THIS is really quite amazing. The Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court in February 2017 ordered Sen. Leila de Lima arrested and detained on drug-trafficking charges, with several witnesses fingering her.

Yet as a senator, de Lima has received her full salary and benefits, and spent everything allowed a fully functioning senator since 2017. But other than incessantly ranting against President Rodrigo Duterte and other government agencies on her Facebook account, have you heard any real output from her, a good research study or a bill that became law, even if this were done by her staff, and simply attributed to her?

The P400 million is based on the Senate’s recent report of amounts paid to and expenses for each senator from January to December 2019. For that year, de Lima’s salaries and benefits as well as those of her staff, and other expenses for her office totaled P107 million.

THIRTY-five years after EDSA 1, only the Yellow Cultists, I-was-there-behind-the-scenes people and those who amassed wealth as part of the two Aquino governments cling to the myth of a glorious People Power in which Light overcame Dark, Democracy defeated Dictatorship.

Rather, there is a consensus that includes even those who had been Corazon “Cory’ Aquino’s true believers, that EDSA 1 merely restored the pre-Marcos oligarchy-ruled republic. It is amazing indeed — and a testament to the power of propaganda — that anything other than that could be expected: the Lopez clan that has been the archetype of the Philippine oligarchy was Cory Aquino’s most visible and powerful supporter. And just a few months after EDSA, it would reopen its old powerful weapons, the Manila Chronicle and ABS-CBN, and retake its old family jewel, Meralco.

The People Power myth wouldn’t have lasted a decade if not for the fact that that there were two more Yellow presidents, the opportunistic Fidel Ramos and Cory’s son, the vacuous Benigno Aquino 3rd. Both won in the country’s two most contested elections.

Second of 3 parts
THIS is a most despicable thing that a Filipino in a position of power has done to justify the violation of the Constitution and to surrender our sovereignty to a foreign superpower.

In the span of two years, the Supreme Court deliberated on several petitions filed in 2014 asking the high court to declare the Aquino 3rd administration’s Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) unconstitutional.

The agreement was signed April 28, 2014, a condition for US President Barack Obama’s visit to the Philippines. He arrived hours after the treaty was inked. Indeed, the EDCA meant a restoration of US military bases, which the 1987 Constitution categorically required to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. EDCA authorizes the US to stockpile their war materiel and station its combat for-deployment troops in five of our military camps, whenever they wish so.

The Supreme Court led by Aquino 3rd’s chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno dragged its feet for two years in making a ruling. When it finally had to decide, then Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, who has been the most strident Yellow propagandist against China, convinced his colleagues to turn a blind eye to its obvious constitutional requirement of having the Senate ratify it.

He scared the justices out of their wits: if they invalidate the EDCA, China would very soon be grabbing all of our territories in the Spratlys.

First of 2 parts
PRESIDENT Duterte should forget about the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), and whether he should abrogate or charge the Americans for it. He should instead junk the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), the new form, and a much more cost-effective way for the United States to have its military bases back in the Philippines. EDCA was the end-product of the Yellows’ Sinophobia, which the US helped whip up to a frenzy that there was little resistance to it when it was instituted in 2014.

The VFA merely establishes the legal framework governing the US military when they are here for joint exercises with the Philippine military, which is allowed under the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951. For instance, the US marine convicted of murder and rape was imprisoned in a special military facility approved by the Americans and not in the national penitentiary, which the VFA allowed.

On the other hand, the EDCA practically restored US military basing in the Philippines, with the country’s five military camps to be used by Americans for prepositioning its war materiel and staging ground for its troops going to battle whenever the Americans say they need to do this. EDCA in effect allows the US a cheaper, as-needed military base in the Philippines.

SOME 684 people — mostly Reds, Pinks and Yellows — are listed as petitioners of 37 petitions asking the Supreme Court to rule as unconstitutional the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) of 2020. What do they think Supreme Court decisions are based on, the size of the mob, as was the case in EDSA 1 and 2?

They should heed the recent Supreme Court admonition over the previous Aquino 3rd regime’s ouster of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, achieved largely through a massive propaganda campaign and the bribery of the Senate impeachment jurors: “The Filipino people live, toil and thrive in a democracy, but the rule of law should not stand parallel to the rule of the mob. Toe this line, and the nation may eventually behold the laws that the Courts have forever sworn to uphold, battered and bent.”

Not elected
Even if your mob increases to 6,840 or 68,400, it doesn’t matter to the Supreme Court. Why? Because the justices aren’t elected, and they don’t give a damn what you think of them. They don’t care, unlike a lot of politicians, especially in the Senate, if the Communist Party with its New People’s Army can give them a million, though at-the-point-of-a-gun, votes.

You can’t frighten them with death threats. Most of the Supreme Court judges — unlike the two appointed by President Aquino — have been criminal-court judges. This means they had been eating death threats for breakfast for years from merciless criminals you can’t even imagine.

THE defamation of the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona, as well as the Supreme Court, by a Yellow columnist in her piece the other day (“Misplaced compassion,” MT, Feb. 15, 2020) is one of the most sickening hatchet jobs I’ve read.

We columnists, by definition of our jobs, express our opinions. But we cannot disseminate disinformation, regurgitate allegations proven baseless years ago, and disguise these as our opinions. That kind of garbage should not have a place in a decent, fair newspaper.

The Supreme Court in its January 12 decision awarded Corona’s retirement benefits to his widow Cristina – four years after his death in 2014. The unanimous decision also practically vindicated Corona — who was judged by the Senate sitting as an impeachment court, guilty for filing an incomplete statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) — by declaring: “The SALN is a tool for public transparency, never a weapon for political vendetta.” 

It alluded to President Aquino 3^rd and his Yellow cult’s massive propaganda campaign against Corona in 2012 to remove him as chief justice: “The Filipino people live, toil, and thrive in a democracy, but the rule of law should not stand parallel to the rule of the mob.”

Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr., Southern Luzon Command chief and spokesman of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, is a hero. He is risking his life for the nation as the most powerful critic of the communist insurgency and he is starting to open the eyes of Filipinos to this grave threat to our nation’s stability, and even democratic ideals.

There hasn’t really been anybody — except for President Duterte — who has been so bold as to openly challenge the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and expose it as now the gravest threat to the nation, and reveal to the public its devious tricks and witting or unwitting mouthpieces.

General Parlade is a hero
Can you tell me if anybody, even during martial law (and except for President Ferdinand Marcos, that is) who has been as vocal as Parlade in openly battling the CPP?

Parlade knows of course that he is risking his life. Military men retire at 56, which is just a few years away for him. That means either Parlade would have to spend a fortune for bodyguards if the CPP, as is likely, were to “make a sample” of him, puts him in its version of a permanent fatwah or “enemies-of-the-people” list.

THE following article, written by a political scientist specializing in Asean and Chinese studies, Anna Rosario Malindog-Uy, was posted on the website Asean Post on February 17, with the title “Philippine-China Relations Under Siege.”

I took the liberty of deleting a few sentences so it would fit in this column’s space, and rearranged the topics she discussed to put first her discussion on the new Chinese law on its coast guard’s authority on the use of force. (FYI, the coast guard’s official name is “Chinese People’s Armed Police Force Coast Guard Corps.”) I didn’t add a single word to her article.

Former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio recently wrote two frothing-at-the-mouth columns over this law, one of which claimed it has made the superpower “A grave threat to world peace.” The other was a brazenly sinophobic column titled “China unleashes another deadly virus,” which indicates he is a true believer of Trump and his ignorant, racist followers’ view that Covid-19 was a Chinese conspiracy against America, and that its new coast guard law “this time is a legal virus.” Not even mercenary communist propagandists have gone that low in throwing dirt at China. This demonstrates that Carpio’s writings on our disputes with China are obviously no longer springing from rationality, but, as the Filipino phrase would put it “Iba na.” I intend to find out why the vitriol, put up or not.

The Coast Guard issue is very well addressed in this piece by Malindog-Uy. I dare Carpio to answer her claims. This young researcher shames him.

STUPID, bungling or lying conspirators — you decide.

For all their flag-waving shrieks that China is encroaching on our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and must be fought even to the point of war — as Benigno Aquino 3rd implied in 2011 — these Yellows have used spurious maps of our EEZ and our territorial seas, which in effect even gave away huge swaths of our maritime zone. The maps they disseminated are spurious in that all of them were not issued as official maps by the Philippine government, specifically by the sole mapping agency, the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (Namria). As that authority informed me on January 22 in response to my freedom of information request, it has not and cannot issue maps of our territorial sea and EEZ as it is still “awaiting for the maritime zones bill to become law… which will be its basis in preparing the official map.”

Spurious Map 1: The very first (“Fig. 1” in the book) map that retired Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio — arguably the de facto spokesman of a Sinophobic stance on the South China Sea dispute — presented in his e-book on the controversy was, quite astonishingly, from a mere Wikipedia entry.

First of a series on our messy maritime claims
THE likes of former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio and Aquino 3rd’s bungling former Foreign Affairs secretary Albert del Rosario have been incessantly ranting against China, that it is encroaching on our exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and our “West Philippine Sea” (WPS).

A bit of a problem though: we do not have an EEZ nor a territorial sea — yet. We have not enacted a law indicating these maritime areas. The government agency that has the sole authority to define such areas as provided by law and locate it in official maps says so.

We may not even have a West Philippine Sea, since President Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administrative order giving that name to the waters off the western side of the Philippine archipelago implicitly stipulated that a big part of it is the EEZ, which however really has a phantom existence at this time.

Yes in theory, we have such maritime areas, since we ratified the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos) in 1984, which stipulated that the EEZ “shall not extend beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines.”