Recto Bank incident

“Satire is a very effective way of exposing the falsity of positions issue by issue and politician by politician.” -Barney Frank

POLITICOS and government functionaries always have their own ways of wiggling in and out of arguments. But they are most entertaining when they paint themselves into a corner, so to speak.

I am, of course, talking about the functionaries who have taken up the cudgels for the President who was woefully quite days after a Chinese boat (which would later be identified as a militia vessel) rammed a Filipino fishing boat and were left for dead well within our country’s exclusive economic zone — Recto Bank.

I loved seeing the social media cussing foreign affairs secretary who joined in the fray with his “collision-allision” difference analysis. Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. argued that no collision happened since boats on water will always move with the waves even when they are anchored. Hence, an allision happened rather than a collision.

Merriam-Webster defines allision “as the action of dashing against or striking upon or the running of one ship upon another ship that is stationary — distinguished from a collision.”

So, based on the definition, a boat can be stationary at sea. For whatever intent or purpose of the good secretary, it did not change the fact that Filipino fishermen were left for dead after the collision or allision or any thingamajig you want to use. My point being is that Locsin’s analysis was never near concerning our fisherfolk’s welfare. It was just a display of random factoid that doesn’t help the situation.

I also loved seeing Palace Spokesman Salvador Panelo try to slither and slide his way through an interview with an unrelenting anchor of ANC, who kept on poking holes at his every argument.

Panelo insisted that the Palace has been consistent with its stand on the Recto Bank incident. But when the anchor unfurled Panelo’s statements in a corresponding timeline, Panelo was visibly irked and went on to ramble that what he said was consistent on that particular time as more information came in about the incident. Nice try but not good enough.

Sports commentator turned politico turned functionary Emmanuel Piñol was also entertaining during the unraveling of events in the past days.

His response to the incident was ostentatious. First, a phalanx of anti-riot police was deployed outside the house of the Filipino boat’s captain. Second, he gave boats that could not venture anywhere near the fisherfolk’s usual fishing grounds. Third, he gave the fisherfolk a loan. Let me repeat that, a loan and let that sink in.

After all these fisherfolk have gone through by now, a loan is the last thing on their minds.

I find it funny that Piñol belabored the point that since fisherfolk and farmers are under the purview of his department that he should have a first crack at the aftermath of the incident.

These functionaries held different, nay conflicting stands on the Recto Bank incident. Unfortunately, the same could not be said with the President’s and the Chinese envoy’s statement which were almost copy-paste statements. The Chinese envoy came out with a statement first, that the incident was a “simple maritime accident.” After days of silence, the President released his statement which eerily echoed what the foreign diplomat said — “simpleng banggaan ang nangyari.”

What all three of the above-mentioned functionaries failed to zero-in on is the simple fact that the incident involved foreign vessels inside our country’s exclusive economic zone. Our coastguard and Marina should only come in if two Filipino boats collided in our EEZ. This is a matter for the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea (period).

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While all that drama has been unfolding in the national scene, here, the Capitol’s legal counsel is doing such a bang up job of promoting Gov. Yevgeny Vincente Emano’s pro-poor brand: “Basta taga Misamis Oriental ka, secure ka!”

The evacuees of Mincamansi, Lagonglong certainly didn’t feel secure when they were shooed away from the capitol grounds. Misamis Oriental officials turned its back on the people who needed them most.

It based its decision on some mundane definition of what a temporary and permanent “structure” is. A local paper (not this paper) even had the incident live streamed. In the video, a certain representative from the Office of the Building Official read a decision that the evacuees’ “structures” would be demolished for violating, I guess, the building code.

However, city administrator Teodoro Sabuga-a Jr. denied that the OBO issued an order to demolish the temporary structures the evacuees built in the capitol grounds.

Sabuga-a pointed out that even though the capitol grounds are located right smack at the center of the city, it is under the control of the provincial government.

Well, I guess this is the change that this administration has been bannering about.

Exacerbating the aggravation to this highly divisive issue on the evacuees are supposed friends who are so quick to dismiss the evacuees as if it were their fault that their ancestral land holds riches that moneyed firms covet. Pfft.

The Ocon-hate bandwagon

THIS will be my second column on Councilor Zaldy Ocon. But this will be the first time for me to name him. This column, however, is not an attempt to ride the Ocon-hate bandwagon.

The first time I alluded a column to the councilor cum radio anchor was when he dismissed a friend’s explanation on air because my friend “sounded gay.” My friend happens to be the information officer of Northern Mindanao’s social welfare office.

My friend was trying to explain the delay in the payout of a dole-out program of the social welfare office. However, Ocon interrupted him by commenting that my friend sounded gay. It was uncalled for.

This incident was brought up again during Cagayan de Oro Press Club’s lecture series on ethics in commemoration of the Press Freedom Week in May this year. The discussant reminded the participants that you should not discriminate people based on their belief, race or gender preference or orientation.

In January last year, the Office of the Ombudsman slapped Ocon with a six-month suspension for slapping a traffic enforcer.

There have also been many photos of his “parking skills” on social media. He has the penchant for parking on entrances for people with disability, double parking at the public market, and parking on a no-parking zone.

The last part was why he was confronted by the traffic aide where Ocon’s response was slapping the guy silly.

Ocon also hogged the headlines when his pick-up truck figured in an accident near Gingoog City where it was discovered to have carried sizeable board feet of illegal hardwood. He wasn’t in the truck when the accident happened but he admitted to owning the truck and its hot cargo.

A competing radio station also has a beef against Ocon. He defended Kapa Community Ministry International Inc. when a radio announcer of that competing radio station figured in an entrapment operation by the NBI for allegedly extorting money from Kapa ring master Joel Apolinario.

Earlier this month, Ocon berated former mayor Reuben Canoy in the lobby of a Canoy-owned hotel. A video clip of part of the incident has since gone viral on social media.

There is a signature campaign going on at the Press Freedom Monument that is calling for the “removal” of Ocon from the city council. The campaign spokesperson even went as far as to call for Ocon to leave the city and go back to Davao where he supposedly comes from.

I’ll be stating the obvious when I say that Ocon has attitudinal problems. I would not be surprised if a lot more people will come out to say that they have been wronged by Ocon, too.

Look, I agree that Ocon’s behavior is reprehensible. What he did to Ninong Reuben was uncalled for. As a public official, he should be held to account.

But you cannot banish him from the city for that. Just as I cannot banish you from the city for laughing and clapping your hands at every rape joke of the President.

It’s called right to domicile, you double-standard “righteous” people. Pfft.

What’s up with Briones?

“Tempus fugit.” – Leonor Magtolis-Briones

FIRST, I must say outright that Leonor Magtolis-Briones took my breath away the very first time I met her, personally. I was star-struck, honestly. Sadly, that’s just yet another anecdote I would tell my drunk friends here in Cagayan de Oro.

If you knew her the way I did, you would be as perplexed as I am with her recent string of non-starters and unfeeling tirades against her very own public teachers, to say the least.

I first met her while the “anti-pork barrel” campaign was riding high in 2013. I was with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism at that time.

Then, while the pork barrel of legislators appeared to have gotten the most flak from the public, it was the President’s own pork barrel that should get more attention – and the ax as well, the former national treasurer Leonor Magotolis-Briones once told me. She was also the lead convenor of the Social Watch Philippines, a global network that monitors the implementation of government commitments to social development — or whatever she stood for then.

She once told me that in comparison to a President’s lump sum funds, the Priority Development Assistance Funds (PDAF), otherwise known as the pork barrel, are actually small. In fact, Briones said, the PDAF of legislators is just a “biik,” or piglet, compared to the President’s “inahin,” or sow.

I learned from her that presidential pork is not even reflected in the General Appropriations Act. A big chunk of the President’s largess comes from revenues from government-owned and -controlled corporations.

“Ang problema ay hindi tayo nakikialam kung saan na ang budget,” Briones once told me in an exclusive interview inside an office in UP Diliman Campus, six years ago.

She also pointed out that a President’s lump sum funds are only audited after three years unlike the spending of line agencies which are audited every year. In this case, any abuse by a President on the use of the lump sum funds would be discovered too late by the Commission on Audit, Briones said.

She was, to me, a crusading prosecutor of the people and a breath of fresh air amid the fog of derision of the Aquino administration.

However, when she took the helm of the Department of Education under the Duterte administration, she turned into something but a crusading prosecutor of the people.

In 2017, she issued Department Order No. 40, Series of 2017 — the “Guidelines for the Conduct of Random Drug Testing in Public and Private Secondary Schools.”

As Phelim Kine of the New York-based Human Rights Watch’s comment on the departmental order: “Imposing mandatory drug testing of students when Philippine police are committing rampant summary killings of alleged drug users puts countless children in danger for failing a drug test. Education officials should be protecting students, not putting them in harm’s way through mandatory drug tests.”

Last month, Briones called the public school teachers expose of a widespread practice of teachers using their classroom toilets as their makeshift offices as “drama.”

The height of her numbness, to me, was when she said that “teaching is not all about money.” Of course, when you’re the second highest paid cabinet member, receiving a whopping P3.93 million a year, you won’t need to concern yourself with money.

“But perhaps what has to be scrutinized first is the mystery of worsening poverty amid supposed economic growth. After all, eradicating poverty is Goal No. 1, with its more specific targets being to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, as well as those suffering from hunger. The level of success in achieving this goal has a profound impact on the rest of the Millennium Development Goals,” Briones once wrote for PCIJ then.

Where is that Briones now? The public school teachers sure need that Briones now. Pfft.

Pride month

“There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot wrong with the world you live in.” — Chris Colfer, American actor, singer, and author

IT is June once again. It is Pride Month, a month when we celebrate and advocate for equal rights for members of the LGBTQ+ community.

To be honest, I never really cared about this month before, other than it marks the first half of the year. Don’t get me wrong. I am not homophobic. Many of you, my avid readers, know that I spent 12 years of my life in an exclusive boys’ school. If there is one thing I’ve learned from those 12 years, it is that homosexuality has got nothing to do with the lack of courage, and neither does it lessen one’s humanity. It is also most certainly not a disease which could be “cured.”

So, when the ignorant git from Malacanang told an audience in Japan last week that he was once gay and that he got “cured” by beautiful women, it must be called out as what it really is — a display of naked bigotry.

“Good thing Trillanes and I are similar. But I cured myself. When I began a relationship with [ex-wife Elizabeth] Zimmerman, I said, this is it. I became a man again,” UK-based news portal Independent quoted it as saying.

The Independent goes on to report that its “one and only” Honeylet Avanceña was with it when it made the statement.

So, I guess it is like a piece of bacon after all — “honey-cured.”

This kind of statement should be rebuked since it comes from a man who has had a long list of gay-bashing but still enjoys substantial popularity.

When one of my daughters opened up to me to tell me she is queer, I knew it took her a lot of courage to come out the way she did.

Like most men its age, they seem to be locked in believing that homosexuality means lack of valor, courage. They and it believe that homosexuality equals being a sissy or cowardly. These people grew up thinking that boys should not show affection and emotions.

This year’s Pride Month is particularly momentous in that it also marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village in Manhattan. From that day up to July 1, the gay community in New York held demonstrations that were mostly violently dispersed by the police.

If that wasn’t courage, standing up for what you believe in, then I don’t know what it was that moved the gays to stand toe-to-toe against NYPD’s “finest.”

It is 2019, for crying out loud. It is ironic that in this supposed information age, this kind of backward thinking still exists. How many riots will the gays have to fight for the cavemen to understand that they have as many rights as them?

I enjoin you, my dear readers, to support and join this year’s Pride March. Let’s join hands with the LGBTQ++ community in breaking the chains of bigotry.