Hijacked momentarily

Herman Tiu Laurel / DIE HARD III / The Daily Tribune / 08-26-2013 MON

The national outrage leading to what has been dubbed the "Million Man March" today against "pork" started escalating when news of the Ballsy Aquino-Eldon Cruz extortion and the pass-on of public utilities' corporate income tax to consumers came out. The government, the pre-eminent family of the ruling class, and the ruling class itself, along with the country's top corporations, all reeled from the tide of awareness of their perfidy.

What appeared to be a brilliant diversion, executed through the persistent campaign of a mainstream newspaper tagged "The Daily Oink-quirer," has now revived a 10-year-old corruption issue that stemmed from the "Joc-joc Bolante Fertilizer Fund Scam" involving the pork barrel funds of several "sow-lons."

Since the controversy was also huge at that time, one brave investigative journalist indefatigably pursued it. For that valiant effort, Marlene Esperat paid the ultimate price for that exposé, as she was cold-bloodedly murdered in 2005. Very little came out of it and the brains behind her killing are still on the loose.

Back then, the group, Lawyers Against Monopoly and Poverty (Lamp), of Cefie Padua filed a legal suit against the "pork barrel," raising it all the way to the Supreme Court (SC), asking the courts to declare the disbursement of the fund illegal and unconstitutional. But the SC, then led by Justice Renato Corona, dismissed the case.

Ironically, seven years after that decision, the SC's chief justice, Renato Corona, was impeached by the House in 2011 ostensibly due to the speedy release of solons' pork barrel allocations and convicted using "pork barrel" enticements for the votes of some senators, all anchored on the ruling family's vengeance.

The whole point of this historical recounting is that the self-proclaimed "civil society" that has hijacked today's "Million Man March" never went as far as it has done today. Its newspapers and broadcast media have never gone to this extent of placing the issue of "pork" at the forefront. Could that be because civil society was okay with it as long as it was still allied with the sitting government; and now that a redirection of certain issues is needed, it got its controlled media and PR agents working overtime?

The evidence showing "civil (or evil) society" hand riding on and grabbing the steering wheel of the current anti-government and anti-corporatist wave is the discovery of the use of the clenched fist image superimposed on the sun of the Philippine Flag on the "Million Man March" posters, which is the exact copy of one of the 2010 BS Aquino III campaign posters.

Investigative efforts of netizens produced an admission from a certain Peachy Bretana, who claims to have just downloaded and copied it. But a prodigious search reveals that the 2010 logo was nowhere on the Internet; so Bretana must have had a hard copy to extract the image from. It turns out, Bretana is from international ad agency Publicis.

Meanwhile, another mover, Inday Espina-Varona, is affiliated with ABS-CBN. Varona was a former NUJP (National Union of Journalists of the Philippines) colleague whom I had shunned since her Edsa II advocacy of the coup against a legitimately-elected president.

ABS-CBN has been at the forefront of steering the "million man march" and one morning late last week Noli de Castro interviewed a certain female lawyer surnamed Aguilar. Who "appointed" Aguilar to speak for the march and announcing the guidelines for it? Coincidentally, Aguilar admitted to be from an ad agency, too.

As for the other personalities, on Saturday at the Annabelle's Kapihan, Fr. Robert Reyes and a certain Manny Lopez were presented as among the organizers of the "Million Man March."

Today's march is supposedly a "spontaneous" social media and netizens' event. Though netizens' rage and passion over pork are undoubtedly real, the other matters could have been stoked and directed using underhanded means, such as "sock puppet" accounts.

David Warner of the New York Times exposed this, saying, "A fake virtual army of people could be used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online comment threads, or manipulate social media…" So as the controlled print and broadcast media follow this through, presto, they have a redirected rage from the Ballsy-Eldon Inekon extortion try and the corporatist scams to the old pork barrel issue.

This mass consciousness is then backed up physically by the Catholic Church (like in Edsa I and II). The Catholic Educational of the Philippines (CEAP), for one, has announced that it would be mobilizing students to join.

Then, various innocent "leftist" and "citizens" groups are marching along for variations of the protest theme. Bayan will distinguish itself by having its own march from Rizal Monument to Mendiola, an attempt to re-direct the re-direction of "evil society."

Another group (comprising S4S, Tandem, and others) wants to burn a giant yellow ribbon at the Quirino Grandstand. I hope they do so as that would be shifting the focus to the right direction.

Then that's the time we shall all raise the call for the complete abolition of BS Aquino's P1-trillion "discretionary fund" as well as what whistleblower Mel Magdamo would like to call Malacañang's "BABOY" or Benigno Aquino III's Budget for the Oligarchs and Yellows.

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