Senator Alan Cayetano said that the Senate investigation into the highly anomalous us$329 million national broadband network yielded evidence “leading up to the Office of the President” but no direct testimony linking President Gloria Arroyo to the corrupt deal.

This is lawyer-speak for the fact that, although she may well be guilty, the evidence gathered against GMA won’t stand up in court nor, for that matter, in the Senate investigation or impeachment proceedings. True, a lot of the president’s men were directly implicated, notably Benjamin Abalos, Romulo Neri, Lito Atienza and a host of lesser functionaries, but there was no “smoking gun” to incriminate Arroyo. She’s one lucky bitch indeed, in the words of Gov. Salceda, and cunning too. Her people took the heat and she brazened it out, until the Supreme Court decision upholding Neri’s claim of executive privilege gave her some relief. Read the rest of this entry »

A bit of good news.

I’ve written before on how the University of the Philippines (U.P.) centennial celebration has brought to the fore the problems plaguing the country’s premier institution of higher learning, the most critical being its perennial lack of funds.

There are many reasons for this sorry state of affairs, including the usual bureaucratic inefficiencies. But the main cause is that the outdated U.P. Charter curtailed the university’s fiscal autonomy, limited its ability to manage its own administrative and financial affairs and kept it hostage to political interests.

Finally, with little fanfare, President Arroyo, herself a U.P. alumna, signed a new charter for the country’s foremost university that now puts it on equal footing with its international counterparts by, among other things, allowing it to significantly raise the salaries of its faculty, improve its facilities and enhance its research capabilities. Read the rest of this entry »

The “rectum surgery scandal” in Cebu has been getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so, as the doctors behaved abominably in making fun of the man who had to have a long, cylindrical metal object surgically removed from his nether regions following a night of passion with a stranger. Seems that Mr. “X” hooked up with a dude who shoved a body spray container up his anal orifice, maybe with or maybe without consent, it’s not actually clear. This by itself was a bad enough situation.

Problem was, some wise guy took a video and uploaded the procedure in YouTube, including the apparently spontaneous celebration of the surgical team after the successful removal of the foreign object. The sight of the doctors and nurses whooping it up was disgusting, with the head surgeon apparently spraying the contents of the canister all around to show that, contrary to earlier speculations, it was not empty.

Public outrage, as reported in the Inquirer, led Congresswoman Riza Hontiveros-Baraquel to file House Resolution 524 asking for a probe (ooops!) and : Read the rest of this entry »

House Speaker Prospero Nograles and Palawan representative Abraham Mitra, the chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, is set to file this coming week a bill entitled “An Act promoting corporate farming and providing incentive(s) therefor“. Nograles and Mitra would require the country’s most profitable (read large) corporations to engage in agricultural production supposedly to feed their own employees. But it also aims to encourage corporations to enter rice farming in a big way, through tax incentives, government loans and even use of public land.

The proposed bill’s explanatory note states:

In addition, corporations and other business entities shall be required to engage in corporate farming with rice as their primary crop. Vast tracks of unused public lands can be tapped for such corporate farms. Corporations can also enter into joint venture agreements with farmer beneficiaries of agrarian reform communities. As such, employers will not only be able to feed their own employees and but will ensure provide ample supply to local consumers.

The classic argument for this is that corporations will be able to achieve economies of scale that small rice farmers could never hope to attain. The built-in efficiencies of corporations will allow for the cultivation of an ample rice supply at lower costs and, presumably, speed up the processing and distribution of the end product. Read the rest of this entry »

“WTF ?!?” was my immediate reaction when I saw a picture on the front page of today’s Inquirer, which shows two high-rise buildings being built right smack in the middle of the Subic rainforest. Apparently, the Philippine arm of Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Corporation, one of the world’s largest shipbuilders and construction companies, with 2006 sales in excess of 2 billion US dollars, saw it fit to build “staff housing” for its Korean expats by tearing down a huge swatch of our diminishing forest cover. The “staff housing” consists of a 10-storey high building and another 20-storey structure which dwarf the forest growth around it. The buildings are obscene, like a cancerous growth on a baby’s face, and the picture made me ill just by looking at it.

My dismay was compounded by the claim that Hanjin got an Environmental Clearance Certificate (ECC) for the project, estimated to cost about US$ 20 million. WTF again. Having experienced the pains and tribulations of trying to get an ECC for medium-sized, legitimate enterprises on privately-owned land in non-ecologically fragile areas, it boggles the mind how Hanjin got an ECC to built what are essentially residential condominiums in a public forest.

According to Amethya Dela Llana-Kovak, Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) ecology department chief, the ECC was issued last year in a “built-up” area of the Subic forests, which supposedly allows development activities. The condos are located near a former naval magazine or ammunition depot. It doesn’t take a military genius to figure that the magazine would have been built in a fairly remote area in the Subic rainforest, for obvious reasons. It would also have left most of the surrounding area untouched, save for a mound or two housing the magazine itself and which would have been immediately reclaimed by secondary forest growth. This doesn’t mean its Ok to build high-rises in the same area. What were they thinking ? Read the rest of this entry »