ONE of the most enduring myths in Philippine political discourse is that Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was toppled in 1986 by a spontaneous uprising of democratic fervor, as if “people power” emerged in a vacuum, detached from material realities. That narrative, endlessly recycled by the Yellow camp and its academic echo chamber, ignores the far more decisive factor: By the time Filipinos massed on EDSA, the Philippine economy had already collapsed.

The regime had been mortally wounded not by slogans, but by a devastating economic crisis rooted in the debt explosion of the early 1980s. Even the super-elite Zobels joined Juan de la Cruz in the massive demonstrations to boot out the dictatorship.

That crisis is often lazily attributed to rising global interest rates, but the reality is more complex — and more instructive. The sharp tightening by the US Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker did dramatically raise borrowing costs, and because much of the Philippines’ external debt carried floating rates, servicing costs surged almost overnight. But this shock became lethal only because it struck an already fragile structure.

THE continuing, desperate move to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte would be comical if it were not such a serious misuse of one of the Constitution’s gravest instruments. Strip away the sanctimony, the press releases, the moral grandstanding, and what you are left with is a spectacle driven either by stupidity or by something far worse — cold, transactional opportunism masquerading as principle.

It is so shameful at this time, with the severe global repercussions of the US-Israel war against Iran creating very soon a socio-economic crisis here. Instead of burning the midnight oil to think up legislation or undertake projects in their districts to mitigate its impact on our countrymen, House members continue to waste taxpayers’ money in conspiring to get the vice president impeached. The only logical explanation for such an insane, inutile fixation is that they are getting compensation for this from the Marcos camp that sees — accurately — that a Sara presidency will be catastrophic for the clan.

There is only one fact that matters in impeachment, a fact so basic it should be engraved on every congressman’s desk. Under the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines, conviction requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate — 16 out of 24 votes. That means only nine senators are needed to acquit Sara.

Seven senators are sure to back Sara: Dante Marcoleta, Imee Marcos, Bong Go, Bato de la Rosa, Robin Padilla, and the two Cayetanos.

Go through the list of the following senators and it would be easy to conclude that at the very least, two of these would back Sara, so there would be a total of nine senators, enough to acquit her: the trio of Chiz Escudero, Jinggoy Estrada and Joel Villanueva, against whom the Marcos-appointed Ombudsman has disclosed he would be filing plunder charges again; Loren Legarda, whose congressman son Leandro has been hurling serious diatribes against the administration; Camille and Mark Villar of the family conglomerate, against whom the Securities and Exchange Commission has filed serious charges of corporate anomalies; the brothers Raffy and Erwin Tulfo, one of whom may be close to the first lady but who are just starting their political careers that could be derailed if they hitch their star to a hated administration; and Win Gatchalian, who has, for a controversial business tycoon’s son, surprisingly demonstrated a remarkable degree of fairness and level-headedness.

I WAS stunned to read the first of a two-part series bashing the Chinese Embassy here, written by one “Ray Powell” in this paper. While many excellent writers and academics have been bugging the editors — unsuccessfully — to publish their pieces in this prestigious paper, a professional propagandist on the payroll of the US Navy, succeeded in “infiltrating” this newspaper, getting it to publish a two-part piece of baseless trash demonizing not just China but the Chinese Embassy here.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Ji Lingpeng should demand that he be given space equal to that given to the de facto American spokesman to debunk his claims.

Or The Manila Times should demand that Powell or the US Embassy here pay for the space for his two-part piece, which is really the nature of paid “advertorials” of embassies to air their views or publicize their activities. Given his deviousness, it is not beyond Powell to lie to his superiors that he paid The Manila Times editors a lot of dollars to get his piece published, and demand reimbursement.

OMBUDSMAN Jesus Crispin Remulla’s announcement that he is preparing plunder charges against former House speaker Martin Romualdez and former Senate president Francis Escudero is all but revolutionary in strengthening our justice system — if it is pursued of course.

For the first time ever, a former Senate president and a former speaker of the House will be charged for stealing huge amounts of public funds in the same scam and thrown in jail until their cases are decided upon, which could take years.

When the charges are actually filed in the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court, it will eclipse in significance the plunder charges against former president Joseph Estrada and his senator son Jinggoy in 2001.

TWO news clips during the Holy Week gave me goosebumps:

– US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in a news briefing at the Pentagon, prayed for US troops in the region. “May God watch over all of them each day and each night. May His almighty and eternal arms of providence stretch over them and protect them and bring them peace in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.” Just the other day, he asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

– As a Khorramshahr long-range missile lifts off to kill people in Tel Aviv, there is shouting in the background, “Allahu Akbar! This is an Arabic phrase meaning “Allah is the Greatest” — He will kill Muslims’ enemies.

In a similar vein, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often invoked biblical imagery to justify his nation’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, at one time telling his soldiers to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you’ — a reference to a biblical passage in which Israel is commanded to destroy its enemy without mercy.

It is ironic that the barbaric invasion of Iran by two nations whose religions see the Old Testament as the word of God himself coincided with the Holy Week, during which Christianity re-indoctrinates its faithful to worship the God of Love, and adhere to the ancient but preposterous idea of a single man-God saving billions and billions of humanity dead and living today or in the future.

Religion is often presented as humanity’s moral foundation, the source of compassion, charity and meaning. That is only half the story. The other half, less comfortably acknowledged, is that religion has also been one of the most effective instruments of the ruling class for legitimizing power and exploitation of the masses, and for having its people kill other people in wars, for reasons they cannot comprehend, for benefits they will not enjoy.

Wars require religions in order to persuade ordinary men to kill strangers and to risk dying themselves. Across history, religion has repeatedly supplied that belief. It has not usually been the root cause of war, but it has consistently made wars easier to fight, easier to justify, and harder to question.

FOR decades, the Philippine state has quietly relied on a single, brutally simple formula: When the domestic economy cannot provide jobs, export the worker and import the dollar. This policy has never been formally declared as doctrine, but it has functioned as one. It has kept unemployment politically manageable, propped up consumption and stabilized the peso. It has also allowed successive administrations to avoid the far more difficult task of building a productive domestic economy.

That entire structure is now at risk, not because of internal reform or policy shift, but because of a war thousands of kilometers away.

The Iran conflict is widely discussed in terms of oil prices and geopolitical escalation. What is barely acknowledged, however, is its potential to undermine the very foundation of the Philippine economic model: the dependence on overseas Filipino workers, particularly in the Gulf.

The numbers are stark. The Philippines deploys roughly 2.3 to 2.5 million OFWs in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — primarily in Saudi Arabia (about 900,000), the United Arab Emirates (around 600,000), Kuwait (250,000), Qatar (200,000), and the rest in Oman and Bahrain. Taken together, around 55 to 60 percent of all OFWs are concentrated in these six countries alone.

THE silver lining in the US and Israel’s barbaric, unprovoked war against Iran could be that the US would be severely wounded by this misadventure, which involves the Strait of Hormuz’s critical role in the world economy. This would signal the decline of the US empire that has ruled the world since the end of World War II to usher in a new era of liberation of humanity from this scourge.

It would be the equivalent of the defeat of the then mighty British Empire by the Egyptians in 1956, which involved another choke point of global oil supply and commerce, the Suez Canal.

Thus did distinguished scholar Alfred McCoy argue in an article posted in several news and opinion sites, among them in the Fair Observer, titled “Imperial Decline in the Strait of Hormuz: The Iran War as America’s Very Own Suez Crisis.”

McCoy is an influential contemporary scholar of US empire, state power and Philippine political history. A history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, McCoy has spent decades examining how colonial rule, elite networks and global geopolitics shape modern states.

IN a move as shocking as it is anomalous, Solicitor General Marlene Berberabe asked the Supreme Court on March 6 to reverse the 2020 conviction by the Manila Regional Trial Court — affirmed unanimously by the three-man Court of Appeals in 2022 — of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa for cyberlibel in a suit filed by a businessman in 2017.

Ressa and her accomplice, Reynaldo Santos Jr., were found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of the crime of cyberlibel, ordered jailed for six months to six years and to pay the complainant P400,000. The two, however, asked the Supreme Court in July 2022 to reverse the courts’ conviction. Both are out on bail.

SolGen Berberabe shocked the legal community when she asked the court to acquit Ressa, claiming the one-year prescription for the crime had lapsed, pointing to an October 2023 decision by the Supreme Court. She conveniently ignored an earlier 2018 court ruling in Tolentino v. People (GR 24031, Aug. 6, 2018) that the prescription period is 15 years.