"We think that Locsin will pull off the job with professional aplomb, and will hugely enjoy himself while doing it."
In A recent piece, CNN talked about the growing realization—and fear— among Chinese officials in Beijing that President Trump could indeed be serious about his promise to upend the type of bilateral relations that the Chinese have become accustomed to in the past few decades. The trade war is now spilling over into the diplomatic and even military fronts, with both countries ratcheting up an increasingly riskier maritime game of chicken.
It may not yet be the start of the next Cold War, but relations have indeed plunged into an unprecedented deep chill. And with Chinese President Xi set to meet with Trump at the G20 leaders summit in Buenos Aires next month, policy experts on both sides worry that it may already be too late to find a way back.
It’s an incipient regional crisis between superpowers that our new Foreign Affairs Secretary, Ambassador “Teddy Boy” Locsin, may find is his first challenge in office. After he unpacks his bags from his last posting at the United Nations, he’ll find his work cut out for him in crafting a Philippine position that steers clear of shoals on either side, in a path that goes clearly and carefully down the middle.
We think that Locsin will pull off the job with professional aplomb, and will hugely enjoy himself while doing it. He’s generally known for his often profane candidness as well as written eloquence, but fewer may remember that he is both a Harvard-trained lawyer and a former congressman, i.e. smart on the street and off.
The last thing Locsin is short of is self-confidence. This will serve him well as he deals with even bigger egos within the region and among the various superpowers who keep trying to pull our strings.
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During his Bali trip to attend the ASEAN Leaders’ Conference last Thursday, the President called for economic resilience in ASEAN amid the various global challenges that affect the region’s economy.
He encouraged deeper cooperation between ASEAN, the United Nations, IMF and the World Bank to implement “ASEAN Community Vision 2025” and the “United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” He asked for expanded roles of the IMF, World Bank and the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office in building the capacity of ASEAN countries to reach their sustainable development targets. On the same note, he also highlighted our government’s efforts to improve its performance in achieving those targets.
As a matter of fact, a good portion of ASEAN economic activity is already intra-regional. Thus the message of economic resilience should be accompanied by a continuing push for deeper integration through the ASEAN Economic Community. The liberalization of local markets will also lead to greater inclusion of MSME’s and the informal sector in the lofty economic plans of the leaders.
At the same time, Secretary Locsin should also push for disaster resilience as well as economic resilience, in the aftermath of the recent disaster in Indonesia. An ASEAN disaster-response or disaster–mitigation contingent might be a good initiative to take up post-meeting. Maybe our country could help get the ball rolling with the contribution of a contingent of our own.
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Meanwhile, in the Senate, the Minority senators filed a bill to suspend the scheduled increase in excise tax levy on oil products under TRAIN, as well as rolling back the levy to December 2017 rates. It’s another race to the bottom on populism that these senators have time and again proven themselves to be experts at.
Finance Department Assistant Secretary Tony Lambino reminded the Senate that the inflationary impact of those oil excise taxes is manageable. At worst, the impact is one-off, as the income-enhancing provisions of TRAIN begin to increase the after-tax purchasing power of consumers over the holiday season.
The law actually allows suspending any excise tax increase scheduled in January, but only after waiting for three months. Well, January is already just three months away. Surely the honorable senators can wait a bit longer for the sake of following the law.
Over at the Lower House, it was the Majority this time that came under a heap of public criticism for proposing a draft new constitution that did away with term limits, the anti-dynasty provision, and the anti-turncoatism provision. These were among the widely-applauded goodies offered by the alternative version coming from Duterte’s hand-picked consultative committee on constitutional reform led by former Chief Justice Reynato Puno.
The House version has been called the “Arroyo charter” after the Speaker—unfairly so, we think, since a lot of other congressmen also signed on as co-authors of the bill. In fact, Speaker Arroyo herself clarified that the only language she added to the document was a mechanism for creating federal states—without which, of course, the House version would have been even weaker.
Amid all the criticism, what I think people should notice is that, with the formal proposal of the House version—no matter how flawed it is—the process of charter change in the House has finally and truly started. For his part in the Senate, federalism champion Senator Koko Pimentel—to get around the endless debates over “Con-Ass”—has simply said, “Let’s approve charter change as if we’re [simply] legislating a new statute.”
Nonetheless, the prospects of holding a plebiscite on a new constitution no later than together with the May 2019 midterm elections already look dead in the water. If the next elections produce a new Congress that is no less reluctant to pass a new constitution, then federalism advocates might as well start to mobilize for the holding instead of a Constitutional Convention.
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The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency last week announced that two to three local officials, and possibly some police officers in Lanao del Sur, were involved in the ambush the other Friday that killed five PDEA agents and wounded another agent and a civilian. To avoid accusations of a whitewash, the National Bureau of Investigation—not the Philippine National Police—will investigate the four police escorts of the agents, whom witnesses said sped away in their van and left the agents behind, minutes before the ambush happened.
It’s bad enough that drug syndicates were able to kill these five agents. It’s a lot worse that police officers no less may have been complicit in the murder of fellow law enforcement agents on the orders of drug lords. If such complicity is found by the NBI, the book should be thrown at these suspected criminal accomplices and traitors in uniform.
Also last week, the President unveiled a special report revealing the involvement of law enforcement officials in illegal drug trade. Several PNP officials, former and current, were named in the report, along with officials from PDEA and Customs. The PNP said a case build-up against active policemen in Duterte’s recent drug matrix is still ongoing, which is “necessary to gather sufficient evidence to file charges.”
Perhaps in deference to the legal presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, Duterte refused to disclose any names on his list. Given the factual and legal infirmities that were later found in similar lists that he’s waved about earlier, his reticence this time is also the prudent way to handle the situation.
But the public is becoming impatient. Now that the Philippines has been reconfirmed as a member of the UN Human Rights Council—over the loud objections of the usual Duterte critics abroad—the public will want to see more arrests and more neutralizations, at high enough levels, to justify its continuing support for the draconian style of the country’s war on drugs.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.“‹