good news! “Supreme Court stops EOs on coco levy funds”

The Supreme Court stopped the implementation of two orders of President Benigno Aquino III aiming to manage billions of coco levy funds. 

EO 179 provides for the inventory, privatization and transfer coco levy assets in favor of government. EO 180, meanwhile, mandates the transfer of the funds to government for an “Integrated Coconut Industry Roadmap Program.”

In issuing the TRO, the tribunal acted on a petition filed by the Confederation of Coconut Farmers Organization of the Philippines, which argued that the executive orders were “rushed” and would expose the fund to plunder.

Charlie Avila, head of the farmers’ group, said in May that Aquino’s orders violate a Supreme Court decision prescribing the funds “only for the benefit of all coconut farmers and for the development of the coconut industry.”

kudos to the farmers groups.  and charlie avila has a blog pala.  maybe i’ll send him my coco levy posts, get some answers to questions i’ve long been asking.

Joseph Stiglitz: how I would vote in the Greek referendum

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Read on…

amazing obama

It may seem odd, decades after the civil-rights movement, to note that for a sitting President to say that the Confederacy fought for the institution of slavery—and that doing so was a moral wrong—is a radical statement. Yet it is, and shortly after making it the President fell silent. It appeared that perhaps he had lost his way, but then, in a remarkable moment, he began to sing “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that is at once a lament, a prayer, and a hope—written by John Newton, a onetime slave trader who became an abolitionist. Immediately after the speech, people began debating whether the song had been part of the prepared text or whether the President sang it out of an impromptu spiritual imperative. In either case, he was likely hoping to see in the national culture precisely the transformation that Newton had experienced in himself, one that facilitated his first truthful accounting of the evil of slavery. 

— JELANI COBB

Sex and the Missionary Position: The Grammar of Philippine Colonial Sexualities as a Locus of Translation

Marlon James Sales
Monash University, Australia

Introduction
The written history of Hispanic Philippines is a story wrought in translation. Colonial accounts about this Southeast Asian archipelago attempted to make sense of its people and their cultures by translating them for a European readership in a period that spanned more than three centuries. While there were indeed a number of colonial administrators, travellers and other lay chroniclers who mentioned the country in their writings, it is in the texts penned by missionary priests that we find the earliest and most extensive intent to systematize the understanding of Filipinos on the basis of their languages and customs. From the very beginning of Spain’s colonial expansion in Asia in the 1500s until the last year of the Empire in 1898 when the Philippines was finally ceded to the United States, members of various religious orders wrote histories that recounted how their brothers in the cloth preached the Christian doctrine to different ethnolinguistic groups in the country and the rest of the Asian continent. They similarly wrote grammars and dictionaries, the primary purpose of which was to help ministers in the administration of the sacraments and rituals of the Roman Church in the islands’ many vernaculars.

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