Constitutional Re-Write: Aquino vs Kritz

Rappler did a nice wide-ranging interview with President Aquino on October 17. It touched on everything from Chief Justice Sereno to Best Friend Puno to the Cybercrime Law to re-writing the Constitution.

I'd like to extract a few remarks from the President on the subject of re-writing the Constitution to bring more foreign investment into the Philippines. The re-write effort is termed "cha-cha".

Foreign investment has been a burning point of passion for some bloggers like Ben Kritz. Ben works as a business consultant in the Philippines. Open up the floodgate to overseas ownership and Ben's services are mighty useful, I'd think. He knows Philippine commerce inside out. So he has a point of view on the need to re-write the Constitution, and it is hard. Hard in the sense than anyone not sharing that view is an idiot.

But maybe it is useful to pause and recognize that ignorance - accidental, negligent, or purposeful - allows all of us to see only a part of the whole picture.

I've opined myself that raising permitted ownership of businesses from 40% to 100%, and allowing land ownership, would be beneficial to bring both money and management expertise into the Philippines. So I am on the same side as Ben K. And I am influenced myself by the fact that I have bought two substantial properties in the Philippines with my money, but have not owned anything.

So I ask, from the comfort of my desk chair in the nice home I do not own, why the rigamarole?  Why do I have to play games like own property through a trust, for example? Or place all my assets in the name of my wife? Some wives would be inclined to take the money and run. Certainly there are a great many moneyed people who are held back from investing because the path to ownership is blocked.

So I, too, come at this from a point of view derived from personal circumstances. I sit in my desk chair surrounded by a forest of my own ignorance about historical precedent on rewrites or the ways and means of business owners in the Philippines. And a part of me says "rewrite it!"

How does President Aquino come at it?

Well, his view is much broader than that of Ben Kritz or Joe America. And he has the whole of his government giving him ideas, information and advice. Neither Ben Kritz nor Joe America get this depth of intelligence.

Another circumstance is that he actually has to ACT, or FAIL TO ACT, whereas Kritz and America only need to type at their keyboards. They bear no risk from acting or failing to act.

As I read the President's remarks on the subject of re-writing the Constitution to get more foreign investment into the Philippines, I have to give him credit.

He makes good sense.

First of all, he points out that the Constitution is a good basic law and there are many other more important priorities that need to get straightened out before the Constitution is looked at. 

President Aquino:

• "When they conduct surveys, cha-cha is, at the most, 7th in the list of 10 priorities. We talk about red tape, policies, corruption, infrastructure, cost of electricity, etc., as more pressing concerns," he said.

There you go. Perspective and priorities. Opening up the spigot for foreign investment is priority number 1 for Mr. Kritz, no fault there. It is important for JoeAm. No fault there. But it is not for President Aquino.

No fault there.

Unquestionably, until Customs, for example, is cleaned up, both of immense snarls of red tape and stained hands in every fee jar, why bust one's buttons trying to lure money into the Philippines. Importers and exporters would turn sour . . . or turn away. Futile. It's like trying to attract tourists who have to deal with trashy airports and swarms of beggars to get to the jewels of Philippine beaches.

Kritz complains mightily about the lousy airports in the Philippines. He gets the point of "infrastructure supporting tourism". The lack of infrastructure gives him ammo to ridicule the whole tourism push, and the President for not getting the airports rebuilt in a year.

But Ben ignores the point of "infrastructure supporting investments" it seems to me. The President wants to work on that infrastructure before rewriting the Constitution.

Well, the point is the same for both, tourism and foreign investment. They both need a framework that works. Policies and practices and regulations and transportation that turn outside interest, and money spent, into real value. Smoothly. Efficiently. It will be interesting to see how the ambitious "More Fun in the Philippines" tourism push turns out given the weak infrastructure supporting it.

President Aquino also makes the point that property ownership is not crucial to success. He cites the case examples:

• "China is the biggest growing economy in the last 10 years and they only have long term leases, [they] cannot own land. Vietnam, the darling for such a long time, [foreigners] also… cannot own land. So that doesn't seem to be an argument born by the facts," Aquino said.

I have to sit here in my cozy home and chuckle. Yes, I suspect that it true.  "Where there is a will, there is a way." If there is money to be made, or there are other values (like retiring in the Philippines), investors will find a way around ownership restrictions.

That said, I think the restrictions are a part of the framework that eventually needs to be fixed. But perhaps it is not a critical part. And for sure, it needs to be weighed against the big gorilla in the room, the room where the rewrite of the Constitution would occur.

It has to be weighed against the fact that we can't predict what the Gorilla will do, what the re-write will produce. President Aquino's take on this:

• "Until I am shown empirical evidence, I don't think the risk of opening up the Constitution is worth the theoretical possibility that it might have," he added. 

So he share's the wariness JoeAm has expressed about re-writing a document that could, if disassembled, get reassembled as an entirely different form of government. Those who believe that we are finally getting THIS ONE rooted in sound principles and honesty are not inclined to throw everything up in the air creating opportunity for people to run around scooping up as much fame, power and wealth as they can glom onto. Whilst not getting much done to build a wealthier, healthier Philippines.

It's better to work on progress within the rules of the existing Constitution, a reasonable document, if not a perfect one.

President Aquino also addressed the point of "need" or "objective" in re-writing the Constitution, saying that he has asked his staff to draw up a list of matters warranting attention. I would imagine such an exercise would list things now in the document that need to be removed or changed, and additions to it. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Certainly, without a clear road map of changes to be effected, the risks to opening up the Constitution to rewrite are huge.

I come down agreeing with the President's take on this, and leave it to Ben to argue from the vantage point of his own priorities.

Ben Kritz: The Alien Who Shoots Straight

The blogging community in the Philippines is both diverse and small, rather like Hollywood, where all kinds of movies get made but you keep seeing the same faces showing up on the giant screen. John Travolta, Eddie Murphy and Robin William all showed up in dresses at one time or another. The Filipino blogging community is equally tight and equally quirky. Furthermore, relationships fall faster than mangos in a typhoon, both in Hollywood and the ph blogosphere.

Today I will focus on one Ben Kritz, who blogs as Ben K, and who has been pounding the blog typewriter for at least as many years as I have been in the Philippines, which is becoming a bunch.

I first encountered Ben at the defunct Filipino Voices community blog site. He quickly gained my respect because he could disagree with my newly arrived, half-baked opinions without calling me a moron, and if I happened to write something agreeable the next day, he would say so.  His own writing was blunt and intelligent even if occasionally, in my view, wrong.

Kritz Politics

The thing I like about Ben is that he has principles and sticks with them. When Bong V at Anti-Pinoy broke with AP editorial policy and into the realm of hypocrisy by deleting my comments, Ben, one of the three main guys at Anti-Pinoy at that time, put them back in.

Here's a bit of history. BongV, benigno and Ben K all marched out of Filipino Voices in a big snit a number of years ago because FV chose to moderate their comments. Many of the FV blog threads had deteriorated into personal pissing wars, and a couple of these characters could piss with the best of them. They marched off to Anti-Pinoy and started blasting Filipino Voices (they still ridicule the site today, rather like stomping on dead bodies) for its "censorship" and failure to support "free speech".

Well, the timeline shows all kinds of worms have turned since then. benigno and Ben K split from Anti-Pinoy after a blow-up with Bong V. I'm not sure what it was about, but it may have involved Bong V's ardent pro Muslim perspectives.

BenK went to benigno's Get Real blog site and they set out to promote that site as a popular voice of progressive thought in the Philippines. Ben K does many of the business articles on one of Get Real information platforms:  http://grbusinessonline.com/wp/

The final worms turned when Anti-Pinoy started deleting comments and Get Real started "spamming" contributors who irritated the authors, even if they did not engage in profanity or deal in personal insults. They just had the effrontery to disagree and be persistent at it.  Spamming is like blacklisting a contributor. It mars his ability to comment on other sites, too, not just Get Real. So benigno took it one step further than Filipino Voices, not only banning commenters but tattooing a number on their forehead as well.

I had been criticizing Get Real here at The Society of Honor for some time and that probably contributed to benigno's decision to eject me. I'm sure that President Aquino would like to spam the whole Anti-Pinoy and Get Real crowd, but he does not have the same autocratic right as a blog editor does.

Why Get Real Members Understand Filipinos So Well	Characteristic	Dysfunctional Filipino	Get Real Member
	Hyper-sensitive	X	X
	Thuggish	X	X
	Vindictive	X	X
	Hypocritical	X	X
	Rationalizer	X	X
	Blame-caster	X	X

I check in at Get Real every now and then to read and get some ideas. My "ideas" generally are to write something the opposite of what they are busy framing as intelligence.

I didn't really follow Ben K's writings.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, a slow day with no typhoons or dances to attend, I started doing a little catch-up reading and came across the most fascinating dust-up between Ben K and what appears to be a little cabal of Get Real  strategists back in late 2011. The cabal had evidently gotten together in 2010 to hatch the stance Get Real would take in its blogs and at Facebook. I have long thought that Get Real is an agenda-pushing blog site and this is testimony to that fact.

The cabal decided it would dedicate itself to pushing for re-writing the Constitution to get the economy rolling.  Translated, that means re-writing the Constitution to open the nation up to foreign investment.

Ben Kritz sans Helmet

The dust-up came when Ben K wrote an article at Get Real Business criticizing advocates  of such a Constitutional re-write for not being aggressive enough. Ben K is a free lance business consultant and I suspect he would become a very popular and rich guy if the Philippines opened up, so there is a reason he would like to see more aggressive action.

In other words, he writes to an agenda, as well.

Maybe we all do.

There is nothing wrong with being an advocate. There is something wrong with pretending to be one thing whilst doing another. Like relentlessly criticizing the President of the Philippines in the guise of being constructive agitators for an improved Philippines, when your real goal is to portray the nation as incompetent so that more people seek expertise and capital from overseas. Because then you get rich personally.

Alas, the little cabal of strategic thinkers took issue with Ben K's criticism, even though he did not mention them by name. If thinness of skin were to be measured by the thickness of one's blog comments, then these guys come with extraordinarily thin skin, because the words came flying, and the tone was downright snide and  nasty toward "Blunt Ben". The nerve of the guy expressing his ideas out loud.

Kritz Humor

Here was one of the comments made by a certain Orion Pérez Dumdum, who I would note writes an occasional blog article at Get Real:

You never indicated any interest in the movement, and it was quite clear from the assholic nature of some of your previous posts dissing the Movement (why the heck do you also need to be so assholic about it, Ben?)

Here is Ben K at his "assholic" best, as he wrapped up his criticism:

Beyond that, however, the current mild push for constitutional reform unfortunately seems more likely to fail than succeed, in one of three ways: either outright by failing to remove constitutional protectionism due to a lack of effort and clear goals; by failing to produce any significant economic gains (i.e. a significant increase or growth of FDI) from the removal of constitutional protectionism, due to a lack of focus on other critical reforms to the investment environment; or by unintentionally creating a condition by which strong vested business interests can increase their favored and protected status to an even greater degree, using the lack of constitutional guidelines for ownership and investment as an excuse to do so. To be fair, this is probably an unlikely nightmare scenario; on the other hand, there is nothing in the current trajectory of the reform advocacy that would clearly prevent it from happening.

If the significant and comprehensive economic reform the Philippines needs cannot be accomplished, for the potential investor it will be a regrettable missed opportunity; but for the country itself, the stakes are much, much higher. For everyone’s sake, most of all their own, those pushing for constitutional reform ought to think about rolling up their sleeves and approaching the initiative as real work.

Kritz Serious

If these guys get bent out of shape by that commentary, I'd hate to see what they would do if someone were direct and told them they were incompetent, the key measure of competency being that something is in Committee or is actively before the Legislature for votes. Clearly these cabal guys went Ampatuan on Ben K, reading him riot in a public forum (I'm sure they have his e-mail address, which they could have quietly used if they were not so needy as to engage in face-saving public showboating in the Philippine tradition).

Ben K responded that he thinks for himself, but of course there is nothing that can be said to calm a clan of ranting Filipinos out for blood. So Ben K properly went silent and let the rest of the diatribe go irrelevant.

What I find fascination is the existence of a cabal which identified the Get Real editorial slant in 2010, to advocate for a rewrite of the Constitution. Named by Orion as members of the cabal are himself, Arnel, Chino, Lester, and Anthony. Ben K was a member, too. A guy by the name of Eduardo R. Alicias, Jr., may also be a member. Here is Eduardo's take:

• Mr. Ben Kritz, an ALIEN! your ideas are welcome, but what gives you the right, the nerve to impose your ideas, let alone insult us or at least some of us Filipinos on our internal efforts/discussions to improve our own country?

That of course is the peculiar definition of free speech that says "you can say whatever you want as long as I agree with it." I guess Eduardo packs his own Humpty Dumpty dictionary.

Here is the full article and blog comments if you wish to read the glorious dirt yourselves:

• The Economic Liberalization Initiative and the Philippines: Path to Prosperity, or Road to Hell?

Do I trust Ben K? I trust him to be principled rather than personal. And one of his principles is to advocate for those people and activities that benefit him and his consultation business. He is anti-Aquino. He was pro-Corona.  He is consistently aligned with the Get Real agenda. Yet he is not a shrill, insecure hit man. He just pushes on, relentlessly and somewhat irreverently.

Do I respect that he toes the Get Real line so precisely? I don't agree with that line, but I respect that he can have a different take on things than me. He does not have to like that I see the Philippines optimistically, for he may believe it is misleading and overly rosy when poverty and ineptitude really suck. The interplay between the two views is where constructive output can be found. It is benigno's refusal to allow that interplay that makes him a dog among bloggers.

The main purpose of this blog is to recognize Ben Kritz as his own man, an independent voice who lives in the Philippines, works in the Philippines, and advocates passionately for issues he believes in. He is able to discern issue from personality. He is not needy. He speaks directly. He does not insist that you be his friend or even like him. What is important is the message, the idea, the action.

Kudos, Ben K. I hope you are writing blogs and stirring up thinking here for a long, long time. It's good for the Philippines.

Ben K's web site is found here: http://weatheronneptune.wordpress.com/