THE EDSA traffic is becoming more horrendous each day, and in this day and age of technology and rationality, one would assume that government could use all its resources and sovereign power to solve a big obstacle to the country’s economic growth and relieve its citizens of their daily hell.

The traffic is a veritable crisis, and it is long past the time for debating that it isn’t. Metropolitan Manila consists of 16 cities and one municipality. Even if EDSA traverses only six cities (Caloocan, Quezon, San Juan, Mandaluyong, Makati and Pasay), any solution to the avenue’s gridlocks would have to involve nearly all of Metro Manila’s 17 local governments, all of which have the authority to pass “ordinances” that tend to hinder efforts to solve this huge problem.

One solution, for example, would involve opening up the posh “villages” — parts of Forbes, San Lorenzo, Wack Wack and Greenhills, among others — but their rich residents would certainly get the courts to stop it.

THAT the country won in the ruling of an arbitral panel in our suit against China over our disputes in the South China Sea region has been a colossal deception foisted on our people.

As a fabrication, it is rivaled only by the huge lie in the first years of the Yellow regime of Aquino 3rd, that since he is the son of the “saint of democracy,” he would create a graft-free and progressive nation.

If President Duterte had pursued the arbitral ruling, it would have been the very worst impact on our nation of the Aquino regime, even triggering an economic crisis.

EVEN President Duterte’s harshest critics would, I think, concede that he has emerged as the country’s strongest president ever, at par with Ferdinand Marcos in the first years of his strongman rule.

By “strong,” I borrow the political scientists’ definition of a strong state.

First, Duterte is a strong leader because he is independent from the economic elite that in most cases in our past influenced Philippine presidents for their own gain or even led them by the nose. This is shown by the fact that Duterte’s guns have been trained on what he himself names as “oligarchs.” He has moved or has started to move against the Rufino-Prieto clan that owns the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Lopezes of the ABS-CBN television network. He took on both Lucio Tan, for Philippine Airlines’s P6-billion unpaid fees to government, and Mighty Corp., the competitor of Tan’s Fortune Tobacco, for its P30-billion tax liabilities.

LAWYER Jude Sabio last week revealed that it was former senator Antonio Trillanes 4th who was the brains behind the so-called “Totoong Narcolist” videos, spread through social media in April that claimed President Duterte and his children were involved with illegal drug syndicates.

Last May, Peter Joemel Advincula, the narrator in the videos who called himself “Bikoy,” surrendered to authorities and disclosed that the allegations in the video were all lies and that it was a fabrication of Trillanes intended to sway voters to vote for the opposition Senate candidates in the elections early that month. Trillanes denied the accusation in a privilege speech at the Senate.

Last week, Advincula’s disclosure was supported by Sabio, who has been viewed as one of Trillanes’ closest conspirators in the latter’s anti-Duterte campaign. He was the lawyer for Edgar Matobato who had claimed to have been with the Davao “death squads” when Duterte was the city mayor. He also filed a case last April against Duterte and several of his officials at the International Court of Justice, accusing them of mass murder in their war against illegal drugs.

Second part of a series
IN the second case* where we shot ourselves in the foot in the arbitration case against China brought by President Benigno Aquino 3rd and his Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, the tribunal in effect ruled that we can’t have our Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), since this would violate provisions of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos).

The episode would be really hilarious if not for its very serious impact on our Republic’s territory. The bungling duo thought they could force China out of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) by filing the arbitration case, invoking the Unclos. Instead, one consequence is that if we comply with the arbitral ruling, we’d have to give up our KIG. And we are the only ones who have to comply with it, as China refused to recognize the tribunal, and its ruling doesn’t apply to any other nation.

The KIG is the only addition to our territory since the 1898 Treaty of Paris (by which Spain sold us to the US) established the archipelago’s boundaries. It was Marcos, through his Presidential Decree (PD) 1596 in 1978, who annexed a hexagonal territory covering most of the Spratly islands — which China and Vietnam had claimed several decades earlier. Other than Bajo de Masinloc, the KIG is the only thing really that has involved us in the South China Sea territorial dispute.

THE silver lining in the dark cloud that was the near-release of the rapist-murderer, former Calauan mayor Antonio Sanchez, is that the episode is a huge argument for the restoration of the death penalty.

How much more heinous can a crime be than that of Sanchez — a powerful and rich jueteng lord — who for a night’s entertainment raped the 19-year-old Eileen Sarmenta, then had his bodyguards also violate her, and ordered them to shoot her dead — in her face, as it turned out. His bodyguards followed Sanchez’s sadistic ethos, and tortured Sarmenta’s companion, Allan Gomez, before shooting him in the head.

A civilized society must have such a gruesome crime be punished with the severest form of penalty, depriving the perpetrator of his life. Sanchez’s release was under a law passed during former president Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administration, and apparently — to be frank, I’m not sure — would have occurred if not for the public outrage over it. (more…)