Good and bad news

During his most recent state of the nation address (SONA), Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III rued the lack of enthusiasm in the local media in reporting on the progress of the Philippine economy. President Aquino said that commentators in the foreign media have been bedazzled, citing Bloomberg Business week’s “Keep an eye on the Philippines.” And according to Morgan Stanley’s Emerging Market Equities which Aquino quoted, “The Philippines is no longer a joke.”

Or perhaps, the joke is on us. Are the foreign media and foreign credit rating agencies better judges of the Philippines’ economic performance? It’s the local media who are reporting on the gloomy realities on the ground, and they should know better.

It’s also the local media who are directly in touch with people without jobs, with poor families struggling to put bread on the table or make both ends meet, with striking workers demanding higher wages, or with victims of extrajudicial killings and violation of political and civil rights wondering when they will see justice done. These are stark realities the media cannot ignore. It’s not the business of President Aquino to tell reporters to write only the good news. Besides, the present administration already has the yellow media and more than a handful of influential columnists in the country’s major newspapers who would write only good things about President Noynoy Aquino – members of the Philippine press who obviously are staunchly loyal to the administration, for better or worse.

President Noynoy Aquino aboard an army truck in Tunasan village, Muntinlupa
City on the way to visit with Typhoon Gener evacuees at the elementary school.
Aquino called the village folks as "gritty people" and in a "lively mood" which he
said made his burden lighter. With the President are his sister Kris Aquino, Risa
Hontiveros, DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas, Tesda Director General Joel Villanueva
and Customs chief Rufino Biazon. Click link below to view "Slideshow: Manila's
rains play cruel game,"  as compiled by ABS-CBN News,
 http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/08/08/12/slideshow-manilas-rains-play-cruel-game



Just two weeks after Aquino trumpeted his administration’s initiative to bring all anti-disaster initiatives inside one boat, which he called Project NOAH (apparently referring to the Great Flood in the Bible), Typhoon Gener struck Metro Manila and nearby provinces. Remember Aquino’s words during the SONA: “We no longer leave the evacuation of families to mere luck. We now have the technology to give fair warning to Filipinos in order to prepare for and avoid the worst.”

Instead of disaster relief agencies working with little coordination or cooperation, Aquino’s government has adopted a new culture – “‘bayanihan’ – a coming together for the sake of the people, this is what we call Convergence.” A new bureaucratic jargon of the Aquino administration, but not totally a novel concept.

But as Typhoon Gener savaged the country with continuous heavy rainfall after three straight days, the only thing that has surely converged is the sea and floodwaters, flooding Metro Manila and nearby provinces, a diluvian landscape as disaster officials have described.

But no worry, the yellow media reported that the flooding would not likely set back the country’s economic momentum, the kind of good news that is music to Aquino’s ears.

Good news reporting does not necessarily mean conveying the truth. In fact, the implication could be the contrary. A President who wants only to hear the good news is someone who is not interested in hearing the truth. What else could be the role of the press than to provide information that is based on the truth, not information the President would like to hear, only the news that is pleasing to his ears.

President Aquino, for example, has claimed that under his presidency, almost 3.1 million jobs were created, more than the estimated million new entrants to the job market every year. Thus, to the President’s mind, unemployment is on a steady decline: from 8 per cent in 2010 to 7.2 per cent in April 2011, and this year, it dropped further to 6.9 per cent. Certainly, this is good news to hear.

But what is the real story behind this so-called growth in employment? What the President really does not want us to read or hear is the deterioration in the quality of jobs. Full-time employment actually fell by 1.6 million but this was compensated for by a large 2.5 million increase in the number of part-time workers, which is what the President is really claiming as job growth during his two years in office. And we know what part-time employment is: these are jobs that are conventionally low-paying, insecure and without benefits. Part-time work now accounts for over four out of ten (43 per cent) jobs in the economy or 16.2 million out of 37.8 million employed.

People's SONA 2012. Illustration courtesy of Migrante International. Click link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtHPybSamtI to view "People's Sona 2012."


To prove his job generation strategy, President Aquino points to the growth in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. In 2000, only 5,000 people were employed in this industry. In 2011, the number of BPO workers jumped to 680,000, and the industry, according to the President, has contributed 11 billion dollars to the economy.

What are these BPO jobs? BPO is a growing industry in the Philippines. In 2011, the Philippines has the highest number of employees at call centres in the entire world. In the Philippines, call centres began as providers of business email response and managing services. The call centre sector comprises 80 per cent of the total BPO industry with 80 per cent of the call services provided for the U.S. market. Call centre jobs are such in high demand in the Philippines because of lower labour costs, available highly skilled and educated work force, and high proficiency in spoken English.

According to President Aquino, by 2016 when his term expires, the BPO sector will be bringing in 25 billion dollars and employing 1.3 million Filipinos. Furthermore, as the President said, “this does not include the estimated 3.2 million taxi drivers, baristas, corner stores, canteens, and many others that will benefit from the indirect jobs that the BPO industry will create.” Great news, indeed.

But what is wrong with this type of news?

These BPO jobs are not the ones that would help in building a genuine Filipino industry and developing domestic agriculture which are necessary if we need our economy to take off to the next level. It’s not just about generating jobs that provide foreigners cheap Filipino labour and natural resources. This is the main flaw in an economic plan that is fixated on overseas work, business process outsourcing, mining and low-value added electronics manufacturing.

Reporting only news that is pleasing to the ears, which is what President Aquino would like, is nothing but conveying untested or unverified information. The realities on the ground, no matter how unpleasant, need to be reported so we can test the information we read or hear through debate or argumentation. In this way, we would be able to understand what we know and what we still need to learn.

It is not sufficient to hear the official story from the government. We knew by experience from the martial law years under Ferdinand Marcos that it’s easy for the government to paint a rosy picture to cover up the country’s economic squalor. Imelda Marcos used to order her army of street cleaners during those years to build and whitewash all fences on the main highways to hide the ugliness of slums every time foreign dignitaries visited the country. How different is this from President Aquino’s whim to hear only the good news?

If we have to defend democracy as the most efficient and equitable form of government, then we need to expand the circle of debate as widely as possible and not only between kindred spirits. But to do this, we need all the information from every source. The foreign media may be unaware of what’s actually happening on the ground. If it’s the local media who can best convey the sufferings of the people on the ground, then this government should not silence them in articulating the view of the downtrodden.

Manufacturing public opinion

Very often we are asked to have our say on matters of state policy, such as the ongoing consultations with the public by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. All levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – always stress the importance of feedback to government proposals in changing policies or regulations. Whether useless or effective, duplicitous or sincere, these public consultations create another layer in the decision-making process, in addition to our elected Parliament and local councils, and the army of technocrats in the government bureaucracy.

Canada Immigration, for example, conducts public consultations to “generate greater public understanding of the difficult decisions involved in managing a global immigration system.” According to its recent press release, “There are competing visions and diverging goals for the future of the immigration program, and there are no easy answers. Engaging stakeholders and the broader public is key to CIC’s development of an overall strategy for Canada moving forward.”

According to a press release from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the purpose
of immigration consultations is to "seek feedback on immigration levels, including
the appropriate level of immigration for Canada, and the most suitable mix between
economic, family class and protected persons." Click link to view "Many changes to
immigration under Jason Kenney,"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UXER3dLjto

The purpose of Canada Immigration’s ongoing public consultations is to seek feedback on immigration issues, including the appropriate level of immigration for Canada, and the most suitable mix among economic, family, and refugee and humanitarian classes.

Are we really that ignorant to be duped by the current Conservative government that our input matters in policy decision-making?

Early this year, Canada Immigration Minister Jason Kenney decided to cancel out all immigration applications submitted prior to February 27, 2008. Close to 280,000 applicants are affected by this decision. Minister Kenney rationalized his decision by arguing that the Federal Skilled Worker (FSW) Program is hampering Canada’s ability to respond rapidly to changing labour market needs. Kenney said: “Having to process applications that are as many as eight years out of date reduces our ability to focus on new applicants with skills and talents that our economy needs today.” This was a draconian shift in government policy, yet did Canada Immigration ask for our feedback before they decided to go ahead with their new policy?

Prior to Minister Kenney’s decision to close the door to these early immigration applications under the FSW program, he also imposed a moratorium on the sponsorship of parents and grandparents, thus denying new permanent residents the opportunity to bring their families to Canada. With a stroke of the pen, Kenney is rewriting the objective of family reunification under the existing law and making it even more difficult. Was there a consultation with the public, especially those affected by the change in policy?

Last July, Minister Kenney put a temporary hold on all new applications under the federal skilled worker and investor program until July 0f 2013. Kenney said he needed to “reset the button” in deciding on the moratorium on Canada’s skilled labour program. This decision was necessary, Kenney said, to enable the government to develop an effective backlog elimination strategy. In addition, Minister Kenney also reduced health care benefits – including support, to refugee claimants in Canada. Again, was there public consultation before Kenney made this decision?

Every major policy decision made by Jason Kenney bears the imprint of his impatience to overhaul Canada’s immigration system, which the opposition can only criticize but to no avail. Even these so-called public consultations will amount to nothing but photo ops that the people were consulted and heard before the government decided to change its policies. The obvious truth is: the government has already made up its mind.

The process of public consultations emerges from the basic belief that legitimate governments are those that listen to their citizens. After all, democratic government is tested by the capacity and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate. But how much information is deliberated in public consultations and what influence do these consultations have over the state are questions which may not be answered directly by the outcome of this process.

Access to the public consultation process by the ordinary citizens may have in fact been limited, whether by design, the targeted audience or ulterior motives. For one, these consultations are politically controlled; as such, they are ultimately used as tools by the ruling government for advertising rather than the medium from which the public gets their information on vital political matters.

Take for example the 2012 Immigration Levels Plan (from the 2011 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration) that is attached supposedly for discussion during the public consultations. This is Canada Immigration’s blueprint for determining immigration levels and mix, prepared by the department’s bureaucrats. One wonders how much can be expected from the public in terms of revisions or additional issues which Canada Immigration bureaucrats may consider in setting the final immigration levels and mix.

But the most important question to ask is how sincere is this government in canvassing public opinion in its policy decision-making?

All the press releases, all background information attached to the public consultations, and several pronouncements by Minister Kenney and his bureaucrats may in the end all sound like junk mail or a telemarketing call, which the ordinary citizen usually sets aside for good. Not that information is unimportant. Too much information is also not very useful because it simply leads the public consultation to a glitzy show of government statistics, not to a substantive debate on the government’s strategic priorities.

Writing about the lost art of political argument, Christopher Lasch wrote in Harper’s Magazine:

“Let us begin with a simple proposition: What democracy requires is public debate, not information. Of course it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only by vigorous popular debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.”

When the process of public consultations becomes an extension of the town meeting, then we can say we truly have created a public forum. Not when the government calls for public consultations to advertise planned policy changes, and not actually to allow the public to debate the substance of the proposed changes. Not when public consultations are held in order to display an appearance of transparency or create the impression that the ruling government also listens.

There seems to be so much preoccupation with publicity nowadays. Publicity in terms of having good public relations or a positive public image. This is the new danger to democracy, less direct but more insidious than that of the tyranny of majority as we have now in Parliament by the ruling Conservative Party. Because it ultimately leads to the decisive influence of certain insistent and powerful minorities – those who are intent in limiting access to the public sphere since this is how they operate and thrive in a competitive political environment.

This public consultation process, the kind embarked by Canada Immigration, may very well be an effort to create public opinion that simulates the existence of a general feeling in favour of a cabinet minister, his policies or his party’s eagerness to disembowel the whole immigration system. It’s clearly ironic that the deference to this kind of manufactured public opinion may be greater than that the ordinary citizens may yield to, one which they believe to be the genuine sentiment of the majority.