Randy David | PUBLIC LIVES If you ride motorcycles, as I do, you might be forgiven if you have been seeing the world as a universe of crisscrossing highways. For a biker, nothing quite compares with the ecstasy of exploring a newlyopened expressway. The experience is akin to following a tiny trail in a lush forest. You are not sure … Read more
To talk about politics while the country confronts a looming food crisis would seem insensitive. Politics connotes divisiveness, and one has to be callous not to see the need to come together and act as a unified community if we are to solve the basic problem of feeding our people. But if the search for … Read more
Tomorrow, April 20, if the opinion polls are predictive, the next president of Paraguay may well be a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Fernando Lugo, who has been called “bishop of the poor,” resigned as bishop of the diocese of San Pedro in 2005 to become a full-time politician. The Vatican suspended him from … Read more
The growing lines of the urban poor seeking their daily ration of rice are images suffused with political meaning. Any regime that knows its politics cannot fail to see great danger looming ahead. For nothing illustrates more sharply a crisis spinning out of control than angry people scrambling for food. The Arroyo government is aware … Read more
My father-in-law went through a difficult period of dialysis before he died in 1999 at the age of 80. My 78-year-old mother suffered from the same end-stage renal disease and died the following year. Both went through the same arduous course of daily peritoneal or thriceweekly hemo-dialysis, punctuated by recurrent infections requiring hospital confinement, and … Read more
It is important to understand exactly what the recent Supreme Court decision on the Neri v Senate is all about. The 9-6 ruling nullifies the Senate’s arrest and detention order against Romulo Neri for his failure to heed a Senate summons and answer further questions on the nature of President Arroyo’s involvement in the NBN-ZTE … Read more
Until just a couple of days ago, Eliot Spitzer was the governor of New York. Young and adorned with Ivy League credentials (he graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School), he became one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party, widely whispered about as possible presidential timber. Time magazine hailed him as “Crusader of … Read more
We may not always be successful in finding enduring solutions for our problems as a nation, but at least our attempts to grapple with these issues enrich our political vocabulary. This is good for us in the long run. An increasingly complex world requires a complex and nuanced way of talking about it. This is … Read more
Just about everybody in our country these days is looking for the truth – senators, bishops, the media, students, professors, spin doctors, and street-corner pundits. Truth is the most sought-after commodity, yet its nature and uses are also the least understood. But, it appears we are not alone in this sport. Vanity Fair calls 2007 … Read more
Because it is easier to imagine it, corruption has taken center stage in the public’s appreciation of the current national crisis. Against the backdrop of mass poverty, the quantities are truly mind-boggling: $130 million in kickbacks for a government project worth $329 million, a bribe offer of P200 million for a single signature, cash gifts … Read more