We beg to differ.
No wonder the fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) of Philippine President Benigno Simeon “BS” Aquino III took all of 102 minutes. He tried to cover every bit of detail in what was an unstructured litany of statistics, examples, and anecdotes. But to the expansion of BS Aquino’s speech in duration was a reportedly…
Sad milestone for a once glorious city and a former citadel of American industrial power. Detroit, Michigan — the city itself and its surrounding metropolitan area home to the United States’ “Big Three” car manufacturers, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler — yesterday filed for bankruptcy following a decades-long decline the sharpest of which was felt…
According to Associated Press “reporter” Teresa Cerojano who wrote an AP article, the Philippines’ much hyped economic “boom” was credited by “many” to the “new vitality to the policies of President Benigno Aquino III, elected in 2010 on promises of eradicating graft and fighting poverty.” Perhaps. But the indicators of this growth cited by Cerojano…
Read More “Boom times in the Philippines’ call center and OFW economy” »
Hardly surprising. Much of the “gains” in the Philippine economy scored by the administration’s media lackeys and spin doctors mainly on the basis of a prolonged bullish run by the share market is turning out to be no more than smoke-and-mirrors. A surging sharemarket in essence says nothing about the underlying substance of a national…
Read More “The Philippines: One Big Broken Promise to investors” »
Singapore — resource-poor and dependent on services, exports, and tourists — is reeling from the effects of smog reportedly coming mainly from waste being burned in Indonesia’s palm plantations. For days, a haze has blanketed the prosperous city-state and the “smell of burning wood” has seeped into buildings making residents’ efforts to avoid its effects…
I left off my previous post with a paragraph that had the sub-heading, “Without a Vision, Reviving Manila is a Lost Cause”. SOS Save Manila Bay’s woeful calls for “environmental” and “heritage” preservation is as shallow and meandering as the silted Pasig River that disgorges its black sewerage water into Manila bay. Why? It’s not…
Read More “Pining for Manila’s Old Glory is a Sign of a Lack of Vision (Part Two)” »
If you want to know how the Philippine economy is doing, you will find it hard to get a straightforward answer from the mainstream media. There’s enough spin to counteract every piece of bad news out there to do your head in. It seems the Philippine government is doing its best to project an image…
To understand the fundamental flaw in the idea of the Philippines’ relying on a strategy of counting on “foreign investment” to rescue its people from their own self-created wretchedness, it is important to understand the equally fundamental definition of poverty. Quite simply: Poverty is a habitual entering into commitments one is inherently unable to honour….
Read More “Loser mentality: Filipinos’ 500-year dependence on foreign investment” »