I’ve seen some very disturbing numbers that Mighty Corp. has to refute far better than it has so far. Let me start with just one—cost of manufacture. Over the past 11 months since the sin tax increase, Mighty, a small (3 percent of the market at the time) cigarette manufacturer owned by a Mr. Wong [...]
My heart goes out to the poor, poor people of the Visayas. We must help them, all of us. Even the smallest amount can add up. I’d suggest through the Red Cross, an organization designed to assist in emergencies, and we can trust it to do the job.
Amendments to the Cabotage Law would help do it. There’s a bill in Congress—and has been there since the late 1990s. As expected, approval of the bill is being opposed by local shipping companies, one of which had too many accidents that resulted in the death of more than 4,000 passengers yet is still allowed to ply its deadly trade. I’ve no idea why. Perhaps someone at the transportation department can tell me.
It’s called the proposed Freedom of Information Act and it seeks to promote transparency in government transactions. The President promised its passage during the campaign: He must honor his promise.
Last week I talked about the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System’s abrogation of its contract through the exclusion of tax it had committed to include. But there were other questionable decisions it made. It said there were some errors in the financial reports submitted by the concessionaires, but these are relatively minor items that could have been clarified with the latter, particularly as the external, independent auditors had found no such faults.
The so-called Napoles scam is a subject we cannot allow to turn into a one-week wonder. Unless public pressure is aggressively exerted on the establishment, the scandal will eventually be swept under the rug by conniving officials. This is potentially a pivotal point in President Aquino’s fight against corruption. If he handles this controversy forthright [...]
Guilty until proven innocent. For too long, far, far too long, the politically powerful have gotten away with their crimes. It may be unfair, it may be wrong, but the people at Luneta believe the senators and congressmen—not their staff or anyone else they try to transfer their guilt to—are guilty in the so-called “Napoles” scam. So they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt their innocence. And this we should insist on. We do not have to prove their guilt in a court of law; this is not, at its core, a legal issue, it’s a social, a moral one.
It’s amazing. Here we are halfway through a presidency and for the first time ever we have a President who has retained his popularity, trust and support. In the Social Weather Stations’ latest survey, 86 percent of the public still supported him (I removed the undecided because having no opinion, they should not be included). [...]
I had planned to write about the Sona this week, but it’s hard to do. The speech was just that: the “State of the Nation.
I want to continue on the water case because it’s much more than an issue of whether the concessionaires should be given revenue increases, and how much, or not at all.
Have you ever tried to get a committee to agree on something? Or worse, to agree to many things? Or even worse, many things where strong positions prevail, or something worse than that: two or three committees to come together to agree? If so, then you’ll realize what monumental significance there is in getting 17 business chambers to agree on not just one but eight issues they all think are of the highest importance. The 17 are made up of 10 local business chambers supported by seven foreign ones. It’s an amazing confluence of disparate entities that shouldn’t be ignored.
My good friend Eddie Yap, chair of the urban development committee of the Management Association of the Philippines, wrote an excellent piece on the ills of the metropolis. After I saw how life and work were again disrupted, with so many people stranded and stuck for hours in unmoving traffic after a little rain on Monday, I think what he said deserves public attention and government action.
