THE PESO declined on Monday due to fresh tensions between the US and China. — BW FILE PHOTO
THE PESO weakened versus the greenback on Monday amid risk-off sentiment following tensions between US-China’s as well as the further contraction of the local manufacturing sector.
The local currency finished trading at P50.595 versus the dollar, weakening by 19.5 centavos from its P50.40 close last Thursday, according to data from the Bankers Association of the Philippines.
The local unit opened the session at P50.55 versus the dollar. Its weakest showing was at P50.62 while its intraday best was at P50.54 against the greenback.
Volume of dollars traded sank to $349.35 million on Monday from the $906.8 million seen on Thursday.
A trader said the peso’s depreciation on Monday came amid risk-off sentiment following news that the US is looking to impose new tariffs on China.
“The peso depreciated after the recent threat of new tariffs from President Trump escalated market fears of renewed US-China geopolitical tensions,” the trader said in an e-mail.
Reuters reported that US President Donald J. Trump threatened new tariffs on Beijing as Washington heads on for retaliatory measures over the outbreak.
Sources told Reuters that the US is looking into a range of options against China but these are in their early stages.
“We signed a trade deal where they’re supposed to buy, and they’ve been buying a lot, actually. But that now becomes secondary to what took place with the virus,” Mr. Trump told reporters, as reported by Reuters. “The virus situation is just not acceptable.
Aside from this development on the US-China trade relations, weaker local data also hurt the peso’s strength, according to Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. Chief Economist Michael L. Ricafort.
“The peso was also weaker after the latest decline in Philippine manufacturing data,” Mr. Ricafort said in a text message.
The manufacturing sector saw contraction in April as factories faced shutdowns due to the lockdown done to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
On Monday, IHS Markit released the Philippine Purchasing Managers’ Index which dropped to 31.6 in April from the 39.7 seen in March as well as the 50.9 logged a year ago.
A reading below 50 indicates contraction in the manufacturing sector.
“Production fell rapidly, while new orders and export sales declined at record paces,” IHS Markit said.
For today, the trader sees the peso moving between P50.50 to P50.70 versus the dollar while Mr. Ricafort gave a forecast range of P50.45 to P50.70. — Luz Wendy T. Noble withReuters
THE MAIN INDEX snapped its three-day climb on Monday due to record low manufacturing data in April and brewing tensions between the United States and China.
The bellwether Philippine Stock Exchange index (PSEi) gave up 128.62 points or 2.25% to close at 5,572.09 yesterday. The broader all shares index also shed 59.53 points or 1.72% to 3,386.30.
“Market’s drop of 2.26% was influenced by negative sentiment at home and from overseas,” Philstocks Financial, Inc. Research Associate Claire T. Alviar said in a text message.
She noted the contraction in the country’s Purchasing Managers’ Index to 31.6 in April from 39.7 in March spooked investors on the economic slowdown brought by the coronavirus crisis.
US President Donald Trump’s remarks blaming China for the pandemic also sparked worries over the two countries’ renewed tensions after more than a year of trade war.
“Dismal (gross domestic product in the first quarter) is also anticipated by the investors, which (is) to be released on Thursday, so some exited the market this early,” Ms. Alviar added.
PNB Securities, Inc. President Manuel Antonio G. Lisbona also blamed the Sino-US tensions for the market’s decline on Monday, which moved in step with the rest of the region.
“Investors took money off the table today on concerns of a renewed trade war between the US and China. US President Trump threatened tariffs to punish or hold China accountable for the pandemic,” he said in a text message.
Other Asian markets also declined yesterday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Topix indices dropped 2.84% and 2.24% respectively, South Korea’s Kospi index fell 2.68%, and Taiwan’s FTSE TWSE Taiwan 50 Index lost 2.90%.
All sectoral indices at the local bourse closed in red territory. Holding firms went down 160.73 points or 2.89% to 5,383.56; industrials shaved off 175.16 points or 2.34% to 7,299.77; financials lost 24.63 points or 2.07% to 1,164.04; mining and oil erased 85.18 points or 1.80% to 4,623.39; property slid 47.95 points or 1.64% to 2,873.97; and services fell 22.17 points or 1.61% to 1,351.65.
Value turnover dropped to P5.11 billion from P6.58 billion in the previous session. Some 522.40 million issues switched hands yesterday.
Decliners totaled 150 to beat advancers which stood at 46. Some 34 names ended unchanged.
Investors offshore remained sellers for the 33rd straight day. Net foreign selling yesterday was P509 million, down from the P658.39 million logged in the previous session.
“The main index hovered above 5,500 for most of the trading day as bargain hunters took advantage. Last-minute buying propelled it higher… We may see it bounce higher (today) unless investors lose more optimism overnight,” AAA Southeast Equities, Inc. Research Head Christopher John Mangun said in an e-mail.
The Coronavirus has made many of us very afraid. Our fears are justified. While not enough is known about how to deal with the disease, the online Department of Health (DoH) COVID-19 Case Tracker reported on April 30 that we already had 8,488 confirmed cases of the disease, 568 deaths, and 1,043 recoveries. As the cases and deaths continue to rise, we all hope that the government and health authorities can find manageable solutions soon and that the people affected by the lockdowns will have the support and patience they need to weather this catastrophe.
But what could make the virus pandemic even worse than it is? What can spread faster than the virus through personal contact, online, through the airwaves, by print or even by social media? What can make perfectly reasonable people do extremely unreasonable things? It is the mental and socially transmitted “virus” of uncritical or, simply, bad thinking.
We fall into bad thinking because of wrong assumptions about how people get to know things. We might think that numbers always make for better information or that claims are truer the more people make them. Such assumptions short circuit our thinking process in ways that lead us to false conclusions very quickly without us knowing that we’re doing it. And because we are unaware that we have caught the bad thinking virus, we generously pass on our “knowledge” as misinformation to others since we think we are doing them a favor. The recipients go on to spread the misinformation to others, too.
Government leaders, law makers, business owners and heads of families need to make decisions to protect the lives of those who depend on them while helping the latter cope with terrible economic and social disruption. The quality of decisions they make depend a great deal on the quality of information they have. They may think they are making good decisions on the basis of sound knowledge when they are actually making things worse for the very people they are trying to help.
During the pandemic, we have been flooded by impressive number claims and statistics in ways we have rarely seen except, perhaps, during elections. This is pushing our quantitative intelligence to its very limit. On March 11, before our government first put Metro Manila under community quarantine, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, testified before Congress about COVID-19: “…this is ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that’s something that people can get their arms around and understand.” Although Fauci qualified his statement because the limited data available to him at the time made it impossible to get a valid estimate of the death rate, his “ten times more lethal” phrase became one of the most quoted portion of his testimony because it was an easy number to grasp and remember. Nevertheless, it had no basis.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the Program on Medical Outcomes at Stanford University, explained: “If I get the infection, how likely is it I’m going to die? That number depends on knowing how many people have had the infection — not just actively have it now, but have had it and recovered from it. If 50 times more people have had the infection, the death rate could drop by that same factor, putting it somewhere between ‘little worse than the flu’ to ‘twice as bad as the flu’ in terms of case fatality rate.”
The problem with Fauci’s estimate is that there was hardly any COVID-19 testing being done among the general public at that time. This made it impossible to know the proportion of the public who had had the infection — a number that was necessary to properly estimate a death rate. Bhattacharya recently conducted a study in the Sta. Clara County in California by testing over 3,000 people and estimated that there were 50 to 85 times more infected people than the county had reported. If the study turns out to be accurate, the death rate for COVID-19 will be much lower than Fauci’s estimate. We definitely need such a study in our country. The DoH does not currently report the number of COVID-19 tests being done in the country which leaves us all in the dark about the general rate of infection and the death rate.
How can we inoculate ourselves against the spread of the bad thinking virus? Our most basic defense is what we learned in school — thinking scientifically. When someone makes a claim, let’s analyze it critically while we decide whether to accept it or pass it on.
For example, many people claim that a vaccine will be ready in 12 to 18 months. With so many COVID-19 vaccine projects now going on, this may just be possible. But since a vaccine has never been made generally available to the public in less than that time, this is quite an optimistic claim that we need to be cautious about.
What about the six feet social distancing rule we are asked to follow? Research shows that cough vapor can travel as much as 12 feet and farther, depending on air conditions. It is prudent, therefore, to stay even farther away while scientists confirm the causal mechanism of how the virus spreads through the air.
At the risk of sounding rude, we would be wise to question anyone making a COVID-19 claim: Is that the case? Who said so? What is the evidence? When anyone claims to know how COVID-19 affects our bodies, we can ask the same questions plus a couple more: How does it happen? What is the causal mechanism?
While we wait for treatments and vaccines, guarding against misinformation is our best chance to thrive during the new normal we now find ourselves in.
This article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines or the MAP.
Dr. Benito “Ben” L. Teehankee is the Jose L. Cuisia, Sr. Professor of Business Ethics and Head of the Business for Human Development Network at De La Salle University.
A CRISIS as life-altering as the coronavirus pandemic naturally inspires speculation about how it will change everything. But it is worth recalling that a far deadlier predecessor, the Spanish Flu, killed 50 million to 100 million people between 1918 and 1920, and was followed by the Roaring ’20s. So did it change anything?
FREEPIK
Possibly it simply accelerated trends that were already underway. And the same may be true today. The coronavirus hit at a time when the world was already turning inward, largely in reaction to the global financial crisis of 2008. Nations have been erecting barriers to the free flow of people, money and goods, even as the flow of internet data has continued to rise rapidly.
There is evidence that all these trends are now speeding up, particularly in countries led by populists, who are exploiting the pandemic to erect barriers that they wanted to raise anyway. And as lockdowns force people to work, shop, study and play at home, internet traffic has spiked 50% to 70% in developed nations — creating new habits that to varying degrees could outlast the pandemic.
The era after the coronavirus is thus likely to feel much like the era after the crisis of 2008, but with its inward tendencies magnified: populist leaders more emboldened to bash foreigners; nations less willing to expose themselves to world trade, global banks and international migration; national economies more reliant on local industries; people everywhere retreating to the coronavirus-free safety of home to pursue employment, education, and entertainment in the immersive world of the online economy.
Global trade was growing more than twice as fast as the world economy before 2008, but has barely kept pace in recent years, and now all bets are off. Global trade is projected to fall around 15% in 2020 — at least three times the expected fall in economic output — and the extent of the post-virus recovery could be dampened by more divisive trade politics.
President Trump has ratcheted up his anti-global, anti-trade, and anti-China statements, saying “I’m not sure which is worse,” the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organization, both of which he accuses of favoring China. His trade adviser Peter Navarro has cited shortages of protective gear for health workers as proof that Trump was right all along about the risk of relying on China for manufactured goods, and “vindication of the president’s buy American” strategy.
The big difference now is that anti-China talk is growing more strident and common in many nations, including Britain, France, India, Brazil, Italy, and Japan. And anti-trade talk is coming even from one of the last high profile champions of globalization, President Emmanuel Macron of France. “Delegating our food supply” to others “is madness. We have to take back control,” he warned in March. His finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, followed up with an appeal to “economic patriotism,” urging stores to “Stock French products!”
Many nations are engaging in a form of food nationalism. France, Spain, and Italy were among the countries pushing the European Union to protect their farmers before the pandemic, and they are pushing harder now. Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter, has imposed quotas on grain exports. Vietnam, one of the largest rice producers, suspended rice exports. More than 60 nations have limited or banned exports of face masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment, leaving many poor nations that don’t manufacture this gear naked in the face of the pandemic.
Democracy was in retreat, and autocrats were on the march, before the virus appeared. To contain it, leaders of all political styles have assumed previously unthinkable powers to shut down the economy, steer production, close borders, and place businesses on life support. Even the most liberal societies have gladly ceded these powers, in the spirit of wartime mobilization. But precedents are being set, red lines have been erased. The big risk is that leaders with autocratic tendencies will come out of the pandemic with greater leverage to control and close off societies, including democratic societies.
The universalist spirit of globalization was fading before the pandemic, and is harder to find now. Investors once entranced by the prospect of making fortunes in the emerging world have been scaling back since the global financial crisis, but the retreat accelerated in the first three months this year, when more than $90 billion pulled out of emerging stock markets.
The deglobalization of finance is reaching deeper into debt markets too. After 1980, a combination of falling interest rates and financial deregulation set off a global explosion in lending which — by the eve of the 2008 crisis — had tripled the world’s debt burden to three times global economic output. The credit meltdown that year hit banks and households particularly hard and left them with a generalized fear of taking on new debt.
Now, economic lockdowns are cutting off the cash flow of heavily indebted companies from the United States to Europe and Asia, threatening to drive them into bankruptcy, and to burden many of them with a severe case of debtphobia as well. That will leave only one important class of borrowers — governments — with the confidence to take on new debt, if only because they can print money to cover the payments. The debt “super cycle” that helped supercharge global economic growth between 1980 and 2008 is lurching to a halt, one frightened class of borrowers at a time.
The retreat inward has inspired many nations to rethink supply lines that now wrap around the world and lead, most often, to factories in China. Driven originally by rising wages in China, later by rising concern about the uncertainties of doing business there, this retrenchment has been underway for years. At its 2007 peak China was the assembly plant of the world, generating nearly one fifth of its economic output by assembling parts made elsewhere into finished products, but that share had fallen to less than one-tenth by the time the coronavirus hit.
A recent survey covering 12 global industries found that companies in 10 of them, including autos, semiconductors, and medical equipment, are moving or planning to move at least part of their supply chains, which in most cases will mean out of China. If nationalists have their way — Mr. Trump has cited the pandemic as yet another reason to bring manufacturing back to the United States — factories will be returning to their home countries. Japan is offering $2 billion to companies relocating out of China as part of its coronavirus stimulus package.
The pandemic arrived like a propaganda gift from nature to populists who want to contain all things “global,” from migration to the internet. In recent years, China has led the way in creating a national internet, sealed off from the wider web, but Russia, Indonesia and others are following its lead. The European Centre for International Political Economy tracks a growing thicket of internet bans, rules, and subsidies, including measures that attempt to ensure that data is stored locally, and is difficult to transfer overseas. In the 2010s the number of “data localization” rules doubled worldwide to more than 80.
To an extent, these rules have begun to steer internet traffic into national channels, but without slowing the growth in overall volume. The boom in traffic over the last two months, however, has greatly accelerated the shift to an online economy, in which people connect screen to screen, not face to face, and never need step out the front door.
Social media platforms are reporting record usage, particularly in hard-hit countries where the internet is now a lifeline for information on the pandemic. The number of active users of Google Classroom has doubled to more than 100 million since early March.
Sector and Sovereign Research, a research firm, estimates that of roughly 40 million Americans who hold desk jobs, the number who work remotely has tripled since January to nearly 25 million from eight million — and forecasts that roughly three million of these new online desk jockeys will stay home after the pandemic passes. Video conferencing providers are straining to handle the volume of participants — up from 10 million to more than 300 million a day on Zoom, for example — and have become hangout spots for friends and family as well.
Tech analysts expect this surge to fade after the pandemic — but to a higher base than before, and possibly a faster growth rate as well. People who had never thought to try online work, school, or shopping have learned the basics, and many are finding it’s not so bad. The most intriguing possibilities, however, are in digital gaming, because its ambition goes way beyond games.
Even before this year, the rise of online games had turned gaming into a $150 billion global industry, still growing fast, and already larger than the stagnating global music industry and box office combined. Then came the lockdowns.
Verizon reports data volumes surging across the board, but especially for digital games, up 75% in March. In the first week of April, US consumer spending on video games was up 95%, compared to the same week the year before, while spending in movie theaters was down 99%. The evidence from China and South Korea — where people have been slow to return to reopened bars and restaurants — suggests that businesses that rely on packed houses will struggle to recover.
And to think that, not so long ago, gamers were still widely perceived as teen misfits, wasting time in mom and dad’s basement. The strength of the world economy in the coming years depends in part on which of these teams wins the all-out contest for global domination: risk-taking gamers, or barrier-building populists.
Though the rise of the virtual economy is also a turn inward, toward the lone worker safe at home in front of a screen, its fresh focus on efficiency and creativity could lift productivity in the coming years and ease the global slowdown.
The global economy recovered slowly after the crisis of 2008, owing in large part to deglobalization, and now even slower flows of people, money, and goods threaten more of the same — less competition and investment.
The pandemic is in effect telescoping the future. Trends that might have taken five or 10 years to play out have unfolded in only five to 10 weeks, and all point in the same direction. To a world turning further inward.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ruchir Sharma is the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, author of the forthcoming book The Ten Rules of Successful Nations, and a contributing Opinion writer to The New York Times. This essay reflects his opinions alone.
YOU CAN HAVE a good war and still be seriously wounded.
South Korea has been relatively successful at controlling COVID-19 infections, and made good progress in reopening its economy. But it’s still suffering a serious downdraft, with consumers pulling back at home and demand collapsing in key trading partners. Some kind of recession for this trade-dependent economy looks assured; only the scale is in question.
There’s a lesson there for other open, trade-dependent places like New Zealand and Australia that deserve a measure of commendation for containing the virus. Unfortunately, the economic rewards will probably be elusive. With the global outlook bleak and international movement of people likely to remain subdued for an extended period, hopes of a return to growth have been kicked into the third quarter. Even then, it will be a long slog as the world’s biggest commercial powers struggle. These pandemic stars don’t control their own destiny.
The specter of deflation is haunting the world, and South Korea is in its sights. Consumer prices rose 0.1% from a year earlier in April, the government said Monday. That was well below economists’ forecasts and a world away from the central bank’s 2% target. Inflation was quiescent even before the pandemic. An outright decline in prices now looks a serious possibility despite unprecedented easing by the Bank of Korea and a robust dose of fiscal stimulus from President Moon Jae-in. Long term support for the economy is warranted.
Anemic inflation reflects the extent of deterioration in the global picture and shell-shocked local conditions. Gross domestic product shrank 1.4% in the first quarter, led by a 6.6% nosedive in consumption that was the worst outcome since the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. Exports, which account for about 40% of the economy, cratered 24.3% in April from a year earlier. Shipments to China fell 18%. To the US and the European Union, they dropped 13%.
Moon has managed to keep a lid on the virus at home, quelling a late February surge through aggressive contact tracing, mass testing, and social distancing. But as with Australia and New Zealand, there’s no easy way back for the economy. The worst global downturn since the 1930s, coupled with the likelihood that the pre-virus vim won’t return for years, points to a need to reorient economic priorities. Whether recessions are shallow or deep compared with the rest of the world will depend on the degree to which domestic economic engines can fire. This won’t be easy. Engagement with the world made these countries prosperous. Enmeshment in global supply chains and cool-sounding tourism promotions won’t be the ticket to prosperity they once were.
Leaders in Seoul, Canberra, and Wellington must contemplate a thorough re-engineering of the economic models that have dominated policy development since at least the 1980s. Containing the coronavirus was essential to avoiding a social and economic collapse; it doesn’t make the recovery any easier. Sadly, medals for the public-health response won’t pay the bills.
AS WE CELEBRATED Labor Day, it seems a cruel irony that working class families in the country and in most of the world, especially those living under a lockdown, are currently experiencing perhaps the most difficult period in their lives.
Labor Day is intended to be a celebration of the working class and what they fought for (and gained) and what they continue to fight for in employment conditions. It has its origin in the commemoration of a violent confrontation between workers, who were striking for an eight-hour work-day, and policemen in the city of Chicago in 1886 that resulted in the death of some workers and policemen.
WORKING CLASS
The “working class” is variously defined but one definition tags them as the “social group that consists of people who earn little money, often being paid only for the hours or days that they work, and who usually do physical work.” Excluded from the working class are employers, self-employed workers, and among employees – professionals, associate professionals, those in managerial positions, as well as those in other occupations who are on permanent status and paid monthly.
By this definition, 46% (around 19 million) of all Filipino workers belong to the working class, based on the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) Labor Force Survey in October 2018.
JOBS OF THE WORKING CLASS
The largest groups of working class jobs in the country are farmhands and laborers, shop salespersons and market vendors, construction workers and carpenters, public transportation and delivery drivers, and waiters and waitresses, among others.
They are among the most likely to have lost jobs due to the enforced lockdown. And because many of them are not reported by their employers to the Social Security System or the Bureau of Internal Revenue, they are unlikely to get aid from the Department of Labor and Employment.
Among the poorest half of households in the country, close to 60% have working class jobs. Most of the rest are in low-earning self-employment as farmers or as low-end service providers. Majority are in the informal sector.
Collectively, they are the ones likely not to have any savings buffer, have a large family, and not own private transportation, all of which raise the hardship of the lockdown. Median family size for the poorest half of households in the country is five compared to only four for the richest half.
LACK OF SOCIAL INSURANCE FOR LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS
Their hardship is compounded by their lack of access to social insurance and protection. Even as household official poverty incidence in the country declined from close to 20% in 2012 to 12.1% in 2018, social protection for low-income households apart from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program and Philhealth, remains weak.
Based on the PSA’s 2017 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey, only 20% of employees belonging to the poorest half of households are enrolled either in the Social Security System (SSS) or the Government Service Insurance System. This figure goes down to 13% when looking only at the poorest 30% of households.
Among self-employed workers belonging to the poorest half of households, the rate is even lower at only 9%, and only 7% among the poorest 30% of households.
This means they have no access to loans from these institutions or the unemployment benefits promised by SSS to its members who lose their jobs due to the economic fallout from COVID-19.
There is other evidence of the low level of social protection for the poor from the same data: only 3% of those in the poorest 30% of households said they benefited from the government’s supplemental feeding program; and less than one percent reported benefiting from the government’s sustainable livelihood programs.
BOOSTING SOCIAL PROTECTION FOR WORKING CLASS AND INFORMAL SECTOR
If nothing else, the current crisis reminds us of the need to raise social security and social protection for the working class and other vulnerable workers.
At the very least, Republic Act 8282 and the compulsory coverage in SSS of all private sector employees not over 60 years of age should be strictly enforced. The current crisis has shown it is the employees who bear the brunt of their non-coverage, which is the responsibility of their employers.
For self-employed informal sector workers who earn low income, the government should consider subsidizing their participation in a social security scheme. This would incentivize their registration — the lack of list of informal sector workers was a hindrance to helping them during this lockdown, which will make it easier to fold them into the formal sector later on.
More broadly, the feasibility of a more expansive unemployment insurance scheme, such as in other ASEAN countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Lao PDR, together with how it can be financed, should be discussed. The possibility of a guaranteed basic income, if not for the entire population then for a subset of the population, especially during the difficult months ahead should also be examined.
Geoffrey Ducanes teaches at the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Economics.
THE NUMBERS are staggering: 99.9% of travel ground to a halt in Japan; the World Food Program (WFP) says that some 130 million people — in addition to the 135 million already facing acute food shortages prior to the pandemic — face hunger this year. The chief economist of the WFP, Arif Husain, estimates that 265 million people may face starvation.
More than a million Americans are infected. Close to 70,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 as of the first week of May. As US pundits intone incessantly now, this figure exceeds the number of deaths from the Vietnam War, which lasted over 19 years. And the 26 million who are suddenly unemployed have filed for assistance from the US government insurance system.
Half of humanity is confined to home. Der Spiegel writes that “180 countries that only a few weeks ago were experiencing economic growth and rising prosperity have now plunged into a deep recession.” The World Trade Organization estimates that “global trade will shrink by between 12 and 32 percent — numbers that are so unbelievable that they leave one gasping for breath.”
The Philippine government will run out of money in a few months. The Philippine President has said as much. In television appearances, he acquits himself of culpability for possible economic collapse by bemoaning the unexpectedness of it all. He is in this particular way a part of the Philippine majority — likely a global majority — that can only absorb what is going on by the slap-in-the-face impact of economic standstill and imminent hunger. This common cluelessness, of course, does not a leader make.
In any case, the global experience of the pandemic is now described as “radical uncertainty.” Yet this uncertainty need not have been radical. Nor should it have been unexpected. While most of the relevant material is indeed arcane and impenetrable to most, enough science and advocacy have been circulating in the global public sphere for governments to include in scenario building.
No leader anywhere should be able to feign or hide behind confessed ignorance. Nor mount a bully pulpit to spout the opposite: pretend-knowledge. Professed ignorance and pretend-knowledge are the same thing. This two-faced spin is a staple of martinets pushing a repressive agenda. Unhappily, it is recyclable for use in different times and places: inevitably to quash public backlash against cavalier attitudes to civil liberties, and the poverty and hunger produced by the deeply anti-people heart of populism.
Autocrats use rhetorical strategies because it is typically their core talent. This is, granted, their genius — dark, but it is what it is. Rhetoric is thought to replace the hard, skilled work of governance.
It should nevertheless be obvious by now that the genius for disinformation shared by all autocrats impairs the ability of their teams to face down catastrophe: a pandemic, to state the obvious. The campaigns to alter reality, essential to installing tyrants to power, careen wildly upon contact with cataclysmic misfortune. Ultimately, spin doctors cannot spin the fact of mass die-off — in this case, each a painful and unexpected death of an exotic disease that can take down anyone, across class and other divides; and, experienced alone, assaulting the human need for community.
COVID-19 will be only overcome in a body politic in which precision information circulates like oxygenated blood through veins and lungs. Each citizen and transient stays healthy only through a consistent supply of evidence-based knowledge. In the early, crucial days of the contagion, this supply of truth had not been available — like the scarcity of personal protective equipment (PPE), food, hospital equipment, and medicine in the Philippines, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, China, among other countries run by populists with an autocratic bent.
These are connected and co-dependent scarcities. The pandemics of ignorance and populism created in and released from laboratories and factories of lies in Russia, China, the Philippines, the US (to name the most prolific and venal) systematically broke down the scientific formulation of truth. It was hardly possible, living within architectures of disinformation and confusion that they imagined they could control, for autocratic governments to grasp signs of a pandemic outbreak and to rally the sharpness to act within a narrow window of time given to each country depending on the vectors of contagion. Lack of PPEs is merely a symptom of disconnectedness from scientific wisdom.
It was hardly possible for deliberately addled populations to have figured quickly what is to be done. In what will certainly be a durable case study for future analysis, the disinformation campaign waged by the state in the Philippines to create horror around the anti-dengue vaccine Dengvaxia, in order for the present populist president to politically destroy his neoliberal processor, produced more than widespread fear of vaccines.
Aside from a new outbreak of polio in 2019, the Dengvaxia scare promoted distrust of the health sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic could not have come at a worse time to Filipinos, who, in the last four years, have been fear-mongered to recoil from a modern health delivery system that has been a global model for a century. It is not far-fetched to suppose that the high mortality figures for doctors and medical service providers during these pandemic issues is likely as an unexpected side outcome from the same deliberate erosion of respect and admiration for their field.
Dismally, there is no room for hope to be found in unpacking the conjoint DNA of the pandemics of ignorance, populism, and COVID-19. Xi, Duterte, Trump, Erdogan, Modi, Bolsonaro, and their ilk are consolidating their political fortunes by hothousing yet another pandemic of a new strain of an old plague: an anti-poor regime of truth.
Among the early signs of this revitalized contagion is a recent pronouncement by an advisor to the Philippine President, that the poor should be allowed to go back to work because they are “somehow resilient to the virus” — as unscientific, class-entitled, and heartless as it gets. Once more there is no antidote.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic whose research interests include international art events, museums, identity politics, cities, and clothing. She is the founder and principal of TAO, Inc., a museum and exhibition development corporation.
WITH all National Basketball Association activities suspended until further notice because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, Indiana Pacers big man Myles Turner is making the most of the forced downtime by staying productive and active.
Last played in March when the league moved to suspend the season after one of its players contracted the highly contagious respiratory disease, Mr. Turner, 24, said just like the rest of the league he misses playing but understands that they have to take a backseat for now in light of the current situation with the coronavirus, which already has 3.5 million confirmed cases worldwide and 1.18 million in the United States alone.
But despite not being able to do his thing with the Pacers, Mr. Turner is finding other ways to keep himself busy while awaiting their possible return to the NBA floor, including, among other things, shoring his knowledge in yoga and finance.
“I’ve been doing yoga. And learning about finance lately, learning about the stock market and it has been fun learning stuff,” said the Pacers stalwart in a media conference call, the video file of which was shared by the league to BusinessWorld.
“I’ve been doing yoga for three to four years now. I started taking it seriously a couple of years back. For me personally, it helps in injury prevention. It helps me focus and in my breathing,” said Mr. Turner, who was averaging 11.8 points, 6.5 rebounds and 2.2 blocks in 55 games before the 2019–20 season was suspended.
“It’s workout outside of lifting weights. I mean, you can lift all the weights you want but you also have to have muscle functionality. And that’s what yoga brings for me. And, more importantly, I’m having fun doing it,” he added.
Reading, too, is something Mr. Turner has been doing with the free time he has, including those concerning finance, which he admitted to not having a lot of knowledge of in the past.
“The biggest thing [among those I’m reading] is the stock market, I think it is something I never really got into. You have an app on your phone and you see these things on the ticker. I see a lot of that but I did not really know what they meant. I still have a lot to learn about it but I have been getting the data and learning how the money works and how it affects the economy; and how my finances work for me. How it works on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
DEALING WITH COVID-19
Mr. Turner also shared that COVID-19 hit his family firsthand after his father, David, contracted the disease.
He said the episode was rough for them, knowing what his father went through. But he noted that everything is going well now for his father.
“Everybody is doing fine now. Initially it was a rough patch. My dad initially got the virus, a week before my birthday. I don’t know how he contracted it. He got it early before everything got crazy. They did a lot of stuff on him. He was in the hospital for a week and was in isolation. He’s better now and I’m glad. I’m close to my dad. He put the ball in my hands. And he made a lot of sacrifices for us,” he said.
As to the resumption of the season, as a competitor Mr. Turner said he would love to return playing but recognizes a lot has to be considered to make it happen.
“There a lot of legitimate concerns. The NBA just has to follow the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As we have seen, this disease affects families and it would not go away without vaccines. The competitor in me wants to play but I see why people have a lot of concerns,” he said.
He went on to say that if the season does continue, he likes the chances of the Pacers.
“I’m optimistic of our chances. A lot of things can happen. We are one of the teams that can create much noise when play resumes,” Mr. Turner said.
The Pacers were sitting at fifth place in the Eastern Conference when the season was suspended with a 39–26 record.
NORTH CAROLINA — The National Football League (NFL), the only major American sporting league so far largely unaffected by the coronavirus outbreak, says it is on course to begin its season on time in September.
“We plan announcing late next week the full regular season schedule that begins with Kickoff on September 10 and culminates with the Super Bowl in Tampa February 7, 2021,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said in an email to Reuters.
Each team is expected to play 16 regular season games as per usual, though the league is evaluating contingency plans should this prove untenable, multiple media outlets have reported.
It is yet to be announced whether fans will be allowed to attend games.
While other major sporting leagues, including the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB), have shut down due to the coronavirus, the NFL has been able to buy time before making any major decisions.
Its season ended in early February, shortly before evidence of a major coronavirus outbreak in the United States became widely known.
Some areas of the United States are now starting to emerge from lockdown as rules are relaxed even as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases rises in some states.
Last week’s NFL draft attracted record US television ratings in a country starved of live sporting action. — Reuters
TOKYO — American tennis player Taylor Fritz and his doubles partner, Tik Tok personality Addison Rae, won the virtual Stay At Home Slam on Sunday as real-life tennis remains on hold because of the coronavirus crisis.
The likes of the Williams sisters, Japanese stars Naomi Osaka and Kei Nishikori and the recently retired Maria Sharapova competed as their favorite characters from the world of Nintendo to raise money for charity.
The professional tennis tours are closed down until mid-July at the earliest because of the coronavirus pandemic, meaning fans and players alike were eager to turn their attention to the tournament played within the Mario Tennis Aces game.
The final, which pitched Fritz and Rae against Nishikori and his partner, DJ Steve Aoki, was watched live by over 35,000 people on Facebook Gaming but did run into technical difficulties as the match froze midway through the set.
After a delay, which was filled by awkward banter between co-commentators seven-time Grand Slam winner John McEnroe and YouTube personality iJustine, the match restarted.
Mirroring his real-life playing style, Fritz’s dominant serve was the deciding factor as he and Rae ran out 6-4 winners to claim the championship and a $1-million donation to the No Kids Hungry charity.
All the players received a $25,000 donation to their charity of choice.
“I was more nervous there than any of my real tennis matches,” Fritz said.
The Williams sisters couldn’t translate their real-life prowess into the virtual world as both lost their opening-round matches.
Sharapova and partner, model Karlie Kloss, also went out in the first round while Osaka’s match against Nishikori and Aoki had to be forfeited after her partner Hailey Bieber struggled to maintain a strong internet connection.
Despite the technical issues — brushed off by McEnroe as being “like a rain delay” — tennis fans will have to be content with virtual tournaments for now.
Last week, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray headlined the Virtual Madrid Open, which was also plagued by some technical snafus.
“It has been a crazy time but we all need to have some fun and it is for a great cause,” said McEnroe.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has infected over 3.4 million globally, killing at least 240,000 people, has also played havoc with the world’s sporting calendar.
The Wimbledon championships were cancelled for the first time since World War Two while the French Open, originally scheduled to begin in May, has been pushed back until September.
All ATP and WTA tour tournaments have been cancelled until at least mid-July. — Reuters
OMAN HEAD COACH Branko Ivankovic, Thailand and Chiangrai United midfielder Ekanit Panya as well as Northern Mariana Islands international Enrico Del Rosario are the latest Asian football stalwarts to lend their voices in containing the transmission of the coronavirus pandemic in the Asian Football Confederation’s (AFC) #BreakTheChain series.
The widely supported mass awareness campaign continues to extend its reach throughout Asia and beyond with more than 130 Asian players and officials from 42 member associations answering the call to stand in solidarity during these challenging times by promoting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines and offering heart-warming messages of hope and unity.
The highly decorated Ivankovic, whose vast experience in Asian football include steering Islamic Republic of Iran to a third-place finish in the 2004 AFC Asian Cup as well as clinching three domestic titles with Persepolis FC, said: “I want to express my respect and appreciation to everyone who is battling this crisis on the frontlines.
“The sacrifices they have made are immeasurable and we must all pay tribute to the determination and tenacity of our health care workers battling this COVID-19 from around the globe.
“To everyone across Asia, I urge you to stay strong. These are difficult times, and we know staying at home has its own challenges, but it is also a privilege — one that our medical heroes do not have.
“The greatest gift we can give them at this moment is to follow the advice of your governments and health care experts, so I encourage everyone to join me to break the chain and stop the spread of this virus.”
Thai prodigy Ekanit, who netted the winner in the War Elephants’ 2-1 victory over United Arab Emirates in the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and AFC Asian Cup China 2023 Asian Qualifiers last October, said: “Just as in football, the hardest defeats are those that hit you unexpectedly and now, we have been confronted by an invisible opponent that can strike anyone when you least expect it.
“There is no question that we are facing our toughest opponent yet and our only chance of survival is by presenting a united front to break the chain and to remain vigilant constantly.
“Since the start of this outbreak, there has also been an unprecedented wave of compassion, kindness and graciousness. Our strongest defense is our actions and we must continue to keep our faith in each other to overcome this crisis.”
Del Rosario, the first player from Northern Mariana Islands to join the campaign also features in today’s episode with more member associations from the Asian football family set to appear for the first time in the coming weeks together with some of the continent’s biggest names including former Manchester City defender and China PR legend Sun Ji Hai as well as Japan’s defensive lynchpin Maya Yoshida.
AFFECTED like everybody else in the country by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, members of Baguio-based Team Lakay are turning to their Igorot heritage to get themselves through the crisis.
Left to do training on their own for now as government measures in place against the coronavirus prevent them from working on their game in the collective in their gym, members of Team Lakay said the last month and a half have been a challenge in more ways than one but they are getting by and making things happen.
They said this is in part to the Igorot traits they have grown to see, and which are proving to be of good use especially in times like this.
“The Igorot people are known to be resilient, self-sustaining, village-oriented, and we are used to simple living,” said Team Lakay coach and founder Mark Sangiao in underscoring simple living being the root of the Igorot culture’s survival.
“Remember that during the war, Cordillera was able to sustain themselves because of the strong ties that we have here, coupled with the patience and the resiliency that we have,” he added.
For former ONE Championship world lightweight champion Eduard Folayang, obedience is another quality that the Igorots have that is serving their community well in the time of COVID-19.
“The Igorot people are obedient, we make sure to follow our figures of higher authority, especially our elders. We also practice what we call ‘binadang,’ which means helping those in need, which is very important during times like this,” said Mr. Folayang, who last fought in the ONE Circle in January here, where he lost to Pieter Buist by split decision.
Discipline, too, is another Igorot quality that is getting them through all this, said reigning ONE world strawweight champion Joshua Pacio, a good reason, he added, why the number of COVID-19 cases in their area is not that high compared to other places.
“The Baguio-Benguet area is somehow one of the places with the least number of cases of people that have tested positive for the coronavirus, and I believe that it’s because of how disciplined the Igorot people are. We listen and we take seriously what the government says. We stay at home and we don’t go out, and we make sure that our health and safety is a must,” said Mr. Pacio, who is currently the lone Team Lakay member holding a world title in ONE Championship.
While there is still no vaccine against COVID-19, Team Lakay members said staying healthy and strong is a must to guard against contracting the highly contagious disease.
“We’ve managed to stay strong throughout this period because I believe that the Igorot people are naturally healthy people. The Igorots are physically strong because we are very hard workers, and that helps make our immune system strong as well. Having a strong immune system is very important nowadays so that we don’t get sick with the virus,” said featherweight contender Edward Kelly.
Team Lakay is one of the top teams in ONE Championship, holding at one point four world titles all at the same time.
ONE Championship activities are currently on hold because of COVID-19 but it said it is bent on resuming immediately once conditions permit it. — Michael Angelo S. Murillo
