"Shocked!" "Angry!" "Mad!" I rarely hear (or read) such words from my Filipino friends, but I did over the past two weeks about the corruption scandal in the Philippines. In my observations, Filipinos are easy going, perhaps to a fault, when it comes to corrupt government individuals and their associates. They enjoy lampooning corrupt officials and the notoriously corrupt police force. The lampoons, or sometimes even arrests, don't change things. I read not too long ago that Erap Estrada had been elected again to public office. He is the former president who was impeached for corruption and put in jail, where he faced a capital punishment sentence for stealing over a million dollars from the people who elected him. As the current head of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism said recently, "If you can't jail them, elect them" (New York Times, August 30, 2013). (This same NYT article, points out, I should note, that the corruption is not within the Administration of President Aquino.)
But Filipinos have a tipping point, as President Marcos discovered too late, when he was outsted by the huge non-violent People Power Revolution in 1986. It seems that Janet Lim-Napoles became the tipping point this time, though she is just the last in a series of recent cases of official corruption. Ms. Lim-Napoles, a businesswoman with deep pockets and insider connections, was imprisoned in late August. She allegedly bribed government officials to siphen off something like $141 M USD. These funds had been established by the government for projects to bring relief to the very poor. The officials and their connections concocted bogus relief programs and then pocketed the money for themselves.
Thus the outrage and the tens of thousands of Filipinos protesting non-violently but very angrily in Luneta Park in Manila on Monday, August 26. Thus the reaction of my frustrated friend, "Bob, we are not only angry! ! ! We are Mad!"
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