Category: Manila Times Columns

THE EDSA traffic is becoming more horrendous each day, and in this day and age of technology and rationality, one would assume that government could use all its resources and sovereign power to solve a big obstacle to the country’s economic growth and relieve its citizens of their daily hell.

The traffic is a veritable crisis, and it is long past the time for debating that it isn’t. Metropolitan Manila consists of 16 cities and one municipality. Even if EDSA traverses only six cities (Caloocan, Quezon, San Juan, Mandaluyong, Makati and Pasay), any solution to the avenue’s gridlocks would have to involve nearly all of Metro Manila’s 17 local governments, all of which have the authority to pass “ordinances” that tend to hinder efforts to solve this huge problem.

One solution, for example, would involve opening up the posh “villages” — parts of Forbes, San Lorenzo, Wack Wack and Greenhills, among others — but their rich residents would certainly get the courts to stop it.

THAT the country won in the ruling of an arbitral panel in our suit against China over our disputes in the South China Sea region has been a colossal deception foisted on our people.

As a fabrication, it is rivaled only by the huge lie in the first years of the Yellow regime of Aquino 3rd, that since he is the son of the “saint of democracy,” he would create a graft-free and progressive nation.

If President Duterte had pursued the arbitral ruling, it would have been the very worst impact on our nation of the Aquino regime, even triggering an economic crisis.

EVEN President Duterte’s harshest critics would, I think, concede that he has emerged as the country’s strongest president ever, at par with Ferdinand Marcos in the first years of his strongman rule.

By “strong,” I borrow the political scientists’ definition of a strong state.

First, Duterte is a strong leader because he is independent from the economic elite that in most cases in our past influenced Philippine presidents for their own gain or even led them by the nose. This is shown by the fact that Duterte’s guns have been trained on what he himself names as “oligarchs.” He has moved or has started to move against the Rufino-Prieto clan that owns the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Lopezes of the ABS-CBN television network. He took on both Lucio Tan, for Philippine Airlines’s P6-billion unpaid fees to government, and Mighty Corp., the competitor of Tan’s Fortune Tobacco, for its P30-billion tax liabilities.

FORMER President Aquino, his foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, and his Solicitor General Florin Hilbay patently betrayed our national interest in the arbitration suit they filed against China:

They asked the tribunal to degrade our islands in the Kalayaan Island Group, especially our Pag-Asa Island — the second biggest in the disputed area — to mere “rocks,” telling the arbitral tribunal that, as such, these therefore do not generate a 430,000-square kilometer (sq km) circular exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

The tribunal, of course, upheld their allegation. Why wouldn’t they when it is the representatives themselves who claim their islands are not islands but just rocks? Their allegation in effect lost us at least 430,000 sq km of potential EEZ, an area bigger than the Philippines’ 300,000 sq km land area.

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LAWYER Jude Sabio last week revealed that it was former senator Antonio Trillanes 4th who was the brains behind the so-called “Totoong Narcolist” videos, spread through social media in April that claimed President Duterte and his children were involved with illegal drug syndicates.

Last May, Peter Joemel Advincula, the narrator in the videos who called himself “Bikoy,” surrendered to authorities and disclosed that the allegations in the video were all lies and that it was a fabrication of Trillanes intended to sway voters to vote for the opposition Senate candidates in the elections early that month. Trillanes denied the accusation in a privilege speech at the Senate.

Last week, Advincula’s disclosure was supported by Sabio, who has been viewed as one of Trillanes’ closest conspirators in the latter’s anti-Duterte campaign. He was the lawyer for Edgar Matobato who had claimed to have been with the Davao “death squads” when Duterte was the city mayor. He also filed a case last April against Duterte and several of his officials at the International Court of Justice, accusing them of mass murder in their war against illegal drugs.

Second part of a series
IN the second case* where we shot ourselves in the foot in the arbitration case against China brought by President Benigno Aquino 3rd and his Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, the tribunal in effect ruled that we can’t have our Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), since this would violate provisions of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos).

The episode would be really hilarious if not for its very serious impact on our Republic’s territory. The bungling duo thought they could force China out of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) by filing the arbitration case, invoking the Unclos. Instead, one consequence is that if we comply with the arbitral ruling, we’d have to give up our KIG. And we are the only ones who have to comply with it, as China refused to recognize the tribunal, and its ruling doesn’t apply to any other nation.

The KIG is the only addition to our territory since the 1898 Treaty of Paris (by which Spain sold us to the US) established the archipelago’s boundaries. It was Marcos, through his Presidential Decree (PD) 1596 in 1978, who annexed a hexagonal territory covering most of the Spratly islands — which China and Vietnam had claimed several decades earlier. Other than Bajo de Masinloc, the KIG is the only thing really that has involved us in the South China Sea territorial dispute.

First of a series on the Aquino-Del Rosario foreign policy fiasco
MORE precisely, not really “us” but former President Benigno Aquino 3rd and his incompetent foreign secretary Albert del Rosario who shot our Republic in the foot by filing in 2013 the arbitration case against China, invoking the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).

They didn’t even consult Congress or any other body for this very important foreign-policy move.

If not for President Duterte’s bold move to put the brakes on it, it would have resulted, and I am not exaggerating, in an economic disaster for us — to the advantage of our neighbors like Vietnam, which also have territorial disputes with China, but weren’t as stupid as filing such a case against Beijing and adopting an anti-China foreign-policy stance.

THE silver lining in the dark cloud that was the near-release of the rapist-murderer, former Calauan mayor Antonio Sanchez, is that the episode is a huge argument for the restoration of the death penalty.

How much more heinous can a crime be than that of Sanchez — a powerful and rich jueteng lord — who for a night’s entertainment raped the 19-year-old Eileen Sarmenta, then had his bodyguards also violate her, and ordered them to shoot her dead — in her face, as it turned out. His bodyguards followed Sanchez’s sadistic ethos, and tortured Sarmenta’s companion, Allan Gomez, before shooting him in the head.

A civilized society must have such a gruesome crime be punished with the severest form of penalty, depriving the perpetrator of his life. Sanchez’s release was under a law passed during former president Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administration, and apparently — to be frank, I’m not sure — would have occurred if not for the public outrage over it. Continue reading

A MOUNTAIN of evidence has been piling up that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), through its front organizations like Anakbayan, has continued to dupe our gullible youth, barely out of adolescence, to join their long- discredited project to topple our democratic system.

Simply put, they want to install — to be quite frank about it — the mass murderer Jose Ma. Sison as the Filipino “Dear Leader,” or some NPA commander who has spent his adulthood in jungles, the kind of milieu that created the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Cambodia.

Isn’t it such a no-brainer that it is high time this violent organization is outlawed?

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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