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Evidence vs perception EDITORIAL 04/15/2011

Friday, April 15, 2011

Evidence vs perception

EDITORIAL
Click to enlarge
04/15/2011
The Supreme Court decision clearing businessman Danding Cojuangco of allegations on his having illegally acquired his 20 percent share in San Miguel Corp. (SMC) undoubtedly will be seized upon anew by the Yellow backers of Noynoy to crucify the SC, whose majority members the Yellow crowd considers as remnants of the past and thus are seen as their enemies.

What is being given the spotlight in one Yellow newspaper was a dissenting opinion of one of the senior associate justices that called a “joke” a contrary claim on the close association of Cojuangco and deposed President Ferdinand Marcos, on which hinged the allegation that Cojuangco used crony money to buy his way into controlling SMC and thus make it grow into one of the most successful business giants in Asia.

To back up the opinion, the justice cited the fact that Cojuangco was usually seen in the company of Marcos and was even with the disgraced leader when he was forcibly exiled..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com1.html

Halt! They go too far FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 04/15/2011

Halt! They go too far

FRONTLINE
Ninez Cacho-Olivares
04/15/2011
Catholic bishops are really going too far in their meddling ways. Add to that the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) always butting in and insisting on guidelines on how characters are to be portrayed in cinema, ads and TV.

Both choke freedom of expression, which is against the Constitution.

Just a few days ago, the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines’ Episcopal Commission on Family Life (note, it is not even the CBCP as the voice of the Church) complained about a McDonald advertisement that showed two youngsters, a boy and a girl, grade schoolers, with the girl asking a young boy if she is already his girlfriend. The boy replies that he is not yet ready. The girl reasons out that what she really wants is french fries.

The CBCP commission claimed that the message of the advert is not acceptable as the ad conveys the wrong values about courtship, equating “cheap” french fries with human relationships.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com2.html

RP canned show stirs TV debate focus 04/15/2011

RP canned show stirs TV debate

focus

04/15/2011
MANILA — Fast-talking comedian Willie Revillame is one of the most popular television personalities in the Philippines with a legion of poor fans who crave the thick wads of cash he hands out to audience members.

But to many critics, the 50-year-old star represents all that is wrong with an industry that they say has for years promoted low-brow entertainment and toilet humor.

Producers at TV5 television yanked Revillame’s Willing Willie show off the air this week amid an uproar over a segment involving a crying six-year-old boy the host cajoled into simulating a striptease for the equivalent of $230.

The incident in March has sparked a heated debate over the standards of Philippine television, with some calling for an end to shows they say prey on the poor and debase moral values in the conservative Catholic nation..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/

Diversions NO HOLDS BARRED Armida Siguion-Reyna 04/15/2011

Diversions

NO HOLDS BARRED
Armida Siguion-Reyna
04/15/2011
A friend reminded me it was going to be the fourth in a row, if I touched on Janjan Suan anew. It’ll be the sixth, I replied, and if curiosities keep on arising the way they do, there may yet be a seventh piece. Or an eighth. While I’m at it, I might as well be clear. I’m not mocking anybody here, neither laughing at the poor. Some questions just beg to be asked.

When the parents of the little boy first came out on TV to explain why they permitted their son to dance thusly, among other things, Joe, the father mentioned, was that they were so poor, “’Yun ngang bahay namin, walang pinto.”

Now he and wife Diana have sued child psychologist Dr. Honey Carandang, bloggers John Silva and Froilan Grate, and several John and Jane Does, for causing them “dishonor, discredit and contempt.” The man who could not afford a door for his house brings a group of people to court. Don’t you wonder who is paying for his lawyers?.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com4.html

Donald Trump president bid splits Republicans FEATURE 04/15/2011

Donald Trump president bid splits Republicans

FEATURE

04/15/2011
NEW YORK — Running on a populist message of isolationism and spite for President Barack Obama “the foreigner,” billionaire businessman Donald Trump is romping to early polling glory in the White House race.

In less than a month, the 64-year-old known best for his multiple marriages, garish skyscrapers and reality TV show, has jumped from 10 to 19 percent support among Republican voters, tying with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, according to a CNN poll released this week.

That puts the real estate mogul with the signature comb-over ahead of a crowded field of more established potential Republican contenders, including conservative Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin (12 percent) and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts (11 percent).

But more than four in 10 Republicans said they would not like to see the real estate mogul enter the 2012 race, the poll found..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com6.html

Jordan urged to drop nuke plans after Japan crisis focus 04/15/2011

Jordan urged to drop nuke plans after Japan crisis

focus

04/15/2011
AMMAN — Following the nuclear disaster in Japan, experts in Jordan want their energy-poor country to drop its ambitious plans to generate atomic power, despite reassurances by the kingdom’s nuclear regulator.

“The project lacks environmental assessment and feasibility studies,” environment ministry adviser Rauf Dabbas told AFP.

“We do not know its actual cost. We do not know what precautions should be taken to prevent a nuclear catastrophe in the country.”

Jordan, which imports about 95 percent of its energy needs, has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with several countries, including Japan, in a bid to produce atomic energy for power generation and water desalination..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com7.html

RP’s rice and fall DIE HARD III Herman Tiu Laurel 04/15/2011

RP’s rice and fall

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
04/15/2011
Since the 1986 Yellow takeover of Philippine government, the country has nosedived economically. The US and IMF-WB-backed Cory Aquino economic team’s promised progress and democracy never came. Ushering in economic dynamism with competition, the elimination of corruption, as well as “foreign investments” were merely used as pretexts for the ruling Yellows to impose globalization, through the triad of liberalization, deregulation and privatization.

Twenty-five years later, after privatizing the central bank by decoupling its accountability from public control through constitutional and statutory redefinitions; after emasculating tariff with import liberalization; after privatizing major state industries in power, water and lucrative infrastructures such as tollways and ports; and after the many extractions of “foreign investors,” the country has been pauperized.

Today, amid increasing domestic hunger and global food supply and price crises, these Yellows are into privatizing the National Food Authority (NFA) and the country’s rice trading, thus, ensuring the explosion of hunger and the final collapse of the nation’s food sustainability.

Each and every privatization of economically as well as socially beneficial, not to mention strategic and basic, state enterprise was preceded by massive disinformation and black propaganda — obviously to discredit, vilify, and even demonize the prized target.

Yellow economic managers and controlled mainstream media, including captured learning institutions such as the UP and Ateneo schools of economics, joined in maligning these state enterprises — whether in power, water, and other services — as either corrupt, inefficient, or budget-guzzling white elephants.

When that did not suffice, successive Yellow presidents appointed their loyal lieutenants as heads of these companies to ensure that these state enterprises indeed became even more corrupted, inefficient, and budget-guzzling — and sabotaged deliberately, the way Cory Aquino appointed power oligarch Ernesto Aboitiz to the National Power Corp. (Napocor), old Tarlac politico Aping Yap to the MWSS, and terrorist bomber Ed Olaguer to the PNCC.
Today, the final privatization is going into high gear, led by the Malacañang team so endeared to the Americans that its ambassador went to congratulate the then president-elect in 2010 to preempt the official congressional proclamation lest some evidence crop up in the aftermath of Hocus-PCOS. That was essential to ensure that the global neo-conservative agenda of systematic re-domination and mass genocide of clueless and unresisting Third World countries proceeded unhampered.

With the “success” of privatization of virtually all essential public services now used to squeeze every ounce of wealth from each Filipino, the globalists are now ready to privatize the last remaining ones to squeeze him of the very staple that gives this nation life — rice. With it, the globalists are going to wield the power of death over our nation.

This was done systematically in the years leading to Edsa I, even as the late Bong Tangco, then President Ferdinand Marcos’ Agriculture secretary, tried to preserve the gains from Masagana 99, a timeline of which the NFA Employees’ Association provides us:

1980: WB Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) $200-million loan — phase out of price control and subsidy for farm inputs including fertilizer;
1983: Increase of loan to $300 million — on condition that the private sector is allowed to export rice, as price controls for rice and corn are dismantled;
1985: US PL-480 conditionalities — liberalize fertilizer imports (which led to the death of PhilPhos), privatize wheat/flour imports and non-grain trading, thus reducing NFA revenues;
1986: Dismantling of government-supported monopolies in international trading of rice, corn, wheat;
1993: ADB loan agreement leading to complete subsidy withdrawal in 1998;
1998: USAID-AGILE study on privatization of NFA;
1999: Required privatization of rice importation, etc. in exchange for ADB’s $175-million loan grant;
2001: Incorporation of AGILE plan to dismantle NFA under Arroyo’s Medium Term Development Plan;
2010: Proposed zero budget for NFA under PeNoy as the WB recommends the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program instead of rice rationing so that the US a la PL-480 and transnational corporations can control rice trade and sell their surplus rice to the poor.

In contrast, Marcos had the CorFarm that required large companies like Meralco (Manila Electric Co.) and San Miguel Corp. to engage in rice production to supply one sack of monthly rice allowance to its tens of thousands of employees.

Despite pressures from the US, WB and ADB, Philippine rice production was sufficient throughout the 70s and 80s until the effects were heightened by the FVR-Sebastian policy of giving low priority to rice and high priority to such “high value” crops as black pepper, leading to the rice “pila” and deficit in 1998 that quickly recovered under Estrada from 1999 to 2000, until it crashed again into deficit a year after Edsa II, in 2002, and remained that way ever since.

Nothing good has and will come out of the acquiescence of the Philippine government to the demands of the multilateral financial agencies and the US Agriculture Department to completely privatize our government’s rice agency and its related functions. That will be the nation’s fall.

The only good thing, in a black humor sort of way, is the potential for mass uprising and revolution that a desperately starving people may resort to. But that will require a leadership that is ideologically and organizationally developed to lead to the correct path. A Tunisian or Egyptian “people power” will not do; only a Venezuelan Hugo Chavez-type revolt, organized with an alliance of nationalist-populist mass organizations like the ones we have here that are led by nationalist military idealists, will pave RP’s rise.

(Tune in to 1098AM, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m.; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8, on “Yellow Hypocrisy vs Willing Willie?”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus select radio and GNN shows)

(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)


SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110415com5.html

Plunder raps filed vs 3 ex-AFP CoS, 14 others 04/15/2011

Plunder raps filed vs 3 ex-AFP CoS, 14 others

04/15/2011
Retired Lt. Col. George Rabusa, former Armed Forces of the Philippines budget officer, formally filed yesterday before the Department of Justice (DoJ) plunder charges against three former AFP chiefs of staff and 14 others in connection with the multimillion-peso send-off and welcome gifts to the military top brass through the corruption-ridden conversion system practiced by the AFP.

Rabusa was with his counsel, Noel Malaya, when he filed the plunder complaint before the DoJ.

In his 86-page complaint-affidavit for plunder, Rabusa through Malaya, charged former AFP chiefs of staff retired Generals Diomedio Villanueva, Efren Abu and Roy Cimatu; former AFP comptrollers, retired Lt. Gen. Jacinto Ligot, retired Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, former Intelligence Service of the AFP (Isafp) officer Divina Cabrera and the former auditor and accountant of the General Headquarters Office of the AFP..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110415hed1.html

BRICS speaks out against use of force in Libya 04/15/2011

BRICS speaks out against use of force in Libya

04/15/2011
SANYA — The world’s five emerging-nation powers spoke out Thursday against using force in Libya and across the Arab world, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev saying force was not authorized by the UN.

“We share the principle that the use of force should be avoided,” said a statement by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, released after they concluded an annual meeting in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan.

The talks among the so-called BRICS nations included Chinese President Hu Jintao, his fellow presidents Medvedev of Russia, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and Jacob Zuma of South Africa, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Medvedev later said the UN Security Council resolution establishing a no-fly zone over Libya and authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians did not endorse the use of military force..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110415hed3.html

JPE: Senate can compel GMA to appear before impeach court By Angie M. Rosales 04/15/2011

JPE: Senate can compel GMA to appear before impeach court

By Angie M. Rosales 04/15/2011
The spectacle of former President and now Pampang Rep. Gloria Arroyo appearing before a court room may just happen at the Senate court when it convenes to try the impeachment charges against Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez.

If need be, Arroyo can be called and compelled to testify in the impeachment proceedings against Gutierrez by the Senate, acting as an impeachment court, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said.

He did not rule out the scenario of Arroyo being made to take the witness stand in the impeachment proceedings, especially “if there is a justifiable, relevant material and pertinent reason for her appearance.”.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110415hed5.html

DND revives P200-M Scorpion tanks repair, defends revival By Mario J. Mallari 04/15/2011

DND revives P200-M Scorpion tanks repair, defends revival

By Mario J. Mallari 04/15/2011
The Department of National Defense (DND) yesterday defended the “revival” of the P200-million refurbishment and repair contract for the aging Scorpion tanks of the Army which was shelved in the early 2000s due to alleged irregularity.

DND spokesman Eduardo Batac admitted the DND gave the go signal upon the recommendation of Undersecretary Fernando Manalo, who heads the DND-Modernization Group.

Batac said the recommendation came out after Manalo’s group, composed of technical working groups from the three major services, made a review of all pending projects, including that of the Army’s Scorpion tanks..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110415nat1.html

Lawmaker welcomes filing of fertilizer case vs ex-governor By Gerry Baldo 04/15/2011

Lawmaker welcomes filing of fertilizer case vs ex-governor

By Gerry Baldo 04/15/2011

A lawmaker from the anti-corruption watchdog Citizen Battle Against Corruption (Cibac) yesterday welcomed the move of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez to file the first ever case against one of those involved in the P728-million fertilized fund scam.

According to Cibac Rep. Sherwin Tugna, while he considers the move as a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Ombudsman, it is still a good moral booster.

“People say it is only a knee-jerk reaction of the Ombudsman in response to the impeachment move against Merceditas Gutierrez but it’s good enough, it’s a good booster,” Tugna said, a lawyer by profession..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110415nat5.html

Solon seeks probe on public utility franchise By Charlie V. Manalo 04/15/2011

Solon seeks probe on public utility franchise

By Charlie V. Manalo 04/15/2011

Ang Kasangga sa Kaunlaran Inc. party-list Rep. Teodorico Haresco Jr. is seeking a congressional review of all franchises for the operation of public utilities granted by the government since the 8th Congress up to the present.

“It is important to reexamine said franchises to make sure these public utilities are still in compliance with the purpose for which they were originally granted franchises,” Haresco revealed.

Haresco cited Article XII, Section 11 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution which states that “...Neither shall any such franchise or right be granted except under the condition that it shall be subject to amendment, alteration or repeal by the Congress when the common good requires.”.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110415nat6.html

P1.1-billion smuggling case slapped against big meat processing company By Conrado Ching 04/15/2011

P1.1-billion smuggling case slapped against big meat processing company

By Conrado Ching 04/15/2011

The Bureau of Customs (BoC) has filed a P1.1-billion smuggling case against a major meat processing firm for undervaluing its imported buffalo meat from India.

Foodsphere Inc., the company which processed and canned meat brands such as CDO Karne Norte and Samba Corned Beef, supplies buffalo meat to nearly all popular restaurants in the country.

Charged were Rolando Juan Cruz, assistant vice president for finance of CDO-Foodsphere Inc. and Romeo Lerit, a Customs broker based in Escolta, Manila. Also included in the charge sheet were several John Does and Jane Does who participated directly or indirectly in the release of subject shipments.

Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez accused Foodsphere of declaring a per kilo value of only $1.50 (P66) for the 8,964,600 kilograms of buffalo meat it brought in between October 2009 and March this year..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/metro/20110415met2.html

Ecowaste urges Filipinos to put to death practices that harm Mother Earth By Jason Faustino 04/15/2011

Ecowaste urges Filipinos to put to death practices that harm Mother Earth

By Jason Faustino 04/15/2011

An environmental watchdog has urged Christian Filipinos to quietly mark the upcoming Earth Day on April 22 with a commitment to “put to death” destructive practices not only on Good Friday but all throughout the year.

“We need not hold any bazaar, concert, symposium, protest or parade to commemorate the Earth Day which falls on a Good Friday,” said Roy Alvarez, president of the EcoWaste Coalition.

“What is needed is a quiet personal reflection about the state of Mother Earth’s health and an earnest commitment to ‘put to death’ practices that are contributing to her ailment, destruction and demise,” he pointed out.

“Practices that cause environmental degradation are acts that both disrespect and diminish the integrity of God’s creation,” he added..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/metro/20110415met3.html

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