THE worst flooding in years has exposed not only what I have called the worst presidency in our recent history. It has exposed what may well be the worst Congress as well.

More than 8 million Filipinos have been affected by the southwest monsoon and tropical cyclones Luis, Maymay and Neneng. Entire provinces have been placed under a state of calamity.

Roads and bridges have collapsed, farms have disappeared under water, schools have suspended classes and families have watched filthy floodwaters rise inside homes that had supposedly been protected by hundreds of billions of pesos in flood-control works.

Yet where has Congress been?

The House of Representatives and Senate months back investigated the corruption surrounding flood-control projects. Senators have grilled contractors over ghost and substandard projects, while the House has had its own investigations and proposals. That is necessary. But corruption is only half the scandal. The other half is staring us in the face: After the government spent enormous sums supposedly for controlling floods, why did so much of Luzon still go underwater?

That is the investigation Congress should have launched with the urgency of a national emergency. Yet Sen. Erwin Tulfo, just before the floods inundated the country, callously said: “Iikot na lang ba ang mundo natin sa flood control? Can’t we move forward?” Instead of appealing to his colleagues that the impeachment is proving to be a waste of time and that the nation demands a solution to the flooding problem, Sen. Miguel Zubiri complains that he has become so tired as the trial has claimed half of the Senate’s usual work period. Of course, he cannot ask the Senate to stop its law-making tasks. Why can’t he be bold enough to say that the impeachment trial is a big waste of time?

THERE is no need to manufacture an image of national collapse. Filipinos can see it on their phones. For weeks, social media has been inundated with heart-wrenching photos of how the floods have made Filipinos’ lives so miserable: mothers carrying children through brown floodwater, old people ferried out of homes, commuters wading along roads turned rivers, families lifting appliances above the waterline. These are not scenes of another bad monsoon.

They are a visual indictment of a state that has spent hundreds of billions of pesos supposedly to prevent precisely this.

By the government’s own count, the scale is staggering. As of Aug. 30, more than 8.1 million Filipinos in 10 regions had been affected by the combined southwest monsoon and tropical cyclones Luis, Maymay and Neneng. At least 32 people had died, 19 injured and three are still missing. About 25,800 people remained in 297 evacuation centers. Infrastructure damage had reached P6.11 billion and agricultural losses P2.32 billion. Roughly 2,900 houses had been damaged, 349 of them destroyed. This is a national calamity stretching across Luzon and beyond.

The affected-person count is especially revealing. The combined habagat-Carina-Butchoy disaster of 2024 eventually affected roughly 5.4 million people by NDRRMC’s final tally. Typhoon Ulysses in 2020 affected 3.7 million in one mid-storm NDRRMC count, though its own final tally reached nearly 4.9 million. The present 8.1 million figure is cumulative across several weather disturbances and should not be passed off as a meteorological record comparable to a single typhoon. But as a measure of how many Filipinos’ lives have been upended, it shows how extraordinary the present flooding has become.

The Philippine economy is sending warning signals that should have forced an emergency meeting of the economic team. Growth slowed to 2.3 percent in the second quarter, the peso weakened into the P62-per-dollar range, the stock market fell below 6,000, investment contracted sharply, foreign direct investment declined, and consumers turned deeply pessimistic.

Yet Malacañang acts as if these are isolated statistics that will somehow correct themselves.

The most visible alarm is the stock market. The Philippine Stock Exchange index closed Friday at 5,988.17. At the end of 2024, it stood at 6,528.79; it ended 2025 at 6,052.92. On the first trading day of 2026, it rose to 6,135.06, briefly raising hopes of a recovery. Eight months later it is below 6,000 again.

THE bombing by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), ordered by its late chairman Jose Ma. Sison, of the Liberal Party’s preelection campaign rally 55 years ago today, is one of the most pivotal events in our history.

The first President Marcos used it as one justification for imposing martial law, which in turn led to the so-called revolutionary flow that made a fledgling, clumsy Communist Party relying on opposition senator Benigno Aquino III’s support, expand way beyond its leaders’ dreams. These were among the major reasons why we are what we are today — a nation more than half of whom are poor, with a corrupt political leadership and economic structures that if unchanged will get us deeper into poverty.

It is shameful that no academic has even tried to write a definitive account of this central event that formed much of the contours of our history. Instead, they write about historical trivia such as what Rizal had for breakfast and the amount he bet in Madrid’s lotto.

It was an American journalist who gave the most accurate account of it, and its perpetrators. I know for a fact — and even as an eyewitness to the CPP plot — that his account is true.

What follows is a column on the subject that I wrote in September 2022. I wrote a dozen more articles on it, which you can access in my website. This column I wrote six years ago.

Second of a series on the Salim Empire in the Philippines

WE’RE suffering not only from the rottenness of our political architecture, worsened by the unprecedented corruption in the current administration and Congress. Hardly figuring in the public discourse though is that fact that we are also being impoverished because of anomalies in the Philippines’ economic order.

One such aberration is the fact that an Indonesian magnate, Anthoni Salim, through his Hong Kong-based First Pacific Co., is the biggest shareholder, with 48 percent shares, of Meralco, the country’s largest power distribution firm with 8.2 million customers.

The national tragedy is that most Filipinos don’t even know that part of their monthly electricity bills have increased and will increase the wealth of Salim, Indonesia’s fifth-richest tycoon with a $14 billion fortune. Congress investigates so many “bs” issues that result in feeble or useless laws but dares not find out why an Indonesian tycoon is allowed to earn billions of dollars from a power-distribution monopoly in our country.

Partly due to the fact that electricity prices in the Philippines are the among highest in Asia — P12/kWh compared to Thailand and Vietnam’s P5/kWh — and Meralco’s policy of giving dividends to its shareholders every year equivalent to half its core net income, data from First Pacific’s annual reports indicate that it sucked out of the country a total of $1.5 billion (P93 billion) in profits from 2013 to 2025. Yet its CEO, Manuel V. Pangilinan, claims the firm cannot bear the cost of its system losses which accounts for about 6 percent of a customer’s electricity bill.

FORMER public works and highways secretary Rogelio Singson has revealed — the first time this has been made public — that the government had another public works budget called the…