The Sunday edition of the Philippines Daily Express on September 24, 1972, the only newspaper published after the announcement of martial law on September 21, the evening prior.
Ferdinand Marcos changed parties to run against Diosdado Macapagal and was elected president in 1965. While running for the presidency, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda Romualdez, sang campaign duets as part of his strategy to win votes. Marcos came to power as a nationalistic social reformer with a broad electoral mandate to deal with the country’s chronic problems.
During his first term of office, he achieved considerable improvement in initiating infrastructure programs and increasing rice production. The country was ranked second in Asia in terms of economic standings.
At the beginning of his term, Imelda was all charm. Then in Sept. 1966, she made her international debut on an official trip with Marcos to the United States. She entranced Lyndon Johnson…
I’ve been growing roses since 1971 and joined the American Rose Society the following year when they were still in Columbus, Ohio. I started with five modern roses because that was the only thing I knew about roses. But as I began to love the history of anything and everything, I read about Old Garden Roses and began to explore its fascinating history. I started to plant some old garden roses after I moved to our third home in the ‘80s. I still had some modern roses in the garden because it seemed like everyone who visited my garden was looking for hybrid teas. But Old Garden Roses have…
The Philippines is one of the probably very few countries in the world that do not speak a primary language on a national scale. This situation, unfortunately, has grave disadvantages, more directly in political and educational developments and, hence, ultimately in economic development.
By primary, I mean the language that is commonly used in speaking and writing in practically all situations such as, in government, business, schools and even at home and other informal occasions. A primary language becomes necessary in uniting the people when there is a concurrent presence and use of several languages in a country. Call it “lingua franca”, if you will.
Geographically, at present, the regional languages predominate in day-to-day conversation—at home and in informal gatherings. But these languages are rarely used in public writing, except…
General Macario Sakay y de Leon was born on Mar. 1, 1878, along Tabora Street in Tondo, Manila. and died 114 years ago today on Sept. 13, 1907, at age 29. He first worked as an apprentice in a kalesa (carriage) manufacturing shop. He was also a tailor, a barber, and a stage actor.
Sakay grew up in Tondo, where he had gotton to know Andres Bonifacio. Joining the Katipunan in 1894, Sakay acted in popular Tagalog verse dramas, which were staged in different neighborhoods in Manila, thus providing the perfect cover for the young Katipunero to move about. He fought alongside Bonifacio as a Filipino general in the 1896 Philippine Revolution against Spain. In 1899, he continued the struggle for Philippine independence against the United States.
The Philippine-American War, also called the Philippine Insurrection by the United States, was a war fought from 1899 to 1902 by forces of…
There is a common acknowledgement that the quality of our education system is quite low. This observation, without doubt, has been validated by the poor results of the performance of our students in periodic international assessments of achieved learning.
The most telling of these assessments is the very poor performance of our students in PISA (Programme for International Assessment) in 2018 for 15 year-olds where our students ranked lowest in reading and second lowest in mathematics and science, out of 79 countries. A humiliating results, indeed; but which brought a loud and clear confirmation that may drive us to action. Similarly, we did poorly in the ASEAN assessment in 2019 of Grade 5 students among six ASEAN countries.
In addition to the academic issue, the term I use to…
Back in the states, people were still dancing to the tunes of The Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie and Artie Shaw. They listened to the songs of Doris Day, the Andrew Sisters, Lena Horne and Rosemary Clooney. But, some others weren’t so lucky, in the army there was always latrine duty, as depicted in the following letter from Smitty.
Many are the times you have heard me refer to the latrines. Never before had I any conception or realized the amount of genius and mathematical figuring that was necessary for the building of one of these casual looking comfort stations.
Yesterday I had the dubious honor of being selected, with four other disgruntled G.I.s, to labor on a detail whose sole aim and mission was the digging and building of a latrine. It seems that in order…
An encomienda was a system adopted in all the Spanish colonies based upon the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista (Reconquest) of Muslim Spain. As legally defined in 1503, encomiendas (the term comes from Spanish encomendar, “to entrust”) were used to reward the long, loyal, or hazardous service to the Crown by military men who had participated in the conquest, mostly soldiers with Sargento mayor rank or above. It was also used to recognize and perpetuate Spanish class distinction in Asia. The receiver of the reward, the encomendero, was charged with a number of “Indios” living within a specific geographic area he was supposed to instruct in the Catholic faith and the Spanish language. The law limited the number of natives in an area to not more than 300, and the land value was limited to…
A heartbreaking face of poverty is the present-day preponderance of undernutrition of Filipino young children.
The leading single measure of this undernutrition, or malnutrition generally, is stunting—the health condition of children under five years old of having a height shorter, as defined, than the median of a reference population, which in our case is the Philippine population. Stunting is associated with the consequences of malnutrition, including brain underdevelopment.
The consequences of stunting are devastating—poor performance in school and low productivity as adults. The gravity of this health condition is further illustrated in a recent World Bank report on undernutrition in the Philippines. The report states that normal height growth and brain development not achieved during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life from conception (about two years…
According to Washington Post today, “Bernie Sanders is on the cusp of leaving an indelible mark on the federal government, having shepherded a $3.5 trillion spending blueprint through the Senate this week. The legislation, backed by President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders, sets the stage for the most significant expansion of the federal social safety net in generations and the largest government response to climate change ever mounted. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called the pending legislation – which could include free community college, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, vast clean energy investments, and the largest-ever proposed expansion of Medicare – a reckless taxing-and-spending spree that was authored by our self-described socialist colleague.”
Senator Schumer said, “The Democratic budget will be the most significant legislation for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. It is big, bold change — the kind of change America thirsts for.”
I’m afraid I have to disagree with Senator Schumer. It will bankrupt the country and burden the future generation with huge taxes and insurmountable national debt. Do we want that for our children and grandchildren?
The American people should go back in history and learn about FDR and the New Deal, which created the Great Depression. Are we going back to the same worst era of our history?
In 1932 Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Hoover in a landslide. Along with Washington and Lincoln, FDR is routinely listed in polls as among the “great” presidents. Many Americans believe his New Deal programs rescued the country from the grips of the Depression. In fact, under FDR, unemployment averaged a whopping 18 percent from 1933 to 1940.
One biographer said that there was no one more ignorant of economics than FDR. It showed. FDR knew nothing about how wealth was created. The legislation he called for was a patchwork of absurdities, sometimes at odds with each other and sometimes even at odds with themselves.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), which established the National Recovery Administration, was an enormous contradiction. On the one hand, it sought to keep wage rates high to give the consumer greater “purchasing power.” On the other hand, it established hundreds of legally sanctioned, industry-wide cartels that were allowed to establish standard wages, hours of operation, and minimum prices. The minimum prices meant businesses would be prevented mainly from underselling each other; everyone’s price had to be at least the prescribed minimum. The artificially high wages meant continuing unemployment, and the high prices meant hardship for nearly all Americans.
FDR’s agricultural policies were in a class of genius all their own. Not content with setting high prices for other goods, FDR moved on to food. He proposed to pay farmers for cutting back on production or producing nothing at all. The decrease in supply, he believed, would raise farm prices. But in the meantime, he had to deal with the existing bounty. The administration decided to destroy much of what had already been produced to create a shortage and thereby raise farm prices. Six million pigs were slaughtered, and ten million acres of cotton were destroyed.
The New Deal labor laws and the increased labor cost associated with Social Security further contributed to the unemployment problem to the tune of an additional 1.2 million unemployed by 1938, according to economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway. Unsure of what the federal government would do next and what other punitive measures would be imposed on them, businessmen and investors stopped investing. Businessmen took seriously the various ravings of the anti-business zealots who occupied the White House. Sounds familiar?
FDR gave a tremendous boost to organized labor with the National Labor Relations Act, better known as the Wagner Act of 1935. The standard textbook takes for granted that what is good for unions is good for workers (even though the whole purpose of a modern union is to exclude people from a trade in order to raise the wages of union workers). The fact says otherwise. The ways in which labor unions impoverish the society are legion, from distortions in the labor market to work rules that discourage efficiency and innovation.
The New Deal’s admirers assure us that FDR’s massive spending projects provided jobs and economic stimulus. But such jobs are funded by taking money from some people (taxpayers) and giving it to others, so there is no net stimulus. In fact, such programs are positively bad in that they divert capital from the private sector and inhibit healthy job creation. The various public works programs that FDR established and the billions of dollars he devoted to them only dried up capital in favor of government projects that were inherently wasteful since they lack the kind of profit-and-loss test that guides entrepreneurs in their investment decision.
FDR’s public-works projects were rife with corruption. Economic historians have been at pains to account for the distribution of these projects around the country – why, for example, did the South, where people were the poorest, receive the least assistance from FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)? Several scholars, noting the rather curious preponderance of WPA projects in western states where FDR’s electoral margin had been thin in 1932, believe political considerations played an important role in how these projects were distributed. In other words, FDR was buying votes with make-work jobs.
WPA workers were often pressured to support FDR’s favored candidates, change their party affiliations, or “contribute” to FDRs’re-election campaign to remain employed. Registered Republicans on relief rolls were demanded to register as Democrats in order to keep their jobs.
This was by no means the only example of political intimidation that occurred during the FDR years. The standard textbook provides all the details of Watergate and Richard Nixon’s abuse of power (as indeed it should) but not a word about FDR as the pioneer of this activity.
“Why do the Democrats get away with anything?” one might ask. It is time we educate ourselves and voice our opinion to members of Congress.
References:
Washington Post article – Aug. 12, 2021
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History – Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Ph.D.
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