Here and There
Ace up JDV’s sleeve: cha-cha
By Gerry Garcia
ONE can’t help being amazed at the overwhelming number of motorized trikes (motorcycles) on the road today. Private motorists in the province (as elsewhere most probably) often find themselves harassed left and right by these bike riders zooming in and out of lanes to pass or overtake them. And most of these dare-devil drivers, (including women!) are not wearing helmets — a requisite which should be as legally imperative as the driver’s license. Is it here?
There have been deaths, reported and unreported, resulting from these wanton violations. Especially in crowded urban communities, like Metro Manila. But these demons on the saddle have not learned a lesson as they continue to believe every open highway is a race-track.
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It’s about time authorities got wise to what’s happening on the road with the invasion of this 2-wheeled mosquito fleet… and built wider roads with special outmost lanes intended for bike users. And also to broaden our narrow primitive highways, both national and provincial.
And for god’s sake, stop the farmers from making our highways a multi-purpose facility, especially here in the province. They’ve been spreading rice grains to dry on half of the road, including protruding nails!
It also seems the recent warning issued against tricycles without rear lights travelling the open roads at night . . . has fallen on deaf ears. Private motorists, like us, often fail to see the unlighted tail-end of the trike ahead, especially against the bright headlight of an incoming vehicle.
It would be wise if the LTO also added headlight testing as a pre-registration requirement besides smoke-testing. Seems most vehicles plying the road at night-time have no dimming system or their drivers are heedless to the point they just don’t give a damn about what would happen if both motorists coming from opposite directions dared each other to switch to dim light first.
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We’ve often been asked, by the way, why we often write about Joe de Venecia as if he was the only guy in Congress who could bring home the bacon.
Up close, we always see something big in little JDV, he being a kababayan, formerly one of the boys in media, local and national.
First, who among congressmen in the past and present was able to conceive and initiate a program of overseas employment that is now bringing in close to $10 billion in remittances yearly to the country? None but little Joe.
As a young diplomat posted in Vietnam in the late 60s, the rarely known real JDV conceived and implemented the dollar-remittance program for overseas Filipino workers. For which he was granted award by the Central Bank.
Earlier his pioneering ventures in the Middle East and Africa led to the employment of millions of Filipinos, doctors, nurses, domestic helpers, care-givers and other professional technicians.
Joe was also the principal author of the now well known Built-Operate-Transfer Law which has saved multi-millions for the country in construction costs and has become, in fact, an example for other developing nations to emulate.
And last but not least, who among the lawmakers in the post-martial law era, has served as Speaker of the House for the fourth consecutive time?
Besides being national president of the ruling Lakas-CMD party, Joe is also vice-president of Centrist Democratic International Party comprised by representatives from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
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What could be the ace up the sleeves of Big Little JDV is his current drive to replace our traditional but hopeless presidential bicameral government with a federal unicameral parliament — the kind that had become cause for our Southeast Asian neighbors, like Singapore, to become newly industrialized countries, several notches above The Third World level to which our RP unfortunately has been tied for decades. Unfortunately too, because of understandable Senate intransigence, the fight for basic government system reform will be hard and troublesome.
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