The tie that binds

Who was the commissioner-in-charge of the Mindanao regions where most of the cheating in 2004 took place? The answer is Benjamin Abalos. A day before elections, Chairman Abalos checked into the hospital, for bleeding ulcers if memory serves me right. Overworked and under-fed, or mis-fed, whatever. Because of this, he was able to designate Virgilio Garcillano, whose assignment was Regions 4 and 5, to temporarily take charge of Mindanao. Time enough to order the delay in the canvass of votes from Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Sulu, Sultan Kudarat and Basilan. Time enough for the Lintang Bedols and the Rey Sumalipaos and all the usual cohort operators of the master cheat to start their foul deeds.

Since he was now in charge, Garcillano was able to move out a general like Gudani, so that Kyamko and Habacon could "cooperate". And he could ask the Esperons and the Lomibaos to cooperate, while Leandro Mendoza did his thing in his "beloved" Cebu, and Ebdane as trouble-shooter at large.

Remember Hello Garci? If you listened enough to the entire voice tapes, one of Garci's callers was one Ruben Reyes. Yes, it's the same Ruben Reyes who is now involved in the ZTE deal on the broadband project. The same Ruben Cesar Reyes who weaves in and out of the military establishment, the go-to guy for promotion of colonels into generals. His whispered recommendation carried magic cachet to the brother and the husband of the commander-in-chief. He knows the levers to pull within the intelligence community. Could it be that this Ruben Reyes ordered the tapping of Garcillano's cell phone, just to be certain he will not double-cross his most important client? Not unlikely.

ZTE was the big collection chip. Abalos knew that she owed him plenty. And if small-time Garcillano was happy enough to stay at a villa in Subic during the Hello crisis, and every time he wants to be in Luzon, courtesy of his niece, a certain Zamoranos who has been designated, likely until 2010, as customs collector for juicy Subic, Abalos should get much, much more. He has not been chair of cheating for nothing.

Right after her "victory" in 2004, Doña Gloria visited China, whose two trillion dollars in foreign reserves was such an attractive magnet for the corrupt. Unlike the multilaterals or Japan which yielded to the demands of transparency and anti-corruption, China was Big Papa who simply closed its eyes to whatever fishy deals its clients wanted, provided: One, it got certain concessions, whether oil-drilling rights, forward oil supply contracts, or "joint exploration rights" over land and water; and Two, the contractors of its loan-aided packages were Chinese firms. Nobody gets China's money for nothing, but naturally. The Doña understood perfectly, and was thus transmogrified into Boss Woman. Forget Washington DC; Beijing was where she went. After all, retirement does not have to be in the Bay Area facing the Pacific; it can be around the border of Spain and Portugal where ousted Latin American dictators wake up to face the Atlantic from whence they fleeced their fortunes.

Abalos discovered ZTE. And ZTE discovered a good project in the national broadband. And because it was conveniently easy to overprice the broadband project, unlike other infrastructures whose nuts and bolts were all too easy to understand, the price ballooned to 329.5 million dollars, more than half of which would be commissions. The perfect deal, Abalos must have drooled, and thus conscripted his other partner in the original crime, the 2004 electoral cheating, Ruben Cesar Reyes, who was designated "bagman", friendly to him, and trustworthy enough to the first family.

So when we cry foul due to corruption most gross, and damn the perpetrators all the way up to the Boss Woman in the stinking palace, never ever forget that the conspiracy of the criminal started when someone wanted to win, at all cost, with no less than "a million" in 2004.

The ties that bound Gloria and her Mike to Abalos and his Ruben are not just a common habit of corruption, but also the original sin of her illegitimacy.

She is corrupt because her presidency was born out of corruption likewise.

And she will not resign because she has two more years of corruption to work out. We want her out, we must oust her. Oust her from office she never won to begin with. Oust her because she is plain usurper, plain squatter. The ties that corrupt begin with the tie that binds. Cheaters are never clean.

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We still keep getting mail from readers who cannot stomach the moral cowardice of our lord bishops. Here is another:

"The way I see things going, I see the return of Padre Damaso in the Catholic hierarchy. When I was in high school, I loathed reading Jose P. Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. What made it worse was the textbook given to as was in Tagalog. I am a Cebuano so reading the novel written in the national language really would twist my brain from lack of Tagalog vocabulary. I had to buy a comic version just to visualize what Rizal wanted us readers to sink in our head. It is fortunate that Rizal's message sank to my head and Jun Lozada made the most fitting statement that I relate with the two novels Rizal wrote - "The worst corruption is corruption of the best".

"Yes, the corruption of our religious leaders. I am a Roman Catholic schooled by Jesuits. I still hold the Jesuits with high regard, (wait till you get to know one Fr. Archie Intengan, the mentor of Norberto Gonzales) but as to the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, I am disillusioned. As I go to mass every Sunday, I am slowly questioning myself - what's the point? Even they can't make a stand. So in my own way for the past three Sundays I have stopped giving money during offertory. They receive bundles and bundles of money from Malacañang anyway, which is surely not from GMA's pocket but from the taxpayers. So as I pay my taxes, I am now giving funds to the church (most likely just the bishops). So why give more to the Sunday offering? I have encouraged other taxpayers to do the same in internet forums. Are we going back to the Spanish era of corrupt friars?"

And then he paraphrases Edmund Burke, "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men (aren't bishops supposed to be good?) to do nothing."

Amen.

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