First of two parts
LOVE him, as the Yellows do, or hate him, as those who were sympathetic to the late Chief Justice Renato Corona — whom he is alleged to have helped oust — do, Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, who retires from the Supreme Court on Friday, has had a fascinating career, marked by episodes one might term either tragic or jinxed.

You, dear reader, decide which would be the best description.

What is mostly forgotten now is that Carpio and his ideological mentor, retired Gen. Jose Almonte executed in 1992 then President Fidel Ramos’ bold tack early in his administration of going against two of the country’s powerful oligarchs then: tobacco magnate Lucio Tan and the Antonio Cojuangco clan which claimed to own Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT).

FORMER Supreme Court justice Francis Jardeleza is proposing that the July 2016 ruling of the Hague arbitral panel on our territorial disputes with China be brought before the United Nations, this newspaper reported the other day — strangely the only one to do so.

Jardeleza echoed the insistence recently of former foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario – under whose watch we lost Scarborough Shoal because he believed a US diplomat’s lie* — that the Duterte government should also do the same.

Such a proposal is crazier than the Aquino government’s move itself in 2013 to drag China into arbitration proceedings over our territorial disputes, which the superpower refused to participate in.

TO very clearly see why Leonor Robredo — the Yellow Cult’s last pathetic attempt to create a false idol — has been the Republic’s worst vice president, one just has to remember our past vice presidents.

In comparison to these, she is an intellectual and political pygmy.

Let’s start with the most recent one. Jejomar Binay had been Makati mayor for six terms, and despite the Yellows’ intense campaign to paint him as corrupt in the past elections, his role in Makati’s growth as the country’s premier financial district is incontestable.

SEVERAL people — including those based in North America who rely on the Internet for assessing what’s really happening in the country — have asked the same question: “Why is it that when I google a particular topic, I often get Rappler articles high on its results list, and when I read the articles, they are mostly either short pieces without much information, or biased against the government?”

Try it yourself; google “Duterte war vs drugs.” After the Wikipedia entry there, the entry “Duterte war on drug news and updates” in Rappler’s website is high up in the google results. This leads not just to one article but to Rappler’s list (with the links to the articles themselves) of its articles on this topic, all containing the news site’s line that Duterte’s war on drugs has resulted in “thousands of innocent lives” lost.

No wonder US media, and even those in the West, believe the portrayal by Rappler head Maria Ressa and her Yellow allies that we are in the darkest of ages, with our streets littered with bodies killed by Duterte’s death squads. Why wouldn’t they, lazy journalists that many of them are, when they just rely on Rappler’s reportage, which is listed high in Google searches?

THE Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI), which has been practically the official organ of the Yellow Cult since 1986, is falling on very hard times. It suffered a loss after tax of P320 million in 2017, from its profit of P20 million in the previous year, according to its management in its stockholders meeting on June 8, 2018.

Sources in the company claimed that the newspaper’s finances hemorrhaged profusely last year to reach P400 million — hidden partly, however, by the P140 million sale of its property.

What fudged PDI’s bottom line for 2018 though was it owners’ move to hollow out the firm: they sold in November 2018 its main asset, its 2,000-square-meter (sqm) Makati property, including the building. That leaves such things as its brand name, its reporters, and mostly anti-Duterte columnist as its assets —which, however, many would even consider as negative assets.

PRESIDENT Duterte’s official trip last week to Russia combined with his two visits to China — both adversaries to the US in different degrees at different times and different spheres — marks the dawning of a new era for our nation: Independence from the US, which has subjugated the country in various forms since it aborted our freedom at the turn of the century.

Unless the Yellow Cult manages by some miracle to grab power and reverse Duterte’s assertion of our sovereignty, that is. After all, the Yellow Cult’s founders Ninoy and his widow, President Cory, as well as their son Noynoy, were so slavish to the US.

Think about it. The President’s official visits abroad signal our stance in our relationship to the world, and especially to its superpowers. In the case of Corazon Aquino, the dust of the EDSA Revolution had hardly settled before she made her first official visit to the US, practically acknowledging her indebtedness to the Americans for putting her in power. Her son Benigno 3rd’s first trip abroad as a president was to the US, a few months after he assumed power.

IT’s a bit difficult to understand why the usually intrepid and intelligent Sen. Richard Gordon, the head of the Senate blue ribbon committee, in his investigation of the reselling of captured illegal drugs, hasn’t gone on to summon former interior and local government secretary Mar Roxas and the then Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Alan Purisima to shed light on this sordid crime.

They were in charge of the PNP when this crime — the pilferage of seized shabu worth hundreds of millions of pesos, and their resale to drug lords — was discovered and came to public view. Yet the two did nothing.

It is a bit suspicious that attention — and the lynch mob — so far has focused on PNP Chief Oscar Albayalde, who will be retiring next month. It is bizarre that media has been reporting the recycling of seized illegal drugs by rogue police, dubbed “ninja cops,” as if this crime happened just yesterday.

Second of a series on the Scalice revelations
WITH the franchise for the Lopez clan’s ABS-CBN broadcasting network still in limbo, it would be very informative to look at this oligarch’s history, why it fought Marcos (and was depicted after his fall as noble pro-democracy tycoons) and how powerful its media empire was, so formidable that only Marcos’ martial law could stop it.

What follows are not my claims, but a narrative on the Lopezes from a meticulously researched PhD dissertation by Joseph Scalice, submitted as a requirement for his doctorate at the University of California in Berkeley.

Scalice writes:
“Like Marcos, Vice President Fernando Lopez was reelected in the 1969 elections but in the immediate aftermath of the election, Lopez and Marcos had a falling out with explosive political consequences. Noted historian Lewis Gleeck stated that, ‘The relationship of President Marcos, the political sovereign, and the Lopez brothers, the economic giants, was always an uneasy one … In the beginning, each needed the other, but in the end only one, of course, could be top dog.’ The Lopezes were not to be taken lightly, as Benigno Aquino Jr. made clear in his apt description of their political influence:

First of a series on the Scalice revelations
THE Yellows’ martyr Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino, Jr. was crucial in the founding and growth of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (CPP-NPA). Aquino, until his arrest when martial law was declared in 1972, supported the CPP-NPA as one of his weapons to topple his arch-enemy Ferdinand Marcos.

This is among the many explosive conclusions and details of a 2017 PhD dissertation by Joseph Scalice at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1957-1974.

The 800-page thesis is replete with encyclopedic information not just on the old pro-Soviet Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and Jose Ma. Sison’s pro-China Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Scalice reveals surprising details on political figures of that era that would shock the Yellows and the Reds.

IT is astonishing how the Yellows — incontestably rejected by the nation as demonstrated in the past senatorial elections when they failed to get a single seat — are still trying to impose their will on the country.

This time, they are pressuring the Supreme Court, which is the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) that will decide on Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s electoral protest against Maria Leonor Robredo for the vice-presidential seat, to bow to the apparently rushed draft decision by Justice Benjamin Caguioa to dismiss the case.

The Yellows are doing this by leaking Caguioa’s draft to their operators in social media, and to a Philippine Star columnist who summarized its contents in his column yesterday. Caguioa’s draft could have come only from him, as Supreme Court staff are mostly career people who wouldn’t dare risk their positions. Caguioa appears to have rushed the report, submitting it September 10, in the hope that the Supreme Court will vote on it, before Justice Francis Jardeleza, another former Aquino official who would likely support his recommendation, retired on September 26. The high court, however, decided to postpone deliberation on Caguioa’s draft, as the justices still needed to study the case.