What Filipino Middle Class?

While trying to figure out why the middle class in the Philippines was so small I stumbled across this fantastic opinion piece in the Philippine Star newspaper. The author, Nelson Navarro, makes it clear that the Philippines wasn't always the impoverished economic basket case that it is today and that 30 years ago the neighbors of the Philippines used to welcome affluent tourists Filipino with money to spend. Today countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and even China are modernizing and have thriving economies. The Philippines has slums, barefoot feral children, beggars and so many excess people that according to Navarro’s piece 10% of the population of the Philippines lives abroad as OFW’s doing manual labor or are domestic servants. Philippine government officials and their cronies make money off of the export of laborers and maids.

The Philippines attracts call centers because Filipinos speak English and work much cheaper than English speaking Singaporeans or English speaking North Americans but attracting other foreign investment where the Philippines has to compete with their neighbors is hard. Really, why should multinational businesses invest here? Infrastructure has been neglected, there’s almost no public transportation so employees can’t get to work on time, electricity costs more than anywhere else in Asia and is undependable so brownouts and blackouts are a regular occurrence due to inadequate grid, bribes are required at every stage of business, squatters are rife and the underpaid police and low level government officials augment their income with bribes. Why not have your office in places that have a modern infrastructure and that work better such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok or anywhere in China?

According to one of our hosts he fully expects that politicians to take bribes and steal from the public purse. That’s normal behavior in the Philippines and many other places in Asia. “But do they have to take it all?”, he said. Evidently they do and citizens mostly tolerate it. Manila’s public transportation consists of light rail lines (no municipal buses). The speed of the trains is held to around 20 mph due to a problem with the rails and the lack of spare parts due to a lack of money. New rolling stock is needed but a Czech supplier of rail cars was solicited for a 30 million USD bribe to get the business.

So what about the politicians? Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe collecting wife were the very models of kleptocracy but he's dead (but she lives on as a powerful elected senator as does her son Bong Bong). Current President Aquino has an actress sister named Kris who is all over the country on billboards as the official spokesperson for a fast food chain, Chowking. Her and a basketball player have a son named "Bimby". President Aquino also has a sister named, I kid you not, "Ballsy". Shockingly Ballsy was recently accused and cleared in a bribery scandal. It's that kind of country and will probably stay that kind of country.

Manila

When I was in Manila last year I found the place to be a collection of gritty, hot shanty towns with gridlocked traffic and my pocket was picked at the airport. So why am I back?

My wife has many friends here and although Manila is indeed a smog and traffic choked corrupt city the individual people that we've been visiting and who have opened their homes to us have been beyond generous and hospitable.  Mega Manila may be chaotic, overcrowded, poor and steamy but the individual people have been beyond warm and welcoming.

A Flaw in My Thinking and the Possibility of Deportation

One of the foundations of our big sweep through Asia has been the ability to make it up as we go along. Have laptop and smartphone will travel, just look for agreeable fares and hotels and go to that place like a modern vagabond and plot out the next leg based on the same premise. But I almost got caught up in a major flaw in this kind of thinking, the kind that rubs governments the wrong way.

When we went to pick up our boarding passes for the flight from Xiamen to Manila on China Southern Airlines the agent noticed that we only had one way tickets to the Philippines. she asked to see a ticket to our next destination but we told her that we didn't know where we were going after a month in the Philippines.  My wife was born in Manila so the airline wasn't concerned with her but the China Southern agent had me fill out a form absolving the airline of any financial responsibility if the immigration officers in Manila decided to deny me entry and have me immediately deported. Eleanor spoke to the agent in Mandarin but she wouldn't budge.  The concept is sound, what would prevent me from entering the Philippines on a 30 day tourist visa and never leaving? In modern American lingo I'd be an undocumented immigrant. I'd be an illegal alien national and on the lam from the Pinoy la migra.

When we landed in Manila I deposited my form attesting that I hadn't visited west Africa and that I didn't have Ebola and I moved on to the immigration windows.  Eleanor spoke to the immigration officer in Tagalog and convinced them that since she's entitled to a one year Balikbayan visa I should be too.  The immigration officer agreed and I avoided having to pay for my own deportation to China.

The weather in Manila is hot and steamy.  I'm told that the best way to cool down is to enjoy a big bowl of cheese and corn ice cream.

The Philippines

Partially written at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila:

Awaiting our flight out of Manila to Kuala Lumpur.  The hospitality here in Manila has been wonderful, we haven't been able to buy a meal and it hasn't been for lack of trying.   Eleanor's friends opened their hearts to us and in at least one case, their homes.  They showed us the city and even some of the countryside.  But as wonderful as the Filipino people have been the Philippines itself is heart breakingly broken.

Take the airport in Manila.  Most Asian capital cities have wonderful new airports speeding arrivals to their downtowns by modern high speed rail lines.  NAIA is not one of those Asian airports.  It looks and smells like an American Greyhound bus station from the 1970's.  Light fixtures are dark with missing or blown out bulbs, the ceiling is stained by roof leaks.  The 2 guards who were supposed to inspect our boarding passes were too busy taking cell phone selfies to bother with us.   Except for the liquor store the shops at the airport are few, dimly lit and poorly stocked.  This airport doesn't need a makeover, it needs a wrecking ball.

But it's not out of character with the city that it serves.  Manila traffic is absolute chaos.  I saw many stop signs in Manila but I never saw a car stop for one.  When we were being taken around Manila kids would approach the SUV at a red light and get right up to the windows attempting to sell home made feather dusters, brooms, plastic Santa Clauses or sunglasses with built in LED's.  This is the kind of place that I've read about where if you stop for a traffic light and dangle your arm out of the car window street urchins could steal your watch in a flash.  I was cautioned by locals to not ride the rapid transit rail lines, they were tightly packed and unsafe due to violence, groping and pickpocketing.  A friend of Eleanor's told me that the rail rapid transit lines have no escalators because the money to buy and install them when the lines were originally built had been pilfered because the government in the Philippines is a kleptocracy.

Before I came to Manila I had read about the jeepneys, the icon of the Manila streets.  When I got here I saw them, they're banged up homemade minibus/trucks that carry people or sometimes cargo, a sort of home made ragtag private rapid transit substitute for the buses that the government doesn't seem to provide. Passengers and barefoot feral children hang off the backs of the jeepneys in traffic.  When the jeepneys move they belch coal black diesel exhaust onto everything and everybody so Manila lives under a brown cloud.  The spare tires on a jeepney are often bald, sometimes so bald that the tire cord shows.

Worse yet are the tricycles, sort of a local tuk-tuk.  A tricycle in the Philippines is a motorcycle lashed to a sidecar.  I saw tricycles carrying 7 people at once with 4 crammed into the sidecar and 2 people sitting behind the driver. With such a load the tricycle can't move very fast and for safety's sake that's probably a good thing.  But that slows down the cars, trucks and jeepneys to the speed of the tricycles which gums up everything.  Because of the insane traffic entry into Manila is restricted by licence plate number.  The well to do get around this by simply buying and licensing a 2nd car.

Or take the cell phone system.  Locals tell me that it's necessary to have several cell phones or a phone that accepts multiple SIM's because while the local competing cell phone carriers do interconnect with each other they charge more to connect calls to their rivals so many people have service with all of the companies because it's cheaper to do that then to pay their higher charges to call people who use competing companies. Businesses often list several phone numbers, one for each carrier.

So if the government is a screwed up bribe and kickback machine why not vote them out?   Corruption is rampant but the electorate votes the same folks back in with majorities that would make Saddam Hussein proud.  When we were were in Batangas province, I saw incredible poverty with spots of very conspicuous wealth.  I checked, in recent elections the governor was reelected with almost 94% of the vote.  But it's worse than that, read a few paragraphs here about the governor  That kind of comic nonsense is the norm in the Philippines, the people get the government that they deserve.  I broached this subject with several people I met in the Philippines, all were aware how sad and desperate it made the country seem.

So the Philippines makes due economically by exporting workers to more prosperous economies and exists financially by remittances sent home by these OFW's or Overseas Philippine Workers.  The rich families that control the Philippines make money every time an OFW deposits their earnings into one of their banks or calls home to friends of relatives via the phone companies that they own at toll rates that are kept artificially high.

When we were in Dubai we had dinner with Eleanor's niece Rachel, she's been an OFW in Dubai for 10 years.  Exporting workers means that the motivated best and brightest of the Philippines are working and benefiting someone else.  Some of the money comes back but the talents and skills that the country needs do not.  There's an separate OFW entrance and lounge at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila.  I asked Rachel if there were any advantages to being an OFW at the airport.  She replied that the only one she would think of was that OFW's were exempt from having to pay the exit fee of $12.70 US.