P-Noy actions clash with APEC-2015 goals

Like the bullet-planting extortion racket at the Manila International Airport, the traffic gridlock in south Mega Manila starting last weekend is, in the eyes of Malacañang, all the citizens’ fault. Vehicular flow jammed for 40 hours, from dawn of Monday to late night Tuesday, due to urbanites’ hardheadedness. Already, for a smooth APEC summit, the haciendero at the Palace shut down public schools and offices for four days (Tuesday-Friday), and private firms for two (Wednesday-Thursday). The national capital’s 14 million pesky sacadas should have taken that to mean to drop everything as early as the preceding Saturday, and stay home or go off to the province. But no, they insisted on getting to work and earning a day’s wage, looking into their olds and meeting medical appointments, and going about their useless little lives. Hence, the traffic!

That hundreds of thousands of workers didn’t make it to work or had to walk tens of kilometers home when buses and jitneys called it quits, that they missed appointments to obtain passports and foreign work visas or flights to overseas jobs and long-booked business arrangements is not, for the P-Noy administration, an offshoot of its incompetence. Rather, the media are, like in the “tanim bala” shakedowns at the airport, only blowing things out of proportion. To paraphrase the Press Secretary, what’s a million locked down Mega Manilans compared to a national population of a hundred million?

That the MRT-3 commuter train reportedly conked out again on Monday and Tuesday is, for P-Noy’s publicists, the fault of the negativist press. It was working in half the 17-kilometer line on the next two days, so what’s the big deal? And what’s this report that a woman in labor had to give birth inside a taxicab because the cops on steadfast security duty wouldn’t let anyone without an APEC Card through their cordon to the hospital on the bayside boulevard where her Ob-Gyn was waiting? Those bleeding-heart rights activists would sue, they say? Likely, as in Netizens’ calls to sack P-Noy’s favorite Transport Secretary and Manila airport GM for the bullets-in-luggage scam, there’s a plot to discredit Malacañang and the presidential candidacy of its anointed Mar Roxas. Hmm, better call in the NBI to investigate that conspiracy angle too.

As the P-Noy tenure makes it look, there would be no bullet-planting if only Filipinos would stop taking airplanes. Similarly there would be no traffic if only they’d stop commuting.

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Shut out as they may have been from the APEC, Filipinos are being lectured by their leaders to expect gains from it. If only they’d stop nitpicking on the P9.8-billion cost of hosting the pre- and summit proper; or the billions of pesos of man-hours and business opportunities lost due to the traffic, the lockdown around the summit venues, and the cancellation of 1,800 international and domestic flights at the Manila airport – airlines alone lost P2 billion, provincial vacation resorts likely quadruple during APEC week – they’d be able to see those gains. Where exactly, the leaders can’t say.

The way to judge APEC-2015’s effects on the Philippines is by its two announced aims.

One is its call for “inclusive economics.” That would be hard to explain to Filipinos just victimized by the political-economic elite’s exclusivist stance during APEC week. Harder still, after the haciendero at the Palace rejected only last week the plea of the Senate President and House Speaker to lower individual-income taxes.

The issue is clear-cut. The present tax rates were enacted nearly three decades ago. The cutoff annual income is P500,000 ($10,000), at which the earner must pay P125,000, plus 32 percent of any excess. The P500,000 then could buy a brand-new car, the private schooling of three children, the home mortgage, and more. Today it is merely the entry-level pay in a call center – yet the rate is highest in this corner of Southeast Asia. Ten years ago, in enacting the 12-percent Value-Added Tax, the government told taxpayers it would cut income taxes because the tax burden would henceforth be on consumption. The growing middle class has been waiting for the fulfillment of the promise. The extra income would go a long way to stretching home budgets. Besides, expenses from the additional take-home from tax cuts would be subject to the ubiquitous 12-percent VAT.

P-Noy would hear nothing of it. His Finance Secretary hisses into his ear that any altering of tax rates should be “wholistic” and not cover only the middle class (the lower class is exempt from income taxes). Besides, he sneers, the government would lose P29 billion a year from tax cuts. That’s coming from one who has wasted P10 billion wining, dining, and blinding international credit rating outfits – yet hardly has attracted new investors.

It has been pointed up to P-Noy that if he scraps his P30-billion yearly insertion in the national budget of a Risk Management Fund, he could offset the P29-billion annual revenue loss from an individual-income tax cut – and have P1 billion to spare.

Such Fund is exclusivist, contrary to the “inclusive economics” of APEC-2015. It is for influential tycoons to reimburse from Malacañang losses incurred from profligacy and mismanagement. From it too they draw sovereign guarantees. Example: the P7.5 billion that Transport Sec. Joseph Abaya wants to pay Ayala Corp. as damages even before its consortium can start extending the LRT-1 commuter rail to Cavite, because his agency failed (deliberately?) to provide fire and earthquake studies on the existing line.

The other APEC-2015 goal is “regional cooperation against climate change.” That’s so apt for the Philippines, which two years ago was struck by the strongest typhoon in human history – believed to result from global warming, particularly rising ocean temperatures near the Equatorial Belt. And yet, Philippine leaders did not dare take leading roles in the discussions. That’s probably because they were afraid to be asked about the insensitively, incompetently slow rehab of the areas ravaged by Super Typhoon Yolanda. Malacañang had built less than a thousand of the 10,000 it promised to build, after NGOs and private firms took over five times the number.

Why, it took US President Barack Obama to introduce to APEC summiteers – including P-Noy – 31-year-old Filipino inventor Aisa Mijeno, who needs her government’s help to mass-produce her game-changer – a lamp that runs for eight hours on a glass of seawater.

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