AMONG the revelations of the recent New York Times (NYT) exposé on the tax records of United States President Donald Trump is that in 2017 (and 2016 as well) he paid the US federal government a measly $750 in income taxes.

That’s loose change compared to the $156,824 he paid the Philippines in taxes that year for his income from licensing fees for the Trump Tower at Century City. What does that tell us?

For me, it’s quite obvious that Trump feared, or respected, our Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) more than he did the US’ supposedly super-strict, beyond-corruption Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Contrary to what the Yellows have been saying, we have a tighter rule of law than the US.

Yet US and Western media cannot help twisting this revelation in order to put down President Rodrigo Duterte, revealing their deep bias against him and our country.

The NYT article described Trump’s licensing income as coming from “deals in countries with authoritarian-leaders or thorny geopolitics – for example $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million form Turkey.”

This is patently false: the $3-million brand-licensing deal with the Trump Tower Manila was inked in 2012 during Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administration although the actual payment and taxes was made in 2017 during Duterte’s watch.

PERHAPS it was a classic instance of following an aphorism in Sun Tzu’s Art of War: “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.”

But on the face of it, President Rodrigo Duterte’s statements before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 22 regarding the South China Sea arbitration award was so terribly wrong.

“The award is now part of international law, beyond compromise and beyond the reach of passing governments to dilute, diminish or abandon,” Duterte pontificated. 

But this is very wrong. An arbitration is an arbitration of two parties’ agreement to let a third party settle its dispute. An ad hoc panel of five judges — all European except a Ghanaian, who is, however, a permanent resident of Europe — handled the arbitration that wasn’t an arbitration, as China refused to join it.

The panel itself called its rulings an “award” and not a decision. How can an “award,” which the panel itself emphasized can be binding only on the two parties, become “part of international law”?

IT was Rappler CEO Maria Ressa who fed patent lies to European Parliament member Hannah Neumann and fooled her into getting the body to issue the September EP resolution asking the Philippine government to withdraw all the charges against her or else it would impose trade sanctions against the country.

I haven’t seen such grotesque selfishness as that of Ressa’s: she is willing to have Filipinos — 200,000 workers by one labor federation’s estimate — suffer if trade sanctions are imposed, just to escape her conviction for libel by a Philippine court of law, presided over by a judge of the highest integrity and competence.

Ressa sought out the EP member Neumann right after the Manila Regional Trial Court found her guilty of cyberlibel last June 15, one of her desperate attempts to campaign for international pressure to drop the charges against her — rather than convincing the court to find her innocent.

THAT statement isn’t mine nor from anonymous sources. It’s straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, from former Information and Communications acting secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. (a retired general), who shepherded the entry into the telecoms monopoly of a third telecommunications company.

Rio posted on his Facebook page the narrative below, which I found very informative in assessing the chances of a third telco breaking the virtual two-firm monopoly of the telecom industry.

The two firms pretend to be Filipino-controlled. The reality, veiled by the scheme of “nonvoting preferred shares” is that Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, owned by Singapore’s state investment arm Temasek Holdings, is the biggest stockholder of Globe Telecom Inc. while the Indonesian-controlled First Pacific Co. Ltd. controls Smart Communications Inc. 

I’M BAFFLED why not a few journalists still think that they are mere stenographers, reporting whatever this or that jerk says, and even make it their newspapers’ front-page banner story.

Consider one newspaper’s banner headline yesterday: “Govt urged: Act on EU call.” It quoted at length this obscure labor leader’s claim that if government does not “act on that EU call” — which is, among other things, to release an unrepentant American journalist convicted for libel by the Manila Regional Trial Court and withdraw the Anti-Terrorism Law passed in July — the country will suffer “more unemployment and loss of business opportunities” as a result of Europe’s trade sanctions.

This labor lawyer even pretends to be knowledgeable, claiming that we stand to risk the imposition of tariffs on 6,274 products to the European Union market that, at present, have zero tariffs under the Generalized System of Preferences. That newspaper competed in ignorance with the forever-Yellow Philippine Daily Inquirer’s headline: “EU sanctions on PH to cut 200K jobs, labor group warns.”

These are essentially fake news. The EU didn’t threaten trade sanctions.

For starters, this recent resolution by the European Parliament (EP) is a rehash of its April 2018 resolution (2018/2662 RSP), which simply repeated the Yellows’ and especially Rappler’s claim of “12,000” killed in President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug war, when the actual figure at that time was just 3,000.

MY column last Wednesday narrated that communist ideologue Jose Ma. Sison himself “red-tagged” his Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) over 80 front organizations, when he listed these as members of the International League of People’s Struggles (ILPS) he set up in 2001 to feed this ego that he is not just the leader of the communist insurgencies here but globally.

That each of these fronts undertakes “agit-prop” claiming to represent a particular sector points to the real nature of this supposed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist insurgency today.

Rather than a party that is the vanguard of the proletariat, mobilizing a peasant army according to Mao Zedong’s vision, the CPP has become — or perhaps has been since its start — merely a party of the petit-bourgeoisie (lower to middle class) engaged mostly in propaganda activities against government. 

Their agit-prop activities have prevented a real national discourse we need to develop in the country. The party’s propaganda network seizes every issue possible against government, distorts and magnifies it, with its fronts developing the expertise for quick mobilization and press dissemination. Worse, communist fronts now provide the loudspeakers and war bodies for the issues the decimated Yellows raise, that I won’t be surprised that they are being handsomely paid for their services.

IT is ridiculous for the Communist Party of the Philippines’ (CPP) parliamentary cadres like Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate to claim that Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy and other military officials are “red-tagging” their ilk when they publicly point out that they are members of or supporters of that fake revolutionary vanguard.

Zarate and these Reds think Filipinos are so stupid as to believe that old, old line their leader Jose Maria Sison used in the University of the Philippines in the 1960s. Sison had used ad nauseam that “red-tagging” crap to deny that the Kabataan Makabayan (KM) and other organizations he set up were Communist Party fronts, designed to gradually lure young minds into their Maoist conspiracy. Well, KM has been for decades indeed officially one of the so-called members of the National Democratic Front (NDF), a misnomer really as it is not an alliance at all; its member organizations are arms of the CPP for particular sectors.

MORE than three decades after Ferdinand Marcos’ strongman rule ended in 1986, we still do not have an objective, fact- and document-based history of that crucial period of our history.

That adage that it is the victors in a political or military conflict who write history in this case is so true. What we mostly have are ferociously partisan accounts of the Yellows and the Reds, and of US writers who wanted to cash in on the sudden interest that had emerged in America in the supposedly dramatic fall of a dictator.

This black-and-white narrative has been so successfully disseminated because media has been dominated for three decades by such Yellow newspapers as the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star as well as the giant broadcast network ABS-CBN Corp., which has brainwashed Filipinos with that false narrative. 

Worse, Marcos’ widow Imelda and their children have done little to counter the Yellows and Reds’ portrayal of the Marcos era.

THE photos posted on Facebook of University of the Philippines student Rona Manalo, smiling on the left and then as a corpse, killed in a firefight with Marines last September 3 in Palawan, are heart-wrenching. There have been many like her in recent years, such as Recca Noelle Monte, a UP engineering student also killed in battle on Sept. 4, 2014, with Army troopers in some forgotten mountain in Abra.

The bell could have tolled for me. I was their age when I was recruited to the Communist Party and sent to Samar to organize what would have been some of the first New People’s Army (NPA) units. I am grateful to my sensitive stomach for living this long: I couldn’t stand the diet of coconut meat and bugas-mais staple and asked to be deployed to Manila.

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 (Republic Act 6713 of 1989, 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, unless he makes these documents public to prove otherwise, has 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. Replying to a freedom of information request (under Executive Order No. 2 of 2016) that I had filed, the Central Records Division of the Office of the Ombudsman reported that they have on file only Leonen’s SALNs for the years 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011. Civil Service Commission’s Resolution 1500088 of 2015 ordered all state universities (and several other state entities) to turn over all the SALNs submitted to it to the ombudsman.