AS I was on vacation for most of the week, I only did two, taking a pass on my Thursday column.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025: Careful,your jingoism is showing – This was a follow-up to columns I had written the previous week concerning the strong-arm tactics being applied by Congress against the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) to force them to sell a stake to the government through the Maharlika Investment Fund. The favorite bugaboo of critics of NGCP is that it is 30-odd percent owned by the State Grid Corp. of China, and in a column that I was responding to here, Manila Times columnist Rigoberto Tiglao picked up that thread (not for the first time), and couldn’t even get his figures straight. He of course responded to my response, which I ignored, partly because I’m done with the topic at least for the time being, and partly because Tiglao, who was once pretty sharp, has in recent years turned into the newspaper version of one of those push-a-shopping-cart-around-and-shout-at-the-sidewalk mofos, and is not worth spending a lot of time on.
The irony is that NGCP never had an issue with the state sovereign wealth fund buying into the company, just that self-appointed hatchetmen in Congress were being dicks about the whole thing. As it turned out, even before Tiglao’s column came out a deal was announced (thereby kind of trumping us both) that everyone seemed to be happy with, so it was best just to move on to other things.
Sunday, February 2, 2025: Happy Groundhog Day – a brief history of the odd holiday, and a last bit of low-stress work for me before taking on the shitstorm of current events this week.
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