the House’s dignity, sparing it from the taint of scandal. Others claim he was pressed to go, convinced that a “leave of absence” would no longer suffice as anger mounted in the streets and within the chamber.

What is striking is the chorus of dissent from within Romualdez’s once-solid bloc. Cebu’s Duke Frasco, Navotas’ Tobias Tiangco, Bacolod’s Albee Benitez — all former allies — took turns needling his leadership, some openly siding with the Duterte camp. Even a greenhorn like 27-year-old Kiko Barzaga of Cavite flirted with the Speakership, though his candidacy was dismissed as youthful overreach.

In a different age, political bloodletting like this would have been muffled in committee rooms or resolved with velvet handshakes in Malacañang’s anterooms. But this is the 2020s: television cameras hum, the airwaves roar, and the chamber’s intrigues play out before a restless public.

Romualdez’s resignation may be styled as magnanimity, yet it is also survival — an attempt to retreat before the mob reaches the gates. In his own words: “I step down not in surrender, but in service — for sometimes, the greatest act of leadership is the grace to let go.” Grace, perhaps. But also necessity.

And in Philippine politics, the line between the two has always been thin. Especially now, when scandal piles upon scandal, and both the Marcos and Duterte camps are scrambling to seize the moral high ground, each asking the people to believe that they, not the other, are “the clean.” Yet behind the posturing, the closets are rattling with skeletons, the air heavy with the stench of old crimes and new schemes.

Remember: the country has not forgotten. The memories are not so distant that they can be erased with speeches, photo-ops, or cosmetic rebranding. They linger like unhealed wounds. The atrocities of the martial law years still cast their shadow — the arrests, the disappearances, the torture chambers whose victims have yet to find justice. The trails of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s ill-gotten wealth remain etched in court records and investigative archives: Swiss bank accounts, shell companies, offshore holdings hidden under aliases and dummy corporations. These are not relics of history but active scars, reminders of how power was converted into personal fortune while the nation bled. To this are added the more recent sins of the Dutertes. Rodrigo Duterte’s Oplan Tokhang and Double Barrel — operations that turned neighborhoods into war zones and left thousands dead — are tied not only to extrajudicial killings but to the machinery that funded them: a shadowy rewards system greased by Chinese-led online gambling operations. Sara Duterte, for her part, is haunted by her own scandal: the brazen misuse of confidential and intelligence funds, millions of pesos drained without clear accounting, justified with vague appeals to “national security.” For all their denials, these ghosts will not stay buried; they rise again whenever corruption and abuse are debated on the floor of Congress or in the streets.

And now, as though the weight of history were not enough, new revelations pile on top of the old. Budget insertions, carved in secrecy during midnight sessions, surface like rotten cargo in the daylight. Infrastructure projects are announced with pomp, yet either remain unfinished or collapse upon completion — bridges cracking within months, roads riddled with potholes before the year’s end, flood control systems that prove utterly useless after the first monsoon. Entire communities watch in frustration as contractors — often the same coddled firms recycled from one administration to another — grow fat from public funds, flaunting new mansions and SUVs, while the poor wade through waist-deep floodwater in their barangays.

What emerges is a grim continuity: the names at the top may change, dynasties may trade places in Malacañang or the halls of Congress, but the cycle endures. It is the same circle of bureaucrats, politicians, and cronies — the “bureaucrat capitalists” who treat governance as a family business and the national budget as their private treasury. They thrive in every season, whether under Marcos or Duterte, feeding off the same system, protected by the same impunity. And the people, time and again, are made to carry the weight of their greed.

And the people know it. They may not have the ledgers, but they live with the consequences: the potholes that never disappear, the bridges that collapse before completion, the schools promised but never built. They smell the rot every time a ribbon-cutting ceremony is held for a project that is already cracking. Whether the face on the tarpaulin is Marcos or Duterte, the stench of corruption is unmistakable — and intolerable.

This is why the public mood is darkening. What began as small, almost ceremonial protests against budget abuse and infrastructure anomalies could well explode into something more volatile. People need only look to Nepal or Indonesia for examples, where grievances long ignored boiled into riots that shook governments to their foundations. In Manila, Cebu, Davao — the conditions are present: inflation that squeezes the poor, calamities that expose the failures of governance, and a political class that dares to call itself “public servant” while feeding off the public purse. Names like Discaya, Arevalo, and Hernandez have already surfaced in connection with anomalous flood control projects — names not obscure to the common Filipino, for they are etched in billboards, in congressional districts, in the speeches of officials who promised much and delivered little. And the irony cuts deeper: even as Bulacan is swallowed by floods, even as Davao reels from swollen waterways, the very politicians representing those provinces stand accused of benefiting from the rot that has made those disasters worse.

So yes, the people demand the rule of law. But what rule of law exists when the law itself is twisted by those who write it? What justice can be expected when the accused are the very ones who sit in judgment? It is the great insult of our times: to watch the corrupt bend statutes to protect their interests, and then stand before cameras preaching reform. To see them reelected in landslides, their names etched once more in the halls of power, is an outrage beyond measure. Their words may change, their speeches polished with new promises, yet the spirit of their intent remains the same: to preserve wealth, power, and influence — with or without pork barrel, with or without shame.

And so the burden grows heavier on the people’s backs, and the patience thinner. For sure people still remembered Harry Roque talking about a battle between "darkness" and "evil", and people have enough from these two faces of "darkness" and "evil" both which are corrupt and cruel; so the question now is not whether the public will tolerate this farce forever, but when — and how — the reckoning will come.