Big business and trapos

Trapo is the familiar word Filipinos have come to use in describing the country’s traditional politicians. Literally translated from Spanish, trapo means “dishrag,” quite an appropriate term for our local politicians, who, by any stretch of imagination, are perceived to be corrupt.

Today, our understanding of trapo has very little to do with being traditional but more with being dirty and immoral. A twist of irony because to be traditional originally meant to stick to one’s moral standards.

We are in effect conducting a useless and expensive democratic exercise in electing trapos to office. The enormous amount of money spent in electing trapos could have been better put to use on social and economic programs that the people direly need.

Candidates for president and vice-president in the Philippines are allowed by law to spend 10 pesos per registered voter. Assuming there are 5o million registered voters, this is 50 million pesos per candidate, or roughly $1 million (U.S.) each candidate. Add a counterpart fund of 5 pesos per voter that a political party can spend, or a total of approximately $1.5 million for one candidate. And this is just scratching the surface. If we add cheating expenses incurred during the actual election and counting of votes, the total cost could reach about 5 billion pesos (approximately $1oo million U.S.) per presidential candidate, an amount estimated by Senator Manuel Villar, a presidential aspirant, in an interview in October 2009. While this figure is way beyond the allowable expenditure limits, every candidate knows how to avoid the law governing election finance because there is no effective enforcement of said election laws.

Reality Show: Only the rich can be elected

The real issue is not so much about election spending and regulating campaign financing but the fact only the rich can be elected to public office in the Philippines. This is true from the beginning of time, more than one hundred years before the National Assembly created by the revolutionary Malolos Republic in 1898 and to the democratic institutions ushered in thereafter by the American colonial regime.

While democracy was introduced in the Philippines under American tutelage, it was a dysfunctional democracy in many ways. The Americans nurtured a legacy of patronage-based politics that relied on public funds that passed through the hands of national legislators. They also ensured the perpetration of an elite political system that excluded the masses, a continuation of an oligarchy for the benefit of the landlord class. Even though the electorate had expanded to include non-elites in subsequent decades, a national oligarchy has been so well entrenched to maintain control of the political system until now. So those who have the financial resources or their anointed representatives are elected many times over to the detriment of the ordinary citizen’s political engagement in governance and decision-making.

No matter what electoral reforms like campaign financing or expenditure limits are adopted, only the rich and their chosen delegates will always be elected to power. There is truism in the words of a great American Republican kingmaker who said in the late 19th century: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

U.S. Supreme Court backs big business spending

The idea that money talks in politics is recently reinforced by the latest decision of the United States’ Supreme Court which struck down the longstanding ban against corporate financing during political campaigns. In short, American corporations, according to this decision, are free to spend as much as they want to elect and defeat candidates during elections. With this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a big blow to democracy and plunged the country to the robber baron era of the 19th century.

The U.S. Supreme Court likened corporations to people and are therefore entitled to the same First Amendment rights, i.e., that artificial legal constructs (corporations are creations of the state to make money) have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have, to speak out in support of their political candidates.

What is disturbing in the U.S. court’s decision is the majority’s claim that, unlike contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This has led a major U.S. newspaper to react in its editorial: “If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.”

Reacting to the shameless judicial overreaching by the Supreme Court, U.S. President Barack Obama called the decision a “major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

‘Legitimate’ money and ‘grey’ money

Regardless of what Philippine election laws say about election financing, there are two categories of funding sources for Filipino politicians: “legitimate” money and “grey” money. The big contributors to “legitimate” money are businesses, especially Chinese businessmen who are considered more politically vulnerable and prone to use cash to curry certain favours and business advantages.

“Grey” money, on the other hand, comes from operators of illegal economic activities, gambling, smuggling, prostitution and drugs.

In addition, the ruling party has also the distinct advantage of tapping government resources to ensure that their anointed candidates win. Despite legal prohibitions, the party in power has the unlimited resources of government and its machinery to help their candidates. The ruling party is in a powerful position to secure contributions from business sources because of the party’s control of government contracts, licenses and other favours.

Election a contest of promises

It is therefore much clearer for corporations and businesses to corrupt the political process in the Philippines. Businessmen and corporations place bets on candidates with the greatest chances of winning so they can recover their investment once these candidates are elected. This is why they prefer the trapo to win rather than throw support on some odd crusader for good and honest government.

While some Americans may find it difficult to see the effects of stricter campaign finance rules in reducing corruption in government, which the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court justices also failed to comprehend, businesses and corporations in the Philippines, however, determine the ultimate electoral outcome by the sheer power of their money. Just like American corporations and their lobbyists in the U.S. Congress, big Filipino business corporations also shower large contributions on politicians because they want to gain access to government decision-making and shaping of policy. They would not spend the money if they get nothing in return.

Tighter restrictions on campaign money are obviously important in curbing corruption, and this is not an academic issue. At the same time, they can also level the playing field between the haves and have-nots.

But this is not going to happen in the Philippines. For as long as the culture of patronage pervades our political life, elections will always be nothing more but contests to determine who can give more and promise more.

Replacing our dysfunctional political system with one that will result in greater democratization represents a daunting challenge. This struggle for a new form of governance, however, cannot be accomplished by merely joining a moral crusade against the evils of traditional politics.

Why choose the lesser evil?

This coming national election in the Philippines will not be an ordinary one.

While a successor to incumbent president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will be crowned, the election can also be a prelude to a possible shift to a parliamentary system of government if Arroyo wins her congressional seat in Pampanga and becomes the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. Everyone knows that Arroyo wants to continue as leader of the country and this is her last chance to force an amendment of the Philippine Constitution by way of a constituent assembly.

It will also mark the holding of the country’s first fully automated synchronized national and local elections with about 16,655 elective positions up for grabs by at least 90,000 candidates and close to 48 million voters participating. There are major gridlocks expected. The Automated Election System has been criticized for lack of transparency and other major technical inadequacies that could engender massive fraud. Automated cheating is said to be foreseeable and the failure of an honest election a possibility.

There are sectors raising the alarm that the elections might likely result in a constitutional crisis leading to a holdover presidency. Assuming the elections are able to hurdle the glitches of an automated system, still the most important consideration that the electorate must confront is the political agenda that each presidential aspirant is offering to the people. Are there articulated platforms that distinguish the candidates from each other? Do they represent meaningful reforms in public governance and possible changes in people’s lives? On the other hand, are they more or less the same?

The theory of the “lesser evil” that drives people to favour a candidate from the other has been with us since we became free to elect our country’s first president. Especially when there are no marked significant differences in what the candidates bring to the table. Before, we were used to a political duopoly whereby we had only two indistinguishable choices, either the Liberal Party candidate or the Nacionalista Party candidate, or whoever is the lesser evil of the two. With multi-parties and nine major presidential aspirants, we now face a fallacy of false choices, or simply the choice of who is the least evil of all.

Is the lesser or the least evil the best choice?

Despite the number of presidential candidates to choose from, our limitations are defined by their lack of meaningful and distinct strategies in restoring faith and hope in a government that has been riddled with lack of accountability, corruption, abuse of presidential power, an ineffective justice system, human rights violations, etc.

It seems that all the candidates are simply offering themselves as a mere replacement for a highly discredited president – and not the necessity of instituting meaningful reforms. The real question is what they will do when elected president, rather than simply put a new face in Malacanang. Their record of performance, their financial, political and other ties, and their philosophy of governance, not their media bites and sounds, will determine if they have the wherewithal and moral standing to deliver once elected to the highest office in the land.

When there is not much hope for this to happen, voters become boxed in by the lesser-or least-evil option, which is not the best alternative if people really want political transformation. This lesser-evil or less-nefarious theory makes no sense in our present situation where meaningful reforms are badly needed because the government cannot afford to keep taxing the people’s hope and faith in a system that is rotten to the core.

The choice between a bad or a less bad candidate seems an unconstructive and self-defeating option. It is an apathetic attitude, an acceptance of our own powerlessness. It reflects a fundamentally pessimistic approach to life and disregards the potential for creative alternatives.

It advances the old argument that one should only cast a useful vote rather than a principled one. It is based on the perception that change can only happen within the present body politic, thus enforces the status quo in place and can result in the frustration and disenfranchisement of many.

If we consider ourselves an integral part of our nation’s long historical continuum, then the lesser evil conundrum has no place in it. We should not be content with less evil; rather, we should stand for what is right. Evil is evil no matter that it is less. To do the right thing must be our goal even if this takes our whole lifetime to achieve.

Some may criticize this as plain naïveté and that a refusal to participate or not to vote could be a waste of time. The system cannot be changed through democratic means, they would say. What is really needed is a revolution. A revolution, indeed, might be the only alternative if we continue our willingness to embrace the lesser evil, instead of shunning the system so that it will take notice. The issue is about convincing people to express their voice at the polls and demand that real alternatives be offered.

The “civil society” movement in the Philippines is growing stronger. It offers real and meaningful alternatives that respond to the people’s clamour for effective leadership and governance as well as social and economic reforms. Reforms cannot be entrusted to traditional politicians who have repeatedly failed so miserably, and who are the ones to be blamed for our country’s political, social and economic disintegration.

This coming election will also gauge how much this movement can influence its outcome. If nothing positive happens, there is always the next election before we head for the hills.