Congress has the duty to investigate this colossal boo-boo
I WAS astonished at the gall, and hypocrisy, of former President Benigno Aquino 3rd, when he recently admonished President Duterte to be transparent in his dealings with China.

Aquino will go down in history as the first, and hopefully the last, president to preside over the loss of territory: Bajo de Masinloc, also known as Panatag or Scarborough, Shoal, in June 2012.

Yet Aquino and his official directly responsible for the loss, his foreign affairs secretary Alberto del Rosario, have not explained exactly how they lost Panatag to China. It is not just an academic exercise for the truth on this matter to be ferreted out. The details of Aquino and del Rosario’s colossal boo-boo, will enable our nation to see clearly what our foreign-policy stance should be over the South China Sea territorial dispute.

I have written a number of articles on what led to Aquino and del Rosario’s loss of Panatag, all of which have been confirmed by unbiased reports abroad, a summary of which is as follows:

In April 2012 vessels of the Philippine Coast Guard and the Bureau of Fisheries Aquatic Resources arrested Chinese fishermen in the shoal’s lagoon, alleging they were catching endangered fish. When a China Maritime Surveillance t(CMS) vessel — a civilian ship — arrived to prevent the arrest, Aquino deployed the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, the Philippine Navy’s biggest warship, which had been donated to us by the US a year earlier.

Yellow media reported our ships left Panatag due to typhoon mid-June, when they actually left June 3 Trillanes alleged, upon Del Rosario’s orders.

However, the very next day, Aquino ordered the warship out, informed that oops! he had just militarized the squabble. Three CMS ships with about 50 small fishermen’s dinghies enter the shoal and block the Coast Guard and BFAR vessels, which had of course released the Chinese they had arrested.  (more…)

IF the Philippine presidents’ State of the Nation Address (SONA) is of any use to us, it is as a marker when we pause to assess: “How is this president doing?”

President Duterte’s aura in his SONA the other day was of supreme confidence, even as he uncharacteristically stuck to reading his prepared speech, in a few instances apparently resisting the temptation to move to his default attitude, which is to say what he feels at the moment, no matter who his audience is.

The Liberal Party and the Yellow Cult are in retreat, with its head, former President Benigno Aquino 3rd, so lacking in confidence he again refused to attend the event, yet saying nothing about it — probably deathly afraid that any criticism of Duterte from him now would accelerate the criminal charges being brought against him, foremost of which is the colossal Dengvaxia scam that has claimed more than 70 children’s lives so far.

The party’s president Sen. Francis Pangilinan was dressed up as some unwashed farmer among the demonstrators that included the Southern Tagalog mass base of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which the CPP in desperation had ordered fully mobilized for the anti-SONA rally. As with Pangilinan, the rallyists hardly paid any attention to the other anti-Duterte senator, Antonio Trillanes 4th, coming to join them, and simply tolerated these opportunistic politicians.

The media may have gotten tired of them and their silly tirades, but hardly anything was heard of the other Liberal Party stalwarts on what they thought of Duterte’s SONA.

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TO my mind, it is one of President Aquino’s biggest crimes against the nation, because of the misery and adverse economic impact caused by the yearly flooding of metropolitan Manila, for which he is really to blame. Blood is even on Aquino’s hands because of the deaths—over a hundred during this rainy season so far—due to leptospirosis, an infection caused by a type of bacteria found in the urine of rats and other vermin spread by floodwaters.

Aquino’s crime is nearly forgotten now, for which he has not been made accountable, but of which I am reminded with the onset of the rainy season each year when floods make metropolitan Manila a hell for many Filipinos.

Prodded by the devastation of two typhoons hitting the country in the space of a few days in October 2009, then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo rushed a project to address the flooding in the metropolis, called the Laguna Lake Rehabilitation Project.

Estimated to cost P19 billion, the project proposed to dredge the Laguna Lake so that it could contain more of the rainwater falling on the metropolis. The project would have also dredged the garbage and silt in, and deepened the 7-kilometer Napindan Channel in Taytay so it could better and more quickly draw floodwaters away from the metropolis to the lake.

The Philippine government practically didn’t even need to put up money up front to fund the project as it was to be financed by a P12-billion loan from the Belgians’ BNP Paribas Fortis bank, with remaining P7 billion to be funded by a grant from the Belgian government — the biggest development aid it would have given the country ever.  (more…)

WHILE the Social Weather Stations downplayed this particular survey’s results, and didn’t even issue its usual press release on it, its December 2017 poll found substantial support for a revolutionary government, if ever President Duterte were to declare one.

Asked whether they would “agree or “disagree” in case Duterte proclaims a revolutionary government, 31 percent of the SWS respondents replied in the affirmative, while 39 percent disagreed. Significant is the fact that 30 percent responded that they were undecided.

The 8 percentage points difference is small, and could be easily closed, if one considers that in a revolutionary government, the state would monopolize media, so that it would likely be able to convince much of that 30 percent undecided to support the revolutionary government.  (more…)

IF they have any decency left in their hearts, and if they truly care about human rights in this country, Commission on Human Rights chairman Jose (“Chito”) Gascon should resign immediately, together with the body’s three commissioners who like him are of the Yellow Cult.

All appointed by then President Aquino 3rd in July 2015, these are:

• Roberto Cadiz, one of the private prosecutors against Chief Justice Renato Corona in his impeachment trial in 2012;

• Leah Tanodra-Armamento, one of the three undersecretaries of then Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, now accused of being involved with top drug lords of the country; and

• Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana, the sister of Sen. Aquilino Pimentel 3rd, a staunch ally of former President Aquino before he switched loyalty to President Duterte when he saw the groundswell of support for the Davao City mayor just before the May elections.

If Pimentel really supports Duterte, he should ask his sister Gwendolyn to resign, so the President can appoint somebody independent of the Yellow Cult and bold enough to stop Gascon from making the CHR into an anti-Duterte propaganda machine. I cannot understand why Duterte allowed Pimentel to beome Senate President, when his sister was with the gang painting him as a bloody killer to the world.  (more…)

He should be impeached for betraying the nation

COMMISSION on Human Rights chair Jose Luis (“Chito’) Gascon, who was the Liberal Party’s director general, is one of our highest-paid state government officials. We taxpayers give him P3 million a year, which puts him among the one-half of one percent of Filipinos, including those in the private sector, making at least that much.

Yet he shamelessly paints the blackest picture of the country and of President Duterte, spewing brazen lies in international forums to portray the country as one in which “tens of thousands of Filipinos are being murdered by our government,” and that those opposing the president are persecuted.

I nearly fell off my seat when in a speech at the so-called Oslo Freedom Forum in New York (run by the Human Rights Watch based there), he claimed that the Duterte administration — in just another indication that it is an authoritarian regime silencing its critics — had forced Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales to resign. (The speech was melodramatically titled “Death and the Democratic Deficit in Duterte’s Drug War,” so cheaply using alliteration in the hope that it sticks in his audience’s mind.)

I cannot believe Gascon doesn’t know that Morales is stepping down on July 26 because her seven-year term, mandated by the Constitution, ends on that date.

Duterte’s communication people should be put on high alert. If the Supreme Court as Presidential Electoral Tribunal rules, as I am convinced they would, that Vice President Leni Robredo cheated her way to the post and should be ousted, Gascon will shriek to the world that Duterte removed her from the nation’s second most powerful post.

Devious tack 
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THE crackpot is one Rizza Joy Laurea who appears to be a lesbian since she identifies herself as “Rjhay Gwapito“ in her (his?) Facebook account, and cross-dresses as a male, with an Elvis Presley hairdo.

He — I use from here on the masculine pronoun out of respect for LGBT rights — even posted on his website, a photo of himself dressed as a street toughie making goo-goo eyes at a sexy lady in a bare-midriff top and short shorts.

The National Bureau of Investigation or the National Telecommunications Commission should investigate what he advertises as his “TV Kalinangan.” It isn’t a TV station at all but merely a YouTube “channel” with videos — with total subscribers as of this writing of 5. Yes, five. The BIR or the trade department probably should probe the outfit as it has been asking for donations to be deposited at ”BPI account #2259-0708-75 account name: Rizza Joy Laurea).” Has she registered it as an income-generating firm that should pay taxes?

He obviously isn’t well-off at all. He claims in his Facebook account that he is a marketing manager of a store owned by his brother that sells plaques and trophies, located at Avella Alley, Bago Bantay in Quezon City. He was formerly a sales agent of condos and a “recruitment coordinator” at “After Call Modelling Agency.” (How much more can one hint at with that kind of company name?)

Yet even with his modest means Gwapito from out of the blue last June filed with the Judicial and Bar Council his “vehement opposition” to the nomination as associate justice of Supreme Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez. He followed this up by filing graft allegations against Marquez at the Ombudsman, involving an issue raised and dismissed 15 years ago.  (more…)

Fourth of a series on the South China Sea dispute*

HURT by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s remarks that “President Aquino mismanaged the Philippine sea dispute with China,” former Foreign Secretary Alberto del Rosario blabbered too much in order to hit back.

In an article posted at the website of the pompously named “Stratbase Albert del Rosario Institute for Strategic and International Studies”** —which the billionaire appears to have bankrolled—del Rosario admitted what he and his boss Aquino had hidden from the nation since 2012: We lost Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, just 124 nautical miles off Zambales, because of their huge blunder.

In his article, del Rosario wrote: “During the impasse at Scarborough Shoal with China, we were approached by the US, an honest broker, for both China and the Philippines to agree to a simultaneous withdrawal of ships from the shoal. We therefore agreed. At the appointed time, we withdrew, whereas China did not – in violation of our agreement.”

Del Rosario’s statement, though, is flawed. Neither the US nor China has admitted that there was such an agreement; only talks for such an agreement. Indeed, if there was such an agreement, would the “honest broker” US not have raised a ruckus that China reneged on an agreement it brokered?

Until his piece was posted in his website, del Rosario had not himself claimed that that there was an agreement with China for a simultaneous withdrawal of each country’s vessels from Panatag.

Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th, appointed as back-channel envoy in that crisis, claimed there was no such agreement yet when del Rosario – and not Aquino – ordered the vessels out.  (more…)