Gov’t plans P8B budget terminal at Clark freeport

Passenger traffic seen hitting 900,000 this year

By: Paolo G. Montecillo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

The government is planning to put up an P8-billion budget terminal at the Clark Freeport in Pampanga to take in the traffic that Manila’s congested airport system cannot accommodate.

The new airport is expected to rise by 2014 and will have a capacity of about 10 million passengers.

“We’re looking at a two-airport system with both Manila and Clark being interlinked,” said Victor Luciano, president and chief executive of Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC). “The development of Clark will be more for a niche market without getting any traffic out of Manila.”

Clark is being groomed to replace Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) as the country’s premiere international gateway.

But a more recent review of policies showed that the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport (DMIA) in Clark may operate better as a hub for budget terminals that are driving the growth of air traffic in the region.

“DMIA may be more appropriate as a budget hub. This is being initiated by the Department of Transportationand Communications (DoTC),” Luciano said. He said a no-frills facility designed for budget carriers might be a better way of attracting investments to the area.

Regional giants such as Malaysia’s AirAsia and Singapore’s Tiger Airways, together with partner Southeast Asian Airlines (SEAir), currently operate out of Clark.

Clark, a former US military base, has been seen as an ideal replacement to NAIA due to its close proximity to the northern part of Metro Manila. The DMIA has been seen as a more accessible terminal for people inQuezon City and nearby cities.

Clark also has more than 2,000 hectares of available space where its airport can expand. In contrast, NAIA is located in the middle of residential communities. The 600 hectares of available space in Manila has also been used up.

About 90 percent of all air traffic in the Philippines, or about 25 million passengers a year, originated from Manila. Because of this heavy volume, NAIA has experienced several flight delays almost daily due to runway traffic.

Luciano said the state-owned CIAC has been coordinating with the DoTC to have the contract for the new terminal’s construction bid out under the administration’s public private partnership (PPP) framework.

The PPP scheme aims to transfer the heavy capital burden of infrastructure development to the private sector from the government. In exchange for funding and building a project, private investors are allowed to charge fees from users of the facility.

Luciano said the contract would likely be bid out by the early part of 2012.

The group of business executive Manuel V. Pangilinan has expressed interest in the DMIA project. The company said it would submit a proposal to build a full-service terminal, instead of a budget facility, in Clark to complement Manila’s airport. The proposed full-service terminal will be linked to Manila by a high-speed railway system.

The humbling of America

By: Randy David

Philippine Daily Inquirer

My youngest brother who lives in the United States regularly sends me pictures of his growing family.  Lately, these photos have been accompanied by links to articles dealing with the sorry state of the Americaneconomy.  He’s been trying hard, he says, to figure out for himself, where this complex economy seems to be going, and what he and his wife, who’s also working, must do to ensure the future of their two kids who are still in grade school.

Their worries are typical of nearly every household in the US today.  Sudden shifts in the financial markets and policy decisions made in Washington, over which they have no say, have forced families like them to make momentous adjustments that do little to ease their insecurity. The first thing my brother and his wife decided, after he accepted a cut in compensation to keep his job, was to leave the home they had bought on credit, forfeiting all the equity and improvements they had put into it. They moved into an apartment where rental was much lower than the amortization they had been paying.  They were back to zero, as it were.

They have given up their credit cards, a move that is perhaps akin to tearing up your college diploma in a society where your credit history forms a huge chunk of your identity. They now pay cash all the time, resolutely avoiding the malls where close-out sales have become a common sight.

“It just does not make sense to buy something that one cannot, in fact, afford,” he writes. “But here in the US, we were not able to escape this way of life. It was like everyone was forced to live this way.  Our credit rating was our bank – it gave us an imaginary buying power. Superficial is probably a better description. Just like those hollow buildings in Las Vegas, worthless pillars made of plaster. Now everyone, especially the middle class, is paying for it.”

He is without debt now, he tells me proudly. “We buy what we can afford, simple.  The US might not like it, but we are just a few dots to get noticed.”  The reality is there are millions like him who have realized the perils of a credit-driven way of life and are now opting out. This economic behavior, however, which is sensible and responsible at the household level, goes against the logic of current US economic strategy.

The US government hopes to dig the economy out of the recessionary rut by infusing credit into the economy so that people may continue to buy goods that will stimulate production and create jobs. The key lies in jobcreation, but this is not exactly happening – at least, not on the scale needed to sustain a recovery. Thecredit downgrade given by Standard & Poor’s the other day, the first for the US in 70 years, can only compound this problem.

Americans think their government must set the example of responsible economic behavior by spending within its means and cutting its deficits, instead of borrowing endlessly to fund all kinds of commitments while expecting future generations to pay.  They are shocked to learn that their country’s biggest single foreign creditor is China, forgetting that long before the recession, American consumption was already being funded by Chinese savings.  They are traumatized by the thought that someday US companies would be owned and run by Chinese bosses.

There is a new sensibility that is emerging from this period of American exhaustion.  It is inward-looking and profoundly protectionist.  It is allergic to big government at home, and to the role that a strong America has been accustomed to playing abroad – as the fulcrum of the global order.  It echoes the importance of frontier values like frugality and hard work.  It is patriotic and, in its dangerous versions, xenophobic.  It feeds off the old distrust for professional politicians and big business, and calls for the invigoration of grassroots movements.  Its early impulses have been associated with the conservative Tea Party movement, but it would be a mistake to think that it does not have a wider social base.

This view of America as a great nation that has been betrayed and undermined by Washington and Wall Street fuels a recklessness of the kind that nearly caused the US government recently to default on its federal debts.  At no other time has the country’s political class seemed more powerless to deploy the policytools needed to avert an economic disaster.  The debate over the debt ceiling exposed the inability of political parties to control their ranks.  It illustrated in the worst possible way the pernicious outcomes of political gridlock, a phenomenon that used to be synonymous with Third World political systems.

But Americans can take comfort in the fact that these unsettling developments are not unique to their country. They are fast becoming the norm too in the euro zone economies, where similar credit bubbles conjured the illusion of an economic prosperity. The painful realization comes only after a period of profligatespending has already sunk the economy in debt.  Greece was the first to go.  Next in line are Spain, Ireland, Portugal and now, possibly, Italy.  Their economic troubles show in no uncertain terms the powerlessness of governments to steer their national economies in a globalized world.

Last Thursday, close to a trillion dollars in stock market value evaporated in the United States and Europe in one day of trading. This debacle could not be traced to any single event that happened in the past few days. No one knows exactly where it is coming from or where it is going.  But there is a vague sense that this could be the onset of depression on a global scale, after it was narrowly averted a year after the US financialcrisis of 2008.

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PNP to honor woman officer who beat off rebel attack

By DJ Yap

Philippine Daily Inquirer

 

Senior Inspector Charity Galvez recounting to reporters the attack by NPA rebels on her station last month. Contributed Photo

MANILA, Philippines—Long considered a bastion of machismo, the Philippine National Police  celebrates its 110th year on Monday by honoring a mother with more fire and heart than many of her testosterone-filled colleagues.

Senior Inspector Charity Galvez, chief of police of Trento town in Agusan Del Sur and a former schoolteacher, leads the honorees at the police service’s anniversary in the PNP headquarters at Camp Crame in Quezon City, officials said.

President Benigno Aquino will bestow on Galvez the PNP Medalya ng Katapangan (Bravery Medal) for her “conspicuous courage and gallantry in action” when she led a handful of her men in pushing back some 250 communist New People’s Army insurgents last July.

After making sure her baby and its nanny were safe, the 39-year-old policewoman and 30 of her men fought back and repelled the NPA dissidents, who went on a shooting and looting rampage.

When the hour-long  battle was over, two civilians lay dead and three others, including two lawmen, were wounded, officials said.

A resident of San Francisco town, also in Agusan del Sur, Galvez became Trento’s top cop after just over a year. She became a junior police officer through the PNP’s lateral entry program in 2008.

“I joined the force in the early 2000s after seven years of teaching at the Father Saturnino Urios University in Butuan. I also studied criminology while making my way in the service and passed the licensure examination and became a criminologist,” she said in an earlier Inquirer interview.

Galvez has one child with her husband, an employee of a water utility company in San Francisco.

Her achievement gives a new female face to the PNP, a traditionally male-dominated institution.

Only one in every 750 police is a woman out of the 140,000-strong police force, PNP spokesperson Chief Superintendent Agrimero Cruz Jr. said.

“I am looking forward to the opportunity of personally extending my commendation to (Senior) Inspector Galvez and her men for the courageous defense of their town,” PNP Director General Raul M. Bacalzo said in an earlier statement.

Also expected to grace the event is Interior Secretary Jesse M. Robredo.

August 8 is celebrated as the anniversary of the police service in commemoration of the founding on August 8, 1901 of the defunct Philippine Constabulary, the forerunner of the PNP.

In 1991, the PNP was separated from the Armed Forces of the Philippines and became a civilian law enforcement agency under the Department of the Interior and Local Government.

Aside from Galvez, another Bravery Medal recipient is Chief Inspector Allan B. Umipig, chief of the District Intelligence Operation Unit of the Southern Police District, who figured in an encounter with armed robbers in Sucat, Parañaque City in June. Three suspects were killed in the incident.

President Aquino will also award posthumous promotions to the respective widows of Senior Police Officer 2 Ricky O. Agwit and SPO2 Jeff E. Domingo, both of the Ifugao provincial police office who perished in a landslide on a rescue mission at the height of Tropical Storm Juaning in the Cordilleras on July 27.

The two police officers will be promoted to SPO3 in recognition of their selfless sacrifice, officials said.

Aquino will also present the “Presidential Streamer Award” to the Police Regional Office- Cordillera as Police Regional Office of the Year.

Robredo will present the National Police Commission Streamer Award to the Headquarters Support Service as the National Administrative Support Unit of the Year.

The PNP’s elite squad, the Special Action Force, will be presented with the Chief PNP Streamer Award as the National Operational Support Unit of the Year.

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