It’s good that the matter was resolved in your favor. Normally, customs officers will assess books based on the standard tariff and will tend to overlook the exemptions, if its not clearly stated in the commercial invoice. A historical material should be declared as such to make the examiner’s job easier.

Another matter is the natural tendency to asses the books based on the normally high tariff rate. Customs collections from books should have declined due to the people’s increasing use of the internet to download e-books, making it quite burdensome for examiners who needs to present high tariff collections.

This is in no way a justification of the erroneous assessment but rather, an attempt to speculate on what really happened.

When a country has serious systemic and structural problems in the supply side which results in repeating balance of payments problems applying “Keynesian”
solutions actually exacerbates the problem…

The result of which is clearly and factually documented by the repeating structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF-WB over the last forty years plus. The repeating need to go back to the IMF for short term BOP support and the resulting continued harsher and harsher WB conditionalities imposed.

The IMF plays the bad cop while the WB played the good cop. The result was the country is now caught in a debt
prison.

The result is a form of economic genocide imposed on the Filipino people.

The Marcos government was already feeling the strong effects of the Volker medicine in the U.S. as he attempted to kill the inflation menace by raising interest rates to double digits that precipitated the debt crisis of the 80’s.

The Marcos government had embraced the McNamara’s
grand plan of the SAP by utilizing the transfer of the surplus of the oil producing countries hoard of dollars through the intermediation of the money center banks of the U.S. to the then countries under the control of the IMF-WB.

Someone one day will write a complete history in the chapter of financial colonization of certain developing markets that entered a new phase during that period.

The Philippines is still trapped in that system…

The international trading system has been co-opted by the U.S. through the almost monopoly control of the contract settlement of international trade in their currency.

No dollar -no- international trade.

It is an old word fact that whoever controls the financial system controls trade.

In 1972-73 we started shipping out human labor to pay for our imports of oil.

I know you’re not like Marcos which is why i was surprised when you resorted to bringing up the Communist-bogey. The Left is not just the communists you know. Besides, some of my advocacies (such as the flat tax and removal of minimum wage) cannot even be considered to be coming from the Left.