Individual legislators, legislative committees, and tax policymaking II

This blog entry will illustrate the inordinate power and influence of legislative committees and powerful individual legislators in the policy process.  In the case of tax policymaking, the officials and members of the House and Senate Ways and Means Committees would wield this disproportionate power relative to their respective legislative majorities.  Comparatively speaking, officials of the [...]

Individual legislators, legislative committees and tax policy making

Through this blog entry and subsequent ones, I will continue sharing parts of a book on Philippine institutions and policy making which I started writing the middle of last year. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ In candidate-centered democratic polities, individual legislators exert an inordinately heavy influence on policy making.  This is so since politicians need to develop personal reputations [...]

The Marcoses’ political rehabilitation II

Through this blog, I wish to share comments and my responses to them re the entry entitled “The political rehabilitation of the Marcoses”. Mon Casiple believes that many of the 2010 voters are young and have no personal recollection of Marcosian martial rule. And that name recall is the ‘name’ (pun intended) of the senatorial [...]

The political rehabilitation of the Marcoses

Again, some prefatory disclosures are in order.  I was an ‘unwilling guest’ of the Marcosian detention camps from September 16, 1973 to December 12, 1974.  I was tortured during a tactical interrogation period of about two to three weeks or so at various security agencies (some of which are no longer in existence) including the [...]