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Corruption, primarily in government, has become a major issue in poor countries including the Philippines.

One of the reasons is that it’s there, like Mount Everest, having been around for decades in these countries, and having grown into proportions so monstrous it’s evident in every arena of public life.

Another reason is the international finance institutions’–for example the World Bank’s and the Asian Development Bank’s–relatively recent focus on it.

It’s logical enough. Corruption has so metastasized that these institutions now see it as a hindrance to foreign investments, which in their view is the key to economic development in the former colonies and present neo-colonies. (A neo-colony is a country that has the formal trappings of independence, but whose economic policies and governance are actually under foreign control.)

Bureaucratic extortion and irregularities in the awarding of government contracts–meaning the non-implementation of such rules as bids and bidding conditions, for example–not only add to the cost of doing business in the Philippines. They also mean unpredictable results in one’s ventures.

When a foreign investor stays away for these reasons, goes the argument, the result is that the employment that could otherwise have been generated doesn’t happen. The production of goods people can use or consume doesn’t take place. Economic growth suffers as a result.

Progressive economists like Alejandro Lichauco take exception to the argument that assigns a crucial role to foreign investments as a factor in economic development. They point out that the amount of employment generated by foreign ventures is often exaggerated, that foreign investors put in much less capital than conventional economists claim, and that they in fact make use of domestic credit facilities.

In any event, the World Bank and the ADB look at corruption primarily as a hindrance to foreign investments. Characteristically, the most recent ADB report on corruption in the Philippines is entitled “Improving the Investment Climate in the Philippines.”

And yet the most critical consequence of corruption is not its impact on the confidence of foreign investors, but on the citizenry in terms of inadequate social services, and even on the country’s prospects for the future. Corruption also kills. And as we have seen in the Philippines, corruption compromises the country’s future.

Filipinos are familiar with roads that wash away with the first rain, bridges that collapse, and buildings without fire exits–all made possible via the inspectors of these constructions’ looking the other way in consideration of the usual SOP (“Standard Operating Procedure”: a previously respectable term that in the bureaucracy now means bribery).

When the inevitable comes–when a bridge collapses under less than the load it was built for, or when a fire breaks out–hundreds die and are injured. But not only kickback-built structures maim and kill. In November of 2004, Filipinos also learned that the medical services of the Armed Forces of the Philippines also administer expired drugs to soldier-patients. Such drugs are given away free by the drug companies. Using them instead of purchasing their still potent counterparts means that the funds thus “saved” can go into the bank accounts of the responsible officials. No one knows how many soldiers or the dependents of soldiers have died as a result.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education, one of the most corrupt government departments in the Philippines together with Public Works and Finance, has dumbed-down who knows how many people by making error-filled textbooks available to millions of school children.

The same department has also made sure that there will be more than the usual number of dolts among the citizenry in the future by hiring unqualified but politically-connected teachers. It also has a classroom shortage so severe thousands of children can’t attend school for weeks at a time every rainy season because their “classrooms” are actually the shade of the nearest mango tree.

The ADB report correctly observes that corruption is now “systemic and widespread across all levels of the bureaucracy”. But Tom Crouch, ADB Country Director for the Philippines, told a press conference that the will to implement reforms is not at issue in the Philippines, but rather “the pace of reform.”

Crouch said he was convinced of the Arroyo government’s commitment to reform, but said in the same breath that what is missing is “firm political will and commitment to implement the required policies and civil service reform.”

One can understand Crouch’s dilemma. The ADB report identifies the culprit as the bureaucracy–but the ADB nevertheless has to rely on the big bureaucrats who control the bureaucracy to reform it.

The biggest bureaucrat in the Philippines is the President, who occupies a post so powerful he or she can influence what laws Congress will pass and even how the Supreme Court will interpret them, on the basis of his or her domestic and foreign policies–or what pass for policies.

If she wishes, the President can also summarily dismiss corrupt officials in both the military and civilian bureaucracies. The President can convince the bureaucracy that she is truly committed to rooting out corruption by seeing to it that her associates and relatives as well as she herself are above suspicion for the same offenses.

Despite the vast powers available to the Presidency, no one who has occupied that post has used them to combat corruption. On the contrary. Cronyism–favoring one’s associates over others–has become a principal hallmark of the Presidency, as have the prosperity of relatives, and in most instances, the President’s own. The biggest and most corrupt officials are tolerated, their remaining in office assured by their closeness to the chief executive and by the excuse that nothing can be proven in court, while apprehending small-time crooks are held up as proof of government sincerity in combating corruption.

Why this happens is rooted in the elite monopoly over political power, which itself is assured by fraudulent elections in which who has the most money decides victory. Once elected, the official must pay off the debts, political or otherwise, he or she has incurred–and one of the modes of repayment is appointment to posts lucrative in the opportunities for corruption they provide.

What’s part of the problem cannot be part of the solution. The dominance of the political and economic elite over the Philippine state being at the root of corruption in government, it stands to reason that the crooks cannot be their own prosecutors.

Only the participation of the poor and the powerless in governance can address corruption. Growing public awareness of its disempowerment as a critical factor in government corruption has thus led to vigorous efforts at broadening political participation.

But the elite that benefits from its monopoly of power, and which uses that power to rob the citizenry of public funds to the detriment of the social services to which it is entitled, will not be a party to the eradication of the very conditions that enable it to abuse public power in behalf of its private interests.

Every effort to broaden political participation, whether through authentic party- list groups representing marginalized sectors, or through mass movements and sectoral organizations like women’s and labor groups, is thus being met with police refusal to grant permits and/or violent police dispersals–and in extreme cases, with harassment, threats and assassinations.

It’s logical enough from the elite standpoint. The democratization of political power is the first condition for ending its monopoly over power and one of its consequences, “widespread and systemic” corruption. For the democracy to which it pays lip service to actually happen would be the worst of disasters for it.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)

There is hardly any arguing with the main points raised by the Citizens Committee on the National Crisis (CCNC). The problem is in the

Once hopefully thought to be part of the solution, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has beaten all records including Joseph Estrada’s in demonstrating–within less than two years–that she’s part of the Philippine problem.

That problem is bad government and its consequences: mass poverty, injustice and mass misery. The symptoms of that problem are many: inefficient, secretive governance; runaway corruption; rank political opportunism and money politics; failed but nevertheless persistently implemented economic and social policies; foreign dependence.

In 2001 Mrs. Arroyo might have had the unconditional support of Alberto Romulo and the rest of the Makati business elite, perhaps in their awareness even then that Mrs. Arroyo would favor them above others–or at least on the same level as the country’s police and soldiery.

At the very least, however, the organizations that provided the warm bodies in the Estrada Resign movement and at EDSA 2001–the teachers and students, the clerks and the secretaries, the doctors and nurses, the employees and workers, the fisherfolk and small traders–had their doubts about Mrs. Arroyo’s capacity, willingness and moral commitment to weed out corruption, provide honest government and, overall, encourage through example the growth of new politics.

In these doubts they were more than justified. Nothing in Mrs. Arroyo’s record suggested that she could deviate by so much as an inch from the well-worn paths of Philippine politics, let alone take the least-traveled roads of creative, mass-based leadership. Instead there was every sign that she was more likely to take the paths that lead not only to the wheeling and dealing for which Philippine politics is notorious, but also to the routes to such predictable acts as legislation to rush the country into precipitate globalization, and an agreement providing the legal basis for the return of foreign troops.

If Mrs. Arroyo traveled these accustomed paths as senator, as Vice President her determination to remain silent even when the Estrada government’s administrative and moral bankruptcy was being demonstrated–a determined tightlippedness that ended only in November of 2000–was moved not so much by loyalty to the government of which she was Vice President as by the cynical calculation that to criticize Estrada would mean losing the support of Estrada’s constituencies among the very poor.

This record was redolent not with new but with the old traditional politics in which Mrs. Arroyo’s political life had flourished. Mrs. Arroyo did pay lip service to new politics during her inaugural speech at EDSA on January 20, but was soon demonstrating that she wouldn’t have recognized new politics if it stood up on its hind legs and bit her. Nowadays she doesn’t even mention it, and indeed recoils visibly whenever any one else does, as if it were an unpleasant memory, or a lie too often told.

And yet it was new politics, after all, that had driven millions of Filipinos to EDSA and other sites all over the country after Estrada’s impeachment failed in January 16, 2001.

These millions were at EDSA to express their disgust at the way the traditional politics of money, opportunism and patronage had crushed their hopes for the constitutional removal from office of a President they perceived to be incompetent as well as corrupt.

This much was evident in their outrage over the actions of the Estrada Eleven, and their demand for a government that would be as transparent as it would be efficient.

Yet once in Malacanang and ensconced among her most favored men and women, Mrs. Arroyo dismissed outright the mass movement of which she had been a beneficiary. Instead she made it clear that it was the traditional centers of power in Philippine society–the political and economic elite, the Church, the police and the military–which she regarded as the main instruments in her ascendancy.

Within a few months she was demonstrating her allegiance to another traditional power in Philippine society, from which it had begun to declare its independence in 1991.

The attack on the United States of September 11, 2001, became Mrs. Arroyo’s excuse to demonstrate in policy terms her unquestioning and absolute commitment to US interests, including that which demanded the return of US troops to the Philippines and some form of supply and refueling rights only an arm’s length short of restoring their military bases.

Officially the benefit to the Philippines was supposed to be in the form of military assistance and training.

Unofficially it soon became crystal-clear that the more substantive benefit would be the stabilizing impact on the Arroyo government of implicit US support, as well as the US’s help in assuring her election in 2004.

Meanwhile, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teofisto Guingona Jr.’s disagreement with the re-engagement suggested by the return of US troops became one more occasion for Mrs. Arroyo to demonstrate the extent to which she will go for the sake of the narrowest political ends.

The offer to Blas Ople of the post of secretary of foreign affairs–an offer she had denied making, but which was apparently made both informally as well as through emissaries–was unprecedented even in the putrid annals of Philippine traditional politics. To this offer has been added other attempts to paper over the issues that had made EDSA 2 inevitable. Those initiatives include Mrs. Arroyo’s luring into her camp the likes of Ernesto Maceda, the Puno brothers and Estrada’s principal media operator, Jimmy Policarpio.

None of these makes the Philippine problem any closer to solution. Indeed the Philippines will continue to have a problem because Mrs. Arroyo has a problem. She is after all the President of the Philippines, and whether, unlike Estrada, she will be any better at it will depend on her capacity to look at the truth in the eye and to transcend the narrow personal interests traditional politics has taught her outweighs country and people.

She is seriously challenged in that respect, her principal problem being her having remained, despite EDSA 2, as traditional a politician as most of her predecessors have been.

In the worst traditions of old politics she claims to listen to the people, but doesn’t really hear them. Her first and principal response to criticism and disagreement is name-calling (“Abu Sayyaf lover,” “traitors,” “termite”), which while repugnant to the thoughtful, appeals to the worst instincts of the many.

She mistakes for resolve her unwillingness to consider other options except the most traditional. She has confused her personal interests with those of the nation by allowing foreign troops a foothold which could grow into a semipermanent presence in the Philippine South.

Constantly reminding the nation and the world of her credentials as an economist, she has driven the economy to record levels of unachievement, and pushed 20 percent of the people into the pit of black despair. Rumored to be brighter than Estrada, she is demonstrating daily the dumbing down effect of Philippine traditional politics on even the highest IQs.

Some of the militant groups were warning as early as mid-2001 that an Arroyo administration could end up worse than Estrada’s in the extent to which it could compromise Philippine independence, accommodate corruption and further reduce the government into an exclusive elite preserve. That did not seem possible then. It seems more than likely–that is exactly what is happening–now.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com/Today, July 13, 2002)