Tag Archives: corruption

Chaos

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Driving along Skyway 3 from south going to direction of Nagtahan, I saw a long convoy of Philippine National Police – Special Action Forces. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

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.

This was sent to me by a friend asking if this was true.
A long convoy of Philippine National Police – Special Action Force. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

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.

LOOK: Military welcomes Andres Centino as AFP chief – again

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-What is not fake, is the fact that the AFP CS, Lt Gen Bacarro, has just been replaced by Gen Centino.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 little haul tonight from my suki UP veggie vendor. This is ridiculous. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

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

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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:

  1. 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 ( ).
  2. We privatize government assets because we are always short on cash.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Started with globs of color. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

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.

My hoard. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

And I bought a wok as a gift to my cousin who wanted a paella pan (but I couldn’t find it.

Wok not too heavy so it’s good for flipping fried rice or stir fry vegetables. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Of course, Kimchi just had to sit on it. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Institutionalized corruption

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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.

Great way to start ruining your week

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Yes, this is not a joke. 😤

The thing is under the law, confidential funds (that don’t need to be audited by the state auditor) SHOULD only be applied to intelligence funds. There are specific uses for this kind of confidential funds and SHOULD NOT be abused for other purposes, like TRAVEL. WTF are they going to use it for during their travels???

Confidential funds may also be used to pay rewards to informers; uncover or prevent illegal activities that pose a clear and present danger to the agency, its personnel and facilities; and others that may be authorized in the General Appropriations Act.

The circular provided that the conduct of confidential activities, as far as practicable, be done in collaboration with law enforcement agencies.Confidential funds may also be used to pay rewards to informers; uncover or prevent illegal activities that pose a clear and present danger to the agency, its personnel and facilities; and others that may be authorized in the General Appropriations Act.

The circular provided that the conduct of confidential activities, as far as practicable, be done in collaboration with law enforcement agencies.

Rappler.com

And because there is zero checks and balances in this government because everyone else is under the Marcos machinery (The House Speaker is Marcos Jr’s uncle, the deputy speaker is his son, the brainless Sandro Marcos, and Senate is basically a Duterte-Marcos upper chamber), what can you expect? Budgets are hardly deliberated on.

Good morning, Philippines! LIZA ARANETA MARCOS has a huge wardrobe budget.

And this is another thing that happened today:

For USD earners like me (but don’t give a fuck), this is good on a myopic level because you get more pesos on your dollar.

But for those who think about the bigger picture like me, this means that all goods and services are going to be a lot more expensive. We are a net importer of oil = transportation costs will be much higher. As it is, Grab is more expensive here now compared to Singapore or just about the same.

Double whammy! OMG!

This redounds to cost of food because our goods are transported by trucks, not trains. We are an archipelago so goods are either flown or shipped by vessels fed by oil, not LNG. We also import rice, flour, and other basic commodities. Even onion and garlic! And salt! It’s quite ironic the we are surrounded by millions of km of coastlines and yet we are importing salt!

Cost of power is also climbing because our base load power plants are fed by imported coal and diesel. As it is, gasoline is cheaper than diesel nowadays. And the Filipinos pay electricity through our noses because we pay market rate. Our power is not subsidized, unlike our neighbors. That’s why Indonesia’s inflation rate is artificial in the sense the true cost of goods and are not reflected in the prices that they pay for because its government is shouldering a good part of their expenses (from power to medicines) through state-owned enterprises that own own almost everything. How can you even have three state-owned pharmaceutical companies? Their train fares are subsidized. Just about everything is subsidized.

Anyway, I digress. The point here is, the peso is weakening at a faster rate than expected because it could not shadow the actions of the US Fed. The gap between the USTr and our own benchmark rates has widened, thus, hot money from emerging markets have fled faster. We couldn’t shadow the latest actions (and future actions of FOMC given their latest hawkish stance) because any sizeable rate hikes (like a 75-100-basis-point hike) would kill our very fragile economy now. The BSP has to prioritize the economy before tempering the sinking peso.

This faster fall of the peso will kill our exports as well. Why? Half of our exports is comprised of electronics and semiconductors. Traditionally, these exporters order raw materials (because we don’t process our own minerals like silicon, silver, gold, nickel, and copper) abroad around third quarter in preparation for the orders for Christmas (hello iPhones and iPads). With the way things are, the raw materials have become more expensive now. Then this makes the cost of manufacturing semicon and electronics more expensive = costlier exports.

So I will punch any Marcos apologist right smack on their face if they say that this is good for the economy and that Marcos is making us richer by making us earn more pesos to the dollar. 🙄 Spare me this stupidity. A former reporter (who is now a lawyer) messaged me about this forex thing and she told me that an uncle of her brother-in-law said that this is great and in any case Marcos will make things better because the Marcoses will bring out their gold stash (a.k.a. the mythical Tallano Gold) to help the Philippines. And the sad part here is he was being serious about it, my friend said. Then multiply that to the 31 million who voted for Marcos. This is the level of stupidity reigning over the country today.

Social media has made Filipinos more stupid.

AND THE FUCKTARD MARCOSES ARE ROBBING US RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES! Legalized stealing.

OMG 🤬

How can I even…

I need a drink.

On the brighter side of life, my 10-hour nilaga is stupendous!

Lots of veggies and peppercorns. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

The soup is 👌 *chef’s kiss*

I’m keeping the broth again for future dishes like pho or some egg noodle dish? Ramen? Soba? I can’t wait for my Instant Pot so I can experiment with new dishes I can cook with it.

Noise on Twitter gives birth to a TV interview

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With my reporter friend who interviewed me this morning.

So yesterday was so exhausting. It took me several days before I finished my car registration with the Land Transportation Office, at its headquarters.

I spent x number of hours queuing at LTO Main but a lot of people got stuck there and some had been going back and forth there for days (just like me, albeit at a different LTO satellite branch), which ate up productivity. In some cases these people lost income for the day/s.

Why is it taking so long?

It’s because the IT system had been going down for days. The entire LTO system has been going offline—nationwide—for several days now.

Because of this, people that had been applying for their car registration are getting stranded. The process has been/is still crawling.

This is how chaotic the LTO office had been yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Some applicants had left after spending the entire day at the LTO but I refused to budge. I didn’t leave LTO until somebody attended to my application because DAMN IT, I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WEEK NOW!

I was told that the inspection and stenciling of the serial number of my car had to be redone because it was done in another LTO office. I was like, “WTF!!! It’s not even my fault that LTO @20th Ave Cubao just packed up and left without warning to the public!”

I didn’t budge, I didn’t leave the premises until an inspector did the entire bullshit again. And I began tweeting the process, the issues, and the instances of people leaving their posts at 4 pm.

It was 4:01 pm and no one was around anymore to help us just because they couldn’t encode our papers because the “system was down”. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

One inspector said, he couldn’t do his job of doing the stenciling—his reason for being—because the people in the cubicle above didn’t say I can proceed. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Those guys just didn’t want to do their work and left their posts!

I continued to tweet and tag the Twitter account of LTO central office about my very public ordeal.

Long story short, I finished it because I was adamant at pushing for my right as a citizen.

I was so frustrated with the entire thing that I posted a video monologue of my ordeal on Instagram.

So the next day, this reporter-friend messaged me on Viber about my tweets that were forwarded to her by some LTO people because they said whatever I tweeted were true.

We chatted and agreed that she will drop by and have the interview outside my apartment—along the avenue where we’re at. I was still in my sleepwear and my reporter-friend said that I should put on makeup because this will be an on-cam thing. HAHAHA, talk about pressure.

So to sum it up:

As I said in the interview with ABS-CBN, the problem is the entire system. It was a grave problem—the issue is about the service provider. Apparently STRADCOM is no longer the IT service provider for quite some time and shouldn’t even be there (but wait, STRADCOM still has a window there!) because they were already replaced by a German IT company. But LTO says they *couldn’t* turn over the database to the new IT provider, saying it was *difficult*. So this tug-of-war between the very old IT provider and the new, no non-sense Germans is causing outages in the IT system. Which affected the whole nation because the system outages are all over the Philippines. Every LTO branch is OFFLINE!

And to us reporters, we already know why.

Of course, I couldn’t say it outright that this is caused by corruption. The very inefficient STRADCOM leaves a lot of room for fixers and cash-related items that can fall through the cracks. The rank-and-file up to the high officials get their cuts from the fixers. This is also the reason why there are a lot of dumbass drivers on the road—even those who couldn’t drive can get registered or get their licenses because of fixers.

Once the German company takes a complete hold of the IT system, the entire LTO process will be efficient and accurate. NO room for grease money. Payment system can expand beyond the cashiers of LTO offices and they can tap other payment gateways like what SSS and other government agencies do. Imagine, they couldn’t even process credit card/debit card payments; everything has to be cash basis. If the German company has settled everything, the car registration and drivers license renewal can be done under an hour. No need for long lines, no need for fixers.

DAMN IT.

In the interview, I said this process shouldn’t even take a couple of hours and this shouldn’t even be done every year. In other countries, these are done every xxx number of years and only the old vehicles should inspected regularly for road worthiness. But everything should be done online.

UNFORTUNATELY, the LTO story did not air tonight. Probably it was bumped off by more time-sensitive and mass-oriented matters like the senate hearing on rice shortage/prices and the impending increase in rice prices. I understand that it is beyond the reporter’s control since I am also in the news business and I had been with a TV network too.

My desk and new keyboard before the keycap change yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Good thing I had some distraction because I was so angry. Because my newish mechanical keyboard is so tactile and cute, I was inspired to finish my job even though I was already boiling and ready to kill.

New keycaps arrived. Something that cheered me up yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

And today, I was on a Thursday chill mode to drive away the bad jujus of the previous day.

The latest Chromecast. Photo by CallMeCreayion.com

I chose to be happy while being reasonable. This thing is only PHP 2,800 and it transformed my decade-old TV into a smart TV with all the streaming apps you can install on that pebble-like thing you call Chromecast. I upgraded my second-generation Chromecast to this one instead of buying a new smart TV that costs PHP20,000, if I’m lucky. My LG TV still works perfectly fine and I have no reason to dump it. When we transfer to my new home, I will just mount the TV on the wall and dress it up like a picture frame and have artworks stream via this device (you can choose the kind of artworks you can display). I will have a gallery wall around the old TV so it won’t be obtrusive.

The old Chromecast will be given to my mom so she’s not limited to her laptop anymore when binge-watching Netflix. She has a TV that swivels so she can watch on her bed.

Ah tomorrow, we will be chasing a lot of executives in a hotel where a conference is now ongoing. Good luck to Friday driving madness.

Exhausted

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While I was still parked at LTO

I spent x number of hours just trying to finish my car registration…Days of going back and forth several LTO offices.

We don’t deserve this bullshit.

I’ll write it down tomorrow. I’m just so damn tired today.