The real champions
(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 04-29-2015 WED)
I don’t call them NGOs (non-governmental organizations); that name’s been despoiled not only by Janet Lim-Napoles but even more so by Western-funded civil society groups that have been at the forefront of subverting the Philippine nation-state for the past five decades.
I call them citizen-champions who take up causes for the Filipino.
Driven only by a fervent desire for truth, justice, and creating a better future for the nation, these citizen-champions who selflessly take up causes for the Filipino have won the recent round of cases against the two giant water concessionaires in the Metro and against the provider of our fraudulent election counting machines.
In the former case, our citizen-champions such as the United Filipino Consumers and Commuters (UFCC), which has been at the forefront of this fight, successfully stopped abusive and exploitative private water companies from slapping their corporate income taxes onto water consumers’ bills. Thus, the rates of the two water companies can be expected to go down by as much as 10 percent per cubic meter, amounting to billions of pesos of savings for us water users.
These fighters, these brave citizen-champions, who have sacrificed so much without thought of financial support from any source or rewards of fame and glory, should rightly be the idols of this society more than the likes of Manny Pacquiao et al.
Meanwhile, the victory of our citizen-champions over Smartmatic stopped the corrupt midnight repair deal of the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines by the former poll body chairman, which is likely to push elections back to variations of manual counting and electronic transmission, guaranteeing transparency and verifiability.
This should absolutely not pose any problem to our existing election automation law as pointed by our Tribune publisher Ninez Cacho-Olivares. Since the voter’s shading of the ballot for the PCOS is done manually, a manual counting and recording procedure can be safely added before the ballot is inserted into the automated counting machine.
There is a variation of this voting and balloting system that lawyer Melchor Magdamos, one of the leading crusaders to bring us this victory over the rigged election slot-machine, proposes. He calls it the “visual system” where the ballots, after being manually filled and taken out of the ballot box, are counted manually before a computer camera and projected onto a wide screen for all to see and take videos and pictures of while encoded into a computer for electronic transmission. The projector and computer can then be bequeathed to the schools after the elections.
Among those at the forefront in our victory over the predatory practices in the water service sector is RJ Javellana, founder of Water for All Refund Movement (WARM), who exposed the wholescale corruption and abuse by the water concessionaires several years ago. Javellana later expanded his advocacy to include the MRT/LRT commuter issues and, upon forming the UFCC, has also started tackling power issues, aided by anti-power oligarchy champion Jojo Borja of Iligan Light and Power.
Recently, the UFCC has been assisting Borja at the hearings of the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) on a major power distributor’s rate issues. When UFCC was registering as an “intervenor” (a technical-legal term in ERC rules), the dominant power company submitted its objection and opined that since the National Association of Electricity Consumers for Reform (Nasecore) has already been representing consumers, there was no need for others. It is at this point that I must inform the public of dubious NGOs in the power advocacy sector that must be watched closely.
Our new crop of citizen-champions stand on the shoulders of many others who have made sacrifices for the past three generations fighting the system imposed by the Yellows after Edsa I. The victory over the private water companies’ pass-on of corporate income tax to consumers was based on the struggle of the late Mang Naro Lualhati, his colleague lawyer Cefie Padua, and other petitioners who won the 2003 case against a major power company’s corporate income tax pass-on to consumers (which, the sneaky ERC chairwoman reversed via a sleight of hand insertion).
In the struggle against Smartmatic and the fraud of computerized election, credit must go to the Center for People Empowerment in Governance and a number of individuals, such as Gus Lagman and the 60-30-10 discoverer Ado Paglinawan. This space is organizing a victory celebration for these and other fighters and citizen-champions on our GNN TV show this Saturday. It is our humble contribution to duly recognize the real fighters who must be extolled and emulated by other citizens of this country. They are beyond doubt our real heroes.
(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN 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., with Chito Sta. Romana, Richard Javad Heydarian, and Hiro Vaswani; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)
