After all has been said and done – the vermin who hide themselves under the skirts of government, are able to get away with corruption and engorge themselves in the pork barrel, subsidies, exemptions, and PPP contracts because of PINOY PALAMUNINs.
Yes – those Palamunin Pinoys who believe that society owes them free education, free hospitalization, free condom, free food, free clothes, free housing, free fuel, free entertainment, free.. free … free free.. a libre this .. a libre that – PALAMUNIN.. BILMOKO – a fart by any other name still stinks. C’mon -do you really believe that those are “free”? And that more government is needed in order to redistribute the wealth of the successful to those who are not? And that the role of government is to provide cradle to grave security for all?
However, if you think that they are the only Palamunins feeding on the troughs and latrines of the Philippine welfare state – you may have to give that another thought. Because the “beneficiaries” aka “the bosses” are not the only ones on welfare. If there is a demand for welfare – then it will be supplied and implemented by the welfare state supply chain.
There’s also:
The Palamunin Trapos who hand out the “freebies” - and who come up with the laws to take care of the welfare of the Pinoy Palamunins.
Next are the Palamunin government agencies who dip their fingers into redistributing tax money for the “greater good” – mostly, their employees – benefits, raises, pensions, and tenure.
Then there’s the Palamunin “chosen ones” who are chosen to provide services and supplies like electric power, phones, Internet, TV and cable, beverages, poultry, livestock, magazines, insurance, banking, schools, hospitals – from toothpick to battle ships – only the chosen ones can provide these services and are immune to competition because the state has to take care of the welfare of Filipino businesses too.
And what have we got to show for it? Well, the Righteous Palamunins will hand out all the details about the impeachments, public spending and information overload of garbage data inbound to the brainless Pinoy Palamunins who after clapping and cheering the Righteous Palamunins will go home. What awaits the Pinoy Palamunins at what pretends to be a home. Bills to be paid – to the Palamunin “Chosen Ones” .
Here’s how it looks like.
Quite a mess huh? Note how the state – and its cronies, is deeply entrenched into all aspects of individual Filipinos.
Those who got tired of being Palamunins themselves left the Philippines and saw how it was in the more prosperous states.
OFWs wondered – why is it that the same technology is being applied in the utilization of resources – and yet the disparity in access to resources is glaring. And you’d think that those states which were “heartless” because they did not have the same welfare programs/agencies/legislation as the Philippines will have lots of poor citizens.
What the OFWs found however is that citizens are able to afford the health care, education, food, entertainment, electric power, phones, cars. malls, property that they wanted because government’s only role was to ensure that private property and individuals were protected against fraud and encroachment – everything else was left to the individual to decide as they went along in their daily lives in the pursuit of personal happiness.
In doing so, businesses sprang up and thrived up to meet the diverse demands of the market and a healthy economic system resulted in jobs and prosperity for the greater number of the population.
The efficiency of the market demands that businesses meet the needs of consumers. Those which are not able to provide superior value will lose market share, if not go bankrupt. That, is the ultimate in accountability. Why protect MERALC O and its exorbitant rolling power outages? Why protect the expensive – and slow Internet connections of Globe, PLDT, and Smart – and their equally crappy service plans?
When the Palamunin Trapos come up with more regulation that mandates Palamunin Government Agencies to provide the services of the Palamunin Chosen Ones to the Pinoy Palamunins – such as the subsidies not just to the DSWD but to the various GOCCs, DA, DOST, CHED, DOE, DTI, DOH, CHED, DPWH, DoT, DENR, DAR – that’s one big hole burning through the wallets of Filipino Taxpayers. As the size of the market reduces because consumption spending per capita is reduced, we are left with big fishes in a small pond.
I once read a newspaper columnist who wrote that there is no such thing as a Philippine Welfare State. Aha – the genius of the devil is convincing people that he does not exist. But then there are many definitions on who the “evil” can be.
To the Pinoy Palamunins, Trapo Palamunins, Palamunin “Chosen Ones”, and Righteous Palamunins – the “evil ones” are those who will take away their subsidies, their jobs and lifestyles – at the expense of taxpayers.
Is it really evil to be able to “choose” for oneself. To exercise the fullness of one’s liberty to travel, to speak, to live, to defend one’s self with due process and with arms when necessary – in the pursuit of personal happiness. Equality need not mean equality of misery, or equality of access to lousy expensive products and services – it means equality to choose to be miserable or happy, to go for lousy or for expensive – whatever makes sense at the moment – without any coercive impositions by the state.
Non-profits can provide the same welfare services provided by government with more value per unit of money spent.
Kidding aside – the The Pinoy Palamunin culture which gives rise to the Philippine Welfare State is is enshrined in Article 13 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.
Article 13 – Social Justice and Human Rights
Section 1. The Congress shall give highest priority to the enactment of measures that protect and enhance the right of all the people to human dignity, reduce social, economic, and political inequalities, and remove cultural inequities by equitably diffusing wealth and political power for the common good.
To this end, the State shall regulate the acquisition, ownership, use, and disposition of property and its increments.
Section 2. The promotion of social justice shall include the commitment to create economic opportunities based on freedom of initiative and self-reliance.
Labor
Section 3. The State shall afford full protection to labor, local and overseas, organized and unorganized, and promote full employment and equality of employment opportunities for all.
It shall guarantee the rights of all workers to self-organizations, and peaceful concerted activities, including the right to strike in accordance with law. They shall be entitled to security of tenure, humane conditions of work, and a living wage. They shall also participate in policy and decision-making processes affecting their rights and benefits as may be provided by law.
The State shall promote the principle of shared responsibility between workers and employers and the preferential use of voluntary modes in settling disputes, including conciliation, and shall enforce their mutual compliance therewith to foster industrial peace.
The State shall regulate the relations between workers and employers, recognizing the right of labor to its just share in the fruits of production and the right of enterprises to reasonable returns on investments, and to expansion and growth.
Agrarian and Natural Resources Reform
Section 4. The Sate shall, by law, undertake an agrarian reform program founded on the right of farmers and regular farmworkers, who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till or, in the case of other farmworkers, to receive a just share of the fruits thereof. To this end, the State shall encourage and undertake the just distribution of all agricultural lands, subject to such priorities and reasonable retention limits as the Congress may prescribe, taking into account ecological, developmental, or equity considerations, and subject to the payment of just compensation. In determining retention limits, the State shall respect the rights of small landowners. The State shall further provide incentives for voluntary land-sharing.
Section 5. The State shall recognize the rights of farmers, farmworkers, and landowners, as well as cooperatives, and other independent farmers’ organizations to participate in the planning, organization, and management of the program, and shall provide support to agriculture through appropriate technology and research, and adequate financial, production, marketing, and other support services.
Section 6. The State shall apply the principles of agrarian reform or stewardship, whenever applicable in accordance with law, in the disposition or utilization of other natural resources, including lands of the public domain under lease or concession suitable to agriculture, subject to prior rights, homestead rights of small settlers, and the rights of indigenous communities to their ancestral lands.
The State may resettle landless farmers and farmworkers in its own agricultural estates which shall be distributed to them in the manner provided by law.
Section 7. The State shall protect the rights of subsistence fishermen, especially of local communities, to the preferential use of local marine and fishing resources, both inland and offshore. It shall provide support to such fishermen through appropriate technology and research, adequate financial, production, and marketing assistance, and other services. The State shall also protect, develop, and conserve such resources. The protection shall extend to offshore fishing grounds of subsistence fishermen against foreign intrusion. Fishworkers shall receive a just share from their labor in the utilization of marine and fishing resources.
Section 8. The State shall provide incentives to landowners to invest the proceeds of the agrarian reform program to promote industrialization, employment creation, and privatization of public sector enterprises. Financial instruments used as payment for their lands shall be honored as equity in enterprises of their choice.
Urban Land Reform and Housing
Section 9. The State shall, by law, and for the common good, undertake, in cooperation with the public sector, a continuing program of urban land reform and housing which will make available at affordable cost decent housing and basic services to underprivileged and homeless citizens in urban centers and resettlement areas. It shall also promote adequate employment opportunities to such citizens. In the implementation of such program the State shall respect the rights of small property owners.
Section 10. Urban or rural poor dwellers shall not be evicted nor their dwellings demolished, except in accordance with law and in a just and humane manner.
No resettlement of urban and rural dwellers shall be undertaken without adequate consultation with them and the communities where they are to be relocated.
Health
Section 11. The State shall adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development which shall endeavor to make essential goods, health and other social services available to all people at affordable cost. There shall be priority for the needs of the underprivileged sick, elderly, disabled, women, and children. The State shall endeavor to provide free medical care to paupers.
Section 12. The State shall establish and maintain an effective food and drug regulatory system and undertake appropriate health manpower development and research, responsive to the country’s health needs and problems.
Section 13. The State shall establish a special agency for disabled persons for rehabilitation, self-development and self-reliance, and their integration into the mainstream of society.
Women
Section 14. The State shall protect working women by providing safe and healthful working conditions, taking into account their maternal functions, and such facilities and opportunities that will enhance their welfare and enable them to realize their full potential in the service of the nation.
Role and Rights of People’s Organizations
Section 15. The State shall respect the role of independent people’s organizations to enable the people to pursue and protect, within the democratic framework, their legitimate and collective interests and aspirations through peaceful and lawful means.
People’s organizations are bona fide associations of citizens with demonstrated capacity to promote the public interest and with identifiable leadership, membership, and structure.
Section 16. The right of the people and their organizations to effective and reasonable participation at all levels of social, political, and economic decision-making shall not be abridged. The State shall, by law, facilitate the establishment of adequate consultation mechanisms.
Human Rights
Section 17. (1) There is hereby created an independent office called Commission on Human Rights.
(2) The Commission shall be composed of a Chairman and four Members who must be natural-born citizens of the Philippines and a majority of whom shall be members of the Bar. The term of office and other qualifications and disabilities of the Members of the Commission shall be provided by law.
(3) Until this Commission is constituted, the existing Presidential Committee on Human Rights shall continue to exercise its present functions and powers.
(4) The approved annual appropriations of the Commission shall be automatically and regularly released.
Section 18. The Commission on Human Rights shall have the following powers and functions:
(1) Investigate, on its own or on complaint by any party, all forms of human rights violations involving civil and political rights;
(2) Adopt its operational guidelines and rules of procedure, and cite for contempt for violations thereof in accordance with the Rules of Court;
(3) Provide appropriate legal measures for the protection of human rights of all persons within the Philippines, as well as Filipinos residing abroad, and provide for preventive measures and legal aid services to the underprivileged whose human rights have been violated or need protection;
(4) Exercise visitorial powers over jails, prisons, or detention facilities;
(5) Establish a continuing program of research, education, ad information to enhance respect for the primacy of human rights;
(6) Recommend to the Congress effective measures to promote human rights and to provide for compensation to victims of violations of human rights, or their families;
(7) Monitor the Philippine Government’s compliance with international treaty obligations on human rights;
(8) Grant immunity from prosecution to any person whose testimony or whose possession of documents or other evidence is necessary or convenient to determine the truth in any investigation conducted by it or under its authority;
(9) Request the assistance of any department, bureau, office, or agency in the performance of its functions;
(10) Appoint its officers and employees in accordance with law; and
(11) Perform such other duties and functions as may be provided by law.
Section 19. The Congress may provide for other cases of violations of human rights that should fall within the authority of the Commission, taking into account its recommendations.
If there was another item in the charter that can be removed – other than the economic restrictions, it should be to remove the entirety of Article 13.
These provisions can be enacted as statutes instead of staying as constitutional provisions.
The lessons of the imploding economies of the European Welfare states show that despite the openness of their economies, the cost of welfare programs and the tax burden needed to sustain such a program is unsustainable. Sooner or later – something’s gotta give.
The Philippine government’s safety valve – and milking cow – is the OFW remittances. The audacity of the BSP to loan out $1B to loan money to the Euro Trapo Palamunins, the Euro Palamunin “Chosen Ones”, and the royally Righteous Palamunins – money generated from the backs of OFWs – the milking cows who have been Orwellianesquely called “modern heroes”. Trust the Palamunin “Chosen One” for entertainment to parade the Pinoy Palamunins in TV shows accepting freebies and glorifying mendicancy to the sights and sounds of bimbos strutting their tits and ass.
However as the economies where the OFWs are deployed also suffer from the unsustainable economic policies adopted by their host countries’ government – these remittances are bubbles waiting to burst. And some have actually burst – Syria, Japan. Fortunately the political upheavals in the Middle East were swift and the task of rebuilding provided job opportunities. The wisdom of staying in the temporarily effed up Middle Eastern countries paid off when weighed against the obvious joblessness if not underemployment waiting in the squatter colonies of Manila, Cebu, Davao and all over the 7,200 islands whose once blue crystal serene waters are now full of coliform bacteria, industrial and residential waste.
It does make sense in a perverted way that – the continued existence of a welfare state depends on the existence of poverty – and without it – there simply is no justification for a welfare state – and the parasitic ecology that comes bundled with it.
So how do Pinoys cease to become Palamunins?
Why will you allow a nameless palamunin bureaucrat in Pasig to dictate that the only food, education, entertainment, clothes, shelter, banking, phones, electricity that you pay for must come from their chosen ones ONLY. Nope you can’t get a BMW or a Porsche or a Tata people’s car unless you shell out 100% in tax – or you have an insider in the BoC who can “seize” the package and “auction” it back to you -sans the 100% tariff - your savings of course will have to be invested along the way.
It begins with the proverbial first step – stop thinking that government’s role is to take care of you from cradle to grave. No, that’s not the role of government - that’s your role – get government out of the way, and find your happiness. Indeed change comes from within. Be a wimp and get the welfare state. Be productive and proactive and you take care of your welfare.
Can Pinoys step up to the challenge of seizing the moment? As the Japanese aptly puts it – “fall eight times, rise nine times”.
The Charter Change advocacy exists not because of whim or flights of fancy – but by necessity to the survival of each and every Filipino – Palamunins of all shades and sizes included.
About the Author
BongV has written 407 stories on this site.
BongV is the webmaster of Antipinoy.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment