By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR.

YOU can’t blame local officials and traders tripping over each other on radio to sing hallelujahs to business tycoon Lucio Tan the morning after his visit to Dagupan City to receive an honorary degree for leadership in entrepreneurship from the Lyceum Northwestern University. In this material world, it’s to each his own kind of praise, to each his own motive.

It’s rather unkind to say this, I know, but frankly a perceptive reading of their universal acclaim for the man who ranks No. 785 in Forbes’ Magazine’s Top 1,000 Billionaires of the world can be summed up this way: Come on, Lucio, pour us part of your billions here in Dagupan and Pangasinan and you, too, will be our God. A rather selfish, if disdainful, motive at paying tribute to a self-made man who made his pile by the sweat of his brow – and some uncanny sense of business timing.
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By DANNY O. SAGUN

NOW we understand why environmental pollution problems cannot be addressed or acted upon expeditiously: Provincial offices of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) cannot act on their own.

As a matter of course, they still have to bring public complaints on pollution problems to the regional office of the Environmental Management Bureau, a line bureau under the DENR, for proper action..
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