The Mess We're In...

One thing that made alarm bells ring in my head was the price on my sister's electric bill. The month wasn't even over, and she got another electric bill. That's two bills in one month. Each for three thousand pesos. Golly. In Germany, my electric bill is 15 euros per quarter. That's half of her bill. And I live in a first world country, where everything is supposedly more expensive.

I asked my sister about her electric bill, and she just shrugged her soldiers. Eight people, one house. Air conditioning. What can you do? she seemed to say.

A trip to the grocery store just showed me how impossible life in Manila is becoming. I had three thousand pesos with me, confident that with 50 euros in my pocket, I could buy a week's worth of groceries for a household of eight. My jaw dropped when I bought 1/4 kilo of potatoes in SM for thirty fucking pesos. Dude, that's fifty euro cents for a tiny plastic bag of potatoes. In Germany, I could get a kilo for that. Rice, 50 pesos per kilo, Sugar too. And to think that we produce sugar!

My sister told me that prices of goods went up after Typhoon Ondoy (you know, that typhoon where the guy was floating on a jetsam of trash), and stayed that way.

I don't know guys. I think we're being screwed over.

Hopefully, Filipinos have reached a saturation point wherein they would say enough and try to actually put our fucking country in order? So I would be confident enough to say, hey, screw Germany, I wanna go back home?

But that is a dream. I think that we're getting there, though. When the rich start complaining about the status quo, you know you're getting somewhere. I think I would drop dead if I get a P 41 thousand peso electric bill. That's 650 euros! For a house!

A lot of people are saying we should go nuclear. Guess what people? Former President Marcos did build a nuclear power plant. Sorry to Cory Aquino fans out there, I have love for the yellow too, but she mothballed the opening of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BPP). I remember that RJ Miranda even did a commercial to push for its opening. But it was the era of Chernobyl, there was no way that the BPP was gonna get opened. I remember the outcry against the opening of the BPP. I don't know if our country would also have been able to maintain the power plant in a condition that would not endanger our country.

Shortsightedness is another reason why former President Ramos entered into deals privatizing the supply of electricity and why we are indebted to private American companies that make a tidy profit of selling electricity to power distribution companies for P 11 per kwh!

Per Yahoo news: http://ph.news.yahoo.com/mb/20100408/tph-meralco-hikes-power-rate-020e1c8.html

Meralco's higher generation charge for this month's billing was mainly due to higher cost of supply procurements from the WESM which reached as high as P11.36 per kWh, and the fuel cost accounting for the condensate shift of its contracted independent power producer First Gas because of the maintenance shutdown of the Malampaya gas facility from February 10 to March 13.

A few months after a mega typhoon that dumped a month's rainfall within six hours, Manila is again suffering from the effects of El Niño. Same as last year, drought, rationed water. Why? Goddamn it open the fucking Wawa Dam already. Why do people think that La Mesa Dam has enough water for the 13 million people living in the Greater Manila Area? And now they want to tap Laguna de Bay? Geez, they allow tilapia farms to pollute the water. I don't know if that is such a great idea.

Reading the news in the PH makes me so sad, it's no wonder that my sister's TV is tuned on 24/7 to Wowowee, and Manny Paquiao makes the front page. I think that it's the Pinoy way of preventing ourselves from putting a pistols against our heads. Geez government, why don't you just kill us already?

Wait a minute, we are the government! I think we just did.