Don't want Filipinos to leave the islands? Then stop depending on OFW earnings!

The above title expresses the only thought that came to mind as I took in esteemed "economist" Winnie Monsod's "gone-viral" video.

"If you are going to help this country, you've got to be in the country. If any of you have ambitions of going abroad so that you can earn more, please disabuse yourself, because by doing that, you are essentially betraying the people in the Philippines who trusted you and who invested their money in you," she told her students, whose tuition at UP is subsidized by the government.

Zzzzzz...

The sort of hollow-headed populist admonitions of people who pompously go where JFK had already gone before simply rings hollow in a country run aground and rendered a vast economic, physical, intellectual, and spiritual wasteland by its own people.

Last I heard the number of Filipinos who live in the islands overwhelmingly and utterly dwarfs the number of people who are working and residing abroad. Even without doing much research on the subject, I don't think too many people would disagree with an unsubstanitable assertion that for every one Filipino earning sweet dollars abroad, there are on the average four to five (or even nine, thanks to Catholic dogma) direct family members and a vast network of extended family and friends related to these waiting at home mouths agape for the next "paycheck" to be distributed thinly amongst them (thus the logo of AntiPinoy.com).



Monsod is barking up the wrong bayabas tree.