Reconstruction and Recovery

The World Bank says that timely reconstruction will help lessen the impact of super typhoon Yolanda. Before we digest these words, it is also significant to look back into the past.

There was a time in fairly recent past when NBC news anchor Brian Williams sounded like a broken record repeating the words over and over again that: Aviation in the United States of America is dying. This is now true with Philippine air line companies and selected several other businesses in the Philippines right at this very moment.

During the post-Yolanda period, only at least one air line company that very enterprisingly lowered its passenger rates (presumably including for cargo) per seat-mile, notwithstanding that the Philippine government ordered that a number of fees and charges being levied in the aviation sector will be waived, among other behests in order to lessen the burden for victims of the calamity and those that had to fly to ground zero to participate in disaster relief and recovery operations . . . .

Dire is a weak description for the situation that a select number of businesses in the Philippines are in right now. More > >

Proposed revision of Senate Bill for Bohol-Cebu-Negros Rehabilitation

A proposed bill (text shown below) for the reconstruction and recovery of Bohol-Cebu and Negros Oriental that suffered from enormously damaging, killer earthquakes enjoins the government to create the Bohol-Cebu-Negros Reconstruction Commission and to allocate no less than Philippine Pesos Thirty Billion for this and other purposes.

This site proposes the bill to be revised to include all of Visayas but to take care of affected areas only, particularly those provinces in Eastern, Western and Central Visayas affected also by typhoons.

The proposed budgetary allocation be changed from PHP30-Billion to Philippine Pesos One Hundred Fifty Billion (PHP150-B). The law must also be made retroactive.

Any actions respective to the current response to the damage and other effects of calamities such as what is happening now in Tacloban City where thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands are hungry, there is killing, looting, anarchy in the streets, relief is short, power and communications are down, everything has gone haywire, must be charged to the funds of this Commission.

However, the Philippine Legislative Branch must go to work soon and fast. Any waiting on the wings, any slippages as had been done and now being regretted by the Executive Branch, should be avoided. The concerned are admonished to act now for the welfare of the people.