Over a year into its administration, the divergent factions within Benigno Aquino III’s cackling gaggle of confidants, cabinet men, classmates, crushes and cabals still cannot get their act together. Too many conflicting interests and too many agendas.

Too much politics also, resurfacing recently when a key ally resigned and a factotum was reportedly retained in exchange for congressional votes to scuttle statutory elections.

At the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) a similar dilemma infests unchecked. Already, we’ve lost one of our most competent in exchange for retaining beyond reason and rationality a presidential protégé.

Increasingly, the medium of exchange – cabinet positions – is depreciating faster than the double-recession dollar.

In a single communications office there are Moe, Larry and Curly.

At the Department of the Interior and Local Governments, factionalism literally contributed to a massacre. Innocent lives lost are thus far the highest price paid for managerial weaknesses.

Dysfunctional factionalism evidences a slobbering lack of leadership. While constituencies might grudgingly forgive intellectual or emotional lapses, business cannot be as tolerant because blunders cost money.

Without leadership, a mishmash of beasties, brainiacs and buffoons enter a vacuum and result in factionalism.

There is one within Aquino’s muddled menagerie who the business community trusted might rise above the fray. DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas was to have been a no-nonsense manager. Incorruptible. Uncompromising. Headstrong and hardworking. He was to have been the lost leader we traded off when we accepted Aquino for as long as the latter did not steal from us.

For sure, Roxas is not lazy. The beat he follows is his own. Of the president’s men, it is Roxas who understands business.

In another life, I remember standing with him on a dark Quezon City curb, opposite a printing press. At an ungodly hour past midnight, we waited for the first copies of an investment prospectus we had worked on. I remember the hours invested, the financials crunched, the arguments, the lost tempers and the friendships re-won. To this day that public offering stands as one of the best capital-raising issues of the Philippine capital markets.

I also remember sitting outside the boardroom of a major television network. It was way after office hours. We had no financial analysts, no one to flip the charts. All we had was a comprehensive capital infusion proposal to catalyze the network to the top rung.

Lately, however, neck-deep in politics and light years from our investment banking days, Roxas now seems engulfed by politics’ corrosive culture of compromise.

In at least two instances, the DOTC’s positions impact negatively on the sanctity of corporate contracts - a matter increasingly alarming to investors and critical to attracting much-needed capital for the Public-Private Partnership, which ironically, Roxas himself conceived.

One is the continuing non-payment by a DOTC agency of liabilities owed. Aggravating this are issues of corruption, conspiracy and collusion.

Another is the tanking of a foreign-funded state-of-the-art port facility junked on the basis of belated DOTC reports declaring it “superfluous”. It takes more than superfluity to void a contract. Moreover, a presidential economic review agency labeled DOTC’s report “deficient”.

Risking credibility and expensive lawsuits, the disposition of both is at best tenuous. Few thought Roxas would fail these litmus tests.

It seems we all need reality checks. Perhaps the demands of politics and party intrude excessively. As a party official, he serves constituencies who are more equal than others.

Or maybe it is the distant call of a higher office echoing like a disembodied whisper that forces him to accept the vagaries of a factional administration that all too easily surrenders to trade-offs.

What he is today after a failed bid for the presidency and the vice-presidency contrasts with promises buried but reborn when he took over from his late brother Dinggoy and from there rekindled other promises unfulfilled by the late, great Gerry Roxas.

Mar Roxas stood taller than most. More than his presidential running mate, he was prepared for higher responsibilities, a journey derailed by the alchemy of unexpected circumstances and a coterie of circus ringmasters.

His congressional record was sterling. Where others were grandstanders, Roxas had grand visions. Where others had political designs, Roxas had preordained destiny. Where statutes involved commerce and economics, his leadership shone in such issues as the expanded value added tax, the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement, the business outsourcing industry, cheaper medicines and the investigations into pension plan fraud.

Figuratively, Roxas is the mythical lost son of Alexander in Kipling’s “The Man who would be King." Perhaps it is not too late to rekindle the torch Gerry Roxas had once lit.

The end of a beginning invariably compels a review of policies against outcomes. We all recognize that Benigno Aquino III was swept into office by unexpected circumstances, a rejection of the immediate past, hope for the future and the machinations of the ambitious. These make a review imperative. More, when we realize his track record prior to the presidency was unremarkable.

The alchemy of these factors is best tackled by more astute analysts. We have neither the stomach nor the acumen for politics so our criterion based on whoppers, lies and broken promises is simple if not simplistic, revealing a bias perhaps deemed unfair by those with some explaining to do.

Against critics, Malacanang foists an “it’s-too-early-to-tell” excuse with one factotum labeling commentators as troublemakers. That’s unfortunate. And idiotic. Only the lazy ignore wake-up calls. Our review is comprised of documented reversals. These are not functions of time but of conviction or its absence.

In no particular order, we’ve listed thirteen reversals of policies and pronouncements that reflect the consequences of a laid-back, feet-on-top-of-the-table, work-averse, delegated (or abdicated) style of mismanagement.

Let us start with the economy.

Sometime last April, amidst the uncontrollable rise in aggregate prices, Aquino promised to study the reduction of the Expanded Value-Added Tax. His timeline betrays him. A month before promising, speaking in Singapore, Aquino had already committed to keep the E-Vat despite its negative impact on the inflation-weary.

His position on taxes is similarly tenuous. Aquino promised no new taxes, yet his government insisted on implementing a heretofore suspended value added tax (VAT) on tolls despite VAT’s inapplicability on such fees.

Likewise on foreign investments, during the Public-Private Partnership launch, an appointee announced that the Philippines “is now open for business”.

Unfortunately realities conflict with clichés. Last week, one foreign chamber of commerce raised the issue of the instability of business contracts. Victimized by temperamental capriciousness are two critical projects- a French-funded port project and a Belgian-funded dredging operation, the latter twice signified legitimate by the Justice Department.

Last February, referring to a P28.5 million remittance from government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCC), Aquino claimed credit from his administration’s efforts in “working overtime to bolster our abilities to give back to the Filipino people”. Never mind that of the total, P9.3 billion were earned from 2003 to 2006, P5.4 billion from 2009, and P1.3 billion from 2010 - all prior to Aquino’s presidency.

Aquino likewise promised a lean cabinet and yet he created a three-headed bureaucracy by spawning a superfluous communications and strategic planning office. It would not have been a laughable media gadfly had not the immature hydra evolved into the antithesis of communications and strategy.

Still on appointments, vowing a “level playing field” Aquino declared over radio that he would not extend favors to “allies and supporters”. Yet, he did just that. Campaign supporters, their relatives and friends in the entertainment industry now sit on the boards of GOCCs and other agencies.

In Aquino’s playing field, obviously, some are more equal than others. In defending an official accused of involvement in carjacking and aiding and abetting corporate raids, Aquino evoked due process. Never mind that due process had already been applied by two departments.

Apparently, double and disparate standards rule. In another agency, within days, sans due process, Aquino unceremoniously sacked a distinguished and lettered career scientist.

In his inaugural, Aquino promised emergency employment. Last Labor Day, he promised one million jobs created under the Community-Based Employment Program (CBEP).

Again, the numbers don’t match. Between September 2010 and March 2011, unemployment ballooned from 7.4 million to 11.3 million while prospective jobs created by the CBEP top off at 832,132 of which 43.30% are generated by infrastructure works where short-term employment ends upon a project’s completion.

Worse, under Aquino, a good number of jobs, sadly lacking economic support, vanished completely. The statistics show that for half of Aquino’s first year, nearly 4 million gainfully working went from employed to unemployed.

At least the unemployed are alive. Before European ambassadors, Aquino declared seeking “closure” to extrajudicial killings. His record shows otherwise. From July 2010 to March 2011, fifty incidents of extrajudicial killings and disappearances were recorded. Do the math. In six years Aquino will attain what took the previous incumbency eight.

Mortalities are likely to escalate. Unaccountable autocracy has been imposed in Mindanao from Aquino’s insistence on denying Muslim Mindanao suffrage – a violation of his oath to defend democratic processes and the constitution.

Likewise, Aquino promised to enact a freedom of information law. On this promise, Aquino has completely reneged and betrayed years of spadework.

Finally, Aquino’s thirteenth whopper is a promise to quit smoking upon attaining the presidency. On that, Aquino’s failure is understandable. After all, quitting requires strength of conviction, internal fortitude and will power.

In the United States the damning issues of sexual indiscretions have resurged to a level that goes beyond tasteless tittle-tattle. Unfortunately the aptly labeled Weiner Scandal in New York, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity in California plus the recent indictment of a former mid-state presidential wannabe have rekindled flames and turned gossip into wildfires.

The question of sexual impropriety when it involves high-ranking politicians or heads of powerful organizations from which critical leadership and judgment are expected impacts on valid questions of character. For that reason, indiscretions are fodder for debate on one's fitness to govern.

After being caught posting lewd photographs and e-blasting these to at least one youngster, for nearly a week New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, first lambasted pranksters, lied to media and then fudged and fiddled on questions of indecency and authorship.

Sex scandals embroil a growing number of VIP men, including Tron of France, Sweden's King Gustaf, ex-Calif. Gov. Arnie, Italy's Berlusconi, and IMF's Khan. Edd Aragon

For those who deny that sexual indiscretions are irrelevant in a macho society such as ours, simply ask yourself what goes through a grown man’s mind when he positions a camera within inches of his groin to take a snapshot of his crotch.

What kind of executive decision-making is involved in the choice among exhibiting the family jewels through Twitter or Facebook? Will a 15-pixel crotch close-up increase satisfaction ratings among voting constituencies? Does this make one look cool or should he just drive around in a Porsche to impress the girls?

On a national scale, two-time presidential hopeful and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards was recently indicted for malversing US$ 925,000 of campaign contributions to keep secret an affair he had with his publicist. Edwards, who presents an image of a clean-cut, family-loving idealist admitted to the affair but rests his defense on the question of legal versus illegal contributions rather than the fact that he lied.

Across the Atlantic and into Europe, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was once caught “consorting” with minors in one instance, and in another, with a 42-year old prepaid escort. In other instances, the women involved were either a Moroccan belly dancer or a US$ 10,000 prostitute.

In the global financial world, the man who could nearly have been the president of France, one of the architects behind the establishment of the Euro, former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known among bankers as DSK, stands accused of sexual assault.

It is not his first.

In 2006, Sexus Politicus, a book by Christophe Dubois and Christophe Deloire on the relationship between sex and politics included a section on DSK.

In 2007, while at the IMF, DSK faced accusations involving “favoritism, or any other abuse of authority” when he had an affair with one of the Fund’s economists.

It is one thing for a plain vanilla nobody to get caught in a compromising position in a hotel room with the chambermaid thereby betraying spousal trust. It is quite another for a person installed in power by false imagery, to live out a lie, betray the public confidence and project a persona starkly disparate from that presented before constituencies who’ve bestowed both faith and trust.

The Arthurian lore on the requisites for a knight worthy to pursue the grail says it all – when upon leading a righteous charge, one cannot live a lie.

But never mind indecency. Let us not moralize. Never mind depravity. Let us be like the French who are accustomed to having monarchs consort with anyone they choose. Let us invoke our cliché cop-out excuses and crusted self-denial defenses. Different standards are applied to Filipino males. More so for unattached bachelors.

Having said that, let us however refocus on questions of righteous character where we rallied and reposed upon our current leaders the mantle and the mace to mount a white steed and run after those who had previously betrayed our trust.

More than questions of sexual indiscretions, let us focus on how character plays out in decision-making. Note that the men in our litany were aggressive movers and shakers. They were driven workaholics. Wouldn’t it be a pity if they were sluggards and the only thing on top of their desk were their feet?

To belabor the obvious, imagine a leader, God-fearing and prayerful, simple in tastes, and almost Spartan in lifestyle. Imagine him once more, pure of heart, honest and innocent of worldly wiles. Imagine him thrown into the ring by a divine hand and there installed with great power and responsibility by a public worn and weary of political fabrication.

Now imagine a person attracted to cheap and prurient pleasures that might border on deviant behavior. Imagine the same, slick and glib, with a propensity for self-indulgence and toys for big boys.

Now superimpose these dichotomies and start praying that the whispers heard in the far corners of news rooms do not reach the ears of those with bragging rights.

For two of the most controversial bills pending before Congress, utilizing legitimate and perhaps even clandestine channels to pander to partisan interests, there is one person who appears to be trashing sacred institutions established with great effort by the late Corazon Aquino. Plainly partisan, what shallow objectives are pursued are neither patriotic nor pro-poor where these risk violating constitutional principles protecting life, the family, peace and order, suffrage and democracy.

They are simultaneously ironic, tragic and even heart-breaking. Not only are these insidious assaults on the memory and legacy of the late president we loved dearly, but the institutions Cory fought to sustain are being deliberately desecrated and undermined by that one person who would not be wielding such power had it not been for her death.

Riding on the back of quickly dissipating satisfaction statistics, there is a creeping realization even among Benigno Aquino III’s ardent supporters that he may not be cut from the same cloth his iconic parents were.

Ninoy Aquino was brilliant and driven. He was no one’s puppet. He was a leader and he inspired. He had a profound sense of history and the role he needed to play as dictatorship unraveled and a void was imminent.

Cory Aquino was deeply devout, prayerful and loved the Catholic Church from which she drew guidance and amazing inner strength. Such guidance, plus a sensitivity for others and her own self-awareness, made Cory keenly conscious of her responsibilities in restoring the democracy her predecessor had destroyed with greed and autocracy.

We evoke these specific characteristics deliberately.

In one arena, in exchange for a US$ 434 million foreign grant signed by Aquino’s controversial Finance secretary, Benigno Aquino III conducts a confounding confrontation against the Catholic Church – a war many doubt Cory would have waged.

In another arena, where democracy had long been suppressed by violence, Cory took one of the boldest steps in establishing representative government as a foundation for peace and democracy. She signed into law the organic charter of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) - a historic statute authored by former Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr., himself the father of the ARMM Law and the Local Government Code.

Unfortunately, as Benigno Aquino III threatens with charges of sedition Catholic bishops who’ve called for the same civil disobedience to an immoral autocracy Corazon Aquino once rallied, he is simultaneously hell-bent on imposing a partisan-sponsored autocracy in the same ARMM his mother established, albeit the son’s presidential whisperers conspire to control.

The plot to manipulate, muzzle and deny ARMM’s sovereignty and replace its forthcoming August exercise of suffrage with the autocratic installation of appointees was spawned by the Akbayan Part List and fully-supported by Aquino’s Liberal Party.

Under House Bill (HB) 4146 initially authored by Akbayan, sooner than grant the ARMM the autonomy to choose its leaders, the bill proposes the appointment of the un-elected and constitutionally unauthorized to run the ARMM until the national elections in 2013. The ploy is plainly autocratic, definitively undemocratic, signifying distrust in Mindanaoans, and blatantly unconstitutional.

Rather than trust in democracy as Cory had done in granting Muslim Mindanao autonomy, the plan peddled in the Senate resurrects autocracy’s darkest undersides by denying suffrage and installing products of whim and whispers. Not only does the ploy desecrate the democratic legacy sewn into the fibers of the ARMM’s organic act but the gambit Malacanang pursues recklessly exposes the presidency to violations of the constitution.

The constitution is clear. It vests in the president only general supervisory powers over the ARMM. That does not include the power to appoint Officers-in-Charge.

Neither subsequent laws passed nor presidential overtures can violate the constitution and deny suffrage. And yet HB 4146, declared urgent by Malacanang, brazenly stipulates “the President of the Republic of the Philippines shall appoint officers-in-charge who will take over the functions of the incumbent elective officials of the ARMM at the end of their term on noon of the thirtieth (30th) day of September 2011.”

On the pretext of synchronization, the president effectively denigrates Muslim Mindanao and muzzles its will. It is obvious entities worming behind the woodwork fear that their unpreparedness for the August ARMM polls will compromise their pursuit of power. Unfortunately, Aquino’s bench is shallow. Failing to attract “winnables” and inspire a better breed to join the government, government resorts to appointing losers.

But by imposing the unconstitutional and undemocratic to compensate for these shortcomings, Aquino risks desecrating the legacy of his parents.

He must respect their memories and the constitution he swore to uphold. He must cut the puppeteer’s strings, free himself from parasitic dependence and reestablish his ideological umbilical with his mother who risked her life to restore democracy, and his father who died violently under a similar autocracy insidiously infested with worms and whisperers.

After all the fire and brimstone, what the Senate Blue Ribbon committee managed to eke out of a controversy that cost a former cabinet official his life was a half-baked report that avoided the issue for which a life was wasted. The stalled hearings resumed and the inutility continued as senators tried to refocus on matters tangential to the resolution that spawned the hearings in the first place.

On the issue of plea bargaining at the Ombudsman’s court, what remains concern remedial measures. On systemic corruption however, outside the Garcia episodes, the evidence has been mostly testimonial. What is documented involves only indications of ill-gotten wealth - the kind of material a dogged tabloid reporter might dig up.

Deep down, the sordid mess that surrounds the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the tragic loss of a valuable life in the name of “honor” reveals an aberrant martial culture we’ve tolerated for far too long.

More than tolerated it, we’ve suffered a clandestine sub-culture, trading-off principles and relegating the realities we deny to that bin of rotten garbage we’ve labeled as necessary evils.

The recent surveys merely tell us what we already know, validated daily on every thoroughfare as uniformed enforcers carry on their business of mulcting. Outside the metropolis, the same is reprised as military checkpoints prey on food delivery routes.

Rampant criminality, terrorism and secessionists continue to justify the existence of martial institutions, whether comprised of law enforcement rejects resurrected as bodyguards, security guards or barangay tanods, or self-styled gunslingers who fashion themselves action stars.

While there are a few good men, we fear the rouge cop or the general with the kitschy lifestyle is increasingly the default. They are behind the drug syndicates and summary executions. They are behind the kidnappings, carjackings, prostitution, extortion, petty larceny, street crimes and the recycling of confiscated dangerous drugs.

We are waking to the realization that the military, police and even private security institutions harbor perhaps the largest criminal network unwittingly funded by taxpayers. We are effectively bankrolling the atrocities they inflict, the protection they provide criminals, and the corruption they nurture. Where they appropriate taxpayer’s money into their private coffers, they are nothing but crooks.

In the order of crooks, they are crooks of the worst kind, stealing not just from the public where economies of scale dilute consequences, but from their subordinates, violating a code of solidarity alternately referred to as loyalty or brotherhood.

Increasing from a previous 8%, the recently polled 49% corruption statistic still does not quite tell of corruption as eloquently as when we delve into doublespeak. The subculture’s lexicon reveals how an institution deodorizes itself and institutionalizes criminality.

The most often used terminology is the word “conversion”. In the financial or mathematical sense conversion involves equal values expressed under different units of measure. In the context of securities, conversion involves the exchange of convertible security.

In the AFP’s criminal underworld conversion is when legitimate appropriations are converted to an unlawful use. The correct technical word is “malversation”. The non-technical word is “stealing”.

Following recent revelations, criminal malversation was institutionalized through the Provisions for Command-Directed Activities (PCDA) reserved for the AFP Chief of Staff and his generals

The PCDA identifies criminality’s provenance. It indicates systematic plunder where star-rank officers wantonly scrape from other budgetary units to sustain prioritized funds in the PCDA.

The process introduces us to two other legitimizing nomenclatures. One is “Float”. The other, “Tradition”.

In finance, a float is the time between the issuance of a financial instrument to the time it is settled. In the capital markets, a float refers to shares publicly held and available for trading. For the AFP, a “float” is a fixed appropriation religiously maintained regardless of need, usage or alternate priorities. Never mind that medicines, protective gear and ordnance might be needed in the battlefields. A predetermined level of cold cash is ensured and kept in a general’s vault for unforeseen expenses, junkets, gifts or whims, wining and dining.

Of the terminologies one of the most abused is the term “Tradition”. According to whistleblowers, the ex gratia remunerations upon entering and exiting a command perpetuate as part of military tradition. By labeling these integral to customs and conventions, they not only institutionalize criminality, they relieve each member in their virtual “la cosa nostra” of personal responsibility thus eroding the foundations from which honor might stand.

To evoke “honor” often emblazoned on a soldier’s symbolic chevrons, members of a militia like to stand proud in a virtual salute. Unfortunately, no amount of pomp and pageantry, stars and stripes, medals and decorations, and even a twenty-one gun salute, the solemnity of Taps or a horse-drawn caisson rolling against the beat of somber drums can restore personal honor tragically lost to a tradition of corruption.

Like a roller-coaster ride, this one starts off slowly, relegated by broadsheets to an eighth of a page on the bottom corner of page one.

Its presence will not be felt until the mess is adequately sordid and the victims totally helpless. The story will at first be filled-in with historical references to 1985, over a quarter of a century too distant for present day victims whose references will be the Legacy scandals and the grandstanding it produced at the Senate.

Many will use the rather unseemly term “Holiday” to refer to a bank that suddenly padlocks its doors and switches off its cash dispensers. “Holiday” refers to a cheerful event. A bank holiday is the farthest from that.

The technical definition is the “temporary closure of a bank in the event its obligations exceed its resources.” Such definitions of business economics are illusory. Recent history is replete with banks on holiday, seeking bankruptcy protection and never to re-open. Should some re-open, they reincarnate as a different bank with different capital structures and owners.

Even the terms “obligations” and “resources” are debatable. In a bank’s balance sheet, a hierarchy of liabilities or “obligations” array opposite the degrees of liquidity of assets or “resources”. Deposits are liabilities and are placed at the upper levels declaring their priority over the claims on assets by creditors and shareholders.

Deposit liabilities are opposite entries representing liquid assets which depositors have a prior claim. Despite these, defenders of self-imposed holidays insist on solvency rather than liquidity. Under banking statutes, a solvent bank where total resources still cover obligations can go on a “holiday” by invoking illiquidity.

Yet Section 29 of Republic Act 7653 authorizes imposing conservatorship on a bank “in a state of continuing inability or unwillingness to maintain a condition of liquidity deemed adequate to protect the interest of depositors.”

In last Tuesday’s closure of a major thrift bank, avoiding official declarations of a holiday, bank officials claimed solvency while pointing to illiquidity as the cause. Under Section 29, a declaration triggers conservatorship. But R.A. 7653 does not require a declaration in the strictest sense. It requires an examination report from the Monetary Board of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) prior to conservatorship.

While there are other multi-billion peso-capitalized commercial, thrift and rural banks afflicted with the same malignant structural weakness, when padlocking afflicts mid-to-low net worth depositors, inequities are particularly tragic and the whole economy is threatened.

In last Tuesday’s bank holiday the inequities are even more wretched where these spawn from disputes between regulators tasked to instill economic stability and a bank with a multi-billion won-but-unsettled claim against its regulator.

In a March 14, 2011 memorandum, the bank’s executive vice-president said the bank has “been suffering from extraordinary panic caused by a well-orchestrated smear campaign”

Add reckless and irresponsible statements made by a ranking government official whose position on systemic risks is at best lackadaisical thus perpetuating moral hazards within the banking system, the public is indeed in for a roller-coaster ride.

The bank in question has been down this road before. On July 23, 1984, citing illiquidity, it declared a self-imposed holiday. Granting a Php 3 billion line, regulators placed the bank under conservatorship a week after. On January 25, 1985, following an examination report released two days earlier, the bank was ordered closed. Six years later, in 1991, the Supreme Court (SC) declared the closure illegal. The bank re-opened in 1994.

The bank has been seeking Php 25 billion in financial assistance and regulatory relief for its closure. As part of its prayer, it filed a Php 18.8 billion damage suit against the Board of Liquidators of the regulators.

Presently, based on Basel III’s capital adequacy requisites (CAR) and the BSP’s requirements for Tier I core capital, the subject thrift bank’s capital deficiency reached Php 1 billion. Albeit critical, the CAR imposition is not urgent enough to cause closures. Basel III’s deadline is 2015.

While authorities say the bank continues to lose “from Php 800 to Php 900 million a year” and “has admitted its inability to generate enough income from normal banking operations”, its contingent multi-billion receivables from the damage suit, financial assistance and regulatory relief would alleviate CAR pressures several times over.

Years after the SC ruling, a Makati court directed the authorities to release the financial assistance and regulatory relief to the bank without delay. That was two years ago in November 18, 2009. Early this week, the Court of Appeals stopped the implementation of that order.

It is one thing for innocent depositors now denied their savings to have to bear the CAR deficiencies of a bank. It is quite another to have a stagflation-afflicted economy suffer severe collateral damages from a quarter of a century long dispute between government agencies and a private institution.

As an economist Benigno Aquino III could do well to be more discerning about what bean counters and wordsmiths whisper in his ear or draft for teleprompters. In a recent speech Aquino proudly declared that lives are discernibly better since the presidential limousine and all that went with it were turned over to him by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

He was later presented with the dividends of government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCC) amid flowery speeches of a new “spring and bloom” in these institutions. In the midst of pomp and pageantry, factotums spoke of the birth of a tradition – “a tradition of regular, sustainable and, hopefully, (sic) increasing share of the national government in GOCC profits.” Never mind that the dividends were the fruits of past labor long since earned. What, in reality, had sprung and bloomed, sprung and bloomed nearly half a decade before.

As for the presidential limo, that has since been replaced by a Porsche. Aquino realized the car didn’t work, giving credence to the truism that what looks good isn’t necessarily so. As in financial data and economic indices cavalierly quoted, it is always better to kick the tires and check under the hood.

Another case in point are allusions to the record-high 7.3% growth of gross domestic product (GDP) for 2010, and that as a virtual springboard towards higher GDP growth as infrastructure under the Public-Private Partnership program catalyzes an expansion in employment.

Aquino correctly focused on the importance of employment when he recently declared in Filipino, “Paulit-ulit po natin ididiin: Trabaho ang pangunahin agenda ng ating administrasyon.”

Unfortunately, when we array a soundbite concern for employment with the economic data, plus the current exponential expansion of aggregate prices and the crime wave in the streets in recent weeks, the picture that emerges is not one of discernibly better lives. It is not even one of a government that gives a damn.

Note data disparities on the official unemployment statistics recorded in the same year GDP grew by 7.3%.

Conventional wisdom dictates that if GDP grows, so should employment. High output is associated with a reduction in unemployment and vice versa. That did not happen. Unemployment fell by only 0.4% - a virtual stagnation in absolute terms.

The underlying reason for the deviation is a macroeconomic tendency described by economist Arthur Okun. In the relationship between unemployment and GDP growth, he determined that for every 1.0% increase in unemployment over its normal levels there will be a GDP gap of from 2% to 4% from its potential. The actual ratio derived is 1:2.5 where the latter represents a GDP fall.

Should we spin the arithmetic on its head, we might say that for unemployment to decrease, GDP must at least grow by 2.5%. Any growth less than that and unemployment remains.

If GDP grew by 7.3% then employment should have grown noticeably. Because it did not shows us not only the weaknesses of GDP as a measure but also the foolishness of quoting an aberrant index that tells us nothing about our well-being.

The arithmetic that comprises GDP counts pesos either produced or consumed. It does not count volume. It does not count quality of expenditure. It does not count costs. It does not even count involuntary hunger that spiked 15.9% during Aquino’s first quarter of governance.

Rising prices is one of the distorting factors that render GDP an irrelevant measure. When aggregate prices rise, the economy is slow to recover and tends to linger closer to recession despite the illusion created by GDP.

Note that little is being done to control the exponential bloating of fuel, power, transportation and food costs under Aquino. At the end of the year, we might post higher GDP growth, but actually be worse off.

Worse, his economic mangers are applying iron fists on the informal economy that the despondent rely upon as poverty-alleviating economic measures to compensate for an unresponsive government.

Complicate this with systemic corruption where these add to the cost of goods, services and infrastructure, warping values along the way.

Add the detrimental impact of taxes that tends to further alter values as the expanded value-added tax does, given embarrassing failures in tax collection.

To account for the negative impact of such costs, Okun proposed a Misery Index that netted out unemployment and inflation from GDP growth. Applying this to 2010, the resulting index rationalizes the stagnancy in employment.

Further applying this to Aquino’s prospective 7.3% to 7.8% GDP growth range for 2011, unemployment will either stagnate at best or increase at worst, given the uncontrollable increases in aggregate input costs and multiplier prices under his crop of economic managers. Unfortunately, this establishes the Misery Index as more appropriately descriptive of Aquino’s economic governance than the irrelevant GDP.

At the height of his popularity on a noontime show aired by a network that has now filed charges against him, Willie Revillame lived down the road from my house. He was a quiet neighbor and unlike other celebrities in the area, he was not intrusive, noisy or indecent. He did not act like the international celebrity that he was.

We once had a neighbor who, at three in the morning, summoned his household by switching on his sirens. We had another whose fleet of security vehicles parked along what his detail must have determined to be major choke points in our toddler, nanny and stroller-occupied village where marauding bands of pre-schoolers hunted wild game, butterflies and frogs.

Off-the-cuff judgments for or against Revillame are often a matter of perspective and preference. Like attitudes toward New York City, some hate him, some love him. Revillame is as controversial as his career is speckled and simultaneously charmed and cursed. To praise or condemn him, one needs to be discerning. He is crass yet charming, crude albeit compassionate.

In a Quezon City court, Revillame petitioned for the rescission of a contract he had with a previous employer. In his view, while it bound him to one network, the latter prevented him from fulfilling commitments where a suspension indefinitely condemned him to a limbo of sorts. That petition now stands as a parent motion.

Because subsequent accusations against Revillame were essentially variations on the theme of competition, each seeking an injunction against the airing of what he does best, two restraining motions were denied for violating a 1999 Supreme Court ruling preventing restraints on succeeding cases that effectively rule on a parent case sans a trial on the original.

In another town and another forum, a third case was filed despite contractual provisions stating related disputes be settled in specific jurisdictions. While dealing with copyright infringement, this seeks similar restraints on airing. Citing camera angles, cheering crowds, even the manner prizes are awarded, among others, again competition founds the complaint.

This splitting takes us to the law. Relevant jurisprudence in Francisco G. Joaquin, Jr., and BJ Productions Inc. vs. Franklin Drilon, Gabriel Zosa, William Esposo, Felipe Medina, Jr., and Casey Francisco (G.R. no. 108946, January 28, 1999) provides that “the format of a show is not copyrightable”. Citing Section 2 of Presidential Decree 49 it enumerates specific works entitled to copyright.

Since copyrights are statutory concessions, rights are obtained only for subjects specified by the statute. This is mirrored in the Intellectual Property Code or Republic Act 8293 where the format or mechanics of a television show is not among specifically protected work. Section 175 states “copyright does not extend to an idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery regardless of (the) form”.

In the context of competition, the specificity of copyright protection essentially advances economic productivity through competition, thus mitigating control and domination.

Unfortunately, charges of conflicted and self-serving preferences have now entered the courthouse. Citing partiality and conflicted relationships, Revillame’s co-defendant in the copyright infringement case petitioned the Court of Appeals to inhibit a Makati Regional Trial Court presiding judge from hearing the case.

The David-versus-Goliath aspect is obvious. Had Revillame returned to being a drummer, he might not be facing these anti-competition lawsuits. Had he turned to newscasting, then copyright infringement charges would be just as absurd despite newscasting’s global mirror format.

For Revillame, detractors see veiled arrogance. Unfortunately, what they insist we see and what we do see is not a zero sum. If there is any arrogance, and we do not discount some, it is consumed by what a greater majority see as beneficial to them. We sneer at a thousand-peso hand-out, but for some that is life-changing.

They see an iconic rags-to-riches Cinderella who inspires, entertains and protects us from the absurdity of senseless reality. The dichotomy presented by his show as a direct contradiction of a newscast on a rival channel is the most eloquent example.

Was it not Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra who said the madness of Don Quixote was preferable to the absurdity of cruel reality? If Quixote as escapism is madness, what is the denigrating news footage of dead fetuses, child rape, murder, criminality, corruption and sex scandals against Revillame’s fans whose faces and hearts brighten with hope and happiness?

Preferences underlie Revillame’s charisma. Some hate him. Many don’t. Because his is commonplace and appropriately colloquial, he is condemned by the self-righteous and the high-brow artsy-fartsy. And, incidentally, he is also condemned by those who profit when he is denied a forum. Indeed it is a matter of preferences. Judging by the ratings, many prefer Willie be freed from the bias and binds inflicted on him.

When the phenomenon of globalization impacted on outdated bureaucratic systems, the aspect of data control suddenly turned critical as information was not simply networked through global markets but also the expertise to wield data seemed limited to those with the appropriate technologies. For an economy deficit-driven, corrupted, crook-controlled and largely dependent on labor and brick and mortar assets, often the quickest response to the globalization challenge was to outsource and depend on vicarious data management providers.

To emphasize the obvious, doubling within ten years from the eve of globalization the United States Department of Homeland Security estimated that during Gloria Arroyo’s incumbency over 40 million merchandise shipments were processed but only 1% of inbound cargo was examined by the Bureau of Customs (BOC).

Automation is expensive. Maintaining an information technology (IT) system, updating and applying home-grown expertise malnourished on a civil servant’s salary even more so. Never mind that cluelessness had exponential costs that far outweighed these and the propensity for corruption when data is controlled leads to even more unimaginable costs.

Whoever controlled data controlled Customs. The identity and beneficial control of an outsourced data contractor is critical. It is all-too-easy to establish falls fronts, fund those and have those contracted as outsourced data management providers where clandestine beneficiary interests straddle conflicted client and service provider platforms. Dummies are a dime a dozen. One can be had to effectively cloud and cover conflicted relationships comprising a conspiratorial web.

To identify, simply list the names of officials then and now and draw connecting lines among current and past business interests, partnerships, employer-employee, supervisory and subordinate relationships, and other covert commonalities that define conflicts of interest. Now add client-service provider contracts.

For the BOC, an appendage of the Department of Finance (DOF), the criticality of risk involving clandestine connivances cannot be underestimated. More where Benigno Aquino III’s mandate is founded on mitigating systemic corruption passed from administration to administration, recycling and resurrecting as a convoluted web of hidden interests forms the superstructure for dubious governance.

Five years ago, on the eve of the imminent junking of some of Arroyo’s officials leading to the Hyatt 10 betrayal, a study sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was being conducted covering the Finance Department’s BOC. The findings presented critical revelations made even timelier by the possibility that entities who now wield authority on one end and outsourced responsibility on another might have spawned from a single side.

In other words, little may have changed save for the institutionalization of detrimental systems where these recur, recycle and reaffirm deceptive associations.

While there are other studies of the processes of the BOC, for now, we will confine our analysis to those under the USAID-sponsored report if only to show that what infected the BOC has survived political firestorms and seems to have petrified as institutional afflictions that curiously, few or none in the present bureaucracy bother to correct.

In commentaries on the BOC’s Management Information Systems and Technology Group (MISTG), the Business Mirror more than once exposed data manipulation as a basis for corruption. The media coined the term “The Pindot Gang”. Yet nothing has changed. Never mind that the anomalies reflected by data discrepancies have reached an increasingly concerned international audience. And never mind that foreign and domestic traders continue to be victimized.

Evidenced by the study’s diagnosis, the trademark lack of coordination in the Aquino bureaucracy might find a second home in the DOF and the BOC. Against global best practices for effective risk management-based systems, let us review what was revealed albeit today continuously ignored.

Among the identified benchmarks effective risk management needed “automation coupled with the development of databases that serve identification, analysis and monitoring”. It also needs “pre-arrival data collection” and “layered controls using inspection, data analysis, certification and intelligence sources for deterrence and interdiction”.

The BOC employs a screening process called the Selectivity System where the programming and installation of screening is undertaken by the MISTG which manages the computer system. The study listed some of the MISTG’s problem areas.

One, the quality of screening development is poor, lacks specificity and prevents account-based monitoring, meaningful audits and analyses.

Two, screens are not updated regularly allowing for manipulation and connivance with encoders in order to obtain preferential routing within the Selectivity System.

Three, there is no formal system for tracking operational experiences or compliant behavior enough to guide decision-making. In effect, the BOC IT system does not “learn”, there are no formal feedback mechanisms, territoriality is prevalent, the data is not shared, “narrow” interests prevail and coordination resisted. Aggregated, these constitute a corruption culture.

Sadly, despite having better choices, Aquino’s bureaucracy has recycled those who perpetuate these weaknesses, thus reconstituting a web of questionable relationships. Recycling, when done haphazardly, nurtures institutional corruption.

The Department of Finance has correctly denied the proposal to grant value-added tax (VAT) exemptions to oil and petroleum products both on the basis of its negative effects on revenue collection efforts and its minimal social impacts and trade-offs on poverty alleviation. Their arguments are valid. Beyond those, we likewise feel that the granting of exemptions on critical inputs along a value chain could well lead to higher costs and subsequently higher prices.

It was long after legislators conspired to cover a self-inflicted deficit with a cocktail of anemic sin taxes, a controversial attrition law and an even more controversial expanded value-added tax (E-Vat) law that debate on exemptions began.

Ironically, despite overwhelming sponsorship, the same lawmakers who voted for expanded VAT coverage eventually pandered to populism and political expediency when the public bucked the tax. A few however, stood on principle and they continue to stand their ground.

These opposing perspectives compel an examination shorn of rhetoric and politics. Fortunately, the exemption debate centers on petroleum and oil tariffs. These are not simply common costs but economic multipliers where exemptions impact, negatively or positively, along the value chain.

One of the intrinsic benefits of a VAT is its ability to prevent the cascading of tax burdens as they occur along a value chain. Because the VAT is applied only on values added at specific levels where inputs and outputs are delineated, once applied, there should be no taxes on taxes that cascade.

These are, however, dependent on the consistency of a VAT application on all stages of the chain where a taxable commodity is an intermediate input such as petroleum and oil products.

Many consumers imagine that VAT exemptions might alleviate price increases and VATs harsh effects. But do they?

To analyze, let us take the example of VAT exemptions for medication enjoyed by senior citizens against the proposed across-the-board VAT exemption on oil products.

Senior citizens are final consumers. If VAT-exempt, they do not pay VAT. Here, indeed VAT exemptions alleviate harshness.

Unfortunately, the tax burden creeps up the value chain to the drugstore that purchased the medicines but was not VAT-exempt. As nothing previously inputted as costs might be VAT exempt other than the senior citizen at the end of the value chain, taxes remain for all other levels and for all other inputs that went into the medicine. For these taxes, the drugstore, unable to pass these on will have to bear the full tax burden.

Costs then bloat at the drugstore level where they effectively subsidize the tax that the senior citizens should have borne.

For oil products, when these are raw materials or intermediate inputs such as fuel burned in power plants or those used to transport food, vegetables and other final products whose prices carry fuel, transportation and other costs as inputs, when exemptions are imposed the tax burden is effectively applied one level up where costs inordinately bloat as VAT credits cannot be reclaimed.

Note that oil is an imported commodity and upon its importation a VAT was applied. The VAT chain on oil starts at the very top. If exemptions are applied down the line, some entity within the chain will have bloated costs.

Simply put, if oil products were VAT-exempt, sellers, including bulk fuel dealers cannot levy a VAT on it and the VAT chain is broken. However, VAT on any other input remains.

For instance, the VAT on services, electricity, transport, insurance, etc, remains as costs subject to VAT and thus comprises the total product’s tariff at the pump level. As delineations vanish, these taxes become part of the cost of goods sold because of the unrecoverable tax at the seller level.

Should the supplier take advantage of the exemptions in a broken VAT chain to charge VAT-inclusive prices, they reap additional profits at the intermediate levels of a value chain and create the same cascading effect that VAT sought to avoid.

It makes better business sense for suppliers to pay the VAT and claim input credits rather than have exemptions that bloat either costs of goods sold or expenses when credits cannot be reclaimed and are instead tucked into the price of a commodity. As cascading begins where VAT is applied down the line, it leads to higher prices. Do the simulations to validate the price bloating postulate. Studies show cascading can result in increased prices from 12% to as much as 30%.

Exemptions break the VAT chain and cause an inflated costs of goods sold to cascade where down the line VAT is necessarily applied on an inordinately larger amount than would have been included had a VAT credits been reclaimable and thus theoretically taken out of the equation.

For politicians who pander to populism, beware what you wish for.

When headlines banner and booming baritones break the morning air blaring a public servants connection to any controversial event, the first thing out of the window is critical circumspection. Mere connection turns to involvement, and involvement turns into conspiratorial participation. By the fifth sentence, innocents are convicted as criminal masterminds.

Innuendo starts a demolition derby with allusions and accusations tendered and coupled like runaway freight cars barreling down the tracks. Damage and demonization soon follow and before the second paragraph of a banner story, knee-jerk condemnation sets in as bylines, pen names or pseudonyms comfortably sit in the caboose.

A case in point is the rash railroading of vilification against the undersecretary of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) barely a quarter into his tenure and absent of any evidence save for unproven innuendo, pseudo-analysis and chit-chat.

It is unfortunate that in some instances the court of public opinion where often media sit as judge and jury easily degenerates into wanton irresponsibility, scourging and denigrating, absent of civility, rules and the tenets of a legal system that keep us civilized.

Ask anyone of what they know about DILG Undersecretary Rico E. Puno and invariably four casual sound bites are known about him inequitably arrayed against the kilometric judgments that follow in this runaway locomotive.

One, he admits he is not a hostage-taking expert unlike three-quarters of the Philippine population, their uncles and 100% of media men, all of whom are self-proclaimed authorities. Albeit, of two undersecretaries at the DILG, he is the undersecretary for peace and order, solitarily tasked with that portfolio while the other is for local governments. Two, he is the president’s shooting buddy. Three, he was accused of receiving illegal gambling money. Four, he is not the Rico J. Puno.

The list is expectedly short as Puno is not one to hog the limelight. But note that a good portion of the incendiary coal that fills this demolition locomotive with hot air are accusations from a twice-redoubtable trigger-happy politician who once accused a former Senate President as behind an assassination plot against a sitting chief executive.

Against the little we know, let us array a tad more detail to perhaps form better perspectives and at the end of the day realize if we might not have been railroaded into a reckless if not an unfair condemnation.

First, Rico Escalona Puno is not Rico J. Puno.

Next, on the hostage crisis, as it unfolded, the often asked question was where the DILG secretary was as he is tasked by the constitution to govern over police matters. It was only later that his presence was noticed and even much later that people realized its fatal consequences. Both legitimate queries and the ambiguous answers that followed feed the notion that some enjoy vicarious credibility while others, lacking factional sponsorship, might be sacrificed to the wolves.

One columnist wrote, “Puno unwittingly serves as a buffer between the DILG secretary and the controversial Philippine National Police (PNP). If Puno was not placed by Pres. Noynoy Aquino as chief PNP liaison, (DILG Secretary) Robredo would have been under greater pressure to account for the bungling of the hostage rescue.”

Liaising and focusing on peace and order as undersecretary are distinct from wielding constitutionally-vested authority, responsibility and accountability as cabinet secretary. Puno’s appointment as undersecretary for peace and order did not reorganize the DILG hierarchy, much less did instructions to liaise and focus. Authority, responsibility and accountability remain with the secretary.

Verging on dereliction, claims of being “out of the command loop” are as self-serving as claims of not having been informed of the situation. The media more than adequately informed all and sundry, including the hostage-taker, and anyone armed with constitutionally-vested powers would have been compelled to act. That those who might have been derelict sit and judge over subordinates tasked to simply liaise and focus raises questions of gross inequity. It is a question of self-exoneration and morality. By choosing to judge, one can alter the blame-game, shed responsibility and accountability, and effectively exculpate oneself.

On Puno’s qualifications, the record shows that beyond being a shooting buddy, Puno was the President’s legal consultant in the Lower House and likewise in the Senate where Puno served as officer for public order and safety, economic affairs and local governance. He was also the liaison officer for the PNP and the armed forces.

On the illegal gambling issue, even the retired prelate who broke the story belatedly admitted he did not have an iota of evidence.

As for the accusation spewed under parliamentary immunity that Puno profited from illegal gambling, absent evidence, these can be filed among others that insinuate a former Senate President an assassination plotter, a former president a cheat and the various sightings of Elvis Presley.

Attempting to undercut the professional foundations that underlie Benigno Aquino III’s team at every turn, relevant or otherwise, political irritants continue to issue calls for across-the-board resignations.

Trees with attractive fruits are often pelted. An attempt was inflicted on the Palace’s new communications group. From where we stand however, Malacañang Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma, the gentleman that he is and one among Aquino’s most competent and lettered, singularly replied with a high albeit humbling note.

For those educated on the permutations of Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s famous dictum, the criticisms hurled are shallow and simplistic.

Parkinson noted that work expands to fill time available for its completion. Developed from a study of British civil service bureaucracies and published in 1955 in “The Economist”, a corollary states that among tasks, the trivial swell to fill the time needed to accomplish it.

Known as the Bicycle Bench Law where Parkinson arrayed debate on constructing a bicycle bench against a nuclear plant, the permutation explains why criticism panders to least common denominators. This propensity for triviality is the affliction behind the criticism of the communications group. The headlines are cases in point.

The law on trivialities explains why commentary on the travails of Kris or hostage-taking matters occupy more column space than news that, owing to the communications group, we now have a president systematically far more responsive than the lying variety we were cursed with.

Unfortunately because Hollywood is today’s great educator, every Tom, Dick and Harry is a hostage management expert. And because blogs are in the periphery of mainstream media, everyone is a journalist. In contrast, following Parkinson’s allegory, few understand a fiscal crisis. Cecile B. de Mille did not make epic movies about accountants.

Note tell-tale contrasts as we deliberately match black against white.

Against scandals ad nauseam, in the economy where it counts, few appreciate that we now have the strongest currency in the region dovetailing this week’s foreign investment inflows and a system-wide increase in foreign exchange where gross international reserves cover 9.5 times short-term external debt thus making our endemic debt infinitely easier to bear.

Institutionalizing a penchant for triviality and catering to colloquialism, for some, those economic achievements are gobbledygook. Likewise, in a turkey-shoot where cowboys point-blankly target resignations, they label the communication group a redundant three-headed hydra.

We disagree. On the accusation of redundancy, analyze the delineations and apply educated discernment. These are clear-cut and do not overlap. Twines do not meet and there is no duplication. The delineations are, in fact, rationale and efficient.

One is clearly a spokesman. His job is to speak for the president. It is his job to stand behind the podium, before microphones with the seal of Malacañang behind him. That he is a lawyer adds to the competence level of pronouncements and assures us that a degree of legality and statutory sieves are constantly applied.

He is not tasked to create the presidential message nor does he manage any government institutional vehicles of communication.

The other is in charge of messaging. This involves crafting the prose and the substance of the message where these are consistent in each of the media employed and, more important, with the thoughts and intentions of the president.

He is not a spokesman. When he speaks, he does not carry the same weight as the official spokesman. But because he might enjoy a critical proximity with the president, then he is uniquely qualified to transform presidential thoughts into presidential verbiage. These fine distinctions are important.

Of the three in the group, we are forthrightly partial to Sec. Coloma. He is in charge of the myriad institutional vehicles through which the government and the president communicates with the public and is effectively made accessible to that same public.

These media outlets and infrastructure include those government facilities that cover radio, television and print, the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) and any other fora he might establish as a presidential communications vehicle. He has executive, administrative and managerial functions over these that enhance and include constant coordination with the media in all its forms. He is not the spokesman nor is he responsible for messaging.

For those functions, Sec. Coloma is uniquely competent, experienced and qualified. Prestigiously lettered, he is both an educator and a technocrat. He was the Dean for executive education at Asia’s premier management institution and was once a university president. He is likewise a Malacañang veteran having headed the Presidential Management Staff and serving as the deputy executive secretary of the Office of the President.

He is not new to the bureaucracy. He was twice an undersecretary, once for the Department of Agrarian Reform and another for the Department of Transportation and Communications.

In this regard, there is indeed clear-cut competence in front, beside and behind the president.

As a result of entities accused of incompetence in the recent hostage-taking scandal involving our security forces, some have decided to deflect the real issues and focus on muzzling media.

Proposals from simple restraint and regulation to censorship have been raised each threatening in various degrees not only the freedom of expression but the right of the people to know. Invariably those tickled-pink with their mugs flashed across television screens have taken to the talk show circuit to preen and pose. The opportunity to inflate both egos and airtime is a strong come-on. Swagger, smirk and soi-disant all suit smug windbags.

As a counterfoil a few validly argue for better-educated, more circumspect and self-disciplined journalists. We are blessed with these younger, more principled breed of better and brighter media-men. More than the wrinkled old dogs, they see both the discipline of science and the creativity of art in media.

Still, the lesser-educated and long-toothed persist with the opposite view falsely believing that geriatric grey passes for wisdom.

Fortunately, where sound bytes do not rule, television cameras do not roll and self-important media celebrities are not fashioned by talk show glib and verbosity, the issues of media muzzling are better debated.

In a modest courthouse away from the glitz and grandiloquent duplicity of talk show habitués, media was being un-muzzled against resurgent threats to deny the people’s right to know.

Last September 2, 2010, broadsheets reported the junking of a petition to silence media through a temporary restraining order (TRO) inflicted on the publication of appeals that sought presidential assistance in investigating alleged irregularities in the controversial Smokey Mountain fiasco.

The “Dear Noynoy” appeal entitled “Kung Walang Corrupt, Walang Mahirap”, by the Kapisanan Kontra Korapsyon, sought help but was challenged by an injunction, that was eventually rejected.

That the battle to deny media censorship was won in the courtroom of Judge Evangeline Castillo-Marigomen made sense. Several times before, when and where it mattered, judicial history was written in the journals of Branch 101 of the regional trial court in Quezon City.

In 2006, Judge Castillo-Marigomen, citing parliamentary immunity under Article 6 of the Constitution, ordered the release of a 73-year old legislator then being harassed following a declaration of national emergency issued presumably on the basis of an alleged coup against Gloria Arroyo’s incumbency.

In 2007, following a TRO she had earlier issued, Judge Castillo-Marigomen stopped the government from imposing a strain of rice developed from potentially toxic genetically modified organisms (GMO). That established a landmark decision, the first since 2002 when the Arroyo government first allowed the entry of GMOs into our vulnerable food chain.

The Smokey Mountain TRO recently and rightfully junked by Judge Castillo-Marigomen sought to muzzle the publication of a desperate appeal to President Benigno Aquino III to investigate a billion peso scandal where entities demanded the payment of over Php 3.17 billion for an uncompleted project wrought with controversy and where, reportedly, only Php 211 million worth of actual work had been accomplished.

In questioning the overpayment proposal, the public’s desperate appeal published by two leading national broadsheets to ensure against criminal overpricing follows calls by President Aquino for a major anti-corruption overhaul in government. According to the court, the imposition of prior restraint against media contradicts the policy of the Aquino government to make public projects transparent.

Ironically, those publications upon which censure was attempted had previously hosted full-page ads which carried the side of those who would now seek censorship. In her decision, apparently, such irony was not lost on Judge Castillo-Marigomen. She declared that a TRO would effectively amount to prior restraint on media. In a democracy public scrutiny is critical and opposing perspectives are likewise as essential as the right to know.

These are neither sound bytes nor talk show rhetoric. The voices sought to be silenced do not belong to graying talk show regulars who inflict motherhood prattle on media muzzling. When the victimized resort to public appeals for transparency, that in itself is symptomatic of inequitable access to media.

In this instance, it is the lowly and often neglected victims of injustice who stand to be twice raped had their appeals been censured. This makes this more important than boob-tube drool and drivel and we are thankful that in some quiet courtroom, real justice reverberates with a booming voice.

Contrary to first impressions woven, spun and eventually peddled to the public by the original engineers behind the expanded value added tax (E-VAT), there is no specific exemption granted tolls against the imposition of an E-VAT.

We combed through R.A. 9337, the VAT Reform Act, and Bureau of Revenues Regulation 16-2005 that deal with the question. The spin concocted following the opposition to exponential increases in toll way charges, whether tax-related or as a function of rising costs, panders to political populism more than the actual word of the law.

However unpopular, there is indeed a basis for applying increases despite the multidimensional criticism that bears upon revenue authorities rightfully performing their duties and correctly interpreting their charge.

Unfortunately, both our new Finance Department authorities and those tasked to increase revenue collections after a long period of government excesses are duty bound and must confront popular issues as well as the statutory realities.

While the public remains the sovereign voice above all clutter and din, dura lex sed lex, or more appropriately, dura tax sed lex, nowhere in the equation of priorities is there room for spins concocted by politicians no matter their evocation of representative government or self-serving claims as authors of a measure as controversial as it is condemned.

Filter out the cacophony and read through the statutory foundations which, by their own hand, they carved into R.A. 9337. They provided the foundations for the application of a value added tax specifically on the NLEX and SLEX (North Luzon Expressways and South Luzon Expressways). While we are uncertain such is applicable on a nationwide basis covering all roads for which a toll and fees are demanded, on the NLEX and SLEX we see exactly where the VAT might be justified.

The pertinent provisions are R.A. 9337’s Section 108 dealing with the imposition of a value added tax on the sale of services. This is the same foundation for a VAT on telecommunication services. The same for water service contractors charged with a private management contract and the state utility behind those.

The rationale behind a VAT on services is undeniable. While water resources might be considered part of the sovereign domain, ancillary services, from water management, maintenance and billing comprise services subject to VAT.

As statutory basis, R.A. 9337’s Section 108 is supported by BIR Regulation 16-2005 dated September 1, 2005. Sections 4.108-1 and 4.108-2, the first dealing with the sale of services, while the second defines a “sale or exchange of services” as the “performance of all kinds of services” for a fee.

While it is easy to argue that a tax cannot be imposed on another tax where toll charges are considered such and therefore cannot be imposed a VAT, this argument’s simplicity hides its sorely simplistic nature.

A toll on the use of a road is a road user’s tax. A toll is applied to recover capitalized costs or periodic maintenance not beyond the ordinary. In the NLEX and the SLEX, that aspect of road usage is present.

There is however an aspect of the total taxes and fees charged that extend beyond the issue of a road user’s tax, perhaps more in the NLEX and SLEX than other roads. The NLEX and SLEX are road systems. Where fees are concerned, extraordinary operating costs enter the equation and special services provided become the subject of VAT.

Fortunately, both issues are simultaneously on the table for debate diametrically delineating the differences. One argues on the tax sense, the other, on the increase in operating expenses sense.

Those issues in the NLEX when combined turn intricate when we break down a toll between its tax components and its cost recovery components, the latter allowed as a VAT on services.

Where proceeds pay for services such as the management and maintenance of the road complex, the state-of-the-art traffic systems, the clean-ups, the security, computerization, lighting systems, cameras, speed monitors, communications and public phone systems, fences, dividers, and competitive wages ensuring the roads are competently managed, then extraordinary services are provided and tariffs charged go beyond being a road user's tax.

The SLEX issue, the increase in fees to compensate for the increase in the operating expenses, illustrates the need for current revenues to cover expenses more directly.

On this second issue, the authorities are not calling the increase a tax but rather, a fee to compensate for expenses. This issue is un-clouded by definitions of taxes and tolls and is clearer albeit, between the two, it is the one authorities can suspend temporarily.

As both interpretations are currently before us - the NLEX increase on a question of VAT, and SLEX where fees are raised to dovetail expenses – it would be interesting to see how one might be stricken down while another is sustained.

We now know the fatal and tragic consequences of blindly arming career goons and gorillas who, inept and unable to employ reason or rationality, think with their guns and gonads.

Taking hostages at the point of a gun in place of a microphone and eventually peppering innocents with bullet holes will not be the last we will see of this. Unfortunately, so will continue equally inane and violent resolutions. The recent tragedy is simply just another in a series of absurd episodes as we careen down the path of mind-numbing violence. Behind it, we fear, is our terribly warped martial culture, insidiously permeating from the benign and spreading openly to the most malignant.

The helipad beside the tennis court of a plush resort barely an hour from the metropolis had nothing worth stealing. Despite being nestled among well-kept walkways and gardens a quarter of a mile from the road, the deserted court was patrolled by a diminutive armed guard carrying a shotgun.

Alarmed albeit amused, the prospective investors ferried by the helicopter were looking at the Philippines as a possible manufacturing hub for computer peripherals. But peace and order must be elusive. What could possibly justify deadly ordnance in an empty tennis court? The same holds for fast-food joints, bookstores and daycare centers inside malls.

In a posh residential enclave in the heart of the city, one that hosts one of the best and most exclusive schools operated by the religious, an army of pistol-toting guards brandish deadly armaments like gunslingers. Daily, they crudely shout, yell and whistle at parents, drivers and nannies who drop off and pick up children along the school’s fortress-high walls.

Their priorities are warped. Save for a handful, the army of guards seems more concerned that cars speed away from momentary congestion than they are with the children’s safety. In grunt-fashion they force children to squeeze dangerously between towering SUV’s as they press the traffic to quickly move on.

Many guards are former policemen with minimum education. Some are academy rejects. Worse, the caliber of their deadly ordnance surpasses cumulative IQs as the martial gene is predominant. To this day, fetchers remember when one of them was violently run over by a vehicle apparently allowed by fawning guards to speed in the opposite direction because the truck was part of a politician’s entourage.

While the blood on the curb was quickly washed off, for the young and impressionable minds that witnessed the incident, the memory stains a bit longer.

Obviously there is a disconnect between the values nurtured inside the school’s walls and those outside representing a martial culture that distorts our society.

Simply ask how many toddlers would rather become policemen than doctors, engineers, lawyers or teachers. Ask why and invariably the gun becomes a focal point.

It does not take grainy cell phone video footage replayed on national TV to realize how warped and decayed our society has become. Indeed, we are nauseated by the images of a man treated as far less human, twitching in pain, screaming his last cries before death might mercifully set in to end the brutality inflicted by those, nurtured first and then virtually charged by our tax pesos.

We are nauseated not by the images, but by the realization that this is what we’ve tolerated for far too long. This is what happens before those decaying bodies turn up in dumpsites and along the water’s edge with signboards tied around their necks, extremities cut off and torsos pockmarked with cigarette burns and bullet holes.

It is nothing new. There lies the problem. The word “salvage” we’ve coined for such acts is by now colloquial, commonplace and cliché – long integrated into our crass crudity that diminishes the criminality behind the act but not less than the societal rot we all wallow in.

The etymology is from the Latin salus that means welfare or safety. When used as an adjective, the word turns into salvus. That adjective, when combined with a noun such as legis or law turns into salva lege meaning “without violating the law”. It is interesting to see how far we’ve fallen from our Roman bases in democracy and law.

We now know that those who inflicted the torture and possibly the death of the man in the footage were entrusted, armed and authorized to protect society and install justice as we would have it. We call them law enforcers and we know them by different names and under different degrees - from barangay tanods or village guardians, to security guards and night watchmen, to the military and the police. These are the men who constitute that part of our society we’ve purposely carved out from society’s underside, empowered, entitled, armed and called martial.