Time and again I say we Filipinos are a miseducated people. Our education works for the interest, glory and honor of foreigners, most especially the Americans. (Lost racial pride) Because of colonialism ours has been an educational system imported from America, in which we are shaped into the mold of miseducated Filipinos. We imbibe a foreign...
Category: Opinion
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Independent media’s critical role in social transformation
Remembering the Edsa people power uprising that toppled Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s dictatorship 37 years ago—on Feb. 22-25, 1986—must include recognizing how the independent media played a key role in providing facts on the ground, which the people at large used to become proactive in molding their milieu. Ninoy Aquino’s assassination at the then Manila International...
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Edca puts Philippines on path to perdition
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recent trip to South Korea and the Philippines and his meeting with Japan’s defense minister in January say much to validate the “war with China by 2025” prediction of US Gen. Mike Minihan, chief of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. A media release issued by the US Department...
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Merrymaking gone south, or a portent of things to come
Almost a month into 2023 and the rain still won’t stop in certain parts of the country, as though portending a bad time ahead despite the lunar new year’s promise of “a year of recovery.” The “shear line,” or the point where the cold northeast monsoon meets the warm easterlies from the Pacific—a relatively new...
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Is the Philippine economy ‘backward’?
We are not a “backward” economy. It’s just that economies capable of producing sophisticated manufactures necessarily require economies that must specialize in raw material or labor exports. That’s global capitalism for you. Ours is a developed capitalist economy to the extent that the capitalist economic system that grips the world today is already fully mature,...
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Will World Economic Forum folks believe Bongbong?
Before leaving for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. said he will “highlight the significant economic gains we have achieved in the last part of the year.” He is the only leader eager to attend from Southeast Asia. The WEF was set up in 1971 as a global multistakeholder...
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When the wheels of justice grind
When she is released from prison, whether by virtue of bail, dismissal of her remaining two drug cases, or acquittal, Leila de Lima is clear on what she will do. “I will make every second of my life as a free woman count. I will waste no time,” the former senator said last November in...
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In 2022, crisis in incomes and jobs pummeled labor sector
Despite the economy’s recovery from the recession induced by the pandemic, workers faced a worsening crisis in incomes and jobs in 2022. Thus, while businesses were slowly recuperating, formal and informal workers continued bleeding from wage and income erosion, job losses, and a fall in employment quality. Inflation climbed steadily for the whole year, from...
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Tax the rich: 9 reasons for a wealth tax
Rising inequality has been an inescapable phenomenon of global economic development over the past 200 years. Per the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, growing inequality affects 70% of the global population and threatens “long-term social and economic development, [harming] poverty reduction and [destroying] people’s sense of fulfillment and self-worth,” all of which “can breed crime,...
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Martial law and the urgency of remembering
In the morning of Sept. 23, 1972 (Philippines), Edel shook me awake, his face looming above mine and his voice murmuring my name while I got my bearings. The radio’s dead, he said finally. I lurched out of bed, confirming in his eyes what we sensed the night before, when a colleague abruptly left a...