The Fourth Perspective

The Philippines is a consumer and service based economy. Meaning the economy is driven by consumer spending, while consumer’s purchasing power emanates from domestic and foreign services. The latter constitutes the bulk of the country’s economic stimulus substantially sustained by the middle sector acting as the significant consumer base. Think of a pyramid where there is an apex represented by the oligarch constituting the minute portion of the population that owns and controls the big industry. Next is the upper middle section of the pyramid that has the capacity to generate income to sustain consumption of needs as well as wants. Owners of medium and small scale enterprises,  professionals, overseas contract workers, technology experts, corporate employees in the pay of large companies and intrapreneur,  belongs to this group. At the lower middle section are the contractual laborers, other corporate employees, transport drivers, market vendors, tailors, barbers and t...

Nature’s Law is like merchandise, you break it... you pay for it. The best things in life are free, so they say; the truth is …it is true. Nature is abound with everything to satiate man’s basic needs. Early man gathered food by foraging, fishing and hunting in the most primitive and conservative way. Taking just enough from nature and leaving the rest to multiply and rejuvenate. Amazingly, primitive as they were, they understood the process and the law that governs the natural order of things. Today, man hardly gather in the traditional and primitive sense, rather he plowed, planted and harvested without rest and he whipped with sophistication, believing that the soil will cough more than it can. He took more than he needed to support his wants. The ground is rooted even before it replenished. It gave out more of what it has, faster than it can accumulate.  Slowly but steadily it is losing strength; its nutrient nearly depleted. Synthetics piles up beneath on the very fa...

Boxing is an art of combat motivated by reward and  governed by rules  of  the  game. Head batting and hitting below the belt are considered dirty fighting that leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It defies convention, decency and morals and are prohibited, sanctioned and penalized. But war is different all through out and the analogy lies on conventions or the manner by which each should be fought. Boxing and war have conventions but only the former is self-limiting in as far as damage is concerned. In the latter though conventions are in place, there is neither a referee to stop the erring contender or a crowd to boo the villainous act. There is no moral... no decency, on the contrary all the means were employed to bring about the greatest damage and destruction to the enemy, including the use of dreaded weaponry. The motivation is to end in victory, quickly! Conventions becomes guidelines reserved only for the vanguished. In war, acts were inhuman t...

The Jeepney is old and flabby; it farts too loud, too much; with bulges and curves in places but the right ones; it became meaner and larger, even slower than ever; to all direction it moves in a crisscrossed fashion, aiming to isolate its breed; but when on a halt, it is almost in hibernation, as if in the wait for the onset of the next season. The foregoing analogy is an attempt to personify, not vilify the Jeepney’s current state in relation to its rational 67 years ago. It had survived the post war era, the baby boomer years, the rock and roll hype, a decade and half of martial rule, plus three more decades up… unto this very day, and towards to probably more. The jeepney has been a part of Filipino lives and it occupies a niche in the Philippine culture. It came about after the war, amid the scarcity to serve the need for a rugged means of transportation. Since then, from dawn till next, it had  responded to that need. It had traversed roads where there was none, ...

For decades the Philippine armed forces is at war within. Insurgency has been around since the end of World War ll. Secessionist and separatist groups had divided, multiplied and changed names since the 70’s. Banditry took the limelight in the recent past with kidnapping and killing of other nationals in the southern Philippines . The older armed forces had fought in Korea and Vietnam , and the current ones had a contingent in some of the most troubled spot in the world under the auspices of the United Nations. Indeed, prolonged and protracted fighting, amid the scarcity, is something that the Philippine armed forces had learned to live by and die with. Needless to state, fighting is not much of strange word or activity for the Philippine military. Its long exposure to low-intensity conflict had honed its spirit and skills and relative to its assigned mission, may be considered as one of the best in the world. But then, being infantry based, whose experiences rotates around non-...

While being introduced to legislative floor, proposed law may either be as ridiculous as the Anti-Planking Bill or it can be as sublime and controversial as the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, among many others, but in its final form, the Philippine Constitution and all the enabling law for that matter may humbly be described as one of the most comprehensive and substantive in the world. It practically covers every circumstances, acts, omissions and even far more remote situations and conditions that one could possibly imagine. Its roots was seeded on Hispanic and American Jurisprudence, both recognized then to be repositories of  the combined and aggregate experiences of the institutions under the civilize west. It was imbued with the same lofty ideals as that of the American Constitution promulgated after the independence of colonial America . In it dwells the same democratic premise and concept championed by the forerunners of the American Revolution. Truly the Philippine Laws ...

“Diplomacy works only if you are carrying a big stick or you have with you lots of friends, all of them carrying a big stick. - Unknown” “Political power grows from the barrel of the gun. - Mao   Tse Tung" “Don’t forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings. - Frederick the Great.” “ Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us   fat. - Herman Goering” The bureaucracy and the elect have come to the realization ( at least they pretend to have ) that there is some truth in the foregoing words uttered by some great and some infamous  men in the old arena of geopolitics. In fact, lots of truth as history and the Philippine’s on-going effort to rearm, would attest. The firm realization comes after knocking at doors of UNCLOS, ASEAN, the US of A and the world. The revelation is disheartening , that geopolitics is not only about goodwill, but also more about thinking like Mao and Frederick and...

Article l paragraph l of the United Nations Charter states and I quote " To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;...( Bold letters are mine ). How would this number one provision of the UN charter be applied in the situation that besieged countries such as the Philippines, China and Vietnam, among others, with respect to the territorial claims in the sea west of the Philippines and south of China? Decades had passed, and the persistence of this issue is slowly accelerating beyond diplomatic tolerance of the countries involved....

Someone told me that wall eyed is ron-pari in Japanese. One eye is looking at Rondon and the other at Paris . As the crisis drags on and vicious military spending gradually and steadily magnifies across the waters west of the Philippines , there is but a surface knowledge on the part of the Philippine populace on what is going on and why it is so. The prevailing attitude may be characterized as uncaring, disinterested, uninvolved, and lukewarm- in a day …to sadly.. forever cold. Are these attitude demonstrative of a vacuum in patriotism over the hearts of this nation, or is it something else? Curiosity brought me to the phrase “ Scientia Potentia Est ( Knowledge is Power)”. Could it be that the culprit is sheer ignorance? Ignorance brought about by a disconnection between media and the majority of the populace at the lower half of the social echelon, on matters that does not directly affect their livelihood and daily existence, such as issues on national and economic se...