Nothing in this woman's track record tells me she's corrupt

indsight is 20-20 vision. I can only write this piece because certain things fait accompli are already known. So let no one think that I’m saying I’m better than COMELEC Commissioner Rowena Guanzon—I am NOT. Truth is I know next to nothing about election laws.

That said, I agree with the INTENT of Commissioner Guanzon to disqualify Bongbong Marcos. Of course, on record I have gone out on a limb TWICE to predict that they will NOT disqualify him, nevertheless.

There IS ground to disqualify him if you so much as put ten manhours into writing that decision. Conversely, it only takes as much effort to rationalize it the other way.

Remember when they were trying to disqualify Senator Grace Poe on the ground that she was not a natural-born Filipino? She was a foundling, which gave enough wiggle room for the decision to have swung either way. And what about Erap Estrada openly flaunting the worst-kept secret in the world that all his boys are first-born sons from different mothers. If that’s not moral turpitude in this fiercely Roman Catholic nation, I don’t know what is.

My point is, election cases are political cases. Them being resolved on political considerations is par for the course. Even if it looks like they hearken to some criminal standards in defining qualifications and disqualifications, that is all for show believe me.

From the time when you can already file a disqualification petition (November 16, a day after the deadline for substitution of candidates) to when they must start printing official ballots already (middle of January), you’re talking seven or eight WEEKS, tops.

What case throughout the entire Philippine legal system is ever resolved THAT fast? Even the most optimistic lawyer will tell you “we will be in the Court of Appeals for a while, 2 years, maybe 3” and if we have to go up to the Supreme Court “add another year or so.”

For election cases, that simply won’t fly. They must be decided before election day. If en banc, it must be decided within 30 days, and if by Division within 10 days (I think this was amended to 15 days)—from the time the last pleading has been filed by any party. That last pleading would be the Formal Offer of Evidence--and the last to come in was received on January 14. Fifteen days from January 14 would be the 29th which falls on a Saturday. So the decision is not due until Monday, January 31--just a day shy of Comm. Guanzon's retirement.

But there’s a catch in Section 9-b (Part IV, Rule 18) of the COMELEC’s internal rules, which says if any part of the hearings or reception of evidence is delegated to “any of its officials” then you begin counting the 15 days after that official has submitted his report. Apparently, that official, a lawyer in the staff of one of the commissioners, tested positive for Covid-19 yada yada. So the deadline will likely be missed.

But by any measure, that decision would still be rushed. Meeting even its most generously extended deadline cannot be done while at the same time applying the same precision dissection of a criminal case, or the interminable ping-pong exchange in “preponderance of evidence” of a civil case. If you’re looking for thoroughness of analysis, don’t look for it in an election case where decisions are characteristically full of rough edges and grey areas.

But that is not unusual. Political cases are like a homeplate umpire’s call in baseball. If the guy says the ball sailed through the strike zone, the call stands. It’s totally impractical to dispute it. When the umpire says “play ball!” that’s pretty much what you did and just let the game be decided by which team scores more runs. You just don’t hang your entire hopes for the game on that opening pitch.

Arguably, the decision in the Marcos DQ cases is not grossly delayed. It is only “delayed” if you’re shooting for a special deadline—in this case, preferrably before Comm. Guanzon retires.

It’s one thing to “do the right thing” and another thing to get the intended result. Comm. Guanzon acted according to her conscience in voting to disqualify Bongbong. Morally, I agree that’s the right thing to do. But announcing her vote ahead of the two other commissioners in the Division (and then accusing them of disrespecting her) doesn’t achieve the intended result which is, presumably, to create an adverse sentiment against the candidacy of Bongbong Marcos.

If you are a Leni partisan—which I even happen to be—you’ll hate my saying that it’s not only Bongbong Marcos who must tell the truth. We all must, including Comm. Guanzon.

When she prematurely announced her DQ vote, the conventional wisdom is that it would put pressure on the other two commissioners to follow suit. That’s not a valid presumption, or even a reasonable expectation. The COMELEC is a collegial body and they vote on the final resolution of a case after they have fully deliberated, before assigning the writing of the majority opinion to a ponente. Just like the way it’s done in the CA, Sandiganbayan—all collegial bodies, including the Supreme Court.

In short, the members of the COMELEC Division deciding a case already know, more or less, what the collective decision is BEFORE the ponencia (the written decision) ever comes out. They have already voted—whether formally or in principle—BEFORE it is sent to the ponente for styling. Of course, they still vote a second time to formally adopt the ponencia as a final fail-safe measure because, what IF the ponente wrote the exact opposite of what they earlier agreed upon?

Comm. Guanzon makes it sound like she has no idea what the ponente would write and that it is only after the ponencia is submitted that the fate of Marcos would be known. That is clearly NOT true.

In an interview later, she would hurl the wild accusation that the Marcos camp must have bribed the two other commissioners. If she wants people to believe THAT by the mere fact that being inside COMELEC she must know something the rest of us don’t know, I get that.

But the basis cannot be speculative or a rhetorical question: “How do you know that my opinion is the minority opinion? You must know the opinion of the other two. You must have an idea who you bribed.”

It won’t take a lot to convince me that Marcos is capable of bribery and corruption. But it still doesn’t make Guanzon’s accusation fair. We know that her opinion is the minority opinion because she said so.

Not expressly, but there’s no other conclusion if she claims that a senator is trying to delay the decision to await her retirement on February 2. But why delay the decision if it’s the same as her opinion? She certainly would not raise a ruckus about it if she knew that Bongbong would be disqualified anyway, even if she retires.

So Comm. Guanzon must know that the collective decision is favorable to Bongbong—and she knows that from since before they sent it to the ponente. And because we know that SHE knows, then her coming out with her DQ vote is what confirmed to us that the other two must have voted to dismiss. Otherwise, if the other two voted for DQ too, delaying the announcement changes nothing, and Comm. Guanzon would have no reason to be bursting her appendix right now.

Let me put it another way: even she admits exposing what the other votes are, without knowing it. She wrote a separate opinion, which is no different from a dissenting opinion in that it does not conform with the majority opinion. It’s a black-or-white decision. We don’t know what color the other votes are until she said, “hey, guys, my DISSENTING vote is “white!” So the other two cannot be anything but black.

Therefore, insinuating that the Marcos camp have advance knowledge about something that everybody can figure out anyway, no sweat, only comes out looking like it is calculated to make things appear sinister. It’s gaslighting speculation that further erodes public confidence on our electoral system, as ground-huggingly low as it is already.

Her beef is that if the decision comes out after she has retired, her vote would no longer be counted and her dissenting opinion would not form part of the record of the case. True that. But the factor that she is retiring a couple of inches short of the finish line was not created by Marcos.

So what’s happening is Comm. Guanzon is coming off as unhinged, trashing about and jousting with Father Time as she watches her magnum opus of a dissenting opinion slowly getting dragged over the cliff into irrelevance.

She has taken to writing a reprimandatory memo to a collegial peer—in all respects her equal—to urge her to write the decision already.

How different is that from an “Urgent Motion for Early Resolution” that should have been filed by the petitioners? (in fact why, pray tell, have they NOT done that?)

When you are a judge and you take action that it behooves one of the adversarial parties to make, you lose the “cold impartiality of a neutral judge.” After all, the benchmark of neutrality is that a judge must not only be impartial, he must APPEAR impartial.

The assigned ponente, Commissioner Aimee Ferolino-Ampoloquio is junior and less experienced, but nothing in this woman’s track record suggests to me that she is morally depraved, incompetent or corrupt. More importantly, she is an equal peer—Comm. Guanzon is wrong to insinuate that she is “her presiding commissioner” within that Division.

Even in the Supreme Court, no Chief Justice “memos” another “lesser” justice because there is no such thing as lesser or greater Justice. Even the Chief Justice is only “primus inter pares” literally meaning “the foremost AMONG EQUALS.”

The same is true among COMELEC commissioners—they are all equal. So Comm. Guanzon ordering Comm. Ampiloquio to “explain in writing” is, to my mind, too condescending, like scolding and spanking a misbehaving juvenile.

In the same token, challenging the counsel of a party appearing before you to a debate is unjudicial. No court and no judge must ever contend, defend or advocate for her decision—precisely because that is betrayful of the requisite cold impartiality of a neutral judge.

Even my junior law students (we start teaching the Rules of Court in third year) know that when you appeal a decision of a lower court by a petition for certiorari, you implead the judge of the court where you lost as a “public respondent.” You make an “assignment of errors” and you literally accuse the judge of committing serious mistakes in rendering his decision.

But you know what—that judge CANNOT file a memorandum, and he cannot defend his decision in the appellate court. His attitude must be something like “I have decided, I recited the law and the facts on which I based my decision, take it or leave it and I couldn’t care less if you can reverse it on appeal.” A judge has NO STAKES in the outcome or effect of his decision.

Bottomline, you cannot be emotional about your decision and accept no other opinion contrary to your own.

Now here, to me, is the most serious mistake that Comm. Guanzon made: she assumed that her vote to disqualify Bongbong Marcos has its greatest value in being rendered before her retirement and in becoming part of the official records.

That is wrong. History tells us that.

Erap Estrada was impeached not because the sealed envelop containing the details of the Jose Velarde account was opened, but precisely because the Senate voted NOT to open it.

To this day, whatever that envelop contained is STILL NOT part of the official records—but it still cost Erap the presidency.

Comm. Guanzon’s presumably LONE VOTE to disqualify Bongbong Marcos would not have prevailed over the majority opinion presumably dismissing the petition. In other words, if the majority opinion were announced before she retired and her dissenting opinion becomes part of the official records, it would have had no value. It would have changed nothing.

On the other hand, if she retired with no decision out yet, imagine the impact of her releasing her UNUSED opinion during her post-retirement press conference?

“I’m sorry my dissenting opinion will no longer matter and I was no longer able to vote. But I owe it to the Filipino people to disclose that I would have voted to disqualify and this would have been my dissenting opinion.”

THAT would have put the COMELEC on the spot. Even if they dismissed the disqualification case by unanimous vote, the “Guanzon Opinion” would have placed a permanent cloud of doubt over it.

It will not be part of the official records of COMELEC that nobody really cares about. But it will be recorded in the history books that generations will read for years into the future.*

(Read more articles like this in theunheardside.blogspot.com)

Twitter finally catches on with trolls

witter deactivated some 300 fake accounts linked to the campaign of Bongbong Marcos for violating Twitter’s Community Guidelines against the use of language that fosters hate, violence and prejudice. It also cited these accounts for spreading fake news which, simply defined, is any reportage of events that did not happen or any claim asserting facts that do not exist.

There have been photos of several troll farms operating in the Philippines, and those 300 fake accounts on Twitter alone confirm their existence. There’s no doubting the authenticity of those photos. They were taken by persons working at those troll farms, manning banks of smartphones all transmitting propaganda at the same time off a single wifi router. Those ex-trolls, many of whom when recruited were told they would be working as “call center operators,” soon realized they were duped. Just for the money they stayed awhile—and God bless them—I can certainly understand why. Life is hard, every honest peso you can earn counts.

Ironically, that’s exactly the reason why some of them decided to leave. While they were working honestly, they soon understood that what they were being told to upload were lies. So just like those “Magnificent 35” COMELEC vote tabulators in the 1986 snap presidential elections who walked out of the national canvassing board’s tallying center, these former trolls left their shoddy workplaces (mostly dimly-lit warehouses in suburban Manila) and decided to go out in the real world and tell it all.

And tell it all they did—usernames, passwords, machine codes, filter links (designed to foil discovery)—everything. Now cybersleuths and independent industry watchdogs have the whole blueprint of these troll operations. So it’s very easy to detect them, even locate them now.

Personally, I have nothing against the individual UNPAID troll who is fervently supporting a candidate he believes in. I consider it the opinion extension of “one man, one vote.”

It doesn’t matter if you are the noble kind who builds and projects the virtues of your own candidate, or the virulent kind who tears down and villifies the opponent. All is fair in love and war AND politics. I don’t care how morally righteous you are, stop crying if you get hit below the belt. That’s your own naiveté expecting immoral people not to hit below the belt. We don’t live in a perfect world, but it’s the only world there is.

I don’t even care if you resort to libel, or cyberlibel (it’s all THE SAME, believe me). There are laws in place about these things and I say, hey, if you’re willing to do the time (behind bars) go ahead and do the crime.

What I have a problem with is when somebody employs digital automation so it becomes “one man, one million opinions”—that’s foul.

I’m not talking about multiple sharing, particularly network sharing. I make very provocative posts on MY Facebook wall that people share forward to their friends. That’s NOT me replicating my opinion. That’s REASON itself leading others to agree with my opinion and if they choose to adopt it, it becomes THEIR original opinion as much.

It spreads as far and wide as there are others who freely agree with the opinion of a friend of a friend of a friend. The spread is stopped dead cold only when it runs smack into the wall of someone who declines to believe—and THAT’S how it’s supposed to be in the freemarket of ideas.

Troll farms subvert that system. They pit machines against humans. If you get a comment consisting of a whole line of taunting emoticons—no words, just emoticons or an annoying short animation (called “GIF’s”)—you’ll be wasting your time engaging that robo-basher and chasing it down every rabbit hole. You’re literally arguing with a machine.

But your pride will often prod you to do it anyway—even digital factscape, if tweaked cleverly enough, can be convincing and utterly provocative.

In other realms, machine reality is useful—pilots train on simulators all the time that allow them to “crash” their planes as often as they like till they get it right, without hurting anyone.

That’s not what troll farms do with their version of machine reality. They ‘Photoshop’ a sparsely-attended rally to make it look like a million people attended. Or they ‘pelletize’ a provocative statement that fits any situation then write a short Java script file that launches and lodges that comment in your inbox or timeline when you click any of several innocent-looking links they float in cyberspace.

The reason I find this objectionable is not because of the content of troll material, but because of the glut that their volume causes to the system. All hacking attacks, in fact, have been volume-powered. Even federal government websites in the US have been disabled when unusually huge volumes of robo-logins swamped their servers.

Troll farms in the Philippines—thank God all they could hire so far have been less-experienced IT people with mediocre programming skills—try to flood FB comment sections the same way.

I was laughing when I saw one of those troll farm photos, where they had hundreds of cellphones propped up against a wall, and an overworked “operator” was flitting from one cellphone to the next, literally having to stalk “enemy pages” and keying in short trashtalking comments one at a time. It’s pathetic but you can draw consolation from the fact that one human being can only do so much damage.

But that’s only as far as the “meatball surgery” operations of barrio troll farms go. My fear is there can be more sophisticated operations somewhere in some Makati or Bonifacio Global City penthouse, with just one prodigious Bill Gates-person sitting behind ONE laptop, able to send bursts of text messages to thousands of recipients everytime he hits the “ENTER” key.

Fortunately, that’s easier said than done. Unlike phone numbers that an autodialer can systematically generate, it’s impossible to guess usernames and email addresses—and there’s no way to randomly create them to match a second existing key data stored in the server. That’s why both Facebook and YouTube now employ “Two-Factor Verification” during login.

In short, even “Bill Gates” in our scenario needs full access to USER DATABASES to gain traction for their robo-trashtalking trolls. They either surreptitously buy these databases from utility companies or, less likelier, CREATE them with their own “phishing” operations. And sky’s the limit on how creative they can get.

Even my favorite hardware store in SM shoved a form in my face at the checkout counter that promised me discounts and a “mystery gift” if I just filled in the blank for my email address. When I declined, the girl said, “Sir, we need those information so we can include you in this raffle…” so I said, “Hija, I don’t care what you need, I’m not giving my email address because I’ve got so much Spam in my inbox to put Ma-Ling out of business!”

She didn’t get the joke.

But these “surveys” are carried out everywhere, and it’s not like you can always refuse—like at the bank, for example. You HAVE to give the bank your email address, or how can they send you your bank statements? I tried reading their “EULA” clauses (for “end-user licensing agreement”) so I’d have an exact idea what I’m allowing them to use my data for. But it’s printed in 8pt. font you can’t read it with the Hubble telescope.

Besides, from my own knowledge about how BENECO lost P58-million and other contemporary news, they just happen to be among the Three B’s I don’t trust these days anymore: BANKS, BBM and Boy Abunda.*

(read more articles like this in theunheardside.blogspot.com)

Voter suppression in the US, vote-buying in the Philippines

hat is happening today in America is the opposite of what’s happening here in the Philippines.

Today Americans are struggling with strengthening the right of suffrage, albeit in opposing ways. Republicans and allied conservatives are working hard passing legislation state by state to impose stricter identification requirements for voter registration. This is seen by Democrats and allied liberals as voter suppression because people of color and other minorities, which comprise its base, are more likely not to have those ID’s. These are Americans who comprise the lower economic classes, many of whom are not permanent employees with social security numbers.

They are mostly in the service sector, self-employed or small entrepreneurs. But a significant number of them are illegal or undocumented immigrants who don’t necessarily report their economic activities, even though they pay taxes like everyone else, especially indirect and pass-on or value-added taxes.

Some other legislations, all on Conservative initiative, limit voting exercise, putting in place more stringent procedures on absentee- and voting through mailed-in ballots. They cannot eliminate these modes of voting, of course, but by tightening their deadlines both for filing and counting they can reduce their volume and how they affect the voting results.

Again this is seen by Democrats as suppression of a valuable liberal demographic because hardworking lower economic classes are more likely to avail of these modes that allow them to cast their votes without going out of their way, interrupting their work.

Conservative America—the so-called “red states”—is statistically predominantly “WASP” (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Arguably, they consider themselves “native” Americans because they are descendants of the first colonists who arrived on the Mayflower. Either that or they have descended through many generations from the time their grandparents came to North America from English-speaking United Kingdom and Europe—many Irish, Scottish, Welsh, etc.

Liberal America—the so-called “blue states”—is statistically predominantly immigrant, both the voluntary and involuntary kind. Many African-Americans—blacks—are descendants of slaves who arrived in America on slave trading ships. It took a civil war and, ironically, a Republican president Abraham Lincoln, to free them. But it took a modern hero from a much later time, Dr. Martin Luther King, to secure their full political equality with WASPian America, at least in terms of voting rights.

Technically, the only true “native Americans” are the ethnic redskins with names like “Sitting Bull” or “Flying Eagle” and such. They are not “Indians,” they are just thought of as such because Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the east when he stumbled upon the western hemisphere instead. Everyone else, without exception, are really immigrants. America was founded as an immigrant nation—a fact which they keep forgetting.

White Conservatives, who are not increasing in number anymore, feel threatened by the unstemmed tide of present day immigration, especially from Latin American states further south of Mexico—Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and throw in Cuba and the Carribbeans, too.

Their classic rant is these immigrants “take our jobs and our women” (I don’t know who coined that combination!) and would one day “run us out of our own country.” So their effort is concentrated on sealing the borders or sending immigrants back to the “hell-hole” places where they came from—but, at any rate, just don’t let them vote.

Currently, all you have to do to vote in America is prove that you are a citizen of voting age. How can that be a threat to any political party?

Well, unlike here in the Philippines where we vote our instant convenient persuasion, American voters are loyal to their native interest. With the possible exception of Kanye West, it’s practically impossible to convince a black American to see politics from the eyes of a Donald Trump. In general, you know which way certain demographics are voting before they even cast one ballot. So if one demographic is historically opposed to your party ideology, you didn’t try to proselytize among their ranks, you just sought to eliminate them from the picture altogether. That’s the long and short of voting suppression: make it difficult for your antagonists to vote.

I said this was opposite to the Philippine situation because here, we don’t try to limit or even reduce the number of voters, we try to expand it—confident that the more voters there are for the getting, the more votes there can be gotten for a song. We don’t fear immigration, we invite it. We’re not scared that immigrants might vote and influence who our elected government officials would be, they don’t have to. They can transact with ANYBODY that gets elected and can basically get what they want from, it’s just a matter of “if the price is right.” Immigrants--even those that have obtained Philippine citizenship--have little or no interest in trying to vote.

Suffrage mentality in the Philippines is also diametrically opposite to the American mindset. Here, the government through COMELEC practically has to beg for Filipinos of voting age to please register, and barely manage to get a few hundred thousands of them struggling, kicking and screaming to enlist. The numbers do not improve even when we extend the deadline for registration several times. Extend the registration for American voters? Unthinkable.

The thinking among political camps seems to be, it doesn’t matter how many voters there are in total, it only matters how many of them you can get to vote for you. The objective of political campaigns in America is to drive up voter turnout. The objective of campaigns here is to secure partisan support.

People rant about “vote-buying.” Let me be blunt: every single vote in the Philippines is for sale—I don’t care whether you agree or not. My vote is for sale. My price is very high. If I like you based on a number of non-ideological factors—are you “approachable,” are you “para sa mahirap”, are you a veteran or so-called “tried-and-tested” incumbent or are you the new, innocent yet-unspoiled newbie to bring about the “change” I’ve been praying for, do you belong to a political dynasty, has my family historically voted for your family?

If you tick enough of these boxes for me, then you just bought my vote. Others have other boxes in their minds, or just an open palm on the end of an outstretched arm. That’s buying too, on cheaper terms. The point is I don’t have a political affiliation and I also use beng an “independent” as an excuse to not waste any effort investigating what political parties truly stand for. There’s nothing to investigate. Philippine political parties do not stand for anything. Their platforms are campaign promises put together by ad agencies.

The truer this description is of anyone, the harder they protest and say they are a party of principles and moral tenets. Why should high principles be a party matter? Shouldn’t it be the universal trait? And if it is for anyone, why should that be admirable? Why should I admire you because you are honest? Shouldn’t you BE honest? Shouldn’t we all?

The problem with MY line of reasoning is that it makes everyone a free agent. Who is to say WHAT is honesty? And this is why in the Philippines, a campaign is a season of reintroduction every single time.

There are no permanent congenital interest. Labor will vote for an oppressive oligarch. They do it all the time. Intellectuals will support a despot’s son and even render their skillset to aid in historical revisionism. They can justify themselves, and I give them the benefit of all my doubt, as I give everyone else. To them, that is their congenital interest—but I doubt if it is permanent. It all depends on who is running in the NEXT election.

Now you see my point.***

(Read more articles like this in theunheardside.blogspot.com)

Why did Duterte call BBM a "weak leader?"

upporters of Bongbong Marcos are livid about the scathing pronouncement made by President Rodrigo Duterte that Bongbong “would be a very weak leader.”

For once I believe Duterte. A while back he also insinuated that this politician from a prominent political family was a cocaine addict, without specifically naming him. Again I believe Duterte on that. He should know.This vaunted “war on drugs” is his flagship program and he supposedly knows all the “big fish” in the drug trade, both on the supply and demand sides. After Duterte gave out that blindsided broadside many observed that it was the camp of Bongbong Marcos that went out the busiest denying it. If the shoe fits...

So why is Sara Duterte running as Bongbong’s vice-president?

It’s an admission that the Duterte brand has been ruined so bad it’s no longer capable of winning a national election by itself. So making Sara run for president would be a mistake.

The Marcos brand is no better. It has a stranglehold on a very small “KBL” loyalist basket of deplorables, to borrow Hillary Clinton’s term. They’re not too small as to be ignored, but not big enough to carry Bongbong on their own.

Politics is addition. If you add the Marcos vote with the Duterte vote, then perhaps the union can snag the presidency, especially if there is more than one opposition candidate.

If there is only one, the chemistry will still work if one or two credible “administration-turned-opposition” stalwarts are fielded. I call them “manufactured opposition” or “opportunity opposition” and to this category belongs Manny Pacquiao and Isko Moreno.

To me only Panfilo Lacson, because of his broad and eclectic support base, has the potential to be a “dark horse”--which also makes him the most potent swing vote all the way up the eve of the election, when he can still withdraw and endorse either Bongbong Marcos or Leni Robredo.

This is the reason why Leni Robredo ran as an independent. It allows her to build a rainbow coalition (no, not LGBT but certainly including them) and at the same removes any partyline impediments to accepting the endorsement of anyone from any party at anytime. No organizational recalibrating needed.

Back to the puzzle of the Bongbong-Sara tandem. The only possible thing that can go wrong for them would be split-voting. Unlike in the US elections where a vote for president carries the runningmate as well, here in the Philippines people can vote separately for the president and vice-president. So the father’s endorsement may be enough to carry the daughter to victory, but will not secure her upward mobility unless a Bongbong presidency is secured too.

So President Duterte’s message that Bongbong would be a weak leader is code for “make BOTH Sara and Bongbong win now, we can think about replacing Bongbong with Sara later.”

Bongbong’s followers must understand this but they also know they cannot win the presidency unless they help Sara win the vice-presidency. They need her votes to pad Bongbong’s votes.

Sara’s followers, on the other hand, understand that it’s useless to win the vice presidency if anyone who is a stronger leader than Bongbong wins the presidency. So they need to make Bongbong win because he would be the only president weak enough to fall in a Sara ascension.

But all of this is paper calculation. The mutual distrust in this uneasy alliance between Bongbong and Sara can trickle down to their followers. There is enough time and opportunity for both camps to realize that the success of one can only come with the demise of the other. So each one may still have a fallback strategy for milking the most support from the other as much as he can for as long as he can, and then going it alone in the last few yards of the sprint to the finish.

Right now, on the basis of the need for survival alone, my own calculation is that Bongbong would be better off trying win on his own and avoid incurring a political debt to the Duterte’s who WILL COLLECT on that debt as sure as the sun rises in the east.

I still think Duterte won in 2016 because Mar Roxas and the Liberal Party belittled him too much. They underestimated his ability to do political calculations that the LP's think-tanks, with their political doctorates, can not break down. They were wrong. Mar Roxas lost dismally but his vice president Leni Robredo won handily in the clearest-cut example yet of the result of split-voting. But, as they say, the rest is history as Leni STAYED vice-president, she had no ambitions to replace Duterte.

But Duterte never slept a single night soundly with the thought that his vice president is NOT from his party. I think that, if for no other reason, is mostly why Duterte ruled with an iron fist, perhaps more than even necessary. He is imprisoned by his calculation that it takes being a strong president to stay in power.

Which, of course, is universally true--as is its converse: a strong vice-president underneath a weak Bongbong presidency would de better than Leni did under the forceful presidency of Rodrigo Duterte.

Clearly, Duterte is a better learner of life's political lessons.

So no one should make the same mistake of underestimating him again.

Why do I talk like he's running for president? Well, he is--they just put his daughter's name on the ballot.

Telling it like it is

ne of the most shameful things that happened in 2021 was that failed blitzkrieg attempt of the thoroughly-discredited National Electrification Administration (NEA) to takeover BENECO, during the dawn hours of October 18, 2021.

With the help of a heavily-armed contingent of PNP personnel—all of whom are facing serious administrative charges today and could end up being dismissed from the service—two NEA lawyers, conniving with four disgraced former directors, broke into the cooperative’s offices, destroying property, locking out employees, briefly closing down South Drive and turning South Drive Barangay into a martial-law era military hamlet. All for just one purpose: to install a former Malacañan press release writer as “general manager” and fill up a vacancy that did not exist.

That person doesn’t know a thing about managing an electric cooperative, her claim to fame being hinged entirely on some sense of entitlement as a former minor factotum in Malacañan, a veritable “tao ni Duterte.”

It was a disgraceful move condemned by ALL local government units’ (LGU) legislative bodies. Both the Baguio City Council and the Benguet Provincial Board passed resolutions declaring lawyers Omar Mayo and Ana Marie Rafael as “persona non grata”—unwelcome in the City of Baguio as well as the province of Benguet.

The “PNG resolutions” themselves were welcomed by local chambers of commerce, professional groups, artist groups, labor groups, youth groups, academic societies—practically everybody. NEA really ended up hanging on a limb totally all by its lonesome.

The spontaneous and overwhelming “People Power” response that thwarted NEA’s embarrassing naked grab for power taught NEA a lesson it learned well and fast.

If it wants to devour BENECO, it cannot take it alive and kicking. It has to slowly and surreptitiously suffocate it to death first and then feed on its cold carcass later.

Public awareness about BENECO issues soared to record heights. Unfortunately, it is not in the interest of NEA to achieve clarity. Quite the opposite, it sought to muddle the issues by adding into the mix trumped up charges against the BENECO directors and officers whose valiant defiance of its shameful takeover attempt caused NEA to lose face. In the words of Manila Times columnist Isabel Ongpin, “NEA’s name is mud in Baguio.”

But unfortunately, there still also remains a lot of public misconceptions (including by Ms. Ongpin herself) about the internal affairs of BENECO. Right now, NEA is trying, and partly succeeding, in creating an impression that there is corruption and abuse galore in the Triple-A rated BENECO, even though it is NEA itself that pronounced its high performance efficiency evaluation. NEA, of course, does not need to PROVE any corruption, it just needs to allege it because for purposes of salvaging its tattered image, it has to plaster mud on the face of BENECO--and oftentimes IMPRESSION is all you need to create. Impression can be just as damaging than the truth, if not more.

The whole “inside story” is long and convoluted and, like I said, NOT in interest of NEA to clarify. And that is unfair because while maintaining a serene front, as though it was leaving BENECO alone, in reality it is keeping its tightening siege on it as vicious and virulent as ever, this time mostly out of sight and close observation by the public.

It’s cutting BENECO’s lifeline to the banks—suborning these banks into breaking every sound banking practice imaginable—to cite just one example. It also maintains a fake BENECO “website” and equally fake Facebook page, which continues to be the laughingstock of the whole cybercommunity in Baguio. It’s not only fake but daily emblematic of the horrible incompetence of the people behind it. Even a fifth grader can spell “electric” correctly, but not them.

So on January 29, 2022, the valiant defenders of BENECO will convene a Special General Membership Assembly, essentially to “loop in” everybody who is interested in preserving BENECO as a true peoples’ cooperative, empowering everybody with the truth they need to know, which has been kept from them for far too long. I urge everyone to go there.

A friend of mine challenged me to summarize the whole BENECO-NEA mess in one sentence, and I said I wouldn’t be doing justice. Then he said something that struck me deep: “That’s your weakness—you care about justice, propriety, fairness, decency, doing the right thing and all that motherhood crap. NEA doesn’t give one solitary droplet of shit about those things. So when NEA makes any pronouncement about BENECO, it’s always a reckless broadside, leaving it up to you to fill in the rest of the details. You should do that too, once in a while. Let THEM scramble to do the denying and explaining, for a change.”

“I don’t know if I can do that, or if I should. What I know is I can raise an alarm that people need to figure out how to respond to in each their personal way,” I said.

“Then say it,” he said.

In my view, what NEA seems determined to accomplish is simple: to turn BENECO from a Triple-A rated viable, efficient and lucrative public electric cooperative into a Triple-A rated viable, efficient, lucrative PRIVATE PROPERTY of some lucky business group close to Malacañan.

If you don’t come out and participate on January 29, if you prefer to stay in the comfort of not getting involved, you are helping NEA accomplish that.

“See? That wasn’t too hard to do, was it?” my friend said.