No blog is an island

I read the recent entries of in FilipinoVoices.com on the possibility Jun Lozada and Governor Panlilio might embark on blogging, with interest. I disagree with many of the assumptions Rom makes in Too Much. To wit: that there is anything particularly different between Philippine political blogs and those overseas; that the public tired of NBN-ZTE (my understanding is that when those Shenzen photos surfaced, Internet traffic spiked for Inquirer.net, and back to pre-Holy Week levels where they’d remained in the doldrums until then); that Ed Panlilio won by force of charisma (he has little of that; it was a revolt on the part of the traditional upper and middle classes of Pampanga, and a victory was barely eked out in the face of the mobilization of the poor, who, despite decades of Panlilio’s involvement with them, still gravitated to the Pineda machine); though I agree Lozada’s run of out anything new to say

I think Benj is wildly off the mark in The Worst-Case Scenario: The Cyber Crackdown. The infrastructure simply isn’t in place, either for regulating or monitoring content a la China (see the analysis of Chinese methods in my conference notes), or simply pulling the plug, a la Burma. Though China does provide the key to understanding how governments will tackle the Internet, not because domestic public opinion matters, but rather, in an effort to damage foreign public opinion. The Chinese government supposedly prefers to apply influence on potential critics to get them to engage in self-censorship, rather than provide ammunition to critical foreign observers by actually throwing bloggers in jail (though it’s done that, but perhaps more to make an initial point).

I’d think that in pragmatically allocating resources to neutralize critics, our government would make the Internet the least of its priorities, not because its an inconsequential field of battle, but rather, because it’s easier to neutralize. The way the government latched on to Bong Austero is a case in point. Whatever he meant or intended became irrelevant: his e-mail, having been produced by a private person helped give the impression that a middle-class constituency was mobilizing, spontaneously, to defend the administration. It was broadcast and repurposed and the buzz his e-mail created gained him a column.

The Internet is a wide field and blogs are just part of the landscape: there’s YouTube, where political messages are broadcast; there’s message boards and groups, where many of the older generation and even a significant chunk of the younger but politically-inclined citizenry is active (a couple of weeks ago I had a round table with some student leaders and the ones from UP told me about how the Peyups message board played a significant role in raising issues that affected the recent student council elections); there’s the passing-on of e-mail, too from person to person; there’s the online news sites, and then blogs; there’s even online broadcast of radio content, particularly effective for Filipinos overseas who tune in to keep tabs on what’s going on at home.

Here, the advantages of incumbency and of managing media scientifically have been magnified, and not reduced. The principle at work, as far as neutralizing critics is concerned, is similar to using chaff to discombobulate the radar signals of the enemy in warfare. If the enemy latches on an issue, simply scramble it by drowning it out in a flood of competing messages; and if that fails, you’re better off launching, say, a denial-of-service attack on an offending website. On the other hand, for the purposes of an offensive or counteroffensive, the Internet is simply yet another platform for amplifying the Message Of The Day -and it can be done relatively cheaply, and efficiently. The message of the day will be seized upon by the genuinely convinced, too. A paid propagandist has an advantage over the committed, but amateur, partisan: there are no ethical concerns to worry about, no effort required to demonstrate respect or even tolerance for contesting claims.

Still, Marocharim brings up the point that interests me the most in Back to Basics. The question of the future of political writing on the newfangled Interweb -particularly for those holding political office. One dominant view of online communication is that it is a conversation; and that a conversation is highly personal, and is less effective when institutional; that it must be characterized by authenticity: which is why the disciplining and clarifying benefits of rhetoric are hotly contested, too. Perhaps, on a person-to-person basis, rhetoric is counter-productive; but in dealing with entire populations, or even segments of those populations, it is essential. Political leaders, particularly in national positions must now balance communicating with segments while those segments, at least for now, continue to believe they constitute a whole: one whose component parts, the citizenry, shares basic values (recall my past reference to Joseph Lane’s reference to Pericles to understand the ongoing American primaries campaign).

The question of authenticity -that bloggers possess it, politicians by their very nature are incapable of it- and the counter-culture self-identification of bloggers as somehow superior even when engaged in political partisanship, is at the heart of whether politician-bloggers should be welcome to, or resisted, when it comes to planting their flags in the blogosphere. Will the politician post manufactured content, in contrast to, say, the more authentic content of even politically-committed bloggers?

James Fallows, journalist-blogger, and incidentally, also a former speechwriter, in tackling criticisms of Barak Obama’s rhetorical gifts, dissects this question:

Several people have written back to say: Well, maybe he just has better speechwriters! And: Since you (me) used to work as a speechwriter (for Jimmy Carter), shouldn’t you be particularly sensitive to this point?

Answer, to the second question: No. And it’s precisely because I have worked is this field that my answer to the first question is: I don’t care who originally came up with these phrases or drafted the speech.

If a public figure’s basic quality of mind or ability to express himself is in question, as frankly is the case with President George W. Bush, then it might be worth investigating whether the words he is uttering actually reflect his underlying outlook and comprehension.

No sane person wonders this about Obama. By himself, long before he had a staff for such help, he wrote one very good book, Dreams from My Father. By all accounts he has written other crucial speeches, including the one about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, all on his own.

So once we have this indication of his basic abilities and outlook, it really shouldn’t matter whether he applies them in every speech he makes. Indeed it would be a misuse of his time and talents to do so. No important political leader can personally perform a lot of the tasks that are carried out in his or her name. The test is whether he can motivate, lead, and manage teams of people to perform in the way, and at the level, he would do himself — if he had a million hours in each day rather than 24. (This is the leadership version of “give someone a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach someone to fish… and soon the oceans will be empty.” Oops, that’s a different point.)

If Obama personally wrote both the 2006 and the 2008 commencement speeches, great. To me it suggests that he’s getting better. If he wrote the old one and an assistant wrote the new one, great too. It shows that he is able to have even better work produced in his name. In a way, the second would be more reassuring, as a guide to possible performance in office.

I’ve said before that politics is primarily about communication: a politician either has the ability to communicate, or doesn’t; rhetorical gifts are a definite plus but their absence isn’t a fatal liabilty; but as I pointed out above, the politician’s dilemma is to communicate in general and particular with limited time and resources, and widely-varying expectations and even assumptions on the part of the various audiences. As with so many other activities, the benefits of highly-focused communications has to be balanced with its costs when it comes to equally necessary wide-scale or wholesale communications.

The only member of Congress I can think of who has a genuinely readable blog is Congressman Ruffy Biazon. From what I’ve heard, the entries are actually his: but is the time and thought he puts into it, worth it, politically?

The only national candidates seriously attempting blogging are Adel Tamano and Danton Remoto (with the up-to-now token participation of Gilbert Remulla, JV Ejercito, and TG Guingona) in The Opposite of Apathy, an interesting experiment that still has to gain its sea-legs. Previously, Mong Palatino experienced the shortcomings of online campaigning in 2004, but it isn’t clear if those shortcomings were due to flawed assumptions (that there is a youth vote, for one), flawed messages (can his ideology compete when it comes to the kind of audiences plugged into the world wide web?) or other handicaps (the efforts of the administration to neutralize the Left by hook or by crook, whether by outright liquidation or institutional subversion through the Comelec, etc.).

My own suspicion is that the blogosphere is politically valuable if -and only if- politicians recognize that it’s an effective venue for courting the Middle Class, with an eye to engaging then mobilizing its members. It is not the venue for mass, or wholesale politics, where TV and radio reign supreme; it is the place for retail politics, and for providing access to a limited portion of the electorate -citizens interested in policy debates, regardless of economic status.

The problem, of course, is that the Middle Class has little to offer the politicians, and particularly so, come 2010: the middle class proved itself as manageable as the masses from 2005 onwards, and having neutralized itself with 2010 as its consuelo de bobo, it will truly have proven itself bobo at least as having an impact in 2010 is concerned; but potentially very significant in 2013 and then 2016, because other factors will then start having an impact (but more on that some other time).

Numbers-wise, they (the middle) are inconsequential and would only matter if they donated generously to campaigns, but they don’t. Not being invested, either in terms of time or money, in the candidacies competing for the mass vote, and the mass vote proving itself susceptible to being marshaled by old veterans (the churches, the labor and other movements, the local machines) or managed by institutional intervention (at the Comelec and in the counting), the candidates have no reason to take middle class advocacy into consideration. Not because politicians don’t care, per se, but in a fight that requires the most efficient allocation of resources, there’s little reason to allocate them to cultivating the middle class.

Case in point: if stuart-santiago says, don’t vote for politicians who do product endorsements, what will it achieve? It will validate the assumptions of the politicians when they undertook those endorsements. They won’t lose or win on the basis of a boycott on the basis of their endorsements. And those who do win despite such a boycott will only serve to entrench the practice. An advocacy of a boycott would only be effective if done -now, prior to elections- by boycotting the products they endorse. A mass-based approach to an issue raised and ventilated (and most effectively wielded) by the middle and upper classes is self-defeating. It’s not that it’s the wrong fight -just the wrong target, considering those expected to do the fighting.

So, let me suggest that the middle class’s salvation, politically, is if campaigning for its heart and mind is done on line: because the middle is actually so broad (what, A to C? but only on line do A to C actually meld together, effectively). That is because appealing to Middle Class values (not very different, for now, to those of the upper class in whose image they have been raised and trained) in the mass media immediately alienates the masses; but online it can be done consistently and with less of a chance it will lose mass votes. The politician who devotes energy and resources to cultivating the middle online just might discover getting real bang for the buck -because, if the middle is properly courted online, it might actually mobilize; then the kind of middle and upper class revolt seen in Pampanga might actually have a chance to be replicated in national politics.

But failing that, what the blogosphere is trying to work out, is a larger conflict, one History Unfolding discussed recently:

The most fundamental conflict in western civilization, in my opinion, is probably between reason and emotion. A year or two ago I purchased a most interesting-looking book, The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman, dealing with the gradual erosion of reason and the triumph of Christian faith between the fourth century B. C. and the seventh century A. D. ,,, the very title raises the issue of whether this could happen again—not a frivolous question in an era in which faith is rivaling reason in struggles to establish an orthodox view of how and when the human race came into being. In fact, surveying the last few centuries, I suspect that the empire of reason has passed its peak. On the other hand, that may not be altogether a bad thing either. Human beings may have some capacity for rational thought, but they cannot rid themselves of their feelings, and attempts to proclaim the supremacy of reason in human affairs have repeatedly led to disaster. What we need is that precious and most elusive of modern outcomes, an equilibrium—and it must be found fairly soon.

Though David Kaiser in his entry has a different time frame, his concerns, to my mind, can be connected with a belief earlier brought up by one of my favorite historians, John Lukacs. In At the End of an Age he says that our present age, the Modern Age (which began in the 1500’s and superseded the previous Middle Ages) is passing:

To list the evidences of the ending of the Modern Age would fill an enormous book. Here I must try to sum up -or better, to suggest- some of them.

The progressive spreading of democracy has marked the history of mankind, certainly during the past two hundred years but in many ways throughout the entire Modern Age. This progress was usually gradual, at times revolutionary, and not always clearly visible on the surface of world events. How long this democratic age will last no one can tell. What “democracy” really means is another difficult question. But there is a larger consideration. We are living through one of the greatest changes in the entire history of mankind, because until relatively recently history was largely (though never exclusively) “made” by minorities, while increasingly it is “made” by majorities. (In reality it is not so much made by majorities as it is made in the name of majorities.) At any rate, this has become the age of popular sovereignty (at least for a while). History has moved from the aristocratic to the democratic era -a passage occurring mostly during the Modern Age, and one that may transcend even the great accepted (Western) scheme of Ancient and Middle and Modern times.

This spread of democracy was the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville; it is present throughout his writings, most clearly in the second volume of Democracy in America, where his very method of description was to summarily juxtapose and contrast how society, politics, arts, and even more, mores and manners, formed differently in aristocratic ages before the developing democratic times. And within this very large vision there was a historically more limited one: Tocqueville’s recognition, more than a century ago, that this had been and still was a gradual process: with aristocracy declining and democracy rising, the existence of some kind of aristocratic order was still necessary to maintain some of the freedoms of otherwise increasingly democratic societies… Nearly 175 years later, at the end of the Modern Age, much of this is past. Still the Modern Age was marked by the coexistence of aristocracy and democracy, something which has now come to an end.

“Aristocracy” ought not be categorically defined as the rule of kings and/or noblemen. “Democracy” also means something more than the rule of “the people,” more, indeed, than mere popular sovereignty. Bust especially in Europe, between the highest and the lowest classes (or between the rulers and the ruled) there was another, rather particular, class in the middle: the so-called bourgeois class or classes…

And he says that as the Modern Age now undergoes its terminal decline, it should more accurately be known as the Bourgeois Age. In a most lyrical passage, he distills what that Age has been all about:

The Bourgeois Age was the Age of the State; the Age of Money; the Age of Industry; the Age of the Cities; the Age of Privacy; the Age of the Family; the Age of Schooling; the Age of the Book; the Age of Representation; the Age of Science; and the age of an evolving historical consciousness. Except for the last two, all of these primacies are now fading and declining fast.

Indeed! The challenges to, crumbling of, and increasing certainty that all these Ages of have passed -of the state, of money, of industry, the city, of privacy, of family, of schooling, the book, and representation- are played out in this blog nearly day-to-day; just as the debate over which should be exalted, reason or emotion, periodically re-erupts here…
But this clash between Reason and Emotion, as Kaiser sees it, or the passing of the Modern Age, as Lukacs put it, in either case is being played out in blogosphere, too, between those whose references are to a longer framework of time (the Internet Age being the latest evolution of the Modern Age, for example, a view I subscribe to in my attitude to blogging being the latest reincarnation of the Era of the Pamphleteers: see the latter part of my May 7, 2008 blog entry) and those for whom the present Age has vanquished all that’s come before (the Internet as the successor to the Modern Age, though not necessarily a Postmodern Age, as expressed by big mango in Are You a Member of Generation V (for Virtual)? ).
To return where I started: it’s folly (and fallacious) to think a present or future tyranny would be a carbon copy of past tyrannies; tyrants and tyrannies evolve and they thrive when their victims think that so long as the old ways aren’t repeated, exactly, then they are free.

Malakas at mahina

Blogger Imperfect Hush makes a unique comparison: says Winston Garcia’s like cartoon supervillain The Red Skull! o_O

While the corporate drama that played out last Tuesday was quite riveting (leaving reporters like Iris Cecila Gonzalez exhausted; for reportage, see When smallest to biggest owners become electric), it was the following blog entries were responsible for my column for today, which is ‘Malakas pa si Lopez’. Blogger myclique, who works for a Lopez company, and LeNdl VicENciO’s UseLEss MuLtipLy , who features an extremely detailed rebuttal from his elder sister, a Meralco employee, got me thinking about how more than the big players are invested, emotionally and even financially, in the Meralco fight: there are the employees, each of which has a family, and most of whom constitutes part of our shrinking middle class; and there are also the stockholders.

Blogger Vicoyski’s Eye (a shareholder) gave an eyewitness account of the proxy battle at the Meralco Theater:

I saw firsthand, corporate drama in real life. Obvious, but savvy, corporate raiding moves, that some would interpret as an underhanded attempt to subvert the proxy nominations under the name of recognized Meralco management representatives. A director from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) coveniently coming out with an order to remove the Asst. Corporate Secretary, Atty. Tony Rosete, and invalidate all proxies under Meralco management supportive directors, at the exact moment that Mr. Garcia made a signal by pulling-out a manila envelope and flashing its content. An order that was subsequently junked by a majority of the board on the grounds that it was undated, was signed only by a SEC Officer-In-Charge, didn’t have the official seal of SEC, and doesn’t even have the necessary docket number to be considered a legal order.

What I believe is the funniest (others would say scariest) part of the whole proceeding was when Mr. Garcia began losing his composure due to the heckling of a number of Meralco employee-stockholders. He began stating, as I remember it, “…I have more shares than all the (Meralco) employees here combined!” It is indeed something that is true… However, his seemingly childish outburst showed great arrogance, considering that he doesn’t own, but only represent the shares of government employees who have very little say as to where he invests their GSIS retirement money.

Fernando G. Gagelonia in his blog At Midfield quantifies the cost of the government campaign and Garcia’s bravura performance as follows: for all shareholders in Meralco, the stock’s value has shrunk by 24 percent; and for the government itself, book losses for state institutions that “now exceed 6 billion pesos.”

Returning to the Meralco stockholder’s impressions of the proxy battle, something New Philippine Revolution said in his postmortem of the proxy fight-

That scene showing Garcia standing up and shouting at all those stockholders show you how a member of Gloria’s mafia gang thinks about himself as an overlord of this country.

Suggests to me that something interesting is going on that hasn’t been widely commented on. And that is, the posturing wasn’t aimed at one specific audience, but many audiences. You would think the Lopezes, having encountered Garcia up close and personal in the boardroom, would have known his propensity to come across as a boor, and welcomed the opportunity to have him do their work for them.
But perhaps they knew as well as Garcia does, that his bluster wasn’t meant to impress serious stockholders, much less potential foreign investors, but rather, the broader public. And that is what separates the present management of Meralco from Garcia’s gang: the management had specific shareholders and investors to keep happy, while Garcia and the President are playing to the gallery (which is not to pass judgment on either side: businessmen will obsess over calming investor and shareholders’ nerves while politicians can and must play to the gallery). blog@AWBHoldings says that prior to the proxy showdown, other kinds of political proxies were being solicited by the government:

Last Sunday, I came from church, and my mother reported that a barangay kagawad (councilor) was making the rounds, asking people to sign a piece of paper. It was supposed to be a petition calling for lower electricity rates. But when my mom scanned the document, she found a list of reasons, and number one referred to the Lopez family. My mom refused to sign, knowing it was political in nature, most likely concocted by a local official allied with the current regime. My mom refused to be used by this regime for its political games.

Which brings me to one final extract from New Philippine Revolution’s entry:

This gambit of Gloria backfired. First, it showed how powerful the Lopezes are compared with the Garcias, the Aboitizes, the Alcantaras, and the Arroyos of this land. Second, it showed how teethless the SEC is. And third, it shows how inept and foolish government becomes when the people allow it to continually perpetuate its proto-dictatorial powers especially on businesses.

Pinoy Observer had a similar reaction:

At around 2 pm, GSIS President and “coup plotter” Winston Garcia went out of the Meralco building with his tail between his legs. He has been heckled and jeered at by Meralco employees. Last minute dilatory tactics by the government through the SEC has been rebuffed…

Garcia should blame his publicist for this image fiasco. He lost twice today. He lost his power because Meralco stockholders rebuffed him and he lost his dignity.

Or, as you might have heard from people following the news, “Ay, mahina pala si Garcia!”
This was the main theme of my column: the public posturing of both camps to prove to the public that one was more malakas than the other. This was a concept Filipino historian Mina Roces introduced in her book, Kinship Politics In Postwar Philippines: The Lopez Family 1946-2000.In many ways an effort that arose out of dissatisfaction with the anthology An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines and Phoenix: The saga of the Lopez family, Roces puts forward two highly useful ideas for understanding politics and business:

One persistent theme in Philippine postwar political history had been the continuous charges of graft and corruption against an administration, foreshadowing its demise at the next election contest. Such fluctuations in Philippine politics have been an established pattern since independence was granted in 1946..How can one explain such “cycles” in Philippine postwar history?

This book proposes a framework for such an analysis. It argues that a contest between two competing discourses -traditional social idioms embedded in kinship politics or politica de famila and Western values (here interchangeably used with the term “modern”) inculcated in the colonial period- accounts for these political oscillations. Traditional, or pre-European, political organization is seen as being based on the politica de familia or kinship politics. This concept is used here to mean political process wherein kinship groups operate for their own interests interacting with other kinship groups as rivals or allies. Politica de famila thrives in a setting where elite family groups and their supporters compete with each other for political power. Once political power is gained by one family alliance, it is used relentlessly to accumulate family wealth and prominence, pragmatically bending the rules of the law to gain access to special privileges.

She then goes on to specify what these “Western idioms” are:

The colonial period introduced a number of Western idioms (the term Western idioms or Western institutions is used for lack of a better term to refer to non-indigenous influences introduced externally into the society from the West from the 16th century onwards) which were eventually incorporated into the cultural milieu and thus of political behavior. Some of these values were in direct conflict with the traditional elements of kinship politics. The set of Western idioms which penetrated and influenced Philippine political culture may be classified into three categories. First, a new set of ethics and morals, introduced in the Spanish period through the vehicle of Catholicism, provided a novel standard with which to conduct and judge behavior, often intruding into the established methods of comport. (This does not imply that there was no “morality” before the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century). Secondly, bureaucratic professionalism inculcated in the American colonial period emphasized a different method of participating in politics and business -that of utilizing impersonal norms, the assessment of people on the basis of achievement, and maintaining objectivity in major decisions involving personalities. Finally, the concept of loyalty to a nation-state, an entity far surpassing the specific confines of the family or village, began to emerge as nationalist ideas spread throughout the archipelago from about the second half of the 19th century to the movement for independence in the 20th century…

And then, how it comes together:

With independence, Filipinos assumed full political leadership and the tensions between these two opposing discursive practices surfaced. This unreconciled tension explains the peculiar behavior of postwar politics that saw the cyclical rise and fall of governments as each administration was voted out of office for graft and corruption. Families who operated in the traditional style found themselves exposed and criticized in the free press by rivals who used the rhetoric of Western values to attack those families in power. Having been shown to have neglected the national interest in favor of familial concerns, these families failed to retain their power beyond one administration. In this framework, the Marcos regime (1972-1986) represents the epitome of pure kinship politics as one family alliance alone had monopoly of political power and owning most of the country’s major corporations…

This book argues that this unresolved tension was responsible for the ambivalent behavior exhibited by Filipino families who have used political power for familial ends. On the one hand, these individuals families sincerely believe the rhetoric they imbibed from their education -that corruption is bad, that the modern discourses of professionalism, ethics, and morals, and the concern for the national interest should override the familial interests in the political sphere. While these families use the modern idioms to criticize other families who in their eyes use political power to build a business empire, at the same time they remain blind to the same faults in themselves -almost oblivious to their own practice of kinship politics. In this manner they continue to apply one set of values (Western/modern) to their rival families, and one set of discourses (kinship politics) to themselves.

Another concept Mina Roces puts forward as deserving of further exploration, is that of palakasan:

Another Tagalog concept also used as in idiom in the discourse of kinship politics yet unexplored by social scientists is palakasan. The word malakas literally means “strong” and the word mahina designates the opposite -”weak.” In a political sense, a person who is malakas is one who is in a position of power and uses that power unscrupulously to benefit his/her kinship group…

One who does not want to his/her position or power to help his/her kin group is “mahina.” And to be branded “mahina ka” (you are weak) is pejorative. In the cultural value system, “malakas” is a virtue. One who is malakas is looked at with awe and it would enhance once’s position to work for such a “malakas” person. Thus, one’s being malakas or mahina becomes a culturally-defined yardstick of a person’s prestige, power, or influence. If a family is malakas, many would want to work for it or desire an alliance with it. The unabashed ability to display how malakas one is by using one’s power to give one’s family special privileges and concessions in business is received with great admiration.

Palakasan is a system wherein those in power compete with each other in obtaining special privileges and exemptions from regulations and beding the rules of law for their kinship group. For the palakasan system to function, there must be various groups of family rivals all attempting to exercise power in the pursuit of family wealth and privilege. Each family then tries to outdo the other in being “malakas.”…

And the assumptions on which such a system is based? A fundamental inequality among the people:

Malakas implies special status, blatantly stressing the inequalities in the social structure between those in power and those out of power. But malakas status is not dependent on social or economic class (although one could argue it represents the current political class, a position far from being static, as family alliances constantly move in and out of political office). Since the criterion for malakas status is solely political power, a wealthy person can lose out to a relatively poor but more influential family alliance. A group of squatters in a Manila slum area may be malakas because they have close ties with the mayor and therefore feel no threat of eviction. The person who owns the land illegally occupied by the squatters though wealthy, has no hope of retrieving his/her land or of evicting the squatters as long as these squatters maintain their malakas status vis-a-vis the mayor…

It is true that, generally, wealthy families have more chances of attaining malakas status: politicians are willing to receive financial assistance from a wealthy family at election time in exchange for ties of utang na loob. Wealthy families are also financially capable of employing someone who is malakas in order to speak in their favor. For example, rich families can pay influential malakas lawyers, or malakas judges to favor them in court. A poor person who is mahina would not have the financial materiel to approach a malakas person for help. But it is important to note that even families from low social classes, the poor peasants, may be malakas if they are close to the powers that be. Don Aflonso may be wealthy but he could be mahina in the municipality of Pasay City, whereas, Mang Pedro who is the bodyguard of Mayor Pablo Cuneta of Pasay City could be malakas in that municipality.

Because of this, Roces argues that being malakas isn’t always about the wallop of one’s wallet:

Malakas highlights inequalities not along socio-economic class lines but distinguishes between those who are exempted from all laws and rules that govern the rest of society (malakas) and those who have to follow the rules (mahina)… Those that follow the rules disadvantage themselves by sublimating themselves in a lower status while those who blatantly bend or break the rules of law gain prestige because they reveal their special status (they can break the rules without punishment, or they do not have to follow the rules that everyone else has to follow). And it is usually those who are in political positions who can exercise the malakas prerogative. An interesting point is that in order to show malakas status, one has to break the rules deliberately; one has to exercise status to show status.

Which brings me to suggest that Roces’s book provides a keen insight into what took place at the Meralco proxy battle. She pointed out that when it comes to powerful blocs duking it out, Western notions of the “rule of law” become a benchmark of success when one bloc manages to prove itself better at legal manipulation, in other words, malakas.
At the start, both the Lopezes and Winston Garcia had a default malakas position, the Lopezes by being the incumbent controlling interests and Garcia by being backed by the chief executive and having access to a big warchest; Blogger The Write Stuff zeroes in on what the potential political benefits for the President (and Garcia) going into the battle, were:

As a political move, this is probably the best time for Gloria’s administration to take over a highly unpopular power utility firm, or at least take it away from the Lopez family and earn pogi points from the public. Mind you, any Presidentiable making a statement of support to the Meralco Group right now would be taking a political suicide.

The showdown was in many ways reminiscent of the way datus retained or lost their authority by means of challenges from contending datu-wannabees. It seemed as if the fight -highly political because of the nature of both rivals as keen players of the power game (literally and figuratively)- would be old fashioned (think “politics is addition”).

The Inquirer editorial today says Garcia gets points for personal courage but zeroes in on the SEC’s attempt to stop the voting:

Above all, it depended on a master stroke and the element of surprise: an order from the Securities and Exchange Commission to exclude certain proxy votes solicited by the Lopezes from being counted.

The order, read before a stunned assembly by Hubert Guevara, director of compliance and enforcement at the SEC, could have handed Garcia either a strategic or a tactical victory: Either the Lopez proxy votes would have been invalidated or excluded, negating the Lopez family’s advantage, or the stockholders’ meeting would have been postponed, allowing Garcia more time to get more proxies.

Instead, after the board recessed and Meralco management consulted its battery of lawyers, the Lopezes and their business allies decided to ignore the SEC order. They gave a total of 10 reasons why they considered the order legally infirm—only one of which, the charge that GSIS was merely forum-shopping, could be considered invalid. (The GSIS petition for a temporary restraining order had already been withdrawn before the start of the meeting.) Not least, Meralco officer Monico Jacob, a former chairman of the SEC, emerged to explain to the public that intra-corporate disputes were not in fact within the jurisdiction of the SEC.

Indeed, of the many events that transpired Tuesday, it is the SEC order that provokes the most curiosity.

Was the order only the latest confirmation that the Arroyo administration was behind the GSIS attempt to shake up Meralco management? The timing of the order is suspect; it seems part of a script directed by someone in control of government resources.

But why was the order transparently flawed? Only one commissioner’s signature, no official seal of the SEC, no notice given: The list of errors goes on. It is as if the document was designed to be ignored.

It was after the board’s decision to ignore the order and resume the meeting that Garcia, a controversial man at the best of times, objected loudly and confronted members of the pro-Lopez audience.

Ricky Carandang on TV mentioned that one issue was that GSIS had accepted the validity of a quorum and so questioning the validity of proxies made no sense (if they were valid for determining a quorum, why would they suddenly be invalidated for the purpose of voting? Yet the Lopezes too, said Carandang, had contemplated postponing the election early on; it seems perhaps both sides were engaged in a real nail-biter as far as the proxy war was concerned), but like many observers steeped in Western idioms perhaps missed the point (something the editorial came closer to pointing out). The SEC order had nothing to do with law, or the rule of it; it had to do with palakasan and it was meant to be a coup de theatre for Garcia. See GSIS plan to lie low, spring surprise fails:

The Plan” called for the GSIS to lie low and feign weakness in the days leading to the annual meeting, hoping that the Lopez family and its allies would lower their guard.

An official, who had knowledge of the plan to shake up the board of the country’s largest power distributor, said the “diversion” was important because the Lopez family was expecting a full frontal attack from the government led by the GSIS.

The plan coincided with recent pronouncements by Malacañang distancing itself from the boardroom brawl, and by leading industry observers that Garcia would back down without public Palace backing.

Also part of the plan was to float the idea that the GSIS would ask the courts to issue an injunction on Tuesday’s annual stockholders meeting, ostensibly because it had failed to gain access to “proxy votes” records…

The GSIS filed a motion to that effect on Friday in the Pasay City Regional Trial Court, but immediately withdrew it.

GSIS legal counsel Estrella Elamparo said the strategy was to divert the attention of the Lopezes away from guarding against requests for temporary restraining orders (TROs).

The Lopezes need not have looked far as the GSIS filed a complaint on Monday morning in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—only a few hundred meters from Meralco’s headquarters.

Despite filing the complaint earlier in the day, the GSIS called a press conference in the afternoon, where Elamparo denied having filed a petition for a TRO…

That very same day, SEC Commissioner Jesus Martinez signed the order favoring the GSIS motion to “set aside” the counting of all proxies gathered by the Lopez group. The order would be delivered by SEC representatives as a surprise during the Meralco stockholders’ meeting…

When SEC director Hubert Guevara read the “cease-and-desist order” on the floor, the entire assembly fell silent. The audience was clearly confused by its implications, and the Lopezes and their directors were stunned by Garcia’s deft maneuver.

“Without the Lopezes’ proxies, they would have only 33 percent [or Meralco’s total outstanding stock],” said another business ally of Garcia. “Winston has about 40 percent, including proxies. He will win.”

The plan—had it been successful—called for the GSIS to elect five board members, plus nominate one independent director who would be sympathetic to their side…

As it turned out, however, the Lopezes’ lawyers saved the day for the influential family, finding “infirmities” in the SEC order, including several technicalities like the absence of a docket number, date and official seal on the written order.

What looked like the SEC’s technical errors gave the Lopez group the courage to disregard the order and proceed with the stockholders’ meeting.

And so, the coup de theatre that failed added to the malakas reputation of the Lopezes -and again, let’s recognize that neither side was operating from the basis of subordinating themselves to the rule of law, but rather, tried to outfox each other in applying the law in as wily a manner as possible. What Garcia had hoped would produce shock and awe -the SEC order, incidentally widely-understood as being something of an unprecedented development- was blunted when the Lopezes survived the initial bombardment and sallied forth from their bunker.

So, if there’s one sector that’s unquestionably benefited from this fight, it’s corporate lawyers.

On to the point I first raised and the final point in my column. The administration’s skating on thin ice in playing the populist card but going after big businesses that have a reputation for cultivating their employees.

Think of the middle class, which has felt besieged for some time: subjected to the predations of politicians, and hostile to the masses because they’re viewed as land-grabbers, etc. When a government whips up mass sentiments, the instinct of the middle class is to throw its support behind the upper class, on which its own status is intertwined. the President, after reformist elements proved themselves powerless during Edsa Tres, realized that a combination of military support (generals, often having a subtantial net worth, have no real incentive to throw caution to the winds if regime change introduces more, and not fewer, variables into the political equation, for examply by possibly putting in power a fragmented opposition), and consolidating middle and upper class support by reassuring them the might of the state would mobilized to protect property, peace and order, etc: anyway, they’re “prepared to sacrifice their freedoms to move the country forward”, economically, etc.

But the President can’t ignore the broader public, which meant they had to be reassured things were really trickling down (“Ramdam na ramdam ko ang asenso!”) and if they didn’t feel it, well, tough luck, they would be denied avenues to express their dissatisfaction while those with a gift for organizing the discontented would be liquidated one by one. Meanwhile, those from the middle and upper classes inclined to show common cause with the broader public would be portrayed as hopelessly naive, dangerous class traitors -or simply, and most effectively, as possibly sincere but on the whole, mahina.

Much as the middle and upper classes express themselves in Western terms, in their breasts beat hearts that still palpitate to traditional notions. Hence the admiration for the President’s survival instincts and cat-like-grip on power. Hence the derision that greets her critics when they fail to dislodge her (after, mind you, initiial posturing when it seems they might just pull it off!). Hence the satisfaction with the arrests of anybody but themselves. Hence the relative tranquility with which big business greeted the events of 2005.

This only began to change when the President showed signs of wanting to stay in power, and of sending her cabinet to gun after certain corporations (remember Favila and his threats to the Makati Business Club), and how she’s gone beyond the usual saber-rattling all presidents indulge in: the attack on Meralco and possibly Smart, Globe and Sun (Pangilinan gave some cryptic criticisms of the President; the Palace mistrusts the Zobels; administration allies the Gokongweis have to wonder how they’ll wriggle out of this one) inspires the sort of instinctive panic that gets businessmen to mobilize faster than you can say “People Power.” As I mentioned in my column, Garcia’s saber-rattling against SGV might also antagonize another powerful bloc. And all these blocs have a big chunk of the middle class working for them, and in a sense, identifying with their bosses.

Meanwhile, as the news stories keep coming out, see Meralco shares face protracted beating and SEC intervention may scare away foreign investors and Garcia discloses gameplan when he takes over utility, there have been postmortems in the blogosphere:

Pilipinas, you need to work says if things drag out in court, it won’t help consumers. blackshama’s blog makes an interesting comparison to the dissolution of the monasteries in England:

It is not the first time that the King or in our case the Queen has tried to take over a private enterprise. Like Henry VIII who dissolved the Monasteries, Gloria I tried to “dissolve” Meralco by bringing up the spectre of high energy costs. While Henry had his Cromwell, Gloria has her Winston. The only similarities between them is that both royal subalterns are in their faces! But her Winston is no Churchill.

In a globalized economy, doing a Ferdinand I on the Lopezes is nigh impossible unless Gloria I declares martial law (which requires Congressional assent). So she had to do it by proxy. The stockholders saw through this and trooped to the meeting. When Winston queried if the people in the theatre were employees,not a few responded “I’m not an employee!”

And Ricelander’s Blog takes a karmic approach to the whole thing:

GMA’s decision to pick a fight with the Lopezes to score points from the public reeling from high power rates would be popular, but for her own past sins, it calls attention to herself. Like a mirror, it reflects. Take the issue of transparency. When Malacañang seconded Winston Garcia’s call for the Meralco management to be transparent with its records and transactions, it got sneered at instead: “look who’s talking?”. Look, indeed, who’s talking? The many scandals that have become her government’s trademark are known not just for their gravity but also for the groundbreaking lessons in naked cover ups and stonewalling that followed each. When Meralco management points its finger to ERC to justify corporate practices that at first glance appear unethical and immoral saying “hey guys, it’s legal says ERC”, you are at once reminded of the legalistic barrage popularized by Malacañang mostly by the frequency of their employment: “Respect the institutions!” “Go to the courts!” When the Lopez group went after proxy votes in a manner seemingly dubious, the Palace could have raised a howl in the name of fairness and goodness but how, without calling back to memory “Hello, Garci” and all the parallel backroom operations during the heat of her own series of crises.

She’s looking at a mirror; it’s herself she sees and it is ugly. Question is: is there any chance she’ll recognize the reflection?

As for the Lopezes, what’s the stuff this family made of exactly? Thanks to this ongoing power struggle, they’re out in the open finally for all to see, while being undressed. This family had successfully parlayed its “good guy” image as a victim of “bad guy” Marcos to earn sympathy and to get into the good side of society. It paid well; the Lopezes got their business empire back free, a compensation for the wrong done to the family by a “rapacious” dictator, supposedly. But now, it’s all coming back and people want to see documents to crosscheck with their claims of grieveous wrongs and if indeed sympathies were well-placed. Because if the Lopezes were/are indeed the “good guys”, some things here are in serious disconnect. Good guys don’t get this sneaky on people and their costumers. Good guys do not behave this way!

Review Roces’s book for a more detailed look at some of these allegations. But on a minor point, I don’t know that the younger are ever better than their elders, as Ricelander suggests; often the opposite; but the real point is, at a certain point one generation can’t be -or should be- held accountable for what their kids do. Parents, I think, should always get credit for whatever good things their kids do, but the blame, if they don’t do good, should stay with the kids, who are individuals and not clones.

And Pinoy Potter’s Chronicles reproduces a effort to trace back the Arroyo-Lopez konfrontasi to the 1920’s, but the real bad blood, if any, dates back to the Macapagal administration, but politicians on all sides are more pragmatic than to bear in mind old fights; it’s the new fights that interest them.

Arab News Newspaper: RCBC Robbery: An Aberration or a Prelude?

RCBC Robbery: An Aberration or a Prelude? Manuel L. Quezon III

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On May 15, a payday, the Cabuyao, Laguna Province, branch of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation was invaded by armed men. They executed eight bank employees and a depositor before escaping with the bank’s cash. Filipinos from all walks of life continue to express anger and horror over the bank robbery: it was unusual not because it was a robbery, but because of the cold-blooded murders involved. The scuttlebutt among bankers, according to a colleague, is that bank robberies spike in May because tuition’s due. But that doesn’t explain why the civilians in the bank were executed by their captors. Because Filipinos are spread all over the world, one way to gauge the genuine sentiments of the public is to look at what Filipinos write in their blogs on the Internet. The reactions of one couple, both of whom blog, is instructive. While Touched by an Angel focused on the human dimension of the grisly bank robbery, her husband, The Warrior Lawyer, delved into what was particularly horrifying about the crime, which was the methodical liquidation of witnesses. He says the loot must have been so vast that the robbers could afford to leave behind a small fortune because the banknotes were soiled with the blood of their victims. He also points to the murder, the week before, of Alfred Dy (columnist Geronimo Sy’s wrote that Dy had been held up once before, leaving the same bank branch). The Warrior Lawyer says of the two crimes that, “Both incidents seem to indicate an “inside job”, as a tipster from inside the bank seems to have alerted the robbers in the killing of Atty. Dy, while there was no sign of forcible entry in the RCBC robbery. In fact, probers surmise that the RCBC victims were killed precisely because they knew or could identify some of the perpetrators.” Unlike the Warrior Lawyer, I’m not so sure this is something that can be pinned on a general deterioration of society because of the negative example of the present administration. It might be more accurate to say that it reflects the low regard the perpetrators have for a specific institution, the Philippine National Police, and for the specific command holding the reins of command at present: the influence of the administration may be in that it attempted a kidnapping and liquidation and was caught, and police officials were left twisting in the wind when the Senate investigated the abduction of government fixer-turned-witness Jun Lozada — and the cops accepted the humiliation inflicted upon them by the Palace. That, and the vulnerability of the civilian population in institutions like banks and in the provinces, which breeds a feeling of impunity on the part of robbers. Indeed, I think we should be alert to whether we will start seeing more of these sort of crimes. There was an element of terrorism in this crime. But there’s something else I’d like to point out. Just a hunch. It’s that the moneybags are building up their reserves. Syndicates are flexing their muscles. Before elections, there’s a noticeable increase in bank robberies and an escalation in instances of general mayhem, from snatchings to drug deals gone sour: essentially, as Filipino businessmen have discovered they can go on vacation during the campaign season, and thus avoid having to donate money to politicians, the politicians have taken to raising campaign funds by means of robberies or accepting funds from gambling lords and drug dealers. This was explained to me by professor (and prominent administration supporter) Alex Magno who explained to me in 2007 that the reason businessmen can afford to ignore and actually evade the politicians is that they are no longer at the mercy of the politicians they way they used to be. The era of currency controls is long gone, for example; and the old sugar bloc (divided into the faction of planters and millers) that lavishly funded politicians is long gone. Instead, Magno told me, politicians are really in a lose-lose situation: elections are getting even more expensive, but there simply isn’t enough money coming in to finance them. So, he says, the real kingpins in politics are those with illegal funds who now play the role the big businessmen used to play. He breaks down the primary sources of political funding as follows: 1. Drug money; 2. Gambling money; 3. Quotas on customs and the Bureau of Internal Revenue; 4. The Philippine National Police. Whether these dots can be connected to RCBC remains to be seen. But think about it. Was the grisly bank heist an aberration, or was it the prelude to something else? Was it an isolated incident, which means that it will only be properly understood when the specific case is solved, or was it a manifestation of something that’s been going on before, or represents an escalation in the confrontation between organized crime syndicates and the police (sometimes one and the same)?

Corporate drama

I. On Meralco

Blogger village idiot savant says the administration’s been “taking a cue from professional wrestling:

In professional wrestling parlance, it’s called “generating heat.” Being the scripted entertainment that it is, wrestlers rely less on their physical prowess than on various gimmicks to stay in the fans’ visibility. And so, if a wrestler wants to rise in popularity, the trick is simple: pick a fight. It doesn’t matter with whom. Anyone will do. Just pick a fight.

That seems to be the overall stratagem of the Arroyo administration of late. In the absence of any issue of substance, it’s resorted to cheap gimmicks to generate heat. Just a few weeks back, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo vowed to go after rice hoarders, and for a while, the front pages were rife with inspections and arrests. Around the same time, Gen. Angelo Reyes called for an energy summit and demanded to know why fuel prices were so high.

And so the public relations offensive continues: GSIS bigwig Winston Garcia is taking Meralco to task for high energy costs and “lack of transparency”; and over in Congress, Prospero Nograles has floated the idea of free text messaging. It’s gearing up to be a big battle royale : the government in one corner and big business — the oil companies, the telcos, and the Lopez utility-media empire — in the other.

In a match like this, there’s little doubt as to who’s the face and who’s the heel. The cards are lined up so that we know who it is we’re supposed to be cheering for. And yet, why do the bleachers seem awfully quiet?

Answer: we’re not marks. We know that, for all the amusing antics, it’s fake. It’s all fake.

A similar view’s expressed by The Philippine Experience. Over at Arbet Loggins @ Multiply, there’s a point-by-point critique of Winston Garcia:

One: Garcia is barking up the wrong tree. Meralco cannot impose rate increases unless it is approved by the Energy Regulatory Commission, which is headed by a Gloria Arroyo ally, Rodolfo Albano. Garcia should instead petition ERC to reduce Meralco’s rates. This regime keeps on asking us to follow the rule of law, yet one of its lackeys keeps on ventilating on the wrong forum. “Bring it to the courts” is a favorite line by this regime, and it should walk the talk.

Two: Garcia’s allegation that the Meralco management is withholding important documents. As a board director, he should know what is happening to the company. And if he thinks the Meralco management is indeed withholding the documents that he needs, he should ask the courts to compel Meralco to produce these documents.

Three: The issue on systems loss is actually not a legal issue, but a moral one. The law allows Meralco to pass to its customers up to 9.5% its system losses. So if Meralco charges us 9.5%, it is not illegal. It can be immoral, but rule of law prevails.

Four: Meralco passing on to its customers its electricity expense. This is allowed by the law; heck, all businesses factor in electricity expense in the pricing of their products and services. Singling out Meralco is unfair, I think.

Five: Knowing that it can actually lower rates by petitioning ERC and removing/reducing VAT on electricity, this regime has chosen to do what it says the opposition does – trial by publicity.

To be sure, there are those rather gleeful about the showdown (see maexstayo; on a related note see Dan Mariano who takes a look at how the p.r. war’s been fought out by the Garcia camp), or actively hostile to it (see Adventures of an Exiled Aristocrat who is overseas, ). But in general, what’s remarkable is the ambivalence of the public. This is something I observed in my column yesterday, Get-rich-quick Garcia .

You may want to read the following: What Meralco has been charging its customers and Meralco swamped with refund claims. Concerning some points raised in my column, you may want to refer to Meralco Refund for the Period 1994 TO 2002 in Bulatlat.com (and how party list representatives have it right: Leftist solons to petition ERC for Meralco refund); the Energy Regulatory Commission website; the Temasek Holdings website; and What is a Corporate Raider?

A more accurate representation of (informed) public opinion might be Pinoy Observer:

In truth, I’m not supporting Meralco. My stand is to carve it out into different franchises to encourage competition. However, I am not supporting government bid to takeover Meralco now since we know for sure that the utility firm will just be given to Gloria’s allies, namely, the Aboitizes, Garcias and the Alcantaras. Surely, this crown jewel of the Lopezes deserve nothing more than a clean bidding process. It should be managed by groups with the national interest at heart. It’s okey for them to recover their investments, yet, there should be more consideration on the public’s consumer rights than business interests. And the Lopezes want nothing of this sort.

Personally, I believe that if any problem exists, then the problem is one of scale. Meralco’s gotten too big. It’s gigantic franchise area happens to include both the most productive parts of the country (commercial areas), some of the most lucrative (residential areas of the middle and upper classes), and extremely large black holes -the areas in which the very poor live- all of whom have to be served but not all of whom are paying customers or who can afford to pay full rates. Comparisons with costs in Cebu, etc., then aren’t fair ones to make because other areas do not have the problem of large swathes of the population living on the border of the poverty line at best. These areas essentially have to be subsidized, both for poor but paying customers and those who derive their electricity from pilferage. The government tried to mobilize public support by basically playing off the middle class against the poor, portraying the systems loss charge as an unfair subsidy.

Tongue In, Anew asks, Should We Pay Meralco’s Systems Loss Charge? and defines systems loss simply:

To make things simple, systems loss is the difference BETWEEN the total power generated by the plants AND the sum of all the power ACCOUNTED FOR in the residential, commercial and industrial electricity bills. Not all is stolen, though.

Someone who manages buildings told me something similar. A systems loss occurs even in buildings, according to the manager. You know, through the building meter, that a certain amount of electricity is brought in; if you meter your tenants and then your common areas, you also know how much electricity your tenants consumed and the common areas used up. But somehow, even if you meter as much as possible, there’s simply a certain amount that simply vanishes, apparently consumed but not by anyone, specifically.

Anyway, Tongue In, Anew goes on to put systems losses in perspective and proposes a novel solution:

It’s standard practice worldwide that distributors are ALLOWED a certain amount of systems loss since there are no perfect machines, so transformers and conductors are not an exemption to this. The amount of energy leaving the power plant will always be bigger than the energy that the distributor will collect based on the meters.

Therefore, technical losses are inherent to the system thus, we can allow Meralco or whoever runs distribution to pass this on to the consumers wholly.

Some may argue that technical losses can be minimized. That’s true but in the case of transformers, oversizing is the only way to improve efficiency, but that will also increase capital machinery cost and the bottom line is it will just be reflected on the Return On Rate Base (RORB)- a percentage of profit the government’s regulating agency like ERC, or a law like EPIRA, may fix for utility companies. No gain there. Conductors? Copper is the cheapest material presently known to man that serves the purpose. Improving systems loss on conductors by installing silver or gold cables will definitely be a bigger headache later.

Pilferage, the last time I checked is already a crime. Going after criminals is whose business, Meralco? Of course Meralco will be needed to identify and prove pilferage, but excuse me, I have yet to see PNP Chief Razon or Sir Raul O. Gonzales who heads NBI ordering their men to investigate wide scale pilferage in many squatters’ areas in the Metropolis. Or a systems loss investigation for whole cities and provinces.

To ensure Meralco will participate in apprehending and prosecuting pilferers, a reward system is necessary even if just to reimburse Meralco for its expenses and effort.

In this case, I say charge systems losses from pilferage to government This government wants to earn taxes without doing its job? By charging it to government, they will be forced to protect the paying consumers and ensure that the distributors will be rewarded. The present system only encourages thieves and punishes honest consumers. Do I hear a lawyer saying it’s unconstitutional?

So back to my view…

The question then is whether, and how, government should go about cutting up the Meralco franchise area? Winston Garcia’s basically proposed to do it by means of a boardroom coup. But his past record, at this point, becomes relevant. He’s a corporate raider, not an entrepreneur. His abilities lie in swooping in on a company and then making a tidy profit from his barging in and breaking its existing ownership structure. This is why he changed tactics mid-way: the perhaps more sensible goal of breaking up Meralco came later, and not initially when he began his attack (note to self: servants of the present dispensation are amazingly selective; what is sauce for the senatorial goose is obviously not sauce for the administration gander; to mix my metaphors even more, no fishing expedition’s reprehensible if undertaken by the government).

Over at ANC I told my producer that personally I felt that it would be healthier for the Lopezes to be made to decide between transmission or generation but not both; better still, for them to divest from energy and focus on media. I have no confidence that forcing a separation between the two interests of the family will serve the public good at this point. I have a hunch -but only a hunch, based in large part from what Maria Ressa’s revealed about tensions within the Lopez family- that this will be the way things will develop eventually, but only after the generation of Oscar and Manolo Lopez passes from the scene. One branch may continue in energy while another focuses on media, but the era of the regimented family corporation will have passed. As much a function of the business scene getting more sophisticated than any actual wisdom on the family’s part.

Meanwhile, as the Business Mirror editorial yesterday counseled, what government can do is go great guns for Open Access:

The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) explains it this way: Industrial and commercial consumers, including malls, factories and five-star hotels, who use up at least 1 megawatt of power during peak hours can deal directly with independent power producers, or IPPs. The interim open-access scheme, which will be proposed by the IPPs to the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), removes distribution and system-loss charges being charged by power-distribution companies, including Meralco.

The interim open-access scheme, according to Neda, is a stop-gap measure to allow consumers to directly deal with IPPs even if the government has yet to privatize most of its power-generation assets.

The advantages of open access are obvious. One, it will allow end-consumers to choose the electricity supplier that offers lower rates. And two, it will create competition and ensure a level playing field where no dominant player can exercise undue advantage, thereby leading to lower power rates.

Apart from open access, various groups are also calling on the government to remove the value-added taxes on fuel and even on the system losses and royalties on indigenously produced natural gas. These are sound proposals that we think should be seriously considered by the government.

The elimination of royalties for gas and oil used domestically is a subsidy, and apparently one practiced in places like Malaysia and Indonesia.

As for the ongoing drama, the way it’s playing out can only set back efforts to entice investments unless the investors’ idea of a good business environment is being cozy with a particular administration, which means they’re in it only for the short term. On the eve of the meeting, it seemed that GSIS execs concede defeat. But it seems that’s before the SEC was brought in -or the so-called concession was actually a ruse.

If this GMANews.tv report is correct -see Analyst: SEC intervention in company stockholders meet unprecedented – then corporate types are getting nervous. No coincidence that the President has had to make soothing noises: Arroyo vows ‘friendly environment’ for business. She’s skating on pretty thin ice (see last Sunday’s Inquirer editorial).

As it stands, after a truly unedifying exhibition of corporate groupthink (see Boos, pro-Lopez chants greet GSIS chief at Meralco), the stockholder’s meeting quickly stalled (see Reuter’s Fight for control roils Meralco meeting ) but has now resumed: ABS-CBN says Meralco board election to push through after halt and ‘Meralco meet has quorum, election to push through’ . Looks like this may end up in court, as as Marichu Lambino explores in her blog:

Based on the news report, the grounds of the CDO are: the SEC acquired jurisdiction over the complaint filed by board director Winston Garcia and there was a “finding” that the proxy validation process was “fraudulent” or that some of the proxies were “manufactured” (i don’t have a copy of the order, i’m paraphrasing). The grounds of the majority board are: the CDO is invalid for being issued by just one commissioner and not by the Commission en banc and it is undated.

What happens next?

It depends. (And, not having a copy of the order, i won’t give my own opinion, just scenarios). In the face of an “order” from the SEC or an SEC commissioner to cease and desist, the majority board can successfully maintain its defiance if it is able to successfully show it was correct in its theory on the jurisdictional “issues”. Remember the oft-quoted principle, “Jurisdiction is conferred by law”? If the order was issued without jurisdiction, it is void. No amount of words and paper can confer jurisdiction, it is given by law. On the other hand, if the order was issued with jurisdiction, while it cannot retroact once elections are held, or while it cannot turn back the hands of time, to be metaphorical, because the matter had become moot and academic, the SEC can issue ANOTHER CDO preventing or stopping the newly elected board from exercising functions. Then the SEC will hold hearings on the allegations regarding the proxy votes. Pending that, the SEC can appoint a temporary management committee. And then later on, the SEC can nullify the elections held today.

The latter scenario: if the SEC or the SEC commissioner HAD jurisdiction in issuing the order and the majority board defied a valid order: (i will use my Keanu Reeves voice for that): Dude, that scenario is messy. But if the SEC or SEC commissioner did NOT have jurisdiction in issuing the order, then GSIS chair Winston Garcia has to go the long route of litigation and pending that, the newly elected board takes over, that’s temporary smooth-sailing for MERALCO pending litigation, but either way, the value of the stocks might continue to go down because of the uncertainty.

II. On the Lakas-Kampi Merger

(forgot where I looted the screencap above)

In his blog, Mon Casiple says there are signs the administration has decided to throw in the towel, as far as perpetuating itself in power is concerned:

The GMA administration, it seems, has already left behind its obsession to stay in power. It may have failed to get the critical political mass to push it through the various obstacles to such a scenario. Its moves in the past week or so has been to satisfy loyalists, ensure their transition, and blunt opposition. These point to a 2010 election scenario.

Obviously, presidentiables are waiting in the wings for this. We can expect a more active effort on their part to get the Malacañang quiet endorsement without unduly exposing themselves to an anti-GMA voting public. The ruling coalition may not escape unscathed–it will be subjected to severe pressure from all sides and will be hard-pressed to unify behind one candidate. It does not have a viable candidate at the moment.

Casiple points out that all this is taking place without the electorate really figuring in the picture. I’ve heard that various components of what will, hopefully, emerge as a Reform Constituency are starting exploratory talks with each other, even as the Lakas-Kampi merger’s apparently hit a temporary snag.

A review of an HBO film, “Recount,” about the controversial Florida vote in 2000, brings to mind the kind of argumentation the present administration’s perfected:

In the end, Baker and company best Klain’s team. The film leans in the direction of the Gore camp — they are the underdogs after all — but as Baker points out about the Bush team, “We won every single recount. The system worked. No tanks on the street. Peaceful transfer of power. The strength of the constitution and the rule of law.”

He says this, but in one of the strongest sequences in the film, you see the Miami-Dade canvassing board being intimidated into shutting down the hand recount by a mob that’s allowed to go into the building and storm the hallway. Those protesters were orchestrated and financed by the Bush campaign. Those tactics, including turning the recount atmosphere into a circus with grown men dressed like babies, holding signs that say Gore is whining like a baby, and kids in tee-shirts that said “Gore lies,” undermined the process. It was right out of the Nixon dirty tricks playbook. You don’t see anything like that from the Gore side. The Gore camp is all about strategy, turning the law inside out to get the votes counted. Their cause is not to give Gore the win, but the count the votes. The Bush camp simply wants the win they think they’ve already won…

And as for the votes, in a scene that evokes Raiders of the Lost Ark, Roach shows us the boxes and boxes of ballots in a Florida warehouse. Still there, still uncounted. Who the hell really won that election after all?

Like a chad, the question’s still hanging.

III. On Crispin Beltran

The passing of Rep. Crispin Beltran of Anakpawis, a true patriot according to Uniffors, and whose death had the Justice Secretary commemorating it by pissing on his grave (I agree), has been eloquently marked in two entries by Achieving Happiness, see her Crispin ‘Ka Bel’ Beltran, mahal kong boss at Kasama and Hay naku, Ka Bel! . She also takes the Catholic Church to task in Kato-liko.

Concerning the Catholic Church, the response of the hierarchy in Beltran’s native province points to how the alliance between people of Beltran’s political persuasion and the clergy dating back to martial law, has essentially been abrogated. A new generation of bishops and even priests is on the scene, and their views can no longer be viewed as sympathetic to leaders in Beltran’s mold.

As for me, he was a man loyal to his class, faithful to his principles, and the point is not whether I disagreed with some of those principles, but rather, that he served those principles dutifully and well. I took pride in shaking his hand on the Session Floor of the House after his release; his detention was a scandal and that few so-called democratically-inclined Filipinos took that scandal to heart was a scandal in itself.

He was, through Felixberto Olalia, Sr., his former mentor, directly in the line of true labor leaders like Crisanto Evangelista -and what could be said of Evangelista, and in turn, Olalia, could be said of Beltran. He served incorruptibly and ably.

IV. On the RCBC tragedy

While Touched by an Angel focused on the human dimension of the grisly bank robbery, her husband, The Warrior Lawyer, delved into what was particularly horrifying about the crime, which was the methodical liquidation of witnesses. He says the loot must have been so vast that the robbers could afford to leave behind a small fortune because the banknotes were soiled with the blood of their victims. He also points to the murder, the week before, of Alfred Dy (see Geronimo Sy’s tribute to his murdered friend; Sy says Dy had been held up once before, leaving the same bank branch). The Warrior Lawyer says of the two crimes that,

Both incidents seem to indicate an “inside job”, as a tipster from inside the bank seems to have alerted the robbers in the killing of Atty. Dy, while there was no sign of forcible entry in the RCBC robbery. In fact, probers surmise that the RCBC victims were killed precisely because they knew or could identify some of the perpetrators.

Blogger At Midfield describes the ongoing “investigation” as something like bad movie rerun, and The Warrior Lawyer, so to speak, returned to the scene of the crime: read his review of the cops’ handling of the investigation and why it’s so troubling (either pure bungling or a cover-up, simply and disturbingly put: see The Paradoxical Ley Line, too ), but I’d like to focus on the question Warrior Lawyer raises (see also Don Sausa):

Next, the question on a lot of people’s minds is why the crime was vicious in the extreme. The obvious answer seems to be that the robbers wanted no witnesses. But the diabolical, execution-style killings upped the ante on the lengths criminals are willing to go to escape prosecution. They will kill with impunity and without remorse.

But what could push them to such inhuman ferociousness ? Poverty is often cited as a factor. But that’s only part of the story. The Philippines literally has millions of people living in destitution, but they don’t turn into mass murderers. Otherwise, we’d all be dead.

I think Conrad De Quiros was correct when he wrote that the execution of the RCBC bank employees should be seen in the context of the widespread violence being perpetrated by the present administration all over the country…

Indeed, why would the RCBC robbers have any compunction about killing when the first to break the laws of God and man are those sworn to uphold them in the first place ?

To take Mr. De Quiros’ argument further , it’s not just a question of state violence, but also of unbridled corruption that goes all the way to the top. Why should the Cabuyao killers not steal millions at gunpoint when our national leaders routinely steal twenty, fifty, a hundred times over with the stroke of a pen, after a few secret meetings ?

…I fear that the RCBC robbery has now become the template for future acts of a like nature. Almost surely, we’ll be seeing more bank robberies in the near future, simply because, as bank robber Willie Sutton supposedly answered when asked why he robbed banks, “that’s where the money is”.

Incidentally, the Warrior Lawyer also points to a remarkable follow-up to the crime:

A final note on the gruesome photographs of the RCBC murder victims now circulating on the internet. They could only have been taken by police investigators at the crime scene and it’s reasonable to assume that someone in authority deliberately leaked them. I’m of two minds about it. It would certainly be painful for the victims’ families to have their loved ones’ grisly deaths exhibited in so public a manner. A valid argument for desecration of the dead can also be made. At the same time, the graphic and compelling nature of the images ensures that the crime will not easily be forgotten. Viewing it brings about an almost uncontrollable gut-feeling of deep anger and moral outrage. Owing to its viral nature, it has also reached far more people than what would normally be possible through news reports alone. Maybe it’s just what we need to spur us into action to battle these and other, more insidious, forms of evil so prevalent in Philippine society. No sane person can be neutral about it after seeing the pictures. As a the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Unlike the Warrior Lawyer, I’m not so sure this is something that can be pinned on a general deterioration of society because of the negative example of the administration. It might be more accurate to say that it reflects the low regard the perpetrators have for a specific institution, the Philippine National Police, and for the specific command holding the reins of command at present: the influence of the administration may be in that it attempted a kidnapping and liquidation and was caught, and police officials were left twisting in the wind when the Senate investigated the Lozada abduction -and the cops accepted the humiliation inflicted upon them by the Palace.

That, and the vulnerability of the civilian population in institutions like banks and in the provinces, which breeds a feeling of impunity on the part of robbers.

Indeed, I think we should be alert to whether we will start seeing more of these sort of crimes. There was an element of terrorism in this crime. The scuttlebutt among bankers, according to a colleague, is that bank robberies spike in May because tuition’s due.

For a background on the rising cost of education -and remember, the rule of thumb is business in general is slow in May, as families scrape together tuition expenses- see Filipino families and government spending less on 
education. The government’s response? Arroyo halts college tuition hikes. I am skeptical of trying to solve problems by basically decreeing that the law of supply and demand be suspended. A good education costs money. That money can come directly from parents or the state can step in and subsidize education. The President’s solution helps parents short-term, but at the expense of students, long-term.

Returning to the RCBC tragedy, The Unlawyer pointed to the tragedy being part of a series of shocking crimes and how it’s revived the debate on the death penalty.

But there’s something else I’d like to point out. Just a hunch. It’s that the moneybags are building up their reserves. Syndicates are flexing their muscles.

Before elections, there’s a noticeable increase in bank robberies and an escalation in instances of general mayhem, from snatchings to drug deals gone sour, etc. See Sheila Coronel on gambling money and elections. As for drug money, this has been nagging at the back of my mind ever since I encountered what Third Wave blogged about it back in February: it’s a factor no one wants to factor in when it comes to elections. And refer to what Alex Magno told me and which I blogged on March 9, 2007:

The reason businessmen can afford to ignore and actually evade the politicians is that they are no longer at the mercy of the politicians they way they used to be. The era of currency controls is long gone; and the old sugar bloc (divided into the faction of planters and millers) is long gone. Instead, the columnist (Alex Magno) told me, politicians are really in a lose-lose situation: elections are getting even more expensive, but there simply isn’t enough money coming in to finance them. So, he says, the real kingpins in politics are those with illegal funds who now play the role the big businessmen used to play:

!. Drug money

2. Gambling Money

3. Quotas on Customs and the BIR

4. The Philippine National Police

Whether these dots can be connected to RCBC remains to be seen. But think about it.

V. Other matters

Overseas, in the Asia Sentinel, The Dollar’s Dead Cat Bounce has Peter Schiff advising people to dump their US dollars, while Peter Bowring looks at how Asian Fuel Subsidies Distort the Energy Market.

On China’s earthquake, the Economist writes approvingly of how China helps itself.

And Pico Iyer writes of the Dalai Lama that Behind the Saffron Robes, a Savvy Politician.

In the blogosphere, PrOsTiTuTeD_LiBeRaTiOn in Cebu takes a look at whether it’s really the administration’s heartland, and tries to take a nuanced approach to the problem of fighting for accountability while avoiding throwing the baby out with the bath water:

Public dissent in Cebu, however, does not manifest in every means that of Metro Manila does. Rallies are very unpopular here. What is apparent to an observer who is not in Cebu is the disposition of its top politicians, the church- or the head of the church- and the media. They try to speak, and act, in behalf of the people but often, they fail- deliberately or not.

I am convinced that the general sentiment of the Cebuano people over the NBN-ZTE scandal, for example, is disgust. Our politicians, however, continue to proclaim allegiance to the president but I don’t think that it is because the people who voted for Arroyo do not call for accountability and do not see her culpability. I think that we are highly misrepresented.

The cab I was riding on my way to work some time last month was tuned into a local AM radio program, and I was fascinated with the comments sent, thru SMS, by the listeners on the issue of household rice hoarding which they conscientiously lambasted as a big stupidity. This government, they suggested, and I agree, is as thick-faced as to blame the people for the current crisis. One of these days, they said, the same government will accuse us of corruption- of stealing our own, taxpayers’ money. I think that the message of its sarcasm borders on the truth that anything is possible with the government that we have- anyone, and anything, is a potential scapegoat. That explains why the Lozada noise was suppressed by the rice crisis, and why Meralco takeover is cooking. I understand that these two issues deserve the people’s attention but see how nice and dirty the administration plays?

Very little has been said about Cebuanos who feel and think the same way that I do. This is not to claim that I think differently. My point is that I get dismayed with the lack and oftentimes, the absence of mobilisation in the local media. The perceived indifference is one, a failure of the media to get into the bottom of the people’s sentiment and rouse the people from stupor even as necessary; two, a failure of the local government to liberate itself from the shadow of the President and three, the obsession of some Cebuanos to be called “different,” specifically, being different from Metro Manila. I noticed how some people would deliberately ignore issues that call for collective action- Northern Imperialism is overrated.

I am glad that the third factor I proposed invited some friends to speak out. I was told by one that it’s a matter of efficacy- what can a rally in Cebu do to oust Arroyo? Pretty much nothing- just a potential investor who changes his mind about putting up his business in the city. Another friend told me over coffee that, yes, we are naturally regionalistic but that it is just a matter of preserving the momentum our economy has gained in the last five years- are we willing to sacrifice all these?

Being in the BPO industry, I can come from a call center boom perspective. Honestly, I think that outsourcing will still be with us in the next ten years regardless of whose administration we have. I want to think that the economic growth in the past months is not a cancer but a cure. When I come to juxtapose the value of the peso and the pinch of inflation, I start to think again. The abuses of the administration is a very expensive price to pay so I wonder if we can ever concretise what it is that we are sacrificing our moral imperatives for. I gloat, and gleefully, at that, when I scan the paper and see the peso plunging from 40 to 41 or 41 to 42. No, that I have dollars to exchange for pesos but that I see the foreign exchange as the administration’s talisman- like nothing can touch it as long as the peso is strong.

I still beg to disagree, with all due respect, that another People Power revolution is the next bold step to make. I was in Fuente Circle along with the hundreds of students who protested against the suppression of truth in not opening the “second envelope” in the heights of former President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment. I was there and I cheered (aged 19 and oblivious to the dangers of the game) as the names of the generals withdrawing support from the government were being announced. How far have we gone after that? Ours is a vicious cycle- the president we install after the revolution owes the military (and only the military) the debt of gratitude. The same president would only want to keep the military to stay in office. Much has been said about the excesses of the military in Arroyo’s presidency, I am tired of it- a president surely knows whose loyalty he should keep.

This article is not an attempt to justify the perceived indifference. This is an attempt to give voice to the Cebuanos who have given Arroyo a chance but have been disillusioned– the taxi driver who tells me he has always tuned into the NBN-ZTE hearings and believes the truth Neri is hiding is right under our nose, the newspaper vendor who insists it is the president’s husband who is screwing up her office and the officemate who can’t explain how the prices of even non-petroleum products and less-processed foods rocket– I am one of them.

The views expressed above, I think belongs to a significant group which hasn’t had its concerns addressed by the various opposition groups over the past few years. We will see if efforts to ramp up the impeachment in October finally manages to inspire such people to get involved, politically.

And the last word on the debate on The Canon of Philippine Literature, courtesy of ExpectoRants:

I think Sassy’s basic error in her questioning and line of defense is that she was criticizing something she didn’t bother to study in-depth, thus she came off “philistinic,” in the words of Exie Abola. Trouncing a critically acclaimed work just because one didn’t understand it because it’s too hard indeed smacked of something unswallowable. No wonder the academic and literati types were up in arms, what with all that intricately hard work of theirs brushed aside in such a cavalier fashion. As Angela Stuart-Santiago wrote, Sassy would’ve made a better argument had she claimed, for instance, that Amado Hernandez’s work is a piece of leftist propaganda; she could’ve made a more passable argument and spurred a more interesting exchange.

Nod.

Book of the week

Numerology and politics

This entry was all brought to mind by my postponing with several a-bloating entries still in draft form, and taking time off to read article by Lei Feng in the Asia Sentinel, China’s Disasters by the Number:

Like the US post-9/11 and my fellow office workers, many of China’s Netizens have been trying to find meaning in what it is being called the worst year in the country’s history – though none mention the famines in the late ’50s or the Cultural Revolution years.

There were the crippling snowstorms of January, unrest in Tibet followed by what is widely perceived here as international insult and humiliation heaped on the “sacred flame” of the Olympic torch while it made its journey outside the Middle Kingdom. A horrific train crash came next and now the earthquake the Internet is abuzz with material that is familiar in its own way to Americans who have pondered the coincidences of the John Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln assassinations (“Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln; both had vice presidents from southern states named Johnson…”).

It is also reminiscent of the weird idea that a Nostradamus couplet foretold the attack on the Twin Towers, or that the word “Satan” could be seen in the smoke that rose above the collapsed building on 9/11.

In China, it’s about numbers: add up the dates of the snowstorm (1-25), the Tibet riots (3-14) and the earthquake (5-12) individually and you get “8″ normally an unusually auspicious number and the reason the Olympics will kick off on 8-8-08 (and why it costs significantly more to get a phone number with multiple 8’s).

The five tooth-achingly cute cartoon character Olympic mascots called “Fuwa” – I think of them as exotic, colorful Smurfs are also now seen by some to be harbingers of China’s recent miseries. Representing a fish, panda, swallow, Tibetan antelope and the Olympic flame, those seeking coincidence see the panda as an earthquake warning, since the ravaged area is also home to China’s endangered giant panda; the Tibetan antelope well, you can figure that out; ditto for the Olympic flame; the swallow is seen as emblematic for the “kite city” of Weifang in Shandong province where China experienced a deadly train crash last month.

The remaining one is a fish symbol, representing water, which online doomsayers suggest could indicate pending horror in the Yangtze River.

Some Taiwanese TV stations are also blaming the feng shui of Beijing’s massive new “Bird Nest” Olympic stadium, saying it has “interrupted the pulse” of a giant dragon said to lie beneath the country.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Josef Goebbels whipped out an astrological chart and confidently informed Hitler that the tide had finally turned in favor of the Third Reich. Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers. Aguinaldo supposedly had a potent anting-anting, Time Magazine reported in 1944 that Quezon was somehow convinced he would never die in the daytime (he died in the morning) and of course Ferdinand Marcos adorned his room with mystical pentagrams and had a great faith in the significance of the number seven. President Arroyo has had the presidential palace exorcised several times, she consults mystical nuns (one independence day celebration involved little flags adorned with some sort of slogan being dropped from a helicopter, apparently upon the prophetic exhortation of one such nun), while Feng Shui principles are applied to the layout of the Palace and so forth. Former Speaker de Venecia decided to support the last impeachment because he was receiving letters dictated by his dead daughter from beyond the grave. And Romulo Neri, apparently, does nothing without consulting the I Ching.

If, as Randy David says, the real crisis confronting our country is what he calls A Crisis of Modernity, then you have to despair of a political class that determines its political actions not according to a pragmatic cost-benefit analysis or anything else, but according to omens and other efforts at divination. Not least because this prevents any real, rational, analysis of political events and trends. Or then again, if numerology and divination helps us cope with an increasingly complex world, maybe it’s no big deal?

Our society: looking back

Even as China earthquake magnitude revised to 8.0, here at home, 4.6 magnitude quake hits Calapan City. And Typhoon Cosme claims eight lives.

Jeepney, bus fares up.

Banko Sentral toying with the idea of pumping additional funds into UCPB. While San Miguel’s thinking of taking over the Bank of Commerce.

And Hermogenes Esperon is made a human Colt Revolver and named chief presidential peacemaker.

The Inquirer editorial looks at the appointment of Jesus Dureza, former head of the peace process, to the Press portfolio. The editorial says it can only result in Dureza’s reputation being diminished, and along the way takes a look at how Dureza’s predecessor shrank in public stature:

Bunye has appeared on television and been published in the papers countless times … But out of all that footage and film stock, one image will define him for all time: that time, three years ago next month, when he appeared before the cameras with two compact disks in hand, just as the “Hello, Garci” scandal was breaking. He told a rapt nation that he had evidence that the President’s alleged wiretapped conversation with election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano (the CD in one hand) were a fabrication, because the conversation was actually between the President and a certain political aide named “Gary” (the CD in the other hand).

This bold attempt to immediately contain a political crisis immediately backfired, because it turned out that the object of the wiretaps was not the President, after all, but Garcillano. In other words, and as the recordings and transcripts circulated or published online immediately made clear, President Arroyo’s supposed conversation with “Gary” could not have been part of the Garci tapes.

The flaw in the plan to cover up the crisis was that it was based on a faulty reading of the problem (Palace operatives thought it was the President’s phone which had been bugged). The faulty reading of the problem, however, proved that there was in fact a cover-up. A Palace official—the President’s spokesman, no less—had been caught with both hands inside the CD jar.

Much later, under questioning in Congress, Bunye alleged that the package of CDs had only come into his possession, sub rosa. He said he didn’t even know where the package came from. The brainless excuse, from an otherwise careful lawyer, led many to conclude that Bunye, at the very least, was part of a cover-up about a cover-up. If Bunye really did not know the provenance of the two CDs, why did he present them to the media? As his old and new friends from the banking industry might say, It doesn’t compute.

Fr. Joaquin Bernas offers up an interesting glimpse into the strict limits on the judiciary, and says the JELAC is basically unconstitutional:

Under our Constitution the judiciary as judiciary may not give advisory opinions whether to the President or to Congress. As judiciary, its language must have the force of law which must be obeyed. Advisory opinions do not command obedience. Giving advisory opinions can demean the judiciary.

It is true that individual justices sometimes give advisory opinions. But they do it on their own, and improperly. Neither they themselves nor the courts are bound by such opinion.

In the 1987 Constitution there is also a provision which says that the “Members of the Supreme Court and of other courts established by law shall not be designated to any agency performing quasi-judicial or administrative functions.”

(photo above taken at Mendiola last Saturday; “Suportahan ang Presidente. Ibagsak presyo ng koryente.”)

Amando Doronila says the government and the Lopezes would both be better off if they manage to pull off a compromise when the President and Manuel Lopez, big boss at Meralco, meet today:

The Bohol summit is the first time that the Arroyo administration is confronting the economic power of the Lopez family, which has during the past 50 years survived attempts to crush it by several post-war governments, notably those of President Diosdado Macapagal, Ms Arroyo’s father, in the 1960s and President Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s who confiscated Meralco and ABS-CBN with martial law powers. In those battles, the Lopezes fought with their media weapons, something they are now using to damage the present administration, with considerable success.

The current Arroyo-Lopez confrontation is no less fierce and no side is emerging unscathed. The summit in Bohol has far-reaching implications for the balance of power between the political sector’s interventionism in business and autonomy of private sector economic power centers. It is not a battle merely between Ms Arroyo and the Lopezes.

The meeting ought to be compared, then, to Napoleon and Czar Alexander of Russia’s Treaty of Tilsit, famously described as a meeting of two sovereigns on a raft. See Two hundred years after the ‘peace’ of Tilsit.

My column for today is An essential experience . Some reminiscing about a childhood visit to Santa Ana Church kicks the column off (some pictures over at Traveler on Foot). I’m uneasy with terms like “Kingdom of Sapa,” which is supposedly what the area we now know as Santa Ana was, because it may be a misleading description of the locality in pre-Spanish times.

Anyway, the column came about because last Saturday, I had the chance to visit Gold of Ancestors: Pre-colonial Treasures in the Philippines at the Ayala Museum. Any museum display involving gold artifacts is a sure crowd-pleaser (see Market Manila), and this display is no exception.

Until this exhibit was opened, the collection of the Central Bank of the Philippines was the focus of public awareness of prehispanic gold artifacts.

The sadly no-longer-updated blog, Pu-pu platter — a delectable selection of oriental appetizers, contains an extract from Ramon Villegas’ Ginto: History Wrought in Gold (see photos from the book, in Flickr):

Harrisson compared Borneo finds with gold artifacts in important Manila collections, particularly of Leandro and Cecilia Locsin’s (Harrisson 1968: 43). He concluded that the Limbang hoard shows close Philippine affinities, though the group is strongly “Javanese” as well. Second, small but significant “Hindu-Buddhist” influences are suggested, or more vaguely as Indonesian (“Indian”) influence rather than anything “Chinese.”

Also, “as in West Borneo, few gold pieces can be dated very early and the major goldsmithing appears to have occured after 1000 AD — and perhaps especially between 1200 and 1400 AD…as in Borneo so in Philippine pre-history, remarkably few fine things of gold seem to have been made later than about 1400 AD — perhaps because of a change in trade patterns and export requirements to the mainland after the start of the Ming dysnasty (or the equivalent), and/or the new attitudes evoked by Islam after 1400″ (Harrisson 1968: 77)

Finally, he reiterated that Philippine gold artifacts in general tend to be more elaborate and better crafted than most from West Borneo.

Harrisson looked at the Dr Arturo de Santos collection (part of which was acquired by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) as well, and observed that “…the range of Philippine gold jewelry…includes many pieces of a complexity and finesse that is beyond anything attempted in Borneo” in so far as what had been found at that time (Harrisson 1968: 56).

Throughout Indonesia there was a relationship between gold artifacts and the ruling aristocracy, in the class-power centers which developed on the coastal plains around the middle of the 1st millenium AD (Harrisson 1968:44). Precious metals were worked ‘exclusively in those areas where the influence of Hinduism was strongest’: he includes Java, Bali, southern Celebes and the coastal districts of Borneo. These areas developed as centers with established hierarchies, which necessitated the conspicuous display of wealth (Harrisson 1968: 47).

There was a demand for gold, which the Philippines could have supplied. It would be reasonable to suggest that one of the main sources of Javanese and Bornean gold was the Philippines. That trade would have been important enough to have been direct, by-passing minor pass-on players say, in Sarawak or Sulawesi. Moreover, the early interest in gold from the Philippines would have been in the raw material rather than wrought artifacts. In turn, local interest would have been on goods not made of gold, which they had plenty of.

To paraphrase Harrisson, “This, in turn, liberated the (Filipinos) from conventions in gold-craft not ideally suited to local materials and outlook, thus producing the much livelier (forms) seen in Manila” (Harrisson 1968: 80). Indianization in Philippine gold ornaments, therefore, was a matter of selective adaptation, rather than wholesale adoption.

Incidentally, a comment by pupuplatter on May 3 in Market Manila is well worth reading, with its account of the conquistadores avidly excavating graves to loot them for gold:

Your ancestors in Bohol, Cebu, and elsewhere in the Visayas were also wearing beautiful pieces of gold jewelry that they crafted with their own hands. In 1565 Miguel Lopez de Legazpi issued a proclamation in Cebu requiring Spanish soldiers and sailors who dug up Cebuano graves in search of treasure to properly declare their finds to the authorities in order for the King of Spain to take his “royal fifths and rights,” his majesty’s “cut” in the loot.

Such a great “quantity of gold and other jewels” was found in the “many graves and burial-places of the native Indians” in Cebu and so invested were Spanish officials to collect what they deemed was their rightful share in the stolen goods that more drastic measures had to be taken.

The commenter then quotes a Jesuit writing about a hundred years after Legaspi:

“I do remember that once when I was solemnizing a marriage of a Bisayan principala, she was so weighed down with jewelry that it caused her to stoop — to me it was close to an arroba or so (1 arroba = 25 lbs.), which was a lot of weight for a girl of twelve. Then again, I also heard it said that her grandfather had a jar full of gold which alone weighed five or six arrobas. Even this much is little in comparison to what they actually had in ancient times.”

pupuplatter, in another comment on May 4, provides a reading list, too (and since all good things come in threes, pupuplatter also points to online resources for Philippine artifacts held in Spanish collections), and this caveat:

I doubt that the makers of what has been called the “Surigao Treasure” were Muslim. Islam came to the Philippine rather late, less than 200 years before the Spanish conquest. We should also avoid idealizing, even as we begin to appreciate, the pre-colonial past: some of the pre-colonial jewelry recovered in Mindanao and elsewhere may have been hastily buried to hide them from Cebuano, Tagalog, or Samal slave raiders and looters. And it is difficult to determine who the “original” inhabitants of Mindanao really are. For much of the Spanish colonial period, agents of the maritime state of Sulu conducted slave raids throughout much of the Philippines. (Bisayans in particular resented this since before Christian conversion they claimed that they were so mighty that they would have been the ones looting, pillaging, and slave raiding their way across the Philippine waters.) These slaves gathered pearls, bird’s nest, wax and other products that were then sold to the agents of the British East India Company who, in turn, sold those products to China. It’s a complicated, global history.

The danger of romanticizing things is something I pointed out in my column, too. All the bling was not freely given, I think it’s safe to assume. The exhibit actually goes to great lengths to use precise terms -e.g. “stratified society”- and to point out that these were items meant to convey wealth and status

Rizal’s “Nuestro perdido Eden” and Bonifacio’s nostalgia for the blissful, civilized, land of the Taga-ilogs may just have been places with societies not too different from the kind of society we criticize today. The rape and rapine of conquistadors took place with the help of native allies, leaders playing what may have been, to them, simply the latest round in the power games they were used to. Sociologists and anthropologists have been pointing out how local cultures have survived foreign influence; and we’ve all heard anecdotal evidence of this (a friend once told me, for example, that in the vicinity of Iloilo, babaylan could be found until the 1950s). I haven’t read anything on the subject but it seems circumcision could be a cultural holdover from the days of Islam.

There are two things I mention in my column all-too-briefly. The first is The Laguna Copper Plate Inscription (Ambeth Ocampo, in a column, recounted that he’d had dibs on buying it but rejected it; he also says there remain many unanswered questions concerning the artifact). Here’s the inscription, as reproduced by Hector Santos:

As Ocampo recounted in his column, the story behind the discovery of the copperplate, and the debate over its authenticity and what the inscription means, is quite interesting. See The Laguna Copperplate Inscription by Paul Morrow (which has a Filipino version) and Sulat sa Tansô: The Laguna Copperplate Inscription, a Philippine Document from 900 A.D. by Hector Santos.

As for the inscription itself, Morrow puts forward the inscription transcribed into our Latin writing system, while Santos provides the first translation by Antoon Postma and then his own translation. Morrow was also asked by Santos to do another translation. Here is Morrow’s English approximation of his translation:

Long Live! Year of Siyaka 822, month of Waisaka, according to astronomy. The fourth day of the waning moon, Monday. On this occasion, Lady Angkatan, and her brother whose name is Buka, the children of the Honourable Namwaran, were awarded a document of complete pardon from the Commander in Chief of Tundun, represented by the Lord Minister of Pailah, Jayadewa.

By this order, through the scribe, the Honourable Namwaran has been forgiven of all and is released from his debts and arrears of 1 katî and 8 suwarna before the Honourable Lord Minister of Puliran, Ka Sumuran by the authority of the Lord Minister of Pailah.

Because of his faithful service as a subject of the Chief, the Honourable and widely renowned Lord Minister of Binwangan recognized all the living relatives of Namwaran who were claimed by the Chief of Dewata, represented by the Chief of Medang.

Yes, therefore the living descendants of the Honourable Namwaran are forgiven, indeed, of any and all debts of the Honourable Namwaran to the Chief of Dewata.

This, in any case, shall declare to whomever henceforth that on some future day should there be a man who claims that no release from the debt of the Honourable…

The Ayala Museum exhibit displays the text of the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, and it made me chuckle, because of the way it bristled with honorable so-and-so and honorable such-and-such. Our obsession with titles certainly goes back a long, long way.

And the second item I mention is The Boxer Codex. A brief introduction to this document and what it contains was written by the late Petronilo Bn. Daroy. The codex is used as the launching pad for connecting the little we know about prehispanic life, with the items on display, in the video presentation of the Ayala Museum.

Take the image above, which is from Wikipedia, and is one of the Boxer Codex’s illustrations of Tagalog notable types.

And take a look at the biggest crowd-pleaser in the exhibit, below:

This is from the Surigao Treasure, and you can immediately make the connection between the 10th-12th Century object and the 16th Century illustration. Weight? About 4 kilos. It’s something the curators suggest might be an Upativa, a symbol of belonging to the Brahmin caste. A general sense of what an Upavita is, and its ritual significance, can be gleaned from reading Upavita and Rules of Chanting. In the extract from Villegas’ book at the beginning of this entry, and in the articles of Morrow and Santos, one grey area in our prehispanic past is how we define the colonial period, in the first place.

I recall attending a lecture by Prof. Luis Camara Dery (see Milestones in Moro historiography for a glimpse into some of his writing) and if memory serves me right, he said that Lapulapu was a Tausug.

It’s interesting to see how Lapulapu himself could be the subject for more interesting discoveries to come. See a lecture delivered in Biliran Province by Prof. Rolando O. Borrinaga, From Bagasumbul to Naval: A Historical Review:

These were the questions that led me to theorize that the great victory suggested by the folk mind was probably the native victory over the Spaniards in the Battle of Mactan in April 1521, that the person referred to as Bagasumbul was Lapulapu of history, and that the people who walked behind his steps were the legions of Lapulapu followers who were among the earliest settlers of Barangay Caraycaray.

And so, after the writing of the annotated history of Naval in collaboration with several local intellectuals in 1989-1990, which was published in Kinaadman journal in 1992 (Borrinaga, et.al., 1992), I proceeded to write another paper with the tentative hypothesis that Lapulapu was the person attributed to as Bagasumbul in our folklore. The paper was published in the same journal in 1995 (Borrinaga 1995).

A dozen years after its publication, I still collect evidence to strengthen the Mactan-Naval connection and to bolster the “Lapulapu was Bagasumbul” theory. At the least, this theory has not yet been totally debunked or refuted in the literature.

Returning to Dery, if Lapulapu wasn’t a Cebuano, this is a problem if you subscribe to the cartoon version of our past. Or take this article on The Muslim Rulers of Manila, which basically points out they were Brunei royals. You would then have to start defining what you mean by native and non-native, by colonialism, too: is it colonialism if involving alliance and conquest by a European power, and not if it means one ethnic group being ruled by members of a family from another ethnic group? What does it say of Cebuano assumptions concerning their identity, if Lapulapu was, indeed, Tausug? Or for Tagalogs if Rajah Matanda a member of an interrelated set of ruling families in Manila, Sulu, and Brunei and the grandson of Sultan Bolkiah of Brunei?

This is simple if you view it from the point of view of a pan-Brunei sort of identity, with Brunei as the center; but you’d be dodging the question of how they came to be leading families of those areas.

And this brings us to the Upavita above. In general in quest of a prehispanic identity we go back to a Muslim one; but that identity, in turn, was it imposed or adopted? If imposed, then the colonial period might have to include a possible Islamic conquest of areas that were formerly Hindu in terms of belief and culture (the story of the spread of Islam in Indonesia would be useful to look at, from this point of view, as Bali became the Hindu holdout in the otherwise succesful Islamic conversion and conquest of the rest of present-day Indonesia). If by conversion, and without force, how was conversion achieved? Was it a case of rulers ethnically different from their subjects, adopting a new faith and their subjects going along with the conversion? Or something in between?

Anyway, this goes to show how very many interesting questions need to be discussed both among the experts and with the public. See Jessica Zafra’s Newsweek article on the exhibit, Going for the Gold: A new permanent exhibit offers tantalizing hints to the Philippines’ precolonial history.

Some photos:

A sword hilt from the Surigao Treasure.

A belt. The collection features many other belts, and clasps, as well.

At times, the terse captions were frustrating. What on earth is a penannular, for example? The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archeology says,

In the shape of a ring, but with a break at one point. Often used to describe brooches and torcs as well as arrangements of posts, slots, and ditches forming the walls of round houses and enclosures.

Ah.

These “chastity covers,” or “ancient pek-pek protection” as I overheard one young museum visitor excitedly put to to a companion, were conversation-starters but how they were used (were they to preserve the modesty of the pudenda of the dead, or meant to preserve the virginity of living daughters?)

A kind of costume for what may once have been a household image. The spread of Catholicism resulted in the destruction of household images, and while the image this gold costume was once meant to adorn no longer exists, it does indicate the general appearance of the image, and also, it’s not far removed from the lavish costumes for Catholic religious images.

There is also an extensive collection of porcelain and other kinds of wares on display, from China and places like Thailand, recovered from graves and shipwrecks, on display. I’m completely uncultured when it comes to appreciating pottery and when confronted with porcelain my eyes glaze over. All the porcelain brought in from overseas, though, points to what I described as the precolonial origins of today’s “Gucci Gang” types. The Datu’s wife may not have worn Prada, but she might have spat out betel-nut juice into a porcelain bowl from China.

Anyway, people who appreciate these things are quite delighted by the pottery objects on display.

My column closes with a mild criticism of the exhibit. This book:

“The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead” (Heather Pringle)

among other things, discusses the problem of human remains when it comes to museums. Do you put them on display, and let people gawk at them, or having studied them, return them to the descendants of those remains? The question has led to a more respectful attitude towards human remains both during and after archeological excavations. I found little tangible signs that such an approach has had in impact here, at home. It’s something that needs to be pointed out in the case of exhibits such as the Ayala Museum’s, as one question that comes to mind is, what happened to the remains of those from whose graves these artifacts were taken? Not so much in terms of what can be done, decades after these excavations took place, but in case future finds come to light.
[Incidentally, once more, an appeal to the kindness of readers: if anyone can help be get a copy of Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms, by Laura Lee Junker in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, I'd be very grateful.] Thank you to pupuplatter for sending it to me!

See this 2005 entry on Pre-European Philippines and China over at ThirtySomething v 4.3.

In the blogosphere, Ellen Tordesillas points to a series of workshops citizens can attend, to understand how the national budget is formulated.
The journalist-versus-blogger debate, French style. See French Politics which is a great blog to follow for exposure to the richness of French political discourse.

Market Stalinism

Via a Twitter from Jon Limjap: Frog Migration: Omen to China Earthquake Disaster. What is emerging is that Earthquake in China struck in 2 stages.

The scale of the tragedy in China has led to people zeroing in on the human cost, and on a person-by-person, family-by-family basis, if possible. James Fallows does this and points to an emerging trend in reportage of the earthquake’s aftermath: how families subjected to the one child policy have been particularly devastated (one BBC report casually mentioned that wealthy families in China ignore the government’s regulations, as they can afford to pay fines for having extra children; that’s a story in itself, I think).

Frog in a Well looks at how the Chinese government’s trying to manage the news, in the light of previous efforts:

During the Yangzi floods a few years ago I remember seeing pictures of PLA troops trying to hold back the water with their bodies, which probably was not very effective as a flood control measure, but did result in pictures of the Army helping the people. Paratroopers are already landing in the quake area.

Proper management of a natural disaster is of course important for states, and people are already drawing comparisons to the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, the bungled handling of which was one factor in the political chaos of that year.

Qian Gang is putting out what I would call the official line, that the time is not right to ask questions…

All I can say is good luck with that. Perhaps the Chinese government is learning the American trick of saying first that the event is too close for us to understand it and then switching to saying that this is old news and we should not live in the past. How well the quake is defused as a political issue depends on a number of things. How well the relief efforts go. How much of the damage was caused by shoddy buildings. (At least some people are already blaming corrupt officials for cutting corners on school construction) How much future damage will be caused by shoddy buildings? (Up to 200 dams were supposedly damaged by the quake. This could end up being a slow motion disaster.) Will the state be seen as insensitive in its handling of the crisis? (Already people are asking that the Olympic torch run/great national celebration of China Power be toned down a bit.) In the next year or so I expect that things will be pretty bleak in the quake areas in part because of the quake and in part because it was a pretty poor rural area to start with. Will this lead to more talk about rural poverty? In the West this will probably be a pretty short media cycle, which may clear up a few questions in our elite media such as “Is Sichuan where Szechuan food comes from” (yes) and “Why is China so stagnant and unchanging?” (Don’t get me started) I expect the Chinese press to be filled with stories of rescue and grief for at least a while, as Qian Gang suggested.

Adam Hanft in The Huffington Post believes that Out of Tragedy, a New Cultural Understanding of China, and lists the evolution of American (and perhaps, Western) views on China:

There have been four modern phases that define the way Americans see the Chinese, four lens of perception.

The first was as opium-smoking Mandarins during the 19th century.

The second lens, which emerged late in the 19th and early in the twentieth century, was that of a feverishly over-populated civilization where human life was meaningless. The Chinese were a “Yellow Peril”, and journalists used that incendiary language to whip us into a frenzy of fear and discrimination.

The third lens, which defined our view during the Communist period — particularly the Cultural Revolution — was that of brainwashed, amoral thought slaves who were able to be manipulated and controlled by Mao…

The fourth lens, our contemporary one, views the Chinese as still amoral, but now 24/7 capitalists, cold, calculating and emotionless. A civilization that is willing to relocate millions, manufacture tainted products in a free-for-all economy and destroy the environment as they play the largest catch-up game in human history.

…The Chinese government, of course, bears some responsibility for this. In their burning desire to both modernize and control, their global image management strategy was to focus on China’s transformational economic success, to restore national pride and never, ever convey weakness or softness or victimization in the process.

One has to wonder, though, whether Filipinos have even gone past whatever images were prevalent in the 19th century, as far as China and the Chinese are concerned. In one sense, I think we have, and that’s in terms of aesthetics, where the J-Pop and K-Pop crazes, telenovelas, and so on, have changed people’s images of what’s desirable and attractive. But at the heart of our attitude to China, I’d still think, is the idea that Chinese society is still an imperial society; and that most of all, a fundamentally anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneurial, and vaguely xenophobic attitude towards the Chinese still reigns.

There’s this striking passage in China’s All-Seeing Eye: With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. by Noami Klein in Rolling Stone Magazine:

China today, epitomized by Shenzhen’s transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called “market Stalinism,” it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

…Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out.

A slightly different interpretation of what the Chinese authorities are up to, is presented by Professor Mitchell Langbert:

The Chinese have decided to imitate American economic progress. But they have chosen to imitate the wrong thing. American economic success has come in spite of, not because of, government development schemes. In particular, the US government and the states granted large amounts of land and access rights to railroads in the nineteenth century. Although railroads contributed to economic development, they did so at much higher cost to the public than was necessary. The public donations of land were accompanied by considerable incompetence and corruption. More railroads were built than were needed. In today’s world, the corruption associated with land grants has not disappeared. The Progressives of the early twentieth century believed that by rationalizing the corruption of the political bosses, government support for business could be rationalized and made honest. In the Progressive tradition, Robert Moses in New York and similar social democratic Progressives in other states involved state and federal governments in considerable grants to business. This tradition is not why America has succeeded. America has succeeded in spite of government support for business. Sadly, the Chinese have chosen to imitate the Jay Gould/Robert Moses tradition. They are attempting to modernize their country through government support for development coupled with inflation.

The way that America did succeed in developing its economy was entrepreneurship. Freedom of enterprise not only permitted entrepreneurial genius to innovate here, but also drew entrepreneurial geniuses from other countries. For instance, Nikola Tesla came to the United States because Europeans refused to invest in his concept of A/C electricity. Thomas Edison, Jonah Salk and an endless list of homegrown and immigrant innovators came here because of American freedom. But a long list of social democrats, media pundits, quack academic economists and socialists have done all they can to destroy America’s freedom.

The development that occurred because of Jay Gould, Robert Moses and Bruce Ratner, the successor to the governmental welfare approach to business, is not the development that made America a great country. Rather, America became a great country in spite of Jay Gould, Robert Moses and Bruce Ratner. In the case of Robert Moses, the public housing on which he squandered billions of dollars and was supported by the New York Times caused massive increases in crime, destruction of neighborhoods and the near-bankruptcy of New York City in the mid 1970s. Jay Gould’s and his contemporaries’ railroads were incompetently run and cost the nation far more than they should have. Despite the massive tax on innovation that corrupt government support for business has posed, the US surged ahead because of the innovation of men like Edison and Tesla. The entrepreneur, free of government impediment and government welfare subsidy, thinks of ways to meet consumer needs and so makes himself wealthy and the world wealthier still.

In “Asian Godfathers” (Joe Studwell) the author basically argues that Harry Lee (alias Lee Kwan Yew) advocates 19th Century European ideas of eugenics, camouflaged as native pride (from this online excerpt from his book):

If anything, Chinese-ness is rather trendy in Southeast Asia these days, sometimes bizarrely so. The theaters of Bangkok’s original Chinatown are thriving, even though most of the players are now Laotian, the Chinese having moved on to better-paid work. Under Thaksin, most Thai Rak Thai election candidates made a point of putting their name in Chinese characters on their election posters.

All this owes a lot to China’s economic rise, and to a desire to be seen to be in tune with what is presently perceived as “the future”, but it also reflects a waning of the capacity of indigenous elites to divide and rule their subjects. Time – since the end of large-scale immigration before the Second World War – has been both a healer and an educator.

In the Philippines, race is a non-issue. Hong Kong has become a far more culturally relaxed, mature and integrated society since the end of colonialism in 1997. The exceptions are Chinese-majority Singapore, where Harry Lee Kuan-Yew will likely take his dreary eugenic theories to the grave, and Malaysia, where the still relatively even demographic balance between ethnic Chinese and bumiputras allows the indigenous (if this term is still meaningful) political elite to plunder the country in the name of positive discrimination. Nonetheless, around the region, the race relations story is a very positive one.

A critical review of Studwell’s book by Richard North describes Studwell’s view:

Studwell tries to persuade us that historic circumstance even more than culture or genes accounts for the power of the Chinese Godfathers. Indeed, Studwell is keen to point out that the Chinese Godfathers are much more apparently than actually Chinese: they are “chameleon” – as though they are uncertain whether to promote or disguise their ethnicity. He is especially fierce about anyone who claims there is something Confucian about the Chinese Godfathers or their form of capitalism. Indeed, he sees the ethnic posing of the likes of Lee Kuan Yew, erstwhile Prime Minister of Singapore, as a sort of social manipulation, which enjoins workers to be obedient and quiescent in case something damages the special but fragile economy in which they toil.

China at the very least, doesn’t have a government people would classify as weird. But in the Encyclopedia Britannica blog, Robert McHenry asks, in the case of Burma, what do you do when a government’s obviously insane?

Closer to home, The Asia Sentinel reports on Malaysia’s LingamGate,

A royal commission appointed to investigate Malaysia’s judicial system has concluded that the country’s courts have been subject to widespread fixing of judicial appointments that corrupted decisions at the behest of ranking politicians.

The report has not been released and, given its political sensitivity – involving, for instance, allegations of judicial abuses by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad – it is posing serious problems for the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the United Malays National Organisation…

However, the report appears to confirm what has been widely reported so far on b logs and in the press — and that is that the court system was almost entirely in the thrall of politicians with close ties to businessmen. The commission was appointed last year after opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim made public an eight-minute segment of a 2002 videotape showing the well-connected lawyer VK Lingam in conversation with Ahmad Fairuz, then the country’s third-ranking judge. The release of the videotape played a major role in energizing opposition to the ruling Barisan Nasional, the ruling national coalition of ethnic parties, in elections earlier this year that wiped out the coalition’s historic two-thirds majority and resulted in its biggest defeat since independence.

You may want to check out Mahathir Mohamad’s blog, to see how he’s reacting to the issue.

atheista.net makes an appeal to ignore the 100 pound Gorrell-a in the blogosphere. Fair enough but what makes this appeal interesting to me is that it reveals the limitations of the entire effort to identity the “top 10 emerging blogs.” The criteria are subjective and nearly every blogger trying to propose blogs for consideration has to wrestle with the dilemma of is the process about identifying up-and-coming blogs with influence, or is it about endorsement, is it a wish list or an objective identification? Also of interest to me is this concern with “reputation,” as far as the blogosphere is concerned, which only proves that bloggers outside media aren’t immune to the fierce self-identification with a specific platform that accounts for so much antagonism between platforms.

Meanwhile, from some time back, BuzzMachine on Tearing down the news-opinion divide.

So opinion crosses a media divide: How can you write a blog without a human voice? And once you import stuff from that blog, even a Times blog, into print, you’ve brought in a human voice — that is, one with a stated perspective — into a publication that has prided itself on having no perspective. Heh.

There’s another divide to consider here, an organizational divide. Don’t forget that at The Times and many American newspapers, there’s a wall between business and editorial and another wall between the newsroom and the editorial page. The silly conceit of this is that opinion can be relegated to and imprisoned in the walls and pages of an editorial department: They own opinion and nobody else is allowed to have any — and that is the inoculation that has, historically, preserved the news department’s own conceit that it is objective: See, we don’t do opinion, those people over there do.

So one has to ask what the difference is between Andrew Sorkin and Paul Krugman except that Sorkin is paid to spend more of his time reporting with more sources. So — no offense to Krugman; I just picked the most convenient beat — but what whose opinion/perspective/viewpoint is more useful? If we take the argument that newspapers make against blogs — they just have opinions; they don’t report — that would give the contest to Sorkin, now that he is allowed to have opinions. So what’s the point of having opinion-page columnists? Why not just have reporters who can also share their perspective?

There’s another opinion divide to consider: inside v. outside. What about those bloggers? As newspapers get relationships with them — The Times has taken Freakonomics under its wing and the Washington Post today announced it is syndicating TechCrunch onto its side (as it syndicates my PrezVid) — one need wonder about their opinions. They have them. Michael Arrington certainly has them — including opinions about mainstream newspapers, we should remember. So how does that fit with the news-opinion divide? I was surprised to learn recently that Freakonomics is under The Times’ Opinion section. Why? The Post put TechCrunch stories on its technology news page. What’s the difference: prissiness, as Nick says, or turf battles? (And by the way, in all these cases, I think a network relationship is smarter than a syndicated relationship — but that’s the subject of another post another day.)

Which brings us to RG Cruz in his blog. See RG’s entry for today:

IF I am to believe everything that ive been hearing so far, then I would think that Ping got Joe to divulge THE pictures, that this alex guy is a but a front to Joe who is still neither here nor there if he’s gonna spill the beans on Mike and Gloria, that Joe is getting from Gina and Joey big time, except that Joe is afraid he’s gonna go to jail if he does spill the beans (thats why he flew overseas), that the blackened figure in one of the pictures isnt ben but a tourist, that all this drama now is but part of a big scheme to bankrupt a family corporation to ease some pressure on certain individuals.

That—is if im to believe everything ive heard so far. DO i? Jury is still out.

Fair enough.Two reporters -Jove Francisco and RG Cruz- are good examples of the points raised by BuzzMachine above: the value of having reporters not only do reporting, but have the freedom to blog and present their personal take on things.

Meanwhile, you’ll enjoy this article on a family feud involving oil millionaires going on in Texas: Oil in the Family.

The Long View: The scientific imperative

The Long View
The scientific imperative 

 

By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:09:00 05/15/2008

 

Benjamin Espina may be familiar to you as a debater and blogger-advocate of Atheism (www.atheista.net). He’s also begun writing for Filipino Voices (www.filipinovoices.com), a blog that’s aggregating some of the most interesting social and political commentators online. In his first Filipino Voices entry, Espina describes how my fellow columnist (and regular on my show, The Explainer, on ANC) Patricia Evangelista has inspired young people to try out for the privilege of representing the country at the English Speaking Union International Public Speaking Competition held annually in London. After all, winning that competition was Evangelista’s first claim to fame.

According to Espina, a 16-year-old student from the Philippine Science High School bucked the trend by addressing the theme of the competition, “New Horizons, New Frontiers,” by speechifying not on self-improvement but instead on how research has progressed in our country. Instead of waxing poetic on generalities, the young man, Gian Karlo Dapul, decided to talk about fish mucus and foot fungi: scientific frontiers. Dapul won the competition here at home, and went on to represent our country in London, where he recently bagged first prize.

You can—and should—read Gian Karlo Dapul’s speech, “Fish Mucus and Foot Fungus” (reproduced at Atheista.net) and hearken to Dapul’s call for public support for science fairs and contests. This young man intends to be that rare thing, a Filipino researcher in science; and he advocates that rare thing, a dedication to science and its problem-solving principles.

Last month, Fortune Magazine did an article on carbon credits. One example they gave was from the Philippines.

Fortune reported on Daniel Co, who raises about 10,000 pigs on a farm called Uni-Rich Agro Industrial in Tarlac province. That many pigs result in a heck of a lot of pig poop. What to do with all that poop? According to Fortune, the usual method is to shovel the poop into concrete ponds, where it can rot away—producing oodles of methane, and a heck of a stink. And that’s for conscientious hog raisers. Environmentalists regularly battle hog raisers who simply divert all the poop into the nearest river.

Well, the enterprising Daniel Co got interested in biogas technology. What if he could seal the pig poop ponds, and thereby trap all that stinky gas, and with the gas, produce electricity? But to do so would mean spending something in the neighborhood of $200,000. Apparently, Co is an enterprising type and he found out he could get paid to turn pig poop into gas for generating electricity.

Countries committed to reducing greenhouse emissions can invest in projects in the developing world. Projects with a measurable impact then produce credits, called Certified Emissions Reduction, or CER, certificates, which are tradable.

The long and short of all this is that EcoSecurities, an Irish company, identified Co’s piggery as among the “carbon-mitigation projects.” Its experts, according to Fortune, calculated that the methane from Co’s piggery would generate 2,929 CERs a year.

Here’s how Fortune says it all came together: “EcoSecurities offered to pay Uni-Rich $4 per credit, or $12,000 a year, every year, until Kyoto expires in 2012, and to handle all the paperwork at the United Nations, which registered the project late in 2006. Uni-Rich then installed the methane digesters.

“Now, thanks to the magic of carbon finance, Daniel Co and his family treasure their pig waste. They use it to produce electricity, which has reduced their utility bills by about $48,000 a year. They collect their $12,000 a year in carbon revenues. EcoSecurities, in turn, will sell the credits for about $18 each, or $54,000 a year, to a big French bank called Caisse des Dépôts.”

So indeed, there’s gold in them thar pigs—and their poop!

On my show Tuesday night, a spokesman for the hog-raising industry said that in China, the wastes of entire villages are used to produce biogas. You know there’s a shortage of millions of toilets in Metro Manila alone: public health and rising energy costs could be addressed by building public toilets so that if you poop in a public toilet, it can help generate electricity for your neighborhood. How’s that for sending a signal to National Power Corp? Or Manila Electric Co.?

Energy alone provides oodles of opportunity: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can point to the windmills of the Ilocos region; the Cordilleras boasts mini-hydroelectric dams; but we have yet to explore the energy that can be produced from harnessing the waves and tidal flow from our enormous coastlines.

In agriculture, Israeli advances in a kind of irrigation that relies on the underground distribution of water. And fertilizer (which minimizes water loss due to evaporation and delivers water and nutrients directly to the roots of plants) is being studied for use in sugar-producing areas; it has already been adopted in Bukidnon province, where mountainsides have been given over the production of a particularly high-value variety of bananas that require a cooler climate. The amount of rice lost to primitive drying methods—consider the usual sight of “palay” [rice before milling] laid out on roadsides in the provinces—and to pests could surely be addressed by harnessing our tinkering mentality. You only need to offer incentives.

And, of course, you need the right policy environment. The Department of Science and Technology (DoST) celebrates its 50th anniversary—underfunded, understaffed and underutilized. We could have avoided the ZTE national broadband network (NBN) fiasco and the controversies surrounding CyberEd, if officials had focused, instead, on DoST’s PREGINET (visitwww.pregi.net).

(See also my 1995 article, “Canned adobo and other S&T adventures,” athttp://philippinesfreepress.wordpress.com/2006/03/06/canned-adobo-and-other-st-adventures-october-11-1995-2/.)

Nursing students left in the lurch

Got a call from someone very upset because a bunch of nursing students in the province who signed up with a review center, discovered that the review center absconded with the kids’ money leaving them in the lurch. The review center promised to register the kids for the PRC exams in June, but the kids found out they were never registered. Have asked for details.

My column for today is The scientific imperative , was inspired by a FilipinoVoices.com entry, and ended up about pig poop and alternative sources of electricity and a kid’s speech (which you can watch via a link in Atheista.net or read online, see Fish mucus and foot fungus—Gian Dapul ; check out Random Thoughts who points to a Filipina who’s won a research prize in the UK).

The point and counterpoint continues: Meralco accused: ‘Ghost deliveries’: Solon hurls new charge vs Meralco; Meralco denies Villafuerte rap: ‘Gas was banked’. Banked? After elaborate explanations, it may make sense, but this is the sort of thing that gives the Villafuertes ample ammunition.

Rene Azurin, in his column today, says restructuring is overdue but people aren’t being precise with their language. I’ll reproduce his column in full:

Are the National Power Corp.’s generation charges and overpriced coal purchases or the Manila Electric Company’s systems losses and questionable pass-on charges or the Energy Regulatory Commission’s look-the-other-way lapses to blame for high electricity rates? If the Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001, or EPIRA, had been fully implemented as specified within three years after its passage, there would be no need for the congressional inquiries now being conducted on the matter.

Actually, the Joint Congressional Power Commission’s time should be spent looking into why there has been a lot of foot dragging on the implementation of the EPIRA and ensuring that there is no further delay. Obviously, it is not in the best interest of certain parties to see the main objectives of EPIRA — “open access” and retail competition in the electric power industry sector — achieved. In fact, it is disingenuous of some parties — including certain members of Congress — to be publicly branding EPIRA a failure, considering that it has not yet been fully implemented. One should suspect that those demanding that EPIRA be scrapped because “it has failed to bring down electricity costs” are really only pushing the agenda of those who are now profiting handsomely from the present situation in the power sector. Clearly, some people want things to remain just as they are.

In the recent Philippine Energy Summit, the workshop module tackling electric power rates concluded — after listening to the views and arguments of various industry participants and user groups — that introducing open competition in the power sector, improving efficiencies in power systems management, and developing the competencies of industry regulators in tariff-setting methodologies were the main ingredients needed to reduce electricity rates to the lowest level possible. Thus, the most urgent priority action recommended by that workshop was “fast-tracking” the full implementation of EPIRA. Today, that essentially means accelerating the privatization of another two or three of the government-owned NPC’s power generation plants and the auctioning to private administrators of the management of at least 70% of the supply contracts NPC now has with independent power producers.

What fully implementing EPIRA will do is fundamentally change the structure of the electric power industry. Putting at least 70% of the electric power now generated or controlled by NPC into several private hands ends government’s monopoly over electric power generation and NPC’s current monopoly of all coal purchases as well. Removing from electricity distribution utilities, like MECO, the option of selecting the suppliers of power to their respective franchise areas and turning over these choices to the end-users themselves ends the monopsony (the single-buyer structure) long enjoyed by distribution utilities. Allowing privileged entities the exercise of monopolistic or monopsonistic power, of course, is almost never good for the general public.

In the “open access” environment to be created by EPIRA, every power generating plant connected to the electric grid can compete for the business of every customer likewise connected to the grid (no matter where located). The various operating power plants will therefore be forced to offer lower rates or better service in order to attract and sell power to the customers they want. In the restructured industry environment, distribution utilities become merely conduits, or highways, for electricity to pass from power generator to electricity end-user. Like toll highways, these distribution utilities will only be entitled to a specified toll fee (called a “wheeling charge”) for the use of their wire network. They will have been deprived of any ability to choose to use up first the power generated by sister companies in the generation side of the business.

Regulation is not the answer to bringing down electricity prices. As history has proven time and time again — just review the American (therefore, presumably corruption-minimized) examples of the Interstate Commerce Commission that controlled entry into the railway and trucking business or the Federal Aviation Authority prior to air industry deregulation or the Food and Drug Administration whose policies continue to favor (even if this may be unintended) big pharmaceutical companies today — regulation invariably results in higher prices for the consuming public and higher profits for the “regulated” entities. Open competition, even when it is chaotic and messy and unpredictable, somehow always ends up producing outcomes more favorable to the consuming public than the orderly and more stable conditions of a regulated industry environment.

The EPIRA is one of the rare examples of enlightened legislation, and it would be tragic for the Filipino public if the vested interests fighting a rear guard action finally succeed in derailing its implementation or getting it scrapped altogether. Most likely, this will be done under the guise of proposing amendments or “improvements” to the present law. We need to be aware of this. With the provisions in the EPIRA already mandating privatization and open access and retail competition, we need only put these in force so that we consumers no longer have to worry about NPC purchasing overpriced coal or MECO passing on inflated system losses and own-debt expenses to consumers or government regulators unable (or unwilling) to figure out what’s going on while permitting too-high rates. We would just need to choose the lowest cost electricity provider for our particular area and our specific circumstances, and to heck with the rest.

Open competition, we will find, will do wonders in reducing the inefficiencies and corruption that are natural consequences of monopolized power and that contribute significantly to raising electricity rates. It will also spur investments in efficiency-boosting technologies and more economically viable plant capacities. This is good. For us consumers, it is better that we put our fates in the vagaries of a competitive and objective and impersonal marketplace than in the hands of monopolists and monopsonists and regulators. Those creatures are not our friends.

Bong Austero writes in his column about prepaid electricity:

The system is quite simple. A special prepaid meter is installed in lieu of the usual electric meters. The prepaid meter contains indicators that show up how much electricity credits are still available as well as a keypad which consumers can use to input electric load credits which they buy in increments of 100 pesos. The meter automatically shuts down a household’s electricity system as soon as the credits are consumed.

Unlike the ordinary meters which only record consumption and which require a “reader” to monitor, the prepaid meter allows consumers to plan their electricity consumption more effectively. Because they pay for the electricity in advance, the impact of the expense is immediately felt compared to the usual system which in effect makes consumers automatically at debt to the power supplier.

There are many benefits that can be derived from implementing a prepaid electricity system. Obviously, there is no need for additional manpower to serve as meter readers. This translates into lower overhead costs for power suppliers. Theoretically, power suppliers are also prevented from charging systems losses to consumers although of course we all know that as we have learned in the case of Meralco, there are many creative ways to milk consumers dry. Long queues at payment stations as well as for other services are also done away.

It’s a system that is working quite well in Tacloban City. I was told by electric cooperative personnel that the same system is being implemented in other cities such as Palawan, Cebu and even in Baguio.

AM radio last night was painting dramatic word pictures of labor officials deliberating on whether to grant wage increases. The President won’t give details but Arroyo says Metro workers assured of P20 wage increase. A Palace ally isn’t happy: Wage hike to trigger downsizing – employer group. Meanwhile, the President proclaims a conditional fiesta: GMA orders release of P12.6B in IRA.

This is remarkable: SWS: English proficiency of Filipinos improves.

Do consider donating to the Red Cross for the purpose of China, Burma, or Negros Occidental disaster relief. Contact the nearest Philippine National Red Cross chapter.

Apparently, as Jeric Peña blogged, a text message went around yesterday predicting an earthquake. People got nervous. So a clarification: USGS: Earthquakes can’t be predicted. But bloggers in China are discussing the possibility a prediction was made, but ignored.

Global Voices Online sets up a page focused on Sichuan Earthquake 2008, consolidating links to blogger accounts, photos, videos, etc. The New York Times carries an analysis of A Rescue in China, Uncensored, pointing to how the Chinese government’s been fairly liberal about keeping the public informed:

In its zigzagging pursuit of a more nimble and effective form of authoritarian rule, China may be having a defining moment. Its harsh crackdown on discontented Tibetans bore the hallmarks of Beijing’s hard-line impulses. But its decision on Tuesday to scale back the elaborate domestic leg of the Olympic torch relay — after a flood of Internet protests calling it insensitive — is a sign that officials are not deaf to public sentiment.

At least at first. The Financial Times reports Beijing reins in coverage of quake:

A meeting of the party’s most powerful propaganda officials on Tuesday stressed the importance of “correct guidance of public opinion” and ordered a strengthening of political consciousness among journalists.

All frontline coverage of the disaster should “uphold unity and encourage stability” while “giving precedence to positive propaganda”, ordered Li Changchun, a member of the party’s supreme Politburo standing committee, the People’s Daily reported.

But certainly, there’s been an impressive sense of national solidarity on the part of the Chinese. In contrast, in Burma, people have been hard-pressed to get relief or express themselves. Read Juan Mercado’s ‘Malign rapacity’.An interesting observation is in Myanmar: Voices through Tweets.

In A Tale of Two Devastated Countries, John Berthelsen details the Burmese junta’s madness and the cyclone’s long-term effects:

Although aid flights finally began to arrive in Burma over the weekend, a full week after the disaster, the delays in flights and visas for relief workers and the confiscation of emergency supplies have multiplied the misery for millions. The junta followed up its inaction with two remarkable actions – the first to hold a rigged constitutional referendum while the country was still in the initial stages of digging itself out of the disaster and to dragoon its citizens into a yes vote by intimidation, and second, according to The Observer, continue to export rice to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka even as it tried to curb the influx of international donations.

According to relief organizations, Burma will need as much as 500,000 tonnes of rice and perhaps as much as 2 million tonnes to meet subsistence levels for most of its population in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which wiped out 65 percent of the rice-growing capability of the Irrawaddy Delta. The country had expected to export 600,000 tonnes in 2008. According to several estimates, Burma, once the biggest rice-exporting nation in Asia, will be forced to import to make up shortages for years to come.

Satellite imagery showed that a 16-meter storm surge pushed salt water 40km inland in the delta. According to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, it can take up to a year to leach out the salt, depending on the kind of soil, the amount of rainfall and whether farmers plant salt-resistant varieties of rice. The storm, unimpeded because protective mangrove forests had been destroyed for prawn farming and additional rice paddies, destroyed everything in its path, as well as drowning as many as 100,000 people.

Nonetheless, according to The Observer, sacks of rice destined for Bangladesh were being loaded on to a ship at the Thilawa container port at the mouth of the Rangoon River at the end of last week, even though the rice-bowl region had been literally destroyed by the deadly storm. The paper quoted the regime as saying it planned to meet all of its contractual commitments.

On a related note, the RGE Monitor today asks, How Is China Going to Feed Its Population? Agriculture Abroad? The blog China financial markets says The devastating earthquake is also bad for monetary policy.

Meanwhile, The Economist, in Let them eat Juche , says even if out of sight and out of mind, the North Koreans go starving on:

Good Friends, a Buddhist human-rights group in South Korea, says that in rural areas families are again adding tree-bark and grass to their diet, and foraging for food in the wild. It says that in South Pyongan province in west-central North Korea, people are already dying of starvation, while listless farmers ignore officials’ calls to plant this year’s rice. Last month the World Food Programme (WFP) called for urgent help to avert a “serious tragedy”.

Then on a global note, in The BRICs (and Mortar) of the New Global Economy, the Asia Sentinel’s correspondent says the United States has dissipated its wealth, and that:

The true dimensions of the changes heralded by the end of the Cold War are only now becoming clear. The world looks headed for a gigantic economic boom. Massive economic prizes will go to the producing economies. Economies that produce less than they consume can expect some economic and political shocks. Investors should beware and construct their portfolios accordingly.

Which sounds very discouraging for the Philippines, which seems to consume more than it produces when it comes to nearly everything.

In the blogosphere, even as the bunker makes an admission (see Palace: Arroyo visit to Shenzhen was no secret), The Warrior Lawyer weighs in by noting that

The obvious question that can once again be asked of Arroyo is the same as that asked of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal:

What did the President know and when did (s)he know it?

And Blog@AWBHoldings.com can’t help but point out that the President’s designated Heckle & Jeckle need to pause and ponder what they’re saying:

The first salvo came from Golez, who said that the witness should charge Gloria Arroyo in the courts. Of course, let us pardon Golez’ ignorance of the law (even if ignorance is not an excuse, as per Civil Code), and tell him gently that we cannot sue Gloria criminally since his amo enjoys immunity from any suit. And to remove that immunity, she has to be impeached first. But, the House of Reprehensibles will never do that, however substantial the impeachment complaint is. Golez tries to be cute, but he instead insults every consciously-thinking (there are those who chose not to think) Filipinos.

Oh, he continued trying to be cute, first by stating that the meeting with ZTE officials were official. Mr. Golez, if it was official, how come it was not reported in the media? How come there was no press release? Second, he said that the picture hasn’t prove anything malicious, that there was nothing wrong with Gloria playing golf with her husband. Well, this proves that delicadeza is dead, a Filipino value that is left forgotten, for it hinders corruption. Mr. Golez, there is nothing wrong with a president of a country courting foreign investors. But to do so in secret is not right. And who paid for the golf game? Can you show us some receipts, please?

The second salvo came from Fajardo, the most effective spokeswoman that Gloria has ever hired. First, she admitted that her amo met with ZTE officials, confirming part of what that witness had said: that Gloria did had a meeting with ZTE officials, and insisted that it was not a secret. Ms. Fajardo, please read my comments to your colleague’s failed attempts to be cute, you might learn a thing or two.

And what she had said next implicitly stated the rationale for the Fortress’ attack against Meralco: it is a diversion, plain and simple. She said that the public should not be diverted from the true issue at hand, which is high power rates. Kaboom! There you go!

The Marocharim Experiment comments on the creation of the Judicial Executive Legislative Advisory and Consultative Council (JELAC). An ominous blurring of the lines that ought to keep the different branches of government separate? It’s not as if Presidents haven’t consulted the Supreme Court in the past. My own view is, another pointless innovation when an institution already exists, the Council of State, which was the subject of a new executive issuance in 2003.

Yesterday, I talked to Rachel Khan’s class and she generously blogged about in khanterbury tales. One of her students hated the whole experience, though, see Sirang Plaka for a no-holds-barred critique. Perhaps it may have been more productive to distribute and discuss The civic imperative: a reflection, (see my blog entry for March 21, 2008 as well).

Could this possibly be true, or too much of an extrapolation? Study: Philippines has 2.3 million bloggers.

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