A Pause On My Birthday

I kind of pause a bit every year around this time in November because I turn one year older and because it is the thanksgiving season. So, let me share at random my current stream of consciousness. On a personal note, I have my share of angst in life and always there are reminders around me. The dreams that turned out to be elusive, personal problems and the problems of the world that in my social development work feels like I carry the weight on my shoulders.

So, I have developed a method of reciting a mantra to tell myself that I cannot have everything and that our collective work is hopefully always to make things better. And, yes, across the years, I find that things are different and so much better now. One example is that technology makes life handy and fun. The one technology that reminded me that I am one year older is Facebook. This is a wonderful medium and indeed we are now a global village.

I went to a meeting in Manila last week and it was a meeting of a development law group ( Alternative Law Groups) that I have not been to for a while now. I was much pleased to realize that our group has consciously developed a successor generation: the best and the brightest lawyers and development practitioners who are choosing to work for the poor and the oppressed instead of for the rich and powerful. But, I am also wary that the recent economic crisis is affecting the various development funding windows in a precarious way. I hope that this will not make social development work unattractive to the younger generation as a career track.

Ideally, it is about the challenge of tapping the centers of wealth and power towards social responsibility and the promotion of social justice. The rule of thumb here is the biblical saying “ Ask and it shall be given.”

We were discussing the national situation at this juncture in time and the twin issues that are plaguing us : corruption and poverty. The variation of the themes in a nutshell as shared by Representative Walden Bello to our group are on poverty reduction through conditional cash transfer (CCT), the likelihood that the reproductive health bill will be passed as a law, that there should be a reversal of trade liberalization which is the cause of our current economic crisis, the absence of a real opposition in the House of Congress because the 30 representatives in the lower house are headed by Rep Gloria Arroyo, our eight ( 8) million Filipino economic refugees spread around the world, and the Balay vs Samar political factions in the P-Noy cabinet which are personality driven and which are in a kind of tug of war in terms of programs and policies in government. ( read : Balay is the Roxas- Araneta home in Cubao & so it is the Liberal Party & more ; & the Samar group is the group which held office during the campaign period in Samar Avenue in Quezon City and is the other set of power holders in the P-Noy team)

To set the anti-corruption agenda in motion, the newly created structure is the Truth Commission. I am filled with hope that this will work out because some of the personalities that are here are our friends who came from the social development circle. The other structure is, of course, the track of impeaching our Ombudsman and the Akbayan Party List is very much into this track.

The latest on poverty reduction is the billions worth of conditional cash transfer which has recently been practiced in other jurisdictions like in Mexico, Brazil and Bangladesh. It is such a resounding success in Brazil. Anyway, this methodology is about giving cash to the poorest provided they send their children to school and that they visit health clinics and this project is being presided over by our Department of Social Welfare & Development (DSWD). Our legislators are examining the capacity of the DSWD as a bureaucracy to deliver this huge four (4) billion pesos worth CCT program. This CCT transfer program is related to achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG). My personal take is that, perhaps, the impact of CCT will take time. There was a sense in our development law group that asset reforms like agrarian reform, modernization of agriculture, taxation, moratorium on debt repayment should also be pursued more vigorously towards real reduction of so much social inequality.

I now realize that my life is so very much intertwined with my work that I find very meaningful in the larger scheme of things in this world. And that is a good reason to celebrate my birthday.

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps




This is the first movie I saw on the big screen this year so I might as well revisit it with you.

As a sequel of the first 1987 Wall Street movie and made relevant with a poetic treatise of the real 2008 financial crisis, this film is worth writing about.

Manhattan is postcard pretty as ever as the financial center of the universe.

The screenplay is made familiar by a show of the state of the art of the financial markets and some of our current concerns such as energy requirements of the future and progressive non profit websites that are tools to change the world for the better for our children and the next generations.

This Oliver Stone ( 1987 Wall Street JFK & Nixon fame ) film opens with Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) being released after eight years in jail for financial fraud, which as the character explains later in the film, is actually a much larger crime than the insider trading crime, the initial transgression that we saw at the end of the first Wall Street film.

After seven years we find Gekko a star again as the author of a best seller book : Is Greed Good?

But, the angst of the life of Gekko is mostly about his estrangement with Winnie ( Carey Mulligan), his daughter who blogs in a non profit website, that started to get 50,000 hits or website visits per day and ultimately got 200,000 hits per day when indications for market corrections were published.

The daughter blames the absentee Gekko in jail for all the tragic events in their dysfunctional post modern family : a brother who died due to drug overdose and a mother who went mad.

The partner of Winnie is Jake Moore ( Shia LaBeouf) an energy investment expert working in Wall Street who thinks that energy fusion using water, through hydrogen fusion, is the next “bubble” that will solve our energy problems for the next generations.

The poetic screenplay ( Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff ) is actually narrated from the point of view of Jake, a protégé of Lou ( Frank Langella of Nixon fame), who commits suicide after his financial investment bank falls. With the help of Gekko, Jake finds out how and why the company of his mentor went bankrupt.

The next scenes are about the so called “ market corrections” in the financial meltdown that is ailing Wall Street. These corrections largely use the legal and justice system structures.

This film tries to explain in scenes, not unlike the television clips we saw in the real life 2008 financial crisis, what is wrong with our financial markets :people borrowing to the hilt, all of the profits coming from financial services such as trading, leveraging, hedge funding and some of these funds are used to finance industrial military weapons of mass destruction ( WMD) and that only about almost a hundred people in the world control these transactions.

That speculation is the mother of all evil.
Gekko describes the current Ninja generation as the generation with “no income, no job and no assets.” The solutions to all these in the words of Gekko are three words “Buy My Book” as the answers can be found in his best selling book.

Gekko, while introspecting in jail felt that he was the lone sane man inside and everyone and all out of prison were crazy.

The conflict in the movie is the struggle of Jake to make the corrections in the cancerous financial market mess, not unlike the real life 2008 financial mess that as we saw was bailed out by the United States treasury in what was called the billions worth “stimulus package.”

The concept of “ moral hazard” is explained: “someone gets your money and that someone is not responsible for it.”
The villain in Bretton James ( Josh Brolin) is exposed; the wall street crook was found committing securities fraud : trading for his own account and betting against the market he was making.

One of the scenes described by A.O. Scott in the New York Times movie review, that also caught my fancy was the fundraiser soiree event where one finds the beautiful people of Manhattan dressed in designer clothes and the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography, zoomed in on the bulky & beautiful earrings of the women in gorgeous gowns.

 It was such an ostentatious display of wealth for charity.

The beauty and the beast that is Manhattan & Wall Street as further described
by A.O. Scott is the intersection of “ material excess…. with genuine beauty”
and that “ what went wrong” in the financial center can be explained in two words: “ human nature.”