Above the political fray

As we approach the end of 2016, rath­er than prepare for the merriment of the holidays, Kris Kringle and Christmas parties, and what is effectively a half-month of toil­ing at the proverbial salt mines at the height of the Yuletide season, the backroom offices and cubicles of most account­ing departments across the archipelago are busy pouring over the year’s T-accounts, ledgers and journals. Most are busy reconciling accrued ex­penses long left open through­out the year, closing open ac­counts and filling in balances and receivables-payables gaps. It is sweatshop labor for white-collar workers.

Accountants at this time of the year are like cloistered Trappist monks, dead to the world, anti-social, grim-faced, reclusive, harassed, focused only on balancing accounts and coming up with the ap­propriate financials to kick-start the imminent year ahead. Their happiness is a function of the volume of accruals against cash accounts. The world outside their books is inconsequential and, includ­ing the Christmas carols sung at night and retailers barking bargains in the daytime, all are merely static background noise.

An accountant’s sin­gle-minded focus on reflect­ing, and for some, improving the financial balances of an enterprise at this time is both admirable and enviable. We should be as lucky to be so blessed with an endeavor that both closes the year that grind­ingly ends and passes not quite as quickly enough as we would want it to against an optimistic forward-looking endeavor to jumpstart the incoming 2017 at exactly the right foot where we can leap and leave behind a decidedly speckled and incon­venient past.

For many businessmen we know who need to keep their businesses going as they em­ploy thousands who depend on their enterprises, and per­haps the millions more down­stream in the markets served by these businesses, the same kind of deliberate self-inflicted blindsiding is necessary.

The fact is that standing opposite on the other side of focus is a deliberate self-denial of the ugly realities outside the myopic business world they operate in. These external real­ities that businessmen struggle to tune out are the unsavory downsides of the Philippine socio-political economy that forced its way into society through the election of a coun­terculture candidate many imagined as the diametric op­posite of an incompetent and bungling predecessor.

The truth is not easy to confront.

The current reality out­side the business world has been defined largely by the campaign promises of Rodrigo R. Duterte and the bonds and relationships, however bizarre and unusual, that he needed to collect, combine and even­tually accumulate an over­whelming mandate enough to overcome the larger and much richer campaign machineries of his competition.

Duterte had forged an alli­ance with two former residents of Malacañang and one fami­ly praying that it might again move in. He likewise tapped into deep fears underlying the populist vein of potential constituencies. Both the fear of violence and a society rot­ting from within from the drug menace that had been allowed to fester are, indeed, compel­ling issues central to his man­date.

The foregoing is an in­tegral part of the reality and the ever-intrusive external en­vironment that businessmen are now confronted with. It is the same undeniable reali­ty likewise arrayed against the agenda of this government’s economic managers from the trade and agriculture depart­ments, to the budget office, to those looking at the macroeconomy from the seaside of­fices of the Monetary Board to the conference rooms at the nearby Department of Fi­nance.

Campaign promises were made and, indeed, unholy al­liances and dalliances were forged and consummated. The bed in which these were spawned remains continuous­ly un-made.

The issues identified by the Vice President integral to her disagreements with the President are good starting points to list a longer litany of the political realities accoun­tants, businessmen and even the government’s economic managers seem to be avoiding as they attempt to hover over the political fray.

One is the Marcos-burial controversy. The other is the worsening extrajudicial execu­tions that have claimed more lives than two decades of dic­tatorship. The same that our solons deny perhaps imagin­ing that those 5,000 or so fa­talities with duct tape wrapped around their heads all died from natural causes.

Outside the list are intru­sive issues such as the ques­tion of trade and military rela­tionships with China and the United States, the worsening secessionist war in the south, and, on a more profound lev­el, a creeping and encroaching police state that has no respect for the rule of law or the sanc­tity of life.

Businesses remain mod­erately insulated from politi­cal vagaries. Remember those eight tiny tubes of “B’ Loo­nies,” “Blobo” or “Wham-O” plastic balloons we played with in the 1970s? The ones that smelled like antiseptic acetone? Our economy is en­closed in a thin plastic balloon floating on a sea of political poop. Many businessmen are in self-denial deliberately ig­noring realities that have so far been largely irrelevant.

Unfortunately, soon enough plastic balloons burst.