the question is quite simple: if Bistek’s government, and in effect PNoy himself, allowed for the SONA rally to take place, as it always has, relative and as counterpoint to the president’s State of the Nationa address, would this have happened at all? (more…)
today, the workers of a Coca-Cola plant in Sta. Rosa Laguna have started their strike.
that is, Coke’s drivers, haulers, fork lift operators, and pickers, almost 300 of them, have refused to go to work, effectively stopping operations in two plants (as i write this at 9AM today), as they call for their most basic rights as workers be respected by Coke. that is, just wages, workers benefits and job security. and ironically, this strike demands that workers be given the right to form a union. (more…)
In January, the Department of Tourism (DOT) celebrated the 6.09% rise in the number of tourists to the Philippines. That’s 25,000 more people who have come to visit this country where everything’s more fun. That’s 436,079 tourists who landed in good ol’ Pinas in January alone.
It gives me goosebumps. Far from the good kind.
Because it would take an amount of delusion to think this all good, and only the naïve would think those numbers equal to development or change. This is not to dispute those numbers, neither is it to question those online surveys that say Boracay is the Best Beach in Asia. This is to ask questions borne of actually traveling this country, and observing tourism on the ground.
This is to ask: have you heard of the “poor Filipino face?” (more…)
i’m sure there is truth to much of what PNoy said in that SONA — propaganda after all, as with press releases, have the facts that we need so that a google search should reveal those to be true. and of course the State of the Nation is the nation according to the government’s statistics, numbers always look better than real life, and that isn’t new either.
PNoy should really just stop pretending that he is different from GMA, when he sounds exactly like her, speaks of the state of the nation the way she always has. we should also just stop expecting more from him, even more so putting words in his mouth: the stand on responsible parenthood IS NOT a pro-reproductive health stand, anobah. (more…)
it must have a lot to do with the conversations. when it can be had about the billboards that riddle the streets, where capital and colonialism, consumption and crises, become par for the course, of that long stretch of EDSA that cradles the car from one city to the next two, as it shifts from quiet residential to sprawling Manila, the dip in the tone, the way that it sounds, onomatopoeic i say, a conversation you’ve been having with your brother you say. which moves us down other cities far from here: shanghai, islamabad, bangkok, and we stop at sin — singapore, towards which you are moving, not leaving, just taking a trip, you insist, i insist, we rationalize. there seems to be no reason to stay in this conversation of refusing to acknowledge the impending distance, from one end of the road to the next, one country to another, one long stretch of time between what we cannot say now and where it might lead next. much like you giving me directions in your part of the city, and i follow even as i might know a shortcut, an easier way, of laying cards on the table, letting it all hang. it’s too soon and sudden, striking but also surreal. and right now what is urgent is only: this stretch of road, a u-turn to make, a right, until everything’s left, you and me on that stretch of road, like the silences that surround roadkills, the swiftness, the transience, when a new set of cars and dangers, noise and victims, take our place.