Sympathy for Remulla’s son

Thought-provoking indeed: “Marcos Jr. and the older Remulla must make a sacrifice. Specifically, Remulla, the father, must resign from his being Justice Secretary. And Marcos Jr. must encourage him to do so.”

By FILOMENO S. STA. ANA III  

The title is meant to provoke. I differ from those who think that the son of the Justice Secretary must be punished for possession of illegal drugs.

My stand: The son deserves humane treatment. In fact, in a kinder world, the son does not deserve harsh judgment and heavy punishment.

But to spare the son from the law’s harshness, the father must make a big sacrifice beyond what he has offered.

I do not deny that this piece is political. But I veer away from partisanship as I declare my sympathy for the devil. (My apologies to the Rolling Stones.)

But before I explain why I have “sympathy for the devil,” let us critically examine the troubles of the Remulla family. How this issue is handled will also have repercussions, for better or for worse, on President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s government.

Illicit drug enforcers arrested Juanito Jose Remulla III, the son of Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla, through a “controlled delivery operation.” That is, instead of immediately confiscating the contraband at the port of entry, the operatives allowed the parcel containing 937 grams of high-grade cannabis delivered to the young Remulla. Under the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, a person convicted of possessing 500 grams or more of marijuana faces the penalty of life imprisonment and a fine ranging from P500,000 to P10,000,000.

But the Philippines is way behind the curve with respect to drug rules and enforcement. We witness an increasing number of countries or societies accepting the use of marijuana and hallucinogens. Cannabis legalization is spreading all over the world. Among countries that have legalized the recreational use of cannabis are Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Africa, and neighboring Thailand.

In the US, a growing number of states have made recreational marijuana legal. At the federal level, US President Joe Biden has pardoned thousands convicted of mere possession of marijuana.

Other countries have limited the scope of legalization to medical use or have decriminalized drug use (not just cannabis consumption).

This shift from punitive action to a humane policy is a recognition of the failure of the violent war on drugs. Harm reduction is the emerging framework and strategy.

Indeed, it makes no sense that cannabis use is criminally punished, but the sale of alcohol and tobacco is legal. Yet, the scientific evidence shows that alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than cannabis. (Our society should then be understanding towards the younger Remulla and sterner towards politicians who peddle tobacco and alcohol.)

Prohibition, as economic history has demonstrated, is costly and damaging to society. A “war on drugs” is less effective in curbing consumption, for this merely drives users underground. Worse, it abets corruption and violence (including extra-judicial killings especially during the time of Rodrigo Duterte).

Strong regulation — by distinguishing between hard and soft drugs and using a variety of tools to discourage consumption and apply harm-reduction strategies — is more effective to address substance abuse.

As pointed out by a Time article (Aug. 1, 2018), “Want to win the war on drugs? Portugal might have the answer.” What Portugal did in 2001 was to decriminalize the use of all drugs if individual consumption does not exceed a certain amount for 10 days. According to Portugal’s Health Ministry, 15 years after decriminalizing drug use, heroin use went down by 75% and death from overdose dropped by 85% although this increased slightly in the wake of an economic crisis. Overall, Portugal’s drug mortality rate is one of the lowest in the whole of Europe.

The explanation above should lead us to rethink our drug policy. It should also lead us to sympathize with the younger Remulla and many others accused of or convicted for using drugs.

Moreover, the Remulla controversy is an opportunity for Marcos Jr., to overturn Duterte’s failed war on drugs. Was it Winston Churchill who said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste?”

Turn the Remulla crisis into an opportunity to reform. Marcos Jr. in fact has already taken a different approach, having rejected the violence and brutality that characterized Duterte’s drug policy. He can take a bigger, bolder step by overhauling the Dangerous Drugs Act. At the minimum, decriminalize drug use. (Note that decriminalization is very different from legalization.)

But to do this, Marcos Jr. and the older Remulla must make a sacrifice. Specifically, Remulla, the father, must resign from his being Justice Secretary. And Marcos Jr. must encourage him to do so.

Secretary Remulla’s pronouncement that he will not intervene in his son’s case, nor will he influence the process is nonetheless insufficient. Similarly, Marcos Jr.’s statement that the calls for Remulla’s resignation “have no basis” is off the mark.

Those demanding Remulla’s resignation have raised the questions of delicadeza* and potential conflict of interest. Delicadeza and avoidance of conflict of interest are strong reasons why Secretary Remulla should resign.

I do not doubt Remulla’s statement to “let justice take its own course.” But this is objectively difficult to happen so long as he heads the Department of Justice. Remulla may not intervene, but his employees or subordinates will still regard him as their boss and will continue dealing with him even after the resolution of his son’s case. It is but natural for them to butter up and please their chief.

Here’s the dilemma. The law is the law, and the law is hard. The law must apply to the younger Remulla.

Aspiring for a new direction regarding drug policy, we want the harm reduction approach to prevail. That means giving the lightest sentence to Remulla if he is found guilty.

Prima facie, the case against the younger Remulla is strong. But having a light sentence is the way to go. Doing this sends a clear message that the whole of government will, from now on, lean towards harm reduction.

But giving Remulla, the son, a light sentence in a situation when the father remains Justice Secretary will arouse public suspicion and anger. That will lead to a political backlash.

The public will accuse the administration of having a double standard of justice. The poor are severely punished, even killed, in the course of the war on drugs. The son of a powerful politician gets a light sentence. But as I have argued, everyone charged with drug use or possession deserves humane treatment.

Upholding harm reduction means sparing anyone, including the younger Remulla, from heavy punishment. For Marcos Jr. and Secretary Remulla to show credibility in doing the right thing, they must make the ultimate sacrifice: Remulla, the father, must resign. It is for their own good.

Having himself acknowledged that he used drugs, Marcos Jr. has sympathy for drug users and understands the need for reform. At the proper time, Marcos Jr., using his political capital, can announce that henceforth, government will terminate Duterte’s war on drugs, amend the Dangerous Drugs Act, and adopt harm reduction.

This essay is written in memory of Edgardo Araneta Kalaw, Jr. He was a Filipino pioneer in championing harm reduction.

* Maintaining dignity by avoiding embarrassing situations and comporting oneself properly. A sense of propriety.

 

Dollar diarrhea

As usual it’s OFW remittances that will keep us afloat somehow. And as usual America doesn’t care about the impact of their mopping-up operations on the rest of the world.

By CIELITO HABITO

With the peso-dollar exchange rate now seemingly courting P60 to the dollar, our economy appears to be suffering from a case of LDM, or loose dollar movement. Dollars are indeed flowing out of the country for various reasons, foremost being how the US economy is sucking in its own currency with its rising interest rates.

The US Federal Reserve Bank has been deliberately raising its rates to mop up too many dollars in circulation, which has caused inflation rates Americans have not seen in decades. High-interest rates make US financial investments more attractive, unless other countries match the US interest rate hikes point by point. But central banks have various reasons not to match the US Fed’s moves, especially because higher interest rates also stifle investments, production, jobs, and incomes.

Such is the predicament our own Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) faces. It saw no need to match US interest rate hikes point by point earlier on, as our own inflation has not been as high and was more due to supply disruptions (especially in meat and fish), not too much money going around. But then Russia invaded Ukraine, which affected supplies and pushed up prices of our vital imports like fossil fuels, fertilizers, and wheat, fueling further domestic inflation. It also led to greater outflow of dollars to pay for the now more expensive imports, adding to the dollar diarrhea, further raising the exchange rate. But a rising exchange rate actually favors a lot of people: workers in export, tourism, and import-competing industries (whose competing imports get more expensive), families of overseas Filipino workers receiving remittances, and workers who get jobs in new or expanding foreign firms that now find investing in the country cheaper. A peso that has lost value is, after all, also a more competitive peso. Thus, the BSP does not fret over a depreciating peso as much as it does with rising inflation.

But things changed by the time the exchange rate had risen by more than the inflation rate because that now meant that the exchange rate rise would worsen inflation itself. And given that managing inflation is BSP’s primary mandate, it must now stem inflation—and depreciation—with tighter money supply, which means raising interest rates, even if it means further dampening the already dampened growth of the economy. That means stifling jobs, if not killing them outright. Many argue that growth is not everything, and that controlling inflation is more important, but it’s hard to tell that to those who are unable to find jobs or losing their jobs outright.

There are two important things to note about the current peso depreciation. One, it is almost entirely caused by the rising dollar, and completely external to us. It can be seen in how the peso’s movement has closely tracked that of the euro and Japanese yen, two of the most important reference currencies for the dollar. This means that all other currencies closely linked to it have also been drastically losing value, including the mighty British pound which is now almost at parity with the dollar, as Britain braces for great economic troubles ahead.

Two, while it is said that the peso has been the “worst performing” currency in Asean and possibly Asia since the start of the year, we could also describe it as having become the most competitive currency, for reasons already explained. In fact, while major economies are now bracing for recession through next year, the Philippine economy remains positioned for robust growth, albeit slower than earlier projected. And much of that growth will come from how the effect of remittances, which have traditionally driven our consumption growth, will be boosted by the peso depreciation—not to mention its push on tourism, exports, and foreign direct investments. Still, we must expect things to get worse before they get better.

So, what can we do to weather the difficulties ahead? At the individual level, the same simple advice I heard back at the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998 holds today: produce more, consume less, and share more. That could well be the way to minimize the pain for all of us.

Marcos Is Already Undercutting The Philippines’ Economic Future

WILLIAM PESEK
Forbes.com
Sep 27 2022

History just doesn’t seem to be Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s thing.

The most obvious example is how his administration, just 88 days in, is trying to whitewash his father’s disastrous 20-year reign that ended in 1986 amid a massive “people power” revolt. Now, though, Marcos is angling to rewrite far more recent history concerning his troubled economy.

In a September 23 interview with the Associated Press, Marcos said he wants to “reintroduce the Philippines” to the world and raise Manila’s profile on the international stage. The reaction from many global investors: Huh?!

Whether it be delusion or not, Marcos is glossing over how former President Benigno Aquino III already achieved that. During his 2010 to 2016 tenure, Aquino didn’t just say over and over that the one-time “sick man of Asia” is “open for business.” He proved it in ways that scored Manila’s first-ever investment grade credit ratings. READ ON…

Goodbye to the queen, goodbye to the fairy tale

I don’t know that the 10 days of pomp and pageantry that attended the death of Queen Elizabeth is going to do the reign of King Charles much good. Unless of course the funeral was meant to signal, truly, the end of an era and the start of serious downsizing and decolonizing complete with apologies and reparations and repatriation of looted wealth. In which case it was an impressively extravagant show of love and respect, even, a well-deserved last-hurrah for a queen who did a stupendous job selling white supremacy to the world. Otherwise, if it’s going to be business as usual under Charles, then the recent ostentatious display of vast wealth is grist for the mill of anti-monarchists of all colors and stripes in a world where the happy rich are obscenely few and the oppressed poor are obscenely many.

Read Chris Hedges’ Sept 12 essay, Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History. https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-monarchs-belong-in-the-dustbin-of-history

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the UK saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

… In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. Her Majesty’s Government inherited staggering wealth from the $45 trillion Great Britain looted from India, wealth accumulated by violently crushing a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine….  

And watch the Sept 14 video of Double Down News, The Dark Side of British History You Weren’t Taught in School @GeorgeMonbiot

the text.

MONBIOT. In Britain we present the colonial project as being about teaching the natives table manners and double-entry bookkeeping. In India the British manufactured a famine in the 1870s out of nothing. There were food surpluses, massive amounts of food, but the governor Lord Lytton insisted this food be exported wholesale to Britain. The ensuing starvation killed at least 12 million people, possibly as much as 29 million people.  All relief works were banned except for hard labour in labour camps, where the inmates received the same rations as the inmates of Buchenwald and where there was a 94% death rate per year.

This was all done in the name of liberal free-market capitalism; of course, the British did something similar in Ireland. In Kenya soon after the Second World War there was an uprising, by the Kikuyu people who wanted their land back. The Kikuyu were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. Almost the entire population of over a million people. People were systematically tortured to death. They invented a new kind of pliers, whose purpose was first to crush men’s testicles and then to cut them off. They raped women with bayonets, they raped men similarly. A favored technique was to Ram sand up the rectum with a stick. Sometimes they were rolled up in barbed wire, and kicked around the compound until they bled to death.

Some of the British soldiers boasted about this; this is within living memory. The Colonial Secretary lied about it, the papers documenting it were burnt. The impact of the rich and powerful Nations has been so phenomenally murderous and destructive that it is being completely airbrushed from our national consciousness.

In order to justify the land grabbing colonial projects, you had to create an ideology: we the Europeans or the Americans, have come to rescue the rest of the world from its depravity and backwardness. But in order to do that you have to be able to demonstrate that the rest of the world is depraved and backward. From this arose the racism that is still with us today. It was a necessary component of the colonial project.

Some people might claim; well, okay, we broke a few eggs to make this omelet.  As if all those human beings were eggs! But look at the omelet, isn’t it fantastic! Look we’ve made this fantastic omelet! Forget about all that unpleasant stuff and let’s just celebrate where we are.

Where we are is a continuation of the project: we commodified people’s land, and people’s labour, and turned it into our property. We’re also destroying the rest of the living world alongside it.

We don’t have to be like this. We are the same human beings as anybody else. We’re all part of the same big human family. We just have to recognize that, accept that.

Of course within Western countries there are plenty of brilliant people, resisting colonization within our own countries, and external colonization of other people’s countries. These are the voices which must come to the fore, those who emphasize altruism and kindness and generosity, and empathy for others. Those who recognize that skin color and any other difference of language, of religion, of background is completely irrelevant, by comparison to what we share, which is our humanity.