ChaCha: Duterte’s endgame #SONA2018 #NoToChaCha

Katrina SS

The Duterte government is on overdrive, providing us all with requisite distractions from the fact that the Duterte-appointed consultative committee has drafted a federal constitution to the President’s liking, and we’re all back to this discussion, not about whether or not we even want charter change, or if it’s necessary at all, but about how it’s going to happen.

Let that sink in.

Duterte’s propagandists and chacha advocates have been able to bring it to this point when we’re not even discussing whether or not charter change will happen but how it will happen. The President and his people have muscled their way through this charter change push — we’re talking THREE different federal constitutions after all since August 2016 — and it has been able to do this by utilizing what we’ve seen government do consistently and viciously the past two years: chaos-by-design.

Read on…

enormous cost of shift to federalism

ALEJANDRO DEL ROSARIO:  At the 365 Club at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Makati, former senator Juan Ponce Enrile expressed his concern about the enormous cost of a shift from the presidential to a federal form of government.

“I don’t know where the government will source the money for this big shift when funds are already scarce for the administration’s Build, Build, Build infrastructure projects and the taxpayers are already groaning from rising cost of living,” Enrile said.

Enrile also said that regions under a federal system would also have the power to secure loans from other nations, making the country’s foreign debts even bigger.

“the line between federalism and feudalism can be easily blurred”

read business mirror‘s nov 2017 editorial Federalism or feudalism, reacting to the economist‘s The Philippines has the most persistent poverty in South-East Asia and warning that federalism is not necessarily or absolutely the answer.

The Economist article concludes, “The popular perception of him [Duterte] as an outsider willing to fight against the elites of Manila has some grounding in reality.” Some will see this as a justification for the President’s call for federalism.

… the reality—and our concern—is that the line between federalism and “feudalism” can be easily blurred.

The belief that the Philippines has moved beyond the mentality and structure of the “provincial warlord” is dangerously naïve. No better example is the Maguindanao massacre. The feudalism of medieval Europe was the family of the primary landholder giving the peasants just enough sustenance to work the fields but not enough to give them the strength to rise up against the Lord of the Manor. Not much has changed in the past thousand years.

Interestingly and maybe just coincidental (or not) is that the best effort at poverty reduction has occurred in countries—China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand—with very strong and controlling national governments.

Federalism may be an important step to break the hold and power of Imperial Manila. But unless the rule of law can overcome the warlords, we are not going to accomplish anything positive.

Just who do they think they are? #NoToFederalism

Francisco S. Tatad

…Inverted Federalism

According to Merriam-Webster English Language Learners Dictionary, to “federalize” is “to join (states, nations, etc.) together in or under a federal system of government.” Concrete illustration of this is every existing federal government in the world, from the United States, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, to Malaysia. The correct usage therefore is to federalize 18 regions into one federal union, and not to federalize one unitary state into 18 separate regions. The proper term for that opposite process would be balkanization, which means to divide the nation into smaller (mutually hostile) states or groups.

It is an inherent and irreconcilable intellectual contradiction, like holding that a square is in fact a circle, which no right-thinking mind can possibly latch upon. But since DU30 has openly proposed his dogma, no one has found the moral and intellectual courage to prostrate themselves before him and say, “Your Majesty, it sounds like a great idea, but as far as my poor brain can grasp it, it is all wrong.” Everyone proclaims how wonderfully gilded the self-anointed king from Davao is, but in fact the king has no clothes at all!

DU30’s ablest defenders have tried to justify his folly by saying he is merely trying to fulfill a promise he made during the presidential debates. Indeed, he promised to have the Constitution amended, in order to establish a federal system of government, just as he made so many other promises, which he has not bothered to fulfill at all. But for the reasons just cited, this was an election promise he was not expected to fulfill precisely because the Constitution did not allow him to propose any amendment, and his idea of federalism has long been buried by the constitutional reality of a Philippine unitary state. Finally, there is no popular clamor for federalism, assuming the public shared DU30’s misguided understanding of the concept, to which he had a duty to respond…