More bad news for President Aquino amid impeachment travails

Bad economic news assailed the Aquino administration on Thursday as its all-out offensive to have impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona convicted by the Senate impeachment tribunal appeared to have lost momentum after the prosecution team reeled from a series of adverse decisions handed by the senator-judges over the past two weeks of the trial.

On the impeachment trial front, the bad news for the government—but good news for the citizens—was that the senator-judges, except for a few, have increasingly behaved in a manner showing how they are determined to conduct a fair trial and to resist external interventions, either from the executive department or from its lynch-mob legions in the the streets, howling for the conviction of Corona.

On Wednesday, the prosecution was in disarray, when the presiding officer and some senator-judges upbraided them for being unprepared and disorganized in their presentation of the issues (concerning the statements of assets and liabilities and net worth [SALNs] of Corona) in Article 2 of the eight-point impeachment complaint. The prosecutors were trying to pin down the Chief Justice, through his SALNs, to show that he had amassed “ill-gotten” wealth. They tried to show discrepancies between what he disclosed and did not disclose. The senator-judges were also riled during the sessions held on Tuesday and Wednesday when the prosecutors turned out unprepared to present witnesses to back the documents they had submitted to the tribunal. The sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday found the prosecutors scrambling over the sequence of articles they were lining up to present—that is, whether they start with Article 1 or Article 2—and the lack of witnesses they were to summon.

On the sixth day of the trial, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, the presiding judge, issued a ruling not to allow the prosecution to present evidence related to the alleged ill-gotten wealth of Corona, but they may present those about his properties that were not declared in his SALNs.

The tribunal appears to have taken great pains to be even-handed in its rulings in an attempt to make the impeachment process fair and the outcome of the historic trial credible. But public attention was not entirely focused on the legal process of the trial. It was also distracted by bad news about the national economy amid criticisms that in pursuing its impeachment case against Corona, the administration has been neglecting the economy whose growth has slumped during the past two years.

As if the setbacks of the prosecution—mainly due to their slipshod preparations—were not enough, economic bad news intervened to call attention to the fact that the government was paying a heavy price for concentrating on the effort to impeach Corona and send to jail former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (who appointed Corona chief justice), at the expense of neglecting the national economy.

Yesterday, amid the legal wranglings over procedures in the impeachment trial, the dim economic outlook grabbed the center stage of national debate and refused to be sidelined.

The International Monetary Fund released on Tuesday its World Economic Outlook (WEO), which  said that economic growth in the Asean 5 (consisting of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) was now expected to grow by 5.2 percent this year and 5.6 percent in  2013, lower by 0.4 and 0.2 percentage points, respectively, than what was projected in the September 2011 WEO.

The IMF attributed the dimmed outlook of the Southeast Asian economies to an expected spillover from the “mild recession” looming in the euro zone this year. “Global recovery is threatened by intensifying strains in the euro area and fragilities elsewhere,” the report said. As a result, the IMF cut its projections for gross domestic product expansion across the regions. It said global growth was now expected at 3.3 percent this year and 3.0 percent in 2013, down by 0.7 and 0.6 points, respectively.

For Asean 5, IMF expects gross economic product (GDP) expanding by 7.4 this year and a slower 5.0 percent last year. In the Philippines, the National Statistics Office reported in November last year that GDP grew 3.2 percent in the third quarter, bringing year-to-date expansion to 3.6 percent against a 5-6 percent official outlook—meaning, the economy was underperforming relative to the official targets.

More specific to the Philippines, the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) reported that the GDP last year slowed to just 3.6-4 percent, compared to the preceding year’s 7.6 percent, missing the 5-6 percent target and 4.5-5.5 percent forecast.

Despite these dim results, government economic managers put up a brave front. They said they were upbeat on growth prospects and they insisted they were keeping to this year’s 5.5-6 percent target and setting a 6-7 percent goal for 2013. The 6-7 percent target for 2013, the officials said, assumes improvements in the domestic and global environment.

The bravado is based on assumptions (meaning a pie in the sky), and flies in the face of a track record of target shortfalls. How can an economy grow or stop from contracting under a government whose most important reason for keeping power is to hound and send past officials to jail? How do you expect growth from a government that treats the economy as an unwelcome and minor concern of government, or as a poor relation—unlike fast cars and hand guns for target practice?