President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo drove her opponents to bring their case to Congress, where she said she is ready to face impeachment. Her apparent intention was to take the steam off the mounting protests in the streets. But the impeachment complaints – which charged her with bribery, graft and corruption, betrayal of pubic trust, and culpable…
Category: Salungguhit
They’re Not Buying It
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com As reaction to the growing clamor for the removal of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from office, the administration camp has been painting Metro Manila and the provinces with pro-Arroyo streamers and posters. The proliferation of propaganda paraphernalia is meant to dissuade people from supporting anti-administration rallies as these will hurt the…
Uncle Sam’s Dillema
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat The U.S. is in a quandary of late on what measures to take in the face of the political crisis hounding President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Just when the President – under siege on all fronts from left to right over allegations of fraud in the 2004 presidential election – appears to be…
Against People Power
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com As mass protests against the “illegimate” presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo heat up, many of her erstwhile political allies have begun to abandon ship – among them former Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos. Aquino has called on Macapagal-Arroyo to step down from her post to avert an “extra-constitutional” political transition,…
Crocodile Tears?
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com As President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo appeared June 27 on television saying “I’m sorry” for talking to an election official during the counting of votes – trying very hard to shed tears, critics said – reports were rife that congressmen involved in the hearings on her series of taped conversations allegedly dealing…
Unintimidating
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been going around threatening to charge with sedition everyone calling for her ouster in the wake of the surfacing of CDs supposedly containing taped conversations between her and Commission on Elections (Comelec) official Virgilio Garcillano. The coversations allegedly had to do with the fraud that reportedly…
A Plague unto Itself
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s attempts at preempting an alleged destabilization plot by her political opponents have only put her in a position where she holds fort in a sand castle being battered by the waves. Electoral fraud and illegal gambling scandals rock her government at the same time that the people…
17 Years Old and Getting Worse
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com On the 17th anniversary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), Filipino farmers remain plagued by landlessness, as land use conversion favoring multinational agri-business giants chews into the little food security that the country still enjoys. Instead of addressing the ages-old maladies of landlessness and hunger, 17 years of the…
School Opening Blues
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com For 22 million elementary and high school students on June 6, all roads lead to schools they temporarily left last summer. For the coming school year, they are expected to learn from their underpaid, overworked teachers. They have to sift through pages of textbooks, outdated as they are and rare…
Rightful Owners
By Jasper Almirante/ Bulatlat Bulatlat.com Now amounting to P150 billion (about $2.8 billion), the coco levy fund remains in the hands of government and is being traded to some powers-that-be in return for some favor. Taken from coconut farmers during the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s, the fund is now the subject of a bill…