“supplemental agreement” is not the same as “renegotiation”

you are making it appear that the JPEPA that was eventually ratified by your senators was not the same JPEPA that was first submitted by the executive branch to the senate for ratification.

no sir. what was ratified was the same one that was submitted

if your senators really objected to JPEPA, they should have rejected it outright. if the “formidable opposition” to the JPEPA should be heeded, then JPEPA should have been rejected without delay.

the “formidable opposition” to JPEPA wants the whole JPEPA rejected.

a supplemental agreement?

1. thats a whole lot different from your earlier claims of a “renegotiation” due to your senators’ “scrutiny”!

you are making it sound like jpepa itself was changed despite being ratified already by the Japanese Diet, that the contracting parties went back to the drawing board, thanks to the heroics of your senators

Miriam was “confident that with the supplemental agreement, there would be no need to renegotiate the JPEPA. The Japanese government is not expected to renegotiate with the ratification of the JPEPA by the Diet, the Japanese parliament”

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/nov/15/yehey/metro/20071115met6.html

2. what were the contents of these exchange of notes in august 2008? according to Miriam:

“The exchange of notes means that the areas of investment activities reserved by the Constitution to Filipinos will remain reserved, and will not be opened to Japanese investors.

“This will ensure that the to [deal] will not result in violation or amendment of any nationalistic provisions of the Constitution, notably the ownership of lands of the public domain and exploration, development and utilization of all waters, minerals, coal, petroleum oils, all sources of potential energy, fisheries, forest or timber, wildlife, flora, fauna and other natural resources.

“This also makes it clear that Japanese nationals and companies are prohibited from operating any public utility, practicing any profession or owning mass media and advertising firms in the country.”

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?page=felMaragay_sept13_2008

exactly my point – in areas where our constitution conflicts with the JPEPA, the constitution will prevail. but the rest of JPEPA which does not run counter to the constitution will remain valid.

You wrote: “geo, i’m not as convinced as you that the politicians will see the benefits of liberalizing the economy in the same manner as businessmen, mainly because businessmen seem to be mastering the ability to dodge the politicos when they go around begging bowls in hand, come election time, though there are of course some big players who have mastered the traditional game of funding politicians in a strategically-sound manner. in that sense one would hope lobbying would advance in this country in a formal manner, instead of keeping in the shadows. i have this impression because of the many cases you hear of once flourishing local industries (such as the seaweed industry) that have been hammered by the short-sighted approach of local governments and the indifference of the national government (and equally self-defeating business practices among the players) so that they become increasingly uncompetitive and then lose talent to more aggressive competitors, such as indonesia (where filipino seaweed farmers were actively poached to convince them to work and bring their expertise to that country).”

** No offense, but I’m not sure I followed all of that. My tentative response is that most good politicians know that PROVIDING JOBS is even better than pork barrel roads or bus stops (or ocho-ocho dances!) when it comes to getting votes. If a foreign firm goes to a district with a plan for creating a competitive export business, you don’t think that the Governor, Congressman and Mayor aren’t interested?

Like I said, politicians usually follow the money…

…and the whole idea here is that the current monopoly holders just aren’t delivering enough benefits/opportunities to enough people in enough barangays/towns/munis/districts/regions.

There is a vacuum since Marcos’ fall which has yet to be completely filled.

And there is now a large pool of politicians who have figured this out.

Problem is…the foreigners aren’t too ready to cede so much control to their non-risk-taking local counterparts. So if the laws are that discriminatory, they might as well do a project somewhere else.

And there is now a large pool of politicians who have figured this out.

(As a side note — This is arguably the only way the oligarchy can be brought down several notches. In my own vision, this is one of the key parts of a devolutionary process. Hence my support for Federalism, Parliament and the rule of law.)

You wrote: “Geo, is there any chance that the ballots used by the PET were tampered with?”

** Yes, there’s a chance. There’s always a chance around here for tampering. However, since there’s always an equal chance that someone is making intrigues, let’s look at the SC’s own findings:

“the protestant had not adequately and convincingly rebutted the presumption that as public documents, the Congress-retrieved ER copies, used for the proclamation of the protestee by the NBC, are authentic and duly executed in the regular course of official business.”

“As to the alleged break-in in Congress, which allegedly facilitated the switching of ERs, no conclusive evidence has been given. One of the protestant’s own witnesses, Atty. Artemio Adasa, Deputy General for Legislative Operations of the House of Representatives, categorically denied that a break-in and a switching of ERs had occurred in Congress.”

That the Senate of the Philippines concur, as
it hereby concurs, in the ratification of the Japan-Philippines
Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) as modified by the
Supplemental Agreement consisting of the Exchange of Notes
Between the Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs and the
Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs known as the Romulo-
Aso Exchange of Notes of 23 May 2007 and the Exchange of
Notes between the Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs and
Japanese Ambassador to the Philippines known as the Romulo-
Komura Exchange of Notes of 28 August 2008.

The Senater cannot tell the Japanese authorities what to do, but can make its approval of a treaty entered into by the president on behalf of the republic, conditional.

Senate Resolution 131

the jpepa is a mere bilateral treaty. no different from any other treaty – they all need senate ratification.

my only issues with you regarding jpepa is:

1. you said it was renegotiated, presumably because of your senators’ “vigilance”.

again, it was not renegotiated. the jpepa was ratified as is.

2. why did it take for your senators more than a year to ratify the jpepa? a mere bilateral treaty? whether to ratify it or not is much much more important than making committee reports

“formidable opposition”? to jpepa? to repeat – “noisy” is more apt!

im really surprised by your statement:

but it was public pressure and senatorial scrutiny that saved it,in a sense, from the overeagerness of the government to conclude the treaty. the exchange of notes between the japanese and our government can be viewed in the nature of an amendment, additional understandings of an official nature that sort out potential pitfalls in the agreement. that the japanese agreed and our government approached indicates that both sides knew these issues had to be resolved to guarantee concurrence. failure to do so might have imperiled the treaty not just in the senate, but in our courts. again, you may have viewed the treaty as a run of the mill agreement meriting little debate and a swift approval; but both the government and its critics viewed the agreement as a landmark one.

again, for the nth time my dear kababayan -

the jpepa was ratified as it is! in its original form when it was submitted to the senate for ratification!

the Japanese ‘agreed’? it was not renegotiated!

the Japanese Diet ratified the jpepa earlier, in late 2006. senate action on jpepa took longer.

just imagine if the hearings on the making of committee reports gave way to jpepa hearings. for sure a few months after your senators were elected, the senate would have ratified it before year end 2007

i wonder though how businessmen and in particular, entrepreneurs can do to show there’s effective public opinion on their side, willing to demand these reforms from the local and national governments.

you bring up a crucial point about the divergence between headlines and actual reports. this is a cause of frustration even among journalists, and i think you’d find it interesting to compare the headlines on inquirer.net and those on the broadsheet, for example.

regarding congress: this is one of my biggest frustrations concerning anything to do with government in general, the lack of an appreciation for comparative data. it’s sometimes out there but a real pain in the ass to obtain, much less make sense of. which makes for a lot of inefficiency to start with and people arguing apples and oranges much too often, even within the government itself. the lack of any real institutional memory is a big obstacle to consensus or rational planning etc.

but this is not just a government problem, it’s a societal problem, too, one of my future entries will deal with the overlap in activities and data-gathering various civil society groups are engaged in, too. also, the disinclination of authority to shae potentially damaging information (clamdown in NEDA, for example, executive privilege all around, etc.). Even the House of Representatives, hammered with headlines about absences, dispensed with the PR problem of absentee congressmen by simply abandoning taking attendance, so there’s nothing to compile, ergo nothing to report, which means no embarrasing headlines to deal with. My understanding from House and Senate reporters I’ve talked to, is that getting copies of bills and even the journal of either chamber is difficult because the staff make money from xeroxing documents so they basically aren’t interested in simply providing soft copies of all these documents. add to this the lack of follow-through in various agencies so that otherwise promising starts to providing information end up petering out. i’ve discussed how basically this lack of tidy record-keeping dates back to the secretive nature of the martial law government.

my point concerning the senate is that as part of congress, if you focus on legislation oriented towards the economy, it seems to me that the batting average of the administration is pretty good, and might actually be outstanding. partisanship seems to affect economics-related laws (including the national budget) less than other legislation. as for other legislation, the political mood of the times has put the burden on the senate and the supreme court as the front line in holding back the most aggressive assertions of executive authority in a generation. and again, the validation of this are the elections.

with regards to the election results, to return to your point concerning the garci tapes, the comittee report(s) by the house may be of interest to you, it seems to me, it reflects the sum total of what can be officially said to have been determined about it, to date:

Committee Report No 1653

the members of the house who put together this report took great pride in it, and their approach was different from the public’s. while the public viewed it as a smoking gun (the tapes), the house expressed concern that if the president of the philippines could be tapped, this was a major national security breach. they did not reach any definite conclusions on the tapes, and called for the executive branch to mount investigations. these have not been done. even the question of proving the tapes a forgery or at least a misleading and highly selective editing of other tapes, foundered on the palace itself releasing versions of the tapes and various officials muddling efforts to authenticate the tapes. this lack of interest in achieving any definitive finding was of course, part of the president’s strategy of keeping her legal options open, with the very real possibility of an impeachment fight; but the absence of any effort since then to resolve the tapes only strengthens the perception that there’s something incriminating there, or that, the actual contents aside, the circumstances surrounding the tapes would be too much of an explosive issue to fully explore (tony abaya subscribes to the view that it was an effort by the usa to topple arroyo, something neither washington nor manila would want to unravel once the president survived the intitial challenges to her stay in office).

and on one point the house did point out that the palace, for its part, undertook a coverup concerning the tapes -and if you recall, this was enough grounds on my part, to conclude the president had to go (e.g. watergate).

concerning the supreme court and the election controversies, the supreme court was careful to establish the parameters within which it has to operate, as the pet, and the regulations concerning the discovery of fraud. in the first place the mechanisms at the disposal of institutions like the pet date back to the era when ballot-stuffing was the mechanism for fraud. the more sophisticated accounting procedures first explored in the twilight of the marcos years and increasingly made even more sophisticated since then, makes the discovery of proof that much more difficult. yet, it’s possible, as the case of aquilino pimentel proved and has been indicated by the protest of koko pimentel moving forward are concerned. we don’t know if it could have been ultimately proven in miriam’s case, because the case was dismissed when she ran for the senate.

setting aside the possibility that operators like garci weren’t just operating for the administration but other candidates as well, i think it’s enough to point out that an operation to alter the results for the president would be different from an operation for the vice president, that absence of cheating for one would indicate the absence of cheating for the other.

while i do find it convincing, as argued by the fpj people, that two operations actually took place, a sophisticated one to inflate voting results to provide wiggle room for incrementally shaving votes for opposition candidates on one hand, while adding those small increments to the president on the other, the tiny fractions not upsetting the overall results people expected (where she was expected to win, she won; where she expected to lose, she lost: but add all the little incremental fractions together and they totalled a winning margin), but which proved insufficent to obtain the desired margin, thus requiring a hasty and clumsy effort by garci which was made worse by the active meddling of the president (robbing her of plausible deniability), obviously i won’t expect you to give this theory any credence.

still, the question then becomes that as far as the presidential results are concerned, no thorough analysis has taken place, because by the rules, fpj died and no one could pursue his protest except him; and no other candidate wanted to spend the time and resources to mount their own protest (i suspect, had he lived, maybe roco could have done so, but he died soon after the garci issue broke out: you could argue ping and the others were too interested in cloak and dagger people power promotion to pursue this avenue). the president’s own priorities were clear during the canvassing by congress, when her interest was in avoiding a power vacuum and having herself proclaimed as quickly as possible.

the legarda protest then is only proof that she most probably lost, or that she could not point to where real monkey business took place in case it incriminated her, too. but there is no iron-clad resolution beyond the already controversial proclamation by congress, based on documents the supreme court would have referred to but which it could have gone beyond, except the whole question was rendered moot by fpj’s death. and since then ample time has passed to tidy up any discrepancies in the records going all the way down, possibly, to the ballot box.