JULIUS Giron, the Communist Party of the Philippines’ fourth chairman in its 51 years of trying to overthrow by force the country’s democratic system, was killed March 13 in Baguio City, allegedly in a firefight with a team of military intelligence and police operatives.

That Giron, known in party inner circles as “KaNars,” was the CPP chairman and head of its New People’s Army (NPA) had been kept secret both by the Philippine military and the party; the former for some undisclosed reason while the latter hasn’t done so as its leadership has been in disarray. Members of the central committee have abandoned their safehouses, fearing that these may have been revealed in Giron’s computer files. They have been unable to meet or even communicate with each other; thus, there is no unit with the authority to announce its chairman has been killed.

Three months after Giron’s death, the CPP has been unable to designate even an acting chairman. There is no other obvious party leader with the stature to assume the post. This actually reflects the grave crisis in the party’s leadership, which is aging without a new younger core. In the 1970s, it was a party of angry young men with most of its central committee in their 20s or early 30s — founder Jose Maria Sison was just 31 then.

THE claim that the dictator Marcos’ Masagana 99 (M-99) program was a total failure is an excellent example of the Yellows’ invented, Manichaean narrative of that era — that it was the country’s Dark Age, that absolutely nothing good came out of it.

The M-99 program was actually a desperate, do-or-die move for Marcos, who assumed one- man-rule just months before the program was launched.

The typhoons and floods in the early 1970s (among the most destructive that hit the country), the tungro virus infestation (the equivalent to rice of the current coronavirus), drought and the fall in global rice production threatened a rice crisis that would have required massive, expensive importations of rice. That risked a balance of payments crisis because the surge in crude oil costs starting in 1970 had bled our foreign exchange resources.

THE riots in American cities in the past few days, in outrage over the brutal execution by policemen of a 46-year-old African-American, George Floyd — even as he was begging for his life and crying “Momma, Momma” in his last moments — have unraveled one of our era’s biggest deceptions, which has held millions of Filipinos in thrall: America as the land of milk and honey and as the greatest democracy in the world.

Not a few Filipino America-lovers were quick to post in social media photos of Hong Kong youth taunting the police. How many of these have re-posted that terrible video of a Minneapolis policeman pressing his knee into Floyd until he snuffed out his life?

To be frank, one of the things that gets my goat has been the phenomenon of Filipinos, even supposedly our top journalists and intellectuals, who have abandoned their country, got comfortable jobs in New York from which they paint our country as a backward one where human rights aren’t respected. Why haven’t they been using their journalistic skills in exposing the deep injustices in the US of A they so much love, rather than picking on the country they abandoned?

With ABS-CBN Corp.’s closure, the republic — its executive and legislative branches, to be joined soon by the judicial branch, I would bet — will be hitting two birds with one stone.

First, it will disarm of its most potent weapon, the Lopez oligarch clan, which has been a kingmaker of presidents, incurred massive debts from government financial institutions, and influenced government policies and actions for their benefit throughout our nation’s modern history.

LAST Monday, I devoted my column to a slightly edited version of a May 20 report by a team of eight University of the Philippines professors evaluating the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I am using my column today to publish their recommendations to continue government’s success in combating the pandemic, which I hope our policy makers will consider when and if they decide to lift the lockdowns next week for most of the country.

THE lockdown imposed by the government since March 12 has been successful in combating the coronavirus pandemic in the country, according to a May 20 report by a team of eight University of the Philippines professors.* The group has been monitoring the pandemic since April and has produced seven reports so far — the projections of which have been largely accurate.

“The past enhanced community quarantine has been critical in reducing transmission and deaths due to Covid-19 in the Philippines,” the report said. “We know this because the reproduction number ‘R,’ which measures the rate of spread of the pandemic, has been decreasing since the beginning of ECQ.”

A value of R, also called R0 (“R naught”) of more than 1 indicates that the pandemic is spreading and the number of new Covid-19 cases is increasing, while R less than 1 indicates this number is decreasing.

ABS-CBN Corp. once a-gainst demonstrated its combativeness against President Rodrigo Duterte — a portent of things to come if it gets to open again — when it very pettily picked on his trip to his hometown Davao City last week, claiming that he was violating the quarantine rules that his own government has instituted. It was only ABS-CBN that tried to make an issue of Duterte’s Davao trip.

How vicious or dumb these people can be. He is the President for chrissake, and he is free to go around everywhere in the republic he heads when he wants for whatever reason.

But Duterte’s trip actually highlights his humanity, with  his Presidential Security Group chief Col. Jesus Durante 3rd remarking: “He is in Davao after more than two months of not being able to see his family.”

THE coronavirus pandemic, the most serious global and domestic crisis since World War 2 — even worse than that conflagration if a vaccine isn’t discovered soon — has exposed what the two most inutile institutions in our nation are. Probably also in most parts of the planet.

These are the Catholic Church and the Congress. Each has similar sized work forces (9,000 for the Church, 8,000 for Congress) with a budget of P3 billion*  annually. Yet probably 95 percent of these have mostly been twiddling their thumbs since this crisis broke out in early February.

Yes, a number of Church entities have provided accommodation to stranded workers and frontliners and given food to the needy.

ABS-CBN Corp. head honcho Eugenio “Gabby” Lopez and his strategists sorely underestimated Filipinos’ resentment of their oligarchic rule and their use of a news and entertainment behemoth for their own pecuniary and political ends.

Except for the usual Yellow and Red crowd — including that dual citizen that CNN fired who claimed that a “small administrative agency was ordered by Duterte to close down” the network of 11 million staff — there has hardly been any intelligent defense of ABS-CBN’s impending closure by respectable and rational commentators.

DEFYING President Rodrigo Duterte to whom he owes his speakership post, House Speaker Allan Cayetano the other day mounted a last-ditch effort to rescue the oligarch-controlled ABS-CBN Corp. media behemoth from the dustbin of history.