hard times (updated)

my self-embargo (cvj’s term) re the ces drilon kidnapping is not so much because i approve of the way anc and inquirer initially managed the news blackout, rather because the information available even now is so thin and confused, and anc’s not talking, what a twist, so that to say anything would be only to speculate based on unconfirmed reports. so saka na lang.

meanwhile, life goes on and it’s a bitch.

yesterday i was in mall supermarket’s checkout counter, waiting to pay for some 2,000 bucks worth of groceries, when i saw that next in line was a young woman in office uniform buying just one tiny can of sardines. my heart sank. and yet and yet she was okay. while the cashier took off to check the price of a bottle of pickles that had no price tag, our eyes met and we exchanged smiles and she even explained that the cashier also needed a code thingie that came with the price tag.

later i wondered how much longer she could keep it up, being nice. how much longer before she can’t pretend anymore na okay lang.

not much longer i think. with the price of oil surging worldwide, so will the price of gasoline and diesel and lpg continue to rise to heights that will further impoverish the lower classes and bring the middle classes to the brink of poverty.

and yet we here in the philippines seem to be in denial. aside from gma’s subsidies and salceda’s noah’s ark ek-ek for the poorest of the poor, we seem to think, to pray? that this is temporary, that prices will go back down to normal, that is, affordable levels, eventually. not so.

writes carmen pedrosa of philippine star:

We should not be lulled that if we just economize here and there, save on gas, count the centavos in our grocery bills, close our air-cons etc. we should be ok when the storm passes. That is a dangerous presumption. Happily there are more serious individuals warning us how unprepared we are for the “time of trouble.”

These individuals, some of whom were branded crackpots in the past warn against a dangerous cataclysm that we cannot dismiss with the wave of the hand and that “business as usual” will return. They believe that unless coordinated and widespread worldwide action led by governments, perhaps under the wing of the United Nations, are in place soon, we are nowhere near being prepared.

This school of thought is based on projections made by oil expert and geologist Colin Campbell and a few others. Their predictions three years ago were so dead-right they are now being taken more seriously in mainstream media. Their conclusion is that the world has reached its oil peak. Campbell is not saying that the oil has run out. What he is saying is that the oil peak has been reached and is on a downward spiral. What has exacerbated the peak oil is that it is being outpaced by world demand from the older superpowers and the new economic giants playing catch up, like China and India.

* * *

In a recent article, Times Asia correspondent Leo Lewis reported on a G8 conference of energy ministers in Japan and he said they are now singing a different tune. Indeed, the participants generally agreed that “the record surges in crude prices have propelled the world into an era in which oil may never be cheap again and energy security will become the foremost concern of governments everywhere.”

They may have expressed concern about prices but more significantly they admitted that “the old rules of energy markets must be torn up if the world was to avoid a crisis.”

The energy ministers were from the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations China, India and South Korea. Their countries represent 65 percent of global energy demand. They described the tone of this year’s meeting as “fundamentally different” from previous occasions. It is now admitted that global oil production – at about 87 million barrels a day – is sputtering. The real question is: why?

“Is it, as advocates of the “peak oil theory” claim, because there is simply not enough oil left in the ground? Or is it because of other reasons, such as a lack of investment in new fields and production?”

“It is a fact that some of the world’s biggest oil areas are being depleted rapidly. There are plenty of examples. The world’s largest oilfield at Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, which produces more than five million barrels a day, more than 6 percent of global production, is thought to be in decline. But other areas, such as the Santos Basin off Brazil, are just opening up. But Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, faces technological problems in exploiting its latest oil and gas discovery,” Lewis reports.

Here are some of the energy ministers’ comments:

“If we leave this situation as it is, it could lead to a recession of the world economy,” Akira Amari, the Japanese Energy Minister and host of the meeting, said. That meant, he added, that energy security, including the stability of the oil market, had become one of the top priorities for every country.

Andris Piebalgs, the European Energy Commissioner, said that the high oil price was not a passing phase, adding that “no economy should gamble on a potential return to low prices”.

Sam Bodman, the US Energy Secretary, described the recent price spike when a barrel of benchmark US light crude rose $10, as a shock said “that similar price volatility lay ahead.”

He conceded that there were relatively few things that could be done in the short term. There was also disagreement on how to protect consumers from high oil prices. The United States led calls for developing world subsidies to be removed to help curb demand. There were riots in India last week when price increases were passed on to consumers.

John Hutton, the Business and Enterprise Secretary, told The Times that the oil market was no longer “responding to price signals”. Strangely the conference while agreeing on the dangers the world faced stopped short of any firm policy statements on the role of speculators in energy markets.”

ah yes, oil speculation, which is said to be playing a non-trivial role (in addition to demand/supply issues, and the weak dollar) in the high price of oil.  the latest is, the malaysian prime minister is urging western governments to rein in speculation on basic commodities.  says mike the actuary:

I’ll admit, there is something appealing to the notion of restricting participation in the oil futures markets to those who can actually take delivery of the product.

Unfortunately, there are two big problems with that desire.

First, we have a little matter of the market being international. Getting all the global commodities exchanges to cooperate is likely to be almost as challenging as herding cats.

Second…well, I’ll just point to an article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

While Nymex operates as a U.S.-regulated market, ICE Europe operates as a foreign exchange with trading terminals in the U.S. and is exempt from U.S. rules on reporting and speculation limits.

One person close to the matter was unsure if an actual agreement on setting levels had been set. Another said that even if the FSA and ICE Europe had agreed to the setting of limits on the front-month contracts, the FSA still isn’t sure who is doing the trading.

It’s kind of hard to regulate the speculators if you don’t know who they are, don’tcha think?”

heto naman ang fearless forecast of mass poverty ni tony lopez ng manila times:

WITH oil prices hitting new highs almost every week, expect local gasoline prices to adjust upward almost every week too.

Steep gasoline prices, however, seem like small pain compared to the harm record high crude prices will do to many Filipinos. Millions will be impoverished. Those who are barely middle class will fall to the edge of poverty.

In the interim, there will be long lines of people wanting to buy cheap rice. Malnutrition will worsen, as will mass hunger. Dropping out of school will be fashionable. The result is social unrest never seen in the last 30 years. Food riots could erupt in some urban places in the country where so-called informal settlers are dominant. Boycotts over high-priced bus and jeepney fares can be expected. . . .

The most severe rice shortage in 30 years will cause malnutrition, hunger and mass poverty. The highest crude oil prices ever will finish off what the rice shortage doesn’t, meaning bring even greater number of Filipinos to the brink of poverty.

And many once rich families will feel very poor. They may have to give up some of their so-called luxuries-like driving the kids to school or driving oneself to office.

Together, the food crisis and the energy crisis will create hardships and privation never seen in a generation. One form of hardship is inflation which surged to 9.6 percent in May from 8.3 percent in April this year. . . .”

even alex magno who loves gma admits that the situation is explosive and subsidies can’t be forever.

Modern governments are expected to protect citizens from inflationary surges and other quirks in the market. When they begin to appear to be unable to do so, the social contract is eroded and legitimacy is undermined. . .

What should governments do in the face of increasingly explosive social situation following round after round of price surges?

Not much, in the last analysis. Governments cannot attempt to subsidize oil prices. That is a bottomless pit that will drain scarce public resources from other public services. . . .

At best, governments can help conserve the social contract by token but highly visible acts.
We see that in the response of our own government to the worsening price crisis. First, we began by taking out levies on imported oil. But while that hurt government revenues, its effect on arresting price rises was at best impalpable.

There are populist politicians agitating that government withdraw value-added taxation on oil products. That will only worsen the fiscal situation and create more problems down the road. It will force us to borrow to finance public operations and bury us in debt down the road.

In the face of incessant price increases and an inflationary surge, government has finally decided to postpone the goal of a balanced budget originally targeted for this year. Instead, government has evolved a program of direct subsidies to the poor to help mitigate the adverse impact of inflation on their lives.

Recently, government began handing out conditional subsidies to encourage poor parents to keep their children in schools. Then the DSWD began handing out coupons to indigent families to help them acquire cheap rice. Last week, government began handing out P500 to lifeline electricity consumers.

The money is handed out directly, with the consumers lining up for them. It might seem to be a tedious and inefficient way of doing it. It would be far easier to credit the amount to the billings of poor consumers, with the money paid directly to Meralco to cover the subsidies. But that would deny government the important by-product of reinforcing its legitimacy and reassuring the public government stand by its part in the social contract.

Presidential economic adviser Joey Salceda suggested a package of spending measures that would ensure adequate food stocks. Included in that “Noah’s Ark” package is a large amount of subsidies to help the poor cope with the price surges.

We cannot go on and on providing subsidies at every instance. But neither can we court a social explosion by not giving out such subsidies in a moment of great social difficulty.”

on cnn a couple of weeks ago, I caught an economist saying that the only time the price of oil might go down to reasonable levels is when the demand for it goes down, which means, less gasoline consumption all around. as the price continues to surge, this is exactly what we might see, less consumption for the poor and middle-class, but i’m not sure that rich countries like the u.s. and china would oblige.

independence day blues

i want a president who has a better sense of nation than gma. it’s not right that we do not celebrate independence day the way we used to. the way we should.

like smoke, i forgot, until the receptionist at a doctor’s office reminded us. when we got home the first thing we did was to bring our flag out and hang it by the window, the way my father did religiously all his life.

i like to think that smoke, who feels the same, speaks for the youth:

It’s what today?

When the taxi driver greeted me with a ‘hapi independens day, mam!’ I had a brief moment of ‘it’s what today?’

When i recovered my wits, I was mortified.

This, i think, is the reason why the independence day holiday should never be moved to the nearest monday or whatever. With all the things you need to do just to survive, the higher things – like remembering to commemorate Independence – tend to get snowed under. If today were a holiday, Independence day would have been the first thing on my mind. Instead, all I could think about was making my ten o’clock meeting.

To a large extent, forgetting was a personal failure. But still, I was pissed to find out that I wasn’t alone in my lapse. After being reminded by that taxi driver, I made it a point to put on a bright smile and greet everyone a happy independence day. Most of the people I greeted returned the same blank stare that I’m sure I gave the taxi-guy. And like me, those blank stares were quickly replaced with memory and a mumbled, ‘I forgot.’

But that’s not the worst of it.

There were some people who just looked at me with a kind of sneer and said, ‘so what?’ They knew it was independence day, but they didn’t care.

This is the kind of trivialization of important observances – independence day included – that ‘holiday economics’ promotes. It kills our sense of history, numbing us to the sacrifices of our forebears and thereby robbing us of the ability to see ourselves as being part of the tapestry of history – if nothing else, then as inheritors of people who fought and died for the freedoms we now take for granted. It’s shameful, I tell you.

By reducing independence day to the status of just-another-excuse-to-skip-work we are slowly but surely inducing a national amnesia of our forefathers’ sacrifices, and we make ourselves more and more incapable of asking what we can do for our country and our people. Instead, we find it ever easier to ask only what our country and our people should do for us.

Without reminders of our place in history, we tend to focus only on what we need to do to ensure individual survival, reducing the national psyche to subsistence levels, and inculcating in us a pathologically mendicant mentality. Ultimately, this will result in psychic stagnation – the state of being so fixatedwith the here and now, with what our entitlements are, and with the utter sense of despair thatwe never get everything we have convinced ourselves we unconditionally deserve thatwe can no longer imagine – much less work for – a grand future.

I’m sorry I forgot it was independence day. I will not forget again.”

me too. it’s not only mortifying, it’s saddening, and who wants to be sad on independence day? but yes, sad for the nation, sad for ces drilon, sad for lorna tolentino, sad for the poor and hungry, sad for us all.

why juday

tanong ng marami, why not claudine, or kris, or ruffa, or sharon? tanong ko, did meralco’s first holdings ask judy ann first because they think she’s the most credible of them all? or maybe she just has the widest fan-base of them all, so wide she got jamby elected to the senate?

jp fenix calls her “the darling of the masses” who was supposed to sweeten the unsavory message that systems losses in our electric bill are real,justified, and legal.

Judy endorses the “systems loss” advocacy with analogy of how some ice melts away on your trip from the store to your home. She adds that systems losses charged to consumers are never higher than what’s prescribed by law.

True enough – but it totally misses the point of what we all find distasteful about this issue. Sure, the kilometers of cables and wires that bridge the generation of power to the consumer at home may result in attrition of the electricity that runs through them. We can accept that, just as we can accept the ice melting on the way home analogy.

What gets our goat is the system loss due to Meralco’s inefficiency… no, ineptitude… no, incompetence… no, plain katamaran, the cost of which is charged to us, the consumers.”

so really the culprit (among others, of course) is meralco, not judy ann, so why fault her for doing the meralco commercial? she got paid for it. trabaho lang. say ni bong austero, juday has the right to peddle opinion:

I read somewhere that Santos did get paid for that infomercial.Four million pesos, if my reckoning serves me right. I don’t see how anyone can take that against her-she is a celebrity who makes money that way. Last I looked, there is no law in this country against making a living. What I can’t take is the wanton disrespect for Santos’ right to make and peddle an opinion because, “she is just an actress.” It’s all part of this dangerous stereotype that casts actresses as simpletons who simply parrot whatever their benefactors ask them to do. Is it too much to assume that Santos has her own mind and her own advocacies?

I understand that someone as popular as Santos has a moral obligation to her followers. I also concede that actresses like her with a massive fan base have the responsibility to take into account some notion of “the common good” in her actions and statements.  But-and this I insist on-no one in this country, absolutely no one, has the right to dictate his or her own notion of what is right or wrong on another person.

At the end of the day, we all have to account for our own actions. If Judy Ann Santos made a grievous mistake by taking the cudgels for Meralco, then that is something that she has to account for personally. But I don’t think she should be castigated for participating in a national debate simply because she is an actress and has been paid to do so. That’s her right and privilege. Excluding her from the debate because she is presumably “inferior” is just another form of bigotry.”

oo nga, judy ann has her own mind and no doubt she has some notion of “the common good” which is perhaps why she was seen, or so i heard, at the wake of ka bel.

but i don’t know that she’s in any position to truly promote the common good, not as long as she’s pushing consumerism big time, doing tv commercials that peddle all sorts of products – laundry detergent, feminine wash, shampoo, ginisa mix, vinegar, clothes, beer, cough medicine, flawless skin, diet pills, pawnshop, sardines, evaporated milk, texting services, perfume, eyewear, watches – raising needs that most of her fan base have no way of gratifying, which is really quite unkind if not downright cruel.

and then, again, who knows, maybe the meralco ad signals a new stage in the evolution of judy ann santos. maybe she’s into political advocacy now. maybe she has political ambitions a la ate vi? hmm, then she should take a sabbatical, do some homework. politics is complicated stuff.

battle of the blogs

si manolo quezon ba ang pinatatamaan ni benignO?

one blogger’s citation of another blogger’s work serves the double purpose of also promoting the former’s own blog (at least if the latter sets their blog to allow trackbacks). This eureka moment of mine suddenly makes the style of some bloggers suspect in my book – those who pepper their work with so many links to other blogs. I made the observation yonks ago about how the style of a noted blogger has evolved from making very sharp-edged, highly-focused entries to the ones we see today that have more of the stock-take-cum-shotgun approach of a content consolidator.”

the daily dose is the only blog i know that is always peppered with links to other blogs, which style, yes, promotes the daily dose, but also provides a unique service to readers like me who want to know the latest developments and utterances on the political scene but can’t be bothered or don’t have the time to do all that research. i don’t know though that manolo’s posts have lost some edge and focus over time – i haven’t been into the blogosphere all that long. truth is, i never count on manolo for edge or focus. for that i read dean jorge bocobo and ellen tordesillas.

but yes, benignO raises a valid concern re the “establishmentisation” of the pinoy blogosphere where the success of a blog is measured by its popularity, i.e., the number of other blogs that link to it and the comments it gets per post, never mind the substance or lack of it or the vision or lack of it. it’s like preferring formula box-office hit movies to indy films when indy films are easily the more edgy and visionary:

For Indy film producers, an audience is a bonus. For Studio movie producers, an audience is the whole point. The latter is driven by credentialism and the former by insight. We all know mass appeal brings home the bacon, whilst edginess and loyalty to vision attracts a far smaller subset – insightful minds. That ultimately is the choice faced by every content producer, be they film makers, illustrators, writers, and – yes- bloggers.”

which brings me to tonyo cruz (whom i found through manolo’s daily dose) and the filipino blogosphere’s insipid aristocracy.

… the Pinoy blogosphere aristocracy are just behaving as expected: aristocratic and elitist. Some would cry “repression!” only when its their own voices that are being muffled or muzzled. Some would gladly lay down a virtual red carpet for their own online writing projects on Philippine issues, but would demean the efforts of others. At other times, these clowns cry for “democracy” when all they really want to say is “listen to me only” or “listen to me first”. Some are fans of a near-total absence of online accountability. As to the threat of repression, the question of the need to fight repression is set aside by insinuations that the new ones may be inviting harm all by themselves (ain’t that the same “blame the victim” outlook which they also detest in posts elsewhere).

There is a danger to the way these characters view themselves. They may be harboring not ill thoughts about others, but an overestimation of their self-worth. Given the discussions on related topics, it is not farfetched that they would soon propose a canon for the Pinoy blogosphere and anoint themselves as the new “gods” to whom we should solely and exclusively look for truth.

That is not democracy. That is only a complete reproduction of mass media and Philippine education in general. Full of elitism and bullshit, exclusivist rather inclusive, and finds as questionable the entry of new voices such as Lozada, Panlilio and the nameless masses.”

i LUV it. this is the kind of “edgy” i’m looking for – not the personal angst-laden kind of edgy but the politically edgy that takes a stand, that selflessly fearlessly speaks out against elitist bullshit, never mind kung makasakit man o makasagasa. ‘ika nga, truth hurts but it cures. (well, it should.)

tonyocruz is, i gather, correct me if i’m wrong, referring to some of his fellow bloggers in filipino voices whose reactions to the recently launched blog of jun lozada verged on the supercilious, judging it wanting just because it’s not like their own blogs? because jun lozada dares do more? because, oh no, he has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments already, talbog silang lahat, talbog tayong lahat, pati si kitty go? he must be doing something wrong, like brian gorrell? LOL

even the noted blogger has fallen into the trap. almost belittling lozada’s filipino ideology of nationhood just because it wasn’t crafted with the help of the blogocracy? and even warning of capital flight because jun lozada quoted lenin, never mind that lenin was speaking a truth about land reform? maybe benignO’s right.