Just the tip of the iceberg

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
1/31/2011



As Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia couldn’t have pulled off his larceny on the Armed Forces’ logistics command without authorization from above, so could these superiors of his (i.e. Angie Reyes, other chiefs-of-staff, including various Defense secretaries) also not have conducted these rackets over time without their higher ups ever condoning such acts.

For one, let’s ask who got Reyes to turn against the Constitution in Edsa II by shanghaiing a busload of generals to Gloria Arroyo’s illegal oathtaking, with him even sardonically exclaiming, “Gentlemen, we are committing treason.”

Knowing the answer is key because ever since that fateful day, Mrs. Arroyo has lavishly taken care of Reyes’ fortunes; likewise that of the “cheap” magistrate who administered her oath; and, of course, the vast riches of that noted oligarch slash Edsa pavement dancer who financed her coup — whose ilk Gloria’s economic adviser Joey Salceda claimed nine years later to have “…never had it so good, earning P10 trillion in 10 years” under their Queen’s inglorious reign.

Going by the P300-million loot Garcia had amassed, the former military comptroller may look like a big or middling fish. But once people get to see how much more his bosses may have plundered, he will certainly look like a small fry.

A small fry indeed Garcia is compared to, say, his erstwhile boss, Angie Reyes, who could have amassed P500 million to well over a billion (or even more), and that former Chief Justice, who was alleged to have benefited from the P3-billion Judiciary Development Fund, a scandal circa 2002-2003 that set off impeachment proceedings against him, which Gloria expectedly quashed.

A small fry, too, is what Garcia appears to be especially when placed alongside members of the then expanding Arroyo cabal, whose power addiction grew simultaneous with their own designs to stay in power, such that subsequent elections had to be rigged in order to net the players hefty kickbacks in, say, the ZTE-NBN scandal or even the transitional ruse that was the fraudulent P11.8-billion Smartmatic system.

But then, these billions are definitely miniscule compared to the ten thousand billions of pesos (read: P10 trillion) that the handful of Big Business oligarchs got, starting from the P5-million to P10-million payola-laden passage of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira) by the Edsa II lameduck Congress under Sonny Belmonte, which ushered in a decade of power plunder that, up to this day, is the single biggest economic disaster for Filipino households and livelihoods.

Why, Epira was just a harbinger of all the predatory public utility rate increases that followed. In the years after Edsa II, the oligarchs were always on a roll — be it water, toll ways, or even port and harbor service fees! Good thing that a handful of consumer advocates, like the 89-year-old Mang Naro Lualhati, who won us our first P30-billion Meralco refund, are still around. This Feb. 7, he will be presenting in court Meralco’s P92-billion disallowances and P39-billion overcharges.

If and when the likes of Garcia and Reyes are put away in jail, does anyone believe Philippine society will be cleaned up? Their acts of corruption are but shovels of garbage from the Payatas pit of official corruption.

Who were the collaborators of Arroyo and Reyes all through the last decade in the Senate, Congress, media, religious and business sectors, as well as NGOs?

Ask Roilo Golez who, as National Security Adviser, defended Arroyo to the hilt during the Oakwood protests and investigations and called my radio program on dzXL to stop my reading of the Trillanes manifesto on July 27, 2003 and got me kicked out of the station a week later.

Ask Sen. Rodolfo Biazon to enlighten us as to why a group of retired generals reject him as being part of the so-called “righteous generals” of our soldiery. Ask Sen. Miguel Zubiri, too, who has been vocal on the Garcia issue. Let’s see if he can explain how he won his Senate seat.

Oops, I almost forgot, what about Etta Rosales and the funds she got from Gloria to jumpstart her party-lists and her comrades’ congressional careers?

If anyone thinks Garcia and Reyes’ alleged loots are scandalously huge, they should ask Sonny Belmonte where the former QC mayor’s annual P1-billion pork barrel went to in the past 10 years, and why his councilors’ counterpart pork barrel had grown from P40 million to P50 million a year, amid the worsening squalor of Quezon City’s poor.

What about the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and its officials, who are collaborating in a great financial larceny by keeping the P1.22-trillion Special Deposit Account idle while borrowing heavily year in-year out, adding up to the country’s mounting murderous debt to the global banking mafia?

What about the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s top officials, who implement debilitating taxes on small and medium scale businesses, as well as the onerous VAT on hapless Filipino consumers, knowing that an awfully huge chunk of these go off to feed the insatiable sharks of international Finance?

Garcia is a small fry; Reyes is but a middling shark. And while we should never take our eyes off them, we must all know that the megalodons (or prehistoric, dinosaur-like sharks) are swimming below in the coldest, darkest depths of our predatory sea.

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m. on 1098AM; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8, about “Crime and Corruption in Philippine Society” with PMJ’s Tito Guingona and Atty. Oliver Lozano; visit our blogs, http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com and http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com)