These days, President Aquino faces a storm surge of suggestions on how to run the government’s reconstruction program in the areas walloped by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.” The purpose of this piece (and of a roundtable on reconstruction matters to be held in mid-December) is to help the President and his assistants to sort through the suggestions pouring into their offices. Some are good; some are not so useful.
At least once a year in the last three years, I’ve tried to document the patterns of criticism directed against President Aquino. I got started because of what I thought was unfair criticism; I continued partly because of the vigorous, sometimes orientation-altering feedback, and partly because tracing the patterns can be instructive and useful to understanding politics, Philippine-style.
Two weeks after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” reduced Tacloban City to a rubble, reminiscent of the devastation of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb in 1945, the Philippines was swamped by an outpouring of foreign aid on a scale that choked its capacity to distribute relief goods to the storm’s hapless victims.
This was not just a case of shoulda, woulda and coulda. And Anderson Cooper had nothing to do with it. Notice that even Philippine media reported similarly. Even without CNN (add to that BBC and Al Jazeera) and the commentaries, the cries from the hungry and homeless survivors of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in Tacloban sounded more than pleading, to say the least.
If we go by recent opinion surveys, President Aquino must be wearing an armor-plated vest that cloaks him with permanent impermeability from criticisms on his performance.
There are various shades of red in the political spectrum, but for the sake of argument I will adopt the convention in use in many newsrooms and identify the Philippine Left as those associated with the National Democratic Front (NDF). These political forces include some of the most successful party-list groups in our history, such as Bayan Muna.
It’s no longer more fun in the Philippines for Filipinos and those who live in the country. The only ones who have fun in this country are the foreigners who come for a few days and take advantage of its resources, and then leave their mess behind once they’re done having fun. But for the Filipinos who call the Philippines home, they’re stuck having to deal with traffic, typhoons, pollution, poverty—and corruption by the powerful who are supposed to improve living conditions hereabouts.
For once the Nobel Peace Prize Committee was wrong.
The event gives us a tremendous perspective on things. At the Apec summit last week, P-Noy was cheered by his audience for declaring in no uncertain terms he would not seek another term.
Why drag the name of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her administration into the Malampaya Fund scandal? That was the question Eduardo Ermita, Arroyo’s then executive secretary, posed on Friday when he lashed out at the Aquino administration for having filed charges against him, his former boss and 20 others for the alleged plunder of P900 million of the fund.
We denounce the warning issued by the Aquino administration, through the Bureau of Immigration, forbidding foreigners from joining anti-pork barrel rallies.
Since the start of President Aquino’s administration, urban poor people have worked with then Secretary Jesse Robredo and later with Secretary Mar Roxas of the Department of the Interior and Local Government to come up with a housing plan acceptable to both the poor and the government.
