At the Kapihan sa Senado press forum last Thursday, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile explained why he is against the RH Bill.
“Ang pinakamalaking export natin is OFW. Export iyan eh, kaya ako kontra ako sa RH dahil diyan. Ang magpapalago ng bansa natin ay iyong excess population natin na sinanay natin na tumatanggap ng mga trabaho abroad that others don’t want to handle. We have to accept that. Korea started that way.”
check out senate bill no. 3244 sponsored by senator honasan also known as “gringo” also known as coup plotter in the times of marcos and cory.
it is called An Act To Decriminalize Libel And For Other Purposes [sic]. indeed it seeks to decriminalize libel, great! BUT BUT BUT it also provides that no mass media practitioner can practice his/her profession unless he/she is a member of a professional organization that is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)!!!
read lawyer mel sta. ana’s Once again, government’s intrusive mindset threatens the press – and bloggers.
The constitutionally repugnant objective of this prohibitory bill is clear. Journalists or news-reporters cannot print, broadcast or publish their thoughts, ideas, opinions, gathered-news or other works, whether friendly or critical, significant or trivial, indifferent or provocative, conscientious or mindless, unless they are certified members of an organization allowed by government to exist. Simply stated, the general rule is no practice of journalism and no news-reporting activities shall be allowed if there is no membership in a government-approved and registered media organization.
… What is more frightening is that the bill explicitly makes a prohibition on “practitioners of mass communications” unqualifiedly. It expansively encompasses, not only journalists and news-reporters, but everybody in the profession: photojournalists, broadcasters, commentators, artists, printers, publishers, editors, writers, news-readers and even cameramen/women involved in mass dissemination of news and opinions.
… Senate Bill No. 3244, if it becomes law, seriously prejudices not only the journalists, news reporters, bloggers and other practitioners of mass media; it further prejudices the public as a whole. It will deprive the public of information necessary to make important choices.
wow, ha. so if the honorable senators pass this bill into law, i cannot write blogs or books or even letters to the editor anymore because i do not belong, i choose not to be beholden, to any registered media org. that has the blessings of the government?
i googled honasan’s SB 3244 and found that it’s introduced by an explanatory note where honasan quotes Article 19 of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that the Phlippines ratified in 1986.
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
a. For respect of the rights or reputations of others; [bold mine]
b. For the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.
there’s more from honasan, but nothing anywhere that says that the suppression of independent (read, non-establishment) thinking and writing is the way to achieve 3a or 3b.
very clearly, to me anyway, the real concern is 3a, keeping their — the legislators’, among other government officials’ — reputations unsullied by unsympathetic or unimpressed critics, mainstream and online. BUT BUT BUT the only way to achieve that is by getting their acts together, start truly caring, and acting, for nation, as promised, so that there is no cause for criticism.
sabi nga ni socrates, whom enrile threatens to translate a la sotto/kennedy:
“For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censoring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.” [plato writing in “Apology” via marck ronald rimorin)
oh, and may i ask senator honasan, does SB 3244 mean that what senator enrile did in his memoir — like playing fast and loose with the reputations of senator salonga and cardinal sin by calling them liars when they can’t defend themselves anymore — would no longer be allowed? and would enrile then have to register as a mass media practitioner if he’s serious about writing those two more books on his life as a lawyer and his life as a senator?
just asking.
…in the chapter “Setting The Record Straight” of his memoir, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile presents Eggie Apostol as an opportunistic social climber who curried his family’s favor during the martial law years to protect and advance her own business interests.
Enrile says he has no monopoly of the truth, so it is conceivable that he may have fudged facts in his desire to steer public perception away from what he is more popularly known for: the architect of martial law.
that’s from the first of three inquirer columns that butch hernandez, director of the eggie apostol foundation, devotes to a detailed response to enrile’s allegations re eggie.
IT COULDN’T have come at a better time—that is, the decision of a US Court of Appeals to cite the Marcoses for contempt for their contemptuous attitude toward an earlier judgment forbidding them from dissipating their assets. Imelda and Bongbong were found to have been trying to repatriate precious artworks, deemed part of the Marcos estate, and to have agreed with the previous Philippine administration to split their estate with it, with them retaining 25 percent of it tax-free.
The contempt judgment carries a hefty fine: $353.6 million. It will be added to the $2 billion a US district court awarded to the human rights victims in 1995 as compensation. “Human rights victims” sounds almost benign, referring as it does to the nearly 10,000 Filipinos who were tortured, “salvaged,” and made to disappear during martial law, who filed a class suit against the Marcoses shortly after 1986.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. It reminds us forcefully, and forcibly, of a couple of things.
At the very least, the scale of pillage the Marcoses wrought upon this land. The original class suit sought $10 billion in compensation from the Marcoses, already a gross undervaluation of the amount of loot they had amassed. The $2 billion that was actually awarded to the litigants is an astonishing amount, as is the $353.6 million. Our failure to appreciate the mind-boggling plunder this represents comes from the very mind-boggling-ness of the amounts. Their size gives them an air of unreality, an air of abstraction. In a thoroughly impoverished country like ours, where kids are seen lying on the pavement, sleeping the sleep not of the just but of the drugged, those amounts become almost ungraspable.
What helps to grasp it are things like the poster on malnutrition that came out during martial law. The poster showed a child in an utterly emaciated state, wasting away from lack of food, and a bauble-d Imelda representing the initiator of a nutrition program. The poster was meant to show how government cared for the poorest of the poor, but it had the unintended effect of showing instead why we had hungry kids. There, people said, pointing at the poster, was cause and effect: Imelda was the cause, the emaciated child was the effect. The poster disappeared from the city’s walls faster than you could say “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
But the question that arises from all this talk of millions or indeed billions of dollars is how the Marcoses managed to acquire all that. Ferdinand was just a small-time politician—or hood; he was accused of shooting Julio Nalundasan, his father’s political rival, with a sniper’s rifle while the guy was brushing his teeth—and Imelda a poor cousin of the Romualdezes when they began. To have created an estate—what gentile airs that connotes!—worth that much, it makes the phrase “stealing the country blind” sound like a euphemism. That is not their estate, that is ours. That is not their wealth, that is ours. They have no right to use it as they please. Hell, they have no right to it.
At the very most, it reminds us of the horrors of martial law, and prevents the kind of revisionist rewriting of history Juan Ponce Enrile has begun. Etta Rosales is right, the contempt judgment is worth far more than the money it entails. “The contempt ruling means that the US courts are taking seriously the disrespect shown by the Marcoses. More than the heavy fines, this is a big embarrassment to the family who has shown no remorse for the deeds they have done.”
My own hope is that it goes more than embarrassing them to stopping them from carrying out the kind of political laundering Enrile has. Of course Enrile has also been the beneficiary of exceptional luck, quite apart from an exceptional share of the spoils as custodian of martial law, being there at the camps when the people arose against the regime he helped build and defend, and being the Senate president when the impeachment of the first Filipino chief justice took place. The Marcoses have not enjoyed the same breaks. But you never know, stranger things have happened in this country. This should help to stop things from getting even stranger.
Indeed, I hope that the victims of torture and the kin of the “salvaged” and disappeared take it upon themselves to publicize the accounts that are contained in the class suit. I attended one of the collective dredging of memory in the course of that suit in the 1990s, and some of the recollections there were truly harrowing. No horror story beats the capacity of human beings to inflict pain and harm on other human beings.
Enrile has been challenging the leftists to show proof of his guilt and of their innocence, claiming to have the documents that prove the complete opposite. All the victims have to do is bring up their personal accounts in the class suit to the public gaze to disprove him. What Enrile’s documents are, only he can say. What the victims’ documents are have been scrutinized by the American courts, from Manuel Real’s Honolulu court, which ruled in their favor, to the higher courts that continued to rule in their favor after various appeals by the Marcoses. Those documents, not quite incidentally, often mention Enrile as the one who signed the victims’ ASSOs (arrest, seizure and search orders). He may not have directly ordered their torture or “salvaging,” or disappearance, but neither did Marcos. And Judge Real, as well as the other American judges, who heard the class suit found him guilty anyway by command responsibility, or by creating the conditions, policies, and premises that made them possible.
That is one horror story for Undas, too, Marcos, Enrile, and the others who never had to wear masks to horrify the country for so long.