Mas mayaman sa iyo si Henry Sy ng 1,492,863 beses

Maraming salamat sa sistemang Kapitalismo, ang pinakamayamang tao sa Pilipinas ay may yamang nagkakahalaga suma-tutal ng $13.7 billion. Dolyar! Ito ay ayon sa "Philippines' 50 Richest" na inilabas ngayong buwan ng Forbes magazine. Listahan ito ng 50 pinakamayayamang Pilipino, na kinokompyut sa pamamagitan ng pagsusuma ng lahat ng ari-arian (asset na gusali o painting o kotse, atbp.) ng isang tao, menos mga utang. Kasama rin sa pagtala ng yaman ang mga posisyon ng mga nasabing indibidwal sa "stock market," kung saan may shares ang mga ito sa pag-aari ng mga publicly listed na kumpanya.

Hindi na bago sa listahan si Sy. Makailang ulit na siyang No. 1 sa Forbest List. Kasama niya sa listahan ang mga klase ng tao na ang naging pangunahing tanong lang sa buong buhay nila ay, "Paano ba ako yayaman nang yayaman?"

Samantala, walang masyadong statistic na puwede nating paghalawan ng kung magkano naman ang average wealth ng mga tipikal na Pilipino -- ikaw at ako -- maliban na lamang sa isang pag-aaral na inilalabas ng Credit Suisse. Ayon sa "Global Wealth Databook 2015" ng Credit Suisse, isang kumpanyang naghahatid ng mga serbisyong pampinansiya, ang average na adult na Pilipino ay may yaman na nagkakahalaga ng $9,177 noong mid-2015, o P431,319 sa kasalukuyang palitan. Pero, sa parehong pag-aaral sinabing ang "median wealth per adult" ay nasa $1,856 o P87,232 lang.

Ngunit samakatuwid, kung kukunin ang "average," (kahit pa karamihan ng mga Pilipino ay wala naman talagang pag-aari na aabot ang halaga sa halos kalahating milyon), si Henry Sy ay 1,492,863 beses* na mas mayaman kaysa sa kahit sino man sa atin. Another way to put it is, sa bawat piso mo, mayroon siyang halos isa't kalahating milyong piso.

Ano ang mayroon si Henry Sy na wala sa ating lahat? Nakatulong siguro kahit paano na okey sa olrayt magpasweldo ito si Mr. Sy. Ayon sa mga organisasyon ng manggagawa, No. 1 na Endo Lord ang SM. Ngunit dahil malaking bilang naman ng mga negosyong pag-aari ng Forbes Listers ay gumagamit ng kontraktwal -- kabilang na ang Universal Robina, San Miguel, Jollibee, atbp. -- applicable rin sa kanila ang ganitong "meme":

Nangsamantala ng Lakas-Paggawa.
Naging Bilyonaryo.
Lumabas sa Forbes List.

Sa Pilipinas, habang may milyon-milyong Pilipino na pagod at halos walang makain (o kaya'y kumakain ng pagpag na pinulot sa mga basurahan malapit sa Jollibee), may iilang mayayaman na marangyang nabubuhay mismong sa dugo at pawis ng nakararami. Ito ang hatid sa iyo ng sistemang Capitalism.

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*gaya ng sinabi sa unahang bahagi, dahil sa kakulangan ng datos, mapipilitang paghambingin ang statistic ng magkaibang panahon at magkaibang paraan o "methodology." Ngunit halos ganon din naman ang halaga ng yaman ni Henry noong 2015, at No. 1 din siya sa taon na yon. At gaya ng nabanggit, masyadong galante ang $9,177 na average wealth. Ang inyong lingkod, halimbawa, ay mayroon lang na isang bulok na cellphone, limang pantalon (yung iba galing sa ukay), at mga T-shirt. Mayroon din akong pusa, pero sabi nga ni Dong Abay, "mamahalin [siya], pero 'di nabibili" :D.

Under the beat of the baton

In February, a few months before he would take the Philippine presidency in phenomenal fashion, Rodrigo Duterte was quoted as saying that he would grant pardon to law enforcers who might end up killing criminals while carrying out the new regime's social cleansing campaign.

This month, he repeated this statement. Only by this time, Duterte has also said he would double the pay of the members of the police force. Until that happens, the administration could significantly increase the police "hazard pay" for putting their lives on the line. Meanwhile, the drug war will continue, and any talk of an investigation into the alarming number of deaths will not be entertained.

At present, Philippine society is at war. It is officially a war against drugs -- a campaign to rid the nation of its dregs. It is being commandeered by a man we elected. And on its frontline is the national Police force, the people's supposed protector.

However, a look at the records will remind us of just what sort of institution it is that Duterte has chosen to be in the frontline of his campaign.

Just in 2014, Amnesty International published a report that reminded us about who the national Police is. “Torture is still rife, … the overwhelming majority of reports of torture involve police officers.” And yet the content of that report itself is not new. It merely put real faces into a phenomenon that is, as it wrote, the Philippine's “dark, open secret.”

Faces like those of Alfreda Disbarro, a former police asset who the police took and brought to a room. On top of her head, they placed a bottle which they threatened to blow to bits if she would not do what they wanted her to do. Later they forced a dirty mop into her mouth, while beating her on the side. They wanted Disbarro to admit to being a drug pusher.

The report presented data from the Commission on Human Rights which has recorded a total of 457 cases of torture all over the Philippines since 2001. The highest figure was in 2013 when 75 torture cases were reported, 60 of which implicated the Police. The Philippines passed an Anti-Torture Law in 2009. Not a single person in authority has been convicted.

That report pointed out that, to begin with, cases involving the police are underreported and almost undocumented. But in 2010, another report, from The Asia Foundation, stated another kind of police involvement in condemnable acts that cast doubt on their supposed job description of protecting the citizens – extrajudicial killings.

Like the AI report, their data were likewise gathered from 2001, until 2010. They recorded 390 victims of extrajudicial killings. Of the 837 suspects, 9% were attributed to the Police – third only to the military, another state actor, and the New People's Army.

But in fact the hand of the police is tainted even in deaths attributed to the armed forces. Highlighting a similarity with another country whose main killers were police death squads, Kenya, the report noted that victims killed in the Philippines were identified beforehand and killed in remote areas after being detained first by the police. Majority of the victims in the Philippines were identified as legal political activists – activists who first get handcuffed by the police and get brought to their stations.


What is the Police, and who does it serve? In the Philippines, it traces its roots in the Spanish civil guards whose cruelty toward Filipinos the national hero Jose Rizal depicted in his books. But the current police force as we know it descends from the Philippine Constabulary, an institution which co-emerged with American rule in the country. Thus, in the Philippines, policing has in fact functioned as a tool of foreign oppression against the natives.

When the colonizers left, its control was handed over to the local ruling elites. It was the same PC that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos would inherit and would use efficiently. After Marcos was thrown out, police control was handed over to the Department of Interior and Local Government, occasionally figuring in scandals ("Euro Generals" corruption case; the Maguindanao Massacre) and from time to time showing its ineptness, as in the botched rescue mission of Hong Kong bus hostages in Manila in 2010.

The police has been a feared figure in the everyday lives of Filipinos -- a steady presence that exists to protect the ruling elite's banks and malls, and who disperse political rallies against the Philippine's social ills.

The Police has been understood as “an instrument for regulating the lower orders.” As such, it is an institution of force. But according to Richard Seymour, properly understanding the role of the police has to take into account what exactly it defends: “What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defense of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defense of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police.”

A violent social order where the poorest families – millions of them – subsist on P5,750 every month and the richest families earn ten times as much, breeds instability -- and more violence. And the police is a violent state element precisely because it was designed to be so.

But if the police, on an average day, already exhibit these tendencies. What it could do under the guise of the drug war, and in the hands of Duterte, points only to a more anti-people trajectory.

Already, the numbers are troubling. According to the Citizen's Council for Human Rights, from January 1 to May 9 this year, prior to Duterte's election, number of reported deaths from drug-related violence was 39. After May 10, in just two months, this number has risen to 251.

And who are the victims? Those we know of paint a grim picture. Stories like those of Jefferson Bunuan, a scholar of a local NGO who was brutally killed in a "buy-bust" operation. A criminology student, he dreamed of being a policeman. Stories in the Philippine social media of people arrested just because they "looked like" the bad guy.

Already, the groundwork for a regime where especially the shabby-clothed, the tattooed, the un-schooled, the different, the people with the least capability to defend themselves -- are easily carted off to numberless rooms by gun- and baton-wielding men in uniform. They have a name for this. This is called “law enforcement.” Meanwhile, the public cheers and eggs the president on, reveling in the new-found “peace and order,” which is in fact nothing more than the slow surrender of all our freedoms as a civilized people. The country is dancing into lawlessness, and the Police and other armed men are keeping the beat.

Because early on, Rodrigo Duterte himself has shown how little his regard is for the concept of “human rights.” When the police he leads swoops down on  another poverty-stricken community to smoke out the drug den, the right of supposed suspects to not get whacked, to not get arrested without charges, to be presumed innocent at first – to just be respected as human beings – will not be nearest their minds.

If President Rodrigo Duterte is really serious in helping build a fairer Philippine society, he should stop emboldening and empowering the very same forces that threaten the masses.

Meanwhile, we have to study another form of society – one that does not use force and brutality just so it could impose order amidst the inequalities of Capitalism.

How much are Filipinos making these days?

The national average income of Filipino families according to official statistics is P235,000, or around P19,600 monthly for a family with five members. As with other indicators, that average rises to a comparatively higher P379,000 in the National Capital Region. 

That figure is actually misleading, since the national average is driven up by income from the top 10% of the population whose annual family wealth is three times that of the national average. Accounting only for the 90% of Filipino families without this fabulously rich bunch would yield a mean P181,000 annual earnings, or P15,000 monthly, which is probably closer to the reality of the average Pinoy household.

Inequality remains notable. The richest families earn ten times as much as the poorest families on a national average, with those belonging to the top decile mentioned earlier earning P715,000 a year or P60,000 a month. In Metro Manila, the top income earning families earn P83,000 a month, which means they make more in a month what the poorest Filipinos do in 14 months (1 year, 2 months).

The richest 10% of Filipino families own no less than 30% of the nation's wealth. The rest divide the 70% among themselves, but those in the poorest decile have only a meager 3% share, or P147 billion. The PSA's Table 7 is a reminder of what Capitalism is basically all about: The concentration of wealth for those already at the top of the pyramid.

The news is that inequality did not change in the first three years of the Aquino administration. According to the PSA, "the income of families in all per capita income deciles had hardly changed within the period 2009-2012." The next batch of survey results similar to where these figures were taken are not due until February 2017.

What do the figures from the poorest decile actually mean? It means that 10.7 million Filipinos belong to 2.1 million Filipino families whose income does not exceed P6,000 monthly. Or, that's 10.7 million Filipinos living on just about P40 a day.

It also shows ineffective measurement. The statistics agency notes that families in the poorest decile had expenses exceeding their income (what they do to make ends meet is anybody's guess).

Expenditures consist mainly of food (because the poorest spend more on food, or 62.3%, as a portion of their earnings compared with the rich). If even P40 per individual does not meet daily needs, statistics that officially peg the individual poverty threshold at P30 (which is what we actually have) are putting it at a very low margin.

The government currently puts official poverty at 26.3% (or around 26 million Filipinos since were about a hundred million). It appears that number is bound to be a bit more higher.