Editorial
Reason to be bullish
Filipinos have reason to face the new year bursting with hope. That is, insofar as the economy is concerned. From all indications, Asia’s best performer in 2012 is headed for another banner year.
Filipinos have reason to face the new year bursting with hope. That is, insofar as the economy is concerned. From all indications, Asia’s best performer in 2012 is headed for another banner year.
Despite former National Food Authority Administrator Angelito Banayo’s claims of a tuwid na daan policy during his watch, International Monetary Fund trade figures show that rice smuggling in the Aquino administration’s first two years—abetted by the NFA head himself, witnesses recently alleged in the Senate—has exploded to unprecedented levels, estimated at over P16.6 billion worth during this period.
When President Aquino needs to hit his enemies, and make it appear as if the “masses” are doing it, he calls on his fake party-list Akbayan. Aping its boss, when Akbayan needs to badmouth its critics, it calls on its letter-to-the-editor-writing trolls, and in my case recently, on a bogus OFW leader in Greece, one Jose Valencia.
Smuggling in the Philippines is at its worst under President Aquino’s administration, with the smuggled value averaging $19.6 billion annually, an explosion from the comparable figures of $3.1 billion and $3.8 billion yearly during the terms of Presidents Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.
Read the actual document itself, not just the mawkish “peace-is-at-hand” articles, and you will see that the “Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro” President Aquino yielded to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is clearly a roadmap for the republic’s dismemberment.
Every year in September, in a ritualistic way the tale is told: A Dark Lord imposed his will on a hapless people, but then a messiah sacrificed his life to embolden Filipinos to topple the regime in 1986.
President Bengino Aquino III axed in November 2010 one of the country’s most ambitious flood-control projects that was scheduled to start that year. If he had not cancelled that milestone undertaking, it would have been completed last month, and would have significantly mitigated the disastrous flooding of recent weeks.
This type of hurricane is a very strong tempest, so many and so strong hitting these islands that neither Virgil nor Ovid nor any other poet I have read can describe its destructive power. These occur very often and we suffer so much, that even after experiencing them, it is difficult to believe these can happen. —F. I. Alzina, a Jesuit missionary in the Philippines, 1668
Mad that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was freed on bail on a clearly trumped-up electoral sabotage case built entirely on the claim of a massacre suspect, President Aquino pivoted: “But there is a case pending before the Sandiganbayan for plunder, and plunder is not bailable.” There you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. This isn’t [...]
Lacking much to boast about for President Aquino’s two years in office, his propagandists have turned to Morgan Stanley managing director Ruchir Sharma’s raving over him in his book “Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of Economic Miracles.” With such misinformed executives, it’s no wonder that Morgan Stanley had been rescued with $100 billion of US federal [...]
Not contented with mainstream media sympathetic to its master, President Aquino’s camp has been faking letters to the editor to vilify those critical of his actions and policies, sources disclosed to this writer. Such bogus letters, many oozing with uncivilized venom, have especially targeted, ever since the impeachment trial started in December, Chief Justice Renato [...]
That very potent Clinton campaign slogan in 1992, which effectively trivialized his opponent George Bush’s foreign policy accomplishments, may have become a cliché. Yet it expresses quite well the mood of our people (the Boss?) after 20 months of the Aquino II presidency. The dominant temper of the nation: “It’s the economy – high prices [...]
