She still needs Bill

Again we are slipping back into a land of contrasts. We have our President and our finance officials gloating over the rise in the value of the peso, but at the same time we hear the lamentations of our exporters and our families dependent on the so-called “foreign aid” from members working abroad that has now gone down in buying power. Where a dollar they received used to exchange for P50 or more, it can now muster only a little more than P40, which means a reduction of their monthly allowances by about one-fifth.

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Meanwhile, Malacañang has made a fuss about the recent act of the President in cutting the tariff on imports by one percent and that was supposed to look good to the confused Pinoys. But it is appearing now that the cut is of more benefit to oil importers rather than to the poor wage earner and regular taxpayer. There is indeed good sense in the proposal to scrap, or at least suspend, the onerous 12 percent E-VAT on oil products, but is anybody listening?

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Probably only the Secretary of Finance who has sonorously warned that doing so will make the government lose some P54 BILLION. But what of it? The government had fleeced off about that much also when it imposed the E-VAT on us, so why shouldn't it stop punishing us now that it is singing the praises of the rising peso? Surely, it can now afford to stop penalizing us since, with the lower value of the dollar, our debt payments will also reduce. We therefore wouldn't be needing the 12 percent that is being cadged from all of us, rich and poor alike, through the infamous E-VAT.

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The University of the Philippines surely launched the celebration of its 100 th anniversary in a fiery manner with the burning of one of its oldest dormitories. The Narra Hall which, I remember, used to be the Men's Dormitory, was razed to the ground soon after UP alumni staged a brilliant ceremony to kick off the celebration this year. Fortunately, the dorm had already been vacated since it had been inspected and declared condemned. How many more victims of fire we would save if everybody heeded the findings of fire agencies, and, of course, if town and city engineers did their jobs of inspecting old structures.

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I didn't realize how intensely interested people here are in the American election process now going on. It is a bit embarrassing, though, when some of them asks one to explain exactly how the American election is conducted, compared to our simpler (but more vicious?) one. Anyway, it is still very interesting to keep track of the commentaries on the candidates, like when it was noted that former president Bill Clinton often looked awkward when he would stand beside Hillary during rallies. But polls, particularly in New Hampshire , showed very clearly how popular Ole Bill still is there. His rating was 83 while Hillary's was only 75 percent.

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And everybody agrees that he is of great help to her in the campaign. Remember the time when his vice president, Al Gore, ran for president and he wasn't out there helping? Some said it was because Gore himself did not want Bill Clinton to be there because he might affect voters negatively. But Gore lost that one, and now who knows if the results would have been different if the former president had also been out there slugging for him.

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Well, the popularity and vote-getting ability of the combined appeals of the Clintons will be put to the test in the next few days when the country goes on with its primaries. All the candidates will be working their strategies in cornering the votes in the states to be covered. As Hillary said, it is going to be a long haul yet, and let us see if there will be surprises, miracles and upsets like those we saw in the last few days.

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Meanwhile, the traffic enforcer in Bacolod I wrote about yesterday, was waiting for me when I came out of the Sacred Heart Shrine prayer room yesterday. But if I thought he was going to say that they will monitor the trisikads in his area more closely, I was very wrong. All he sounded was defensive, repeating again how hardheaded the trisikad drivers were, and how his officers were surprised that he would be written about, etcetera. With that kind of attitude, I now brace myself for the continued blocking of the church entrance, so long as enforcers like Umadhay are the ones assigned there.*

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