The whole "Corruption is the Root Cause of the Philippines' Problems" bit is actually a rumor-myth that the Oligarchs keep feeding to the gullible Filipino Public in order to distract them from understanding that the real root cause problems of the Philippines are systemic and structural issues related to wrong economic policies and other wrong systems in place.
This rumor-myth serves the Filipino Oligarchs well because because the Oligarchs essentially live off inherited wealth, and as they were born with the silver spoon, they can always say that they are "not corrupt" because they are "already rich" and "don't need to be corrupt in order to live decent lives."
The problem is that they have set up systems (economic and political) that prevent upwardly-mobile newcomers who seek to improve their lives through merit from doing so. These are restrictive systems that are - as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (authors of "Why Nations Fail") describe - extractive in nature and seek to exclude newcomers from joining in their club.
Just look at how Philippine Mass Media (which is essentially owned and controlled by the Philippine Oligarchs) always loves to paint reform-oriented leaders as being "tainted by corruption" whereas their own oligarchic ilk or whoever happen to be their annointed puppets often avoid being accused of corruption and tend to get good press.
Let's look at the way the Filipino Oligarchs prevent newcomers from challenging them economically...
1) They prevent Foreign Direct Investors from coming into the Philippines by setting up anti-FDI laws and constitutional provisions.
- Preventing FDI from coming in means that the oligarch-owned business interests are generally protected from competition.
- Ordinary Filipinos from humble backgrounds who would have normally moved up the socio-economic ladder by working for MNC's are prevented from doing so because MNC's are much fewer thanks to the restrictions that the oligarchs set up. This causes the oligarchs to have less competition because "self-made" types are much fewer. When it comes to running for office, such self-made types are rare because such economic opportunities are also rare.
- The system of setting up businesses in the Philippines is deliberately made corrupt so that the self-made types who want to start their own businesses are forced to pay bribes just to expedite the processing of their business permit applications and other necessary bureaucratic procedures. The Oligarchs, on the other hand, can easily get away with name-dropping so that they won't ever need to resort to such corrupt practices and can still get their processes done. This way, it becomes easier for them to say they're clean while the upwardly-mobile types are tainted with corruption.
- Ultimately, because the economic environment of the Philippines is so inhospitable due to the policies set up by the oligarchs themselves which are intended to protect their monopolistic interests, many up-and-coming types are then forced to find gainful employment abroad as "OFW's" or give up and emigrate abroad.
2) They set up a Presidential System of Government that makes it easy for them to influence only one single person - the President - and get him to do their bidding, from which the President - through the Philippine Pork Barrel System - can then influence the legislature to set up laws favoring them or prevent laws that seek to break their monopoly.
3) The Presidential System is also an extremely expensive system when it comes to campaigning and running for president. As such, the only people who can easily come off as being clean and corruption-free are the Oligarchs.
- The only people who can easily run for office under such a system are extremely rich people.
- That means Oligarchs as well as aggressive newcomer business tycoons. However, because of the lousy economic system in the Philippines, there is a persistent rumor (once again fed by the Oligarchs) that gives the impression that newcomer business tycoons could only become rich through influence-peddling, resorting to bribery, etc.
- Once again, this favors the oligarchs because only the Oligarchs can claim that because they were already born with the silver spoon, they don't need to resort to corruption or other aggressive "unscrupulous" moves, "unlike all those other upstarts who had to claw their way towards the top."
4) In order to totally prevent newcomers from among Overseas Filipinos from joining in the political race and competing against them or against their annointed puppet(s), the oligarchs set up specific restrictions in the Constitution that prevent expatriated Filipinos from ever becoming eligible candidates for the highest offices. The system has essentially narrowed the choices of who can realistically run for President of the Philippines so that we will always be stuck with either incompetent oligarchs or relatively competent "upstarts" who are accused by the oligarch-owned press of being tainted with corruption.
- There is a restriction based on a minimum residency requirement that prevents anyone who has not lived at least 10 years straight in the Philippines from running for President and Vice President. This means that a Filipino PhD in Economics who works for the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) in New York City or in the World Bank in Washington D.C. and might very likely have a lot of solid answers and solutions to fixing poverty in the Philippines is not allowed to run for presidentbecause he would first have to live in the Philippines for 10 years continuously.
- Rags-to-riches geniuses who made their fortunes abroad such as Diosdado Banatao (the closest thing to a Filipino Andrew Grove or Bill Gates that we have) are essentially barred from ever running for president because not only have many of them had to take on foreign citizenship for them to stay on in their adopted countries where their efforts pay off, but also because of the 10 year minimum residency requirement. Yet Dado Banatao and others like him are financially-loaded (and even richer than many Filipino Oligarchs and thus immune from Corruption) and extremely intellectually competent. But too bad, people like him are barred from running for President.
- Another such person who would probably be fitting for the presidency due to competence and intelligence and has wealth that would prove that she has no need to be corrupt but is rendered ineligible to run due to the minimum residency required is Mrs. Loida Nicolas-Lewis, the first Filipino to pass the NY State Bar Exams without finishing law school in the USA and is the widow of African-American business magnate Reginald Lewis.
- When Filipinos lament that the only so-called "corruption-free" or "clean" candidate(s) is/are incompetent and inexperienced, the Oligarch-owned press starts issuing editorials that seek to brainwash Filipinos that "it is better to have a clean and corruption-free President even if he/she is intellectually incapable, incompetent or inexperienced than to have an experienced, competent, or intelligent President who is tainted by allegations of corruption."
5) Sometimes, Oligarchs find it easy to brag about going into public service for little or no pay, forgetting that ordinary people who weren't born rich need to earn a decent salary (either working in the private sector or becoming an OFW) just to pay rent, pay for gas/petrol, pay for monthly car amortization and eat decent meals. It's all too easy for some among the oligarchic class to question others who weren't born with a silver spoon about why they aren't in public service (which in the Philippines doesn't pay decent wages), forgetting that they - as oligarchs - do not need to worry about the homes they live in, the cars they drive, paying for fuel, and eating decent meals since they regularly receive "family corporation dividends" aka "allowances" to pay for their basic living expenses.
6) It is not true that Corruption per se prevents countries from progressing. Numerous countries around the world have corruption problems too but that doesn't prevent them from progressing! South Korea is known to have a lot of corruption, yet they are an advanced and progressive society. Taiwan too has also gone through so much corruption, but that didn't stop them from becoming a world leader in high-tech manufacturing. In fact, some countries in Southeast Asia were listed in Transparency International's corruption perception index ranking to be "more corrupt" than the Philippines and yet these countries are actually doing a lot better than the Philippines when it comes to real economic growth and real job creation. So is Corruption really the real reason that the Philippines is not progressing? Once again, that is nothing but a rumor-myth that Filipino Oligarchs have spread to distract Filipinos away from the fact that they (the Oligarchs) have set up a suite of evil systems that prevent ordinary Filipinos from enjoying upward socio-economic mobility.
Ultimately, the system in the Philippines is rigged so that everything favors the Oligarchs.
In fact, whereas in the rest of the world, living off a trust fund may sometimes tend to be looked down upon and most people are proud to be self-made, in the Philippines, being a trust fund baby is the best thing one can ever be. It automatically removes the stigma of having to be aggressive and unscrupulous and "corrupt" because being born with the silver spoon means that you never had to exert a lot of effort just to be able to enjoy the good life you already live. The Philippines is one of the few societies I am intimately acquainted with in which being born rich is still looked upon with such awe and "admiration." At least vis-a-vis the myth that Corruption is the biggest source of evil in the Philippines, being born rich makes would-be politicians from such families able to brag that "I was born very rich so I have absolutely no need to resort to corruption."
Now if we are to really analyze it properly, though corruption is bad and makes it harder to solve other problems and makes other problems worse - Corruption is actually a symptom of much deeper problems. Corruption, in other words, is actually the result of deeper and underlying root causes.
Let's liken Corruption to Flies.
Flies are terrible pests. They are annoying. They are dirty. But if you have a fly infestation problem, do you think the real solution against flies is to give everyone a fly-swatter and get them to swat all the flies they see? Of course not!
A fly-infestation problem is just a symptom of a deeper underlying cause. Having a lot of flies in your area just means that there is decaying matter somewhere close by and quite often, that means an accumulation of garbage somewhere near. By making sure that the garbage is collected very regularly and not allowing garbage to accumulate, you deprive flies of a breeding ground and that means that there is no reason for flies to go to the area. Get rid of the accumulated garbage and you get rid of the flies.
In other words, root-cause problem-solving is the only way to truly solve the problem of flies. The same goes with Corruption. In order to solve Corruption, you need to prevent the causes of Corruption.
So what exactly is corruption? It turns out that corruption is a kind of coping mechanism for people who feel that they do not have a means with which to get what they need through proper channels. When a civil servant handling business permits is so underpaid and his/her salary is insufficient to allow a decent life or his/her family, it is tempting for that civil servant to resort to corruption in the form of extortion in order to augment his meager salary. So that civil servant slows down the processing of business permits to force businessmen in a hurry to pay bribes just to speed things up. The aggressive up-and-coming businessman who cannot waste time waiting for the slow processing of his business permit, on the other hand, will gladly pay the civil servant extra money just to speed up his business permit processing. In other words, the systemic cause of corruption in this case - low salary of the civil servant - is the cause for why such a corrupt transaction happened.
From the point of view of many moralists, prostitution is a form of corruption. Why? Because Corruption does involve selling your dignity and integrity in exchange for gain. And I hate to say it, but prostitution (and quasi-prostitution) has become extremely commonplace in the Philippines due to the lousy economic system where jobs are extremely scarce. Young women who find it hard to put food on the table through ordinary work realize that they can earn much more and thus feed their families by selling their "time" in exchange for cash. It can be argued that had decent jobs been much more abundant due to a better economic system where foreign investors are more easily welcomed, the problem of prostitution wouldn't have had to be as bad as it is.
In the Philippines, Corruption has become so pervasive precisely because the environment/system is rigged in a way that forces people to need to resort to corruption just to meet their needs. But how did this come to be in the first place? Back in the old days, particularly back in the days of the American Period, my late grandparents used to keep talking about how the government service was generally clean and corruption-free. That if you worked in government, you wouldn't need to be corrupt because salaries were generally much better.
As it turns out, unemployment, poverty, and the difficulty of obtaining basic needs through fair and honest dealings are what cause Crime and Corruption to occur. If you want to get rid of Corruption, you must get rid of unemployment and poverty, and you must make it easy for ordinary people to obtain their most basic needs in a fair, honest and decent way. So what happened?
It seems that government salaries generally stayed the same while inflation kept increasing. The prices of basic goods became higher in price, but government salaries were slow to increase. As the years went by, this meant that some people in government needed some extra money in addition to the salaries they earned officially. Where would that extra money come from? Well, some would do some side-line work like peddling stuff to officemates. And unfortunately others would resort to corruption.
Government salaries are ultimately influenced by salaries in the private sector as well. In the Philippines, the anti-FDI restrictions set up in the laws and in the Constitution (in the spirit of the "Filipino First Policy") increasingly made it harder for MNC's to come into the Philippines and create decent jobs for Filipinos. As the population of Filipinos continued to increase while the number of jobs could not increase alongside the population growth thanks to those anti-FDI restrictions, things just continued to get worse. Job-seekers ultimately kept outnumbering job-openings and in the end salaries stayed low (instead of improving if the reverse happened where job-openings outnumbered job-seekers). How can government salaries increase to decent levels if even salaries in the private sector in the Philippines are dismal? This is why the Philippines continues to have a pervasive corruption problem
And then there's the way the Presidential System works...
Unlike in the Parliamentary System where there is an active scrutiny of the ruling bloc's (Government's) decisions, policies, and execution of policies done by the Opposition, the Presidential System has no such feature. It's already been shown by numerous studies that parliamentary systems are less prone to corruption than presidential systems, and yet the Philippines continues to use this lousy and proven-to-fail system which recently caused a shutdown in the USA in addition to the many other times that the USA went through such a problem.
Ultimately, both the anti-Foreign Direct Investment environment in the Philippines' economic system caused corruption to become pervasive and the flaws of the Philippine Presidential System have caused corruption to get worse.
Such systemic solutions that are easily addressable by Constitutional Reform particularly in simply removing the anti-FDI restrictions in the constitution as well as shifting to the Parliamentary System would enable Corruption to be dismantled. But that's where the problem is right now... The Oligarchs continue to keep brainwashing ordinary Filipinos to think that such systemic solutions are "useless" and that the only real problem that must be dealt with is Corruption. They offer no insights on how to solve Corruption. They have no understanding whatsoever on why Corruption exists and how Corruption is to be curbed and eventually eliminated. They just keep focusing on that rumor-myth that "Corruption is the Root Cause of the Philippines' Problems" because it is a convenient scape goat that distracts people away from realizing that the lousy systems that the Oligarchs set up are the real root causes of Corruption and so many of the other issues Filipinos continue to be faced with.
Stop being fooled by the Oligarchs and their Propaganda!
Corruption is only a symptom of deeper, underlying systemic root-causes. If we fix those deeper, underlying, and systemic root-causes, Corruption will get lessened (and even get eliminated) and so many other problems will go away.
No, Corruption is NOT the Root Cause of the Philippines' Problems...
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