The Abrogation of the Social Contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.