Aquino breaks up his Cabinet
Post author:Rigoberto Tiglao
Post category:Inquirer Columns
In the 45 weeks since he assumed office, President Benigno Aquino III has convened a total of four meetings of the Cabinet, a crucial body which in most republican democracies serve as the head of the government's executive committee and council of advisers.
Mr. Aquino seems so convinced that the Cabinet is a useless body or one that is so unwieldy for him that he has effectively broken it up into five parts, and may even be on the way to dissolving it in effect, through Executive Order No. 43 which he issued on May 13. It is a totally unprecedented, and radical restructuring of the Philippine presidency.
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Sex and the Bible
THE DEBATE over the reproductive health bill points to the fact that, with some exceptions, those against it are really arguing not from rationality but from faith in the Catholic dogma.
The central argument in the basic Church doctrine against the use of contraceptives, Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, is indeed a metaphysical claim: that the Church has a privileged knowledge of natural law, and that the use of contraceptives violates this law since it prevents sex from undertaking its "natural function" of procreation. We should be thankful that the Lord in his kindness designed sex to feel good, but the natural law should be complied with, it says.
But what does the Holy Bible really say about artificial contraceptives and, for that matter, sex?
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Unemployment worsens in Aquino's first year
THAT'S ACCORDING to the latest survey of the Social Weather Stations, commissioned by the BusinessWorld daily, and reported on Wednesday in all major newspapers except one.
According to the SWS survey undertaken March 4 to 7, 27.2 percent of respondents reported they were jobless. The downward trend is pretty clear: the unemployment rate was 23.5 percent in November 2010, and 20.5 percent when President Aquino assumed office.
If the SWS findings are extrapolated to represent national data, the March jobless rate means that Mr. Aquino has presided over an economy in which in just nine months 2.8 million were added to the ranks of the jobless, now totaling 11.3 million.
It will get worse by the time Mr. Aquino marks his first year in office. UP economist Raul Fabella was quoted as saying that the unemployment rate will rise in June as college students who graduated end of March normally do not immediately get work.
Based on the SWS figures, Mr. Aquino now has the distinction of being the first President in recent decades whose first year in office is marked by the steep worsening of unemployment.
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Broken justice system, not corruption
ONE OF the singular achievements of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in her first years in office was the smashing of kidnap-for-ransom gangs that had proliferated so much during her predecessor's term that our country was labeled by foreign media as the "Asia's kidnap capital."
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Myths about OFWs
THERE IS just too much bleeding-heart sentimentalization over overseas Filipino workers, bordering on ridiculousness. They have been practically mythologized, in a manner they themselves would detest.
Yes, there are horror stories—runaways from cruel employers with no one to turn to in a strange land, young women forced into prostitution—but we have to put things in perspective. We are talking here of a population of eight million OFWs, nearly as big as the population of Switzerland or Greece.
One reason for the depiction of OFWs as the downtrodden of the earth is that their alleged plight are being exploited by NGOs, here and abroad, which get donations from European leftist organizations or Christian do-gooder associations, purportedly in order to come to the succor of these "slaves" of global capitalism. More often, though, the donations merely finance the fat salaries (they call it "allowances") of NGO elites who often have never worked a regular job yet manage to enjoy the comforts of cosmopolitan cities.
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Murder in Puerto Princesa
JUST TWO weeks after the Jan. 24 murder of broadcaster and environmentalist Dr. Gerry Ortega in Puerto Princesa, Mayor Edward Hagedorn dramatically announced to the press that the crime had been solved—swiftly as he had vowed over Ortega's grave. Most of the media would buy Hagedorn's claims hook, line and sinker.
Hagedorn pointed the finger at his political rival, former Palawan Gov. Joel T. Reyes. He claimed that one Rodolfo Edrad, who he alleged was Reyes close-in aide, had surrendered to him and confessed to have hired the killer upon the ex-governor's orders. He had even given, using Hagedorn's words, "a blow-by-blow account" of how Reyes ordered the murder.
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'Biggest what of the century'?
"BIGGEST JOKE of the century," according to a recent banner headline in this newspaper for an article on the Supreme Court's decision that Marcos' ally Eduardo Cojuangco's purchase of 20 percent of San Miguel Corp. shares in 1983 was legal and therefore wasn't ill-gotten wealth.
The phrase was really an uncalled-for hyperbole made by senior associate justice Conchita Carpio-Morales in her dissenting opinion: "The argument that Cojuangco was not a subordinate or close associate of the Marcoses is the biggest joke to hit the century."
Justice Carpio-Morales may have thought she was being clever in using that phrase. However, she in effect portrayed her nine Supreme Court colleagues, who voted for Cojuangco's position, as gullible fools. Quite unfairly, as none of her colleagues in the Court argued that Cojuangco was not Marcos' close associate. Not even the tycoon in fact, as he publicly had said that he was proud that he was at Marcos' side to the dictator's very end. What he had been denying is that his purchase of San Miguel shares violated Philippine laws.
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The joy of Lent
Post category:Culture/Inquirer Columns
FOR MY generation, Lent was the worst week of the year. Without DVDs, cable TV and the Internet, we were all a captive audience of movies on the agony and death of Jesus the Nazarene. Most of the TV networks (and even radio stations) shut down from Holy Thursday to Saturday, and the one or two that operated aired nothing but replays of religious movies such as "Ten Commandments," "The King of Kings" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told."
The heat of summer even seemed to remind me of the Hell that I'd go to if I didn't fast or abstain from meat, or if I failed to pray in front of the crucifix to ask forgiveness for my sins.
Two of the many Filipino Lenten superstitions were to avoid taking a bath and traveling on a Good Friday, or else something bad will happen to you. Superstition indeed can lodge itself into one's psyche that decades later, I would still beg off from a dive in a live-aboard scuba trip on a Good Friday, and in Greece last year backed off from what would have been a marvelous motorcycle adventure on that day.
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The Enemy?
RESPONDING TO reporters' insinuations that this administration is in a political-vendetta mode in its move to prosecute the former president's son, Juan Miguel Arroyo III, for tax evasion, Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda replied: "The best measure of good governance is to give your enemy due process and fairness." (My emphasis).
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President prefers a mass murderer's word
AFTER AN investigation that lasted nine months from May 2008 to February 2009, five Manila policemen were found guilty of grave misconduct for illegally detaining a 30-year-old chef, attempting to extort P200,000 from him, and forcing him to swallow a packet of shabu.
Two different independent bodies recommended that they be fired from the force, their retirement benefits forfeited, and banned for life from ever joining government: the Philippine National Police's regional headquarters and then the Office of the Deputy Ombudsman for the Military and Other Law Enforcement Offices.
Nothing more has been heard of four of the five rogue cops. Their leader, two years later, would become a mass murderer, killing eight innocent people, four of whom were women. This, of course, was former Senior Insp. Rolando Mendoza, who hijacked a tourist bus and went on a killing frenzy in August last year.
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