Thursday, July 03, 2008 Wenceslao: Presidential help By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
I WON'T blame relatives (in this case at least one of them) of the victims of the sinking of mv Princess of the Stars for the hesitance in accepting the aid distributed by President Arroyo during her visit to Cebu yesterday. Money, after all, cannot bring back the lives of their dead kin. Besides, there’s the suspicion of the purpose of the assistance.
To be fair to the President and Malacañang officials, the act was the only thing they could have done as of the moment.
Identification of the recovered bodies has, as expected, been slow. The search for and retrieval operation of the corpses, especially those inside the vessel that capsized near Sibuyan Island, has still to resume.
Actually, acts like the giving of financial aid, can be viewed in many ways. I remember a friend, for example, putting up a spirited defense of the President’s one-time subsidy of P500 for consumers of electricity at the height of the Meralco controversy. Of course, there are other options, but, as my friend would insist, “mayo na lang na.”
Interestingly, that one-time subsidy coincided with moves that, to the critics of the Arroyo administration, would seem like a change in p.r. strategy that started with the raising of concerns over the rise in the price prices, Meralco’s electricity rates, the push for free text messaging, etc. Those are gut issues that have gotten Malacañang’s attention.
By focusing on the gut issues, Malacañang succeeded in wresting away from the political opposition the initiative that the latter held with the Senate probe into the NBN-ZTE scandal and the Rodolfo Lozada Jr. caper. Even the attempt to resurrect the NBN-ZTE issue through the ranting of former House speaker Jose de Venecia failed.
But the focusing on the gut issues also raised the awareness of the public of the problem and of the need to solve these. The text messaging issue, for example, made people aware of the profits giant telecommunication firms gained from the service and is pushing these telcos to lower texting rates even if only through their product promotions.
TEXTREAX. This one is from 0915-5107338: Sen. Rodolfo Biazon better shut up if he has nothing sensible to say. He said we don’t need the USS Ronald Reagan here as its air assets are mainly jet fighters. Unsa man diay nang mga Blackhawk helicopters nga gigamit sa US Navy karon sa Iloilo?
(khanwens@yahoo.com/ my blog: cebuano.wordpress.com)
