Saturday, May 22, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Why Fighting Corruption is not Enough
Afterthoughts
By Walden Bello
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 05:02:00 03/22/2010
After nine years of witnessing increasing poverty among the masses and spiraling corruption in high places, it is understandable that Filipinos see a strong correlation between corruption and poverty. And the judgment of many is probably correct that the candidates that are free of the taint of corruption stand the best chance of turning this country around. Moral leadership may not be a sufficient condition for successful leadership but it certainly has become a necessary condition in a country that has been so deprived of exemplary public figures like the Philippines.
Corruption, however, has become the explanation for all our ills, and this brings with it the danger that, after the elections, campaign rhetoric might substitute for hard analysis on the causes of poverty, leading to wrong, ineffectual prescriptions for dealing with the country’s number one problem.
Let me be more explicit: Corruption must be condemned and corrupt officials must be prosecuted because being a violation of public trust, corruption undermines faith in government and leads to an erosion of the moral bonds among citizens that serve as the foundation of good governance. Corruption, however, is unlikely to be the main cause of poverty. Wrongheaded policies are, and clean-cut technocrats have been responsible for more poverty than corrupt politicians.
The complex of policies that have pushed the Philippines into the economic quagmire over the last 30 years might be summed up in that formidable term: structural adjustment. Also known as neoliberal restructuring, it involved prioritization of debt repayment; conservative macroeconomic management that involving huge cutbacks in government spending; trade and financial liberalization; privatization and deregulation; and export-oriented production. Structural adjustment came to the Philippines courtesy of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, but it was internalized and disseminated as doctrine by local technocrats and economists as doctrine.
Prioritizing Debt Repayment
Corazon Aquino was personally honest and her contribution to the reestablishment of democracy was indispensable, but her submitting to the International Monetary Fund's demand to prioritize debt repayment over development brought about a decade of stagnation and continuing poverty. Interest payments as a percentage of total government expenditures went from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994. Capital expenditures, on the other hand, plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. Since government is the biggest investor in the Philippines—indeed in any economy—the radical stripping away of capital expenditures goes a long way toward explaining the stagnant one percent average yearly growth in gross domestic product in the 1980’s and the 2.3 per cent rate in the first half of the 1990’s.
In contrast, our Southeast Asian neighbors ignored the IMF’s prescriptions. They limited debt servicing while ramping up government capital expenditures in support of growth. Not surprisingly, they grew by 6 to 10 percent from 1985 to 1995, attracting massive Japanese investment while the Philippines barely grew and gained the reputation of a depressed market that repelled investors.
Trade and Financial Liberalization
When Fidel Ramos came to power in 1992, the main agenda of his technocrats was to bring down all tariffs to 0 to 5 percent and bring the Philippines into the World Trade Organization and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), moves that were intended to make trade liberalization irreversible. A pick-up in the growth rate in the early years of Ramos sparked hope, but the green shoots were more apparent than real, and they were, at any rate, crushed as a result of another neoliberal policy: financial liberalization. The elimination of foreign exchange controls and restrictions of speculative investment attracted billions of dollars in the period 1993-1997. But this also meant that when panic hit the ranks of foreign investors in Asia in the summer of 1997, the same lack of capital controls facilitated the stampede of billions of dollars from the country in a few short weeks in mid-1997. This pushed the economy into recession and stagnation in the next few years.
The Estrada administration did not reverse course, and under the presidency of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, neoliberal policies continued to reign. New liberalization initiatives in the next few years were initiated on the trade front, with the government negotiating free trade agreements with Japan and China. These pacts were entered into despite clear evidence that trade liberalization was destroying the two pillars of the economy, industry and agriculture.
Radical unilateral trade liberalization severely destabilized our manufacturing sector, with textile and garments firms, for instance, being drastically reduced from 200 in 1970 to 10 in recent years. As one of Arroyo’s finance secretaries admitted, “there’s an uneven implementation of trade liberalization, which was to our disadvantage.” While he speculated that consumers might have benefited from the tariff liberalization, he acknowledged that “it has killed so many local industries.”
As for agriculture, the liberalization of our agricultural trade after we joined the World Trade Organization in 1995 transformed the Philippines from a net food exporting country and consolidated it into a net food importing country after the mid-1990’s. The year 2010 is the year that the China ASEAN Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiated by the Arroyo administration goes into effect, and the prospect of cheap Chinese produce flooding our markets has made our vegetable farmers fatalistic about their survival.
Depressive Fiscal Policy
What likewise became clear during the long Arroyo reign were the stifling effects of the debt repayment-oriented macroeconomic management policy that came with structural adjustment. With 20-25 percent of the national budget reserved for debt service payments owing to the draconian Automatic Appropriations Law, government finances were in a state of permanent and widening deficit, which the administration tried to solve by contracting more loans. Indeed, the Arroyo administration contracted more loans than the previous three administrations combined.
When the deficit reached gargantuan proportions, the government refused to take the necessary steps to contain the key factor acting as the main drain on expenditures; that is, it refused to declare a debt moratorium or at least renegotiate the terms of debt repayment to make them less punitive. At the same time, the administration did not have the political will to force the rich to take the brunt of bridging the deficit by increasing taxes on their income and improving their collection. Under pressure from the IMF, the government levied this burden on the poor and the middle class via the adoption of the expanded value added tax (EVAT) of 12 percent on purchases. The tax was passed on to poor and middle class consumers by commercial establishments, forcing them to cut back on consumption, which then boomeranged back on small merchants and entrepreneurs in the form of reduced profits, forcing many out of business.
Facing the Policy Challenge
The straitjacket of conservative macroeconomic management, trade and financial liberalization, and a subservient debt policy kept the economy from expanding significantly, resulting in the percentage of the population living in poverty, according to the World Bank, increasing from 30 to 33 percent between 2003 and 2006. By 2006, there were more poor people in the Philippines than at any other time in the country’s history.
The country’s plight under the lash of wrong policies over the last four administrations becomes even clearer in a comparative perspective. According to the United Nations Development Program Human Development Report, the Philippines registered the second lowest average yearly growth rate, 1.6 percent, in Southeast Asia in the period 1990 to 2005 —lower than that of Vietnam (5.9 percent), Cambodia (5.5 percent), and Burma (6.6 percent). The only country registering average growth below that of the Philippines was Brunei, which, being an oil-rich high-income country, could afford not to grow.
So yes, we must wage an unrelenting campaign against corruption because it destroys faith in government and weakens the moral fiber of the country. And yes, let us by all means punish corrupt officials and elect morally unquestionable people to power. But let us not mistake corruption as the principal cause of poverty and believe that anti-corruption crusades provide the main response to the country’s economic ills. The main source of our lack of economic dynamics is a wrong policy paradigm that we have allowed ourselves to be straitjacketed into.
It is disturbing that the policy errors that have led to our present state are hardly mentioned in the presidential debates. It is unfortunate that we are not taking advantage of the current international economic crisis that has dragged down our local economy to debate the wisdom of the policies of globalization and liberalization that have brought us to this impasse. Yes, the issues of corruption, management experience, and bureaucratic reform that dominate these debates are vital, but unless the winning team has the courage to reverse 30 years of failed neoliberal economic policies, the country will remain in the economic doldrums, unable to take off, with poverty possibly rising to the point of no return.
*The columnist is representative of the party-list Akbayan in the House of Representatives. He can be contacted at waldenbello@yahoo.com
By Walden Bello
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 05:02:00 03/22/2010
After nine years of witnessing increasing poverty among the masses and spiraling corruption in high places, it is understandable that Filipinos see a strong correlation between corruption and poverty. And the judgment of many is probably correct that the candidates that are free of the taint of corruption stand the best chance of turning this country around. Moral leadership may not be a sufficient condition for successful leadership but it certainly has become a necessary condition in a country that has been so deprived of exemplary public figures like the Philippines.
Corruption, however, has become the explanation for all our ills, and this brings with it the danger that, after the elections, campaign rhetoric might substitute for hard analysis on the causes of poverty, leading to wrong, ineffectual prescriptions for dealing with the country’s number one problem.
Let me be more explicit: Corruption must be condemned and corrupt officials must be prosecuted because being a violation of public trust, corruption undermines faith in government and leads to an erosion of the moral bonds among citizens that serve as the foundation of good governance. Corruption, however, is unlikely to be the main cause of poverty. Wrongheaded policies are, and clean-cut technocrats have been responsible for more poverty than corrupt politicians.
The complex of policies that have pushed the Philippines into the economic quagmire over the last 30 years might be summed up in that formidable term: structural adjustment. Also known as neoliberal restructuring, it involved prioritization of debt repayment; conservative macroeconomic management that involving huge cutbacks in government spending; trade and financial liberalization; privatization and deregulation; and export-oriented production. Structural adjustment came to the Philippines courtesy of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, but it was internalized and disseminated as doctrine by local technocrats and economists as doctrine.
Prioritizing Debt Repayment
Corazon Aquino was personally honest and her contribution to the reestablishment of democracy was indispensable, but her submitting to the International Monetary Fund's demand to prioritize debt repayment over development brought about a decade of stagnation and continuing poverty. Interest payments as a percentage of total government expenditures went from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994. Capital expenditures, on the other hand, plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. Since government is the biggest investor in the Philippines—indeed in any economy—the radical stripping away of capital expenditures goes a long way toward explaining the stagnant one percent average yearly growth in gross domestic product in the 1980’s and the 2.3 per cent rate in the first half of the 1990’s.
In contrast, our Southeast Asian neighbors ignored the IMF’s prescriptions. They limited debt servicing while ramping up government capital expenditures in support of growth. Not surprisingly, they grew by 6 to 10 percent from 1985 to 1995, attracting massive Japanese investment while the Philippines barely grew and gained the reputation of a depressed market that repelled investors.
Trade and Financial Liberalization
When Fidel Ramos came to power in 1992, the main agenda of his technocrats was to bring down all tariffs to 0 to 5 percent and bring the Philippines into the World Trade Organization and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), moves that were intended to make trade liberalization irreversible. A pick-up in the growth rate in the early years of Ramos sparked hope, but the green shoots were more apparent than real, and they were, at any rate, crushed as a result of another neoliberal policy: financial liberalization. The elimination of foreign exchange controls and restrictions of speculative investment attracted billions of dollars in the period 1993-1997. But this also meant that when panic hit the ranks of foreign investors in Asia in the summer of 1997, the same lack of capital controls facilitated the stampede of billions of dollars from the country in a few short weeks in mid-1997. This pushed the economy into recession and stagnation in the next few years.
The Estrada administration did not reverse course, and under the presidency of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, neoliberal policies continued to reign. New liberalization initiatives in the next few years were initiated on the trade front, with the government negotiating free trade agreements with Japan and China. These pacts were entered into despite clear evidence that trade liberalization was destroying the two pillars of the economy, industry and agriculture.
Radical unilateral trade liberalization severely destabilized our manufacturing sector, with textile and garments firms, for instance, being drastically reduced from 200 in 1970 to 10 in recent years. As one of Arroyo’s finance secretaries admitted, “there’s an uneven implementation of trade liberalization, which was to our disadvantage.” While he speculated that consumers might have benefited from the tariff liberalization, he acknowledged that “it has killed so many local industries.”
As for agriculture, the liberalization of our agricultural trade after we joined the World Trade Organization in 1995 transformed the Philippines from a net food exporting country and consolidated it into a net food importing country after the mid-1990’s. The year 2010 is the year that the China ASEAN Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiated by the Arroyo administration goes into effect, and the prospect of cheap Chinese produce flooding our markets has made our vegetable farmers fatalistic about their survival.
Depressive Fiscal Policy
What likewise became clear during the long Arroyo reign were the stifling effects of the debt repayment-oriented macroeconomic management policy that came with structural adjustment. With 20-25 percent of the national budget reserved for debt service payments owing to the draconian Automatic Appropriations Law, government finances were in a state of permanent and widening deficit, which the administration tried to solve by contracting more loans. Indeed, the Arroyo administration contracted more loans than the previous three administrations combined.
When the deficit reached gargantuan proportions, the government refused to take the necessary steps to contain the key factor acting as the main drain on expenditures; that is, it refused to declare a debt moratorium or at least renegotiate the terms of debt repayment to make them less punitive. At the same time, the administration did not have the political will to force the rich to take the brunt of bridging the deficit by increasing taxes on their income and improving their collection. Under pressure from the IMF, the government levied this burden on the poor and the middle class via the adoption of the expanded value added tax (EVAT) of 12 percent on purchases. The tax was passed on to poor and middle class consumers by commercial establishments, forcing them to cut back on consumption, which then boomeranged back on small merchants and entrepreneurs in the form of reduced profits, forcing many out of business.
Facing the Policy Challenge
The straitjacket of conservative macroeconomic management, trade and financial liberalization, and a subservient debt policy kept the economy from expanding significantly, resulting in the percentage of the population living in poverty, according to the World Bank, increasing from 30 to 33 percent between 2003 and 2006. By 2006, there were more poor people in the Philippines than at any other time in the country’s history.
The country’s plight under the lash of wrong policies over the last four administrations becomes even clearer in a comparative perspective. According to the United Nations Development Program Human Development Report, the Philippines registered the second lowest average yearly growth rate, 1.6 percent, in Southeast Asia in the period 1990 to 2005 —lower than that of Vietnam (5.9 percent), Cambodia (5.5 percent), and Burma (6.6 percent). The only country registering average growth below that of the Philippines was Brunei, which, being an oil-rich high-income country, could afford not to grow.
So yes, we must wage an unrelenting campaign against corruption because it destroys faith in government and weakens the moral fiber of the country. And yes, let us by all means punish corrupt officials and elect morally unquestionable people to power. But let us not mistake corruption as the principal cause of poverty and believe that anti-corruption crusades provide the main response to the country’s economic ills. The main source of our lack of economic dynamics is a wrong policy paradigm that we have allowed ourselves to be straitjacketed into.
It is disturbing that the policy errors that have led to our present state are hardly mentioned in the presidential debates. It is unfortunate that we are not taking advantage of the current international economic crisis that has dragged down our local economy to debate the wisdom of the policies of globalization and liberalization that have brought us to this impasse. Yes, the issues of corruption, management experience, and bureaucratic reform that dominate these debates are vital, but unless the winning team has the courage to reverse 30 years of failed neoliberal economic policies, the country will remain in the economic doldrums, unable to take off, with poverty possibly rising to the point of no return.
*The columnist is representative of the party-list Akbayan in the House of Representatives. He can be contacted at waldenbello@yahoo.com
Philippine Democracy: Alive, but is it well?
Afterthoughts
By Walden Bello
INQUIRER.net http://www.waldenbello.org/
First Posted 03:47:00 05/11/2010
The 2010 campaign has drawn to a close, and it’s time to distill my experiences after registering hundreds of miles by land, sea, and air crisscrossing the country as a party-list candidate.
On the purely physical side, my shaking thousands of hands—I estimated some 3,500 in one two-hour period in the public market in Angeles, Pampanga—has apparently given my right arm a life of its own, like that of Dr. Strangelove or one of Jim Carrey’s characters. It twitches uncontrollably when not in action, as if waiting impatiently to be fed.
There is no doubt in my mind that Philippine democracy is alive. Everywhere I went, there was intense interest in the candidates, particularly the presidential candidates, with many pausing from their labors to inquire which presidential nominee I favored and what program my party Akbayan had to offer. Everywhere the courtship of the voter was intense. Gone are the days when the “command vote” for a candidate could be considered sufficient to deliver victory. Except in the remotest places, the “market vote” has increased in both size and decisiveness. The market vote is no statistical abstraction for candidates: In almost every municipality and city, it has become de rigueur for candidates to present and sell themselves in the public market, trying to shake every hand within reach, even the wet hands of fish and meat vendors embarrassed to extend them.
Most of the time, the cynics say, the people are at the mercy of the politicians. Maybe, but for at least three months every three years, the politicians are at the mercy of the voters.
Philippine democracy is alive, but is it well?
It is difficult to answer in the affirmative. The reason for this goes beyond the fact that come election day, scores will have been gunned down and huge sums will have been passed out to buy votes.
What worries me, more than the violence and the vote-buying, of which we will always have a good dosage of, is the skyrocketing cost of elections. P9 billion is now said to be a conservative estimate for a presidential run, and P1.1 billion for somebody running for the Senate is said to be a low figure. For a candidate for Congress, P450 million is definitely on the low side. Most of these sums are spent on media outreach, particularly television. One is tempted to say the media is king. It might be more appropriate to say that the market is king, since it is the demand for advertising space, in a system where there are few legal constraints on electoral spending on media exposure, that raises its price many times over in the course of the 12-week election period.
The need to raise enormous sums to have some impact on an expanding electorate has, of course, naturally strengthened the influence of the rich and those organizations favored by the rich over the electoral system. In this respect, Philippine electoral democracy is a spitting image of its parent, American democracy. In both, the influence of moneyed elites in shaping electoral outcomes is enormous. Candidates fit themselves to the interests of the rich and powerful when they do not themselves come from the ranks of the rich and powerful. In a very real sense, in both countries, elections function not so much as a means through which people choose their leaders but a mechanism whereby rival factions of the elite compete for possession of the state apparatus.
The Political Class on a Treadmill
There is a strong correlation between wealth and political power, but it is not perfect. There is a distinct political class, and in this campaign I truly learned the meaning of the saying that politics is a profession. While it usually does have other sources of wealth, like land, this class is extraordinarily dependent expanding its wealth, power, and status on the control and maintenance of political office.
For competing factions of this class, the positions of mayor, governor, and district congressman are critical offices to gain, and once one reaches the limit of three consecutive terms for each office, one feels compelled to run for another position or return to a previously held position. One cannot just vacate a position for which one can no longer run but ensure that a relative, preferably one’s spouse or offspring, fills it. Politics is truly a family affair in the worst sense of the term. The consequences of losing the hold of one’s family on a political office can be the beginning of decline, and eventually marginalization. The prospect of this loss of power, fortune, and prestige is what motivates families not to be satisfied with just having one position but to monopolize all the key positions—mayor, district congressman, party-list congressman, and governor. The best defense is offense, and family monopoly is best since political alliances based on short-term interests tend also to be short-term.
With almost no exception, this dynamics of dynastic succession repeated itself in almost every city and province I campaigned in. We are accustomed to condemning politicians seeking to keep everything in the family, but, in a sense, they are just as much trapped in a system as the rest of us in a system that encourages destructive dynastic politics.
Non-existent: the Policy Debate
The Villar camp made poverty the issue. But it was the Noynoy-Mar camp that hit the right note with the voters by claiming that corruption caused poverty. After nine years of unbridled corruption in Malacanang and deepening poverty among the masses, the popularity of the kung walang kurap, walang mahirap slogan was understandable.
The only problem is that while indeed corruption contributes to poverty, it is not the main cause of poverty, and the hegemony of the corruption discourse curing the campaign meant the avoidance of any substantive discussion of the key issues behind poverty and economic stagnation--among them, uncontrolled population growth, a debt service policy that has radically reduced funds for capital expenditures, trade liberalization that has devastated industry and agriculture, and the completion of the land reform program. Sure, some policy issues were discussed during the presidential debates, but these were often those, like education policy, that elicited the usual motherhood statements. And when a controversial policy issue could not be avoided, like the issue of reproductive health, most candidates threw principled but unpopular positions out the window.
One can, of course, understand the necessities of campaign rhetoric, but the danger is that campaign rhetoric might substitute for policy initiatives when the new administration comes to power. This would be a disaster since poverty will not be eliminated or reduced by moral crusades against corruption but by reversal of the anti-growth, anti-equity policies such as the debt service policy and trade liberalization.
Religious Diktat Subverts Democracy
During one of the meetings I had with community leaders, I asked a member of the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) if the rank and file had influence on the selection of candidates to support. His response was curt: that was the prerogative of the Church leaders.
This was one of the incidents that revealed to me just how fragile the principle of the separation of church and state is in our democracy. All the presidential candidates fawned on the INC, with its five million votes and paid several visits to Pastor Quiboloy in Davao, who is said to command three million votes. Whoever Church patriarch Eduardo Manalo tells his sect to vote for is law, and the same is said to be true of Quiboloy. The danger to democracy becomes very apparent when elections are closely contested, which is the case for the current race for vice president. The dictatorial bloc voting of the INC and Quiboloy could end up determining who wins the vice presidency, thus subverting electoral democracy, which rests on the principle of choice of the individual sovereign citizen.
As in every dictatorship, authoritarian control spawns collateral abuses. For instance, in one Bulacan municipality, residents allege that local Iglesia leaders sold the promise of bloc votes to local candidates, something that is said to be prohibited by the Church leadership but which occurs nevertheless since the penalties are relatively light.
But it is not only the INC and Quiboloy’s Kingdom Nation that pose a threat to the principle of the separation of Church and State. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines encouraged voters to vote against proponents of the Reproductive Health Bill, wrongly and maliciously accusing them of promoting abortion. The question is not so much the people, which surveys reveal to be in favor of artificial contraceptives like condoms for fertility control, but the politicians, who pander to the Church hierarchy, thinking they still exert strong influence over the opinions of the laity. This is a big myth, and the sooner the politicians see the hollow threat behind the bishops’ pronouncements on matters of individual choice, the better for all of us. With its veto over reproductive rights, the Catholic hierarchy has now become one of the biggest blocks to women’s health, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection.
The Party-List Fiasco
When I mentioned during our innumerable sorties in public markets that I was running for the House of Representatives under the party-list system, I would often be met with a quizzical look. So I can confirm first hand what the surveys have consistently shown: that up to 75 per cent of voters are not aware of the party-list system or how it works.
This dismal state of affairs is not surprising since so few resources have been spent educating the voters about the party-list system that the chairman of the Comelec, Jose Melo, himself has admitted that he did not understand it.
Yet the Comelec is not the only institution responsible.
The framers of the 1987 Constitution appeared to have two related ideas when coming up with the party-list system. One was to give an avenue for the articulation of the voices of marginalized groups that could not prosper under the money-intensive elections for district congressman. The other was to encourage the formation of such parties for the politically marginalized on a nationwide basis. So for 20 per cent of the seats in the House, elections were to be held not on the basis of the first-past-the-post, plurality- winner-take-all system, but on proportional representation.
The idea was excellent, except that a clear definition of a marginalized group was never really made by the framers of the Constitution or by the party-list law. Many party-list groups that formed indeed represented marginalized groups, but the political class saw in the ambiguity of the concept of marginalized group a new avenue to get to the House. From the very beginning, the number of participating parties claiming to represent all sorts of “marginalized groups” was large: 123 in the 1998 elections and 162 in 2001. This election, the size of the ballot—25 inches—was determined by the need to accommodate 187 competing groups.
Malacanang also saw the system as a way of ensuring its control of the House, so in the last few years, it has informally sponsored and funded all sorts of parties claiming to represent marginalized groups, from balut vendors, tricycle drivers, and security guards, to ethnic minorities, and regional ethnic groups. It has been conservatively estimated that at least 45 of this year’s participating groups are “pakawala” or agents of Malacanang, their purpose being to ensure that the president, who is running for the second district of Pampanga, becomes the Speaker of the 15th Congress.
Perhaps the nadir of the party list system was reached two days before the May 10 elections when the Comelec ruled that presidential son Mikey Arroyo could run as a representative of security guards under the party Ang Galing Pinoy even with overwhelming evidence that he had no historic links to the sector whatsoever.
In Sum…
These considerations could lead to the conclusion that the balance of trends in Philippine democracy is negative. However, if one factors in the fact that the Automated Election System (AES) has worked, despite many glitches, the balance, in my view, is positive. Perfected in elections to come, the AES will hopefully reduce poll irregularities significantly.
Yet the disturbing trends we have pointed out cast their long shadow on our democracy. If unchecked, they will definitely destabilize further an already gravely flawed system of governance.
*Inq7 columnist Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives representing the party-list Akbayan.
By Walden Bello
INQUIRER.net http://www.waldenbello.org/
First Posted 03:47:00 05/11/2010
The 2010 campaign has drawn to a close, and it’s time to distill my experiences after registering hundreds of miles by land, sea, and air crisscrossing the country as a party-list candidate.
On the purely physical side, my shaking thousands of hands—I estimated some 3,500 in one two-hour period in the public market in Angeles, Pampanga—has apparently given my right arm a life of its own, like that of Dr. Strangelove or one of Jim Carrey’s characters. It twitches uncontrollably when not in action, as if waiting impatiently to be fed.
There is no doubt in my mind that Philippine democracy is alive. Everywhere I went, there was intense interest in the candidates, particularly the presidential candidates, with many pausing from their labors to inquire which presidential nominee I favored and what program my party Akbayan had to offer. Everywhere the courtship of the voter was intense. Gone are the days when the “command vote” for a candidate could be considered sufficient to deliver victory. Except in the remotest places, the “market vote” has increased in both size and decisiveness. The market vote is no statistical abstraction for candidates: In almost every municipality and city, it has become de rigueur for candidates to present and sell themselves in the public market, trying to shake every hand within reach, even the wet hands of fish and meat vendors embarrassed to extend them.
Most of the time, the cynics say, the people are at the mercy of the politicians. Maybe, but for at least three months every three years, the politicians are at the mercy of the voters.
Philippine democracy is alive, but is it well?
It is difficult to answer in the affirmative. The reason for this goes beyond the fact that come election day, scores will have been gunned down and huge sums will have been passed out to buy votes.
What worries me, more than the violence and the vote-buying, of which we will always have a good dosage of, is the skyrocketing cost of elections. P9 billion is now said to be a conservative estimate for a presidential run, and P1.1 billion for somebody running for the Senate is said to be a low figure. For a candidate for Congress, P450 million is definitely on the low side. Most of these sums are spent on media outreach, particularly television. One is tempted to say the media is king. It might be more appropriate to say that the market is king, since it is the demand for advertising space, in a system where there are few legal constraints on electoral spending on media exposure, that raises its price many times over in the course of the 12-week election period.
The need to raise enormous sums to have some impact on an expanding electorate has, of course, naturally strengthened the influence of the rich and those organizations favored by the rich over the electoral system. In this respect, Philippine electoral democracy is a spitting image of its parent, American democracy. In both, the influence of moneyed elites in shaping electoral outcomes is enormous. Candidates fit themselves to the interests of the rich and powerful when they do not themselves come from the ranks of the rich and powerful. In a very real sense, in both countries, elections function not so much as a means through which people choose their leaders but a mechanism whereby rival factions of the elite compete for possession of the state apparatus.
The Political Class on a Treadmill
There is a strong correlation between wealth and political power, but it is not perfect. There is a distinct political class, and in this campaign I truly learned the meaning of the saying that politics is a profession. While it usually does have other sources of wealth, like land, this class is extraordinarily dependent expanding its wealth, power, and status on the control and maintenance of political office.
For competing factions of this class, the positions of mayor, governor, and district congressman are critical offices to gain, and once one reaches the limit of three consecutive terms for each office, one feels compelled to run for another position or return to a previously held position. One cannot just vacate a position for which one can no longer run but ensure that a relative, preferably one’s spouse or offspring, fills it. Politics is truly a family affair in the worst sense of the term. The consequences of losing the hold of one’s family on a political office can be the beginning of decline, and eventually marginalization. The prospect of this loss of power, fortune, and prestige is what motivates families not to be satisfied with just having one position but to monopolize all the key positions—mayor, district congressman, party-list congressman, and governor. The best defense is offense, and family monopoly is best since political alliances based on short-term interests tend also to be short-term.
With almost no exception, this dynamics of dynastic succession repeated itself in almost every city and province I campaigned in. We are accustomed to condemning politicians seeking to keep everything in the family, but, in a sense, they are just as much trapped in a system as the rest of us in a system that encourages destructive dynastic politics.
Non-existent: the Policy Debate
The Villar camp made poverty the issue. But it was the Noynoy-Mar camp that hit the right note with the voters by claiming that corruption caused poverty. After nine years of unbridled corruption in Malacanang and deepening poverty among the masses, the popularity of the kung walang kurap, walang mahirap slogan was understandable.
The only problem is that while indeed corruption contributes to poverty, it is not the main cause of poverty, and the hegemony of the corruption discourse curing the campaign meant the avoidance of any substantive discussion of the key issues behind poverty and economic stagnation--among them, uncontrolled population growth, a debt service policy that has radically reduced funds for capital expenditures, trade liberalization that has devastated industry and agriculture, and the completion of the land reform program. Sure, some policy issues were discussed during the presidential debates, but these were often those, like education policy, that elicited the usual motherhood statements. And when a controversial policy issue could not be avoided, like the issue of reproductive health, most candidates threw principled but unpopular positions out the window.
One can, of course, understand the necessities of campaign rhetoric, but the danger is that campaign rhetoric might substitute for policy initiatives when the new administration comes to power. This would be a disaster since poverty will not be eliminated or reduced by moral crusades against corruption but by reversal of the anti-growth, anti-equity policies such as the debt service policy and trade liberalization.
Religious Diktat Subverts Democracy
During one of the meetings I had with community leaders, I asked a member of the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) if the rank and file had influence on the selection of candidates to support. His response was curt: that was the prerogative of the Church leaders.
This was one of the incidents that revealed to me just how fragile the principle of the separation of church and state is in our democracy. All the presidential candidates fawned on the INC, with its five million votes and paid several visits to Pastor Quiboloy in Davao, who is said to command three million votes. Whoever Church patriarch Eduardo Manalo tells his sect to vote for is law, and the same is said to be true of Quiboloy. The danger to democracy becomes very apparent when elections are closely contested, which is the case for the current race for vice president. The dictatorial bloc voting of the INC and Quiboloy could end up determining who wins the vice presidency, thus subverting electoral democracy, which rests on the principle of choice of the individual sovereign citizen.
As in every dictatorship, authoritarian control spawns collateral abuses. For instance, in one Bulacan municipality, residents allege that local Iglesia leaders sold the promise of bloc votes to local candidates, something that is said to be prohibited by the Church leadership but which occurs nevertheless since the penalties are relatively light.
But it is not only the INC and Quiboloy’s Kingdom Nation that pose a threat to the principle of the separation of Church and State. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines encouraged voters to vote against proponents of the Reproductive Health Bill, wrongly and maliciously accusing them of promoting abortion. The question is not so much the people, which surveys reveal to be in favor of artificial contraceptives like condoms for fertility control, but the politicians, who pander to the Church hierarchy, thinking they still exert strong influence over the opinions of the laity. This is a big myth, and the sooner the politicians see the hollow threat behind the bishops’ pronouncements on matters of individual choice, the better for all of us. With its veto over reproductive rights, the Catholic hierarchy has now become one of the biggest blocks to women’s health, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection.
The Party-List Fiasco
When I mentioned during our innumerable sorties in public markets that I was running for the House of Representatives under the party-list system, I would often be met with a quizzical look. So I can confirm first hand what the surveys have consistently shown: that up to 75 per cent of voters are not aware of the party-list system or how it works.
This dismal state of affairs is not surprising since so few resources have been spent educating the voters about the party-list system that the chairman of the Comelec, Jose Melo, himself has admitted that he did not understand it.
Yet the Comelec is not the only institution responsible.
The framers of the 1987 Constitution appeared to have two related ideas when coming up with the party-list system. One was to give an avenue for the articulation of the voices of marginalized groups that could not prosper under the money-intensive elections for district congressman. The other was to encourage the formation of such parties for the politically marginalized on a nationwide basis. So for 20 per cent of the seats in the House, elections were to be held not on the basis of the first-past-the-post, plurality- winner-take-all system, but on proportional representation.
The idea was excellent, except that a clear definition of a marginalized group was never really made by the framers of the Constitution or by the party-list law. Many party-list groups that formed indeed represented marginalized groups, but the political class saw in the ambiguity of the concept of marginalized group a new avenue to get to the House. From the very beginning, the number of participating parties claiming to represent all sorts of “marginalized groups” was large: 123 in the 1998 elections and 162 in 2001. This election, the size of the ballot—25 inches—was determined by the need to accommodate 187 competing groups.
Malacanang also saw the system as a way of ensuring its control of the House, so in the last few years, it has informally sponsored and funded all sorts of parties claiming to represent marginalized groups, from balut vendors, tricycle drivers, and security guards, to ethnic minorities, and regional ethnic groups. It has been conservatively estimated that at least 45 of this year’s participating groups are “pakawala” or agents of Malacanang, their purpose being to ensure that the president, who is running for the second district of Pampanga, becomes the Speaker of the 15th Congress.
Perhaps the nadir of the party list system was reached two days before the May 10 elections when the Comelec ruled that presidential son Mikey Arroyo could run as a representative of security guards under the party Ang Galing Pinoy even with overwhelming evidence that he had no historic links to the sector whatsoever.
In Sum…
These considerations could lead to the conclusion that the balance of trends in Philippine democracy is negative. However, if one factors in the fact that the Automated Election System (AES) has worked, despite many glitches, the balance, in my view, is positive. Perfected in elections to come, the AES will hopefully reduce poll irregularities significantly.
Yet the disturbing trends we have pointed out cast their long shadow on our democracy. If unchecked, they will definitely destabilize further an already gravely flawed system of governance.
*Inq7 columnist Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives representing the party-list Akbayan.
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