Opinion
CHICAGO (FAXX/jGLi) -- In some parts of the United States, anybody who wants to vote can do so by registering to vote:
a) in person or by mail, by completing a mail-in registration form and delivering it to his city or town election officer; or
b) at any local election office in any city or town in the state and at any registration event one encounters anywhere in the state; or
c) when applying for or renewing a driver’s license at the Registry of Motor Vehicles or when applying for a service at a designated voter registration agency.
I really like what Sen. Serge Osmeña said about the recently concluded senatorial elections, “P-Noy won but Binay did not lose.”
In my view, the 9-3 score is an affirmation of the President’s popularity. I do not believe that voters elected the senators because P-Noy said so, or (Vice President Jejomar) Binay said so. That P-Noy or Binay said so may have affirmed the choices of the people and strengthened their resolve to vote accordingly, but certainly the people chose.
Why, then, did P-Noy win if the choice was of the people? Simple. The most winnable candidates chose to be with P-Noy. That is why P-Noy won – because the most winnable believed they could increase their already good chances of winning by allying themselves with the most popular P-Noy.
“Ah, the chill of consciousness returns”, the poetic drunk Uncle Seamus would groan after a bender the night before. Morning after the May 13 elections, what do we wake up to?
The wife and I glimpsed first outlines of reality emerging in Precinct No. 513A at Lahug Elementary School . This Cebu City classroom turned-into-voting booth is replicated countrywide
We’ve voted in this precinct since 1994, after retiring from United Nations posts in Bangkok and Rome . Grey hair and bifocals opened the senior citizens lane for us. After a 30 minutes, we shoved our filled ballot into a PCOS computer. It worked.
It’s that time again when traditional sources roll out their unsolicited advice. Vote wisely, vote responsibly, don’t sell your vote, etc. Now that the Internet affords more opportunity for any user to join the chorus from traditional media, including posters on Church walls, the volume of unsolicited advice has increased.
I have been listening to or reading the same unsolicited advice for more than fifty years. It puzzles me why it doesn’t stop. It sure has done from little to nothing in pushing the objective of the unsolicited advice. Why do the givers of unsolicited advice continue to do what has failed their cause for decades?
“Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts floating between the lines.” Norweigian poet Henrik Ibsen’s remark came to mind on reading reports that former police Senior Supt. Cezar Mancao scrammed from his NBI cell. How? By ”using his own key” .
Mancao fled to the US in 2001, after being linked to murders of public relations man Bobby Dacer and driver Emmanuel Corbito. On November 24, 2000, Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force agents, overseen by former Supt. Michael Ray Aquino, flagged down Dacer’s car at a Makati intersection.
The peace talks between the Government of the Philippines (GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines seem to be on the verge of collapse with the recent announcement of Alexander Padilla head of the GPH panel. He was quoted saying that the Aquino government could no longer wait for the NDFP to sit down with them without ‘preconditions’, pointing to the demand of the NDFP to release its consultants who are currently in jail.
Padilla also said that the regular track has been stalled and the special track was killed by this ‘precondition’ being set by the NDFP. The GPH panel has always maintained that the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees or Jasig is a side issue and that the more important things are contained in the substantive agenda.
CHICAGO (FAXX/jGLi) – Less talk, less mistake. No talk, no mistake. This appears to be the mantra adopted by Vice President Jojo Binay’s daughter,
Nancy Binay, whom I will not be voting for senator in the May 13 mid-term elections.
By snubbing fellow senatorial candidate Risa Hontiveros of Team PNoy to a debate, United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) candidate Binay showed her hubris as she is looking past the senatorial election, which she feels is already in her grasp.
Contrast is a compelling tutor. Compare the track records of talks for peace by Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Communist Party of the Philippines. Both were intractable insurgencies.
In Sultan Kudarat, MILF, World Bank and UN signed “Fasttrac” or “Facility for Advisory Support for Transition Capacities”. Based in Cotabato City , this three year project will pool skills, training, research and expertise for MILF and government. That’s needed in dismantling the flawed Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
Poverty in the Philippines cannot be effectively and substantially resolved. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot raise at least 5 million Filipino families out of poverty, not for as long as they do not change the way they look at the poor.
The poor are not the problem, we are. The poor are the victims, not the cause, of poverty. If government wants to effectively and substantially address the cancer we call poverty, then government has to look at itself as the primary culprit. After it, the next culprit is the Church and the elite that have long been in bed with government.
It may be that there is less malice among the culprits than a historical amnesia, and greed, of course. Government shamefully forgets our very history, especially the fact that we were never an impoverished people until we were conquered, abused and exploited by our colonizers. Because poverty was not a natural state of the natives of our islands until we were baptized “Filipinos” by Spain, there is an easy way to trace our poverty.
Two recent poverty surveys – from the government’s National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) and the Social Weather Stations (SWS) – came up with similar results showing that the Aquino government is not making a dent in the poverty situation. According to the NSCB survey, the July 2012 poverty rate of 27.9 percent is statistically no different from the results of its 2006 and 2009 surveys. This despite the fact that the NSCB has a ridiculously low poverty threshold, which according to Ibon Foundation is a mere P51 per day ($1.24 if directly converted and not computed according to the PPP). This was extracted from the NSCB’s poverty threshold for a family of five of P7,821 ($190.75) a month.
So if a family has a combined monthly income of P7,821 ($190.75) or has a budget of P51 ($1.24) per family member, it is not poor and could afford a decent standard of living? Really? Out of this very low figure, the NSCB came up with a food threshold of P5,458 ($133) monthly for a family of five. If divided by the number of family members, this would amount to P36 ($0.88) per person per day. This amount is barely enough for a full meal at the neighborhood carinderia. No wonder most Filipino families could hardly afford to eat two meals a day.
