Think Pieces

By Joy Aceron

As we continue to confront the threats to press freedom, the danger of an exclusive and fast Constitutional Change process that attempts to remove certain human rights and accountability provisions in the Constitution and the prevailing impunity in the implementation of the government's Drug War, there is another challenge that democracy defenders concerned about the Philippines must also contend with: a possible threat to open, transparent and accountable public finance management, specifically procurement.

By Francis Isaac, Government Watch (G-Watch) 

Growing up in a typical urban slum, I never thought that I would ever lay eyes on the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC. But there I was, standing before this massive infrastructure, dwarfed by its rectangular glass windows and passive concrete walls. Passing through a small revolving door, I soon found myself in a spacious square atrium, sheltered beneath a 46-meter high ceiling made up of numerous glass panels and interlocking metal bands.

Have we come to a point when even those who were once reform elements in the "truncated procedural democracy" have become integrated (accustomed, immersed, assimilated) in the system over time that they behave predictably in harmony with the system even when the system is already showing its decay, malfunctioning and total ineptitude?

On November 18 at 12:00 noon, Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator who ruled the Philippines with impunity for 14 years was buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. It was a discreet burial kept hidden from the public until it was done. Protest actions took place all over Metro Manila culminating in a protest action at the People Power Monument in EDSA until the wee hours of the following day. Until now, social media are filled with memes and posts protesting the burial, 'educating' the public about the horrors of Martial Law and criticizing the Marcoses and Duterte for the burial that came like a "thief in the night."