Where the trains run on time

By Luis V. Teodoro
www.luisteodoro.com
November 6, 2009

The results of a poll recently released by the US-based Gallup Organization say that some 700 million people worldwide would move to another country if they could.

No, Filipinos didn’t lead the pack, despite the 2007 finding that nearly 20 percent of the population would take the next plane for another country — any country — if they could, and Philippine airports’ being choked daily with the 6,000 people who’re either leaving for jobs abroad or permanently relocating elsewhere. Ahead of everyone else was the population of sub-Saharan Africa, of which 38 percent was most anxious to pack up and go.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a vast region south of the Sahara desert which includes practically every country (50) in the continent except the six countries that comprise North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara).

With a total population of around 650 million (or some ten percent of the world’s total), the region includes some of the poorest — and most volatile and conflict-ridden — countries in the world, including such headline grabbers as Somalia and the Congo.

Sixty percent of all people with HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — are from the region, with an estimated 22 million men and women infected out of the global total of 32.9 million. Seventy five percent of all deaths from AIDS worldwide occurred in the region in 2007.

With poverty, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, and such other woes as piracy and the proliferation of armed groups of various stripes as part of daily life in many countries of the region, it’s a wonder that the number of those who want to leave isn’t higher.

In contrast to Sub-Saharan Africans, Asians wanted least to leave, with only one in ten of those polled saying they would, despite the number of Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Indians. Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Filipinos, etc. who’ve left their countries to drive cabs in New York or to scrub toilets in London.

As a sub-group, Filipinos are among the most likely Asians to leave. Some go as mail order brides who end up sitting out winters in the US mid-West, others as truck drivers and construction workers braving improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers in Afghanistan. Large numbers of professionals, especially the doctors and nurses of which the Philippines has a shortage, also leave each month for jobs in other countries. While others leave as immigrants, the most preferred country being the United States, where there were 600,000 documented Filipinos in 2008, practically everyone who leaves for the US, Canada or any other developed country would prefer to stay there permanently.

As for the undocumented — the “TNTs” of Filipino migration lore — they’re not only in the United States but also in places as diverse as Italy, the Middle Eastern countries (Dubai and Saudi Arabia, for example), and even Croatia.

Despite what seems to be the obvious answers (poverty, limited economic opportunities) why Filipinos leave has been a perennial subject of debate in talk shows, newspaper columns and academic forums.

Some commentators attribute it all to greed. One broadsheet (not the BusinessWorld) excoriated a soon- to- be medical graduate who was planning to immediately leave for the United States for wanting to live in luxury and for his lack of patriotism, in a display of the self-righteousness the more comfortable in these parts share — “comfort” being defined in terms of a house in a (flood-prone) Manila suburb, a car in the garage, and a six figure salary at least.

The migration-as-greed-thesis does have some validity — but only in some cases, in which leaving the country for, say, the United States, is primarily driven by the immense propaganda impact of Western, mostly US, cultural fare to which allegedly “English-speaking” Filipinos are exposed 24/7. While more and more Western countries are adopting stricter immigration laws, the TV shows, movies and music they blanket the world with daily continue to entice millions with dreams of an earthly paradise in New York or Sydney.

But while among the lower middle classes the desire for some level of luxury otherwise unattainable in the Philippines moves some Filipinos who’ve had some education to leave, at least one other factor accounts for middle class migration. It’s the desire for order and predictability, which in turn has a bearing on a family and its children’s future. If you can’t predict what will happen next year, or even next month, planning for the future doesn’t make much, or even any, sense. (Those who invested in college assurance plans, for example, found this out soon enough when the companies they had put their money in went bankrupt.)

One Filipino academic, asked why he moved to the US, quoted Benito Mussolini’s boast about fascist Italy: at least the trains run on time. Indeed the trains run on time, the mail’s delivered on schedule, and the garbage collected regularly in such places as much of Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, Canada as well as on that emerging destination of choice, New Zealand. But it does come at a price, among them having to live with racism and random violence, among others.

If some Filipinos do leave out of choice, many more do so because they have to. To this category belong the tens of thousands of migrant workers from poor families who can’t get jobs in a country where development has been at a standstill, or who do have jobs, but still can’t provide their families with the medical care, shelter and education to which every human being is entitled. More and more of these are women, and they’re the ones who’ve had to bear long hours of work, abuse, and even being beaten and murdered in some cases for the sake of their parents, siblings, husbands and children back home.

Mail order brides are on the other hand not always solely driven by dreams of comfort — or even, in some instances, the simple and piteous need to be in a situation where “I can eat enough and what I want”. Many leave for countries they may not even know anything about so they can send home something for brothers, sisters and parents. They’re not Out There in search of a place where the trains run on time and the mail’s delivered on schedule. They’re there because they need to be. (BusinessWorld)

Jesus in yellow

Method To Madness
By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:50:00 11/07/2009

THE GRASS IS YELLOW OUTSIDE THE GATES OF HACIENDA LUISITA. Jesus walked here once. His father watched him die, almost five years to this day. Nov. 16 was when close to 15,000 tenants gathered to protest their treatment under the Cojuangco-owned Hacienda Luisita. Dispersal units charged with a thousand soldiers in full battle gear. The Northern Command numbered over five hundred. Stones and shouts, water cannons, tanks that barreled into gates. It was three in the afternoon. The sun burned yellow. The father heard it first: rifle cracks, a barrage of bullets punching through bodies. Jesus died that day, one of seven reported union deaths. They tell me there are more whose names were never reported.

They called it a massacre. Sen. Benigno Aquino III called it propaganda.

On that day, Federico Laza and other farmhands loaded the 38-year-old Jesus into a tricycle. The father wept and Jesus bled. It was too late when they brought him to the hospital. The police claimed they found powder burns on Jesus’ hands, proof he, too, had a gun. The autopsy said otherwise.

Today, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III runs for president of the country his father died for.

I believed in him, not very long ago. I believed in him in spite of a long-ago interview on Hacienda Luisita, on his first run as senator. As it happened, I was standing by Federico Laza, looking at a death certificate, while Noynoy claimed the dead were Manila radicals shipped to Tarlac for the purpose of terrorizing the hacienda. He said the farmers were content, and that all I knew were left-wing lies. The Cojuangcos still own Luisita, even if on paper they are meant to share profit with the same starving farmers who are worse off now than before they were made to sign land meant for them into stock market shares.

And still I was glad Noynoy was running, believed his mistakes, and his mother’s, were a result of their class and could change in the lead-up to 2010. I believed he could bring together a scattered field of candidates, pare down the fight between administration and opposition. I believed that the myth of the Aquinos behind him would be enough to convince his rivals to throw their support behind one candidate, and allow him to prove he was not just a paper doll hero, a crudely-cut outline of his parents. I was afraid he might lose. Now I am afraid he may win. I wish I still believed in him, because without him there’s very little left in the rogue’s gallery of would-be leaders.

For months he has been leading headlines. The Aquino son, soaring on the wings of heroes. His rivals have not stepped back; the field is still open. A fever sweeps through the media, crowning Noynoy, the man who has yet to say anything that is not an echo of the old revolution. Remember my father. Remember my mother. Vote for me, and you vote for them. And that is all. It has been months since he became suddenly the nation’s moral choice, and there is little resembling platform, policy or position. Miracle, they call him. This is the revolution, say his supporters. This is Edsa. So he may not be as intelligent. So he may not be as articulate. So he may not have proven himself. And because we are faced with the usual array of the corrupt and the devout, we wait, we believe. And we are rewarded, in all its cinematic splendor, by a music video.

The scene is a forest, in the dark of the night. Yellow shirts and soft yellow light, Regine Velasquez by a fire in the woods, singing of togetherness and unity and a farewell to fear. There is the small child, offering a bamboo torch to the senator. There is talk show host Boy Abunda, standing on a boat manned by a young boy. There is Kris Aquino, Noynoy’s sister, who is rumored to have been wining and dining A-list celebrities to support her brother. It is national unity via television ratings: the top stars of the warring networks linked by yellow. ABS-CBN’s darlings of prime time television are lit beautifully in the flickering firelight, holding their bamboo torches, hair bouncing as they walk, smiling soulfully into the distance. The camera lets GMA7’s number one love team Dingdong Dantes and Marian Rivera look lovingly at each other as they walk on, a smiling Sharon Cuneta raises a lantern, Ogie Alcasid marches with torch. There is the odd farmer and soldier, but it’s clear who the stars are. And so the full shot, a great phalanx of torch-bearing, yellow-clad men and women marching to battle, the celebrities at the front lines. Through it all, Noynoy smiles at children, at people, at the camera, smiles blankly, and you can almost hear him count in his head the seconds before he has to turn to the lens. In the end, he leaps awkwardly up to a mound of soil, surrounded by his beautiful constituency, and a sun explodes behind him in shattering brilliance.

In a nation where government responsibility has shifted to the media, and calls for aid are directed to newsroom desks instead of the hotlines of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, this sort of move isn’t particularly surprising. A united GMA7 and ABS-CBN may seem like the best of metaphors for a united nation, but it says very much about the sort of man Noynoy Aquino is. Flanked by stars, surrounded by celebrities, content to ride on the waving banner stamped with his parents’ faces. There is no message, other than that personality is king. There are no voices, not even his. His defenders say it’s not the time for campaign—and yet that video rolls on and on in prime time television. You are not alone, they say, but who stands with you? Anne Curtis? Ate Shawie? Marielle Rodriguez? Just recently, Noynoy promised to give up his share of Hacienda Luisita, and yet denies knowing of eviction notices to farmers even while the case sits in the Supreme Court. Laza continues to march in rallies, five years after a bullet ripped a good man away. Nothing has changed, the same songs, the same names, the same injustices.

They say the miracles are colored yellow now—the yellow of thick lengths of ribbon, the triumphant swags of bright flag, the inside edge of a flame on a bamboo torch held up to a camera lens, the same yellow of grass outside the gates of Hacienda Luisita, where a man named Jesus once walked with his father.

FDC calls for debt moratorium, reparations from World Bank, ADB

Friday, 16 October 2009 12:07 p.m.

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES – Desperate times call for drastic measures.

Instead of relying on usual remedies like new borrowings to finance the relief and rehabilitation efforts and the reconstruction of public structures damaged or destroyed by Ketsana (Ondoy) and Parma (Pepeng), the government should firmly and unilaterally call for a debt moratorium, and sternly seek reparations from developed countries’ governments and international financial institutions like the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the current climate crisis.

These were the demands made by the Freedom from Debt Coalition as Congress approved Wednesday the P12-billion supplemental budget for the emergency relief and rehabilitation efforts and as the government shifted the purpose of the P50-billion bonds from funding the Economic Resiliency Program to reconstruction of public infrastructures. The US$1.1-billion bonds will be offered by the state-run National Development Company (NDC) next week.

“This is the time for bold measures,” stressed Lidy Nacpil, FDC vice president. “Relying again on usual measures such as floating bonds would sink the country deeper into the debt and deficit spiral.” “While financing mechanisms should immediately be pursued to provide immediate relief and rehabilitation, it must not be at the expense of bloating the national government debt and our fiscal deficit—all of which shall be borne eventually by the people including the typhoon victims. It would be a case of victimizing the already victims,” she said.

FDC raised the same sentiment on the P12-billion supplementary budget which will be sourced out from different quarters such as the 2009 General Appropriations Act’s unprogrammed funds. “The mere fact that unprogrammed funds are ‘unprogrammed’ means that their sources of financing are dependent on available savings or other extra revenues. Since we have none, this would only become a license for the government to incur additional borrowings,” Nacpil said.

Debt moratorium

“Instead of tapping new borrowings, the government must freeze external debt payments and re-channel freed up funds to finance government’s relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction programs. More than ever, the recent catastrophe must become an occasion for the country to renege from paying external debts many of which are challenged as illegitimate.”

FDC said the moratorium should be until an official comprehensive investigation and audit of all public debt and contingent liabilities is completed while “unbendable” policies such as the Automatic Debt Servicing Provision of the Revised Administrative Code of 1987 which perpetuate our debt problem is overhauled.

The group also said there should be no interest accruing on debts during the moratorium period. It said accumulated principal payments of these debts should not be paid immediately after the moratorium but should be spread out over time.

It was reported that total external debt payment in the proposed P1.541 trillion 2010 budget is P253.459 billion, more than enough money says FDC, to fund any national rehabilitation and reconstruction program.

Reparations

The group is also demanding the Arroyo government to seek reparations from developed countries’ governments and international financial institutions like the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the current climate crisis. FDC said developed countries, transnational corporations and financial institutions must own up to their historical responsibility for their plunder and extraction of developing countries’ resources and minerals as well as for funding technologies and industries that exacerbate the climate crisis.

According to Nacpil, the World Bank and ADB have been funding fossil fuel projects for many decades with investments amounting to $51.4 billion and $7.3 billion, respectively, in Asia alone.

“As such, instead of begging for assistance and aid, instead of acting like beggars and helpless victims, we should be demanding reparations and just compensation for the climate crisis they largely contributed in the first place,” Nacpil concluded.