Laying the premise

Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 09-18-2013 WED

The Yellow faction of the ruling class is laying the premise for the conviction by publicity of some of the leading lights of the political opposition. Consider these headlines: "3 senators amassed P581M in kickbacks" and "Exclusive: Napoles partied, joined Estrada family affairs," the latter of which unjustifiably drags the entire family into the picture.

The oligarchy's controlled mainstream and online media--from the Oink-quirer to Rap-purge--are blatantly sidestepping the main stories of the preeminent role of administration porkers (e.g., the Angaras and the Abads) in the entire pork system. While an administration ally like Ruffy Biazon has been included in the plunder case with Janet Lim-Napoles, the consensus is that such a move is mere tokenism.

Moreover, even if it has been repeatedly claimed that other administration allies will eventually be charged, the administration's operators are merely hoping that time and other issues will overtake the public's interest, allowing the Palace's protected species an easier exit.

This administration's complicity in the pork scams is as rooted to the system that has prevailed since 1986. As the inception of the pork barrel was made possible by the mother of the Yellow movement, Cory Aquino, how can we expect the son to be any different?

Former Senator and Marcos Press secretary Kit Tatad, who has reinforced his statesman stature several times over since retiring from elective politics, has written an exposé that has gone viral on the Internet of BS Aquino's day-long session with Napoles in Malacañang before the latter "surrendered."

Tatad exposed the secret August 28 closeting of Napoles with Lacierda and company in Malacañang before her publicized surrender, with BS Aquino joining them intermittently while attending to various events within the Palace grounds. Malacañang tries to belie the exposé by showing BS Aquino's engagement on that day, yet none of his scheduled activities negate Tatad's revelation about the closeting of Napoles in Malacañang.

But even without it, the general public had already believed that the suspicious behaviors of BS Aquino, Malacañang officials, and Cabinet members (e.g., calling Napoles "Ma'am," BS Aquino's deference to her, etc.) indicated long ties between the administration and Napoles.

Continuing with the Yellows' grand zarzuela, the other premise being laid that's farthest from the truth is that the "system" will now be cleansed with these plunder charges.

Truth is, the system will not change because the most fundamental cause of the corruption in our society persists and will become even stronger. The Tribune report of Charlie Manalo at the start of the week is more than enough proof: "'Epira flaws more costly than pork barrel scam – lawmaker'… The chairman of the House committee on energy wants a thorough review of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira), saying Filipinos may be losing more in high power rates compared to the alleged irregularities in the pork barrel funds involving businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles." Kudos to Oriental Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali for raising this issue and Manalo for reporting it.

Manalo's report points to one of the root causes of the disproportionate concentration of wealth in our society and how these powerful economic interests play the most dominant role in a "system" that will continue to corrupt politicians of all stripes through other means than pork to get the legislation they want in order to feed their greedy schemes.

These economic powers who control mainstream media and finance much of the organized PR within social media are also directing the selective campaign on pork and will likely call off their attack dogs only when the right time comes--which is just before they completely suck in the administration "sow-lons."

Rep. Umali will, thus, have to watch out from hereon as he will be a target of these oligarchs, given his comment on the public's losses from Epira dwarfing the cost of legislative pork.

On the international front, the premise being laid by Western media on Syria's chemical weapons use is that the evidence from the United Nations investigation points to Bashar al-Assad's government--that is, that the chemical canisters bearing Cyrillic (Russian) markings point to chemical weapons supplied to the Syrian government during the Soviet era; that the quantities were huge (350 liters) and fired by rockets, etc.

The problem is Western media had already been projecting these conclusions long before the UN investigators had submitted their official findings and before the voluminous report can even be read through by the UN Security Council.

As always, the game is propaganda--setting the premise even before audiences can get the facts straight. Citizens of the world, beware.

(Tune in to 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Destiny Cable Channel 8, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., also on www.gnntv-asia.com; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 09234095739)

People's triumphs

Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 09-16-2013 MON

The real anti-pork movement, which is shouting out loud for the biggest pork and porker to be eliminated, runs counter to the Yellows' efforts at limiting the scope of this crusade by leaving out BS Aquino and his presidential pork in all discussions.

The meager September 11 Edsa Sila (since I don't believe in them) "prayer rally" at the Edsa Shrine, led by another public relations man and highlighted by the speech of one of the oligarchy's icons, Solita Monsod, is another Yellow anti-pork activity where a ban on placards speaking against presidential pork and BS Aquino was imposed. The Philippine Daily Oink-quirer, in obvious support of it, even headlined, "Edsa Tayo: Leaner, meaner crowd but with more passion," when the truth is that the event was absolutely pathetic.

In contrast, it was the Friday the 13th anti-pork rally at the Luneta that was more authentic--highlighted by really outspoken and straightforward anti-pork crusaders who openly lambasted the biggest pork and porker, BS Aquino. I wanted to attend but had my GNN show taping on the Mindanao conflagration with Al Tillah (by phone patch from Mindanao), Bono Adaza, and Erik San Juan.

I watched the rally on the Internet and heard Party-list Rep. Neri Colmenares castigate BS Aquino for not rejecting pork even as VP Jojo Binay had already. Even though the Oink-quirer whittled the number of participants by half with the headline, "About 3,500 call for pork abolition in Luneta," the news still put the Yellows' Wednesday Edsa rally to shame.

The people's anti-pork campaign has succeeded in surmounting the formidable efforts at redirecting the campaign against BS Aquino and his cohorts despite the Yellows' massive media control. Though it is already a victory, it is only half the fight. Other administration and Yellow stooges in both houses of Congress, such as Angara, Drilon, Mar Roxas, the Abad husband-and-wife team (exemplars of fine Jesuit moral education) et al.--all much bigger porkers--are being spared the Commission on Audit hatchet job.

As such, the struggle to keep the anti-pork, anti-corruption crusade along the right path will continue well into the September 21 anti-pork rally in order for the people to discern the real from the fake.

On the global plane, the peoples-of-the-world won one round against the US and Western ruling classes in stopping their attack on Syria. We laud the efforts of Russia, through the brilliant diplomatic stratagem of President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; the steadfastness of the Syrian Army; the unity of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations in and outside of the UN Security Council; and most of all, the Internet's alternative and social media, as well as the hundreds of thousands of anti-war marchers in the US and all over the world for this victory of peace over war.

Truth is the greatest weapon for the anti-war movement; and the ultimate truth is US capitalist-warmongers are at the core of such warmongering.

The truth in Syria is that the West and its Saudi-Qatari-Israeli partners have been on a campaign of destabilization in Syria from the onset of the civil war. The West had armed and infiltrated the internal "color" or "season" revolution (a la the "Arab Spring") in Syria, funding rallies and fielding armed agents provocateurs shooting at Syrian Army soldiers during mass demonstrations.

Based on United Nations data, of the 110,000 casualties of the Syrian civil war today, half are government troops or militia while only 30 percent are anti-Assad rebel-terrorists who are mostly male adult civilians. Eighty percent of refugees, meanwhile, are women and children, suggesting an organized exodus of families where males stay behind to wage the civil war.

Western propaganda, which some of the local Catholic priests have swallowed, is that Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator and the mastermind of the chemical gas attack that is giving Obama the reason to bomb Syria (the way the US did in Libya and killed more than Gaddafi could ever kill by putting terrorists in charge).

The fact is Syrian Christians, Alawites, Shiites, and even Sunnis who refuse the Western-backed rebels' atrocities are joining Assad's army against these rebel-terrorists and the foreign fighters sent in and armed by the US gang, who are, in fact, allied with the al-Qaeda and al-Nusra terror fronts.

Stopping the wars in the Middle East will end all wars under the ambit of Western imperialism. Without the total control of MidEast oil, the US cannot hope to succeed in its encirclement of Russia and, eventually, China.

There can and will be a 21st Century of universal peace when the world is finally rid of the idea of a lone "superpower" acting unilaterally as the global Wyatt Earp.

BRICS is the building block of global peace and prosperity on the principles of multipolarity, non-interference in nations' internal affairs, and their economic sovereignty (as embodied by a BRICS bank capitalized at $100 billion to counterbalance the International Monetary Fund's imposition of "privatization" economics).

It is therefore heartening to watch these victories. Corruption and war benefit only the ruling classes of each society, where ordinary people are always the main victims.

The progressive elimination of corruption and war thus becomes a triumph of the people.

(Tune in to 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Destiny Cable Channel 8, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., also on www.gnntv-asia.com, this week on "Martial Law: Historical review"; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 09234095739)

9/11, WTC 7 revelations

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / 9/11/2013 / Daily Tribune

Twelve years ago today, I was lying on my bed, sick and woozy, as I turned to cable TV, switching from channel to channel. Then the images suddenly froze on the scene of the Twin Towers in plumes of smoke, burning. Replays of the two planes crashing into the tall structures soon followed.

I stopped at one particular channel, CNN, as I was mesmerized by the clips for long, long minutes before I could think of the next thing, which was to rush to the Internet to get the reaction of my geopolitical "guru" at that time, Lyndon LaRouche, a legendary prophetic political-economic American philosopher and leader of the LaRouche Movement, whose analysis then perplexed me.

LaRouche believed that the complexity, not to mention extensive intelligence and resources, required for the World Trade Center (WTC) terror attacks could only have meant that states (governments) were behind it.

And if I recall correctly, despite the many long years since that initial moment of reading his commentary, LaRouche had already identified elements from within the US government or the Israeli Mossad as among the main suspects.

At that time, I couldn't even comprehend the meaning of it. How could the US cause the death of its own citizens? Why would Bush Jr., who had just become President, allow that? Why would Dick Cheney, his Vice President, similarly allow it? Does the Mossad have that capability?
I have to admit I was still skeptical of LaRouche's analysis then even though I was already a follower, but as I learned in the months after the 9/11 incident the many contrived aspects of the said terror attacks, I became convinced.

In the years that followed, thousands of US citizens, scientists, engineers, architects and families of victims who died in the Twin Towers have become convinced that the "terror attacks," including the buildings' collapse, were an "inside job." The evidence just kept pouring in as the worldwide movement demanding the reopening of the investigation into the 9/11 incident has grown.

This year, the movement has launched Rethink9/11.org to focus on WTC Building 7.
If the reader is still skeptical about 9/11 being an inside job, it would take all the columns of the next two weeks if I were to try to explain it here. I would therefore suggest visiting Rethink9/11.org to follow the hundreds upon hundreds of investigations conducted by competent civilian experts of different nationalities.

These individuals were all free to study with objectivity, unlike the investigations conducted by two US agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), which reported conclusions that the late American National Science Medal winner, scientist Lynn Margulis (former wife of late physicist Carl Sagan), severely criticized.

We must first bring to the reader's attention WTC Building 7 because it was a 49-story structure one football field away from WTC 1 and 2, and with Buildings 5 and 6 sandwiched between them. Yet it burned and collapsed on its footprint at the speed of gravity, without any plane crashing into it.

Then, the government investigation claimed "office fire" melted and collapsed the building, a conclusion not supported by the history of burning buildings and by thousands of experts. And worse, some 185,101 tons of structural steel from Buildings 7, 1, and 2 were scrapped without being examined and shipped to China and India, with other debris sent to recycling yards in New Jersey.

Margulis thus said of the FEMA and NIST probes: "You can't do science when you are deprived of the evidence, and when your hypothesis is the least valid, instead of the most likely … The most likely hypothesis, in the case of Building 7, wasn't even mentioned. This is not science. So the claim is that it's something else? It's trying to prove preconceived ideas."

Indeed, the WTC official investigation was meant to be a cover-up. But evidence citizens innocently picked up during and after the buildings' collapse soon mounted, and ran the gamut from pictures taken from Ground Zero, to firemen's testimonies of explosions, as well as comparative videos of explosions, melting steel, plumes of dust that only explosions can create, spherical molten iron balls, steel beams cut clean, chemical nano-thermite, etc.

Why should anyone in the Philippines care about the truth in the so-called 9/11 terror attacks? Don't we have enough issues, i.e. pork barrel, Edsa Tayo (a.k.a. Edsa "Sila" of the oligarchy's patsies whom I reject), the Moro National Liberation Front's Zamboanga City attack (thanks to Aquino, Deles and Leonen's brilliant "a-peace-ment" and Edsa II's sabotage of Erap's pacification), bedeviling us?

Everyone should care because 9/11 reveals how power cabals that control money, politics and mainstream media can keep vital facts — such as WTC 7 — out of everyone's awareness and, in the process, murder thousands of innocents by creating decades-long "wars on terror" for profit.

Every Filipino should care because, in the Philippines, this cabal and its local counterparts have kept 100 million Filipinos perpetually addled in a state of perpetual poverty — and they're not about to stop anytime soon.

(Tune in to 1098 AM, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Destiny Cable Channel 8, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., also on www.gnntv-asia.com, this week on "The MNLF rebellion redux"; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0923-4095739)