By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
There is an infighting in The CBSTC (Cordillera Basic Sectors Cooperative) which has been brewing for quite sometime already. It had been going on for years, and still going. As far as we know, the coop was able to come up with modern jeepneys which are now plying their authorized routes like Aurora Hill and Trancoville.
No doubt the business of the coop is impressed with public interest. Yet, the regulatory government agencies in-charge of taking care that their problems will not jeopardize public interest have not been acting and are still not acting on the members’ problems.
What else is new? Sorry to say but that was what was expected of government agencies. Expecting efficiency in the performance of their mandates would be stupid. For what is expected, rightly or wrongly, is inefficiency or incompetence, the usual things to expect from government agencies.
From the news circulating around, some of the members of that coop brought the matter to the city council. Not much, however, is expected there. It is peopled by politicians so what can surely be expected would be a lot of grandstanding but in the end will amount to nothing.
Many of those politicians are lawyers. If they really have the welfare of the members at heart, they should take the cudgels for the coop and file the necessary cases with the proper tribunals for them to get the necessary reliefs they want.
Perhaps they will be stumbling over each other in a rush to undertake such when the next election is near. As of now, the next election is still far and hazy in the horizon. When it would be near about two years from now, the coop members would have already forgotten that they had been neglected by such politicians. They might even end up voting for them. That is how short our memories are. It is the recurrent problem causing our failure to progress in many respects.**
I walked over to a hardware store last Friday to get some exercise and some small items for the house. The store, as I gathered, is owned by a Chinese whose capital came directly from China and not raised from the contributions of his compatriots as is usually expected. Yes, they contribute big amounts for the starting capital of any of their compatriots or in order to help those whose businesses are in trouble.
How about us Filipinos? Our usual crab mentality is often controlling. Instead of helping each other, we are very good in pulling each other down. That’s what crabs do.
Going back to the Chinese owner of that hardware store, he is allegedly the heir of a powerful politician in China who was able to amass through corruption a lot of money. Being an ill-gotten wealth, the family have to stash it outside China. In a way, we are lucky because it ended up here, invested in legit enterprises, providing employment to a good number of otherwise unemployed Filipinos.
The members of the family are the kind who would readily pay cash for any real estate that takes their fancy. Whatever their political or economic beliefs when they were still based in China, they are now hard-core capitalists who should be being denounced by our local activists. But,, as I heard, they are now busy fighting each other over turfs, particularly those generating big revolutionary taxes.
Another thing they are fighting for are the biggest sources of foreign donations, supposedly for projects to serve the welfare of poor Filipinos, which, however, often end up in their individual pockets. So they now have big and luxurious houses and other real estate properties and things betraying tastes for opulence.
Welcome to a new breed of capitalists in various masquerades.**
