How PSEi member stocks performed — January 27, 2020
Here’s a quick glance at how PSEi stocks fared on Monday, January 27, 2020.
South Cotabato bridge, road projects due for completion
THE Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) hopes to finish this year three infrastructure projects in South Cotabato, including the P100-million road-widening project from Koronadal City to General Santos City which is set for completion in April.
“To decongest roads, specifically in this area, a P100-million road widening from the present four lanes to six of the Marbel-Makar Road traversing Koronadal City to General Santos City is ongoing with target completion of April 2020,” DPWH Regional Office XII Director Basir M. Ibrahim was quoted as saying in a statement Monday.
The DPWH added that two bridge projects are being implemented in South Cotabato.
Scheduled for completion this month is the P19.4-million Bulok Bridge near Koronadal City’s Roundball monument.
The other is the P80-million Palian Twin Bridge in Barangay Palian, which will be completed in March.
The DPWH said it completed in December the P10-million Saravia Bridge in Barangay Saravia.
“Wider roads and bridges will not only provide more convenience to the travelling public but also faster delivery of local goods in the area,” Mr. Ibrahim was quoted as saying.
On Jan. 17, the DPWH reported that it completed a P122-million flood control structure in Isabela, a P34-million river wall in Leyte, and a P6-million farm-to-market road in Zamboanga del Norte.
The DPWH also hopes to finish within the first half of the year its P279.3-million slope protection project along the Taguig River. — Arjay L. Balinbin
Spy novels need to come in from the Cold War
By Leonid Bershidsky
THE GOLDEN AGE of the spy thriller ended with the Cold War. But of late, news reports have provided enough material for a silver age to start — if authors take heed.
The last time a spy thriller topped the list of a year’s bestselling novels in the US, compiled by Publisher’s Weekly, was in 1988 or 1989 — depending on whether one counts the latter year’s Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy as an espionage novel or a political one. (In 1988, another Clancy book, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, unmistakably a spy novel, was number one.) John Le Carre, who had his first book on top of the list in 1964 (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) and was in the Top 10 a total of nine times, had his last big hit in 1989, too, with The Russia House, although he has continued to publish regularly. That year, glasnost reigned in Mikhail Gorbachev’s moribund Soviet Union and the Berlin wall came down. In November, 1989, the New York Times book critic Walter Goodman wrote — prophetically, as it turned out — about the future of spy fiction:
With ideological walls tumbling and affinities popping up, lesser practitioners find themselves in straits whose direness matches those of their heroes. An Ian Fleming might bring into play some space-age Mafia out to extort billions from both Washington and Moscow, but his books were always kid stuff. Will [Len] Deighton resort to having his creations take on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya or General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama, at the risk of provoking a PEN resolution against picking on little guys? And will [Le Carre’s] next plot find hardliners in the Pentagon and the Kremlin united against the Greens? Until new threats present themselves, addicts of the spy stuff may find themselves out in the cold.
All these tacks, and countless variations, have been tried, and some novels have sold well. But it’s a sign of the genre’s decline that the current Top 10 of espionage bestsellers on Amazon.com includes — in the third spot, no less — Le Carre’s The Honorable Schoolboy, originally published in 1977. The post-Cold War offerings in the genre, or at least those of them that didn’t take the reader back to the World War II and its long aftermath, suffered from a critical flaw: The absence of an underlying clash of civilizations and value systems. Not even the post-9/11 war on terror provided that missing element.
In 2011, the website Salon.com collected the views of spy-novel writers and qualified readers on the genre’s post-Cold War development. Amid practitioners’ comments to the effect that spy fiction is alive and well regardless of who the adversaries of intelligence services are, the words of Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, stood out. “Without the Soviet Union (or Nazi Germany before it) and the struggle with a titanic power, there’s really not much to the genre,” he said. “The kind of novel where the world itself hangs in the balance, where moral choices are stark because they are moral choices — that’s gone now.”
Without such a grand conflict, according to Nichols, spy fiction became cynical, painting all governments with the same critical brush. “Most importantly, the bad guys — usually greedy businessmen or terrorists — are now uninteresting,” Nichols said. “Terrorists are especially uninteresting, because for a spy novel to work, the agent needs a worthy adversary” — and terrorists are essentially just a bunch of petty criminals trying on a bigger hat that doesn’t fit them.
In short, Western spy fiction needs state actors with strong non-Western or, better, anti-Western values to become exciting again. In real life, these state actors are back, and there’s a greater variety of them than during the Cold War.
First, there’s Russia, of course. Highly professional Russian spies, reminiscent of the Cold War crop, operate in Le Carre’s latest offering, last year’s Agent Running in the Field. But the doyen of the genre is behind the curve: Today’s Russian spy thriller should, by rights, be a black comedy featuring the ham-handed operatives of the Russian military intelligence, formerly known as the GRU.
The latest story providing fuel for this treatment features the two Russian “plumbers” with diplomatic passports discovered by the Swiss intelligence in Davos, Switzerland, apparently trying to install surveillance equipment to spy on the world leaders and billionaires who arrive there every year for the World Economic Forum. Earlier installments include the failed assassinations of three Bulgarian arms-making executives; the bungled poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, by two thugs who claimed to have come to look at the spire of the local cathedral; and an amateurish coup attempt in Montenegro in 2016.
Then, for authors still looking for sophistication in spying, there’s China, trying to make inroads into the European Union, a more welcoming playground for its state-owned businesses than the US. This month, the scandal making headlines in Brussels and Berlin involved a top former EU diplomat — named in a Politico story on Thursday — who is married to a Chinese woman and who reportedly spied for China while maintaining a network of high-powered friends. The ex-diplomat, lately employed by a lobbying firm, denies the accusations.
Finally, there’s the almost-unbelievable story of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s suspected hacking operation against Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Here’s an almost-head-of-state reportedly personally involved in spying, and in cyber-spying at that.
In all three cases, stark moral choices and values clashes are evident. In all three, the West’s adversaries are foreign powers, not mere lone wolves or terrorist groups. The conflicts are quintessentially modern: Law-governed states vs. authoritarian ones; free enterprise vs. state capitalism; moxie vs. mass surveillance. In an increasingly transactional, leaderless world, it’s every country for itself — and that’s potentially more interesting than the duality of Cold War. It’s not about “picking on little guys,” but rather a free-for-all that has come to involve smaller countries in more terrifying, and intriguing, ways than before.
This is heady stuff just waiting for the literary equals of Le Carre or plot-moving geniuses of Clancy’s stature to turn into fiction. There are certainly lots of former spies around, bitterly disappointed by “deep state” narratives that devalue their work, who could try their hand at modernizing the espionage thriller. As an “addict of the spy stuff,” to use Goodman’s description, perhaps there’s hope for me again.
BLOOMBERG OPINION
(This is my last column for Bloomberg Opinion. I’m moving to the news automation team at Bloomberg News to try my hand at teaching machines to help organize data into stories; I’m pretty sure they won’t be writing columns anytime soon, though, so please keep reading my wonderful colleagues.)
GDP growth and Fidel Nemenzo support growth
The good news about the Philippines’ GDP growth of 5.9% in 2019 is that it is high by global and regional trends. The bad news is that growth is decelerating since 2016 and our GDP size remains small. With a low economic base, if we keep growing by just 5-6% yearly, it will take us many decades to be at par with the per capita incomes of our neighbors Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand even if they grow only 2-3% yearly. (See Table 1).
And an ironic thing about growth in 2019 is that while government consumption was sizzling at 10.5% growth, capital formation or private investments was contracting at -0.6%.
Obviously, more politics, more government taxation and interventions were among the big reasons why private investments are contracting and overall growth is decelerating: 6.9% in 2016, 6.7% in 2017, 6.2% in 2018, 5.9% in 2019. High inflation and decline in household consumption (which makes up about 65% of GDP) immediately followed when various tax hikes were implemented under the TRAIN law of 2017.
Now we see the selection of the UP Diliman Chancellorship being colored by more politics. There are only two nominees — Dr. Fidel Nemenzo, Professor at UP Institute of Mathematics and known regionally for his research output and Math leadership, who is also the current Vice-Chancellor for Research and Development, and Prof. Ferdinand Manegdeg, Dean of the UP College of Engineering, who has no PhD.
UP Diliman (UPD) would have the highest concentration of PhD faculty per 100 students in the whole country. Having a PhD is the minimum requirement to be an Associate Professor. So if UPD is at the forefront of advancing academic excellence in many disciplines, how could a would-be head, an aspiring Chancellor of UPD, be non-excellent academically? That is a lousy situation. Only more politics, not more academic achievements, would push this kind of situation.
That is why many units and faculty members are alarmed and they take explicit positions of supporting Dr. Nemenzo. A letter by UPD faculty members submitted to the UP Board of Regents (BoR) had 452 signatories including at least five Professors Emiriti, 70 Professors, 65 Associate Professors, 182 Assistant Professors, 89 Instructors, and 28 Lecturers. The growth of his support base is accelerating — unlike the Philippines’ GDP growth which is decelerating.
Consider also my alma mater, the UP School of Economics — 100% of its faculty members are PhD holders and I cannot see anyone there supporting someone who is not excellent in academics as UPD Chancellor.
Recently two pieces of fake news were being spread by desperate groups who cannot cite academic excellence as an important factor for UPD Chancellorship.
One is red-tagging, saying that Dr. Fidel Nemenzo is a communist and if he becomes the Chancellor, lefties and commies will have a grand time in UPD. Garbage. The Chancellor would be busy positioning UPD in the forefront of advance science and technology research, and teaching to help prepare the country in the current Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIRe) and artificial intelligence (AI) advances. Outmoded claims of commie ideology would be far from his concerns.
The secondpiece of fake news has been dragging former UP President Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, Jr. — Fidel’s father — into the UP-Ayala Technohub deal. They say that a “leftist UP President” has produced an “onerous” deal.
I will quote UP College of Law Professor Jay Batongbacal in debunking this. Jay wrote in his public post on Facebook on Jan. 26: “The contract was signed upon authority of the Board of Regents by UP President Emerlinda Roman… These liars and idiots then rely on innuendo, implying that since the process of converting the former idle lands of UP began during the term of UP President Francisco Nemenzo, it was the Left that selected Ayala, and therefore the contract is by the Left.”
More politics, more government taxation and policy reversals midway have resulted in the country’s growth deceleration. We hope that UPD will not be dragged into more politics. Academic track records and vision by the nominee, support and respect by the academic faculty, alumni, non-academic staff and students, should guide in the appointment of the next UPD Chancellor when the BoR meet and decide next week.
Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. is the president of Minimal Government Thinkers.