Once more we're getting a foreign loan?

For our special presentation on our talkshow Straight from the Sky, we present to you the complete story of our up and coming Filipino Saint; Blessed Pedro Calungsod who will be canonized in Rome this coming Oct. 21st. Indeed it is a great honor for us in the Visayas to have one of our own as a Filipino Saint, our second Saint. Blessed Pedro Calungsod is the second to be bestowed this honor, as the 1st Filipino Saint is St. Lorenzo Ruiz. Please take note that both Filipino Saints died for their faith and they were both Catechists.

This should encourage more lay people to do more to spread the good news. To get to know more about Blessed Pedro Calungsod who was martyred in Guam on April 2, 1672 or 340-years ago when there were only a handful of written records… the Cebu Archdiocese tasked Fr. Ildebrando Leyson who was schooling in Rome to be the Postulator for the Cause and Canonization of Blessed Pedro Calungsod. This is why we went to the Archbishop’s Palace to do our interview with Fr. Leyson for this show.

What amazed me is that Fr. Leyson did not only do a great research on Blessed Pedro Calungsod, he also wrote a book about our up and coming Filipino Saint. One big question he hurdles is the family name of our Blessed Pedro because the documents say his family name is Calungsor, not Calungsod. Fr. Leyson went into a deep research and found out that no one has a family name of Calungsor… but there are a lot of Calungsods in the Visayas.

Could it be a misspelling of the last letter? I would rather that you watch the show as Fr. Leyson explains it very well. You can also purchase his book at the Calungsod Shrine as you enter the Archbishops Palace grounds. So watch this very interesting show on the Life of Blessed Pedro Calungsod on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00 tonight and replays on MyTV channel 28 on Monday and Wednesday at 7:00 a.m.

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We were right on the nail when we howled at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for making that pledge of US$ 1 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so the money could be loaned to poor countries, including Eurozone nations that are in a financial bind like Greece and Spain, which of course got the blessings of Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III.

Pro-PNoy pundits chastised his critics (am sure, I’m one of those in their hate list) for not helping the IMF, when in fact decades ago, it was the IMF that helped the Philippines for its financial needs. Come now, the IMF is not a benevolent organization that we should show our profuse gratitude. That is a very shallow mindset if you ask me because it totally disregards the reality that when we were under the gun by the IMF, they demanded from the Philippine government belt tightening measures, where most provinces had to sacrifice giving up their certain infrastructure needs so that the money could be used to pay our international debt.

All this should be behind us now because we have paid our loans from the IMF. But as Prof. Leonor Briones pointed out… the BSP still have billions of loans in the World Bank… so she asked; “Why didn’t we use that money to pay part of our many other loans?” At this point, I still believe that the BSP’s US$ 1 billion pledge to the IMF was totally wrong. Alas, the Aquino Regime doesn’t know where their priorities should be.

Just as I was about over and done with this issue. I opened up to page 11 in last Saturday’s Philippine Star and I couldn’t help but notice a report, which was headlined “Phl eyes P7-B loan from Japan.” As the report goes, the money we would loan would be used to acquire 10 “Multi-Role response vessels (MRRVs) to upgrade the Philippine Coast Guard. First of all, I want to let my readers know that I am all for this project… provided that these multi-role vessels would be built in Philippine shipyards.

We’ve been harping on this issue years ago, because of the presence of the FBMA Marine Shipyard in Balamban, a wholly owned Filipino company, which churned out fast craft vessels for commercial and naval use for the United Kingdom. They even came up with the first commercial application of the ultra high-tech Slice Boat, which was designed by Lockheed Martin that cost US$ 9 million to build. It was purchased by the Mexican State Oil Company Pemex for use in their oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

But that was three years ago and the world financial meltdown in 2008 forced FBMA to shut down operations. Luckily last December, Austal, an Australian company that builds such specialized vessels, purchased FBMA. With the acquisition of FBMA, Austal now has three manufacturing facilities, one in Australia and the other in Mobile, Alabama in the US. So will PNoy do what the other Presidents did not do…make our own naval vessels here at home? I certainly hope so. I just hope that PNoy would cancel that IMF pledge so we can use that money to upgrade our naval capability as the same time add jobs here at home.

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