THE pompously named Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) should immediately investigate the hundreds of purported flood-control projects in President Marcos Jr.’s home province of Ilocos Norte and those in his cousin, former speaker Martin Romualdez’s Leyte.

It is inconceivable that these were spared from the same scam exposed in Bulacan, involving billions of pesos in supposed flood-mitigation projects. There, corrupt officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) released funds to favored contractors for nonexistent or incomplete projects, resulting in massive flooding across the province.

If the ICI does not move at once, it becomes complicit in the flood-control scam. Reports claim that DPWH officials and contractors in Leyte and Ilocos Norte have been burning the midnight oil in recent weeks to cover their tracks, with many records even allegedly destroyed.

THE ouster of presidential cousin Martin Romualdez as House speaker marks the beginning of the end for President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s rule. Because of his administration’s trail of corruption and…

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s public relations machine had shifted into overdrive, claiming to have “spectacularly” insulated their boss from the tsunami of corruption revelations now engulfing the government’s flood control program. But the evidence points to Marcos and Malacañang — a fact that even the slickest PR maneuvers can’t erase.

Worse, the whitewash is hiding from the public a more terrible development for the Republic: Marcos shortly after assuming power in 2022 has tightly controlled the House of Representatives through his cousin Speaker Martin Romualdez, using a billion pesos to bribe the representatives into subservience. On Tuesday, he put the Senate under his thumb, putting a longtime Marcos loyalist, Sen. Vicente Sotto III, to head the body. Marcos is quietly installing a one-man rule.

But the evidence points to Marcos — a fact that even the slickest PR maneuvers can’t erase. It is an inarguable fact that the nonexistent and unfinished flood control projects, estimated to cost at least P200 billion in pocketed taxpayers’ money, were all initiated and undertaken when Marcos became president starting July 2022. It was Marcos who had handpicked Manuel Bonoan to head the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), which had sole authority over the flood control projects.

EVERY weekday (except Monday) that I watch “Democracy Now!,” probably the only remaining news program independent of all the world powers, I get so angry and even depressed, as its first news feature for the past two years shows in vivid video clips the continuing genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza by the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Some days, my eyes get misty watching children if not maimed and crying, starving to their deaths, a pile of bones.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is incontrovertibly genocide; 60,199 Palestinians so far killed by the IDF, 18,430 were women and children, 31 percent of the total. Not a single corpse of the Hamas (Palestinian Resistance Movement), which reportedly started the war, has been found. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, hospitals bombed, food and water cut off, thousands of children starving and 120 journalists assassinated by laser- or radio-guided precision bombs dropped by drones. This is not “self-defense.” It is the deliberate destruction of a people.

Yet the West refuses to call it what it is. Instead, the United States, Britain and Europe repeat the same tired script: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” The Western press dutifully frames the story around Oct. 7, 2023, when the Hamas killed 1,195 civilians and soldiers in a raid into a few kilometers of Israeli territory — amazingly not detected by the Israel’s Mossad, Shin Bet and Aman, purportedly the world’s three best intelligence services, after the Central Intelligence Agency.

IT was in panic that the monsoon would worsen flooding in Metro Manila and several other provinces that President Marcos, in his July 28 SONA, revealed that he inspected several flood-control projects that were defective and crumbled by the monsoon and three other typhoons and was preparing charges against the contractors responsible.

He was worried that the nation would again be outraged and even ridicule him, as they did when, right after he boasted his government had built 5,500 flood-control projects in his 2024 SONA, the metropolis, Bulacan, and two other provinces were inundated on a scale never before seen. In a press conference days after, he disclosed the names of the contractors who had undertaken these projects, and even pointed out that only 15 construction companies had accounted for 20 percent of these projects’ total budget. He taunted media to investigate these firms, who owned them, and what happened to these.

Marcos probably thought he had pulled a PR coup to draw outrage away from him since, after all, these defective projects all occurred under his watch, with the public works secretary reporting only to him.