Category: politics

duterte’s covid politics

it’s the day after president duterte made us wait almost 8 hours — four o’clock p.m. daw pero halos hatinggabi na nang umapir, pre-recorded pa — for a first report on how emergency funds and powers are being used to address the covid crisis, but shared nothing remotely significant (because still in the realm of promises, except perhaps that tidbit about china warning him the virus was coming and two days later it was here) other than that list of donors, sponsors, led by china, of course, and a lot of generous friends, business magnates, with chinese-sounding names. did he really want us to sleep on that?  so it was good to wake up to this from the ateneo’s poli-sci department.

During crisis moments, the challenge to governments, including our own, is to direct citizen participation towards critical thinking, innovation, and cooperation — not to suppress it. Change will not come from those who govern alone. Crisis governance also requires governments and citizens to be guided by data and not by alarmist or baseless assumptions. Moreover, governments must be strategic in communicating concerns and decisions to its various publics.   

that’s from the 1st of an 8-part Discussion Series Framing the Crisis Conversation: COVID-19 CRISIS AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE / Each crisis carries the potential for structural change published by BusinessWorld. 

it would help the national conversation if government were transparent, and people knew what’s going on behind the scenes.

we all who have nothing better to do would really benefit from knowing what the president and his men are thinking, what’s being planned, short- and long-term, to meet the nation’s needs, the better for citizens to navigate this new world and find our own little lockdown ways of contributing to credible and appropriate efforts.

when lies trump truth

“fact-free narratives” have “scrambled” our perceptions of reality…  more dots to connect, but which dots matter?

‘…postmodernism had its strengths and weaknesses. “Its crucial insight is that power in all its dark forms is what often determines what passes for truth in our culture and ignoring that makes you vulnerable to manipulation,” Lynch says.

‘But the big error, Lynch added, “is to infer from this that truth itself was determined by those in power. That collapses what passes for truth with truth itself, which is just a mistake, both politically and logically.”’

that’s from The post-truth prophets by Sean Illing.  a must read.

Politics, economics, rice

ORLANDO RONCESVALLES

The production, consumption, and importation of food (rice or grains) have posed contentious as well as analytically difficult issues even when economics was still in its infancy. In the early 1800s, David Ricardo came up with the idea of comparative advantage to explain why countries trade. On its face, it presented a paradox because comparative advantage suggested that a poor country (one endowed with limited technology) should export a good such as rice even if it didn’t have an absolute advantage in its production (it just needed to have a comparative advantage). Ricardo was also not one to advocate self-sufficiency as he was pretty much a proponent of free international trade. Today’s debate on the merits of rice tariffication presents conundrums and even unanswered questions, though the latter have perhaps more to do with politics than economics.

But even earlier, when economics was not yet a social science, kings and despots already knew that to survive insurrections, they made sure that the price of bread or grain (or any food staple) was affordable to the masses. The Roman poet (Juvenal) considered on or around 100 AD that political stability required whoever was in power to provide bread, as well as circuses! Forget the Romans. The Bible has its share of stories where kings had the burden of protecting their subjects from suffering in times of famine. Closer to home here in the Philippines, when the price of rice spiked in 2018 and became part of an inflation scare, there was a fair amount of wrangling on what to do.

The conventional wisdom today in economics, particularly in the textbooks on international economics, hasn’t changed much in the last two hundred years. Free trade, because it is voluntary and anchored on the concept of comparative advantage, was (and still is) a good thing. And yet, here we are in today’s age of wondrous innovations dubbed as the “fourth” industrial revolution, fulminating at the specter of rice prices remaining high for the consumer but falling to penury-inducing levels for rice farmers. What has gone wrong?

Read on…

Wanted: An alternative political movement

Elizabeth Angsioco

“Crazy? No. Doable? Yes.”

In just three months, the Filipino electorate will again troop to the polls for the midterm elections. Historically, less voters exercise their right to suffrage during midterms. I have heard people say that it is less important than presidential elections. People tend to think that if the presidency is not at stake, then the elections are less crucial.

I disagree. Let us look at the coming elections in terms of numbers. Except for the positions of President, Vice President, and twelve (12) Senators, all other elective positions are at stake. ONLY 14 of the tens of thousands of positions will not be affected by midterm elections. Thus, the coming elections cannot be less important because the people we will elect will determine the trajectory of our country.

Read on…