By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld Then US President George W. Bush. His defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His vice-president, Richard Cheney. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove. These were some of the lords of destruction who engineered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But they were not the brains behind it but merely…
Category: Vantage Point
Independence: ‘Unfinished’ and elusive
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld In 1962, then President Diosdado Macapagal declared June 12 Philippine Independence Day — 16 years after it had been celebrated every July 4 when, in 1946, the United States “granted” the country independence. Few objected at the time, in apparent agreement with Macapagal that the June 12,…
Education in the perilous backseat
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld The day after the opening of the country’s schools, it’s customary for the media to regale the country with human interest stories and photos on how, in those communities far from Manila or any other urban center, children of school age walk kilometers, brave rain and raging…
Unthinkable
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld If a military takeover or a declaration of martial law as what happened in Thailand seems unthinkable today in the Philippines, it seemed equally implausible in 1972. But that didn’t prevent it from happening then; and there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen again. The key element…
Total system failure
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld “Total system failure at all levels of government to protect Filipino lives” was how Phelim Kine, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), described the situation in Tagum City, Davao del Norte last Wednesday, May 21. Kine was presenting to the media HRW’s…
Rehabilitating Lacson
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld Former Senator Panfilo Lacson says he’s having a hard time doing his job as the Aquino administration’s “rehabilitation czar,” complaining only a week ago that two members of the Aquino Cabinet have been deliberately thwarting his efforts to rehabilitate the areas in the Visayas razed by super…
Recipe for betrayal
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld Begin with a statement that your so-called allies “need access to Philippine terrain” — a totally clueless assertion that assumes that your current allies will always be your allies, despite the fact that one of them, Japan, attacked and brutalized your country during World War II. Devise…
Back to the past
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld Most Filipinos — 85% of them, according to a survey by the US-based Pew Research Center — may think the US their lord and savior. But no matter how convinced they are that their devotion to the US is reciprocated, and that the latter will go to…
The sub-über class
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld The diversion of pork barrel funds, of which Janet Lim-Napoles and several members of Congress have been accused, could be implemented not only with the collaboration of congressmen and senators and other high level bureaucrat-capitalists. It also needed the sustained efforts of a class of individuals familiar…
Lawmakers, lawbreakers
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld The conventional wisdom is that the Philippines has good, even great laws, but that the problem is in the implementation, which is done either badly or not at all. The country, so say the conditional and eternal optimists, would otherwise be an earthly paradise via legislation. But…
Just another imperialist bully
By LUIS V. TEODORO Vantage Point | BusinessWorld The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 led to the dominance of Deng Xiaoping and his like-minded colleagues in the Chinese leadership. To Mao’s insistence that China should hew to the socialist path of development, Deng argued that “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or…