“Supreme Court Associate Justice Mario Victor Leonen may be even a worse offender of the Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) Law than the ousted chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. That law (called the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees) requires all state officials and employees to file their yearly SALNs.

“Sereno was removed from her post in 2018 for having failed to file such reports for six years, an offense for which her colleagues decided that she had no integrity and, therefore, could not have been appointed as chief justice.

Leonen failed to file his SALN for 15 years, from the time he joined the University of the Philippines (UP) faculty from 1989 to 2003 and for the years 2008 to 2009.”

I had thought that it was an open-and-shut case. My column wasn’t “speculation,” as Yellow news outfits referred to it, as it was the official reply by the Ombudsman to a freedom of information (FOI) request that I had filed months before.

FOR several days last month, the Yellows’ most senior senator, Franklin Drilon, alleged that the Duterte government had a huge P33-billion stash of funds squirreled away in an obscure agency, implying massive corruption in the administration or that a war chest was being prepared for the 2022 elections.

What Drilon thought was his bombshell of an exposé was a total, colossal dud; very nearly fake news exposed. After a few days that Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez rebutted his allegations, the senator started shutting his mouth but still giving some false statements that the finance department had responded positively to his claims.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) bannered Drilon’s allegations; all of the other broadsheets totally ignored them or buried them in their inside pages. I can’t say though if the PDI was hewing to its vocation as the Yellows’ mouthpiece or if Drilon controls its editorial staff, especially since all of the bannered articles on the alleged issue was written by one senior reporter DJ Yap.

SO how do we collectively refer to organizations with such diverse avowed aims as feminism (Gabriela), youth welfare (Anakbayan), trade unionism (KMU) or “people’s economics” (Ibon Foundation)?

There is something certainly common to them, and therefore, they are a class that deserves its own name: they are all against any administration; they all adhere to the program first espoused by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as the struggle for “national democracy,” which will put an end to the evils of “imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.”

Don’t call them “progressives,” the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s preferred term for them, which is really an indication of that paper’s sympathy and even admiration for them. That’s an old, old term that disguised the nascent communist movement, which CPP founder Jose Ma. Sison in the 1960s used to camouflage his political views drawn from his readings of Mao Zedong. In fact, his first printed venue for such writings on this was titled The Progressive Journal.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “progressive” as “making use of or interested in new ideas, findings or opportunities.” Progressive may have been appropriate in the 1960s to describe the kind of views Claro M. Recto espoused, which was for the country to move out of the American colonizers’ economic, political and cultural hold.

FOR undertaking a comprehensive campaign to eradicate — finally, the nation hopes — the 52-year-old Maoist menace in the country, Rodrigo Duterte has emerged as the country’s boldest president ever. By doing so, he is also the most perspicacious and the least “pulitiko” (as I will argue in this column) as he has torn down the disguises — the “fronts” such as the Red party-lists — the communists have been wearing since their party’s founding in 1968.

In the post-EDSA I era, none of its five presidents have taken on the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its private army, so ridiculously misnamed the New People’s Army (NPA), which explains why we have the longest-running insurgency in Asia.

Corazon Aquino of course embraced the communists, continuing her husband Benigno Aquino 3rd’s alliance with communist ideologue Jose Ma. Sison and his Red conspirators established at the very founding of both the CPP and the NPA — which was in the Cojuangco-Aquino clan’s Hacienda Luisita in the late 1960s.

TO understand why the communist movement has persisted in this country, one has to realize that psychologically and philosophically, it is a religion, a cult in secular form — one which has become dogmatic, fanatic and, of course, as violent as extremist Islam.

Surprising as this assertion may seem, this has been pointed out, and written about in detail during the rise of the communist movement in Europe by European philosophers, mainly by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his colleagues in the so-called Frankfurt School of critical theory in pre-war Germany. These philosophers pointed out that communism is simply a “translation” into the materialist language of Judeo-Christian messianism.

Messianism in essence is the belief started by the Jewish nation thousands of years ago, that one day there will be the Messiah who will defeat the Chosen People’s exploiters and create the new Eden humanity had lost because of its original sin, Paradise in which everyone is happy, everyone is prosperous. Indeed, the classic collection of essays by six renowned intellectuals who once believed in communism but later totally rejected it, was entitled The God That Failed.

IT is so despicable, and the height of duplicity, for communist mouthpieces, present and former Bayan Muna representatives Carlos Zarate and Teodoro Casiño, to claim — even in the halls of Congress that is a pillar of our democracy — that the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) are not their nor the Filipinos’ enemies.

How could they have the gall to claim this when the CPP-NPA is responsible for over 50,000 military, police and civilian deaths; when in their official publications, they boast of ambushing and killing the Republic’s military and police; when even its “chairman emeritus” Jose Ma. Sison two years ago publicly asked the NPA to kill at least one soldier a day?

Official records — i.e., combat reports and death benefits to soldiers’ families of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) — show that the NPA has killed 14,000 of its troops from 1975 to June this year. This is four times the 3,145 of our troops killed by both the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and 82 times by the Islamic terrorists Abu Sayyaf.

But this is an underestimate of actual casualties, as these do not include the deaths that occur months or years after a soldier dies from a wound from an NPA bullet or mine. Many AFP records during the martial law period and the first years of the Cory Aquino regime, were also lost when the AFP headquarters building burned down from rebel fire during the 1989 coup attempt.

THIS newspaper’s editorial the other day titled “IATF should study the science and math of the pandemic” is so patently wrong. Contrary to that editorial’s claims. The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is not just like the flu, it’s far deadlier and more dangerous; lockdowns, with other measures such as mandatory face mask wearing and social distancing, work to fight the pandemic.

The piece claimed: “On October 5, the WHO finally confirmed what many experts and studies had been saying for months — that the coronavirus is no deadlier or dangerous than seasonal flu. The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of its 34-member executive board.”

Neither the World Health Organization nor any of its officials in that October meeting of its executive board, to this day, said that, not even anything close to that.

Neither did it issue any statement that could be misinterpreted that way. They did not compare — or even dare to compare — Covid-19 with the seasonal flu, which after all most of the world has come around to control for decades. Only very few experts but a number of crackpots, United States President Donald Trump leading them, pooh-poohed Covid-19 as “just like the flu.”

THE biggest lesson of this pandemic, which has been the biggest threat to humanity in this generation, is that the nation-state matters a lot, and its leadership as well. These two are the most important things that determine if a human being lives or not and, in a broader sense, whether he lives a satisfying life or a miserable one.

All the blah-blah about globalization, about being a global citizen have proven to be hogwash. The European Union even with its bloated expensive bureaucracy left its members twisting in the wind of the pandemic. It couldn’t even undertake a unified, coordinated campaign to fight the pandemic. The idea of a borderless Europe proved to be a naïve one as each EU nation decided for itself whether to close its borders or not.

Supposedly the most powerful and richest on earth, the US nation-state failed in fighting the pandemic and became the worst infected country: an unbelievable 12 million cases and over 250,000 deaths.

Compare that to that country which the United States has been continuously hectoring how to govern — the Philippines, which has 416,000 cases and 8,000 deaths. Even if one adjusts those figures to reflect the US’ bigger population (274 million as against our 110 million), we are so much better off: the US has 37,500 cases per million of its population as against our 3,784. Deaths from the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in the US is 789 per million; ours is 73.

What has been disastrous for the US has obviously been its leadership. President Donald Trump was in total denial mode that Covid-19 was a grave threat and therefore not only failed in mobilizing his country’s vast medical and logistics resources, but even worsened it by claiming that masks and social distancing were useless in fighting the pandemic.

NEVER in his wildest dreams did Communist Party founder Jose Ma. Sison imagine that this could happen in his lifetime.

The country’s top state academic institution for which taxpayers spend P20 billion annually, the University of the Philippines, has become practically the Communist Party’s cultural base, a center for its propaganda and one of the top recruiters for its cadres and for the New People’s Army’s Maoist jihadists.

It has become a university of the Reds’ sheep, the naïve and cowards. It is ironic that while the NPA has dwindled from its peak of about 20,000 guerrillas in the mid-1980s to at most 2,000 fighters now dispersed in squads in a few scattered jungles, the communists’ power at the UP has grown over the years.

NATURAL disasters are supposed to draw the noblest in humanity, as these remind us that while humanity is nothing really special in the face of nature’s wrath, or its total uncaring, we are one species with empathy and reason to care for each other.

Instead, the Yellows and the Reds take disasters, as in the recent Typhoon “Ulysses” devastation, as opportunities to pillory government and in the case of the most fraudulent vice president we’ve ever had, Leni Robredo, to portray herself as a more caring successor to President Duterte.

In the morning after Typhoon Ulysses hit, the Yellows launched their #NasaanAngPangulo social media campaign, apparently thinking that Duterte’s age and seeming frailty would keep him at home.

While I don’t think that really gained traction — and certainly not Duterte’s habit with his long experience as mayor — it is a testament to the power, or illusion, of social media that Palace spokesman Harry Roque Jr. had to debunk that campaign’s implicit claim that government was doing nothing to help the victims of the disaster.