Hillary Clinton's great media coup!

For our special presentation on Straight from the Sky, we bring you most of the players in the power industry to give us a frank and honest picture of the power situation in Cebu and the Visayas. As The Freeman’s headline last Saturday blared, “Power Outages Seen Until 2010”, which gives us a picture that we just might face a bleak Christmas next month.

So in order to give you a clearer picture of what’s really happening with our power situation, we invited Mr. Jesus “Jess” Alcordo of Cebu Energy Development Corp. who belongs to the power generation, while for power distribution, we have with us Mr. Ricardo Lacson Jr., Vice-President of the Visayan Electric Company (VECO). For power transmission we have Mr. Romulo Vitor, head of Planning and Mr. Neil Modina, Senior Superintendent of Network Operations for the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) a company that used to be called TransCo.

We gathered in this taped interview that The Freeman report was right on the nail, that indeed the power outages would continue up to March 2010 when the Cebu Energy Development Corp. would begin operating Cebu’s 1st Clean Coal technology in Sangi, Toledo. This means we consumers must now do our share to reduce our energy consumption so we an help alleviate our critical power situation. So please watch this very informative show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm tonight.

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The whole nation watched last Friday morning when ANC held a special forum featuring US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who pulled what I’d call the greatest media coup ever done by a US official. US Ambassador Kristie Kenney is one great US Ambassador because of her outgoing ways and her being so approachable to the ordinary Filipino. But last Friday, her boss Hillary outdid her own ambassador.

That ANC Interview revealed a lot about Sec. Hillary. She can woo people with her wisdom, her wit and her being down-to-earth frankness, answering all the questions thrown to her in a no-holds-barred fashion. Even the jaded Maria Ressa of ABS-CBN, who used to be a CNN Senior Reporter ended up blushing as Sec. Clinton entered the stage of the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) Auditorium. She lost her composure and ended up looking like an excited schoolgirl than a hardnosed experienced broadcast journalist.

In the end, Sec. Clinton won the hearts and minds of the Filipinos who were inside the UST auditorium and those who watched her on tv all over the country. There’s no doubt that the anti-American Filipinos within our midst were not happy with that interview. The Clinton special tv interview no doubt drowned out the militant left’s anti-American rallies they prepared for Sec. Clinton’s visit.

But the bottom line is clear. Hundreds of Filipinos still line up daily for US visas at the US Embassy in Roxas Blvd. because majority of Filipinos still embrace the American dream embodied in the United States Declaration of Independence:”The Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Someday, when we Filipinos get out acts together and vote the right leaders for this country, leaders that would give real reforms, I’m sure that the dream of the Filipino to go to the US would change to one where he won’t need to leave his own country for a better one.

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Talking about reforms brings us to the issue plaguing the country, which is now focused in Barangay Lahug, about land ownership. When 65 families living within the property of the University of the Philippines-Visayas Cebu College (UPVCC) lost their homes and shanties in last week’s fire, the State University lost no time in finally getting back their property from illegal squatters. Feeling lost, they got the help of Lahug Barangay Captain Mary Ann Delos Santos, who fought the school officials for being heartless and fencing the property, so the indigents could not rebuild their homes.

This always brings us to a perennial problem that we Filipinos can’t seem to find solutions. Poor people who have no lands to call their own have the right to occupy state-owned or even private property and they can’t be evicted, as social justice demands it. But is this really what justice is?

This impasse needs to be reviewed carefully, after all, Lady Justice is depicted as a blindfolded woman. And while as Christians, we fully agree that the homeless should be given shelter, it should not be in the context of stealing private or government property. This disputed piece of property is only 800 square-meters, but the entire nation is focused on how our legal luminaries find solutions that satisfies the demands of justice as a whole!

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