Official Persecution Of Readers

MLQ3 has a new blog entry up: Official Persecution Of Readers. Here's an excerpt, and his suggestions for action:

Book lovers expressed satisfaction when President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, during her ninth State of the Nation Address, stated her administration’s policy as follows: “Taxes should come from alcohol and tobacco, and not from books. Tax hazards to lungs and livers, do not tax minds.”

Two months before her speech, Makati Rep. Teodoro L. Locsin Jr. had hailed the President for instructing the Department of Finance to rescind Department Order No. 17-09 dated March 24, 2009. DO 17-09 provided the legal basis for the Great Book Blockade of 2009, and officialdom was surprised when the imposition of taxes on imported books provoked opposition from book lovers from all walks of life. Citizens joined hands with booksellers, the National Book Development Board and Unesco Philippines in expressing indignation over an arbitrary and patently illegal tax.

In response to the public furor, the Department of Finance issued Department Order No. 27-09, dated May 25, 2009, saying it had received letters from the NBDB and the Philippine Book Publishing and Development Federation while ignoring Unesco and the citizenry. The officialese used in the new order was pouty: DO 17-09, it said, was “hereby suspended pending resolution of the issues raised.” The phrasing was good-naturedly ignored by many book lovers celebrating what they thought had been a kind of successful People Power; the general, and magnanimous, opinion at the time was that the bureaucrats in the Department of Finance and Bureau of Customs had to save face.

However, between the time the book tax was “scrapped” (according to the Palace) or “suspended” (according to Finance officials), troubling news began to trickle in that the bureaucracy apparently had a mind of its own and fully intended to defy the President and keep on putting the squeeze on the public.

This time around, since the commercial bookstores are still in the clear, it doesn’t look like any official will take up the cudgels for the consumer, whose existence was studiously ignored by the DOF in the first place. So if the book tax is to be truly eliminated, citizens will have to get together with fellow citizens and organize themselves.

How can this be done?

1. Tell RockEd Philippines you want to help by e-mailing info(at)rockedphilippines(dot)org, or contact them via these numbers: (632) 709-0792; (63916) 409-2378; Telefax: (632) 376-2184.

2. Try to take photographs of the customs assessors, post office employees, etc. and document your case and inform chingbee.cruz(at)gmail(dot)com who has been in touch with UP College of Law dean Marvic Leonen since last May. Leonen has been compiling evidence for the filing of appropriate legal cases.

3. Be prepared to call the attention of Jaime Regala of the BOC IIPD-CIIS (Internal Inquiry and Prosecution Division-Customs Intelligence and Investigation Service) or complain to him personally at tel. 527-4522 once RockEd and Leonen have a clearer idea of the scale of the illegal duties being assessed.

Previous entries on the latest developments here, here, here, and here.