To compensate, all sorts of allowances have to be created which supplements the take home pay, but does not address the need to offer salaries commensurate with what’s expected of an official.In this blog, a reader kindly calculated, more precisely, prewar official salaries to an extent that exceeded my own attempt at a computation of the value of the President’s salary over time.Of course if you were to add up the various allowances congressmen are entitled to, their salaries are fairly generous but the problem is that it involves quite a bit of accounting sleight-of-hand, which corrodes accountability….  In order to alleviate the situation of the members of Congress who were getting no more than the six hundred pesos per month provided for in the Constitution, President Osmena, in the use of his emergency powers, authorized the Auditor-General’s Office to make advances to the members of Congress to enable them to meet the cost of living in Manila during the sessions….  Had the lawmakers at that time less respect for the Constitution, and had they then discovered the magic formula of the allowances, they could have solved their problem by making payments to themselves, not in the relatively small amount of P20,000 but ten times as much, as succeeding legislators were to get -and not only once, but every year.Many of the members of Congress were defeated in the election that followed on this issue of back pay, but later members of Congress were to be reelected again and again after paying themselves much more in the form of allowances than the legislators of 1945 paid themselves in the form of back pay.

Read Executive Order 310, s.  2004, and the limits on public use of the Presidential Seal.

Back in 1997-1998, President Ramos ordered the presidential palace, rather run down and ramshackle after a decade of being uninhabited, repaired so that, as he put it, his successor would have a place fit to live in. At the time, it seemed Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo would be a contender for the presidency, and I recall telling some friends (who were shocked) that if she won, you could be sure she would never step down (at the time, I hadn’t started writing for her yet)….  The daughter had already done better than the father (DM had failed in his senate bid in the 50s), and she could look forward to not only posthumously vindicating her father by becoming president (a dream that had eluded Gerry Roxas and Doy Laurel), but also, to relishing the role of being the top dog after decades of having her family treated like dogs, relatively speaking….  This was a thing of personal importance to me, because in my article on Corazon Aquino as the Person of the Century, I’d argued that what our country has had all too little of, are leaders who willingly, and serenely, relinquish power (which is why I continue to admire Cory Aquino).Here’s s very interesting observation in The Blog:This entire drama is being played out between the ruling classes, and there doesn’t appear to be any space presenting itself for a legitimate democratic revolution – who would lead one anyway, with the Left bitterly divided between the powerful Communists and the less radical but more responsible center leftists?There is one interesting possibility that should be noted.

Estrada is now to the opposition what FVR is to the ruling coalition -a decoration, a receding symbol of past mistakes but not a key to a better future.Relevant readings, from the West and the East: The Rockefellers and the Angry Commoners discusses how the millionaires of America’s Gilded Age staved off class warfare; King Duck Goes to His Taiwanese Reward shows how Taiwan’s Kuomintang is weaning itself away from its mafia connections.

“The Third Philippine Republic, 1946-1972″ (Lewis E.

See How Quezon handled government crooks, August 19, 1961, Crooked judges get the boot, May 27, 1939 and Quezon and the judiciary, 1959.

After Edsa Dos, I expressed the opinion, mainly in private, that having stepped down, and having avoided bloodshed, Joseph Estrada should be left alone in Greenhills and left to wallow in his riches….  The reformist instincts of the President were swiftly abandoned at that point, when it proved her Civil Society allies couldn’t protect her; instead, the military and the operators shielded her and the inevitable slide to 2003 (her decision to run again), 2004 (the manner in which the campaign was conducted), 2005 (the divorce between the President and what remained of the reformists within her government) and 2006 began.After having gone against her instincts and ordering the arrest of Estrada, the President always proved ambiguous about the trial and a conviction: from day one, she’d preferred exile as a solution….  Meanwhile, she expressed no dissatisfaction with the trial being dragged out, since a quick resolution of the case wouldn’t do her any good (in the absence of a willingness, on Estrada’s part, to recognize her legitimacy by accepting a pardon from her), and while a drawn-out trial also served Estrada’s purposes (either postponing an inevitable conviction or keeping him in the limelight as some sort of self-styled prisoner of conscience), neither side seemed capable of figuring out what a possible compromise could be.

But to do so, it must exhibit a high growth rate (faster than that of the technological frontier) over a long period of time (as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan have done), by persistently pushing out the steady-state level of output per worker to which it is headed, not so much by achieving a higher saving rate, a lower population growth rate, and a higher quality workforce, although these will help because of synergistic effects, but by significantly improving its total factor productivity….  In particular, three absolutely essential and indispensable elements for social transformation are: an effective, efficient, and high-quality education system, a vigilant civil society that demands high accountability from the government, and a competent, corruption-intolerant government administration of firm purpose committed to reform and transformation.And next, from yesterday’s Inquirer editorial:The lesson Filipinos have learned is that both leaders have more in common with each other and both have more that sets them apart from a public that is as angry at Arroyo’s cash bar as it was over Estrada’s karaoke governance….  And the President’s attention to detail and workaholic style seems to have been spent more on manipulating the bureaucracy to approve the ZTE and other deals, than on anything particularly productive.Add to this the growing realization on the part of military officers that they have to consider their career prospects in a future administration (a reason, I’ve heard it pointed out, that with the retirement of the previous service commanders, current and next-in-line commanders have quietly but effectively put a stop to tolerating extrajudicial killings and abductions, which seem to have subsided), and the realization among the politicians that the President’s solution to party problems -throwing money at people causing problems- has made politics so expensive and so utterly transactional, that they will have to bear the price of this in campaigns to come -and it makes politics a pretty much losing proposition, financially.Put together the infighting in the President’s ruling coalition, with the sustained efforts of the various groups opposed to the administration, with the growing dissatisfaction with the President on the part of sectors formerly content to either turn a blind eye to her shortcomings, or who preferred her government to the prospects of a new one before 2010, and you have an administration running out of wiggle room.

“The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940″ (William L.

Put it this way, even if the blast wasn’t due to terrorism, it raises troubling questions, as Mara Finds points out:[B]ut what is being stored there and why it wasn’t being audited and regulated by Ayala Center is a little bit questionable because, allegedly, there is a big gasoline tank sitting right under the mall and empty fuel cylinders being stored there.What, they can’t find alternative storage solutions that they have to choose storing explosion hazards in the basement of a very busy mall?!…  But a hypersensitive public will tend to pore over every official comment to see what it may mean when police officials say US experts unable to detect C-4 component from blast site, when perhaps all the cops are doing is trying to be more nuanced:However, Razon said the test results could have varied because Philippine and American authorities swabbed different areas.”The [US] tests are negative because when the US experts arrived at the blast site, they swabbed the exterior portions or the portions that were not directly at the center, or at the seat, of the explosion….  Inner Sanctum explores the accident theory, which he says “geek friends” proposed even when official statements started focusing on that possibility:Over the weekend, several geek friends of mine have put forward deflagration as the probable cause of the Glorietta blast, especially after The Inquirer published a composite image of the blast site inside the Glorietta 2 lobby.According to them, deflagration is just like a gigantic fart, wherein tremendous gas pressure is released similar to a gas-powered canon–meaning, in one direction–as opposed to the ripple effect of a bomb.Philippine Commentary goes to greater lengths and points to One news item shows how intense emotions have gotten: Kin of Glorietta victims ask Arroyo for justice, not cash.