Category: Manila Times Columns

THE political opposition most likely rejoiced over President Duterte’s veto last week of Congress’ purported “anti-endo” bill, as it gave them ammunition in their propaganda that he is “anti-people,” the communists’ formulaic allegation against him.

For the fast-vanishing Yellows, it is another instance of Duterte failing to fulfill his election promises.

One thing though that everyone, even his critics, would agree to is that contrary to academically pretentious claims by commentators who have struggled to explain away his popularity, Duterte isn’t a populist, or one who merely plays to the gallery, or who throws bounties to the masses, even if its economic consequences would make their situation worse.

THE Social Weather Stations’ (SWS) recent poll, one of whose results an anti-Duterte media outfit headlined as “93 percent of Filipinos want PH to regain China-occupied islands” is a patently fake survey.

This SWS poll is the worst kind of push poll, or one disguised as a survey but which actually is intended to mold people’s minds. In this case, SWS polls tried first, to falsely portray China as having illegally occupied islands that the Philippines owns, and second, that more than 90 percent of Filipinos want these “islands back.”

The poll is utterly spurious because it asked its respondents a bogus question: “In your opinion, is it important that the control of the islands that China currently occupies in the West Philippine Sea be given back to the Philippines?”

NOT exactly fake news. But certainly a variation of it. This particular deception has been spread mainly by the Yellows, helped by mercenary academics and uncritical media.

For some reason, they are doing this to make Filipinos hate China and pressure President Duterte to take a belligerent stand against the emerging superpower.

This version of fake news: “The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 ruled in favor of Philippines’ claims against China.”

THREE years after the five-man arbitral tribunal ruled almost entirely in favor of the Aquino government’s maritime claims against China that invoked the Unclos provisions, its real impact has become so crystal clear, yet hardly talked about by US as well as our mainstream media and academe.

Totally unenforceable, the suit only helped China emerge as the unchallenged superpower in the South China Sea. It’s a perfect case of blowback, the most recent version of the law of unintended consequences that has been a curious feature of history. Here’s how and why.

China didn’t respond to the arbitration suit, which it claimed was a US-inspired plot to wrest its sovereign claims, merely through legal debates and propaganda.

THE so-called writ of kalikasan suit asking the Supreme Court to compel government to enforce our environmental laws in the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal is a cheap, despicable and stupid political plot by the Yellows and Reds. If it wins, it will result in political chaos and economic ruin, at a level worse than we’ve ever seen.

Lawyers led by failed Otso Diretso candidate Jose Manuel Diokno, known to be close to the Communist Party, filed the suit last April claiming to represent the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and Filipino fishermen affected by foreigners fishing in those areas.

But the fishermen have declared that they had nothing to do with the suit, didn’t authorize Diokno and his gang to represent them. They said they were shocked when they saw their names as complainants in media reports. Solicitor General Jose Calida the other day submitted to the court the affidavits claiming such, sworn under oath by all the 19 fishermen whom Diokno’s gang said it represented.

BASED on the latest Social Weather Stations’ poll, President Duterte has emerged as the most popular president in our post-EDSA history, with a remarkable 80 percent of Filipinos satisfied with his leadership.

SWS data show that for the three years that he has been power, Duterte’s net satisfaction rating (percent satisfied minus dissatisfied) averaged 59 percent, trouncing the 44 percent in the same period of Corazon Aquino who, conventional wisdom says, was the country’s most popular president, being the near saintly heroine of Philippine democracy.

That is significant in itself as there has been a non-stop, intense and well-financed propaganda effort from the Left and the Yellows, as well as American media, that Duterte is Cory’s antithesis, an authoritarian who will soon do a Marcos, that is, declare martial law to establish one-man rule.

I SWEAR, one of these days, if it doesn’t drop its anti-China, anti-Duterte thinking, the Philippine Daily Inquirer will publish inflammatory but fake news that will rouse Filipinos to go to war.

Last Friday, the newspaper put out a banner headline: “Foreign fishing crowd PH waters.” Covering two-thirds of the front page were satellite images of what seemed to be an invasion of boats into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone(EEZ). I myself was alarmed, as the images were compiled by the respected Karagatan Patrol from a weather satellite using infrared sensors that detect lights, day and night, hundreds of miles away from earth. The assumption in this technology is that the lights are from fishing boasts.

The piece’s spin was that these “foreign ships” were mostly Chinese, quoting international law expert Jay Batongbakal, that there was a “high likelihood” that many of these were Chinese vessels. The piece of course fits into the PDI and the Yellows’ narrative that China is intruding into our territory.

THE following is a must read, a totally different perspective from what the Yellows and Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio have brainwashed a lot of people to believe in. This was written by two American scholars, Jared McKiney and Nicholas Butts, back in July 14, 2016, a few days after the arbitral panel issued its ruling on the Philippines’ suit against China, for which we spent P500 million.

The article was in the respected 34-year-old magazine The National Interest, published by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington, D.C. think-tank that espouses the school of thought in international relations theory known as “realism,” which obviously the Yellows, Carpio, the China-hater Albert del Rosario, and even noisy academics here have never heard about.

Realism has been described as one of the dominant strains of thought in modern foreign policy and is not tied to ideology. It does not favor any particular moral philosophy, nor does it consider ideology to be a major factor in the behavior of nations. I daresay realism appears to be President Duterte’s foreign-policy paradigm.

THE claim that President Duterte should be impeached for not restricting our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from foreigners is so absurd that it is astonishing that media has given it mileage at all, with even otherwise sober commentators believing that rubbish.

What is disgusting is that the two men mainly responsible for spreading this nonsense—Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio and Aquino 3rd’s foreign secretary Albert del Rosario—cannot not know that they are misleading the public, as I will show in the course of this piece.

Why are they doing so? Because of an ideological hatred for China, and an added factor for del Rosario, to cover up for his role in our losing Bajo de Masinloc (also known as Panatag or Scarborough Shoal) in 2012 to China. The Yellows are cheering them and repeating their yarn of course because they think they can pull down Duterte’s popularity by stoking the embers of anti-Chinese racism among Filipinos.

PRESIDENT Duterte is wrong to call Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio buang, for criticizing his statement to allow Chinese fishermen access to “Philippine waters.” Buang means stupid — certainly a description that applies to the Yellow senators who claim Duterte would be violating the Constitution to allow that.

But Carpio isn’t stupid. He’s worse. He is so ignorant about an issue he blabbers on about but doesn’t understand that he should be ashamed to be in the Supreme Court, an institution dedicated to arriving at the truth based on facts.

But I don’t think Carpio is ignorant. He is diabolically devious, and his criticism of Duterte is just another instance of his incessant propaganda to stoke anti-Chinese xenophobia using our territorial disputes with China, exploiting the respected pulpit of a Supreme Court justice.