100 Songs! For Melodious Success!

Apropos as I am 39 today. Per promiscuous tagging by Noisy Noisy Man based on Baddieverse entry:

I’m giving you this playlist, which I will upload to an iPod soon, to give you a springboard into the world of music. You will eventually develop your own taste in music, but for now, consider this your starter kit. These songs kept me sane during my dark times of depression and drama. These songs accompanied me during my happiest of days. Let this list be your first soundtrack to your triumphs and tragedies. Just don’t dick around with your iPod while driving.

So, in no particular order, mixing sung and purely instrumental pieces, 100 songs, maybe not to save your life, but as a Chronicle of Time Passing (some songs here have many versions; the version here is the meaningful one for me).

1. Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, Buddy Rich

2. Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

3. I’m Sitting On Top Of the World, Bobby Darin

4. I’ll be Seeing You, Iggy Pop (Jazz at Ste.Germaine)

5. My Baby Just Cares for Me, Nina Simone

6. Danke Schoen, Wayne Netwton

7. Keep Young And Beautiful, Annie Lennox

8. Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing), Janis Siegel (Swing Kids Sound Track)

9. It’s De-Lovely, Robbie Williams

10. Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Marlene Dietrich

11. Moment To Moment, Matt Monro

12. We’ll Meet Again, Vera Lynn

13. I’m Getting Sentimental Over You, Tommy Dorsey

14. Song of India, Enoch Light

15. Bei Mir Bist Du Schon, Janis Siegel

16. Go West, Pet Shop Boys

17. Blister In The Sun, Violent Femmes

18. Weather With You, Crowded House

19. Walk On The Wild Side, Lou Reed

20. Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

21. Don’t You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds

22. Tainted Love, Soft Cell

23. Caravan of Love, Housemartins

24. Our House, Madness

25. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, The Smiths
26. More to Lose, Seona Dancing
27. State of the Nation, Industry
28. Da da da, Trio
29. Ziggy Stardust, Bauhaus
30. Changes, David Bowie
31. We’re Not Gonna Take It, Twisted Sister
32. Enter Sandman, Metallica
33. Windmills Of Your Mind, The Colourfield
34. No One Is To Blame, Howard Jones
35. Graceland, The Bible
36. Forever Young, Alphaville
37. Nobody’s Diary, Yaz
38. Strobe Light, The B-52’s
39. Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy, Ren and Stimpy
40. Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary: The Queen’s Funeral March (Procession), Henry Purcell
41. Bolero, Maurice Ravel
42. See the conqu’ring hero comes , Handel
43. Romane from “The Gadfly”, Shostakovich
44. Scheherazade (The sea and Sinbads Ship), Rimsky-Korsakov
45. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 – I. Aria (Cantilena), Villa-Lobos
46. Tannhauser (Overture), Richard Wagner
47. Cuban Overture, George Gershwin
48. Gloria in D Major, RV 589: Gloria in excelsis Deo, Vivaldi
49. Overture On Filipino Folksongs, Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra
50. Ay Kalisud (A Lament), Gilopez Kabayao
51. Line to Heaven, Introvoys
52. Kay Ganda ng Ating Musika, Kuh Ledesma
53. Five Years, Sugar Hiccup
54. Ikaw pa rin, TIto Mina
55. Panakip-Butas, Hajji Alejandro
56. Samba Song, Bong Pañera
57. Sarung Banggui Cha-cha, Anastacio Mamaril & His Orchestra
58. Alerta Katipunan, Inang Laya
59. Marcha Collectevista, cond. by Leopoldo Silos
60. The Internationale, Billy Bragg
61. Colonel Bogey, Leonard Bernstein
62. Königgrätzer Marsch,  Herbert Von Karajan
63. Meadowland, The London Festival Orchestra & Chorus
64. Marche Slav, Tchaikovsky
65. Happy Days Are Here Again, Old Dixie Boys
66. Down by the Riverside, Lynda Randle
67. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Elvis Presley
68. Danny Boy, Harry Connick Jr.
69. Just the Way You Are, Billy Joel
70. Half a Minute, Matt Bianco
71. Guaglione, Perez Prado And His Orchestra
72. Bella Maria De Mi Alma, The Mambo Kings
73. Tico Tico, Les Paul & Mary Ford
74. Cha Cha Cha de Amor, Dean Martin
75. Yo Vivire, Celia Cruz
76. Mack The Knife, Rosemary Clooney and Perez Prado
77. Invitation, Cal Tjader
78. Desafinado, George Michael & Astrud Gilberto
79. New York Afternoon, Basia
80. Tristeza, Baden Powell
81. Aguas De Marco, Elis Regina n Antonio Carlos Jobim
82. Corcovado, Everything But The Girl
83. Like a Lover, Sergio Mendes And Brasil ‘66
84. Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me), The Puppini Sisters
85. Penny Lane, The Beatles
86. With Or Without You, U2
87. Bigmouth Strikes Again, Placebo
88. Regret, The Get Up Kids
89. Two Points for Honesty, Guster
90. It Don’t Mean a Thing, Mel Torme
91. You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To, Julie London
92. But Not For Me, Elvis Costello
93. So In Love, K. D. Lang
94. Love For Sale, Billie Holiday
96. It’s all right with me, Jeri Southern
96. I Concentrate on You , Ella Fitzgerald
97. From This Moment On, Frank Sinatra
98. Anything Goes, Caroline O’Connor & Chorus
99. Saigo No Iiwake, Ted Ito
100. Little Sparrow, Kobayashi Aso

Tha’s all, folks!

The Long View: Honest and dishonest graft

The Long View
Honest and dishonest graft

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:35:00 05/28/2009

The reason bishops and farmers get hosed down at the doorstep of the House of Representatives, an institution that’s supposed to represent and not repel them, is a simple one: land remains the fundamental basis for wealth, prestige and power in our country. Landowners are in a position to ensure their interests are protected by lawmakers, many of whom are landowners themselves. But it might be inaccurate to simply describe the House of Representatives as a “landlord-dominated” body, since there are many lawmakers who enter office without being landowners and who may never achieve the extensive landholdings hacenderos possess.

John Sidel has argued that for politicians, ownership of land wasn’t a sine qua non for obtaining political office, which is often how the origins of our political class has been understood. Rather, it would be better to understand ownership of land as the fruits of political office; that from quite early on, our system as it evolved, allowed enterprising individuals to turn their professional credentials, particularly as lawyers, into the means to gain access to political office; and that once in office, control over not only law-making but the executive management and control of the many licensing and permit-granting powers of government, is what enabled officials to buy land, and make the jump from obscurity to high social status.

This is what he calls the “mechanisms for private monopolization of the resources and prerogatives of the state”—in other words, a kind of dynastic regime of fixers. You do not have to be a hacendero to sympathize with and uphold the interests of hacenderos, because it’s just possible that many lawmakers don’t equate land wealth with owning plantations, but instead are more interested in urban property. It might just be that in contrast to hacenderos who inherited land, the political class is more likely to speculate in land, buying cheap property and selling that property when development has overtaken previously worthless areas, turning the land into prime commercial real estate.

The American Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt, at the turn of the 20th century, called this kind of speculation “honest graft,” in contrast to “dishonest graft,” or simply stealing from the public treasury. Honest graft, he said, boiled down to this: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” How? He gave concrete examples.

Say, he said, “my party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place.” Armed with such insider information, “I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.”

The result? The rewards of speculation! “Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft.”

Another scheme involves the right of way for public projects: “Or supposin’ it’s a new bridge they’re goin’ to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank.”

Plunkitt rhetorically asked, “Wouldn’t you? It’s just like lookin’ ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee or cotton market. It’s honest graft, and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.”

Or take another instance: “I’ll tell you of one case. They were goin’ to fix up a big park, no matter where. I got on to it, and went lookin’ about for land in that neighborhood.

“I could get nothin’ at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I took it fast enough and held on to it. What turned out was just what I counted on. They couldn’t make the park complete without Plunkitt’s swamp, and they had to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?”

“Somehow,” he bragged, “I always guessed about right, and shouldn’t I enjoy the profit of my foresight? It was rather amusin’ when the condemnation commissioners came along and found piece after piece of the land in the name of George Plunkitt of the Fifteenth Assembly District, New York City. They wondered how I knew just what to buy. The answer is, I seen my opportunity and I took it.”

Here, in a nutshell, is how many politicians in the past made their money, and as far as it goes, there was nothing specifically illegal with this method. But even at the turn of the last century, Plunkitt tried to distinguish between what he did, from plain and simple graft. His, he claimed, was the “honest” kind, in that it required street smarts and avoiding outright theft from the treasury.

But the world has moved on since the turn of the 20th century, and just as insider trading in the stock market is now illegal in the 21st, what could be winked at in the past can no longer be tolerated. The bar for permissible official behavior has been raised higher and higher. What has become obnoxious to the public is the idea that elected leaders, by virtue of their insider knowledge, can engineer public works so that their lands are affected, either in that they get to pay themselves, by means of right of way, or be first in line to profit from the development that follows from public works improvements.

Read Plunkitt’s bragging about “honest graft,” if you want to understand the real issue at the heart of the accusations against former Senate President Manuel Villar. The issue is not whether real estate is, by itself, incompatible with his being a public servant, but rather whether he has put public works at the service of his pocketbook, directly, by means of using his influence to maximize specific profits from specific properties.

Where to, next?

This is a question posed by quite a few bloggers active in the effort to reverse the policy of imposing import duties on books.

La Nueva Liga Filipina has been the fiercest in insisting that the battle isn’t over yet, and that if political momentum has been generated, it must be sustained:

We now have the initiative. We have the enemy on the run. We must maintain the momentum and not let it go to waste. Guys, we have a good thing going here.

Entonces, I now recommend that we push on and now demand the resignations of Undesecretary Sales and Customs examiner Rene Agulan for embarrassing our country before the international community.

village idiot savant has a similar point of view:

Even its resolution calls for some pause. It looks and feels like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has struck a blow for book-lovers everywhere. Remember: it was her Secretary of Finance that imposed the tax in the first place, and being a cabinet position, it was, effectively, an extension of her office. If she caved, it was because it was an opportunity to look good, not to acknowledge the DoF’s and the BoC’s violation of the Florence Agreement. It cannot be properly called a victory without censure of these offices’ flawed interpretation of the law.

Both also say that it isn’t enough to identify problems, but that work needs to be done to propose solutions. He is not alone in pointing this out. 1ReAd2 says there remains the problem of public libraries:

There is still a need to develop other avenues by which everyone can avail of the book and one of this is develop our public library system. Promote and develop them.

Not everyone can afford to buy a book. Not everyone has a credit line to buy a book. This is where or this where a library, public or otherwise can fill the gap.

Or that returning to the status quo ante is not particularly something to cheer about, as My World describes it, lifting book duties will have an effect on prices that are still high:

A “really good (imported) book” in the Philippines, hard bound, excellent paper quality written by a noted author can command a price of upwards 2000 pesos. The paperback edition of such book with nice paper quality sells at around Php1500 to Php2000. A “good book” (one in which the author is not that popular) with a nice paper quality typically sells around Php1000 – 1500. Between Php800 – Php1000 are the “downsized” version of a typically good book or the so – called mass paperback copies. Below Php500 are books whose printed pages are of newsprint quality. By comparison, in China, a paperback edition book with nice paper quality costs around Php300 – 400 (converted already) tops. As a matter of fact, last December, during my vacation in China, I’ve bought 7 books for 341 RMB or roughly Php2500 total. Imagine 7 books for the price of 2 or maybe even 1 bought in the Philippines (the books I’ve bought in China are scholarly works on Chinese History). Now that is expensive. It is due to this high price of books that book buying and collecting is fast becoming an expensive “hobby” of the “well – to – do”. A “financially struggling” individual can’t “afford” to read and collect books even if he loves books. It is for this reason that an imposition of a few percentage points of custom duties on the cost of books would only make books more expensive and the matter worse. However, it won’t be that bad if we have a “functioning” public library system instead of a pathetic one that we have now.

School Librarian in Action noticed the lack of engagement by librarians, as organized professionals, in the issue, but takes a positive attitude:

I’d like to think that most Filipino librarians are battling their own professional issues and problems that to make a noise on the TGBB is just too much to do for now. I would like to think that somewhere out there, Filipino Librarians are quietly transforming their libraries into places where the public can freely access information from printed and online media.

Philippine Commentary would be somewhat pleased with the above, because in his view, the call of the times is to hasten the demise of the book and to encourage, instead, the consumption of books as digital files.

Indeed it seems to me that the healthy thing about online advocacy is that it helps cure -or remedies- a basic weakness of public causes and those involved in them, which is, the disinclination of many participants to take stock of what took place, so that lessons, hopefully, can be identified, learned, and institutionalized.

There seems to be a lot of angst in that the supposedly successful resolution of the whole campaign has revealed it to be a primarily Middle Class cause. As Cocoy put it in Filipino Voices:

Victory is sweet. Who would have thought we could change Government’s mind?

The sad part of it, as much of our people care more about Kho’s, Belo’s and Halili’s sex life. We won this victory without 95% of our people understanding why it was fought in the first place and why this is important. We fought this battle largely without network television and hardly any support from the daily newspapers. Heck, I don’t think they know it was fought at all.

The frightening and dangerous thought is that if this was won largely without popular support, in the next engagement, should we bother getting them onboard? That to build this nation, do we still need them? Are they immaterial to the larger war? Dangerous question, correct?

People saw the book blockade, this war on book taxes and duties as a war of the elite. How many people who joined this crusade who are actually multimillionaires but instead are ordinary people, living ordinary lives who love books?

Now there were those who were ambivalent about the issue from the very start, because of its bourgeois characteristics or, to be more accurate about it, at first blush (it seemed to me, anyway) because of their disdain for anything smacking of the bourgeoisie. This was clearly expressed in stuart-santiago and by caffeine_sparks in Filipino Voices (though she clarifies, in response to this entry, that she most definitely does not have an automatic disdain for things bourgeois), but the answer may be in another portion of the same entry by sparks:

“Did you see who carted away the books first?” I murmured a negative, having come a bit late. He motioned his head to the inhabitants of the Manila Bay area, skin darkened from sleeping underneath the naked sky. To be clear I said, “You mean the Great Unwashed carted most of the books away?” In a conspiratorial way only journalists would ever be able to manage, he murmured an affirmative. “You see, we the so-called enlightened ones like to assume the hoi polloi would never care for books. But right there, before my eyes, was proof that isn’t true.” Indeed. The printed word is a luxury for many. In our little enclaves we tend to forget the great privilege of being able to make sense of letters strung together. What jewels they must be for those whose precious monies must be spent on not starving.

Now this may or may not suggest by even the Divided Left had both its main branches speaking out against the book duties, but was it out of genuine concern for issue, or a desire to pander to the Middle Class, a manifestation of United Front politics? Nonetheless, Stuart-Santiago’s, caffeine_sparks’ point of view was also echoed by The Zeppelin’s Mezzanine:

But I just can’t help but wonder. If the power of the Internet-driven Pinoy community was that great, it’s a wonder people haven’t tried to levy for a decrease in gasoline prices via Facebook. Or they hadn’t called for the exposition of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo by Twitter. Heck, it’s actually a wonder that there aren’t any online petitions calling to end Jejomar Binay’s plans to run in the 2010 elections.

See what I’m talking about? The curious variable in this whole mess was that the only reason these guys went to the streets – er, what’s the Internet equivalent? – was because it involved something they held to be important. This only serves to point out the old adage of infernal dynamics: The energy required to move an object in the correct direction, or put it in the right place, will be more than you wish to expend but not so much as to make the task impossible.

Meaning people will only move when they think the cause is worth their while. But as to what my own demographic considers important, well. You could say that that’s a whole new ball game.

Personally, I believe our civic sense to have become so thoroughly enfeebled, that any small victory -and the victory, perhaps small though it may be and possibly even temporary, becomes a large one, if only because there have been so few instances where domestic public opinion actually led to official action and someone in officialdom relenting- is worthy of celebration in and of itself.

Also, surely it’s also worth considering the perspective that Middle Class empowerment is a good thing, and a necessary thing, if politics is to be about the national community and not just a winner-take-all battle between its constituent parts. If there is to be pluralism and not just triumphalism on the part of segments of the population, then the entire apparatus has to be seen as responsive to a Middle Class that has been so enfeebled, politically, as to have boycotted the country by voting with its feet and pursued permanent emigration abroad.

Now on to something else that Cocoy thinks, which is that,

This battle was won largely because the diverse group used cyberspace to get our message across. We were heard in the halls of the US Embassy. We were heard in twitter and facebook. We were heard in the UN. And those entities helped put in pressure on our government who would normally wait for the storm to pass.

The Internet isn’t just a delivery mechanism for sex scandals. It is a delivery mechanism to help change the world.

Perhaps a bit premature, methinks, and a tad colonial-minded in that “we were heard in the halls of the US Embassy” seems to be perceived as an achievement in itself. We do not know, and there seems no reason to think, the US Embassy lifted a finger in terms of this issue; although it is remarkable that the Americans -or, to be precise, an American in the embassy staff- told David Hemley that the issue made them reconsider their previous low opinion of the effectiveness of the Internet when it comes to mobilizing people.

I do believe that the the Internet made possible the story’s emergence in the first place. David Hemley -an American, one less inclined to take official impositions sitting down, which is what Filipino book importers were inclined to do- wrote about it online.

His story was tremendously easy to reproduce, because of that; and a constituency was revealed because of that story. More remarkably still, the story was enriched because of the initiative of blogs like Philippine Genre Stories that didn’t just take Hemley’s word at face value, but dug around deeper. The online buzz forced at least a token nod in the direction of all the online agitation going on, on the part of mainstream media, though I personally suspect mainstream media viewed the issue with ambivalence because it tends to view most things through the same Class Struggle lenses that made some bloggers ambivalent about the issue, too.

Anyway, if the story would not have otherwise emerged, if not for the internet; if the story wouldn’t have spread, without the internet; if the internet made possible people not only expressing personal indignation, but discovering they didn’t exist in impotent isolation, but actually formed a constituency, then the view of Cocoy is valid.

But I’d like to point out one shortcoming, and that’s of official perception and even, of what gets officials to act. In a sense, even as online media and organizing proved its clout with this issue, it also demonstrated the residual power of the traditional print media: if only because the ferocity of print commentary kept the issue from being totally shrugged off by both print reporters and radio and TV media.

I must say though, that I’m on shaky ground on this one, as I might simply be seeing this through the self-satisfied eyes of a print opinion writer. Though I was told that it was the direct challenges to UNACOM that prodded it into hastening the release of its statement, which the Department of Finance never wanted released at all.

There are officials, though, who are surely of the impression that the whole issue had nothing to do with the internet, or put another way, that the internet was irrelevant in the resolution of the issue. What resolved it was media noise, which gave one faction within the President’s official family, the nerve to challenge another; but that in the end it was a matter of getting the President’s ear, and her stepping in to stop the official squabbling.

But be that as it may, perhaps the celebrations and soul-searching are premature. See Gov’t urged to totally scrap tariffs on imported books in BusinessWorld. As The Grin Without A Cat says, vigilance!

Locsin on the Right to Reply (edited)

My understanding is the House of Representatives is tackling the so-called “Right of Reply” Bill, which is essentially an Obligation to Publish Bill. Like all issues politicians seize upon, there is a kernel of validity in what they are proposing, although the manner in which it’s being accomplished is entirely wrong and patently self-serving. The only thing helping the legislators’ cause is public skepticism over the assertions of a kind of sacred sovereignty on the part of media.

A Right to Reply is actually mainly of interest to people who are private citizens, do not live in the public eye, have no access to the powers-that-be, and who find themselves dragged into public scandal or controversy, without any means to properly defend themselves.

This is only my opinion gleaned from talking to readers, including some whom I’ve urged to write to challenge things they consider unfair or offensive to themselves. Generally, their answer is, it won’t accomplish anything, anyway, because the only thing as bad as an antagonized politician is an antagonized media person.

This goes to the heart of a problem many media people have, which is, that over the years, every time media has faced official hostility, there is a significant, even dominant, portion of the population that derives a kind of delight over media’s being on the defensive. Media people have a problem with this, because most of the time, they’re used to being praised and flattered by the public, which calls on them to expose and condemn the things the public finds wrong with officialdom.

But the power of the Fourth Estate comes not from public belief in the integrity or idealism of media, though individual media people do earn the respect of the public in terms of integrity and idealism, but rather, from the general cockfighting approach of the public to politics and public issues.

Media has gained its power and become convinced of its importance because it is used as a proxy by the public, in fighting officials the public couldn’t otherwise challenge, either institutionally or politically. But the usefulness of media shouldn’t be confused with public affection or respect for the profession and industry as a whole. It is all a proxy fight, and the proxy is only useful so long as a citizen or group of citizens find media fighting for their pet causes; but as for media itself, the widespread public attitude, it seems to me, lumps media practitioners with the politicians as part of an Establishment that bullies its way to get what it wants, regardless of the public good.

Were Congress to pass a law giving ordinary citizens the Right to Reply to articles/stories/broadcasts they believe unfairly slurred them, I think the public would applaud. But such a law would have to distinguish between ordinary citizens and those who, by virtue or position or affinity are public figures (for example, the ridiculous insistence of the Palace that the President’s husband is a “private citizen”).

Current proposals in Congress do not make any distinctions of this sort, and many of the arguments made by representatives like Monico Fuentebella and even former Senate President Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. points to politicians wanting to pass the law because they feel slighted and aggrieved over media handling of their actions. But if there’s one thing public officials don’t lack, it’s access to media to give their side on any story.

From my understanding of his arguments, Locsin believes Congress has dug a legal hole for itself with this effort to compel media to give politicians the right to seize equal space to reply to stories concerning them.

On the one hand, as a media person himself, he knows that libel presents a clear and present danger to media:

Even if a libel suit is eventually won, the expense of defending against it can be so prohibitive. Libel suits are a powerful deterrent to press freedom and a potentially fatal financial threat to media. Respected jurists noted this after the highly defective New York Times v. Sullivan decision unleashed a firestorm of libel judgments from outraged state judges protective of the reputation of their constituents. That was when the “dancing in the streets [only of journalists over the NYT decision] stopped.”

But he makes a point probably noxious to media people, which is, that libel is not a question of free speech and disputes the assertion that press freedom is a kind of sacred right:

US Chief Justice Rehnquist said that freedom of speech is a value, sure but it is not the only value protected by the Constitution; personal honor is another. And while Thomas Jefferson extolled press freedom as essential to democracy, he changed his mind after four years in the presidency, saying words to the effect that press freedom is as much of a threat.

In short press freedom is not a sacred right because, as everyone knows, journalism is not a priestly calling. None of its practitioners practice celibacy except when they have no choice. Indeed, there is nothing sacral about journalism—not by a long shot—even if its practice involves excessive intakes of heady beverages, frequent complaints about the shortness of “bread”, repeated grousing about the failure of media owners to multiply their wages combined with the overcompensation of former colleagues who are unaccountably transubstantiated into editors and publishers. All this followed and preceded yet more frequently by blasphemous takings of the Lord’s name in vain—or, worse yet, someone’s mother. (The PI invective made famous by a presidential candidate uttered when copy is read.) Any journalist who takes himself too seriously is not a serious journalist and is probably an academician or a media watchdog. As Samuel Johnson may have said, “Why do writers write? It’s a job.”

But he does believe that legislation is in order to provide what he calls “The Chance to Answer and the Right to Retract”:

This is the Chance [not Right] to Answer aspect of my short substitute. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, who asked for a second chance [to redeem an act of cowardice or—in the present case—recklessness] inspired the second aspect. To wit, a journalist should have the right to retract and thus be spared the liability or expense of a libel suit by voluntarily “eating his own words”—if they aren’t worth his trouble to keep the words out there for someone to sue on.

So instead of imposing something, the law would encourage something, a difference in attitudes that avoids the dangers of prior restraint on the press:

My substitute bill, aside from possessing the rare quality of brevity and being environment friendly, removes the smallest element of compulsion. It is this element, the US Supreme Court said in the Miami Herald case, that was the only objectionable aspect of a right of reply bill, saying that the right to compel publication is a step away from the right to repress it. Talk about hyperbole.

He argues, in another statement, that the proposed Bill has serious legal flaws:

The Senate bill, like that of the House, takes off from the Penal Code definition of libel. “Any person, natural or juridical, who is accused, directly or indirectly, of committing, or of having committed a crime or offense defined by law…” So far so good, free speech and press are unaffected although there is emerging view that it would be.

Unfortunately, if this is the basis for a new right of reply, how is it to be enforced? By stipulating that we are dealing here with a libel and demanding the right of reply, who shall determine if it is a libel in the first place?

It cannot be the alleged victim of the alleged libel because he will always believe he has been libeled. On top of which, if the alleged victim’s subjective judgment decided if a right has arisen and a remedy is in order, it would violate the first principle of justice which is that no man can be judge in his own cause.

It cannot be the media because they will never admit they have libeled the people they do in fact libel. They would violate the same principle of justice by unilaterally deciding their own innocence even as the victim would similarly assert his own injury.

Only an impartial third person could make the decision if a libel happened as the basis of a right of reply.

So, just as we were set to go, “Houston, we have a problem.” The very motor of this lunar venture won’t work—not legally which is what counts. We need an initial determination of probable cause that a libel has been committed to be made by the only qualified person to do it: a state prosecutor or fiscal. So we need to introduce the prosecutor or fiscal without whose determination that a libel has been committed, no right of reply exists.

On top of that, both the Senate and the House bill add as the subject of the right of reply the obnoxious clause: “or otherwise criticized for his public or private Act, provided the person criticized is named or identified and the subject is not privileged communication.”

If both bills had stuck strictly to the definition of libel, a case might be made for a right of reply. But to add any other criticism of a person’s public or private deeds that do not constitute a libel is really to chain discourse to the most humdrum and innocuous subjects.

And there are other problems with the proposed legislation as it stands:

Finally, if a right of reply bill passes, where would that put a right of rebuttal on the part of the publication? Would the rebuttal be protected from libel? If not, then why accord the right of reply? Where is the win-some, lose-some aspect of such a bill. What if the rebuttal is allegedly even more “libelous”? Would that occasion another right of sur-rebuttal? And so on? Indeed, what if the original reply is libelous, can the publication sue for libel? This is a bill that requires more thought, though not outright suppression into the archives.

And in the sense that no politician has ever put forward a proposal unless he feels there is some sort of support, in terms of public opinion, that can provide an issue on which to base a cause, Locsin is correct. Media will do itself more harm than good by ignoring skeptical public opinion concerning not only itself, but the ethics and principles media people often grandly proclaim but which the public believes media people ignore every bit as blithely as politicans ignore the commonweal.

As it is, as he himself summarizes his bill -

In my bill, if the reply of a victim of an alleged libel is published, he loses any right to sue the writer and the publication, civilly or criminally.

It achieves what the public wants, and yet protects the media’s Constitutional rights; it gives a positive incentive for media outfits to respond to complaints of unfair coverage, accords citizens a means to get themselves heard, and potentially eliminates many unecessary suits before the courts.

But as Locsin himself concedes, even as he marvels at the beauty of his own proposed bill, it isn’t the final solution:

It is not perfect in the sense that the usual media extortionist can put out anything libelous about a person and then, having inflicted the damage, retract it motu propio, leaving his victim powerless to seek a remedy since he cannot sue for libel anymore and the public will stop believing in the sincerity of the retraction if he does it often enough. After a while, the public will take retractions as merely pro forma but in no way substantially withdrawing the libelous allegations. (So, maybe, civil liability should be remain and only criminal liability should be extinguished.)

But it is better than what Congress itself proposes a present, and the risks it’s taking:

A congressional oversight committee on this subject is a Kangaroo Court composed of the usual suspects who always claim they are libeled and violates the first principle of justice above.

And, finally, while all that talk about the sanctity of press freedom is a lot of mumbo-jumbo, this is a fact as attested to by the World Bank’s chief economist: a free press is the only effective restraint on abuse of power and public theft, which accounts in great part for the continuing underdevelopment of poor countries. A free press with all its severe defects is still more important than free elections, which only guarantee the periodic reelection of those who abuse power to mass illegal wealth to buy elections.

Here is the first statement from which I lifted the blockquotes above, in full:

Press Statement of TLL

And here is his second, latest, statement, in full:

Locsin on Right of Reply Again

And here is his proposed substitute bill, which has been introduced as an amendment -a substantive one- to the bill that will probably be discussed in the House tonight.

HB No. 3306

The Long View: On official allowances

The Long View
On official allowances

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:02:00 05/25/2009

The unfolding scandal in the United Kingdom, where members of parliament are facing public outrage over their allowances and tax exemptions, reminds me of one of my favorite political autobiographies: Jose E. Romero’s “Not So Long Ago: A Chronicle Of My Life, Times & Contemporaries” published in 1977 by Alemar-Phoenix. To my mind, it’s about as honest as any politician’s account of his life can be expected to be. Romero, who was a congressman, assemblyman, majority floor leader, Constitutional Convention delegate and then secretary of education and sugar lobbyist, covered political events in which he played a part from 1925 to 1946 (it seems he died before he could complete his memoirs).

His book helps explain how government officials went from living within their means to trying to supplement salaries that failed to keep up with inflation or the requirements of their jobs.

“I entered Congress,” he wrote, “just when the great economic depression of the thirties began to be felt, and the first thing we did was to reduce salaries and expenditures by 10%. Congressmen’s salaries then were fixed at P600 a month, P7,200 per annum, and in our time there were no extras or allowances whatsoever. The reduction in our salaries of 10% amounted to P60 per month, and this was applied to all government employees, so that teachers who were getting P50 a month got a cut of P5 a month. It pleases me now to recall in what good spirit this sacrifice was made by all. Because we did not resort to deficit spending, the prices of everything, especially rice and other foodstuffs, remained low, so that no hardships were felt, especially by the poor. There was no complaint or discontent because everybody sacrificed equally.”

This account by Romero brings up one (harmful) change over the years, which is that government salaries for officials that hold a great deal of responsibility have shrunk while the salaries of the rank and file, on the other hand, remain all right. The gap between a congressman’s salary and that of a government director is almost negligible, while the gap in responsibilities remains vast. 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.

Just to update a detail I first mentioned in this space in 2005: if today the President of the Philippines earns about P640,000 a year, consider the equivalent, in today’s money, of the President’s P30,000 annual salary when the position was established in 1935. According to Henry Ma of the Asian Development Bank, in 2008 pesos, the presidential salary would be P10 million today.

Since salaries in keeping with their responsibilities are politically dangerous, politicians keep their salaries low by means of increasing their own allowances. Romero’s autobiography points to the precise point when congressmen decided they had to find ways to boost their salaries. He wrote of the situation the last Congress of the Commonwealth faced, in 1945: “The members of Congress,” he recalled, “like most other citizens, had lost most of what they had … To compound the problems of the members of Congress and everybody else, inflation was rampant. Even sugar was lacking and was selling at five times the usual price.”

He continued, “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 Osmeña, 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. This was the principal reason afterward for the approval of the much-criticized Back Pay Law.”

An accounting problem then arose: “At the end of the sessions, the Auditor-General was pressing for payment of the advances made under the authority given by President Osmeña. Their term of office was expiring. The solution was found in the payment of Back Pay to the members of Congress for salaries due them during the war. This move was bitterly criticized by the public, and the question became an issue in the succeeding elections and caused the defeat of many members of Congress in their bid for reelection.”

But, Romero argued, “Taking an objective view of the situation, however, this form of relief for the lawmakers was almost a necessity. The amount involved was only a little, over P20,000 for every member of Congress, and the payment made was only once. Of this amount each legislator had already received some P8,000 in advances. It was simply impossible for the lawmakers to live in Manila at six hundred pesos a month with the inflation then rampant. 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.”

And so, “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.”

So the moral of the tale is things haven’t always been the way they are, but that things can change pretty swiftly and then gain their own momentum. Which is precisely what’s happening in the UK.

The dangers of official disclosure

Sonny Pulgar puts forward this piquant quote:

As Vittorio De Sica remarked, “moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.”

And along the way he points to one lesson from contemporary political history: an incumbent must always seek an inferior successor:

Erap and his nocturnal Malacanang pirates were shoved in the calaboose. Immediately we mounted a moral pygmy onto our own pedestal pining for a “gentler, and better presidency.” We were soon disillusioned when we were introduced rudely to her incredibly rapacious estranged espouse. (Erap in hindsight was nanghihinayang with the unbeatable team up of Erap with Lito Lapid in May, 1998. He harassed Lito with myriad Ombudsman cases that led to the latter’s suspension early on the former’s presidency. Had Lito been Erap’s Vice President, Ramos and company could have thought a million times before undermining Erap’s helm).

Asked why he had not replaced Spiro Agnew on the 1972 ticket, Richard Nixon replied, that Agnew was his “insurance policy” because “no assassin in his right mind would kill me.”

(Incidentally some time ago in To cheat is patriotic, he put forward this very shrewd look into the moral framework, politically-speaking, of the President; I happen to agree in that the fundamental lesson she took away from her father’s presidency is, nice guys finish last).

So for every effort at constituting a Moral Majority, the President can underscore the timelessness of Machiavelli’s dictum that the appearance of virtue is more important than virtue itself. I have been pointing this out since June 14, 2005, and once more, with feeling, is Machiavelli’s advice:

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite…

For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious.

And so in response to Hayden Kho and his documenting his conquests, the Elected are proposing all sorts of legislation to penalize public exhibitions of penises. Which makes for the Law as less a means to enforce public morals but rather, to camouflage the public’s voyeuristic proclivities, Government as Fig-leaf, if you will.

So anyway let’s go on to public dissatisfaction over other public sins like profligacy with the public purse.

Even if you grant that Pulgar’s De Sica quote has a kernel of truth, still, that can only give an insight into the hidden motivations of public outrage over official spending at a time of public want.

Domestic news and public opinion have completely ignored the rather remarkable goings-on in the United Kingdom, where, for the first time in 300 years the Speaker of the House of Commons ended up confronted in such a manner. Things came to a fascinating head during a stormy parliamentary session, in which the embattled Speaker tried to make an Arroyo-style “I am.. Sorry” speech which only poured gasoline on an already-raging fire.

Accounts of the tumultuous parliamentary session particularly struck me because of the elephantine institutional memory of everyone concerned. Aside from most commentators pointing out it’s been three centuries (not since 1695 to be exact!) since a Speaker of the House of Commons has been prematurely removed from office, Sir Patrick Cormack, in responding to the Speaker’s apology-flop, brought up the Norway Debate (in which Neville Chamberlain lost the confidence of the Commons in 1940). Bloggers picked up on the reference as well, see From a Vauxhall Velox:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

The words of Leo Amery in the Norway Debate have never had such resonance and appropriateness as they perhaps have had today in the House of Commons. Sir Patrick Cormack referenced the great debate of 1940 during what can only be described as the shambolic statement by Mr Speaker Martin today.

And Leo Amery, a partisan of Churchill, in turn used the famous lines of Oliver Cromwell when he dismissed the Long Parliament on April 20, 1653, perhaps one of the most vitriolic speeches ever made by a politician against his peers:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

Although SnarkMarket points to research suggesting the speech may have entered legend but without a basis in historical fact! But puts forward this genuine account of a genuine example of vintage Cromwellian ire:

Lt. General Cromwell (I am sure of it) very loud, thumping his fist upon the Council table, til it rang again, and heard him speak in these very words or to this effect; I tell you, Sir, you have no other way to deal with these men, but to break them in pieces; and thumping upon the Council table again, he said, Sir, let me tell you that which is true, if you do not break them, they will break you; yea and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your head and shoulders; and frustrate and make void all that work, that with so many years’ industry, toil and pains you have done, and so render you to all rational men in the world as the most contemptiblest generation of silly, low-spirited men in the earth, to be broken and routed by such a despicable, contemptible generation of men as they are; and therefore, Sir, I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them.

It’s interesting how the fallen Speaker’s defenders tried to turn the tables, at first, on their critics, see To labour is to struggle:

The Speaker may appear to be a victim of misdirected anger, a scapegoat. However it was Mr Martin who actively blocked attempts to use the FOI act to reveal the spending habits of MP’s. His response has been muted in public and obstinate in private. He is totally out of touch with the public mood. His example (his wife’s taxi fares) before this blew up, his failure to step forward as an impartial representative of the house of commons and his subsequent (in)actions clearly warrant his demise.

His supporters have long suggested that his opponents are waging war on a nationalistic (Mr Martin is scottish) class front. Mr Martin is brusque at best and rude at worst but these are traits present in many of our business and political leaders. He has however been accused (below the parapet) of a lack of impartiality in his running of the house.

But the public mood was definitely not only sour, but indignant on a nationwide scale. A commentary in The National Newspaper outlines the whole issue, including some of the more lurid revelations:

The cause of the MPs’ decline is the publication of their expenses, leaked to a newspaper. It is the detail that has caught the public imagination, rather than any huge sums of money. Yesterday it was revealed that a Conservative MP installed an ornamental floating island in his garden to protect his ducks from being eaten by foxes, at a cost to the taxpayer of £1,645 (Dh9,500). A fellow MP claimed for cleaning the moat around his country manor. No one can see how these expenses were necessary for them to carry out their jobs, especially at a time of deep recession.

More seriously, several top politicians, including cabinet members, have manipulated the rules so that they can avoid paying the taxes that they legislate for other people to pay. Others have claimed for reimbursement of the interest on non-existent mortgages, which looks like fraud and is being investigated by the police.

The scandal might have been contained but for the fact that a succession of MPs have explained their conduct by saying it was “within the rules”. But the MPs themselves set these rules and fought hard to keep them secret from outside scrutiny. Many still cannot see that it was their responsibility to change a patently unreasonable and immoral system, not to go along with it. Some caught with their hands deepest in the public purse have blamed the Fees Office – the body which approves and reimburses their expenses – for not cracking down on them.

MPs are paid a relatively low salary – £64,766 a year – so they can enjoy projecting an aura of frugality. By comparison, a B-list news presenter on the BBC was forced by an angry parliamentarian to admit that she received half as much again – £92,000 pounds. In order to bump up their pay – and provide for having two homes, one in London and one in their constituency – MPs have been allowed to claim generous allowances. These have ballooned into covering the cost of food, gardening and refurbishing homes that can then be sold at a profit, tax-free.

Suspicions about what the MPs were claiming were heightened when they fought to keep their allowances secret, retaining an exclusion from the Freedom of Information Act. The public mood was already one of anger at the elite: the reckless greed of the bankers – abetted by a complacent government – had driven the country into recession.

With hindsight it is clear that the British parliament was blinded by its own traditions, which date back to the 13th century.

The New York Times editorial today also says the issue is one of official salaries not being in keeping with what the jobs may really require:

Members do have a legitimate compliant that they are paid too little: less than $100,000 a year, compared with about $170,000 for a member of the United States Congress. Britain’s taxpayers want changes. They want to make Parliament’s doings more open, which is a good thing. They also want to cut out these fat and far too easily abused expense accounts. That’s good too. But they will also have to find a way to pay their representatives a better wage.

The Daily Telegraph has been at the forefront of the issue.

As this article (Selangor to enact Freedom of Info law ) shows, increasing demands for public access to official records may be part of the Zeitgeist.

Official allowances have also been controversial, domestically, and economic downturns often lead politicians to trim their salaries as a sop to public opinion, while finding other ways to maintain their income (see my October 31, 2007 entry on official allowances).

This whole thing is extremely relevant in light of the ongoing efforts to muster public support for a Freedom of Information Act. Public indignation was sparked by journalists using the UK’s Freedom of Information Act of 2000 to secure official information damaging to officialdom.

See A Very Important Notice in Filipino Voices:

While the Supreme Court has upheld the enforceability of the constitutional right to information, its effective implementation has for the past two decades suffered from the lack of the necessary substantive and procedural details that only Congress can provide. There are also no effective sanctions that will deter the violation of the right.

The passage of an enabling law has come closer to reality when the Lower House approved on third reading and transmitted to the Senate its counterpart measure last 12 May 2008. What is left is for the Senate to pass its counterpart measure. Initially we had difficulty moving the Senate committee concerned. However, during the change in Senate leadership last December 2008, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano became the chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media. He has committed to take the measure forward, and has made good his promise by conducting the necessary public hearings and technical working group meetings.

A draft committee report is now ready, and a final committee hearing on it is scheduled on Monday, 25 May. After the committee members sign the committee report, the next step is its sponsorship before the Senate plenary. The fighting target is to have the sponsorship on Wednesday (27 May).

I support a Freedom of Information Act but with the understanding that it may be very much a Dead Letter even if enacted. Its effectiveness will depend on an institutional awareness of the importance of record-keeping, and the safeguarding of official records -which brings up the problem that much of what is of public interest is not being recorded at all.

For example, minutes of official meetings, and institutional diaries and so forth; not all government agencies are created equal in this regard and even those with a tradition of record-keeping, have their records protected by new interpretations of existing laws or concepts like Executive Privilege. This can only make getting to the bottom of current events even more difficult than it already is.

As Tony Abaya says of himself and Tony Gatmaitan, people commenting on politics are all looking through a glass, darkly; you are as liable to get things wrong as you get things right; but sooner or later you will be proven either right or wrong. What is worth pointing out in addition, is that it takes some time for what is often bruited about in politically-active circles, to percolate into the public domain. Let me give you an example.

If you’d read this blog entry by Mon Casiple mere weeks ago,

However, various scenarios threaten to replace the election scenario or at the least vitiate or weaken its regime-changing role. One, of course, is the current charter-change move. Other possibles are the attempts to manipulate or–failing–to sabotage the automated elections (and revert back to manual election system), the creation of artificial political atmospheres to justify various forms of state of emergency, and the scheme to form a caretaker government premised on a nationwide failure of elections. Various combinations of these are also possibles.

You might have considered him unduly alarmist. At the time, officialdom was confident that it could accomplish the full automation of national elections by 2010. Even as late as the other week, when iBlog 5 took place, by all accounts, James Jimenez of the Comelec was upbeat; though one has to wonder if he wasn’t already aware of the looming problem of the bidding for automation not being successful.

Indeed, not very long after Jimenez’ smooth reassurances at iBlog5, the Comelec’s own chief was publicly speculating on No-Election scenarios. Personally, whether a conspiracy exists or not, it’s the public indifference to the issue that’s pregnant with political meaning. Public opinion -or the lack of it- has a direct relationship with however things unfold, politically.

This brings me to something Ellen Tordesillas blogged about in more timely fashion: the response of Judge to her (and my) view that he was out to get himself inhibited. Vera Files published a transcript of the Judge’s response:

Q: Balikan ko po ang isyu: Ano pa po ang pressure ng Malacañang na sinasabi ninyo at pinag- iinhibit kayo?

A: I am a trial lawyer, may mga ginagawa na idedeny lang nila. Frankly, sino ang gagawin kong witness? Yung gumawa sa akin e di syempre pag ka tinanong nyo siya, idedeny nya. So yung tangible lang ang itotouch ko dahil isa akong trial lawyer nga ako. Dati, ang tagal kong nagproprove ng kaso, ang tagal ko sa piskalya. So I will touch on the tangible ones.

Itong pressure, marami pa itong kasunod, tinatawag nga akong ignorant. Ang nakakatawa dito, doon sa Internet, chini-cheer nila ako e. Maganda ang May 4 order ko, may lumalabas na gross ignorance of the law.

Q: Saan nanggagaling?

A: Yung tama ang ginawa ko? Sa mga blogsites. Ang daming bloggers na pinupuri ang aking mga decision. Tapos may tumitira na ignorant ako of the law. Pero ang matagal na tayong judge. Umpisa lang ito, I’m sure meron pa yan.

Kaya lang nga, ang masasabi ko sa kanila. Kahit anong gawin ninyo, hindi ako mag-iinhibit dahil ayaw ko ipasa ito sa mga mahal kong kapwa mahsitrado. The temptation to inhibit is very great. All I have to is, o sige, inhibit and then balik ako sa dati kong buhay. Kawawa naman judge na mag-iinherit ng kaso, ganon ba dapat, hindi e, trabaho ko ito.

Q: May mga demolition job na ho.

A: Umpisa na ito after hearing today’s news. Expected nyo na bukas na may motion to inhibit na. E hanggang ngayon wala.

Q: Tangible po itong demolition job. May nabanggit kayong intagible, maaari nyo ba kaming bigyan ng clues?

A: If I mention the name of the person, he will just deny e, syempre tao lang ako, syempre natatakot din ako. Kahit anong tapang ko, kung may ahas dyan o bayawak, lintik na itik, yung famous words ni Jamby Madrigal, kung may lintik na na pinepressure ako, baka matakot ako. Kahit itik yan, kung may pangil ang itik na yan di ba?

Q: Ano po ang ginawa ng taong yan, Judge?

A: Hindi nga. Ganito na lang, kahit ano pa gagawin niya sa susunod, hindi ako mag-iinhibit sa kaso.

Balik tayo doon sa order ko May 4, ito lang yata in Philippine history na pinost sa Internet. Yung mga bloggers medyo pilyo ito, sina Manuel Quezon III, si Ellen Tordesillas ng Malaya. Meron silang theory na kaya ko raw inisyu yan para ako mag-inhibit. Well, I would like to correct, although binasa ko ang blog ni Ellen Tordesillas, naiyak ako e. Kasi marami palang nagdadasal sa akin na pagpatuloy ko raw to. Kaya lang ang misis ko tinutukso ako kasi meron din doon ano ba yun, kaklase ko yata yung judge na nakikipagusap sa dewende. Tawa sya ng tawa. Tinitira ka dito. Sabi ko, oo nga no. Ganun lang, may freedom of speech.

Q: Sino sa Malacanang ang nag-pressure sa iyo?

A: Syempre, hindi sila personally magpapadala nyan, si di ko alam,. Di ba pag may conspiracy, ang main conspirator hindi nagpapakilala. Hanggang ngayon hindi nga natin alam sino nagpapatay sa ating hero.

Q: Pero lumapit po sa inyo? Tinawagan kayo?

A: Hindi ako crybaby. Kahit elementary ako, kung suntukan, suntukan, kung karate, karate. Pero matanda na ako, ayaw ko na makipagsuntukan.

Marunong din ako matakot, kahit anong pananakot nila, tuloy ang kaso sa akin.

A little later in the interview, he says he wrote his bistering opinion to pique public interest, and as a means of self-protection:

Q:Ano po sinabi?

A: I will be consistent, hindi na. Ito na lang mas importante.

Puro sa news… baka hindi nyo nakikita ang plano na mag martial law?

Balik tayo kina Manuel Quezon III at Ellen Tordesillas. Sabi nila mag-iinhibit lang ako kaya ko ginawa yung funny order. One of its kind, pero hindi eh. I intentionally wrote it that way para maging interested ang tao para pag nagsalita ako ngayon, madali na.

Q: Hindi ba kayo natatakot at mas lalo kayo pag initan?

A: Tao lang, syempre matatakot ako. Just the same, hindi ako mag-iinhibit. Tuloy ang kaso sa akin. Wala pa naman akong motion to inhibit. Ano gusto nila? Dahil sinabi ni Lolo Gonzalez na mag-inhibit ako? Wala nga motion sa akin e, paano ako mag inhibit?

Voluntary inhibition, ayaw ko nga mag-voluntary inihibit. Ayoko ipasa ang problema sa kapwa ko judge na mga mahal ko kahit yung iba hindi ako mahal…

Q: Motibo?

A: God-fearing kasi eto nga. I hope I’m very wrong in my analysis na magkakaroon ng martial law. All these are moving towards martial law. Pero kung hindi ko sinabi ito ngayon, I will not be able to forgive myself, my conscience will be bothering me for the rest of my life. Kasi maraming nagsasabing hostile witness role na hindi nakita ng iba, tawa sila ng tawa kung pwede ko daw bang ipaaresto ang presidente. Sabi nga sa isang dyaryo ignorant daw ako, hindi daw pwede, pero si former Secretary Drilon sinabi pwede at hindi nakakatawa.

In the meantime, read this glowing account of the preparations in Indonesia for their coming presidential elections, and weep: Indonesia Clears the Decks for a Presidential Election.

The Long View: The perils of loyal opposition

The Long View
The perils of loyal opposition

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:18:00 05/21/2009

Every appeal to government for redress of grievances is a loyal appeal, a humble appeal. So far, this has been how most people infuriated by the Department of Finance’s imposition of customs duties on books have approached the issue. But Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr., in a recent conversation, pointed out that bombarding officialdom with petitions would do no good because the amor propio of officials is already at stake.

Although not everyone in officialdom is dismissive of public opinion. And while the UNESCO Philippine Commission still seems to be (spectacularly) AWOL on the issue, there have been officials aplenty who’ve expressed concern and outright opposition to the DOF’s scheme. Foremost among them is the National Book Development Board, whose chairman, Dennis Gonzalez, has forcefully, and eloquently, spoken up against the book tax.

Gang Badoy tells me that Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo has also expressed interest in the case, and I can only assume he is attempting to do something in his quiet and smooth manner.

Locsin himself is banking on his being in good odor with the Palace and assumes President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will favorably consider his loyal appeal for her to restore the status quo ante.

Still, he is enough of a pragmatic politician to recognize that unless the President can be convinced public opinion has been aroused, there will be little incentive for her to reverse the DOF’s mutation—and mutilation—of the law. He believes the issue must sizzle for a few more weeks if there’s to be any hope of presidential action. And the sizzling must take place in the media.

Which means a lot still has to be done.

Columnists have come out swinging and the roll of honor includes the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s own Amando Doronila and Conrado de Quiros, Jullie Daza in the Bulletin, Jarius Bondoc and Jessica Zafra in Philippine Star, Jojo Robles in Manila Standard Today, Libay Linsangan Cantor in Sunday Times, and Elfren Cruz in BusinessWorld. The nation’s leading weekly news magazines, The Philippines Free Press and the Graphic have called attention to the issue. Louie Jon Sanchez, in particular, reported on the efforts of Bicolano novelist Abdon Balde, and educators like Dr. Elizabeth Morales-Nuncio, to spread awareness of the issue.

This newspaper, in an editorial, has come out strongly against book importation duties; but its news side has basically chosen to ignore the issue. Only the Philippine Star has undertaken fairly sustained news coverage, followed by Business Mirror. There has been a smattering of coverage on radio talk shows (radio jock Mojo on 89.9), and a rare report or two on the evening news (24 Oras), but that’s it.

Writers are up in arms; educators are up in arms; librarians are upset, citizens in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao are outraged. Still, public opinion, so far, has mostly been ventilated on line, which is both a blessing and a bane. A blessing because people have found ways to organize themselves, primarily to express common feelings of indignation; but also a bane in that it’s proving difficult to figure out what to do. Or what can be done.

A good way to achieve a consensus in this regard is to join RockEd’s Sunday activity at the Baywalk along Roxas Boulevard, from 3 p.m. to sundown. Booklovers are asked to bring 3-5 books they’d like to swap or give away, as an act of solidarity with fellow booklovers. Perhaps this will also provide a venue for discussing, and committing to, future courses of action, such as asking for a rally permit on the steps of the DOF.

If the President won’t act, then what? Litigation will be the only path to pursue. Litigation is precisely what DOF is hoping, because it will allow them to continue collecting duties on books while tying things up in court.

A Filipino writer overseas believes that if officialdom’s petty amor propio has committed it to defying public opinion, the public on the other hand, must view failure in this issue as not an option. “Winning this battle is not just a victory for the middle class literati, but has a lot to do with proving that social networking and new media is not toothless when it comes to ‘real world’ movements,” he said.

Neither does the writer seem inclined to support proposals to fight DOF’s illegal behavior by guerrilla book-peddling: “Circumventing rather than battling the customs taxation is only going to perpetuate the practice; I would even say that the problem stems in large part to booksellers willing to capitulate to negotiations [when the real question is] should the booksellers be taxed because they are making money? No, because it is illegal to do so. And for every copy of ‘Twilight’ they sell they also provide the availability of reference material for engineers …”

At the heart of the officialdom’s inflexibility is the dangerous distinction it believes it is entitled to make “between good books and bad books, between books that are useful and books that make money. Making distinctions like that is what eventually leads to book burning.”

A blogger has identified a different path of resistance altogether: for the citizenry to wield the power of the purse by refusing to buy any book that has been subjected to book importation duties. Locsin says booksellers have declined to take the lead on this issue because it would “appear self-serving,” which seems a cop-out. Everyone is in it, together, on this one: and the blogger’s proposal zeroes in on the disinclination of booksellers to join readers for whatever reason (which includes an understandable disinclination to invite retaliatory Customs and BIR “inspections”).

It hasn’t come to that, yet; but it may. So let’s start by seeing each other on Sunday; and please write to your favorite media outlet to demand coverage of this issue.

The globalization of Essay Mills

This morning I got an e-mail from Davao City, bringing an article to my attention, and asking me to do an episode of The Explainer on it.

Let me quote from that e-mail:

I wonder if you have discussed the issue on ‘online writing’ in your show…

Pity that I didn’t run a thread before working for them. It turned out that we were writing academic papers for lazy students abroad. But while on it, I would receive follow-up phone calls at 12 midnight or 4am from who I believe to be a Filipino call center agent (the accent). It’s like Filipino professionals helping foreigners to rip off Filipino professionals.

I asked the sender if the information above came from person experience, and here’s a portion of the reply:

It’s a shame Sir, but I did for almost 2 weeks this April 09. I remember making a historiographic essay on Joan of Arc and an architectural analysis of The New York Times Heardquarters building…

Then, I saw this report on Fox (or CNN, not sure now) which discussed about the triviality of the homework and a local school’s effort of purging the practice due to the number of essay mills offering custom papers for a pay.

So I quit and run a thread online. I learned that a number of Filipino writers (and Indians) have been scammed since 2006! Most of them got quite nasty while a few felt like their passion was ill-used (helping students to cheat).

Finally, this person’s views on why the issue needs to be discussed:

As a Filipino and a teacher at that, I feel like in the losing end if this will be discussed by foreign media. The question on ethics, plagiarism, the parasitism of the third world, the (in)dignity of the Filipino professionals, the practice being currently adapted in our colleges and universities… among others… I guess, need to be comprehensively discussed.

The article in question is Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply: From Virginia to Manila: on the trail of papers for cash published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.In a nutshell, the article is an expose on companies that write academic papers for a fee. A case study of sorts is used in the article, focusing on entrepreneurs from Ukraine who set up dummy American companies and then operate an academic paper sweatshop in the Philippines:

Call any of the company’s several phone numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night. The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls, The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering any questions.

But while the company’s management may be publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since 1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company’s customer-service center is located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students. The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on the first page of Google results. (They’re doing a good job, too. Recently two of the first three hits for “buy an essay” were Essay Writers sites.) One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link builders.

Some of the company’s writers work in its Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers, which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between $1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently advertising for more writers, praising itself as “one of the most trusted professional writing companies in the industry.”

It’s difficult to know for sure who runs Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr. Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices, according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. “He looks like Harry Potter,” the source says. “The worst kind of Harry Potter.”

So there you go. The article includes a presentation, Journey to the Center of an Essay Mill, which gives an online tour of what essay-mill writers see when they log on to the company’s website.

The Long View: Moral intensification

The Long View
Moral intensification

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:13:00 05/18/2009
That was a term coined by the present Chief Justice, arising from his belief that the legal system is powerless to address the country’s problems, but that change can be achieved by reversing what he sees as the longstanding moral decay of the country. Religious leaders, according to him, can act as “moral forces” in “redirecting the destiny” of the country.

There is much that is admirable about our present Chief Justice, but I am troubled by a suspicion that at the heart of his public acts is a belief in the benefits of a theocratic state. To me, this is a point of view that is dangerous, because it is fundamentally incompatible with his being a jurist who is tasked with the application of secular law. Fr. Robert Reyes once quoted the Chief Justice as having told him that the “justice system is based on our morality which is based on our spirituality.” This would have shocked many, if not all, of his illustrious predecessors. Hadn’t Chief Justice Jose P. Laurel referred to “justice in its rational and objectively secular conception” in his justly famous definition of social justice?

The core values of our state, degenerate and dysfunctional as it may be, at present, are enshrined in three words from Laurel’s description above: that human progress is served by institutions that are Rational, Objective and Secular.

These core values are quite compatible with religious feeling, and in and of themselves not opposed to sectarian doctrines. It is like the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould’s description of faith and science being subject to non-overlapping magisteria, or authority. As he put it in his famous essay, “The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.”

Does the Chief Justice propose reconciling law and faith, or is he expressing a desire to subordinate human institutions to the dogmas of specific faiths? The Philippines is not alone in having societies in which Mysticism, Sectoral Partisanship and Theocracy are increasingly viewed as the antidotes to corruption, injustice and misery. Should this tendency be embraced? This seems, to me, the dangerous path on which the Chief Justice has embarked.

At the heart of the approach to law and government among people like Laurel, whose thinking and training were informed by the Enlightenment thinking of people like Rizal and Mabini, the conduct of human affairs was more properly approached in a manner that best approximated scientific inquiry and problem-solving, if it was to avoid the risks—of fanaticism, intolerance, inquisition and persecution—that Godliness inflicted on human society in ages past.

Recall that a lesser judge was expelled from the judiciary for believing in magical dwarves: is there any difference in a chief magistrate who preaches as from a pulpit, confusing the robes of office with the robes of priestly, even prophetic, ministry? For the great crime for which the duwende-loving judge was dismissed, was to throw the judiciary in disrepute for the eccentricity of his views, which put in doubt his capacity to render impartial justice. But if these were grounds, there must surely be those of the opinion that a Chief Justice who essentially throws in the towel, declaring the salvation of the nation lies in God and not in Law, has no business being in the courts one moment longer and should, instead, either found a church or become a partisan politician?

A couple of years ago, during a forum held by a foreign chamber of commerce, one Filipino in the audience expressed frustration over the timidity of the hierarchy. I responded by saying that perhaps this was a good thing, as reducing the political influence of the Catholic Church was better for the country in the long run.

On one hand you have the Catholic Church effectively mobilizing to block the Reproductive Health bill, and on the other, mobilizing to keep Land Reform legislation alive. Tolerating the former because of the need for a force capable of mobilizing to promote the latter is a Faustian bargain we shouldn’t even have to consider. It only serves to underline the inherent contradictions when the element of sectarian morality muscles into the political sphere.

And this applies to all churches. At the very least, marshaling religion for one side only permits marshaling religion for the other; it does not introduce anything new nor does it offer any real opportunity to break the impasse the country’s been in, politically, since 2005. There is no difference between a politician bragging of Lakas and Kampi’s machinery and those who proclaim the presidency can be obtained by a coalition of Catholic bishops, the Iglesia Ni Cristo and Evangelical Christians.

We, the People: How Candidates view The People as Electors

Last week, a Leadership Forum was held in the Ateneo de Manila where putative presidential candidates subjected themselves to questioning for the first time. Today Inquirer editorial called the exercise an example of Maturity unfolding. It suggests that the public is keen on watching candidates confront each other, and that dodging debates, as Joseph Estrada, Fernando Poe Jr. and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did, won’t wash with the electorate anymore.

It’s interesting to compare how a grizzled old veteran like Amando Doronila (in a nutshell, he says Nobody got away undiminished) and young observers who blogged their reactions, compare to each other in terms of their reactions to the debate. I particularly enjoyed the blog entries of So far, so good, Philippines Rising, jessie’s wicked world of reality and Jolly Life. The respective media teams of the various candidates will gain a valuable insight into what young people, in particular, thought of the whole exercise.

But once again, let me revisit John Nery’s February 10 column, in which he pointed out that there was something remarkable about how The 2010 race is set. The public, acting as a communal self-limiting mechanism on politics, has, quite early on, narrowed the field. And let me point to another, more recent column of his from April 7, on how The vice-presidency is subtraction:

[M]y hypothesis: Since the snap election, the principal role of the vice-presidential running mate has changed. To be more precise, since 1986 the winning presidential candidate’s decision-making process for selecting a running mate has turned from addition to subtraction.

In other words, the main value of the vice presidency in election politics is tactical: It provides a presidential candidate the best way to sideline a strong rival.

The classical dictum of electoral politics, as famously expressed by the late Eulogio “Amang” Rodriguez, is that “politics is addition.” But since 1992, in the absence of rules and other mechanisms that foster majority presidencies, the opposite has become political conventional wisdom: from “dagdag-bawas” to coalitions formed, not to create large movements, but to hobble others, politics has become subtraction. It has also, as a result of demographic trends, become less national, in a sense. We saw this emerge in 1986, when, for the first time since national elections for the presidency began in 1935, the “North-South” rule was junked, in putting together both the administration and opposition presidential and vice-presidential teams.

Marcos-Tolentino and Aquino-Laurel were both all-Luzon tickets; and while in 1992 and 1998, no single ticket won, both Ramos-Estrada and Estrada-Macapagal ended up all-Luzon presidencies and vice-presidencies. When, for the first time since 1986, a unified ticket “won” both the presidency and vice-presidency, the Macapagal-de Castro ticket was an all-Luzon one. And there’s a simple reason: Luzon matches the votes of the Visayas and Mindanao combined; and in particular, the extended National Capitol Region, which encompasses, in political reality, vote-rich areas of Southern Luzon, is a bloc capable of giving the presidency to a candidate in closely-fought, multi-candidate contest.

Consider the implications of the data in this image, which distills the relative populations of Luzon vs. Visayas plus Mindanao, and the accessibility of radio and TV to the population.

I bring this up because of a column Tony Abaya recently published (see Crystal Balls) in which he boils down the points put forward by Tony Gatmaitan, another grizzled veteran of the political game. I’ve slightly re-ordered the relevant details, as reported by Abaya.

First, here are the issues that will matter in the presidential campaign:

That the issues will be the core issues of economic recovery, accountability, graft and corruption, peace in Mindanao, poverty alleviation, foreign policy, the environment.

Second, that the personal characteristics the electorate wants to see in candidates are:

That the qualities being sought by voters in a president are: magaling (good, competent), madaling lapitan (easily approachable)., mapagmalasakit sa mga mahihirap (will work for the benefit of the poor).

Third, that the electorate, as a subset of the larger population, is as follows:

32.4 million voters are expected to vote, out of 45 million registered voters.

Fourth, that the candidates will be competing on the basis of what has been demonstrated before, in terms of the vote-getting power of past candidates:

[T]he previous top vote getters in a presidential/vice presidential election have been Estrada (10 million) and De Castro (15 m); in senatorial elections: Roxas (19 m), Legarda (18 m).

Fifth, that if these are the benchmarks in terms of what is “doable,” in terms of courting votes, then the political math works out as follows:

[I]n a three-way race, 11.8 m votes or 30 percent are enough to win. In a four-way race, 9.1 m votes or 28 percent; in a five-way race (most likely), 7.8 m votes or 24 percent, would be enough to win. In the 1992 seven-way presidential elections, Fidel Ramos won a plurality of only 23 percent.

Sixth, the electorate will be courted, not by means of old-style barrio-to-barrio barnstorming and stump-speeching sorties, but by means of what’s called the “Air War”:

In 2010, television and radio would be the main field of combat and will account for 50-55 percent of candidates’ expenses: ground level logistics and organizational expenses 30-35%; and cyberspace – internet, texting propaganda – only 15-20 percent.

(Gatmaitan first put forward the idea of how cellphones and to a much smaller extent, cyberspace would matter, politically, in 2008, see my entry for May 14, 2008 see, also, a May 8, 2008 news report by ABS-CBNNews.com ).

At this point, let me put forward what all the candidates have in common, in terms of viewing the public as an electorate, and that is, they are approaching things according to the perspective of the advertising industry. Let me put forward my personal opinion that Advertising methods and approaches have become dominant, in no small part, because of changes in the composition of society. Formerly significant sectors, organized as blocs, have shriveled away and except, perhaps, for the mobilizing power of some churches and parties, there’s no other way to attract and mobilize people, except by means of the strategies employed to get the same people to buy soap, etc.”

The advertising industry looks at the broader population by breaking it down into segments, based on income and lifestyle:

Another way of subdividing things, on the presumption you vote according to your wallet (and the lifestyle its contents can buy you), with AB being High Income, C being Middle Income, and DE Low Income:

You could then zero in on various subsets of these groups, whether in terms of age, or in terms of location (particularly useful for courting regional voting blocs, or where households are more likely to vote as blocs), or say, in terms of urban versus rural populations:

So this would be the picture, nationally:

And here is the equally-relevant (if not actually more so) picture of the NCR:

So if you’re a candidate in a crowded field, what do you do? Who do you go after? Again, let’s reproduce the breakdown:

Class AB, your Captains of Industry and the Boards of Directors, will probably have its heavy-hitters flee the country or go on vacation come election time, or make their clout felt by financially supporting candidates. In any case, statistically, even in a close elections, their votes matter less, because liable to be too independent to court as a demographic.

Class C, the Middle Class, has two components, really.

C1, the Upper Middle Class, is your aspirational class, your Professional Classes who have their own vehicles and own their own homes, your Upper Management, aspiring to the status of, and sharing many of the values of, AB, will vote as AB does. That is, unpredictably. Even if you got them as a demographic, you’d have to ask if the resources and time required would be worth it.

C2 your Broad Middle Class, Midlevel to Lower Management, with a steady income but still renting rather than owning homes, may feel more ambivalent about, if not resentful of, AB, yet shares with AB and C1, a resentment and fear of, E. Therefore, it can be nudged in one direction or another, as a demographic.

Though one politically-active advertising person I talked to says Classes ABC are better off treated as one chunk, with similar aspirations (and perhaps, prejudices?). And put together, ABC can compete with D and E.

Class D, the Working Class, according to one advertising person I spoke to, can be broken down as follows:

D1 holds jobs; your salaried employees in factories, etc.

D2 occasionally works, whether seasonal work or without the benefit of permanent jobs, for example your SM salesgirls.

Put together, Class D has the lion’s share of the votes. Will it likely share more in common with E, in terms of the values that will mobilize its members to vote for one candidate or another (emotional or idealistic or pragmatic appeals?); can it be mobilized in solidarity with, or opposition to Class E? Whatever the case, Class D is large and broad enough for all candidates to be willing to exert effort to actively compete to get a piece of that segment.

Class E, the Unemployed, is, perhaps, almost exclusively the preserve of the Machine politicians, in that they are more likely to already be incorporated in the command vote networks.

This is a picture that essentially underlines what is a perennial frustration of the blogger demographic, which everyone basically assumes is a largely Middle Class one: that as a constituency, the Middle Class is relatively unimportant, politically:

Still, how would you motivate people to vote for you?

Appeal to idealism? Reform. A Better Philippines. A Fresh Start. Change.

Appeal to pragmatism? Jobs. Benefits. Security. Stability. Discipline. Order.

Ideally, appeal to both sides, the Yin and Yang, of as many people as possible?

Or bring in the Fear Factor? Here is where the Republican Playbook (its continuing evolution can be seen in this entry in The Treatment and in a Miami Herald story), used to such effective advantage by the present administration, comes in:
Republican Playbook

Next time, I’ll explore, further, information that might be relevant in exploring the pocketbook-as-vote-getter.

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