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After all this atrocious electoral confusion, let’s push for a national I.D. one time and for all

The last fourth dimension a "National Computerized Identification Reference System" was propounded by one-time President Fidel V. Ramos in his Administrative Lodge No. 308 (this was in Dec 1996), the idea not just made sense – information technology was imperative. Alas, half dozen years after, FVR’s Administrative Order 308 was struck downward by the Supreme Court in a close viii-to-six decision.

Looking at the icky confusion and chicanery which accompanied the May 14 elections, it’south high time the idea of requiring a tamper-proof national I.D. system was resurrected, and this fourth dimension submitted to Congress in a course that contains adequate safeguards against violations of the Constitutional right to privacy.

But last Tuesday, President Arroyo herself complained that her mother, the belatedly Beginning Lady Evangeline Macapagal, had died some years ago (on May 16, 1999, if I recall right), yet, to GMA’s surprise, it was found that the tardily Eva’s name had not been taken off the eligible voters’ listing. This is a state where "ghosts" not simply walk (as in the "Phantom" comics series) but vote, not to mention not-real individuals, and the birds and bees. A national I.D. would constitute, once and for all, who’s an odd bird, similar a flying voter, or who’due south a phantom who’south neither in the telephone directory nor the cemetery.

The original FVR scheme was intended "to provide Filipino citizens and foreign residents with the facility to conveniently transact business organization with basic service and social security providers and other government instrumentalities and to properly and efficiently identify persons seeking basic services on social security and reduce, if not totally eradicate, fraudulent transactions and misrepresentations." (Whew – what a wordy judgement).

Despite the High Court’s ruling penned by Justice Reynato Puno which alleged FVR’s A.O. No. 308 "null and void for existence unconstitutional," a revised, acceptable I.D. program must exist given priority by the next Congress.

What Justice Puno and the seven other Justices who voted with him really found objectionable was that the former A.O. No. 308 involved "a subject field that is not appropriate to be covered past an authoritative lodge" and that, as drafted, the administrative guild would accept given "the regime the power to compile a devastating dossier confronting unsuspecting citizens." What’s of import is that, in his ponencia, Justice Puno alleged that he is not per se against an I.D. for all citizens.

It’s adept that Senate President Aquilino Pimentel Jr. has already openly declared his support for a national I.D. for every Filipino as an effective means to curb balloter fraud. He should, therefore, when the next Congress commences its session, proceed to writer and sponsor the necessary legislation for this. In short, this time let’s make it a law of the land, non a mere "brusque-cut" blazon Executive Guild from Malacañang.

Once once more, I ask those who’ve opposed a national I.D. in the past: What are y'all hiding from? Are you lot ashamed of beingness who you lot are? Is your address not already listed in telephone and cellphone records, income taxation returns, driver’southward licenses, cedulas, and a plethora of other forms and documents?

So, why all the fuss? Those who seek concealment must be upwards to no good.

It’s interesting that The Asian Wall Street Periodical has been carrying more and more than manufactures nearly the Philippines (every bit have ASIAWEEK magazine and Far Eastern Economic REVIEW).

This is mayhap because its editors realize that many of the English language-literate readers in Asia are to be constitute in the Philippines, although, sadly, English is losing ground here every bit rapidly as it’southward being picked up in countries like Japan, China, Vietnam and Malaysia since there they realize its growing importance not only in trade and commerce merely in net and Information technology (Information Technology).

Yesterday, there was a typical forepart-page, two-column story in the AWSJ of a man-interest nature. It was headlined: "For Philippine Town, Repatriated Earnings Pave Route to Riches." The subhead read: "Sums From Overseas Kin Pay for New Homes, Shops."

This is not news to most of us, who’ve long known that our OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) ship home billions of dollars annually to help beacon up our economy in a fourth dimension of distress and vanishing foreign interest and investment. This time, yet, Reporter Robert Frank zeroed in on the town of Pozorrubio in Pangasinan (an Ilocano-speaking municipality on the route to Baguio, if you’ll recollect).

Wrote the announcer: "For hundred of years, this remote farming boondocks fabricated a living by growing sugar cane, rice and coconuts in the Philippine floodplains. Today, information technology has establish a more than mod calling – harvesting coin from its thousands of citizens working overseas.

" ‘Now we’re growing houses,’ smiles Noli Venezuela, the town’s former mayor, walking past a Spanish-fashion mansion in the middle of rice paddies. ‘This one’s endemic by a maid in Hong Kong. Across the street, she’s a nanny in California.’

"Remittance income, or the money sent home by workers living abroad, is apace transforming this town of sixty,000, where one in ten people works overseas many families collect their monthly income from the window of Western Matrimony, a money-wire service. Even every bit economists and academics wage a growing fence over how remittances affect the developing world, the benefits are increasingly clear in towns similar Pozorrubio.

"At that place is a new park in the town foursquare, with fruit trees and Chinese pagodas, compliments of a group of maids, nannies and nurses working in Hong Kong. Workers in Guam funded a new library, and proud Pozorrubians working in the US paid for bus stops, modest roads and a sign for the school.

"A group called the Pozorrubians of Greater Los Angeles recently flew in to bring the hospital a batch of antibiotics and stethoscopes. The town’s main street is overrun with new shops and businesses, thank you to money earned overseas. Lorna Terre worked for v years on an assembly line in Japan, snapping together television plugs, before using her savings to open L.J. Video Rental, which now does a brisk business organisation in titles such every bit ‘Terminator 2’ and ‘Coming to America.’ Downwardly the road, Salcedo’s hardware is selling so much concrete and building supplies for new homes that it had to open up a bigger store.

"Every Sunday,"

Frank writes, "families oversupply into the Ritz-Com Cyberspace Buffet to email their mothers and sons abroad."

" ‘Our trouble is we have more money than we really demand,’ Fatima Costa, director of the town bank, the Rural Bank of Pozorrubio observes. ‘The bank has more than $ii meg in deposits.’ ‘We need more borrowers,’ Ms. Costa says."

Thanks to Robert Frank for this heartwarming slice, which is a mirror of towns all over our scattered archipelago. Our five million Filipinos, nursing loneliness, homesickness, and sometimes heartbreak in the diaspora, laboring in exile all over the planet, send dwelling to their loved ones not just money, only comfort, promise and cheer. It’s both a sad and happy situation. And fascinating, too.

For example, many airlines (not just Prc Pacific, Saudia, Kuwaiti Air, Northwest Airlines, etc., and, of form, Philippine Airlines) have Filipina stewardesses and cabin crew – because ferrying those millions of Pinoys and Pinays, home and abroad, has become big business. We may blench at the feeling that the Philippine passport has somehow been devalued, only there’s a sting of pride, too, when international airline announcements are made in Pilipino or Tagalog.

A wise historian once wrote (her proper noun escapes me at the moment) that nations live in different centuries at the aforementioned time. Every state has its decades of poverty, each i its period in the sun. Empires rise and fall. Where are we now? In the Waiting Room, if you lot ask me. Only, possibly, although nosotros perversely strive to frustrate it at every turn, our "fourth dimension" may exist only around the corner.

There was an era in the United states when Italians were scorned, Irish immigrants had to argue with signs, "No Irish Demand Apply", but since and then they’ve produced the best, the brightest, and the virtually successful in the UsA. (not to mention in the rackets, besides). In that location was a time when the rich had to accept an English butler, an Irish maid, a Japanese gardener, and a Chinese laundryman. And think? In Lolo’s time, prominent Filipino families in Manila employed Chinese amahs – at present, it’s the reverse.

When I was a immature reporter covering Japan in the postwar "Reparations Menstruation", when the Japanese were still poor, nosotros Filipinos were the ones who swaggered upwardly and downward the Ginza and frequented the nightclubs similar Copacabana, Latin Quarter, Queen Bee, and The Mikado.

In Tokyo final week, we went to one of my old haunts, the rowdier East Side of Shinjuku where the entertainment quarter and the havens of the Mizu Shobai ("The Water Globe", as the Japanese telephone call their "pink" entertainment trade) are located. In a cheerful lodge called Shinjuku Manila Order, there were 44 Filipino One thousand.R.O.s (although they’re called by another proper noun), all fetching ladies. They were beautiful, tall, shapely – well-educated and well-mannered. One of them sang on the stage, accompanied by "Kuya Steve", a Filipino musician, with 5-star quality aplomb, which wouldn’t have been out of place on the casino excursion in Las Vegas. She was a knock-out.

What are then many of our prettiest doing in Nihon? Earning a living. If you’re a comely lass, poised and attractive (the type you’ll spot in Makati’southward poshest places), or even a less-than-star-billing starlet, you tin become to Japan and come up home three to iv months later on, about US$ten,000 richer. If you’re fortunate, of grade. Some fall into the hands of the wrong sort, including the criminal Yakuza. It’s a peril of the trade.

No wonder we take 40,000 young and remarkably skillful-looking Filipino women working in Nihon at whatsoever in one case.

When they come home, who knows. One of them may, someday, become Kickoff Lady. Or a company President. Or Mama-san, Numbah One. The ball is round in this crazy, merely never deadening world.

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Source: https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2001/05/23/99342/after-all-awful-electoral-confusion-lets-push-national-id-once-and-all

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