Political parties, candidates, and other election stakeholders worried at how credible the 2013 mid-term polls will be should take a second look at the preparations being made. Many of them will be surprised to know – or perhaps not at all – at the way election preparations are being botched by Smartmatic and how the whole exercise has become yet again a money-making business.

If the country’s elite and traditional politicians had their way, the Party-list system is an easier route to take to increase their dominance in the House of Representatives. In the present 15th Congress, 51 of the Party-list congressmen are millionaires or multi-millionaires while more than 10 percent come from political clans. Since the first 1998 elections for Party-list, this “social justice tool” which was envisioned to ensure the representation in Congress of marginalized sectors has been increasingly taken over by the elite.

Aquino III officials are all ecstatic over the latest Transparency International (TI) report showing a slight improvement in the Philippines’ corruption perception index (CPI) from 129th last year to 105th out of 176 countries this year. The country is still one of the most corrupt countries in the world - it scored 34 on a scale of zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean) and in relative terms moved up from No. 7 out of 10 to No. 5 in Southeast Asia overtaking Indonesia (118th) and Vietnam (124th).

SINGAPORE, December 19, 2012 - Economies of developing East Asia and Pacific remained resilient despite the lackluster performance of the global economy. The World Bank’s latest East Asia and Pacific Economic Update released today, projects the region will grow at 7.5 percent in 2012, lower than the 8.3 percent registered in 2011, but set to recover to 7.9 percent in 2013.