THE exposé by US broadcast network CNBC August 19 that Rappler head Maria Ressa had hired a “lobbying juggernaut to take on Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte” has revealed the depths of this woman’s betrayal of her mother country.

I have never heard of major US public relations, lobbying or law firms having been contracted by a Philippine entity, except in the months before and after EDSA 1, when the Yellows and then the Cory-government itself hired Sawyer Miller and seven other lobby and PR firms to undertake a massive campaign to demonize Marcos and his regime. Even the Noynoy Aquino government, because of the cost, couldn’t afford to hire a lobby firm to get the US government’s support during the Scarborough stand-off with China in 2012 and for its arbitration case filed the next year.

Except for Ressa’s case, I have never heard before of a US law, PR or lobby firm being contracted by a Filipino to defend him or her in media, in the courts, or the US Congress in criminal cases committed in the Philippines, to be tried in a Philippine court, and under Philippine laws.

We should be outraged over Ressa’s perfidy. She is spitting on our Constitution and nation by contracting a US firm to do so, one of whose tasks would be to paint our country as a dictatorship suppressing the press, and that there is no rule of law here.

What lobbying in the US Congress will this entail? To convince the US government and Congress to undertake actions to influence our courts, and if that doesn’t succeed, to overthrow the Duterte government?

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EACH year since Benigno Aquino 3rd stepped down from power, the commemoration of his father’s death is becoming more and more pathetic, with the crowd the other day at Ninoy’s tomb not even reaching a hundred.

This holiday really should be canceled, if only to spare Ninoy and his family the storm of insults — e.g., “Happy traitor’s day,” “Ninoy died. So what?” — he gets in social media every August 21.

What demonstrated this year that the Yellow Cult is all but extinct is that no high Liberal Party leader and others who profited from Noynoy’s rule were there: no Franklin Drilon, no Francis Pangilinan, no Edsel Lagman, no Risa Hontiveros. Antonio Trillanes 4th, a Nacionalista was there, to his credit, in gratitude to the Yellows for making him, a bungling coup leader, a senator for 12 years.

TODAY is a special non-working holiday, officially “Ninoy Aquino Day” as decreed by Republic Act 9256, signed into law in February 2004 by President Arroyo, when Speaker Jose de Venecia and Senate President Franklin Drilon headed Congress.

Curiously, the proclamation did not call Aquino a “hero,” nor did it explain why a holiday was being declared in his name. The terse six-paragraph text merely said it was a holiday “in order to commemorate the death anniversary of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino Jr.” That he is a hero is an interpretation from the fact that only two other persons have holidays declared in their honor, Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, who were declared heroes in the same legislation that enacted their holidays.

Peruse the following facts and decide for yourself if you think Aquino is a national hero.

The superstar of the Liberal Party tipped to win against Marcos in the forthcoming 1973 elections, Ninoy was arrested in the hours after martial law was declared. He was found guilty of subversion and murder by a military court in 1977, together with New People’s Army (NPA) leaders “Kumander Dante” and Victor Corpuz.

In May 1980, Ninoy had a life-threatening heart attack. He refused to be put under the knife at the Philippine Heart Center, built by the Marcos regime in 1975, and Asia’s first specialized center for cardiac surgery, endorsed by the best cardiac surgeons in the world.

Aquino claimed that since it was a government hospital, Marcos could easily order its doctors to kill him, under the guise of a botched operation. While that was a slap on the face of the Filipino surgeons at the center, it was a clever move on Aquino’s part, for him to escape the country. Marcos feared that if Aquino died of a heart attack in prison, it would be blamed on him. That would have seriously undermined the semblance of stability that he had built after the 1978 interim Batasan Pambansa elections, in which the opposition leader ran and lost.

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SOCIAL media was abuzz in the past several days, with netizens cheering on as Krizette Laureta Chu, an ordinary but very active and audacious blogger, take on — and shame — the leftist Bayan Muna leader Teodoro Casiño, a three-term party-list congressman, for threatening her with a libel suit.

Casiño claimed that Chu’s posting of a photo in her timeline (that went viral) of him and his son (his face blocked out of course) in a La Salle school activity was a violation of their right to privacy.

Chu had posted the photo to show the hypocrisy of the Left who recruit — brainwash, really — students from schools that cater mostly to the lower middle class to join the New People’s Army and die in some jungle, while their leaders like Casiño put their children in expensive schools like La Salle, cloistered from the real world.

READ on, and I guarantee you’ll be shocked and angry at the sanctimonious European and US NGOs and media’s lies about our country and its President.

A few weeks ago, Global Witness, a UK-based entity purportedly championing issues, came out with its 2018 report, published like an expensive magazine with dramatic color photographs and graphs, and melodramatically titled Enemies of the State.

It claimed that last year, with “30 environmentalists” killed by state forces, the Philippines was the “world’s deadliest country for defenders of their land or the environment.” Global Witness is mainly funded by ideological imperialists, the tycoons George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The two, through North Base Media and Omidyar Network, have also have been the main foreign investors in the stridently anti-Duterte website rappler.com.

Ours is the deadliest country, the report claimed, since Brazil — the country notorious for the killing of those resisting logging by businesses of its Amazon rainforest — had only 20 such deaths, Columbia 24, and India 23.

Western and local Yellow media bannered the claims, without taking an iota of effort to validate them. The New York Times even had a brutal piece by its editorial board that had a devious wordsmith’s trick, if you can detect it: “ In 2018, 164 defenders of the land and environment were killed, with the Philippines of the brutal President Rodrigo Duterte taking over from Brazil as the deadliest place to resist rapacious developers and governments.”* This indeed is another confirmation that Western media, especially those in the US, have long lost their professionalism and objectivity.

Fabrication
The Global Witness report on the Philippines is such a colossal fabrication.

To pretend that its findings are based on data, Global Witness listed the names of the 164 killed in the 20 countries it reported on. I checked each and every “victim” in the Philippines it listed.

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I FIND it astonishing that commentators with doctorates in political science who oppose the revival of mandatory college-based military training (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps or ROTC), miss one of the most important reasons why this is necessary.

This is the fact that one of the most essential features of sovereign states — the most important social organization in this stage of humanity’s history — is their military. There is no state that doesn’t have a military (except perhaps the Vatican). It’s a no-brainer that the strongest states in the world are those with the strongest military forces. Even the orthodox political science definition of a state is that it is the only entity within a defined territory which has the legitimate use of force — which the military and its cousin the police exercises.

A state’s military force does not just tell the world that its sovereignty is to be respected, thereby strengthening its citizens’ patriotism, and pride in it. Through military service, citizens of one country get to realize deep in their hearts and minds that they are members of a community called the nation-state, which is so important that they can be called to risk their life for it as soldiers. The ROTC is in fact the “lite” version of military conscription, the least demanding way of requiring a citizen to contribute to the nation. (more…)

IT was indeed heart-wrenching to hear mothers tearfully relating at a Senate hearing, how their teenage daughters — for chrissake! daughters — abandoned their homes and schools as they were recruited to become full-time cadres of Anakbayan which, I will mince no words, is one of the fronts of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

To be honest, I am astonished at how the communists are still able to recruit students – by definition an educated, thinking sector – into their ranks, most likely to lose their lives for a useless cause, and be buried in unmarked graves in some jungle.

Maybe it’s self-serving, but in my time, there were so many things that would have easily convinced anyone to join the Communist Party. There was the global student movement against the “Establishment.” There was the Vietnam war which made “US imperialism” so real. Philippine elites were in deadly combat, so that two villages in the North were even ruthlessly burned to the ground because they didn’t vote for one gubernatorial candidate.

The Communist Party even succeeded in nearly pushing things to breaking point when it bombed with four grenades the Liberal Party’s miting de avance in 1971. Thousands of students marched to lay siege to Malacañang, with several killed or wounded by brutal “fascist police.” The biggest country in the world, China, was at the height of its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which purportedly would make it the beacon for socialist revolutions worldwide. And of course, there was Che Guevara, of whom countless youths fancied themselves to be the reincarnation of.

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PRESIDENT Duterte’s critics claim that his popularity and political acumen, as well as his allies’ overwhelming victory in the May elections, have made him so powerful that he is on the way to becoming an absolute ruler.

Yet in the case of the huge Coconut Industry Investment Fund-Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG), which just five years ago had revenues from its coconut oil milling operations of over P14 billion, its board of directors has managed to defy his orders.

A year ago, five of the group’s eight directors nearly got to stop the firm’s operations when they resigned and got all the key officers to go on mass leave, to protest Duterte’s nomination of a Davaoeño, one Rehan Lao. Duterte bent over backwards, and rescinded Lao’s appointment.

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