The Power and the Money

The Philippines is not a democracy

Philippine democracy was always sick, but it died the day President Duterte took office. You cannot have a democracy in which the executive branch can kill people at will. Full stop.

The impetus for this observation came from the recent assassination of Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog, of Ozamiz, Mindanao. Parojinog was not a good man. He was corrupt; his family ruled through intimidation and patronage. Philippine elections have never been free from violence and coercion, let alone lesser forms of bribery. But you cannot combat impunity by impunity. All you do is move the impunity from lesser weaker patrons to the national executive. 

Right now, there are only two things to protect you from the Philippine state. One is obscurity. The other is the protection of powerful private interests. Under those conditions, democracy is dead. 

Duterte will push until he comes up against a stronger force. A full Marcos would not surprise.

Wagging the Dog: Lessons from France and Gabon

In 2011, France was wracked by corruption scandals in which African leaders, from Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon in particular, passed off millions of dollars in cash to the Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin. It was the flip side an earlier scandal in which the French national oil company, then called Elf Aquitaine, funneled millions of dollars per year into the coffers of Gabonese leaders. The African tail had begun to wag the French dog; some politicians called it “reverse colonization.”

And now it looks like something similar could happen under President Trump. Consider our own former colony in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte has appointed Jose E.B. Antonio to be Manila’s special representative to the United States. Antonio also happens to be the CEO of Century Properties Group, which is building the Trump Tower Manila and paid the organization around $5 million for the privilege of using the Trump name. More payments are due: one Trump deal in Puerto Rico involved a 12.5% share of profits plus a 4% slice of operating revenues in addition to the up-front fee. 

What happened in France was illegal. What is happening in America appears to be legal: the payments from the Philippines are not coming directly from the government.

But what happened in France had tangible effects on Africa. France continued to prop up the execrable Bongo dynasty well past its sell-by date. In 2008, for example, the French government shut down an investigation into the provenance of Omar Bongo’s Parisian real estate portfolio. In 2010, the American embassy in Cameroon reported that the Gabonese government embezzled funds from the Banque des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale — that is to say, one of the two central banks serving French West Africa — and used them to support President Nicolas Sarkozy. When Bongo’s son, Ali, won the 2016 election with a razor-thin (and clearly fraudulent) margin the country erupted into riots. Ironically, the 2011 corruption scandal made France reluctant to pressure Gabon with anything stronger than mild language: not because Gabonese oil is so important, and not because Hollande received Gabonese money, but because the public scandal itself made any French actions in Gabon appear to be a continuation of the illicit ties between the two nations. 

Right now, a legal battle between President Bongo and his sister is bringing some of the looting to light and the European Parliament threatened sanctions on February 2nd. But Bongo is still there and Gabon is looking far more fragile than an oil-rich coastal statelet of 1.5 million people has any right to be. 

So now in the Philippines you have Duterte running death squads and cozying up to China. Maybe no U.S. president would have been able to do much about the former (and the latter likely deserves no response). But President Trump is not even going to try. And maybe he would not have tried no matter what. But the stench of corruption lies about it. Françafrique, meet Philamerica.

And worse yet, there are other, even more depressing places involved. Wagging the dog, indeed.

Duterte or not Duterte?

 Imagine my surprise when the Economist told me that President Duterte made two quotes in his inaugural speech: “Abraham Lincoln, expressing mildly laissez-faire views; and Franklin Roosevelt, expressing gently left-leaning sentiments.” 

Oh, I wasn’t surprised that Duterte made contradictory quotes! No, I was surprised that Abraham Lincoln expressed “mildly laissez-faire views.” What might those be? Well, here is the quote from Duterte’s speech: “And from Lincoln I draw this expression: ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; you cannot help the poor by discouraging the rich; you cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer; you cannot further brotherhood by inciting class hatred among men.’”

That certainly would be mildly laissez-faire! The thing is that the quote isn’t from Lincoln. Nope, it’s from William Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister, written in 1916.

Puerto Rico is no longer foreign in the domestic sense, it is domestic in the domestic sense

 In another post, J.H. and I had an interesting discussion about Puerto Rico’s political status. Is it a colony in which the U.S. constitution does not apply — what American law calls an “unincorporated territory”? Or is it an old-fashioned territory, like Alaska and Hawaii before 1959 or Arizona and New Mexico before 1912?  

I am going to argue that Puerto Rico is in fact a de facto incorporated territory, just like the area covered by the Northwest Ordinance or Colorado before 1876. Bit by bit, in scattered pieces of legislation, Congress has fully extended the Constitution to Puerto Rico. Sure, Congress could pass an organic act and declare the Commonwealth to be an old-fashioned territorial government, but that would change nothing. It is now just an old-fashioned territory, like Arizona used to be.

Some history: the United States annexed Puerto Rico along with the Philippines in 1898. For purely racial reasons, there was zero support for taking over the Philippines as an ordinary territory, thereby bringing 7 million “Malays” into the American polity. Congress therefore created a special colonial status for the Philippines, under which the U.S. government would exercise sovereignty but within which the U.S. Constitution would not apply. That status was extended to Puerto Rico (essentially by default) and the Supreme Court ratified it in the infamous insular cases, which ruled that Puerto Rico was “foreign in a domestic sense.”

After 1898, however, Congress  and the Supreme Court slowly but surely extended the Constitution to the island. In 1917, Puerto Ricans became American citizens. In 1947, Congress extended Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution to the island. In 1952, it went further, declaring that anyone born in Puerto Rico (regardless of parental citizenship) would be a citizen. The Supreme Court then extended the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eleventh and Fourteenth amendment to the territory; extending the latter brought along the Sixth and Eighth amendments with it. 

The Seventh Amendment, which guarantees a jury trial in civil cases, does not apply to Puerto Rico. But it does not apply to any state, either: in 1877, in Pearson v Yewdall, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment does not impose the Seventh upon the states.  

What about criminal law? Didn’t the Supreme Court recently rule that someone could not be tried separately in federal and Puerto Rican courts? Well, yes it did, but the logic of 2016’s Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle stated only that Puerto Rico was not a state, sovereign under the 11th Amendment. Rather, it was a creation of Congress. But that gives Puerto Rico the same status as any pre-1959 territorial government; nothing in the reasoning derives from Puerto Rico’s original colonial status. 

Puerto Rico is indeed treated differently in terms of federal funding — a big part of the recent crisis is in fact due to Congress’s decision to fund Medicaid at a far lower rate on the island. But is that because Puerto Rico is unincorporated? No: Alaska was similarly shortchanged for federal highway money before statehood.

That leaves the income tax exemption. (Alaskans paid income taxes before statehood; the District of Alaska was incorporated in 1912, around the time of the 16th Amendment.) It seems fair that Puerto Ricans don’t pay those taxes on the basis of “no taxation without representation,” but the courts haven’t held that. Rather, they don’t pay because of 48 U.S. Code § 734. In other words, Congress exempted the island in 1917. Could it have done that with an incorporated territory? I have no idea and I would love to have a lawyer weigh in ... but I suspect that the answer is yes. After all, nobody doubts the constitutionality of the Empowerment Zones, which provide tax exemptions for investors and businesses that set up shop inside them. 

Finally, what about citizenship? Reader J.H. worries that Congress might strip Puerto Ricans of their citizenship should it so choose. (Or, more realistically, should Puerto Ricans vote for independence.) That, however, seems unlikely. The courts have defined Puerto Ricans as natural-born American citizens. It is extremely hard to strip a natural-born American of their citizenship. The courts have ruled that taking out a foreign nationality will not do it; hell, not even serving in the armed forces of another state will do it. (My uncle Eddie served in the IDF; he kept his citizenship.) The law now recognizes the SCOTUS decisions. Note the italics: “A person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality.”

That is, of course, only a law. It could be changed, but the change would only apply to naturalized citizens (maybe): the courts have been clear that the 14th Amendment protects natural-born citizens unless they explicitly declare that they intend to renounce their citizenship. 

There is a peculiar court decision from 2008 that argues that Puerto Rico has effectively become an incorporated territory. Consejo de Salud Playa de Ponce V. Rullan concluded, “Actions speak louder than words. Although Congress has never enacted any affirmative language such as ‘Puerto Rico is hereby an incorporated territory,’ its sequence of legislative actions from 1900 to present has in fact incorporated the territory.” 

No other courts have cited this ruling, but the logic seems to hold: Congress could pass an organic act incorporating Puerto Rico tomorrow, and it is not clear that anything would change. 

(Statehood, of course, is an entirely different thing.)

To conclude, I am honestly not sure that Puerto Rico’s “unincorporated” status amounts to anything. I suspect that it doesn’t. 

ADDENDUM: This piece in the The Atlantic came to my attention after I wrote the above. It is accurate in the particulars but misses the point: SCOTUS ruled against Puerto Rico on the grounds that it has no independent sovereignty, just like Alaska or Arizona or Minnesota or anywhere else before they became states. The insular cases have nothing to do with it!

(Note: Some states were sovereign before statehood: the Thirteen Colonies, Texas, and maybe if-you-squint Vermont. Hawaii was sovereign but lost it in 1898, 61 years before it became a state.)

Two of these places are not like the others

 So the intrepid data team at the Economist collated all internet mentions of the term “51st state” and came up with the following map:

Don’t ask me to explain the references to existing states. But for most of the foreign countries, I get it. Australia, Britain, Japan, very close treaty allies. Canada and Mexico, in NAFTA. (Canada’s also a very close treaty ally.) Taiwan, special relationship. Caribbean, Philippines, Ireland, lots of emigrants to the U.S. (Bora Bora and Brunei, that’s just weird, but whatever.) 

In fact, I’m surprised that more Latin American countries didn’t crack the top ten: Colombia, El Salvador and Panama have a right to feel slighted. 

But what are Russia and North Korea doing on this list?? Who refers to them as America’s 51st state? And why?

Mad Max is bullshit, people; disasters do in fact bring us together

 We have some unfinished posts fisking the World War Three novel Ghost Fleet. We are not fans of the book. And now one of the authors, August Cole, has posted this. 

“This” is a paean to Tom Clancy wargame in which there is a smallpox outbreak in New York City, after which society collapses and warlords take over. Or something. You can watch a trailer. 

Now, to be fair, Cole has nothing to say about whether a smallpox outbreak in New York would suddenly cause civilization to collapse into dog-eat-dog violence. He just thinks it’s useful to depict scenes of mass human suffering in video games because it will better prepare future soldiers for urban operations: 

“But scavenging in the confines of the New York subway system or winding up in a shootout with a local gang reinforces that your own worst enemy is all too familiar: fellow humans. The game lays bare how the odds are stacked against the survivors of such a calamity, and how even functional complex urban environments teeter and sway between chaos and order each day. Just as the novel World War Z by Atlantic Council senior fellow Max Brooks presents this uncomfortable truth through the premise of a zombie outbreak, this video game does so with close-quarters anarchy caused by catastrophic bio-terrorism ... The Division will appeal more broadly to gamers, given its formulaic progression of acquiring skills, weapons, and powers, which big studio games must incorporate in order to entice millions of players. That is also one of its strengths and perhaps greatest forms of utility in the defense realm: broad appeal. Megacity operations, be it relief or combat, will no longer be an abstract concept to young corporals or privates — or their commanding officers.”

I would like to point out here that there is remarkably little evidence that looting and unrest spike in disaster situations. The first paper of which I am aware pointed that out in 1968. A 2004 paper from the CDC reinforced the argument, showing that most looting involved necessary supplies rather than egregious attacks on other people or their property. “In contrast, researchers have found — at least in the immediate aftermath of disasters — that community resilience and unity, strengthening of social ties, selfhelp, heightened initiative, altruism, and prosocial behavior more often prevail. In short, when things are at their worst, disaster-stricken communities tend to rise to the occasion.”

This issue came up again in 2010, when preliminary reports of widespread disorder after the Chilean earthquake proved unfounded. The looting that did occur was easily controlled. No roving gangs taking over whole neighborhoods; for some numbers, we are talking about an increase in armed robberies from 52 in 2009 to 102 in the year of the earthquake. No houses were hit. It was not Mad Max. 

And again in the Philippines in 2013. Same general story.

In other words, I think our military would be very ill served if it were to promote training tools that gave soldiers the impression that organized violent gangs were going to be their main problem in post-disaster situations. 

The Philippines move right!

 Carlos Yu and I have a long-term plan to write a book on the Philippines under American rule. But it won’t be done until 2018 at the earliest.

One thing that we discovered while writing our book on the Panama Canal was that Panamanians drove on the left until April 15, 1943. The reasons for the changeover are obvious; less so is why Panama started out on the left. The influx from the British West Indies is often cited. (Colombia did not start to regularize its traffic codes until Panama had already seceded but appears to have always driven on the right.) Argentina drove on the left between 1889 and 1945. The first traffic code, from 1872, mandated driving on the right but the country switched to the left in emulation of the British-built railroads. (You can still see this in the Buenos Aires subway.) It moved back to the right on June 10, 1945.

But neither of us had any idea that the Philippines also drove on the left until March 10, 1945! That is more than slightly amazing. The vast majority of cars were imported from the United States. So how did the rule survive so long? Even more amazing, the reason for the shift given in the text of the executive order implies that imported cars had been physically reconfigured to right-hand-drive before the switch:

EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 34: AMENDING TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR VEHICLES

WHEREAS it is deemed advisable to change the existing regulations providing for the driving of vehicles on the left side of the road so that the vehicle traffic in the Philippines shall conform with the practice of driving on the right side of the road obtaining in most countries of the world;

WHEREAS such a change would bring about certain economic advantages to the people of the Philippines in that it would reduce the price of motor vehicles imported into the Philippines from the United States;

WHEREAS during the present emergency the great majority of the motor vehicles of the United States Army used on the roadways in the Philippines are right-hand driven and the drivers thereof are accustomed to driving on the right side of the road; and

WHEREAS the present affords the most propitious opportunity to effect this desired change;

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, particularly Commonwealth Act No. 671, I, Sergio Osmeña, President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, do hereby order;

1. That section 60 of the Revised Motor Vehicle Law, Act No. 3992, be amended, as it is hereby amended, to read as follows:

“SEC. 60. Drive on right side of road.—Unless a different course of action is required in the interest of the safety and security of life, person, or property, or because of unreasonable difficulty of operation in compliance herewith, every person operating a motor vehicle or guiding an animal drawn vehicle on a highway shall pass to the right when meeting persons or vehicles coming toward him, and to the left when overtaking persons or vehicles going the same direction, and, when turning to the left, in going from one highway into another, every vehicle shall be conducted to the right of the center of the intersection of the highway.”

2. That all other sections or parts of the said Revised Motor Vehicle Law and amendments thereof shall be considered as amended or modified as they are hereby amended or modified accordingly so as to conform with the provisions of the Executive Order; and all other provisions of law inconsistent with or contrary to the provisions of this Executive Order shall be considered repealed as they are hereby repealed.

Done at the City of Manila, this tenth day of March, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, the tenth.

SERGIO OSMEÑA
President of the Philippines

Unless most American imports had been reconfigured before sale in the Philippines, then there is no reason why switching the side you drive on would make imports cheaper. Today the Bahamas drives on the left but enforces no such rule; neither does the U.S. Virgin Islands. Was there a mechanics lobby group in the Philippine Islands that insisted on reconfiguring imports before 1945? 

There has got to be a story here.

Philippine mining taxes are being reformed ... we think

Colombia is in the midst of a controversy over mining taxes. In fact, wrangling over taxes is a lot of the reason why I’m here.

Coincidentally, the Philippines is about to overhaul its mining tax regime. According to the Financial Times, the idea is to replace a hodge-podge of taxes (a 2% excise tax, 5% royalties on federal lands, and a share for indigenous people of at least 1% — see page 37 of this review of mining tax regimes and page 12 of this overview of Philippine excise taxes) with a simple flat 10% excise tax on sales, using the average monthly price in London. More importantly, the government will also take a windfall tax when prices rise above a certain level.

What’s not to like? Well, three things.

First, the basic reform does not change very much. I am not seeing where these tenfold increases in revenue are supposed to come from. Below is the current revenue from mining taxes (data here) in millions of pesos:

		Government revenues from mining
	Output	Royalties	Excises	Other	Local govt
1997	₱ 33,100		₱ 114.8	₱ 921.5	₱ 70.7
1998	₱ 37,700	₱ 34.9	₱ 123.9	₱ 798.6	₱ 116.7
1999	₱ 30,900	₱ 37.5	₱ 241.1	₱ 1,016.9	₱ 180.9
2000	₱ 31,000	₱ 51.2	₱ 243.3	₱ 1,279.1	₱ 152.1
2001	₱ 29,000	₱ 66.3	₱ 129.8	₱ 647.6	₱ 138.4
2002	₱ 35,200	₱ 58.5	₱ 303.6	₱ 823.8	₱ 204.8
2003	₱ 41,100	₱ 79.8	₱ 155.8	₱ 1,039.2	₱ 226.9
2004	₱ 43,400	₱ 120.1	₱ 232.5	₱ 2,769.1	₱ 358.5
2005	₱ 50,200	₱ 210.2	₱ 251.4	₱ 4,733.6	₱ 453.5
2006	₱ 72,200	₱ 192.1	₱ 489.6	₱ 5,313.2	₱ 395.0
2007	₱ 102,200	₱ 774.0	₱ 942.1	₱ 8,371.7	₱ 359.8
2008	₱ 87,100	₱ 557.4	₱ 660.3	₱ 5,949.5	₱ 522.2
2009	₱ 106,100	₱ 396.2	₱ 718.8	₱ 10,272.5	₱ 992.8
2010	₱ 145,300	₱ 800.6	₱ 1,305.9	₱ 10,187.9	₱ 1,070.8
2011	₱ 163,200	₱ 1,180.8	₱ 6,985.8	₱ 12,736.2	₱ 1,176.9
2012	₱ 100,800	₱ 1,644.1		₱ 5,817.8	₱ 496.6

Discounting 2011 (the leap in excise revenues seems to be a temporary effect of a decision by the Bureau of Internal Revenue to impose a 7% tax on gold sales) taxes have already been bumping around 10% of total revenues.

Most of the revenues are not from specific mining taxes, but rather general impost and fees. The below chart recasts the above data in terms of the percentage of total gross mining sales paid in taxes:

Which brings us to the second problem with the reform: the trouble isn’t in the Philippine mining tax code, it’s in enforcement. Excise tax collection runs only around half the statutory 2%. In a report by Maita Gomez, on page 20, government officials blamed widespread evasion (which is odd, considering that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources has the production statistics) and the central bank’s willingness to buy gold without tax payments. (Hence the 2011 special tax.) Royalty payments are even less, since they only apply to companies operating in special reservations.

How can we be sure that a higher 10% excise will be enforced better than the current 2% + 5% royalty? Switching to London prices won’t do much, because page 21 of this IMF report on Philippine mining taxes states that London prices are already used. Moreover, excise taxes have an additional problem: when commodity prices drop, they can drive projects into the red. (By definition, a well-crafted income tax cannot do that.)

And so the third thing not to like: what will matter about the new law is precisely what we do not yet know. How will it treat windfalls from high prices? The details will matter a lot, and that is what has not yet been decided.

In short, if that third leg is well-designed, then the Philippines could start pulling in a lot more public revenue when prices are high. But if it is not, then the rest of the reform won’t make much difference.

I have seen the future and it is ...

... the language of these top stories:

Marso 11, 2013 (Lunes)

1. Gobierno Lokal ya Llama Summit para Discuti Maga Mehoras para el Solusyon del Largo Ora Blackout na Ciudad! 
2. Power Sales Agreement....Ya Pirma ya el Zamcelco y SRPI!
3. Official del Zamcelco....Ya Asegura kay Zero Blackout ya na Momento Puede ya Cumpra Kuryente na SRPI!
4. PNP Chief.......Ya Man Warning Cun el Maga Pulis Quien ay Dale Suporta Cun el Standoff na Sabah!
5. Negosyanta.........Victima de Tiro na Ciudad.......Muerto!
6. Notorioso Riding in Tandem Snatcher...........Ya Aresta el Otoridad!
7. Residente de Sta. Catalina Quien ya Iscribi el Extortion Letter na Power Barge na  Isabela....Ta Man Hunting el Otoridad!
8. Un Miembro del Philippine Army.......Reciente Victima de Tiro na Isabela Basilan!

Hat tip: Carlos Yu. Source: the Radio Mindanao Network Zamboanga.

“I think a native monolingual Chavacano speaker would understand these headlines as one language with three sets of spelling rules,” explained Carlos.

I have seen the future, and the Real Academia should be very very afraid. The Philippines are awesome, and all your base are belong to us.

Some headlines should be accompanied by exclamation points!!!!

Today I read in the Financial Times, “Philippines backs rearming of Japan.”

My reaction was, “Philippines backs rearming of Japan!!!”

When China gets a Philippine official to state “We would welcome that very much,” in reference to having Japan ditch the pacifist clause in its constitution, then you know that the People’s Republic has completely botched its diplomacy. (The Philippines is a country that still remembers the Japanese occupation, albeit not near as vividly as China or Korea.)

I currently believe that the United States is still what preserves the peace in East Asia. China is being aggressive. The Chinese public (at least portions of it) seems to have some militaristic tendencies. (Click the link for the pictures.) So it is not hard to imagine a Chinese government trying for a splendid little war with the Philippines or Vietnam. Nor is the converse impossible: since Japan currently hold naval superiority, Japanese politicians might try to goad the big fellow into a similarly splendid little Sino-Japanese naval war. 

It is not just China. Don’t forget the stunningly hostile South Korean reaction to Japanese possession of the Dokdo (aka Takeshima) islands.

I know, Steven Pinker tells us that we live in a less violent age. And he is right! But still ... sometimes a weird whiff of 1914 drifts over from East Asia. And it seems like the offshore balancing of the United States is what keeps the smell of gas from igniting.

Anyway, to bring it back full circle, when the Philippines calls for Japanese rearmament, then China’s attempt to assert its claim over the potentially energy-rich (and strategically located) South China Sea has now officially backfired.

America has been at war for a long long time

 Rachel Maddow has a new book, Drift. I’ve skimmed it; it isn’t bad. In it, her contention is that for a variety of institutional reasons, it has since the 1980s become far too easy for America to go to war. 

The book started a debate between Kevin Drum and Jonathan Bernstein. Bernstein suggested, “U.S.-sponsored interventions of one form or another are hardly unusual, even before Maddow’s apparent jumping off point in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps the idea is that there was a golden age of sorts after Vietnam, but if so it lasted less than a decade. I’m not really sure it’s become easier to deploy troops for controversial missions or to begin interventions in other nations.”

Bernstein was supported by Armando at TalkLeft, who wrote, “That is not historically accurate in my view. The times getting into war was not easy was after wars that had been very costly and not particularly successful from the US point of view. Think World War I and Vietnam. Otherwise, going to war has been one of the great American pasttimes. I’m all for making going to war hard, but the history does not demonstrate that, except for isolated periods, that was ever really the case in the United States.”

Drum conceded the point, but suggested that there was still a difference between then and now: “So what’s different? I’d say this: it’s one thing to periodically wage brief, smallish military actions. The Dominican Republic occupation of 1965 falls into that category. So do Grenada and Panama ... the last couple of decades seem quite different. The Gulf War, followed by Somalia, followed by Haiti, followed by Kosovo, followed by Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, followed by Libya and Yemen, and all against a background of drone warfare that now seems all but perpetual, feels very different. It feels like we’re simply in a constant state of military action. In the last 20 years, there have only been three or four in which the U.S. military wasn’t at war.” Matt Yglesias supported Drum, adding that there might be an economic element: technology has made it cheaper and easier to project conventional military force, and therefore we do it more.

Bernstein is right. Everyone else, including Armando, is wrong. And none of it relevant to the argument in Drift.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that only the Philippine War rivalled the Iraq conflict in terms of intensity. (World War One, obviously, was hugely worse.) U.S. force levels rapidly grew from 12,000 in 1899 to 70,000 in 1900, by which point U.S. combat deaths approached two soldiers every day. By most metrics, the war (fought by a small all-volunteer army) was as intense as the Iraq War — proportional to the U.S. population, the peak force of 70,000 represented a per-capita commitment twice as large as the peak Iraq deployments in 2008. 

Because the Philippine War lasted 28 months, as opposed to the 102 months of the Iraq War, the total proportion of Americans who served in the conflict was about a third of the recent level. The 126,000 soldiers who served in  the Philippines over the entire course of combat operations amounted to 0.2% of the U.S. population, compared to the roughly 0.6% of the U.S. population who served at least one tour of duty in Iraq between March 20, 2003, and the official end of combat operations on August 31, 2010. The combat casualty rate, meanwhile (excluding deaths from disease) ran at 596 per 100,000 troops in 1900, almost exactly matching the 2004-07 rate of 608 in Iraq. (Iraq casualty rates per 100,000 ran at 718 in 2003, 650 in 2004, 588 in 2005, 583 in 2006, and 610 in 2007. They then plunged to 199 in 2008, 135 in 2009, and 121 in 2010.)

But ... that is fine. The Drum argument does not hinge on the big wars of the past decade; rather it hinges on the continual small wars since 1989. In that respect, 1989-2012 looks pretty much the same as 1898-34: lots of small wars punctuated by two big ones. Nor does Armando’s argument hold up. World War 1 had little effect on the American government’s propensity for military intervention. It is true that the U.S. avoided a potential big war during the Mexican Revolution, but that decision was made before we entered WW1; before, in fact, it was clear that we would.

The history is both worse and better for Matt Yglesias’s argument, depending on how you interpret it. In the Dominican Republic, for example, early insurgencies depended upon the seizure of customshouses to gain resources: naval bombardment, therefore, presented a cheap means of intervention. In general, I would venture to say that Yglesias’s hypothesis is correct: cheaper war probably means more war. (Someone should test that!) What the history does not support, however, is the rather specifc hypothesis that military intervention is cheaper today than it was in 1898-1934.

Let me add that this has little bearing on Rachel Maddow’s overall argument. She wants to explain why the post-Vietnam reforms designed to make intervention difficult failed. She does not claim that 1989-2012 (actually, 1983-2012 for her purposes) is unprecedented or novel. Other readers in the blogosphere have extended her argument, however, and I think it is probably worth adding a little historical corrective.

Policy of attraction, part 4

 Americans don’t spend enough time thinking about the Philippines. America behaved as a deucedly strange colonial power. One of the strangest things was the way the U.S. prevented Americans from investing in the new territories.

Worst empire ever? What was that all about? Well, in May 1901 1902, the Americans signed a peace agreement with Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the insurgency. The advent of a negotiated peace meant that the McKinley administration needed Congress to establish a civil government in the Philippines. Without a civil government, the U.S. would be unable to sell public land, issue mining concessions, or otherwise alter Spanish law.

Problem is, Democrats were inalterably opposed to allowing American investment into the islands. Not in agriculture, not in mining, and certainly not in manufacturing. Now, some of the worry was straight protectionism ... but less than you would think. In the early 20th century, the GOP was the party of protection; the Democrats were the party of free trade.

So why the opposition to allowing Americans to invest in the Philippines? Simply put, the Democrats hated the idea of America as a colonial power. They feared that sizeable U.S. investment would create a domestic interest group with an interest in the permanent retention of the archipelago. That would make annexation much harder to reverse. (Democratic opposition to permanent retention of the Philippines, it should be noted, had much of its roots in racial anxieties over the addition of 7 million “Malays” to the United States. If the Philippines had possessed the racial makeup of Cuba, the Democrats would have set it on the road to statehood; the loudest opponents of Philippine annexation also decried the decision to make Cuba a protectorate. Cuba, you see, had enough white people to imagine it as a state.)

But don’t take my word for it! Senator Fred Dubois (D-Idaho):

I have tried, in what I have said, to be temperate in language. I have endeavored to argue the question presented by this majority bill fairly, with good temper, and honestly. I do not think it will be easy to get out of the Philippine Islands, should future events demonstrate the wisdom and necessity of doing so, after American capital has gone there and is being employed under the tempting opportunities presented by this bill.

Do they not know, if this bill passes, the difficulties in our path will be multiplied many times, provided in the future it is deemed patriotic and wise to allow the Filipinos their own independent government? The granting of these extra privileges and unusual inducements which are offered to corporations and syndicates, it seems to me, contemplates a fixed purpose on the part of the advocates of this bill to retain the islands for all time to come as a colony, as a dependency of the United, States.

Representative John Robinson (D-Nebraska):

The bill which is now before the House provides for the organization of corporations to carry on all branches of business. It provides for the issuance of bonds by the Philippine government and certain of the cities of those islands. It invites the investment of capital, and in the future capital so invested in the Philippines, held by our own and citizens of other countries, will urge their claims to our protection with a stronger voice, and clamor more loudly than ever, that in honor we must not leave their interests unprotected in these islands: but that we must continue to hold down these people by force of arms. We must continue to spend millions of dollars annually to maintain an army there. We must continue to send the flower of our youth to these tropical islands, in order that foreign investors, seeking only worldly gain. may continue to exploit this unfortunate people.
  
An argument such as this, Mr. Chairman, would mean that the time will never come when we can withdraw our forces from these islands. It would mean that the reasons which prevent us now from granting these people their independence would become stronger with each passing year, and that at no time could we hope to withdraw our jurisdiction and leave these people in liberty and peace.

Representative John Williams (D-Mississippi):

Nor do we give away, or prepare to give away, their franchises. It would be contrary to the Democratic theory if we made the slightest preparation for that, because every vested interest which we plant in the Philippine Islands is one more strong voice enlisted in favor of their permanent retention — a vested interest pleading not to be left.

Representative Allan McDermott (D-New Jersey) similarly worried that allowing the government of the Philippine Islands to sell bonds to American investors would indelibly link them to the U.S.:

This bill settles the policy of the Republic Party. It is to be continuing possession and occupancy with unlimited additions to our bonded debt.This bill means that we are to permanently hold the Philippine Islands, and I predict the holding will prove a plague to ourselves and our children.

Representative David De Armond (D-Missouri):

Civil government for the Filipinos! Civil government in which the Filipinos do not participate; civil government in which the Filipinos have no part; civil government which-the Filipinos do not desire; civil government, not for the benefit of the American citizen, but for the American promoter, the American syndicate organizer, the American capitalist, the American boss, the American contributor to campaign funds, used to corrupt the needy voter, to overcome the judgment of the honest element of American citizens, and win victories by false pretenses and more positive wrong. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

And so the Democrats held up the bill, using the filibuster in the Senate and capitalizing on Republican protectionists in the House. The resulting Philippine Organic Act of 1902 heavily restricted the rights of non-Filipinos and all corporations to own land or invest in mineral rights in the Philippines. It banned Americans and American companies from owning more than 1024 hectares (2500 acres) of land and limited mining claims to one claim of 1,000 × 1,000 feet per lode. It also limited the ability of Americans to invest in public franchises and utilities.

For a colonial power, this was weird.

Congressional Democrats did not completely prevent Americans from investing in the Philippines. A 1905 act allowed the insular government to issue railroad concessions, for example. In addition, Americans could invest in sugar mills (although not sugar lands) and they could physically move to the islands and invest as Filipinos in mining operations. Nor did the Democrats manage to keep the Philippines outside of the American customs area; free trade arrived in 1913.

But caveats aside, the restrictions worked. When the Commonwealth of the Philippines became autonomous in 1935, they received a country that was almost entirely owned by Filipinos. That might not have been the best thing for the country’s economic growth, but it was seriously bizarre for a country that had just spent 37 years as a dependency.

Weirdest ... empire ... ever.

Policy of attraction, part 3

 In comments, J.H. asks why the Phillipines didn’t adopt the U.S. dollar. After all, Hawaii and Puerto Rico did, as did Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. So why not the Philippines?

By the time the Philippine War ended in 1902, five different monies circulated in the Philippine Islands:

(1) Mexican silver pesos;
(2) Spanish silver pesos minted under the 1897 Royal Decree;
(3) Fractional currency;
(4) bank notes issued by the Banco Español Filipino; and
(5) U.S. dollars paid to American troops during the war.

The silver currencies traded at values that had little to do with their actual silver content; the Philippines were basically on a fiat money standard, with the difference that nobody was actually in charge of issuing it. Nobody liked that, so the U.S. had to decide between three different options. First, it could regularize the silver currency, basically continuing the existing system but under the control of a single mint. Second, it could introduce the U.S. dollar. (The U.S. was then on the gold standard. Dollar coins had a fixed gold value, and federally-regulated banks were required to back their note issues with gold or U.S. government bonds.) Third, it could introduce a separate Philippine gold-backed currency.

Why adopt the dollar? I give the floor to Representative Ebenezer Hill (R-Connecticut): “I want to say to every one of these representative from the Pacific coast that whenever they vote to put a new and strange system of coinage in the Philippine Islands is to build a fence between the trade of those islands and the trade of that coast.”¹ Since Republicans backed the permanent retention of the Philippines, such a position was not terribly surprising.

What might be much more surprising is that most of the support for adopting the dollar came from the Democrats, who were loudly and uniformly opposed to annexation. What explains that? Well, examine the following exchange:

William Jones (D-Virginia): I would like to ask the gentleman if he does not think by extending the coinage laws of the United States to the Philippine Islands and giving them our lawful money we could get out of there if we wanted to much more easily than if we gave them a distinctive currency which we would have to redeem and pay for?

Sereno Payne (R-New York): Oh, on the other hand, I think it would look as though we meant to stay there forever. [Laughter on the Republican side.]²

What was Jones getting at? How would installing the dollar in the Philippines make it easier to leave? Well, let’s go to Representative James Williams (D-Illinois):

A moment ago the gentleman from New York twitted those of us who want to get out of the Philippines with some sort of imagined inconsistency because we were supporting the substitute bill. ... I believe with all my heart that a greater mistake was never made than ever having landed a man to stay upon the Philippine shore after the Spanish fleet was destroyed. ... But I claim that when we leave we should leave behind American money as a stimulating agency for the expansion of American trade in the future. ... I say today that if you turn the Philippine Archipelago loose as an independent nation upon the Earth, it can not by any legislation float a token coin.³

In other words, the Democrats supported introducing the dollar because they believed that it would promote economic stability, thereby making it easier for the U.S. to get out forthwith. After all, Cuba had the dollar but the United States was smoothly on the way out. (The Democrats had no problem with Puerto Rico, although they were upset that the constitution was not extended to the island.) This position was honest: as I may talk about in a future post, the Democrats also strongly supported restrictions on American investment in the islands as long as they were under American sovereignty.

So why did Republicans prefer the option of a gold-backed Philippine currency?

The first problem is the Philippines were poor. One cent in 1901 was worth 27¢ in 2010 in the United States. In 1901, the price level in the Philippines was a lot lower than the price level in the U.S. (This is a general phenomenon: prices are lower in poor countries than in rich ones.) So one American penny bought at least the equivalent of fifty cents, whereas a Filipino centavo bought half as much. Losing the smaller denomination would have been a serious problem.

Of course, Philippine poverty wasn’t the only problem: Representative Hill proposed that the U.S. reintroduce the half-cent as an easy solution. The second fear was a bout of inflation. Puerto Rico had seen that during the changeover, as merchants attempted to charge as much in the new currency as they had in the old. (In theory, that shouldn’t happen. In practice, it did, and it forced an unpleasant political response.) William Howard Taft, the governor of the Philippines, was particularly worried; the last thing he wanted was popular discontent. Puerto Rico had handled the trouble, but Puerto Rico wasn’t coming out of a vicious guerrilla war.⁴

Finally, the Commission government convinced itself that a new peso could be introduced faster than the dollar. The Taft government (and potential American investors) were unhappy with the exchange rate fluctuations that afflicted the archipelago. It wanted a gold peso to stabilize the situation, and it wanted it quickly. If it could not get a gold peso, then it wanted the right to mint silver ones, but it wanted something.

The Democrats were a minority in Congress. They couldn’t pass a bill adopting the dollar in the House. In the Senate, Democrats were willing to fight for investment restrictions, but they were not going to do that over the currency. So bills passed both houses.

Except different bills passed each chamber. The House of Representatives voted 89-55 in favor a gold-backed Philippine peso, whereas the Senate accepted unanimously a proposal to coin silver. No compromise was forthcoming. As a result, the Philippine Organic Act of 1902 contained no monetary proposal, save an authorization to mint small change.

After another year of monetary chaos in the Philippines, the Philippine Commission went back to Congress. On January 22, 1903, the House of Representatives changed its position and voted 147-127 to introduce the dollar into the islands. The Senate then also changed its position, and voted on February 16th to create a gold peso. This time, however, compromise was forthcoming, in the sense that the House reversed itself. On February 24th, the lower house voted 139-104 to create a gold peso at a fixed rate of 2:1 with the dollar.

The introduction turned out to be messy and unsettled. It proved difficult to get the old silver pesos out of circulation; the exchange ratewith silver varied wildly; and managing the new currency proved more difficult than expected. It is far from clear that switching to a gold peso avoided many of the problems that switching to the dollar would have entailed. But there you have it.

In short, Taft and the GOP wanted to create a fixed exchange rate with the U.S. (believing that would promote trade and investment) but without the delay and dislocation that they believed would come from introducing the dollar. They then got all the delay and most of the dislocation anyway because Congress could not decide.

That said, it is also extremely unlikely that adopting the dollar would have made much difference. For it to have had a big effect before independence, you would have to be a very strong believer in the (excellent!) work of Andrew Rose on the effect of currency unions on trade to argue that having the dollar (as opposed to a fixed rate of 2:1 under American sovereignty) would increase trade by much. (In fact, Rose would expect it to make no difference; the fixed exchange rate between the U.S. and the P.I. was already a strong currency union.) There was a big financial crisis in 1919-22, in which the management of the fixed exchange rate was involved, but it is unclear at best whether the dollar would have really made any difference. The combination of postwar dislocations and mismanagement at the Philippine National Bank would have been a major problem either way; the dollar did not protect Cuba.

As for post-independence Philippines, well, after WW2 the U.S. spent a lot of effort to de-dollarize countries that used the currency. Considering how important capital controls were for postwar Philippine governments, it is hard to see why the Philippines would have been any different. Capital controls would have still been imposed and an American commission would have helped introduce a new currency, and the only difference is that the exchange rate would have fixed under the Bell Trade Act at 1:1 instead of 2:1. Perhaps the Philippines would have resisted de-dollarization (Panama did) but that seems very unlikely.

In short, the Philippine currency embroglio probably belongs in the list of Great Debates That Turned Out Not To Matter. But it get the world some coins that it otherwise would not have had, and now you know why.

Things happened before the Internet, really

 Enough, already! Now Steven Walt has joined the ranks of the people stunned by the effect of the internets. “A combination of modern mass media (Al Jazeera, the Internet, email, Twitter, etc.) has clearly played a major role in driving the pace of events.” I could handle this kind of thing from 20-somethings who don’t remember when you had to wait for a letter to arrive in the mail. But Steven Walt?

I am at a loss as to why people keep coming back to the Internets. Here is a chronology of recent events:

Dec. 17 - Mohamed Bouazizi sets fire to himself in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia.
Jan. 04 - Bouazizi dies of his burns. 
Jan. 14 - After days of riots, President Ben Ali flees to Saudi Arabia.
Jan. 22 - Protests in Algeria.
Jan. 23 - Protests in Yemen.
Jan. 25 - Protests in Cairo.

And here is an even more impressive and more rapid chain of events:

Feb. 22 - French government bans protest meetings. Riots break out.
Feb. 23 - Prime Minister Guizot resigns.
Feb. 26 - King flees to Britain.
Feb. 27 - Protest marches in Germany. Governments give into demands.
Mar. 13 - Riots flare in Vienna. Metternich resigns.
Mar. 15 - Mass demonstrations in Budapest.
Mar. 18 - Demonstrations in Berlin.
Mar. 20 - Uprising in Poland.
Mar. 31 - Constitution drafted for Germany.
Apr. 08 - Revolt in Moldava.

The difference? The first group happened in 2010-11, and the second in 1848. But somehow that has gone right into the memory hole. I am flabbergasted that the Brazilian, Philippine, and Chinese events of my living memory seem to have been forgotten. I am surprised that nobody seems to mention 1968. But I really stunned that 1848 has been lost in the frenzy to declare how super marvelicious the internet is for freedom.

I am making a strong argument here: if the internet had been magically shut down on December 17th, events would have proceeded in much the same way. News travels and people organize in ways that do not involve modern electronic communication.

And that is why Egypt’s internet shutdown is not having much effect. Except in surprising the more breathless techno-evangelists.

Policy of repulsion, part 2, or why Americans should apologize to the next Filipino you run across

 I apologize for the sparse posting. That probably won't change before March of 2011, when I’ll have a manuscript ready for The Empire Trap and have teaching notes done for all my cases. Plus, the World Cup! (You don’t follow my Facebook page?)

But let’s take Scott’s half-joking question: Why didn’t the Phillipine Republic’s amazing access to the U.S. market trigger a sustained export boom? Simple: the fixed exchange rate mandated by the Philippine Trade Act. 

 

The Bell Trade Act fixed the parity of the Philippine peso at 50¢, the same as the prewar parity. That was ... how to put this? That was insane. Price levels jumped six times after the war. Nominal wages followed, but with a lag. After the war, the economy went through a brutal deflation ... which neither reduced nominal wages nor brought the real exchange rate back into line. It was economic insanity. The eurozone follies are nothing in comparison. Harry Dexter White testified before Congress about how insane it was, albeit in an understated way. “The very essence of sovereign monetary systems is that they may get out of line with each other. If you protect the loss against exchange by fixing that rate of exchange so that it cannot be altered, you may be subjecting the country to economic conditions which would be bad for the whole country.”

Had the Commonwealth of the Philippines received the status of Puerto Rico (better yet, Hawaii) its people would have emigrated en masse and it would have received far more reconstruction money. Had the United States really cared about the new Republic of the Philippines, it would have offered a perpetual customs union in return for giving U.S. investors equal treatment with Filipino ones and allowed the peso to be devalued to 20¢ before re-establishing parity. (Or better yet, a devaluation followed by dollarization.)

Neither happened. Representative Wilber Mills (D-AK) let the cat of the bag as to why. “We are attempting in the language there to safeguard the value of capital that may go from the United States to the Philippines.” That is not crazy. Devaluation would reduce the value of U.S. investments. But why not give the Philippines a head start by bringing the exchange rate into line with relative prices? Ah. Well. The Philippine Trade Act allowed the President of the United States to “establish the total amount of Philippine articles which may ... be entered or withdrawn from warehouse in the United States” whenever he find “that they are coming or likely to come into substantial competition with like articles that are the product of the United States.” Now that provision in itself did not handicap the Philippines, but a Congress that would insist on that provision was not a Congress that would allow the Philippines to adopt the trade policies that Japan, Germany, and South Korea would later adopt ... and which China (at a much larger and more damaging scale) is adopting today.

At this point, the story is pretty much done. Still, there is an important wrinkle, which is below the fold.

Policy of repulsion, part 1

 “Policy of detraction” didn’t seem quite right. This post deals with Philippine independence, and the unwinding of the American “policies of attraction” that I will continue to sporadically post about. 

 

The Republic of the Philippines gained sovereignty on July 4, 1946. In theory,the economic separation of the Philippines from the United States was hedged by the Philippine Trade Act of 1946.   The Truman Administration persuaded Congress to allow free trade for eight years, after which tariff privileges would be slowly withdrawn until July 3, 1974. The U.S. would subject the Philippines to quotas on sugar, cordage, rice, cigars, tobacco, and coconut oil, but that was nothing new. In addition, the law provided for a fixed exchange rate of 2:1 between the peso and the dollar, gave the nationals of each country full freedom to invest in the other, and prevented the Philippines from imposing capital controls “except by agreement with the President of the United States.” 

For all the claims of Philippine nationalists, the Trade Act was almost entirely a Philippine initiative. Washington had little desire to admit Philippine products. Nor did it have much desire to maintain an open market in the Philippines — major U.S. corporations, in fact, lobbied in favor of import controls during this period. Their reasoning was simple: in a small protected market, the first company in gains an enormous advantage. Scale economies would limit the establishment of competing plants, and trade barriers would keep out imports. Voila! Washington did, however, have reasons to keep the Philippine economy marginally viable and maintain favor with the Republic’s leaders. 

It was much easier for Truman to shepherd the Philippine Rehabilitation Act, an agreement to turn over U.S. property to the R.P., and an extension of Philippine access to the American market if he could claim that American business was getting something in return. That something was the freedom to invest and temporary free trade. According to page 17 of the U.S. Survey of Current Business, Volume 31, the U.S. granted the Philippines $166 million in grants and $64 in loans between the end of the war and mid-1948, followed by an additional $488 million in grants and $36 million in loans in 1948-50. 

This was a substantial, but far from overwhelming, amount of money. In nominal terms, it came to about $5 billion in grants and $800 million in loans, plus $6 billion in transferred property. Of course, the U.S. economy was much smaller then. An equivalently-sized foreign aid program today would cost $35 billion in grants, $5.6 billion in loans, and $44 billion in transferred property. Looking at it from the other perspective, U.S. grants averaged about 4% of Philippine GDP, with loans coming to another 1%. 

The catch? (You knew one was coming.) The Philippine government quickly figured out a way to protect the domestic market, with the full cooperation of the U.S. president using his power under the Philippine Trade Act. In essence, Manila managed to get the “best” of all worlds: access to the U.S. market, very high levels of protection at home, and essentially unconditional American aid.

Details forthcoming, as I drive through violence-torn northern Mexico on my way to the D.F.

Philippine election postscript

 (A) The election in Lanao del Sur (where the shootout happened) has finally been declared a failure, largely I suspect because the video went viral. 

(B) Erap (Estrada) is making noises about fraud. Just because they are opportunistic doesn’t mean they are wrong. But I suspect that even if they are right, they won’t generate enough furor to challenge Aquino’s win.

(C) I forgot to mention that when I asked most interviewees what they hoped would change as a result of the elections, they said an end to the economic crisis, in particular lower food and basic good prices. One person has related a story of US AID dogfood mixed with dirt being served in hard hit indigenous communities a few years ago. Poverty sucks.

(D) Spent last day in urban garbage scavenger communities, near Smokey Mountain 2, interviewing Bayan Muna activists. Big fear of evictions and typhoons. Bayan Muna gets its political leverage in Manila slums by offering secure titling. Urban pigsties are the savings accounts of choice, holding up to ₱10,000 per pig in porcine wealth.

Erica Field has an interesting paper on the returns to slum titles. Using data from Peru, she finds that titles increase investment in slum housing, but not because they slumdwellers get more access to credit. Rather, it seems to be due to a lowered fear of eviction.

(E) My earlier post on coercion as a general purpose technology was unclear: I just meant that when there are men with guns in play, they can get used in unforeseen ways, like the local Chamber of Commerce being able to threaten violence.

(F) Apparently one of the only ways of distinguishing the military from the NPA in the countryside is that the latter wear crocs instead of military boots. Who would have thought those hideous pastel sandals would be insurgent footwear of choice?

The Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao

 Here are some final comments about the Philippine election. Thank you, Noel!

NOEL: I certainly hope you become a regular here, Suresh! So does at least one reader. It isn’t like you don’t have a lot to say ...

This crazy electoral gunfight video is from the PIOM delegation to the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Somebody tried to expel partisan poll watcher, which started a fight. Guns were whipped out, shooting started, and one person was killed due from shrapnel. (No one seems to have been directly shot.) Strangely, somebody hauled off a PCOS voting machine during the melee.

Apparently, Comelec doesn’t use the term “electoral violence” to describe violence during elections in the ARMM, because it’s between rival families and clans. But the report of the PIOM team that went there was an endless litany of very bad things: Election workers not even showing up to some very large precincts. The rejection of electronic voting refused because of fears that the immediate public tally would prompt violence. Election fixing — one candidate received ₱20,000 to drop out of the race. Seals broken on the electronic ballot boxes. People taking money on their way into the voting area. Hell, snack distribution by one candidate triggered a fight, and 3 bombs went off in other polling areas ... thankfully, nobody was hurt.

I don’t really understand the situation in the ARMM, but that’s gotta be a textbook case of elections in a weak state. Interestingly, the area where the videoed gunfight broke out is still counting votes, indicating that the election is NOT considered a failure.

U.S. troops have been deployed in the ARMM to hunt down Abu-Sayyed, including the creation of military outposts. It may not be a stretch to think of ARMM as a Latin American country, albeit with its own unique Islamic blend of U.S. military bases, bullets and ballots that created such problems in Colombia.

Our final PIOM report and other stuff can be found here.

Coercion as a general-purpose technology

 One of our delegations reported in with a picture of a letter from the Bicol Business Council that said, “We know you are financed by the NPA. Stop working with them or else. We know you have a family.” Not exactly a friendly reminder from the local chamber of commerce.

I’m reminded of a conversation with Jim Robinson where we discussed the idea of coercion as a general purpose technology. No matter the reason you put men with guns on the ground, they can be used for lots of things, including the interests of the local elites.

That is why counterinsurgency is so dangerous. The strategy entails the increased use of troops and intermixing them into everyday life. Unless the troops both fully understand the local situation and are truly impartial, canny locals can often get them to do their dirty work for them. The flip side is even more dangerous. When the official forces possess limited local knowledge, the temptation is huge to empower and legitimize private armies raised by local landlords to “keep their land values high peace.”

Hacienda Luisita

 One group went to Hacienda Luisita, which I blogged about earlier as owned by a clan connected to Aquino and embroiled in the violent killing of striking workers.

Interestingly, a bunch of voting machines all coincidentally failed at about 12:58pm, and were still not working as of 3:45 pm. The Hacienda is 6,000 hectares and encompasses multiple barangays, but, interestingly, this economic power did not translate into an overwhelming vote for Aquino. Some labor union leaders were told “If Noynoy wins, you better watch out.” The union recognized that if Aquino won, any hope of legal redress or land reform of this hacienda would go out the window. It seems that it was strong enough to convince its members to vote against Aquino in numbers large enough to swamp the mysteriously failing voting machines. 

We have been told that the source of the 2004 labor conflict was an attempt by the Luisita management to rezone the area in order to escape the land reform law. They bundled shares in the Hacienda with their labor contract, so that their employees were actually counted as owners. Therefore, they were not eligible for land reform under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Genius!

Bad representation, proportional representation, and military persecution in the Philippines

 The Congress of the Philippines, like the American one, is divided into two houses. The upper house, like the American one, is elected in a crazy way. It’s a different form of crazy, though. Every three years, half the 24-person Senate is elected at-large, with all the problems that entails. At least now there’s a ballot, instead of having people write in their favorite candidates.

The lower house is elected by a combination of first-past-the-post and proportional representation. The districts are pretty straightforward, although their populations can vary wildly between 1,559,641 people in the 2nd district of Quezon City, with a few as small as 50,000. Why the disparity? First, the constitution mandates that each province receives at least one district. Second, there hasn’t been any redistricting (other than the creation of new provinces) since 1987. The reason for the latter is left as an exercise for the reader.

Dakilang Isagani, Mapa na nagpapakita ng populasyon ng mga distritong pangkonggreso, ayon sa resulta ng bilangang isinagawa noong Agosto 1, 2007 at inilathala noong Abril 2008, Wikimedia Commons.

Voters get to cast a second ballot for a political party. The parties will divvy up 20% of the House seats, with two caveats: to get a seat, a party needs to get at least 2% of the national vote, and no party can receive more than three seats. In the 2010 election, there will be 219 districts and 54 party-list seats. The party-lists are decided by such narrow margins that they don’t release the results until all the precinct votes are in.

 
The above is an Armed Forces flyer reading, “Don’t vote for the NPA party-lists,” followed by a list of organizations, including one we talked to earlier. One thing that came out of our interviews is that the military seems to target party-list candidates, who are more progressive on average. I wonder if this is a tragic real-world test of the hypotheses (made by many people, but here is a paper by Iversen and Soskice) that proportional representation is better for pro-redistribution candidates. After all, why else would repression be targeted against the candidates that win the PR seats?

Post Election notes

 Today I’m heading back to Manila to compile the report with the other PIOM delegations, and then returning to the U.S. on Sunday. I don’t think there was any national-level credibility-shattering fraud. We observed fairly placid polls, at least by Philippine standards. The people I’ve talked to so far report the same. So far, the press seems to be corroborating my own observations.

 
There have been incidents of post-election violence. A bit north of here, in Mindanao’s Compostela Valley, its terribly unequal plantation belt, NPA guerillas killed 4 soldiers and 2 poll workers who were transporting memory chips. Call it the AES-era analogue of burning a ballot box. I’m curious if there anything particular at stake in Maragusan, or if the attack was simply an NPA show of force.

We’ve been hosted by a Philippine NGO, the People’s Movement for Change, or Pagbabago. I asked them what they thought about the election. Firstly, they believed the Aquino victory was anticipated. Second, Arroyo is going to retain substantial power, in part through her appointments to the judiciary and in part by the fact that her allies will likely retain control of Congress.  They also think that U.S. backing of Aquino was key to the outcome. That came as a surprise. They claimed (IMHO plausibly) that the U.S. Embassy set up meetings between Aquino and various domestic and foreign players, which secured the funds and vote banks needed to cement victory. It is true that the candidates regularly met Embassy officials.

If the national election outcome was foreordained — and if little substantive is likely to change with the new administration, given that its social base is basically the same as th old government   — then what is the point of monitoring the polls? The best answer is that there is value in documenting all the pre-election nastiness that goes down out the rural areas. Hopefully, it will draw international attention to the intimidation that routinely occurs in non-election times.

Notes on poll watching

 I still haven’t seen the news. (I’m out in the sticks without internet; Noel is getting these posts third hand, in a process involving scrawled missives, motorcycles, and carrier pigeons.) But here are some observations on the poll watching and interviews around Santa Cruz.

Long lines. One booth had a voting machine breakdown for 3 hours, others were just plain backed up. But people were waiting up to 5 hours to vote. The election has the flavor of a festival, with people hanging around long after they’ve voted to meet extended family.  So people just take whatever time they need to complete this most important of political rituals. I.e., I don’t think turnout was much deterred by the long lines.

Lots of flagrant rule breaking. Like party workers (called poll watchers) in the voting area, helping people fill out their ballots and enforcing the 3-kg of rice/100 pesos-per-vote contracts that are a guilty secret for many people here. The local police vests had a candidate’s name “Dockie” printed on it, who also happens to be the vest supplier. Also, many people missing from the rolls, finding that they had “already voted” or unable to find their name (and finding the names of long dead relatives) on the voting lists.

Nonetheless, overall impressions of the election were optimistic. This turned to frustration over the course of the day as the lines and crowded rooms took their toll. At the end of the day, two out of five machines in my precinct failed to electronically transmit their votes; the chips were sent to the municipal canvassing office. 

While our small group, by the nature of our task, is hyper sensitive and paranoid about possible electoral chicanery, I think this is as good as it gets in rural underdeveloped countries. The bubblesheets were certainly an improvement over the old Senate ballots, which involved writing in the names (or nicknames) of the preferred twelve candidates, with all the room for fraud that implies. The local canvasser told another group member that this was the best election he’s seen in 35 years.  

Political dynasties

 I asked the new mayor of Davao, who is the daughter of the old mayor (and new vice-mayor) what she thought about political dynasties, given that the Philippine constitution has a clause authorizing Congress to legislate against them. 

She said: (a) well, anyone can run in the election and (b) you have George Bush 1 and 2, no? Sigh.

The electoral left and the insurgency in the Philippines

 Just met with Joel Virador, an ex-congressman now running for city council in Davao. While a congressman, he was charged with participating in the armed struggle, which was kind of crazy given that he was in Congress when the supposed acts occurred. This is a recent tactic of the AFP; charging leftist activists and politicians (I’ve met 3 that are on the run from the army here in Mindanao) with “frustrated murder” and participation in the NPA, a designated “communist-terrorist” organization. Once so charged, they become subject to Oplan Bantay Laya 2, a counterinsurgency program explicitly modeled on the Phoenix Program used by the United States in South Vietnam between 1967 and 1972.

Oplan Bantay Laya 2 divides military operations into four stages: military operations to “clear” the area of insurgents, “hold” the area by forming paramilitary groups and an intelligence network; “consolidate” the area through civic action operations such as medical and dental missions; and “develop” the area by introducing livelihood and development projects. 

The difficulty of reconciling the first two phases of the counterinsurgency plan with electoral democracy is obvious. As the counterinsurgency program gets more muscle, the left takes a beating. In Negros, the results have been horrifying. It is notable that, at least of the admittedly select folks I’ve met, none have repudiated the NPA or condemn them. Despite the personal (one guy is dealing with a slew of health problems) and political costs these courageous people have borne by being tarred with the “insurgent” label, they refuse to condemn the NPA or sanction government counterinsurgency programs.

The problems of Philippine democracy, though, go beyond military abuses. Discussing politics with Jose has been confirming my working mental model of the effects of persistent inequality, probably mathed up best by Acemoglu and Robinson. (My co-blogger has written a little about similar models, although mostly in non-democratic contexts.) It postulates a clientelism trap, where elites control votes via their control over key economic assets, and then use that vote bank to stymie any (political or economic) redistribution that would threaten the value of those assets. Land reform, foreign debt repudiation, tax enforcement, and urban infrastructure development all fail in the Philippines because Congress is filled with the rich, who realize most of these programs will eat the flow of rents they enjoy from their assets. It’s simple, pessimistic, and maybe a bit left-wing, but that does not mean it is wrong.

Styles of repression, repression in style

 Counterinsurgency is a strange branch of military operations. The New York Times recently published an article suggesting that the overuse of powerpoint presentations was hurting the American war effort. Well, the Philippine military has developed a somewhat more “productive” use of the technology. One favored tactic by the AFP is to force poor people to watch anti-communist powerpoint shows, countering the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (NPA) ... and by extension progressive movements, leftist party-lists, and labor unions. Besides the clear human rights violation presented by forcing people to endure powerpoint presentations, this reminds me of the tactics employers use in campaigning against union-recognition elections in the United States. 

There is a longer meditation here on the political use of sovereign power. Sovereignty implies a state has control over people in its territory, just as private property and the labor contract imply the boss has control over people in his firm. If there’s interest, I’ll write it. Right now, I just wanted to point out that terribly non-democratic practices work even in the absence of outright fraud and the presence of the secret ballot.

Now it gets interesting

 I’m on a plane to Mindanao, which IMHO is the most interesting large island in the Philippines. Mindanao’s real estate is parceled up into local landlord fiefdoms (most notably the Ampatuan clan in Maguindanao), Dole banana plantations, Aussie mining companies, a large autonomous Muslim area, and insurgent controlled territory, under both the nationalist MILF and communist NPA. The combination of high stakes and ruthless players makes it no wonder that elections are contested with guns as well as money.

The local elections in the city of Davao seem like an almost stereotypical contest between different clientelist elites. The incumbent mayor, linked to anti-criminal death squads, is attempting to swap places with the current vice-mayor, who also happens to be his daughter. The opposition mayoral candidate is Prospero Nograles, who was chief of staff of the Arroyo administration. The Arroyo administration, I should add, also has their own death squads targeting activists in the area. Charming characters all around. But we will be meeting the two Bayan Muna city council candidates this afternoon. So let’s see what they say. 

Bayan Muna is a vaguely-leftish opposition party founded in 1999. In 2007, the national police arrested Satur Ocampo, one of the party’s three representatives, on murder charges related to the NPA’s execution of three alleged government informers on Leyte in 1984 ... when Ocampo was being held in jail by President Marcos. After an outcry, the Supreme Court ordered Ocampo released. The Arroyo administration later admitted to fabricating the charges.   

The Armed Forces have just been deployed to Davao, after a petition to Comelec by Nograles and another local politico. The official line is that this is to keep things “in order” for the election. But it’s also probably to intimidate people before the election and swing it for the administration. Can the two things be meaningfully distinguished in a place like Mindanao?

More when we land.

“Security by obscurity” in the Philippine elections

 One of the most interesting components of the current Philippine elections is the introduction of electronic voting. (It’s called the “Automated Election System,” or AES in the acronym-happy local idiom.) Instead of paper ballots tallied by hand at the precinct, the AES has people fill out bubbles on a sheet. (This immediately invoked my private traumas with standardized tests.) A computer then reads the bubblesheets and transmits the tallies to the next highest level of vote aggregation. E.g., results from a barangay (probably best translated as “ward”) go to the municipality (actually a county in North American terms), and then to the province and finally the national election commission, called Comelec. The system is intended to stop the long-standing practice of dagdag bawas, literally “add-subtract,” whereby zeros are creatively appended (and other digits somehow dropped) in order to favor particular candidates during the tally. 

All good in theory. But technology alone can’t beat the political animal. The implementation of the vote machines, which are designed by a private company SmartTec, has been ... fraught. It raises a few general questions about technology, democratic legitimacy, and the regulation of public-private partnerships. 

The initial AES law had a number of clauses guaranteeing security of the vote and providing for pilot projects. Comelec has ignored most of these in implementing the AES. For example, Section 12 of Republic Act 8436 (as amended) states: “Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof.” The idea was that the code could then be stress-tested and debugged by a global army of recreational hackers. Comelec, however, has kept the code under wraps. Not only has it not been made public, it hasn’t even been made available to AESWatch, a highly-qualified federation of local groups! Rather, Comelec outsourced the testing to U.S. companies at a price tag of ₱7 million. Whether this reflects partisan pro-Arroyo bias, institutional politics, or just plain old bureaucratic incompetence is not yet clear to me. The cipherpunks and open source community long ago argued that “security by obscurity” doesn’t work to protect software systems. 

The rub is that voting technology is not just any software system! What elections do (to crib from Jim Fearon) is legitimize a government by making it common knowledge that the ruling group has enough support to take on all comers. Since the technical e–voting issues are beyond the grasp of the general non-hacking public, it is REALLY important that local technical experts, ideally drawn from a broad social base, give the election technology a thumbs-up. This kind of legitimacy is exactly the kind of thing the private sector, however efficient and low-cost, can’t provide. It comes from a social knowledge base of recreational political geekery. In the fraud infested environment of the Philippines (and other developing countries experimenting with electronic voting), everyone is suspicious of the new technology. 

Open-sourcing the underlying code wouldn’t just have helped to insure the elections against nefarious technical manipulation; it would have created legitimacy for the Philippine democratic process V2.0.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. Instead, we face the possibility of the “imponderable, unthinkable and unimaginable” should the system fail ... or worse yet, the possibility that the results will be rejected by powerful groups even if it does not.

Suresh Naidu blogs the Philippine elections!

 I’m Suresh Naidu, a friend and colleague of Noel. I’ll be guest-blogging the upcoming Philippine elections.

 

I’m here in Manila with the NLG component of the People’s International Observers Mission (not as a lawyer, but a fellow traveler). The PIOM is a coordinating group for international election observers, and they are getting us up to speed before sending the 80+ internationals out in teams to various parts of the country on Sunday. (Mine is Mindanao in the south.) 

We’re on day 2 of our orientation, and yesterday we got a rundown on Philippine politics and what’s at stake in this election. Two things that need to be established right off the bat: (A) The Philippines is terribly unequal and poor (ranked 105 in the Human Development Index), with a plantation based agricultural sector and a nascent foreign-owned service economy. (B) The government’s policy options all waft out from a noxious cauldron of repression, foreign debt service, and corruption.  

The standard academic story (which is probably right) is that Philippine politics is a Frankenstein of local clans and patronage networks welded into political machines by national politicians. Local landowners use their economic (and paramilitary) power to secure votes, in the classic Latin American fashion, and then combine these vote banks across clans and coalitions to form national electoral blocs. The result is that virtually all of Congress is landlord (either urban or rural) controlled, and all the presidential candidates come from the same landowning elite. 

Need proof? Imelda Marcos is running for the Congress in her family stronghold of Ilocos Norte, in northern Luzon. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is running for the Senate, which is elected at-large. Meanwhile, the likely winner of the presidential poll, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino (son of former president Cory Aquino), is not just the owner of any plantation in Central Luzon ... he is the owner of the Hacienda Lucita, the site of a 2004 massacre of striking workers.

The incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA as the acronym-loving population has dubbed her), has epitomized the worse features of Philippine politics, being cartoonishly kleptocratic and corrupt. She is also very good at the Philippine political game. She has faced down impeachment proceedings and coup attempts.

GMA managed to get the Philippines branded the most corrupt country in Asia, and her the most corrupt president in Philippine history. (I would still give that title to Ferdinand Marcos.) In addition, she has stacked the electoral body and the Supreme Court with her allies and used the military to persecute the only source of political innovation permitted by the existing institutions: the left-wing party-lists, which contest the 20% of House seats that are open to “marginalized sectors” and elected at large.

In other words, the job of the election observers is cut out for us. Observers are no panacea for the underlying inequality and weak institutions that are the Philippine colonial inheritance. That said, independent electoral observers can improve the electoral process in the face of repression and widespread fraud. While it is a small contribution towards changing the balance of power between elites and citizens in the Philippines ... it is a small contribution towards the only thing that will ultimately allow badly needed reforms to occur.

More reports to come.

Dubai, incorporated: hiring and firing

 Dubai laws make it very easy for a company to hire whomever it needs from abroad. There are some attempts at Emiratization, but they are nowhere near as serious as in neighboring Abu Dhabi. In the free zones, in fact, they don’t exist.  Upshot? Dubai is one of the few polities in the world (with Abu Dhabi perhaps being the other) where the conceit of comparing the country to a company actually makes sense.  Non-citizens make up 96% of the labor force, and their residence permits are directly tied to their jobs.

 
The Dubai government charges fees for labor permits, but doesn’t view them as a source of income. The upside for Dubai is obvious. Production and construction costs are more like Shanghai than Seattle. Firms can recruit in a global labor market, and offer salary premiums to skilled workers over what they would get in London or Paris without raising their own labor costs. The resulting growth creates a wonderful cycle: since firms in many industries like to near other firms in the same industry, growth begats growth, and the owners of Dubai real estate (e.g., the ruling family) make a boatload of money.

It gets better. First, Dubai doesn’t pay the costs of educating all those workers; nor does it have to worry about their retirement. They come, do what they do, then go home. Governments in places like the Republic of the Philippines or the United Kingdom subsidized their education and will handle their old age. Second, the labor force drops in downturns. No worries about the social cost of unemployment. For example, the Indian embassy to the UAE reported that 20,000 seats on flights to India had been “bulk-booked” by Dubai employers for March 2010. The workers are flown out the same day they get fired because, in the words of a British construction site manager, “a lot of them commit suicide and we don’t want that on our hands.”

At this point, the answer to Barry’s question is obvious: the work system isn’t messed up at all. An auction of work permits would be the equivalent of a direct tax on labor. It would make as much sense for the Dubai government to auction off work permits as it would for the developer of a suburban business park to charge rents based on the number of employees.

 

Of course, you get some weird results. Consider the Emirate’s population pyramid. The female side resembles a somewhat exaggerated version of many large cities, which show a bulge of childless people in their prime working years. (American cities have high birthrates, and are often exceptions to this pattern. Brooklyn’s pyramid, for example, is a real pyramid.) The male side is just strange, driven by South Asian men working on construction sites and (much less so) Filipinos working as semi-skilled labor. (I have heard more than one Westerner here say flat out, “The Filipinos saved this place.”)

 

About 22% of the population (as of 2005) lives in “collective housing,” e.g., labor camps. They most resemble a dusty version of California-style dingbat apartments with less parking and no graffiti. By law, the employer’s name has to be emblazoned on the side of the building. They are a bit hard to find ... in the sense that you will have to work to convince the average cab driver that you aren’t confused and really want to go. That said, other than the signs proclaiming “Visitors are not allowed in the camp” there is nothing stopping you.

 
Sadly, I can’t find the photograph of the Chili’s logo.

 
The upshot is a development model that really is akin to a real estate development company. The unanswered question is how much that model will have to change. Eventually the construction boom will come to an end, but the social problems from that will be channeled to Bangladesh. Similarly, as other posts have already discussed, the free zone model is also going to come to an end, most likely (I’m told) via the implementation of a VAT. (As oil and real estate returns dwindle, the Emirate will need tax revenue to sustain public services, which the businesses in the free zones rely upon.)

What I do not know is how the model will develop. No American city has ever tried anything like it; only five large metropolitan areas in U.S. history have ever gone above 40% foreign-born: Detroit between 1870 and 1900, New York and Chicago between 1870 and 1920, Miami-Dade after 1980, and Los Angeles after 2000. In fact, no major American city is that high today: for Miami and L.A. you need to cheat, and consider only the central counties ... which to be fair do contain two and ten million people respectively. (Toronto metro went over 40% in 2001, but I do not know the historical figures for Canada. Vancouver did not, in neither 2001 nor 2006. Immigrants, after all, have Canadian babies.) Moreover, the Emirates make getting citizenship almost impossible. 

In other words, they ruthlessly send the jobless home and offer no real path to citizenship. Maybe that can be maintained forever.

 
Or maybe the little cricketeers outside my window will have other ideas. 

How to talk to a MILF

 A few years ago, 2005 in fact, I got in trouble for accidently allowing a section heading in my case on the Philippines to be called “Wooing the MILF.” It was about the Moro insurgency in Mindanao, of course.

 
Now Foreign Policy jumps on the same low road, and this time it is deliberate. Even so, it is an interesting article about the state of the current negotiations with the MILF, well worth reading.

Any interest in Philippine labor migration?

Margaret Thatcher and island-buying in 1979: less than it seems

 Did Britain and Australia really propose to create a new Hong Kong in the Philippines to be populated by Indochinese refugees?  The Guardian says yes.  The documents from the National Archives say no.  Unless there is more than the Archives made available, or I missed the juicy stuff in my long skim, nobody seems to have really considered the creation of a new Crown Colony in 1979.  I can’t find any references to an entrepreneurial city or opposition from Lee Kwan Yew; I certainly can’t find any references to an actual transfer of sovereignty.

Judging from the documents, the story does have a grain of truth.  There was a bilateral meeting between Australia and Britain, although little seems to have been discussed other than the possibility of a joint position at the U.N. conference.  (Both countries had already tried and failed to get the main Western powers in for a sit-down before the U.N. meeting.)  The British ambassador to Jakarta did raise the possibility of buying an island from Indonesia for an expanded refugee camp capable of housing up to 200,000 people.  The thing about that is that the report about the British suggestion and the Indonesian response is phrased in vaguest possible terms.  It isn’t clear who exactly would have put up the money.  (I suspect that the British were thinking about the UNHCR, not HMG)  It certainly isn’t clear that the use of the term “buy” meant “transfer sovereignty” as opposed to a simple land purchase. 

The rest of the stuff in the Guardian story is easy to find, from the worries about riots to the weird decision to try to make it harder for immigrants to bring their spouses into the U.K.  But the island-buying and rival Singapore?  Can’t find it. Maybe I’m not reading carefully enough. 

The full story, best as I can tell, is below.

On June 15th, 1979, the U.K. cabinet sat down to discuss the refugee problem, after receiving from hysterical letters from Thailand and threatening ones from Malaysia.  The Thais bluntly stated that they believed that the Vietnam intended to displace or kill the entire Cambodian population and “replace them with Vietnamese immigrants.”  The Singaporeans were more limited in their assessment:  they believed that the Vietnames aimed at expelling a potential Chinese fifth-column.  The Malaysians didn’t care about the reason; they simply stated that they intended to start sinking refugee-laded ships. 

This prompted a lot of worry back in London.  There was some discussion about allowing some into Britain, if only to convince other countries to take them, but Margaret Thatcher ixnayed that.  “Sir Murray Maclehose said that … he hoped that the U.K. would feel free to make a bid of her own.  The Prime Minister explained the difficulties created for the British government by the pressure of 2 million immigrants on our large cities.” (1)  I assume that meant two million existing immigrants, and not the possibility that Britain would accept two million Vietnamese refugees.

On June 22nd, the Malaysian foreign minister, Tan Sri Ghazali, stated that he believed that the Vietnamese were determined to expel their entire Chinese population.  He also believed that if the refugees were not allowed to depart by sea, the Vietnamese would push them over the border into Thailand—interestingly, and accurately, he no longer bothered to refer to Cambodia as a separate country.  He therefore proposed upping the capacity of the proposed Galang facility to 200,000.  “He commended this idea to HMG and … hoped that it would receive HMG’s support.” (2)  The British believed that the total number of additional refugees would not exceed 800,000; I have no idea where that number came from.  (3)

On June 26th, France put some pressure on London. “Since the tragedy of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos has begun to assume the character of a veritable transfer of population … the President of the Republic has decided that France will welcome 5,000 additional refugees … for every 1,000 inhabitants of France, there is one refugee from Indochina … France urges all states able to do so to add their efforts.” (4)  By that point, France had accepted 51,500 refugees; proportionately about the same as 230,000 who had arrived in America and far above the 2,316 that had arrived in Britain. (5)  The southeast Asian countries were losing patience.  The Indonesians had agreed to set up a 10,000-person processing center on Galang Island, but the U.K. suspected that their plan was to shunt the refugees they had already accepted to Galang, rather than take more.  Of course, that would imply packing 32,000 people into a facility built for 10,000 … ugh. (6)  Britain, meanwhile, had given £3.5 million to the UNHCR in 1978, and expected to give £4.75 in 1979.  That, however, still left the UNHCR underfunded to the tune of US$67 million … assuming that the problem didn’t get any worse. (7)   

On July 6th, Belize agreed to accept 1,000 refugees, as long as the U.K. provided funds for their “health, education, and welfare.” (8)  One July 12th, Britain pledged another £5 million for the UNHCR. (9) The next day, Britain’s ambassador in Jakarta reported that they had approached the Indonesian government “about the possible purchase of an Indonesian island,” and had been rebuffed. (10) The same day, the FCO reported that Britain would be on the hook for US$7.503 million for refugee aid and resettlement. (11)

The Malaysian government then reiterated its proposal for a 200,000 person settlement on an island, somewhere. It proposed that the United States set up a “United Nations Processing Centre for Vietnamese Refugees,” preferably on its own territory, but also possibly Hainan (!), Okinawa, Darwin, or New Caledonia.  All the refugees would then be transferred to the Centre, and “security and other matters affecting sovereignty and ownership of the land should be determined by the government of the United States of America … but ways must be found to overcome difficulties in the municipal law, e.g., the writ of habeus corpus … in order that these U.N. processing centres are immune from the process of local laws.”  (12) It is too bad that the Malaysians didn’t have better lawyers, or they would have known that the Constitution already did not apply to America’s Pacific territories, save Hawaii.

And that seems to be pretty much it.  Unless I missed something, which is quite possible. 

Thoughts?

(1)  J.S. Wall to Stephen Wall, “Vietnamese Refugees,” 15 June 1979. Reference PREM/19/130.
(2)  Telegram 204, “Vietnamese refugees,” 22 June 1979.
(3)  Telegram 644, “Your Telno 284:  U.N. Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees,” 20 June 1979. 
(4)  Telegram 268, “France : Council of Ministers : Indo-Chinese Refugees,” 26 June 1979.  Reference PREM/19/130.
(5)  Lord Carrington to the Prime Minister, “Vietnamese refugees,” 25 June 1979, p. 6.  Reference PREM/19/130.  Canada had accepted 15,000.  The FCO didn’t have up-to-date Australian numbers, but stated that the country had taken in 19,500 as of May 1st.
(6)  Ibid, p. 9.
(7)  Ibid, p. 14. 
(8)  George Price to Margaret Thatcher, “6 July 1979.
(9)  JS Wall, “Indo-China Refugees,” 12 July 1979. 
(10) JS Wall to Brian Cartledge, “Possible State Visit by President Suharto of Indonesia,” 13 July 1979. 
(11) Telno 318, 13 July 1979.
(12) Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie to HMG, “The Vietnamese ‘Boat People’—An Outline of Malaysia’s Proposal to Resolve the Problem,” 14 July 1979.  Reference PREM/19/130

Links from parallel universes

  Or, in fact, not.  The first comes from Alex Harrowell.  It seems as though Margaret Thatcher quite seriously proposed to the Prime Minister of Australia that the two countries buy or lease an island from Indonesia or the Philippines in order to house Vietnamese refugees.  In 1979.  Even more astoundingly, Lee Kwan Yew took the idea seriously enough to strenuously oppose it.  Alex gives links to the primary source documents, if you’re having as much trouble believing it as I did.

Truly, the mind boggles.  Ferdinand Marcos was all kinds of corrupt, but he hid it behind a veneer of nationalism ... it’s impossible to imagine him selling part of the country to the U.K.  Leasing, though ... okay, I can’t imagine this.

The second is a commercial currently popular in Mexico, courtesy of Gancho. If you don’t know who the American is, you need to watch more sports.  Enjoy!

Calling for suggestions on day-trips from Manila

 John Nye and I just gave a joint presentation at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City.  The title was “Will Elites Permit Reform?” although neither of us talked about that exactly.  John presented a big picture view of economic growth and the development of limited governments in the West over the past half-millennium, while I talked about land reforms in the Philippines during the first two decades of American rule.  The audience was great, with a lot of very good questions, including one from a graduate student who pushed me on the ambiguousness of our results — he generously called them only “slightly” ambiguous — and another from a fellow at the law school who quite brilliantly suggested that we look at local government tax deeds.  I’ll get into the details of the suggestion whenever I get around to actually talking about the paper itself, and explain why it was such a good one, but that’ll wait for later.

Right now I just want to know if anybody has advice on an interesting half-day trip from Manila.  I’ve been to Batangas and Tagaytay, but that’s it for places within a three hour drive.  Tomorrow’s my free day, and I’d like to get out of the metropolis and see someplace I never have before.  Any suggestions?

Was conquering the Philippines worth it?

  When you're a recreational blogger (procrastinational is more accurate) every so often an issue that you know a lot about is raised among the Big Dogs of the blogosphere, and for a moment you're annoyed that they didn't bother to check you out.

That's universal, I'm sure.  In my case, though, it's immediately followed by relief.  I don't want this place to be well known.  I mostly use it to establish a public record of my ideas, most of which will go into the book(s) I'm working on.  I've had a few bad experiences with tossing out such ideas sans public record.  Truth is, most of them are between silly and wrong, but every so often there's something good buried in there.

This applies to links to other people's ideas.  The linking makes me think about them, and how they apply to the stuff I work on.  It's why I don't see the point in link dumps, as opposed to specific links.

Which is why I'll link here to Matt Yglesias's question:  “Was conquering the Philippines worth it?”  In it, he suggests the following:

I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?  It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.

I have my own opinion, of course.  I might even give it later, although some of my thinking can be found here and here.  And I do think that one should take into account a counterfactual view of the Philippines before issuing judgment.  “Fifty years of Hollywood” might have improved the lot of the Filipinos, and it seems reasonable for a retrospective to seriously examine that possibility rather than reject it out of hand.   

So, before I give my own opinion (which is, as so often, changeable), what are your thoughts?

Cha cha con ass

  On my one trip to the Philippines, the nation suffered an attempted coup just as I deplaned.  In Mindanao, On another, Abu Sayyaf started chopping off heads right before I got to Mindanao.  And then there was this.  So the country should maybe be worried about the fact that I just returned. 

In fact, the papers just announced that the city would be shutting down for tomorrow’s “SONA,” or “State of the Nation Address” from President Arroyo.  Mass demonstrations have been called, and the military in Manila has been placed on “red alert.” 

Why the fuss?  Well, you can sum it up in four short syllables:  cha-cha con-ass.  “Cha-cha” stands for “charter change,” or constitutional reform.  The reform in question concerns Article 12, Section 7, which prohibits foreigners from owning land.   H.R. 1109 calls for convening Congress as a constitutional assembly in which 3/4ths of all members would be needed to pass an amendment.  In effect, this would neuter the Senate, since there are only 24 senators against 242 representatives. 

The fuss, however, is not really because foreigners might be permitted to own land.  Rather, the fuss is over the possibility that the Con-ass might vote to switch the Philippine government to a parliamentary system, which many see as a way for President Arroyo to remain in power as prime minister, instead of stepping down as the current constitution requires.   It hasn’t helped that the National Security Advisor, Norberto Gonzalez, breached the idea of a “transitional government” headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, during which a new constitution would be drafted in time for the May 2010 elections. 

So we will see what the President has to say tomorrow.  It seems as though I’ll get another day to work in my hotel room, which is not a bad thing.

The Philippine legislature, corrected

  I while back, I ran a post about upper legislative houses in the Americas, including the Philippines, and a later one on Bolivia.  It turns out that I got the history of the Philippine legislature wrong.

The Constitution of 1935 established a unicameral National Assembly.  The reason was not that the drafters wanted a unicameral legislature.  (Although I'll be damned to understand why they didn't want one.)  Rather, the drafters wanted an upper house, but couldn’t decide on how it should be apportioned.  Delegates from underpopulated provinces wanted equal representation for each province.  Progressives proposed a Senate elected by proportional representation.  Conservatives wanted to keep the existing 12 senate districts, each with equal representation.  Each proposal lost in a vote.  Unicameralism emerged by default.  (See here, p. 144.) 

In 1937, President Quezon started to raise the bicameralism issue.  Publicly, he claimed that he feared that a unicameral legislature could create an “oligarchy.”  Privately ... well, who knows?  Ricardo Jose of the University of the Philippines believes that Quezon worried that a unicameral legislature could more easily challenge presidential authority, especially if a political enemy controlled it. 

Whatever the reason, Quezon got the Assembly to approve the change to bicameralism on September 15th, 1939.  (The amendment also changed the presidential term from six years to four and allowed re-election.)  How was the new chamber to be elected?  Article 4, Section 2:  “The Senate shall be composed of 24 Senators who shall be chosen at large by the qualified electors of the Philippines, as may be provided by law.” 

In other words, every three years Filipinos picked twelve names off a list of Senate candidates.  The top twelve vote-getters became Senators.  Sort of like proportional representation, only not.  The amendment passed the required popular referendum on June 18th, and President Roosevelt approved them on December 2nd.

As so often, however, the devil is in the details.  The 1941 election introduced “block voting,” in which a voter could check a box next to the name of a party, thereby automatically giving each of that party’s candidates one vote.  Under that system, a party that could muster a plurality would sweep all the Senate seats.  Unsurprisingly, Quezon’s Nacionalista Party managed to pull off just such a feat. 

For reasons unknown, the Philippine senate is still selected by at-large elections.  Yet another inexplicable upper house, out of so many that America has given the world.

Philippine economy watch

  The latest figures indicate that the Philippine economy has started to shrink.  Truth be told, I'm surprised that it took so long.  The Philippines may be relatively less dependent on exports, but 38% of your economy is still 38% of your economy.  Meanwhile, the country is highly dependent on remittances sent home.  Latin American countries have seen such inflows plummet.  In the P.I., though, they've held up. 

Luckily for the Philippines, there isn't too much evidence that the place suffers from the strictures of emerging-market Keynesianism.  The yields on Philippine bonds rose at the bad economic news, presumably on anticipation of more government debt issues to combat the downturn, but only by 5 basis points.  That really is not a lot.  So, not much sign of crowding-out so far.

The peso fell, but that's probably a good thing.  It's good because it gives exports a filip and increases the domestic value of remittances.  It's bad because as of 2007 the Philippines owed to foreigners $23 billion in debt securities and $40 billion in other debts. 

We will see how it shakes out. 

A curious reaction to the Mexican flu

  “The Philippines’ health department urged people to avoid kissing and hugging in public.”

This led a colleague to ask me, “Is kissing and hugging in private somehow safer?????”

Senates

 There is a debate going on downblog over the United States Senate. 

Let’s take a brief tour of Senates around the hemisphere. (To which we’ll include the Philippines, due to its political history.) The American example set in 1787 proved very influential, particularly for the larger nations of América. Did their adoption of an upper house with equal representation for federal subunits make sense? Did they keep it? 

Argentina: The Argentine constitution gives each province three senators. That’s obviously undemocratic. Argentina, however, has a historical justification for the practice. Like the United States, the Argentine Republic began as a federation of independent states. Unlike the United States, the states that formed the Argentine Republic had very little autonomous political history; most had been created from city councils that simply declared independence in the wake of the political chaos that enveloped South America after 1808. After a great deal of civil war, including the loss of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, provincial forces decisively defeated Buenos Aires in 1852. A convention that excluded representatives of Buenos Aires hammered out a constitution the next year. That same constitution has remained in effect since then, at least juridically. 

The convention accepted equal provincial representation in the Senate in order to limit Buenos Aires’s dominance. It also had senators elected for nine-year terms by state legislatures and required them to be able to show a minimum annual income of 2,000 pesos. (That’s approximately US$67,000 today in terms of purchasing power.) Thankfully, later amendments got rid of those latter features, but equal representation remains. In short, while there isn’t really any good reason to keep the apportionment of the Argentine senate, the institution has deep roots in Argentine political history. The resemblance to the U.S. case is quite strong.

Brazil: The constitution of the Federal Republic of Brazil gives three senators to each state. The historical roots of this institution, however, are rather shallower than in Argentina or the United States. The 19th-century Imperial senate did not provide equal representation for the provinces. When the empire fell to a military coup in 1889, the new leaders had to find ways to convince provincial elites to support the new government. One of the ways that they did so was to provide the provincial governments with equal representation in the upper house, in open imitation of the American example. (In fact, the constitution of 1891 named the country the United States of Brazil.) Brazil has gone through multiple constitutions since then, but the institution of the Senate has remained. Unfortunately. 

Mexico: The constitutions of 1824, 1857, and 1917 all granted equal senate representation to each state. There was never much historical justification for doing so, other than imitation of the United States. (Mexican states gained much autonomy during the 19th century, and several declared independence, but that came about after the end of Spanish rule.) Since the country’s governments rarely ruled by the constitution, however, legal stipulations didn’t matter. Under Porfirio Díaz, for example, all legislative votes were unanimous after 1893. Nor did senators necessarily come from their putative state. Under those circumstances, the number of senators per state didn’t make a difference. The Revolution didn’t change that. Under President Álvaro Obregón, for example, recalcitrant legislators were often shot. Then came the creation of the PRI, with its iron-lock over politics, and ‘nuff said. Constitutional stipulations didn’t become more important than party rules until the 1997 midterm election. 

Mexico, however, is now ruled by a democratic government, and the constitutional rules matter a lot. As part of the transition to democracy, Mexican politicians amended the constitution in 1993 and 1996. In theory, the reforms granted each state four senators, up from two. In practice, the reforms created an upper house selected by a weak form of proportional representation. The winning party in each state receives two seats. The runner-up receives one. The remaining 25% of senate seats are then allocated to each party in proportion to their popular vote share. In effect, the Mexico’s current senate keeps the form of equal representation for each state while abandoning much (but not quite all) of the substance. 

The Philippines: The Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916 created a 24-person senate. The act grouped the country’s 50 provinces into 12 districts, each of which received two senators. The 1935 constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth dumped that crazy system, but selected something even crazier in its place:  at-large Senate elections. That is, every voter writes in 12 names. The top 12 vote-getters then become senators for six years. The exercise is repeated every three years, making for a total of 24 senators. The 1987 constitution of the Philippine Republic retains the feature.

The only polity that I can imagine justifiably imitating the United States, Argentine Republic, and Federal Republic of Brazil in the 21st century is the European Union. Then again, I may suffer from a lack of imagination.

Policy of Attraction, part 2

  The Philippines came under American military rule in 1898.  In 1902, Congress authorized a civilian government known as the Philippine Commission, which ruled the place until the Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916. 

 

By the admittedly low standards of colonial governments, the Philippine Commission ran the islands rather well.  It spent heavily on infrastructure and education.  It purchased rice overseas during shortages and sold it at subsidized prices.  It ran a wide array of public enterprises, including a credit system.  It even ran an agricultural research program that managed to double crop yields. 

How did it pay for this?  By taxing the Philippines quite highly by contemporary standards.  Strangely, an entire literature has developed around the idea that the Commission government undertaxed the Philippines.  That literature simply happens to be wrong.    

Here are some international comparisons from 1920:

		Revenue per capita	GDP per  capita	Gov't revenue as a % of GDP
	Philippine Islands	$4	$36	10.5%
	Puerto Rico	$15	$190	7.9%
	United States	$85	$803	10.6%
Asian colonies	India			6.0%
	Malaya	$16	$181	9.0%
	Korea	$4	$42	9.5%
	Dutch East Indies	$5	$52	9.6%
	Taiwan	$7	$64	10.5%
	Burma	$5	$43	11.7%
	Vietnam	$3	$21	14.2%
Latin American states	Peru	$6	$163	3.4%
	Mexico	$9	$176	5.1%
	Argentina	$17	$444	3.9%
	Cuba	$25	$375	6.6%
	Brazil	$8	$69	11.3%

The Philippines only seemed undertaxed because few outside observers bothered to estimate how low nominal incomes actually were.  In fact, Philippine tax collection was even more advanced, because the implementation of full free trade between the U.S. and the Philippines in 1909-13 utterly devastated trade tax revenue.  The Philippine government, therefore, needed to develop a remarkably efficient system of internal taxation for such a poor nation.

This leaves a puzzle, of course:  why didn't the Philippines capitalize on its relatively efficient tax system?  The modern Philippines collects only 14 percent of GDP in taxes, barely above its revenues in 1920.  That is not enough to fund education, infrastructure, a modern judicial system, defense, police, public health, and (perhaps) anything resembling modern social insurance.

It's a mystery, along with other failings of the Commission government that will be the subject of later posts.   

Policy of Attraction, part 1

Here's something I didn't realize:  in 1932, Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña privately asked a rather surprised President Hoover to veto an independence bill that they had publicly supported. 

As best as I can reconstruct it, it was a combination of the nativist reaction to the Watsonville Riots of 1930 and pressure from the sugar and dairy lobbies what led to the approval of the Philippine Independence Act of 1934.  Quezon got Hoover to veto the first independence bill, but Congress overrode him.  Quezon then managed to get the Philippine legislature to reject the bill, but Congress (and FDR) made it clear that independence was barrelling down the pike no matter what.  Quezon succeeded in convincing Congress to rewrite the provisions involving the retention of military bases, which gave him enough political cover to cut his losses and declare victory.  The Commonwealth of the Philippines came into existence the next year, with the Republic of the Philippines followed along in 1946.

Congress immediately cut the number of Filipinos allowed to come to the United States from unlimited to 50 per year.  (That's right, fifty.)  It also started offering Filipinos free passage home in 1935, but that wasn't very successful.  You've got to love the reason given in the linked article. 

Ironically, the U.S. reconsidered the Act's trade provisions (allowing Philippine products tariff-free entry until 1954 instead of 1939, albeit subject to a quota, and giving them preferential access until 1974) and the Philippines changed its mind on U.S. bases. (which infamously remained a huge presence on Luzon until 1991). 

I can shake the suspiscion that it's too bad that the U.S. couldn't decide on a permanent form of what both sides called "dominion status" back in the 1920s.  A permanent relationship along the lines of the Compacts of Free Association would, I think, have served both countries well, much better than the temporary and unequal arrangements that actually emerged, and then faded away.

Counterarguments and commentary are, of course, welcome.

It’s not all nanas

By request, a short post is coming on the Philippine government’s efforts to encourage emigration.  But first, a short post dispelling a very potent myth, particularly among people who have spent time in Singapore or Hong Kong:

Most Philippine emigrants are highly-skilled.  The “nana” is not representative.  This is not to say that domestic workers don’t make up a significant part of Filipino emigration.  It is to say, and I want to repeat this, that they are not representative of Overseas Filipino Workers.

As of 2004, 35 percent of  “temporary” Filipino migrant workers held a professional qualification. Another quarter worked in manufacturing.  That left 38 percent in the service sector. 

Of those, 58%, or 22 percent of the total, worked as domestic help. 

Permanent Filipino emigration is harder to track, since the emigrants don’t qualify for the many benefits that the Filipino government provides to its temporary migrants.  That said, the vast majority of the permanent emigrants go to the United States under the family-reunification laws, and the Philippine government tracks who they are.  In 2003, 51 percent of permanent migrants (excluding children, housewives, and the retired) fell into one of the following occupation categories: professional, technical, managerial, executive, or administrative.  All of the above require a degree. 

In short, overseas Filipinos aren’t just domestic workers.  Rather, they’re mostly nurses, teachers, doctors, pilots, accountants, managers, and engineers. 

In other words, the brain drain is very real. 

Chillaxing on the volcano, or, the end of empires

Another repost from the HDTD archives, this one from 2006:

I am sitting on a cliff overlooking a volcano sticking out of a lake, and contemplating the end of empires.

One of the reasons for that is the fact that I am being serenaded by a three-man band in mariachi suits singing an off-key rendition of “La Bamba.” Is there an image that better captures the colonial history of the Philippine Islands?

Why yes, there is:

The United States is probably the only other country on the planet in which you might find an “eatería.”

Anyway, I am contemplating the end of empires, in this case America’s empire in the Philippines.

That empire did not end in 1946. In some ways, U.S. power in the Philippines grew after independence. The postwar Parity Act, for example, removed most of the restrictions on private American investment in the Philippines that Washington had imposed during the colonial era.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  Yes, Washington did things like that, once upon a time.

The Bell Trade Act allowed the Philippines duty-free access to the American market for a number of years, but it was American pressure that kept the agreement from being permanent.  The Bell Act also required the Filipinos to keep their market open to American goods, but in fact exchange controls made it increasingly difficult for American producers to sell their goods in the islands.

For those of you who might quite reasonably conclude that post-independence Philippine stealth protectionism was a blow to the Dread Empire, it turns out that it was a highly-resented U.S. trade mission in 1950 that foisted the entire edifice of capital controls on a Philippine government that would have greatly preferred to retain open trade. In fact, during the 1950s the “Special Economic and Technical Mission in the Philippines” 1950s exercised more control over Philippine economic policy than the Governor-General ever did.

American influence went beyond economics.  In a more traditional imperial manner, the Armed Forces of the Philippines not only defeated Communists at home, but were capable of sending 7,000 combat troops to Korea when Uncle Sam asked. This influence remains.  A small number of American troops quietly helped the ARP neutralize Abu Sayyaf, American forces provided aid after the 2006 landslides, and everyone seems to have an “uncle in the U.S. Navy.”

But the empire is fading. America is withdrawing from this country. The United States seems much further away than it does in El Salvador or Panama, and I don’t mean geographically.

You first see it in little signs, things that might not be obvious to most visitors, but which stand out to anyone who has spent time in Latin America, or at least Latin America north of the Panama Canal.

It starts with the use of the word “Asian.” Everything is Asian. The commercials brag about “Asian” products. The new malls tout themselves as Asian. Stranger still, whenever somebody points out something odd or interesting about the Philippines — even the most astoundingly Latin American things — they’ll smile and say something like, “Now you know what it’s like in an Asian country” or “That’s how we do things in Asia.”

I used to agree with President Fidel Ramos — the Philippine Republic is a Latin American country in the wrong hemisphere. And when I first got here, Manila somewhat reminded me of San Salvador, only bigger. The architecture, in fact, is if anything even more American than anywhere south of the Río Bravo, and that (combined with mariachis, eaterías, and those Special Forces guys in Mindanao) made it seem at first like the American influence was still going strong.

But after a week I’ve become clear that the Philippines are not in the same orbit as Latin America. 

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  I’ve found Filipinos often use “Asian” as an adjective to describe things they believe aren’t derived from the West. Since Filipino culture has the very American tendency to gloss over the actual details of history — unlike some nations, whose inhabitants hold onto history like grim death — this can lead to some very WTF moments. But General Ramos went to West Point, where they do not stint on history, and I think he was very aware of the possibility he might become the Philippines’ first caudillo ... and if my read on his character is correct, he didn’t like that idea at all.

Take musical tastes. Them Filipinos, some do like the hip-hop, at least in a poorer part of Mandaluyong City where Lil’Kim (Lil’Kim? Yeah, Lil’Kim) blared from a boom box. And they play 50 Cent in the hotel gym. But that’s not representative. Filipino pop music is, to an American ear, an unlistenable slop of odd melodies and slow beats. Imagine a world where pop peaked with Electric Light Orchestra.

But the really popular foreign artists come from Korea and Japan, not Brooklyn or southern California. And it shows in the way people dress. There are no baggy pants, no chains, no track suits, nada. Nor is there stringy hair and ripped jeans. Or black nail polish and combat boots. None of the typical American pop subcultures can be found, in rich neighborhoods or poor.

The contrast with, say, Zacatecas City in Mexico, is striking. You can say the same about almost anywhere in Latin America.  It is in the same pop-cultural orbit as the United States.  The punk rock is as good, the hip-hop is much better, and the Latin music is... uh... the same. Even the schlocky pop and the embarrassing (but addictive) Euro-techno-electro-dance-whatever is recognizable in Latin America — it may not be on MTV, but you’ve heard it in a car commercial.

That’s not true in the Philippines. I mean, nobody here even knows what reggaetón is.  And I don’t recognize any of their musical icons, whether they are from here, Hong Kong, or Korea.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  Ahem. I’ve seen the signs for reggaetón in NYC, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard any.

A VOICE FROM THE FUTURE:  Maybe not in 2006, you hadn’t, but that can’t still be true.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  Be that as it may, one of the Philippines’ most noticeable human exports used to be musicians for the supper clubs of Asia. Lounge acts and saxophonists, no kidding. The point of reference you want is not ELO, but the Captain and Tennille singing “Feelings” to a background of Kenny G. Haven’t you karaoke’d there yet? I'm shocked.

A VOICE FROM THE FUTURE:  I did in fact karaoke in Manila (but not Zamboanga City, no) after I wrote the original version of this post.  And the Colbert Report has since clued me in to the identity of at least one pop star from Korea:

Considering that I’m here on business, I also can’t help noticing the strange business card ritual. You whip out the card, hold it with both hands so that the other fellow can read it, and hand it over with a little bow. If there’s a business card ritual in the other hemisphere, I bloody well never noticed it. But it’s the norm all over Asia.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  As far as I know, this is recent in the Philippines, Asia’s last holdout regarding this custom, which I believe was modified from fin-de-siecle British practice.

It’s more difficult for me to talk randomly to people than it is in Latin America. The reason is that the general level of English is poor. Surprisingly poor. All the newspapers are in English. Most of the signs are also in English, even in the slums. Yet I’ve overheard only two conversations between Filipinos occurring in that language; one here at this volcano-side resort, the other in a (rather good!) bookstore in the upscale Rockwell area of Makati City.

(The bookstore had the very Filipino name of “Fully Booked.” One thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the Filipino love of a bad pun.)

Nevertheless, ‘more difficult’ isn’t the same as impossible. The fellow we hired to drive us around, Raul Relente, introduced me to his friends and family. And here’s what I found: they all have relatives in the States. Most would like to move there. But most would like to move anywhere that is neither poor nor predominately Muslim. The U.S. is just another country.

Raul is particularly angry about the perceived decline of English in the Philippines, believing that it’s robbing his children of opportunity. “Tagalog will not go anywhere! Tagalog will not disappear! They are not going to forget how to speak Tagalog!”

While Raul’s command of English is excellent, he’s mostly self-taught and his accent takes some getting used to. And while English is more than just another language here, its level in the Philippines may be deteriorating. I’ve heard this complaint over and over, from journalists to academics to politicians.

English could disappear.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  And why not? it happened to Spanish.

People could forget how to speak English. In fact, I’ve seen it happen on national television, where the head of the National Bureau of Investigation started to stumble for words during an interview, and the announcers switched to Filipino without realizing it.

Of course, it’s hard to say what the real trend is. Ferdinand Marcos strongly discouraged English during his rule, and switched the schools over to Tagalog. Cory Aquino kept the policy after the first EDSA revolution ousted Marcos. Nevertheless, the 2000 census reported that 64% of all Filipinos over age 5 can speak English, up from a reported 52% in 1980. What we don’t know, however, is the quality of English. 

Responding to President Arroyo’s recent decision to re-emphasize English in the public schools, the Department of Education administered an English diagnostic test to about 60,000 teachers... and has since refused to release the results.

A VOICE FROM THE FUTURE:  My original links about the controversy no longer work.  Here is a copy of Executive Order 210, which brought English back to the schools.  Here is the current state of the debate, as legislators try to not only bring back early-age English instruction, but make its use mandatory from the third grade onwards. 

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  My take on the Filipino linguistic situation is that it’s not bilingualism, but diglossia. Two languages are used, but each in its own social context. (The literature on the subject sometimes talks about “high” or “prestige” versus “low” languages. I find this terminology carries its own toxic set of assumptions.)

In the Philippines, English is not primarily used as a lingua franca, but as the language in which one discusses, um, the matters one discusses in English. It’s the technical language par excellence. It’s the language of journalism and Scrabble and international gossip. You don’t use it to converse by itself, but as a specific mode to convey certain types of information.

You can see how this might not quite correspond to what a modern language educator would consider fluency.

Also, there’s a lot of code-switching in Filipino conversation. One language will be used to convey sincerity, and then there’ll be a sudden switch to another to discuss business, and possibly even another switch to a third for other subjects. Think of the French conversations in War and Peace. It’s like that.

Education policy may be changing back towards encouraging English, but the idea is not to retain ties with the United States. Rather, it’s to compete better with other Asian nations. If the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (J-PEPA, “jay-pepa”) with Japan comes through — which I tend to doubt — Japanese might be more relevant. Raul has three sisters who are married to Japanese men, with ten Japanese-born and Japanese-speaking children between them.

A VOICE FROM THE FUTURE:  J-PEPA is still up in the air. 

I met the Philippines’ chief negotiator with Japan, Thomas Aquino, on Friday. He had a lot of very interesting things to say, but two things stand out. The first was during a discussion of investor protection in J-PEPA. He mentioned that the Japanese are very different than the Americans … and more attuned to the Philippines. “The USTR came down hard on is on intellectual property; they wanted to see prosecutions. But we’re more Asian: the courts are used more to get a feel for the other guy’s negotiating position before going to an out-of-court settlement.”

(He’s half-right. The Japanese are trying their best to be attuned to Philippine sentiment, but the particular use of the courts that Mr. Aquino describes is not particularly Asian—it’s common to any country where personal relationships can’t cover everything and the courts still don’t work very well.)

He went on to say, “The feeling that people have about the U.S. is that it’s just there. The U.S. expects us to be an ally like Britain, but we’re just not that close.”

And that’s true. You know what the kicker is? No anti-Americanism. The place just suffered an attempted coup, a Senator is on the lam, American troops are still roaming around the far countryside, and nobody, not in the papers, not on the TV, seems to be ranting about Washington.

PURE PRODUCT OF AMERICA:  That Latin American style of anti-Americanism certainly has existed in the Philippines, but I think — and I could be entirely off-base here — that it’s now viewed as rather quaint, like tie-dyed love-beaded hippie protestors are in the U.S.

Of course, all this could really be nothing more than my Latin American background. I’ve spent most of my time either in the United States or in a region where it dominates everything, from pop culture to politics. When the informal American empire cracks in the Western hemisphere, it involves tear gas, oil prices, and really long speeches on television. You see it cracking.  But here, in the Philippines, the United States just seems to be slowly fading away, so far replaced by just an inchoate “Asianness.”

Maybe it’s a case of inflated expectations that I didn’t even know that I had.

There are lots of ways the fading of U.S.-Philippine links could stop, or even reverse. Call centers and business process outsourcing could tie the Philippine economy back across the Pacific.  Something bad could happen in the islands or the immediate neighborhood and bring calls to have the American empire charge right back. Or the U.S. could start to cultivate the ties it’s allowed to fade since the first EDSA revolution.  It could happen.  In some ways, it already is.

After all, can a country that can produce this really ever break its ties with the homeland of Orange County? 

Balikbayan blogging, redux

  I have been frantically trying to put the finishing touches on a paper about the Philippines, co-authored with Lakshmi Iyer.  Last week we presented it at a conference in Venice (Italy, not Los Angeles) and it’s almost ready to go.

Two years ago, I blogged a bit about a trip to the Philippines, during which I bought my lovely wife her engagement ring.  (Thank you, Carlos, for telling me where to go.)  I repost the first one in that series below.

Nuestro presidente

Soon, very soon, this fellow will be out of our hair.  That time, however, is not yet.  And so we get such classics of diplomacy as the following:

Reaction quote from a “Philippine-American,” Carlos Yu:  “I don't deny the capacity — I'm not bad myself — but it's certainly not the thing that comes to mind. Like great German stand-up.”

Poor Gloria Arroyo, needing to sit through that and smile. 

Leyendo los archivos en la madre patria

I’ll try to keep up the slack while Doug’s in Germany this holiday season.  This one goes out to Carlos’s paternal grandparents. 

The Republic of the Philippines is unique in Asia in how well it’s assimilated it’s Chinese population.   Chinese-Filipinos have served their country in every position from private to President of the Republic, and nobody seriously questions their Filipino-ness.  As a result, for all their communal solidarity Chinese-Filipinos consider themselves Filipino first, Chinese-Filipino a rather distant second, and Chinese-Chinese not at all.  (I have a sneaking suspiscion that future Chinese governments will find themselves unpleasantly surprised by that fact.)  This didn’t happen in Burma or Thailand or Vietnam or Malaysia or Indonesia. 

So why did it happen in the Philippines, and what does any of this have to do with the madre patria? 

Amma and I were in Sevilla because I was looking for tax and budget data on the Spanish Philippines.  The first place to look for that is the Archivo de Indias.  You can see the main building behind the beautiful woman in the above photo.  The reading room is across the street behind the main building:  look for the sand-colored edifice to the right of this group of Sevillano pedestrians.

In 1864, Madrid decided to modernize the Philippines’ tax system.  Since specific taxes laid on Chinese generated about 7 percent of the islands’ revenue, the Crown commissioned some fascinating reports before deciding on the specifics of the reform.  Extracts below the fold:

Nostalgia, or lack thereof, Part 3

So I'm here reading the Congressional debates about the annexation of the Philippines.  Man, Senator Hoar really ripped Senator Beveridge a new one.  "Have you read the Declaration of Independence, sir?  Allow me to remind you."  And Carlos will be proud that his people's representative, Senator John Spooner, proceeded to call Beveridge's economic justifications of American rule "base and sordid." 

But that's not why I'm here.  I'm here to ask a question that I've asked before, but who's answer I've forgotten:

WTF happened to baseball in the Philippines?  It's gone, disappeared, nada, se fué, totally driven out by ... basketball.  How and why did that happen???

From the Country that Brought You the Katipunan

The city of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, commissioned a great deal of public art.  The sculptures are more-or-less abstract, quite playful, and rather weird.

When I was last there, after a very luxurious trip across the country, I was thoroughly sick of being wined-and-dined.  Since Jeddah is one of the few places where a vaguely Arab-looking man in Western clothes can walk around unnoticed, that's what I proceeded to do.  That led to an impromptu basketball game with a group of Filipino expats. I automatically blurted out "Kumusta-ka!" when their car pulled up in front of me as I watched other people toss a ball around on some public courts, and an invitation to play naturally followed.

So when they told me that the below sculpture had, in fact, been designed by a Filipino, I was not surprised.  I have also been unable to stop laughing.

And a close up:

Brought to you by the country that named its first independence movement the "KKK."  I am not surprised, and I am still laughing. 

The missing post on Filipino food

Through the magic of the Internet we have a replacement for Noel's planned post on the glamorous food of the Philippines! The great cartoonist Lynda Barry was once asked:

pork versus chicken adobo, which camp do you belong to? and will you share your adobo recipe with us? also bryan wants to know your opinion on the other filipino debate, "long grain vs. calrose"?

Her answers begin here. Remember: chicken adobo will sterilize the problem.

(Shameless name-dropping: Lynda Barry did the cover art for my friends Joe and Anita's wedding album. Eleventeen remixed renditions of the Chicken Dance on CD. It's terrifying. I say this with admiration. Like Ms. Barry, Joe is a product of Richland Center, Wisconsin.)

Also, the Wily Filipino (narrow it down) has blogged about the mystery of adobo here and here, among other places.

PS I'm sending a copy of Cruddy in the next box to Yerevan, so probably in July. C and D, you'll like.

Update: there are also more of Belle Waring's thoughts on the Philippines here. (I should warn our gentle readers that there are some unpleasant and disturbed people in the comments which follow Belle's remarks. And Doug!)