IN THE ’70s, Cebu was heroically defiant of Marcos’ dictatorship. By some quirk of fate, it is again proving to be the nemesis of a more modern type of one-man…

Barely six months after President Aquino removed Renato Corona as chief justice, his replacement—the grossly inexperienced Lourdes Sereno who had boasted of “18 years of judicial stability”—created a crisis in the Supreme Court that has dented its integrity as the bastion of the rule of law.

In a move that stunned the Court, Sereno ordered on Nov. 27 the Clerk of Court to issue a notice that declared that the Court en banc ratified her decision to set up a Regional Court Administration in Region 7 and to appoint the deputy clerk of court to head the office. That shocked the magistrates: There was no such decision by the Court to organize the regional office, only to study the proposal. (more…)

Being an ex-smoker, I certainly commiserate with President Benigno Aquino’s failure to free himself from nicotine. But he is the President of the Republic, whose sworn duty is to implement the Constitution, and every law and rule that flow out from that basic law. And illegal cigarette stubs shouldn’t after all be littering the straight path.

Mr. Aquino’s disclosure that he hasn’t stopped smoking raises important questions I hope the spectacularly timid Malacañang Press Corps can ask him. (more…)

Foreign direct investments into the Philippines during President Aquino’s first two years in office have steeply fallen, putting the country only a notch above Cambodia as the least-favored site in East Asia for offshore investors.

The annual average inflow of net foreign direct investments (FDI) under Mr. Aquino amounted to only $1,367 million, compared to the $2,171 million under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s watch from 2005 until June 2010, and the $1,746 million during Joseph Estrada’s years. These figures are from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the World Bank. (more…)

When President Aquino needs to hit his enemies, and make it appear as if the “masses” are doing it, he calls on his fake party-list Akbayan. Aping its boss, when Akbayan needs to badmouth its critics, it calls on its letter-to-the-editor-writing trolls, and in my case recently, on a bogus OFW leader in Greece, one Jose Valencia.

I was hoping that Akbayan would have principled leaders who would explain why its report on contributors to its electoral campaign kitty in 2010 showed a handful of “ruling-class” contributors, mainly  Mr. Aquino’s sisters and cousins and Chinese-Filipino tycoons close to the President. I thought they could explain why a dead man and individuals living in poor neighborhoods could donate as much as P1 million individually for Akbayan. (more…)

Smuggling in the Philippines is at its worst under President Aquino’s administration, with the smuggled value averaging $19.6 billion annually, an explosion from the comparable figures of $3.1 billion and $3.8 billion yearly during the terms of Presidents Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.

In Mr. Aquino’s first two years in office, the value of smuggling totaled $39.2 billion, more than the $35.6 billion during Arroyo’s nine years in office.  (more…)

THE REPORT on financial contributors to Akbayan’s 2010 election kitty is an exposé: President Aquino’s family, supporters, and big businessmen allied to him gave this miniscule group the electoral war chest to win two seats in Congress.

Out of the 115 donors who gave Akbayan’s P110-million campaign funds, only 24 families, groups, or tycoons accounted for 90 percent of its electoral kitty.

Contributing the biggest chunk of P17 million were Mr. Aquino’s sisters Kris (P10 million), Victoria with her husband Richard (P5 million), and Ma. Elena Cruz (P2 million). Mr. Aquino’s Lopa cousins (Christina, Jaime, Rafael, Michael and Anna) contributed P2 million. Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office chair Margarita Juico gave P1 million.

Apparently, since few of Mr. Aquino’s supporters would agree to be put on record as donors to Akbayan, his fund managers had to scramble for names. One “Edgardo Aguas” contributed P500,000. He is the pro-Cojuangco chair of a barangay in Hacienda Luisita, who was initially tipped by Mr. Aquino’s PR people to swear him into office. One Francis Hernando, who gave P1 million to the party, now occupies a key position in the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. as vice president for gaming and licensing.

If one believes Akbayan’s report, Chinese-Filipino tycoons and big-business executives, now believe in the proletarian cause to contribute substantial amounts to this group that professes to be a socialist party. The simpler explanation: They are Mr. Aquino’s financiers who were asked to fund what would be his lynch mob. Among them:

• The  “Discovery” hotel-chain owners—Bansan Choa, Ben Tiu, and Ruben Tiu—gave P15 million.

• The “Belle Corp. group” gave P10 million. Willy Ocier together with Jaime Dichavez controlled Belle when then President Joseph Estrada for a P200-million commission ordered SSS and GSIS to buy its shares at an inflated P2 billion price. Ocier is also president of Pacific Online Systems, the supplier of the PCSO’s lottery terminals. While Ocier is not listed as an Akbayan donor, sources claimed that his contributions totaling P5 million were coursed through his executives such as Belle chief financial officer and Pacific Online director Manuel Gana. Another associate, former Belle president and now GSIS trustee Gregorio Yu, gave P5 million.

• Willibaldo J. Uy, who gave P1 million, is president of Phinma Properties Corp. of the Ramon del Rosario family.

• Johnip Cua, who gave P2 million, was Procter and Gamble Philippines president for several years and director of Macro Asia and Philippine Airlines until Lucio Tan gave up control of these two firms.

• Antonio Moncupa, who gave P2 million, was a cadre during martial law of Akbayan’s archenemy, the Maoist Communist Party. Moncupa changed careers to eventually become president of East West Bank, controlled by the Gotianun family. He claimed, though, that his contribution was “personal” and that the Gotianuns had nothing to do with it. Kris Aquino in March was named main brand endorser for the Gotianuns’ Filinvest Properties.

• Antonio Samson, who gave P2 million, has been an executive since the 1980s of Mr. Aquino’s cousin Antonio Cojuangco.

Some of Akbayan’s donors can even be fictitious to conceal more funding from Mr. Aquino’s camp, which would be perjury and a matter for the Comelec to investigate. One Antonio Correa donated P2.5 million, even if his residence is a decrepit house in “6 Bulusan St., Mandaluyong.” Joel Rocamora (now National Anti-Poverty Commission head) gave P1 million on the same day that Akbayan got P1 million from a “Princess Costales” who lives in a lower middle class neighborhood in Biñan, Laguna. The only information I found regarding one “Efren Berioso” who gave P1 million was that he was a Samar barangay official who died in 2011.

We belabor the point. Akbayan is a small association of mostly armchair revolutionaries who had been living off donations from leftist European NGOs. They are skilled in media work, though, with Walden Bello for instance being the only congressman to have a regular opinion column in the Internet edition of this paper. The marginalized sector Akbayan represents consists merely of its leaders who defected from the Maoist party which marginalized them out of the Left mainstream.

There is no way Akbayan could have raised P110 million on its own. Bayan Muna, whose mass base is that of the nationwide 44-year-old New People’s Army, could raise only P1.3 million.  Akbayan spent P100 million or nearly all of its Aquino-source funds for expensive TV advertising, an amount no other “party-list” could ever dream of having, thereby assuring its victory.

No wonder that rather than pursuing a socialist agenda, Akbayan has been stretching its very thin resources to be always at the lead of Mr. Aquino’s lynch mob against President Arroyo, former Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, and Chief Justice Renato Corona. Why would a tiny “socialist” party spend its energies against such persons, against whom the entire apparatus of government has already been thrown?

They’ve been paid that role, as the lynch mob to falsely portray in media that the “masses” support Mr. Aquino in his witch-hunts. Akbayan even shamelessly uses cheap agitprop tricks of having old women and children at the forefront of their Aquino-supported demonstrations.
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Rather than a legacy of peace, President Aquino’s pact with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front contained in the “Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro” will be his curse on the nation. The consequences of the pact, renewed violence in Mindanao and even terrorist attacks in urban centers, will outlive his term, and will be one of the biggest headaches of the next president.

We have to disabuse ourselves of the naive, sappy “give-peace-a-chance” mentality that peace accords always lead to the silencing of guns. From Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that led to the fall of Saigon, to the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War but led to the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, ill-conceived peace pacts in the world’s history have often led to greater hostilities. Violence after failed peace pacts intensifies as the parties claim that they were betrayed, infuriating their fighters to fierceness. (more…)

Read the actual document itself, not just the mawkish “peace-is-at-hand” articles, and you will see that the “Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro” President Aquino yielded to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is clearly a roadmap for the republic’s dismemberment.

No wonder the Moro insurgents are ecstatic: The pact calls for the creation of an MILF-controlled state within a state—precisely its main aim in the past decades. Bannered by the Islamic invocation “In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” the document even reads not as a pact between a sovereign secular state and a rebel group but as an MILF manifesto. (more…)

The charges against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo involving Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office funds represent the most ruthless move of President Benigno Aquino III to persecute his predecessor, one that brazenly mocks our justice system.

Given that Mrs. Arroyo’s health has deteriorated drastically in the past months that an attending doctor diagnosed her condition as life-threatening, the arrest warrant recently issued against her points to a diabolical plot: a murderous one. Have we come to this? (more…)