Pat Really

Sickest man of Asia EYES WIDE OPEN - Iris Gonzales And there it goes – the Philippines under Marcos 2.0 is again facing one of its most challenging periods, just a few nightmares away from the crisis that hounded the first Marcos regime or the pandemic era. It seems we aren’t just back to being the Sick Man of Asia. We are even sicker than before, afflicted by a malaise that has crippled this nation of 117 million, no thanks to corruption, the incompetence of our leaders and dirty politics. Our third quarter growth says it all: the economy grew by just 2.1 percent, even slower than the revised 2.4 percent in the second quarter and the four percent recorded a year earlier. This brought growth for the first nine months to 2.5 percent. And yet the numbers only confirm what our people have long been grappling with – an extremely difficult economic tide. tinyurl.com/7yxn5v8f