Mr. SHULIN XIAN Chinese

www.businessmirror.com.ph

A looming battle royale

Manny F. Dooc TELLTaLEs

AN ominous clash between two women with sharply contrasting styles in politics and public service is threatening to erupt in the not too distant future. I may be wrong but Vice President Leni Robredo and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte appear to be crossing their swords this early, more than three months before the official filing of the certificates of candidacies in October. It may be recalled that Mayor Sara lashed out at VP Leni over the surge of Covid-19 cases in her home city.

The feisty hizzoner did not look kindly on VP Leni’s remark about the spike of the pandemic in Davao City. In her weekly radio show, the VP commented that Davao City could learn from the Cebu experience, which has succeeded in containing the spread of the virus. She also said that Cebu has done many things to contain the spike and heaped praise on the strong partnership between the LGU and the medical community in Cebu. Reacting strongly to VP Leni’s comments, which Mayor Sara considered as an affront to her and her medical team in Davao, Mayor Sara said: “There will be a proper time to attack my performance as a Local Chief Executive in this pandemic if she dares to run for president.” Mayor Sara’s office further added that VP Leni “should refrain from giving advice if she knows nothing about what is happening on the ground.” She then accused the vice-president of cheap politicking. Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque joined the fray by saying: “Patuloy po ang aming pagtatrabaho, samantalang si VP Leni po ay namumulitika at nangangampanya na para maging presidente sa pamamagitan ng kayang walang tigil na birada sa administrasyon.” This elicited a quick retort from Barry Gutierrez, VP Leni’s spokesman, who tweeted articles about the tarpaulins sprouting around the country urging Mayor Sara to run for president. He then asked: “Who again is politicking and campaigning in the middle of a pandemic?”

The campaign period for national offices starts only in February 2022 but we are already hearing about these fireworks. If the two run against each other, it will be the first time that two women on top of their game will go head to head against each for the presidency. It will be an interesting contest. Mayor Sara is supported by the incumbent president and the vast resources of the ruling party. Hopefully, VP Leni is backed up by all the opposition forces and the disgruntled elements of business and society. If all the anti-Duterte elements unite and throw their support behind VP Leni, she will be a viable challenger. The only way to beat President Duterte’s anointed candidate is by fielding a single opposition ticket. Let’s hope that there will be no spoilers this time. This was the winning strategy adopted by the anti-Marcos forces in the 1986 snap election, which eventually installed President Cory Aquino in Malacañang. She and Doy Laurel coalesced, with the latter sliding down to be President Cory’s running mate under a political party ominously named United Nationalist Democratic Organization or UNIDO.

We can expect more skirmishes between the two camps as the battlelines are drawn. Temperature will rise with every heated exchange. No quarter asked, no quarter given. Everything will be a fair game. President Duterte has warned that he will be VP Leni’s nightmare if she seeks the presidency. I hope VP Leni can handle it and all the brickbats that will be thrown at her during the campaign. As Senator Panfilo Lacson has reminded VP Leni, “goodness of the heart” is not the only criterion to win the presidency. The candidate must also possess “toughness” to get the job. On the other hand, Mayor Sara should take the high ground and keep her independent mind and be her own person. Mayor Sara’s apparent interest to pursue the presidency despite her father’s admonition that the presidency is not for women and her repeated statement of “No to Duterte-Duterte” tandem are earning her some plaudits.

The two are both trained lawyers. VP Leni’s father was an RTC judge in Bicol and her late husband, DILG Secretary Jesse Robredo, was a Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for public service. Her successful initial foray in politics reflects the love and support of her constituency to her beloved husband. No question that she has gained her own following and national support with her lowkey but effective approach to governance. Mayor Sara will always be a formidable opponent. She’s the chief executive of the biggest and most prosperous city in the south. Even before President Duterte became president, she was already making a name for herself as a no-nonsense mayor of Davao City. She’s well respected by her constituents and feared by erring subalterns and political opponents. Earning her wrath could cost one his powerful position, like the speakership of the House. She has not lost an election and maintains the fabled Duterte’s clout in and outside of her bailiwick. Her Hugpong ng Pagbabago exerts strong influence among many government officials around the country. Although she’s not a member of PDP-Laban, she has considerable supporters inside the party, which could give Senator Manny Pacquiao sleepless nights.

The coming days will tell us if VP Leni and Mayor Sara are headed towards the warpath. So far, VP Leni appears headed to clinch the nomination of 1Sambayan as its presidential standard bearer. If drafted, I don’t think she will decline to run. VP Leni has admitted that she has a great sense of public service and it would be difficult for her to turn her back against the people. And what greater service can she render to the Filipinos than holding the reins of the national government. For Mayor Sara, her recent outburst against VP Leni is seen by many political observers as an indication that she’s running for president. Mayor Sara’s challenge for the former to seek the presidency so that VP Leni can criticize her fairly is another way of saying that they meet as presidential contenders so that they can freely ventilate their position on all issues. It will be a much-awaited event. Every pretender should give way to the battle of the titans. Everyone should brace on their seat for we will soon be watching the biggest blockbuster of all time not on NetFlix or HBO Max. It will be the battle royale between VP Leni and Mayor Sara for the presidency of our Republic.

Iran. . .

continued from A12 from the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be asked to run the Oil Ministry. Candidates include Masoud Mir Kazemi, oil minister from 2009 to 2011, Abdol Hossein Bayat, ex-head of National Petrochemical Co., and Mehdi Doosti, who held a senior position at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s construction conglomerate, according to an official not authorized to speak publicly.

If control of the portfolio shifts to a hardliner, Iran could shun deals with European majors such as Total SA, which abandoned a $5 billion project after Trump’s sanctions, and turn to Russian and Chinese developers and the Guard’s engineering firms. Defense and foreign policy is largely decided by the Supreme National Security Council—usually chaired by the president with its decisions approved by Khamenei—and the military.

Born into a clerical family, Raisi entered a top seminary at 15. Five years later, and with the Islamic Republic just 12 months old, he was appointed a judge near Tehran, beginning a rise through the judiciary.

When he first ran for president in 2017, the incumbent Rouhani summed up his rival’s achievements as “38 years of executions and jailing.”

Raisi has never publicly commented on accusations by human-rights groups that he was a presiding judge in mass executions of political prisoners in 1988. The US, sanctioning him in 2019, cited his role in a deadly crackdown a decade earlier on protesters alleging vote fraud.

Despite his record, Vaez at Crisis Group doesn’t see Iran reentering a period of extreme confrontation with the West under Raisi.

“If they’re seeking consolidation at home, they would need de-escalation with the outside world,” he said. And unencumbered by domestic infighting, hardliners might be more “capable of delivering on any future commitments than their pragmatic rivals.”

Opinion BusinessMirror

Friday, June 18, 2021 A13

The loneliness that kills

Tito Genova Valiente annoTaTions

The Japanese have a term for it—kodokushi, or lonely death. This refers to, in the context of Japanese culture, people dying alone, with the body not discovered for a considerable period of time. The phenomenon has another name, koritsushi, which means “isolation death”.

The said phenomenon had a significant airing from CNN by multiawarded journalist, Blake Essig, in a news feature, “Inside Japan’s growing ‘lonely death’ clean-up service”.

The video shows a team of cleaners arriving in an apartment where a body was discovered days back. The job of these cleaners is to pack up all the things left by, in this case, an old man of 70 who passed on without anyone inquiring about his situation for a long time. The fact that cleaners from a company called Memories Co. are there only imply that the deceased do not have a kin to even clear or claim what the man has left behind.

From the interviews in the feature news, we learn more about loneliness, the type that kills. Essig talks next with Michiko Ueda of Waseda University. The political scientist, who authored a book, Economic Analysis of Suicide Prevention, begins to speak about loneliness and suicide. In her study, she shares a finding indicating how 40 percent of the Japanese people express loneliness. When the investigation and analysis focused on respondents whose ages were below 40, the percentage increased to 50 percent.

When economic crisis hits a country, middle-aged men are affected, Ueda says. In Japan, however, more and more young people are expressing loneliness and, from this number, arises figures correlated to suicide.

Similarly, in BBC News, another writer, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, has reported from Tokyo about the relationship between Covid and suicide, posing the question about whether the rise in the number of deaths from suicide is a warning to the world.

Why Japan? In the CNN news, the anchor was circumspect in saying how deaths by suicide have increased also in other countries. But following the BBC article, something is underscored, a factor unique to Japan, which is that the authorities report suicide faster and “more accurately than anywhere else in the world.”

In many reports it is thus stated how in 2020, in 11 years, the incidence of suicide has gone up.

For all the difficulties posed by the practice and science of correlation, it is safe at this point to mark the pandemic as a factor common among the many deaths by suicide in Japan and in other countries as well. What is extraordinary though—and interesting for social scientists —is the element of loneliness and isolation.

Pardon the detachment, but Japan has always been a significant fieldsite for the study of aloneness, depression and suicide. A society that has thrived on what those from outside sense as a rigid moral order, to complain about emotional disturbance has remained stigmatized. It is a culture that upholds the value of the gaman, which is translated as “persistence” or “tolerance.” The English equivalent does not quite capture it especially when the word, gaman is combined with tsuyoi or strong. In gamanzuyoi, we can locate endurance with stoicism.

In our country, suicide has always been whispered about. We hide it, if we are able to. Families do not talk about it; the person who commits it, or fails to die by suicide is subjected to a judgment harsher even than the

loss or damage that occurs after the act. In the grim scenario, we own the guilt but one, to reverse Kafka’s words, that we, ineluctably, doubt.

In the ’70s, two celebrated suicides took place in Japan: those of Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata. Mishima committed seppuku or ritual disembowelment, observing the Bushido, or the way of the Warrior. During the funeral ceremony for Mishima, Kawabata presided the event and was quoted saying: “Quiet praying, apart from discussing wrong or right upon Mishima’s death, is a traditional emotion of the Japanese people.”

In 1972, Kawabata committed suicide. No suicide note was left. But Japanologists—and the many who admire the writer—can always go back to the speech Kawabata delivered when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. In that speech, Kawabata mentions an essay he wrote, “Eyes in their

Last Extremity.” That title, according to the Nobel laureate, comes from the suicide note of the writer Akutagawa

Ryunosuke (1892-1927). Part of the note states: “I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice… I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before.

I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.” Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927; he was 35. Kawabata in the said essay would comment on the life of Akutagawa, considered to be the father of the Japanese short story: “However alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment.”

In October 2020, noting the dramatic surge in suicide cases, the Japanese government appointed its first Minister of Loneliness.

E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com

Race for a global tax revolution faces hurdles in final stretch

By Isabel Gottlieb & William Horobin

Bloomberg Opinion

The world’s richest nations have set the stage for a revolution in corporate taxation, but they still have their work cut out to actually achieve that overhaul.

Talks in coming weeks between more than 100 governments before a Group of 20 meeting in July will build on the outlines of a deal earlier this month by Group of Seven finance ministers.

Despite their breakthroughs on a minimum global corporate tax rate and a shift in philosophy allowing one country to apply levies to profits of another’s national champions, multiple technical details remain unresolved.

Agreeing which companies will be covered, and deciding how governments can still use tax incentives to encourage virtuous economic activity despite a minimum rate, are among several other challenges that have overshadowed years of talks hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Implementation of any accord may take years, requiring treaty amendments and domestic legislation, and concerns over whether it can stick could yet hamper a deal too.

“It’s a month already that we’ve had little sleep,” Pascal Saint-Amans, the official running the OECD talks, told French television on June 14. “The next two weeks will be very important.”

Scoping a deal

THE G-7 accord agreed principles on transferring some profits from companies’ home countries for taxation in nations where they make sales. But deciding exactly which corporations to include—those said to be “in scope”—is still a challenge.

A Biden administration proposal in April would use revenue and profitability measures to limit the list to about 100. That defused conflict over more qualitative criteria, or singling out tech companies, but countries still need to reach a final agreement on the thresholds determining which companies should qualify.

The Intergovernmental Group of 24 developing countries, which includes Brazil, India, and South Africa, wants the scope to gradually broaden to include more than 100 companies, according to a policy note it sent to other governments last month.

Nations must also decide how much tax revenue to share after the G-7 agreed to reallocate “at least 20 percent” of profits above a 10 percent margin. Developing economies want the biggest possible wedge of tax income from multinationals operating in their territories.

Negotiators are also revisiting controversial qualitative criteria to keep low-margin Amazon.com Inc. in scope by separating out its profitable business lines. Companies have complained such segmentation can be overly complex, particularly if they do their own financial reporting differently. If financial services are excluded from a deal as expected, that poses another challenge since drawing a clear line between them and tech companies is getting harder.

Minimum tax

THE so-called second pillar of the talks would create a global corporate minimum tax, an opportunity to boost government revenues that is a priority for the US, with broader backing elsewhere. The OECD estimates an extra $150 billion a year could be generated from tougher US rules on foreign income and a 15% global minimum rate.

That will be a hard sell for Ireland, whose corporate rate is 12.5 percent. In addition, some countries including China want exclusions in the rules that allow them to attract high-tech investment with tax incentives.

“Minimum tax is devolving part of tax sovereignty and how you maintain incentives over a particular kind of foreign investment,” said David Linke, Global Head of Tax & Legal at KPMG. “That’s a difficult issue.”

Digital dilemma

AN OECD deal could eradicate a host of levies on mainly American tech firms that countries enacted unilaterally in recent years and which prompted US threats of retaliation.

To restore trust, negotiators must agree on which measures will be rolled back and when. Countries aren’t keen to abolish such taxes until they’re receiving extra revenues from the OECD deal, and getting developing economies on board may be particularly challenging since they won’t gain much in the process.

“Every country will have to weigh the cost and benefit,” said Marilou Uy, director of the Group of 24. “In particular because it will be asked to forego unilateral tax measures.”

Uncertain implementation

IMPLEMENTING new rules agreed at G-20 meetings in July or October will require many changes to treaties and domestic laws.

That is thorny for the European Union, where directives on tax changes throughout the bloc require unanimity, and several countries may object to such legislation enforcing an OECD deal. Aside from Ireland’s reservations on a 15 percent minimum tax, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called that plan “absurd.” The US will face challenges too, since a deal may need legislation in Congress, and treaty changes in the Senate that require a two-thirds majority.

Democrats largely support Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s efforts to overhaul international taxes, but party leaders want assurances on other countries’ commitments before asking members to vote on controversial minimum taxes.