關於 philippine money ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

Dear Philhealth,

Do you think it’s fair to ask OFWs for contributions that they CANNOT use at all?
Do you really think all OFWs can afford this? If they’re getting 20k/month, after food, rent, taxes, bills, health insurance, and money to support their families in the Philippines, how much is left?!
Do you think it’s sustainable for a 0.5% increase per year?? Do you think employers are that generous that there’s a salary increase of 0.5% each year?? Is it fair that their salary increase is going to something they cannot use rather than to improve their lives?

Now to the more detailed questions, let’s take your 7,488/year contribution for example (remember this is on the conservative side, a lot of people will be paying 21,600/year), according to Philippine Statistics Authority, there are 2.3M OFWs. That amounts to 17.2 BILLION pesos per year. This is a HUGE amount of money, the least you can do is tell us how the money will be spent.

How did you magically come up with 3% (17.2B, is 1% enough? is 0.5% enough? Has this been responsibly budgeted with Filipino health in mind?
How much percent is going to cancer treatments?
Dialysis?
Diabetes treatment? Etc.

And don’t give us bullshit numbers. Give us details. For example, how many cancer patients will benefit from this and how much in pesos is Philhealth going to cover?

Yeah, you didn’t think that far ahead right? Because my fear is, this money will be mismanaged just like in the past. In 2016, Philhealth had a 250M deficit. In 2017, 4B deficit. (I can’t find the figures after that, I’m sure someone can).

Is the OFW contributions going to cover your outstanding debts from hospitals?
Are we being used to correct your past mistakes? Is that fair?
Is the money going to be spent on hotel stays just like Celestina Dela Serna did in 2018? She spent 1.3M in a year just by staying in a hotel, are we paying for that mistake?!

And how about the 16.58M missing from OFW contributions?
In Feb 2020, a whistleblower Ken Sarmiento said that 4 Philhealth officials did not remit 16.58M from OFW contributions and that an estimated 50-100M is missing from OFW contributions. A day after the news came out, Philhealth President Ricardo Morales said that only 1.2M was missing and that recruitment agencies were to blame, that this was reported to the NBI since 2015. (now bear with me) My question is, yes you investigated the 1.2M but isn’t anyone questioning, where is the 16M to 100M? I don’t believe that Ken Sarmiento is making this up. Are we going to believe one person who says yeah nah, it’s fine, it’s only 1.2M. Is this being thoroughly investigated? 16M is not a joke, it’s a huge amount of money and this is a serious allegation.

Will the same thing happen to our 17.2B OFW contributions? Will it disappear into thin air?

To all Filipinos and OFWs out there, we should fight this and demand ANSWERS. Philippines still has a BIG corruption problem and a broken health care system and I fear that only a small percentage of the OFW contributions will actually benefit Filipinos who need it. I’m a citizen here in New Zealand, and because of this news, sadly I will not be processing my dual citizenship. I’m fortunate because I have an escape but for OFWs working in HK, Singapore, UAE etc. who can’t get citizenship, we should all fight for them as well.

Please share this post, sign the petition, it already reached 300k. However, the more support the better. This is the only way I know how to support OFWs, if you have any other ideas, please comment below and with all of us fighting, we can actually change this. Thanks for reading.

利用太陽能發電來建構小型的灌溉系統，為農地服務提高生產力💪

#陽光屋頂百萬座 ＃太陽能發電 ＃太陽能板 ＃綠能發電 ＃綠能農業 ＃菲律賓

Target: 500,000 hectares

PRES. DUTERTE PLEDGES P44-B
FOR SOLAR-POWERED IRRIGATION

By Manny Piñol

President Rody Duterte last night pledged that Philippine Agriculture will get the money that it needs to undertake a nationwide Solar-Powered Irrigation Systems program which aims to provide water to at least 500,000 hectares of farmlands over the remaining four years of his administration.

The President made the commitment during the 28th Cabinet Meeting in the Aguinaldo State Dining Room of Malacañang which stretched from 5 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.

Agriculture was not in the agenda of last night's Cabinet Meeting but during a discussion on how to feed the growing population of Filipinos, Pres. Duterte asked about the Solar-Powered Irrigation Project he launched in March last year.

"What happened to the Solar Irrigation Project we launched last year?" President Duterte asked me during the discussion.

I informed the President that 169 units have either been completed or undergoing construction this year but that next year, the budget will only allow us to build 10 additional units.

I told the President that the DA will have to abandon some of its non-essential programs and realign the funds to the SPIS program for 2019 with a target of at least 100 additional units.

President Duterte was briefed that providing water for agriculture is the most important factor for food production, especially for the rice program as it would allow farmers to plant twice a year.

Currently, only 1.2-M hectares of the estimated 3.9-M hectares of rice farms are served by irrigation systems under the National Irrigation Administration (NIA).

That leaves an area of 2.7-M hectares which could only produce rice once a year and this is during the rainy season.

Most of the non-irrigated rice farms could only produce between 3 to 4 metric tons per harvest, a production capacity which could vastly improve if there is available water supply all year round.

In fact, the estimate is that the additional 500,000 hectares of unirrigated rice farms if served by small irrigation systems could produce an average of 6 metric tons per harvest twice a year.

This would mean an additional rice production of 4-M metric tons every year which if dried and milled with a 50% recovery could bring in 2-million metric tons of rice.

The impromptu computation I made on the cost of building SPIS to cover 500,000 hectares resulted in a figure of P43.7-B.

This was based on the computation that each of the 6,250 system would cover an average of 80 hectares at a cost of P7-M per set-up.

"You will get the budget that you need for that," President Duterte said.

Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno told the President during the discussion that the money for the SPIS program could come from the Imported Rice Tariffication Program and regular funds to be included in the national budget for 2020.

#DuterteDelivers!
#Changeishere!

(This video shows the recently commissioned Manubuan, Matalam, North Cotabato Solar-Powered Irrigation System which was completed in 60-days at a cost of P6.4-M and could serve up to 100 hectares of rice farms. Video by DA RAFID XII)

A GOOD READ from one of the greatest leader that lived, #SINGAPORE's founding man, #LeeKuanYew

THIS MUST BE SHARED AND THOROUGHLY READ BY EVERY FILIPINO... Its quite long but it will surely strengthen our minds but then at the end, I was like "SAYANG!!!"
It came from the SINGAPORE'S FOUNDING MAN ITSELF, former Prime Minister LEE KUAN YEW on how the Philippines should have become, IF ONLY...

I've just read it and, its point blank!
Its a good read
____________

(The following excerpt is taken from pages 299 – 305 from Lee Kuan Yew’s book “From Third World to First”, Chapter 18 “Building Ties with Thailand, the Philippines, and Brunei”)

*

The Philippines was a world apart from us, running a different style of politics and government under an American military umbrella. It was not until January 1974 that I visited President Marcos in Manila. When my Singapore Airlines plane flew into Philippine airspace, a small squadron of Philippine Air Force jet fighters escorted it to Manila Airport. There Marcos received me in great style – the Filipino way. I was put up at the guest wing of Malacañang Palace in lavishly furnished rooms, valuable objects of art bought in Europe strewn all over. Our hosts were gracious, extravagant in hospitality, flamboyant. Over a thousand miles of water separated us. There was no friction and little trade. We played golf, talked about the future of ASEAN, and promised to keep in touch.

His foreign minister, Carlos P. Romulo, was a small man of about five feet some 20 years my senior, with a ready wit and a self-deprecating manner about his size and other limitations. Romulo had a good sense of humor, an eloquent tongue, and a sharp pen, and was an excellent dinner companion because he was a wonderful raconteur, with a vast repertoire of anecdotes and witticisms. He did not hide his great admiration for the Americans. One of his favourite stories was about his return to the Philippines with General MacArthur. As MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, the water reached his knees but came up to Romulo’s chest and he had to swim ashore. His good standing with ASEAN leaders and with Americans increased the prestige of the Marcos administration. Marcos had in Romulo a man of honor and integrity who helped give a gloss of respectability to his regime as it fell into disrepute in the 1980s.

In Bali in 1976, at the first ASEAN summit held after the fall of Saigon, I found Marcos keen to push for greater economic cooperation in ASEAN. But we could not go faster than the others. To set the pace, Marcos and I agreed to implement a bilateral Philippines-Singapore across-the-board 10 percent reduction of existing tariffs on all products and to promote intra-ASEAN trade. We also agreed to lay a Philippines-Singapore submarine cable. I was to discover that for him, the communiqué was the accomplishment itself; its implementation was secondary, an extra to be discussed at another conference.

We met every two to three years. He once took me on a tour of his library at Malacañang, its shelves filled with bound volumes of newspapers reporting his activities over the years since he first stood for elections. There were encyclopedia-size volumes on the history and culture of the Philippines with his name as the author. His campaign medals as an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader were displayed in glass cupboards. He was the undisputed boss of all Filipinos. Imelda, his wife, had a penchant for luxury and opulence. When they visited Singapore before the Bali summit they came in stye in two DC8’s, his and hers.

Marcos did not consider China a threat for the immediate future, unlike Japan. He did not rule out the possibility of an aggressive Japan, if circumstances changed. He had memories of the horrors the Imperial Army had inflicted on Manila. We had strongly divergent views on the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia. While he, pro forma, condemned the Vietnamese occupation, he did not consider it a danger to the Philippines. There was the South China Sea separating them and the American navy guaranteed their security. As a result, Marcos was not active on the Cambodian question. Moreover, he was to become preoccupied with the deteriorating security in his country.

Marcos, ruling under martial law, had detained opposition leader Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, reputed to be as charismatic and powerful a campaigner as he was. He freed Aquino and allowed him to go to the United States. As the economic situation in the Philippines deteriorated, Aquino announced his decision to return. Mrs. Marcos issued several veiled warnings. When the plane arrived at Manila Airport from Taipei in August 1983, he was shot as he descended from the aircraft. A whole posse of foreign correspondents with television camera crews accompanying him on the aircraft was not enough protection.

International outrage over the killing resulted in foreign banks stopping all loans to the Philippines, which owed over US$25 billion and could not pay the interest due. This brought Marcos to the crunch. He sent his minister for trade and industry, Bobby Ongpin, to ask me for a loan of US$300-500 million to meet the interest payments. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “We will never see that money back.” Moreover, I added, everyone knew that Marcos was seriously ill and under constant medication for a wasting disease. What was needed was a strong, healthy leader, not more loans.

Shortly afterward, in February 1984, Marcos met me in Brunei at the sultanate’s independence celebrations. He had undergone a dramatic physical change. Although less puffy than he had appeared on television, his complexion was dark as if he had been out in the sun. He was breathing hard as he spoke, his voice was soft, eyes bleary, and hair thinning. He looked most unhealthy. An ambulance with all the necessary equipment and a team of Filipino doctors were on standby outside his guest bungalow. Marcos spent much of the time giving me a most improbable story of how Aquino had been shot.

As soon as all our aides left, I went straight to the point, that no bank was going to lend him any money. They wanted to know who was going to succeed him if anything were to happen to him; all the bankers could see that he no longer looked healthy. Singapore banks had lent US$8 billion of the US$25 billion owing. The hard fact was they were not likely to get repayment for some 20 years. He countered that it would be only eight years. I said the bankers wanted to see a strong leader in the Philippines who could restore stability, and the Americans hoped the election in May would throw up someone who could be such a leader. I asked whom he would nominate for the election. He said Prime Minister Cesar Virata. I was blunt. Virata was a nonstarter, a first-class administrator but no political leader; further, his most politically astute colleague, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, was out of favour. Marcos was silent, then he admitted that succession was the nub of the problem. If he could find a successor, there would be a solution. As I left, he said, “You are a true friend.” I did not understand him. It was a strange meeting.

With medical care, Marcos dragged on. Cesar Virata met me in Singapore in January the following year. He was completely guileless, a political innocent. He said that Mrs. Imelda Marcos was likely to be nominated as the presidential candidate. I asked how that could be when there were other weighty candidates, including Juan Ponce Enrile and Blas Ople, the labor minister. Virata replied it had to do with “flow of money; she would have more money than other candidates to pay for the votes needed for nomination by the party and to win the election. He added that if she were the candidate, the opposition would put up Mrs. Cory Aquino and work up the people’s feelings. He said the economy was going down with no political stability.

The denouement came in February 1986 when Marcos held presidential elections which he claimed he won. Cory Aquino, the opposition candidate, disputed this and launched a civil disobedience campaign. Defense Minister Juan Enrile defected and admitted election fraud had taken place, and the head of the Philippine constabulary, Lieutenant General Fidel Ramos, joined him. A massive show of “people power” in the streets of Manila led to a spectacular overthrow of a dictatorship. The final indignity was on 25 February 1986, when Marcos and his wife fled in U.S. Air Force helicopters from Malacañang Palace to Clark Air Base and were flown to Hawaii. This Hollywood-style melodrama could only have happened in the Philippines.

Mrs. Aquino was sworn in as president amid jubilation. I had hopes that this honest, God-fearing woman would help regain confidence for the Philippines and get the country back on track. I visited her that June, three months after the event. She was a sincere, devout Catholic who wanted to do her best for her country by carrying out what she believed her husband would have done had he been alive, namely, restore democracy to the Philippines. Democracy would then solve their economic and social problems. At dinner, Mrs. Aquino seated the chairman of the constitutional commission, Chief Justice Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, next to me. I asked the learned lady what lessons her commission had learned from the experience of the last 40 years since independence in 1946 would guide her in drafting the constitution. She answered without hesitation, “We will not have any reservations or limitations on our democracy. We must make sure that no dictator can ever emerge to subvert the constitution.” Was there no incompatibility of the American-type separation of powers with the culture and habits of the Filipino people that had caused problems for the presidents before Marcos? Apparently none.

Endless attempted coups added to Mrs. Aquino’s problems. The army and the constabulary had been politicized. Before the ASEAN summit in December 1987, a coup was threatened. Without President Suharto’s firm support the summit would have been postponed and confidence in Aquino’s government undermined. The Philippine government agreed that the responsibility for security should be shared between them and the other ASEAN governments, in particular the Indonesian government. General Benny Moerdani, President Suharto’s trusted aide, took charge. He positioned an Indonesian warship in the middle of Manila Bay with helicopters and a commando team ready to rescue the ASEAN heads of government if there should be a coup attempt during the summit. I was included in their rescue plans. I wondered if such a rescue could work but decided to go along with the arrangements, hoping that the show of force would scare off the coup leaders. We were all confined to the Philippine Plaza Hotel by the seafront facing Manila Bay where we could see the Indonesian warship at anchor. The hotel was completely sealed off and guarded. The summit went off without any mishap. We all hoped that this show of united support for Mrs. Aquino’s government at a time when there were many attempts to destabilize it would calm the situation.

It made no difference. There were more coup attempts, discouraging investments badly needed to create jobs. This was a pity because they had so many able people, educated in the Philippines and the United States. Their workers were English-speaking, at least in Manila. There was no reason why the Philippines should not have been one of the more successful of the ASEAN countries. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the most developed, because America had been generous in rehabilitating the country after the war. Something was missing, a gel to hold society together. The people at the top, the elite mestizos, had the same detached attitude to the native peasants as the mestizos in their haciendas in Latin America had toward their peons. They were two different societies: Those at the top lived a life of extreme luxury and comfort while the peasants scraped a living, and in the Philippines it was a hard living. They had no land but worked on sugar and coconut plantations.They had many children because the church discouraged birth control. The result was increasing poverty.

It was obvious that the Philippines would never take off unless there was substantial aid from the United States. George Shultz, the secretary of state, was sympathetic and wanted to help but made clear to me that the United States would be better able to do something if ASEAN showed support by making its contribution. The United States was reluctant to go it alone and adopt the Philippines as its special problem. Shultz wanted ASEAN to play a more prominent role to make it easier for the president to get the necessary votes in Congress. I persuaded Shultz to get the aid project off the ground in 1988, before President Reagan’s second term of office ended. He did. There were two meetings for a Multilateral Assistance Initiative (Philippines Assistance Programme): The first in Tokyo in 1989 brought US$3.5 billion in pledges, and the second in Hong Kong in 1991, under the Bush administration, yielded US$14 billion in pledges. But instability in the Philippines did not abate. This made donors hesitant and delayed the implementation of projects.

Mrs. Aquino’s successor, Fidel Ramos, whom she had backed, was more practical and established greater stability. In November 1992, I visited him. In a speech to the 18th Philippine Business Conference, I said, “I do not believe democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.” In private, President Ramos said he agreed with me that British parliamentary-type constitutions worked better because the majority party in the legislature was also the government. Publicly, Ramos had to differ.

He knew well the difficulties of trying to govern with strict American-style separation of powers. The senate had already defeated Mrs. Aquino’s proposal to retain the American bases. The Philippines had a rambunctious press but it did not check corruption. Individual press reporters could be bought, as could many judges. Something had gone seriously wrong. Millions of Filipino men and women had to leave their country for jobs abroad beneath their level of education. Filipino professionals whom we recruited to work in Singapore are as good as our own. Indeed, their architects, artists, and musicians are more artistic and creative than ours. Hundreds of thousands of them have left for Hawaii and for the American mainland. It is a problem the solution to which has not been made easier by the workings of a Philippine version of the American constitution.

The difference lies in the culture of the Filipino people. It is a soft, forgiving culture. Only in the Philippines could a leader like Ferdinand Marcos, who pillaged his country for over 20 years, still be considered for a national burial. Insignificant amounts of the loot have been recovered, yet his wife and children were allowed to return and engage in politics. They supported the winning presidential and congressional candidates with their considerable resources and reappeared in the political and social limelight after the 1998 election that returned President Joseph Estrada. General Fabian Ver, Marcos’s commander-in-chief who had been in charge of security when Aquino was assassinated, had fled the Philippines together with Marcos in 1986. When he died in Bangkok, the Estrada government gave the general military honors at his burial. One Filipino newspaper, Today, wrote on 22 November 1998, “Ver, Marcos and the rest of the official family plunged the country into two decades of lies, torture, and plunder. Over the next decade, Marcos’s cronies and immediate family would tiptoe back into the country, one by one – always to the public’s revulsion and disgust, though they showed that there was nothing that hidden money and thick hides could not withstand.” Some Filipinos write and speak with passion. If they could get their elite to share their sentiments and act, what could they not have achieved?

-----

SAYANG! kindly share.

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