Or are we just mindlessly following whatever we see are the fashions and likes of the white men? Is there a desire in the Pinoy psyche to be white? There are so many Philippine products that sell on the claim that it will give the user whiter skin. Why is this?

Do we hate the original kayumanggi skin of the Filipino that a lot of foreigners love so much?

Certainly, even our legislators seem to prefer foreign to local as in the laws that they write for automating our elections. We will be trying out in the elections for the autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) three months from now several machines using different technologies but all coming from outside the country.

Other countries automated their elections such as India and Korea. Did they use foreign machines? No. They developed their own and have succeeded with them. Here, in order to qualify, the machine should have been used in automated elections over several years with so many million voters using them.

In order to qualify for that, a Filipino inventor would have had to develop and election machine, sold it to another country, which would have used it over several elections before bringing that machine back to the Philippines so that it can qualify under the rules written by our legislators.

Our own legislators write laws that exclude Pinoy techies from the bidding. How smart is that?

This is part of the leavings of our colonial masters – a lack of belief in the Pinoy and an over-reliance on the wonders that come from the western world.

In computers, we are at least at par with the rest of the world. We have very good to excellent programmers and other technical persons who could (and have) created systems for automating our elections but who are not given the time of day by our legislators.

One was even called a "braggart" by a congressman for having the temerity to prove that his system was superior to what the congressman was apparently pushing. (Perhaps, he would have make a small commission if the system he was pushing was sold to the Comelec.)

Sadly, the reality is that our own Congress (and our congressmen) has no real love for this country and its people. Wouldn’t the proper thing to do be to push for Pinoy-developed systems to use in our own elections?

But no, they will not do that. Why take a chance on something local when one can buy something similar from other countries? The presumption of our colonially minded legislators is that if something is made outside this country, it has to be better than anything that Pinoys can invent, manufacture or do.

Should we still wonder why this country is not going anywhere?

***

There is an issue regarding the decision of the Manila City Council that was backed up by the Supreme Court that will greatly affect investors in this country.

When the City Council of Manila decided that the oil companies must relocate from the Pandacan Oil Depot that they have been using since before World War II, they created a legal pickle. What the council did is called "spot zoning."

It re-zoned a small part of the city to suit the current situation. Pandacan was always an industrial zone. It was that when the oil depots were set up in the area. There were a lot of squatters around the oil depot and the city grew around the area to the point where the council considered that a terrorist attack on the oil facilities could wreak great havoc on the city and have a death toll that could surpass the 9-11 terrorist attack on New York.

Thus, the council in effect re-zoned the Pandacan oil depot site to get that dreadful possibility out of their minds.

First of all, they should have considered other things such as what it would cost to relocate that depot. If oil prices are now so high as to be almost unaffordable, the relocation will increase costs even more since what is now cheaply moved by pipeline will have to be trucked, amore expensive proposition. Trucking our oil supply into the city will also increase the traffic coming into Metro Manila.

But the greatest loss would be the country’s credibility to our investors. Imagine that one could invest millions in, say, a warehouse, which a succeeding elected administration might rezone into one where no warehouses are admitted.

Actually, this is also happening in other places. Why are schools, for instance, allowed to be built in what ought to be purely residential areas?

In the case of the Pandacan Oil Depot, this was originally in an industrial zone and the residential area simply grew around it. So, why should the Oil Depots now be the ones that have to leave the area when they were there before all of those houses?

Of course, people will go where they can and if there is money to be earned somewhere, the more that they will congregate in that area. Still, considering that when one buys an industrial site, the normal way is to invest the area with more machinery, equipment and facilities as the years go by.

One realizes that Pandacan would probably be a nicer place if the depot was not in the area, the reality is that if the depot had not be there, the whole neighborhood would have been taken over by squatters and would be an even uglier and more dangerous neighborhood than it now is.

***

Selling Petron to the Gokong-weis, a family with interests in petrochemicals and an airline makes more sense than giving it to Ashmore, a financing firm. Who would run it for Ashmore so that its 40 percent is protected?

As it is, Petron has so many problems – tax debts, suits from Bataan province and a host of other problems, including allocating millions to move its oil depot out of the Pandacan area that the smartest thing to do with it is what Aramco did – find someone who will buy them out.