Secretary Ramon Lopez of the Department of Trade and Industry is among the hardest working Cabinet members we have today. Under his purview is the unenviable task of attracting foreign investments, shepherding local industries to global competitiveness, creating international trade opportunities and protecting local consumers from unfair trade practices, among many others.

There was already a third telecommunications company “telco” to the Globe Telecom and Smart Telecom “duopoly.” In August 2010, San Miguel Corp. (SMC) bought Bell Telecommunications Philippines, Inc. (BellTel) and set up Vega Telecoms, to challenge the emerging duopoly of Globe and Smart (philstar.com, Aug. 17, 2010).

ROUTINE is defined as “a usual fixed way of doing things,” which is often how life is lived. T.S. Eliot describes routine too -- “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” The felt absence of routine may rank next only to the loss of regular income for a retiring executive. So used is he to checking his schedule of the day that a completely blank calendar is sure to throw him off.

Unbeknownst to many Filipinos, two quite significant developments in the academic world happened this month. One was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings before the US Senate in relation to his appointment as Supreme Court justice, which revealed the deep leftist bias that many law schools have (including Kavanaugh’s own alma mater, Yale).

A “nuisance candidate,” to summarize what Section 69 of the Omnibus Election Code says, is someone who files a certificate of candidacy (CoC) with the intention of mocking the electoral process or putting it in disrepute; whose name is similar to that of other registered candidates and whom the electorate can therefore mistake for him or her; or who has no real intention to run for the office for which he or she filed a CoC.

STEPHEN Sondheim’s eponymous song from his musical A Little Night Music is good background music for the 2019 elections which just kicked off with the filing of the CoCs. Photos of known personalities on their way to the registration desk, accompanied by families, well-known predecessors themselves are front-page stuff.

THE discourse around fintech is generally future-focused, including in the Philippines. Founders will discuss how their solutions will change their particular sub-sector of fintech -- be it remittances or mobile payments -- while journalists will opine how these technologies will upend entire industries. Our collective gaze, in short, is firmly fixed toward the horizon ahead.

Please allow me to share with you a recent report by Moody’s Analytics, which I believe is very relevant particularly to those who are very concerned with the ongoing trade war between the United States and China. Essentially, Moody’s Analytics noted that “US trade policy has the potential to do more harm than good for US manufacturing and the broader economy, particularly if more protectionist policies are implemented by the US or if its trading partners retaliate.”

I attended the Managing and Teaching Business Ethics conference at Lassalle-Haus, Bad Schönbrunn, Canton of Zug, Switzerland, from May 13 to 16, 2018. The conference aimed to strengthen both the theoretical discourse and the practice of corporate ethics. This conference is year two of a three-year event. The first was held here in the Philippines for the Asia-Pacific Region, and was hosted by Ateneo de Manila University. This year’s conference was hosted by Lassalle-Haus for the European and African region, and next year’s event will be at Sta. Clara University, California, for the Americas.

Yesterday, a lecture on “Capitalism and inclusion under weak institutions” was delivered by national scientist Dr. Raul Fabella, my former professor at UP School of Economics and fellow columnist here in BusinessWorld. Another columnist Romy Bernardo mentioned the lecture in his column here last Monday.

FOR THE PAST few days, we have seen once again the spectacle of candidates filing their candidacy for elective posts in the 2019 mid-term elections. The faces and surnames of most of the serious candidates are familiar to us. This spectacle shows the same people who keep on coming back for reelection, including a few of them who had been indicted for misuse of money. It also made manifest the recycling of family members into elective posts: son or daughter in place of a parent or vice versa; a spouse for the other spouse; a sibling in place of another sibling; several members of the family running simultaneously for elective posts. And the most shameful of all: close relatives running for No. 1 and No. 2 positions in the same political jurisdiction.

Political contestation is one of the major components of a democratic setup. It involves challenging the position of incumbent and outgoing leaders of government at the national, congressional, and local levels. In particular, electoral contestation has been recognized as the regular form of political contest and has been recognized to represent electoral democracy.