Nykos2

The Abrogation of the Social Contract

2011-09-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

We've always assumed that there is a Social Contract. Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his book about the origins of society, the Social Contract, the world has assumed that society does function according to terms of a social contract passed on from generation to generation over the eons. There appears to be a gene in our DNA marked "Social Contract."

This Social Contract gene mandates that society functions only with the permission of people living in it, with those people giving up some of their freedoms and resources to a government for the greater good. Society is orderly because everybody knows his or her role in it. Society provides security and peaceful existence, in exchange every member of society contributes something to society according to that person's means.

The poor contribute their labor, enabling the rich and the aspiring middle class to amass wealth that the latter two groups contribute to society to assure the continued functioning of that society. The rich and the middle class in modern societies pay the taxes that keep their government running and assuring that justice, law and order, security, peace are maintained. The poor survive on a combination of wages and handouts and refrain from robbing the rich, making war on the rich, and cursing the rich.

What happens when one sector of society shrugs and refuses to carry its load?

It started in the 1950s, when perhaps the most influential novelist-philosopher of the 20th century published her book, Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand, whose disciples have included some of the best known and respected minds of the 20th and early 21st centuries, looms large in western societies today.

Alan Greenspan, the predecessor to Ben Bernanke and perhaps Ben Bernanke's most influential teacher, is one of the notable disciples of Ayn Rand. Many Mensa (society of genius-level IQs) and Mensa wanna-be's have over the past five decades been letting out a shriek as they shrug their shoulders to shake loose the world that has rested upon those shoulders through the centuries.

Those who presumably have supported the world with their job-creating industries and their taxes have been hinting for decades now that they are no longer willing to support their world and their governments. They have let loose and have threatened to let the world go in free-fall. They are no longer willing to bear the burden imposed on them by the original Social Contract. That Social Contract is too much to bear, if you ask the collective Atlas - the rich, the geniuses, the entrepreneurs, the small businessmen who create society's new jobs.

In western societies - in America in particular - the elites have outmaneuvered the progressives, who maintain that the elites must continue to support the government and society in general, or the whole world collapses.

In Atlas Shrugged, there is the underlying assumption that when the collective Atlas - the elites - refuse to carry the world on its shoulders any further, there would be a societal realignment and a confrontation of the new challenges. The world will adjust as the collective Atlas continues to shrug from its traditional role as the world's pedestal.

In America, the rich and super-rich have managed to decrease their contributions to the government through taxes over the past decades. From an average of 30% of income paid in the form of taxes by the rich and super-rich, now that group pays on average only 18% of their income. You can google this and know this to be true.

The effect of this long-term trend of decreasing taxes paid by the rich and super-rich is that American federal, state and local governments are at or near bankruptcy.

While the incomes of the rich and super-rich have increased by some 200 percent in real terms, the incomes of the poor and middle classes have actually decreased over the past few decades.

Meanwhile, as society becomes more complex and as prices increase, making governments' budgets infinitely more difficult to balance, the rich insist that they are not willing to cover the budget shortfalls that are occurring all over God's created universe. Thus, the most important element in the Social Contract - the willingness of the more fortunate members of society to contribute sufficiently to the maintenance of that society - is no longer a tappable reserve.

The Social Contract has effectively been abrogated.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote what appears at first blush to be a brilliant column yesterday, called the Social Contract. He assumed, just as nearly everybody in America assumes, that the Social Contract is still operative. Unbeknownst to Krugman and to most people in America, the Social Contract is dead. It's abrogated, it's obsolete.

Where we are now is the post-Social Contract world. The rich have become so rich that the world they inhabit is markedly different from the world of the rich that the Great Gatsbys of America used to inhabit. It's not enough to make their first million, young people today aspire to make their first billion. Athletes and entertainers no longer dream of the million-dollar contracts. They assume that every project they enter into will produce multi-million contracts.

There is a gold rush going on, and it's not panhandlers anymore who are in the middle of the stampede. It's the rich and super-rich, the talented and super-talented. Everyone - with few exceptions - assumes that their goal in life is to make as much money as fast as possible and to keep as much of that money as the federal and local governments will allow them to keep. That is why you see most of them buying influence in government so they can wrangle from government the most pro-rich legislation that they can get.

Governments, which still function in the pre-Ayn Rand world where the assumption is that governments must take care of the needs - all needs - of modern living, continue to budget as though money in the form of tax revenues would somehow magically be forthcoming to finance governments.

They can't be any wrong-er (if that is a word). Atlas (the rich, the super-rich, the elites, the geniuses) has shrugged. The Social Contract is dead, gone, kaput, went belly-up.

The top 400 people in America have more assets than the bottom 150 million Americans. Since assets typically are income producing, you can see why the top 400 people in America should pay enough taxes on their income that support the bottom 150 million Americans. It's not even close. The top 400 people in America would like to pay taxes to support a lot of people - but not anywhere near the 150 million bottom-feeding Americans. Not even close.

That, folks, is why the federal government and the state and local governments are bankrupt or near-bankrupt. We can cut government expenditures drastically, which would exacerbate the problems confronting the poor and the lower middle classes, or we can ask the rich and super-rich to shrug a little more slowly. We can ask the rich and super-rich to ease the country into smaller and more efficient governments instead of insisting on tough-love policies that will hurt tens of millions of Americans who will be thrown out of their houses because dramatic cutbacks in governments will mean massive layoffs.

The old Social Contract is dead. After the transition and hopefully a softer landing than we seem destined to make, we will need a new one.

That, or there will be chaos. Perhaps even a second Civil War with the rich and their paid servants - who number in the millions - massed against perhaps two hundred million Americans who will not understand why the rich and super-rich are not willing to support their federal, state and local governments, which have done an excellent job in protecting the lives, properties and businesses of those rich folks.

The equivalent of an Arab spring? More like an American winter.

Bush's Many Mulligans

2011-09-04T06:19:00.000-07:00

As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I am haunted by the specter of what happened in U.S. governance over the past ten years. By now, most informed people in the world know about Japan's Lost Decade - the decade of the 90s, when the Japanese economy collapsed and nothing that the Japanese authorities did could bring it back to life.

What we don't know, and what is not generally acknowledged, is that the Bush years were probably the years when we started a downward spiral from which we have not recovered, and may not be able to recover for a long, long time.

It all started with Bush's first Mulligan. A Mulligan, as we all know, is a golf term that refers to the second chance awarded to a golfer who muffs a swing because of an unexpected startling event that occurs on the course, i.e., someone sneezing, a bird landing near the ball on the tee.

How does a Mulligan apply to 9/11? Well, Bush did not exactly get a do-over in terms of the 9/11 airline hijackings by Al Qaida terrorists. That was simply not possible, or acceptable. He got a do-over on the job of protecting America from the terrorists.

Recall that Bush had no focus on terrorism in his first seven months in office. He appointed Vice-President Cheney as head of the anti-terrorism task force, which never met in the months preceding the 9/11 attacks. When Bush got a top secret memo stating that the Al Qaida people were focused on an attack on U.S. soil, Bush ignored the memo and continued bicycling and clearing brush in his Texas ranch, where he had been on vacation during the month of August - the month immediately preceding the 9/11 attacks.

Bush was also victimized by a brilliant chess game that Al Qaida was playing. What Al Qaida did - on hindsight - was similar to the Chess Opening known as Queens Gambit. Queens Gambit is an attack in the game of chess in which the White player offers Black a pawn on the board's queen side. If Black takes the pawn, it creates an opening for White to mount a winning offensive on the king side.

Recall that during the Group of Seven meetings in July, 2011 in Milan, Italy the whole world knew that Al Qaida was poised to attack the heads of state that were meeting in that city by crashing planes into the buildings where the meetings were being held. The City of Milan closed the skies - no planes were allowed to fly - for the duration of the meetings.

No attack took place. Al Qaida's plans were widely believed to have been foiled. That turned out to be the queenside pawn that Bush accepted.

When Bush got back to the U.S. from those Group of Seven meetings in Milan, he undoubtedly felt relieved that Al Qaida's plans had been foiled. He immediately went to his ranch in Crawford, Texas for a month-long vacation. Bush still had daily briefings, but he was apparently convinced that there were no imminent threats from Al Qaida, and he pooh-poohed an August 2nd memo that urgently warned Al Qaida was still focused on an attack on U.S. soil.

A little over a month later, Al Qaida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and would have been able to attack the Capitol or the White House if the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 had not bravely sacrificed their lives to stop the terrorists that had hijacked their plane.

Normally, a President who commits such a huge blunder - especially one that cost the country nearly 3,000 innocent American lives - would have been dragged to Lafayette Square, next to the White House, and flogged like a fallen tyrant. But Bush, on the strength of a dramatic and rousing performance at Ground Zero a few days after the attacks, was given a Mulligan by a nation that was hungry for a leader who would personify their rage and who would promise them that heads would roll, that we would get our revenge, that there's hell to pay for the slaughter of nearly three thousand American citizens and nationals.

The country overlooked the fact that Bush had failed to protect the country because he had not been focused on the fight against terrorists whose enduring dream was to kill as many Americans as possible in a spectacular game-changing attack.

Bush was given another chance, and he took advantage of that chance masterfully. We Americans got visceral satisfaction out of the sustained bombing of Kabul and other Afghan cities, and later the raining of missiles on Baghdad. We killed many more Afghans and Iraqis than Al Qaida killed on that day of infamy, 9/11/2001.

The man who was AWOL in the fight against terrorists during the first seven months of his presidency was now the rallying symbol in that fight.

Bush's second Mulligan was the Tax Cuts. Bush in late 2011 already knew that the country had a massive expenditure staring in its face. There was definitely going to be a war against Afghanistan, and, unbeknownst to most Americans, also a war in Iraq. That meant that the country would need to raise taxes to finance the wars. Inexplicably, Bush still insisted that his tax cuts - which would mainly benefit the rich and super-rich - would have to proceed. His justification was that the economy needed a boost. The country was poised to go to war on two fronts, which would definitely give the economy a boost, did it still need a boost from the tax cuts? Most economists, in hindsight, do not think so.

The tax cuts were clearly a bone-headed economic policy, but in those days Bush could do no wrong. Years later, it became clear that the Bush tax cuts did nothing for the economy. They created a few jobs, they merely erased the Clinton legacy of budget surpluses "as far as the eye can see." But all was forgiven for Bush, because he was the Al Qaida fighter that the country needed.

The country's focus on the "war on terrorism" was the smokescreen for many Bush errors in judgment. The country was hemorrhaging jobs to China, India, Ireland, Mexico and other countries, but Bush's hands were handcuffed, assuming that he was inclined to do something about the hemorrhaging. He could not make waves because the biggest financiers of his two wars - and later his unfunded Medicare prescription drugs benefit - were the Chinese. He knew that America was committing economic hara-kiri by allowing factories to close plants in the U.S. and open new ones in foreign countries, mainly China, but did not use the enormous powers of his office to intervene.

Bush had painted himself into a a corner and could not do anything about the American multinationals' abandonment of America in favor of countries that paid their workers coolie wages by American standards. The country forgave him, giving him another Mulligan, because the country was aware of the huge distraction known as the Iraq and Afghan wars.

During Bush's two terms, the Republican-dominated Congress passed many bills that increased the Federal budget and ballooned the deficit, but Bush never saw the need to veto any of those budget-busting bills. Bush clearly was in the pocket of the U.S. Congress, which allowed him to spend money on the Afghan and Iraq wars off the books, meaning the expenses on those wars would not be a part of the official U.S. budget. This assured that the official annual deficits that were being recognized by Congress were $300 billion give or take. This of course, was sleight-of-hand because the federal deficit doubled during Bush's term from about $5.5 trillion when Clinton left office to about $11 trillion at the end of Bush's second term. Bush also signed TARP into law, which assured that Obama's first year would start being in the hole for close to $1 trillion. That $1 trillion would be credited to Obama since the monies would have to be spent in Obama's first year.

Bush got another Mulligan, but this time the blame was not erased; it was, rather, placed on Obama's shoulders.

How did Bush get away with all of these? I have struggled with this question over the years, finding myself in dead ends mainly. Recently, I came upon a possible explanation.

It was the Lewinsky scandals. The country was so shocked and bewildered by the Lewinsky scandals that they temporarily forgot that Clinton had brought the country into its second golden age, when life was easy, especially the part about making money.

At the subconscious level, Americans wanted to bring back the old George Bush whom they had jilted mistakenly in favor of the dashing and glib Bill Clinton in 1992. Americans longed for a leader who would not break their hearts, someone who would bring back the sense of decency and the "thousand points of light" and "gosh and golly" Americanisms of the George Bush, Sr. days. And who better to take the place of the old George Bush than his son, a vastly imperfect man at that.

This was probably the explanation for why Americans were so forgiving of George Bush, who had spent American taxpayer money like a drunken sailor, who had lied the country into a needless war in Iraq, who had allowed the Chinese to dismantle our manufacturing industry and take it all to China, who had given his friends and cronies the huge tax cuts that put the country into a trajectory towards financial ruin, whose religion of laissez-faire and deregulation had led to the Enron, Madoff and mortgage meltdown scandals.

Bush in his last two years at least had enough intelligence to realize that he had wrecked the well-oiled and beautifully running Cadillac that Clinton had handed him. Bush kept to himself, dared not show his face during the two years of campaigning leading up to the 2008 elections so as not to remind voters how a Republican - Bush - had used his dirty old hands to mash up the American economy as though it were potatoes that needed to be mashed by hand.

And so, as we count the days to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, let us finally realize that the greater tragedy was the wholesale murder of the American economy and the scuttling of America's future that occurred during the Bush years.

And let us not forget that it was us, the American people, who had kept giving Bush the mulligans that he never deserved. And that, friends, was by far a greater tragedy than 9/11.

Pulling the trigger on a Philippine Retirement - 20 years in the making

2011-08-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

I have this ongoing conversation with lifelong friends about my plan to move back to the Philippines in 2013, when my 12-year-old son graduates from grade school and starts his high school career.

I've been planning my Philippine retirement since 1992, the year I finally took a trip back home after a 25-year absence. Finally in a position to move back to the Philippines in 2007 - after my wife and I had sold our house in South Orange, New Jersey and converting most of our assets to cash and marketable securities - we decided instead to move to Las Vegas, close to where our daughter, Natasha, was going to college in Los Angeles. We felt that the 6000 miles that would separate us from Natasha would be problematical because Natasha needed us to be around during her critical college years.

I recently broadcast my intentions to my friends, who are concerned that I may be making the wrong move, that I should do some serious homework before I implement my plan.

Here's the email letter from Fritz Reith, a friend I grew up with at La Salle College, the school run by the Christian Brothers, the same Christian Brothers who operate a winery in Napa Valley, California and many schools and universities in the U.S. and all over the world.

HI Chay,

In my feeble mind I was composing a short letter to you about ...'going back home'.....we all who were born there & lived & went to school there, have an undeniable attachment in our hearts & minds...to that country....a self evident fact.

My note to you was simply going to say, if you feel so strongly about going back, simply reverse your mind set ,ie go back (dip your toe in the water) before jumping in....go to all the places, experience all the things you didn't, take your time to say hello again (maybe at least three months) to mother country. This is instead of asking yourself & loved ones...shall I pull the trigger? A safer
alternative....No? The time you have invested in your "new" country has been, I would imagine, a source of personal pride in your achivements & a good feeling...not to mention having a certain sense
of security....medically,politically,personal safety...etc...I could go on...

However, I did not know you had a 12 year old son.....this changes things obviously. I need hardly say that it comes down to the fundamentals within yourselves....do you want him to experience the
Pinoy experience? This will take some years....maybe all of the time you have left? Then what? Dissatisfied? Going back?

I shall stop now, realising that maybe I may have stepped over the personal privacy bar.

All the best, Fritz

This was my reply to Fritz:

Hi Fritzi,

My son is potentially the biggest stumbling block. I have often broached the subject of him doing his high school in the Philippines and each time he adamantly refuses to even entertain the thought.

I am going on the theory that we parents know best. Let me give you an example. While still living in South Orange, New Jersey, our neighbors across the street told us about their son blaming them for not insisting that the son continued with his piano lessons. The son - who had reached the age of 25 - told them: "You should have forced me to study piano. I was a child, what did I know? Now, I'm trying to play the piano but it's too late for me. I just can't focus anymore."

My own experience with my daughter, who is now 23, is similar. When she was 14 my wife and I enrolled her in Mount St. Mary High School, an all-girls school that had an excellent reputation. She had already been in that new school for three weeks but she was still miserable. She judged her classmates to be stuck up and spoiled, her phone message on her cell phone cried for help because she felt she was a prisoner in a school run by nuns.

Seeing how miserable she was, we transferred her back to the public high school where most of the students she had grown up with in South Orange were going. She liked school again and flourished socially. But, the public high school, being co-educational, was mass distraction. She quickly became interested in boys, started entertaining thoughts of boyfriends, her grades suffered a bit, and her discipline went kaput.

I am now convinced that she would have been much better off if she had stayed in Mount St. Mary High School. My daughter is not blaming me for her grades going to pot, but I'm blaming myself.

Kids really don't know what is best for them. They know what they like at the moment, but they have no perception of what is best for them long run.

Las Vegas public high schools are just like most high schools in America in one sense. There are serious students - mostly Asians - and slack-offs everywhere. All of them spend countless hours playing video games. They dress funny, go around with shoe laces untied, and disrespect their elders.

If we remain in Las Vegas through Paul's high school years, he will surely go to the public high school near our house - a long city block away from the main entrance of Rhodes Ranch, the guard-gated community where we live. In a more urgent sense, Las Vegas high schools are different from most American high schools. Las Vegas public high schools are some of the worst in the nation. There's an excellent Catholic high school within three miles of where we live - Bishop Gorman High School - but Paul has already told us he is not going there, even if he is admitted. My sense is that this is something Paul would take a strong principled stand on.

And so I'm faced with this dilemma: do I enroll him in a Las Vegas public high school which I already know has lower standards than the average American high school, or do I take him to the Philippines, where La Salle, Ateneo, Xavier, U.P. High (which is called differently now) can offer him an education that in my experience is perhaps equal to the best in the world? And at the same time would teach him about his heritage, his Filipino-ness, and perhaps give him a Christian education that he hasn't had since he's a product of public schools in New Jersey and Las Vegas? To me it's a no-brainer.

The only possible hitch is whether he can adapt to the Philippines weather-wise, or whether he can recover quickly enough from the all-but-certain initial culture-shock.

We have enrolled him in Kumon, which is an international tutoring service for math and English. Paul's math, which was only average, is now above average. His English has always been exceptional, so we feel we don't need him to do the second part - English tutoring. By the time he graduates from grade school (in 2013) he will be way above average in math. He will be ready for La Salle - or Xavier, or U.P. High.

As for me, I'd be a happy sonofagun in the Philippines. I've been taking vacations in the Philippines and each time it's for either one month or three weeks. I know I'm going to like it there. My wife too would enjoy living there since she still has so many friends and ex-schoolmates in the Philippines.

And, if we live in the Philippines she will no longer have to work. Here in the U.S. she has to work because we have become so used to an above-average lifestyle and such a lifestyle is very expensive here. She doesn't have to work in the Philippines, but if she decides to, she's a CPA, an alumnus of both La Salle and SGV (Sycip, Gorres and Velayo) and has great connections. She may be able to set up an accounting practice, specializing in due diligence reports for companies that are contemplating going public. She has experience in that area and other accounting areas as well.

But, like I told her, she will work only if she wants to, not because she needs to, and only if an offer that she cannot refuse comes along. She is 51, at her prime, and all her friends are at their prime and in high leadership positions in Philippine industry and commerce.

With her not working, we will be able to take frequent trips together. Right now, I often travel alone because she works and cannot go on trips with me. That would change immediately once we reach the Philippines.

I know I can afford to maintain two houses - one in Las Vegas and one in metro Manila. Heck, if Michel Lhuillier can afford to maintain 37 houses - all large, modern and new houses - I think I can afford to maintain two.

Going back to my 25-year-old daughter, Natasha. My hope is that she will move with us to the Philippines. She is a fashion designer, went to the same school that Michel Lhuillier's world famous daughter went to - Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising - and I am convinced that Natasha will do very well in Manila. And, who knows, maybe in all of Asia?

She is on her way to New York to become the Creative Director and fashion designer of a store in New York's world-famous Soho district. The store, called Playing Mantiss, is owned by her aunt, my wife's sister. It will be her stepping stone to the big fashion design houses in New York. My daughter has of course no intention of moving to the Philippines, but what she thinks is best for her is not necessarily what we her parents think is best.

Thanks for your concern, Fritzi.

Chay

PS We're still two years away from this Philippine retirement. A lot can happen between now and then.

Fast Forward to Hillary

2011-08-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

I was one of those Democrats who campaigned for Hillary till the last moment, so maybe I am really biased against Obama. I am, sadly - sadly because the country has had to suffer - vindicated because my greatest fears about Obama have been confirmed. I felt then and am convinced now that Obama has held this narcissistic view that being the first black President would be his greatest accomplishment and that he was interested in making history primarily for the benefit of African-Americans and only secondarily - though a close second - solving the country's problems. In retrospect, he probably felt that the country's problems were insoluble and therefore it was not his job to solve them and that successive presidencies after his would complete the job. He in retrospect never saw himself as another FDR.

It seems crystal clear now, according to our 20-20 hindsight, that he did not understand the gravity of the problems that confronted Americans and how he could use the power of his presidency to solve a big chunk of those problems. He may have understood the statistics, having a full grasp of those statistics, but he did not seem to know in his heart what the economic problems did to the psyche of average Americans. This is why he did not act immediately, with the urgency of FDR's fight against the Great Depression. He did not seem to know that the people being hurt the most by the economic meltdown were African-Americans, 92% of whom had voted for him in the 2008 elections.

Obama should have multi-tasked, fighting for his health care reform and solving the jobs crisis at the same time. Instead, he chose to merely throw money at the unemployment problem and concentrated on his history-making health care reform. All that time, the much-respected columnist of the New York Times, Bob Herbert, was imploring him to treat the unemployment problem as his version of FDR's World War II, yet Obama's response was only a professorial acknowledgment that there was a huge unemployment problem plus speeches about the need to solve that problem. When he noticed that Republicans were blocking his half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, he did not go to the American people and denounce the obstructionist Republicans in Congress.

Hillary has always struck me as a bulldog who won't let go once her jaws are locked on a problem. She has always been a problem solver and a clear, decisive thinker. It's what came out of the Senate when she served there. It's what came out of the Lewinsky scandal, when she decisively sided with Bill and not let her emotions rule the day.

Obama's governance has been marked by his obsession with writing history. He refused to go after those who lied us into the Iraq war and those who created the mess in our economy, intent on creating a historic post-partisan legacy. He didn't much care what kind of health care plan came out of Congress, he only wanted to make sure that there was a health care plan that history would credit him for. He seemed to be uninterested in the details of the stimulus bill that he signed, 1/3 of which consisted of tax cuts that he was ambivalent about. He simply made sure there was a stimulus bill and that he would be credited by history as the President who stopped the economy from sliding into the ravine.

Obama does not seem to have any patience for details and is terrified of conflict. His 2004 speech before the Democratic convention said it all. "There are not red states or blue states, there is only the United States of America."

This was received by Americans gleefully and wholeheartedly and Obama got rave reviews. It was also naive. It was like Bush standing on the decks of the U.S.S. Lincoln and declaring "Mission Accomplished."

Obama was very, very wrong. The fact was, there were blue states and red states, and in many of those states, there were blue towns and red towns, blue communities and red communities, blue families and red families, blue brothers and red brothers.

The great divisions that had riven the country would not suddenly disappear just because we wished them to disappear. Obama, incredibly, did not have the foresight to know that his election into the Presidency, should that happen one day, would exacerbate the deep divisions in the country. He did not seem to know that his ascension to the Presidency would turn red states into deep red and blue states into deep blue.

How can a man so eloquent, so intelligent, so celebrated as a brain-iac be so naive and/or innocent?

The answer may lie in the fact that Obama is not really a black man. He is only half-black. In fact, psychologically he may have thought of himself as white when he was growing up under the care of his Caucasian grandparents in Hawaii. I am speculating, I know, but it is entirely possible that Obama did not grow up as a black boy. He probably did not know he was black unless he looked at himself in the mirror. And even while looking in the mirror he may not have seen a black boy.

This is key. If he did not know that he was a black boy and later a black man, he would not be aware of the deep hostility that many Americans, especially in the deep South and the heartland, hold for people of color. And if he in fact knew of this hostility, he seemed not to be aware of the intensity of this hostility in the first two years of his Presidency. He seemed to think that the opposition's wall of defiance had been erected because of policy differences only and not because of his being a black man with a black wife and a black family.

I think now in his third year he is fully aware of the racial roots of the livid hostility that permeates the air in most gatherings where the opposition talks about him. The problem, however, is that he is not fully equipped psychologically to handle the ferocity of the hatred and insults hurled in his direction at every turn.

"Kenyan," "Socialist," "Commie," "Muslim apostate" - these are just some of the epithets that white racists are using to diminish him. And yet, incredibly, he thinks that his best response is not to give a response, or at best a tepid response. Or a discussion of policy.

At a time when there is a war for the hearts and minds of Americans, Obama's followers are being led by a man who doesn't think there is a war. He thinks that the root causes are just policy differences and therefore the conflict could be won by exceptionally good policy. He did not think, initially, that the Tea Party-led Republican House members, for example, were willing to bring the whole economy down if the demands of those Tea Party Republicans were not met. He thought that if he crafted policy that was reasonable, the Tea Party-ers would come to their senses.

He was wrong and the country now suffers because America is perceived as being led figureheadedly by a leader who just doesn't get it. The country in fact is now led by a minority Tea Party that doesn't reflect what Americans visualize for the country, but who is willing to destroy America in order to rebuild it, an America that would rise from the ashes of their own destruction in the image of the Tea Party movement. Shades of American Vietnam policy - napalm bombing of whole villages in South Vietnam by American forces so new communities would someday spring up and be like model cities that the American military had envisioned.

A brilliant piece of psychoanalysis came out in the New York Times today which encapsulates what Obama's calculations and/or character flaws might be that have led to his continued insistence that the best policy is to compromise with his uncompromising opponents who are intent on his destruction and character assassination.

The author - Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University and the author of "The Political Brain - The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation" - offers lucid conjectures on why Obama is Obama. It would be a crime not to repeat the author's words, digest them and peruse them in this, the post-mortem on the Obama presidency, which will either end in January 2013, or virtually earlier if he decides to become a non-factor, stepping aside for a suddenly resurrected Hillary.

"The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

"... Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

"... (Obama's) stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.

"A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

"But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks."

What an indictment. The problem for Obama is that the people who are saying these and similar things about him are not his opponents - they are his supporters and people who voted for him in 2008 and are no longer inclined to vote for him next year.

I can't see any future for Obama in these few months leading up to the elections in 2012 - does the election season start in December this year or in January next year or have the general elections already started? (Obama versus an unidentified Republican) - and he would do everybody a big favor by simply getting out of the way and letting the Clintons try to salvage the Democratic Presidency that is still the country's hope against the abuses and terroristic tactics of the Tea Party-led Republicans.

I suspect that there will be a growing grass-roots movement to encourage Hillary to step into the primaries. But, life is long, with many twists and turns. Obama can still salvage his unraveled presidency by issuing an executive order that declares United States debt as a sacred promise that America will always honor. His executive order will abolish the debt ceiling and declare that debt ceilings are unconstitutional since the 14th amendment clearly states that all legitimately acquired public debts of the U.S. shall be honored. This would effectively prevent another debt ceiling debate in the future and reassure the world that the U.S. will never, ever default on its obligations.

The resulting debate would put Obama front and center once more in the public's consciousness, resurrecting his image as a consequential President and not as a spectator in the history that is now being made by Tea Party Republicans.

The only hitch to this grand design is that Obama would not do this. It will require boldness and a willingness to gut it out, to stick it out the way Bill Clinton did during the impeachment hearings and the subsequent trial in the Senate. Obama does not have it in him to be subjected to threats and actual Congressional deliberations on his impeachment. Obama thinks his job is to be re-elected and any constraints on his electioneering are out of the question.

And he still wishes to this day that people would just get along.

This is why Democrats will increasingly call for Hillary to come forward and claim the Presidency which should have been hers to begin with had the country not been bamboozled by an eloquent but vastly inexperienced and untested Obama. Remember the 3:00 a.m. phone call that Hillary had warned all of us about?

The meaning of meaning

2011-06-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

While driving my son to school one morning he asked me: "Dad, what is the meaning of meaning?"

I hesitated, reflected on his question for a while. He thought he had stumped me.

"Meaning," I finally said, "is what words stand for. It is the idea or object that is being characterized by the use of a word or group of words."

I knew I was losing him. Finally, I said, "meaning is the idea or object that we want to express or convey whenever we use a word or group of words."

Didn't help either.

I knew my son actually knew the meaning of "meaning." He just wanted to know if I really had an answer for his every question.

Since that morning, I have thought off and on about his question. What, indeed, is the meaning of "meaning"? I googled the word. Here's what I found:

There's a book titled "The Meaning of Meaning," authored by C.K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The late I. A. Richards just happened to be one hell of a literary critic. The book is a classic semanticists' delight, something worthy of perhaps the greatest semanticist of the English language, the late S. I. Hayakawa.

Nothing will beat a dictionary definition, however, because every dictionary definition takes into account all the known meanings of a word.

From Dictionary.com
mean·ing
[mee-ning] Show IPA
–noun
1.
what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import: the three meanings of a word.
2.
the end, purpose, or significance of something: What is the meaning of life? what is the meaning of this intrusion?
3.
Linguistics .
a.
the nonlinguistic cultural correlate, reference, or denotation of a linguistic form; expression.
b.
linguistic content ( opposed to expression).
–adjective
4.
intentioned (usually used in combination): She's a well-meaning person.
5.
full of significance; expressive: a meaning look.

Like most words, the word "meaning" has many uses, for various and distinct purposes. One profound philosophical point made about meaning comes from an author who has written about his impression of the book, The Meaning of Meaning. The author, Em Griffin, writes about an encounter with one of his students in a Philosophy class he was teaching.

The student, named Brenda, asked the professor: "Sir, my boyfriend wants me to put out physically to prove that I love him. Does this mean that he loves me?"

The author/professor relates how that question stumped him. Finally, he decided to answer the student's question with his own question: "Before we answer that question, let us first know your definition of "love."

The author goes on to say that the meaning of a word is not in the word, it is in the person that is using it.

What a word means is always what the user of that word intends for it. Words do not have meanings independent of the person using it.

When a priest asks you "What is the meaning of life," you know what he is driving at. You know that he wants you to think that earth is your temporary home and that the after-life is your true destiny.

When a college professor asks the same question, the professor's intent will depend on the professor and his state of mind at the time he asks the question. Is the professor an inspirational leader? Is he an agnostic? An atheist? Is he an existentialist? Or perhaps, like Camus, an absurdist?

The meaning is in the person using the word, not in the word itself.

"She called me a slow poke," said Donald. "Does she mean I move too slowly in our relationship, or does she mean it takes me forever to climb the four flights of stairs to her apartment?"

"What do you mean I don't do anything around the house? I take care of the laundry, I clean the pool, I take care of our child after school." The husband is clearly frustrated that his wife does not think he is doing anything around the house, when he has all these chores that he has just enumerated.

"Your dad means well," the mother assured her teen-aged daughter, "he is just having a hard time expressing himself to you right now because he sees your ear-rings and the rings on your eye-brows and he wonders where his little baby girl had gone."

"I mean... I mean," the mail-room clerk stammers, not sure that he is expressing his thoughts clearly to his boss.

"The boy carries your books for you when you get out of your car and walk uphill on your driveway towards your house. He mows your lawn, he feeds your cat when you're away. Does any of that mean anything to you?" asked Maggie's friend Cheryl. "That's just it," Maggie tells Cheryl. "I don't want this fourteen-year-old doing all these things for me. I can't reciprocate, I'm not his mother."

"There are dozens of mosques in New York, it's just one more mosque," says the Imam. "Yes, but none of the mosques are a stone's throw from Ground Zero. Think of what a mosque that close to Ground Zero would mean to the grieving families," says Giuliani.

A word's meaning, the meaning of an action, or a gesture, is often determined by context and by the dynamics of the relationship between the sender of the message and its recipient. To a loving couple, a word such as "pest" could be a term of endearment. It could mean that the man is a horny sonofagun.

And so, my dear son, if you are reading this blog post, the meaning of meaning is the thought that the communicator wishes to convey, and not necessarily what most people think the word or group of words means.

Channeling S. I. Hayakawa: Help!

Plunder and the Philippines

2011-06-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

1972 was a special year for me. It was the year I was supposed to go back to the Philippines. It was the year I was to reclaim my destiny. Five years. Five years was all I had given myself. Seattle was lovely, especially in the Summer and in the Fall. But it was not my home. My home was 6000 miles away - on the biggest island in an island chain in the Pacific. I had given myself five years in my new home, Seattle, and then I would go back - my family in tow - and make something of my life. I was convinced that someday I would be an important man in the Philippines, but to accomplish that I needed to go back.

It was getting a bit late. I was already 31, but I knew that if I was too old, I was only too old by about five years. And what's five years compared to the rest of a man's life?

Psychologically I was already back in the Philippines. I wrote one of my childhood friends that Seattle had become too toxic for me. I resented going to Dick's Burgers to picnic on burgers and french fries. My taste buds yearned for tinapa (smoked fish) and salted eggs mixed with sliced tomatoes. To me, that was a picnic. Not those french fries. Not those burgers. And I wanted to eat fried rice and tuyo (salted fish) on the mornings.

Everybody who knew me knew that my ultimate goal was to go back to the Philippines. I told my bosses that, I told my friends, I told my wife.

Tragedy struck. The legitimately elected (elected by landslide) President, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law, jailed all his political opponents, including the student leaders at the University of the Philippines and other universities. Some of the jailed leaders were my friends.

1972 was a bad year to go back. 1973, 1974, etc. were not a good time to go back. But my soul was already back in the Philippines, stuck and in limbo. I had already lost interest in forging a career in the U.S. I went through a string of jobs - good jobs, because I was terrific in job interviews - but I was unhappy.

I had what in retrospect was a delusion of grandeur. I thought of myself as a man of destiny, that I had no business being in the U.S., that my true home was the Philippines.

But I could not make it my real home because I did not trust myself. I was convinced that I would eventually end up in jail if I went back because I was not one who would keep my mouth shut if I saw injustice being done to my fellow Filipinos.

So I suppressed my dream as the calendar swiftly turned, day after day, season after season, year after year. Till I woke up one day and decided that America was my home and there was no going back.

Though I was never a victim of Marcos' atrocities, I was in a very real sense also his victim. He robbed me of my dream. It was a dream that would not be replaced by any other dreams for many years. I walked around, defeated without having even started. A man with no dreams.

1986 was prolonged delirium. The country finally unchained. By a woman, by a housewife. Cory Aquino was the widow of a murdered hero. Greatness appeared to be in store for a people long neglected but ever exploited. By outside colonizers. By the elites in society. By nearly everyone who could afford to buy a plane ticket to take one to this island chain. The whole world had watched the toppling of a hated and despised dictator, his dowager wife, his palace guards. The whole world learned from Filipinos how to topple dictators and dictatorial regimes. Shortly after, the Berlin Wall came down amid a cacophony of hammers. The Iron Curtain was shredded. Even China was taken to the brink by peaceful demonstrators, who had molded their tactics after the People Power revolution in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, did the Filipino people really win? The hero's widow proved powerless against the mutineers. Except for top brass, the military never really accepted her and let her know in many different ways. The widow was beleaguered, besieged by her many foes. To add insult, there were rumors that her relatives and cronies were as pigs in a sty.

The old power structures during the Marcos years started streaming back into the Philippines. They were back in force, reclaiming the wealth, prestige and power they had enjoyed. Even the highly successful Fidel Ramos presidency would not prevent the gradual return of Marcos elements back into Philippine elite society.

By the time the actor-turned-politician, Joseph Estrada, was elected President, the whole Marcos clan and nearly all his cronies, were back in power. The message to the Filipino people? It's OK to plunder the government, to murder the people, to steal from political opponents because the Filipino people are very forgiving. Either that, or they have no real power. Or they are too stupid to know how to use their inherent power as the supreme ruler of their land.

So the Joker, Estrada, himself plundered the treasury, fearing no downside. Sure enough, though convicted of plunder, Estrada was pardoned by his successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Arroyo, herself, feared no prosecution because she owned the wheels of justice. The Ombudsman was a classmate of her husband's at the Ateneo and would never prosecute her if she was caught stealing from the blind to give money to her friends in the illegal numbers business. Arroyo felt she was above the law, and by extension, her husband too.

Now comes President Noynoy Aquino, the hero's and the widow's son. He was swept into office by the accumulation of rage and hope of a people that was fed up with all the far-too-imperfect, far-too-fallen leaders who had masqueraded as the people's saviors. All the while focused on the country's meager resources. How these leaders went about appropriating for themselves a percentage of all major government contracts was a study in genius. There are many different ways powerful people could make money on government contracts, and all the leaders knew all those ways.

The jury is still out on President Noynoy. So far all we have seen is shadow boxing. No prosecutions, only threats of prosecution. No judgment day, only talk of the people exacting revenge upon their exploiters.

One very disturbing and maybe very telling indication that President Noynoy's administration may yet be same old, same old was the recent appointment of Vice-President Binay to head the committee to decide on the request of Senator Bongbong Marcos - yes, the late dictator's son - to bury his late father with full military honors at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery for Heroes). Because of the uproar over this suggestion, VP Binay has made a counter-offer, to bury the late dictator not in the Cemetery for Heroes but in an Ilocos Region cemetery with full military honors.

What!...? Full military honors? Is this how dictators are treated by countries with a conscience and with high standards of morality?

The late Marcos, to begin with, was granted asylum in an island paradise - Honolulu - while most other dictators ended up in unglamorous cities to live out their retirement years. Cities such as Riyadh, Cairo, Asuncion, Paraguay, Karina,Zimbabwe, Santiago, Chile. Marcos, of all the dictators, ended up in paradise to live out his retirement years. And now that he is dead, he is to be given full military honors?

Ano siya, sinuswerte? (What? He's the luckiest man alive - or dead.)

I don't know VP Binay personally. I know of him, that he was a good administrator while serving as Makati's mayor. But this suggestion to bury Marcos with full military honors - even if it's done in Ilocos and not at the Cemetery for Heroes - is a travesty. It makes a mockery of the People Power revolution that toppled Marcos in 1986. It sullies the memory of those who had been murdered by Marcos's secret police and military. It sends the wrong message to the people: that Filipinos are so forgiving that the man who had ruled with an iron fist, had plundered the Philippine treasury, had murdered and incarcerated so many innocents, deserved forgiveness.

Why did Binay even think of making that suggestion? Was he gunning for national reconciliation? Is reconciliation more important than the Filipino soul? The Filipino soul had been wounded by this man, Marcos, and no reconciliation is possible without the continuing and proper punishment meted out to this man. Others have suggested that the family of Marcos and his cronies should be barred from leadership positions going forward. I'm not getting into that, since that is an altogether different question. Suffice it to say that if Marcos is buried incognito, with no honors, that should take care of the future of the Marcos children. None of them should ever be allowed to ascend to the Presidency and a Marcos incognito burial will get that done.

Reconciliation is not possible without justice. The relatives of Marcos' victims have not been adequately compensated. Many have received no compensation. No apology has been received. Marcos's heirs and cronies are high-flying and thumbing their noses at the country. Meanwhile, a greater percentage of Filipinos are dirt-poor and in desperate straits than before Marcos became President. Our economy is in a state of arrested development while our Southeast Asian neighbors are overachieving, thanks in large part to the lack of development - even negative development - during the Marcos years.

And now Binay is suggesting that this Marcos guy deserves full military honors?

This, folks, is why the government's treasury is being plundered. President Noynoy will probably break the chain of Presidents who have seen the government treasury plundered, but when he is gone and someone else (Binay, Roxas, etc.) is in power, the treasury will be plundered again. Why? Because the message is clear: if you are president, you can plunder, murder, pillage and maybe even rape all you want and the Filipino people will forgive you. You might even be given full military honors when you die.

And this is the country I had dreamed of going back to, for which I had sacrificed my early years in America? What was I thinking?

Oh, but I will go back. I will keep going back. Probably not for full-time retirement, but for significant chunks of time. It is not the Filipino people's fault that they are gullible or too forgiving. Filipinos have known only exploitation. It's already in their genes. They will be exploited, fooled, their treasury plundered, and they will still smile and shriek and sing the Wow-wow-wee theme song. They are a lovable people and easy to please. They seek to be pleased. With the slightest compliment. With the minutest of favors.

This is why plunder will always be open for business.

Adrift in an Ocean of Troubles

2011-05-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

I asked a friend recently if she was interested in what was going on in the Philippines and was stunned by her reply. The woman, who at one time occupied some of the highest government positions in the country, confessed to me that she held out very little hope that the country would be able to emerge from the ocean of troubles that smite it constantly.

She is not alone. Many of my friends - retirees all - do not want to retire in the Philippines even though it would make good economic sense because they feel that the country, at least in the foreseeable future, will not prove equal to its many challenges.

Even leaders of industry in the Philippines seem to think that it will be a cold day in hell before the Philippines starts functioning like an efficient Tiger. One very successful Filipino industrialist and businessman told me, quite frankly, that it will take 500 years before the Philippines can emerge as one of the South East Asian tigers.

Why is there so much pessimism about the prospects for our country?

I'm sure a good part of the reason is that we seem unable to produce first-rate leaders. With the exception of perhaps Fidel Ramos and Ramon Magsaysay, all Philippine presidents since independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946 have been damaged goods with feet of clay.

The Filipino people elected Benigno (Noynoy) Aquino last year amid so much pomp and high expectations that even if he did very well it was almost impossible for him to live up to the people's hopes and wishes. And he hasn't exactly governed well. In fact, his administration is adrift, seemingly unable to decide which gargantuan problems it would tackle first.

Why can't we find good inspirational leaders who can hit the ground running, taking the country where it must go?

I noticed a copy of my book, Out of the Misty Sea We Must, on my bedside table last night and chanced upon the last chapter in that book. That chapter, which is also titled Out of the Misty Sea We Must, perhaps has the answer for why the Philippines is a perennial candidate for membership in the Union of Failed States, or UFS.

The chapter is quite long, so I'm copy-pasting only the relevant parts.

Chapter 19: Out of the Misty Sea We Must

A friend recently commented that all the Philippines needs is more time. The U.S., after all, took more than a hundred years before it found its stride and galloped toward an economic development and boom that had never before been witnessed on earth. A lot of countries, such as Australia, Canada, South Korea, Japan, China, India, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and others took a long time to mature and got on the road to economic and political development only after many tortuous years.

Based on the experiences of those countries, does it necessarily follow that the Philippines – if given more time to develop – will eventually hit its stride and become a first world country?

To answer this question, we have to ask: Does the Philippine experience share the same characteristics as the American experience, or that of Australia, Canada, Brazil and other countries? Do we have anything in common with America other than our love for everything Hollywood?

The U.S. and the Philippines both revolted from major world powers to erect their own self-determining independent governments. But, there is one very important distinction. In the case of the U.S., the rebels were the same people as the tyrants they revolted from. The American patriots were the same racial stock as the Red shirts they drove away.

In the Philippines’ case, it was not Spaniards in the Philippines who revolted against Spain. It was the natives, more specifically the educated natives. The country was founded not by westerners but by the native populations who had never experienced being citizens of a modern country.

The Australian experience is similar to that of the U.S. The Australians are mainly people who came from Britain and who eventually cut their umbilical cord. Australia was not founded by the Aborigines, which were the native nations in Australia before the white man arrived. The same was true of Canada. Canadians are mainly British and French people who gained their independence from Britain and France. They are not descendants of American Indians. Brazil was founded by Portuguese and black immigrants, not the Indians who are the original owners of the land, and who still live in the interior Amazon regions.

Philippine independence is remarkably independence from a foreign people. The same is true of African independence. When the world’s powers – England, France, Germany, Belgium and others – were driven out of Africa, the people who took over were native Africans, not descendants of citizens of the foreign powers.

This is key. America did not miss a beat when it separated from Britain because Americans were the same people as the British. Americans simply did what they would normally have done if they had remained subjects of the British throne. Americans also had in their possession the advanced culture and thinking habits of their oppressors. They had the genetic memory of an advanced civilization when they founded the new country that the world now lovingly or disgustedly call America.

The economic development that was going on in Britain and the rest of Europe was also going on in America, though it was refined and Americanized further by the introduction of slave labor in the large plantations.

The Philippines and African countries were exploited unabashedly by their colonizers. Filipinos were intentionally kept ignorant by the Spanish authorities for fear that Filipinos would realize that they were being exploited and would revolt. Only the Filipinos in the elite class became educated, with literacy levels remaining dismally low.

The Americans who came after the Spaniards left introduced an American-style public school system that tried to educate the masses and lift their standard of living. This American initiative was successful, but only to a point. The Americans were never able to erase the effects of centuries of educational deprivation that the Filipino people had been subjected to. While literacy rates have improved dramatically, it is by and large basic-level literacy. People think in oversimplified terms, which is why they cannot change their political, economic and religious systems if their life depended on it.

Filipinos lag way behind their southeast Asian and Asian neighbors in quality of education, which probably explains why the Philippines is underperforming economically in a region where most countries are overachieving.

The quality of a democracy is determined by the educational level of its citizens. A quantum leap in the Philippines’ educational system will improve the quality of democracy there and this will lead to a dramatic improvement in governance. This in turn will lead to a decrease in corruption levels, which will then lead to an increased willingness on the part of the people to pay their income taxes. If people have assurance that their taxes will be used to educate their children and not line the pockets of their corrupt politicians, tax collections will increase dramatically.

WE MUST FIND THE RIGHT TRACK

We got to where we are almost by trial and error. We had never had any experience being one nation. The pale faces cobbled together a group of island paradises and handed it to us saying, “here, this is your country now, do with it as you please.”

We did not start out like America, or Australia, Canada or New Zealand, so we should not expect to get the same results that they did. We, rather, started out like the Congo Republic, or many of the small and inconsequential African states who were freed from exploitation by their white masters and let loose in an ocean of uncertainty and chaos.

We cannot therefore expect that eventually we will become like America, or Australia, or Canada. The track we’re on will probably lead us to where the African nations are. Or, if our population doubles as expected, to where Indonesia was before its recent resurgence.

Giving ourselves more time when we know we are on the wrong track means that eventually we will be so deep in that un-enchanted forest of our own creation and may sink in the bog of our Malthusian existence.

We must get off that beaten path that has led us to where we are and find the right path. It will mean that we will listen only to our own hearts. We must not be captives of the thinking processes that the IMF’s, the World Banks, the CBCP and others have programmed into our brains.

We must do all the thinking, all the imaginings, all the statue wrecking, all the creation ourselves and set sail with the confidence that we alone are capable of thinking of what is good for us – not for the world. The world has led us to where we are, just as it has led much of Africa where it is. It is time we wrest back control of our fortunes from the rest of the world.

We must find that solution that makes sense for us, even if this solution causes our patrons to abandon us. No one will shed tears if we as a nation fail. Failure has only one author and success has many fathers.

If we succeed in this venture to get on the right track, to build a new Philippines, the whole world will rejoice with us and claim that they too had fathered our child.

We already know that we have been wrong all these years, that all our assumptions have been wrong. That the trust we have placed on our masters – including the Church that has stifled progressive thinking in our country – has been misplaced and undeserved.

We have to ready our boat now. It is morning, and we must set sail on our own and be masters of our ship.

Out of the misty sea we must.

An "Of the people, by the people and for the people" campaign

2011-05-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

It all came to me in a dream. For much of the week I had been thinking of how the problems that confront my United States of America can best be solved, using common sense.

I was thinking along these lines when I fell into a deep slumber after a night of ballroom dancing. I was dog tired. In an instant I was dreaming.

I had seen the movie Inception and was convinced that people could, with practice, change their realities inside their dreams.

This, as far as a I can recall, was the content of my dream:

I arrived at the White House gate in a limousine - not clear how I got into the limo. The driver was flashed an OK sign to drive deeper into the White House grounds and I was dropped off at a special entrance. A couple of suits met me and motioned me to an elevator where the two men accompanied me. When I came out of the elevator, a nice-looking woman, someone I wouldn't mind ballroom dancing with, took over. She asked how I was and I said fine. I told her it was all so unreal to me.

When we got to a heavy lacquered door, she opened it for both of us. I was startled when I saw four figures inside what I immediately recognized as the Oval Office. The President was sitting behind his desk, while Senator Reid and former speaker Nancy Pelosi sat in the sofa and lounge chair. I did not recognize the man who was standing beside President Obama, but after the computer in my brain sorted out the features of his face I decided it was the Chief of Staff, Richard Daley.

"Mr. President," began the young lady in a smart green dress, "this is Cesar F. Lumba of Las Vegas, Nevada. If you don't need me for anything else, I'd like to go back to my office."

She left as I stood frozen in front of the President with whom I have at best a lukewarm personal relationship. I like his policies on national security, but I am thoroughly disappointed in his economic policies and his tendency to give up the bank in his compromises with Republicans.

"Sit down, Mr. Lumba, right here in front of me," said the President, as he motioned me to one of the chairs in front of his huge desk.

Just then, Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi rose from their seats and sat in the chairs next and in front of me. President Obama and Mr. Daley came around the desk and sat in the other two empty chairs.

We formed a circle - the five of us - and carefully eyed each other.

President Obama opened up the conversation: "We called you in here, Cesar - can I call you Cesar? (I nodded) - because we think that of the millions of Americans who consistently vote in elections all across America, you represent the great majority of Americans. You are liberal on social issues but you are economically a conservative. You have a firm grasp of what's going on in the country, but you are also in many respects misinformed. You love your adopted country with a passion, but you also hate what it has become. To us, you are the perfect person to ask about what the heck we should do leading up to the elections of 2012, which we feel will be the most important elections of our lifetime - more important even than the 2008 elections."

"Mr. President," I replied, "how can I presume to know more than you and the others in this room about how to solve the many problems that are sinking America's chances to recover from its doldrums? Shouldn't I instead be asking each of you this question?"

The soft-spoken Senator Reid interjected: "If I may, Mr. President. The reason we called you in, Cesar, is that we know that we can count on you to speak your mind. We want to know what the American street is thinking. How do we solve the Medicare problem? How do we strengthen Social Security? What will Americans accept and not accept?"

"You want to take the pulse of average Americans and perhaps pick their brains?"

"Exactly," said Speaker Pelosi. I noticed that the former Speaker looked younger than her years. It must be the genes.

"We think that the elections of 2012 will be pivotal in our nation's history. We can put the country on a trajectory towards solving most of the problems, or we can assure continued paralysis through constant politicking on both sides. We would like to know what you think so we can fashion a campaign geared towards the great majority of Americans. If we can speak to the heart, soul and mind of the majority of Democrats and Independents, we will take back the U.S. House, the Senate and retain the Presidency. And this time, we will all be united so we can pursue policies that will benefit the poor and the middle class and not just the richest 2% in our country," said President Obama.

This was all I needed to get started. "Mr. President," I began, "I have a winning Democratic strategy that I have been carrying in my head for some time now. I am deliriously happy that I am face-to-face with you and Mr. Reid and Speaker Pelosi. Even your Chief of Staff is here. What an honor you are bestowing on me. I am so passionately involved in the 2012 elections - despite the fact that it is only May, 2011 - and you do me a great honor by asking me for my input.

"We must take back the House. But this time, we must take it back with people who will be in lock-step with us. We don't need any more Democratic congressmen who are marching to a different drummer. We tried this before and voters were livid. They thought they elected Democrats; turned out some of the people they elected were Republicans.

"Especially in the Senate. We had sixty Democratic senators, Mr. Reid, yet we couldn't beat back the threats of the Republican filibuster. Why? Because we had among us Republican senators we were passing off as Democrats. If we want to get things done in the new Congress, we must have only Democratic senators who will vote as Democrats and not as Republicans.

"We start by running only House and Senate candidates who will pledge in public that they will support our party's platform. People such as Senator Nelson of Nebraska must be made to understand that he is expected to vote as a Democrat and that we will not tolerate his pro-health insurance industry policies.

"With the right kind of people running for office, if we win back the House and expand our majority in the Senate, we can do a lot of good for our country. We will have a government of the people, for the people and by the people, and not a government of the special interests, by the special interests and for the special interests."

"That's all fine," said President Obama, "but how do you turn right-of-center America into basically a left-of-center society?"

"Mr. President," I quickly replied (I felt myself completely animated), "the old labels are no longer important because the Independents are now a huge chunk of the electorate. And the Independents will go left-wing or right-wing, depending on their mood and convictions. Right now, the mood in this country is to solve our problems. The independents don't care if the solutions are left-wing or right-wing, all they care about is that the solutions must make sense and hold a lot of promise.

"We know we can count on Democrats. If we ran Charlie Sheen for the Senate, Democratic voters will vote for him. It's the Independents who hold the key. We must therefore gear our campaign towards the Independents.

"How do we do that? We must come up with our own version of the New Deal, or the New Frontier, or the Contract with America. And don't forget the Great Society. Americans have been clobbered by the Great Recession, by the jobless recovery, by the flight of jobs to China and other countries. They look around and see that the only people who are benefiting from the recovery are the super-rich, the rich and the well-connected. Everybody else is struggling. Our homes are under water. There are many among our friends, neighbors and relatives who are either unemployed or who constantly fear of becoming another unemployment statistic.

"There is clearly a resentment for the rich and privileged few. Since those rich and privileged few will never vote for Democrats anyway, we must exploit this resentment by turning the 2012 campaign into a campaign against those rich and privileged few. If we are successful, those whose knee-jerk is to support the rich and privileged few (the Republican Party) will fall by the wayside.

"Mr. President, your 2008 campaign was a 'Yes, We Can' campaign. It was also about 'Change We Can Believe In.' So why don't we call the 2012 campaign an 'Of the people, by the people and for the people' campaign? This will strengthen our hold on the middle class, the poor, the immigrants - those who feel that they are getting the short end of the stick while the rich and super rich have never had it so good.

"This 'Of the people, by the people and for the people' campaign will have as their foundation eleven pillars:

"1. If a Democratic Congress is elected again, our first order of business will be to put Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on solid financial footing.

"2. We will tax the rich and super rich. We were the undisputed greatest country in the world when our top tax rate was 70% - during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter eras. I don't know if the top tax rate should be 70% again, but it must be high enough to generate much needed tax revenues that will help strengthen the entitlement programs and reduce our sovereign debts.

"3. We will also increase taxes on the middle class and on businesses that outsource their manufacturing to other countries. The middle class must share in the sacrifice, while the businesses that are responsible for creating economic booms in other countries while decimating the work force in the U.S. must be taxed heavily for the privilege of selling their products and services in the U.S., the world's biggest market.

"4. We will scale back our military commitments abroad and convert our military to rapid-response and high-tech warfare combat-ready units. We will completely withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, close many of our military bases and shore up our national defenses. The goal will be to cut down our military expenses to 75% of today's level.

"5. We will work for a Medicare-for-all system, patterned after the Canadian and Australian models. The American people and their employers will be taxed to pay for this Medicare-for-all system. The important difference will be that the premiums will not be as high as today. Since Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest drivers of the government's deficit spending, the savings will immediately put the government firmly on the path to fiscal sanity.

"6. We will introduce a financial services tax of 0.5% to be in effect for at least ten years, or until the nation's sovereign debt is reduced to about $5 trillion. All financial transactions, without exception, will be subject to the tax, which over the years could raise trillions.

"7. We will create incentives for American and multi-national businesses to bring jobs back to America by selective tariffs and other disincentives for locating factories in China, India, Ireland and other countries.

"8. Full employment will be a goal against which every U.S. national administration will be measured. Full employment will be defined as 4% unemployment rate or better, and any substantial increase in the unemployment rate will cause a series of fiscal remedies to automatically go into effect.

"9. The U.S. will not accept anything less than preeminence in green technology. We Democrats will put our best and brightest students in the field and will devote as much resources and attention to the attainment of that goal as the country did to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Of course we will not neglect our energy needs during the transition to renewable sources of energy. We will encourage massive production of natural gas and increased oil drilling and production within our shores and offshore.

"10. We will do our part in the fight against global warming and will prepare the country for what appears to be inevitable: the inundation of cities, the disappearance of barrier islands, the sinking of marshes. The U.S. will be best prepared to meet head-on the challenges of rising oceans and violent changes in weather patterns.

"11. Finally, and most importantly, the Department of Commerce must be replaced by the Department of Exports. It will be the Secretary of Exports that will promote American products throughout the world and the Cabinet Secretary will be tasked with promoting the manufacture of U.S. products for export. The Secretary of Exports will have the power to discipline organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lately has been advising its members to manufacture products overseas."

Just then, as if on cue, White House stewards opened the door and wheeled in a coffee cart. One of the stewards was a cute Filipina, and there was a smile in her eyes as she briefly stared at me.

"Oh, just in time," the President announced. "You make a lot of sense, Cesar. You have exceeded even our highest hopes for this meeting."

The transition to my waking was jarring. I wanted to go back to sleep and resume my dreaming, though I knew there was no guarantee that I would pick up the same dream. Slowly but surely I became wide awake. It must be 5:00 a.m., I thought, since I always wake up at right around 5. But, when I looked at the alarm clock, it showed 6:37 a.m. I had overslept.

South Orange

2011-04-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

I've always known that the number "11" was my lucky number. In my early years I believed in horoscopes and read everything I could to discover what was in store for me according to the stars. I learned that as a Piscean I was given to mood swings - from the depths of the ocean to the bright light of the noon sun, as the fish swims just beneath the ocean's surface.

After my tumultuous early career years, when my body was in the U.S. but my soul was in the Philippines, I hit my stride only after I had moved to 11 Warren Court, South Orange, New Jersey and started working at 11 Kulick Road for a Japanese company in Fairfield, New Jersey.

My love affair with number 11 started in my 13th year as a student athlete in De La Salle College, a kindergarten to Masters private school in the Philippines run by the Christian Brothers. Having been told by syndicated astrologers that my lucky numbers were 1 and - less so - 2, there was no question that I would adopt number 11 as the number on my basketball uniform at La Salle. On opening day of the Archdiocesan Athletic League Midgets 1954 season, I exploded with 14 points out of my team's total 42 points. It was the highlight of my brief career as a basketball player.

I had dreamed of a career as a basketball star in the Philippines. I played basketball, breathed basketball, sunned my heavily pigmented skin shooting baskets all day in the hot equatorial sun. Basketball was my life.

My parents had other ideas. They took me to three different cardiologists because they wanted to hear from a doctor what they needed to hear: that I needed to stop playing basketball for health reasons. Long story.

I did not know it as deliverance at the time, but my tumultuous marriage fell into ruins while I lived at 11 Warren Court. It was bad for the kids - all divorces are bad for the kids - but for both my first wife and me it was an opportunity for a new beginning. Would I have gone through it all if I had known how it would affect the kids? Of course not. But, what's done was done and we all had an opportunity to move on. Compliments of 11 Warren Court.

The house was 40 years old and in bad shape inside when we bought it. It looked like a sparkling all-brick English tudor on the outside, but it was crumbling inside. I would spend tens of thousands renovating the interior over the years, when $1000 was still a lot of money. The moldy bathroom. The termite infestation. The worn and dirty carpets. The unfinished third-floor room. The unfinished half of the basement.

It felt like home. I had never felt more at home than after I had moved to 11 Warren Court. I remarked to my first wife that I suspected that I might have been reincarnated and that in an earlier life I had lived in that house at 11 Warren Court.

My former next-door neighbor, a guy named Bob Krueger, who had raised his kids at 9 Warren Court, wept when he saw his house a few years after he had sold it. It was the only house he had owned and in his sickly old age he was overcome with deep nostalgia as the memories rushed while he sat in his car watching the old house - the one and only house he had ever owned.

I was afraid something akin to that rush of emotion would await me upon seeing that old house in South Orange once again. It was my son's spring break from April 16 through April 24, and I took him back to South Orange, where he could reconnect with the friends with whom he first saw the world. I had a lot of loose official business to take care of and spring break 2011 was as good a time as any. It was after all my lucky year - the 11th year of the 21st century - so what could possibly go wrong?

Sure enough, the trip went smoothly as son Paul and I renewed our friendships with old friends and former neighbors. Paul and I stayed at the house of long-time neighbors Mike and Carolyn Banks, who had just remodeled their kitchen and bathrooms at a cost of $100,000-plus. I immediately called my wife to tell her how elegant and expensive the kitchen and bathrooms looked.

It didn't start auspiciously though since we went from the brightness and warmth of the Las Vegas sun and 90 degree weather to winter in New York and New Jersey. When our plane touched down in New York's JFK airport at 6:00 a.m. on the 16th of April, it was winter. What about spring? Wasn't it supposed to be spring? It was obvious from the start that the New York area was the land that Spring forgot. It was cold, dreary, foggy, damp, wet and soporific. And I had lived in this neck of the woods for thirty years?

From across the street, on the lawn of 8 Warren Court, our house in South Orange looked small and boxy. The couple who had bought the house cut down the front-lawn tree that had framed the house and made it look like a tudor on the English countryside. Now it sat there on a tiny lot squat and unpretentious, looking like a decorated box. This was not the house I remembered. I had romanticized this house over the past four years. This was the house that I had thought would bring me to tears when I cast my eyes on it one more time - perhaps for the last time before I moved on with finality?

No, this can't be that same house. This house was small, much smaller than I had
remembered. Now I fully understand why some friends who had seen our house years ago remarked that our house looked like a cute gingerbread house, where Hansel and Gretel might have lived.

Son Paul had the greatest week of his young life. He spent three days with Marshall, his Warren Court friend who is a few months older and with whom he had discovered the hypnotic spell of video and computer games. The two best friends forever never really lost touch because they kept communicating in cyberspace through XBox Live and web cams. Marshall is still a head taller than Paul, but since the two of them move like Thing One and Thing Two, nobody notices the height disparity.

The poignant scenes were reserved for the meeting between Paul and his best friend in school, Sean Taylor. Paul knocked on the front door of the Taylor residence even though the house looked like there was nobody home. I had remarked to Paul that the Taylors were probably not home because it was spring break. "Let's just knock," Paul said.

When Mrs. Taylor opened the door, she was smiling from ear to ear. I sat in the car and observed the scene at a comfortable distance, but it was obvious that she was so happy to see Paul. She called Sean Taylor down and Sean and brother Brian came rushing down the staircase. When Sean reached the fourth or fifth step, he stopped and clutched the bannister and eyed Paul. I had already entered the house and was standing in the anteroom. Paul stood at the bottom of the stairs while Sean had the look of a kid who did not know what was happening all around him. Paul had the same expression on his face he always has. He had the confident airs of someone who knew exactly what was happening because he had made it happen.

Kathleen (Mrs. Taylor) related to me that Sean had often wondered if he would ever see Paul again after we had moved to Las Vegas. Sometimes, Sean would ask his mother to drive through Warren Court just so Sean could see the house where Paul used to live. Paul and Sean were best friends at Marshall School from kindergarten to 2nd grade - both mildly ADHD and both having each other's back as they learned to form alliances on Marshall School's rough and tumble playground.

Paul wanted to see as many former classmates on this trip as we could find. Unfortunately, I had forgotten where his other friends lived. Except Zach Britton, who made a brief appearance at the Taylor residence after hearing that Paul was at the Taylors'.

South Orange in grown-up talk is a disaster. A lot of houses are on the market but are not selling. Everybody we saw on this trip told us how lucky we were that we had sold our house in August, 2007, just before the housing market crashed. Now, every third homeowner in town is trying to sell his house because of the insane property tax system. Property taxes have skyrocketed as the New Jersey state's finances have taken a turn towards possible bankruptcy. The state is no longer there to help the small towns and cities, so South Orange must raise funds by taxing its residents.

The brother of one of my friends in the old neighborhood now pays $33,000 a year in property taxes because his house has been appraised by the town at $1.5 million. Furious, he put his house on the market so he could, like me, become a property tax refugee. Nobody is buying. He is selling his house for $799,000 and still nobody is buying.

He went to the town assessor and argued his case for lower property taxes. He could not even sell his house for $799,000, so how could it possibly have an assessed value of $1.5 million? To no avail.

Some good things - enough to tickle - are happening in South Orange. The old supermarket building in town has been renovated, and new tenants - an upscale supermarket and a swanky restaurant on the second floor called "Above" are the new occupants. The dumpy parking lot of the old supermarket now has a three-story mixed use building, with two floors of ritzy apartments and stores and offices on the ground floor.

On the main street, South Orange Avenue, store owners are fleeing the high cost of commercial rentals, which have been made necessary by the dreaded first-in-the-nation property taxes.

What will become of South Orange as residents flee for low-property-tax areas like Florida, Nevada, Texas and California? For years there have been talk of South Orange and Maplewood merging and becoming one town once again. South Orange did in fact start out as a part of Maplewood, broke off because of concerns about its needs not being met. Now it may be necessary for the two towns to become one once again if those two towns are to have a decent chance to be viable in today's fiscal environment.

The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, is gutting the state government to force a balanced budget. He obviously wants to set an example for the local governments like South Orange and Maplewood. If Christie's state government is the wave of the future, local governments all over the state will be forced to scale back and pool resources. Public education will suffer, roads and bridges, public safety will deteriorate.

More will be demanded of county governments, as small towns and cities become less independent and more dependent on the counties' meager budgets.

The limits of taxing properties in South Orange have been reached. Unless property taxes are rolled back, few residents would want to stay in that town. We, the Lumbas, fled South Orange in 2007 primarily because of our high property taxes. Others before us and still others after us have done the same.

Paradoxically, a monumental collapse of the housing market may be the only hope for the town's residents because that would force the local government to substantially roll back taxes. This, of course, would be the worst thing for seniors who until the housing collapse had been counting on selling their houses and using the proceeds to partially fund their retirement.

Is South Orange the metaphor for the entire United States experiment?

Sweet Bird of Youth

2011-04-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I took a sabbatical from this blog to view my blogging from a distance. Was I writing useful stuff? Was I helping anyone? Was my blogging centered in people's needs and interests and not merely my attempts to prove I had something to say?

A part of me knows I have something important to say, yet another part of me says that I delight in appearing knowledgeable, smart and sometimes witty. A part of me wants to write for the sake of writing. It's akin to arguing for the sake of arguing. You hear people say all the time, when they interject a hypothetical, "Arguing for the sake of argument."

A little more than a week ago I was introduced to a book that could possibly change my life and perhaps other people's lives.

The book, called "NO More Heart Disease," traces the author's life's work to Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel, as almost everyone knows, at the end of the 19th and dawn of the 20th century packaged powdered nitroglycerin mixtures in dynamite sticks that revolutionized modern-day living. Through Nobel's invention, mountainsides have been blasted to make way for roads, mine shafts and tunnels have been built, neighborhoods have been demolished to make way for shopping malls.

Nitroglycerin, invented by a chemist in 1846, is a substance that has been around for more than 150 years. Nothing new with this product, which is even used to treat angina pectoris, or chest and other pains. Exactly how nitroglycerin works to ease the pain was not widely known during Alfred Nobel's time, and that is probably the best explanation for why Nobel himself refused to be treated with nitroglycerin for his cardiovascular disease, even when all other treatments had failed. He died of complications of that disease.

Nobel, against his doctors' advice, refused to use nitroglycerin for his ailment because he did not want a substance used in producing dynamite, or its by-product - nitric oxide, which comes out of automobile tailpipes - to enter his blood stream. To him, nitroglycerin was simply a product for the sewers, not his body.

A Brooklyn boy with a prodigious love for chemistry, Louis Ignarro, was so fascinated by Alfred Nobel's life and dynamite itself that he soon found himself devoting his scholarly energies to a greater understanding of nitroglycerin. His research took him to the study of nitric oxide, which most assuredly comes out of cars' tailpipes but is the primary substance in nitroglycerin that treats angina pectoris.

His interests led him to a career in pharmacology. Through collaborative research with other medical scientists, he learned that there was a silver bullet in the treatment of atherosclerosis - hardening of the arteries - and arteriosclerosis, the clogging up of arteries. It was nitric oxide, but he did not know this at first.

The enormity of the subject transfixed him. It was well-known that the average human body has 80,000 miles end to end of arteries, veins and capillaries. Every cell in the body needs oxygen and nutrients, and the body's infrastructure of arteries, veins and capillaries are the conduit for the blood that oxygenates and feeds the cells in our bodies.

Heart attacks and strokes are the result of blood vessels no longer functioning at optimal levels or are clogged up, depriving organs - especially the heart and brain - of oxygen and nutrients. His life's mission, he felt in his gut, was to find ways to improve the functioning of the blood vessels. His medical research and experiments led him to an amino acid known as L-Arginine. This protein would prove to be effective in repairing the endothelium, the one-cell-thick lining that protects the blood vessels' interior walls.

Ignarro knew that the interior walls had to be protected, otherwise the vessels would harden, a condition known as atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis or hardened arteries, makes arteries inefficient conduits for blood.

Ignarro knew that the key to delaying, even reversing aging was the proper functioning and health of the blood vessels. In fact, 75% of aging is caused by damaged and worn-down blood vessels.

His research revealed that a substance, which he called "endothelium-derived relaxing factor" or EDRF, was produced by the endothelium and was the body's defense against harmful molecules and substances that damage both the endothelium and the blood vessels' interior walls.

It took years before researchers discovered that the substance was nitric oxide, the very substance found in nitroglycerin and auto exhausts, and which substance the human body produces in sufficient quantities in youth but in ever-decreasing quantities as we age. Nitric oxide, chemical formula NO, or one atom of nitrogen and one atom of oxygen, is secreted by the endothelium in much the same way that the linings in our mouths produce saliva. Nitric oxide protects the endothelium from free radicals and bacteria.

Once this relationship between the health of blood vessels and nitric oxide was established, one would think that it would all be downhill from there. No such luck.

As we age, the endothelium is damaged, veins, arteries and capillaries are blocked all along the 80,000 miles of blood vessels. Because the endothelium is the main source of nitric oxide, not enough NO is produced, and eventually the blood vessels harden to the point that organs no longer get enough sustenance, leading to disease and eventually death.

Ignarro knew that to delay aging and prevent strokes and cardiovascular disease, the key was to keep the blood vessels young and healthy. To accomplish this, the endothelium needed to be repaired.

His research introduced him to an already known protein called L-arginine. That protein was found to repair the endothelium, bringing it back to health and appeared to reverse the hardening of the arteries and other blood vessels. It also appeared to melt away the plaque buildup in arteries, sending the liquefied plaque to the kidneys for disposal.

The problem with L-arginine, however, was that its effect lasted only a few seconds. Hardly the kind of treatment that anyone would be interested in. Through his many experiments he found that L-citrulline, another protein, when combined with L-arginine, worked synergistically with the latter to encourage production of nitric oxide by the endothelium for 24 to 36 hours. This pharmacological breakthrough eventually won for Ignarro the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1998.

Ignarro was almost home. Since much of the damage to the endothelium is caused by free radicals (oxygen atoms missing one electron) he knew instinctively that the mixture of L-arginine and L-citrulline had to be combined with powerful anti-oxidants to do the job. Determining sufficient quantities of antioxidants was the next big challenge, which Dr. Ignarro was more than equal to.

Ignarro was at Nice (France) airport in 1998 when he retrieved his voice mail and heard his friend in the U.S. tell him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his successful research into the cocktail mixture of L-arginine, L-citrulline and antioxidants to combat atherosclerosis and arteriosclerosis. He got the call on April 1, so he assumed that it was an April Fool's joke.

When he arrived at his destination - Naples, Italy - some journalists and photographers greeted him as he alighted from the plane, walking down the metal staircase. He looked behind him because he thought that a celebrity was closely on his trail. There was nobody there.

When his Italian friend, a pharmacology professor, handed him a copy of a press release announcing Dr. Ignarro's Nobel prize, Ignarro fell to his knees on the tarmac, overcome with emotion.

It was as though the decades of hard work and disappointments typical among researchers looking for that proverbial needle in the haystack - all those years of not being taken seriously by the medical community - had melted away. History, of course, is replete with examples of announced breakthroughs that in the end proved to be worthless - even harmful - junk. So how does society know that this time, this discovery is for real? Society only knows after the fact.

The book, "NO More Heart Disease," is a runaway best-seller at amazon.com. It sells for $10.87, with free delivery.

More importantly, the book has encouraged medical researchers to conduct parallel research on the effectiveness of nitric oxide treatment on cardiovascular and other diseases. A brilliant researcher, Dr. Joe Prendergast, has confirmed not only that nitric oxide treats and repairs the endothelium and interior wall of the blood vessels, it also acts as a signaling agent for the maintenance of the vessels.

A substance that is present in dynamite and that comes out of auto tailpipes - nitric oxide - is our own bodies' defense against degenerative diseases of the organs, the blood vessels themselves, cellular damage, and even microbes and other harmful substances that invade the blood stream. In fact, Ignarro and others discovered that our white blood cells repel invaders by producing nitric oxide and using that gas as an important weapon.

And because nitric oxide, through continued and prolonged use and in sufficient quantities, cause normal functioning and regeneration of blood vessels, the effects of disease and aging are known to have been reversed. People who were on the waiting list for heart transplants in the High Desert Heart Institute in Victorville, California (Dr. Prendergast's study and treatment, not Ignarro's) recovered and were taken off the waiting list. Thousands of Dr. Prendergast's diabetes patients recovered from the organ damages that the disease had wrought on those patients.

Because blood vessels tend to become new again when sufficient quantities of nitric oxide are used in treatments, physiological aging stopped for most patients, and in many cases there was evidence that aging was reversed, meaning that people actually got younger.

The excited buzz among the researchers is that because aging is caused primarily by blood vessel decline and because nitric oxide repairs, regenerates, makes supple and softens blood vessels again - to the point that old people eventually become physiologically young again - theoretically people's life expectancy could someday increase to 150 years, instead of today's 79 years.

Has modern medicine found the fountain of youth? I certainly hope so. If man can build robots that think, look, feel and fall in love like humans, why can't man discover a way to doubling his life expectancy?

So far, only man's optimism is eternal. But, in the not-too-far distant future, maybe man himself will be close to being eternal.

(Disclosure: I am involved in the marketing of a product that uses Dr. Ignarro's discoveries to treat cardiovascular, diabetes and other diseases. The product, which increases blood flow as one of its primary effects, also allegedly treats some forms of male impotence. I can't vouch for this personally because this claim is based on theory and not on actual testimony of the product's users.)

Singularity

2011-03-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a long time I stayed up till 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning. And so I spent much of Saturday recuperating. I watched the History Channel all day practically, comfortably sunk in the couch in the master bedroom, with a light blanket draped over me, the kind of blanket that has pockets for one's feet.

I watched in amazement many scientists argue that earth must have been visited by intelligent beings in the ancient times because that is the only way we can explain the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the massive sculptures on Easter Island and other monuments to a superior civilization that flourished on earth when the homo sapiens species had just barely come out of the wilderness. Those superior beings obviously used sophisticated tools that would be considered a marvel even today. Archaeologists point to numerous cave and wall drawings and carvings depicting humans in what look like today's astronaut suits and in the controls of what look like space ships. There appear to be great similarities in the drawings supposedly made by ancient humans and today's astronauts.

I of course had seen this movie before. Nothing new, except the bold assertion from astronomers that it is only a matter of time - not IF - before man discovers other life forms in the universe. The History Channel program asserts that while in the not-too-distant past scientists overwhelmingly held that the earth is unique in the universe, that our earth is probably the ultimate exception in that it supports life, now the prevailing notion among scientists is that there must be life on other planets somewhere in the universe, probably on not one but many of the heavenly bodies circling certain suns in the Milky Way. And that's just the Milky Way.

The lady astronomer interviewed bravely predicted that within our lifetimes we will discover life outside our planet. What would be hard to tell, she said, is if that life is intelligent life.

The lady astronomer (astronomatrix?) is confident that the very powerful telescopes on earth and mounted in deep space probes will allow man to discover planets that have water. Once these planets - or moons - are found, it will be a "mere" analysing the data to determine if life does exist in the waters.

We of course will not know if the life that is found is intelligent unless we humans interact with that life.

That means we have to get closer to that life. Which means we have to go on a voyage of discovery. The nearest candidates for extra-terrestrial life is millions, even billions of miles away. Man cannot travel that far. It's nearly impossible.

Or can he?

Lately, scientists have revived the notion of Singularity, which was first introduced by futurists in the 1960s. According to futurists, there will come a time when men and machines will become indistinguishable. Thus the word Singularity.

In a recent issue of Time magazine, in the New York Times, on CNN and other major channels, the buzz word is now Singularity. Futurists are predicting that at some point, probably in 2045, robots will be able to duplicate human intelligence to the point that they will also have the capacity for empathy and other emotions. Shortly after that Singularity moment, there will be a machine that will be able to store knowledge equivalent to the combined knowledge of all 7 billion people on earth.

The Time magazine article goes one step further. It quotes experts who say that the post-Singularity era will make man immortal. How does this happen? Imagine yourself at the point of death in 2045 or shortly after. A robot would go into a room with you and scan your brain for all your knowledge and your memory, including your emotional memory that may at that point be for the most part hidden from even you.

The robot, armed with what amounts to be your essence - your personality - will then absorb that scanned and digitized person into its own cpu (central processing unit). After that procedure, which probably will take no more than a minute, the robot becomes you. It will have your consciousness, your emotions, your loves, your hatreds, etc.

This robot is immortal. It will grow as it accumulates more knowledge and stacks up more memories. It will interact with your friends and family and they will recognize you in that robot. The robot probably would even look like you, either your older version or younger version.

If you're a Don Juan type, the robot might even be equipped to function as a lover to people who depend on you for emotional attachment and fulfillment.

Recently, an IBM computer called Watson challenged two of Jeopardy's all-time champions and demolished them both. A few years ago, a computer called Deep Blue trounced the then reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, who admitted that man was no longer a match for a machine that could think thousands of moves ahead in a matter of seconds. The computers and robots in the future will be infinitely smarter and will have not only artificial intelligence but also artificial emotions and human intuition.

OK. Now assume that you have become a machine and that you are now immortal. You can then go on a space probe that will travel billions of miles and not miss a beat. You will no longer need to sleep. You will be permanently posted watching TV screens in your spaceship, looking for life in other planets in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Time will not be an object because you are now timeless. You are immortal. You can travel at the speed of light because you are a machine.

What happens to religion? Well, your human body has died and your soul has gone wherever it's supposed to go. The only thing that the machine has that used to belong to you is your memory, your consciousness. That part of you is immortal.

Science fiction? No. Futurists are very confident that this will happen eventually. Computing power since the early days has increased by a factor of 2. First, it increased by twice the original increase, then 4 times, then 8 times, then 16 times, then 32 times, and on and on and on. Someday, probably by 2045, computing power will be such that it will be possible for robots to function as humans with their artificial intelligence, complete with human emotions, idiosyncrasies and intuitions.

The post-Singularity world? Futurists are unanimous in saying that that world is unknowable. Will the machines eventually replace humans? Will they cause a world war so devastating that humans will be wiped off the face of the earth, replaced by machines with human consciousness and human attributes? Or will they usher in a new world order where national boundaries and national origins no longer matter, and where people will respond to John Lennon's famous invitation in "Imagine":
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one.

It's a giddily-scary thought because, as the Chinese would probably characterize the not-too-distant future, it presents an "opportunity riding the crest of a dangerous wind."

The Many-Countries Solution

2011-02-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

I promised my friend Fritz Reith that I would provide him with a blow-by-blow and round-by-round account of the Donaire-Montiel fight last Saturday. I was just behind ringside and no more than thirty feet from the boxers. I could see every punch thrown. I had my Composition notebook on my lap and was prepared to take notes.

After the first round, I wrote on my notebook: Boxers feeling each other out. Donaire appeared to be stronger and his hand speed remarkably superior. Donaire slipped a couple of left hooks in, Montiel didn't do a thing.

Then came the second round. They were still sizing each other up. Montiel threw a right straight which Donaire countered with a stinging left hook. Montiel fell forward and as he was going down, Donaire met him with a right upper cut. Montiel, sprawled on the floor, tried to get up but looked like a newborn horse trying to right itself. He managed to clear his head and sold himself to the referee as fit to continue. Donaire went after him with two punches to the head and the referee stopped the fight.

There was not enough material for this blog.

It occurred to me that since kindergarteners and early grades public school students in the Philippines are now being taught in their native tongues, it may be the right time to introduce the idea of a "many-countries solution" to folks who have not read my book. Teaching early grades students in their vernacular would make it easier for them to learn their academic subjects, but it would also reinforce the strong regional identities of those students. That's the unintended consequence.

So I'm reprinting Chapter 11 of my book, Out of the Misty Sea We Must, in this blog. I hope y'all like it.

------- O ------

Kayangan Lake Carlos Esguerra Photo
Chapter 11
The Many-Countries Solution

I favor the confederation, or many-countries solution, over federation because of the fragmented nature of Filipino life and psyche. We are many islands, many nations, many languages, cultures and traditions.

Yet if Filipinos had a "free look" period of five to ten years, they would not take all that time but instead return the idea of a confederation to the salesman immediately. Especially if the salesman is a Tagalog. Filipinos probably would claim that the confederation idea favors the Tagalogs too much and will put the other independent states in a deeper hole.

Assuming that the partition of the Philippines is done along the lines of the 17 regions in the Philippines, the poorest regions would be Ilocos, Bicol, Eastern Visayas, Caraga and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

Those regions would have per capita incomes of less than 20% of the figure for Metro Manila. In the case of the ARMM (Autonomous Region) the per capita GDP would be less than 12% of Metro Manila's.

Metro Manila, or more formally the National Capital Region, has an annual per capita income of $10,000+, with Makati having a whopping per capita of $29,000+ and Mandaluyong with a nearly equally impressive $20,000+.

Metro Manila's per capita Gross Domestic Product is the 30th highest in the world. Beijing is barely ahead of Metro Manila, while Jakarta and Delhi, India are immediately behind Manila. Guangdong, China comes right after Delhi, and Bangkok is two places behind Guangdong.

Metro Manila is in giddy company. If Metro Manila becomes a separate country, it will look like Hong Kong of a couple of decades ago.

Should the Visayans, the Ilocanos, Kapampangans, etc. reject the idea of a confederation as overwhelmingly favoring Metro Manila? If time were to be frozen, the answer is a resounding "Yes." This idea could be easily dismissed as a ploy by Manilenos to allow Metro Manila to splinter from the archipelago known as Philippine Islands and never look back.

Time, however, stands still for no one. Along with time, huge changes will quickly follow. What are the prospects for the other regions which will now become independent states - alone or in combination with others?

Metro Manila has developed quickly since Independence on July 4, 1946 while the provinces, especially the remote areas, have stood still. Not completely stood still, for certainly progress has come to those areas albeit at a snail's pace. And it is progress at the barest of all minimums.

It's patchwork progress.

David C. Martinez, who writes prose with equal passion as his poetry, is the foremost proponent of breaking up the Philippines into separate countries. His book, A Country of Our Own, has been reviewed very favorably in international literary circles. I am reading that book – it is not meant to be for one sitting – and I often wonder how someone who was not born in the language could write so well in English.

Here’s an excerpt of a review of A Country of Our Own published by the Tambara, a publication of the Ateneo de Davao University – that Jesuit university in Mindanao, Philippines:

This book shouldn't be read in one sitting. Martinez' critical analysis of the fabricated state that is the Philippines is a lifetime thesis on a subject so insistently compelling to its student, filtered through years of anguish, outrage, confusion, yearning, and hope against hope.

The Dumaguete-born exile essays Philippine history sans the distracting, driving emotions that had fueled his fevered inquiry, in a brutally honest tone that engages reason, in lyrical words that speak to the heart. What is left is the distilled conviction of an intellectually honest man who knows what he is talking about, though he is constantly on the verge of digressing given the sheer volume of data he needed to present. What makes this book well argued is the magnified clarity to detail that must have come only from remembering ever so often that which had been forgotten every now and then.

The book poignantly begins with the newly exiled casting off into the high seas to escape the political persecution that came in the wake of the proclamation of PD 1081(the Marcos martial law decree). Adrift in the waters, the world rendered aloof, he became as one with the countless many who came centuries before, seemingly tied to the world only by the fragile moorings of his unutterable hope, the distant stars and an ancient map on cloth. He discovered for himself the emergence of the age-old need wrought in the human psyche to search for authentic identity…

In the first nine chapters, Martinez provides a thorough depiction of the accidents and intents that have led to our (Filipinos’) current experience. Like a marriage made in hell, this tells us why we're not likely to stay together forever. Advocates of federalism and secession would find this book indispensable.

Martinez posits that it is the imposition of uniformity that set the Philippines on the road to self-destruction. He examines the myriad ways through which homogeneity in thought and behavior was hammered over time through conversion, colonial governance, and elitist protectionism, regimented by a twisted concept of Catholicism, an equally twisted concept of democracy, and a system of education meant to indoctrinate attention to form rather than substance.

Can uniformity be fashioned from diversity? Of course not. But oh, how we all suffered in the cruel attempts to make this pipe dream (a single Filipino nation) come true for its deluded dreamers.

Will diversity achieve harmony and equality? Only if consent to be inconvenienced is respectfully sought and willingly given.

But if legacy is about planting seeds that would take root, this book deserves to be read by the young who, in their unconscious wisdom, deny the lie that is Philippine history taught in our schools, are repulsed by it, and cannot relate to it. Excised from their indigenous communal roots and trapped in the incongruous exercise of a culture alien to where they are, four out of five seek psychological congruence in the expression of this desire to be out of here. For all intents and purposes, the next generation has virtually seceded anyway. Rootless, they long for solid ground under their feet, one that would allow them to stand firm, stand proud.

Roots are not so much about where we are physically as they are about who our minds know us to be. Reading this book would lead the young to seek a connection to their authentic roots, to find genuine validation of their psyche, and to finally come home to their primal selves. That, I think, was what the author had in mind when he rose to the duty of putting this out.

As promised by its subtitle, this book audaciously dares to make a case for partitioning the Philippines according to its indigenous nations: the Cordillera, Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao, and Bangsamoro.

Gail Tan Ilagan teaches Social Justice, Social Psychology, and Sociology at the Ateneo de Davao University.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

The first time I went back to the Philippines - in 1992, after a 25-year absence - I was dumbfounded when I saw the rivers in the rural areas. What used to be pristine rivers where the local damsels washed their laundry, all I could see were garbage strewn all over the banks, some sticking from beneath the water levels. People were using the rivers to dump their everyday castoffs.
Was there even garbage collection in those areas? In Boracay two years ago, the catamaran I took my family on was caught in a heavy downpour. We had to make an emergency landing in the back of the island. Then it struck me: that's where all the garbage and some of the sewage were ending up.

This was not the country I had left in 1967, when I promised myself that I would study for five years in the U.S., get my Masters, perhaps even my PhD and then return to the Philippines to be a part of the nation-building.

I had dreamed for 25 years of going back and seeing the Philippines once more. I had envisioned myself dropping to the tarmac at the Manila International Airport (already renamed the Ninoy Aquino International Airport) and kissing the tarmac.

When I saw the tarmac and the countless chewing gum discards stuck to it and other forms on the surface that I judged to be dried up spit, I quickly changed my mind. I would rather kiss a four-foot two midget woman with no teeth.

I recalled what a doctor in Seattle once told me when I told him of my plan to go back to the Philippines to do important work there. He quoted Thomas Wolfe. “You can’t go home again,” he said.

Even Paradise, it seemed, had been despoiled, all in the name of "progress".

Progress for the hinterlands has come at a tremendous cost. Because of a lack of infrastructure development at par with Manila's, the rural areas are overrun by the trappings of progress.

While people's garbage have increased a thousand-fold (progress is always accompanied by a geometric explosion of garbage), people still have no jobs or adequate education. People have nothing to look forward to but the prospect of going abroad someday - to Saudi Arabia, to Hong Kong, to Malaysia, to Canada, California or New York. The luckiest ones have only to go to the nearest Western Union to claim remittances from relatives abroad.

The nearest convention center is in front of Aling Inday's sari-sari, where locals congregate at night to drink lambanog and trade jokes. Lately, the karaoke bars have served as the magnets for locals to trade jokes and to drink.

The only truly significant, transformative progress over the years is the one that has come to Metro Manila, Cebu, Angeles City, Subic and Davao. Only portions that are in excess of Metro Manila's needs have trickled off to the provinces. I know, some of you are thinking, what about Baguio, General Santos City, Cagayan de Oro? What about this and that city?

THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CASE FOR PARTITIONING

Once the regions become independent states, they will be able to carve their own destinies and implement laws that favor them. They will not need the permission of a Manila government to pursue their own dreams. All progress will accrue to them, not to an overbearing Metro Manila.

If the independent states wish to open their countries to foreign investments by scrapping the prohibition against foreign majority ownership of businesses, they will be free to do so. There will be no Manila government trying to stop them.

If those states want to scrap minimum wage laws to make them more competitive in the world market, there will be no Manila government frowning on them.

If those states want to offer their natural resources - industrial and precious metals - for development by foreign interests, there will be no Manila government trying to thwart their will.

If those states want to lease their territories to governments for commercial or military purposes, there will be no Metro Manila halting the construction.

If those states want to pursue social policies that differ from Manila's, they will be free to do so.

For example, if some independent states favor a more progressive family planning policy, there will be no Manila government or CBCP shaking a stick in their face. Spain, the source of the country's religiosity, has after all leaped into the 21st century and has legalized abortion (under certain strict conditions) and divorce. I do not personally favor abortion or divorce, but if the independent states want them, who am I to stand in their way?

Were some of the independent states to make ten-year temporary marriage contracts legal, there will be no overbearing CBCP to stop them. Because there will be no CBCP. Each independent state will have its own archbishop and lineup of bishops - or none at all, as in the case of the ARMM.

If some independent states want a more liberal or more aggressive tax policy, they will be free to follow their wishes, without some bureaucrat in Manila telling them they can't do it.

Each independent state shall be able to adopt economic, educational and social policies without interference from the other independent states. They will be free to set off on a course that is their very own.

All tax collections and revenues shall accrue to the states and will not go through Manila, where some funds are now being used to line pockets of some very powerful people there. There will be no corruption or favoritism at the national level, because there will be no national treasury to plunder or distribute to a national government's favorites.

Each state will be free to organize the equivalent of its own Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs. The old corruption-ridden BIR and Customs of the current Philippine government shall be scrapped and replaced, hopefully with equivalent local agencies that will honestly collect income taxes and customs duties. It will be an opportunity to start over and set up tax collection agencies in the mold of the Internal Revenue Service of the U.S. In fact, I would advise the states to seek assistance from the U.S. government in setting up their Internal Revenue and Customs laws and offices.

Each state will have its own constitution and legal system. It can make justice happen as fast or as slow as its people want to. The corrupt arreglo system in Manila will be replaced by judicial systems that can dispense justice. Will there be a jury system? Only if the locals want it.

Finally, and most importantly, the focus of all activity in each of the independent states is the rise in the standard of living and educational level of their people. There will be no Manila-centric policies to pursue.
There is no doubt that the partitioning of the Philippines into independent states will be beneficial to the archipelago as a whole. We have to be certain, however, that the independent states we set up shall be economically and politically viable.

Because of what happened recently in Haiti, and more distantly in Somalia, the question of viability is front and center. Viability is the reason some states shall not be organized according to the ancient divisions of language and nations. For example, the Central Luzon state shall be made up of Kapampangans and Tagalogs.

THIS, FOLKS, IS THE LINEUP OF INDEPENDENT STATES

I have tentatively drawn plans for setting up the various independent states and offer the following lineup. (All chartered cities shall be absorbed by the provinces where they are situated.)

1. Metro Manila, or National Capital Region.

2. Ilocandia - Ilocos, the Cagayan Valley Region, which includes Batanes, along with Abra, Benguet, Baguio City, Ifugao, Apayao, Kalinga and Mountain Province.

3. Central Luzon - made up of Pampanga, Bataan, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Tarlac and Zambales.

4. Calabarzon - Cavite, Batangas, Laguna, Quezon, Aurora and Rizal.

5. Bicol Region - Albay, Camarines Norte and Sur, Catanduanes and Sorsogon.

6. Western Visayas and Mimaropa - Aklan, Antique, Guimaras Capiz, Iloilo, Negros Occidental, Marinduque, Mindoro, Palawan and Romblon.

7. Central and Eastern Visayas - Bohol, Cebu, Negros Oriental, Siquijor, Samar, Leyte and Biliran.

8. Northern Mindanao - Bukidnon, Camiguin, Lanao del Norte, Misamis Occidental and Oriental.

9. Central and Southern Mindanao - Davao peninsula, Cotabato, Sarangani, Sultan Kudarat, Agusan, Dinagat and Surigao.
10. Muslim Mindanao (Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao) - Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

There you have it, folks. Toss these in your heads and let us as a country discuss. But before you hop on your soapboxes, I want you to know that upon breakup of the Philippines, Metro Manila will be tasked with the development of Bicol to help that region become a viable state. The Bicolanos will have an incentive to build their nation properly, for the alternative will be their absorption into the Calabarzon state and resultant loss of the Bicolanos' country of their own.

Central Visayas, and Central and Southern Mindanao will be depended upon to help Northern Mindanao and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao become viable states. If that doesn't work, the ARMM shall be allowed to break off in the future and become a part of Malaysia if that is their wish, while Northern Mindanao can be absorbed by Central and Southern Mindanao.

.

The Other Filipino Boxer

2011-02-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

The global Filipino's near deification of Manny Pacquiao has rendered us blind to the exploits of another Filipino boxer whose ring triumphs are nearly as amazing as Manny's. This boxer is taller than Manny - is 5 ft. 7 inches - has a deadly left hook, like Manny, and has not lost a fight since 2001. His only loss in a career that has matched him with the best fighters in his weight classes, was to an unknown fighter. In only his second professional fight he agreed to be a last minute substitute fighter and got tripped up by an unknown. That would turn out to be his only loss in his 10-year fighting career.

On his way to multi-weight championships, he demolished the careers of many a world-class fighter.

He is the reigning WBC Continental Americas Bantamweight king. He is a former WBA Super Flyweight World Champion, IBF World Flyweight Champion and IBO World Flyweight Champion. He is rated by Ring Magazine number 5 in the ranks of best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. He is four years younger than Manny and retirement is still far into the future.

He is 28, in his prime, now fights at 118 pounds (bantamweight) and is the most fearsome fighter in that weight class.

On February 19, Nonito Donaire, Jr. will clash with Fernando Montiel at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the latter's WBC and WBO world bantamweight titles. Montiel is a decisive underdog, but Donaire and most observers of the boxing game predict that it will be a savage struggle and may in fact turn out to be the most competitive fight of the year. Ring Magazine's "Fight of the Year" honors probably await this fight, notwithstanding the Manny-Mosley fight coming up in May.

Montiel has a record of 44 wins, 2 losses and 2 draws and is considered a knockout artist. He is also a technical boxer, which means that Donaire must learn to box scientifically or it will be a long night for him.

The fight is another Filipino vs. Mexican contest and both the Philippine and Mexican flags will be on display. National honor and pride are at stake. I don't know if the Philippine politicians will descend upon Mandalay Bay, the way they do at every Pacquiao fight, but they should. If Donaire wins this fight, and he is favored to do just that, there is really no one out there who can challenge him in the bantam class. He could take fights that will cement his place in the history of the sport and claim the title of best pound-for-pound when Manny decides to hang up his gloves.

Donaire, being only 28, has four years on Manny. He hasn't had brutal fights with an Eric Morales or a Juan Manuel Marquez, the way Manny has. One is tempted to conclude from this that Donaire is not as battle-tested as Manny. But Donaire grew up with a sibling, Glenn Donaire - also a boxer - who constantly beat him up in sparring sessions. He developed his survival instincts from his sparring sessions with his older and stronger brother.

Donaire was born November 16, 1982 in Talibon, Bohol, the Philippines. Like Manny, he grew up in General Santos City in South Cotabato. He trained in the same school as the fabled Manny. Nonito, Sr. - his dad - was in the Philippine Army and was an amateur boxer who immigrated to the U.S. in 1990. Donaire joined his dad in Van Nuys, California in 1993, at the age of 10.

Emulating their dad, Nonito Donaire, Jr. and his older brother Glenn both took up amateur boxing and both honed their skills by beating each other up. It wasn't long before Nonito, Jr. discovered the classic fighter with the devastating left hook, Alexis Arguello. He watched countless videos of the great fighter Arguello and patterned his fighting style after Arguello's. Let's hope he doesn't completely follow in Arguello's footsteps, since Arguello became mayor of a city in Nicaragua and, while mayor, allegedly committed suicide.

While still enrolled at San Lorenzo High School in San Lorenzo, California, Donaire and his brother Glenn won many amateur boxing championships in the U.S.

Donaire has only 26 professional fights over ten years, winning 25, 17 by knockout, the rest by unanimous decision. Don't be fooled by that, because he had 76 fights as an amateur.

From Wikipedia: "As an amateur, Donaire won three national championships: the National Silver Gloves in 1998, National Junior Olympics in 1999 and the National USA Tournament in 2000. He also won the International Junior Olympics in 1999. Donaire's amateur record was 68-8 with 5 TKOs."

After starting with a 3 wins, one loss record since turning professional in 2001, Donaire went back to the Philippines with his brother and dad. He was listless in the Philippines and decided that he really would be better off training in the U.S., where there were far fewer "distractions" than in the Philippines. He landed in a boxing club in San Leandro, California.

Unlike Manny, Donaire is a natural flyweight-bantamweight. He has not experienced the growth in heft and power that Manny has. On any given fight night, he can be a flyweight, super flyweight or bantamweight. Nothing bigger. He has a thin frame and unlike Manny has no room to build up additional muscle. He is however all muscle in his 112 to 118 pound 5 ft. 7 in. frame.

Donaire's opponent, Mexican Fernando Montiel, is three years older at 31. Like Donaire, Montiel is in his prime. A much busier fighter than Donaire, Montiel was undefeated as an amateur and has been a professional since turning 16. It is not clear how many amateur fights Montiel had before turning pro, but it is clear that it was in excess of 100. By 20 he was the WBO world flyweight champion.

Montiel has fought the best in the flyweight and bantamweight classes, and has been responsible for derailing careers of many up-and-coming boxers in his weight classes. Those who think Montiel will beat Donaire point to this record as a foreboding prospect for Donaire's first setback in ten years.

Donaire's only loss in his stellar career came on March 10, 2001 to Rosendo Sanchez in Vallejo, California. It was his second professional fight, a fight he took on short notice, with little time for training. He lost by unanimous decision, but observers claim the bout could have gone either way. Donaire never got a chance to avenge his defeat because Sanchez retired from boxing after chalking up an unimpressive 2 wins, three losses record.

The smart money has Donaire knocking out Montiel. Though the two are evenly matched, Donaire appears to be the fresher boxer. If Pacquiao was relatively unscathed in his recent fights, Donaire has emerged fresh from all his fights. Except in that loss to Sanchez, he has either knocked out or knocked down all his opponents. Smart money feels that when Montiel goes down, as he probably will, he will not be able to get up from the canvas.

You're wondering what happened to Donaire's older brother Glenn? Glenn Donaire has compiled a record of 19 wins, four losses and one draw, has had two title shots but lost both. His first title fight, with Vic Darchinyan, ended in a technical knockout, as his jaw was knocked out of position. Glenn Donaire claimed that it was Darchinyan's elbow that did it, but videos do not show an errant elbow being the culprit.

Nonito avenged his brother's defeat on July 7, 2007 by knocking out Darchinyan and taking the latter's IBF and IBO world flyweight crowns. The knockout was awarded Ring Magazine's "Knockout of the Year" and "Upset of the Year" distinctions in 2007.

I might be able to get tickets to the Donaire-Montiel fight and to the Pacquiao-Mosley fight in May. I'll tell you after the Donaire-Montiel fight on February 19 if I actually do get the tickets and watched the fight at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas.

Donaire may not be exactly another Manny - because Manny is a unique boxer in that he has been able to climb 8 weight classes over his long professional career - but he promises to be another Alexis Arguello. Those familiar with boxing history and watched Alexis fight in the 1970s and 80s know this fighter intimately because in those days, the important fights were televised free on network television. People grew up watching Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran and Alexis Arguello.

I can't wait for the Other Filipino Boxer to get in that ring in Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Vegas - Vegas, baby - and climb that rarefied atmosphere now reserved only for Manny.

Did I tell you that Manny's fight in May sold out as soon as tickets were made available last week? There are tickets still available to the Donaire-Montiel fight and Fil-Ams still have a chance to watch Donaire fight before he becomes a huge international celebrity and the hardest ticket in town, like Manny.

The Catholic Church and Freemasonry

2011-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

"Freemasonry unambiguously states that it is not a religion, nor a substitute for religion.[44] There is no separate "Masonic" God.[45] Nor is there a separate proper name for a deity in any branch of Freemasonry.[46] There is no general interpretation for any of the symbols.[citation needed] In keeping with the geometrical and architectural theme of Freemasonry, the Supreme Being is referred to in Masonic ritual by the attributes of Great Architect of the Universe (sometimes abbreviated as G.A.O.T.U.), Grand Geometer or similar. Freemasons use these variety of forms of address to God to make clear that the reference is generic, not about any one religion's particular God or God-like concept.

"Nevertheless, Freemasonry has been criticised for being a substitute for Christian belief. For example, the New Catholic Encyclopedia states the opinion that 'Freemasonry displays all the elements of religion, and as such it becomes a rival to the religion of the Gospel. It includes temples and altars, prayers, a moral code, worship, vestments, feast days, the promise of reward or punishment in the afterlife, a hierarchy, and initiation and burial rites.'[47]" (From Wikipedia)

The most eloquent critics of Freemasonry in the Catholic Church, notably Father William Saunders of Notre Dame Institute, argue that since Freemasonry partakes of quasi-religious rituals and beliefs, Catholics are committing a grave sin by becoming Masons. What they try to hide from their Catholic faithful, however, is the fact that Masonry prohibits discussion of any religious beliefs precisely because it does not want to become another religion that competes with the religions practiced by its members.

In fact, when some Illinois Mormon Masons turned their lodges into religious places of worship, they were expelled by the Masonic Grand Lodge of Illinois. No religious practices are allowed in Masonic lodges, under penalty of expulsion.

There are Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims - Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis and protestant ministers even - in the Masonic community. The Masons who have studied Freemasonry and have been admitted to the brotherhood know that it is not a religion and that it is not an enemy of their true faith. In fact, because of the Masons' emphasis on righteous living, those who join the Masons become more righteous members of their individual religions. The Catholics have become better Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews, the Muslims, etc. have become more righteous and more tolerant practitioners of their individual religions.

When Masons attend a lodge meeting, they do so not to worship but to meet and practice camaraderie. It is a place where grown men discuss how they can be of service to their fellow men. Religion is farthest from their minds.

What am I saying? I am saying, categorically, that the Catholic Church and other critics of Freemasonry are dead wrong about this sublime society of men who are sworn to righteous living and the defense of freedoms. Fellow Masons treat each other like brothers and the wives, children, sisters-in-law, mothers and mothers-in-law as sacred relations. A Mason will have nothing to fear leaving their children with fellow Masons and their families because Masons consider other Masons and their families as their own.

In contrast, many Catholics would not leave their children alone with Catholic priests or other Catholic elders for fear that those in position of ecclesiastical and lay authority over their children might molest them. Pedophilia is unknown in the Masonic movement, while it is a terrible disease in the Catholic Church. This is also a growing problem in the Protestant churches, of course, but the protestants never claim to be superior to Masons.

The prohibition, under pain of symbolic (not actual) severe corporal punishment, against marrying widows of fellow Masons or children of fellow Masons has erected an impenetrable sexual barrier between Masons and all members of the Masonic family. Furthermore, the Masonic insistence on righteous living is considered by every Mason as a command to go out and seek peace with all men (and women).

When one looks at Masonry and the way it is actually being practiced and contrasts that with the picture being painted by the paranoid zealots in the Catholic Church who are obsessed with the continued demonization of Freemasonry despite the fact that Pope John Paul II had approved the removal of Freemasonry from the list of condemned organizations in 1983, one senses that the Catholic ban on membership in Freemasonry is not only illogical, it is also ridiculous.

The Masons had been condemned by the Vatican since the mid-18th century and all Catholics who would become Freemasons were subject to excommunication. In 1983, the Code of Canon Law, signed by then Pope John Paul II, dropped Freemasonry from the list of organizations membership in which would automatically result in excommunication. This was big, very big. It was something that the Masons had been waiting for over more than two centuries. But, the paranoid zealots in the Catholic Church were not to be deterred. They would continue to demonize Masonry if that was the last thing they did before they - presumably - joined their maker.

The logical conclusion from the de-listing of Freemasonry is that Catholics were allowed henceforth to become Masons. This was the prevailing conclusion of many Catholics post-1983 and many Catholics, by the hundreds of thousands, started joining Freemasonry. Catholics are still joining Masonic lodges in droves to this day.

Those Catholics who became Masons after 1983 are still practicing Catholics, their faith strengthened because of the Masonic call for righteous living. In contrast, the general (non-Masonic) Catholic population continues to abandon the Catholic Church. Church attendance is at an all-time low in the world, yet the Catholics who joined Masonry continue to worship as Catholics.

It is truly ironic that some very influential people in the Catholic faith, first and foremost the current Pope, still think of Masonry as the enemy. In November, 1983, the current Pope (Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger), prevailed upon Pope John Paul II to issue a clarification, stating that Freemasonry was still an enemy of the Catholic Church and Catholics were forbidden, under pain of mortal sin, from joining the Masons.

Any impartial observer of life in the 21st century, however, knows that the true enemy of the Catholic faith is modernity. As the world turns increasingly to science and to technological progress, people's religiosity is taking a hit at an alarmingly increasing pace. Catholics are staying away from their parish churches, staying away from the priesthood, openly defying bans against divorce, birth control and - in some cases, abortion - and are in open revolt against the priesthood that they suspect are either defenders, enablers or practitioners of pedophilia.

One of the emerging countervailing forces that the Church could turn to is Freemasonry, which promotes righteous living and belief in God. Yet, some important voices in the Catholic church apparently are hell-bent on continuing the deep chasm that divides the Church and Freemasonry. Pope John Paul II, who in the 1980s obviously saw that Freemasonry was not a threat, and who was forced by the heavy hand of Cardinal Ratzinger to issue his "clarification," must be turning in his grave.

If one is looking for proof that Masonry is not a religion and certainly not one that competes with the Catholic faith, one only has to look at the fact that the Catholics who have become Masons are generally better Catholics than those Catholics who only know about Masonry from priests who are rabidly anti-Mason. This proof is sadly not available to everyone, only to those who are deeply involved in the Masonic movement.

The accession of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the Papacy was the worst thing that could happen to Catholic Masons. Cardinal Ratzinger was the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the very agency in charge of the Inquisition and the enforcer of the Catholic vendetta against the Masons. Many Catholic Masons are hoping that there will be another Pope soon and that the next Pope would not be as hostile towards the Masons.

But what about the charge that Freemasonry uses religious symbols in its rituals? Masonry traces its roots to antiquity and the symbols are the accumulation of the rich traditions from which the society derives. Masons do not regard the symbols as religious symbols but are rather part and parcel of the Masonic culture. The words "In God We Trust," for example, are ingrained in American culture but are not a religious symbol, which is why in America, where there is a strict separation of church and state, those words are allowed in its currency.

The Masonic "G" and the square and compass - which are the most recognizable symbols of Masonry, stand for the Grand Geometer (the Grand Architect of the Universe) and the two tools of engineering and architecture. Belief in the Grand Geometer, or the Grand Architect, is the least common denominator with all religions. The members are expected to supplement this belief with their own religious beliefs. The Christians call the Grand Geometer "God," the Muslims "Allah," the Jews "Yahweh," etc.

Masons believe that the universe was created by a Supreme Being, but they are not required to believe in any one religion. The members themselves decide which particular religion they are to practice. This proves, except to the paranoid zealots in the Catholic Church, that Masonry is not a religion but a secular way of life.

There is currently widespread fascination with Freemasonry as a result of books and movies that have been shown worldwide and that have become blockbuster successes. Foremost of these is The Da Vinci Code best-selling book and movie. National Treasure, a movie that stars Nicolas Cage, is about Freemasonry in the U.S. Americans are being unduped, if there is such a word, meaning that they are coming out of the circle of the fooled and duped and are seeing in the light of day that Freemasonry is not that secret society that some priests and bishops had warned Catholics about.

Freemasonry is perhaps one of the last stands that the world has erected against the very powerful forces that argue for atheism and the worship of science and technology. Freemasonry is, indeed, an ally of Catholicism and not its enemy.

The Questions We Never Ask

2011-01-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

I was startled to learn that in two major surveys released right after the crazed lunatic sprayed death-seeking bullets at a sparse crowd in front of a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona it was determined that most Americans don't think that the toxic language of the right had anything to do with the carnage.

I guess if you ask Americans now what the best newspaper is in the U.S., they will tell you USA Today. The New York Times would be at the bottom of the list.

The point I'm trying to make here is that in most surveys people will respond to the question according to what they think SHOULD be true and not what IS true. Unless you confront them with a closed-end question, where there is no escape from a clear choice between what people want to believe and their closest approximation of the truth, you will not get a valid survey result.

Americans are fascinated with guns, so if you ask them if the ease with which people access guns had anything to do with the Tucson rampage, they will most likely tell you that the very liberal gun laws had nothing to do with it. Most Americans are screamers. We scream at our political opponents when we disagree with them, so there must be nothing wrong with screaming. We are merely stressing a point and exercising our right to free speech, including the right to threaten our political opponents' lives.

The first poll that came out, the CBS poll, asked responders the question: "Did harsh political tone have anything to do with the Arizona shootings?" 57% of Americans said no, that harsh political tone had nothing to do with the Arizona shootings.

The second poll, conducted by Gallup, asked if the inflammatory language from the right had anything to do with the Arizona rampage. Again, a majority of Americans rejected this charge, only 35% said yes.

The problem with polls is that one can elicit a desired response by the way the question is framed, or the exact wording used.

Most Americans who say that the conservative right's rhetoric led directly or indirectly to the Arizona rampage actually have three events in mind. They are not pointing fingers at the very general and fully-diluted "inflammatory language" of the Gallup poll or "the harsh political tone" in the CBS poll. What liberals and progressives have in mind, when they accuse the right-wing hate machine of complicity in the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords are three statements in particular:

1. Sarah Palin's exhortation to her followers to pull the trigger on the elimination of Gabrielle Giffords from the U.S. Congress. Palin put cross-hairs on twenty congressional districts in the last elections, one of which was Gabrielle Giffords', which included Tucson. Palin now claims that the cross-hairs were similar to the Democrats' bulls-eye on some states that the Dems had targeted for election victories in the past. The language may be similar, but the approaches are vastly different. Palin in her speeches consistently referred to targets as gun targets. She exhorted her followers to not give up in the face of temporary setbacks, but instead to "reload" and keep firing, until the targets are hit.

2. Jesse Kelly, one of the top leaders in the Tucson Tea Party movement and Gabrielle Giffords' Republican opponent last year, habitually referred to Gabrielle Giffords as the opponent who must be eliminated, by implication with a gun if necessary. Jane Hamsher of the "firedoglake" website tweeted on January 8,2011:
Giffords Opponent, Jesse Kelly, Held June Event to “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16″ to “Get on Target” and “Remove Gabrielle Giffords.”

3. Sharron Angle, Nevada Senator Harry Reid's Republican opponent in the last senatorial elections, famously quipped that there are always "2nd amendment remedies" to get rid of political opponents, obviously referring to using guns, if necessary, to rid the country of people who she and her followers deemed unpatriotic, i.e., Democrats.

In the immediate aftermath of the Arizona rampage, Democrats charged that Sarah Palin, Jesse Kelly and Sharron Angle were inextricably linked to the Arizona shootings through their inciting language. The Democrats never said that the vague "inflammatory language" or the even more vague "harsh political tone" had indirectly or directly led to the shootings. Therefore, the CBS and Gallup surveys should not have framed their questions in such a manner.

What the surveyor should have asked but what the bosses in CBS and Gallup would not have allowed them to ask was this:

"Given that Sarah Palin had put gun cross-hairs on Gabrielle Giffords for 'elimination' in the last elections, and that Giffords' opponent, Jesse Kelly, had exhorted his followers to "shoot a fully automatic M-16" to "get on target" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords" and Sharron Angle had exhorted her followers in Nevada to resort to "2nd amendment remedies" to get rid of political opponents, do you think the language of those political campaigns eventually led, directly or indirectly to the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the gun rampage by one Jared Lee Loughner?"

If the survey question had been couched in those terms, there is no doubt in my mind that Americans would have answered, resoundingly, that yes, the toxic language and atmosphere had something to do with the attempted assassination.

What you get out of surveys is predetermined by the questions you ask. Both the CBS and Gallup polls asked the wrong questions. We need another survey that asks the right question.

Of course, if Americans overwhelmingly answer "yes" to the question that I believe should have been asked by the Gallup and CBS surveys, it does not automatically mean that Loughner was in fact influenced by Sarah Palin's, Jesse Kelly's and Sharron Angle's rhetoric. We don't know and we may never know.

But, with all the heat and vitriol being generated by the campaigns all over this land, and especially in the congressional district that includes the wild, wild west where Mexican wetbacks are routinely cursed, vilified and gunned down, it would take a leap of faith to conclude that none of the electoral noise influenced Loughner, that Loughner in fact acted on the basis of what was going on inside his head.

To say this, which is what a lot of right-wing commentators have said about the deranged Loughner, is to ignore the fact that even insane people see and hear the same things that we sane and borderline-sane people see and hear.

I once had a conversation with someone who I judged to be insane. He complained to me that he no longer watched World News Tonight on ABC because the late news anchor, Peter Jennings, kept lecturing him and was staring at him as he (Jennings) spoke. He also said that the moon was following him because everywhere he went, the moon was there.

I did not reveal this to entertain any of you. It was a sad turn of events when this person flipped and became divorced from reality. It is even sadder now because this individual has been helped, can be helped by medications but refuses to take his medications regularly. I only want to demonstrate that the deranged see and hear the same things that we see and hear. The difference is that deranged people react very differently to what they see and hear.

Loughner had access to TV, to Internet news, to the vitriolic political conversations going on in Arizona. In a large part of the Tucson society, Giffords was perceived as an evil woman intent on turning the U.S. into a socialist state. This image of Giffords, I'm convinced, was helped along by Sarah Palin's cross-hairs on Giffords and her exhortation to "reload" (and fire away if not successful the first time) and by Jesse Kelly's violence-inspiring "shoot a fully-automatic M-16 rifle" to "get on target" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords" and Sharron Angle's "2nd amendment remedies."

You let an insane man hear those words and see those images of cross-hairs and M-16 rifles and 2nd amendment remedies and you have the perfect recipe for an assassination plot when fully cooked in Loughner's mental oven.

Machiavellian Economics

2011-01-08T04:47:00.000-08:00

I was on a tourist bus in Tokyo when I heard the tour guide announce to us gullible American tourists: "We are passing some orange groves that supply Tokyo and the surrounding areas. Notice how carefully trimmed the trees are. The trees are small, but they are packed with fruit. It looks like the orange industry is doing very well. But the truth is orange growing in the country is living dangerously. It is under attack from American oranges. The government of Japan must step in and protect the oranges, otherwise the orange farmers in Japan will be wiped out."

It was 1982. I could not believe my ears. Japan had just successfully killed television and radio production as well as the textile industry in the U.S., was in the process of killing the larger electronics industry, was flooding America with Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans, and was running huge trade surpluses against the U.S. Yet, the Japanese were talking about the need to protect their orange growers.

In Machiavelli's the Prince, the genius of deception advises his prince, "The prince must, as already stated, avoid those things which will make him hated or despised, and whenever he succeeds in this, he will have done his part, and will find no danger in other vices. He will chiefly become hated, as I said, by being rapacious, and usurping the property and women of his subjects, which he must abstain from doing and whenever one does not attack the property or honour of the generality of men, they will be contented; and one will only have to combat the ambition of a few, who can be easily held in check in many ways."

Machiavelli knew that the prince must behave properly at all times. No minor kicks, no vices, especially not in front of his subjects. The prize, the North Star, is much bigger. If the prince behaves well in public, he can get almost anything from his subjects.

Machiavelli's book was of course written for the benefit of rulers and not businessmen, yet if we just substitute "Japanese businessmen" for prince and "consumers" for subjects, we can easily see that the above passage is applicable to Japan's hoodwinking of the American consumers.

Japan orchestrated the systematic destruction of the most important manufacturing sectors in the U.S. without seeming to have done so. The Japanese executives and trainees who were sent to the U.S. to manage Japanese interests here looked and lived like handicapped aliens. They all spoke broken English. They all needed help from their fellow American workers. They all humbly sat in their corners and never bothered anyone. They were neophytes who appeared lost in their new surroundings. Their incomes were only marginally more than those of the average American workers.

Americans were not tempted to envy or despise those Japanese because they appeared to be struggling economically, along with the Americans they employed.

They were generous, and they showed their employees a good time whenever the occasion called for it.

What Americans did not know was that the Japanese they worked with were paid two salaries: their salaries in America that allowed them to live modestly but comfortably and the salaries paid by their home offices, which depending on their positions in the home office hierarchy, could be substantial or puny.

The commercial relationship between Japan and the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s can be characterized as that of the elephant and the mouse. The wily Japanese were supposedly the mouse and the American economy was allegedly the elephant. But, with one important twist: the mouse was spreading a virus that the elephant would not recover from for decades.

It was a virus that weakened America's economic muscle and turned the American economy into a consumer and service economy. We became subjects of the Japanese manufacturing Prince but were made to feel that we were the rulers. It was a virus that turned American macho men to wimps.

While we gladly opened our markets to Japanese products, the Japanese virtually closed their markets to ours. They dumped their excess production in the U.S. and brilliantly explained why their products were cheaper in the U.S. than in Japan. They explained to us that the Japanese market had - and still does - many distribution layers that had been erected over the centuries. There were relationships that had survived the generations, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nightmares. There were middlemen in every corner of Japan that added to the cost of Japanese products as they negotiated the complex marketing infrastructure. This marketing infrastructure, the Japanese told us, was responsible for making not only Japanese made products very expensive in Japan but also American products and rendered U.S. made products non-competitive in the Japanese market.

We looked with awe at the cost of living in Japan - one of the highest in the world. What we did not know was that this was by design. The Japanese were willing to pay exorbitant prices for their own products to assure that Japanese products could be marketed cheaply - even at a loss - in other countries. That was how the Japanese would destroy manufacturing in the Americas, in Asia and in Europe.

America's exports had no luck in Asian, European and South American markets either. U.S. manufactures competed with "dumped" Japanese exports and could not compete on price and eventually quality. The Japanese victory in its trade war with America was complete.

If the Japanese had not built factories in the U.S., the trade imbalance with Japan would be much, much larger than it is today. Japan currently is the second biggest creditor of the U.S., holding close to $900 billion in U.S. debt. America's number one creditor? You guessed it - China, with more than $1 trillion of U.S. debt.

Before we go to China, we must make mention of the South Koreans and other minor players. They too have been practicing Machiavellian Economics at our expense. South Korea has virtually closed its markets to American consumer products just as they attempt to replace Japan as the biggest source of cars, televisions and electronic products that are marketed in the U.S. President Obama wants a trade agreement signed with South Korea so bad that he was willing to go before the South Koreans, hat in hand, to convince them to sign on the dotted line. South Korea, which is benefiting greatly from the status quo, does not appear eager to sign a trade agreement which will grant American businessmen the right under the law to market goods in South Korea under most favored nation terms.

This brings us to the Chinese. When the current Chinese industrial revolution started, the Chinese burst on the scene as coolies who were merely trying to earn a buck - literally. Chinese workers were willing to work for $1 a day and were almost robotic in their efficiency. They were the hardest workers in the world. The Chinese have built, over the centuries, a veneration for artisanship. They can build the best and cheapest Nike shoes, day-in and day-out, for years and for decades. They don't complain of boredom. They have Confucian pride in their craftsmanship. They could build the best Nikes in the world, earn $1 a day, and never complain.

They became the darlings of American business. Even as Chinese wage rates increased exponentially over the years, Chinese labor still cost much less than American labor, both unionized and non-unionized. The Republicans are quick to blame unionized American labor for the disparity between Chinese and American wages, yet China's wages also beat non-unionized American wages by a mile.

The Chinese are quick learners, and they learned quickly from the Japanese. They adopted Machiavellian Economics from the Nipongos, but improved on the method. Instead of shipping Chinese brands from China, or manufacturing Chinese brands in the U.S. using parts manufactured in China, the Chinese merely negotiated with the American multinationals to either locate those multinationals' plants in China or to employ Chinese sub-contractors. The Chinese also manipulate their currency by virtually pegging the yuan to the dollar and adopting monetary policies that would keep the exchange rate virtually constant. This way, American products will not suddenly become cheap in China. The Chinese have our goose cooked.

Americans go to Wal-Mart, Target and other chain stores all over the 50 states and buy American brands, not knowing if those products are actually made in the U.S. or made elsewhere. The answer, of course, is simple. They are not made in the U.S. They are, most of them, made in China. Some, like tires, are made in Malaysia.

For the nearly two decades the deception went along with silky smoothness. Then one day Americans noticed. Where are the American manufacturing jobs? If we are buying record quantities of cell phones and computers, nearly all of them American brands, why can't we find neighbors who are employed in those factories?

Machiavelli will always outsmart his subjects and will never be found out. Machiavellian Economics, however, works only to a point. The subjects - American consumers - eventually find out that they have been duped.

Can we, American consumers, go to an all-out declared war with the princes? No, it's a war that we cannot win. What we need to do is to turn the tables on all of these international princes. We must create advantages where none exist. We must exploit our weakness and turn it to an advantage. We must engage in deceptive trade practices without the princes knowing what's up in our sleeve.

How do we exploit our weaknesses and turn them into strengths? We must become the new Japan. We must create our own version of Japan's Ministry of Industry and Trade that will create strategies in international trade. The goal must be to become an export economy, not a consuming economy. The American Ministry of Industry and Trade will craft world distribution strategies, but will also help in the manufacturing end. Questions such as what is the right mix of robotics technology and American unionized and non-unionized labor will create the optimum advantage in final product cost must be answered - convincingly. How can the U.S. protect its manufacturing industries without appearing to be protecting them?

The American Ministry of Industry and Trade shall oversee the creation of giant American trading firms, patterned after Mitsubishi, Mitsui and others. These trading firms will have one overarching goal: the promotion of American manufactured products overseas.

A new marketing infrastructure will have to be created, assuring that products manufactured abroad will have a much harder time reaching the American consumers. We can justify this new infrastructure by announcing to the world that Americans need jobs and the only jobs American businesses can give them are the layers of distribution that must handle imports as those imports go through the pipeline.

We can do a lot of crafty and wily things, which I am not going to write about because such strategies must be kept a secret. We will of course be found out eventually, but by the time we are found out, it will be too late for the Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans and others who have been practicing Machiavellian Economics at our expense over the years.

We will be the new international princes, directing our invisible guided missiles at our unsuspecting targets - the Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans and Germans. We need to start this yesterday.

Aliens in the Mist

2011-01-01T06:43:00.000-08:00

They might as well be aliens. They have nothing in common with us ordinary Americans. They cannot identify with us, they do not share our everyday concerns. They are the new aristocrats of the crumbling aristocratic world. They are the Marie Antoinettes.

How can you expect them to identify with regular folks when they make as much as 500 to 600 times what an average worker makes? I am talking about today's Chief Executive Officers.

Fifty years ago, CEOs made ten times what the average workers made. All the concerns, all the fears, all the feelings of insecurity that the average workers had, the CEOs also had. What happened to the workers impacted the lives of the CEOs too.

One reason Mad Men, the cable TV show, is such a hit is that people identify with the advertising executive characters in that show. Those advertising men had to watch their budgets, ran out of money like everybody else, scrimped and saved.

One reason Bill Clinton had such high approval ratings even in the midst of the Monica scandals was that Bill identified with ordinary Americans ("I feel your pain") and they with him. Americans knew that Clinton had financial problems, just like them. In order to raise the money to fund his legal defense, Clinton did not dig from a trust fund, or his stock options, he borrowed against his life insurance policies.

The CEOs today are immune from financial hardship. They would never outlive their finances if they lived a thousand years. They no longer have anything in common with the common man.

This, in my humble opinion, is at the heart of the destruction of the American middle class. The CEOs do not identify with the American middle class because they cannot fathom what ordinary folks are experiencing these days. The CEOs might as well be space aliens newly landed from outer space. They look at American labor and what they see is a factor of production. They do not see people, they see a class of people. They see a commodity.

This is why they would close plants in America and open factories in China, India, Singapore and Taiwan without so much as a sigh. Hitler and his fellow murderers looked at the Jews and saw only the letters J-E-W. They did not see them as Dr. Rosen, or Mr. Rosenthal, or Mrs. Graham, or Master Schultz. They saw them as a class of sub-humans. The CEOs do not see their employees as individual workers to whom they owe some loyalty. They are just workers who could be replaced by other workers in China, India, etc. at a fraction of the cost.

This behavior on the part of the CEOs has been rewarded by Wall Street. Multinationals that close plants in Ohio and Indiana and open new factories in Guandong and Mumbai have seen their stocks rise in multiples of three, four or five over the past few decades.

CEOs and their highly-paid staffs have broken way past the ceiling of reasonable compensation and are earning tens of millions in salaries and perks each year. The average worker makes do with $30, $40, $50 thou a year, while the CEOs and their entourage give each other salaries 200 to 600 times what their average worker makes.

Are these CEOs especially talented, like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Celine Dion, Oprah Winfrey, Lebron James and other stars in the rare firmament of stars? No way, Jose. These CEOs are just ordinary blokes who have poor people skills and are of average intelligence, but by simply being at the right place at the right time, they are elected to the pinnacle of the corporations where they have made a living for a number of years. But wait, these blokes do have a talent. They are ruthless cost-cutters. They have developed a reputation as cost-cutters. Meaning, they have in the past closed a lot of factories in the U.S. and have either opened new ones in China, Malaysia, Singapore or India; or, they have engaged sub-contractors in those countries.

With that cost-cutting reputation in tow, plus a reputation as a heartless executive, these powerful bomb throwers eventually ascend to the position of Chief Executive Officer. Once in office as the new CEO, they continue cutting costs by closing plants in the U.S. and opening up new plants in China. And Wall Street rises to its feet and gives them a standing ovation.

Labor costs are so cheap in China, India and other emerging Asian countries, which more importantly have many highly educated, science-and-math-trained workers that to the CEOs, it's a no-brainer. These plants in China make the CEOs of American multinationals look like geniuses.

More like a hare-brained strategy to me. The destruction of the American middle class has a steep long-term cost. As the American standard of living declines, purchasing power drops precipitously, and in time the American market will no longer sustain the big multinationals. True, they can sell to the emerging Chinese market, but the Chinese are still years away from matching the fertile American market. Thus, there will come a point when the multinationals can no longer sell as much to the American market because of Americans' decreased purchasing power, while not being able to sell to the emerging markets because those markets are nowhere near the American market in purchasing power.

The net result is a contraction of the multi-nationals, their decline and eventual demise. A look at the Dow Jones component companies in 1900, compared to the Dow Jones components in 2000 reveals how American corporations have gone from being on top of the world to being nowhere to be found. Only one of the 30 Dow Jones companies in 1900 was still around in 2000 - General Electric. The twenty-nine others are gone.

These multinationals that close plants in America and open factories in China and India, if history is a guide, will not be around in 2100. They will have outsmarted themselves. Having destroyed the American middle class, they will eventually see their markets shrink. Their reduced business volume will make their scales of operation unsustainable and they will find it necessary to splinter and/or be gobbled up by the new emerging companies, some of which only exist in our imaginations today.

There is an important cross-current that may still save the day for the middle class. Some important multinationals, such as Texas Instruments and Global Foundaries, a spinoff of American Micro Devices, when confronted with the question of where to locate their new, very promising high-tech plants, decided to locate them in Richardson, Texas and upstate New York. The trend is powered by a desire on the part of American businesses to locate their plants near their customers. It is also fueled by a very intelligent long view. Chinese labor costs are compounding at the rate of 15% a year, while American labor costs are increasing at an average of 2% a year. Over the 20-year-life of a factory, Chinese labor may approach or even exceed the cost of American labor.

There are security concerns. There are concerns about knock-offs. There are concerns about quality. It used to be that Westinghouse refrigerators lasted almost a lifetime. Now the refrigerators that are made in China easily break down, need repair or replacement and are more costly in the long-run. Bicycles? Fuhgeddaboutit. Bicycles made in China last exactly one month.

There are concerns about keeping highly trained employees, with job-hopping becoming common in China as new companies are formed and good employees are pirated away.

Texas Instruments has a wealth of talent to tap because of so many closed factories in Texas, in the southwest region, and finally in the United States. By partnering with the University of Texas in Dallas, TI can assure itself of a steady stream of talent that is university-trained.

There are CEOs who are so far ahead of the curve that they now see the U.S. as a destination of choice for the new factories that they are setting up to manufacture their new products. These are the CEOs who will be around for a long time and who will take their companies deep into the current century and perhaps onto the next.

If the CEOs of American multinationals do not reverse course - and soon - their days may be numbered. New, lean and mean American manufacturers are sure to sprout up and challenge the multinationals in the American market as China's and India's and other Asian countries' labor costs rise by double digit percentages each year and as the product quality differential bites the multinationals in the nose.

These aliens in the mist must emerge in daylight and learn how to be Americans again. One bright and glorious morning, most Americans will wake up and realize that the problem is not them - the canard is that Americans are under-educated and ill-trained; it is rather that aliens from outer space are running the multinationals and are decimating the middle class.

One bright and glorious morning, a responsible Board of Directors will cut back on executive compensations and bring CEOs and their sycophants down to earth, closer to their workers and become Americans again. When that day arrives, Wall Street will realize that it is not just the bottom line that predicts future success, long-term viability is conditional upon the protection of the American middle class. It is in the multinationals' self-interest to protect the American middle class, and I am confident the CEOs will eventually realize how important this goal is.

There's hope yet.

Meanwhile, some "facts" we have to live with (from the article, "American Manufacturing Going the Way of the Dodo Bird," found in Chip Hanlon's Red Country, a conservative website):

*The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.

*Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

*In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.

*The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000. (Nykos2: George Bush was President when U.S. manufacturing lost 5.5 million jobs. Bush never commented to the country about this loss. Did he know? Did he approve? Of course he approved. Those space-alien CEOs were his base.)

*In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

*As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

Merry Christmas to us: Wall Street Bull, Cost-cutting CEOs and the politicized U.S. Supreme Court

2010-12-24T06:01:00.000-08:00

The CEO's were not the only ones busily tightening the screws on us ordinary, gullible and dumped-on Americans. The new class of business aristocracy that had emerged starting in the 1960s from Harvard Business School, Wharton and other mass producers of financial whiz kids were emptying our pockets as we stood tied to a pole, ready to be cannibalized by savages dancing to the beat of a jungle (survival of the fittest and best connected) drummer.

We were overnight transformed from a producing society to a consuming society, overnight transformed to consumers of Wall Street's raging bull droppings. Instead of making things, we are now selling things made by others. But, there are not enough sales jobs in warehouses and retail stores to go around, so we sell each other financial products invented for us by the financial wizards in our midst. The financial whiz kids from Harvard and Wharton sold us a gargantuan Ponzi scheme that dwarfed even Bernie Madoff. They sold us securities consisting of worthless mortgages and products not the smartest among us could understand.

Wall Street icons sold us worthless securities knowing full well they were worthless, bet against the products they were selling us, effectively tanking their reputations by telling us those securities were opportunities of a lifetime. They were out for the quick buck, these gleaming cap-toothed suits, they were not concerned for their long-term reputations. "A horse, a horse, my reputation for a horse!"

Continuing with Robert Borosage's blog post, "Obama and the CEO's: Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places":

Financial Speculation and Soaring Insecurity

40 percent of American households have experienced unemployment, foreclosure, underwater homes or mortgage arrears in the financial collapse. Americans lost some $11 trillion in savings and home values, dashing retirement plans. At the height of the Bush economy, Wall Street was capturing fully 40 percent of corporate profits, as the housing bubble built on a tsunami of financial speculation. UBS and General Electric, whose CEOs met with the president, were among the financial institutions bailed out by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

This bubble-bust Wall Street economy was a product of deregulation, the growth of a shadow banking system, and the spread of leveraged speculation with other people's money. President Obama was right when he said Wall Street needs to be smaller and engaged more in real investment than in speculation. But the president's cautious reforms engendered a multimillion-dollar lobby reaction from Wall Street. The banks were rescued but not reformed, the casino has reopened, and Wall Street's back to paying record levels of million dollar bonuses. The pervasive fraud and abuse revealed in the housing bubble has resulting in shockingly few prosecutions.

(Nykos2: We as a country do not want to learn. We are split by ideology. Those in the right are getting hoarse, screaming into our ears that we must leave business alone. They are drilling into our cerebellums the notion that government is the problem, therefore, government cannot possibly have the solution. Our government, effectively neutered, has stepped back. Wall Street is back in business, selling us on their latest Ponzi schemes.)

The economy can't work well without major reforms that curb financial speculation and make banking boring again. That requires tighter control on leverage and activities, curbs on banker's compensation schemes, and, as even the IMF now supports, taxes on banks -- including a financial transaction tax that would dampen computer-driven speculation. Needless to say, America's financial barons and their lobbies will oppose these reforms fiercely.

(Nykos2: From the Washington insider bloggers' website, The Hill: "One idea for raising taxes to pay down the debt is the bill introduced this February by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.). His “Debt Free America Act” (H.R. 4646) would impose a 1 percent “transaction tax” on every financial transaction — whether paid by cash, credit card or any form of financial transfer, the only exception being transactions involving the purchase or sale of stock. Theoretically, everyone would pay one cent on the dollar for every such transaction in America every day — whether $3 million on a $300 million business acquisition, $300 on the purchase of a $30,000 car, or $5 on a $500 ATM withdrawal.

"To reduce the impact of such a flat tax on the poor, Fattah’s bill provides for a 1 percent tax credit for couples earning $250,000 or less ($125,000 or less for individuals) and discretion by the Treasury Department to exempt certain transactions on which lower-income people disproportionately rely. Another idea would be to amend his bill to exempt all transactions below $500.

"Using 2008 numbers as an example: There was $755 trillion in total transactions that year. If you deduct the exempted $312 trillion in stock transactions, that leaves $443 trillion in revenues, minus the cost of the tax credit and other possible measures to soften the impact on the poor. This means that with Fattah’s transaction tax in place, there is a real chance for eliminating the national debt within the next 10 years..."

This is a great idea, and easily enforceable. Will the U.S. Congress pass this bill? Of course not. Many in the lower House and in the Senate are kangaroos in Wall Street's pockets.)

Top End Tax Cuts and a Collapsing Infrastructure

America is literally falling apart. Collapsing bridges, exploding water mains, crumbling levees are a deadly clear and present danger. Children go to schools that are dangerous to their health. Our declining infrastructure is also costly economically, with outmoded transport, crowded highways, slow and inadequate broadband impeding our ability to compete. As President Obama has suggested, we need to make significant investments in building a 21st-century infrastructure, in education and training, in research and development as a foundation for a revived American economy.

In theory, the business lobby supports these investments. But they also lobby hard for top end and corporate tax cuts, and for spending cuts that makes it impossible to finance them. A fruitful conversation with the CEOs might have focused on whether they would commit real resources in a drive to increase investment in areas vital to our future. Instead, reports are that the president promised to move directly from the egregious top-end tax cuts in December to cutting spending and reducing deficits in January. If the wealthiest Americans, like those around the table with the president, are going to continue to pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries -- as Warren Buffett has noted -- then America will continue to starve investments in the areas vital to our future.

(Nykos2: Why shouldn't America's secretaries pay a higher effective tax rate than their bosses? The secretaries are lucky to have jobs. Top executives, after all, no longer need secretaries. They can do all their communication themselves via the Internet, using their companies' sophisticated email. The filing work can and is being done in India by some outsourcing company at the fraction of the cost of America's secretaries.

Their coffees? The executives can designate one of them to be in charge of coffee for the day. Each executive from division manager on shall function as the coffee guy or gal to serve all the other executives. By installing such a system, the executives will be forced to communicate with their fellow executives, promoting inter-department, inter-division communication.

Why shouldn't the executives eliminate the position of secretaries? They've eliminated their personnel managers, their data processing people, their accountants, their factory workers, their staff managers, etc. Every job that can be off-shored or outsourced to China, India and other countries is already either in China or other countries, or on a plane going to destinations suspected but officially unknown.

Their Boards of Directors are rewarding executives for shipping jobs overseas. Wall Street loves news about jobs going to China and making multinationals enormously profitable.

Secretaries who still have jobs should be eternally grateful that their jobs are not yet being outsourced to some heavily-accented Indian. So, yes, tax the secretaries more than their S.O.B. bosses.)

Regressive Tax Reforms and Record Poverty

More than 43 million Americans are in poverty, the highest number since they began keeping records. More than 42 million are on food stamps. Millions of homeowners are still facing foreclosure and loss of their homes. Mass unemployment continues, with more than 20 million Americans in need of full-time work. An entire generation of urban kids is essentially being written off, sentenced to crowded schools, broken families, dangerous streets, and joblessness. This is the tinder for social explosion.

Yet, programs for the poor will be on the chopping block from conservatives when the new Congress convenes. The politicians that the CEOs supported will be adding to, not subtracting from, the burdens of the "least of these." For there to be a serious effort to address poverty, to promise a fair start for every child, to provide the core elements of a real hand up that offers them the opportunity for a good education, a decent job, an affordable home and hope, we'll need costly new priorities that will have to be pursued largely without significant corporate support.

(Nykos2: The rich, the powerful, the well-connected are the new aristocracy in America. The outrageous compensations that they have packaged for each other have put them on a rocket ship to space. They no longer identify with ordinary, everyday Americans. "Americans are starving? Let them eat cake. I don't have time for them," they seemingly say to each other. "They are scum because they choose to be scum."

Listen to these new American aristocrats talk. Then, and only then, will you know if you still have a future in this country.)

Corporate Power and Corrupted Democracy

Corporate lobbies and corporate money are corrupting our politics. Over the last two years, we've witnessed graphic scenes in how powerful and entrenched corporate lobbies could fend off common sense reforms in health care, energy, finance and trade. The decision of the conservative Supreme Court gang of five in Citizen's United, overturning settled precedent to declare that corporations had the same free speech rights as people and could spend unlimited amounts in independent expenditure campaigns to influence elections, contributed to the flood of corporate money that helped to bring Republicans the majority in the House.

Washington can't work as an instrument of common purpose so long as corporate lobbies dominate the backrooms and corporate money dominates elections. Hundreds of billions of subsidies are now wasted on entrenched corporate complexes -- the military industrial complex, the drug and health care complex, the agribusiness and Big Oil complexes. Needless to say, the Obama CEOs aren't about to cut back their lobbying unilaterally and oppose bitterly any restrictions on their political activity. Yet, no reform agenda can survive unless the corporate hold on Washington is challenged.

This list can go on. Talking with CEOs makes much sense. Finding areas of agreement -- perhaps around infrastructure investment, education, R&D -- is useful. (It remains bizarre that corporate America so vociferously opposes single-payer health care that would remove from their balance sheets a major expense that harms their ability to compete). Making an alliance with the small businesses and national companies that actually want to prosper in America might be possible.

But the president should not use his "bully pulpit" to teach the wrong lesson. America can't succeed without prosperous companies, but global corporations now are prospering while America fails. They stand in the way of reforms vital to our economy and society. If Obama is at peace with America's corporate barons, he isn't doing his job. Embracing their agenda isn't "moving to the center," it is abandoning the fundamental reforms this country desperately needs.

(Nykos2: Obama has not completely capitulated to the business interests. I know, I was overly harsh on him in my past comments. Further reflection has convinced me that this guy may have the right stuff after all. He has allowed Big Business, Big Oil, Big Insurance, etc. to win this round. Hopefully, if he is re-elected in 2012, we will see the real fight between this administration and a business community that is drunk with power. The CEOs and their satellites and sycophants have, after all, most of the power centers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, seemingly in their pockets.)

Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage

Merry Christmas to us: American CEOs creating jobs in China

2010-12-18T04:52:00.000-08:00

I can't get that old Christmas spirit this year. I remember waking up many times as I progressed from year to year in my childhood immersed in a serenity that I could never feel in adulthood. Childhood, to me, left when I could no longer genuinely feel and see the words of "Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright."

I have a 14-foot Christmas tree in my house this year, yet I can barely sense the smell of pine. As a child, my family's Christmas trees were no more than six feet tall, yet each morning during the Christmas season I woke up to the sweet aroma of pine. If I knew tai-chi, I probably would have gone to the nearest fog-shrouded park and practiced that serene art of kung-fu in slow motion.

I know I'm in trouble because I can't smell the pine in my house, which now has a massive 14-foot Noble tree top straight from the rain forests in Oregon.

An Internet friend forwarded this Christmas message to me, which flummoxed me. Was I supposed to be offended, or was this a genuine Christmas wish full of hope and encouragement? You be the judge:

"To My Progressive Friends:

"Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Nor is this to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

"To My Traditional Friends:

"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year"

I opened my mail this morning and lo and behold, I am getting excited again. A lifelong friend who lives in Australia emailed this piece from Huffington Post that puts into words exactly how I feel about my beloved America, only much better than I ever could.

Robert Borosage is the President of American Institute for America's Future and a regular blogger at Huffington Post. As I read his piece, which I am reprinting in my blog in two installments (with my commentary, of course) I was reminded of John F. Kennedy, who used all the moral suasion powers at his disposal to bring down the mighty U.S. steel industry to its knees. American power and hegemony was unquestioned in those days and what the President of the U.S. said was the law. No hemming and hawing, only universal respect for the Office of the Presidency.

Borosage, in his latest blog, noted that President Obama has met with the very people that he should be castigating. He led with an apology when he should be demanding one from the CEOs of the very corporations that are responsible for the gutting of American labor and the dismantling of the American middle class.

I do not believe that Obama owes any American CEO any apologies, so why did Obama apologize to them? I am an anti-conservative, yet I am being drawn closer and closer toward the conservative position that Obama is too humble. He bowed to the Emperor of Japan, to the Saudi prince, and who knows who else?

Obama must learn to project power, not humility. Especially not before the very people - the CEOs of the major multinational corporations - who have wrecked the American economy while building their multinationals. It is as though these CEOs have conspired to ruin America and partition the country into corporate serfdoms that are part and parcel of their empires which transcend national boundaries.

That's not OK by me, and should not be OK by Obama. He, after all, is the President of this country that is being partitioned by these multinationals for their personal gain and not for, by and of the American people.

From Robert Borosage"s "Obama and the CEOs: Looking for Love in all the wrong places":

The president kicked up his "corporate charm offensive," meeting for hours with 20 CEOs yesterday. Characteristically, he started with an apology for not "finding the right balance" in addressing business. "We want to be boosters," he said, because "when you do well, America does well." The president and the business leaders talked about free trade, fiscal discipline, and relief from regulation. The White House let it be known the president was considering a speaking gig at the board meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, the right-wing corporate lobby that had accused him of waging a "general attack on our free enterprise system."

You can't fault the president for showing a little love to America's corporate leaders, but there is one small problem here: The entire premise of the meeting is wrong. The reality is that the corporations are doing extraordinarily well -- and America is in trouble. US corporations recorded the highest profits on record last quarter, while more than 20 million people were in need of full-time work, and poverty is at record heights. What is good for General Motors or General Electric or IBM is no longer necessarily good for America.

In fact, these executives and their companies are more part of the problem than part of the solution for this country. They've been making out like bandits, but Americans are less and less the beneficiaries of their success. As President Obama has stated, if we are to revive an America with a vibrant middle class and a widely shared prosperity, we need fundamental reforms to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity -- an agenda the country needs and the CEOs he met with largely oppose.

Consider:

Unsustainable Trade Deficits and Massive Job Loss to Offshoring.

America was running a trade deficit of more than $2 billion a day when the economy collapsed, borrowing that sum from abroad, largely from Chinese and Japanese bankers. We've been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for years. Now the big companies are offshoring information technology and back office jobs in large numbers. We're running a growing deficit in high technology goods with China. The CEOs the president met with -- from General Electric, IBM, Cisco, Intel , Boeing -- have been at the front of this trend. As Andy Grove, the former head of Intel,warned, there are now fewer manufacturing jobs in the US computer business than there were when the first PC was assembled in 1975.

(Nykos2: I remember 1975. I remember when the first IBM PCs came out. They were 16 kilobytes in capacity. Now my PC has 326 gigabytes. I was one of the few lucky ones who had access to those PCs. Ninety percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the PCs, yet astonishingly, we had more employees in U.S. computer manufacturing then than we do now. These computer manufacturing companies are saturating the American market with computers made in foreign countries, using coolie labor trained by genius American trainers.)

The president rightly made balancing our trade central to his economic agenda. That requires pressure on China, Germany, Japan and the surplus nations -- not more trade accords that allow them to play by a different set of rules. And it requires making things in America once more, with companies committed to exporting goods, not jobs.

(Nykos2: Exporting jobs is almost as dastardly as the Philippine policy under former President Arroyo of exporting people.)

Yet, the CEOs the president met with have fought hard against reforms that would end tax breaks companies collect for moving jobs abroad. They champion trade accords that have helped disembowel manufacturing in this country. They support lobbies like the Chamber and Business Roundtable that oppose bold industrial initiatives that might help American manufacturing revive. Their increasing ability to run up profits while moving jobs abroad and using the threat of doing so to lower wages at home undermines America's prospects.

Gilded Age Inequality and a Declining Middle Class

In the five years before the financial collapse, when the economy was growing, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 2/3 of all income growth. Household income for the typical family actually lost ground over the course of the decade. Corporate and Wall Street executive compensation practices allowed the top executives to capture excessive rewards, while workers were facing lay-offs, wage and benefit cutbacks, and greater insecurity.

(Nykos2: The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 2/3 of all income growth? How did this happen? This is like in old Europe, when the kings and the royal family, relatives and friends of the court lived lavish lifestyles while 99% of the population lived in abject poverty.)

The CEOs the president met with are perfect examples. Kenneth Chennault, the CEO and Chairman of American Express, pocketed $17.3 million during 2009 when the economy tanked, about 542 times what the average worker makes. Jeffrey Immelt, Chair and CEO of General Electric, took home about $9.8 million, 308 times a worker's pay. Paul S. Otellini, the CEO of Intel, was paid about $14.5 million, making more in a day than the average worker in a year.

(Nykos2: I remember reading this classic novel about American business in the 1950s, called The Executive Suite. The main character in the book was the CEO of a major food manufacturer whose salary was $50,000 a year. That was 10 times what the average worker in his company earned. Ten times, not 542 times, which is what the Amex Chairman and CEO makes today, compared to the average Amex employee.)

A prosperous middle class economy cannot survive if the wealthiest are capturing this proportion of the rewards. In the US, we've never done much redistribution through taxes. The only successful strategy -- the core of the post-World War II economy that built America's middle class -- has been a strong labor movement in a full-employment or near-full-employment economy. When labor was 35 percent of the private workforce, it not only lifted the wages of its members, but its wage and benefit packages set a standard that non-union employers had to respond to. And a strong labor movement provided an internal check on executive excess. A full employment economy lifts the demand for labor, making it easier for workers to make wage demands, as demonstrated most recently in the dot.com economy of Clinton's last years. Reforms are also needed to limit current executive compensation schemes, which hide the full cost of pay packages through stock options, give perverse short-term incentives that have little to do with relative performance, and rely on board compensation committees that are controlled by executives.

(Nykos2: No wonder these executives cry "socialist," "commie," "hippie" every time their outrageous compensation packages are mentioned in polite and impolite company.)

Needless to say, the CEOs that the president met with are unlikely trumpets for these reforms. Business lobbies warned that labor law reform would bring down Armageddon on the administration. Curbing excessive executive pay meets fierce resistance. But it is hard to imagine how we rebuild a broad middle class unless workers can once again capture a fair share of the productivity increases that they help to generate and executives are limited in how much they can plunder the companies that they head.

(Nykos2: I know you can absorb only so much in one sitting, so I want you to think about what you have read so far, toss it around in your head, and I will pick it up from here in my next blog. It only gets better.)

Dear Santa

2010-12-05T04:24:00.000-08:00

Dear Santa,

I'm sorry I doubted you it's just that some kids at my school made fun of me for believing in you.

Here is a list of the item(s) I would like for you to give to me.

* Skate 3 (Xbox 360)
* Castel Crashers (Xbox 360)
* Star War Force Unleashed 2 (Xbox 360)
* Ghost Busters (Xbox 360)
* Batman Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360)

If you cannot fulfill a certain one of my wishes please do not buy an alternative like if you can't make Skate 3 do not make skate 2 as an alternative and even if it's the same game for a different console like the wii or ps3 do not use that as an alternative

Sincerely,
Paul Lumba

"Mom," my then 9-year-old son Paul asked his mom in 2008, "I'm upset with Santa. He never gets me what I want. I asked him for an Xbox 360 and all he gave me are these stupid things that are made in China. I thought his dwarfs make toys in the North Pole. Why are these things made in China?"

His mom replied, "Paul, Santa ran out of Xbox 360s because so many poor kids in Africa want them. Those poor kids get nothing else for Christmas, and it's very important for them to get their wish."

"But those kids don't even have TV. How can they play with their XBox 360?"

My wife looked at me, suppressing her laughter.

I chimed in. "Oh, but their tribal leaders have TV sets, and electricity. The kids just take their XBox 360s to their leaders' houses so they can play their favorite games on them."

"I hate Santa," Paul said. "He never gives me what I want, only these stupid stuffs from China. His dwarfs don't even make these things."

"There are so many kids nowadays," his mom tells him, "and the dwarfs cannot make enough toys for everybody. So Santa is now buying toys made in China, like everybody else."

Fast forward to today. "Dad," Paul, now eleven, tells me. "Santa never gives me what I want, that is why I am asking him for only small things."

"You kidding?" I asked Paul, feigning incredulity. "I saw the list you sent to Santa. That's a lot of stuff you're asking from him. And, by the way, you are not using the correct punctuations. You have run-on sentences. Maybe we should revise your letter."

"Forget the letter, Dad," Paul says. "Here's what I want you to buy for me."

He told me what he wanted me to buy, something that costs $200. That's all that stuck in my head, that it would cost me 200 bucks. I didn't really hear what it was that he wanted. All I knew was that it would cost 200 bucks. And it was not just $200, of course, because the small items he wants from Santa all add up.

I'm a smiling Scrooge. Especially when it comes to buying things for myself and my wife.

"Paulits," I usually told her in Christmases past, "Let's not get each other big gifts. We both go out throughout the year and buy whatever we need. I can't think of anything that you and I don't already have. Every day, it seems, is Christmas day for you, with all the compulsive shopping that you do."

I hate shopping. Rarely do I go with Paulita shopping. And when I do, I always manage to disappear into a corner of the mall, sit and wait until I get tired of waiting. That's when I start to look for her. Usually that's a major production. Whenever Paulita is in the mall, she vanishes into thin air. I can never find her. Sometimes I suspect she hides from me. As soon as she sees me coming, she ducks into the women's fitting room.

Instead of relaxing on a comfy seat in the mall, I spend 90% of my time looking for her. Usually, I remember that I need something for myself, like batteries or a Just for Men hair dye. So I go to one of the stores that I know carries the stuff that I need, plus two cans of cocktail peanuts perched on a shelf near the checkout counter. I go in, pay for my stuff, and come out. I head for the seat in the mall where I was sitting just a few minutes ago.

Still no Paulita.

I think I have a theory that partly explains why the American economy is now dependent almost exclusively on the American consumer. Most American consumers are women. And they are a patsy for the store displays and merchandising that retailers have now reduced to a science. My daughter is graduating next year from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA, the same school where the internationally famous Filipina designer Monique Lhuillier studied and was some sort of a legend in. I'm going to ask my daughter if my theory is correct: that because of the science of merchandising which is aimed at women shoppers, women simply cannot resist going shopping and feeling like it's Christmas everyday, thereby fueling the American economy.

The empowered American woman shopper is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the old days, women were on strict budgets from their husbands. The husbands worked while wives took care of the kids and made the home and themselves pretty. Now, women occupy important positions in society and many out-earn their husbands. The woman shopper has become empowered. She buys what she wants, when she wants. Her husband has very little input in the shopping process.

Many of Paul's classmates are being cared for by their fathers. The moms work while the dads stay home. I can't say for sure that the phenomenon of the working wife and the stay-at-home dad is prevalent here in Las Vegas, but if it is, there's a reason for it.

Male employment in Vegas has dried up. The construction trades, the real estate field, the casino dealers jobs - all male dominated employment sectors - have laid off tens of thousands of workers and have not rehired the laid-off workers. So the men stay home.

Luckily for most of these families, women's jobs are not hit as hard. The nurses, other hospital workers, secretaries, retail clerks, hairstylists, etc. continue to work in droves. On top of that, traditionally male fields like sales are also employing a lot of women. Women are generally better salespersons because they are capable of more empathy than men.

After more than two years of lopsided male unemployment, the women's liberation movement is now complete.

Like I said, I don't know if most of the male parents of my children's classmates are stay-at-home dads. The kids that my son hangs out with, however, almost without exception have stay-at-home dads. Maybe it's because Paul is attracted to those kids, since he himself has a stay-at-home dad. I've been retired since 2004 and have been taking care of Paul 24/7 all this time.

While long-term unemployments is really bad for the dads' psyches, I can see that the kids themselves are flourishing. Dads make their sons like sports more. Dads teach their sons how to grow up and be a man. Dads teach their sons at an early age how to fight off bullies and assert their rights on the playgrounds.

Paul, taking his cue from me, also hates shopping. Sometimes I think he hates shopping even more than I do.

Going back to this business of Santa. I'm waiting until the stores run out of merchandise so I can tell Paul he can't have everything on his Santa list. I know that I have to buy the big item that he wants me, not Santa, to get for him. There's just no escaping that. But I don't want him to get everything that's on his list, which incidentally, will probably grow as Christmas fast approaches.

I want him to know that he is not going to get everything he wants out of life, and I want him to get used to that idea. That is an important life's lesson that he should be learning now, not when he's 30 years old.

In my own family, the younger children who were born shortly before my father entered politics and the family got wiped out financially, have done very well in later life. Better than most of us older kids, who got used to the good life when we were young. The younger kids knew at a very young age the value of money, hard work and grit and determination. They were more focused on their career objectives in later life than us older kids.

Having tasted hardship at a young age turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.

And now this letter from me to Santa:

Dear Santa,

Please don't give Paul everything he asks for. Leave out one or two of the items, just so he knows that in life he cannot get everything that he wants. It will be the most important lesson you will teach him.

Yours sincerely,
You

This is your moment, Mr. President

2010-11-18T05:34:00.000-08:00

Just before the then Senator Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination for President in June, 2008, his primary opponent and major headache, Senator Hillary Clinton, went into an all-out attack, unleashing devastating ads that portrayed Obama as un-ready for the Presidency. Clinton's missives hit the mark and Obama failed to win a single big state that still had to vote in the primary contest. Clinton won New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, California and other big states.

Obama had won most of the small states and nearly all of the caucus states (the states that selected their presidential candidate in caucuses and not by direct vote.) Clinton no longer had a mathematical chance to overtake Obama through the primary process. The only avenue left for Clinton was the at-large primary voters consisting of the "super delegates" - the Senators, congressmen and other Democrats elected to public office.

If Clinton could convince the still-undecided super delegates to dump Obama because he could not win the big states, an argument could then be made at the convention floor to un-select Obama and throw the convention in the hands of all the delegates attending. Clinton's hope was that the delegates would negate the result of the primary process and select her in the end.

The super delegates refused to reverse the judgment of the primary process and lined up behind Obama. That was how Obama won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.

The lesson that may be learned from this now seemingly insignificant episode is what many now feel is that Clinton may have been right all along. Obama may in fact not have been ready to be President when he became the 44th President of the U.S. And not because Obama was not qualified to take the 3:00 a.m. call, but rather the other calls that may come along in the rest of the 24-hour day.

Consider this: while Clinton was on the attack, getting Obama's nose bloodied in the process, Obama chose to be "above the fray," calling Clinton's attacks an indication that the campaign had entered "the silly season."

By dismissing the attacks lobbed at him by Clinton as silly, Obama never did address people's reservations about him. He dismissed them as silly and just walked away, thinking that the criticisms would all die on the vine.

And so it came to pass that during the nearly first two years of his presidency, Obama refused to engage those who questioned his citizenship at birth, those who maligned and smeared the health care bill, those who questioned his resolve because the stimulus bill that passed Congress was not large enough to put America back to work, those who complained that the Wall Street reforms did not reform Wall Street.

Obama seemed to trust the American people to come to the conclusion on their own that what he had done was actually good for the country. He assumed that, like his students at the University of Chicago, the American people would do their homework and conclude that everything that he had done as President was good for the American people.

Obama did not answer the passion of the opposition with his own passion during much of his first two years as President. He did so only in the last few months of the 2010 campaign, when the die had been cast. It was too little, too late.

Fast forward to today. After the drubbing the Democrats took in the last elections, during which the Republicans vowed to repeal the health care reform law, to investigate Obama's alleged attempts to offer Joe Sestak incentives to pull away from a fight for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania in favor of incumbent Senator Arlen Specter, to investigate Obama's natural-born citizenship status, to frustrate all efforts by Obama to solve the unemployment problem, Obama's first response was to offer an olive branch to the Republicans.

The Republicans do not want the olive branch. They want his head. The far-right's hatred for Obama is visceral. They don't like him as a human being, they will never cooperate with him if their life depended on that cooperation.

Obama obviously thinks it's the silly season redux. Professor Obama rationalizes this visceral hatred for him and acts as though it would all disappear if he looked in control, cool and above the fray.

My unsolicited advice to President Obama:

Mr. President, many of these people don't consider you their President. They see you as a black man who has desecrated the Office of the Presidency.

The American people want you to fight for them and fight your enemies hard if that is the only way you can defend the interests of the American people against the pro-Big Business, pro-rich, pro-Big Oil, pro-Health Insurance companies, pro-China, pro-Wall Street enemies of the people.

If you will not stand up to a Republican Party that clearly is not interested in the welfare of middle class Americans, a political party that has thrown its lot with the Mr. and Mrs. Bigs in America, then we grass-roots Democrats, the youth, the hopeful independents who put you in the Oval Office may have made a colossal mistake.

We expect you to fight for us, to take a stand, to show backbone. That backbone is very important to win the fight. It is not for bending backwards.

Your first major stand must be on the extension of tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans. Most Americans do not want to extend the tax cut for the top 2%. The tax cut has done nothing for Americans except increase our debt. We borrowed from other countries - China mainly - over the past ten years more than $1 trillion to finance the tax cut. We have been paying interest on that $1 trillion and will continue to pay interest on it till hell freezes over. Now, you are going to compromise and extend the tax cut for the top 2% to the tune of another $700 billion over ten years?

We middle-class Americans and - get this - many of the rich people themselves have drawn that line in the sand. Why do you not join us and be on our side? You know that it is wrong to extend that tax cut for the top 2%, yet, incredibly you are willing to extend it for perhaps two or three years, knowing that if you do that it probably will become permanent because the Republicans will not allow it to expire when the two or three years are up.

Please read this analysis published by Bloomberg News just last September:

"Give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut and history suggests they will save the money rather than spend it.

"Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

"The findings may weaken arguments by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who say allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to lapse will prompt them to reduce their spending, harming the economy. President Barack Obama wants to extend the cuts for individuals earning less than $200,000 and couples earning less than $250,000 while ending them for those who earn more.

“ 'I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior,' said Chris Cornell, an economist who mined government reports back to 1989 for West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Analytics. 'Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business- cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.'

"The Moody’s research covering couples earning more than $210,000 found that spending by the wealthy is more likely to be influenced by the ups and downs of the stock market than changes in income-tax rates."

This is not the Silly Season, Mr. President. This is not a game either. This is the season for demonstrating your allegiance to the American people. You are our leader and we expect you to fight our battles for us. There is a massive and long-term transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich that has been going on since President Reagan sat in the Oval Office. We in the middle class are fighting back. We do not want to be impoverished in order to please those in the higher income brackets. We expect you to be our leader in this fight.

The American people do not want you to compromise on the tax cuts for the rich. They want those cuts to end on December 31, 2010. Period. And, if middle class taxes rise because all of the Bush tax cuts expire at the stroke of midnight on December 31, so be it.

You are a great orator. Go before the American people and explain to them why their taxes are going up. You should trust yourself and your ability to convince Americans that their tax rates are going up because Republicans have decided to play games. You have to have faith in the American people. You must learn from Bill Clinton.

President Clinton took a principled stand against the Republicans even to the extent of seeing the Federal government be in lockdown. The lights went out in the White House and most federal buildings, federal employees were furloughed and except for emergency services, the Federal government completely shut down. Eventually Americans turned their fury on the Republicans and Gingrich and his Republican cohorts caved.

This is the moment, Mr. President. The American people are behind you all the way on this. The American people are waiting for an opportunity to make shared sacrifices for the sake of the country, for the sake of their children and their children's children who will end up paying for the deficits to be created by the tax cuts for the top 2%.

They hear echoes of President Kennedy's speech that famously included a call to sacrifice. The American people are asking what they can do for their country. If their taxes have to rise to prevent the continuation of the scandalous tax cuts for the top 2% of society, they are willing to make that sacrifice.

And another thing, Mr. President. Do not walk like a lone basketball player when you alight from your presidential helicopter and across the White House grounds. Walk deliberately and powerfully, the way a Boss like the late Mayor Richard Daley would. And always have two or three VIPs walking with you. Do not appear on television again walking by yourself. It reinforces people's assessment of you as some kind of elitist and indecisive Hamlet.

Show that important people in this country are walking side by side with you. Biden, Hillary, Bill, Reid, Pelosi, Durbin and Schumer. Those people represent us in every way and have earned our trust. Those are people who are willing to do the right thing even if it means that they will lose an election.

When they walk with you, we are walking with you. Just remember that. As long as you are fighting for us, we will back you up. If you refuse to fight for us, we will find someone who will.

Your humble servant,
Cesar F. Lumba

Who do we shoot?

2010-11-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

In a scene from the John Ford adaptation of the John Steinbeck classic, Grapes of Wrath, the farmer Muley was evicted by an agent of a shadowy organization from the farm that his family had worked for three generations.

MULEY: You mean get off my own land?
THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.
MULEY’S SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?
THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.
SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?
THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where’s the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?

In the recent elections, the American electorate was farmer Muley. But it was a different farmer Muley, one who was infinitely more determined to shoot. That electorate rampaged on the streets looking for people to shoot, people deemed responsible for their miseries. Except that now in 2010, those going postal pick off their managers.

The American people knew exactly who to shoot. It was the managers. And that meant the Democrats.

One by one, Democratic congressmen and women were picked off, downed by marauding mobs brandishing hunting rifles and shooting wildly into the air just to make sure their weapons were loaded and firing.

It was a massacre. Some of the best and brightest went down, along with the new ones who entered Congress only two years ago, men and women who clearly had nothing to do with the Great Recession that started in 2007, when the absentee President, George Bush, Jr., was still President.

The people are still jobless, their homes, their farms, their businesses have not been returned to them, but at least the American Muleys had found their revenge.

Now the Republicans are in charge of the House of Representatives, and they have two years to prove that they can do a better job than the Democrats in the area of job creation. The people want jobs, jobs, jobs. They are not interested in the ideological warfare that is going on between progressives and conservatives, between liberals and libertarians. They just want to work again. Is that too much to ask?

A lot of Americans - especially those 50 or over - who lost their jobs in the Great Recession just past, a recession that is officially over but is for most people still going strong, may never work again. Unless some drastic, even draconian steps are taken by the U.S. government. And what steps may those be?

Oh, please. Don't give me this tax cuts for the rich thing that Republicans Boehner and McConnell are trying to sell to the American people like snake oil. Reagan and Bush, Jr. slashed taxes for Americans in dramatic fashion and few jobs were created. Bush, Sr. and Clinton raised taxes and the economy boomed, with 22 million jobs created in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency. Were the jobs created because of the tax increases? Of course not. But this proves that tax cuts do not create jobs, while tax increases do not lead to job losses.

What actually created jobs in the 1990s? It was American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. There were so many start-ups that were created by the high-technology boom during the Clinton years. Those start-ups were formed in kitchens and garages, employing one person plus the partners. They quickly grew and soon they were employing hundreds and relocating to Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Boston and other centers of high-technology. A lot of Americans were known to have day jobs and night jobs, some of them my nurse clients who worked in hospitals for three days and in nursing homes the rest of the week. Money was easy during the Clinton years.

America must start making things again in this country. All these American companies that pay their CEOs and top managers salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions while laying off American workers and transferring manufacturing and back-office operations to other countries, must be discouraged from doing so through punitive taxes. These companies must be encouraged to relocate plants and operations back in the U.S. or forced to pay punitive taxes. What? These companies will simply relocate to other countries to escape U.S. taxes? The U.S. Congress will know exactly what to do with such companies.

The challenge for these companies that relocate manufacturing plants in the U.S. is to remain competitive in the global markets, since American-made products will tend to be more expensive than goods manufactured in, say, China. How will American business accomplish this? By increasing productivity. We can put a man on the moon, we can explore the universe with our probes. We should be able to increase productivity enough to compete with any country.

The process will take time, over at least a ten-year period. In the meantime, the U.S. must impose tariffs on goods coming from countries that have a lopsided balance of trade with the U.S. If a country exports to the U.S. lopsidedly more than it imports from us, there will be tariffs imposed on their products that are exported to the U.S. We want trading partners, but we want partners who will buy from us, not just sell to us.

Think China. Of course this legislation would be aimed at China. Serves them right. Many economists, notably Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, believe that China manipulates its currency to make the dollar more expensive than it should be, rendering American goods uncompetitive in the Chinese market. The tariffs against Chinese products will level the playing field and encourage American manufacturers to relocate back to the U.S. Chinese companies may also be encouraged to manufacture products intended for the U.S. market to be manufactured on our shores.

There is a widely held doomsday scenario that features a China retaliating and taking the world to the brink of a trade war between the world's biggest trading "partners." Fine. Let there be a declared trade war. There is currently an undeclared trade war being waged by China against the U.S. and other countries such as Japan and Brazil through its currency manipulations. In a declared trade war the American people will be on the same page, and on the same side.

In a trade war, the American market will be virtually closed to Chinese goods but will be open to Canadian, Mexican, European, Australian and Asian manufacturers. Most countries will be on notice that if they exploit the American market through predatory practices, they too will suffer China's fate. China, in such a hypothetical, will be forced to sell goods normally sold to the U.S. market in other countries, but this avenue appears closed to China because China has also manipulated its currency vis-a-vis other currencies. The result is that non-U.S. markets will not absorb the excess Chinese capacities resulting from the closure of the U.S. market.

In fact, other countries such as Japan, Brazil and Europe would likely be emboldened to confront the Chinese and join the U.S.-initiated trade war.

It is an Armageddon that China would rather not face. China will try to avoid this Armageddon from ever starting. However, if the world moves inexorably towards a trade war, the most likely scenario that will unfold is that China will dramatically ease its controls on its currency and allow it (yuan) to float to its true value vis-a-vis world currencies such as the dollar and the yen. The rise in value of the yuan, will of course happen gradually and the U.S. must not consider this as a cure-all.

The U.S. must insist that the multinationals that have access to the world's biggest and most reliable market - the American consumer - must go back to manufacturing in the U.S. once again. At minimum, the U.S. government must insist that the multinationals manufacture products intended for the U.S. market on U.S. territory.

Americans must have jobs again. The continued high unemployment in the U.S. will eventually result in the collapse of the American consumer market, which will not be good for China, Japan, India, Europe and all exporters to the U.S.

Besides, continued high unemployment will further stoke the fires of anger and angst in the U.S. and marauding mobs will no longer be just active during the election season but will be active year-round, year in and year out. Institutions will collapse and nihilists and anarchists will rule the streets, the airwaves and the academic communities.

American manufacturing must be revived, and quick.

Meanwhile, as China sees the error in its ways, the rest of the world will probably look upon the U.S. with admiration and gratitude because most of China's trading partners have suffered the same fate as the U.S. Especially hit hard, in fact, are some of the European countries. China's march towards world dominance will be slowed and to an extent reversed.

China will someday be the biggest and most important economy in the world. Only a fool would deny its inevitability. But it must be slowed to allow other countries, especially the U.S., to make structural changes that will ensure the viability of their consumer markets, which is important for an orderly globalization of the world's economies.

A word on the Chinese threat to stop buying U.S. treasuries. The additional revenues generated by our resurgent manufacturing will expand the U.S. economy, which in turn will be able to absorb the shock of a closed Chinese market for our treasuries. If that proves insufficient, we can print more money, causing a measured devaluation of the dollar, making us more competitive. The Fed has in fact done this recently, when it bought $600 billion worth of U.S. treasuries. U.S. short-term interest rates would go down further, causing an uptick in economic activity. The resulting inflation will also cause an increase in the value of U.S. assets, especially houses, rescuing homeowners from their upside-down (houses worth less than the mortgages on them) financial condition.

Consumer items will cost more, but the unemployment rate will drop dramatically and people will actually have money to buy the more expensive goods. The President and other political leaders will have to be on TV almost daily, explaining why higher prices are actually good for the American worker. Higher prices will mean lower unemployment in the U.S. in the long-run and a less reliance on a predatory Chinese economy in the short-run.

When normal trade resumes with China, the U.S. trade deficit with that country will be dramatically down. U.S. manufacturing will be healthy and strong and the relationship between China and the U.S. will be mutually beneficial, not one-way as it decidedly is now.

A new high-tech industry in the field of alternative energy, a long-range program of upgrading U.S. infrastructure to the 21st century standards being set by China and other modern countries will parallel efforts to bring back lost manufacturing industries to the U.S. Tax revenues will increase and Clinton-style surpluses may soon appear on the horizon, finally breaking the back of the monster that dumps mountains of debt on American taxpayers.

You wonder how the world will change for our children and their children? The answer lies in the political will of our leaders. If they act decisively and smartly, there is no reason why our children and their children must live in a humbled, timorous and self-doubting America.

There is no reason why future generations must adjust to a standard of living that is down significantly from ours.

(Pictures used are from Glorious Opposition and Media Matters for America blogs.)

Under cover of darkness

2010-10-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

Like most of you, I have over the years joined a lot of social clubs. In many of those clubs, leaders were selected by the few who dominated those clubs. There were elections, to be sure, but most of the elections had predetermined outcomes.

The difference between social clubs and U.S. society at large is that elections for public office do not have predetermined outcomes, or so we hope. No matter how rich and powerful, those who rule over their fellow citizens cannot dictate who the voters should elect. There are just too many people to influence, coax, cajole and deceive.

Enter the United States Supreme Court. In the Citizens United vs.the Federal Elections Commission case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, etc. have guaranteed first amendment rights to free speech. And money used by such groups to influence elections is a form of free speech. They therefore must be allowed to contribute to elections as much as their resources will allow. They are free to advertise and attack politicians they oppose, in the same manner that individuals are free to do so.

From the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) blog site:

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Docket No. Argument Opinion Vote Author Term
08-205 Sep 9, 2009
Tr. Jan 21, 2010 5-4 Kennedy OT 2008
Holding: Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.

These mid-term elections are the first elections held since that fateful ruling in January, 2010.

In his State of the Union speech last January, just a few days after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, President Obama warned that because of that Supreme Court decision foreign corporations through their foreign subsidiaries would be able to influence U.S. elections through largely unrestricted contributions to groups that target individual candidates and political parties they oppose.

I remember seeing Justice Samuel Alito flinch and with his lips moving, he seemed to utter the words, "That's not true." What Justice Alito was really saying was that Obama was lying.

Fast forward to the current elections. The New York Times, in a front page article October 21, ran a story naming corporations that have given huge donations to groups that have been running false and misleading ads targeting politicians that those groups oppose. In a prior article, the New York Times pointed out that groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove's American Crossroads have been running television ads that run constantly - 24 a hours a day - about the record and the plans of certain politicians those groups oppose.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been receiving donations from unknown shadowy foreign corporations while the Chamber continues to flood the airwaves with misleading ads and outright lies.

Did the Supreme Court, in its ruling, intend this? Obviously not, but this is exactly what is happening. How does this affect our democracy?

We all know how powerful the TV medium has become. Many of the "facts" that we hold sacred nowadays we get from watching television. There are messages that come to us at the conscious level, there are messages that reach our subconscious.

The groups whose contributors do not have to be revealed are so flush with money they can afford to run political ads aimed at destroying political and personal reputations round-the-clock. One commentator who guests from time to time at MSNBC - I believe it was Jon Ralston - reported that one study found that in one day in Las Vegas alone 1340 ads were run, and most of the ads were either lies, half-truths or distortions.

I guess it is OK for candidates to throw mud at each other. Democracy, after all, is messy as one sage has observed. People lie about each other's record, plans and resumes. People lie about their own resumes.

But when groups supported by huge multinationals and foreign corporations are doing the lying, they do so in such a way that they flood the airwaves with these lies. These groups, multi-nationals and foreign corporations spend huge chunks of money on these lies because they know that the constant barrage of these lies will eventually work. The mind surrenders to lies that are told often and relentlessly.

This why a lot of people now believe that Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya. This is why people now believe that re-electionist congresswoman Dina Titus has voted to give Viagra to convicted rapists. This is why people believe that Harry Reid has voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal aliens.

Because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the other groups, notably Karl Rove's, are targeting Democrats, the actions of these groups are effectively turning the country deep Red, that is, Republican and Tea Partyist. The country is on the verge of electing people hand-picked by the corporations - both local and foreign - and groups of wealthy individuals who have a decidedly right-wing agenda. Central to that agenda is the dismantling of the New Deal programs that have protected vulnerable Americans since the three terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Justice Samuel Alito says the foreign corporations will not be allowed to contribute to the destruction of democracy in the U.S.? Happening now. Foreign corporations, under cover of darkness, have been contributing to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is spending record amounts on ads that lie and lie and lie about Democrats, making outrageously deceptive claims about Democratic candidates.

Not even the notorious political hacks who created the Willie Horton ads that linked Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis to the murders of women killed by serial killer Willie Horton, could possibly top the lies being served on dinner plates of Americans in this election cycle. All courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its secret, shadowy contributors, along with Karl Rove's American Crossroads. Right now, only a few foreign corporations are known to have contributed to these sleazy ads, but the elections are not over yet. The end-game, I understand, will feature record-breaking contributions from all sources - including foreign corporations - to seal the deal for the Republicans.

Our country may be on its way to becoming a social club democracy, where the rich and powerful people - including powerful foreign corporations - are the ones selecting our elected officials. There is no way to prove this, but we are all old enough to know that in politics when something is considered legal, it is done if it results in political advantage. George Orwell's 1984 is apparently happening now, with constant barrages of lies that are turning Americans into robots who follow the bidding of the powerful local and foreign corporations, courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the newly spawned groups masterminded by Karl Rove. Courtesy, ultimately, of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Every freshman college student who is taking a Psychology course knows that the information that reaches our subconscious is what propels us to act and not what is coming at us at our conscious level. We can repel the onslaught of information at our conscious level, even debate the sources of such information, but we are powerless against the information that has found a home in our subconscious.

The U.S. Chamber and other groups that are flooding the television airwaves with lies and distortions know this, and they are laughing at us as they pull the strings.

We must resist this violation of our sacred trust, the elections that are central to our democracy. We must vote for candidates that are being targeted by those groups financed by shadowy corporations, both domestic and foreign.

Let those corporations squander away their profits. We must send the message that we will not allow them to trick us into voting for their candidates.

Are you a true catholic?

2010-10-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of noise lately regarding people's catholicism. How does one know that one is a true catholic? Is someone a catholic if he/she goes to Church every day? Receives communion regularly?

The Jews were often in their synagogues, but Jesus Christ pointed out that a lot of them (Pharisees and Sadducees) were not truly religious. Christ railed against the hypocrisy of those alleged holy men. The religion that Jesus Christ was preaching was that of universal love and honesty and complete absence of hypocrisy. Christ went after the hypocrites and those who were defiling the Temple by turning it into a market place. He blessed the poor, the downtrodden. He honored gentiles who had good hearts.

To help my friends determine if they are true believers in the Catholic faith or not, I have devised the following 10-question self-examination, which measures one's true catholicity, and not merely count the number of masses attended in a week, in a month, in a year.

To take the test, rank yourself according to the following point system:

5 points - strongly agree with the statement;
4 points - somewhat agree with the statement;
3 points - neither agree nor disagree with the statement;
2 points - somewhat disagree with the statement; and
1 point - strongly disagree with the statement;

41 - 50 points - Ang lelang mong panot. Hindi ka katoliko, animal.
(English translation: Your grandmother is a baldy. You are not a Catholic, you animal.)

31 - 40 points - You are a hypocrite, but not as bad as the Congressman from Idaho, Larry Craig, who had railed against homosexuality but was caught trying to pick up an undercover male federal agent in a public restroom.

21 - 30 points - You are average. A cafeteria catholic. You have situational morality. People hate you because they can't categorize you.

11 - 20 points - You are a good catholic.

10 points - You are a true catholic both in theory and in practice. Unfortunately, you do not exist.

The Self-test

(Take as much time as you need)

1. On mendacity in my dealings with fellowmen:

I am capable of hoodwinking my friends, promising again and again to pay them back the money I borrowed and then surprising them with a letter from my lawyer announcing my bankruptcy petition, which wipes out my debts to them.

1-Strongly disagree: 2-Somewhat disagree; 3-Neither agree nor disagree; 4-Somewhat agree; and 5-Strongly agree.

2. On hypocrisy and sexuality:

I am addicted to calling other people gay to hide my feelings of sexual inadequacy. I am also obsessing about the sodomy that goes on between homosexual couples in the privacy of their bedrooms. This is why I oppose same-sex marriages.

1 2 3 4 5

3. On spirituality:

I think the only way to communicate with God is by going to church frequently and receiving holy communion. I also believe that people who do not go to church as often as I do are destined for hell.

1 2 3 4 5

4. On truthfulness:

I frequently lie and even more frequently exaggerate about other people's faults to score points in discussions and debates.

1 2 3 4 5

5. On race relations:

I make fun of people of color. I am especially harsh towards blacks and Hispanics.

1 2 3 4 5

6. On materialism:

I am glowing in my praise of people I judge to be hugely successful financially and dismissive and arrogant towards those who are less successful in my view. I am a name dropper, citing often the powerful people I know.

1 2 3 4 5

7. On attitudes towards the poor and downtrodden:

I am convinced that people on welfare are lazy bums, while those who are on unemployment compensation are spoiled.

1 2 3 4 5

8. On Social Security and Medicare:

I believe that people who did not plan for their own retirement or disability are not entitled to help from the government in the form of Social Security payments in retirement or in disability.

1 2 3 4 5

9. On health insurance:

I believe that everyone in the U.S. already has health insurance, for as George Bush famously said, people can go to emergency rooms when they get sick, and they will be treated at taxpayer expense.

1 2 3 4 5

10. On Muslims:

I believe that the only good Muslims are dead Muslims. I also get a lot of satisfaction in calling people I hate "Muslim" after going through half a lifetime calling people I hate "liberal," "commie" and "lefty."

1 2 3 4 5

This study, as far as I know, is the only objective measure of one's catholicity. It is universal in applicability because the Catholic Church recognizes that the catholics of today are not just baptized catholics. The classification also includes those who are catholics by blood (heroes) and catholics in spirit (non-catholics who practice catholic virtues.)

As someone who is not particularly religious, I probably am not the most credible authority on catholicism. To all the doubters I say: Eat your heart out. If you were so smart, why did you not think of this self-test first?

__________________________________________________

I won first place in a golf tournament without actually knowing how to play golf, courtesy of long-ball hitter Jun Teves and fellow beginner Bob Maglaya, in the second day of the golf outing of the Lasallian Boys at the Happy Valley Golf Club in Summerlin, Nevada, on the western flank of the Las Vegas valley. Gary Salcedo complained that he had been playing golf for twenty years but had never won a first-place trophy.

A trophy is a trophy, even though the honor is depreciated somewhat by the fact that it was a best-ball game and it was only for five holes. Long story. Each team had three members, and all three members hit at the best ball spot. My team leader, Jun Teves, almost always had the best ball, so all three of us hit from where his golf ball landed. It was as though we were all hitting exceptionally well ourselves and not slicing, shanking, hooking or hitting duds that dribbled a few feet in front us.

No, the game was very forgiving. And, in the case of our team, known as Team 6, very rewarding.

Had to fly to San Francisco Airport Saturday night to attend a wedding of my niece, Annabelle Lumba, to Antonio Calasanz, a San Francisco policeman. All the Lumbas were going to be in attendance, so there was no way I would miss the wedding. Drove more than 30 miles to San Jose (straight down Highway 101) to check in to my hotel room at the Radisson. San Jose is dead after 8:00 p.m. so after checking into my hotel I had to drive twelve miles to a Chinese restaurant that was still open to join my relatives for dinner.

It was a nice wedding at the San Jose cathedral in downtown San Jose and a very short walk from Fremont Hotel where most of my relatives were staying. Fremont is probably the number one hotel in San Jose, but it is also the most expensive. Though guests at the wedding got special rates, I stayed at Radisson, where I had booked a room through Priceline. It was the first time I had done anything through Priceline and I'm sure it will not be the last. Priceline is really, really cheap. My rental car, also through Priceline, was $12 per day. $12 per day, like in the 1970s.

The groom is the son of his namesake, Antonio Calasanz, who grew up with my younger brother, Amado, in Santa Ana, Manila. It's a big world, but also a small world.

A Conspiracy of Dunces

2010-10-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

I'm hooked on politics. Maybe it's in my blood, in my genes. If I had stayed in the Philippines instead of immigrating to the U.S. 43 years ago, I probably would be in politics. I like to think that I would be one of the good guys, but realistically I probably would have become just like everybody else there, looking the other way while others stole from the country blind. To survive there, one must not speak out against the shenanigans of the most powerful and richest.

Unless one was willing to spend a lifetime in the limbo of lost causes and election losses.

I think that the way my life turned out is OK too. I am in the U.S., where the best democratic politics are practiced. As a spectator, I get all the thrills that any man has a right to expect to have. Politics in the U.S. is the best politics in the world. British politics is the only kind that even comes close.

That's because we have ideological clashes, religious struggles, the politics of money versus idealism, the politics of personal destruction, campaigns based on lies and padded resumes, labor unions versus multi-national corporations, conservative populists versus progressive populists, white racists versus empowered minorities. Name one contest of wills between two or more social groups or movements - we probably have it here.

I love those nail-biting elections the outcomes of which determine whether the U.S. will continue to expand its empire or recede into the background. Elections like Bush vs. Gore in 2000, when unfortunately the wrong guy was awarded the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court and the country quickly went into a downward spiral almost to the depths of another Great Depression from which the U.S. has not yet fully recovered.

Yes, that's how important elections are here in the U.S.

There are of course major disappointments, the most infuriating of which is the contest between Brian Sandoval, the Republican, and Rory Reid, the Democrat, for the governorship of the great state of Nevada - my home state.

I caught their debate last Thursday and with mouth wide-open I could not believe that I was witnessing an actual debate. Reid appeared to have given up. Why he bothered to show up for that debate was beyond comprehension.

Sandoval, who refuses to tell the people of Nevada which costs he will cut when he becomes governor and who refuses to paint a clear picture of how he would govern if elected, kept lofting soft balls at Reid during the debate, but Reid would not swing.

I was beside myself. Reid was not prepared for that debate. He was at least ten percentage points down, with a little more than three weeks to go. He should have been swinging for the fences.

I hurriedly wrote a letter to the editors of the Las Vegas Sun, which the Sun decided to publish. In the letter I complained that Reid missed an opportunity to dramatically distinguish himself from Sandoval.

The moderator kept asking Brian Sandoval if he would increase certain taxes, identifying specific areas where taxes might be increased. Sandoval kept saying no, he would not increase those taxes. Reid, when asked the same questions, simply kept saying he would not raise those taxes either.

It was a missed golden opportunity that probably put a nail in the coffin for Reid.

If I were Reid, I would have answered the moderator's questions this way:

"It is irresponsible for us to say we're not going to raise this tax, or that tax, this user fee or that user fee. We - all of us Nevadans - must ask ourselves: If we don't raise some taxes, can we get by with less money for the education of our children, or for the repair of our roads and bridges, or for the police and firemen? Are we going to let our local governments lay off more people so that the exodus of good people from Nevada continues unabated? Are we not going to take a stand so that our houses stop losing value as a result of being abandoned by Nevadans who are losing their jobs and moving to other states?

"We Nevadans must remind ourselves of what John Kennedy exhorted Americans in the 1960s to do (I'm paraphrasing): Ask not what your state can do for you, ask what you can do for your state.

"There is a 15% unemployment rate in Nevada, which means that 85% of Nevadans who want to work are working. True, many are working in jobs that are beneath their levels of expertise, but at least they are working.

"We must ask the 85% of Nevada workers to do more for the people of Nevada. If it means that they have to pay higher taxes or higher user fees, then I as governor and their leader, will ask them to willingly pay these higher taxes and user fees. This will benefit everybody. If the layoffs slow down as a result of local governments having enough money to keep their employees, the problem of empty, abandoned houses will be alleviated. Those 85% of Nevadans who are working will slowly see the values of their own houses rise as the economy improves all over America and the world and Las Vegas becomes even more attractive as the world's playground.

"As Nevada's governor, I will ask the people to make some sacrifices so that we can keep the current level of public sector employment while we create more private sector jobs, such as new jobs in renewable energy.

"In contrast, my opponent, Brian Sandoval, is not willing to tell Nevadans that in extraordinarily difficult times such as what we are faced with in Nevada today some taxes must be raised. Sandoval wants to take the easy way out. He simply promises not to raise taxes, which, under the circumstances, is irresponsible. Will he just let government services suffer for lack of money? That appears to be his prescription, since he is unwilling to raise any taxes, even though a majority of Nevadans in survey after survey indicate that they are willing to pay higher taxes or higher user fees to keep the level of government services they are currently getting.

"Sandoval is not a leader, fellow Nevadans, so how do you expect him to be a good governor? I want you to think twice and think hard from now until election day, about what I told you tonight. I want you to join me in putting our ship of state back on course. It will take a lot of sacrifices, but I'm asking you to make those sacrifices. Together, if you entrust me with the governorship, we will make those sacrifices and move our state forward.

"We were the greatest, most progressive state in the Union in the 1990s and in the first half of this past decade. We can be great again, if you elect me your governor."

Oh, I love making speeches. A speech like that, which comes from the heart, could have been the game-changer that Rory Reid was waiting for. The opportunity to make such a speech came in the debate last Thursday and Rory forgot that his goal was to swing for the fences.

I love politics, even when my dog won't bark - or bite. People will forgive me, I know, for suggesting that the campaign for governor of Nevada is a conspiracy of dunces.

Slavery in the Philippines

2010-10-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

Many decades after my journey through Philippine elementary and high school education, I now realize how inadequate my education has been about Philippine history. We who grew up in the Philippines learned world history and American history rather early in our lives, but we learned very little about our own history. The historian I grew up with was Gregorio Zaide, who in retrospect was a historian who wrote Philippine history with a decidedly western world view. Either that, or my history teachers were mere parrots owned by the West.

We were taught - in the 50s - that the Spaniards had burned books about the Philippines because those books allegedly were pagan books and were works of the devil. This was why there was very little historical information about the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish cross and Eskrima.

Turns out there was a wealth of information about Philippine life, social and political structures. The scholar-historians had to do some digging, but this they did and all the juicy information about the Philippines in pre-Spanish colonial era burst into the surface. I was already in college - a full-time working student - when new research about pre-Spanish Philippines found their way into Philippine history textbooks.

The result is that there are gaping holes in my knowledge of Philippine history. I suspect that there are many in my generation who have this problem.

I was therefore very happy, in fact deliriously happy to discover the blog http://mananalaysay.blogspot.com where the excerpt below can be found.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN 17TH CENTURY IN THE PHILIPPINES

by
Roel Cantada

"Take a look at the figure above and compare the 16th century social structure of the Philippines with that of the 17th century. What changed? What happened to the Datu? Timawa? Alipin? Who occupied the highest and lowest social statuses?

"These questions are what we will try to answer in this lesson. Notice that the highest social status is now occupied by the Spaniards and all the natives are below them. This means that wealth is not the only basis of the social classes but race as well. The implication is that no matter how wealthy a native gets he will never be equal or higher than a Spaniard in the colonial society. The racial barrier is something that will never be overcome unless the Spaniards are removed from the country.

"What if a native marry a Spaniard will their children be considered Spaniards? The answer is no, the Spaniards consider only pure blooded Spaniards, and half-breeds whom will be called mestizos later on (creoles in Latin America) will not be accepted equal to Spaniards. But in the 17th century there is not enough half-breeds to constitute a separate class.

"During this time the Spaniards coined three terms to refer to the natives of the Philippines. They called the natives who had converted to Catholicism indios, the muslim moros, and the pagans of the Cordilleras in Luzon, igorots. All three terms had bad connotations and should be avoided today. Both the datu’s family and the timawa are now called indios which when translated in the native languages would be equivalent to Tagalog, Visaya, Bikolano etc. The word indio is a word used by the Spaniards to refer to the natives of Latin America, wherein Columbus I think made a mistake when he thought that he was in India when in fact he was in another continent. In English it is the same as calling the natives of North America Indians. It is also related to the terms Indonesia, East Indies (Philippines and Indonesia) , and West Indies (Cuba, Haiti etc.).

"Returning to our figure, you would have noticed that the lowest class is now occupied by the timawas. What happened to the alipins? They were freed or natimawa by the Spaniards. The King of Spain issued a proclamation banning slavery (esclavitud in Spanish), and the Pope also issued a bull stating the same and even threatening excommunication for anyone keeping a native slave. But these proclamations where not automatically enforced because there was one curious thing about the implementation of Spanish laws in the Philippines: the governor general can decide which laws to implement and when given the current conditions and because of the distance from Spain. It takes months before communication with Spain arrives and consultation would have been impossible for emergencies. It probably took a hundred years before slavery disappeared. Until the 17th century some Pampangan datus were reported to have filed cases in Manila against their slaves who had escaped. The Spaniards being weak and under threat from Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and muslims tribes from the south did not want to alienate their datu allies. Rather it was the next generation who had converted to Catholicism and integrated the values of Christianity taught by the church that had resulted in the freeing of slaves.

"Of course for the Timawa the implication was not good, they had become the lowest class and lost prestige. In fact by the 17th century the word timawa is no longer associated with being free or freedom, something positive, but with being destitute, poor, and always hungry. Today no one wants to be called timawa, because it has been equated with being a slave rather than being free. But as late as 1896 during the Philippine revolution Andres Bonifacio used it in his poem to mean free. Later on they would coin the new word malaya (free) to avoid the negative connotations of the word timawa.

"The datus did not go unscathed by the freeing of the slaves. The power of the datus in the 16th century was based on slavery. The slaves did the extra farm work that provided more crops and they served as rowers in the balangay boat for warfare. Without the slaves the datus lost prestige, wealth and military power. Later on we will talk about how the Spaniards substituted other institutions for datus to remain higher than the timawas."

Who were the datus and what were their perks and privileges? In much of the Philippines, the datus were the political leaders and the owners of vast farms, called the bukid or kabukiran. They owned many slaves, which were differentiated according to whether they lived in their own houses (namamahay) or lived in makeshift shelters on the grounds of the datus' houses (sagigilids).

Because the Catholic Church forbade slavery in the 17th century, the slaves were technically freed from bondage and ascended to the status of timawas, free men who were mostly poor but who counted among them some rich families who excelled in commerce. The datus technically no longer had slaves (alipins) but in practice still had them because the people who owed them money had to repay them through involuntary servitude.

The Spaniards were not willing to cross the datus because they needed those datus as allies against foreign invaders such as the notorious Chinese bandit, Limahong. This was the reason slavery persisted even after the Catholic Church mandated the abolition of slavery in the Philippines and other Spanish colonies.

The alipins, as an institution in the Philippines' social structure, have been formally absent since the 17th century, but in reality many Filipinos functioned as alipins until the the Land Reform Act in the 1960s was passed. Prior to Land Reform, many tenants of the biggest landlords were virtual slaves, working off debts to the landlords - for medicines, for rice seeds (palay), for operating capital for their small farms.

Until political correctness became fashionable, the treatment of housemaids and houseboys in the Philippines hearkened back to that earlier period in the country's history, when whole generations of pre-Spanish "Filipinos" were functioning as slaves.

The Spaniards as a ruling class have of course disappeared. They have been absorbed into the great mass of educated elites. Economically, the rich Chinese have replaced the Spaniards. Unlike the Spaniards, the Chinese tend to be as pliant and adaptable as the bamboo and have blended seamlessly into Philippine society. The Chinese are rich and powerful, but they are decidedly Filipino. They have never once hinted that they are superior to the local population the way the Spaniards saw themselves as being.

Going back to Philippine slaves. Slavery in the Philippines still exists today in the Filipino people's psyche. Many of the dirt poor people in the provinces behave as though their rich, landed patrons owned them.

The quality of Philippine democracy rests on the backs of people who have never known true independence and freedom. The masses who vote in Philippine elections - most Filpinos who are of voting age vote - are not voting their consciences but are voting choices dictated by their patrons and virtual masters.

This is how the powerful in the country retain power. The rich and influential people align themselves with their chosen candidates and generally deliver the votes in their spheres of influence.

The leftists in the 60s referred to Philippine democracy as de-mock-cracy. It was and still is a mockery, since most people in the provinces who cast their votes are not casting votes for their choices. They are mere clones of their patrons at the voting booths.

People talk about the utang na loob institution. Add to that the slave complex as a social institution.

The few who rule over the local economies and the local corridors of power are allowed to choose their candidates, while the great mass of the people echo those choices. This is why there are so many political dynasties in the Philippines. It is an important reason why the same people keep running and winning political offices in the Philippines, regardless of their abysmal records of service. Known jueteng and drug lords continue to be re-elected. It's always the same families, the same political groups, the same corrupt politicians that keep winning political offices there.

The rich and powerful decide who should retain or ascend to political power, while the great mass of political slaves make sure that the will of the rich and powerful is enforced in the ballot box.

The obvious question from all this discussion is this: if the great mass of voters in the Philippines act as ideological slaves of their padrinos (patrons) and not as independent agents who vote their consciences and according to their own ideologies and convictions, is true democracy possible in the Philippines?

Would the Philippines not be better off under the rule of a benevolent dictator? True, we tried this with Marcos and were greatly disappointed. Marcos was, in the language of today's youth, a bad, mean dude, but not every man or woman in the Philippines is a potential Marcos. Absolute power need not corrupt absolutely.

If Noynoy does what he promised to do in the campaign and the Philippines becomes a much better place and country, Filipinos should start thinking of keeping Noynoy as president for the long-term. He cannot be a Lee Kwan Yew if his term is limited to six years. The constitution would have to be amended to allow Noynoy to succeed himself for another term and after that for still another term, so don't hold your breath.

So far, Noynoy despite his glaring mistakes in judgment and execution is following through on his promises. The country is becoming stronger economically and slowly gaining admirers as a modern state. The world, especially the U.S., is eating out of Noynoy's hands. If he keeps this up, the country may find itself in its first golden age.

It is beginning to look like the masters and the slaves found someone who would lead the Philippines for the benefit of all, not just the masters. We will watch the developments in the Philippines in the coming months and years while keeping our fingers crossed.

The Estrada-fication of American politics

2010-09-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

We all remember former President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, the ninth President of the Republic of the Philippines. He of the famous one-liner, "Bill Clinton gets all the scandals, I get all the girls." Or something to that effect.

He uttered another famous line, this one during his wildly successful campaign for the Philippine presidency in 1998. He said, I'm paraphrasing: "We Filipinos have tried all the brilliant politicians already. All we got out of them were brilliant ways of stealing from the government." Filipinos loved this and elected him in a landslide, with Filipinos largely ignoring the fact that the movie actor Estrada was a high-school dropout whose heroism and love for the common man was on display only in the movies.

What the Philippines got during the three years Estrada sat in power were dumb ways of stealing from the government. His idiotic ways eventually resulted in his resignation from office while the people literally were storming his Palace and he had to flee for his life. Prior to his resignation from office, he had been impeached by the Philippine Congress and he was later convicted of plunder of the Philippine treasury.

He is the only Philippine President who was ever impeached by Congress and charged with the crime of plunder. Even though in comparison to the late Ferdinand Marcos, Estrada's plunder accomplishments were puny. When the dumb steal from the government, they take very little, hoping that their crime will be considered a misdemeanor. Marcos, of course, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the number one plunderer of government funds of all time, even though Marcos' stolen billions (in dollars) have not been recovered. The late Marcos was brilliant.

But this piece is not about corruption in government, though that is always topic number one whenever people all over the world talk about the Philippines.

I am reminded of Estrada every time I turn on the TV these days. America has made a decisive turn towards philistinism and it's reflected in our politics. The Tea Party is an illustration of this surly and visceral disaffection with cerebral governance and an unabashed embrace of the uneducated leaders of the angry mob.

The mood had been building up over the years. First, we noticed that the brilliant minds in business were using their above average intelligence and Ivy League diplomas to figure out ways to starve the labor movement in America by shipping jobs to foreign countries. Americans were being laid off by the thousands, then by the millions and factories were being opened up in India, China and other foreign countries. It was brilliant, and the multinational companies that shipped jobs overseas were richly rewarded with fantastic stock market successes.

Second, the brilliant and creative Ivy Leaguers in Wall Street securitized worthless mortgages and sold them to the public, to institutions, to banks and other financials, and this led to near-bankruptcy of the the country's financial system.

Third, the brilliant among us figured out ways of spending money that the country did not have, issuing IOUs to China, Saudi Arabia and other countries, effectively mortgaging the future of Americans yet to be born to the tune of $121,000 each. Each future American now owes that amount on the day they are born. They each will be coming into this world $121,000 in the hole.

The collective brains of the best and brightest individuals of this country, it appears to a lot of Americans these days, have been used not to reach for an even higher standard of living for Americans but to squander away the legacy of all our forebears who have built this country into the greatest democratic experiment in the history of man, the most successful social contract ever devised by human beings.

We have tried the brilliant minds among us, they have only led us to the brink. It is time, it seems to try those who are short on intellect but long on passion.

Enter Sarah Palin. This woman, when asked by CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric two years ago what books and magazines she had read, couldn't name one book, or one magazine. She went to four different colleges before earning her four-year college degree. She "wrote" a book that became a best-seller, despite the fact no one in America believes that she was remotely capable of writing a book.

Sarah Palin is America's version of Joseph Estrada. She is the ultimate anti-intellectual. She once claimed that she was qualified to talk about foreign affairs because she could see Russia from her front steps. She therefore was qualified to be a heartbeat away from the U.S. Presidency.

Her political soul-mates, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck of Fox News are all anti-intellectual clowns and buffoons, reminiscent of Joseph Estrada, the clown and buffoon of Philippine politics.

There is a viscerally anti-intellectual movement in this country - "The Harvard guys and gals have sold this country to the Chinese" - and it is evident in the rip-roaring sucess of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party activists have sucked out all the oxygen from all other movements in this country. Such as the labor movement which is infinitely much more justified in crying foul after most manufacturing and back office jobs in America have been shipped to other countries. Only the Tea Party activists are being heard from these days. The insurgent youth in America, who swept Barack Obama into the presidency in 2008, are beleaguered. They are leaderless, they are dispersed, they are busy sending out resumes because the only jobs they can find after graduating from the most expensive U.S. colleges are as car wash attendants. There is a long line of applicants for every waiter and waitressing job in America's hotels, casinos and restaurants.

Only the Tea Party activists and radicals can find the time and do have the resources to march in the streets. These activists are mainly seniors and older Americans who have already built their nest eggs. That is why the only placards you see on TV these days are those comparing Obama to Hitler, those that declare Obama is a secret Muslim, those that claim Obama was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.

They are all angry at Obama, ignoring the fact that Obama has been able to turn the country around after Bush and the Republicans had taken it to the edge of the ravine. Why hasn't Obama restored the country to its pre-eminent economic position in the world after 19 months in office, they scream. He's had 19 months, why hasn't he done anything, they cry. They ignore the fact that the economic decline of America was years - decades - in the making and that the irresponsible deficit spending in the Bush years finally brought the country to virtual bankruptcy.

The leaders who are coming out of the Tea Party movement and who are being installed as the hot new leaders of the Republican Party are all anti-intellectual anti-heroes. Christine O'Donnell, who won the Republican primary for senator in Delaware, just recently graduated from college, despite the fact that she had been claiming for years that she was a college graduate. She apparently has dabbled in witchcraft and may have committed criminal offenses in the past, using campaign contributions to pay her rent and her many personal bills.

None of this matters to Tea Party activists who are fed up with the squeaky-clean, academically qualified and golden-resumed politicians. The Tea Party activists will embrace the passion of charismatic leaders like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin, as long as they share the American people's revulsion for the bright boys and bright girls who have brought America to the brink.

Many American voters have become like the Philippine voters in 1998, when Joseph Estrada ran for president. Americans are fed up with the Ivy Leaguers and the so-called intelligentsia and are now on the verge of handing over the reins of government to the great unwashed, the intellectual peasants, the angry, empty drums that make the loudest noise, even when the noise does not make any sense. Anyone, or anything, as long as it is something that America has not tried or may have long rejected.

Consider what the Tea Party activists who have managed to hijack the Republican Party are promising to do if and when they win control of the U.S. Congress and Senate:

1. They will privatize Social Security, meaning they will invest working people's Social Security contributions in private investment accounts, effectively killing the Social Security program, which takes working people's contributions and gives those contributions to retirees.

2. They will scrap Medicare and Medicaid, which they say the country can no longer afford.

3. They will repeal the Health Care Reform bill that Obama signed into law early this year, effectively returning the country to the old system, when 50 million Americans were uninsured and Americans could be canceled out of health insurance plans when they got sick, or others could be denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, including unhealthy babies.

4. They will scrap the Department of Education, letting each state decide on the quality of education that is offered by states to their citizens.

5. They will force the Federal government to balance its books, knowing that the only way to do this is to make drastic cuts in government services and entitlements.

6. They will shut down the Federal government to starve it of funds, if that is the only way to enforce budget cuts.

7. They will make discrimination against minorities legal in private establishments, while continuing to make it illegal in government offices. Restaurants will be allowed to refuse service to people they don't want to serve, even if the restaurant owners are making the decision on the basis of race, sex, age or national origin.

8. They will investigate Obama to find out where he was really born. They refuse to believe that he was born in Hawaii despite the fact that Obama has produced a birth certificate documenting his birth in Hawaii and a newspaper account of his birth 48 years ago.

9. They will pass a law mandating that all candidates for President prove that they are natural-born citizens and a mere birth certificate is not considered proof of this.

10. They will give more tax cuts to the rich - the people who need the least amount of help from the Federal government.

11. They will starve "the Beast," the government that they consider the problem and not the solution. By starving "the Beast" they will assure that the government will not be able to afford to pay for all the entitlements that go to undeserving Americans, especially the unemployed Americans who have been "spoiled" by the system and are not going out and looking for jobs, electing to live off the unemployment compensation that they are getting from the government. The government that continues to pay them for sleeping and goofing off, claim the Tea Party activists.

12. They will apologize to British Petroleum and Big Oil for the government's "excessive" regulations. They will apologize to Big Business for the government's meddling in private business decisions.

13. They will reduce the number of regulations governing business in this country, for they believe in the wisdom of the markets. They believe that the markets are the only reliable source of solutions for whatever ails America.

14. They will display the Ten Commandments in government offices and demand that the country be returned to its Christian roots. They claim that the country was founded on Christian principles and the separation of church and state should never have become a pillar of the social contract.

If you think all or most of these positions are extreme, you are not alone. Most Americans disagree with the Tea Party activists at the very fundamental level. Yet, most Americans seem to think that the situation in this country is so bad, how much worse could it be if the Tea Party activists ascend to power?

Well, they are wrong. The frog found out very quickly what happened when he jumped out from the frying pan into the fire. The Cubans found out quickly that Fidel Castro was not the savior that they had been waiting for. The Germans found out too late that they could not control the Nazis and Hitler by merely surrounding them with normal people.

I am not comparing the Tea Party leaders to Hitler and the Nazis. The metaphor is narrow, applies only to the mistaken notion that it is ok to choose extremist leaders, as long as there are people who can force them to moderate their positions. This, history tells us, is an intellectual chimera. Those who choose to ride the tiger often end up in the belly of the beast.

The Empire Strikes Back

2010-09-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the family room watching a broadcast of commemorations going on all over the U.S. and, the announcers emphasized - all over the world - of the most heinous act of terrorism successfully conducted on U.S. soil. It happened, as we all know, on September 11, 2001.

I immediately was transformed back to that fateful morning - approximately 8:45 a.m. - when I was hurriedly trying to down my coffee while reading the New York Times (or was it the Newark Star-Ledger?) and watching the TV in the kitchen all at the same time. I was multi-tasking.

Suddenly the TV showed the image of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center with thick billowing smoke coming out of one of the mid-level floors. Shortly after, I saw a plane seemingly going into the other tower and not coming out.

It was the end of the world as I knew it, but I did not know it then.

Now, nine years later, I struggle to find meaning in the event itself and in all the subsequent events that followed as unintended consequences and which have had a profound effect on both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.

To many Muslims, it was as though an asteroid had struck their earth, a dark cloud hangs in the atmosphere, their homes have been shattered and their landscapes have been ruined and perhaps will never be the same.

It is remarkably unfortunate for Iraqis in general because they had nothing to do with 9/11. Darth Vader (Dick Cheney) and his student, George Bush, had decided that it was the Iraqis who must bear the brunt of America's wrath. An enraged Zeus with his thunderbolt must teach man his lessons, and Zeus could pick any man or men to be on the receiving end.

Close to a million Iraqi civilians are dead (the official number is 100,000), more than two million were displaced from their homes, many of them ending up in Syria and Jordan, destabilizing the populations in those countries and straining the infrastructures there to the point of breaking.

Iraqi infrastructure is a mess. There is not enough electricity, there is not enough water, the roads are still dangerous, occasionally patrolled by bombers and snipers.

The Iraqis have been punished hard. And for what? For having been cowered into submission by the tyrant, Saddam Hussein and his two sons. The era of the Husseins ended, and the era of the American bombers began.

Curiously, the Afghans who had cradled the blood-thirsty criminals who were the architects of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have gotten lighter sentences. Sure, they've been toppled from power, but now the Taliban are in a resurgence and will probably be in charge of Afghanistan once again. At some point in the future, after the Americans leave.

The American invasion of Afghanistan destabilized western Pakistan. The Taliban escaped through the Afghan Alps and into northwestern Pakistan and turned the already-lawless region into a political powderkeg. The Pakistani government no longer controls that huge region and is helpless in the face of the Taliban and their sympathizers' challenge.

Muslim communities in America, in Europe and elsewhere have had the spotlight trained on them and their cultural practices and traditions. Muslims everywhere are being commanded by the host populations to either assimilate into the mainstream cultures or else. The "or else" is deeply disturbing and foreboding, since this usually means harassment, intimidation, hostility and Empire-striking-back terror.

The silver lining in all this is the acceleration of the Muslim march into the 21st century. The de-Muslimization of peoples who either originated from Islamic countries or descendants thereof is continuing and even accelerating, though greatly unnoticed.

To what extent this de-Muslimization will succeed is anybody's guess, of course, because the call of the Muslim prayer is strong, and it is obvious that Muslims are transported back in time through ages to their roots in Iraq and Saudi Arabia every time that call is heard.

It is equally obvious that though many Muslims are trying to assimilate, there is no way of telling which ones are and which ones aren't and which ones still have murder and mayhem in their hearts. The Muslim dress is no longer the tip-off. The 9/11 attackers all wore western clothes. They all mixed in with the general population, drank (which of course is forbidden by their religion) and whored the night before they boarded the ill-fated planes.

And this is the quandary for the side of the American people, the Europeans, Australians, Canadians and people all over the world who are suddenly confronted with the threat of terrorism emanating from the Muslim ghettoes, communities and mosques that are fast sprouting in their cities and countrysides.

With no way of telling which Muslims are becoming like us and which Muslims are rejecting us and are planning our itineraries that must include our reunion with our Maker, we have lumped all Muslims as dangerous, feared and treasonous. Not all of us, for there are many in America who have idealized the freedom of religion and pursuit of happiness clauses embedded in our constitution as their guiding principles and are full-throated defenders of the Muslims in our midst.

And this is the miracle of America and western society in general. Because of our love for our freedoms and our constitutional guarantees of adherence to justice and fairness, we know that there will always be Muslim defenders in our midst and nothing that approximates the Holocaust will ever be visited upon them in America.

Unfortunately, there is countervailing evidence that radical Islam has been bolstered by a bumper-crop of new recruits who live for the jihad that imams everywhere have declared upon the west. At one point, there was a fatwa (a call to assassinate) placed on the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, Sr. That fatwa may or may not be in effect to this day.

It is this strain of radical Islam that the west has found itself at war with. The struggle may last as long as a hundred years, or it may build up and eventually explode into a conflagration before the end of this century, settling once and for all the question of which civilization shall be pre-eminent in our ever-shrinking world: the Crescent of Saladdin or the Cross of the Templars. Too dramatic? Perhaps. Yet, if you really think about it, the clash of Islam and western civilization was never really settled. Truce was declared, a truce that lasted over centuries. But the hatred, the hostility remains, and, like the coal in the bowels of the mountains of Pennsylvania, continues to burn underground.

Islam, after all, teaches that infidels who are occasions of sin may be killed. And we are, with our modern culture that exploits our women sexually, are occasions of sin. That is why the torturers in Abu Ghraib prison used naked women to insult the Muslim prisoners. Displaying the naked flesh and private parts of women before the prisoners was a form of torture since the Muslims deeply believe it is against their religion to find pleasure in the sight of naked women who are not their wives.

If the Muslims in Abu Ghraib held the guns and not the buards, the Americans there would have died.

This is the world we live in now, nine years after that fateful morning just as American children were starting a new school year. We adults did not know it then, but some radical Muslims were going to take us to school. And our world would never be the same.

The era of cheap imports is over

2010-09-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Frank Sinatra, in his comeback album in the early 1970s, sang "What is America to me?" a patriotic reading of everything that was great about America at a time when the U.S. was at the pinnacle of its military power and just before the Japanese became big enough to pose a credible challenge.

We don't have another Frank Sinatra to sing what must be an obvious sequel to that song: What is America to me on Labor Day 2010? Or, more specifically, "Quo vadis, American laborers?"

No doubt, the songwriter probably would extol the virtues of American labor, but while Sinatra clearly believed every single word he uttered in his 1970s song, the songwriter would be hard-pressed to craft together inspirational words that he himself could believe in.

What is American Labor to all of us? What are its strengths, if it has any left, and what are its weaknesses, decidedly many more than its strengths?

Until recently, why couldn't we build cars as well as the Japanese and Germans? Why do American-made cars break down after four, six or eight years while Japanese cars just keep on ticking, like the Eveready bunny?

Why have the leaders of industry abandoned American labor in favor of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and other Asian laborers?

No doubt, the biggest reason for the exodus of jobs from America is the cheap labor elsewhere. The Chinese will work ten-hour days for $5 to $7 per day. The Indians for just a little bit more. Every Chinese factory, though outwardly modern with all the modern equipment, bells and whistles, is on close analysis a sweatshop.

Chinese laborers are so depressed about their lot in life, even as they see Shanghai's skyline rise inexorably to the heavens many of them end up depressed, needing therapy, which of course is unaffordable to most of them. This has led to numerous suicides.

There was a time, in America's inglorious past, when it was the U.S. that had a clear advantage over its European rivals. We had slaves whom we did not have to pay a dime to work our farms and our mills, who worked twelve hour days in construction projects, such as the construction of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. for peanuts, three square and a roof over their heads.

A book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," chronicled the lives of slaves in America and convulsed American society and was partly responsible for the Civil War.

Earlier, during the age of the Romantics in Europe, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities put the magnifying glass on the misery of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited workers in France. The book was an indictment on the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of workers by owners of capital and by the nobility in France. It was a reminder to all Europeans, particularly the British, that the Industrial Revolution was failing the working poor.

The Romantics, through their literature, changed Europe, granting workers and the oppressed more civil rights and employee benefits. The dignity of the individual was the focus of all reformist movements, which eventually led to European romantics railing against slavery in the U.S. The Europeans' opposition to slavery in the U.S. was of course partly based on their desire to even the playing field. How could they compete against American industries when the Americans held the distinct advantage of employing workers who were paid virtually nothing except a roof over their heads and three square meals?

Now it is American Labor that is railing against the sweatshops in China and elsewhere because American industry has discovered that goods could be manufactured in China and other Asian countries at a fraction of the cost to produce them in the U.S.

Yesterday, President Obama extolled the contribution of the U.S. labor movement to the creation of millions of middle-class Americans who have become the backbone of our democracy. We must not fail the middle-class, the President warned, for this would mean the end of the American experiment as we know it.

President Obama, clearly miffed at his critics and his perceived enemies - the business elites and other powerful defenders of the status quo - issued a challenge to anyone who would dare to confront him and further underestimate him.

"They talk about me like a dog," Obama challenged. The gloves are clearly off. From now until November, President Obama will be swinging.

I applaud this change. Obama must confront those who belittle him and who are spreading lies about him - that he is a secret Muslim, that he was not born in America, that he is a communist - and must beat his enemies to a pulp. Figuratively, of course. He is the President. No one in America is more powerful than him. He must learn to use that power.

In addition, however, President Obama must go before the American people with a Checkers speech. He must say something like this:

"My fellow Americans, During the past 19 months I have worked hard to improve the lives of Americans by creating jobs, by preventing many private and public sector jobs from disappearing. By all statistical measures, we have been successful. The economy did not get worse, in fact it is getting better and is clearly on the mend.

"My policies, however, have not resulted in the immediate creation of the eight million jobs that we need to put every American who is looking for work back in their jobs or new jobs being created by this great job-creating engine known as the American economy.

"Clearly, all of the blame must be laid at my desk. I am your President, and the buck stops at my desk.

"I apologize to all Americans who are long-term unemployed, who have taken jobs that are way beneath their training and experience, their families, especially the children who feel the pain of their parents whose prospects for finding jobs are either non-existent or very remote. I too feel your pain. I have tried very hard, but apparently I haven't tried hard enough.

"I need Republicans to cooperate with me in passing a job-creation bill in Congress. The stimulus bill has been successful but it has not been successful enough. I have grown impatient over the slow pace of the bill's job creation. The bill simply has not created as many jobs as we have hoped.

"I need the cooperation of Republicans and I want you to call your Republican congressmen and senators to implore them, even beg them to set partisanship aside and work with us Democrats to pass the $50 billion job creation bill. The bill will rebuild our roads, bridges and railroads.

"We have a crumbling infra-structure. Many countries have overtaken the U.S. in terms of modern infrastucture. We need some catching up to do. We also need to put Americans back to work. We need to prime the pump once more, to get our economy moving at a fast clip once again.

"I have bent backwards, I have coaxed them, cajoled them, humored them, but to no avail. The Republicans refuse to work with me, specifically, and with us Democrats in general. Nothing has worked. So now I must turn to you and ask you to call your Republican congressmen and senators."

This is the way his speech should have started yesterday in Wisconsin, but I understand why he did not start it that way. He had a score to settle, plus he was speaking to leaders of the labor movement. He needed to offer them a lot of red meat. Now that he has settled that score and presumably has stated his case before the labor movement's leaders, he needs to make the speech I have laid out for him above.

He should go before the American people once more and apologize for his anemic job-creation policies. And then he has to tell us what his $50 billion job-creation bill will accomplish.

American labor efficiency is unequaled in the world, but this has not given us an advantage in the world markets. American labor is expensive, but if Americans want to bring back some of the jobs that have been lost, the rest of America must be willing to pay more for the goods that they buy in the department stores.

There are no two ways about it: If Americans want their jobs back, they must be willing to buy products that are made in the U.S. which cost more than those made in China and other Asian countries.

We need this slogan on every car bumper: The era of cheap imports is over.

Stunningly beautiful but language-challenged

2010-08-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

There are language experts who will argue that language confusion leads to a life of confusion. We cannot, for example, count as part of our culture that which we have no word for. Since we do not have distinct words for "brother" or "sister" - we only have the unisex word "kapatid" when referring to a sibling - we often get confused about the use of "he" and "she."

Which brings us to the speech pattern of the Philippines' Miss Universe contestant, Venus Raj in the recently-held Miss Universe contest in Las Vegas. Because Venus obviously thinks in Tagalog but translates her thinking into spoken English, she came up with "major, major" in the most important short speech she had given in her young life in front of a global television audience.

In Tagalog, we often double up on a word to emphasize its meaning. For example, we say "maraming marami" to denote the existence of a humongous crowd, or a humongous collection. We also say "mahal na mahal kita," meaning "I love you so much." We say "ang ganda-ganda ni Tess," when we mean "Tess is so beautiful," or "ang itim-itim ni Popoy," meaning "Popoy is so dark-skinned."

Repetition of a word for emphasis is a distinct Filipino or Tagalog speech pattern. That pattern is the origin of Miss Venus Raj's "major, major" before a global television audience.

We Filipinos are a self-conscious race and I strongly suspect that a lot of Filipinos in the global audience cringed and wished they were elsewhere, drinking a pina colada instead of watching the Miss Universe contest on TV. I strongly suspect this because from the comments I have read on the Internet, that's exactly how a lot of Filipinos felt.

Venus Raj's slip-ups are an indictment on our government's schizophrenic policies towards language development. The Marcos and Aquino administrations' cockamamie decision to mandate the use of Tagalog as the medium of instruction in our schools raised two generations of Filipinos who are barely conversant in the English language. There was a time when you could tell the graduates of U.P. and the old NCAA schools and the exclusive girls academies by their flawless use of the English language. Not anymore. A lot of Filipinos who grew up in Marcos-era and Aquino-era elementary and high schools cannot construct a grammatically-correct sentence in English.

Marcos and Aquino mandated the use of Tagalog in schools, yet they did not mandate the use of Tagalog in business and the professions. This resulted in two generations of Filipinos who think in Tagalog but who speak English in formal company. The result is Tag-lish (a helter-skelter mixture of Tagalog and English) when Filipinos are talking to each other and excruciatingly difficult speech when speaking to foreigners in English. This is evident even among television broadcasters. There are, to be sure, television reporters and anchors who speak flawless English and with ease. There are many more, however, who struggle with the English language every time they open their mouths in front of the cameras.

The nationalistic ones speak Tagalog exclusively, even when answering questions that are put to them in English.

I sometimes watch television hosts interview the famous talking heads in English even though I find it difficult to watch the broadcasts. I sit in my sofa watching the hosts struggle with their questions, carefully framing their questions in a language that is obviously not the language that they think in.

After Venus Raj's unraveling on global television, I became more convinced than ever that Philippine educators must decide once and for all: are we an English-speaking country, which Koreans and others consider us to be, or are we a Tagalog-speaking country? One or the other. We cannot be half Filipino and half-English. If we try to be half and half, we end up with generations of Filipinos like our television commentators and hosts - confused and language-challenged.

(Those of us who live in America and other English-speaking countries are the exceptions. We can think in Tagalog when speaking that language, and think in English when using the English language.)

I don't want to further comment on Venus Raj. Her difficulties with the English language are apparently not of her own making. She is a victim of the schizophrenic policies of the Philippine government on language. In a perfect world, she would be suing the Philippine government for educational malpractice.

Existentialist nightmare in the Desert

2010-08-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

In Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, the main character is arrested and scheduled for an arraignment and an eventual trial. He sits inside a building that serves as the courthouse for a remote unnamed location. The authorities that are bringing the case against him are unknown. He has never seen them, nor talked to them. He doesn't know what the charges are against him. All he knows is that he is being arraigned and eventually tried for something.

The Trial is one of the best-known books written by Franz Kafka, acknowledged as one of the greatest existentialist writers of all time.

I thought of Kafka last Friday as I waited in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Flamingo Road in Las Vegas. When you go to the DMV anywhere in Las Vegas, prepare to spend more than an hour in line just to talk to someone. After talking to one of the many DMV employees who sit in open windows, you are given a number and you're supposed to wait two to three hours so you can be helped by other employees with their own open windows.

Pray that the second employee you talk to will be able to help you. If that employee can't, or won't, you will be asked to come back and go through the process of falling in line and sitting for hours, awaiting your turn.

I thought of The Trial because of the absurdity of the Nevada system for the enforcement of its clean-air laws.

My daughter's car, a 2001 Ford Windstar, failed the smog test in Nevada a month ago because of an engine light on its dashboard and an indication that an oxygen sensor was not working. Since my daughter had to hastily go back to Los Angeles to attend her college classes, I instructed her to have the repair for the oxygen sensor done in LA.

On my trip to LA two weeks ago, I decided to drive the Windstar back to Nevada to have it smog-tested once more. It failed again, this time because another oxygen sensor was not working.

My mechanic in Vegas fixed the problem and reset the car's computer to remove the engine light on the dashboard. He told me to drive the car 50 to 80 miles before going for another smog test. I did, but this time, the car was rejected because the computer in the car had not re-set. I called my mechanic, who told me I had to drive the car another 100 miles and just keep driving it, waiting for the computer to re-set.

I took the car for a smog test a fourth time. It was rejected again.

Another mechanic suggested to me that I needed to drive the car at least 50 miles at speeds under 60 miles per hour and then bring it back to him. I did that yesterday. You ready for this? It was rejected a third time and with the two failed tests, that was the fifth time the car could not get past the smog-test station.

The car's computer had not yet re-set.

While I was in line at the DMV last Friday, waiting to talk to an "Information" clerk, I thought of Franz Kafka and the Trial. Why was the full weight of the Nevada bureaucracy on my shoulders? Was I being accused of fouling up the air? I know this was not the case because the test results never mentioned toxic substance levels beyond the level of tolerance coming out of my car's tailpipe.

The car's computer actually works, it just did not work properly in one area - the monitoring of oxygen levels.

The car's registration expires today, August 22, which was the reason for my visit to the DMV. I needed to get a time extension for registering the car. And that I accomplished, easing the burden on my shoulders.

I stood there in line thinking of The Trial. No one is accusing my car of fouling up the air. The whole point of smog testing is to make sure that the car does not spew toxic substances into the atmosphere at levels beyond what are permissible.

The car is not being accused of that. What it is accused of is that the computer is taking too long to function in one area, and one area only - the monitoring of impurities. Because of that, the car cannot be registered. Everybody knows that it sometimes takes a long time before a car's computer starts to function properly again, yet I'm supposed to make the computer work by driving it around and around in the streets of Las Vegas to force its computer to kick in. How far I have to drive - and for how long - nobody knows.

I've already put in close to 500 miles, driving around, nowhere in particular to go. Meanwhile, I cannot register the car because it continues to be rejected for the smog test.

I thought the smog test measures the quality of the air that comes out of the car's tailpipe. In New Jersey, contractors for the Department of Motor Vehicles stick a metal rod into the car's tailpipe to measure the amount of toxic substances that are coming out. If those substances are within tolerable limits, the car passes inspection.

Of course, in New Jersey, they also look at the engine light. If the engine light is not on, the car passes. My car's engine light has been off since my Las Vegas mechanic fixed the oxygen sensor problem.

In New Jersey the Motor Vehicles people test for toxic substance levels, the whole point of keeping the environment clean.

In Nevada, it's an existentialist nightmare. You know that your car is not polluting the atmosphere. Yet your car cannot be registered. The whole weight of Nevada bureaucracy is on your shoulders. Your friends, neighbors, everybody tells you that at some point in their lives they too have found themselves face-to-face with Nevada' existentialist bureaucracy.

I am channeling Franz Kafka. Hey Franz, want to write another novel?

I was to meet with a Filipino mechanic this morning (Sunday, August 22) who would finally put a fix on the problem.

But before I meet with him, he said, I had to drive my car on the highway at 45 mph for ten miles, then drive it at 65 for another ten miles, then 45 again followed by another ten miles at 65.

I hopped on my car at 8:30 a.m., drove north on Highway 215 for ten miles at 45 mph, got off the highway, turned around and started driving at 65. I noticed that the car started to make funny noises as a I struggled to keep it running at 65 mph. The car kept decelerating. Luckily for me it was Sunday morning and there weren't many cars on the highway.

I kept pressing on the gas pedal as the car slowed down to a crawl. When I reached the off-ramp to Sahara Avenue, I took it and forced the car to climb up the ramp until I had to step on the brakes in front of the traffic light, which was red.

When the light turned green, I stepped on the gas and the car did not move.

I knew right away that I had blown the transmission. Maybe it was from driving the car at a constant speed of 45 mph on the highway, maybe it was a problem that was already brewing. Who knows? All I know is that I don't want to spend another $2000 to repair the car's transmission. The car is worth - perhaps - $750, why should I spend another $2000 on it, especially since I've been spending $2000 a year - easy - on the car since 2007.

Now I've got another set of problems. Would a car dealership accept the car as trade-in even though it is not running and the transmission has to be fixed? Will the charity organizations accept it as a tax-deductible donation? Failing all that, will the auto wreckers accept the car?

The nightmare has not ended. It, like in the movie "Inception" is a nightmare within a nightmare.

Hope for under-water houses and millions of unemployed Americans

2010-08-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

My classmate in my dance class, Laura Emerson, who is on the staff of the Las Vegas Review Journal, recently wrote a piece on the historically low mortgage rates. The low mortgage rates are out there, beckoning homeowners in Las Vegas and elsewhere, she wrote. Nearly everyone who owns a house probably would refinance these days because of the bargain-basement interest rates. Except that most cannot take advantage of the low mortgage refinance rates.

Most homeowners in Las Vegas are not qualified for refinancing. Many have homes that are under water, i.e., with market values lower than their mortgage balances. No mortgage banker or broker would refinance such properties. Homeowners whose houses are not under water are also shut out of the refinance market because their houses are barely above water and their home equities are much less than the 20% that banks require. Banks would refinance houses that have less than 20% equity provided that the homeowner purchases mortgage insurance. The cost of the mortgage insurance effectively shuts most people out of the refinance market.

I was reflecting on Laura's front-page business section article the other day and may have stumbled on a solution to this conundrum.

Assume that a house owned by a Las Vegas couple - let's call them James and Eleanor Alfonso - has a mortgage balance of $300,000. Their house now has a market value of $270,000. That house is clearly under water, with a negative value of minus $30,000. The bank that holds the mortgage on the house is probably watching this loan with eagle eyes for any sign that the Alfonsos may be thinking of defaulting and skipping town, or buying a second house - a very cheap foreclosure - prior to defaulting on their $270,000 house.

It is the way of a lot of houses in Las Vegas. People are just walking away from their houses. The "responsible" debtors are the ones who buy a second home - a cheap foreclosure - move into that second house and then default on their first house.

It's a sad, sad tale of mortgage waywardness in Las Vegas and elsewhere in America.

But what if there is a way to make both the bank and the homeowner whole?

Obviously, the biggest housing crisis since the Great Depression calls for the most creative solutions.

What if the bank that holds the $300,000 mortgage is willing to set aside the $30,000 negative equity on the Alfonso house and freeze it? The $30,000 will not be forgiven, just set aside and frozen. What that would do is that the mortgage will suddenly be equal to the market value of the house. The equity on the house will be zero, but at least it will no longer be under water.

Not long ago, people could buy houses with no money down. There were loans to first-time home buyers, to military people and others that the government was trying its best to put into houses. The mortgage industry can revive such programs, except that now the only people who would qualify for such programs are those who already are living in their own homes and have zero equity in them. The goal will not be to qualify as many Americans as possible for home ownership. Instead the goal will be to keep Americans in their current homes after years of proving that they can afford the mortgage payments.

The government will back the refinancing of mortgages that mortgage companies now hold on under-water houses. There could be a requirement that the homeowners who qualify for these zero-down, zero-equity mortgages have lived in their houses for two or more years. There could be an additional requirement that the homeowners have had a good payment record, that is, no more than one month in arrears in their mortgage payments.

With today's mortgage interest rates at about 4.5%, the Alfonsos' house, refinanced at a net loan amount of $270,000, will mean a monthly payment of $1368.05. Assume that the original mortgage amount on the Alfonso house was $350,000, with a mortgage interest rate of 7.5%. This means that the Alfonsos' monthly mortgage payment is currently $2497.25.

This means that the Alfonsos will see their mortgage payment (principal plus interest, not including real property tax and insurance) reduced by $1129.20. What this does for the Alfonsos is that they will do everything in their power to stay in their home and to continue making mortgage payments. Most Americans in a similar plight as the Alfonsos will welcome the decrease in their mortgage payments because a lot of them are hurting due to the Great Recession. A lot of them used to be double-income families but are now struggling with only one of the spouses working while the other spouse is receiving unemployment insurance compensation or not receiving anything at all.

The special refinancing arrangement, of course, would not be available to those who bought houses in 2006 and 2007 in Las Vegas. By 2006, home values had nearly tripled in the Las Vegas valley from a base year of 2002. Houses bought in early 2007, 2006 and some in 2005 had appreciated so much that when home values plummeted to 2002 levels those houses had lost up to 60% of their market values. At some point, the banks and the Obama administration will have to figure out what to do with those houses. The great majority of houses in Las Vegas and across the U.S., however, would qualify for the special refinancing arrangement.

Because of the help that can be provided to the Alfonsos in Las Vegas and millions of American families, the number of foreclosures and abandoned houses will slow to a trickle and the housing market will stabilize. At some point, the value of houses will start to climb and people who once owned homes that were under water, will see increases in their home equities. (In some parts of the country, the housing market has indeed stabilized and home values are starting to rise - even without much government intervention.)

This may even result in a mini-boom in the real estate market, as more people are encouraged to buy houses because of the expectation of increasing home values. The resultant mini-boom will encourage contractors to build again, causing a mini-boom in the construction industry.

Remember the $30,000 that the mortgage company set aside when the Alfonso house was under water by exactly that amount? Because the market value of the Alfonso house at some point will have increased to more than $300,000, the Alfonsos can refinance their house a second time, adding the $30,000 to their mortgage debt. This refinancing will divert $30,000 to the Alfonsos' original mortgage company, wiping out the amount that was set aside and frozen by that mortgage company.

It is important for mortgage rates to remain low, or even go lower, for this plan to work. The Alfonsos, after adding back the $30,000 to their mortgage balance, must not see a substantial increase in their monthly mortgage bill for this to work. If the government keeps mortgage interest rates low, or drives rates even lower, the Alfonsos and millions of refinancing homeowners will not be discouraged or inconvenienced.

If the $30,000 is added back to the Alfonsos' loan and the Alfonsos refinance a second time, assuming that the mortgage rate stays at 4.5%, their monthly mortgage payment will rise to $1520.06, still considerably less than what they are paying now.

The Obama administration is wracking its brains trying to figure out how to end the mortgage crisis in America. We may have stumbled on the way out of the conundrum.

If nothing is done, the economy will continue to be dragged down by a real estate market that is not just under water but is in the midst of a great flood. Banks will continue to suffer as more Americans walk away from their homes after defaulting on their loans. Banks and mortgage companies have every reason to embrace my plan, which will stop the bleeding from the foreclosures.

A second government initiative that must be pursued and announced in dramatic fashion immediately is the creation of millions of jobs. This is priority one for this administration.

This is my recommendation to the Obama administration:

1. We will offer every recipient of unemployment insurance payments, starting with the 99-ers, those who have been unemployed for 99 weeks or more, a chance to work and at the same time keep receiving unemployment insurance checks for another six months. The mechanism for doing this is the private sector, as explained in 2) below.

2. We will start with small businesses and gradually add larger businesses to the program. Small businesses with five or less employees typically are unwilling to hire additional employees even when work volumes increase because of possible harm to the bottom line. The government program will make it possible for a small business to add an employee it needs but cannot afford to hire. Assume that a small business needs an additional employee at a position that typically pays $15 an hour, $120 a day or $600 a week. An unemployed person who gets $450 a week from the government would probably want to take that job, which would pay her an extra $150 a week and put her in the ranks of the employed, rescuing her from her desperate straits.

What is the incentive for a small business owner to hire this additional person? The small business owner will only have to pay his additional employee $150 a week because his new employee will still get her $450 from the government.

This arrangement will put money in the pockets of unemployed Americans, resulting in increases in business activity. The resultant increases in business activity will mean more revenues for small businesses and eventually large companies, as small businesses start to increase orders of office supplies, equipment, plant, raw materials, machinery, etc. Restaurants will have a mini recovery as more people decide to eat out instead of eating at home. The increased business activity will ripple and echo into the larger economy.

With more people being employed again, tax collections will increase and local, state and - to a much more limited extent - federal government coffers will begin to fill up.

The federal government cannot afford to finance this program indefinitely for obvious reasons. The program may, however, over a six-month period be enough to jump-start the economy and get all its pistons humming again.

Many of the unemployed Americans who are hired by small businesses will probably stay on after the crash federal make-work program ends. An even larger number will find work in other companies, as the economy expands, causing the creation of millions of jobs in the private sector.

The third leg in this three-legged dance to the gods and goddesses of employment is the single-minded focus on the manufacturing sector. Small businesses in manufacturing industries would have the priority over other kinds of businesses in the creation of jobs that are partly paid for with unemployment insurance. The start-up businesses in the alternative energy sector would have high priority.

The contractors engaged in the erection of solar panels on rooftops. The sub-contractors engaged in the building of plants that will manufacture solar panels. The sub-contractors engaged in the erection of wind turbines. The manufacturers of futuristic cars - cars that can be driven in water and sprout wings, electric sports cars.

Small businesses that supply GM, Ford, Chrysler and the foreign manufacturers with plants in America will automatically qualify for this program that puts unemployed Americans in jobs while still receiving unemployment insurance.

Sub-contractors that install electric recharging stations all across America to power the electric cars that are now entering the American market.

Apparel manufacturers, electronics manufacturers who wish to add employees because Americans are becoming conscious again of the need for patronizing American-produced consumer items. The Made in America campaign of the Obama administration, if pursued with imagination and presidential resolve, will drive home the point that if Americans want jobs they must be willing to buy goods manufactured in America even if the goods cost more than the cheap imports.

In the past, our financial wizards and Federal Monetary Board poobahs fought inflation in a knee-jerk fashion. Recent experience tells us that some inflation is good because manufacturers are not afraid that they are producing goods at today's prices but may be selling these goods at tomorrow's lower, bargain-basement prices, killing their profits. Increasing prices mean that goods produced at today's low prices will be sold at tomorrow's higher prices, thereby assuring bonus profitability.

In other words, we want more inflation, not less. But not too much. Too much inflation will erode the value of our money too fast and the result will be an inflation spiral that could go out of control.

If I were Obama I would go before the American people and announce a plan that will dramatically reduce monthly mortgage payments for many Americans through a boom in refinancing. I would also announce a plan to put unemployed people back to work in small businesses, financed partly by a continuation of unemployment insurance payments to such people who find employment through such a program. Thirdly, I would announce that the first small businesses that will be helped by the make-work program are those engaged in manufacturing.

I would do it the day after Labor Day.

The Formative Years

2010-08-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

I almost drowned when I was seven. My friends in that old neighborhood in Santa Ana, Manila all knew how to swim. Most swam doggie-style, but at least they stayed afloat. I didn't.

I remember diving into the pool after everyone else did and in an instant, all I could see were violent bubbles. I was gasping for air as I kept sinking on the steep incline of the pool's bottom surface. The more I tried to find air, the deeper I sank. I remember thinking that I would not get a chance to finally meet the child actress, Tessie Agana, who was my obsession in those days. I did not think of my parents, brothers and sisters. I thought of Tessie Agana and how I would not have a chance to ever meet her.

My life did not flash before my mind's eye, there was only surrender and a realization that my young life was about to be snuffed. Just then, there was a push against my back. Another push. Then another, and I could see the sky once more.

I had been saved by my friend Neto, who was probably two years older and very athletic even at that young age.

When I finally drown in the waters of my old age - which I am betting is still quite a ways from now - I don't expect to see my whole life unfolding before me either, contrary to what has been written about in books and movie scripts. I expect only an eerie silence, a cosmic resignation, a sublime acceptance.

Whatever parade and review of my life's icons, the nostalgic whispers of the real-life characters in my youth, the imagined giants who informed my moral and character building, those are happening now. Not at the point of death, but in moments such as now, when I wake up and spend a morning reflecting on my life.

My first class party (sophomore in high school) was an Elvis-filled night. One of my classmates, Jorge Bunag, shook his hips, stabbed his knees in a downward spiral, as his body gyrated to the tune of Blue Suede Shoes. It wasn't really my first party. That was a party at the home of my older brother's classmate, Gilbert Evaristo. I don't remember the music that was being played, though I'm willing to bet it was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was all we listened and danced to in those days.

I remember dancing with a girl who may have been twelve - I was thirteen - and telling a joke which I considered particularly funny. I laughed so hard at my own joke that a bubble formed from my right nostril. I was so embarrassed I quickly turned around and left the girl in the middle of the dance floor. I glanced back at her to see that she was frozen in place, not knowing that she had just suffered the first trauma of her young life.

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I remember having a book of pictures of Brigitte Bardot. I don't know how I got to own that book. I might have gotten it from my father's collection of books and paperbacks. My dad was an avid reader of pulp fiction and an admirer of the female form.

Brigitte Bardot, or B.B., was to an average 14-year-old boy like me the ultimate pinup girl. She had a bronzed body, long legs, a bosom made for the gods, narrow hips, and full, sensual lips. The old woman who did our family's laundry often caught me glancing at B.B.'s pictures while doing what normal 14-year-olds normally do. I did not care that she saw me. I remember thinking she was old anyway, what did she know?

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The Beatles introduced me to the subtle intricacies of young adulthood. I was graduating from the unrequited love of Frank Sinatra ("If you are but a dream, I hope I'd never waken...") to the coy and complicated emotions of Beatle-land ("If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true?" and "Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover").

I remember having a girl friend where I worked who spoke to me in Beatle-talk. Whenever she wanted to tell me anything, she quoted a line from one of the Beatles' songs.

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JFK was a huge influence on my political ideology. I am a Democrat now because Kennedy was a Democrat. I am a liberal-progressive despite the fact that where I grew up - La Salle - manufactured, and still does, religious conservatives. By the hundreds, by the thousands.

JFK also sent me subliminal signals that people who were borderline heroic were also sometimes immoral in their daily lives. I thought in those days that JFK was one of the exceptions, that he was one of the few heroic figures who were also immoral. Now I know that a person's personal morality has no connection with his heroism or lack thereof.

Marilyn's "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" before the world's TV cameras encapsulated the ill-fated romance between the world's greatest living man of the era and the world's most famous, most desirable woman.

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Marlon Brando was the first of the "method" actors who came out of a small acting school in New York. Founded and operated by the father of Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's wife and later widow - who appeared as the wife of Omar Shariff's Dr. Zhivago - the acting school produced James Dean, Paul Newman and many other actors and actresses who became giants on the movie screen.

Brando was only one of the many actors who graduated from the famous "method" acting school with a mission to transform acting into an art form. To be sure, there were great actors who had preceded Brando. Those actors, however, were not products of any school. They were great because they were great natural talents. Recall Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda.

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I'm willing to bet that the generations that came after my generation have their own set of memories that make them feel that theirs have been lives worth living. But I just don't see how their wonder years could have the same sense of discovery that people of my generation enjoyed in our formative years.

Society allowed us to grow and become our individual selves. We roamed the streets and came home in time for dinner, our parents all the while knowing that wherever we were, we were safely discovering our ever-expanding world. Today, kids are forbidden from venturing out into the streets because so many kids disappear only to be found later in ditches, lifeless and covered with mud.

There are so many crazies, perverts and all kinds and degrees of social deviants that kids are locked up in houses out of necessity. Thank God for video and computer games kids can stay home and not end up wrecking the furniture.

When they are in their sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond, are the kids going to have memories of their adventures and misadventures, or are they going to have memories of their degree of expertise in Warcraft III? Will they remember how good they had become in Halo 3?

The generations born since the turn of the 20th century probably worried about the generations coming after them. The world was shrinking and becoming more dangerous. I imagine, however, that the older generations living at the end of the 19th century envied the younger generations because the kids in those days were beginning to discover the wonders of indoor plumbing. The world was also starting to eschew war as their countries' primary foreign policy strategy.

The 20th century brought us sanity and sanitary living. The 20th century enshrined the value of human life, human rights and civil rights.

The 21st century is threatening to dismantle all that we accomplished in the past 100 years, as the world moves towards the clash of civilizations (Islam versus the rest of the world), the imprisonment of our young (fear of perverts, rapists, serial murderers and such who prey on children and women), the rise of the counter-culture (tattoos, body jewelry, drugs, four-letter words) and the institutionalization of long-term unemployment.

What will the memories of today's digital generation look like?

We need an all-out ideological civil war

2010-07-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

We need an all-out ideological civil war. Without the blood-letting of course, but just short of it. We need to pit right wing versus left wing. Progressive ideas versus conservative ideas. Not in the realm of politics, but in our daily lives.

Americans have to be told that this is necessary. We face an uncertain future that is getting more and more uncertain every day. We can no longer pretend that the day of reckoning is not at hand, because it is staring us in our faces every morning, as we brush our teeth.

The Democrats are thinking of introducing next year legislation that will amend the recently enacted health care legislation to include a public option. Should they succeed in doing that, there will be an uproarious national debate on the role of government in this country that will make last year's dysfunctional town hall meetings seem like a picnic.

America needs this. If the left, progressives and students mobilize to support the public option and the right, the chambers of commerce, the old conservative folks mobilize in opposition, the resultant gut-wrenching shouting match will determine the country's permanent direction.

I believe in the public option. I believe in progressive ideas. I believe that most of the problems we are seeing today - economic, societal, lack of political will - are a result of years, even decades of conservative neglect. From Reagan, to Bush I to Bush II, the Republicans have neglected the erection of defenses against the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians who have systematically dismantled American manufacturing and other business sectors.

They looked the other way as country after country took advantage of the U.S.'s commitment to laissez-faire economics. Reagan, after his second term ended, had no idea why the Japanese gave him a one million dollar gift during his visit to Japan in 1989. The Japanese loved Reagan. He never once entertained thoughts of protecting American manufacturers of television sets and other electronic products from the cheap Japanese products that were being dumped in the U.S. market. By the time Reagan's second term ended, the radio, television, non-high tech consumer electronic products industries had been buried in Arlington cemetery. All in the name of American military superiority.

Bush II - the younger Bush - looked the other way as China consolidated its position as chief night burglar of U.S. manufacturing jobs. He looked the other way, because China was financing Bush's ill-advised war in Iraq. He looked the other way, because China was financing the massive Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans, many of whom were and still are Bush's friends. He looked the other way, because China financed the expensive flexing of world power muscles that Bush extolled when he proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" on the U.S.S. Lincoln.

We became like the Russians, as the Russians became like Americans. Recall that Russia was a third-world economic power even as it assumed the role of the second military superpower, a menacing knife at the throat of the world's number one superpower, the United States of America.

With China and India leading the way, other countries have taken over manufacturing and back office operations for American business. It started with Reagan during the Japanese miracle, continued under Bush I and to a certain extent under Clinton - though Clinton must be credited with the explosion of high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley and other technology centers all over the U.S. - and reached a crescendo during the Bush II years, when China and India systematically relocated a sizable chunk of American business into those two countries' cities.

The Russianization of America is nearly complete. Like most third-world countries, we struggle to find jobs for our people. We promise ourselves that we will develop alternative energy - solar, wind, thermal, nuclear, etc. - yet in the back of our heads we know that China and other countries are so far ahead of us in these fields that we may already be an also-ran in them.

We delight in being the sole military superpower in the world, an empty distinction since we know that a devastating terrorist attack on American soil is not a question of "If" but of "when."

In the end, we really have inherited nothing, just the wind. We are fast becoming third-world economically, even as we cling on to our military might. Just as the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.

The most important, most valuable resource owned by Americans - their houses - have lost so much value that now people can't wait to get rid of their houses instead of treasuring them. People are fleeing their upside-down houses (houses that owe more money than they are worth) as though those houses had the germs that cause the Black Plague.

Americans expect the worst of their Social Security system, their Medicare and Medicaid, which they consider already bankrupt as we speak. Americans are wrong on this, because the Social Security system is decades away from insolvency, even if the U.S. Congress does nothing. But the dim prospects are real. If America cannot find future public financing for the continuation of Social Security and Medicare, those two entitlement programs will eventually become insolvent.

For the first time perhaps in its history, the American nation fears its future. Are we equal to the challenges? Do we have the talent? Is it true Chinese and other Asians are born smarter than Americans? Why do Asians outperform most American kids academically?

Do we have enough money to support our military? Shouldn't we slash the Pentagon budget in half and bring our troops home where they can protect the country from Al Qaeda and other terrorists who are plotting to one day launch a terrorist attack that will rival 9/11?

American ingenuity, which used to be our source of pride and the promise of a prosperous future, is now being rivaled by other countries. While we still dominate new patents, our lead over the rest of the world is fast shrinking.

Our Ivy League universities are the greatest, but they have become so expensive that our own children are shunning them. Nowadays, our elite universities are educating Chinese, Indian, South Korean, Taiwanese, HongKong and other scholars so that those scholars can go back to their home countries and accelerate the pace of dismantling American-based businesses.

Besides that "minor" inconvenience, the current Great Recession has rendered diplomas earned in those great universities useless as more and more of their graduates find difficulty finding jobs upon graduation.

Americans do not dare to dream of the nice juicy jobs, they are fighting each other for jobs, any old jobs. And the prospects are more of the same over much of this decade. Will it ever improve? What happens to all these kids who are graduating from college and are spending the next chapter of their lives doing odd jobs because there are no permanent, career-making jobs that are available?

Is the solution another "Go west, young man" epochal episode, with west being China and points in Asia, where American jobs have immigrated to? Citizens of third-world countries have to expatriate themselves to find work. Are Americans destined to do the same in the not-too-distant future?

And what do we do about those who are in this country illegally? We can't deport them all, even if we could find them. What would King Solomon do? Is America sufficiently Solomonic to tackle the illegal immigration problem smartly and logically, not through their gut reactions?

America must go through a soul-wrenching national debate that explores a multitude of issues confronting American society. We can start with a debate on the public option. Such a debate will necessarily answer the question: Is America entering a welfare state phase, similar to the phase Europe had to live through as it struggled to take care of Europeans' needs after the Second World War, when Europeans were dependent on the good graces of Uncle Sam?

If America can no longer afford to solve most, let alone all of its problems, then the correct prescription would be a welfare state similar to the European welfare states.

That is what a national debate on the public option will accomplish. I believe - even as I favor the public option - that if the U.S. Congress successfully introduces the public option, it will be only a matter of time before the country adopts a health care system that mimics the Canadian, Australian, British and other European systems. I think those are great prospects. Health insurance for all, administered and financed by the U.S. government. With money collected from the people through higher tax rates.

America will look more like Canada. But is that such a bad thing? In the Time-Life documentary, "Auschwitz," reference is made to a section of the Auschwitz concentration camp as "Canada." That section was known as Canada because it was run like heaven. Corrupt - because German soldiers routinely pilfered Jewish prisoners' private belongings - but nonetheless run like heaven. The German soldiers in Auschwitz believed that Canada was the land of milk and honey, where all things good and beautiful awaited the people who were fortunate to have landed there as immigrants.

More and more Americans are turning their envious eyes to the north. Canadians have their future and their present mapped out for them. The government does all the planning, the people do all the enjoying. Canadians pay a whole lot for the privilege of living in that section of heaven they have carved for themselves, but they gladly pay. They look at their neighbors below them and tsk-tsk their way to the realization that the Americans expend a lot of energy rejecting the one lifesaver that can save them.

I'm all for a welfare state. Let us entrust the government with more of our money so that it can take care of our needs - basic and sophisticated needs. Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. After they get done with the bills, all they have left is their paltry disposable income that they use to buy clothes, go to movies, party with their friends, etc. Then they work for another month so at the end of the month they have the money to pay their bills.

We Americans save very little of what we earn. Most of the citizens of countries that we dismiss as welfare states - or socialist states, if we believe the Republicans - save more money than we do. They take longer vacations, they enjoy life more, while we Americans work our fingers to the bone for the privilege of paying our creditors.

All the while, we are trusting in Uncle Sam. We think that Uncle Sam will protect us when we get old, or if we become disabled. But how can Uncle Sam do that if we are constantly questioning why we even pay taxes to the Federal government?

As a nation, we Americans must dialogue the question: if the government can promise us the security that Canadians, Australians and Europeans enjoy, are we willing to pay more in taxes? Are we willing to give up some of our freedoms for the greater good? Those are the questions confronting us today.

The sooner we answer that question, the sooner we can go on the road and meet our destiny as a nation.

A speech Obama must deliver

2010-07-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

My fellow Americans,

A week ago, I told some of my most passionate supporters in Nevada that I found it hard to believe that the Republicans, who ditched the American economy not too long ago, now are demanding that you give them back the keys.

While I got a few laughs and some positive comments from that remark, I now realize that I may have erred in comparing the American economy to a ditched car. It was never my intention to make light of the earth-shaking events that clobbered the American economy the year I was running for the Presidency.

The American economy in 2008 in many respects looked like the economy did in the years leading up to the Great Depression. Banks, insurance companies, investment houses were all sinking. They had taken in water, the turbulent waters of the mortgage meltdown, the houses whose values were falling like rocks to the bottom of the sea. Americans had lost their jobs - 8 million of them. For the first time in a long time, American optimism had been replaced by a sense of impending doom. A foreboding sense that a huge comet from outer space was on a collision course with our planet earth.

Thus, to compare the American economy to a ditched car was wrong - utterly wrong.

What really happened in 2008 was that an earthquake - the mortgage meltdown - had so violently shaken the American economy that a side of a Rocky Mountain had broken away and had been sliding down a snow packed slope. It was a wayward mountain side the size of Rhode Island that was fast slipping down that slope. At the end of that slope was a drop no less than 100 miles deep. It was a straight drop.

I remember being in the heat of the campaign in 2008 and being briefed by my advisers about the meltdown in the financial markets that was threatening the whole American economy and eventually the world's economy.

I watched with horror as news filtered in that the American economy was headed for a steep fall. I, like millions of Americans, was relieved when I learned that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson took the near-desperate step of sponsoring a bank bailout plan that promised to end the dangerous slide of the American economy.

It would cost close to a trillion dollars, but at least the economy could be saved. There were still danger signs everywhere, but the bailout of Wall Street would at least buy time for our economic planners to permanently halt that slide towards that ravine that was a straight drop 100 miles deep.

Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, aided by the U.S. Congress, was able to come up with a huge tree. Imagine a tree so huge it is almost as big as the state of Rhode Island. This was the $1 trillion tree that stopped the descent of the American economy into the ravine.

When I assumed the presidency in 2008, though the economy was no longer sliding, the weight of that rock the size of Rhode Island was proving to be too much for even that gargantuan tree. It appeared that the tree would eventually break and the rock would continue down that snow-packed slope and into that ravine.

Though the slide had been stopped, the lack of economic activity threatened to crush that huge tree. Nobody in America was buying. Nobody was buying cars, houses, durable goods, investments, shopping mall goods. Economic activity had come to a dead stop. If that condition went on too long, most people in America would lose their jobs, because if nobody was buying anything, there would be no need for American and foreign companies to produce anything.

It was clear that the solution lay in the government itself providing the spark that would create the energy that would make the American economy spring back to life. Every responsible person in America agreed that a stimulus bill costing at least a trillion dollars was needed. Some economists argued that the stimulus bill should be bigger than one trillion. We in America propose, but the U.S. Congress disposes. Congress would pass a stimulus bill that was a shade under a trillion dollars.

With our stimulus bill, the bailout of the American car industry, the cash-for-clunkers, the full-scale immersion into solar, wind and turbine energy industry, my administration, the Monetary Board, the U.S. Congress and the American business community all working together, we were able to jump-start the American economy so that now we are in the midst of an economic expansion that is on a trajectory to an eventual full economic recovery.

We are pulling that huge rock back up the slope, inch by precious inch. But, it is an activity that is historic and epochal in its challenges. Those old enough to remember the Great Depression perhaps can remember that the recovery from it took more than ten years. The final piece of the puzzle came when the U.S. entered the war in Europe and Asia and American industry went into full-employment.

While the American economy did not go into a Great Depression in 2008 and 2009, the enormous challenges before us were clear for everyone to see. We had lost 8 million jobs during the Bush years, we were still losing 750,000 jobs a month when I took over, and many of the jobs already lost and we were continuing to lose we knew would never come back - because they were manufacturing jobs in industries that had fled America for China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and other Asian countries.

My biggest challenge was how to put people back to work. That was the only way the country could slowly pull that rock back up that slope and reconnect it to that Rocky Mountain side from which it had broken off.

Thanks to American ingenuity and the heroes of Main Street - the small employers, the big multinationals that are now hiring again - we are gradually seeing the rebirth of American optimism. The economy has added jobs again, though the jobs that are being added have not been enough. We need to do much, much better in this area. We cannot let a whole generation of Americans - today's college graduates - spend the best years of their young lives unemployed and uncertain of their future.

We need to create jobs by the hundreds of thousands and eventually by the millions. We need to accelerate the pace that that big rock goes up that slope. We must push harder, and pull with more force. I believe that I have been leading in this effort. I've had my focus on the economy from Day One. People in America may not know this, because I did not constantly remind them of it, but since I got my initial briefings on the state of the American economy at the beginning of my term in 2009, I've had my eye on that rock. I knew it was going to be very difficult, one of the most difficult things that any American president would ever be challenged to accomplish.

I believe in my heart that we are on the right track, even though there are times when I am tempted to be discouraged. The pace of our recovery is so slow and I know there are millions of Americans who are having an incredibly tough time making ends meet. And the generation that just graduated from college must be wondering if they will ever find meaningful jobs in their lifetime.

But we must not allow the few among us who want a return to the policies that got us into this mess to prevail in the ongoing national debate. We are making progress, we are pushing that rock back up that slippery slope slowly but surely.

If we turn the U.S. Congress back to the Republicans, who along with the previous administration caused the earthquake that broke the side of that Rocky Mountain to split apart and go on that downhill slide, we are making a big, big mistake. The Republicans threaten to undo what we have already done. They want to return to the policies that caused the economic mess we're in.

They are not just saying NO to everything that my administration is proposing, they are also trying to convince us that their old policies of no regulation, of every man for himself, of low taxes for the rich, of hundreds of billions in tax breaks for the oil industry, of artificially generating economic activity by going to war in countries like Iraq will work. Even though we still have the memory of how the previous administration dragged our country to an economic collapse.

We Americans are a patient people, as long as we are given the facts. Just the facts.

I hope you, my fellow Americans, will not lose faith, that you will see that though the American recovery is probably the most difficult undertaking of our lives, we can get the job done. We are Americans. We never give up.

It will be tantamount to giving up if we give the reins of our economy back to the same people in Congress - the Republicans - who got us into our mess in the first place. If America must replace the Democrats in Congress, please do not replace them with the same people who ruined our economy through bad policy decisions. Can't think of any others who could do a better job than the Democratic legislators? That's because there are none. Despite the presence of Tea Party activists who at best have only muddied thoughts to offer about the American economy.

I appeal to the American people to stay the course. I need the help of a Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress to pull that huge rock back up that slope. We don't need a Congress that is pulling in the opposite direction - back towards the profligate policies of the past.

My fellow Americans, I appeal to your reason. I know it is difficult for you not to blame the party that is in power while you continue to suffer through the worst economic times since the Great Depression. I thoroughly understand your frustration. But it would be a much bigger mistake to hand Congress back to the same legislators who doubled the national debt in the 8 years of the Bush administration, who presided over the loss of 8 million jobs many of which will never come back, who refused to regulate the industries that sorely needed regulation.

It took us many years, nearly ten years to get us into this economic mess. Please do not give up on us after 18 months. We must redouble our efforts, but most of all, we must work together. The Democrats in Congress are wracking their brains, figuring out how best to generate more economic activity in this country. I need their help. Don't give me a Congress that will work against me in the coming years. You elected me to at least four years to get our country back on track. I need a Congress that will work with me and not against me.

A Republican Congress - which is saying NO to everything I propose - will surely say NO in the future.

If you will not do it for me, do it for yourselves. You need an administration and a Congress that are working together and not against each other.

Good night, and God bless America.

On being published

2010-07-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

The greatest dividend that you as an author get from having been published is the probing and incisive questions that your readers ask about the ideas advanced by your book. The second greatest is the realization that the subject matter of your book is interesting enough to elicit further questions from people who have not yet read your book.

I delighted in both dividends over the past week as I kept opening my email and discovering questions on a few of the ideas in my book "Out of the Misty Sea We Must."

From my friend Tony Nievera:

Cesar,

1. What is the difference (between) a Commercial Base (and an) Export Processing Zone? and 2) What advantages/benefits will the Philippines offer?

Export processing zones, or Free trade zones, are operated by the host countries. Commercial bases in the Philippines shall be operated by the leasing foreign countries. Thus, if the United States leases a commercial base in the Philippines, U.S. laws will apply inside the commercial base. The multinationals that set up businesses in the commercial base shall be insulated from the stifling bureaucracy, the capricious judicial system, the corrupt culture, the crimes, the threat of kidnappings, etc. that may from time to time pop up in the Philippines.

Because commercial bases will be extensions of the foreign countries' territory, all manufacturing and other business activities conducted inside the commercial bases will be taxed by the foreign countries and considered as those countries' domestic production, reported as part of their GDPs. Such countries will be free to move their own citizens into the bases, providing them jobs that would otherwise go to China, India, Ireland and other countries that now benefit from the mass exodus of manufacturing and other jobs from the industrialized world, including the United States. The unemployed in the U.S. and other countries will find work in the commercial bases, thereby easing the pressure on the U.S. and local governments to provide unemployment insurance to the huge army of unemployed Americans.

For its part, the Philippines will benefit by providing jobs to its citizens. Multinationals in the commercial bases will need to employ Filipinos if they are to become competitive with manufacturers in China, India and other low-labor-cost countries. The areas around the commercial bases will see an accelerated real estate and infrastructure development. The first world business and government culture that sprouts inside the commercial bases will serve as the model for Philippine business and government, as more and more Filipinos are exposed to the efficient management and operations inside the commercial bases.

From Nelson Paguyo:

This I know. American business will set up business in any country where the business atmosphere is pro–investment and fair; and the government and people are welcoming. I am not sure the Philippines is at the present; and perhaps the reason why American businesses [and others] have avoided the Philippines.

My response to Nelson: The commercial bases, as explained earlier, will be slices of America. The bases will be run as though they were a slice of Washington, D.C., under the complete jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Philippine laws and governance will not apply inside the bases.

From my friend who signs his name "dmjj52":

it is not the people who (are) the problem, but it is the system of the government that drives away foreign investors. way back in 1994 i was sent to Keesler Air Force Base as an exchange officer. i was instructed to get my ID at the admin office. to my surprise, only ONE guy processed the form, signed it - and presto, i have my foreign military ID.

and this will NEVER happen in the Philippines. at the adjutant general, you will have to spend hours, if you are lucky! it will take a long list of personnel to have your ID issued.

and this is reality. foreign investors are not used to RED TAPES! sa atin kasi, lagayan dito at lagayan doon. try your luck at LTO, or even the Bureau of Customs!

not unless there will be a drastic change in the way our government works, then there will be a CHANGE.

My response to dmjj52: This is a perfect argument for the commercial bases. The red tape, the corruption, etc. that are found in the Philippines will not be found inside the commercial bases. The commercial bases will be operated by foreign countries under those foreign countries' laws, business climate and culture.

From my friend Jun Gomez (commenting on the obvious advantage of unemployed Americans being able to follow the jobs into the commercial bases in the Philippines):

I think that was the original idea in setting up manufacturing plants in China, unfortunately the very cheap labor abundant in China was just too tempting to pass so they hired locals instead!

My answer: The unemployed Americans who move to the commercial bases to work in American manufacturing plants there will be able to follow the jobs that would otherwise be lost forever to China, India and other countries. They will of course be paid well below what they would earn in the U.S., assuming that the jobs even exist in the U.S. Americans would be willing to take the jobs because the cost of living in the Philippines is way below that in the U.S.

It is estimated that a family of four could live on $1000 a month in the Philippines. A couple who both work in a commercial base and receiving $500 a month each would have a comfortable life there, sending their kids to American schools that would surely sprout inside the commercial bases.

From Kenn Stokes:

"Benefit" is certainly (subjective). I left the US to get away from the "Americanized" lifestyle of waste, stupid extravagance, self-centeredness, and outrageous taxes. So I have to wonder about this "benefit" thing. I know others that feel as I do so I'm not exactly the Lone Ranger in my thinking.

As for "benefits" to the economy I have to once again reflect on the lifestyle of credit that keeps the US so vulnerable and compare that to the resilience, even if defined as "impoverished" by the rest of the world, of the filipinos where the trade off is P5 in the hand or a few hundred thousand dollars in debt (you know, the mortgage on a house that manages to keep all members of the house separated, the 2 SUV's in the driveway, enough electrical appliances to choke a horse - but support the utilities contractors fantastically, the 500" television, two tons of toilet paper, kids with so many toys that they have no sense of reality, and monthly cell phone bills and daily latte budgets that would feed entire families in many parts of the world). I don't know, a few peso in the hand or debts with no light at the end of the tunnel.....hmmmmm, who's better off? Where is this "benefit"?

My answer to Kenn Stokes:

It makes sense to question the American values of excess and self-centered lifestyles. Americans have really re-defined the meaning of extravagance. But Filipinos are not at that stage where they are in a position to ask themselves: how much is enough?

Most Filipinos are dirt-poor. There are many slum dwellers in the Philippines who live on the edge of human existence. A new development in the slum areas is the "pag-pag" - dishes made from meats gathered up from rich people's and restaurants' garbage, boiled and served with spices and sold to slum dwellers for P10 (20 U.S. cents). People ransack piles of garbage, looking for items that may be salvageable and could fetch enough money for a family's next meal.

People are really living hand-to-mouth over there. They are far from the stage where most of them are asking, "what is enough?" Or "how many cars, how many houses does one really need?" Instead they are asking, where is my next meal going to come from?

From Eduardo (Danding) Gimenez:

Cesar,

It is a good idea. It’s not the best idea because once again it is about making goods for our masters while we continue to refrain to make things we need for ourselves. Let’s take just one field of endeavor. Transportation. Despite having a population almost 100 million, why is it that virtually every vehicle that plies Philippine roads is made outside the Philippines? Why is the Philippines the only in Asia that has not gone through the 2-wheeler stage?

Many of our neighbors make their own scooters, motorbikes cars, engines, trucks and buses. For decades, we’ve had a large enough population to sustain such manufacturing. In the 1980s, with a population of 17 million, Taiwan was manufacturing millions of 2-wheelers and cars. With a much smaller population Korea makes so many cars that they are completely self sufficient. Indonesia makes millions of 2-wheelers.

Our steel industry in the Philippines should have been much bigger had we gone that route. It would have forced us to create a machine tool industry, a plastic injection molding industry. Instead we are devoid of all necessary industry aimed at a better life for our people. Almost every call I see is a call to create industries and businesses to serve foreign investors. It is a continuation of the call to our best and brightest to serve everyone but the Filipino.

I hope you can see why I say it is not the best. It is a lazy idea. It is a weak idea. It says to ourselves “Let’s continue using our best and brightest to serve Americans”.

Love to all,

Danding

My response to Danding:

China's business model as a so-called awakening giant is making goods for the rest of the world, mainly the Chinese people's former "masters." If a country or a people must be criticized for being the manufacturing arm of the great industrialized countries, that criticism must be leveled at the Chinese.

The commercial bases idea does not expand the number of Philippine manufacturers whose sole function is to make products for their former "masters" - the Americans. It will be American companies, European companies, South Korean companies, Japanese companies and, yes, even Chinese companies manufacturing in Philippine commercial bases to fill orders from their home markets. They will merely do this in extensions of their territories that are situated in what is now the Philippines.

With regards to Philippine industry producing bikes and other motor vehicles for local consumption, that is an entirely separate issue. Over the decades since independence was granted the Philippines in 1946, Philippine manufacturers have had a difficult time competing with foreign manufacturers who ship their products to the Philippines. Foreign manufacturers, such as Suzuki, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, etc. have discouraged Filipinos from even thinking of venturing into such manufactures.

As a country we have been content with merely building the biggest and most modern malls and shopping centers where foreign-made goods are sold. That is how our economy has developed. I agree that we should do more manufacturing so that more of our locally-produced goods are sold in our mammoth shopping malls.

Maybe, if enough multinationals locate plants and factories in the commercial bases, there will be renewed interest among Filipino entrepreneurs to venture into the manufacture of bikes, cars and other durables, as more and more Filipinos become exposed to the multinationals' business culture and discover that they too are capable of engaging in the same activity at less cost.

Here's a query from a certain Michael:

Cesar:

Would Americans travel thousands of miles away from their families and friends to a hot and humid foreign country for a low paying job just to escape unemployment in the U.S.?

Why would companies import American workers to your "bases" in the Philippines? Companies are, to use your word in another posting, amoral. They are after profit, and not to solve their countries' unemployment problem.

Wouldn't it be more cost effective for them to hire local people?

And it would be good for the people in the Philippines They wouldn't have to leave their country to find work.

Go to Hong Kong and other Asian countries and you will see ten of thousands of Filipinos working as maids. Even the lower middle class families in Hong Kong have madis from the Philippines.

Wouldn't they be better workers in your "bases"?

Michael

My response to Michael: I think when Americans realize that their long-term unemployment is caused by the permanent disappearance of jobs that have gone to China, India and other low-wage countries, they will know that they have no choice on the matter. They must go where the jobs are. Ordinarily, Americans cannot go outside the U.S. to follow their lost jobs. The commercial bases will give a lie to that general rule, for they can indeed follow their jobs which may have relocated to commercial bases in the Philippines. But that's because American commercial bases in the Philippines shall in reality still be American territory.

American multinationals that establish manufacturing operations in the commercial bases shall be motivated by profit. They know that if nothing is done, the U.S. will be forced to raise tariffs against cheap imports from China, India and others and force these multinationals to manufacture again in the U.S. That would result in a global depression, as other countries raise their tariffs in response. Locating manufacturing operations in commercial bases will not require the U.S. to raise its tariff barriers and will in fact strengthen the multinationals as they navigate away from over-reliance on Chinese manufactures.

Finally, from Nel Reformina (an education specialist), commenting on my recommendation to convert most public elementary and high schools to math and science schools and to declare a moratorium on interest payments on sovereign debt:

Hi Cesar,

I have read with great interest your book.

I have always been an advocate for a drastic improvement in our public school system. In fact, I believe that the root cause of all of problems is the wide gap of education between the very small elite and the Filipino masses. Hence, I fully agree with your thoughts on education. A moratorium on the interest payments on the country’s debt is really worth pursuing as a means of financing the massive education improvement programs in the next 10 years. How do we convince our creditors that the interest savings shall be invested in education – and will not just go to the pockets of our corrupt government officials and employees?

For the moratorium to be acceptable it is important that the present administration should pursue a massive anti-corruption campaign, recover most stolen money and send to jail a number of corrupt officials to show case the sincerity of the campaign. Furthermore, in the next 10 years or so, if the pork barrel allocations of congressmen and senators cannot be removed (for political reasons), it should be mandated that at least 50% of the pork barrel be invested in the public schools of each congressman’s respective district.

If the corruption campaign succeeds and at least half of the pork barrel funds are diverted to education, I estimate that we would have enough money to double the present budget for education. We may not even need to ask for interest moratorium –even if our creditors by that time are willing to give in – and need not face the question of commercial bases which most likely will encounter a lot of resistance due to social, political and emotional issues.

By all means, we have to solve our education problem first. It is like a heavy anchor that prevents the ship from sailing to a new journey. All other issues – jury system,parliamentary system, confederation of independent states – are secondary to having a functionally literate nation.

Yes, out of the misty sea we must – sail to a new tomorrow!

Nel

My response to Nel:

We have been trying to reform our tax collection system and have been trying to rein in the abuses of our congressmen and senators for more than fifty years and have not succeeded. Our politicians merely laugh us off. But, we cannot wait any longer. If we do not put a complete halt to our slavish reliance on sovereign debts to solve our government's inadequate financing problems, we will wake up ten to fifteen years from now and discover that nearly all of our income tax collections will go to servicing our debts. At that point, we will all be working for our country's creditors.

As a country we will be forced to run our government with the remittances of our overseas workers and the VAT collections. The government will be so poor in relation to the massive need for financing social services (including and especially public health and education), infrastructure development, salaries of government workers, etc. The country will be either in an implosion or near-implosion stage by that time.

A moratorium on interest payments is essential to righting the ship of the Philippine state. Or at least the threat thereof, with the burden of finding creative alternatives on creditors' shoulders. My book, however, shows the way out of the interest moratorium nuclear option: Philippine sovereign debts can be converted to 99-year leases on Philippine territory for the purpose of setting up commercial bases. Philippine sovereign debts are wiped out, and the countries whose financial houses hold those debts will have an opportunity to stop the loss of manufacturing jobs to China, India and other low-wage countries.

Thank you for all your comments and questions, folks. I believe that we Filipinos are capable of solving our problems ourselves, freed finally from the suffocating head-lock that the IMF, the World Bank, the Paris Club and other organizations currently have on our psyche.

Of Blinders and the Blind Side

2010-07-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's become hot and heavy these days on the Internet. The elections in the Philippines, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tea Party movement, the near-bankruptcy of Greece, the free-falling Euro, the very real prospects for a third Great Depression have hot-wired our emotions.

It's exciting times. I believe that unless we short-circuit our complacent brains and hot-wire our jagged edges, we cannot begin to transform our thought processes. And that we must do to be equal to the task. The world is falling apart before our very eyes. It's not just the Philippines and the other perennially perplexed and flummoxed societies that have seemingly insoluble problems. Countries as great as the United States, Germany, France and Britain are counting the days before that dreaded Day of Reckoning.

Some have noticed the upturned volume and the preponderance of negative thinking over the Internet. To this point, some have suggested that there be a moratorium on negativity. It was in response to this call for a moratorium that I drafted the letter below to some friends, only one of whom actually called for the moratorium.

In the letter, I focus on the problem of religiousness as a blinder. My thesis - which of course is not original - is that religion can be a blinder because it prevents government planners from seeing and considering the correct solutions which may in fact be right before their eyes, staring them in the face.

I had mentioned in my communication with my friends on the Internet that Filipinos have a blind side - whether it is the inability to see the corruption going on around them in their families, in their circle of friends. Or the inability to see that the Philippine population explosion is a major cause of the problems there. Or the inability to see the capriciousness in the judicial system. Or the inability to see the incentive-killing effects of nepotism and political dynasties.

My diatribe grew out of my concern that a misplaced trust in people such as economist Bernie Villegas - an Opus Dei founder in the Philippines - would assure that the country's economy will continue to circle the runway, unable to take off.

That is the effect of relying on people with a blind side, or who wear blinders. Most Filipinos, in my judgment, do have blind sides or permanent blinders.

July 4, 2010

Dear Carlos, Gene, Frank and others,

The historical argument is all there. Look at Europe. After the 2nd World War, the countries that completed their transition to secularism from Catholicism - France and Italy - and the countries that completed their transition to secularism from Protestantism - Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, the low countries, Austria, Switzerland, etc. - all made great economic strides. The countries that remained Catholic - Spain, Portugal, Ireland - and the countries that remained traditionally Orthodox - Greece and the near East countries - all lagged in economic development.

In the late 70s and 80s, as Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and others became increasingly secular, those countries experienced an economic boom. While few French and Italians are practicing Catholics, the Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Greeks, etc. have remained deeply religious. They however began to realize that their governments had to be secular and separate from the Church. In Spain, for example, divorce and abortion are legal and the Spaniards have learned to compartmentalize.

South America's history parallels that of Europe. As South American societies became secular - leftist in some cases - South America started to emerge from the huge shadow cast by the giant to the north until they experienced an economic miracle that rivaled the Asian miracle of the 70s and 80s.

One of the keys to economic success is secularism. I am not advocating that the Filipino people should discard their religion. What I do hope for is that the government - national, provincial and local - will someday become completely secular. There is hope in this area. President Noynoy Aquino has openly advocated family planning despite protestations from the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines).

We must tame that monster (population explosion) that we have lived with since the end of the 2nd World War, when Filipinos began to breed like rabbits. This, despite the invention of the Pill and the promotion of condom use as a defense against AIDS. Why have we not succeeded in taming that monster? Because it is protected and encouraged by the Catholic Church, which is the real and enduring power in Philippine governance.

Because of overpopulation, there is corruption in all stitches, nooks and crannies of the social fabric. People simply must be able to make ends meet, and corruption is the easiest way to a balanced budget. Because of overpopulation, there is widespread poverty, which leads to violent crimes, prostitution, jueteng, drug smuggling, murders-for-hire, etc.

Because of overpopulation, all the economic gains are eaten up literally by the ever-increasing number of mouths to feed.

Bernie Villegas, an Opus Dei founder in the Philippines, does not talk of overpopulation. He can't. He is far too invested in his extreme religiosity. He thinks that there should be more religiosity in government, not less.

Former President Arroyo, the late Cory Aquino and the de facto President Imelda Marcos either did not separate their faith from their governance or used the Catholic Church in a very cynical way, and the result was complete public subservience to the CBCP.

It was in fact during the administration of Fidel Ramos, a secular Protestant, that the country experienced real and sustained economic progress. So strong was the Philippines' growth spurt that it lasted well into the term of the plunderer Estrada - who just happened to be an irreligious jester.

I understand completely Carlos' impatience over the negativity that pervades Internet discussions about conditions in the Philippines. I think we should not criticize for the sake of criticizing. If I am coming across as that kind of a critic of the Philippines, it must be because I do not communicate my intentions as well as I should.

I must continue to emphasize that I am not an ordinary critic. I feel that I am entitled because I have devoted my retirement years to figuring out solutions to the country's myriad problems. I have even written a book (Out of the Misty Sea We Must...Blueprint for a New Philippines) that is chock-full of recommendations. I am most certainly not one who criticizes Filipinos and the Philippines for sheer enjoyment.

We cannot begin to improve our lot if we are allergic to self-examination and self-criticism. The first step on the road to improvement is a completely honest self-examination. Without that, we are just deceiving ourselves. Better to sit and wait for that miracle, or to pray until our prayers bring dividends.

I submit that people who wear blinders are incapable of honest self-examination. The Opus Dei is a blinder. That is why people like Bernie Villegas cannot be entrusted with the country's economic fate. That's just too bad, because I was once a huge fan of Bernie, who graduated summa from Harvard Business School. I was also offered a chance to win some kind of scholarship to further my studies in Economics either in the U.S. or in England and to explore that opportunity, I was scheduled to meet with Bernie, who at the time was the head of the Economics Department at La Salle. I was already in U.P. at the time, but my classmates and lifelong friends in La Salle threw my name into the mix of potential scholars.

I did not show up for the meeting with Bernie for reasons I can no longer remember. It was certainly not because of the Opus Dei thing because Bernie was not in that movement yet.

Oh, and the blinders. We all have blinders. There are very few who have absolutely no blinders. The few who wear no blinders are atheists and I often find them annoying.

Cesar L