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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (58872)	10/13/1999 1:11:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

I was about to answer this earlier, but the power went out, one of the joys of 3rd world life. Cory Aquino has received a lot of heat over her performance, from both left and right. Some of it is justified. All of it must be weighed against the fact that she inherited a country that was close to being ungovernable, stood as the titular head of a coalition that had splintered irrevocably before she ever sat in the palace, and faced a set of expectations as wildly unrealistic as any that have ever existed. She survived, and passed the country on in a reasonably clean election, which are considerable accomplishments under the circumstances. It might be good to mention here the unseemly haste with which creditor banks and multilateral institutions moved to recover the money which had been lent to some of the least creditworthy borrowers ever to walk the face of the earth (I know I resort to extremes; it was a time of extremes). When over 50% of the national budget is marked off for debt service, the chief executive is not going to have much fun. I mentioned earlier the quandary facing the new finance secretary, who had no choice but to bow before the IMF, go before the people, and announce that the first economic policies of the new democratic government would be to remove all of the subsidies Marcos had placed on basic commodities, to combat the resulting inflation by running interest rates up above 35%, and to honor all debts incurred by Marcos. That won him a lot of friends; he ended up committing suicide, though some still think it was murder. He was an honorable man, his son is a friend. Quiet heroism: he knew what was going to happen before he took the job, and also knew that someone with a credible record had to take it (it was a very short list, and nobody on it wanted the job). We often see soldiers charge in the face of gunfire; how often do we see a prominent and successful businessman commit professional and political - and ultimately personal - suicide for the good of his country? I wander on. If you really want to know what I think of it, I have somewhere on this hard drive a memoir/essay on the uprising and Cory Aquino, written a few years back. If you'd like to read it, PM me an e-mail address and I'll send it. I won't be offended if you don't want to read it; it is a somewhat obscure topic.