Party List
by Luz Rimban
PITY party-list organizations. Although Republic Act 7941 reserves 20 percent of House seats for these groups, which are supposed to be from marginalized sectors whose interests are not represented in Congress, the reality is that it is difficult for them to win votes. That’s because Filipinos are still mostly uninformed about the party-list process and the Commission on Elections has done nothing in terms of a voter-awareness campaign to remedy the situation.
Virgilio Garcillano
by Sheila S. Coronel
VIRGILIO Garcillano will go down in history as the election official whose wiretapped conversations mortally wounded a president. He disappeared from public view in the second week of June, as the controversy over the wiretaps heated up, and many may have a hard time recalling what he looks like. Yet his raspy voice, distinctive lisp, and thick Visayan accent are now embedded in the audio memory of millions of Filipinos who have listened to the “Garci” tapes.
by Alecks P. Pabico
THE COMMISSION on Elections has a lot to account for, with some of its “mistakes” running into billions of taxpayers’ pesos. Ironically, some of its costliest errors had started out as a means to improve the election process and minimize voting irritants
What went wrong with the Comelec?
by Alecks P. Pabico
TO DESTROY an institution like the Commission on Elections (Comelec), you must first fill it up with handpicked commissioners with questionable credentials and even more dubious impartiality. Then, let them run the constitutional body as if they were ruling over personal fiefdoms. This would then reduce middle-level bureaucrats to mere vassals doing — or forced to do — their every bidding, including perhaps, as the taped conversations involving President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano suggest, rigging the elections in their political benefactor’s favor.
TODAY the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stands on the edge of the abyss. Will she fall or can she pull back from the brink?
This crisis is not only the most serious in her four-year presidency, it challenges the viability of Philippine democracy as well.
The President
by Sheila S. Coronel
UNTIL last month, the heavens seemed to have favored Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The economy was picking up, the stock market was trading briskly, and Congress had just passed a new tax measure. For sure, the budget deficit and rising oil prices were something to worry about. At the same time, the opposition seemed bent on raking the jueteng muck. But all these were part of life — and politics — as usual.
by Yvonne T. Chua
Official statistics show that fewer boys are finishing secondary school, with the problem most acute in the country’s 5,000 public high schools. [Photo by Jose Enrique Soriano]WHENEVER perennial job applicant Edwin de Asis hears the words, “We’ll call you,” he knows he has just been turned down. He also thinks he knows why: “They saw […]
by Yvonne T. Chua
“WHERE ARE the boys?”
Quezon City Schools Division supervisor Beth Meneses has been asking this question the past several years. On really bad days, she says, as many as one in five of the male students in the city’s high schools could be anywhere — the streets, the canteen, the mall, the computer gaming shop — but in the classroom.
by Yvonne T. Chua
WHEN BARRIO doctor Richard Lariosa arrived in Tagapul-an, Samar in 2002, he was surprised to learn that medicines for the town were being kept at the mayor’s office. “When you gave a prescription to a patient not of the same political color as the mayor, he’d be told by the people at the mayor’s office there was no medicine even when they were still a lot,” the doctor says. “Color coding.”
by Jaileen F. Jimeno
LINGAYEN, Pangasinan — Since 1975, the year Pangasinan’s population office was created by then Gov. Aguedo Agbayani, Luz Muego’s life has been governed by numbers. At the time, Muego was a researcher at the office. Now she is the province’s population officer, but she is still preoccupied with all sorts of figures.
