
*Rene Agulan, the Philippine Department of Finance & Bureau of Customs
I am of course, speaking of The Great Book Blockade of 2009 that supposedly began when Customs examiner Rene Agulan noticed the infernal numerous amount of Twilight books being imported into the Philippines and got greedy.
Not that Twilight’s really responsible for anything but oh the glee of it being ever so slightly to blame for something (unlike the other people in the popular Livejournal icon I posted above, it is a possible excuse for Rene Agulan if he is ever confronted by a horde of angry book lovers. hee.)
It also goes without saying that it’s infuriatingly unfair that they’ve decided to tax books. Of course, if the tax on books went to the development and maintenance of public libraries, I wouldn’t mind so much but we all know where our tax money goes (or doesn’t go.) I am hoping for the best but the pessimist in me dreads the futility of arguing with Stupid People Who Think They’re Right. (Forgive me, I’ve barely recovered from the exciting new contract filled with wonderful benefits that my beloved company has offered me that I’ve skipped Bargaining and gone straight to Depression/General Acceptance of the inevitable. But that’s another story.)
For example, this part of the article struck me as incredibly stupid:
Take the official’s interpretation of the following sentence in RA 8047 (the Book Publishing Industry Development Act): “the tax and duty-free importation of books or raw materials to be used in book publishing.” According to Sales, this lacked a comma after the word “books,” which meant that what was tax and duty-free was only books used for book publishing.
People in the book industry were left scratching their heads, wondering what a “book used in book publishing” is. Customs went further and said it interpreted the Florence Agreement to mean only educational books are tax-free, with Customs deciding whether a title qualifies as being educational or not. Booksellers responded that this went against half a century’s common understanding of the treaty; did this mean everyone had been wrong and Customs suddenly right? Sales replied, “Yes.”
Ah yes, because the lack of a comma totally justifies the lack of common sense. How idiotic to base a loophole on a punctuation instead of logic. Oh well. I’ll stop now because I’m sleepy but for more information about this go here or here.



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