President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo seems everywhere these days distributing rice, money, scholarships, and other forms of assistance to the poor. She calls these “katas ng VAT” (“juice from VAT”), a cynical appropriation of the phrase “katas ng Saudi” that adorns tricycles, jeepneys, and taxis bought with remittances from overseas work.  But there is no similarity … Read more

It is difficult to imagine Claro M. Recto advertising a brand of soap, or Jose W. Diokno endorsing a brand of toothpaste, or Santanina Rasul lending her lovely face to a skin-whitening product.  All three were once senators of the Republic to whom the serious business of deciding what directions we should pursue as a … Read more

Having seen, in the last seven years, the kind of behavior our top political leaders are capable of, what I am going to say here may sound counterintuitive if not plainly wrong.  I believe that if we continue to confuse political moralizing with political analysis, we will remain blind to the systemic nature of our … Read more

This is the magic word that is carrying Barack Obama to the farthest horizon of current American politics.  Merely hearing him say it drives his supporters into a state of frenzy.  The word seems to sum up for them a whole agenda of what America needs to do to erase the incalculable injury that George … Read more

The price of electric power in our country (the second highest in Asia) has become so complex that even a well-informed citizen would have a hard time grasping the issues, allocating blame, and determining what should be done. This situation is susceptible to demagogic positioning and political opportunism. One can only hope that those who … Read more

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