THE arrogance demonstrated at the airport by “ACTS OFW” representative Aniceto Bertiz 3rd that triggered netizens’ outrage should remind us how absurd our so-called party list system is.

Purportedly set up to represent the country’s marginalized sectors, it has merely become the means for millionaires, religious cults, and most importantly, Communist Party cadres to enter Congress.

While supposedly representing OFWs, Bertiz is not an OFW, and is in fact the 11th richest party-list congressman now. While he claims to have been an OFW in his youth, Bertiz owns and heads the Global Asia Alliance Consultant Inc., one of the biggest deployer of OFWs. For each deployment his company charges a substantial fee. For him to claim that he represents OFWs is like saying that a capitalist who was once a salaried employee and then set up his own business represents the workers of that enterprise.

To explain what this party-list system that Cory Aquino and the Yellows made a part of our Constitution, I am reprinting below (with some minor edits) the first part of a series I wrote last February this year (“The party-list system is utterly absurd, a mockery of democracy” and “Cory Constitution gave fake parties House seats”).

Thank you, Mr. Bertiz, for reminding us that we really have to do away with this mockery of people’s representation. Abolish the party-list system, which has spawned hundreds of Bertizes since 1998, and even worse, Magdalo mutineer Gary Alejano, Akbayan’s Tom Villarin, and Carlos Zarate.  (more…)

FOR all the Yellows’ shrieks alleging widespread human rights violations (HRVs) during Martial Law, they have never filed a single case for such crimes at the Commission on Human Rights it set up in 1987 nor in any Philippine court.

Even as the Yellow regime held uninterrupted power for 12 years (Cory and then her anointed Fidel Ramos), it never got around to filing a single case against, much less convict, a Marcos, a police or military, soldier or policeman for HRVs, the biggest “sin” the martial law regime has been accused of.

And to think that during that time, the Yellow presidents totally controlled the judiciary: Cory and Ramos in their 12 years in power appointed 33 of the country’s Supreme Court justices, as many as Marcos did in his 17 years as president and then strongman.

In fact, by 1987, Aquino had appointed all of the 15 Supreme Court justices, except two who had been appointed by Marcos (Ameurfina Melencio-Herrera and Hugo Gutierrez, both of whom left the court in 1993).

But she didn’t. Then CHR chairman Aurora Navarrete-Recina in March 1997, upon the request of then Rep. Imelda Marcos, issued a certification that there were no formal complaints with the CHR against the former President and members of his family. I haven’t found any report that such cases were filed after 1997.

I also haven’t found any cases alleging HRVs by the Marcos regime filed in local courts.

Reasons why

Why were there no such cases filed?

I could think of four reasons:  (more…)

JUAN Ponce Enrile’s recent claims on Martial Law in his interview by Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has thrown the Yellows and Reds into paroxysms of rage against the respected senator. The unkindest comment was from the editor in chief of Philippine Star who, instead of presenting facts to debunk Enrile’s claims in her column, branded him “a senile man with symptoms of dementia” who “should be tossed into a regular jail pronto.

Such is the sad state of journalism in this country. Such vitriol is proof of Jose Ma. Sison and his Communist Party’s victory in having Filipinos toe their propaganda line, helped by the Yellow Cult.

The communists’ fabrication in Hitler’s style of repeating the Big Lie again and again: “Communists and its NPAs arrested or killed in the course of their armed struggle against the reactionary State are victims of human rights violations.”

Lazy or naïve journalists — and unscrupulous ones fabricating false data — have swallowed the lie. A CNN Philippines article was entitled “8 things Juan Ponce Enrile, Bongbong Marcos got wrong about martial law.” There it claimed: “More than 3,000 were killed during the Marcos regime, data from human rights group Amnesty International show.” I have copies of the AI reports from 1974 to 1981: Nowhere did the AI make that claim.

That article also claimed: “A 1974 Amnesty International report also said Enrile ‘admitted privately to the Archbishop of Manila that incidents of torture against martial law detainees had indeed occurred.’”

That’s not Marcos, but Cory.

The biased-for-the-leftist-view report of course didn’t report the actual AI phrase which was “reportedly admitted,” which means it was hearsay on the part of AI. It also didn’t quote the very next sentence after that: “Mr. Enrile also said some colonels and other high officials had been court martialed.” That is evidence that there was no state policy for torturing dissidents, but did occur as aberrations that happens all the time in all countries during armed rebellions.  (more…)

AGAIN that cliché I can’t help but use for this affront to the Republic: Only in the Philippines.

Communist Party founder Jose Ma. Sison spent his entire adult life trying to violently overthrow our democratic system. By many accounts, he had personally ordered the execution of probably several dozen Filipinos whom he condemned as counter-revolutionaries, ordered the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing of a Liberal Party rally, and for nearly 50 years now exhorted the party’s New People’s Army to wipe out soldiers and policeman of the Republic.

He was captured in 1977 and faced charges of rebellion, subversion, and murder in two military courts, a process deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1981, since the crimes were committed during Martial Law.

Corazon Aquino ordered him freed eight days after she assumed power on Feb. 25, 1986. A few months later, after a speaking tour at the University of the Philippines, he abandoned his comrades in the country and went abroad, finally settling in the Netherlands in 1987. There he continued his incessant exhortations for the NPA to intensify their killing of the Republic’s soldiers — one soldier a day, he even boasted a few months ago.

Yet last May, he and his wife Juliet got P2.4 million, remitted to his bank in Utrecht. For his arrest in 1977 and incarceration, and because his wife’s psychological travails due to his detention, they were declared “human rights violations victims” during the Marcos regime, deserving to be, as Sison himself quipped, “instant millionaires.”

It was the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board (HRVCB) attached to the Commission on Human Rights that declared the Sison couple as “human rights violations victims,” and gave them P2.4 million. Among the members of the board (who are appointed by the President) who decided on this was now CHR chair Chito Gascon, and former National Democratic Front spokesman Byron Bocar.  (more…)

EVERY September since EDSA we get reportage condemning the strongman Marcos for alleged human rights abuses during his regime, and the killing of young people who were purportedly merely fighting for “farmers’ rights.”

These accounts are so naïve, their writers so gullible to the narrative of the Communist Party and the Yellow Cult, or guided by their outfits’ owners who were the oligarchs that Marcos had put away during Martial Law.

If there’s a single person to be blamed for the killing of young people by the police, the army and even by village militias during martial law, it is Communist Party founder Jose Ma. Sison.

I know this for a fact as I was witness to his madness. In his delusion that he is the Philippine Mao Zedong who would lead the communists to victory through armed struggle, he sent in the 1970s hundreds of idealistic youth to far-flung rural areas with hardly any military training and armed with only rusting World War 2-vintage rifles and pistols. These were teenagers and those in their early 20s, roused to revolutionary fervor by the 1970 demonstrations and the global youth uprising of that era.

The urban activists that Sison deployed to the countryside, who believed Sison’s propaganda that they were warriors of a formidable “New People’s Army,” headed by a legendary Kumander Dante, and armed with brand-new AK-47s that China had provided, were no match for the police and the military. With that impression, do you think a platoon of soldiers – as young as the NPA fighters – who might have chanced upon them in the middle of a dark night in some jungle, would first ask them to surrender, before firing? Just last June, Army rangers on a long-range patrol mistakenly killed six police officers and wounded nine more during an operation against NPAs in a thick jungle.

In many cases, these radicalized, naïve drop-outs were killed just by village militias, who thought that they were bandits.

Decades later the communists, the Yellows, and gullible clergymen would call them human rights victims, or heroes in the “struggle for democracy.”  (more…)

WHAT has happened to the University of the Philippines, supposedly the country’s center of scholarship that is subsidized by tens of billions of taxpayers’ money, and which for decades has been headed by people who resist mobs and even governments in order to assert the institution’s academic independence?

It now has a president so spineless and so worried he might lose his well-paid job, that he immediately capitulated to the small but noisy leftist gangs in the university.

UP President Danilo Concepcion was without an iota of doubt a huge supporter of the strongman Marcos all throughout his regime.

As a Marcos believer, he got to be a member of the Sangguniang Bayan of Valenzuela, 1972 to 1974, and president of the Kabataang Barangay Federation of Metro Manila from 1976 to 1978. Under Marcos’ aegis, he was youth sector representative in the Interim Batasang Pambansa, the proto-parliament that the dictator had organized, from 1978 to 1984. A Marcos stalwart, now senator Richard Gordon, took Concepcion into his law firm, which became the base for his legal career.

Nothing wrong with that, and — despite the Yellows’ propaganda that martial law was a dark period of our history — many of the country’s best and the brightest worked under Marcos in their conviction that he was leading the country out of our quagmire, as strongmen all over our part of the world were doing.

We even had a president who was martial law’s muscle: Marcos’ cousin Fidel Ramos who headed the national police (called the Philippine Constabulary) for the entire period of that regime. The administrator and legal eagle of the regime was Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, at 93 a revered elder statesman of our nation.

KB reunion
Last August 27, officials and members of Marcos-era Kabataang Barangay — the strongman’s project to mobilize the youth for building the nation (or alternatively, depending on your political persuasion, to get the youth to support his regime) — had a reunion at the UP Alumni Association’s event venue, attended even by Imee Marcos, who headed the KB in that era. Concepcion, one of the top bigwigs of the KB, of course, attended it, “to be with old friends I haven’t seen for decades,” he said.

A harmless reunion of an organization, the kind that people in their 50s and 60s revel in to relive their youth, the best times of their lives.  (more…)

HIS big mouth has put Antonio Trillanes 4th in another big trouble, this time for allegedly violating the nation’s anti-sedition laws.

The non-lawyer forgot or didn’t know — perhaps in his panic or shock over President Duterte’s move against him — that calling for the overthrow of a Philippine president other than through impeachment, violates our anti-sedition laws, which most countries also have.

Trillanes talked — or shrieked — too much in his daily press conferences against Duterte after the President voided his amnesty on September 4. His rantings against Duterte, according to a suit filed September 14 by former Negros congressman Jacinto Paras and three others, were in violation of the anti-sedition provisions of the Revised Penal Code (Article 142), or the listing of most crimes and the penalties for these.

These among others clearly specify that to incite “people against the lawful authorities” is sedition and punishable from six months to six years imprisonment.

Duterte issued his proclamation against Trillanes, but then asked the courts to issue the warrant of arrest. Obviously afraid of spending a single night in some grubby police jail, Trillanes has holed up in the Senate (for the 15th day today), and threw vitriol against the President, calling for his overthrow almost every day.

(more…)

PRESIDENT Duterte’s offensive against Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th, nearly two weeks after it started, has made the Yellows so afraid.

To call a spade a spade, the Trillanes episode is Duterte’s political blitz against the Yellows, three-and-half years before elections.

It is a major move for Duterte to decimate the opposition this early, and to ensure that the next president would be his anointed.

Soon, Trillanes will be as much a footnote as alleged drug-lord coddler Leila de Lima and the former president’s abomination at the chief justice post, Ma. Lourdes Sereno. The opposition is left with no deadly political hitman. Nor even in Trillanes’ mind, a “winnable” presidential candidate in the 2022 elections: based on my interview with him in 2015, he believed that the presidency was his next post after his senatorial stint.

Trillanes has been the Yellow’s mad dog who has been barking incessantly so loudly and wildly against Duterte, that media’s microphones could not but pick up his baying. Trillanes has been the Yellows’ political rabid-mad cur, an askal, from the street; Senators Risa Hontiveros, Bam Aquino, Kiko Pangilinan are the pusillanimous chihuahuas of the Philippine elite. At 73, don’t expect the obese Sen. Franklin Drilon to fit into the armor of a dashing Yellow knight who would duel with Duterte.

Former President Aquino is fast becoming totally bald probably because of his fear of being jailed himself for graft or even just criminal negligence. He is so much discredited, and with the blood of the SAF 44 and Dengvaxia victims on his hands, he doesn’t even dare appear at a mall. His would-be ex-successor, Mar Roxas posted a video on his Facebook wall saying he was off to a long soul-searching kind of journey throughout the archipelago.

The Yellows didn’t see it coming. They were busy convincing themselves, and panicking to get some proof (“he went to Israel for treatment”) that Duterte was dying from some illness. They even thought that the move against Trillanes was such a big blunder that one of their columnists Melito Salazar and Aquino’s disgraced tourism undersecretary Vicente Romano were in a duet singing “The End is Near.”  (more…)

LAST month, President Duterte said outright: America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) planned to assassinate him. He didn’t give any reason why the CIA would want to do so, but not a few analysts think it is because of his getting close to Russia, the US’ arch-enemy even after the Cold War ended in the 1990s.

Indeed, the US even recently warned Duterte not to buy submarines that the Russians were offering.

My opinion though is this: If there’s any reason why the US would want Duterte toppled, it is his independent foreign policy stance over the South China Sea territorial dispute, and his refusal to make the country, as the past administration slavishly was, the US proxy to oppose Chinese claims in the area.

More than ever, the US desperately needs a puppet like President Aquino in the South China Sea, to try to stop China’s emerging hegemony in the area, even if only as its de facto spokesman. But Duterte has adamantly refused to do so, even defiantly drawing the country closer to the most powerful claimant in the area, the People’s Republic of China.

The only way for the US to have its lackey would be to topple Duterte and replace him with Vice President Leonor Robredo, who is together with her Yellow forces so subserviently pro-American in ideology and in practice.

In the US strategy, Duterte has to be removed now, to reduce the chances of his anointed, with a stance just like him, succeeding him in the 2022 presidential elections.

The all-out campaign by the US through its most influential media such as the New York Times, and through local media outlets funded by American foundations, namely Rappler, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, and Vera Files is not due to its noble crusade to protect human rights all over the world.  (more…)

IN their wishful but deluded thinking that the inflation spike and the Trillanes brouhaha will be bringing down President Duterte soon, the Yellows can’t even pick a slogan that won’t hint at their lunacy.

Melito Salazar, a Board of Investments vice chairman during the Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos administrations, very surprisingly titled his column “The end is near.” There he claimed that the Duterte administration was now in “economic and political chaos” that marks the end of any regime.

Vicente Romano 3rd, President Noynoy Aquino’s five-month tourism undersecretary who nearly got the country to plagiarize the Poland tourism slogan (and even logo), echoed Salazar’s take: “You know the end is near when… the economy is in a free fall. Prices of commodities are hitting the roof, beyond the reach of the poor. And nobody seems in charge on how to contain the problem.”

That “the-end-is-near” line of course is an old, old line used in so many caricatures of religious nuts wearing sack cloth shouting (with placards even): “Repent, the end is near.” So, it is befitting that these Yellows should be using this cliché.

Either he is a closet Yellow cultist, or a political opportunist with a lousy sense of timing (or just dull-witted analyst), but Senator Ralph Recto in the opening prayer of the Senate session the other day — for chrissake, in a prayer! — also portrayed the country as already in economic collapse, saying that “food is scarce, their prices high” and that “inflation is robbing our people of the full value of their wages.”

Inflation is indeed high at 6.4 percent year on year in August. That means prices went up 6.4 percent from August 2017 to August 2018, not as some Yellows are stupidly claiming, that prices went up from July 2018 to August 2018. That means your P100 in August last year can buy only P94 worth of goods in August 2018.

There were unique factors that pushed up the rate in August. Mainly three: the uptick in global oil prices which — in our very market-oriented oil industry — had to be reflected in higher prices for fuel (and therefore transport); the fact that June to August is the lean season in agricultural production, with harvests, especially for rice, still to come in two months’ time; and production and distribution disruptions due to typhoons. The National Food Authority in its programming apparently didn’t take into account the Duterte administration’s clampdown on rice smuggling, which was rampant during the past administration, which explains the low inflation rates at that time. (See my column last week “Clampdown on smuggling destabilized rice prices, supply.”)  (more…)