benign0's blog

As usual, ProPinoy.net resident Mr Important is trying to be cute in his latest blurb where he presumes to tell current hero of the Illustrado class, James Soriano a thing or two. Too bad that thing -- even two of it -- falls short on sense . Nice try, Mr Manuel Buencamino. But do think again . English is just another means of communication . That is true -- among a people who have strong traditions of scientific, technological, and commercial achievement . Thus among successful societies, it does not matter whether you speak English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Swedish, or Singlish. These languages -- and the people who speak them -- are peers among themselves.

I have often asserted that Filipinos are a people who are primarily driven by hiya (shame). Unmoved by any calls to higher purpose or noble pursuit, Filipinos continue to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. As such I remain convinced that any political solution pitched as a "cure" to the malaise that grips the Philippines at the very threads that weave the very fabric of its society (whether it be the latest "messiah" running for office or the current top-down change initiative in vogue) delivers incremental improvements at best.

Development in understanding in recent years is making real limits on growth a lot more palpable since it is becoming quite evident that our approach to measuring economic value and the costs of acquiring said "value" (i.e. our monetary system) is woefully incomplete. Yet economic growth remains the be-all-end-all that pervades every aspect of human aspiration. Corporations scramble over one another to get into the next market to expand into. Shoppers are continually trawling vast malls looking for the next must have . Credit is wantonly extended to grease the entire endeavour.

Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. in a recent statement made crack that the Philippines " should have been a Singapore " by now if the Edsa "People Power" "revolution" of 1986 had "not prospered". This is of course debatable and an easy assertion to make since it is by all intents and purposes unknowable and unprovable anyway.

Of late, there is the issue of (1) "the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill" and (2) President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino's backflip on his earlier promise to prioritise it. Without having to get off my armchair and just from browsing the little niche of the Net that I inhabit, it seems the "advocates of the RH Bill" have been up at arms over the above two challenges -- getting the Bill passed in Congress and overcoming the hurdle of Noynoy's backflip on his promise. What is wrong with this picture? It often helps when one is merely a bemused outside observer. Because for me, the issue remains quite simple.

Fear not my desperately underpaid compatriots! Even as Filipino nurses pour into the job market in enormous value-crushing volumes as Filipinos tend to do, there is yet another lucrative overseas market emerging for starving Filipino workers. In her paper " Pirates' in the Sea: Private Military and Security Company Activities in Southeast Asia and the Philippines ", Katherine Marie G. Hernandez reports that there is a lucrative market for Filipino mercenaries in various war zones all over the world.

Pathetic how Filipino nurses now have to pay in order to get work experience . That indeed is one for the books -- to have to pay an employer for the privilege to work for him. It's a kind of below-zero negative unemployment ( unemployed na nga, negative pa ). Whereas the Philippines is already known for its dirt cheap labour, it now has the distinction of being a country where negative wages are paid! It'd be hilarious if it weren't so poignant.

Ain't it quaint how 1.7 million people would troop to Manila for a chance to catch a glimpse and possibly -- hoping against hope -- touch the "revered" Black Nazarene figurine. I don't get it. How is this crowding around a relic different, say, from the 30,000 Filipinos who trooped to the ULTRA stadium to see an episode of Wowowee live and, later, stampeded all over one another and literally trampled the shit out of 78 such hopefuls ?

The 4th of February 2011 will mark the fifth anniversary of that monumental tragedy that happened in the PhilSports "ULTRA" Stadium in Pasig, Metro Manila where 78 people died in a stampede for tickets to see ABS-CBN's hit television show Wowowee . It ranks up there along with the same sort of mass-casualty disasters that happen onli in da Pinas , except that unlike tragedies involving killer Sulpicio Line ships, homicidal mud slides that bury entire towns in Leyte, and murderous floods caused by storm drains clogged by human refuse, the Wowowee massacre happened on a nice sunny day.

Politicians are quick to grandstand about their achievements and their "contributions" to the development of our wretched land, the Philippines. Whenever statistics about the economy or survey results describing public sentiment is released, politicians will go on a media blitz to ensure that an association between these and themselves are implanted in the vacuous minds of their constituents. Retrospective narrative about statistics is easy. But it takes real courage and conviction to use statistics as prospective measures of future performance.

According to a report released by the Philippine Central Bank (BSP), remittances by overseas workers to the Philippines was supposedly the "highest monthly level so far recorded". This was reported by the Inquirer.net as due to a "robust demand by foreign companies for Filipino skilled and professional workers".

There's been a lot of trumpets being blown over how the Philippines had recently surpassed India as the world's biggest remote supplier of call centre and back-end business process outsourced (BPO) services. The value proposition of such services to the market is quite clear as far as Filipinos are concerned: they are delivered on the cheap by a society awash with under-employed university graduates who speak excellent English.

I just recently came across the term " kuliglig ". It refers to a motorised pedicab -- a pedicab fitted with some kind of small gasoline-powered motor normally used for motorising small boats. It's another one of those instances of "Pinoy ingenuity", I suppose. A modern-day jeepney-style "adaptation" to the chronic dire situation that is the Philippine condition. These vehicles are flat-out illegal . But like that other renowned Filipino lifestyle -- squatting (which is also illegal ) -- operating kuligligs had recently become the latest fodder for the quaint ululations of Filipino populism.

The venerable Abe Margallo in his FilipinoVoices.com article House Bill 5043, quo vadis (whatever the hell does " quo vadis " mean, anyway?) makes another one of those typically irresponsible rah-rah assertions about the issues of population and reproduction -- the sort that fuels primitivism in already hopelessly backward Philippine society. The cornerstones of his thesis are the following ululations : (1) Filipinos are "assets", so the more such assets we produce, the more value is delivered to the society. (2) The reason Filipinos remain poor despite their being an "asset" is that they lack "opportunit[ies] to work and earn income". (3) The "economic elites" have not done their "duty" to invest more of their resources into creating said "opportunities" for the masses. Guess again, gramps . Here are some reality checks for you...

The Philippines with its population of 96 million registered a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $117 billion in 2006. Singapore for its part, with its relatively paltry population of 4.6 million delivered a GDP of $132 billion on the same year. For less than half a tenth of the humanity Filipinos apply to the job of adding value to the economy, Singapore delivers more in absolute terms .

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

There is good debt and there is bad debt. Like, say, a loan taken out to buy property or start a business, good debt is used to fund appreciating assets. The cost of the borrowed funds (the interest the borrower pays on the principal disbursed to him) is offset by the returns that are yielded by the asset purchased using said borrowed funds. Those yields could come in the form of (1) income generated by the assets -- such as rent or earnings from the funded property or business, and (2) capital gain -- such as when you sell the property or business for more than its value at the time it was acquired -- also taking into account the cost of funding (interest expenses) and cost of ownership.

Some non-debatable facts that Inquirer.net columnist Jose Ma. Montelibano dropped in his recent piece on the economic might of Filipino-Americans (figures that follow presumably are estimates or averages): on an annual basis (1) Filipino-Americans spend $50 billion in personal living activities and purchases, (2) they remit $8 billion to the Philippines. To highlight the scale of these numbers, Montelibano shows that the total expenditure is double the budget of the Philippine Government and the remittance figure accounts for 60 percent of total remittances to the Philippines by Pinoy expatriates.

The Philippines is imprisoned by a deep systemic inability in its people to extricate themselves from poverty. It is a problem that is an outcome of (1) the sheer number of Filipinos that inhabit the planet, (2) the average productive output of each warm Filipino body earning (or seeking to earn) a living, and (3) the general attractiveness of quality of life outside of the Philippines . The following challenges with respect to these three aspects of our dire situation easily reveal themselves...

Yet again, a beholdenness to religious edict -- specifically the stand of the Medievally powerful Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines -- is at the centre of a heated debate between the forces of progress and the Forces of Primitivism. What is in effect a "total ban" on all forms of abortion in the Philippines is resulting in a nightmarish world of death, suffering, and despair for many poor Filipinos -- the very people whose welfare the Catholic Church presumes itself to be the guardian of.