The Duterte administration will end in 2022, but Dutertism could still continue to afflict the country for the next six years and even beyond should any of Mr. Duterte’s lackeys, cronies, clones, and surrogates win the presidential election that year.
As the number of cases surged enough to put the Philippines ahead of other countries in Southeast Asia; as millions of workers lost their jobs; as schools and businesses ceased operations and even closed permanently; and as the economy spiraled into a recession, apparently at a loss over what to do, Mr. Duterte on a number of occasions declared that only a vaccine could stop the pandemic.
The assumption that education at the basic level should go far beyond the conventional essentials should inform the country’s return to face-to-face classes. Because not everyone can go on to college — where it is presumed that imparting a commitment to civic responsibility and respect for the Bill of Rights are part of the curricula (but often are not) — developing among the young the capacity to make informed decisions as citizens charged with deciding the future of this country should be among the fundamentals of basic education.
US intervention throughout the globe over the past 120 years in the defense and furtherance of its economic, political, and military interests has not only imbued most Americans with the arrogant presumption that they know best what’s good for everyone else on earth. It has also legitimized the use of force as the main instrument of State policy
Without the informed participation of the stakeholders in governance, the 2022 elections could make the brazen despotism, the unremitting brutality, the shameless corruption and the gross incompetence that reign in officialdom permanent.
It explains why it is abridging the people’s right to information: it is to prevent the citizenry from demanding that government truly address the roots of poverty by, among other means, curbing the dishonesty in public office that contributes to the hopelessness, hunger and despair that has led many Filipinos to take up the gun. His own regime is in that sense at cross-purposes with Mr. Duterte’s oft repeated promise to end corruption.
Both reactions provoke further criticism and even outrage not only from ordinary citizens but even from their fellow officials themselves. No one can blame those who, as a result, end up concluding that regime bureaucrats focus on non-essentials because the administration they’re serving can’t even articulate its own policies and actions.
The results of the September 2020 Ulat ng Bayan (literally, the People’s Report) survey of Pulse Asia released on Oct. 8 surprised — and, said one of their fellow political observers, even “appalled” — some of the polling firm’s own executives. Indeed, in response to the skepticism of those citizens aware of, and deeply concerned…
It doesn’t take much imagination to picture some of President Rodrigo Duterte’s officials shaking their heads or slapping their foreheads and muttering “why on earth did he say that?” when their boss of bosses blurts out something patently absurd, incoherent, or completely off during one of his late night television appearances. After all, not every…
Could Senator Leila de Lima be right? Was President Rodrigo Duterte’s speech as “plastic and (as) fake as the dolomite beach”? Did he not really mean what he said? Senator De Lima was primarily alluding to Mr. Duterte’s pre-recorded speech before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which she compared to the P389.8-million “white sand”…
The Duterte regime’s denying the public access to government information prevents the populace’s meaningful involvement in the politics and governance of this country as the essential condition to bringing about the social, economic and political changes needed to bring it to the 21st century — changes Mr. Duterte was promising during his 2016 campaign for the Presidency, and in anticipation of which he was elected by 33% of the electorate