Remember, that man sitting in Malacañang now wanted the people in EDSA strafed. He was 29 years old.
Never forget
Category Archives: politics
Chaos
Yesterday was rife with tense undercurrent as memos coming from various Philippine National Police (PNP) camps/regional offices started surfacing in group chats and private messages like this below.
So I had to ask my network of national beat reporters regarding this. One of them said PNP held a press conference and of course they denied that this was not true. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) also denied such thing in a press release.
However, my source inside AFP said the resignations were true as the senior officers got disgruntled with the flip-flopping of Marcos.
A fellow reporter and I were throwing theories at each other, thinking about the power struggle between Duterte (whose AFP Chief was Centino and was a holdover) and Marcos (Bacarra is Marcos’ appointee who got unseated by Centino again).
One of the messages passed on to me by a reporter said:
From a lawyer na anak ng retired general
-What is not fake, is the fact that the AFP CS, Lt Gen Bacarro, has just been replaced by Gen Centino. Gen Centino the CS AFP carried over from PRRD’s administration, was earlier replaced by Lt Gen Bacarro, who was appointed as CS AFP, by BBM in August 2022. Bacarro was scheduled to retire on Sept 2022, but because of the new law fixing the term of the CS AFP to 3 years, Bacarro’s term as CS was until Aug 2025. However, Bacarro could not be promoted to 4-star general as Centino, a 4-star general, was set to retire on Feb 2023, and under the law, the AFP should only have one 4-star general. Hence, the anomaly of a 3-star CS, with a 4-star general-former CS on floating status until his February 2023. Then after the New Year, Centino who is not yet retireable, is surprisingly appointed by BBM to his former post as CS AFP, replacing Bacarro. Parang pawardy-wardy ang galaw ng gobyerno. So what gives?
And one of the national defense veteran reporters in my network said:
The last message sent to me was this.
The facts:
- there was a memo from the PNP about destabilization in the AFP which required them to be on red alert. The memo was pulled out same day.
- 3 DND USecs resigned the other day
- Bacarro was compulsory retired and Centino was placed back as CSAFP
Allegation: - unrest and destabilization in the AFP
Theory: - PNP sowing misinformation to redirect the current issue (request for mass courtesy resignation of all Colonels & generals of the PNP) away from them.
Some of my friends and my even my sister said, let them implode so that both Marcos and Duterte camps destroy each other and the Philippines will benefit. We’ll just eat our popcorns while we see the meltdown.
Never have I experience this kind of negligent government that just let the prices of onions and other basic vegetables go nuts (PHP 750/kg of onions!) while the harvests up north get stuck and are not transported down here in the south to stabilize prizes. Because Marcos never cared about such things anyway. He’s just in this for the perks of the presidency as the entire family gets diplomatic immunity as they were not able to travel for decades due to the conviction handed down to them by international courts. He’s now preparing to travel to Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum, an event that he does not even understand. He’s just there for the junket trip.
My PHP 740 only got this much of veggies and this does not include onions because there are no onions available! Lord, how are the poor feeding themselves?!
Yesterday, I just wrote here that I’m staying in this country because I’m happy here but staying means I’m forever having this toxic relationship with the Philippines. Like I’m not leaving because of some messianic thing, being a journalist with a higher calling shit, etc etc.
It’s stupid, really. I don’t know what I’m doing but this is shit, man. If all of the people like me leave (educated, with a voice, have the means to change things), who will be left to help in nation-building? My maid, who will be finishing her college education in 2024 with my financial help, would be able to lift her family out of poverty, since I pledged that I would be supporting her education until she graduates even if we’re going to part ways by May.
This is just like what my parents did for my nanny, who finished college, got a job at the university as a tech staff with my parents’ help. She was able to help her parents send siblings to school, went home to her province, went to school again and got a permanent position in her local government unit. She was able to send her kids to UP and both are already professionals while she is now the head of the local registry in their LGU. Not only that she was lifted out of poverty, but it had a multiplier effect so her extended family also got out of extreme poverty since she sent her siblings to school and was able to buy land for farming.
You see, small things like this make a difference. What I’m doing for my maid now is just one of the many we’re doing for our fellow countrymen. I also have a platform; I can help change things, small things, little by little.
Fuck it! I don’t know why I’m justifying to myself my decision to stay in this wretched country. I guess I’m so bothered by the opinion of others who have no idea how I was raised.
But then, my guilt towards my children is eating me up alive.
Public shaming
I will troll her until kingdom come.
You see, I used to cover her at the Philippine Competition Commission when she was still a commissioner there. She was one of my favorite commissioners to put on a hot seat during press conferences (the other one is Comm Joey Bernabe). I used to love covering both of them and she once told me that I keep them on their toes whenever I attend their presscons. She was really good and made sense. Her specialization at the UP School of Economics was health economics—everything that concerns private healthcare funding, universal healthcare, public health finance, etc.
Then she ran for congress.
She’s now swallowed by the system (or maybe there was a corrupt politician hiding in her all along) and has co-authored the bill that would create the Marcos slush fund a.k.a. the 1MDB 2.0.
What are sovereign wealth funds? These are created by states so that their excess reserves can go somewhere more productive instead of sitting in the national treasury. What states have excess funds in an age of budget deficits? Oil countries. Malaysia, Norway, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern states.
What is a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)?
A Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund or entity that is commonly established from:
- Balance of payments surpluses
- Official foreign currency operations
- The proceeds of privatizations
- Governmental transfer payments
- Fiscal surpluses
- And/or receipts resulting from resource exports
And as a public finance and macroeconomy reporter of 8+ years, let me tell you this:
- We used to log BOP surpluses but that changes month on month. I used to do magic and produce news articles just from a table of national current accounts (oh the pain of writing BOP stories)…. BUT it’s more frequent that the numbers are in ( ).
- We privatize government assets because we are always short on cash.
- We didn’t have fiscal surpluses. We never balanced our budget and the smallest budget deficit that finance reporters of my time recorded was PHP 60bn (if I remember it right) and that was before the global financial crisis. Arroyo had to backpedal on the zero-deficit plan because by 2008 our economy went shit.
- Receipts from resource exports? We don’t have OIL AND GAS to export, unlike the countries I mentioned above. Our mineral resources aren’t generating enough receipts for us to create an SWF. Indonesia has coal and nickel, while we have the low-grade variety of these minerals.
(Not well versed in govt forex operations and transfer payments as source of funds for SWF so I won’t touch on those).
Tapos obsessed na obsessed tong gobyernong to magtayo ng SWF, kala mo may excess funds tayo. HOYYYYYYYYYY we have always operated on a deficit. Kapal ng mukha netong mga to!
HOY STELLA! Slush fund ng Marcoses ang tinutulak mo. Di kami bobo.
To calm me down, I resorted to sketching this scene at the Singapore Botanical Gardens before I started editing today.
This government is driving me nuts.
I bought more frames when I was at the Mall of Asia/Ikea. Just because. If I produce a decent sketch or painting of something, maybe I can frame it and give it as a gift.
And I bought a wok as a gift to my cousin who wanted a paella pan (but I couldn’t find it.
Schadenfreude
Karma is out there to bite your ass.
This person, whom I refuse to name on this blog, is the primary mother troll who had released his troll farm on me a few years ago when I criticized a government agency (which allegedly employed him as an attack dog a.k.a. social media handler) regarding an infrastructure project bidding.
For two weeks they tried to destroy me online. Even attacked my company’s social media assets, much to the shock and confusion of our APAC and global headquarters.
I do believe the universe will be out to get you if you haven’t been nice.
My friends and I are ROFLing now.
Speaking of trolls, I once again dodged the prinicpal of these creatures by leaving the conference venue early today. I AGAIN didn’t check the program—it was only during the welcoming remarks did I learn that Marcos is supposed to speak this afternoon. 🤦♀️ So the conference delegates were told to avoid going in and out of the area by 2 pm because the Presidential Security Group needed to check and secure the premises.
I left at 11:30 am. Good thing I was able to ambush interview my targets early.
I really can’t stomach the thought of being in the same room as this thief.
I just can’t.
I have covered past presidents and sat through some of their speeches but the last two presidents… 🤬 Nope.
I quickly escaped to SM MOA (since I was just at Marriott) to write my stories, buy Christmas gifts, and then I took Skyway so I can fly back home.
Or so I thought I could get back home quickly.
It still took me two hours to get home. I left at past 3 pm, I arrived at past 5 pm. 🫠 And to think that I already used Skyway to bypass Edsa or C5 to reach QC. 😵💫
I just want to stay put in the next few days… Traffic jams are so bad that they suck the soul out of you.
All coffee/dinner with friends would have to be pushed back after Christmas. It’s just insane to be on the road these days.
Institutionalized corruption
Proposed by Sandro Marcos and his uncle, Martin Romualdez.
Approved by Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Who is the blueprint of Najib, the central figure in Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal? Najib’s wife was compared to Imelda Marcos, to give you a clue.
1MDB. OmG!
They would siphon off the retirement funds of my mom, my brother, and millions of workers who were forced to contribute to GSIS and SSS.
How dare a foreigner on my LinkedIn post say, “give it a chance.” I wanted to smack him and say, were you here when Marcos Sr destroyed the economy? Were you here when his family made the old Philippine Central Bank their personal bank account? That old central bank that the new BSP had painstakingly tried to erase to bring back credibility to the Philippine financial system? No. Then don’t say such stupid things.
It has driven me up the wall this morning. And it riles me more that opposition to this institutionalized corruption is not enough. 🤬
This economist at Natixis gets it, while my LinkedIn commenter doesn’t. 😤
I don’t know why I even bother writing this down. No one gets me anyway. No one also cares what I write about, think about, what I do…
Ah yeah. This is part of my therapy… Having conversations with myself to parse whatever is in my head to lessen anxiety.
While I was having my 2-hr massage, my brain went into a deep dive again why I was moving back to my hometown. I suddenly had doubts about its wisdom. I would be moving farther and farther from civilization. I would miss my Zennya massages. I would miss the convenience of having Grab Food and Grab car. I would miss the PHP 40 Lazada delivery fee.
My hormones are out of whack now so this may account for having cold feet very late into this stage. I’m writing another check tomorrow for my contractor. I mean hey, I would have a fully functional home by Feb, so why am I havig these thoughts?
My abdominal cramp is killing me now.
Routine
I must have been really exhausted yesterday that I didn’t know when I fell asleep and I just woke up with a child beside me.
Back to my routine after a week of chaos. Keeping checklists is essential or else I would be forgetting to do so many things.
That ring binder keeps my receipts, my monthly budget checklists, umplanned purchases, and of course, my schedule and to-do lists.
I juggle so many roles and duties, so this little thing keeps me grounded and sane. Sometimes I look like I’m absent-minded when driving; the truth is my mind is racing whenever I’m like that because I’m always thinking of the things I must do and which to prioritize. I’m two steps ahead. However, that always ends up in driving blunders 🤷🏻♀️
Speaking of schedules, get togethers have started and last Friday I had two held online. One had a theme and this time I was a willing participant because I want to be extra this year.
I had a curmudgeon ex that would think this is all silly. Good thing I’m solo now and I don’t have to suffer his opinions. It’s silly but fun.
Tomorrow I need to be in BGC for a gathering in a hotel. My car is banned so I need to get there during window hours. Face to face encounters with execs are far and between so year-end gatherings or AGMs are the only times we get to see them.
Because my weeks became out of whack due to illness and travel, I got behind my physical training. It has been a month since I last did my long distance walk and indoor exercises. I’m back to being a blimp.
I should pull my ass and push it do the UP walk today. Today.
I just want to stick this funny-sad Twitter video that embodies how truly fucked our country is right now.