By BENJIE OLIVEROS Bulatlat Perspective Progressive groups were quite busy this June 12, the 116th anniversary of Philippine Independence, as well as in recent months. In the morning of June 12, there was a march toward the US embassy to protest the sell-out, nay giving away, of Philippine sovereignty through the signing of the Enhanced…
Category: Commentary
Maleficent state and bogus independence
BLOOD RUSH By SARAH RAYMUNDO Bulatlat.com In his book “The Nervous System” (1992), Anthropologist Michael Taussig equates maleficium to state fetishism. If ever these concepts sound obscure, Taussig laments that it is because they have been “so studiously, so dangerously ignored… (1992:11).” Marx renders fetishism plain and clear. “By fetishism, Marx was referring to the…
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…
Handling our sea dispute with China
By Satur C. Ocampo At Ground Level | The Philippine Star Invoking the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and seeking resolution to our maritime dispute with China via the arbitral tribunal provided under the UNCLOS is probably the best tack to take, a belated realization by the Philippine government. Better, certainly, than…
For the sake of our environment, resume the peace talks
Both blocs in ongoing civil war in PH claim they are for the interests of the people and the integrity of our environment. Let that be a starting point.
Napoles, Aquino, and Schrodinger’s cat
By BENJIE OLIVEROS Bulatlat perspective People despise Janet Lim-Napoles, this writer included, for what she has done: for facilitating the theft of billions of pesos in taxpayers’ money in the Priority Development Assistance fund scam. While the Filipino people suffer from lack of essential social services, expensive yet deteriorating power and water services, breakdowns of…
If you really hate China, then why do you want other people to rally for you?
QUESTION EVERYTHING Mong Palatino Bulatlat.com Outsourcing may be a popular business innovation but when applied to politics it becomes an atrocious aberration. Political participation is reduced into voting since we expect mainstream parties to oversee and dominate the bureaucratic political processes. Meanwhile, more and more people are shunning political association as they opt for the…
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…
A departure, a wake
By Satur C. Ocampo At Ground Level | The Philippine Star Six months before her 104th birthday my mother, Cecilia Cunanan Ocampo, quietly breathed her last at dawn on May 24. She passed away where she had wished she would: in our farmhouse amidst tall fruit trees and vast ricefields in Dampul (Barangay Sta. Monica,…
Rhetoric, statistics, and realities
By BENJIE OLIVEROS Bulatlat perspective A week ago, during the World Economic Forum, Pres. Benigno Aquino III delivered a speech boasting about the 7.2 percent GDP growth the country achieved last year. “We have always said that good governance is good economics, and the results of our reforms on the economic end are proving us…
The 3-in-1 revolution
QUESTION EVERYTHING Mong Palatino Bulatlat.com At the risk of oversimplifying the definition of revolution, I dare say it involves three dynamics: critique and destruction of the existing social order, building a new world, and the continuous reinvention of the self. Of the three, the most familiar is the first – activists denouncing the bankrupt society…