Archive - Commentary

“Making wars means making maps,” the Thai scholar Thongchai Winichakul wrote in his landmark Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (1994).

During a committee hearing on the OVP's budget on Sept. 6, Angara uttered: "Does Congress still have the power of the purse? I'm not so sure. Anyway, that's a separate debate."

First of all, how was the letter leaked?The Office of the President provided it to the House, which was deliberating on the 2024 national budget.

How can you convince them that Scarborough Shoal is ours when they have been shooed away even before they could get near its entrance?

Vice President Sara Duterte has been the butt of jokes, particularly in social media, over her reticence to open up as a public official about her millions of pesos of confidential funds and her extraordinary number of security guards.

The proliferation of confidential funds has reached a fragile state that has rendered it to a point of illegitimacy, despite the joint memorandum circular allowing it.

By the will of Sara Duterte, her budget hearing in the Senate could have proceeded according to plan.

The proposed 2024 budget shows the administration's priorities for spending: a 58% increase in the president's travel funds, while the agriculture sector gets a measly 6% more than its budget this year.

In 2018, the country underwent a rice crisis. By October, retail prices of well-milled rice (WMR) reached almost Php 50 per kilo, up 14% over prices in the previous year.

That was the big question in 2016 when Rodrigo Duterte ran for president. His troll battalions said, yes.

COMMENTARY: Pulchritude has always been weaponized and used against women.

Because the administration's allies have the numbers — a supermajority, in fact — Duterte can spend the OVP budget however she wants to. That's their version of democracy.