Death blows

Should we send the corrupt to the gallows?

That’s what most Filipinos want, according to a study made by several UP professors. The corrupt should be meted out the death penalty. Punishing the corrupt to the max should help to erode their ranks.

Not really.

First, you have to catch them. That proposition is exactly the same thing as meting out death to authors of heinous crimes—it merely adds corruption to the list. With exactly the same results: nothing. You can propose to lop off the offending organs of rapists, but that won’t mean anything unless you catch the rapists first. Which we haven’t been able to do, except to the poor. Except to those like that house painter we poisoned to death before we decided to abolish the death penalty as inhuman. And before we started wondering if he wasn’t just a patsy.

In fact, simply jailing the corrupt should be enough—if you can only catch them. Which we haven’t been able to do either unless they are small-time. Arguably with some exceptions, but the exceptions only show how thorny the problem is. Carlos Garcia is one of them. We have jailed him, but he was already in jail before we sprang him out in the first place. And though he seems reasonably big, there are others far bigger than he, as the scandal over Angelo Reyes’ pabaon revealed. That pretty much includes all the top brass of the Armed Forces, past and present, who receive completely generous—and completely unauthorized—retirement benefits at the foot soldier’s expense.

An even bigger exception is Erap. But the problem was that he was jailed for political reasons by an even bigger crook, who was GMA, which made it more disturbing than satisfying. It was like the Americans hanging Saddam for crimes against humanity after they rained death and destruction on Baghdad, as hypocritical a blow for justice as you could get. You don’t have to look far to see how the public took Erap’s incarceration by GMA. He raced past Manny Villar and ended up not a bad second to P-Noy in the last elections.

But the problem is not just one of will, it is one of wit. Hard enough as it is to know what to do with the corrupt, even harder it is to know who the corrupt are. That is not as silly as it sounds. In fact, I would imagine the better study to aid anticorruption would be one that tries to find out how Filipinos in fact perceive corruption.

My own hypothesis here, which I have advanced on several occasions, is that we don’t really have a clear concept of corruption. Or we don’t see corruption as stealing in the sense that we see picking pockets, snatching and staging a hold-up as stealing. The reason for this is that we don’t really see taxes as our money, as something that ought to come back to us in roads and services, we see it as balato or tong we give to government. We see it as money that belongs to government officials.

Corruption is when someone tries to get more than his “share.” The corrupt is the sugapa, the ganid, the swapang. Corruption is excessive greed, the corrupt is the inordinately venal. We can see that from such revealing utterances as the ones Romulo Neri and Angelo Reyes made. Neri it was who felt righteous for being there to “moderate the greed.” And Reyes could not for the life of him understand why he was being accused of corruption when he never went beyond the norm, when he never took more than the other chiefs of staff got before him and what they would get after him. “Did I abuse?” he demanded, completely uncomprehendingly, completely indignantly.

By this definition, the corrupt would be people like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Erap, and Gloria and Mike Arroyo. Of course, jailing only them, such as they still live, would already go a long way toward advancing the fight against corruption. But it won’t stop it.

The only thing that can, or curb it tremendously, is the public itself internalizing that taxes are their money and any public official who slips that money into his pocket, moderately or not, is corrupt. That is so in other countries where the term “taxpayers’ money” carries with it the sacredness of “God” and “country.” And where the people get furious at the barest hint of public officials misusing it.

Some weeks ago, the Senate had a very bright idea, though I don’t know that it quite realized it had just found a weapon in the fight against corruption. Several senators called for penalizing government officials that put their names on public projects, such as roads, bridges, clinics, and schools. I endorse their call wholeheartedly. Those signs have always infuriated me, particularly the ones that proclaim that a road is being repaired courtesy of Mayor So-and So. Or indeed the streamers that came out toward the end of Arroyo’s rule that said, “Salamat Pangulong Gloria Arroyo sa footbridge na ito.” The money that goes into those things does not belong to them, it belongs to us. Truly, the people who put up those signs should be fined, or jailed. I won’t mind if it is retroactive.

But far more than that, we need an intensive and pervasive campaign to make people realize that taxes, including the ones they pay in VAT, which should dispel the idea the poor don’t pay taxes anyway, are their money and that taking it away from them is stealing. Civil society, business, media, and all the other groups that helped to mount Edsa can always help in this. Not just by slogans which hit people in the head, but by stories, fables, soap operas which hit people in the heart. The point is not just to make the people know it, it is to make the people feel it. It is not just to make the people intellectualize it, it is to make the people internalize it.

That makes for a far better death sentence on corruption—and the corrupt.