We beg to differ.
(From The Manila Times, Saturday, June 1. Apparently, the link to this article has been giving some readers a bit of trouble, which is probably attributable to the Times’ website upgrade being only a couple days old. Please bear with us.) While President Aquino and the presumptive new Senate President Franklin Drilon have both expressed…
Read More “Political, economic reform: Best left to the grown-ups” »
This article is substantially based on an article I originally wrote in November, 2010 entitled “Applying the Right Fix: Charter Change and the Philippine Condition.” While the essential points made in the original article are still valid today, the Philippines is not exactly the same country it was two-and-a-half years ago, for better or worse;…
Read More “The Impractical Elitism of an Incorrect Perspective on Reform” »
Elections come and go every three (3) years in the Philippines. In fact, the mid-term elections have just concluded, where the Filipinos vote for twelve senators and local government officials. Philippine national elections just happen to be the biggest fiesta nationwide, and this recent one was no exception. As of this writing, with more than…
Read More “Four appalling bits of election ‘wisdom’ that really need to go away” »
There’s really not much you can say about the outcome of the 2013 elections other than to invoke those famous last words: Told ya so. The proverbial pig is a lot bigger than its proverbial lips. So you may put as much lipstick as you want on said lips, and the fact will still remain…
Same old faces, same old farces. Same old names, same old games. Such is the painfully hilarious nature of our national politics. As the 2013 Philippine midterm elections quickly drew to a close, we stood witness to what our collective action has produced, to what our very own brand of democracy has to offer; a…
Read More “Philippine Elections 2013: Long live, democracy” »
From the little window through which I take stock of the landscape of issues that describe the lead up to the May 2013 elections, I’d say — surprise surprise — things haven’t changed much. A lot of developments have supposedly further liberalised and democratised democracy as it is practiced in the Philippines. The two new…
Read More “Lead up to fiesta elections: Has Philippine democratic politics changed at all?” »
Filipinos can only make wistful remarks about the greatness of the late former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who died yesterday aged 87. This is a lady who busted Britain’s paralysing unions, sent Her Majesty’s warships sailing thousands of miles south to take back the Falkland Islands from the Argentines, and stared down scores of…
Read More “The Iron Lady: Could Filipinos have handled a leader like Margaret Thatcher?” »
In past years, the dates of the EDSA People Power revolution were declared national holidays. This means even workers had the day off. This year, though, it seems only students had the day-off. People with jobs had to go to work. For those who normally going through EDSA, it would mean slugging it out in…
Read More “Making sense of EDSA I, 27 years down the yellow brick road” »