PH needs new politics with a new tax culture at its core

By several standards, the Philippines has fallen behind her East Asian neighbors and suffer from predictable consequences. It is often said (and bragged) that the per capita income in the Philippines was second only to Japan in the 1950s.

Rosa Maria Alonso i Terme, an economist from the World Bank who was also recently a visiting professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics (UPSE), reported that almost 60 years later, in 2012 it had slipped down the rankings of the region behind all the by-now-developed countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and all the upper middle-income countries, such as China, Thailand, and Malaysia. In addition, Vietnam and Indonesia had overtaken the Philippines in education results (Program for International Student Assessment tests), and were fast approaching it in income levels.

This drop down the rankings is not unique to the East Asian context. I Terme also observed that the Philippines is now also below the income per capita level of almost all Latin American countries, ranking below Guatemala. The World Bank meanwhile noted that the country also exhibits the highest level of income inequality and the lowest rates of poverty reduction in East Asia during the 1980-2010 period. Even more worrying, despite increasing growth in the 2000s poverty increased steadily from 2003 to 2009 and only registered a statistically insignificant decline from 28.6 to 27.9 percent between 2009 and 2012. The country also exhibits the highest tuberculosis prevalence rate in the region, and infant and maternal mortality rates that are significantly higher than the region’s average.

 

For the rest of the article, please click on the link below:

 

http://www.interaksyon.com/business/96758/reversing-downward-trend–ph-needs-new-politics-with-a-new-tax-culture-at-its-core

Another day, another SONA

President Benigno Aquino III delivering his SONA before the joint session of Congress

 

Yesterday was another State of Nation Address (SONA) day in the Philippines.

The SONA is supposed to be a report of the country’s chief executive on his government’s accomplishments over the past year as well as his plans for the future. In the case of the incumbent, President Benigno S. Aquino III, his plans for the remaining two years of his term.

Sadly, the SONA had been transformed into something less than that.

 

Philippine Congress hears President Aquino’s SONA

 

For one, the exercise has become a fashion spectacle, an obscene, ostentatious and insensitive display of wealth, pomp, and bad taste in the midst of hunger and poverty.  You have the people’s representatives and servants trying to outdo each other on the red carpet.

Second, it became a game of up-onemanship, a very swell pissing contest. A president will list his accomplishments and declare he did more than his predecessors.  Or all other previous administrations combined, for that matter. What should he do that?  Does he have to do that?  Under the 1987 Constitution, he is limited to a single term.  He is not eligible to run for re-election. Why behave like a candidate on the hustings?  Why can’t he locate himself in a continuing narrative of nation-building even if one president supposedly accomplished more than others?

Why can’t a president talk and report to the nation as the President of all Filipinos and not as leader of his party?

 

After all, the members of the opposition are fellow Filipinos, fellow citizens, and thus also his constituents.

 

Can a reform of our winner-take-all electoral possibly remedy this parochialism and short-sightedness?  How about electing the president and the vice president as a single package, similar to what they do in the United States, to enhance unity at the very top of the country’s political leadership?

In the post-Marcos period, all chief executives have been put on the defensive sometime during their presidency and it has limited their effectivity.  For some reason or the other, they sustain a significant dimunition of their political capital and suffer the consequences.

 

Even the saint-like Tita Cory saw a decrease of her political stock as her administration was unable to solve a power crisis (the same problem confronting his son at the moment).  Only her clear intent not to succeed herself after 1992 prevented a further decrease in her political capital.

 

President Fidel V. Ramos developed a reputation of being a doer fortified by complete staff work (CSW) by his able lieutenants.  He is the only post-Marcos president with a grand plan for the country (Philippines 2000) as well as the first one to plan to succeed himself. Thus the deliberate use of the year 2000 in the fighting slogan “Philippines 2000” even if his presidential term was supposed to end in June 1998.

 

Ramos’ image first took a hit with the execution of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipino domestic, in Singapore on murder charges.  Most Filipinos believed she was innocent of the crime, that she was wrongly accused and put to death, and that the Philippine government acquiesced to the Singapore government’s judgement and did not do much to help her escape death.

 

Ramos’s bid to succeed himself through PIRMA was foiled by the opposition of erstwhile allies led by Jaime Cardinal Sin and Tita Cory.  What finally did him was the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. 
While President Joseph “Erap” Estrada was elected in 1998 by the single largest number of voters in the country’s political history, his downfall was swift.  As early as 2000, he faced accusations of grand corruption and tried to parry his political opponents by launching a war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Mindanao. Eventually, he was impeached and removed by another people power insurrection in January 2001, after only two years and seven months in power.

As vice president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) assumed the office and served the remainder of President Estrada’s term.  The constitutional restrictions of a single term did not apply to her and she successfully stood for election as president in May 2004.  Following the 2005 revelation of her taped conversations with a top Commission on Elections (COMELEC) official suggesting that the count be tampered in her favor, GMA was put on the so-called “survival mode”.  She was hounded by corruption charges during the remainder of her term, largely because of the unsavory reputation of her husband, the First Gentleman Mike Arroyo.

This time around, President Noynoy Aquino has to deal with a Supreme Court decision that declared his Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) (or budget impounding schemes, as other would have it) unconstitutional. His popularity rating plummeted and he faces impechment complaints–an entirely new situation for him.  He chose to go on an offensive short of calling the Supreme Court as the chief obstruction to his progressive reforms. His defense: he did what he did for the good of the people.  He says he will follow processes and file a motion for reconsideration with the Court. Then he commits the gaffe of accusing the Court of committing the same proscribed cross-border transactions when in fact, the Court did not.

In yesterday’s SONA, the President wisely backed away from his tirades against the Supreme Court.  What he did was to ask his allies in the Lower House to act on a proposed P2.3 trillion 2015 budget which will give him the leeway to spend public money as he saw fit. 

 

He spent the initial part of the SONA listing his accomplishments in a rather haphazard manner and lacking a unifying or thematic framework that could have earned him a very low grade if he was making the presentation in my class.  It was too micro and a big picture is barely discernible. 

 

While the accomplishments are praiseworthy, I would have wanted them to be presented in the context of what needs to be done for the remainder of his term.  A generic “good governance” may suffice at the beginning of his term but is inadequate given the context of his remaining years.

 

I think he made a few assertions regarding the swiftness of government’s response to the super-typhoon Haiyan that can be effectively challenged by the victims themselves and fact checkers.

 

The single most important gap is the parochialism of the speech.  President Aquino focused on domestic matters and did not respond to urgent foreign policy concerns.  For instance, there was no mention of (continuing?) preparations for the impending 2015 full integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
He spends some choice minutes by attacking his critics and so-called “enemies of reform” first before individually naming and praising allies and well-meaning Filipinos who can continue his reform efforts even after he steps down from the Presidency.  He succumbed to the cheap joy of finding comfort among friends instead of embarking on the more difficult path of reaching out and establishing broad unity.

 

While I am pessimistic of the prospects, I do hope he will change his stance and will be the President of all Filipinos.  That is after all what is contained in his oath of office.

 

 

Checks and balances

With this piece, I offer a nuanced understanding of the principle and practice of checks and balance in democratic polities. Checks and balances is based on the notion of co-equality of branches of government (three in the case of presidential systems).

 

President Benigno Aquino III

The notion of co-equality of branches of government is more myth than reality. This is most specially true with the Philippine presidential system where the executive branch is, de facto, clearly the most powerful part of government.

The Philippine president is the head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, chief of the public bureaucracy, and the country’s chief architect of foreign policy as well as its premier diplomat.

While the constitution stipulates that the legislature has the power over the public purse, real power is wielded by the branch which actually releases public money for purposes supposedly specified by the approved national budget. And that branch is the executive headed by the president. Often, the release of public money is done through the president’s alter ego–the budget secretary.

 

Philippine Congress

 

With an edge over the legislature, the executive can leverage the release of money to influence the passage of so-called administration bills, including the budget itself.

In command of the entire public bureaucracy, the executive has a great edge over the legislature in budget preparation. In this sense, legislators can only tinker with the budget bill proposed by the executive. In fact, most if not all legislators are merely interested in the money allocated for their constituencies or their districts as well as what they can pocket.

The judiciary is acknowledged as the weakest, de facto, branch of the government. The Supreme Court is at its apex, a court that is merely reactive rather than pro-active (notwithstanding bouts of judicial activism). The SC cannot do anything, not being a tryer of facts, unless a case is brought to its sala. The judiciary will likewise have to wait for its funds to be released.

 

Supreme Court (photo from Philstar)

 

It is clear that the executive is the most powerful governmental branch.

This runs counter to the thoughts and wishes of the English political philosopher, John Locke, who developed the notion and principles of separation of powers and the corollary checks and balances.

Locke argued that the most powerful governmental branch should be the legislature since the body is most representative of the citizenry. He would not be in favor of unduly empowering the head of state–one person–over all other branches of government as he came from a great struggle of the English people against an absolutist monarch.

Meanwhile, pioneering Filipino political scientist Remigio Agpalo, echoing anthropologists studying Southeast Asia and other pre-modern “big men” societies, argued in the 1960s and early 1970s that the country had a predilection for a so-called “pang-ulo” system akin to an elected monarchy.

Agpalo’s arguments were soon used to buttress the Marcos dictatorship. Among others, they were also used to oppose changes to a parliamentary system for the Philippines.

If we locate the discussion within the Philippine context, one can note that the Philippine president is more powerful than the US president, the latter operating in a federal framework. For instance, the Philippine president is commander in chief of all armed forces. In contrast, state governors are in control of their respective National Guards (Army National Guard and Air National Guard).

The operational challenge, specially in the light of DAP and PDAF controversies, is make co-equality and checks and balance more reality than myth.

On the unconstitutionality of certain Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) acts

 

 

 

Supreme Court on DAP (photo from Philstar)

 

In a near-unanimous decision, the Supreme Court declared yesterday certain acts under the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) as unconstitutional.

 

The court resolution states that DAP acts violate Section 25(5), Article VI of the 1987 Constitution and the doctrine of separation of powers of the executive and legislative branches.  Under the Constitution, while the executive proposes an annual budget, no public monies can be allocated and spent unless covered by a general appropriations act enacted by Congress and passed into law by the President.

 

The high court declared the following acts and practices under the DAP as unconstitutional:

• the withdrawal of the unobligated allotments from implementing agencies and the declaration of the withdrawn unobligated allotments and unreleased appropriations as savings prior to the end of the fiscal year and without complying with the statutory definition of savings contained in the General Appropriations Act;
• the cross border transfers of the savings of the executive to augment the appropriations of other offices outside the executive; and
• the funding of projects, activities, and programs that were not covered by any appropriation in the General Appropriations Act (GAA).

The DAP is considered by many as the “president’s pork barrel”.  Earlier, the Supreme Court also ruled that congressional pork barrel, or the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) as unconstitutional.

 

Senator Jinggoy Estrada aka Sexy (photo from Philstar)

The DAP earlier hit the headlines when Senator Jinggoy Estrada bared that several senators received some P50 million to P100 million supposedly in exchange for voting to convict former Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Estrada had questioned the “persecution” he has received for allegedly diverting his pork barrel, the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), to bogus nongovernment organizations.

 

The President and his fighting slogan

The Palace as well as House speaker Feliciano Belmonte, Jr. sought to pooh-pooh the SC decision on the DAP by saying the President Aquino has since stopped the program.

 

photo from suertres.forumotion.com

Later, he declared that President Aquino could not be impeached over the DAP because he acted in “good faith”.

 Haven’t the good speaker heard that many roads to hell since time immemorial–from Caligula to Hitler to Ferdinand Marcoswere paved with good intentions?

 

House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, Jr. (photo from Inquirer)

Good faith, good intentions are never a valid defense against harmful deeds, against unconstitutional acts.

Such reasoning will not wash; if a series of unconstitutional acts were committed in the past, stopping does not cure them of their unconstitutional nature.

Qua unconstitutional acts, they constitute impeachable acts as culpable violations of the Constitution.

 Impeaching the President will first have to be done in the House of Representatives which should approve by a minimum 1/3 vote the articles of impeachment so they could be transmitted to the Senate.

Since a ruling coalition headed by the President’s Liberal Party controls the House, it remains to be seen if the House will impeach the president.

The onus is on House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, Jr., currently vice chairman of the ruling Liberal Party.  Belmonte is a proven political butterfly having been a long-time member of the ruling Lakas-Kampi-CMD under then President Fidel Ramos in1992 up to 2009 under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo where he last held the position of senior vice president for external affairs.

Can Belmonte afford not to do anything as the DAP has already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court?

Would he want to be seen as somebody condoning the wrong-doings of the President?  Wouldn’t his instincts tell him to save himself first instead of going down with the President?

The President faces a broad coalition of political enemies who would be interested in impeaching him.  This coalition includes Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, the Estradas, the Revillas, and the camp of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.  As it is, the Sandiganbayan simultaneously suspended Arroyo as representative of Pampanga.  Rumor is likewise rife that Erap Estrada will be unseated as mayor of Manila due to residence issues.

At the sub-national level, it includes the Jalosjos political clan of  Zamboanga which was practically shut out in the 2013 elections.

Vice President Jojo Binay need not do anything overt. If the president is impeached, he will succeed Aquino as president.

If ever, this will be the second time that a sitting president will be impeached.

 As always, I think we will make history.