A warning flag over Philippines?

It was a toss-up, before I started writing this column, over whether I would write about Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, or GMA, the Queen of Rock ’em by Publicity.

Elvis, my idol, lost out – anyway, he’s safely dead. (Last Friday, 75,000 fans from all over the world flocked to his home-cum-shrine in Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, to commemorate the King’s death on August 16, 1977 – 25 years ago.)

This is not to say that, politically, GMA faces any prospect of expiring, but, indeed, she’s being buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and suffering from injuries, some of which are – alas – self-inflicted.

The sooner Malacañang stops talking about the dearly departed ex-DepEd Secretary Raul Roco, the sooner he’ll fade from the headlines. But they keep on making eck-eck about him in the Palace. He’s gone, and La Gloria has already accepted it. He’s now free to prepare to make his own bid for the presidency. The serious misstep GMA has to regret in the wake of that incident is that she herself provided Raul with one helluva impressive "exit line". He was able to slam her "policy of humiliation" before heading out the door. There’s no such thing as damage control in such matters. The damage has been done. The best move is to move on to the next problem. Or, better, the more-besetting and chronic problem: The fight against crime, with the emphasis on kidnapping, daylight robbery, akyat-bahay intrusion, and the continuing insolence and defiance of the gangsters (despite some of their ilk being paraded on television as arrested criminals).

For instance, there’s the Monumento-bound bus of Jell Transport which three gunmen robbed right on EDSA, in Makati, at high noon last Friday.

In that heist, the goons, armed with .38 caliber pistols and a fan knife, stripped the passengers of their cash and valuables. On that day, they were holding a Midnight Madness sale in the Glorietta, which was converted – its aisles clogged with vendors – into one huge tiangge. (Now I know where the illegal sidewalk stalls, being resolutely evicted by Metro Manila Development Authority Chairman Bayani Fernando, have gone – to the Glorietta.)

However, the Madness evidently had started at noontime in that ill-fated bus on EDSA.

Then there’s the plight of the 18-year old freshman student, a coed in – would you believe? – the Philippine College of Criminology. If lightning doesn’t strike twice, apparently the kidnappers struck twice in her case. Her mother said the girl, Eliza, had been abducted in May last year, but had been released weeks later. Her kidnappers reportedly slashed an "x" on her cheek to remind her not to talk – and "remember" them. Last August 14, Eliza was kidnapped again, her mother wailed, crying that she suspected the same group.

The above-mentioned crimes are merely two among the hundreds which occur everyday. The criminals are giving the dirty finger to the President’s daily jihad against the kidnapping, robbery, and drug syndicates. They’re visibly still not scared of the Chief Executive’s TV and print media "scare tactics".

But she must persist. She has to keep on slugging, particularly off-camera. Never mind the l’Affaire Roco and all those political fun and games. Salus populi est suprema lex, as the ancients wisely said. If a leader pursues, as the paramount goal, the people’s welfare and safety, all other rewards will follow. Forget the people’s good, and no amount of desperate image-building or even skullduggery will suffice.

* * *

Whenever I’m tempted to despair of our present-day troubles, I sometimes go back to the great Greek historian Thucydides who lived and wrote in the second half of the 5th century B.C. Thucydides, whose massive work of pre-Christian history is divided into eight books, is best renowned for his perceptive and exhaustive account of the Peloponnesian War – that mortal conflict between the "democracy" of Athens and the "dictatorship" of Sparta over the mastery of the Greek islands and colonies surrounding the "center of civilization" of olden days.

In summing up his narration of the 2,000-year war, which – like today’s confrontations – went through a Hot and Cold War period, Thucydides had the profound insight to observe that "human nature being what it is, events now past will recur in similar or analogous forms."

Authoritarian Sparta and its satellite bloc of subservient states uncannily looked like the former Soviet Union. Athens, with her claim to democratic government (the Greeks, after all, invented that word as well as the name of "tyrant") might be likened to the United States and its allies. The Athenian city-state was led by the wise Pericles and a freely-elected Council of Hundreds. Their confederations resembled the former Warsaw Pact nations (but Warsaw is now joining NATO) versus the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sparta was powerful on land, while the triremes or swift warships of the Athenian Navy controlled the sea.

In the end, both Athens and Sparta became corrupted by the usurious and bitter demands of their rivalry, their mutual suspicion, their series of wars. Sparta sued for peace and détente. The hawks and the "war party" in Athens (the equivalent of the Republican hardliners today?) were reluctant to accept this "unstable" situation. Athens, messianic and self-righteous in her role of defending and extending the frontiers of "democracy", finally got involved in a costly and ruinous civil war in faraway Sicily – a parable, perhaps, for an Athenian version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or an assault on Iraq? At last, her leaders confused and blundering, her soldiers and sailors losing energy and nerve, her strength drained and depleted, Athens faded away – her vision debased and diminished, her power crumbled. Let’s trust that this may never be America’s fate, nor our own, and that of our other allies. But the warning signs are posted on the highway of history — and only the deliberately blind can miss their meaning.

Is there anything new under the sun? The masterful Pericles, at the dazzling height of his success and power, once ruefully admitted: "I rule Athens, Athens rules Greece, Greece rules the world — but my wife rules me!"

As Thucycides records it so eloquently, on the other hand, Pericles also delivered one of the finest speeches of mankind – at the grand funeral the Athenian nation gave at considerable public cost to honor their war dead. Pericles, tasked to deliver the first funeral oration, spoke with erudition of the democratic tradition which, he said, made Athens endure. He pointed out that "If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if the man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no real harm. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code, which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace."

When we consider that these words were uttered more than 2,500 years ago, we cannot help but remark: What a modern ring they have to them! They remain relevant to our day and time.

* * *

Last Friday’s Asian Wall Street Journal carried a four-column article by James Hookway (who also writes for the Far Eastern Economic Review), alarmingly headlined: "WARNING FLAG OVER PHILIPPINES?"

Said the ASWJ: "Five years ago, the Philippines was hammered by Asia’s financial crisis. Now the country risks getting sideswiped by the threat of a similar crunch in Latin America. Among Asian economies, the Philippines most often prompts comparisons with trouble spots across the Pacific, mainly because Manila faces a widening budget deficit, financed largely by foreign borrowing."

"Widespread tax evasion," the Wall Street Journal correspondent asserts, "has stretched this year’s projected deficit to about 4 percent of the Philippines’ gross domestic product – close to 4 percent to 5 percent predicted for Brazil. In contrast, the International Monetary Fund predicts Indonesia – a country ravaged in Asia’s 1997 crisis – will run a budget deficit of less than 2.5 percent of GDP this year."

The writer observed that halfway through the 2002 fiscal year, the Philippines has reached 92 percent of its full-year budget deficit target of P130 billion ($2.51 billion).

"Rene Banez, commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue," Hookway says, "blames slumping tax receipts and most economists agree. Manila’s tax revenue fell to 10 percent of GDP in 2001, down from 13 percent in 1997, and the percentage continued to slide during the first five months of this year."

That compares, the article noted, with a tax revenue-to-GDP ratio of about 25 percent in Malaysia and about 17 percent in Thailand, countries where collection rates are rising.

Sus, the conclusion being drawn is that Malaysia, Thailand, and even Indonesia, are doing much better than us. Madam President: This should be a wake-up call!

Being compared with Brazil is catastrophic. We must remember that Brazil – the immense country which comprises virtually half of South America – is in such horribly desperate straits that the IMF had to rush in to attempt to rescue the collapsing economy with an unprecedented loan infusion of $30 BILLION! It’s not likely the IMF will do the same thing for us if we sink to a similar low.

Already, as the Journal opines, "the Philippines deficit has rattled the currency market, despite the country’s otherwise fair economic performance. After hovering at 50 to 51 pesos to the dollar for most of the year, the exchange rate slipped to 52 pesos Wednesday, while most other Asian currencies are rallying on the dollar’s weakness."

That’s cause for concern.

The AWSJ piece is even-handed, on the other hand. It ends almost on an optimistic note. But let’s not forget the warning that has been so bluntly and earnestly delivered. The headline of the article says it all: A warning flag has been hoisted over the Philippines for all the world to see.