‘Sugar Order was not approved by Marcos’

EXECUTIVE Secretary Victor Rodriguez said yesterday that he had asked the board of the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) to justify their plan to import 300,000 MT of sugar. “They couldn’t, and without the President’s approval went ahead to issue Sugar Order No. 4 that would have authorized accredited traders to import that huge amount of sugar,” Rodriguez said.

The executive secretary spoke with me yesterday over the phone after I texted him a set of questions, asking him to comment on reports that it was he who had prodded the SRA, mainly through the Agriculture department’s undersecretary Leocadio Sebastian, to issue the sugar order.

“Sebastian didn’t even inform the President or me that the Sugar Board will meet to approve that importation,” Rodriguez said. “We found out about it only when my staff reported that the SRA posted the order on its website.”

I ARGUED in last Monday's column that President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. must rescind posthaste the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) the unthinking Aquino 3rd government entered into in 2014 with the US. It…

UNTHINKABLE just a decade ago, more and more experts on geopolitics are now saying that the People’s Republic of China would likely invade and move to occupy its territory called Taiwan sooner rather than later, triggering a war between the Asian superpower and the US.

We ants have to play it safe and be doubly sure not to get involved in this battle of elephants that could crush us.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. should immediately revoke the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that President Benigno Aquino 3rd entered into with the US in 2014, which automatically places us as allies of the US, with access to our military bases here, in a war with China. Marcos could do this tomorrow as EDCA is only an executive agreement. Unlike the old Military Bases Agreement, and evidence that that regime was the Americans’ lackey, we’re getting nothing from it anyway.

WHILE the late President Fidel V. Ramos wasn’t the highest ranking officer in the military establishment that supported Ferdinand E. Marcos’ martial law when it was imposed — Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Espino who served until 1981 was — he was widely viewed as its strongest pillar.

This was not only because he was Marcos’ second cousin, who under Filipino culture would profess undying loyalty to the strongman. Ramos was head for 14 years until 1985 (when he was appointed acting AFP chief of staff), of the powerful and centralized Philippine Constabulary (PC).

It was the PC which had the main task of going after “subversives,” which included all civilians that were plotting against Marcos. The other three service commands were tasked mainly to go after the Moro insurgents. It was the PC’s dreaded Constabulary Security Units in each region which captured most of the Communist Party’s leaders, in my case, with members of the Manila-Rizal regional committee, the 5th CSU.

I AM referring to Bajo de Masinloc, also called Scarborough Shoal, which has an area of 58 square miles, or 233 billion square inches. The Aquino 3rd regime lost it to China in 2016. To recover it must be the priority of the new president, his foreign relations’ principal goal, and I propose how.

But to do that he has first to clear his mind — and that of his officials — of the brainwashing by the Yellows and the US of our dispute with China.

Indeed, I was surprised President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. couldn’t help but resort to the kind of vacuous oratory President Aquino 3rd was famous for, even in his otherwise technocratic, no-nonsense State of the Nation Address last week.

Its depiction in the movie “Maid in Malacañang” — the first ever big-screen film not complying with the Yellow-created narratives and portraying Marcos as not the bloody dictator they depicted him — which has thrown the Yellows into a paroxysm of protest.

The first account validating the movie’s assertion is the report dated May 1986 by a subcommittee of the US 99th Congress armed services committee, titled “Investigation of the costs involved in moving former President Marcos an his party from Manila to Hawaii.”

TO say that President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has his predecessor President Rodrigo Duterte’s huge shoes to fill in, is a big understatement.

Duterte’s approval ratings throughout his term have been the highest among his predecessors, ending at a remarkable 87 percent in June just before he stepped down from office, according to a recent Pulse Asia report. That news, I was shocked, appears to have been suppressed, reported only in a Facebook post, a demonstration of the continuing hold of the Yellows of media.

There is another aspect that emphasizes how phenomenal has been the Filipinos’ nearly universal support for their most recent president. Duterte’s 87 percent is the highest among nine “global” leaders of major countries in the world and four heads of Asean countries.