Critics and political foes have impregnated their media machine with a horde of swindlers and racketeers in broadcast media, particularly the so-called “Last Two” broadcasters, who have been hurling mud and fake news without let-up against Davao del Norte Second District Congressman Antonio “Tonyboy” Floirendo Jr. and the Floirendo-owned Tagum Agricultural Development Company (Tadeco).
“Last Two” broadcasters, fake mediamen who are not licensed by the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkasters ng Pilipinas (KBP), sell “winning numbers” to listeners, especially from the provinces, in a massive swindling operation that has victimized thousands of gullible lottery bettors.
Carrying fake names and selling alleged winning numbers for as low as P300 to as high as P20,000, the fake broadcasters brag of connections to “insiders” in the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes (PCSO), which runs Philippine lotteries including the Small Time Lottery (STL).
The broadcasting racket is heard in AM and FM radio stations in Davao City like DXKT, DXOW, DXGO, DXRR, Radyo Ukay and others, and the provincial FM stations of Radyo Natin.
Alongside selling fake winning numbers to lottery addicts, the broadcasters spice up their airtime with black propaganda against Floirendo and Tadeco.
Apparently paid hefty sums, the ‘Last Two’ racketeers, who broadcast their programs in paid “blocktime” radio hours (up to P20,000 per month for one hour of airtime), go on air with their swindling racket and black propaganda from early morning up to midnight.
The massive smear attacks in the broadcast media comes as House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, a former friend and political ally of Floirendo, is poised to run for reelection in Davao del Norte’s First District in the 2019 election.
Alvarez’s politics was practically dead after an earlier short-lived term in Congress and since he bowed out of the political scene after serving as transport secretary during the administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. His stint in the Arroyo regime was marred by allegations of his link to a controversial multi-million rehabilitation project at the Manila airport.
He hitched a ride on the Duterte-for-President bandwagon in the 2016 election and backed by Floirendo and Tadeco run anew, after more than a decade of political hiatus, and won in the Davao del Norte First District congressional race.
Alvarez has broken relations with Floirendo, an unpopular and widely criticized move in the province aware that Floirendo and Tadeco were long-time political backers of Alvarez.
Reports had it that the Alvarez-Floirendo split was sparked by a public quarrel between their girlfriends.
Soon after he became the Speaker, Alvarez hounded Floirendo with a graft case at the Ombudsman and initiated a congressional inquiry into the legality of Tadeco’s decades-old Joint Venture Agreement (JVA) with the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) over about 5,300 hectares of the Dapecol reservation area that the company developed into a banana plantation.
Except that the fake “Last Two” broadcasters are known for their broadcasting pattern of praising Alvarez and attacking Floirendo and Tadeco, there is however no proof to link them to Alvarez or to speculations that the Speaker is awash with money to fund an expensive black propaganda campaign in media.
However, Davao del Norte Governor Anthony del Rosario, a cousin of Congressman Floirendo, has questioned where the Speaker got P55 million to spend for his birthday bash in Tagum City in January.
Del Rosario raised his query in his speech at a recent Davao del Norte Liga ng mga Barangay event in Davao City.
Short of saying that Alvarez was penniless before he became Speaker, Del Rosario said Alvarez had “begged” from Floirendo for funds to run his election campaign in the 2016 election.
Alvarez’s lavish three-day birthday bash was attended by senators and congressmen, high government officials, movie stars and VIPs, among others.
Reportedly, three planes were allegedly chartered to fly to Davao City, while hundreds of cars were hired for trips to Davao del Norte’s capital city of Tagum. The report, however, did not tie them to the birthday bash.
In the meantime, just about a year to the 2019 polls, Alvarez’s political future appears doomed after presidential daughter Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte vowed to campaign against his reelection.
This developed as the Speaker, the secretary general of President Rodrigo Duterte’s ruling Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban), described as an “opposition,” and without the blessing of President Duterte, the regional party, Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP), recently formed by Mayor Duterte with Davao Region political leaders.
Going ballistic, Mayor Duterte called Alvarez an “asshole” and urged congressmen to oust the Speaker.
She said Alvarez has become a liability to the nation and the administration of President Duterte.
Following the Sara Duterte-Alvarez spat, governors of the Davao Region’s five provinces led other local officials in resigning en masse from the PDP-Laban to join HNP, which was expected to put up a complete line-up in the 2019 regional elections against Alvarez and his slate under the PDP-Laban banner.
Senator Panfilo Lacson and Senator Joseph Victor “JV” Ejercito took turns in lashing at Senator Antonio Trillanes after the opposition senator accused senators of being “puppets” of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Lacson, a member of the majority in the Senate, said Trillanes is “hallucinating too much.”
Senators, according to Trillanes, have become lapdogs of Duterte.
“Itong Senado na dati ay ‘yan yung last bastion of democracy eh ngayon, wala na, para na rin kaming mga tuta nitong administrasyon na ito. Ni ayaw mag-imbestiga eh. Dito ako makakakita ng mga senador na takot, kaalyado ka na lang kasi ayaw mo aminin na takot ka eh,” he said in a press conference on July 2.
“Maybe it is high time that we refer to the Senate Ethics Committee Sen. Trillanes’ actions since he is becoming damaging to the institution, and becoming destructive to the country,” Ejercito said in a statement. Ejercito said that he found Trillanes’ comments “disrespectful and unparliamentary” and noted that he should be reminded that the Senate is a democratic institution.
“I don’t know where he is coming from and I’m not even sure if he is still rationale in his thinking. One thing I’m sure about, he is dead wrong. He is so out of touch with reality, if not hallucinating too much,” Lacson told reporters in a text message.
As puppets of Malacanang, Trillanes, who is severely critical of Duterte, likened the senators to dogs with tails between the legs, afraid of the President.
“‘Yung mga dapat sana na pumuna eh wala eh, sila yung mga bahag ang buntot,” he said.
Ejercito earlier suggested filing of complaint against Trillanes in the Senate committee on ethics, but has mellowed down to demanding that the opposition senator apologize to his colleages..
“If a person apologizes, end of story. As long as he admits his mistake, end of story. An apology would be good for the institution — not for me — the institution,” Ejercito said in a Kapihan press conference on Wednesday.
Ejercito said that he would rather not file a complaint and would wait until he gets the chance to speak to his colleagues before doing so.
The Senate resumes its regular sessions on July 24.
“I do not want to do this to anybody…but I hope Sen. Trillanes should realize that he should not generalize his colleagues,” Ejercito said.
“We could debate on issues, we may have heated exchanges but we have to refrain from insulting each other because it’s in the Senate rules,” he added.
Ejercito also stressed that Trillanes lapdog comment about senators is not true because the Senate, as an independent institution, was given the mandate by voters and not by Pres. Rodrigo Duterte.
He said that it was not fair to assume that those who agreed with the President were immediately lapdogs as it was not all the time that senators were against the President’s policies.
“We have to give (the President) a chance. It’s not all the time we are against him. Constructive criticism is different from destructive criticism,” Ejercito said.
He said that personally, he supported Pres. Duterte for his commitment to spend trillions of pesos to improve the country’s infrastructure.
However, he said that he opposed the proposed tax reform program as it was “too high.”
“There are still a lot of issues that the Senate has shown that we are independent though we support the administration,” the senator stressed.
“We have to maintain decency here,” he added.
In a separate press conference, Senate Majority Leader and chair of the Senate Ethics Committee Vicente Sotto III, like Ejercito, said that an apology would be the best step Trillanes could make.
Sotto said that it was the “honorable” thing to do but noted that he would not demand it form Trillanes. (Azer N. Parrocha/PNA
The last-minute vile attacks by lying amok Senator Antonio Trillanes will not stop presidential race front runner Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte from clinching the presidency in May.
Trillanes, running by his lonesome for vice president under his Magdalo Party, is utterly wrong if thinks he could impede Duterte’s race to victory with his expose of lies about the mayor’s alleged hidden wealth.
Like a deranged moron with a machinegun armed with duds, Trillanes’ foul mouth spewed out venom spiced up with allegations that Duterte had more than P200 million in hidden deposits at the Bank of the Philippine Island (BPI) as well as billions of pesos worth of property not stated in the mayor’s statement of assets.
Trillanes’ hallucinations that began a week ago at the homestretch to E-Day is motivated by three reasons of the drowning dog cum senator yapping in gibberish to gain public attention for his losing presidential bid and to justify a P500 million pay-off from a presidential candidate to destroy Duterte.
One, the vain hope that publicity from the expose could bail him out of the ignominious dishonor of having cornered the franchise over the bottom of surveys for vice president conducted by Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia.
Two, to gain concession (read Cabinet position) in case presidential candidates Senator Grace Poe or Mar Roxas wins the presidency and Duterte is defeated.
Three, the myopic view that his “demolition by perception” that shamed and dragged down presidential bet Vice President Jejomar Binay in a two-year inquisition by the Senate Blue Ribbon committee where he was the noisiest member would work on Duterte, who has led by a mile his rivals the four latest poll surveys of SWS and Pulse Asia.
Trillanes’ hallucinations are trademark symptoms of insanity that merit issuance by a psychiatrist of a prescription and a ticket to a mental institution.
There are a hundred reasons why the rabid dog senator will just have to accept his fate that he is unbelievable and that in the universe of politics he is nothing but an inconsequential passing dot.
But we will limit to three our arguments why ex-navyman Trillanes, after making a fool of himself with his expose against Duterte, needs a .45 to end his miserable fate and save himself from farther ignominy.
One, results of poll surveys, including by his own Magdalo Party, showed that Trillanes’ dream of becoming vice president has been consigned to the canal. The reformist and anti-corruption advocate that he falsely created for himself has been totally demolished and thrown down the drain with his current image of a rabid dog spewing venomous lies to lift him up away from his misery of the reality that he could not be vice president.
Two, Trillanes is a confirmed mad barking dog unleashed by the administration of Benigno Aquino who is exiting as President with his discredited and corruption-laced Tuwad na Daan program of governance as crowning glory and who has the incompetent, idiotic, crazy and stupid Mar Roxas as standard bearer of his Liberal Party.
A double-faced political prostitute, Trillanes is also a Doberman of independent candidate Senator Grace Poe, the housewife and kinder teacher who wants to lead the country as president.
Trillanes playing the role of Duterte inquisitor, as he did in the case of Binay, with the hope of gaining concessions from Roxas and Poe if Duterte is defeated, is pure fantasy. Roxas and Poe, like Trillanes, have already been buried in the dustbin of political history in so far as the 2016 election is concerned. In recent poll surveys, Roxas and Poe ate dust behind Duterte more than 10 percentiles away. The public pulse says only cheating in the election by his well-funded rivals could steal away Duterte’s impending victory.
Three, other than the fact that the allegations of hidden wealth are lies without concrete proof except his insane ramblings, Trillanes unleashed his venom too late in the day, when poll surveys and public opinion already crowned Duterte as the next President of the Philippines. The mad dog wailed with his venomous mouth before an unbelieving public that already dismissed him as a liar.
There is no glory in Trillanes jubilating that he has helped pull down Binay to frustrate the presidential bid of the vice president. After two long years of exposing Binay’s alleged stolen billions, the vice president is still free. Trillanes’ allegations only certified him as a pure-blooded liar.
It has now turned out that the ‘demolition by perception” against Binay by Trillanes has no leg to stand on and merely a mad dog’s barkings aimed to gain points for his presidential bid.
Trillanes has wild thoughts he can do a Binay on Duterte with his “demolition by perception.”
Even if Trillanes sells his soul to the devil or shoot his head with a .45, the Duterte presidency is unstoppable. His “demolition by perception” against Binay may have been a success. But truth is behindDuterte who has the Filipinos behind him. If the yackitty-yacking senator thinks he can destroy Duterte as he did Binay with his lies, Trillanes is dreaming like an inmate in a mental institution.
The amok’s lies about Duterte’s million-peso secret bank deposits have been denied by BPI which refused to issue a statement on the truthfulness of Trillanes’ wild claims.
The alleged bank documents on Duterte’s bank deposits that the loud-mouthed Trillanes waved before the public and media turned out to be forgeries.
Lies can dig graves for an amok like Trillanes.
By claiming he had bank records of Duterte’s alleged hidden deposits, the filthy amok violated the Bank Secrecy Law. So we we can expect that under the Duterte presidency, Trillanes would be in the unhappy company of other senators already incarcerated for grand thievery of public money.
And we will not even talk about Duterte’s vow to hunt down Trillanes for treason for engaging in backdoor diplomacy with China over the disputed South Philippine Sea.
And the economic sabotage that BPI will file against the senator for using the name of the bank in his insane mission to abort a Duterte presidency with lies.
The acronym DDS is morbid, means the Davao Death Squad, the dreaded shadowy gunmen almost always blamed when a criminal is gunned down.
Dabawenyos trumpet their city as one of the most livable and safest cities in the world and would have no qualms about saying that the DDS helped in curbing down criminality. The apparent public tolerance has been assailed by human rights group as part of the culture of violence being allegedly cultivated by police and the local government under Mayor Rodrigo Duterte whom they say are behind the vigilante killers. But the Davao public does not care. The DDS stirs fear and criminals leave the city before they are shot to death. For those who remain to terrorize the city, their days of vertical living are counted. Soon, the police or the DDS would catch up and consign them to another dimension, dead and horizontal six feet under the ground. But there is another DDS in Davao City. Unlike the DDS armed with .45s, this DDS does not shoot people but targets plans, programs and strategies for social and economic development. This DDS is the Duterte Development System (DDS). Like the sweet-shooting killer DDS, this other DDS has no face but has an omnipresence in the life of the Dabawenyos. This DDS is a matrix of people, working together or alone to contribute to the over-all mission of goodness for their city. It is a faceless concept of collaboration and cooperation among the Davao public, the bureaucracy, the business sector and other grooupings with the common vision to make their city fly. The DDS is the CityENRO street sweeper (aka DDS or Dala Dala Silhig in Bisdak) with a broom in hand early morning picking up garbage in the streets to make the city clean; it is that gardener working under heat of sun or cold of the rain who make street landscapes beautiful. The honest taxi drivers and the disciplined sidewalk vendors are part of the hoi polloi that provides the spirit and the energy to the DDS. There is a DDS in the city government bureaucracy: people in the various departments responding to need for food, health, education, environmental protection and other needs of the constituents, with speed, honesty and transparency. And there is the head of the DDS himself, Duterte, now on his more than 20 years of serving the Dabawenyos.
There are members of the DDS in the business, religious, academic and other sectors and in the ranks of the civic clubs and the GOs and NGOs who help make the road to peace and progress easier. The barangays have full of DDS: village officials and volunteer workers tending to children, women and the elderly, and barangay tanods who keep the peace. The fact is everybody in the city, except the criminals and other elements out to disrupt the economic stability and peace of the city, are members of this DDS.
This DDS is real and has been in existence since 1988, when Duterte first stepped into City Hall as mayor. Since then until today the DDS is on a shooting spree hitting targets to achieve peace, development and social and economic progress. Among others, these are the trophies of the DDS productive rampage: The local government has become a working model for excellence and often visited by other local government units in search of programs for adoption. Transparency in government is high with the city ranking low in audits for presence of corrupt practices by both government and private monitoring bodies. Peace and order is stable, with the local police consistent with high ratings in the annual review of the Philippine National Police. Crime index hovers near zero ground. In the latest ranking of Numbeo.com, Davao City is placed as No.9 among safest cities of the world. It is among few cities in the world with an on-call no-fee 911 Emergency Response Unit. Davao City is considered as the financial capital of Southern Mindanao if not the whole of Mindanao; it’s current annual revenue is placed at P6 billion, among the biggest in for an LGU in the Philippines. There is a construction boom and a tsunami of investors is flooding the city. Davao City is considered as the fastest growing city in Mindanao. It is home to a mix of regional groupings from Visayas and Luzon living in harmony with lumads and Muslims. -oOo- Duterte is being accused by human rights groups as behind the DDS, of the killer variety. He has denied it. But at the same time, he owns up to being the head of the DDS, of the other kind, which is the Duterte Development System. Yes, I am the DDS, he said. There is a joke here. Duterte admitting and denying being the DDS. Human rights groups looking for a DDS need not go far if they do their search in Davao City. Every Dabawenyo is a DDS. But they will get nothing if they want to link the mayor to the summary executions. Because the DDS of the real kind would be testifying about the real DDS headed by the mayor: the Davao Development System that has made what Davao City is today: the premier city of Mindanao and home to 1.5 million Dabawenyos who are happy and safe with their lives.
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The acronym DDS is morbid, means the Davao Death Squad, the dreaded shadowy gunmen almost always blamed when a criminal is gunned down.
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