Pinoy saps

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 31, 2014


Reading the official propaganda from several of the BS Aquino government’s mouthpieces, i.e. Edwin Lacierda, Voltaire Gazmin, and Albert del Rosario, as well as a host of “experts” on the China Sea dispute, one gets the distinct impression that all these voices are making a big deal out of the so-called support of Malaysia, Vietnam, and the West for the Philippines’ filing of a “memorial” on March 30 before the International Tribunal on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea at The Hague.

What saps they are making of Filipinos, especially the youngish “social media” crowd swallowing the bluff. Malaysia and Vietnam are getting billions of dollars in benefits from their dialogs with China (while egging RP’s adversarial position) while the West and its allies rake it in from arms sales to the Philippines.

The three years of disinformation, misinformation, strategy-of-tension propaganda, and provocations to create news media and social media stories have laid the ground for the brainwashing of many segments of the Philippine populace to accept whatever the ruling powers want to happen — from creating widespread myopia to gloss over US imperialism’s plot to create tension via its Asia “pivot,” disrupting Asian prosperity, to distracting from China’s “dialog” overtures by instilling an adversarial mood in the Filipino mind in order to prepare RP as eventual cannon fodder in the US’ strategy of “Offshore Control” to cut China’s freedom of navigation and trade routes. The US, its lackeys, and the controlled mainstream media have so far been very successful.

Just to recap the three years of “pivot” and its attendant propaganda and mass brainwashing campaign, recall all the contrived situations that have constituted the provocations from the Philippine government, particularly its Defense and Foreign Affairs chiefs: April 2012 — Philippine Navy arrest of eight Chinese fishing vessels provoked China’s maritime ships to intervene and not vice-versa; October 2012 — Secretary Gazmin accuses China of installing “concrete blocks” to construct a new base which was debunked by his own Armed Forces of the Philippines investigation that these are actually US target practice anchors; January 2014 — Hysteria over non-existent Chinese demand for all fishing vessels plying disputed China Sea areas to register with Hainan, with the Philippine Star triggering a baseless report of China invading Pag-asa within the year.

More recently, the scion of a World War II former Japanese puppet Agriculture and Commerce minister raised the bogeyman of China sabotaging by remote control the National Grid Corp. that controls the 19,500-circuit-kilometer of the country’s electricity backbone; not mentioning that the US Carlyle Group was key to the corporate takeover or that US-British control of Malampaya may have been deliberately planned to allow the market manipulation of electricity prices by the players last Dec. 2013 and Jan. 2014 that saw an overprice.

All these have been abetted by US and local PR trolls in social media (see Infowars: “Yes, there are paid government trolls on social media, blogs, forums and Web sites thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden”).
So, now, Philippine officials are “commissioning” the purchase of P20 billion worth of FA-50 fighter jets, which, according to aviation expert, US Marine combined services specialist Jorge Rillona, have the “capability in terms of performance and weaponry of a genuine multirole jet fighter plane that the Philippine Air Force badly needs to defend the country’s airspace in light of rising tensions in the region.”

On the other hand, China and its first aircraft carrier will rely on the SU-30MKK/MK2 Flander-G, which RHK 111’s Military and Arms page compares with the FA-50 in terms of: “Payload difference: Favor the Flanker-G as it can carry 117 percent (4,320 kg) more load. It can travel much further as it carries more internal fuel (9,400 kg versus 2,150 kg)… more equipment and arms (8,000 kg vs 3,680 kg). The Flanker-G is a much better offensive weapon… the capability of both aircraft in terms of Within Visual Range sand Beyond Visual Range… enables the Flanker-G to have a lot more opportunities to fire its weapons first. It (FA-50) also is no match against the Flanker-G in BVR combat as it is not yet certified to carry medium range air-to-air missiles as… it would be nothing short of suicide to ask our Geagle (FA-50) pilots to try to engage the Flanker-G in any sort of air combat given its deficiencies against that aircraft.”

PAF pilots will thus be made braver than the Japanese Kamikazes, with the former ready for suicide even without targets. With the FA-50, Philippine Air Force pilots will have the distinction of being target practice magnets of “over the horizon” radars and missiles of the Flanker-G, which will make them face their martyrdom even before they realize it is coming. Philippine government officials, who pushed the deal, will only send lavish wreaths afforded by their lifetime sinecures from “commissioning” such flying coffins.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Fascism on the rise?” with Satur Ocampo and “From truck ban to market clean-up” with Councilors Let-Let Zarcal and Dennis Alcoreza; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Global and local media cover-ups

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 24, 2014


Last week saw several media cover-up operations that we would like to point out to the public. First, we have the Department of Justice (DoJ)’s National Agribusiness Corp. (Nabcor) — PDAF “media payola” issue sustained by the Inquirer, where the latter had this March 21 headline: “Media men in payoff may face bribe raps… No special treatment for broadcasters tied to pork scam — Palace.” That was, of course, a defense strategy cooked up by DoJ Secretary Leila de Lima and Malacañang against the devastating revelation from the two unjustly sacked National Bureau of Investigation deputies, Reynaldo Esmeralda and Ruel Lasala, that a video tape exists (and will be released) of De Lima and BS Aquino’s appointed former NBI irector Nonnatus Rojas meeting with the alleged pork barrel scam queen Janet Lim-Napoles.

Rojas resigned after media exposed NBI “leaks” of the impending arrest of Napoles while De Lima and Malacañang cast diversionary aspersions on the other NBI officials and subsequently raised the media payola issue.
Media payola is nothing new and the habitual takers of these “envelopes” are known to most savvy members of the media community as well as PR agents. Politicians, major government agencies, and giant corporations have long engaged in this practice; and so it is barely headline material at all. Instead, what is of vital importance is the incontrovertible video evidence that can lead to an investigation of Rojas, who may just directly link De Lima and BS Aquino to his “secret” talks with Napoles.

Meanwhile, on the international front, the most significant media diversion is the headline, “Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for 9/11 attacks, says son-in-law.” Suleiman Abu Ghaith, married to bin Laden’s daughter Fatima, recounted a meeting in an Afghanistan cave hideaway on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, where bin Laden supposedly said about the attacks: “Did you learn what happened? We are the ones who did it.” But isn’t that hearsay?

A 10-year bin Laden manhunt ended with him supposedly shot dead by US Navy SEALs in an Abbottabad, Pakistan raid. This latest “Osama did it” story has long been discredited as a yarn diverting blame from the conspiracy among Bush, Cheney, Jewish oligarch Silverstein, and Saudi and Israeli intelligence for profit and the “perpetual war.”

A 2013 YouGov US survey showed that one in two Americans doubt the official US government investigation blaming bin Laden. Forty-six percent believe the third building, Building 7, which collapsed on its own footprint, was caused by controlled demolition; only 28 percent still believe that fires caused it. Forty-one percent now support a new investigation, compared to 21 percent who don’t.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, composed of 1,500 top professionals and scientists, are campaigning to reopen the 9/11 investigations.

And what about that Navy SEALs team (whose members, by the way, were all killed in a suspicious copter crash a year later) raid on bin Laden? Famed My Lai Massacre and Abu Ghraib prison journalist Seymour Hersh in a book says, “not one word of it is true” and everything is “one big lie”; a gigantic stage production to reinforce the “bin Laden did it” diversion.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila’s truck ban” and “The Napoles-De Lima scandal”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

De Lima's dilemma grows

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 19, 2014


A week ago, Justice Secretary Leila De Lima fired National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) deputy directors Reynaldo Esmeralda and Ruel Lasala.  She justified the sacking of these career NBI officials — of which one, Lasala, has been a 30-year veteran — saying that they should have resigned instead of NBI Director Nonnatus Rojas (appointed by Malacañang upon the recommendation of De Lima in July 2012), who quit at the onset of the Janet Lim-Napoles scandal in 2013. News reports back then arose of NBI “leaks” alerting the alleged multi-billion NGO scammer to imminent arrest, which purportedly prompted BS Aquino to say that there are “less trustworthy” NBI officials. But at that time, Malacañang was already scrambling to contain the suspicion that Napoles was being coddled by BS Aquino’s Palace men.

Rojas resigned or, as most analysts believe, was requested to resign on command responsibility to take the heat off BS Aquino, whose administration was already mired in the controversy. Remember Mar Roxas referring to Napoles as “Ma’am” Janet and the Palace giving the accused pork barrel scam artist the red carpet treatment that provoked public ire? Rojas was a crucial scapegoat at that point to take the spotlight off Malacañang. De Lima could not have demanded the resignation of those other deputy directors then because she was not able to show cause; neither could she do it now without questions being raised as she still cannot show an iota of justifiable cause.  The only difference a year later is that De Lima apparently thinks that she can now throw propriety out the window by simply sacking the named deputy directors on mere suspicion.

But De Lima’s dilemma has exploded right in in  her face as the two recently sacked NBI officials, Esme and Ruel as they are called, are reported to have possession of a video showing her original ward and Palace appointee to the agency, who resigned with a lot of tearjerker drama and fanfare, meeting with Napoles — information Rojas never revealed to the public because it is a vital piece of information that could have shed light on the newspaper reports of an “NBI leak.” Rojas was made to appear in De Lima’s public pronouncements as heroic and self-sacrificing, which may turn out to be just worthy of a Famas award. Worst for De Lima are the implications for her, being the endorser of Rojas for appointment.

De Lima says she and Malacañang are free to dismiss the two presidential appointees at any time, but the rights of Esme and Ruel cannot be so callously considered when they are career officials, too. Take Lasala, a veteran in the service for 30 years, for instance: Why was he summarily sacked and not just reassigned, which is the only correct course of action if there is no specific cause that can be cited? De Lima will have her dilemma multiplying even more when Lasala brings the matter to court. But then her dilemma will become even more insurmountable when the video of Rojas meeting with Napoles is made public, as further investigation of this will certainly lead to the question: Did Rojas meet Napoles on De Lima and Malacañang’s behalf?

BS Aquino and De Lima have new NBI appointees in place, i.e. Ricardo Pangan Jr. replacing Esmeralda and Antonio Pagatpat assuming Lasala’s post, with Edward Villarta and Jose Doloiras taking over as head of the NBI.  De Lima said this reorganization aims at “ensuring the integrity and competency of our nation’s premier investigative agency.” But that claim can only be believable if the head of the Department of Justice herself, as the endorser to the appointing power in Malacañang, is above suspicion — which is absolutely not the case.
BS Aquino, in attempting to whitewash his and his factotums’ involvement with “Ma’am” Janet, has inadvertently opened a new can of worms.

I have to pick up a share of the cudgels for the Lasala family because I have come to know its members over the years when, in the early years of the Edsa Dos government of Gloria Arroyo, Ruel Lasala’s wife, former National Treasurer Nina Lopez-Lasala, stood up to oppose then Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Gov. Rafael Buenaventura’s privatization of government securities custodianship and information and clearing transactions involving trillions of pesos that resulted in billions in losses to government. Mrs. Lasala was eased out of her post within months of this tussle with the late BSP governor. Ruel Lasala will therefore not allow his tiff with De Lima to sully his family’s name and honor.

Meanwhile, in the global struggle against Western hegemony, we rejoice with the people of Crimea who voted 96.77 percent (on a referendum turnout of 85 percent) to be free to join their motherland Russia and reject vassalage to US imperialism. Also, we rejoice with Latin America whose ever increasing anti-imperialist bloc now has a new member: Chile’s new socialist president Michelle Bachelet who promises to join independent countries such as Venezuela and Cuba in solidarity while its new Senate speaker, Isabel Allende, bears the name of a family that has come full circle in that nation’s long and bloody anti-imperialist struggle, being the daughter of the late US-Pinochet-assassinated Chilean president, Salvador Allende.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila’s truck ban” and “The Napoles-De Lima scandal”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

BRICS is the future

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 17, 2014


Three years of systematic disinformation and black propaganda, all part of a strategy-of-tension aimed at demonizing China, by Western media and top Philippine officials, have paved the way for what is about to happen in the next few weeks — the return of US forces to their former bases, with additional facilities to boot.

To some Filipinos, this is the only future they see. Such is especially true of the traitor class, typified by the likes of BS Aquino III, grandson of an infamous Japanese puppet minister, and anti-China crowd-sourcer Rafael Alunan, whose father also served as a puppet agricultural minister under the Japanese.

What they fail to see is that there is a clearer, brighter world ahead — a world built on BRICS. BRICS, the alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which alone represents 40 percent of the world’s population, has an economic clout that reaches roughly 80 percent of the world due to each of its member-country’s regional partnerships.
Whenever US or EU officials invoke the name of the “international community” in their “regime change” projects in any country, they misrepresent themselves.  It is the BRICS that is the real “international community.”

The US/EU-induced crisis in Ukraine will have the unintended consequence of strengthening BRICS as Russia’s “look East policy for the 21st Century” will gain unprecedented momentum through the closer embrace of China’s friendship.
China will keep the US wish for war at bay by helping in Russia’s resistance and, in fact, will profit from threatened escalation of Western economic and political sanctions that can only boomerang twice over against the West. The US pressure on Europe to escalate aggression against Russia in Crimea as well as South and Eastern Ukraine may even spark the sovereign impulse of Germany and the rest of Europe that the US only wishes a war of attrition with Russia.  Former German leaders Helmut Kohl and Gerard Schroeder have come up to speak against the aggressive tone the US has compelled EU nations to mouth against Russia.

Meanwhile, Russian companies have withdrawn billions from Western banks, keeping ahead of Western actions in this geopolitical chess game.

The little voice in Philippine media that are conscientious must step up efforts to educate Filipino audiences with an independent information, vision, economic reality, and promise that BRICS represents — the promise of global peace and prosperity under a multipolar world where not a single “superpower” could ever impose its unilateral will to feed its own, as what the West is doing on behalf of its ruling class.

“Western sanctions will only strengthen Russian industry,” said Russian Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin, echoing German trade group BGA president Anton Borner’s declaration “that Germany could not do without Russia as both economies (are) highly complementary.”

While BRICS brings unprecedented bright hopes to the East, i.e. North Asia and Asean, the US brings only the “march of folly” of war. The Western monopoly of finance and banking cartels presiding over the imminent collapse of the Western economic system and the revolt of the masses are desperately preparing the world into war to escape the wrath of its peoples.  A repeat of 1914 and 1939 in Europe and Asia is probably what is being sought; but the US and its Alliance of Evil (namely, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) are severely behind schedule while BRICS is surging ahead to build the dam against the surge of aggression from these Western hegemonic powers.
Filipinos should thus be engaged with BRICS to tap its potentials in cheaper energy supplies and infinitely vaster markets.

In the Philippines, the US had started preparing for its “Asia pivot” earlier than the official Obama announcement in 2011, with the manipulation of the 2010 elections via the precinct count optical scan source code controlled from behind by US company Dominion.

The result was the installation of a hopelessly dumb, weak, and inept bubblehead from a traitor’s bloodline atop a puppet regime that will pave the way for the physical and unabated return of US forces and missiles (as time will show), using the Philippines as a forward base and retaliation-decoy before Asian powers can smash the US’ long planned constriction of China’s trade route at the Strait of Malacca and elsewhere, and before any conflagration reaches US bases in Australia.

Tragedy awaits Filipinos as had happened in World War II.

Yet nothing highlights the total depravity of the US-installed BS Aquino government as much as the latest scandal at the Justice Department, where Leila de Lima has been exposed by the most upright agents she and her boss had recently fired. Lawyer Ruel Lasala and former National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) intel chief Reynaldo Esmeralda are ready with tapes to expose De Lima’s closest NBI allies and agents as the ones who had actually met with Janet Lim-Napoles.

I can personally vouch for Lasala whose family I have known for decades and who represents the best of public servants I have seen. More in our next column.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila’s truck ban” and “The Napoles-De Lima scandal”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

West vs the rest: Media war

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 12, 2014


Despite a severe attack of gout today, I am still exerting every effort to counter the onslaught of Western propaganda in every corner of the world. It’s my small contribution to the big pool of truth tellers about the black ops led by the US to subvert countries that oppose its hegemony, as well as to sustain the rest of the world’s efforts at completely turning back the resurgence of imperialism and expanding the multipolar world led by the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) alliance.

The latest notable insertion of US black propaganda in the Philippine mainstream media (MSM) appeared on the Inquirer issue of March 11, which I read online. It reported an on-air resignation (with a lot of huffing and puffing) of Russia Today news anchor Liz Wahl, supposedly a Filipino-Hungarian-American, on the pretext of RT’s censorship of her interview with former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. When Paul was asked by independent sources how that interview went, he denied Wahl’s claims saying, “I listened to the replay of the whole thing, I didn’t think it was slanted in any way. I thought what they reported was exactly what I said.”

What the Inquirer won’t be reporting on, but which may be our provocation may compel it to, is what another presidential candidate in the last US election, Democrat Dennis Kucinich, squarely told arch media neocon Bill O’Reilly of Fox News about what Ukraine Kucinich said, “What I’d do is not have USaid (US Agency for International Development) and the National Endowment for Democracy working with US taxpayers’ money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn’t try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.”

O’Reilly, who tried to be a smart ass, then countered, “So, it’s the USA’s fault that Putin rolled in? We made them do it?” That was what naturally led to this smackdown by Kucinich for the three point: “Bill O’Reilly, if you don’t believe in cause and effect, I don’t know what I can do for you.”

Western propaganda relies on short-circuiting its audience’s rationale minds by throwing out the laws of logical thinking where cause-and-effect don’t apply.

One way is by shortening the history of events and leaving out the real cause of a situation, like shifting the issue to Crimea, when the original outrage against lawlessness and injustice was the three months of violent destabilization that saw snipers funded by US-led NGOs in ousting a democratically-elected president.

Note that as the Agence France Presse (AFP) has been at the forefront in Philippine MSM, spewing half-truths about the evolving situation in Ukraine and Crimea, a Filipino priest-columnist in the Manila Standard Today follows on its wayward interpretation. Both have reported the “Russian invasion” because of “boots on the ground;” but what they are not touching on is that Ukraine and Russia have a treaty giving Russia basing rights, such as the naval facility at Sevastopol that allows up to 25,000 Russian troops in the region to “protect Russian interests” and ethnic Russians. That’s why Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are entirely correct in saying that their actions are entirely legal under a 2010 treaty that extends Russia’s lease until 2042.

If those who are tending to believe Western black propaganda would only step back a while and look at the Western leaders’ behavior, they will notice how shrill, manic, irrational, and provocative they are — the same way that Hillary Clinton made a fool of herself by comparing Putin to Hitler, which many have called the association fallacy of “Reductio ad Hitlerum,” an ad hominem appealing to emotion and not logic, similar to what BS Aquino did last month against China’s leaders.

The use of that fallacy is very extensive in the Philippines, especially by the Yellow media and pseudo-activists who employ “Reductio ad Marcosum” or “Reduction ad Eraptum” and, today, “Reductio ad Glorianum.”

When the US and Nato invoked “R2P” (or “Right-to-Protect”) on Libya in 2011, they were not even involving the right to protect its citizens or those ethnically related to them, as the “threats” from Muammar Gaddafi to his own people were also a fiction created by Western media.

Libya, before the R2P of the US and Nato, was a secure and orderly society that has deteriorated completely today. Even at the height of Western destabilization, it was the Western-backed rebels who took Filipino nurses hostage.
It’s about time Filipinos wake up to the truth about Western and Filipino MSM that when the critical need for accurate and fair information arises they are essentially purveyors of big lies, big disinformation and black propaganda.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila: Sunshine in the city”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Crises in public universities... and Ukraine

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 10, 2014


The near-future of the world hangs on the events in Ukraine and on whether the majority of Ukrainians will get justice in the aftermath of the Western-funded coup against their democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych — much like what was inflicted on President Joseph Estrada and the Filipino nation in 2001.  

Crucial to the outcome is whether the people of the world will be getting the correct information amid the fog of disinformation that the West is now engaged in to waylay them into supporting its hegemonic aggression in Ukraine — much like this recent Agence France Presse (AFP) report hyping the enlistment of Western Ukrainians in the military to oppose what they term as “Russian aggression.”

This space aims to counter Western disinformation, which invariably sets skewed perspectives for its Western and Filipino audiences. And how does the West use the so-called free press to achieve this?  US socio-political critic Paul Craig Roberts explains in Counterpunch (“Propaganda, Wrong premises: Ukraine through the Fog of the Presstitutes”): “Presstitutes sell themselves to Washington for access and government sources and to keep their jobs.”

Thus, standing out lately is international news channel Russia Today (RT), which did not interfere at all with its Washington-based opinion show host Abby Martin, despite the latter’s erroneous criticism of Russian Crimea’s status. RT also kept its cool when one of its news anchors, Liz Wahl, made an unethical on-air resignation, allegedly in protest of the network’s “censorship” of an interview with former US presidential bet Ron Paul, then later publicly acknowledging that she would accept a job from CNN — as if CNN does not censor.  Who could forget that during the 2003 Iraq War coverage, CNN summarily fired star reporter Peter Arnett for expressing disagreement?

Predictably, US neocons elevated Liz Wahl to sainthood, even as days later Ron Paul clarified that what he had said in the interview was never tampered with — thus, making Wahl quite a hypocritical fraud.

At this point, however, I will shift to a totally different subject, as my column title today suggests.  As journalist, I am also committed to “comfort the discomfited and discomfit the comfortable,” which is what Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) and Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) colleagues have asked of us.

I taught political economy and mass communication/journalism at the PUP for three years and graduated from the PLM’s business administration course. Now, the faculty of these two public universities have come to me for help in airing issues against their top officials.

PUP President Emanuel de Guzman, for instance, was said to have academic credentials that are absolutely dubious, using a most probably fraudulent transcript of records, with 15 subjects dropped, seven subjects rated 5.0, 12 subjects with no credits, and four subjects with incomplete grades.

From the PLM, faculty members submitted to us a letter from the Bagatsing Law Office to the Office of the Mayor of Manila that listed these grave concerns: 1) the appointment of PLM President Artemio Tuquero whose overage status was basis for the Civil Service Commission (CSC) to invalidate two previous appointments as president of the University of Manila; 2) the appointment of Dr. Elena Cernia as Dean of the College of Management and Entrepreneurship, despite dismissal from an earlier service for violations of Section 4A (a)to (c) of RA 613 for misconduct, dishonesty, neglect of duties; 3) the irregular designation of lawyers Carlos Carlos as legal counsel (already rejected by the CSC) and Alex Erese as Dean of Student Services, as well as related issues.

In the case of the questioned credentials of the PUP president appointed by BS Aquino, all the physical evidence, such as the likely fake transcript of records, seem incontrovertible. Dr. Orly Molina, professor from the PUP doctorate program, has brought the documentary evidence against him to the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), which Chairman Patricia Licuanan has just apparently sat on.

The political patron of De Guzman turns out to be Speaker Sonny Belmonte, who seems to ride roughshod over our education authorities.  

Many of the faculty and administrative career professionals in both institutions of higher learning are apparently suffering severely from the sense of indignity and injustice caused by these unresolved questions.

Members of the PUP faculty have, at least, raised these to the courts, even though that may not be enough. As I have told the PUP professors who appeared on my GNN public affairs program, they may have to stage pickets and rallies to call attention to the shameful fraud in the executive office of that university.  

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila: Sunshine in the city”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Dare: Joint inquiry

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 5, 2014


We have been following the allegations made by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (CSAFP) Gen. Emmanuel Bautista late February about the alleged “water cannon” shooting of Filipino fishermen by Chinese Coast Guard vessels to shoo them off fishing areas at the Scarborough or Panatag Shoal.

At around the same time, Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin expressed in public the view that the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) should be sent back to the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea “if their Chinese counterparts continue to use water cannons to drive away local fishermen.”

Yet, Malacañang spokesman Edwin Lacierda as of March 3 has continued to insist to media that “We have fishermen there till now... it’s not an issue with us,” which leads us to ask: Are Gazmin and Bautista the tails trying to wag the dog?

The contradictions between the statements emanating from Malacañang and the Philippine civilian defense and military establishment, plus the Department of Foreign Affairs, which filed a protest, belie the allegations that Filipino fishermen are being driven away from the fishing areas of these disputed waters. There is also the lack of any direct witness and evidence that “water cannons” were fired, even though Chinese Embassy officials responding to media questions have been careful to stick to legal and proper diplomatic language that China “has indisputable sovereignty over South China Sea islands and their adjacent waters… (and) does not accept the so-called protest,” neither confirming nor denying the water cannon incident.

What the Philippine media are citing as apparent evidence that the entire incident being alleged is true are statements attributed to a Filipino fish trader, Macario Forones, who said Chinese Coast Guard personnel used crude oil-laden waste water while blowing their ship’s horn in yelling, “Go away, go away.”

The Associated Press quotes Forones by telephone from western Zambales province: “One or two other Philippine fishing boats were hit by the waste water… The water smelled of oil and smeared the side of my fishing boat.” Forones then adds, “But my fishermen did not really leave the area. We’ve spent so much money to travel there and they basically ignored the Chinese.”

If the Chinese Coast Guard, allegedly with bow No. 3063, really wanted to drive away the fishermen, can anyone think that they wouldn’t have done so with their superior strength? Philippine officials below the authority of the president are, thus, hurling repeated accusations even when their superior has, in the words of the Malacañang spokesman, officially shot the incident down by saying that “it’s not an issue with us.” Obviously, if we are to use the correct words for what the Defense and Foreign Affairs secretaries, the CSAFP, and other officials are doing, we can say that they have “gone rogue” and are no longer following official authority. Who then are they following — the US State Department?

The same is true for the so-called activist group, Akbayan, which picketed outside the Chinese embassy to protest the purported “water cannon” incident. This group has been coddled by Malacañang both under Gloria Arroyo and BS Aquino. Its leaders are among those blessed by the political authorities to have tapped into the Janet Lim-Napoles largesse without being investigated. As Argee Guevarra once posted on his Facebook account, Etta Rosales and Riza Hontiveros allegedly received a total of more than P30 million.

Moreover, even as Akbayan ideologue Walden Bello may posture himself as a Third World economist, his foreign relations vision is what can be described as pure US State Department, anti-Gaddafi, anti-Assad, and now anti-China (thus, obliquely, pro-US). Of course, there’s Akbayan idol Randy David with the same line, too.

Some of these very same people and official institutions carping about unproven allegations of China’s “water cannon” aggression were the ones who hedged, lied, or obfuscated the PCG’s machine gun rapid-firing of the Taiwanese fishing boat Guang Da Xing No. 24 in May 2013 that killed one Taiwanese fisherman.

For months on end, these Philippine institutions and their top officials attempted to hide the truth that some of the PCG’s irresponsible actions caused the tragic incident as well as grave damage to the image and standing of the country. But, eventually, the Taiwanese side was able to compel Philippine authorities to engage in a “joint investigation,” such that today the truth is known and justice is meted.

So what is stopping the Philippines in the current “water cannon” imbroglio from calling for such a “joint investigation?”
I am not sure if the Philippines’ carping parties will really want a “joint investigation” for the truth may not be what they want. They seem satisfied with being able to engage in black propaganda against China, perhaps mindful that whatever findings may be uncovered will turn out to be very embarrassing again.

As our fishermen sources tell us, the boats that tried to surround the Chinese coastal vessel may not be fishermen at all but agents-provocateur posing as fishermen. Could the Chinese coastal vessel have video cameras? Would these be released in a “joint investigation” so that we can get to the bottom of the murky waters being repeatedly stirred by such allegations?

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila: Sunshine in the city”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Manila vs Western interference

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / March 3, 2014


While familiar with the arrogance of Western foreign business in the Philippines, I was still taken aback when the European Chamber of Commerce, through its president Michael Raeuber, denounced Manila’s imposition of its daytime truck ban as “economic sabotage.”

The people of the City of Manila have been made to suffer decades of costly traffic just to coddle one darling oligarch engaged in the import-export business with foreign firms, as well as their paid-for national government politicians, in maintaining the Port of Manila for 98 percent of Luzon’s cargo handling while leaving the Subic and Batangas ports to share the remainder.

Mayor Joseph Estrada has asserted the rights of Manilans and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC) to do what should have been done decades ago — divert heavy truck traffic to the other two major Luzon ports.
Raeuber may be very vocal in the Philippines, which apparently puts up with any kind of insult from Westerners, but I wonder if he can do the same in Vietnam, Singapore, or Malaysia, where he’d probably get a whipping.

With a supine ruling class in the Philippines that sniffs the behind of its Western masters for the little crumbs it gets, Raeuber’s rants and insults are just a small price to pay (ditto for the elite’s mainstream media).

The arrogance of these foreign businessmen is verging on the intolerable as even their “planted” writers (business “con-suhol-tants”) in local media are belittling Filipinos to the extent of telling them down, like Peter Wallace of the Inquirer, that the Philippines “needs” these foreigners. The historical truth is, the Philippines has been constantly screwed by none other than the West.

Through his latest measure, Estrada has forced the national government to take cognizance of its duty to distribute more rationally and efficiently the port services for the growing trade requirements of the country, whereby the coddling of the port operator whom former National Economic Development Authority chief Romulo Neri described as charging “the highest port service rates in the world” must end.

Over and above such exploitative operation that extracts its pound of flesh from every Filipino is the salting of surplus earned from these port rates gouging to other countries in cahoots with other foreign companies for so-called investments in other ports.  

However, not all foreigners are of Raeuber’s mind. Japan International Cooperation Agency, for instance, is actually helping the DoTC figure out a plan to decongest the overconcentration of foreign trade cargo services in the Port of Manila. Incentives are being considered for traders and truckers who use the other two major underutilized ports, where capacity utilization is only at 6 percent for Subic and 4 percent for Batangas.

It is unimaginable irresponsibility and stupidity that this situation has prevailed for so long, with corruption of government officials by those who benefit from such an arrangement usually the cause.

Why didn’t the DoTC think of this before — of radically lowering the port services rates in Subic and Batangas to give the Manila port operator a run for his money?

Mayor Joseph Estrada is now restoring the City of Manila into the sane, less-congested, oxygen-filled, orderly city that it once was. After he is through with his first three-year term, we should see some sunshine break through the dark smog of traffic and human congestion that it has become these past decades.

Last week, while riding the Light Rail Transit to Carriedo and coming down the steps to Rizal Avenue, I actually didn’t get the whiff of urine and excrement that I invariably experienced just a year ago. In other words, the LRT station landings are getting cleaned up.

Then, I walked through the middle of Carriedo without having to stumble over overlapping vendors’ stalls — really!
Also, tax revenues are up by 100 percent, mainly from business and real estate tax hikes, which ought to give their share.

Mayor Estrada has always said, “Walang tutulong sa Pilipino kundi kapwa Pilipino.”  (No one will help the Filipino except for his fellow Filipino.)

Unfortunately, there are some “Filipinos” purporting to seek indispensable help, capital, or technology from foreigners for the country, such as the likes of “Boy Blue” del Rosario and Speaker Sonny Belmonte, who, like Peter Wallace, are calling for Charter change —purportedly to bring in much needed capital, even when a leading private bank (such as BdO) has stated categorically that “there is no lack of capital in the Philippines.”

We are, of course, aware of the fate of those countries that accepted “foreign aid” in exchange for Western “liberalization,” such as Greece, Cyprus, Spain, and now Ukraine, whose rump parliament is getting an International Monetary Fund man, a private central banker, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to implement privatization, austerity, high taxes, and neo-Nazi fascism in compliance with Western diktats.

President-Mayor Joseph Estrada has had his own brush with Western interference. That was what got him ousted from his legitimate presidency — after he refused to accede to President Bill Clinton’s demand to withdraw Philippine military forces laying siege to Muslim terrorists in the South. But that’s another story that, I am informed, Estrada will tell in his memoirs.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Manila: Sunshine in the city”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

The Maidan and Edsa

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 24, 2014


It has become clear that a US-sponsored coup d’état has transpired in Ukraine. The legally elected government and president faced mobs in the streets of Kiev that began at what we may call a plaza called the Maidan. It looked like the “Occupy Wall Street” attempts in New York and parts of the US in 2011.

But there was one major difference: Whereas the “Occupy” protesters remained passive in the face of violent police dispersals, keeping their peaceful conduct despite the tearing down of their tents, or seeing war veteran-participants being knocked unconscious and left bleeding and the gratuitous spraying of tear gas straight into the faces of already subdued and handcuffed female protesters, Kiev saw the reverse.

In the Ukrainian capital, helmeted, masked mobsters wielding long iron rods chased and mauled police, or shot the latter with telescoped rifles, and threw Molotov cocktails that burned down government buildings. Yet the police were allowed to carry firearms only after suffering seven deaths from bullets and other violence.

The US and EU never condemned these protesters’ violence, led by US-paid rightwing thugs, which numbered, by all the different estimates we read, 2,000.

A “peace deal” including new elections, was subsequently signed to stem the bloodshed. But before the ink could dry, President Viktor Yanukovych (refusing to resign, reminiscent of Erap) had to flee to a southern city to maintain government.

Last Feb. 7, international media and the Internet released news and a leaked video of Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a private conversation with US diplomatic staff, saying, “F….k the EU.”

That’s because the EU, represented by the interests of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, wanted to install a different president contrary to the wishes of the US, which had wanted a former boxer tuned leader of the pro-West opposition in Ukraine to be installed in the coup that Nuland said the US had invested “$5 billion” in already.

It now seems that the US would settle for nothing less; and no “peace deal” to save the democratic process in Ukraine could stop it. Thus, President Yanukovych is in the city of Kharkov to maintain his government.

The present trouble started when Yanukovych signed an economic pact with Russia that would help Ukraine come out of its deep recession, with a $15-billion financial package and a long-term guarantee of cheap fuel prices. The EU, which engaged in a tug-of-war of sorts with Russia over Ukraine, could offer no economic aid at all, as we have seen for struggling EU members Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy et al.

The US, on the other hand, instead of investing in Ukraine’s economy, chose to invest in the coup.

The demographics of Ukraine is a major factor in the continuing troubles of the land. While ethnic Ukrainians dominate Western Ukraine, the South has many ethnic Russians who gave Yanukovych his electoral victory. Conversely, there is also a huge Ukrainian population in Russia.

“So what about the Ukrainian people?” the Saker wrote in Asia Times, “The EU needs them as slaves (market and cheap labor), the US needs them as pawns (in geopolitical game), and the only party which needs them prosperous is Russia. That is simply a fact of geo-strategy. If the Ukrainians are too stupid and too blinded by their rabid nationalism to understand that, then let them pay the price for their folly. If they are smart enough to realize it, then let them find the courage to act on it and make it possible for Russia to help them.”

But then, without real democratic elections being respected, the judgment of the Ukrainian people will never be known and only the US gets to “f….k ‘em all.”

What do events at the Maidan (Independence Square) have to do with Edsa? Maidan today is what Edsa was at Edsa I, the place where a US-led coup that was hatched as a conspiracy with local oligarchs fronted by mobs forced out the relatively independent Ferdinand Marcos for a completely pliant Cory Aquino.

After Edsa I, the Philippine economy was de-industrialized and its manufacturing and agro-industries withered. Not long after, poverty and unemployment exploded as national assets in electricity, water and infrastructure, along with all their revenues, were privatized, and as the commercialization of education and the expansion of the country’s debt and taxes commenced.

With the social order now imploding, it is clear that Edsa I has failed in all its promises. What we instead have are the electronic “dagdag-bawas” of our election body, as well as a national enslavement to debt and total import dependency that impoverish our people, which make the Philippines nothing but a US geopolitical toady.

Twenty-eight years later, with the US-led Edsa I coup now totally discredited, as seen in the crowds at the Edsa Shrine celebrations dwindling to just hundreds, tomorrow’s celebrations at the ground of Malacañang are precisely so in order to hide that fact.

Ukraine, after this latest coup, will miss the chance of having a balanced economy, benefiting from both Russia and EU, and will be downgraded to a mere market for the latter and a geopolitical tool of the US.

Some years from now, celebrations at the Maidan may look a lot like the pathetic celebrations of Edsa today.

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

MRT 'Fangs Club'

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 19, 2014


The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and the Federation of Associations of Private Schools and Administrators (Fapsa) are at odds over the correct approach to the problem of horrendous traffic jams involving hundreds of thousands of private school-bound vehicles each day to be brought about by the start of the construction of 15 major road projects this year.

The MMDA proposed a four-day school week while the Fapsa proposed “carpooling.” I don’t see how either approach can work. The four-day school week does not reduce the number of vehicles while car-pooling reduces it only by half, at the most. The 15 road projects, in contrast, will constrict the roads involved by half or more.

For two decades now I have raised the need for private schools within the inner cities of Metro Manila to accept school busing of all their students and for government to organize a school bus consortium to equip this busing system with the latest safety, convenience, and security features.

However, echoes of Cory Aquino’s MMDA Chairman Elfren Cruz saying, “The rich will get angry at such a plan,” when he declined my proposal despite the concurrence of the Ateneo and Maryknoll school authorities with whom I had then tried to work, still come to mind. Former Quezon City Mayor Charito Planas, who supported my plan, wondered years later what ever happened to it.

I had proposed the mandatory school busing for private schools way back in 1992 to 1994 when the Metro Rail Transit was not yet running along Edsa. Now, we have the MRT 3 shuttling passengers between Taft and Monumento; and the Light Rail Transit from Muñoz to Baclaran, where one can transfer to LRT 2 at Recto to go to Santolan through Edsa-Cubao, where one can hop back to the MRT 3.

All these light rail systems, though, are already overloaded, especially the MRT 3 and LRT 1. I know because I take them regularly. The best and easiest solution to relieve road congestion is to bring both public and private transport passengers above the road. And for that to happen, the LRT-MRT system has to double its coaches.

MRT 3 was all set to almost double its number of coaches with the Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC) completing the requirements for the lowest cost bidder, Dalian Locomotive and Rolling Stock Company Ltd., CNR group of China. Dalian bid P3.759 for 48 coaches, P10 million lower than government’s estimate. The Aquinos tried to swipe the deal said to have used Ballsy Aquino-Cruz and husband Eldon’s cronies Yorgo Psinakis and Jorge Aquino-Lichauco, with the Czech company Inekon, for double that price. Only principled MRT 3 management professionals stopped this before being heaped with calumnies by the Aquino conspirators. The DoTC team that visited Dalian to verify its capabilities appeared on my GNN show.

Obviously, Dalian Locomotive could prove its capabilities, which was why the awarding of the project was scheduled. But, as expected, a monkey wrench was thrown in by the cronies of this Yellow Aquino government. This group, which I shall call the MRT “Fangs Club;” loves the MRT so much because all of its vampire-players have been sucking dry the blood of the system, with exorbitant fares charged to the MRT’s 750,000 daily passengers in order to fill the P60/trip fare this “Fangs Club” had imposed in the contracts signed by Fidel V. Ramos.

BS Aquino and Mar Roxas lie when they say government subsidizes MRT passengers to the tune of P7 billion a year. That subsidy is to the “Fangs Club.”

With the prospect of 48 new additional coaches for millions of MRT passengers close to reality, the “Fangs Club” petitioned the courts to restrain the awarding of the contract to Dalian Locomotive on the grounds that it (the “Fangs Club” or the MRT Corp. consisting of the original “investors”), being the so-called substantial owner still with a Build-Lease-Transfer contract, should have the right to purchase the additional coaches and that Dalian’s capabilities are in doubt.

To wit, Dalian has over ¥10 billion in annual revenues; exports trains and coaches to 20 countries; and supplies the country with the most extensive network of trains in the world, China.

With capacity-building measures of the light rail systems in place (maybe dedicating some coaches at peak school opening and closing times to students), and in coordination with a mandatory school busing system to shuttle passengers to and from MRT-LRT stations (with special entry and exit areas), this system would be a permanent, far cheaper, and economical mode of transport.

Billions in wasted fuel of chauffeured students’ cars and precious road space (space occupied by one private car for one or two passengers could hold 10 or more in a bus) would be saved.

But, as those in power are the “rich” and can see the problem only through their own stupid eyes, the “rich” are an essential part of the current traffic problem, along with other problems of society in general.

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Build Bricseus, tame the US

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 17, 2014


“C hina has not replaced America — and it never will.” For starters, China doesn’t want to be a global hegemon,” wrote Zack Beauchamp on Feb. 13, 2014. I read it on RealClearWorld among dozens of articles reacting to China’s rise.  Beauchamp echoes some of my own replies to fear-mongering China-bashers who conjure up the “aggressive” and “provocative” Chinese ogre. He takes the right perspective by saying that “China faces too many… regional rivals to ever make a real play for global leadership.” Indeed, there’s India, Russia, the EU and the US itself. More importantly, China sees the lesson of US overreach that is slowly and surely destroying that fading superpower.

However, just two days after that Beauchamp article, another writer was immediately stoking the fires of a “China threat.” Zachary Keck (“Of Course China Wants to Replace the US”) countered that “If China becomes the world’s most powerful country, it won’t be satisfied being America’s number two.” Keck’s basic arguments, though, only reflect the twisted obsession of quite a number of US chauvinists that there has to be “a number one” and that everyone else would want to be that — which the US has been for so many decades since the end of World War II, with its over 800 military-naval bases across the globe (the cost of which is destroying it).

And so the stream of anti-China misinformation and disinformation continues. Even before Keck’s opinion piece, there was this article by Robert Kaplan that really got my goat: “Why is China Really Provoking Its Neighbors?” Why raise tensions as much as they have in the Pacific Basin? Beijing’s recent declaration of new fishing rules in disputed territorial waters has raised the ire of maritime neighbors and the consternation of the United States. It follows on the heels of the recently declared air defense identification zone or ADIZ.”

First, China is neighbor to 14 countries sharing land borders with it and 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean); of these, only three countries are involved in the issues Kaplan identified.

Then Kaplan further errs: China has issues involving the Pacific Basin with only one country, Japan, while the Philippines and Vietnam have issues involving the claims in the China Sea. China bashers invariably generalize and gloss over inconvenient details just to impress upon the generally uniformed public the terms “aggression” and “provocation.”

In the Asean, China is in extremely friendly relations with the rest of its 10 members, making that eight out of 10. Cambodia is, of course, China’s bosom buddy while Malaysia’s defense officials see no problem even with Chinese coastal patrols traversing the commonly claimed sea territories. Only the Philippines has internationalized its territorial dispute with China.

The US and its minions are very uncomfortable with the rise of China and fear losing US hegemony, particularly its freedom to interfere and dominate the world. China poses no aggressive threat as it continues to stress that it needs a peaceful and harmonious environment to pursue its “dream” in order to benefit the region and the world.
China, however, understands the historical record of Western capitalist-imperialists and their need for “markets.” Though the West is using China as a manufacturing base today, time will come when the capitalist-imperialist West will again resort to the “creative destruction of war” where human lives are just incidental.

US chauvinists in what remains of the empire the US still holds (particularly in the Philippines) have difficulty getting used to the idea that a “one-superpower-world” can no longer hold. Another World War may well revive this, as world wars are “winner-take-all” pursuits where the winner becomes the hegemon; but a thermonuclear war immediately banishes that thought.

The real rebalancing that is needed is not the US coming to the Asia-Pacific but keeping it in its place so that the world can have a “balance of powers” toward productive peace and harmony. The US has to get used to the idea that it can and will never again regain its “single superpower status.”

Promoting the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) alliance plays a strategic role in keeping this pompous US ambition in check.

The Philippines, which has no foreign policy vision today, can begin to count again in the world community by taking this up as a mission. Activating the Philippines’ role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which recently called for global disarmament, will be a great boost as well.

The Brics should become the Bricseus (Brics with the EU and US). China can nudge the US toward this by crowding US hegemonism out of Asia.

In a truly balanced world, we can spare our children, grandchildren, and future generations what will be immeasurably worse than what history has witnessed in two world wars.

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on the “MRT TRO: Prolonging suffering”; tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

US Muppets' show

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 10, 2014


Immediately after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22, 2014, the international media exploded with reports of Abe likening the present year, 2014, to the eve of World War I in 1914. He was further reported to have compared China to Nazi Germany and Japan to England.

The Chinese response, summed up in a high-level statement from China’s National People’s Congress Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Fu Ying at the Munich Security Conference last Feb. 1, declared: “Now is the era of peace and development… the ‘Chinese dream’ can’t be realized without a good external environment... the ‘Chinese dream’ will add to peace and prosperity of... the world.”

Two weeks after Abe’s reported comparisons, the Japanese foreign ministry announced on Feb. 3 to Japanese media Asahi and Sankei Shimbun(s) that PM Abe’s controversial remarks were “embellished” by “an employee” of the “private interpretation firm.”

A translation from the chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga shows Abe being asked about a possible Japan-China conflict, where Abe replied: “This year marks the 100th year since World War I.  At the time, Britain and Germany had a strong economic relationship, but they went to war… If something like you suggest were to happen, it would cause serious losses to both Japan and China... We must ensure this will not happen.”

Despite this clarification from the Japanese government about the erroneous translation, BS Aquino in an interview with the New York Times echoed the false Abe comparisons and called on world leaders not to err in appeasing China over the China Sea issues, saying, “Well, the world has to say it… Remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II...”

China’s state news agency, Xinhua, thus branded Aquino as a “disgrace,” noting how he had “exposed his true colors as an amateurish politician who was ignorant both of history and reality.”

History-on-the-Net writes, “The Sudetenland was taken away from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and given to Czechoslovakia… Although American President Woodrow Wilson had wanted people in disputed regions to be allowed to decide where they would live this did not happen.”

Sudetenland was first “taken away,” with its German population severely discriminated against, before it was “given back” in the alleged “appeasement” prior to WWII.

The Palace Idiot thus stepped into the very complex labyrinth of WWII history where even angels dread to tread. While Japan was able to correct the mistranslation of Abe’s remarks, there is now absolutely nothing that Malacañang can do to remedy Aquino’s gross ignorance.

Since US President Barack Obama announced in November 2011 the US “pivot” to Asia, i.e. the US’ programmed deployment of 60 percent of its military assets to the region by 2020, there has been a steady stream of tension and disinformation in relation to the China Sea issues, particularly between China on one side and Japan and the Philippines on the other.

The Philippines raised tensions with China in April 2012 when it attempted to arrest — despite the long-held tradition of “coexistence” between seafarers — Chinese fishing boats in the Scarborough (a.k.a. Ayungin) Shoal claimed by both countries, resulting in a prolonged standoff between Philippine naval (grey) and several Chinese maritime surveillance ships.

This was followed by outbursts of Chinese emotions when the Japanese government officially announced in September 2012 its purchase of the Diaoyu Islands from private Japanese hands, effectively nationalizing them, and unavoidably drawing in official Chinese government counteraction.

Following that, in September 2013, the Philippine Secretary of National Defense accused China of setting up 75 concrete blocks to construct a new base at the Scarborough Shoal, only to retract it a month later (October) when the Philippine government, amid much embarrassment, was forced to admit that these were actually US target practice anchors.

And soon after, Japanese PM Abe made that infamous visit to the Yasukuni shrine infested by known Japanese war criminals, which again provoked furor from neighboring countries.

On Jan. 10, 2014, to China’s surprise, its 30-year old fishing rules burst into a front page issue when Washington labeled them “provocative and potentially dangerous,” to which China replied: “For more than 30 years, China’s relevant fisheries laws and regulations… have never caused any tension… If someone feels the need to say that technical amendments… pose a threat to regional stability… then it must be due to an ulterior motive.”

Then, by mid-January, news spread like wildfire in Philippine and Western media that “China will invade Pagasa Island in 2014,” which a few days later the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department and presidential spokesman denied as having had any basis at all.

Who could forget China’s announcement of its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that was attended by the US and Japan’s virulent objections, when both had already imposed their own ADIZs way back in the 1960s, with Japan’s overlapping parts of China’s Exclusive Economic Zone and with China actually being the last country in East Asia to have implemented this.

But before clarification could be absorbed by the world audience, Japan quickly accused China on Feb. 2 of planning an ADIZ over the entire China Sea, a falsehood China emphatically denied two days later.
Strangely, after months of black propaganda against China, US Pacific Command chief Admiral Samuel Locklear, stated on Feb. 5: “China (is) ‘acting professionally’ in (its) air defense zone.”

Through it all, Japanese and Philippine political leaders seem to be staging a continuous, scripted show to create anti-China scandals that have no basis in reality.  They may not notice it yet but they are looking and sounding more and more like dumbassed “muppets” in a geopolitical media show.

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; e-mail me at htlnow@fastmail.fm; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

RP media suckered to war

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 12, 2014


Philippine media reports and opinions, including those of netizens, are turning reality on its head as to who the real bully is in Asia, by deliberately focusing the spotlight on China when it is the US that has been throwing its weight around in the region since 1945.

General Curtis LeMay, planner of the strategic bombing of North Korea, said, “After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages... over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population.” (Actually, it’s 30 percent.)

Then, further south, aside from four million Vietnamese civilian deaths are “two million Agent Orange victims (where) the figure today is greater than 3 million… including children of the second and third generations.” (Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, US)

In the Philippines, apart from the US’ war atrocities at the turn of the 20th Century, the colonial power is leading the merciless financial and economic extractions behind the dictated hemorrhagic debt and expanded Value Added Tax, electricity privatization, blockade of cheaper Chinese infrastructure goods (like MRT coaches), ad nausea.

The public needs accurate information, such as those coming from James Cogan (“US Analysts Debate Plans for War Against China,” GlobalResearch), who wrote: “Seth Cropsey of the Hudson Institute... told a US Senate subcommittee… ‘With China, our objective ought to be to prevent the rise of an Asian hegemony, a power that would destroy the current US alliance system in Asia (And) the alternative being advocated is by Thomas Hammes.

“Hammes, a former marine colonel... published several articles... promoting his ‘Offshore Control’ plan… in 2012 that the US repudiate direct attacks on targets located on the Chinese mainland... preparing for an economic blockade of China, which is included within AirSea Battle (the US war doctrine now) that the US military instead ‘cripple China’s export trade...’ (by) sinking or intercepting and turning back vessels (or) what in peacetime would be piracy on a mass scale. He noted that ‘80 percent of China’s imported oil transits the Straits of Malacca. If Malacca, Lombok, Sunda, and the routes north and south of Australia were controlled, these shipments could be cut off’, causing a massive energy crisis.”

As I have quoted the official Chinese declaration last Feb. 1 at the Munich Security Conference in my last column about the “Chinese dream” being realized with “a good external environment,” thereby adding to global “peace and prosperity,” the Philippines would indeed benefit from this.

Instead, fear and loathing of the Chinese are being inflamed as the specter of a “threat” is raised. But a “threat” to what?
The Philippines’ gold and other mineral treasures have been sucked dry by the US and its allies over the past hundred years. That is what the West does not want to lose.

China is aware of the eventual “economic blockade,” hence, it is investing in commercial ports in Pakistan (Gwadar), Sri Lanka (Hambantota and Colombo), Bangladesh (Chittagong), and Myanmar (Sittwe and Kyaukpyu). There is also a proposed project to open up the isthmus of Thailand (like the Panama Canal) to be known as the Kra Canal. All these are aimed at obviating the passage of Chinese goods around the Straits of Malacca and avoiding any choke-off of trade to and from China. South Asia and Southeast Asian trade will flourish because of these ports; only the West’s strategic interests are threatened.

China basher Ashley Townshend in YaleGlobal Online, for instance, opined, “Viewed alongside the large-scale naval modernization program being undertaken by the People’s Liberation Army Navy many worry that these ostensibly trade-oriented ports will one day be upgraded into permanent naval bases.”

But why should China do as they fear if others do not attempt to sabotage it and the region’s economic prosperity? The fact is, the US and its Western allies continue to discuss plots to choke off China as cited above.

And why would the US and the West want to start a war? From “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars” by Michael Rivero: “The United States fought the American Revolution primarily over King George III’s Currency Act, which forced the colonists to conduct their business only using printed bank notes borrowed from the Bank of England… World War I started between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but quickly shifted to focus on Germany… seen as an economic threat to Great Britain… When the Weimar Republic collapsed economically, it opened the door for (the state) to issue (its) own state currency not borrowed from private central bankers. Freed from having to pay interest… Germany blossomed and quickly began to rebuild its industry...”

British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said, “The war wasn’t only about abolishing fascism, but to conquer sales markets. We could have, if we had intended so, prevented this war from breaking out without doing one shot, but we didn’t want to.” (Fulton, USA speech, March 1946)

Suck on that, pro-US idiots!

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Germany, Japan militarizing

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 5, 2014


At the recent Davos World Economic Forum Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used his speech to foment disinformation, likening rising tensions between Japan and China to relations of Germany as a rising power against the United Kingdom 100 years ago.

Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s National People’s Congress chairman Fu Ying while attending a session of the Munich Security Conference last Feb. 1, responded saying “Now is the era of peace and development… the ‘Chinese dream’ can’t be realized without a good external environment and in return the ‘Chinese dream’ will add to peace and prosperity of the region and the world.”

China’s Ambassador Fu Ying, assigned to Manila in the late 90s and who pointed out then the National Bookstore sold maps of the Republic of the Philippines (based on government maps) that did not include the now dubbed “West Philippines Sea,” is indeed correct that 2014 has no comparison to 1914 as today is the Era of Globalization that has set down the rules of international trade to obviate the use of force in economic and trade relations; i.e. to paraphrase the late British leader, “To jaw-jaw and not war-war” on economic and trade issues. 

However, there are similarities between England and Japan as financial and economic crisis beset them then and now. Prof. Richard Roberts, of King’s College London, and author of Saving the City — the Great Financial Crisis of 1914, writes, “It was the most serious systemic financial crisis that has ever overtaken Britain — or indeed the world. There were something like 50 countries which had stock exchange crashes and runs on banks.” 

Behind the scenes the global bankers manipulating the financial crash of that time prepared to push the world into war as they have done since the Napoleonic Wars, for untold profits. 

Mujahid Kamran writing in the Nation last April 2012 quotes F. William Engdahl from his book “A Century of War:”
“By 1920, Morgan’s partner, Thomas W. Lamont, noted with obvious satisfaction that, ‘as a result of four years of war and global devastation, the national debts of the world have increased by $210,000,000,000 or about 475 percent in the last six years, and as a natural consequence, the variety of government bonds and the number of investors in them have been greatly multiplied... but nowhere, perhaps, in greater measure than in the United States’.” The past decade that led to the 2008 Financial Crash, the Western global bankers find themselves in the same crisis-and-opportunity moment as 1914 at the turn of the 20th Century.

Japan’s right wing ultra-patriots, with assistance from the US “pivot to Asia” started the drum roll with the Japanese government purchase of the Diaoyu Islands in September 2012 from private owners effectively “nationalizing” the issue and giving the Chinese government no choice but to officially act on the provocation. 

It is vital and fundamental to keep this timeline in mind to keep the proper and just perspective on this. Provocations after provocations followed, leading to Abe’s visit to the War Memorial, Yasukuni Shrine and now at Davos this misinterpretation of World History is made to conform to the war-mongers’ perspective.

On Europe, Stefan Steinberg reports in “Germany, US Push Aggressive Policies at Munich Security Conference (MSC)” appearing in Global Research and the World Socialist Web site:

“The MSC featured a series of speeches by top German officials announcing an aggressive military policy, effectively repudiating the traditional restraints on German militarism that have existed since the collapse of the Nazi regime at the end of World War II... (the tone) laid down by the former East German pastor and current president of Germany, Joachim Gauck... Called for the country’s armed forces to be used more frequently and decisively…”

The US of course has long put pressure on Russia’s western front with missile defense system being deployed in East European countries on the ridiculous excuse that they are to defend against Iranian missiles. A few days ago the US added another provocation, the deployment of ballistic missile defense destroyer USS Donald Cook to Spain to add to Nato’s “anti-missile,” “shield” (of spear) that reaches Russia territory.

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former anti-war activist, said this is “An important posture enhancement is European missile defense in response to ballistic missile threats from Iran,” of course Iran has missiles that can only reach the Gulf region and Israel.

Russia may consider withdrawing from Strategic Arms Reduction if the US continues boosting its anti-missile systems in Europe. Like China, Russia’s economy is looking up and sees no benefit in conflict. 

It is the US, Nato and their puppets aching for conflict to save their economies. The People of the World must not be lured into the trap.” 

(Watch GNN’s TNT with HTL, “R.P. Fried by Rice Smuggling” on Chanel 8 Destiny Cable and Chanel 213 SkyCable, Sat. 8 p.m. and Sun. 8 a.m.; tune to 1098AM, DWAD, Tues. to Fri. 5 p.m to 6 p.m. “Sulo ng Pilipino;” e-mail at htlnow@fastmail.fm; login to www.newkatipunan.blogspot.com)

Erap: Solid gains

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / February 3, 2014


Three great news items emanated from the City of Manila of late: 1) President-Mayor Joseph Estrada’s assistance in resolving the impasse between the Philippine and Hong Kong governments over the official apology demanded by the latter for the August 2010 Luneta Massacre of eight Hong Kong citizens; 2) the micro-management of key critical problem areas, such as the city’s traffic woes as well as the mess of Divisoria’s teeming vendors; and 3) the street-level monitoring of peace and order directly from the office of the mayor, where we personally viewed closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage of security hotspots with Mayor Estrada last week.

To beef up the monitoring system for Divisoria, Mayor Estrada is setting up several high pylons where cameras alongside loudspeakers will be installed. The Mayor wants to watch over the traffic situation, including the vendors, from his office and be able to directly issue oral commands from his post in city hall, such that no beat policeman, market supervisor, or area sweeper can hide from his eagle eye.

Before I saw the CCTV clips, I had heard (and almost believed) that Estrada was failing to clear Divisoria of its legendary congestion; but lo and behold, I saw before my eyes Divisoria’s roads free and flowing, with vendors staying strictly along the center-islands. To see is to believe, as they say.
There I saw how Estrada really meant what he said when he vowed to clear the mess that other mayors also promised but never succeeded at.

Come to think of it, from the very first month of his administration when he cleared Taft Avenue of 90 percent of its terrible traffic, he has always shown that he means business. Although there are still areas in the vicinity of the Philippine General Hospital and Padre Faura that need major action, the CCTVs that are soon-to-be installed will certainly help the mayor crack down on sleeping or pretending-to-be-sleeping traffic officers.

However, the most important contribution the mayor of Manila can give at this time, and not just for the citizens of the city, is the restoration of normal relations between the Philippines and Hong Kong. It is without any doubt that the Filipino public is now in favor of expressing an “official apology” to Hong Kong. I have discussed the matter with many different publics in my radio program, not to mention discussion groups, media “kapihans,” the “masa” the taxi drivers, etc., and the overwhelming common sense reaction is: “As the Hong Kong people suffered the deaths, there’s nothing wrong in us issuing an apology.”

Even though my son says that the attitude of netizens on the various “social media” is one of apathy, if not outright aloofness, owing perhaps to youthful arrogance or being out of touch with the sentiments of the common man, what is real and palpable is the welfare of over 200,000 Filipino workers in Hong Kong and our other economic ties with this particular Special Autonomous Region (SAR) of China.

As Mayor Estrada has always been mindful of the need for him to maintain warm ties with the Chinese government and its representatives, his promise of using this to help resolve the tensions can really bear fruit.

Still, the City of Manila has many problems to surmount. One of these is the mountain of debt it is facing. Given the dire straits of the national economy, which imposes burden upon burden on the local economies, options are limited.
Of all the cities in Metro Manila that are intending to or are actually increasing taxes, Manila has the most defensible case. Manila’s taxes have been among the lowest in the metropolis all these years. The moaning about any such tax hikes would come mostly from businessmen, but where else can increased revenues be derived? That, of course, cannot be said of Quezon City, which is again into increasing its already highest real estate, business, and employment taxes, apart from imposing a new garbage tax.

There are many major storms — both figurative and actual — ahead for the City of Manila, for sure.  That’s why the same CCTV network will also be crucial in disaster relief operations, especially for the dreaded earthquakes that have been long awaited.

For calamitous events like “Yolanda,” Manila’s environmental planners, led by lawyer Donna Gasgonia, have been planning the revival of mangroves along the shores of Manila Bay where squatter communities abound, which is why I brought the reef conservation group of former Magdalo officer James Layug to Estrada’s office to help in the mangrove replanting.

But no matter how things seem to be on the up and up, worse storms may be coming to sweep Manila, the country, and the region, not unlike the financial “perfect storm” of 2008.

Last week, three international bankers, Mike Dueker of Russell Investments, Gabriel Magee of JP Morgan’s European HQ, and Bill Boeksmit of Deutsche Bank, all committed suicide.  What drove them to madness, we may not yet know.  But, like the eminent mayor of Manila, it’s always better to be prepared.

(Watch GNN’s Talk News TV, Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; e-mail me at htlnow@fastmail.fs; and text reactions to 0923-4095739)

30 years of deregulation

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / January 29, 2014

As the Philippines ponders its power ills from its recent price shocks, let’s look at the experience of other countries in the world with the same problem. From the US are some of the following reports and commentaries we gathered:
“Deregulation in Texas fails to make power more reliable, cheap... Jan. 13, 2013... A decade of electricity deregulation in Texas has driven up the pay of investor-owned utilities’ chief executives, but it has not fulfilled promises to produce the nation’s most reliable and cheapest power. In fact, deregulation has had the unintended consequence of discouraging the building of new power plants, leaving the state’s power supplies vulnerable as Texas continues to grow... A new report from the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power says Texans in deregulated areas paid $10 billion over the national average for power over the last decade.” 

“Electric deregulation fails to live up to promises as bills soar... 4-21-2007, by Ryan Keith, Associated Press, Benton, Ill. — This wasn’t supposed to happen with deregulation. Electric bills were supposed to go down. Instead, Ellie Dorchincez can almost see the dollars evaporating every time she turns on the lights or opens the freezer at her small Farm Fresh grocery store. Her electric bill, which used to be about $800 a month, has jumped to $1,800. She’s shut down a large freezer of frozen treats and now closes the store an hour early to cut costs but fears she still may have to raise prices and lay off some workers.

‘I’m just trying to figure any way that I can right now to keep my business afloat,; Dorchincez said. ‘My life is at stake here.’

“The cause of her distress is a common problem: the failure of deregulation to deliver its promise of lower electricity prices. In many states, it’s had the opposite effect with sharply higher rates — 72 percent  in Maryland, up to 50 percent in Illinois. Not one of the 16 states — plus the District of Columbia — that have pushed forward with deregulation since the late 1990s can call it a success. In fact, consumers in those states fared worse than residents in states that stuck with a policy of regulating their power industries. An Associated Press analysis of federal data shows consumers in the 17 deregulated areas paid an average of 30 percent more for power in 2006 than their counterparts in regulated states. That’s up from a 24 percent gap in 1990...”

From Australian, “Economic Affairs: Privatization has failed to deliver cheaper electricity... by Colin Teese (former secretary Dept. Of Trade), News Weekly, May 1, 2010... Victoria’s State Electricity Commission generated and sold power to Victorian consumers from 1926 to 1998. In every single year it reduced the real price of power to customers. Since privatization, however, electricity prices to the consumer have gone up 50 percent. Competition in power generation makes no sense —  To have two power-generating companies (or more), with their separate and enormously costly equipment... governments, ...can borrow at cheaper rates than can private companies... fine-tune the system better with a combination of power plants to ...meet the unexpected surges in demand.”

From Britain, “The grip of privatization on our vital services has to be broken... powerful interests are driving a 30-year failed experiment. Utilities belong in public hands — Seumas Milne, The Guardian, Tuesday, 29, October 2013... Ever since Ed Miliband forced electricity and gas profiteering... The monopolists have outdone themselves. Squealing that such interference threatened power cuts, one after another has taken the opportunity to jack up prices still further. Four of the ‘big six’ cartel, which controls 98 percent of electricity supply, have now increased prices by over 9 percent — blaming green levies and global costs — while wholesale prices have risen 1.7 percent in the past year and profit per customer’ has doubled... Thousands of old people will certainly die this winter... 

In the Philippines the steps toward privatization of utilities, including electricity, started with the ascendance of Corazon  Aquino to power after Edsa I. The first overt at was the appointment of electricity oligarch Ernesto Aboitiz to head the National Power Corp., an appointment with a clear conflict-of-interest involved as Aboitiz is part of a family that is a major power generator and electricity distributor, producer and supplier. Systematic cancellation and delay of various power projects were done leading to the power crises, the “Dark Age,” from 1989 to 1995 which justified Fidel V. Ramos’ massive Independent Power Producers contracts and later the Epira in 2001 after the ouster of President Estrada who dragged his feet on the Electric Power Industry Reform Act.

The Philippines has now had at least 25 years of experience with public utilities privatization and deregulation, it’s time we learned the lesson and change course just as many countries are beginning to do.

(Watch GNN on Saturdays, 8 p.m. and Sun 8 a.m. on Destiny Cable Chanel 8 and Skycable Chanel 213, this week “Public ownership: solving the Epira Disaster”; my emergency e-mail htlnow@fastmail.fs; tune to 1098AM Tues. To Fri. 5 p.m to 6 p.m.)

Fostering false expectations

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / January 27, 2014


So it was cast. The government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front signed the final normalization annex in the Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro (FAB) with a bonus to the MILF called the addendum on Bangsamoro waters to the power sharing annex that would cede parts of Yllana Bay, the Moro Gulf and the Sulu Sea to the rebel group.

The normalization annex even seems to have veered totally from its intent of a disarmament agreement with the government negotiators now talking of “socio-economic issues and transitional justice for the Bangsamoro people.” The alibi was that these provisions were not included in previous peace agreements.

“Normalization does not only deal with the decommissioning of MILF,” Teresita Quintos Deles, Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process, said.

The statements were an oblique admission that no disarmament was really agreed on and it was set aside just to complete the FAB and proceed to the signing of the comprehensive agreement on Bangsamoro that would finally realize the creation of the substate for the MILF.

The surrender of territory to the MILF under the FAB was even greater than what was envisioned under the botched Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MoA-AD) of the previous administration, which incidentally was ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (SC).

The MoA-AD was ready for signing in Kuala Lumpur, the same venue where the Bangsamoro agreement is being forged, and would have been in force if not for the timely intervention of the SC.
The MoA-AD did not even have a provision that included the yielding of the country’s seas yet it was thumbed down as violating the Constitution.

The premise of the rejection was that the MoA-AD sought to create a substate with its own basic law or Constitution, police force and an internal security force which were all granted the MILF under the FAB.

Sen. Aquilino Pimentel, an ally of Noynoy invited to the signing ceremony for the normalization annex in Kuala Lumpur, warned the government negotiators that they may have promised too much that Congress may reject anyway when the final agreement is sent to the legislature for approval.

Pimentel’s guarded view on the current negotiation process is evidently borne out of the aftermath of the SC rejection of the MoA-AD that resulted in the pillaging of Mindanao communities by disappointed MILF members which the government and the MILF later tagged as breakaway groups of the rebels.

From then on, it seems the MILF breakaway groups initiate disruptive campaigns whenever the negotiations between the MILF and the government reached a contentious point something like the MILF pointing a shotgun at the government’s head.

The FAB, which would become the basis of the CAB, is clearly headed the same way as that of the MoA-AD through sheer comparison of the likely form of the CAB and the MoA-AD.
The MILF’s view is the forming of a substate against the insistence of the government that a mere political subdivision is being formed through the Bangsamoro.

Proof of the false notion that the MILF had formed about the negotiations was some MILF forces jumping the gun on the setting up of a Bangsamoro political office in Zamboanga City which appears to be a de facto diplomatic post.
What the government obviously impressed on the MILF was the Bangsamoro would be a state all its own.

A state within a state is unconstitutional, the SC had spoken.