Jobs

By the time this column appears, US President Barack Obama should have delivered a key policy speech concerning job creation. From the previews, we know the speech will propose a $300 billion package that includes tax supports, infrastructure initiatives and retraining of those chronically unemployed.

The details of that speech will be closely scrutinized. There are those who condemned it before it was delivered. The markets will surely seize upon it as a piece of good news, whatever it contains. Any attempt to reflate the US economy is welcome to a world weary warring against a return to recession. Last week, we saw the global markets enter yet another phase of extreme volatility where investors grab any piece of good and bad news and then respond disproportionately to them.

No one expects the Obama jobs program to approximate Roosevelt’s New Deal Program that pulled America out of the Depression. There is simply too much existing public debt and not enough revenues to fund a program of such scale.

Too, any jobs program will involve public expenditure. That means it will pass through a hostile, Republican-dominated US Congress. That is a cruel gauntlet manned by legislators dogmatically opposed to additional social spending.

Already, some analysts are characterizing the jobs package more as a political maneuver rather than an exclusively economic initiative.

Should the US Congress block a costly job-creation package, Obama can blame Republicans for the serious unemployment now taking its toll on his popularity and diminishing his prospects for reelection. On the other hand, if the Congress throws its support behind the jobs program, Obama’s prospects for reelection brightens.

Unemployment is, by far, the single stickiest problem haunting Obama. No American president ever won reelection when the unemployment rate stood at nine percent or worse. Presently, US unemployment stands at 9.1 percent. Last week markets across the globe took a nosedive after the quarterly jobs report showed there was no net increase in employment.

Creating employment is a riddle most economies have difficulty solving.

One characteristic of the new economy we labor under is “jobless growth.” With all the new technologies coming into play at such a fast rate, the most efficient economies create greater wealth with lesser jobs. Large social sectors, those who have lost their place in the new technological order, could not be reabsorbed into the economic mainstream.

Under prevailing technological conditions, it might seem that any jobs program providing low-grade skills, will be merely palliative. A road-building program, for instance, will create some low-grade jobs in the near term only to shed them off later, after the roads are built.

The most sustainable way to address unemployment is to build up the skills profile of a country’s labor force. However, ratio between population growth and economic efficiency then comes into play.

In Libya, for instance, the young are highly trained but the economy simply creates no jobs for them. That is true of Egypt and advanced economies like Britain and France. Economies must not only train their young for competitiveness, they must expand rapidly as well.

This brings this shuddering thought: How will the Philippines manage? We have a high population growth rate, a slackening GDP growth rate and a sinking educational system. Instead of a jobs program, we are putting scarce public funds into a short-term conditional cash transfer program that buys popularity for this administration but not for the next.

Plenary powers

DOJ Secretary Leila de Lima invokes “plenary powers” we have never heard of before to override the rules and procedures of the agency she heads.

Earlier, she escalated the immigrations watchlist as a means of harassing people against whom no cases have been filed. Now, by invoking unseen “plenary powers” she expands the margins of whim and narrows the realm of rules. In place of Orwell’s Big Brother, it seems we now have “Big Sister” diminishing the sphere of liberty our people enjoy.

De Lima invoked those “plenary powers” when she issued a Department Order this week reconstituting a panel to re-reinvestigate the Gerry Ortega killing. That order violates the very rules the Department set for such investigations to protect the rights of the accused.

The first panel recommended charges to be filed against four men directly involved in the killing while clearing, for lack of sufficient evidence, former Palawan governor Joel Reyes and four others implicated by one of the accused.

Lawyers for the Ortega family put in a motion for reconsideration. The panel denied the motion on the strong legal ground that “an extrajudicial confession of an accused is evidence against him but not evidence against his co-accused.” That rule applies both to trials as well as to preliminary investigations.

When the Ortega lawyers moved for a reinvestigation, Senior State Prosecutor Edwin Dayog denied the motion once more. In his resolution, Dayog pointed out that “reopening of the preliminary investigation for the purpose of receiving additional evidence presupposes that the case has been submitted for resolution but no resolution has been promulgated. Since a resolution has already been promulgated, the motion to reopen is not proper and has to be denied.”

Recall why the rule on double jeopardy was universally adopted. It is to protect the accused from constant revival of an accusation, even if initially found innocent against it, until such point that guilt might be somehow established.

De Lima threatens the rule on double jeopardy by stepping over her prosecutors and ordering the case reopened even after it was resolved — reportedly after a delegation representing the Ortega family called on her. She opens a window that will allow politics to snow under legal procedures intended to protect free citizens.