The Cusp (PH)

Eternal Sunshine of an Ahistorical Mind: Rejoinder to Monsod, Magno, Punongbayan, et al.

2024-04-21T20:58:00.005+10:00

Resolution of Both Houses (RBH) Nos. 6 and 7 seek to amend portions of our constitution that deal with foreign ownership in public utilities, basic education, and advertising. The current limits on foreign ownership in these sectors would remain, but Congress would be authorized to modify them through ordinary legislation.

The University of the Philippines School of Economics (UPSE) issued a Discussion Paper (DP) recently in response to deliberations in the House of Representatives. The paper entitled, “How to change a constitution by hand-waving (Or, the unbearable lightness of evidence2 in support of lifting foreign ownership restrictions)” questions the validity of evidence used to support both resolutions.

This reaction paper below seeks to unpack what the UP professors allege is the weak evidence presented at the House and evaluate their counter evidence.

In addition, I recorded a series on The Cusp Youtube Channel that covers the main arguments of the rejoinder. Here they are in order (see below).

Are restrictions to FDI in the 1987 charter passé?

2024-02-13T15:33:00.007+11:00

I was invited by Senator Sonny Angara, Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments and Revision of Codes to provide our position on Senate Resolution of Both Houses, RBH No. 6. This is a resolution that seeks to amend Article XII, Section 11 (Public Utilities).

The following slides were used in my statement to the Senate Subcommittee on Monday, 12 February 2024.

A video montage of my statement and responses at the Q&A can be viewed below:

My closing statement can be viewed below and here.

What the Marcos victory heralds

2022-08-21T12:46:00.011+10:00

Image courtesy of PNA, June 2022.

The New Society under Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos sought to break with the Commonwealth era, by dispossessing the old aristocracy who were in charge of that order and replacing them with his own cronies and political acolytes. State-led development using financial leverage supplied by the West was its economic growth model. This was made possible by various policy settings prevalent at the time.

The Marcos regime operated state owned enterprises in nearly every sector of the economy. It had a fixed exchange rate with the peso pegged to the US dollar. It sought to develop industries behind protectionist trade walls. It had a central wage fixing system that was politically manipulable. Foreign investment was confined to a short positive list, set by his government. The tax regime was highly irrational and regressive.

This was reformed by the EDSA regime, which subscribed to Washington’s neoliberal agenda. State-led development gave way to market-centrism. State-owned enterprises were privatised. Crony capitalists were left to fend for themselves. A flexible foreign exchange rate regime was introduced. Quantitative trade restrictions were converted into tariffs, which were then lowered at an accelerated pace. Foreign investment was restricted by an ever dwindling negative list. The tax regime was gradually made more progressive and rational.

In the political arena, regular “free” elections were restored. This led to the revival of the old Commonwealth political clans that went into hiatus under Marcos. The regime increasingly tolerated many of Marcos’ political allies, at first in local bailiwicks, then eventually at the national stage. This included the Marcoses and Romualdezes themselves who were allowed to return from exile, after Marcos, Sr. passed away in Hawaii.

Some of the EDSA stalwarts who had fought the dictator survived, for a time. But in the end, they either lost to more traditional political clans, former Marcos loyalists and new dynasties, or got compromised by the system, so much so that the distinction between them and their former opponents was difficult to perceive.

Was it any wonder that after restoring the pre-Martial Law system of politics, the result would be the same old patrimonialism that thrived under that old order? Allegiances were feigned towards whoever was the occupant of Malacanang by members of congress and local governments, to gain maximum advantage. No permanent alliances, only permanent interests.

The political class realised that it was better to collude by forging “unity” - the path of least resistance - to remain in power. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. despite claiming that the post-EDSA regime had disrupted his father’s grand plan for first world status, had in fact accepted the tenets of its economic philosophy as the basis for his administration.

Having subscribed to it, he saw no need to debate policy with his opponents during his presidential campaign. They were advocating mostly the same things, anyway. His rivals would only use the debate stage as an opportunity to raise the issue of his father’s dark past, which he needed to avoid at all cost.

At his first address to the joint-sitting of Congress, he surprised many by simply sticking to the policy line of his economic managers. The same high priests who had advised his father, but whose prescriptions went unheeded. Marcos, Jr., for fear of upsetting markets at a precarious post-pandemic period, towed their line.

Neither did he signal any structural break with the past by way of revising the 1987 charter. This was despite hinting that he was for amending it, up until he got elected. Then, he suddenly switched gears and said it was not a priority, dousing the fervour of those who were expecting something more radical from him.

Unlike 1986 when the difference between the Marcos and EDSA regimes were as stark as light and darkness, good and evil, the main differences now had to do with the extent to which three lettered acronyms like PPP ought to be relied on to boost infrastructure spending. They were marginal, because both sides had actually gravitated towards the middle.

In the end all that Bongbong Marcos could offer was more of the same, only better. In truth, this was all the Filipino public had bargained for. They simply wanted more effective governance than what they had been shown in the past. Better conditions on the ground, rather than lofty ideals based on such abstractions as “democracy” or “people empowerment”. The EDSA regime had offered these in spades, but seemed inept, unable to translate them into reality.

The Aquinos, having fallen from political grace, were now seen as the enemy. And so as the logic goes, the enemy of my enemy becomes my friend. These were the Marcoses who were able to spin the yarn that things had been better under their watch. Substituting “unity” for “discipline” the mantra of his father, Marcos Jr., was able to provide an antidote to the perennially argumentative, critically divisive and deconstructive attitude of the EDSA forces. Unity required discipline after all.

And in so doing, he was able to foist his own counter-narrative that would explain the past. It was all a lie, the attacks on our family. We hold these hidden truths that the EDSA forces don’t want you to hear. And yet, despite the success of his propaganda, and his victory at the polls, what did the second coming of Marcos herald? Not a break with the previous dispensation.

Though the rejuvenation of the Marcos dynasty signalled a rejection of the formerly ascendant Aquinos and their allies, it didn’t represent a repudiation of the constitutional, political and economic norms they had put in place. Quite the opposite.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness, so Oscar Wilde said. Maggie Thatcher when asked what her single, greatest achievement was, replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”. So it became with the EDSA regime. Its crowning glory, its finest hour, came not at the apotheosis of the Aquinos, but with the measured return of another Marcos into Malacanang.

A post-pandemic primer on the Philippines

2022-06-18T08:28:00.004+10:00

I recently "sat down" with Cecile from Toronto, the host of a Youtube channel known as CeCe Tee Vee and "The Closet Economist" a former official of the Bangko Sentral who is completing her doctoral studies in Barcelona.

We discussed the state of the world following Covid-19 and the complex challenges facing the nation as it seeks to rebound from its ill effects. We assessed the capacity of the incoming government of Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos, Jr to address it, and the missed opportunity of electing Isko Moreno whose human-centered economic plans were aimed squarely at our complex challenges.

We concluded with reflections on how to promote transformational thinking and keep the flame of the Iskommunity alive.

This episode streamed live on Philippine Independence Day June 12, 2022. The language spoken is mainly Taglish (a combination of English and Tagalog).

Constitutional political economy of foreign investment in the Philippines

2022-06-17T19:01:00.008+10:00

Originally livestreamed on the Facebook page of The CoRRECT Movement on February 21, 2021 (the 35th anniversary of EDSA), this discussion with Orion Perez Dumdum covers the political economy of constitutional restrictions on foreign ownership in key sectors of the Philippines. CoRRECT stands for Constitutional Reform and Rectification for Economic Competitiveness and Transformation. It is a study group that espouses reforms in the Philippine Constitution of 1987.

The show notes used to structure the discussion are found here.

If federalism is the answer, then what's the question?

2022-06-16T21:47:00.005+10:00

Opponents to federalism often ask, what is the problem that it seeks to address. A one-on-one discussion with CoRRECT Movement Co-Founder Orion Perez Dumdum sought to highlight the emerging problems related to the Philippines that a federal constitution would be well-placed to fix. CoRRECT stands for Constitutional Reform and Rectification for Economic Competitiveness and Transformation. The group advocates the shift to a federal parliamentary form of government and the lifting of ownership caps on foreign investments in the Philippines.

The original livestream on February 7, 2021 can be found on CoRRECT Movement's Facebook page. The show notes used by the discussants can be found here.

A close look at the parliamentary system

2022-06-16T19:24:00.006+10:00

I had a one-on-one discussion with CoRRECT Movement's Co-Founder, Orion Perez Dumdum that was originally livestreamed on their Facebook page on January 24, 2021. CoRRECT stands for Constitutional Reform and Rectification for Economic Competitiveness and Transformation. It espouses constitutional reforms that include removing caps on foreign ownership of firms in key sectors of the economy and shifting to a parliamentary, federal system of government.

This was the first of a three part-series where we looked at each of these proposals. In this episode, we took a closer look at the parliamentary system and contrasted it with the presidential form of government.

These are the show notes that I used in structuring our discussion.

6 Takeaways from the 2022 Philippine Presidential Elections

2022-05-11T20:43:00.000+10:00

I have 6 takeaways from the election of 2022. Here they are in no particular order:

United we stand, divided we fall.

The unity of the Marcos and Duterte forces sealed the deal, after Sara settled for the vice presidency. They seemed to have heeded the warning of the 1992 elections. In that year, Imelda Marcos and Danding Cojuangco both ran for president, splitting the loyalist vote in the process. Their combined votes outnumbered the eventual winner Fidel Ramos. If they had put up a united slate, then they would have re-taken Malacanang a mere six years after fleeing in haste. If both Sara and Bongbong had stood for the presidency, they might have been defeated by Vice President Robredo. It was not meant to be as the opposition was fragmented and bitterly divided.

Automated polling has matured.

None of the fears of massive cheating materialised. Despite the stalled voting in several polling places due to malfunctioning machines, the vote count and transmission went smoothly for the most part. By Tuesday morning, right after the polls, the results were known. After administering automated polling over five election cycles, the Comelec and its contractor seems to have mastered how to do it effectively and securely.

Public opinion polls were right.

The pre-election poll results by Pulse Asia, Social Weather Station, and other reputable outfits accurately predicted the outcome of the election. There were few surprises in the night. What happened in 2016 with Duterte coming from behind, in defiance of the polls, may have been a one-off. The science and professionalism of the reputable polling firms has been reaffirmed.

The popularity of Duterte’s government mattered.

In an age of moral panics and outrage over social problems such as illicit drugs, criminality and moral decay from ideologies based on identity, most voters opted to go for continuity rather than change. A poll conducted prior to the election found that 50 per cent of likely voters preferred a continuation of Duterte’s policies but with a lighter touch. This is where most presidential candidates positioned themselves.

The vice president herself promised to continue the “war on drugs” but with a different emphasis on treatment. Others were seen as “Duterte-lite”. While they crowded in this lane, a third of all likely voters preferred the unadulterated version of Duterte’s policies. Bongbong had them all to himself. The mere association between Marcos Sr’s martial rule with that of Duterte’s iron fist was enough for voters to equate Marcos Jr with continuity.

Change is still coming.

The seeming opposite of 4, and comically reflective of an episode of Veep, the message “Continuity with Change” was very much in the air. Bongbong stole the opposition’s thunder early on by claiming the mantle of change, while running with the daughter of the incumbent. People still saw the opposition as tired, old, and out of ideas. After 35 years of being scapegoated for the ills of Philippine society, Marcos became reinvented as a break with the narrative of EDSA that had dominated the airwaves and textbooks since 1986.

He who controls the past, controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.

This Orwellian quote from the novel 1984 is really what this election was fought over. To the victor not only go the spoils of incumbency, but also the pen with which to write, or in Marcos Jr’s case, rewrite history. The Marcoses always suffered a handicap due to the fact that the post-EDSA regime got to tell history from its perspective. Since the election of Duterte in 2016 that narrative has been challenged. Marcos Jr’s loss in 2016 was a kind of blessing in disguise in that he had the luxury of time to build a social media presence to take control of the narrative.

He was able through this to redefine his past and rebrand the Marcoses with a new image that appealed to new voters with no lived experience of his father’s rule. The fact that his opponents condemned it as historical revisionism only raised its mystery and appeal. Once he assumes the presidency, he will have the power to make the Marcoses’ version of events official. And that is perhaps worth more than its weight in gold.

Why the 2022 race needs a third force

2022-03-27T11:06:00.003+11:00

In a 1 v 1 match-up Marcos Jr wins, but in a three cornered fight, there is a chance he loses.

Why? Because even if the remaining non-Marcos candidates withdraw in favor of Mrs Robredo, not all their votes go to her, nor will it be enough, since Marcos is polling between 50 and 60 per cent. Leni is partly the reason why he is doing so well.

Her net satisfaction level is very low, and many voters distrust her. They want to send her a clear message in this election. She spent the last six years being very critical of the administration. At one point, during the height of the Covid crisis, her supporters on social media and in the streets, were calling for the ouster of Duterte.

That is the reason why many are siding with the Marcos scion. There is no way in a two cornered race that she can peel off these voters who support Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s government to switch to her side. If anything, the votes for Moreno, Lacson and Pacquiao might just go to Marcos Jr, not to the vice president.

Manila Mayor Isko Moreno has attracted most of the organic grassroots leaders from Duterte’s 2016 campaign to support him along with those who supported his senate bid in that year who also formed the base of Sen. Grace Poe’s presidential campaign. Many ordinary swing voters who see his achievements in Manila have also been converted to switch to his side.

This has made him a viable third force. He has actively been courting the support of Duterte’s base with his recent pronouncements on the continuation of the president’s programs, most notably Build, Build, Build. The only question that remains is whether he can convert enough of these voters to switch to his side by the time of the election.

In a three cornered fight where a third candidate has cross over appeal to win some of Pres. Duterte’s base, there could be enough erosion of Marcos Jr’s support to make him lose an electoral majority and become vulnerable. But these Duterte supporters will be hesitant to switch to a third candidate, if it would mean Mrs. Robredo has a chance of winning.

That is why Mayor Isko needs to also demonstrate cross-over appeal to win support from the vice president’s camp. He did this when he issued a statement during the first Comelec hosted debate that he would collect the P203 billion owed by the Marcos estate to the goverment and use the money to provide ‘ayuda’ to ordinary Filipinos.

This is the clearest signal on where he stands regarding the Marcoses. He was careful not to demonize them, but to frame the issue as one of simply implementing an existing Supreme Court ruling that was final and executory.

At least, by staying in the race, Mayor Isko Moreno could weaken the support base of Marcos Jr to the point that some other candidate can win. If he withdraws, it all but guarantees that Marcos would win by a landslide, possibly becoming the first post-EDSA president-elect to win an outright majority of the vote. That is why the 2022 presidential race needs a third force.

Policy brief 2022-02: Providing Rooftop Solar and Storage for Public Housing Estates, Schools and Hospitals

2022-02-28T06:00:00.001+11:00

This policy brief lays down the case for installing commercial photovoltaic (PV) solar on the rooftops of public houses, schools and hospitals.

‘Pagod’

2022-02-22T20:52:00.000+11:00

by Emmanuel Doy Santos

Who would have thought that 36 years after the EDSA ‘People Power’ revolt of 1986, we would face another election where the leading candidates include one Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and a widow, turned politician aligned with the Aquinos?

Having lived through Martial Law, I cannot really fathom what is unfolding. Within what I thought was my own circle of tight knit friends, bonds that have lasted decades have snapped. People have left our group because they can’t stand the rhetoric of some of its members. Friends whom I had never known to be political are now quite vocal about their views and judging those who don’t share them. 

I’ve never really seen such partisanship before. People are taking their politics in such a deeply personal manner, the way they treat religion. I mean, if anyone should take it that way it ought to be me. My late father Emmanuel Tiu Santos was a bona fide EDSA figure. 

Having campaigned for Ferdinand Sr in 1961 and gotten Imelda as a sponsor at his wedding in 1967, he turned when Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972. Having sponsored the bill of political, social and economic rights in the Con-Con, as well as the provisions setting up the Ombudsman, he realized that he needed to take a stand.

He decided to throw his hat in the ring in 1978. He co-founded the political party Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN) and ran with Ninoy Aquino. They contested seats for the national capital region in the Interim Batasan Pambansa elections and faced off with his ninang Imelda and her KBL slate. 

My father together with his crew helped engineer the noise barrage that swept the capital prior to election day. He and many others considered this to be the first battle cry of EDSA (see ‘Laban ’78 to EDSA ’86', Inquirer, April 23, 2016).

I personally visited Ninoy in Times Street when he was under house arrest. Our family went to Boston in the summer of 1981 and spent three days with Ninoy and Tita Cory going around Harvard, Bunker Hill and other local sites. 

After EDSA, dad literally dodged bullets and a grenade that was hurled at him while delivering a speech at his ‘miting de avance’ on the eve of the elections of 1988. He stood for election having been the appointed governor of his home province Nueva Ecija. This was an election that locals to this day maintain was stolen from him.

If anyone should hold strong views about a potential return of the Marcoses and their cronies to power, it ought to be people like me. But somehow, I’m not as affected, as some of my friends, who growing up, never really spoke of politics.

I do know that the outcome of this election does matter. When I see Marcos Jr polling ahead, it does affect me. I sleep uneasily at night and wake-up the following morning worrying for my country. But one thing I cannot bring myself to do is criticize nor condemn my friends who are Marcos loyalists. 

The reason for that is simple. I recognize that the Marcoses were a product of their time and the internal contradictions of Philippine society that began at its founding when the Spanish friar lands fell into the hands of a few. As Iyer and Maurer (2009) pointed out, wealth became even more concentrated after the American colonial government partitioned and distributed these lands between 1903 and 1918. 

“The ‘landed elite’ appears to have been broadened at the expense of smallholding families,” they wrote. This gave rise to the Old Society, where in the words of Ninoy “the few enjoy the fat of the land, and the many suffer.” 

I’ve come to recognize a truism (and I mean no disrespect to those aggrieved by the late dictator). Yes, thousands were confirmed to have been abducted, summarily executed, mutilated, raped and tortured during that dreadful period under Marcos Sr. But this horrendous and horrific suffering is itself dwarfed by the tens of thousands that die in our country every year due to lack of basic human and health services, malnutrition, and natural disasters.

Yes, billions were siphoned off by the Marcoses to overseas bank accounts, and only a fraction was returned. But that too is a fraction of the billions wasted and stolen by corrupt officials today. How can we be so intolerant of one kind of abuse, yet turn a blind eye to the other?

The Marcoses, as dreadful as they are, as shameless as they are, are not the real problem. They are merely a symptom of the problem. The fact that their political fortunes have reversed, points to the failings of the post-EDSA neoliberal state that replaced them. The reason why I can’t engage in this gratuitous display of faux revulsion at the Marcoses, is that both sides are equally to blame for the perpetuation of our people’s suffering.

After all these years of political squabbles, I’ve grown weary of the circus that goes on at elections, while the fundamental basic needs of our people remain overlooked. For once, I’d like for us to take their problem seriously. Stop pretending that it will go away, the moment we vanquish the other side. No, it won’t go away. It hasn’t. 

It is clear that what we need to do is see through the illusion of a dualist world view where the competing narratives of either side battle it out, and deal with the reality of ordinary people's lives where the true battle for survival persists. The best way to prevent a repeat of the past is not to promote a confected golden age by one side or the other, but to step out of the cycle of reactivity and retribution, to end the cycle of poverty, and attend to the fierce urgency of now.

The author is a development economist completing his doctoral studies in policy innovation at the University of New England in Australia. He supports Isko Moreno for president.

How Mayor Moreno can address the concerns of Duterte supporters

2022-01-19T09:37:00.001+11:00

Some prominent diehard supporters of Pres. Rodrigo Roa Duterte have endorsed or expressed a willingness to endorse the candidate Isko Moreno for president. One in particular laid down the gauntlet for the mayor to address three main concerns close to his heart as a Duterte supporter.

It is believed that Pres. Duterte himself is looking to endorse a candidate other than former Senator Bongbong Marcos. He was reportedly upset with the way in which Marcos Jr got presidential daughter and Davao City mayor Sara Duterte to run in his ticket for vice president, while Mr Duterte was offering her the top of the ticket with Sen. Bong Go running as her vice president.

Moreno is languishing in third or second place in most polls. He can only improve his numbers with votes from the Duterte Sr camp. These voters are preferencing Bongbong at the moment, but it seems they aren't solidly behind him. Many of them are waiting for a signal from the president to determine which candidate to switch to. Could the proddings of some of these diehard pro-Duterte vloggers be this sign?

Mayor Isko needs to confront the three main issues laid down by them. The document below seeks to address them. It is published here with permission from its source.

Isko Moreno fulfils the promise of EDSA

2021-11-07T14:57:00.007+11:00

Image courtesy of Campfire Media

Adherents of the EDSA movement claim we live in a dualist world. Elections are the site for the eternal battle between the forces of good against the hordes of evil. One side cannot exist without the other. That is the way they have framed every election since 1986.

One of the biggest challenges of liberal democracy is the inflation of expectations. Openness and freedom cause everyone's desires, hopes and dreams to be pinned on a system of equal representation and deliberation. Incrementalism and patience are virtues in this context. It often leads to dissatisfaction and despair at the sluggish pace at which change occurs.

This is why from time to time, the electorate wavers in its support for democratic ideals. This is particularly true in times of crises. Pres. Rodrigo Duterte harnessed voter dismay in 2016. He offered a quicker, more direct route to the fulfilment of expectations by weakening our system of checks and balances.

The election of vice president was equally important in that year. Sen. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. was favored to win. That is why Leni Robredo has become an all-important figure in the pantheon of EDSA. It was she who prevented Marcos Jr from being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The upcoming election of 2022 is billed as a rematch between Marcos Jr and Mrs. Robredo. The Duterte years will be seen either as prelude to a Marcos restoration or interlude to the EDSA regime, depending on its outcome. Both their candidacies have been energized by this match-up. Both have exploited its dualist aspects to harness support and galvanize their base.

The problem is that neither seem attuned to the requirements for the top job. It will be twelve years since Marcos Jr last held executive office as governor of the sparsely populated province of Ilocos Norte. He has spent the last six years pleading his case before the electoral tribunal. His preoccupation during this time has been as a vlogger promoting his counter narrative.

Vice president Robredo for her part has spent the last six years without a clear role in the Duterte administration. She has used her office's meager resources to take pot shots at him and to moonlight as a quasi-NGO leader. Her Angat Buhay program relies on private donor contributions and volunteers to function. The feasibility and appropriateness of institutionalizng them as government programs run by public agencies is yet to be determined.

This is perhaps why both deploy narrative rather than substance to fuel enthusiasm for their respective candidacies. Marcos Jr's videos are all about the achievements of his father's 20 year rule. Robredo's confetti sprinkled caravan reminds us of the protest movement against the late dictator. Both harken with nostalgic fondness to a confected golden age and seek to prevent a return of the opposing side.

They both downplay the challenges of the present. A pandemic threatens our very lives and livelihoods now and in the foreseeable future. The plans of both are ephemeral and self-referential. Marcos Jr wants to unify the nation and lead it down a path towards greatness again. Robredo's plan is to commission a team to study the gaps in our health care system and draw up a plan to deal with them.

The strategy of either side is to captivate and mesmerize the public with myth and folklore to distract from the urgencies of the now. Enter Isko Moreno. He came of age during the lost decade of the 1980s. The nation was reeling from the debt overhang of the Marcos years. The slow, but steady process of climbing out of this abyss rendered the promise of EDSA unfulfilled.

Isko's message is simple: instead of focusing on the never-ending enmity between the EDSA and Marcos regimes, let's focus on the people. It is clear from this message that we need to go beyond the illusion of a dualist world to deal with the reality of ordinary people's lives. The best way to prevent a repeat of the past is not to promote a confected golden age, but to step out of the cycle of reactivity and retribution.

Isko is the perfect medium for this message. His life and work demonstrate it. His life exemplifies how an ordinary poor boy from the slums of Tondo can rise above the vagaries of this world without resentment or vindictiveness to the powers-that-be. His record as a local executive demonstrates how to quickly respond to the needs and aspirations of his electorate while respecting democratic accountability, transparency and the rule of law.

This is why Isko Moreno fulfils the promise of EDSA. He puts into practice its basic tenets. Creating a level playing field for everyone, irrespective of their standing in life. This is done by giving them equal access to the means for achieving their fullest potential. His numerous achievements in education, healthcare, housing and job creation in the nation's capital provide a workable and scalable template for the rest of the country.

It is perhaps for this reason that loyalists from both the Marcos and Robredo camps seek to discredit and tarnish his personal reputation and record in office. They see him as the biggest obstacle to the restoration of their political fortunes. The threat comes from his re-framing of our perennial problem. Moreno's non-dualist worldview lays the squabbling of the past 50 years to rest.

This in the end was what EDSA was meant to bring about. Not the permanent dominance of one political persuasion over another. The movement, according to Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr, was meant to restore the free and open contest of ideas. This would produce a better synthesis for the Filipino people. Mayor Isko Moreno's syncretic ideas could offer a better fit for the present moment. Our weary electorate may decide that now is the perfect time to give him and his ideas a chance.

Mandanas-ruling could worsen fiscal divide

2021-08-23T17:43:00.006+10:00

Former Supreme Court justice Artemio Panganiban calls it “Devolution without federalization”. He is referring to the Garcia-Mandanas ruling.

This Supreme Court decision made back in 2019, affirmed the right of LGUs to include ALL FORMS OF REVENUE COLLECTED by the national government in the computation of their internal revenue allotments. This ruling will take effect next year. It’s expected to cost an extra P234 billion, about 1% of GDP.

To deal with this, economic managers are looking to shift the implementation of various projects worth P405 billion to LGUs. If the NG fails to devolve such powers, it could put pressure on its international credit rating. If LGUs are not prepared to handle the additional functions, it could spell disaster for the post-Covid response.

This could perpetuate the fiscal inequity between “Imperial Manila” and the rest of the country, as we are about to show.

It was on the eve of another election year in 1991 that the LGC was enacted. When it came to effect, the newly installed Ramos administration sought to lessen its impact by restricting its application to income taxes only. But, responsibility for operating hospitals was devolved straight away causing chaos and confusion.

In 1992, the nation was in the grips of an energy crisis, which crippled the economy. Today, we face a far greater health crisis, which has dragged our economy down. This puts in doubt the ability of agencies at both the national and local level to handle the devolution of powers “seamlessly”.

Based on the LGC, the IRA is allocated to LGUs in the following manner: 23% to provinces, 23% to cities, 34% to municipalities, and 20% to barangays. The split for each follows a weighting based on population (50%), land mass (25%) and equal sharing (25%). The formula doesn’t explicitly take into account fiscal capacity, or lack thereof.

With the SC decision, there is still likely to be a fiscal shortfall nationwide, due in part to lower LGU revenues. But because of the way the IRA is split, there will be regions with a larger fiscal shortfall, primarily in the Visayas and Mindanao, while other regions, like NCR and Southern Tagalog, will do particularly well.

We can clearly see that under a weaker economy, LGUs are expected to earn much less from their own sources of revenue next year. This is according to the Bureau of Local Government Finance. The added IRAs from the national government will make up for some of this, but the devolved functions will add an extra burden on LGUs.

We can see through this modelling that NCR and Calabarzon could actually have a surplus of over 64 billion pesos combined. But the regions outside Imperial Manila will suffer a huge fiscal black hole of over 310 billion pesos! In fact, the farther you go from Luzon, the worse it gets with BARMM accounting for nearly half of this deficit. BARMM’s fiscal problems will be fixed however by a separate allotment under the BOL. Other regions however won’t have such extra allotments anywhere near the fiscal gap remaining.

In NCR, LGUs rely on IRA for 20% of their revenues on average, while in Bicol (Region 5), they are dependent on IRA for 81% of revenues. Manilenos earn about 8x that of Bicolanos, on average, yet NCR and Bicolandia receive an equal share of IRA, at around 66-67 billion. Of course NCR has more than twice the population, but Bicol has 3x its land mass!

This will generate and perpetuate huge inequity across the countryside, as less developed regions will be saddled with a larger fiscal burden. To make things more equitable, our fiscal constitution would need to ensure that every Filipino, regardless of where he or she lives, can expect the same level of service as what the average or best performing regions receive, with the same tax burden.

In the spirit of bayanihan, the Philippines needs to adopt a cooperative model of fiscal governance, that observes fiscal equalisation. The OECD defines fiscal equalisation as

a transfer of fiscal resources across jurisdictions with the aim of offsetting differences in revenue raising capacity or public service cost. Its principal objective is to allow sub-central governments to provide their citizens with similar sets of public services at a similar tax burden even if incomes differ across areas.

Fiscal equalisation means there won’t be winners and losers. The gap between rich and poor won’t get bigger. Residents of poorer regions will have access to the same services as richer ones, at the same standard without having to raise their tax burden any higher.

Apart from preserving the economic inequities of our urban-rural divide, the Mandanas ruling may also have political consequences, not just in 2022, but beyond it as well.

Mandanas will supercharge the ability of NCR’s cities to invest in their people and infrastructure, leading to a different quality of life in the capital compared to the regions in the North and South. This will worsen the political, economic and cultural divide between city and region. Growing inequity will just lead to further polarization and populism.

To address this fiscal imbalance across jurisdictions, a re-weighting of the IRA needs to occur, where richer regions which have a greater ability to raise their own revenues should have their IRA discounted, accordingly. A corresponding positive differential should be made to adjust the IRA of poorer regions to take into account their lower revenue raising capacity or higher cost of service provision.

The NG should also decrease the amount of programs it plans to devolve to the regions, so that the fiscal burden doesn’t fall on their shoulders. Not in 2022 while the Philippines still reels from the consequences of Covid, and where LGUs are on the frontlines in dealing with the crisis.

Continuing down the current path would seem like madness. Rather than eliminating the need for federalisation, as Panganiban claims, the Mandanas ruling might actually accentuate it. This is because clarifying the roles of different levels of government and designing fiscal institutions to handle them is precisely what federalization would bring.

But even Pres. Duterte avoided the topic in his valedictory SONA last July. Mayor Sara Duterte for her part has said in the past that she is opposed to federalization, as it will create mini-fiefdoms which would be dominated by political dynasties. The failure of the Duterte administration to fix the fiscal imbalance across jurisdictions could become one of its unkept promises.

Can the Opposition win in 2022?

2021-08-05T13:36:00.006+10:00

The EDSA narrative provides its adherents a meaningful way of making sense of the world based on a valorizing worldview. In this narrative, the Philippines is like the chosen people of Israel who were delivered from the bondage of dictatorship and ushered into the promised land of freedom.

The past five years under Duterte, would have felt like an exile to Babylon for the opposition. Their defeat in the midterm election of 2019 signaled the prolonging of this exile from power. The recent death of Noynoy Aquino has been used to revive their fortunes in time for next year’s polls. So, can they return to power in 2022?

In opposition, the Liberals and their allies have had time to reflect. Why have they fallen so out of favor with voters? Just like the exilic Jews who pondered their fate in Babylon and the meaning of it. The temptation, and in fact the norm would be to adopt the gods of their conquerors and lose their religion. Should the political opposition do the same and bow to their fate?

Of course, for the faithful the answer to that would be ‘no’. If so, then a plausible, credible explanation would have to be found for why they have fallen so far from political grace.

The worshipping of false gods by the Israelites was the reason given by the Jews to explain why the Lord had allowed them to be conquered. This historical narrative allowed them to hold on to their cultural and religious beliefs despite being in a strange land. And by remaining true to their religion, they found a way back from exile with their identity intact. So, is there a parallel here for the children of EDSA, and if so, then what? How can they credibly explain their fall from power and find their way back from political oblivion?

Ninoy had espoused a belief in Christian Socialism, which traced its roots to the attempts of an enlightened monarch in Denmark to liberate his people from serfdom through mass education. It was a human centered form of capitalism aimed at affording the full blossoming of ordinary citizens to reach their fullest potential. The success of this model is demonstrated today by Scandinavia being one of the wealthiest, least corrupt, and happiest places on earth.

The adoption of a neoliberal worldview by the EDSA regime with its idolatry of the Market, espoused by Washington and mediated through market-enhancing institutions of governance promoted by the WB and IMF, was in effect what had caused the children of EDSA to go astray. This is what invited populist backlashes from the left, in the form of Erap Estrada in 1998, from within, with the apostasy of Gloria Arroyo in 2004, and from the right, with the ascendancy of Rody Duterte in 2016.

Vice Pres. Robredo for her part has emphasized the dynamism of the private sector for collective action by brokering donations between corporate foundations and needy communities. She has not lasted long in any of the public roles assigned to her, first as housing czar then as co-chair of the Inter-agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs, preferring instead to become a maverick policy entrepreneur.

Her support for marginalized communities through her ‘Angat Buhay program’ is still consistent with a neoliberal view that public investment merely crowds out charitable spending. It is consistent with a minimalist role for the state, relying on the magic of markets to broker the needs of society through voluntary, altruistic donations by moneyed elite: trickle-down economics, in effect. Government by NGO.

Duterte didn’t mind breaking with this tradition. He didn’t kowtow to the international rules-based order when dealing with the West Philippine Sea or human rights issue. He in effect defiled the sacred cows before which the EDSA forces fall prostrate.

He offered instead a kind of tough love for the development of the Filipino by focusing on the social ills that have come about because of the aimless accumulation of wealth in the pursuit of materialist, consumerist culture. This tyranny of freedom, of unconstrained choice fostered by free markets, has only led to alienation, apathy and addictive forms of behavior.

Duterte, in acting like a strict father establishing boundaries and disciplining his children has stepped into the breach because while the EDSA narrative structured our political and economic ways of life, it had nothing to offer us from a social standpoint. Neither did the post-EDSA regime engage in the necessary work of political and electoral reforms needed to truly democratize participation in our society.

With the recent passing of Noynoy Aquino, his former confidante Rep. Joey Salceda offered an assessment of his legacy. He praised him for accomplishing many noble things, but also said that PNoy suffered from a lack of ambition due to his ‘worldview’. He had the most favorable macroeconomic conditions, but failed to seize the opportunities these presented. This lack of ambition was his cardinal policy failing.

This is what obscured the original agapic vision of Noynoy’s father for a human centered form of development. This idolatry of the market is the folly that has led to their political exile, so it behooves the children of EDSA to return to The Source for inspiration.

If Duterte represents a consumptive love of country - a form of governance that destroys human life to preserve it, that breaks the law to uphold it; and, if the EDSA regime represents a reciprocal kind of love - a form of governance that relies on transactional markets and padrino-based politics, then the agapic love of country, of actualizing individuals by investing in their human capacities is what the successor to the EDSA regime must work towards.

Only by rediscovering this forgotten vision can the children of EDSA rescue themselves from irrelevance. Acknowledging where they went wrong would go a long way towards healing the partisan divide with those who were once in their broad coalition but no longer see themselves as part of it.

The question is, who among their leaders today would be so humble as to do that? Dare I say none; and so, for the true believers in Ninoy’s Impossible Dream, they may have to go outside the fold to find a leader who can re-imagine the promise of EDSA and bring its children back from exile into the Promised Land.

Dilawan: Rise and fall of the EDSA regime - Duterte and the Next Wave

2020-03-22T22:45:00.001+11:00

If Marcos was the logical conclusion of the Old Republic, which was built on a feudal society, where “a few enjoyed the fat of the land, and the many suffered”, then the natural extension of our post-EDSA republic, with its monopolistic capitalist model, is Duterte. The internal contradictions of each society ultimately brought about the conditions for the emergence of these leaders.

The lost opportunity of EDSA was that rather than building a more just and humane society, we simply re-incarnated the old one with the result of entrapping many Filipinos into a life of servitude to the vagaries of the market, as we pursued a neoliberal model of development.

Return to first principles

Aquino’s agapic vision for the country - Christian socialism - originated from Northern Europe, a different branch of the Enlightenment, a path to development independent of the Anglo-Celtic model of Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of the Market.

It was a post-Hobbesian view of the world, Remember Hobbes? The one whose book, Leviathan, was forged after the English civil war. He saw the chaos of royalists vs parliamentarians, similar to our post-EDSA reality, where a similar thing played out between Marcos loyalists and pro-democratic forces. The chaos of that time caused Hobbes to advocate for a social contract where a powerful state would be feared and put to end the war of all against all, and is what many find appealing today in Duterte’s style of governing.

The North European model was neither Hobbesian, nor Lockean. John Locke’s version of the social contract was conceived to guarantee life, liberty and property, which was later reformulated as the pursuit of happiness - on which the American and French revolutions were founded. An atomistic view of the world, where individuals are given the burden of figuring out their own way in the world, without support from any community or tradition. This aimless pursuit has led us to the nihilism of the present.

The misconstruing of happiness as subjective life satisfaction, the maximization of utility, which leads us as individuals to accumulate wealth, possessions, experiences, instead of searching for deep connections, and finding purpose, is what has led many countries in the world, including America to end up with populist leaders.

Christian socialism was based on the agapic efforts of a benevolent, enlightened monarch in Denmark to educate his subjects, to liberate them from serfdom and create the conditions that would afford their full blossoming to reach their full potential. A human centred form of capitalism.

This vision was obscured, post-EDSA by the standard orthodoxy of neoliberalism. The gospel of the Market with its Invisible Hand, guiding us to the Common Good, mediated by institutions of good governance. market-centric capitalism, requiring market-enhancing governance.

From a utopic and nostalgic dream, to an agapic vision for the future.

EDSA is a tale of moving from a utopic vision of the future, to looking back with nostalgic fondness to the past, and now that we are at this juncture where the cultural blinkers have come off, we can retrain our eyes toward a new vision, perhaps that original project for agapic transformation, the Impossible Dream that one man dared to dream in the depths of despotic despair and despondency.

In liberal democratic tradition the goal is to achieve economic and political development - to create conditions that provide for stability which then lead to investment attraction that raises our productive capacity for value and wealth generation - a having mode of existence, where the ultimate goal in life is to have things, a kind of techno-consumerist culture, having the latest gadget.

This has led us to emptiness, meaninglessness, the revival of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, different forms of addiction, polarization, loneliness, and robs us of our human potential.

What we need is to aim for the collective co-creation of conditions that would afford the full development of our human potential both as individuals and as a people - a being mode of existence, where the ultimate goal is to have a sense of purpose and connectedness within our culture and community, apart from material well-being.

Freedom as development

The Nobel economist Amartya Sen had an axiom that states ‘freedom is development’. He was referring to the building of human capacities for people to achieve their fullest potential. It is not just granting them rights and letting them fend for themselves. It’s about giving them every chance to succeed in exercising agency, to act and engage with the world, in ways that are meaningful to them and their peers.

EDSA restored our freedom, but left us unprotected from the predation of powerful forces from within and without, that kept us trapped in lower modes of existence. We had to fend for ourselves in a world of parasitic rent-seekers who extracted from the wealth of our nation, weakening its capacity for human development. Movements led by demagogues from both the left and the right have risen to power offering to liberate us from these parasites, but have often ended up engaging in parasitic behaviour themselves, or have squandered golden opportunities due to the intelligence of these parasites to reconfigure and confound strategies employed to find and catch them.

We are engaged in a two part battle:

Fight poverty, malnutrition, and other development traps - to reverse the cycles that keep us locked-in lower orders of existence. Poverty prevents people from exercising agency, because it strips them of capacity to act. It robs us of our freedom. Freedom from hunger, ignorance and preventable diseases, is one of the basic guarantees that we failed to provide to millions of Filipinos, post-EDSA. It was only recently that the state gained some capacity to provide welfare payments targeting the poorest in our communities, to help alleviate the most extreme forms of deprivation. This came about when we entered a virtuous cycle of growth and taxed consumption, that materialist, reductionist mode of existence based on the accumulation of things.
Improve people’s capacity to reach their full potential - to avoid the condition spoken of by Roseau that, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Once individuals and countries reach middle income status, this battle becomes the more salient, as material well-being can provide a base for subjective life satisfaction, but suffers diminishing returns, as additional income does not necessarily lead to higher satisfaction in life. This has been borne out by cross country comparisons, as well as studies on individuals.

This battle to preserve and extend the gains already made towards well-being is situated in a highly complex world with problems that pose significant challenges. These challenges could threaten the gains already made and prevent further gains.

5 Complex Challenges

Back in 2016, I wrote about the 5 challenges that the next president would face. I posted this on Blogwatch, and will provide the link in the comments below. Haven’t got time to discuss them in detail, but very briefly, they are:

Fourth industrial revolution - threatening obsolescence of our labour force. The internet of things, 3D printing, automation, drones, driverless cars, robots, bots, machine learning and artificial intelligence all threaten to replace our workers. Our factories and call centers are all at risk. With pandemics threatening global supply chains, local sourcing may become necessary. Deglobalisation may occur.
Late demographic shift - placing demands on our resources. The Philippine fertility rate has fallen ahead of UN projections thanks in part to strong policy advocacy by NEDA chief Ernesto Pernia to make family planning services more accessible to those who want, but can’t afford it, namely poorer households which were responsible for the rapid growth of our population. This is why hunger and malnutrition is still a problem in the countryside. Due to malnutrition, the only type of work these children could do when they grew up was low skilled menial jobs in our agricultural sector. As mechanisation takes over, there will be lesser opportunities for them. This is why we need to make a demographic shift.
Severity of climate change - endangering lives and livelihoods. Severe droughts and typhoons, wiping out crops, making it harder to till the soil, killing and displacing people from their sources of livelihood. The Philippines is at the coal face in terms of feeling the effects of climate change. It will need to find ways to weather-proof its economy and protect its citizens from natural disasters.
Geopolitical competition - endangering our exclusive economic rights over fishing and and other natural resources
Fanatical, ideological beliefs - undermining our safety and social cohesion.

In addition to these five major challenges, I also wrote a piece on the 5 major transformations that were needed, which kind of matched these challenges. And they are, again very briefly:

Agricultural transformation - to modernise and mechanise the ag sector, make it more productive, improve crop yields as well as diversify crops into higher value, drought resistant ones.
Industrial transformation - upgrading technology, innovating and becoming more creative. As the fourth industrial revolution rolls in, we will need to upgrade both our software (skills, knowledge, creativity) and hardware (technology and infrastructure)
Energy transformation - in line with the IoT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, our electricity network needs to upgrade into a smart grid, to allow for low and zero carbon emitting sources, decentralised energy production, storage, including the use of electric vehicles for storage.
Social transformation - as an educated middle class emerges, there will be many health challenges associated with a higher protein diet. Dealing with an obesity epidemic, and the chronic diseases this breeds, dealing with various forms of mental health problems, addictions, loneliness, and suicides. We will need to create healthier communities and greater social cohesion in a diverse country, such as ours.
Political transformation - opening up political participation to ordinary citizens, improving how we enter into political discourse and dialogue with each other. Reduce polarisation, which breeds a post-fact world.

So we can see that when Duterte came into office, he had his work cut-out for him. How did he fare?

First test: war on drugs/Oplan Tokhang

Second test: TRAIN law/fiscal reforms

Third test: IS terrorism and Marawi seige

Fourth test: Expanding social entitlements

Fifth test: Ease of doing business

Sixth test: Build, build, build

Seventh test: Inflation and rice liberalisation

Eighth test: China’s incursions in the South China Sea

Ninth test: Boracay and Manila Bay water sanitation

Tenth test: Transport modernisation

Eleventh test: Fertility rate reduction

Twelfth test: Coronavirus pandemic

How do we speed up the transition to generate transformative, creative solutions by applying collective intelligence to our complex problems?

To do this we need to be open to dialogue with other citizens. That means being willing to truly listen, and understand different people’s perspectives without judging their propositional beliefs.

The last fifty years have been spent with opposing camps arguing Marcos was evil. No? Ah no the Aquinos were evil. Now it’s about dilawans being evil. No? They’re the decent ones? And the fascist DDS are the bad guys?

Memetic tribes (Peter Limborg). One side engages in cyber extortion. If you don’t endorse their # to #resist, s then prepare to be shamed. The other side engages in cyber terrorism. If you stand with the # then prepare for a knock on your door. We’ll come after your kids!

To reconcile disparate views there needs to be a shift away from insisting on such propositions. No one is completely good or bad. We cannot sanctify one and demonise the other. If we do that we fall into a trap of polarisation, which we can ill afford, given the challenges besetting the nation.

Duterte was a signal. He signified what was wrong with the EDSA view of the world. The dispensation anchored on neoliberal market ideology, which obscured its founder, Ninoy’s original agapic vision based on Christian socialism .

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Another Aquino

2020-03-07T20:02:00.002+11:00

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Those were the words of Pres. Noynoy Aquino at his valedictory State of the Nation Address to Congress in July of 2015 where he summed up his administration’s achievements and looked forward to “a new dawn of justice and opportunity” forged by “freedom from corruption” as he claimed, and I quote

My one and only interest is the well-being of my Bosses. I did all I could to forge a nation that is more just and more progressive—one that enjoys the fruits of meaningful change. I will let history decide.

And within 12 months of uttering those words, the era of the EDSA regime would draw to a close, with the rejection of Aquino’s hand-picked successor and the election of Rodrigo Duterte, whose approach to criminal justice was anathema to what the regime had stood for.

In this fourth part to the Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime, we will look at the second Aquino presidency, its ambition, achievements and follies, and while five years is too short a time frame to have gained enough “distance” from those events, we will try to explain what led to the collapse in confidence in the yellow movement, which triggered their losses at the ballot in 2016 and since, and as to why it is unlikely that it will return any time soon.

All that is coming up in the program.

Utopia and nostalgia

In 1986, the EDSA regime came to power after five days in February that displayed all that was noble and genuinely hopeful about the Filipino. Demonstrable proof as to why, in the words of the late Sen. Ninoy Aquino “the Filipino is worth dying for.” The events of EDSA were subsequently compared to the biblical account in Exodus of the chosen people’s flight from bondage in Egypt.

The tanks and guns that rolled in, sent to quell the revolt were muzzled by the roses and rosaries of protesters. The chariots sent to retrieve the Pharaoh’s slaves were swallowed up by the sea of people there. These seemingly miraculous events at EDSA led to the adoption of a utopian vision of the future under the yellow regime.

That utopic dream would be dashed as the first Aquino presidency was hamstrung from the outset by a neoliberal orthodoxy that saddled it with the unnecessary burden of repaying corruption-tainted loans of the previous regime. The prioritisation of bond markets over people, the idolatry of the Market as the mode for seeking deliverance from economic bondage, led to social unrest, military adventurism and resurgence of patronage politics.

It was patrimonialism which stepped in, in lieu of the state, too weak and feeble to provide for the needs of its people. Unable to fulfill the agapic plan of her late husband for the development of the Filipino’s full potential, Mrs Aquino prided herself with the restoration of democratic institutions.

But democratic egalitarianism was paid lip-service by the caciques and their cronies. While the EDSA regime valorised the Market and espoused free market principles in both its politics and economy, in practice, the ruling class of the post-EDSA regime constricted competition and created an uneven playing field, effectively monopolising the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace that Ninoy said, would produce the clash of ideas that would result in a new, higher order thinking around our perennial problems.

The antithesis to the first Aquino administration came with the election of the second. If the first one looked forward with utopic visions of grandeur, the second looked backward with nostalgic remembrances of things past. Both forms of sensemaking obscured the regime’s ability to adapt to and shape reality.

The nostalgia of the second Aquino presidency would be exhibited by:

False frugality when it came to public spending with its over-reliance on the market, to provide for the needs of its people, via public-private partnerships,
False piety with the resurrection of the morality of good vs evil leading to a kind of vindictiveness or vendetta politics and purity culture, and
False security in the way it relied on the rules-based international order set-up by the US and multilateral institutions to address challenges both internal and external.

What framed these falsities was a moralpolitik and a misplaced faith in the Market, mediated by a rules-based order of good governance, to provide economic salvation to the nation. This was encapsulated in the mantra Daang Matuwid, or The Righteous Path, a rubric that defined the moral, political and economic components of this ideology.

While this moralpolitik provided an ideal frame for how the state and economy ought to be, namely a stable democracy with an advanced economy, it didn’t have an effective, empirically proven theory for how to get there, for how we transcend our present patrimonial, post-colonial society to get to the ideal state of Western capitalism and liberal democracy.

As shown by EDSA I and II, the yellow movement was only good at resisting, or scapegoating so called “evil” rulers. As was demonstrated by Aquino I and II, it still lacked a credible approach to deliver on its promises. For this reason, people keep referring to the broken promise of EDSA, the missed opportunities, the unfinished revolution.

Correlation is not causation

Many saw in the second Aquino presidency a chance to correct the mistakes of the first one. Mrs. Aquino’s government faced the challenge of a debt-to-GDP ratio of close to 100%, following years of extractive borrowing by her predecessor. This prevented it from spending on social and economic services required to foster national development. Her son’s administration didn’t face that same challenge.

By 2010, the external debt stocks as a percentage of gross national income stood at around 25%, right about where it was when the years of debt-driven growth began in 1974. This came about thanks to the fiscal and economic reforms introduced by two female presidents Aquino and Arroyo.

Mrs. Aquino was prevented from spending on health and education because she had to service our national debt. Her son no longer faced that problem. The country had in fact exited from the IMF emergency loan program under Mrs Arroyo. She had laid the groundwork for the expansion of our basic educational system and creation of a welfare state. Noynoy continued these policies and sought to increase health spending with the proceeds of inflation-adjusted sin tax law. This was a way to prevent the resurgence of populism from the left, to prevent another Erap Estrada from arising in the person of Jojo Binay. Little did he realize that the threat would come as a result of populism from the right.

This is because the EDSA regime remained vulnerable on its right flank. When it came to infrastructure investment, Noynoy would constrain his government to using public private partnerships as the mode for financing them, rather than borrowing at a time of cheap money or raising taxes. In his first state of the nation address in 2010, he said we faced a fork in the road.

Borrowing from biblical allegory, he told his audience that on the one hand was the destructive path trodden by the EDSA Dos apostate Gloria Arroyo. The other was the straight and narrow way of his government, daang matuwid. Unlike her government which expanded the VAT, he would not raise taxes. That was what he decided even when he was running for president, and he stood by it.

Mr Aquino had become the poster child for the augmented Washington Consensus having been endowed with a grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation funded by the US State Department, designed to help us achieve our Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty. The MCC only awarded these grants to countries that exhibited a capacity for good governance.

Aquino’s reliance on PPP’s to fund public infrastructure was based on the neoliberal Washington Consensus creed that said we needed to get the price right. To do that we needed to be guided by the Invisible Hand of the market. But in addition to that, we also needed to get the policies right. Markets would not work without the intercession of good governance. So private players would determine which projects were right, feasible and commercially viable. This is how you stamp out corruption, while meeting the needs of your people for development, so the doctrine goes.

Good governance was good economics. This was the oft-repeated line. Based on the notion that countries that score high on the WB’s good governance indicators also ranked high in income (per capita). But correlation does not necessarily imply causation, nor does it indicate in which direction that causality is heading. The rooster crows before the sun rises. That doesn’t mean one is the cause of the other. They just happen to take place at the same time.

Kauffmann and Kraay, two senior economists at the World Bank claimed that good governance leads to good economic outcomes, because the two are correlated.

They did this by fitting a regression line onto a scatter plot of countries depicting their control of corruption on the vertical axis and their per capita incomes on the horizontal axis. It is true that when you do that, what you will get is an upward-sloping line, which indicates that both indicators are directly proportional. The higher is your control of corruption, the higher your income status as a nation. They then assumed that good governance determines economic well-being. But the direction of causality, if there was one, could easily go the other way. Governance could be improving as a result of sustained economic growth, as Mushtaq Khan, a professor at the School of the Orient and Asian Studies at the University of London, showed in a paper for the UNCTAD.

According to Khan, if you take the convergence club of developing nations that are rapidly catching up with richer ones, separately as a group, their control of corruption scores are the same or not much different on average from nations whose growth is diverging from the rest of the world.

What does this mean? Countries whose economies are developing rapidly like China, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia are no less corrupt on average than the ones where growth has stagnated or sputtered in the time being considered.

History tells us that the East Asian growth model was not based on the neoliberal blueprint. Forcing nations to adopt a one size fits all, gold plated governance standard can be quite difficult and expensive. As Merilee Grindle pointed out, countries need to find ways to improve governance within their context. She termed it good enough governance, an approximation of the kinds of institutions needed to foster a virtuous cycle of growth that leads to development.

The Chinese called it crossing the river by “feeling for stones”. It’s how they secured property rights without having formal ownership of land or rule of law as pointed out by Dani Rodrik, or fostered healthy competition and accountability within a one party state, as pointed out by Yuen Yuen Ang. As Deng Xiaoping once said, it matters not whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

In other words the WB GG indicators represent the ideal state at the end of this process of development, not the path towards that end. If we try to achieve a high income status by seeking to develop GG first, we are not going to get there. No country in the world, in history has done it that way. Western capitalist civilization achieved it through hundreds of years of toil in which human welfare of workers got worse before getting better. Political and economic liberties only arose at the end of this process, as an educated middle class arose.

The few nations that have grown from poor to rich in the last century didn’t do so by competing on equal footing with the rest of the world. They used heterodox industrial policies to achieve their goals. Khan calls them growth-enhancing governance capabilities in contrast to market-enhancing governance, which is what the WB indicators measure. Growth-enhancing governance seeks to foster a continual adoption of new technologies in developing nations, with quasi-market or non-market tools.

Even the US which is the paragon of laissez-faire economics, whose politicians profess Jefferson’s philosophy that the state that governs least, governs best, in practice follows Hamilton’s doctrine of developing native industries through state-led development in new and emerging industries, as pointed out by Mariana Mazzucato, who sits on the council of economic advisers in the UK.

Embedded autonomy a term coined by Paul Evans to denote the ability of state actors to be embedded within the business community to understand their constraints and requirements for growth, but retaining their autonomy to set policy and evade capture by rent-seekers, is a key growth enhancing governance capability.

The size of economic services as a share of the national budget is a clear indicator of the emergence of a developmental state that has this ability. Tim Kelsall points out that regimes with the ability to sustain high growth for longer periods, have the ability to manage succession and continuity either through a professional economic bureaucracy or strong political parties.

“Successful failure”

Noynoy Aquino’s good governance agenda suffered what Lant Pritchett called the “state development trap”. Trying to mimic rich nations’ institutions was a form of agenda conformity. But taking on the appearance of a rich nation’s governance systems does not necessarily mean you are better at governing. “Looks like” cannot substitute for “does”. This was a kind of modal confusion on his government’s part.

It’s an evolutionary strategy called isomorphic mimicry. In nature, a non-venomous species of snake might take on the stripes and colors of a venomous one to put-off would be predators. In Silicon Valley, DiMaggio and Powell found that startups would try to convince venture capitalists that they were the next Apple, by adopting the same set of practices applied by Steve Jobs. As they say, you can fool some people, some of the time, using this strategy, but ultimately, if you don’t deliver, you will eventually be found out.

This was no better than Imelda’s adoption of Plato’s ideal forms - of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Here we have an ideal form of society - Western capitalist civilization. Let’s mimic it by dressing the part. This led to modal confusion. Constructing palatial buildings with borrowed money does not make a nation rich. Similarly, under PNoy, adopting the stripes and colors of Western-style institutions did not make his government any more capable of running its affairs effectively.

This became evident when the PPPs failed to materialise. When the MRT broke down and got derailed on EDSA, injuring passengers, the best metaphor for his government, if ever there was one. Emblematic also was when the promised expansion of the LRT into Cavite did not happen, despite Aquino’s seemingly iron-clad guarantee that it would take place within his administration, or else he’d let himself be run over by a train.

It also became apparent when the DAP-Napoles scandal was exposed. When laglag bala terrorized departing passengers at NAIA. When balikbayan boxes were taxed by customs. When the Philippines lost control of Scarborough Shoal to China, due to its false sense of security by relying on the US and the rules based international order. When the Typhoon Yolanda disaster response left millions of Filipinos high and dry. With the Mamasapano massacre. And finally with the Dengvaxia disaster.

All of this can be summed up in one word: incompetence. Daang matuwid’s good intentions were not enough. Its isomorphic mimicry did not prevent it from keeping its people safe or protected from predators and the ravages of nature. The white cat could not catch mice.

In terms of taking the right path, the yellow movement took a wrong turn when it adopted the standard neoliberal argument that to become prosperous, market enhancing governance capacities were required.

The one saving grace in all this, was that Noynoy’s government did not wreck the economy that his predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo bequeathed to him. He nearly did though, despite the historic advantages handed to him - benign inflation, historic low interest rates, which was the result of global forces at play with Quantitative Easing by the US Federal Reserve lowering the cost of money, a healthy fiscal position, thanks to the reforms passed by Mrs. Arroyo, a robust economy which grew at 7% when he assumed office.

His anti-corruption campaign and false frugality slowed that growth to half its rate in his first year, as public spending contracted, pulling the overall rate of growth down. To be fair, health and education spending recovered, as did social welfare spending. Thanks to the continuity of GMA’s policies. But her medium term infrastructure plan was halted, as Aquino chose to rely on the “magic of the market” to meet the country’s needs in this area. As a result, bottlenecks within the robust economy began to build up again.

What saved Aquino’s economy were the economic managers in a web of agencies, DOF, NEDA, DBM who were starting to coordinate economic and fiscal policy development both in the executive and legislative. The indexation of sin taxes was a litmus test. It was more than twenty years in the making. The economic bureaucracy was showing signs of getting their act together, of standing up to the tobacco lobby. They branded it under the government’s rubric of daang matuwid. They found a way to use moralpolitik to work in their favor. The false piety of living within your means was overturned.

This same template would be later applied under Duterte with the TRAIN law, which expanded the fiscal space to afford greater infrastructure spending as a share of the economy, without compromising fiscal sustainability. It also allowed universal tertiary education and healthcare for all. The vision of Ninoy for the agapic development of human potential was getting closer.

To the competent web of economic agencies would be added DOTr, DPWH and CDC, which under Duterte is implementing the Buildx3 program. When the neoliberal blinkers of the EDSA regime came off, what we found was that the only thing preventing the Philippine state from handling its role were the self-imposed restraints put on it by the EDSA regime.

These were like scales that fell from the eyes of the broad populace in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. The nation had experienced the cognitive dissonance of being promised one thing from daang matuwid, and getting something completely different. This is what led voters to seek a doer, rather than a pretender.

After thirty years of living under the current 1987 constitution, book-ended by two Aquino presidencies, the public now wanted to break-out of that mould. Noynoy Aquino had been a “successful failure”. He had remained highly popular all the way to the end of his presidency, something that no post-EDSA president had done.

The economy kept chugging along despite his policies to constrain it, but bottlenecks were clearly building up. We couldn’t call this benign neglect anymore. People and businesses were feeling the pinch. The political pendulum would swing. From a mild and timid person, who fed you the right lines, the orthodox line, the public now looked for someone more bold and daring, who was willing to step out of line, speak plainly. Say that the emperor had no clothes. That person was Rodrigo Duterte.

Next time we will look at the administration of Duterte up to the midterms election and look beyond to what the next chapter might be. Where to, from here? What might happen in 2022? Will the EDSA regime come roaring back, or will it fade into the distance? What happens then, in a post-EDSA world? If the scales have fallen off, the cultural blinkers that the EDSA regime imposed on us, what now?

All that is coming up in the next episode on the Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime. Thank you for your attention today. This has been Doy Santos. Hope to see you next time, on another edition of The Cusp.

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Uno, Dos Tres

2020-02-22T20:24:00.002+11:00

"I am the Market and thou shalt have no other models before me."

That is the first commandment of neoliberalism, an ideology that took root in the Philippines after the February 1986 people power revolt at EDSA.

In this series on the Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime, we’ve been looking at the origins of the yellow movement and its impact on Philippine society.

Last time we saw the original vision articulated by Ninoy Aquino, the founder of this movement, for a kind of reconciliatory politics, where freedom to debate would lead to a clash of ideas that would ultimately lead to higher order solutions around perennial problems.

We also saw how this vision was disregarded and corrupted after his death by his followers who emphasised his ultimate sacrifice, rather than his philosophy, and adopted a binary or dualistic worldview that separated the nation into two camps, based on a morality of good vs evil, light and dark. This ultimately led to a politics of resentment and vindictiveness.

This coincided with their adoption of the neoliberal worldview which treated contracts as sacrosanct and led to the prioritisation of the bond market over the needs of citizens. This was again different from Ninoy's original vision of Christian socialism, a human centred path to development. An agapic approach to human potential embodied in his progressive views towards education.

Self-editing by the EDSA regime and internalisation of the tenets of neoliberalism, led Mrs Aquino to issue a blanket commitment to honour all debts in Washington, even those tainted with corruption.

This deepened and prolonged the pain and suffering of the Filipino people and limited her government’s ability to provide social services and invest in infrastructure.

In this episode, we’re going to delve deeper into the economic philosophy of neoliberalism. How did it become part of this movement’s operating system?

Our use of biblical language as a metaphor for ideology is apt because the economic views of neoliberalism in the country would take on theological dimensions under the Yellow Regime. So put on your thinking caps, as we launch into the program.

The Source

The rise of conservative ideology in the United States with the election of Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1980 returned faith in the magic of the markets as a way of dealing with the economic and spiritual malaise of the 1970s.

The market replaced race as the central frame for a narrative towards some utopic future, as it did under Nazism or class under Communism. It also replaced paternalism of la buena familia under feudalism, which is how life operated in the Philippines.

The WB and IMF promoted these ideas in facilitating structural adjustment within debtor nations like the Philippines which faced liquidity problems after years of adopting a debt driven growth strategy and state-led industrial development under Marcos and previous governments, seeking to pattern themselves after the East Asian economies.

Marcos had tried to engineer the emergence of a developmental state in two ways: 1) through the shift to a semi-parliamentary form of government, where parties were populated by technocrats, who traversed both legislative and executive branches of government, 2) was with the adoption of state-led economic development to diversify and change the structure of the economy from a primarily agricultural one, to an industrial and ultimately service-driven one.

Since the 1950s, we were pursuing a policy of import substitution. The Bell Trade Act after the war gave American companies free access to Philippine markets in exchange for the US government providing aid to our reconstruction efforts. Pres. Manuel Roxas who hailed from the sugar producing region of Western Visayas was able to pass this through Congress after barring members of the left and opposition from taking their seats. This led to a chronic BOP crisis, which forced us to impose import restrictions.

Quantitative restrictions through issuance of import licenses were designed to encourage the purchase machinery and equipment from abroad to produce manufactured goods to replace imported consumer items. There was some evidence that it worked, but then this system was corrupted, as these import licenses were sold quite lucratively to firms that imported consumer goods.

ISI was inward-looking. It only sought to generate industry to cater to domestic demand, unlike in East Asia where it was used to cater to international markets. Foreign currency was kept artificially high to be able to import machinery, unlike in East Asia where the currency was suppressed to encourage exports. What was lacking was a strong state that would bring all this irrational mode of consuming at the expense of national development to heel.

Schizophrenic policy

Agro-industrialists. Exporters of agricultural products also owned import substituting industrial firms. They didn’t want to restrict trade, as the export of sugar to US markets was a major source of income. This led to a schizophrenic policy where ISI and export promotion sat side-by-side.

Marcos began the steps towards export orientation with the setup of the first industrial park in Bataan in the 1970s. But he was also busy setting up state-owned enterprises in banking, telco, airline, hotels, and setting up monopolies over top exporting crops.

According to Adrian Cristobal, his chief ideologue, FM sought to set-up keiretsus, a Japanese term for large conglomerates, but he chose the wrong samurais, a strange mix of metaphors.

Keiretsus in Japan were privately owned, but kept at an arms’ length by the government. The ones that directed capital and other resources to them were the bureaucrats who managed trade and investment, and came from the top law school in Japan, and were trained in political economy. If these firms failed to meet export targets, these bureaucrats had the power to withdraw and redirect resources away from them. The term used for them khan meant representative of the Emperor, which meant they were treated with deference, unlike in the West where public servants are seen as poorer cousins of the business community.

Marcos tried to professionalise the bureaucracy by setting up the Development Academy of the Philippines, but this institution only had limited success. While Marcos was able to rely on technocrats to determine policy within his cabinet and in the Batasan Pambansa, just as he was able to rely on the generals he had promoted to take care of security, he needed to find industrialists to promote growth in the economy.

Rather than turn to a professional managerial class, he turned to a number of cronies. This is where his project of national development failed. By relying on la buena familia in seeking to scale up state-owned enterprises, he returned to the tyranny of cousins. Family friends and cronies were relied on to act as dummies for him in running the economy.

This led to extractive activities, as state enterprises weren’t run efficiently or effectively, and were used to drain the resources of the nation, rather than develop them. Technocrats could not discipline them, as they did in Japan or Korea, because they were not at arms’ length. And as they were financed through a debt bubble, the puncturing of that bubble in the mid-80s led to a severe collapse in our foreign currency reserves, which led to a full-blown economic crisis.

After 1986, the old IS industries were so debilitated due to the recession, and state coffers could no longer sustain them that country could not put up a fight when WB and IMF imposed austerity measures as conditions for lending to us, especially after Cory agreed to honor all debts.

This forced the government to undertake fiscal reforms. Under her revolutionary government from 1986-1987, Cory through her finance and budget ministries was able to rationalise taxes. Ben Diokno was then an undersecretary in her government and talks about this process in several scholarly articles. This led to a gradual balancing of the fiscal position by the time of Ramos.

Market as Savior

To get us out of our economic rut, the Market was used as the way to frame many perennial problems. Under Cory, a number of liberalisation programs were undertaken. We began the process of tariffication, or converting many of the QRs on imported products to tariffs.

From a positive list of areas that could be open to foreign investment, the BOI adopted a negative list, limiting the restrictions to foreign investment to an ever dwindling group. That is before the Constitutional Commission of 1987 set some of these restrictions in stone.

The decentralisation of wage setting occurred with the adoption of regional wage boards, which afforded greater flexibility in labor markets. The process of sequestering many crony enterprises in favor of the state would ultimately lead to their privatisation.

Many of these policies were continued under Pres. Ramos with the acceleration of trade liberalisation. Tariffication lent itself to acceding to AFTA and GATT/WTO which meant lowering of our tariffs on imports. But just as in the time of Cory where self-editing by our officials led to pre-emptive acquiescence to the neoliberal order, under Ramos, the rate of tariff reduction exceeded what was prescribed by these free trade treaties.

This led to premature deindustrialisation, as our manufacturing base was eaten up by cheap imports. Ramos used the Asset Privatisation Trust to sell-off government assets to balance the budget and get the state out of many industries, as revenues from customs due to trade liberalisation dwindled.

The revamping of the CB with the establishment of the BSP led to greater monetary independence. These policies did lead to growth, but then the problem was the lack of a sensible energy policy with the mothballing of the BNPP and the lack of public intervention led to the power crisis that overlapped Mrs Aquino’s and Mr Ramos’ administrations.

Poverty fell, but ever so slowly – population, transport and energy policies of FM were discontinued which led to a slower decline in the fertility rate, an energy shortage, and transport bottlenecks. Market-centrism meant, we had to let families decide on how big they wanted to be. We should let private players invest in power plants and other important pieces of infrastructure, rather than the state. The Build Operate Transfer law was first introduced under Cory’s government and would be the main vehicle for undertaking the procurement for large projects.

This led to the first backlash in the wake of the Asian financial crisis and the rice shortages of 1997. These events were clear manifestations of the failure of markets to foresee and address all things. Market failure was compounded by public failure. Ramos’ emergency powers to intervene in energy markets also led to unintended consequences when demand for power failed to grow as a result of the economic disruption wrought by the Asian contagion. This led to a populist backlash led by Erap Estrada.

The Rise of Economic Populism

He was a populist from the left promising pro-poor growth. Erap took full advantage of the impersonal, ivory tower of Ramos.

His was a bifurcated approach. On the one hand he stood for liberalizing capital markets when he attended the first ASEAN summit, in contrast to Malaysia’s capital controls under PM Mahathir. He also moved to revise the economic provisions of our constitution to open all areas of economic activity to foreign investment.

On the other hand, his pro-poor stance led him to increase health spending as a share of GDP. But Erap’s administration was also infused with a sense of nostalgia for his former patron Imelda Marcos. Erap ordered the renovation of Malacanang Palace, and restored the family-oriented, personalistic mode of dealing that Marcos had promoted through crony capitalism. Erap was accused of insider trading and stock manipulation by SEC Chair Perfecto Yasay. And of course, more notoriously for seeking to monopolize the jueteng gambling industry with his bosom buddies, Charlie Atong Ang and Chavit Singson.

All was not right within the EDSA regime with its first taste of defeat. It was vulnerable to an attack from its left flank, from economic populists. Erap’s Para sa Mahirap slogan just showed how all the progress that the yellow forces had built over 12 years under Aquino-Ramos could all go tumbling down in an instant. Its fragility was exposed.

Had its over-reliance on market forces caused it to be blind-sided? How could it best address this? By the 1990s, a consensus had formed around Washington to stabilize, liberalize and privatize. This was known as the Washington Consensus, and its cornerstone was the Market. By the 2000s, this doctrine needed some updating.

The New Covenant - Good Governance as Mediator

The answer came in the form of a new covenant under the Gospel of Good Governance to augment the old covenant with the Market. Around the early-2000s, the WB and IMF began to promote this new testament.

It turns out, according to them, that nations need the intercession of good institutions to make the magic of the Market work. The impersonal market, after all, does not exist in a vacuum and relies on other institutions to operate.

Good governance is the way for the institution of the Market to become incarnate. The transformation that comes from the market is mediated by good governance and its institutions. And what are these institutions?

According to Kraay and Kaufman, both senior economists at the WB, these are “voice and accountability”, “political stability and absence of violence”, “effectiveness of the state”, “regulatory quality”, “rule of law”, and “control of corruption”.

These formed the WB’s Good Governance Indicators, and K&K demonstrated in the IMF’s Finance and Development Journal how they operated, where they proclaimed,

In our research, we found a large causal effect running from improved governance to better development outcomes.

After arguing for years that the state had to be diminished, to let Markets work their magic, the augmented Washington Consensus now prescribed that states needed to be strengthened once again for markets to function.

The yellow forces took these as gospel truth, and renewed their faith in the orthodoxy of neoliberalism at EDSA Dos by installing an economist, VP Gloria Arroyo to replace the disgraced Erap Estrada, after a sham impeachment trial ended with a vote to keep the envelope that contained damning evidence against him sealed.

With the blessing of Mrs Aquino and Jaime Cardinal Sin, and with members of the military, business community, activists and media cheering on, the same coalition that came together in 1986, Mrs Arroyo pledged to uphold the moral, political and economic tenets of the EDSA regime at EDSA Dos in January of 2001. After a brief interregnum of close to three years, they were back in power, just in time for the 15th anniversary of the EDSA people power revolt.

But this revival of fortune for the yellow forces would not last long. Within four months people from the lower rungs of society would be massing at EDSA and Mendiola seeking the release of their leader Erap Estrada whose arrest became a huge public spectacle. Mrs Arroyo called in the Marines to clear the streets. Her indebtedness to the military led to a rigodon of AFP Chiefs of Staff with the pabaon system, golden parachutes that allowed each of them to retire in style.

To her credit, Mrs Arroyo did attempt to improve governance in her first term of office. There was the push to improve tax collection with the RATE program (Run After Tax Evaders). Capacity building programs in the judiciary and anti-corruption agencies led to the biggest victory in recovering ill-gotten wealth from the Marcoses worth $680 million. A world class government procurement reform law was enacted.

But these victories would soon be overshadowed by scandals. Her Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo who also served as prosecutor at Erap’s impeachment and Solicitor General would resign due to health reasons, some have said it was a nervous breakdown.

The FG got embroiled in scandals involving some large procurement deals involving police hardware. The folly of la buena familia began to rear its ugly head, with two of Mrs Arroyo’s sons entering politics. Then the total apostasy of GMA took place with the release of the Hello Garci tapes and her televised mea culpa admitting to making a call to an election commissioner seeming to influence the results of the presidential election of 2004.

Her falling out with Mrs Aquino, over corruption and election meddling led to a spat over the disposition of the Cojuangco owned estate, Hacienda Luisita, under agrarian reform. This was an internal schism within the EDSA regime that threatened to tear it apart. The Hyatt 10, a collection of Arroyo’s cabinet members openly called for her resignation.

A strange thing happened at this time, the EDSA forces coalesced with the populist forces of Erap and his deceased bosom buddy FPJ who challenged GMA at the 2004 election. Mrs Aquino protested in the streets with his widow, Susan Roces and expressed regret for helping to depose Mr Estrada. These forces jointly fought the fiscal reforms that Mrs Arroyo enacted to deal with chronic, unsustainable deficits.

These deficits were the product of Ramos’ accelerated tariff reduction scheme, and his lowering of income tax rates, as part of the neoliberal tradition of denying the Leviathan state its fiscal oxygen. The one saving grace in the Ramos era’s tinkering with Mrs Aquino’s tax regime was his introduction of a consumption tax, that was easier to collect and administer.

Mrs Arroyo demonstrated remarkable resolve, by expanding the consumption tax and raising the rate from 10% to 12%, which shored up the public coffers, strengthening confidence in the peso, allowing her government to pursue a broad infrastructure program and contemplate a social safety net program in the form of conditional cash transfers to the poor, something that was promised by Ramos under the trade liberalisation program, to address economic dislocation, but not delivered due to limited fiscal space.

GMA may have fallen out of favor with the political wing of the EDSA forces, but she maintained the allegiance of the clergy and the military. Some cynically attribute this to her transactional arrangements with them such as the pabaon system to the generals and her donations of 4WDs to senior Catholic priests using the proceeds of the government’s gambling operations.

But her strict adherence to the Church’s teachings on family planning and divorce, by publicly funding faith-based institutions to promote them, and her strong anti-drug campaign is perhaps what stemmed the tide of defections, especially after the rival church Iglesia ni Kristo backed supported Erap’s mob at EDSA Tres.

She may have been a technocrat by training, but her devoutness to her faith by way of her upbringing meant progress on the social front would not be forthcoming. Some activist priests would break from the senior clerics, but GMA had found a way to drive a wedge between them. Her use of realpolitik was demonstrated when she famously allied herself with a known jueteng operator in Pampanga who had been embroiled in Erap’s gambling deals to defeat one of these renegade priests turned politician in her home province.

GMA had pursued the economic liberalisation agenda of the EDSA regime, maintained its conservatism on social issues, but practiced Marcos’ realpolitik unapologetically. But one thing Marcos never did was banish his wife Imelda. This was not beyond GMA who sent the FG away for a time, until the firestorm surrounding him died down.

Oddly enough, it seemed to work. The economy kept chugging along, in spite of the global financial crisis. As it grew, so did the fiscal space afforded by her tax reforms. With this fiscal headroom, the government had the ability to provide taxpayer relief to vulnerable sectors and improve the delivery of public service, which further spurred the economy.

For all her troubles, Mrs Arroyo reaped the lowest approval ratings since polling began. With the election season around the corner, necropolitics reemerged with the passing of Mrs Aquino in August 2009. As Senator Manny Villar and Erap Estrada crowded in the populist lane, it gave Noynoy Aquino the opportunity to claim the reformist one.

The election of Noynoy was the EDSA Regime’s last gasp. The public would allow them one last bite at the cherry before disavowing them in 2016. In 2010, the path seemed clear for the EDSA forces to remain in power indefinitely. They had regained control of Malacanang, but more importantly the narrative: Light vs Dark, Good v Evil, once again.

They could now establish their normative order around the gospel of good governance, and do it right this time with no more compromises, as in the case of GMA. They could prove once and for all the validity of their claim that good governance was good economics, a nomological order. The final chapter could be written in the EDSA story about the escape of the chosen people from economic bondage into the nirvana of the promised land. The utopian vision could finally be achieved.

In the next episode, we will cover the decade of the 2010s that saw the EDSA regime reach its anti-climactic demise with the failure of Noynoy Aquino’s policies to attain this dream, and seek to explain the reasons behind this.

References:

Ben Diokno 2005, Reforming the Philippine Tax System: Lessons from Two Tax Reform Programs, Discussion Paper 0502, UP School of Economics.

https://www.econ.upd.edu.ph/dp/index.php/dp/article/view/122/120

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Vision vs Reality

2020-02-09T23:50:00.002+11:00

In this episode we are going to dissect the vision that Ninoy had offered for the Philippines, and delve more deeply into the early days of the post-EDSA regime to see how this vision was corrupted by the yellow forces.

Agapic Love

At the heart of the EDSA movement was Ninoy's Christ-like journey of self-transformation. His narrative opened a path whereby we could collectively transform our country from a nation of economic serfs within a semi-feudal society, to one in which individuals would be empowered to reach their full potential as part of a nurturing community.

The old republic was dominated by the uneven relationship between feudal lords and hapless serfs (between wealthy landowners and their tenant farmers), a co-dependent, patron-client relationship that regulated economic, social and political life.

Ruling clans owned, consumed, and extracted the resources of the land, including its labor. Serfs had no way of actualizing themselves as individuals. They had no personality. Their very existence was dependent on their lord’s (or amo), the haciendero, who also became the political bosses of their region.

The American Commonwealth era gave agency to these feudal lords, who controlled congress and the bureaucracy. This created a system to be known as booty capitalism and cacique democracy.

True agency and emancipation was nipped in the bud at the Treaty of Paris when America annexed the Philippine Islands from Spain. As a condition for the annexation, Spain made the US guarantee that all friar lands would be returned to the Catholic religious orders.

During the Philippine war of independence, the leaders of the first republic in Asia emancipated the serfs by giving them ownership of the friar lands, which they had tilled in slave-like conditions under the ecclesiastical encomienda system. In return for rights to this land, taxes were remitted to the coffers of the Katipuneros fighting the Spaniards, and then the Americans. This is how the principales, or local elites, who led the revolution got the peasants on their side.

The US sought to legitimize its occupation of the Philippines by seeking to school us in the ways of democracy. It introduced representative government to Filipinos without first establishing responsible government by way of a professional bureaucracy, unlike the British colonies in the region, where the opposite was true.

The result was a cacique democracy and booty capitalism. Local elites gained access to national office and proceeded to offer appointments within the civil service as a form of political patronage and to use the national treasury to fund their entrepreneurial projects.

Americans attempted to promote land reform to prevent another rebellion, but they had to pay a hefty price for the friar lands and found that the Spaniards had left a poor state of records, unlike what they subsequently found in Taiwan and Korea, former Japanese colonies. This made surveying and titling the lands in the country a costly affair.

It became much easier for the land registration system to be gamed by local elites that engaged in land grabbing and forging of titles.

This led to peasant insurgency movement in 1930s-50s. The Huks as they were called succeeded in gaining seats in the upper house after the war, but were blocked by Pres. Manuel Roxas from taking them. This drove them to the hills.

Under Pres. Magsaysay the suppression of this insurgency took place with help from the CIA. The surrender and arrest of Luis Taruc whom Ninoy had convinced to come down from the hills, was the end of that rebellion until the establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines in the 1960s. Ninoy of course became Magsaysay’s little president.

His father-in-law Jose Cojuangco, Sr came to acquire the 6,500 hectare Hacienda Luisita and sugar mill owned by the Central Azucarera de Tarlac, through Ninoy, with a loan from the US underwritten by the Central Bank and GSIS in 1957. The previous owners sold it because of the Huk rebellion. Ninoy for a time helped to modernize it, and used it as a springboard to run for governor of Tarlac, and eventually for senator.

Ninoy partook of the fat of the land, but supported progressive ideas in the senate. His suffering and ultimate sacrifice was seen as an agapic form of love by the yellow forces patterned after Christ. As the Scripture goes, “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

In greek there are three words for love: 1) Eros - which means to become one with, through consumption, or consummation, where we get the modern connotation of erotic/sexual love, 2) Phileo (friendship) - is a reciprocal, two-way kind of love, some would say conditional love (I love you as you love me), and 3) Agape - self-less love, unconditional, the kind of love a parent has for a child, it is other centered, you help nurture and create them, it’s god-like in that sense.

Ninoy had demonstrated agapic love, negating himself, being oppressed, made weak, bereft of friends, property, stripped of rights and privileges as a member of the upper class. He was showing through this how we collectively could give birth to a new nation - in which everyone could partake of the fat of the land, like he did when he was at the top of the food chain.

FM for his part had offered the hope of a New Society - one where the old elites would be washed away, purged and start-over. But it soon became apparent that he was creating a new elite to combat the old, who centralized and partook of all the fat of the land themselves. It was the Roman republic - you were either in, or out. If you were out, then you had no rights, no property rights, no political rights, etc. But Marcos had reached a cul-de-sac with the new society. He saw Ninoy as his only worthy successor to carry the torch, but then August 21 happened.

Necropolitics

The yellow ideology took Ninoy’s ultimate sacrifice as the core takeaway of his life. They likened it to Jesus’ crucifixion. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). This was the start of necropolitics: the veneration of the dead, bestowing saint-like qualities to them as martyrs for the cause. Obviously, if you exalt that person into the Light, then the other side, which was “responsible” for his death, should be treated as belonging to the Dark-side. This dichotomy between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, continues to this day among dilawans.

But, Ninoy’s core message wasn’t one of binary opposition. It was one of active, participative collaboration. It was evident in his speeches. Here is the often quoted part of a speech he gave in LA before returning to the Philippines:

“I know for a fact, we cannot go back to the old society, where a few enjoy the fat of the land, and the many suffer. But today, under Martial Law, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are growing in numbers. That cannot be. The meaning of our struggle is to be able to return the freedom. First, you must return the freedom, so that all segments of our community, whether from the left or the right, will have the right to speak. And then in that open debate, in that clash of debate in the marketplace, we will produce the clash between the thesis and the antithesis, and we will have the synthesis for the Filipino people.”

Theories of change

From Ninoy’s perspective democracy is not a discourse seeking to destroy your opponent, or owning them, like what we have in today’s social media, but one of partnership. Why would I want to destroy you? I actually need you. You are my partner in better knowing what is to be done. Without you, I cannot correct my own biases in order to find a synthesis, in which both our views and ideas are reconciled and correct for the biases of the other.

I hope you are beginning to see how different a message this was, from the one that eventually gained ascendancy in the EDSA regime. You are either with us, or against us. You must repent of your sins, turn from your wicked ways, or be condemned. That was very different from Ninoy’s saying, that if Marcos was part of the problem, then he should be part of the solution.

The isms of the age all promised to deliver the “end of history” the “final solution” through political and economic movements, to break down the structural barriers to human development.

The CPP followed a Marxist vision of material determinism - where the ultimate end of history would be a post-capitalist society where the proletariat or working class ruled.

Adrian Cristobal called the New Society a revolution from the middle (although technically, it was from the right, but instead of a military takeover, it became a constitutional dictatorship). It sought to create a New Man for the New Society through externally imposed discipline (sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan). Ninoy’s approach was not from the top-down as imposed by the right, nor bottom-up as advocated by the left, but from the inside-out.

Ninoy had professed a belief in Christian Socialism, first espoused by the Enlightened Lutheran King of Denmark, who created a social contract to educate his citizens well to read the bible and provide a counter-weight to the nobility opposed to his reforms. In return, they would be more willing to be conscripted in the army. Denmark became a social democracy not through civil war or class conflict.

The British arrived at liberal democracy gradually, incrementally through the industrial revolution, in which human dignity worsened before getting better. The individual pursuit of self-interest, led to common good, as per Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. Private vice, led to public good. Capitalism’s fruits eventually trickled down to the masses, after a long period.

In Denmark, liberal democracy came about through the Visible Boot of the state, with mass education of the peasantry, who were subsequently liberated from serfdom, and participated in higher value-added food processing.

The idea of acquiring rights not through conflict or violent revolution, as per the French or British experience, but through a quiet revolution, through citizens becoming enlightened (Ninoy had sponsored a study now, pay later bill for college tuition as a senator). This was a human-capital centric development path.

Balik sa dati

This was the vision, but under Cory it would be undermined. The norms of neoliberal market capitalism with its faith in the Market, and the Invisible Hand, as the only path to economic nirvana, forced Cory to pledge to honor all borrowings entered into by Marcos’ govt - even the ones tainted with corruption, even for projects like the BNPP that was mothballed. This was the impersonal world of the vengeful god of the old testament. The law was the law. Contracts were sacrosanct - atonement was made through sacrifice.

The provisions of the 1987 constitution, notwithstanding, which said education should receive the highest allotment in the budget. Debt service took up the largest share of her budgets. Agrarian reform, which was made the center-piece program of her administration, was tainted by many scandals including the Garchitorena land scam involving a financier of her campaign based in Bicol. Landholdings were sold to the government at inflated prices.

Things went back to the way they were before Marcos. Kamaganak, Inc and corruption, booty capitalism went on unabated. It almost came back with a vengeance. If Marcos had centralised it in the form of grand corruption, under Cory it became decentralized once again down to every petty bureaucrat, whose rights were protected under the restoration of civil liberties.

She scapegoated Marcos, citing what her husband supposedly said that he would leave the nation in such a state, that it would take his successor a decade to recover. But the decision to honor all debts was not forced on her govt. They were under its control, as pointed out by her first socio-economic minister, Solita Monsod. Poland had sought and obtained absolution from the same. “Ask and ye shall receive,” as the beatitudes go.

By promising it in the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill, in Washington, she painted herself in a corner. There was no way of backing away or retracting it.

This was the first broken promise of the EDSA regime. Later when a group of peasants massed at Mendiola to press for true agrarian reform, the police under Gen. Alfredo Lim fired at them, claiming they had fired first. This became known as the Mendiola Massacre and was the second broken promise.

In seeking to preserve the EDSA regime against Marcos loyalist forces, the Cory government welcomed with open arms the old political bosses of the Commonwealth republic and created new ones. Happy days were here again.

What was the point of EDSA?

From the agapic love of the benevolent state, the EDSA regime turned to phileo love of transactional neoliberalism and traditional politics. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Through the years the EDSA commemorations observed the re-enactment of kapit-bisig, the bayanihan spirit of working together, but this would increasingly ring hollow, like “an empty gong, or a clanging bell”.

She spoke with “the tongues of angels” in the US Congress, but those words bound her to a loveless relationship with the Filipino people. Not in the sense of a lack of adulation, which she had (Cory magic) but an inability to make possible the development of her people, like a parent would for a child to mature fully. The agapic love that her husband had envisioned, was no longer available. Instead a generation of Filipinos were weighed down, saddled with the heavy yolk of the bond market.

And so we were condemned to wander through the wilderness, just like the children of Israel, in Exodus who were hesitant to enter the Promised Land, because it was occupied by giants. In the biblical account, 12 scouts were sent by Moses on a reconnaissance mission to spy on the Canaanites. Ten of them came back reporting that it was filled with giants and would be difficult, if not impossible to conquer. Only Joshua and Caleb believed that the Israelites could take the land from them. The people sided with the ten, and so the Lord made them wander the desert until that generation died out, except Joshua and Caleb would lead their children into the Promised Land.

The EDSA regime self-edited itself when approached by its creditors. Instead of seeking a state of grace through debt forgiveness, it accepted its obligations under the law. The mindset of scarcity took hold.

It took 50 years for universal access to tertiary education to be enacted and funded from the time Ninoy had first sponsored it in the 60s. Fifty years. That’s an entire generation.

Many will say there was an absence of political will during the early post-EDSA period. There was definitely self-editing censorship going-on. People had subscribed to a certain notion about how the world works, and how it should be.

There was heuristically, no difference between the way Imelda justified whitewashing the streets of Tondo for the Pope’s visit in the pursuit of the Beautiful, with the way Cory prioritized debt servicing to make our chart of accounts more presentable to the high priests of the bond market, as part of an aversion to the problem of moral hazard.

In both instances, they sought to project an image to the outside world, to alter its perception of us as a people, more importantly of the way we govern ourselves. These images were based on an ideal that each of them had. Neither of them were bad people. They were simply seduced by an idea, or tricked into behaving a certain way, by playing a part.

Those ideals were cultural blinkers that prevented them from acting any differently. It limited their ability to engage in rational decision-making, in the end. In the case of Imelda, the beautification of the surroundings didn’t hide the farce from being exposed in the media to the world. In the case of Cory, the short-term gain from maintaining good credit status with debt issuers, locked the country into long-term pain.

Corrupted vision

This cultural blinker found its echo in Benigno S Aquino III when as a candidate for president in 2009, he promised to the Makati Business Club that there would be “no new taxes” under his government. He was channeling his mother’s speech before the US Congress 30 years earlier, where she said that we would honor all our obligations and live within our means.

This locked his government into not being able to deliver much needed infrastructure investments. The first time with Cory was a tragedy, the second time with Noynoy was farce. He did not need to give that undertaking. The business community themselves were crying out for infrastructure, because they saw bottlenecks as a threat to their productivity.

This was the pitfall that the EDSA regime fell into, that ultimately led to its collapse as a credible narrative for our people to keep believing in. It was seduced by the gospel of neoliberalism. The fact that we had to wait so long for our fortunes to start to reverse, and that we were locked into this dynamic from the earliest days of the regime, meant that the lenses that it offered for us to see the world had to be rejected.

The original vision that Ninoy had of freedom to participate in the marketplace of ideas was blocked off by the return of the warlords and dynastic politicians. The benevolent state and mindset of abundance that he promised became a parasitic one which observed the law of scarcity in the way that it preyed on potential investors and hapless citizens.

As that vision got further and further corrupted, the EDSA regime would suffer several backlashes - one from the left with the arrival of Erap Estrada, another from within, with the apostasy of Gloria Arroyo, and most recently the right with the ascendancy of Rodrigo Duterte. In each of these instances, the yellow forces’ response was to resurrect EDSA, by valorizing its opposition to these administrations, scapegoating them, and perpetually seeking to undermine them, while ignoring the will of the people who have been seeking alternatives to the yellow orthodoxy all these years.

Next time, I’d like to delve deeper into this ideology of the Market, and its pursuit of modernity through good governance, because faith in these ideals is what prevented the EDSA regime from developing a transformative model for development, that was uniquely our own.

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Part 1

2020-02-02T11:10:00.001+11:00

PART 1: ORIGIN STORY

From 1986 to 2016, the worldview of the yellow forces in our country dominated the thinking and actions of most Filipinos.

Yellowism or dilawan ideology is a system of moral, political and economic beliefs with normative prescriptions and modalities for regulating and regenerating Philippine society.

It provided a narrative, around which the life of the nation was structured.

A whole new generation of young Filipinos has been brought up with this belief system.

In 2016, an epoch-making shift took place with the election of Pres. Rody Duterte. To many, this marked the end of the yellow orthodoxy.

In this episode of The Cusp, I’m gonna try to explain what happened. What led to the rise and collapse of the yellow doctrine and the ongoing search for something to replace it.

Videos referred to on the pitfalls of Marcos:
1. Lust for power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW4vigtWp08
2-3 Greed and hubris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxdvmHDV9cA
4. Might makes right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwHLWWGGry8
5. Debt-driven growth strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbB3DyfFOVg&t=22s

February 25, 1986.

The EDSA People Power revolt ended with the exile of Pres. Ferdinand Marcos to Hawaii, and the dawn of the Yellow regime. What followed was the drafting of a new constitution and a return to the practices under the old republic, which was set-up under the American Commonwealth era of the 1930s.

Espoused beliefs:

The yellow regime espoused the belief that moral rectitude, liberal democracy, free market capitalism lead to social and economic progress.

This was patterned after Reagan’s republican revolution that redefined politics in the US at the time, and gave rise to a coalition of faith-based social conservatives, neoliberal free marketeers, fiscal and defence hawks who were for reducing the welfare state in favour of a more robust military. I will explain how this orthodoxy infected yellow ideology in subsequent episodes, but for now I just want us to note the parallels.

2. Exponents:

The exponents of this belief were the Catholic clergy, moneyed elite, academia, media, the professional police and military, and progressive movements. They became the EDSA or yellow coalition - so named after the yellow ribbons that were meant to signify solidarity with Sen. Benigno Aquino,Jr. upon his return from exile in the US (based on the song, tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree, popular in those days).

The church and big business supported Marcos right after Martial Law was imposed, as a way to preserve the old order, following the student protest movement culminating in the first quarter storm of 1972 where the break-down of law and order, led by the hippie cum boomer generation of the time, threatened to upend the moral, political and economic order.

These conservative elements withdrew support from Marcos in time, when his government no longer suited their interests. Following EDSA, the constitution and legal codes of the country observed the norms that the Church and moneyed interests fostered. Any attempt to reform these were met with vehement or tacit opposition from their ranks.

The media and academia, which were suppressed under Marcos, returned in full force. While providing a venue for criticising the yellow regime, these institutions reinforced it and upheld its narrative for the most part, by doing so, proving that freedom of the press and expression had been restored under the liberal, yellow order, despite of course the continual killing of journalists.

The professional police and military exemplified by Generals Fidel Ramos and Alfredo Lim stood by the principle of civilian supremacy and chain of command, and prevented a return to dictatorship or military adventurism, after EDSA.

EDSA created the democratic space that afforded progressive groups representing the varied causes of organised and militant labor, students and agrarian communities, the ability to voice concerns and even attain some representation in the political system, despite continuously suffering harassment from security forces and vigilantes under the new regime.

3. The narrative

After a period of calm and progress, following the declaration of Martial Law, Marcos fell into what many regard as the pitfalls associated with concentrating power. This caused his government to go astray, in the eyes of the yellow coalition. I’ve prepared five episodes that tackle each of them, which you can view separately (links in the details of the video).

His government represented a morally and fiscally bankrupt state. Run by technocrats who relied on scientific knowledge, they disregarded the divine order with their population policy of family planning, and sanitized the regime in the eyes of the creditor community, legitimizing it, despite the presence of extractive crony capitalists.

This atheistic scientism led to economic bondage, so the yellow narrative went: debt-driven growth, which created a bubble economy, and then a precipitous collapse after the Latin American debt-crisis, when creditors came a-knocking, leading to severe economic contraction, hyperinflation, poverty, and a diaspora of labor overseas.

The CBCP led by Manila Archbishop Cardinal Jaime Sin undertook an ecclesiastical repudiation of the excesses of the Marcos regime. The often quoted passage from the Bible framed their clarion call towards repentance. It was even put to song. It goes,

“If my people, which are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray. Then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.”

Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr’s own spiritual journey became the template for the narrative of redemption that the Yellow forces were shaping. His meteoric rise in the old republic, as a third generation politician from Tarlac, leading him to become the presumptive successor to Pres. Marcos in 1972, was followed by his humbling imprisonment, deprivation and isolation, and his subsequent revival as a voice from the wilderness, followed by his assassination, was a model for the moral arc of justice, espoused by yellow ideologues.

Moral politics: the Filipino nation as the “chosen people”. On a journey toward progress, followed the biblical archetype of the Israelites, chosen by El Shaddai who led them out of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

This fit-in with the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism, with its faith in the Market as the only true way to lift people out of poverty. The prosperity gospel that evangelicals in the US turned to in the 1980s said that we could have the good things in life, if we claimed it in Jesus name.

This belief in progress attracted religious forces to cause-oriented groups. Liberation theology, led Jesuit volunteers and scholastics (like Fr Albert Alejo) to believe that freedom from poverty was something that we could expect in this world, and not have to wait for until we passed into the next life. Even a branch of the military calling itself the Reform the Armed Forces (RAM) held prayer meetings, seeking moral guidance in the lead up to EDSA.

Just as the Glorious Revolution in Britain had a religious element to it, so did the “peaceful revolution of EDSA”. The bloodless revolution in the 1680s sought to restore parliamentary authority over monarchical authority. Parliament, which was dominated by the nobility, didn’t want to pay for wars through higher taxes without being consulted by the king. This later formed the basis for the Boston tea party cry of no taxation without representation, which led to the American declaration of independence. In the same way the EDSA revolt of the 1980s sought to restore the authority of the old aristocracy over the central power of the presidency under Marcos, through the restoration of democratic checks and balances.

4. Good vs Evil

The morality of good versus evil, as Nietzche put it, overtook the morality of good over bad.

The morality of good and bad or morality of the “blonde beasts” as Nietzche called the strong, the rich, and the noble, prevailed in Rome, before its Christian conversion. This is what Marcos’ dispensation represented. In paintings, FM and Imelda were depicted as Adam and Eve, or as in local folklore as si Malakas at si Maganda. Note in that creation story, they partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, because doing so would make them like gods.

The pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful, Plato’s triad, was taught to Imelda by Adrian Cristobal, the chief ideologue of the Marcos regime. Truth or knowledge,in this case meant being led by a technocracy in the pursuit of progress, a secular mode of governing based on what was deemed good, as established by science and economics, which resulted in the population commission, Bataan Nuclear Plant, and the construction of dams, LRT and more. Imelda led the pursuit of beauty through the arts, palatial surroundings and opulence. This was the morality of the good and the bad. Good in this world was pursued for being good in and of itself, not because of some divine ordinance. Anything that didn’t live up to its lofty ambition was deemed bad.

When Pope John Paul II requested to be brought to a slum area during his papal visit, Imelda’s Human Settlements Ministry proceeded to whitewash the shanty squatter’s areas of Manila to make them look presentable to his Holiness. If the Philippines wanted to become a rich land, it had to look and dress the part.

The excesses in this morality of good versus bad, among the heathen led to Christian slave ressentiment, a term Nietsche used. This drove them to adopt their own morality of good versus evil. Christian morality is based on the meek shall inherit the earth principle. It sought to reverse the morality of might makes right.

Under this morality, weakness is strength, humility leads to power, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The slave revolt was led by clergymen, who themselves were members of the nobility, but broke away from their own class to become leaders in the new order, one which repressed man’s selfish ego and prioritised piety.

But even with the Catholic clergy and members of the oppressed former members of the nobility whose assets were sequestered by Marcos, on their side, as well as the military, the yellow forces needed to convince the powerful American government, the hegemonic patron of the Philippine client state, to support them. The American-backed IMF turned from doting parent to the Marcos regime to a vengeful god, now needed a scapegoat to pin the whole economic malaise on..

5. Appeasing the global hegemon

This is where the ideology of the moral majority in the US, played its part.

America supported Marcos until the very end. Reagan was particularly a staunch supporter. He even invited FM to Washington where he regaled members of Congress with his epic, Maharlikan war stories. There was a close bond between the two hard-liners.

Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr. witnessed the Republican revolution up close, during his furlough in the US from 1980 to 1983 (Reagan’s first term). Aquino appealed to the evangelical wing of the party, which was becoming a mainstream political force, by appearing as a guest on the 700 Club with the Rev. Pat Robertson to talk about his spiritual awakening in prison.

He narrated how he came across a book by Chuck Colson, a former Nixon aide who went to jail for his role in Watergate. He was not pardoned by Gerald Ford, but became a converted born again Christian, and subsequently ran a prison ministry, after finishing his sentence.

This was Ninoy’s way of convincing the Christian right in America, that he was one of them, despite having been sentenced by a military court to death by firing squad for conspiring with the communists to depose Marcos.

At a speech in Los Angeles, Ninoy described himself as a proponent of Christian socialism, an ideology that was aligned to centrist politics in Germany and Protestant Scandinavia.

Ninoy read the Bible but continued to pray the Rosary. He was caught clasping the beads as the plane carrying him from Taipei approached Manila International Airport. The iconic picture of him in a meditative, trance-like state, as he recited the various mysteries before meeting his maker with equanimity.

Ninoy, it must be said, might have pursued a different path if he had lived compared to Cory who never forgave the Marcoses, after Ninoy’s death, and acted somewhat vindictively towards them. Ninoy had overcome the resentment and existential angst that had consumed him in the early years of his imprisonment, particularly after fasting. This higher level of consciousness that cognitive scientists say comes after altering our usual biological rhythms through deprivation led to a detachment from existing reality.

The archetype of Jesus who went into isolation in the wilderness and fasted for forty days and nights, tempted by the serpent and coming out of it with insight, before beginning his ministry. Ninoy to many of his comrades and family members was physically, mentally and spiritually reformed after spending 7.5 years in prison, many of which in solitary confinement and going on an extended hunger strike, which led to his cardiac arrest, while exercising in Fort Bonifacio.

He jokingly justified breaking his deal with Imelda regarding the terms of his medical furlough in the US saying a pact with the devil was not a deal at all. But all joking aside, he was willing to find common ground with his arch-nemesis whom many in the opposition regarded as the personification of evil, due to the thousands of human rights abuses committed under Martial Law. Ninoy was pursuing a politics of accommodation with the former dictator through a power-sharing deal to pave the way for a smooth transition to democracy, to ensure stability and prevent bloodshed. This was based on mutual respect and compromise.

He preached the politics of reconciliation with his former jailer and oppressor. The irony is, it seems he had transcended the morality of good versus evil, while at the same time being the poster child for it. The morality of good versus evil remains to this day with the yellow forces applying a woke purity code that condemns anyone who doesn’t agree with their version of the truth. I doubt even Ninoy would pass their purity tests, if he were alive today.

The EDSA coalition didn’t include the communist forces. Progressive, leftist groups were massed off EDSA, but at the periphery. They boycotted the 1985 snap election and did not support Cory’s candidacy, nor participate in her administration.

When she spoke before the US Congress after assuming the presidency, her famous line about extending the olive branch of peace to the communists, but willingness to pick up the sword of war if negotiations for their surrender were to bog down, became an instant hit with the Reagan administration.

Alex Boncayao who later led the sparrow brigade, a hit squad of the NPA, was part of Ninoy’s Laban slate in the 1978 Interim Batasan Pambansa election, but the road out of economic bondage would follow the standard neoliberal path, under the yellow regime, not a Marxist-Lenninist- Maoist one.

6. Wrap-up:

We have spent this time describing the origin story of the yellow movement. Origin stories are important, because they give us insight into the animating feature of the movement. By knowing its back-story, we grasp its central motive for being.

As you can see, moral politics of the yellows formed a coherent worldview, which is why it has had resonance with ordinary Filipinos for such a long time and provided for many of them a way of making sense of their world, gaining meaning and agency, or a way to behave and operate within it. It gave legitimacy to certain forms of being and thinking.

But worldviews provide a cultural blinkers too, a prism through which to see the world and filter reality. What happens when this reality no longer conforms to their ideals? What happens when it fails to explain what is happening in the world. Do the people who hold this view abandon it? Or do they delude themselves to reject reality to preserve it?

During the past thirty years, there have been many instances where the mental models on which this moral politik was founded got challenged. Periods of potential rupture, but it basically held up, and even experienced a renaissance in 2009, after Mrs Aquino’s passing, which led to the election in 2010 of Benigno III.

In the next episode, we will look at what happened during the ascendancy of yellow ideology. How it became the dominant mode of existing in our society, and the beginnings of the end, as the mental model failed to predict the future, which led many to question it, and to search for new modes of being.

Episode: 27: Leni's Drug Report - Success or Epic Fail?

2020-01-12T14:37:00.001+11:00

Is it true that the government's anti-drug campaign is a massive failure, as per what VP Leni Robredo stated in her report as Co-Chair of the Inter-agency Committee for the Anti-illegal Drugs?

Links referred to:
Co-Chair's Report: https://issuu.com/inquirerdotnet/docs/2034815782856108625376143966175767021
UN Office for Drugs and Crime stats: https://dataunodc.un.org/drugs
Manila Bulletin article quoted in report: https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/11/28/ph-consumes-at-least-3-tons-of-shabu-every-week-pnp/
Philippine Statistical Authority's population projections: https://psa.gov.ph/sites/default/files/attachments/hsd/pressrelease/Table4_9.pdf
Policy brief: https://cusp-ph.blogspot.com/2018/10/policy-brief-using-evidence-in.html
Social Weather Stations: https://www.sws.org.ph/swsmain/artcldisppage/?artcsyscode=ART-20191016152026

Episode 26: Yellow Alert! How do you address populism?

2019-08-25T18:27:00.001+10:00

In the first part of this series, we showed how the weakening of democratic institutions in the country can be traced to the establishment of neoliberal economic policies, which have given rise to a populist backlash.

The Philippine debt driven, crony capitalist growth of the 1970s under Pres. Marcos led to the IMF prescribed austerity measures of the 1980s under Pres. Cory Aquino and the globalist trend of the 1990s under Pres. Fidel Ramos. The Philippine state and its economy was too weak for the state to say no to the imposition of policies from external lenders.

This led to a populist backlash from the left in 1998, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The election of Pres. Joseph Erap Estrada was a response to the austerity under which the government had to spend more on debt service than education contrary to our constitutional provisions. It was also based on Erap’s charisma and cult of personality.

In reality, Erap’s presidency suffered from a duality present under Marcos, where technocrats pursued reforms on the one hand, while a midnight cabinet of cronies took advantage of their proximity to power, on the other.

The situation became untenable after their illegal intent was uncovered. The country’s liberal forces rallied and installed Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to replace Estrada. Arroyo herself a technocrat vigorously pursued fiscal reforms that allowed the country to weather the global financial crisis, but became immensely unpopular, not just for imposing higher taxes or unseating the popular Estrada, but also due to the shenanigans of her husband and her generals, which she couldn’t control.

The presidency of Benigno Aquino III was meant to carry-on the reforms of the Aquino-Ramos era, but his weakness as a leader led to analysis paralysis as exhibited by his response to serious natural disasters and security threats. He kept Mrs. Arroyo’s reforms in social welfare, education and health, but his unwillingness to undertake major tax reforms hamstrung his ability to invest in infrastructure, adequately.

This led to a populist backlash from the right and was a situation tailor-made for Rodrigo Duterte. His tough on crime record in Davao led to a different sort of personality cult. Not based on the “man of the people” trope that was Estrada’s shtick, but based on him being a “man of action” who gets the job done, at all costs, by any means necessary, even if it meant running roughshod over the rights of some people.

If, in the developed world, populism came about because of economic stagnation, as is the case in the US, where globalisation and automation have caused real median wages of workers to remain flat for over fifty years, in the developing world populism stems from the effects of economic convergence,

As a middle class emerges in the developing world, challenges associated with a rapidly growing labour pool, crowding into urban centers, putting pressure on infrastructure, and becoming more susceptible to droughts, epidemics, and the effects of climate change in the process, is causing public anxiety and frustration over the slow rate at which governments keep up with these demands.

The yellow forces don’t get any thanks for instituting the painful reforms from Aquino-Ramos that have led to the country’s virtuous cycle of growth. Instead they became victims of their own success. When Mar Roxas said that the traffic in Metro Manila was a sign of economic growth, he was stating a fact. But instead of being thanked for generating that growth, he got hammered for failing to accommodate it with better regulation and better infrastructure.

This is an important point, because the yellow forces have all but abandoned the good economic reform legacy of the Aquino-Ramos period by opposing tax reforms since the time of PGMA. They’ve been super cautious not to be outflanked on the left, as per what happened under Erap Estrada, that they themselves have pandered to populist sentiment, pushing for social spending that would become unsustainable without appropriate revenue raising, fiscal capacity.

Duterte has combined pro-poor populism with economic rationalism. He has balanced populist measures like the increase of senior pensions and free irrigation and universal tertiary education and healthcare, which are designed to payoff key constituents to allow for unpopular tax reforms to be passed to fund infrastructure projects.

On the one hand, he is able to pander to populist sentiments for seniors and students, but is able to push for a fuel excise and sugar tax and an expansion of VAT, while making personal income tax rates more competitive, on the other.

The Liberal Party opposed these measures, while questioning the government’s borrowings from overseas to fund much needed infrastructure, stoking conspiracy theories over China’s belt and road initiative in the process, which border on xenophobia.

This made them look opportunistic and obstructionist. Their response to the traffic gridlock in our cities is to sponsor a magna carta for commuters in the senate. This cements the ineffectual nature of their governance style, that was so evident under Noynoy’s presidency.

Duterte’s economic team are simply carrying on with the reform agenda begun under the Aquino-Ramos regime, but have been doing it in a way that addresses the backlash from the left by expanding social reforms along with fiscal and economic ones.

The opposition could have collaborated constructively with the administration, and said there is a unity ticket on the fiscal and economic package, they had started it after all. But they chose instead the easy path of populism.

Bam Aquino’s economic narrative around entrepreneurship and building a highly creative, well-educated middle class needed to be bolstered by a record of responsible, prudent fiscal management, which he undermined when he opposed the TRAIN law. I am not saying this is what cost him votes. What I am saying is that Duterte would probably not have attacked him so vehemently during the campaign, if he had supported the administration’s fiscal and economic reform agenda.

By protecting its left flank, and fighting yesterday’s battles, the opposition didn’t realise that it was being outflanked on its right. The rising middle class who demand better infrastructure and protection, because their main concern is getting to work and back safely, on time, not having to sacrifice too much time away from their families, due to their commute, elected Duterte, hoping he would disrupt things, untangle the gridlock of our streets, enforce some discipline, bring about order from chaos. The opposition’s obstructionism makes them seem part of the problem, rather than a necessary part of the solution.

So now that we have properly diagnosed the problem, it is worth talking about the solution. How do the yellow forces address this populist backlash from the right? To address this, let’s perform a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that Duterte hadn’t pursued his war on drugs and didn’t flirt with declaring a revolutionary government. His administration would have been seen as fitting the mould of the yellow regime. In fact, on economic policy, there is a remarkable continuity from the reforms of Aquino-Ramos down to Arroyo’s, and now Duterte’s tax reform packages and others like rice tariffication.

Only those on the progressive side, who are opposed to capitalism would be opposed to such a reform agenda. Even social democrats who are pro-capitalism, but seek to smoothen its rough edges by distributing some of its benefits, would recognise the efforts being made to provide greater universal access to education and health services, as sound.

So now it comes down to Duterte’s war on drugs where battle lines are drawn, but yellow forces conveniently forget another thing. Cory Aquino had once unofficially endorsed Alfredo Lim over a Laban stalwart in Mel Lopez for the mayoralty of Manila back in 1992. She was reportedly favourable to his presidential bid in 1998 as well, where he lost against Erap.

Yes, Fred “Dirty Harry” Lim, who waged the same sort of war against crime and drugs in Manila, using the same sort of vigilante style killings, was an ally of Cory Aquino. He led the police forces that fired on farmers massing at Mendiola. He also stopped the coups launched against her government. Noynoy was with Lim during the Luneta siege, remember? And he defended the actions taken by the mayor after that debacle.

So what is the difference between Fred Lim and Rody Duterte? The reality is, it just boils down to style. Lim never swore at the Pope. He never requested women to kiss him on stage. He never used gutter language or made references to the Holocaust.

Let’s face it. Impunity didn’t start with Duterte. It occurred in Mendiola, in Hacienda Luisita and in countless other places. No one was ever tried for those massacres. Oh Lim was investigated, but then cleared of any responsibility. The “nanlaban” argument was used there as well. The only difference is that Lim never ran against the chosen one of the yellow forces. He ran against JDV and Erap Estrada, not exactly black and white. Whereas, Duterte ran against PNoy’s chosen successor, so he was labelled a traitor.

Once we get over the false ideological divide that the yellow forces have constructed, we will find that the differences between the two camps are small and petty. Duterte was a dilawan under PNoy. His mother was a member of the yellow coalition that toppled Marcos. He represents one strand of that coalition that does the dirty work that those on top who project an image of purity avoid to acknowledge needs to be done under our flawed judicial system.

The challenge now is, can the yellow forces open a third act? They’ve dealt with populism from the left through reforms that have produced economic growth and expanded the state’s capacity to spend for social programs. Can they deal with populism on the right by doing the same for infrastructure, public safety and security?

How? Well, they need to stop being cheap skates. Stop trying to do things on the fly, like those public toilets with no cubicles, or post-Yolanda houses that look like shanty towns, or buying Mahindra jeeps that breakdown or purchasing trains that don’t fit the tracks they’re supposed to run on.

Stop trying to have things both ways, or being on both sides of the argument. Embrace the fact that you need new and better taxes to pay for these things.Embrace the fact that you need to increase defense assets if you want to secure our borders, or else we will be unable to prevent unauthorised incursions into our waters by foreign ships. Embrace the fact that the judicial system needs reform, or else extra-judicial killings will be the only way some people will obtain security in their homes. Embrace the fact that our political system needs reform, or else corruption, money in politics will continue to rein.

The beauty of the situation now is that because of the painful reforms undertaken during the time of Aquino-Ramos, and under Arroyo-Duterte, the Philippines is experiencing an era of unprecedented growth. With the expansion of the nation’s tax take, the object of political jockeying now is over what to prioritize as the government’s coffers expand.

The task now is to design policies and platforms that continue lifting the broad sections of our society out of poverty and into the middle class, and once they are there, providing them with enough safety and protections to secure themselves, their property, and their way of life. This type of statecraft cannot take place if our political parties are weak and subservient to corporate patrons.

After the financial and economic reforms of the last thirty years, serious political and electoral reforms are needed now to move the Philippines into becoming a modern state. Strong, independent political parties with self-sufficient sources of funds provided by the state are needed to prevent legislators from being captured by vested interests, the way some business tycoons sponsor or even operate their own parties. The Philippines is on the cusp of becoming an upper middle income nation in a few years. It can certainly afford this reform now.

This will prevent populism in the future that is based on a cult of personality. Once we have moved our democracy into the modern era, where parties can independently design policies, programs and projects with proper costings, as they do in advanced democracies, and field candidates on the basis of merit, rather than blood relations.

For the longest time, the yellow forces avoided renovating our political institutions simply because they relied on a thesis that for our nation to be run well, all it needs is for virtuous people to lead. The meek and mild aren’t always the type who get things done, or that challenge the status quo.

This has led to another argument that asserts what we need are people with political will. People who will go so far as to subvert the current system to get things done. Unless those who possess virtue realise that the system is being subverted by people with wealth and power, their terms will expire without much being accomplished. Whatever progress is made just gets swept away by the next regime.

Yes, there are many things to fix. The judicial system, our defence posture against geopolitical forces, our health, education, local government, immigration, transport, telecom, water, power systems, etc. But the first step - the one that ensures that the best ideas from the best and brightest arise - is fixing our political and electoral system. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.

No, strengthening political parties with conditional grants, conditional because they will have to comply with regulations on how they spend it, and how they augment it, will not directly benefit anyone among the voting public, unlike free tuition or free irrigation, but it will indirectly benefit everyone because of the truly representative and democratic system, it will create. It’s not sexy. You can’t create a bumper sticker, a hashtag or a slogan saying political party reform, now, but instituting this reform would be a sign of real maturity.

Marcos, Estrada, Arroyo and Duterte are not the real enemy. They are but a distraction. Getting rid of them didn’t and won’t get rid of the problem. Marcos was a sign that all was not well with the old republic. After EDSA the yellow forces tried to fix it. In compromising with the more conservative forces, they merely restored the previous order that preceded Marcos. They did a half-assed job, half-baked. That meant it was only a matter of time before another Marcos surfaced to shake the EDSA republic to its core.

It’s time we recognised what the Philippines is: a plutarchy with populist tendencies. You have the very rich and famous dynasties lording it over congress and business, fixing the rules of the game to suit their interests. They use populism to bribe the electorate to keep them in power. Even if the occupant of Malacanang has noble intentions, that person won’t get anything done without dancing to their tune.

The irony is that there is multi-partisan support for political party reform in congress with multiple bills pending. That is because every major party from PDP-Laban, to Lakas, PMP and the Liberal Party have experienced the pain of moving from administration to opposition. They have all suffered the same fate of seeing their party mates switch to the other side.

So why doesn’t any administration certify the legislation as urgent? Well, because once in power, every administration has suffered the same hubris of thinking it will be able to manage political succession within its own ranks and stay in power. So, lacking the foresight, each administration has simply squandered its time in office, dealing with the urgent, not really attending to the necessary. Except for once, the administration has seen defections even while it is in power, to NUP, which is funded by a tycoon, and has attracted the president’s congressman son.

PDP-Laban has tried to smuggle in political party reform in a new constitution. But that is not necessary, as Congress can pass these reforms through normal legislation. Why not push for it now, while they still have the most seats in congress. While you are in power you can buy loyalty with positions, money and projects, but when you’re out of power, you’ve got nothing, unless you craft a law that provides funding to parties based on their performance at the last election, regardless of whether members switch parties at the next one.

The very essence of people empowerment should mean that any Juan dela Cruz can run for office, and have an equal chance compared to the scion of a political dynasty. Juan shouldn’t have to be a matinee idol, or a famous boxer or comedian to break into the magic circle. Parties should be able to nominate candidates based on merit, not on whether they have the financial capacity to pay for their campaigns, or possess the name recall to be elected.

Otherwise we’re just kidding ourselves, calling ourselves a democracy, when we aren’t. Might as well have a benevolent dictator then who will bring these vested interests to heel, rather than let them rule the country. If we want to prevent another populist dictator from emerging, then what we have to do is reform our political party institutions, take corporate money and big business out of politics through state funding, and bring our electoral system into the modern era.

Episode 25: Yellow Alert! Is the Opposition drawing the wrong lessons from recent elections?

2019-08-03T22:47:00.001+10:00

Is the opposition drawing the wrong lessons from recent elections?

Are they committing the same mistakes now, which could potentially make them obsolete in the future?

What lessons have the opposition taken away from the elections of 2016 & ‘19? Are they the right ones? What lessons could they have drawn, but are refusing to because it would mean admitting some painful truths to themselves? What are the implications for the future?

As Congress opened just a week or so ago, the opposition was licking its wounds from the beating it took at the polls. None from its senatorial slate were elected to the upper house. Not even re-electionist Bam Aquino or former senator Mar Roxas who lost to Pres. Duterte in 2016. In the lower house, they’ve been reduced to 18 members, whom you could fit in the back of a Toyota HiAce.

Following their electoral drubbing at the polls, the opposition doesn’t seem to show any signs of internal introspection or changing course. They don’t seem interested in taking stock of just what happened, so that they can make necessary internal changes or change tack. The reason for this seems to be that they have taken away the wrong message from the electorate. Here are some of the wrong lessons, that I feel the opposition are drawing from the last two elections:

1. That it was black propaganda that destroyed them at the polls, which must now be countered with their own black prop, or what could be called: when they go low, we go lower.

Ask anyone from the yellow camp why they lost. They might say it was Duterte’s troll army spreading fake news on Facebook and other social media outlets, inflating the role that socmed plays in Philippine politics.

Yet their previous administration in 2016 had a massive warchest, political machinery and propaganda outlets at its disposal. This may have helped Mr Roxas who was perennially at fourth place to reach second on election day. Some say the Comelec may have played a role in that. We still don’t know the full extent of this, as its former Chair Andres Bautista, an Aquino appointee went into hiding, following allegations that he had amassed for himself a huge pile of hidden wealth, ironic since he came from PCGG.

In 2019 we saw the anonymous Bikoy videos spreading fake news which went viral over the internet seeking to discredit the president, and by extension, his senate ticket. Did the opposition stage this, as the man who now claims to be Bikoy, Peter Advincula asserts? Recently a certain Dennis Borbon was arrested for seeking to scam solons by pretending to be a local official seeking financial help. Borbon claims to have been paid by senatorial candidates of the opposition at the last election to besmirch admin candidates. Did the opposition try its own hand in the dark arts?

I’d like to narrate a conversation I had with a former staff member of one of these senatorial candidates who worked in the VP’s office at the time. This was a few years ago. I had shared with him my former association with Cocoy Dayao the blogger and site developer who went into hiding following the expose linking him to several websites that were critical of Duterte. Cocoy to his credit when he recruited me to write for the Propinoy Project in 2010 following the election of PNoy, never interfered with my writing, even when I wrote articles critical, if not scathing, of the administration from 2010 up to 2014 when I paused to undertake a development project in the Philippines.

It was during the 2016 election that I parted ways with Cocoy. He was then actively supporting Mar Roxas, and I was writing stuff critical of Mar’s record. It was then that he began trading barbs with me on Twitter, and I noticed his lines were taking on a slightly offensive tone. It was later revealed through senate hearings that he was being paid by the Presidential Communication Office as a consultant supposedly for his work as a propagandist.

Anyway, the staff member of the VP to whom I was recounting this expressed frustration with Cocoy for being so “stupid”. Nakakainis yang Cocoy na yan, he said. Bakit? I enquired. Because he was so stupid to leave information on his websites that could identify him as the owner. In other words, for not covering up his tracks well enough! Oh, so what Cocoy did was fine with you, so long as he didn’t get caught, I thought to myself.

If that is a reflection of the thinking in the opposition’s camp, then I truly shudder to think, what has become of our democracy, where rather than conducting an open debate about ideas, we’d rather influence the public’s mood clandestinely.

If yellow propaganda exists, and I’ve just indicated that it does, why did voters not fall for it in both 2016 or in 2019? And what made them more susceptible to listen to counter narratives? Either the yellow forces are bad at communicating their message, or there is a genuine credibility gap that exists due to their poor record in office that permits other narratives to be more accepted by the public.

The message that the opposition seems to be pushing now is that the fear factor is spreading, causing the public to give high approval ratings to Duterte in surveys. Or that Duterte does something outrageous like shutting down the PCSO operations to distract voters from the real issues like what’s happening in the West Philippine Sea.

Again, if that were the case and Duterte is a dictator, then his approval ratings ought to be closer to 100%. The fact of the matter is even PNoy was popular until the end of his term, even though some pent up frustrations did exist. I’m sure an anonymous poll conducted by a non-government party whose reputation depends on its being independent, would be enough for people to respond honestly.

And this doesn’t explain other results where polls indicate the public taking a different view to the government on the West Philippine sea. The opposition can’t cherry pick the polls they like, which support their argument, from the ones that don’t. They can’t have it both ways.

The argument that people don’t respond honestly in public polls is akin to the bobotante argument. It doesn’t give voters enough credit in either case.

It also absolves the opposition of any responsibility. Surely, when a president’s public satisfaction rating is assessed, this is done in relation, not only to his recent performance, but also to what the alternative is. Yes, he may be flawed, but in contrast to what the other side does or offers, he might be the only game in town.

Instead of riding along with the president, due to fear or intimidation, perhaps the public are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because they feel there simply isn’t a viable alternative. And that is an indictment on the opposition. It’s at this point, that I’d like to share with you a quote from the late-Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr. made the year before he returned to the Philippines only to be assassinated. He said,

“I know, for a fact, we cannot go back to the old society, where a few enjoy the fat of the land, and the many suffer. But today, in spite of martial law, the rich are getting richer and the poor are growing in numbers. That cannot be. The meaning of our struggle is to be able to return the freedom. First, you must return the freedom so that all segments of our community, whether from the left or from the right will have the right to speak, and then in that open debate, in that clash of debate in the marketplace, we will produce the clash between the thesis and the antithesis and we will have the synthesis for the Filipino people.”

Rather than matching black propaganda with their own black ops, perhaps the opposition needs to draw a different lesson on where they’ve strayed from that struggle that Ninoy was speaking about, to create an open society with open, rather than clandestine, debate.

2. That they needed to counter the public’s perception of them as out of touch elitists by reaching out to the fringes of society, rather than the broad middle class, or pander to a narrow set based on social issues.

This was Leni’s formula for winning the VP. Or was it? Did she really win, is a question that is still being litigated at the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, due to allegations of poll fraud, made by her opponent Bongbong Marcos.

But anyway, whatever the case, VP Robredo went from virtual anonymity to coming within a whisker, on the eve of the election, and may have actually clinched it. That should count for something. And it does. As the titular head of her party, the responsibility falls on her to guide it through this difficult period in opposition.

It was her personal story as an attorney and advocate for the lowly that endeared her to voters, so why not steer the seemingly out of touch liberals to follow her lead. She quickly undertook her Angat Buhay program, which acts as a broker between charitable organizations and needy communities. Helping people on the fringes or laylayan of society gain access to much needed support.

This quickly morphed from an economic narrative to a social and cultural one, as she began to construct a coalition of groups on the fringe, based on lifestyle choices. She started by picking up the cudgels for legalising drugs as a counterweight to Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign. This found its way into the political manifesto of Otso Diretso in the May polls through the Ahon Laylayan Koalisyon program, which she had candidates sign.

From the economic fringes, to those on the fringes of mainstream values and social mores, like the LGBTQI community, the pro-abortion rights groups, and pro-legalisation advocates. This was stoked by her Ateneo college think tanks which lent it a kind of feminist/leftist/ environmentalist feel.

This led them to be popular among woke millennials but, it didn’t really offer anything much for the broad middle classes of society who were more concerned about bread and butter issues.

The current emphasis on feminist and gay rights, legalisation of marijuana and other drugs makes them look even more elitist and out of touch. Like a bunch bespectacled latte sipping liberals with no idea how the other half lives.

To be fair, the enlightened, idealist, college crowd can be potent electorally. Mrs Robredo is following in the footsteps of Miriam Santiago and Raul Roco, another Bicolano, whose first campaigns for president electrified the youth vote. But, as we have seen in the past, there are limits to what this vote can achieve. To be successful, a broader coalition is always needed.

So rather than merely pandering to these groups on the fringes, perhaps the opposition needs to turn its attention to the ordinary, working families in the broad sections of our society.

3. That they need to brand themselves as the party of human rights in contrast to the heavy handedness of the government in its drug war, or its conciliatory approach to China on the WPS issue. This is their rights-based approach.

This was perhaps why Otso Diretso’s bench consisted mostly of lawyers. Erin Tanada and Chel Diokno, heirs to two titans of the old senate and of the parliament of the streets. Romy Macalintal, an election lawyer. Their campaign manager was Kiko Pangilinan, another lawyer. Mrs Robredo herself started her career as a community based lawyer.

The contrast between Otso’s platform vs MaBaGoKoTo’s was stark. It isn’t true that the last election wasn’t about ideas. There were two theories of development at play. On OD’s side was a theory that said development happens when you give people rights. Women, indigenous people, young, gay, and so on.

On the other side, MaBaGoKoTo was emphasizing development through better service to the people. Better infra, better access, better support, better organisation. That was their theory of change. OD focused on assembling a coalition of narrow, disparate groups. The admin focused on helping the broad sections of society, and by so doing lift all boats.

The emphasis of OD on civil and political rights drowned out other narratives that one of their candidates re-electionist Bam Aquino had credibly developed around fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, which had an aspirational tone that could have played well to a much broader audience. This message of optimism was lost in the posturing that OD did on the WPS with their trip to Palawan on jet skis. This was an opportunity lost.

By losing Bam in the senate, the opposition has lost more than a seat, it has lost a future contender for higher office. The VP is all alone now as the sole contender in 2022. She seems vulnerable with her election protest case and with recent charges leveled at her by the govt. But it seems the opposition continues to plod down this disproven strategy.

Kiko Pangilinan’s magna carta for commuters seeks to legislate rights for the riding public. The problem isn’t the lack of rights, the problem is the lack of investment in infrastructure, which they are opposing everytime they question the government’s loans from China.

The DOF has already shown through the brilliant work of ASec Tony Lambino that adjusted for exchange rate expectations, China’s loans to the Philippines are priced competitively when compared to Japanese and other lenders, and they don’t account for the lion’s share of the government’s overseas borrowing program.

Kiko’s public consultation poses the question: “Bakit hassle mag-commute sa Pilipinas?” And his solution is to draw up a magna carta.

This just plays into the admin’s hands. The reason why it has been such a hassle to commute, isn’t due to the lack of rights, it’s because of broken promises for instance to extend the LRT to Cavite, which the previous president made, with a guarantee that if it didn’t happen, he’d gladly let himself be run over by a train. A train that didn’t exist, because the government didn’t procure it, or that broke down because the government fired the competent contractor and hired a newbie, know nothing contractor.

It’s a hassle because the PPP’s of the previous administration never materialised, by and large except in the Powerpoint presentations they made. It’s a hassle because the previous government wouldn’t raise new taxes to pay for much needed infrastructure. It’s a hassle because the previous administration cancelled a number of dredging projects that could have prevented floods that clog up the streets.

This approach by Sen Pangilinan reveals a certain political tone deafness on the part of the opposition. If it feels it can win back voter confidence and trust by offering up paper rights that don’t mean a thing, cause it ain’t got that thing, then they certainly deserve to be where they are now.

This is related to the opposition’s stand on the West Philippine Sea issue. They claim to have won on the basis of a ruling in the Hague, which doesn’t settle the issue of sovereignty, but simply invalidates China’s 9 dash line claim on historical grounds.

The status of the rocks that China has built on was also settled. No, they aren’t islands that any country can claim sovereignty over, nor do they create sovereign rights. The most one can claim is a 20 nm radius surrounding them.

The opposition tries to fry the admin on this issue, because it took a more conciliatory stance on this compared to the previous antagonistic they took when they were in charge. The Atin Yan! Campaign is a sign of Philippine nationalism. Nationalism which has led countries to go to war in the past, and display xenophobia at home.

The so-called abandonment of this government’s sovereignty over the islands. No I don’t think the government has abandoned its claim over the Spratlys. The government is conceding that it can’t impose its sovereign rights while China is poised there. There’s a difference from claiming sovereignty and imposing sovereign rights. That in essence is the problem with the rights-based approach.

Unless the Philippines builds up its own naval assets, it can claim all it wants, but if China throws its weight around, nothing will be able to stop it. Good fences make for good neighbors. So if the opposition wants us to preserve our rights in the WPS, it needs to come up with better solutions than simply lodging complaints or taking China to international courts, which may have jurisdiction, but don’t have the ability to enforce their rulings. That’s our job.

So, rather than legislating rights for every conceivable interest group, perhaps the opposition should get to work drafting plans that would improve the lives of Filipinos, by changing facts on the ground.

I could go one, but in the interest of time, maybe I’ll just leave it there for now. These three are what I believe are the wrong lessons that anyone should draw from the events of 2016 and 2019:

Needing to go low when your opponent goes low
Needing to pander to a narrow set of interests
Relying on unenforceable rights, instead of changing facts on the ground.

Why are they the wrong lessons?

No admission of where they went wrong. No contrition. There was real anger in 2016 and 2019.

If so why was Pnoy still so popular?

Well so was Bill Clinton, but his VP Al Gore bore the brunt of people’s frustrations with the Clintons. The same happened to Mar Roxas, in part because of Mar Roxas, but also because there was pent-up frustration and anger against the administration.

The yellow forces were perceived by voters as arrogant, hypocritical, emitting clear signs of a party that had been in the ascendancy for too long.

Their narrative seemed tired, dated, lumang tugtugin. Voters had lost faith after Luneta, Yolanda, and Mamasapano, felt they had given enough chances to them. Nagsawa na. Nadala na ang tao sa kanila.

And their lack of contrition merely demonstrates to voters that they haven't learned a thing, and can't be entrusted with the reins yet. Possibly ever, the way things are going.

Will they be condemned to irrelevance as a result?

Yes, if they continue down this path. Unless they learn the right lessons from history, they might be obliterated in 2022.

What are the right lessons? I’d like to offer five of them:

1. Stop the scapegoating. Take responsibility for past mistakes. Show genuine contrition and remorse. For once, I’d just like to hear someone from the opposition say, “Yes, mistakes were made. We messed up big time, but are now going to avoid committing them again by reforming ourselves.” I’d like to hear that, and probably so would so many others who have abandoned them, simply because there is no admission of wrong-doing. I believe we Filipinos are a forgiving kind. If there is some contrition and ownership of past mistakes on their part, I believe that would go a long way towards assuaging the public’s anger that still remains from previous failures committed by the previous administration.

2. Practice what you preach. It’s not enough to claim good governance and rule of law, you actually need to practice it. Stop using whataboutisms as an excuse. Do the right things. A corollary to this is: It’s not enough to be good, you need to be effective too. As the group that espouses liberal democracy, they’ve historically taken hits from the left and the right. From the left, Joseph Estrada hit them for not doing enough to alleviate poverty, by prioritising debt repayments and opening our broders to trade under Cory and Ramos, over social programs. PNoy addressed this by expanding social spending during his term. They’ve been hit from the right by emphasizing civil and political rights, but not protecting the community from criminal elements or securing our borders or investing in much needed infrastructure that alleviates the daily struggle to get to work to earn a living. Being good should not prevent you from being effective. Follow what Ninoy said, find the synthesis between left and right, through open debate. Work with the administration on securing communities and protecting borders, through practical, legal measures. Work with the administration to engage in prudent fiscal spending on the right kind of infrastructure that would boost productivity and innovation in the country to create jobs and economic opportunity for all and reduce the number of have-nots that way.

3. Give democracy a chance. Stop trying to unseat or topple a president before his or her term ends. Stop calling voters bobo. Stop even implying they are gullible. Win the debate through open discussion, not through clandestine smear campaigns, or through name calling. The danger in claiming it was black prop and troll armies that won Duterte the presidency, is that be delegitimizing the election, you can lay the ground for undoing the results. The opposition has gotten so used to that game of tearing down, first with Erap Estrada, then with GMA, now with Duterte. But when they had a chance to rule, they stuffed it up in many ways. It’s time the opposition ceased being the party of the resistance, and started to accept the verdict of the people, which clearly repudiated their brand of politics and governance. It’s time they listened to the people who clearly want our leaders to work together again for the common good.

4. Find a new economic narrative. Bam’s was a crucial voice that has unfortunately been lost. The Philippines is now making waves in a couple of surveys. The Startup Genome project recognizes Manila’s emerging fintech ecosystem. The Global Innovation Initiative of the WIPO ranks the Philippines for the first time with other leading nations that punch above their weight as innovators.

This will be aided with the enactment of the PH Startup Act originally proposed by Bam Aquino, and the PH Innovation Act of Loren Legarda, earlier this year. We can help the sectors being left behind, but we can’t lose sight of the engines for future growth, that will provide us with the means to help the vulnerable sectors. We can’t stop disruption, but we can at least guarantee that we ride some of its waves. The opposition must find a new economic narrative that is broader, expansive and optimistic about the future, rather than being merely sympathetic to the ones being left behind. We have the talent, the creativity as a nation to compete, globally. We have built an amazing platform with free education from K-to-Tertiary and with the universal healthcare law. Let’s work on fiscal and other incentives to boost private investment, build infrastructure and encourage research, innovative collaborations and investment. There is a new narrative there. I’m just not sure they have the right people to capitalise on it.

5. Reach out. Broaden your appeal. Stop living in your echo chamber. Stop insulting people, lumping everyone critical of you as a bunch of deplorables. Hate to say this but Kris Aquino may be their last remaining hope. OMG I can’t believe I have to go here. Yes, Kris, who took a more conciliatory approach with the administration both before and after the elections of 2016 and 2019. She’s been lambasted by the opposition for it, but she seems to have a better feel for the pulse of the nation than any of the LP stalwarts. If Ninoy was able to reach out to Marcos after being jailed for nearly 8 years, most of which in solitary confinement, the opposition should be able to reach out to Duterte and his ilk. Kris shows the way.

Episode 24: Yellow Alert: Why democratic forces have fallen out of favour in the Philippines (and how they can win it back)

2019-07-28T05:25:00.001+10:00

It’s important at the start of the program to define key terms. I’d like to do this, by way of question and answer, so...

Q. What do we mean by democratic forces?

A. The leaders and constituents who were responsible for fighting authoritarianism in the 1970s and restoring democratic institutions in the 1980s and sought to maintain them since.

Q. What do we mean by “fallen out of favor”?

A. It means losing at the ballot box, as in 2016, with the election of Pres. Duterte, who ruled Davao as mayor with an iron grip and in 2019, when the entire opposition slate of Otso Diretso failed to make it to the senate, which consolidates Duterte’s control of the legislative branch.

Q. What do we mean by democracy?

A. We mean, not only the system of obtaining popular mandates through universal suffrage, but the democratic system of checks and balances, the freedom of the press, respect for the rights of the minority, observing due process, and the rule of law.

So after defining these terms, we come to the question, why have democratic forces fallen out of favour?

The answer I’d like to offer is varied and multi-dimensional. Let me start off by saying that the election of populist strongmen is a trend that is not unique to the Philippines alone, but part of a global trend, from Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonario in Brazil, and Trump in America.

So let me begin first with some of the global forces that help explain this situation around the world, before going to the particular case of our country. So in answer to the question that we’ve posed, here are some possible explanations for the waning of democracy around the world:

1. The rise of the far right, nationalist leaders around the world can be traced to the effects of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is the late-20th Century resurgence of 19th Century ideas of laissez-faire economic liberalism or free market capitalism. Free markets means opening up borders to trade in both goods and services.

Dani Rodrik, a professor of political economy at Columbia University, has explained it this way:

Sometimes simple and bold ideas help us see more clearly a complex reality that requires nuanced approaches. I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

He means that globalisation, or the integration of world markets under a system of free trade will either weaken national sovereignty, as in the case of EU members where nations surrender their ability to set monetary and immigration policy, or weakens democracy, as in the case of Russia with the emergence of Putin or China with the consolidation of power by Pres. Xi Jinping.

What Rodrik is saying, is that you can’t have all three: globalisation, national sovereignty and democracy. What happened in the US with the election of Trump is that the swing states in the rustbelt of America wanted him to restore national sovereignty, which they felt they had surrendered to the WTO and the UN.

These are workers in the manufacturing and coal mining sectors that have been ravaged by imports from abroad aka China and Mexico, and America’s commitments to things like the Paris Accord on climate change. In other words, globalisation created losers out of them, eroding their standard of living, causing them to vote at the ballot for someone who promised to restore their dignity.

This is a situation that is familiar to many developing nations. In Latin America in particular, which like the Philippines adopted neoliberal policies after the Latin American debt crises in the 1980s, and where populist leaders from both the left and the right, have risen in response. This leads me to the second reason.

2. The rise of populism.

There has been a populist backlash against the tide of neoliberal capitalism that has swept the world. What do we mean by populism? Francis Fukuyama offers three definitions:

The first is a regime that pursues policies that are popular in the short run but unsustainable in the long run, usually in the realm of social policies. Examples would be price subsidies, generous pension benefits, or free medical clinics.
A second has to do with the definition of the “people” that are the basis for legitimacy: Many populist regimes do not include the whole population, but rather a certain ethnic or racial group that are said to be the “true” people.
A third definition of populism has to do with the style of leadership. Populist leaders tend to develop a cult of personality around themselves, claiming the mantle of charismatic authority that exists independently of institutions like political parties. They try to develop a direct and unmediated relationship with the “people” they claim to represent, channeling the latter’s hopes and fears into immediate action. It is typically coupled with a denunciation of the entire existing elite, which is of course invested in existing institutions.

Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was an example of the first and third type of populism. He used the state’s revenues from oil to bankroll social programs, which became unsustainable when the price of petrol fell.

Nigel Farage in the UK and the far right movements across Europe are examples of the second, where their focus has been primarily against immigration, and treating certain ethnic groups within their society as not representing “true English” people, even though these are people who were born and grew up there. Modi’s ethnic nationalism is another form of this.

Erap Estrada and Rody Duterte are examples of the third form of populism. While Erap appealed to the left or the poor or masa, Duterte appealed to the right. They both denounce the “elites” of civil society, dubbing them “evil society” as in the case of Erap, or dilawans, yellow forces, as in the case of Duterte.

Whenever you have a group of people who feel excluded in society, whether they be the poor masses, left behind by globalisation, or the victims of violent crime, drug syndicates and the like, you have fertile ground on which populist leaders can weave their magic.

So from the global to the local, let’s now look at the reasons particular to the Philippines that led to democratic forces falling out of favor.

3. The ineptitude or failure of the political elites to govern effectively.

In 2016 there were three to four populists running against one moderate, in the person of Mar Roxas. Jojo Binay and Grace Poe were populists who were claiming the mantle of Joseph Estrada and his buddy Fernando Poe, Jr. Duterte and Santiago were populists on the right. You would have thought that the moderate had the best chance of winning in this field.

But there was a swing late in the election cycle from Binay and Poe to Duterte. Why did this happen? Some say, Poe who gradually moved to the center ate away at the votes for Roxas, but actually, she could claim it was the other way around. Preferential polls revealed at the time that those who voted for the Senator, predominantly had Duterte as their second choice. If anything, Poe ate away at Duterte’s votes, not Roxas’.

The question is why was the administration candidate so unpopular? Pres. Noynoy Aquino had retained his popularity all the way to the end of his term, so why was his chosen successor not voted in, nor was he elected for another term in the senate last May 2019?

The answer is, many people felt that though well-meaning, though honest, the political class that they represented, failed to provide good, and effective governance, as they had claimed.

What is effective governance? It’s doing the right things, which means having:
A professional bureaucracy - with merit based appointments, not out of political favor
Prudent fiscal and economic governance
Appropriate and sufficient delivery of basic services
Proper defense of the realm - not surrendering our sovereignty or control of our borders
Rational infrastructure spending and urban planning

It also means observing the rule of law, or doing things right, which means:
Maintaining the independence of the courts, free from political influence or interference
Efficiently dispensing justice
Protecting the rights of individuals and sanctity of contracts
Enforcing equality before the law - providing access to legal services, and a fair trial
Observing the even application of the law

Daang matuwid, or the right path that the previous administration used as its mantra, was meant to usher us into a period of enlightened governance in the country. And to their credit, they tried to do this, by expanding social programs, in a fiscally responsible manner, with the 4Ps, or Pantawid Pamilya, conditional cash grants, and expanded health care to indigent families.

It failed however to provide adequate physical infrastructure to keep up with the times. Its PPP, public-private partnership flagship program, which was itself a vestige of the neoliberal economic policies adopted by Mrs Corazon Aquino’s government in the 1980s, failed to deliver on time, the much needed improvements to transport and logistics.

Their development acceleration program, or DAP was ruled unconstitutional by the highest court of the land, and was rorted by congressmen and senators with fake projects, costing the taxpayer billions that could have been used to build much needed infrastructure.

4. The lack of executive competence on the part of the president who had spent his whole political career in the legislative branch, deliberating on laws, showed.

His father, Ninoy, had at least been a town mayor and provincial governor before becoming a senator. But Noynoy’s only experience at managing things was as a sales rep for Mondragon enterprises, the outfit of his late-mother’s former tourism secretary.

Noynoy’s mishandling of the fallout of the Luneta hostage taking and the Mamasapano police operation which ended in the massacre of the entire special forces group of policemen was an indictment on his leadership

Mar Roxas who at least served in the executive branch under Erap Estrada and Gloria Arroyo, should have at least done better. But the problems at the transport department with the MRT, which was operated by a group that he had a longstanding history with, and the post-Yolanda recovery efforts, exposed his lack of decisiveness and executive ability, overall.

5. Their inability to dispense justice fairly or evenly was also exposed following the impeachment of Chief Justice Corona and the Janet Napoles scandal.

Only non-allies were prosecuted after the scandal, even though some allies were implicated by whistleblowers as well.

Ineffective governance and failure to observe the rule of law is what led to the collapse of support for the Daang Matuwid coalition in 2016. It led to a populist backlash, from all social and income groups. It didn’t matter whether you were wealthy, educated, or not. Polls revealed that voters had turned away from the yellow forces.

The question now becomes, how do they win back, not just favor, but legitimacy in the eyes of voters? This is important, because no amount of pandering to the public will win you back legitimacy once you have lost it. It’s about regaining trust, which has been lost.

Let me now offer six ways they can do this:

1. Improve their executive capabilities. Find candidates with proven executive competence. We love our mayors. Jokowi and Bukele were first mayors of Jakarta and San Salvador before becoming president. Our very own Erap Estrada and Rody Duterte were mayors. In the era of local autonomy, metropolitan city mayors not provincial governors rule. Isko is being touted as a future presidential candidate as early as now. We like decisive leaders. Those who get things done, as opposed to scholarly senators who deliberate and craft bills meticulously. Men of action, as opposed to men of books. Jesse Robredo was one such type on the yellow bench, which is increasingly looking shallow. His widow has tried to offer her own version of good governance known as tsinelas economics. Her program of channeling charitable donations to marginalised communities was, however cited by the Commission on Audit for its failure to liquidate expenses. This is something that her camp needs to address. Just as an aside, wouldn’t it be good to have regional autonomy, so that mayors and governors who perform well in their cities and provinces, could then be promoted and practice governing at a bigger scale, so as to prepare them for eventually running the country later on? As Duterte noted, he was unprepared for the gravity or scale of the problems he would be confronted with as president. There is just such a big chasm that now exists between governing at the local level and the national. Somehow, we need a better way of grooming future leaders of the country, by gradually expanding their skill sets, until they are ripe for national office.
2. Work to expand opportunities for the middle class (as an antidote to populism) - as opposed to pandering to a very narrow set of social groups solely. VP Leni’s gambit failed last May. Otso Diretso’s platform which her Ahon Laylayan Koalisyon wrote made it difficult for them to appeal to the broad middle class. Unlike PDP-Laban’s platform which was offering better service delivery to OFWs, households and the like. I’m not diminishing the importance of securing the rights of LGBTQI, indigenous, urban poor, drug dependents, etc. What I am saying is that these are not uppermost in the minds of the struggling households in the suburbs of Cavite and Laguna, for instance, struggling to make a living, while travelling three to four hours a day to the city and back, putting kids through school and university, and having to deal with senior, ailing parents, etc. What they want is efficient transport, safe streets for their kids, access to education and healthcare, stable prices, and better wages. So expanding opportunities for the middle class would mean working with the administration to fast-track infrastructure and jobs program. Passing fiscal, financial and regulatory reforms to spur investment and entrepreneurship, and pay for social programs like universal health care. Improve our urban planning system, increase the rate of home ownership, regulate water, power and telco providers in a way that promotes the interests of consumers, the stability and sustainability of the system, and so much more. People with a stake in the system, will not vote for someone to wreck it. They will want to preserve it. The way to do this is to increase the ranks of the middle class.
3. Improve the functioning of political parties to move us away from personality, celebrity driven politics. What we have now are three major parties, acquired by three different tycoons. NUP from the remnants of Gloria’s and Ramos’ Lakas-NUCD party, run by the ports magnate Enrique Razon, a close friend of Mrs Arroyo’s husband. NPC under the patronage of Danding Cojuangco, at first, but now run by Ramon Ang, his successor at San Miguel Corporation. And the Nacionalista Party run by the family of Manny Villar, who is the richest man in the country. Together these three parties control 42% of district seats in Congress, 103 seats. The remaining institutional parties are Lakas, Liberal Party and PDP-Laban, which together control 47% of districts or 115 seats. The rest are mom and pop operations, remnants of their founders, such as PMP of the Estrada clan, PRP of the late Miriam Santiago, HNP of the Dutertes, and LDP of the Angaras, which account for the remaining 10% or 25 seats. Even partylist groups are now run by rich individuals. So in politics as in business, when you have large conglomerates competing with SMEs run like mom and pop operations, how can we ensure that competition is free and fair? First of all, we need to ask the question, whether it is right to let the captains of industry run political parties. Should those who decide on regulations, awarding of budgets, franchises and contracts be subordinate to business tycoons? Secondly, if these patrons weren’t there, how would these parties survive? How can we ensure that parties are based on ideas, principles and programs of government, rather than personalities, or worse corporate interests? In most democracies around the world, doesn’t matter if they are in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, some form of state-sponsorship of political parties is in place. This means that parties receive financial support from the taxpayer if they meet certain criteria, such as disclose their sources of finance, which shouldn’t include large donations from individuals or corporations, properly audited by the COA. Political party reform in other words, which unlike federalism or cha-cha have sponsors from across the aisle and political spectrum, and have passed in the lower house, but not in the senate. So now my question is, why not create a unity ticket to push for these reforms that would institutionalize political parties.
4. Improve the functioning of our courts and judicial system as a whole. Declogging the courts, so that justice is dispensed with efficiently. This could mean reviewing the structure of the courts, creating specialist courts, increasing the number of judges. It also means applying modern IT systems in judicial administration. Strengthening the prosecutorial arm of the government, as well as ensuring access to legal counsel. Aside from that, reforming our sentencing laws and policies, improving our jail and rehabilitation system. Finally, ensuring the independence of the DOJ, the Office of the Solicitor General, at all times, which should never be used as political instruments, again.
5. Improve our mechanisms for democratic accountability. This means improving our election system. Improving the way we hold public officials to account. Strengthening the Commission on Audit and the Office of the Ombudsman to investigate and indict corrupt officials. Improve the efficiency of the Sandiganbayan to hear such cases. Strengthen the prosecutorial arm of the government as well. Make the appointment of judges and justices more transparent.
6. Strengthen citizen involvement and participation in public life. This could mean having town hall meetings, informal meetups, listening tours, and the like. Socmed is just too toxic for this. It’s necessary to improve the level of discourse. Stop the name calling, scapegoating and tribalism. Start to build bridges, engage in coalition building, rather than virtue signaling and internal purges of the ranks. The pro-democratic forces need to expand their base and be more inclusive in the way they reach out to the general public.

So that’s it. That’s my summary of why democratic, yellow forces have fallen out of favor, and how to win it back.

Did I miss anything? Please tell me through the comments section below. Hope to hear from you. This has been another edition of The Cusp, I’m Doy Santos. Thanks for watching.

Episode 23: Bayanihan federalism by stealth or initiative

2019-07-14T12:28:00.005+10:00

One of the crucial factors in determining whether charter change will succeed or not is the public’s perception regarding the motives behind it. Are its proponents really sincere in bringing about much needed change for ordinary Filipinos, or are they simply looking out for their own interests?

We’re going to examine the case for federalism in the country. Is it justified? Or is it just a cover for unwinding the democratic system of checks and balances that were painstakingly restored over three decades ago.

When President Duterte spoke before an assembly of local government officials, he expressed his frustration with the current set-up of our constitution that he said needed change to root out various forms of corruption. He said one term of office was not enough to do it under our current charter.

To both his supporters and critics alike, this is code for removing our system of checks and balances, to enable a strong leader to effect change as quickly and as drastically as possible. For supporters, nothing short of a complete overhaul of the 1987 constitution to make this possible, is needed. For critics, not one word, syllable or punctuation mark must be touched, lest it pave the way for one man rule.

Having a strong leader in Malacanang has historically created a stable environment, which supports growth. Thus when we have had strong leadership in the palace, people have tried to extend the leader’s term of office, first under Ramos, then Arroyo, and now Duterte. This is the reason why many oppose any attempt at charter change. It has become synonymous with term extension.

The question, however, is what change has Pres. Duterte really instituted to deserve term extension? By his own words the president has admitted failure in his war on drugs, crime and corruption. He promised to rid the country of these within six months, but now he says he underestimated the scale of these problems, and one term is not enough.

There is now a strong belief that the problems confronting our republic are much too great, complex and confounding to our national leaders and institutions, whether it is corruption, criminality or congestion in our cities. We tried dealing with them through virtue, under daang matuwid, and saw what a failure that was.

Many feel that enabling a leader with emergency powers to deal with them is the only way out. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. If we rely on our current set-up, the problems will only fester. But if we empower a strongman to deal with them, then in time, he might not be accountable to the people anymore and may abuse his powers. Furthermore, as we discovered from Marcos, and perhaps now from Duterte, empowering a strongman might not fix the problems of the country, either. So what should we do?

Does dealing with these problems effectively necessarily mean making governments less accountable to the people and vice versa?

An effective government that is accountable and observes the rule of law: these are the three ingredients for building a modern state, according to Francis Fukuyama in the Origins of Political Order. If Arroyo and Duterte represent the strong state (or ‘matatag na republica’), the Aquinos and his supporters represent democratic accountability (‘daang matuwid’).

Rule of law is the missing ingredient, as the two camps battle it out. Their enmity is but an illusion. They are simply approaching the same goal from different angles, and appeal to different constituents with varying preferences and views in life. But both are needed. With federalism, there is an opportunity to make our democracy work better and more effectively, that is produce better results, while observing democratic accountability. How, you ask?

The political philosopher Montesquieu in the 18th century said that democracy, the kind of self-rule which was invented by the Greeks could only flourish within small republics. The problem with smaller states though was that they become susceptible to invasion by larger powers. The problem with large republics, on the other hand, is they become unwieldy and governments become less accountable to the people, more prone to corruption, as what happened to the Roman republic when it grew to become an empire.

The solution that Montesquieu came up with was for a federation of smaller republics to be formed, where the constituent subnational governments would be closer to the people, and act as intermediary powers to counter any tendency towards despotism from the central government. This was the rationale adopted by the American federalists in justifying a strong central government in 1788 under a federal system, from the previously loose confederation of states created in 1781.

When you reflect on this, you might consider that some regions in our country have grown so large, as in the case of Greater Manila, that managing them requires having a powerful executive, who could override the parochial interests of its constituent parts, namely the 13 mayors that make up the region.

Some provinces, on the other hand, have too sparse a population, or have too little economic clout to gain attention from our national economic development planners, unless they band together. This problem is dealt with to a certain extent by our regional development councils, made up of provincial governors. But these RDCs merely wield recommendatory power to the national government on what the regional infrastructure development plans should be. They don’t have full autonomy, and they suffer from parochialism and lack of political mandates from the people to exercise their function.

In both instances, there are coordination failures in our present set-up, which could be addressed by granting regional autonomy, down from the central government, or aggregating power up from the local level to meet these challenges.

Contrary to the caricature painted by some that the bayanihan constitution drafted by Duterte’s Consultative Commission would cause a disintegration of the country, or that it would exacerbate the inequality across regions, the cooperative design of the bayanihan constitution could actually promote greater engagement from the citizenry who would no longer feel that government is too distant or disempowered to deal with their problems. In other words, you get better, more effective governance that is also more directly accountable to the people.

Under the model, internal revenue allotments would be raised to 50% from the current 40% of all government revenues including royalties from the extraction of natural resources. On top of that, there will be an equalisation fund set up with not less than 3% of the general appropriations act. This will correct, not just the vertical imbalances, but the inter-regional or horizontal imbalances as well.

The bayanihan constitution states that “The Fund shall be distributed based on the
needs of each region, with priority to those that require support to achieve financial viability
and economic sustainability” as determined by an intergovernmental federal commission.

Devolving power to regional governments would make them much more responsible and accountable for the development that occurs, or doesn’t, in their region. As part of the bayanihan constitution’s division of labor, regional governments will be responsible for regional development planning, transport, housing and infrastructure. There would be no need to give the president emergency powers, as the problems of traffic, garbage and other services would be handled by local regional executives. These executives and their cabinet would be members of a regional assembly directly elected by the people, as per the bayanihan constitution.

For proponents of a parliamentary form of government, take heart. This will mean our regions would observe a parliamentary set-up, while the national government would be presidential. It would be a hybrid, uniquely Filipino. Not French, German or British.

By all accounts, the Philippines has been approximating federalism through greater local autonomy since this was enshrined in the 1987 Constitution. Its framers’ defined it as “a kind of maximum decentralization, short of federalization.”

This is why many scholars have noted that the Philippines already enjoys greater local autonomy within its unitary set-up than some federal states. The irony is that under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, a self-styled strongman, the push towards greater devolution through federalism is occuring. But many who ought to be on the side of empowering the regions distrust the process for decentralising power, saying it would only create mini-fiefdoms and elements of warlordism writ large in the regions.

It is true to a certain extent. While local autonomy has increased the capacity for LGU self-rule, the stranglehold of political dynasties over them has gotten stronger through the years. So while political centres have been dispersed, these centres have been increasingly dominated by a few families.

The bayanihan federal constitution hard codes anti-dynasty provisions with no need for an enabling law. It also provides for state financed elections, campaign finance reform that limits the size and sources of political donations, and provides extra safeguards in the auditing of these sources of campaign expenses.

Despite many forms of political patronage in congress are being done away with through programs that provide free, universal access to public services like health and education, the stranglehold of public office by the aristocrats will remain, unless the people fight to democratise who can run for office with these reforms. Otherwise the entry cost of running and winning at elections will be too high. It creates an adverse selection problem where only the corrupt can afford to run for office, win and stay in office. Thus, only the corrupt will choose to run for office. The honest people won’t. Hence the rise of political dynasties that have a tighter grip on power now compared to 1988 when they first re-emerged.

The Marcos era was an interregnum between the dynastic oligarchies of the post-war era and their resurrection post-EDSA. In between Mr Marcos stripped them of power, but had to fill the vacuum that they left by appointing his own cronies to replace them. The classic case of a monarch who appoints men on the make to replace barons of the land to maintain control.

We’ve seen how problematic that is. So rather than turning to a strongmen, it is best to empower ordinary people to seek public office and win. Giving every Juan an equal chance to run through state electoral campaigns and political party reforms, term limits and bans on political dynasties would bring about cleaner politics and better, more effective and accountable governance, and make everyone more equal before the law.

So now, we come to the problem of how to effect these changes. Many pro-democratic opponents of federalism don’t oppose bringing government closer to the people as such. They are fearful of the other changes that opening a can of worms like charter change might bring, including erosions to our system of checks and balances, term limits and so forth.

One way is to introduce federalism by stealth. A mere inclusion of “regions” in the definition of political and territorial subdivisions of the republic under Article X Section 1 of the 1987 constitution could pave the way for the formation of autonomous regional governments. This would fulfill the vision of its framers to have maximum autonomy, short of federalism. The enabling law would only need a majority in both houses once the amendment has been made.

Performing a surgical change to the constitution in this manner, rather than an open ended one, under a constitutional convention would achieve the same goal, but without too much divisiveness or disruption, which is what economic managers fear. It would deliver federalism in everything but name.

Art. XVII, Sec. 1 of the 1987 constitution says any amendment or revision to it may be proposed by Congress and passed with three fourths of all its members. To avoid legal problems down the track, it is best to interpret this as three fourths of both houses voting separately. Thus, some opposition senators might come to party if a surgical revision is proposed in this manner, as the shift isn’t tied to term extension. The problem is, such a surgical amendment wouldn’t come with the political and electoral reforms, found elsewhere in the bayanihan draft. Pushing for too many amendments to the constitution could prove too taxing. There might not be enough time to debate it in congress within Duterte’s remaining term of office, especially if controversial amendments are proposed.

A people’s initiative could deliver several amendments and bypass congress, but this would require organisation and funding to be achieved. It has one virtue though, a people’s initiative could bring about changes undiluted by political realities in Congress. The political and electoral reforms contained in the bayanihan constitution that would deal with political dynasties, campaign finance and political party reforms would not need to be watered down to gain the support of three fourths of each house. The resources required for a people’s initiative might turn out to be less than having to, for want of a better term, “buy votes” in congress to get to three fourths of both houses.

Getting the people behind it will be difficult, but not impossible. Consider that the Pulse Asia survey in June of 2018 showed that close to 30% of Filipinos wanted a shift to federalism “at this time”. The fact of the matter is you only need 12% of registered voters, 3% from each district, to sign a people’s initiative to put it to a referendum. If you consider that another 30% were open to a shift to federalism “sometime in the future” and 10% were undecided or didn’t hold a view, then with the right campaign, it might garner enough popular support in a referendum to pass.

The downside is that it will require mobilisation without the machinery from traditional politicians who will balk at the anti-dynasty provisions. Koko Pimentel the president of PDP-Laban and Manny Paquiao have said that they would push for the bayanihan draft, leaving out the judicial reforms, which is a different debate altogether. The question is whether the dynastic politicians that are members of their coalition led by Hugpong will fall in line, especially if Sara Duterte is opposed to it, as she has stated she is. If they are opposed by their own partymates, are they willing to sponsor a people’s initiative?

Much will depend on what the president’s position is. But, if he sits back as he is wont and doesn’t provide direction, then this is where the push for charter change as well as political and electoral reform could fail. I doubt whether federalism would pass in the lower house, if Hugpong is against it. A people’s initiative might succeed with help from the DILG U/Sec Jonathan Malaya who was the convenor of PDP-Laban’s Federal study group. But if liberal forces in the country don’t get behind it, this too will probably fail.

So there you have it, if the bayanihan constitution is debated in congress, it will surely be watered down, its political and electoral reforms in particular, and in fact may result in unlimited terms for congress and the president. If it goes through a people’s initiative, the reforms might have a better chance of remaining intact, but the challenge will be to get it going without the political machinery of the aristocracy that rules the country.

As the song goes, change don’t come easy. But let’s think of the concept of bayanihan, which isn’t just a local tradition or custom, but a collaborative ethos that could help drive much needed reforms. If we put the term bayanihan into practice, it might allow the forces seeking genuine and positive change to move forward.