Category: media

defending celso

i’m not going to pretend i understand what’s really going on with celso de los angeles and the banking establishment.  my kneejerk response when i read that his rural banks had a ponzi-like scheme going, promising high returns to depositors, higher than that offered by the big banks, i was disgusted, lalo na’t it seemed that he was counting on the pdic to bail out his depositors just in case…

and then i read manila times columnist dan mariano‘s vilification of celso de los angeles, and it made me think again. in the wake of the u.s. economy’s crash thanks to innovative financial schemes, it’s hard to think positive of celso’s own innovations, especially because he has been painted as an incorrigible scoundrel by the mass media.

but if it’s true that big banks could actually match the interest rates he offered on savers’ deposits but big banks just won’t because it would eat into their huge profits, then talaga, it’s possible that celso is the victim of a vilification campaign that was meant to panic his depositors, thus to protect the interests of big banks rather than the interests of the banking public.

makes me wonder about the senate and house investigations.  sino ba talagang pinoprotektahan nila?  makes me wonder too about vice-president noli de castro’s deafening silence.  anyway here’s dan mariano’s column in full:

Vilification of Celso de los Angeles

If you are convinced that Celso de los Angeles is as guilty as sin, read no further.

Off the bat, let me say he is a former classmate of mine. I still regard him as a friend even if these past couple of weeks he has not replied to my calls, text messages and e-mail. Given the pressure he is under, I don’t fault him at all.

As Celso’s friend, I am ready to give him, if not sympathy, then certainly the benefit of the doubt. I am still so prepared-even in the current lynch-mob atmosphere created by certain central bank officials and other quarters.

Not too long ago, Celsotold some of his friends he was anxious about a plot to shut down his businesses. The rural banks he set up, for instance, were offering depositors interest rates on their savings that the big banks could not-or simply refused to-match lest it cut into their profit margins.

As a result, the number of depositors in Celso’s banks, which were spread out across the archipelago, grew at such a rate that the big banks began to feel genuinely threatened.

Serves the big banks right, I thought. Their interest rates were so tiny they did not even allow their depositors’ savings to keep pace with inflation. Keeping your money in one of those big banks was only a bit better than stuffing cash into your mattress, but it still was a losing proposition for the average depositors. I had thought that the aggressive marketing tack taken by Celso’s banks would ultimately stir the big banks into giving their customers a similar or an even better deal. I had hoped the big banks would finally wake up and realize that they now face a serious competitor.

Boy, was I wrong.

Instead of stimulating the big banks’ competitive instincts, Celso’s rural banks-along with his “preneed” ventures, which formed an integrated business-became the object of what amounts to corporate murder. The big banks decided to deal with the competition the only way they knew how-elimination at all costs.

For months, articles and columns were caused to be printed in newspapers and aired on radio and TV questioning the “unsound practices” of the rural banks identified with De los Angeles. Predictably, politicians saw a chance to draw free publicity to themselves and grabbed it.

In what seemed like the blink of any eye Celso had become one of the most vilified men in the Philippines.

Even before the hatchet job was completed, enough of the rural banks’ customers had been so unnerved that they understandably withdrew their money.

Result: A bank run triggered, not by the lack of assets or fraudulent business practices, but by negative publicity and intimidation by officials-far too many of whom look forward to a cushy sinecure in conglomerates that own big banks after retirement.

But was there anything intrinsically illegal in how Celso’s banks and preneed companies operated?

For an answer let me quote excerpts from a column written by Dean de la Paz in the Busi-nessMirror. Last Friday, de la Paz wrote in part:

“Despite the absence of an elementary preneed code, regulators and Monday-morning quarterbacking politicians cry illegality. Because there are no laws, to declare criminality requires some amount of creativity for the charges to stick if fraud and malice are to complement illegality.

“Let us examine a hypothetical preneed offering and see whether those are present.

“Matching revenues against costs is critical in the preneed industry. Where revenue sources and fund providers are one, through a virtual holdout feature, risks of defaults are mitigated, collections more efficient and the matching of revenues to costs closer. Note that here we have a preneed subscriber as clients of either a credit-card company or borrowers in affiliated banks.

“By enhancing this financial model, either through a compounding mechanism on the invested fund where interest earned is compounded monthly, quarterly or even semiannually, a doubling of earnings can be achieved.

“For instance, a credit-card holder paying an effective annual interest of 36 percent, or 3 percent monthly, quickly covers a holdout on the same individual whose funds provided costs a nominal 12 percent annually. By tying an investment that earns 12 percent annually to a debt, or a revenue source that earns 36 percent within the same period, a financial institution can earn 300 percent over the same base. Depending on the compounding schedule-doubling can occur in less than five years.

“In the preneed industry, a hypothetical educational plan can be offered featuring a front-end 20-percent rebate. With warrants that allow repurchases where credit-card companies buy the plan via postdated checks [PDCs], a double-your-money instrument can be offered.

“Should the plan holder liquidate prior to maturity, the 20-percent front-end rebate and the PDC repayments that double the plan’s initial value count as the cost of the investment. Matched against the credit-card company’s 36-percent-per-annum revenue, the cost of the assignable preneed plan can adequately be covered under normal circumstances.

“When offered as a contiguous package, is this patently illegal? Was fraud the intent? Are these designed to steal from plan holders? Or were they meant to offer yields matched against specific revenues?”

Some commentators bewail the fact that the deposit insurance cover for the customers of Celso de los Angeles’s rural banks will cost taxpayers some P14 billion.

Yet some of the same pundits remain mum on, say, the billions of pesos in kickbacks from World Bank projects that were reportedly cornered by a close relative of a high-ranking government official.

Now, why is that?

korek si gary, mali ang gma

in gary granada’s place, magagalit din ako, at hindi lang sa gma kapuso foundation, kundi pati sa “composer” na “lumikha” ng piyesang inaprub.  on both counts, the lyrics and the musical structure, gary deserves credit and compensation.

oo nga’t hindi si gary ang sumulat ng original lyrics.  pero in-edit niya ito to fit the melody that he was hearing in his mind, which makes the edited version gary’s version.

oo nga rin at naiba ang melody at dating ng naaprub na version, pero medyo lang, kaunti lang ang pagkakaiba.  korek si gary, obviously nakatungtong ito sa komposisyon niya.  why else does it fit neatly precisely perfectly into gary’s minus-one?  indeed the chance of another composer coming up, out of the blue, with the same melodic structure, bars and chords, as gary’s is one in many millions.

kung totoong hindi natipuhan ng gma kapuso ang komposisyon ni gary, okay lang, it happens.  i’m sure gary was disappointed but i’m also sure that he didn’t feel it was a total waste of time — he could easily come up with his own lyrics, develop the study into a love song, maybe, or a tibak song.   pero dahil ginamit na ng gma7 ang musical structure na iyon, papaano pa niya pakikinabangan?  baka kung gamitin niya ay siya pa mismo ang mapagbintangangang pirata.  hassle.

unethical ang ginawa ng gma kapuso foundation, which sits on the board of filscap that’s supposed to protect the rights of composers and lyricists.  since binitawan nila si gary, dapat ay binitiwan din nila completely ang komposisyon ni gary.  dapat ay original lyrics ang ibinigay sa bagong composer at hinayaan siyang lumikha ng sariling melodic structure without any influence from gary’s work.

unethical din ang ginawa ng bagong “composer”.  inalam kaya niya kung kanino ang original music?  okay lang sa kanya na pagsamantalahan at pakialaman ang komposisyon ng may komposisyon?  member din kaya siya ng filscap?  if yes, yes, yes, it doesn’t reflect well on his integrity as an artist, kung sino man siya.

blogger blues

little more than a handful of pinoy bloggers on my required-reads list have been blogging (and only a handful of readers commenting) on israel’s wicked war in/on gaza, which is a shame because it betrays how insular we can get, as though we were an island complete unto ourselves, which we’re not.

the israel-palestine problem should concern us, at the very least because it involves the u.s. of a. (even if cnn and bbc don’t talk about the how and the why) with whom we are said to have “special relations.”   a must-read is anna de brux’s post, America should stop subsidising Israel’s war on Gaza to the tune of $2.4 billion a year in military aid.   iyan ang “special relations.”   iyong sa atin, a paltry $149 million, poor relations lang tayo, distant relations, even beggar relations, thanks to government policies, e.g. foreign policy, trade policy, debt policy, that keep us dependent on, subservient to, outside forces.

at the very least, next time gma or kristiekenney talks “special relations” because of our long history as allies, let us be aware that it has been a long time since it’s done us much good.

so what have pinoy bloggers been fretting about  instead all through the holidays til now?    the golf folderol (as djb puts it), what else.   now that the blogosphere’s kneejerk rush to judgement in reaction to bambee de la paz’s campaign for justice has been proven rash foolish unwise, many bloggers left twisting in the wind are making the best of a sorry situation, some by admitting outright that it was a mistake, some by posting the pangandaman side, some by utter silence so far, and some by editing their blogs perhaps to avoid libel suits.

must reads:

Final Cut: The Pangandaman-Dela Paz Feud
Bubuyog Tonite: De la Paz, di nagkasya sa payong …
Obliterated: An Anti Pangandaman Blog
Credibility in Blogging and the Libel Suit against Blogger Bambee de la Paz
It’s your blog
The Right to Bitch …

i can hear luis teodoro et al saying, i told you so:

the principles of journalism should apply . . . . there should be verification and fairness even if it’s an opinion piece.“

reading my strong negative reaction at the time, a long time ago, long before bambee, i cringe.   but no, i’m not editing out any of it.   a reminder to think twice before jumping into the next debate between mainstream media and the new media that’s admittedly going through birth pains, no, maybe teething pains, pinoy style.

dismaying discourse on mindanao

nakakadismaya ang pinoy blogosphere discourse on mindanao and the muslim struggle for self-determination. no sympathy for the muslims at all. mostly the attitude is, who are they to dictate on the government, they are only a minority, and mostly bloody insurgents and brutal bandits at that.

it’s a triumph of mainstream media, of course, which has succeeded, wittingly or un-, in painting muslim filipinos as “enemies of the state.”

check out cris m. gaerlan jr.’s paper on the role of media in the mindanao war and turning the moro peoples into internal refugees, read in a bangkok conference at the height of the estrada administration’s all-out-war in mindanao:

Reporters and cameramen are now always at the front lines of almost every military offensive in Mindanao. Even a news blackout that had been arbitrarily declared during the height of the hostage crisis in Jolo did not deter the them from bringing the news out to the rest of the country and the world. But what news does the media bring?

Unwittingly or otherwise, the media has contributed to the creation of a myth – the myth that presents Muslims as enemies of the state. Media is now playing a great role in widening the divide between Muslims and their own country, projecting the conflict as a religious war, good versus evil, Christian against Muslim, the government versus forces wanted to establish an Independent Mndanao Islamic state. AS MASS MEDIA REPORTS ON THE PRESENT SITUATION, IT IGNORES THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MINDANAO CONFLICT, TO THE POINT OF INFLUENCING PUBLIC OPINION AND CONDONING, IF NOT ACTUALLY ENCOURAGING, ACTS OF CULTURAL VIOLENCE AGAINST THE MUSLIM PEOPLE. [caps mine]

The extensive media coverage of the “victory” of the Philippine Armed Forces in Camp Abubakhar further instills in people’s minds that “war is the only solution” to the problem in Mindanao. And hunting down suspected terrorist and not surprisingly only Muslims are arrested with out warrants. And should the people wonder?

…mass mediahas caused the public to equate the word “Muslim” with “bandit”, “kidnapper” “terrorist”, and “murderer,” portraying Muslims as a barbaric people. Mass media has reduced the followers of Islam to a people bent on overthrowing the government, and that these enemies of the state deserve this mutated form of ethnic cleansing.”

it’s all terribly unfair to the muslims. had i been born muslim, given the history and the grinding poverty, i would surely be part of a nonviolent struggle for bangsamoro self-determination and a better life. and i might also hate manila, and america, with a vengeance.