Opinion
PRESIDENT Duterte revived us about his vision for the cityfears about martial law over the state and his decision to impose weekend. authoritarian rule. He said no one can stop him Abella’s comparison of Presifrom declaring it—not Con- dent Duterte to Lee smacks of gress, not even the Supreme ignorance of fact. Unlike DuCourt. This is so he could deal terte, Lee did not reward his with the worsening problem of supporters with sensitive posiillegal drugs and protect the Fil- tions in government. ipino people. Abella also said that like Lee, Recall that it was only recently Duterte is decisive and a “man when he said martial law would of action.” My gulay, how can not solve the problem of the na- Duterte be decisive when he tion. During the time of former says one thing only to contradict President Ferdinand Marcos, it it the next time around? did not solve the problems of the I can understand Abella, country, either. though. Like Andanar, he is just If you are confused as to what trying to earn his salary. might be going on in the Presi*** dent’s mind, so am I. At the rate Former President and now he is talking, he may actually House Deputy Speaker Gloria declare martial law if only to Macapagal Arroyo wants the protect the nation, especially Bureau of Internal Revenue the youth. shielded from political interferWhat really worries me is that ence. She filed House Bill 695 Duterte said he could ignore the creating the National Revenue restrictions that can be posed Authority. by the other branches of govI believe it’s about time. ernment, as provided for by the Arroyo said a National Rev1987 Constitution. This would enue Authority is needed to only be possible under a one- address the growing dissatisman rule, or under a revolution- faction of taxpayers, particuary government. larly over frontline services, I am one with the President high-level tax evasion, avoidin his war against illegal drugs, ance and increasing perception especially since thousands of of systematic corruption in the officials are also involved in BIR. Past efforts to reorganize this trade. There are millions and overhaul the bureau were of drug users in the country. unsuccessful. This is a real problem. I do not Former President Arroyo believe any president can solve knows only too well what ails this within a six-year term. This the BIR—at least three fundais a difficult journey, endless mental institutional constraints. even. There is the But with his rigid personnel repeated promanagement nouncements system where about martial promotion is This really law, President based merely Duterte has worries me. on loyalty and succeeded seniority rather in instilling than exemplary a climate of per for mance. fear among the And then you people. have a compensation structure Worse, after he was quoted that restricts the hiring of firstabout the matter in newspa- rate professionals. The strict per reports, now comes Com- line-item budgeting system also munications Secretary Martin limits the flexibility in the alloAndanar saying the President cation of funds. was misquoted. Andanar only Both Houses of Congress makes the President look like a should make the Arroyo bill a liar. Duterte would be better off priority. It is timely and urgent. without him. The BIR has consistently per*** formed poorly in the collection Secretary Ernesto Abella, Pal- of taxes. The NRA, on the other ace spokesman, has compared hand, would start with a clean the President to Singapore’s slate. founder and first Prime Minister A Revenue Board would be Lee Kuan Yew, who transformed created composed of four govthe third-world city-state into a ernment representatives and first-world nation. three from the private sector. How ignorant can people The government representaaround President Duterte get? tives would include the heads There’s no comparison at all. of the Department of Finance as The authoritarian rule of Lee chairperson, budget and manwas necessary because of civil agement, the National Economstrife. ic and Development Authority Lee’s rule gave emphasis to and the Securities and Exchange meritocracy. To avoid corrup- Commission. tion, he gave all public officials The private sector reprethe same compensation as those sentatives shall include exgiven in the private sector. Lee’s perts in the field of economrule was marked by the suppres- ics, accounting, law, business sion of press freedom and politi- management and other allied cal dissent. He succeeded. professions. They would serve In the early 1960s, I was for a fixed tenure to avoid disamong a select group of jour- ruption of services. The chief nalists invited to Singapore. We executive or CEO would be apinterviewed Lee, where he told pointed by the Revenue Board.
Selling... From A4 collectively known as Official Development Assistance for the next five years. That’s a record, Dominguez said, for any Philippine government for any five-year period, not to mention a record for the first half-year of any government in the past. The China-Japan ODA packages are the same as the US Millennial Challenge grants, in that they are targeted to fund specific projects and will in all likelihood be implemented using studies, technology and even private contractors provided by the granting countries. The only difference being, as Duterte already pointed out, that both China and Japan are letting the Philippines deal with the illegal drug problem and
other initiatives of the new government the way it wants to deal with them. But despite Duterte’s hunch about foreign aid being proven correct—or perhaps because of it—the Dominguez story was relegated to the inside pages of newspapers and given short shrift in the rudimentary and superficial business reports of broadcast news. And there are some in media who still profess that they cannot understand Duterte’s animosity towards the Fourth Estate. Fair is fair. Except, of course, when you’ve decided—regardless of all evidence to the contrary—to be relentlessly unfair. And if media doesn’t get the message and get it pretty soon, bad news won’t even sell anymore. It will just be bad news, repeated endlessly in the tiny, out-of-step echo chambers of unreasonable critics.
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The ‘federal’ idea
TO THE POINT EMIL P. JURADO
Confused? So am I
TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2017
FORMATION GARY OLIVAR (Part 1) EVEN during the early days of his campaign, candidate Digong was already a vocal proponent of changing our system of government from unitary to federal. This was clearly the product of his many years at the helm of Davao, one of the world’s largest cities in terms of land area. But despite its size, it is simply too far away from “imperial Manila” to enjoy comparable largesse from the national government. This inequity must have rankled the long-time mayor of Davao as well as many of his fellow politicians from the island of Mindanao, a region of vast but unrealized promise. It was they who came together over time to form the backbone of the federalist movement, coalesced in such political parties as PDP-Laban and the Centrist Democratic Party. At one point, through the initiative of Cagayan de Oro’s Nene Pimentel, former Senate president and stalwart of the anti-dictatorship movement, the federalist forces enjoyed a breakthrough, with the passage in 1991 of the Local Government Code that sought to implement the local autonomy provisions of the 1987 Constitution. But this breakthrough was short-lived and half-baked, as Pimentel will be the first to admit, and the federalist campaign has since resumed.
*** In 2005, a 25-member constitutional commission appointed by President Arroyo drafted a new charter that, among other things, called for a federal form of government to be headed by a unicameral parliament. Unfortunately, this initiative was cut short by the “Hello Garci” hysteria whipped up by disgruntled deserters from her Cabinet. Nonetheless, the draft still subsists today as a reference for present-day efforts to craft a new constitution. Good things, after all, are never wasted. Also available is a draft document from 1998 under the Estrada government, a couple of House and Senate resolutions, as well as what must now be a growing number of submittals to Congress, solicited or not. It is this abundance of reference material that gives me hope that the writing of a new constitution by a constituent assembly will not take forever, regardless of what kind of congressmen we have today. The wheel need not be reinvented. If a president in the mold of Duterte chooses to crack the whip on the congressmen (and senators) through his own appointive constitutional commission, we may well see a plebiscite on a new charter held as early as next year, 2018. This would just be in time for the May 2019 mid-term elections to convert into the first-ever free election of a new Philippine federal parliament. *** Soon after the President’s inauguration last June, I was asked to help convene a purely voluntary people’s initiative to educate
the general public on “the federal idea.” Under the leadership of Raul Lambino (now PDP-Laban’s deputy secretary general for constitutional change), our group quickly dubbed itself the PDu30 Constitutional Reformers towards Federalism, or “PDu30 Core.” As a member of the speakers bureau, I have since spoken at over a dozen occasions, mostly around Metro Manila, before gatherings as small as Rotary Club monthly fellowships, and as large as the annual convention of over 5,000 civil engineers in the cavernous auditorium of SMX Convention Center. The question I’ve been most frequently asked is how many states we should have in a federal set-up. Fortunately, it is also the easiest one to answer. The suggested number of states has ranged from the ridiculous (as many states as there are provinces or even sub-provinces and large cities), to the conventional (12-13 states broadly based on ethnolinguistic groupings, as proposed by former Senate President Pimentel), to the unconventional (only three states comprising the country’s three island/regions, as proposed by National Economic and Development Authority’s first head Dr. Gerry Sicat). The Pimentel version works out to an average population of 12 to 13 million per state. This is well above the average of about 4.5 million per American state. Our states would clearly not be too small, even if we take account of the significant income and wealth disparities between the two countries. *** My own preference is a modi-
fication of Dr. Sicat’s version, to comprise half a dozen states: Northern/Central Luzon, Metro Manila-NCR, Southern Tagalog/ Bicol, Visayas, Mindanao, and Bangsamoro. The arguments are primarily economic, not ethnic. On size and population grounds, Luzon clearly needs to be broken up into at least two states, with a stronger region (central Luzon and southern Tagalog) carrying a weaker partner (northern Luzon and Bicol). NCR becomes our equivalent of Washington DC, New York, and Boston rolled into one mega-capital. The Visayas are a string of islands that require all sorts of interconnecting infrastructure and utilities (power generation and distribution, feeder airports, interisland bridges and RoRo). These are needed to sustain interconnected business models (e.g. tourism packages, agriculture to agriprocessing) and are best planned and financed as one region. The sheer contiguous size of Mindanao argues for ambitious, island-wide projects to jump-start its potential: from its own nuclear plant and power grid, to its own highspeed tollroads and railway system, to vast networks of corporate farms and attached agri-processors. And of course an autonomous Bangsamoro state is our longdeferred response to our unhappy Muslim brethren. More optimistically, it also opens the door for the country to the banks and capital markets of Islamic finance south of our borders. (To continue on Friday) Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com
Remembering Manila’s Mel Lopez HAIL TO THE CHAIR VICTOR AVECILLA THE Philippines lost another dedicated public servant last Dec. 31 when ex-Manila Mayor Gemiliano “Mel” Lopez Jr. passed away at the age of 81. Mel Lopez started his political career as a city councilor in Manila. Running for a seat in one’s city council may seem like a typical starting line for every aspiring political leader back then, but Lopez’s political plans were not easy to pursue. He was, after all, running in Manila, the city where politicians play hardball all the time, even outside the election season. Despite a 1948 law declaring Quezon City the capital of the Philippines, Manila was where real politics took place. The iconic Plaza Miranda—which hosted political rallies where national and local issues were debated, and where candidates for national and local public office submitted themselves to the scrutiny of the electorate—was in the heart of the city. Manila was definitely the political nerve center of the country, and as Vice President Salvador “Doy” Laurel once said, “Where Manila goes, so does the nation.” Since Lopez was a fiery speaker, he easily got elected. Because he kept his campaign pledges, he easily got reelected. Lopez’ reelection bid in 1971 almost cost him his life. On August 21, 1971, two hand grenades exploded at the proclamation rally of his anti-Marcos political party at Plaza Miranda (mistakenly referred to as a miting de avance in some print and video
Human... From A4 found Oro a very powerful movie was precisely because it got it right with respect to social and environmental injustice in the country. Most people I personally know who protested against the killing of the dogs are certainly against the massacre of the miners and sympathize with the victims of the drugs war. More importantly, the argument of the Oro defenders incorrectly dichotomized human rights and animal rights. Animal rights, protection, and welfare are concepts that are centuries old and universally recognized. It is the idea that animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives and the need to avoid suffering. Advocates maintain that animals should not be view solely as food, clothing, entertainment and beasts of burden but must be accorded humane treatment. While there exist extremist views on the concept, a compromise approach has gained currency in that animals may be used as resources so long as they do not unnecessarily suffer; they have some moral standing but not in the same genre as human beings who are considered superior species. As early as the 1820s, the United States has already enacted anti-cruelty statutes. In 1860s, the first Humane So-
materials), causing death and injury to many. Lopez was seriously injured, but timely medical attention saved his life. Although Lopez’ political allies blamed President Ferdinand Marcos for the incident, Marcos insisted the communists planned it. From revelations of ex-communist cadres made public after 1986, it turned out that Marcos was right—Jose Ma. Sison of the Communist Party of the Philippines orchestrated the bombing and correctly predicted that the people will blame Marcos for it. Lopez was reelected, but his political career was cut short by martial law in September 1972. Soon thereafter, Manila Mayor Ramon Bagatsing, who was elected under the anti-Marcos political party, switched sides and became a Marcos ally. Many in the Manila city council followed suit. Since Lopez refused to be a political butterfly, he was eased out of the corridors of power in city hall by Bagatsing and his minions. Consequently, Lopez became a staunch supporter of political opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. Lopez also became a stalwart in Doy Laurel’s anti-Marcos political party Unido—the United Nationalist Democratic Organization. Six seats were alloted for the City of Manila in the May 1984 elections for the Batasang Pambansa. Lopez was one of five opposition candidates for assemblyman who won in Manila under the UNIDO banner. Those who won with Lopez were Eva Estrada Kalaw, Gonzalo Puyat II, Carlos Fernandez, and Jose Atienza, Jr. A sixth opposition party candidate, Jose Lina, lost to Arturo Tolentino of the proadministration political party,
the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan. After Corazon “Cory” Aquino seized the presidency in February 1986, she designated Lopez as officer-in-charge of the City of Manila, replacing Mayor Bagatsing. In 1988, Lopez was elected city mayor in his own right. While he was city mayor, Lopez upgraded support services for the city’s out-of-school youth, and exposed a rice cartel which was manipulating the market price of the prime commodity. It was during Lopez’ tenure as mayor when the famous city hall clock tower was finally fixed to tell the correct time, everytime. As the dominant landmark of the city, Lopez saw to it that the clock tower was well-lit every evening to remind everybody that Manila is and remains the capital city of the Philippines. Lopez thought that his loyalty to Ninoy Aquino will be reciprocated by President Cory Aquino. In the end, Mrs. Aquino abandoned Lopez and supported exNational Bureau of Investigation Director Alfredo Lim, Lopez’ main rival for the top post in city hall. Sadly, Lopez lost to Lim. Losing his interest in elective public office, Lopez concentrated on sports development, particulary in boxing. He worked very hard to train Filipino boxers in the hope of having at least one of them win a gold medal in the Olympics. With Lopez’ gone, that quest may remain a national dream for quite some time. Unknown to many, Lopez has a quaint place in the history of the University of the Philippines (UP). When UP President Edgardo Angara increased tuition and other school fees in UP by as much as 350% in 1984, UP student leaders led by the now
famous Louis “Barok” Biraogo challenged Angara’s directive first, in the Quezon City Regional Trial Court, and ultimately, in the Supreme Court. Assemblyman Lopez came to the rescue when, upon Biraogo’s request, he whole-heartedly sponsored the photocopying of the voluminous papers the students-petitioners were required to file in the Supreme Court. Truth to tell, Biraogo did not know Lopez personally. Biraogo simply went to the Batasang Pambansa one evening, saw Lopez preparing to leave the building with other assemblymen, recalled seeing Lopez on the television news as an leading opposition leader, approached Lopez and identified himself as a UP student, and narrated to Lopez his group’s dire need for assistance in their court battle against Angara. Without much ado, and true to his role as a public servant, Lopez agreed to help and directed his assistant to assist Biraogo and his group. Since a deadline was imposed by the Supreme Court, the help Lopez provided truly saved the day for the UP students. In January 1986, Biraogo’s fraternity, the Upsilon Sigma Phi, organized a political rally in UP Diliman for the candidacies of Cory Aquino and Doy Laurel, who were running for president and vice president, respectively, in the “snap” presidential elections. Accepting Biraogo’s invitation, Lopez was one of five exclusive speakers in what eventually turned out to be, on account of the thousands who attended it, the biggest political rally every held in UP Diliman. Farewell, Mel Lopez. May God give the Philippines more public officials like you.
cieties and Societies for the Protection of Animals were formed to run animal shelters and promote the enforcement of animal cruelty laws. The movement grew still in the 1970s with the publication of the influential book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, authored by Peter Singer, considered the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Animal Liberation argues that interests of all beings capable of suffering are worthy of equal consideration and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. Singer argues that animal rights should be founded on the idea that animals also have the capacity to feel pain rather on their intelligence. He accuses speciesism (the notion that human beings, being naturally superior, are not morally restricted to exploit animals) of being similar to racism and sexism, in that they all deny moral and legal rights to one group in favor of another. Today animal welfare and protection are deeply entrenched practices not only in the United States but in the West as well. Highly publicized campaigns against animal cruelty and testing have been launched and have succeeded in many places and against many products (eg. clothes and fashion accessories) and
processes (including medical and pharmaceutical testing). The Philippines is, however, a newcomer in animal protection and welfare campaign. Under Republic Act No. 8485, the Animal Welfare Act of the Philippines of 1998, it became the policy of the state to “protect and promote the welfare of all animals in the Philippines by supervising end regulating the establishment and operations of all facilities utilized for breeding, maintaining, keeping, treating or training of all animals either as objects of trade or as household pets.” RA 8485 provides that persons hurting animals will be imprisoned for 6 months to two years and fined for P2,000 to P5,000. These penalties are quite light and is one reason practices that engender animal cruelty persist, such as the dog meat trade, dog fighting and racing, or “tambucho” killing and euthanasia and other forms of animal cruelty. Aside from the benign penalty imposed by the law, the problem lies in enforcement and a more sustained and effective education campaign on pet ownership, pet handling and safety, overpopulation and endangered species and in general more humane treatment of animals. The campaign becomes more challenging when animal cruelty is deeply ingrained in the culture of some ethnic and rural communities in the Philip-
pines. As an indigenous peoples’ rights advocate, I am fully conscious that there are cultural differences among peoples on how to relate to particular animals. A balanced approach is required in such cases and we need to allow for a pluralistic approach while recognizing emergent universal norms. Thus, under Philippine law, the killing of dogs, as part of ritual or ethnic custom, are actually allowed but they should be coordinated with the Bureau of Animal Industry and the Committee on Animal Welfare. The way we treat nonhumans is reflective of our capacity to treat our fellow human beings. None of this however is to deny that human and animal rights are of very different orders. Yet human rights is all about a good and civilized society, to the extent then that we can live in one where we can at least accord animals a modest, if appropriately refashioned, set of rights, devoid of barbarity towards these non-humans which prove to be so beneficial to human beings in a wide variety of ways. Oro is right about the injustice done to the miners. Its filmmakers are wrong about the slaughter of the dog/s. We must always uphold human rights and animal rights together. Facebook: tonylavs
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