Instead of efficiently superintending state affairs as the focus of the national government, it apparently resorts to micromanaging them, even choosing to take a more myopic approach to cushioning the growing disenchantment with the Marcos brand of governance. It’s unfortunate that it’s “business as usual” with no novel policy reforms but to merely placate societal issues with counter-data, and an even more offensive counter-narrative.

Politicians who had served in the Senate a quarter of their lifetimes keep coming back, continuing their winning streak with all sorts of tricks from the playbook. As usual, the midterm electoral exercise was a well-staged “people’s festival,” a distribution for a wide variety of so-called social dividends or “ayuda” (euphemism for bribe money), an optic to chant bold promises and sweet compromises.

In the language of a trade-off, it was reduced to a quid pro quo — “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Things turned out to be even more unconscionable when incumbent congressmen could unilaterally transfer public funds (i.e., switch road repair budgets and “ayuda”), thereby tinkering with public money beyond its intended purpose.

Most people could only see this as a reward for signing the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte, quite a counter ploy to swing favor. Then the short-lived availability of rice through Kadiwa centers to indigents, seniors, solo parents, and persons with disabilities at P20 per kilo was met with strong suspicions the National Food Authority stocks were far from high quality.

This “Bente Bigas Mo” pilot program’s purported claim to alleviate the financial burden on millions of Filipino families and to ensure fair compensation for local farmers was dismissed as sn election gimmick, or “too little too late.”

In another parallel move, the Armed Forces of the Philippines involved itself in a three-week “Balikatan” or joint military exercises with the US with 17,000 troops to the extent of setting up the Strategic Defense Command patterned after Japan’s Joint Operations Command. Could Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. be joking when he called on Philippine troops to prepare for a Taiwan invasion with the AFP in the frontline to rescue over 250,000 overseas Filipino workers there?

It might be quite a stretch to regard Balikatan exercises as falling within the purview of AFP’s Education, Training, and Doctrine Command since the newly acquired fighter jets, patrol gunboats, and missiles are all already on board, even test-fired under the guise of simulated attacks.

How’s that not funny — to fantasize about the kind of future warfare we should respond to?

The defense and military establishments might have embraced the wrong ideological mindset of what collaborative governance would be in a globalized world. Of late, the defense secretary in cavalier fashion even declared, viz: “What is it to me if China gets angry at the deployment of US assets? It’s none of their business.”

Then there is that plan to raise P300 billion in revenue by increasing capital gains, donor, and estate taxes from 6 percent to 10 percent? When the crippling problem across local government units is their inability to collect real property taxes from their constituents, would raising the RPT tax be an enabling regime for LGUs when it looks like you’ll be killing the taxpayers till they scream for mercy?

In terms of a shared populist sentiment among Filipinos, all the congressmen and congresswomen who voted to impeach VP Sara were deemed undeserving of the people’s sovereign mandate. Insofar as the ethos of tribal politics is concerned, most House membership jumped in much like in a feeding frenzy.

Lastly, both Overseas Absentee Voting under Republic Act 9189 and Local Absentee Voting under Comelec Resolution No. 11091 were put into play presumably to fully democratize every Filipino citizen’s right of suffrage. There’s no begging the question that these intervening electoral exercises prior to the main one constitute a force multiplier.