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December 15-21, 2016 • LAS VeGAS ASIAN JOUrNAL
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He said, she said
“I WILL continue to fight against things I do not believe in. If being an opposition leader entails that, then I will be an opposition leader,” Vice Pres. Leni Robredo told the media after she resigned from Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s Cabinet last week. Robredo quit being the chairperson of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) after being ordered—via a text message—to desist from attending all cabinet meetings. She alleged that there’s a plot to eventually remove her from vice presidency. “We had hoped this day would not come. I had been warned of a plot to steal the Vice Presidency. I have chosen to ignore this and focus on the job at hand. But the events of recent days indicate that this plot is now being set into motion,” Robredo said in her resignation letter. Malacañang officials said that the “separation” was caused by irreconcilable differences, as there are certain policies that the two leaders disagree on. Robredo has been a staunch critic of Duterte’s ongoing drug war and has lamented the rising number of casualties. She insists that the rule of law must prevail and urged the public to remain vigilant. “It’s not about deciding who dies or who lives. It’s also about making sure that when the fighting dies down, what’s left is a community that trusts more than fears,” she said in August. The government’s bloody campaign against il-
legal drugs has left more than 3,600 suspects dead, including more than 1,300 killed in gun battles with authorities—an average of 36 killings a day since he took office on June 30. This brutal crackdown on drugs has also led to killings on the streets and violations of human rights, including the right to life and to due process. Another divisive issue that might have pulled the trigger on this short-lived partnership was the controversial decision of Duterte to allow the burial of former Pres. Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery). Robredo is the highest ranking leader of the Liberal Party and a known ally of former Pres. Benigno Aquino III. She also defeated the late president’s son, former Sen. Bongbong Marcos, in the vice presidential race. Cabinet Secretary Leoncio “Jun” Evasco Jr, who related the president’s order to Robredo, denied that the decision to cut her loose was connected to Duterte’s close ties with the Marcoses. On Thursday, Dec. 8, Duterte assured Robredo that there are no plots to steal the vice presidency from her. “I will assure Leni and the rest of the Bicol region that you will have her until the very end of her
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term,” Duterte told reporters. “There is no such thing as removing of a vice president,” he added. Duterte has also accused the “Yellows,” or allies of the previous Aquino administration led by the Liberal Party, of plotting to oust him. This political divide led by the country’s top leaders is set to continue well into 2022 if they both
finish their terms. This is not democracy at work because it brings heightened uncertainty and increased tensions. Instead of inspiring intelligent opinion on the country’s current issues, the continuous disagreement causes national bickering and it is deeply unsettling. (AJPress)
Warning to DREAMers: Do not leave the US when Trump becomes president AS most kababayans in the United States are joyfully preparing for Christmas, there are Filipinos who are weighed down by feelings of uncertainty as President-elect Donald Trump’s oath taking comes near. These are Filipinos who are living and working in the United States without the required immigration papers, while some have benefitted from President Barack Obama’s DREAM Act — deportation relief measures that protect these young people brought to the United States as kids and have considered America their home. However, President-elect Trump has vowed to rescind Obama’s executive orders on immigration which may put many of these kababayans at risk of being deported once Trump becomes President on January 20, 2017. These may include those
Street Talk GReG B. MacaBenta MY father-in-law, Jose Nobleza, Sr., and my eldest brother, Wilfredo, did not live long enough to see this happen, but 99-year old Celestino Almeda of Gaithersburg, Maryland still walks the corridors of power in Washington DC, eagerly waiting for President Barack Obama to sign into law, S. 1555, The Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2015. Almeda is one of only 18,000 surviving veterans, out of 260,000 young Filipinos who answered the call to arms of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt upon the invasion of the Philippines by Japanese Imperial Forces. Both the living and the dead will finally be accorded America’s highest civilian honor for their courage, heroism and sacrifices, by the same U.S. Congress that passed the grossly unjust Rescission Act of 1946 that specifically denied veterans’ benefits to Filipinos who had fought under the American flag in World War II. The Congressional Gold Medal Act was finally passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last November 30. It had been earlier passed by the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent. Signing it into law may be one of the last official acts of the Obama presidency. Filipino and Filipino-American veterans will soon be part of the same roster of heroes headed in March 1776 by the first Congressional Gold Medal recipient, George Washington – a roster that includes America’s most honored men and women, including revolutionary hero, John Paul Jones, Major Generals Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,
who may have been granted advanced parole so they may be The Fil-Am able to leave the U.S. to visit their families back in the Philippines Perspective and be able to come back to the United States. However, immigrant rights advocates, lawyers and universities have warned these undocument- Gel SantoS-ReloS ed immigrants, particularly the beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, against traveling. They say it is best for them not to leave the U.S., or if they have to and have the advanced parole documents, it would be in their best interests to come back to America BEFORE Trump takes oath as president. Immigration is a privilege and not a right, and
therefore, if the new president chooses to issue an executive order barring these undocumented immigrants from coming back to the U.S., even if they have the advanced parole documents, then they may not be able to enter the country again unless immigration laws and guidelines change. DREAMers as many fear he would, but he would instead focus on prioritizing the removal of undocumented immigrants with serious criminal convictions. This segues to a very important reminder to kababayans in America who may have already been granted their green card/permanent resident
status. Atty. Lou Tancinco said it may be wise for them to apply for citizenship NOW because having a green card does not protect you from deportation if you are involved and become convicted of a serious crime. There are benefits and protections accorded to naturalized citizens which green card holders do not enjoy. So what are you waiting for? If you are already eligible to naturalize, give yourself and your family this Christmas gift: apply for U.S. citizenship now! *** Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel. Santos.Relos
US Congressional Gold Medal DOJ: They’re turning De Lima into a martyr Shooting for Filipino WWII veterans Straight Gen. John J. Pershing, Rev. Martin Luther King, Thomas Edison, Charles Lindberg and, among military units, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the Japanese-American Nisei infantry men and intelligence officers who fought in the European theater in spite of the incarceration of ethnic Japanese in America at the outbreak of World War II. The roster also includes South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, the United Kingdom’s Sir Winston Churchill, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Harry S. Truman, athletes Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson, Hollywood icons, Walt Disney, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, and astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr., Michael Collins and John Glenn, Jr. to mention the personalities most familiar to Pinoys. The Congressional Gold Medal will be minted by the U.S. Treasury, to the tune of approximately $33,000, and put on permanent public display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, along with all the other medals. Replicas will be made available to veterans and their living relatives in ceremonies being planned in the U.S. and in the Philippines. To cover the cost of the replicas and thus make them available for free to the recipients, a fund-raising effort will be mounted by the same FilAms that President Rodrigo Duterte dismissed as being inconsequential (“They do not count!”), on one of his foot-inmouth moments. Indeed, it is a rarified pantheon on which our Filipino veterans will be placed. But reaching that apex required tremendous audacity and unrelenting efforts by
Fil-Ams, led by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (U.S. Army, retired), chairman of the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project (FilVetREP). Taguba is the same general who exposed U.S. atrocities in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at great risk to his military career. Despite being lionized by the U.S. Congress and American media, Taguba was eased out of the service by Pentagon quarters. According to Bing Cardenas Branigin, Washington DC-based Fil-Am community leader and former staffer of the late Minister Greg Cendaña’s Malacañang press office, Taguba had been involved in securing approval for the Congressional Gold Medal of the Japanese-American Nisei units. Branigin assisted Taguba in the distribution of medals to the aging recipients. And it occurred to them that Filipino World War II veterans deserved the same honor. In 2003, Taguba, retired Maj. Gen. Delfin Lorenzana (then head of the Office of Veterans Affairs at the Philippine embassy in Washington DC and now Secretary of National Defense under Duterte), NaFFAA co-founder Jon Melegrito, Marie Blanco and Jude Saunders met at the Dubliner Irish Pub in the nation’s capital to discuss the idea of national recognition for the Filipino veterans, All they had to start with was a firm belief in their cause. Recalled Ben de Guzman, FilVetREP’s Outreach Director, there was an outpouring of support for the cause which soon became a national campaign. “A coalition of national advocacy groups serving Filipino Americans, Asian Americans/PaPAGE A7
I FULLY concur with the proposal of former Senator Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr. in urging the Duterte administration to assert our claim on the disputed territory of Sabah in North Borneo and to include this proposal to the proposed amendments in the 1987 Constitution now that we are in full preparations for that monumental shift from our present unitary form of government and into hopefully a Parliamentary/Federal form of government. No less than Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte said that Federalism would help the many issues surrounding the Muslim question. However, what Pres. Duterte perhaps doesn’t realize is that in Cebu and many parts of the Visayas, we too want this shift into a Parliamentary/Federal form of government simply because too many projects are not given to us in the Visayas and Mindanao. Too much Anti-Federalism, like Christian and Solita Monsod have been spreading their negative comments against Federalism, they just don’t know that they have become very unpopular here in the South! Let me cite to you a very clear example why we need Federalism in Metro Cebu. In the six years of the reign of Pres. Benigno Aquino III, the route from Cebu City via Mandaue City all the way to the Mactan Cebu International Airport (MICA) and all the way to the fabulous resorts in Lapu-Lapu City that give Cebu its Tourism industry was already traffic congested. Yet in all those six years under the incompetent rule of Pres. Aquino, not one flyover was constructed to ease the congestion along the way. Despite countless columns giving the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) our suggestions to solve this problem, they only constructed a P36 million island separator, which we do not need! In Cebu City, 16 years ago when
BoBit S. avila I was head of the Cebu City Traffic Management & Operations (CITOM), we already predicted that Escario St. would be heavily congested in the coming years. Back then we proposed to construct a parallel road to Escario St. emanating from V. Rama in Guadalupe, passing through the Guadalupe River and the Lahug Creeks and ending in the University of the Philippines (UP-Lahug) or if we had the extra money, we can bring this road all the way to Rosales Ave. and connect to the North Reclamation Area. If only they have P200 million a year sana tapos na. During the 2010 Presidential campaign, I briefed Presidential bet Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. about this and he said, “If I win, you will be on top of that project. Alas he didn’t win, but the Cebuanos who voted for Pres. Aquino were not listened to by his DPWH. Worse, the National Economic and Development Board (NEDA) did not give this project any priority even if the Regional Development Council (RDC-7) prioritized this project. Ten years ago, Escario St. suffered traffic congestion and until today, the political leaders whom we voted into office have no damn idea on how to solve this traffic mess. How many more years do we Cebuanos have to suffer? This is why we in Cebu do not only want this shift to Federalism; we demand to have this before Pres. Duterte exits from the Presidency. Anti-Federalists say that we don’t need Federalism, but to fix our unitary form of governance. Well it has taken over 71 years and
I don’t see anyone fixing anything! The big fix is our shift to a Parliamentary/Federal government. * * * I was greatly disappointed that the Department of Justice (DoJ) under my good friend DoJ Sec. Vitaliano Aquirre gave embattled Sen. Leila De Lima their nod to allow her to travel to the United States and onward to Germany to speak before the Annual Conference on Cultural Diplomacy. Why in heavens did they allow this to happen to one of the biggest fish working for the Philippine government so high in the top officialdom that we have caught since former Pres. Joseph “Erap” Estrada was convicted? If she is not stopped, Sen. De Lima will certainly seek asylum in those countries (preferably Germany where we do not have an extradition treaty) and use her asylum to launch more attacks (a lot of them are the same lies she peddled during those Congressional hearings) and believe me, she would have a ready audience from her friends in the Human Rights community where she has a good rapport. Then they will turn her into another martyr in the mold of the late Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. Mind you, it is easy to seek asylum abroad especially when one is hostile to the current government. VACC founding chairman Dante Jimenez condemned this move saying, “VACC condemns allowing de Lima to leave because of various complaints under investigation like illegal drug trading in violation of [the Dangerous Drugs Act and for snubbing various hearings of House of Representatives and the Department of Justice” The DoJ should treat Sen. De Lima exactly the same way she treated so harshly former Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo with trump up charges that did not stick at all! (Philstar.com)
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