Political suicide

Batas Mauricio

IT is simply unbelievable, and can be considered a political suicide for his Liberal Party and Mar Roxas, his 2016 presidential candidate, for President Aquino to have vetoed the proposed law granting an across the board increase for some two million pensioners of the Social Security System (SSS), citing the probable depletion of SSS funds to pay for the benefits of current members of the agency.

The fact is that, the Filipino people know that the government has so much money which Aquino and his officials could readily tap and use, if they sincerely wanted to improve the living conditions of SSS pensioners whose current monthly pension benefits certainly are no longer enough to keep their bodies and souls together.

Who among us have not heard about hundreds of billions of annual pork barrel allocations for congressmen and senators who are allies of Aquino? Who have not been informed about the hundreds of billions of yearly government intelligence funds which  are spent by many government officials, including Aquino himself, without being held accountable for even a single centavo of them?

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In this age of technological improvement which enables even the most ordinary cellular phones to take photos and video footages of the things that are happening around us, suing and then successfully prosecuting erring drivers of public utility vehicles–taxi drivers, bus and jeepney drivers–have become quite easy tasks.

If the passengers’ phones are capable of recording conversations, then, by all means, the dialogue between the passengers and their drivers should be recorded. As the recording is started, the passengers must announce into their recorders that they are recording the exchange and the conversation. They could simultaneously take photos and footages of what is happening between them and the drivers.

I am aware that many drivers are really criminally minded for one reason or another, and may–or would–attempt to either prevent the recording or taking of photos. When this happens, the passengers must exert all effort to preserve their recordings, video footages and photos, for submission to the Land Transportation Office. If the cellphones are destroyed while they are being used, the passengers must immediately write a short story of what happened and that would be sufficient.

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Businessman Floren Naguit listed down four ways by which a person can maintain good health through 2016 and beyond, and one of them, he said, is by refusing to worry about anything.

I can only agree with him. The fact is, as I have been writing here for quite some time now, there is no benefit that one can get from worrying. If we worry, nothing is changed. The truth is, we even become worse than before we started worrying, for while we are worrying, our blood pressure shoots up and clogs our veins with so much blood.

So much blood in the veins could cause them to rupture, leading to strokes or other debilitating diseases. So, instead of worrying, we must ask God for everything that we need. If we believe that God created everything there is in this world, He has the power to give us what we need. In fact, He can adjust everything—and I mean everything—so that things that looked impossible or difficult at the start become possible or easy to deal with later. Yes, impossible is nothing.

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com