Poor People Power: Preludes and prospects
La Liga Policy Institute
Just short of its one-hundred days in office, the Arroyo government is confronting the biggest challenge so far to its rule. The 'Poor People Power', being played out at the EDSA shrine, has broken through officialdom's grand narrative of a national consensus on the administration's EDSA 2 ride to power.
Stoned
A TODAY editorial
People Power 3 is significant for the cathartic reintroduction of the poor as a force to be reckoned with in the elitist politics of this nation. We have long known their numbers. Now we have seen and smelled them. Powerful.
Heads should hang in shame
A TODAY editorial
We cannot emphasize enough this crucial betrayal -- there is no other word for it -- of the ethics and responsibilities of the profession of journalism, as shown by the paucity of news until the country learned, to its panic, that a sea of redolent humanity was on a swelling tide and moving toward shore.
The May 1st riot: Birth of Peronism Philippine-style?
Walden Bello for Focus on the Global South
[W]hen all is said and done, one would be hard put to deny the truth that the vast majority of those who went to the Edsa Shrine and later marched on Malacanang were mainly motivated by resentments against the rich, by feelings that a terrible injustice had been done to their hero, Joseph "Erap" Estrada, by a sense that they were acting to protect the constitution and democracy. To say that they were simply manipulated by cynical politicians is to express a half-truth and to do the masses a great injustice.
Lessons
Conrado de Quiros for the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Did 'EDSA 3' represent a class war? I got asked that question several times over the past week or so. And my answer was always, yes and no. No, it was not a class war in terms of its stated reasons or motivations.... (which) was that Erap, who was one of the poor, had been humiliated, oppressed and abused.... It was a class war in that it drew its power from the very real class divide in society, a society rived into a few spectacularly rich and a teeming spectacularly poor.
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