Camille Villar with Susan Toots Ople and the OFW scholars

What is the true worth of a leader? Is it his worth as a propagandist, a rabble rouser or his acts of kindness toward his fellow man?

A leader is someone who not just inspires men to do beautiful things—he is also a man of action. When a leader beguiles us with his words but he does nothing to directly uplift the lives of people around him, he guides us not to the straight path—he leads us towards perdition.

This, I think is the distinct difference between Noynoy and Manny Villar—one was elected by manipulating the call of change, while one spearheads the true movement for change.

The True Leader is someone who belongs to a class, and pursues the interest of the class he belongs. This I found in the person of Senator Manny Villar.

First off, I apologize to Senator Manny Villar for writing derogatory things against him last elections. Secondly, I also admit that I was terribly wrong in my estimation of his worth as a Filipino leader.

Manny Villar is, I strongly believe, a person of extreme worth. He is a true Filipino patriot, a leader who knows the true feelings of the Filipino masses and his efforts and dedication to the Cause of the Filipino Struggle is REAL.

Like Villar, I do recognize my true proletarian roots. I was not born rich. I was born in a middle class family whose roots trace all the way back to Punta, Santa Ana Manila. Santa Ana is one of the oldest Tagalog communities in the country.

Yes, my family owns several lands in Leyte and my deceased dad’s family heritage in Bulacan is somewhat different with my mom’s. Fact is, my ancestry goes all the way back to the Marcoses of Ilocos.

Yet, I was raised in a proletarian family in Manila. My early years was of struggle. There were several times during Martial law where my family only eat once a day. We went by thru the help of God and thru the hard work and persistence of my aunts, my mom, and my grandparents.

The family that raised me was a family of Overseas Filipino Workers. My aunts who graduated with PhDs in UP, are now working abroad, one a bank manager in New York and the other, head nurse for more than 30 years in England. My tito, who did not finish college, but now heads the biggest oil refinery in Yemen, is also an OFW, along with his kids who now works in UAE.

And I, myself, am a former OFW who worked for many years as a Manager in Singapore.

If not for my aunts and my tito, it would have been a very hard climb to the top for me. Yes, I was a scholar since my freshman days at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and yes, I was also a working student when I was taking my masteral and law studies. Yet, in several occasions when I need financial help the most, my aunts and my uncle were there for me.

That’s why I sense an affinity with Villar. His story is like mine, a story of a Pinoy who struggled in life to have a better life for him and for his family.

When Villar’s photos and video shots with OFWs were released and even turned into a commercial for the elections, those scenes were like surreal to most Pinoys, and that included this writer. I thought then that the OFWs were just being used for electoral props.

I was wrong.

Asian School of Hospitality Arts and Camille Villae

Last October, the Villar Foundation sponsored the scholarship of 20 distressed OFWs. The scholarship aims to help these victims of illegal recruitment find another job for themselves. The project was transformative in the real sense of the word. Villar wanted nothing more than see these OFWs find the courage and the strength to rebuild their lives and once again, be proud of themselves.

My friend, the long-time OFW advocate Susan Ople was instrumental in making this happen. The OPLE Center entered into an agreement with the Asian School of Hospitality Arts, the premier hotel school in the country, to accommodate Villar’s scholars and finance their re-education.

The scholarship was nothing like any other. Villar paid not just their tuition fees, but also their accommodations and living expenses. IMagine that—a complete scholarship in the truest sense of the word!

I was a scholar before, and my scholarship includes living expenses, but none compares with what Villar did to these distressed OFWs!

I was fortunate to witness this personally, when his daughter Camille and my friend, Susan Ople, unveiled the project last October 27.

The scholarship was launched at the Coffee Beanery at West Avenue. Many members of the media attended the event. And they saw how sincere and how truthful the Villars were in really seeing that the futures of these OFWs be brighter than what they hoped when they went abroad.

Camille Villar is one of the sweetest creatures I have ever met. She spoke with honesty and her heart really is in the right places. I admit–I had a crush before with Camille. And I consider her one of the loveliest faces in Philippine politics. Fact is, Camille is not just beauty, but brains. Do you know that she was the youngest entrepreneur in the Villar family? She had her Sanrio business when she was in her early teens (12 years old?) and she heads one of her father’s companies.

What struck me was Camille’s humility. When the launching was finished, she just ordered her Frappe and went in one corner of the coffee shop with her staff. No frills, no extra makeup, just plain yet beautiful Camille.

She disarms many with her sweetest smile, her loving heart and her grounding. By the way, when she was just a student of the Ateneo, she was one of the top 5 crushes there. But, enough of this.

Susan “Toots” Ople is just as lovely as Camille. She has the purest of intentions for these OFWs who have nothing in life. The daughter of the country’s most admired labor advocate, Senator Blas Ople, Toots continue the advocacy of her father despite her financial difficulty. And really, the Oples are not as wealthy as the Villars are but these Bulakenos are really rich in the advocacy department.

Like my dad’s family in San Miguel, Toots Ople’s family, especially her dad, started out as a poor yet intelligent student. Ka Blas was a real class act. He transcended his proletarian roots and strove towards greatness. He struggled as a student, and went on as a journalist, just like me. As a journalist, Ka Blas was one of the greatest to have ever lived.

Though my father’s family is somewhat like an haciendero in San Miguel, my own father was not. He was the black sheep of the family, someone who loves drinking and partying while his colleagiala of a mother, gambles the family’s heritage away. One day, he woke up from his dalliances and worked hard for his own family. From a mere clerk at the University of the Philippines, my father struggled and became a Business Manager.

His smoking did him in, and he died without ever seeing his son who was, back then, involved in the serious struggle for real transformation of society. I was deeply involved in my activism back then when my father died. He was asking for me, but I was not there when he breathed his last at the Heart Center.

Ka Blas died from the same illness as what my father got. Smoking did him in. Unfortunately, I also contracted the same vice, like my father and Ka Blas. I pray though that I will not suffer the same fate as that of my dad and Ka Blas, whom my deceased father admired and knew when Ka Blas was visiting UP. Ka Blas knew my father (but Toots does not know about this. Really, fate brought us together, me and Toots. I really feel that we are destined to create more beautiful things together, very soon).

Former president Ferdinand Marcos, who, himself, was also a class act and belonged to a middle class family, noted Ka Blas’ wit and intelligence and love for the Filipino Masses. Marcos appointed Ka Blas as his labor secretary. It was there that Ka Blas changed the world.

That’s why I cried when this project was launched. It was a dream come true, to be able to directly help uplift someone’s life is something to be desired, something laudable, and something which money can’t buy.

Like Toots, I am not as rich as the Villar’s. But we all are in the same wavelength—we all wanted nothing more than change the lives of many. This is true activism in the truest sense of the word.

Why did I succumbed to the bourgeois democrat’s feelings last elections when we have a person like Manny Villar who belonged to the same class as I am? Why did I not feel the same class feelings when Villar is really the true people’s champion than Noynoy?

Had I realized sooner than later that Villar’s heart was really in the right place, I would have championed and even died for him.

Villar promised  to help a 100 OFWs more. The project’s aim is very simple—provide a unique chance for these victims of someone’s greed to pursue another course and from there, uplift their lives. The initial 20 scholars are now students of the Asian School of Hospitality Arts. They are now taking a hotel hospitality course, something which, by Christmas, they would be able to finish.

This is a good thing about ASHA courses–after about months of education, students will be deployed in 5-star hotels and restaurants. In their apprenticeship, students are given salaries commensurable with the industry pay rate.

So, come Christmas, Manny Villar, Susan Toots Ople, me and ASHA will have a real Christmas gift to all these OFWs—JOBS, JOBS, AND A BRIGHTER FUTURE.

There have been other public appearances and debates in different formats in which Aquino and Villar as well as the other presidential candidates have participated. During such an important part of the electoral exercise, the candidates were subjected to tough questioning and scrutiny by each other, the program host, a panel of moderators or the public but none of them has conceivably exhibited any such irrationality that otherwise indicates any form of mental impairment as to put his or her presidential bid in peril by virtue of it.

Of late, while the Villar presidential campaign has been seen as losing some steam, a dubious “psychological” report involving Noynoy Aquino as the patient has surfaced out of the blue. The suspicion is strong that the Villar camp is the original source of the report which has every indices of being a hoax. For one, the spurious character of the report is discernible on its face. A “psychiatric” evaluation prepared by a clergy coming from an academic department (the Psychology Department) of a university instead of a professional medical clinic or a hospital?

Fr. Tito Caluag who is supposed to have signed the report has publicly denounced the hoax by stating to the effect that the document is forged and that he is not even competent to make the evaluation since he is neither a psychologist (nor a psychiatrist).

It was then a perfect opportunity for Villar to be a gentleman politician by condemning the ludicrous fabrication and thereby allowing to mitigate the tone of animosity in the campaign (that is, if the source of the report is not his party or a cabal of rabid partisans). Very unfortunately, Villar did just the exact opposite.

One may recall that during the last US presidential election, a woman from the audience in a town hall meeting stood up and took the microphone to confirm from John McCain if Barack Obama is an Arab (implying maliciously that being an Arab, Obama is either uncivil or a terrorist). McCain defended his rival without any hesitation. “No ma’am,” McCain said to the woman after retaking the microphone from her. “He is a decent family man . . . citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about,” he further stressed earnestly.

Unlike McCain who had had the basic decency to cut off the woman wanting to stoke bigotry, Villar reacted in the other extreme by issuing a statement challenging Aquino to submit to a psychiatric test to determine his rival’s fitness to be a president. In a pretense to appear fair, Villar said he is willing to take the same test or a “comprehensive physical and mental examination in order to ascertain [our] fitness to occupy the highest office of the land.”

In the same town hall meeting where another instigator had claimed to fear the prospect of an Obama presidency, McCain responded emphatically in this fashion: “I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

Manny Villar has chosen to be cut-throat but, doesn’t this kind of political stunt remind us too of boxer Floyd Mayweather’s own silly antics? Mayweather, apparently avoiding an early encounter with Manny Pacquiao, has demanded a pre-fight Olympic-style blood testing. There is no testing policy of sorts required by any boxing commission in the US but Floyd’s excuse in insisting on it is that, like Villar, he’s willing to take the test himself.

Boxing fans all over the world consider Floyd’s demand baloney, many of them convinced that Floyd is either ducking a confrontation with Manny Paquiao or otherwise out to mudsling the Filipino boxer’s reputation.

Is it too hard for millions of Filipinos who since the Pacman phenomenon have turned boxing aficionados in droves to imagine that Manny Villar is simply doing a Floyd screwy spoof?

The Nacionalista Party standard bearer has just about had it.

Senator Manny Villar is now demanding public apologies from those calling him a liar over political claims that he had literally “swam in a river of garbage and too poor to buy the needed medicines to save an leukemia-stricken younger brother” issue a public apology.

Dapat humingi ng paumanhin ang mga naninira. May sakit noon ang kapatid ko. Hindi ba dapat na dalhin ko siya sa (FEU) ospital  (Those smearing me should apologize. Shouldn’t our famiy habe brought my brother to the (FEU) hospital)?

The embattled candidate, whose acceptability ratings as second-running ‘presidentiable’ dropped substantially in the two latest pre-election surveys, went short of threatening to sue his detractors.

Senator Villar is insisting that the accusations against, which have included alleged involvement in a  2-B land grab that victimized minority Dumagat farmer-tribesman in Bulacan are just part of an extended political smear job.

The good Senator must be missing the point: lying about being poor insults the poor, and raises questions about how honest he will be as President, if he does beat the odds.

Manny Villar, utang na loob, lubayan mo ako.

As I watched men in orange caps accost UP students, I wondered how much he’s been spending to win his prize. All this election spending is not a bit like our consumer-led economic growth, all hot air with no ultimate substance. Posters and flyers are printed, ads are produced and aired, thousands are hired to serve the Villar election machine. Tremendous economic energy expended…for nothing. But no, the presidency is well worth Villar’s investment. If GMA is any indication, the chief executive’s SAL has a tendency to skyrocket upon assuming office. The presidency has proven lucrative. What businessman can resist?

But does Villar stand for anything? Speak for anything? Is he, like Noynoy’s platform, driven by ideology at least? Look at the assembly of those in his roster – elements from the left, the right, current admin bureaucrats, the son of Marcos. One big happy family. Given the cast of the Manny Villar spectacle, what sorts of roles should we expect them to play? Are those who have chosen to throw their lot with Manny erring on the side of pragmatism? Principles be damned, we have to win the elections? For now Manny has acquiesced to being their sacred cash cow. But afterwards?

Villar has two messages for two different sections of the electorate. For the poor he says he is one of them. By sheer identification, he exhorts the poor to vote for him. What he will do for them to alleviate poverty is never explicitly discussed. For the non-poor he speaks of an ‘entrepreneurial revolution.’ Each time I hear him speak in forums and TV guestings, I hear nothing but platitudes a twelve-year old could deliver better. This doesn’t mean Villar isn’t smart. You need some sort of smarts to amass that fortune.

But is Manny a man who looks out for the public good? Does he even care to think about policy issues? Or does he simply want to purchase the presidency as he would any land acquisition? By the looks of it, he is pulling out all stops, using all sorts of media platform to deliver messages. We are drowning in you Manny V. You may yet pummel the electorate into submission.

It is human nature: to trust what we hear, what we read, and most certainly what we see.

So it is, perhaps that opinion surveys have that  currency, that presumed efficacy, so much so that well ahead of the May 10 elections, the surveys firms such as Pulse Asia, Social Weather Station, and just last week, the firm that does survey ratings for television shows, TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres), was widely reported to have entered the game of telling us who’s ahead in the presidential derby.

As one news report said:

Senator Noynoy Aquino again leads the presidential race in the latest survey conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS).
The survey was conducted January 28-February 3 with 3,000 respondents.
Aquino got 41.54 percent topping all presidentiables.
Second spot went to Manny Villar with 30.63 percent while Erap Estrada and Gibo Teodoro placed third and fourth with 11.66 percent and 5 percent respectively.

The report drew these reactions immediately:

Former President Joseph Estrada and Sen. Manny Villar on downplayed the results of the latest presidential survey of Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) which had Sen. Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III regaining the lead over his closest rival.
The Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP) presidential bet, who went around Quezon province, said commissioned polls are often biased for those who paid for the surveys.
“Kapag ang nagpa-survey LP, mataas si Noynoy. Kapag nagpa-survey NP (Nacionalista Party), malakas si [Sen. Manny] Villar. Kami wala kaming pampayad sa survey kaya mahina kami (If the survey is commissioned by the LP, Noynoy is leading. If it’s commissioned by the NP, Villar is strong. Those who have no money to pay for surveys are usually lagging behind),” Estrada said.
Last year, Estrada said he would rely on survey results before choosing whether to run or who to support.
However, the former president, whose 6-year term was cut short in 2001 by a military-backed urban uprising, clarified that he also believes in surveys.
“Malayo pa, hindi pa masyadong credible iyan because marami pa ang  undecided. They (voters) can always change their minds,” Estrada said.
Villar, for his part, said he is not actually familiar with Taylor Nelson Sofres, the firm that conducted the survey. He believes that he is still gaining on Aquino due to the warm public reception in his campaign sorties.
Despite his unfamiliarity with the firm that conducted the survey, the Nacionalista Party (NP) standard-bearer said he would still respect the survey’s results.
“Hindi ko alam kung ano ang TNS, ngayon ko lang narinig yan, pero ok lang sa akin. May mga surveys na ako ang lamang, meron naman si Noynoy. Ginagalang ko naman lahat yan. Ang ginagawa ko ina-average ko sila. So, siguro ok naman din yan. Di ko lang alam kung ano yan pero ok din naman siguro yan,” he said.

What’s playing out before our very eyes?
It has become all too obvious that the surveys have become nothing less than mind conditioning tools.

This much was opined by former Senator Francisco Tatad in last week’s Cafe Fernandina Forum:

Candidates, would-be candidates and political parties have taken these survey results at face value as scientific, accurate and totally above-board. The mass media have passed them on freely without any critical analysis, and not a small portion of  the public appears willing to accept them as gospel truth.  Public discussion of   the merits of the candidates and their respective political platforms, if any, has thus been thrust aside in favor of this undivided attention to the surveys.

This gives the polling firms an excessive and unaccountable power they have not earned. There is no guarantee that this power will not be used to tax the public interest; there is, in fact, some doubt that the common good ever figured in the recent surveys. Based on the existing trade literature, not only is the methodology of the surveys fatally flawed, the pollsters have also failed to rise to the high professional and ethical standards of opinion polling in the more advanced countries, notably the United States. Thus, while claiming to serve the public interest, the  surveys  may have, in fact, only served some special political and commercial interests.

Having said these, the former senator went on to reveal the problems with how the surveys are done, to wit:

I put on exhibit first the practice of using face-to-face interviewing in the surveys. This is the standard method used by local pollsters for eliciting responses from survey participants. They say so in their own reports.

In this survey method, respondents are tracked door-to-door and interviewed by the pollsters’ personnel in the field. They are asked to respond to the pre-set questionnaire and shown pictures of candidates as appropriate.

In the past, face-to-face interviewing was viewed by US opinion research experts as an appropriate method for conducting opinion surveys. It ostensibly allowed them to select the “right” respondent to be interviewed. After major failures, however – notably, the erroneous forecast of Thomas Dewey’s victory over Harry Truman in the 1948 US presidential elections– this survey method was abandoned, so much so that reputable pollsters in the US have now discarded it altogether.

Why was this? We invite some experts to tell us why. Chava Frankfort-Nachnias and David Nachmias in Research Methods in the Social Sciences write: “The very flexibility that is the interviewer’s chief advantage leaves room for the interviewer’s personal influence and bias.”

The pollster Kenneth Warren in his book, In Defense of Public Opinion Polling, says: “The cons of door-to-door interviews far outweigh the pros…Because of the sensitivity or personal nature of some questions, interviewers, because they were placed in face-to-face situations, have admitted that they sometimes guessed or fudged responses…These problems are a major source of bias in personal interviews, causing significant contamination of the poll data.”

These methodological and practical problems, according to Warren,  doomed face-to-face interviews forever. By 1980, nobody in the US wanted to pay for this type of  “fatally flawed and grossly inaccurate” surveys.

This, however, seems to have had no persuasive effect on our local pollsters.
A second glaring weakness is the extensive and general use of quota sampling to create “a representative sample” of the Philippine population.  In quota sampling, survey respondents are picked from different types of people (e.g. by age, sex, religion, income) and various predetermined areas (e.g. region of country, as well as urban or rural).

This method is the most familiar form of non-probability sampling. It is supposed to mirror the same proportions in the targeted survey populations, but doesn’t. And it proved to be an earth-shaking failure in 1948 after three leading US pollsters–Gallup, Roper and Crossley—erroneously called the US presidential election in favor of Dewey instead of Truman.  In the United Kingdom, where it persisted, it was blamed for the failure of the pollsters to predict Prime Minister John Majors’ victory in 1992.

“Quota sampling could never work in practice,” says Professor Warren. “Not only could pollsters not know the exact demographics so they could pick a representative sample that actually reflected the proper demographical proportions, but it was naïve to think that the interviewer could manage to interview the precise people needed to fill each quota.”

Thus today, reputable US pollsters rely almost exclusively on probability random sampling to create a “representative sample,” says Warren.

Why then do local pollsters continue to  use quota sampling and face-to-face interviewing for their surveys? Why haven’t they adopted probability random sampling, which has protected US opinion polls from using contaminated data?

Of course, the same methodology is also still used in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.  But that is no excuse, given the high claim our local pollsters make for the supposedly advanced state of knowledge in their trade.

The situation would not have been so bad were the surveys meant simply and solely for the private consumption of clients. But as opinion polls have become a hot commodity and the stakes and rewards have gone up, pollsters have been led to make bigger and bigger claims for their products and thrown standards out the window.

Professional standards are virtually non-existent in the local opinion polling industry. No law regulating the conduct of opinion polling, and no professional association of pollsters either to set and enforce standards of conduct and standards of disclosure and ensure “the reliability and validity of survey results.”

There is a professional association of market research firms–MORI (Market Opinion Research Inc), but market research is markedly different from public opinion research. Consequently, opinion polling firms can pretty much do what they please. They set their own standards and parameters for the conduct of their polls. And they release findings virtually at will.

Tatad further asked:

1.    Who sponsored the survey, and who conducted it?
2.    What is the sampling method used?
3.    What is the population that was sampled?
4.    What is the size and description of the population that serves as the primary basis of the survey report?
5.    The exact wording of questions asked, the order in which they were asked, the text of any instruction or explanation to the interviewer or respondent that might reasonably affect the response.
6.    A discussion of the precision of the findings, including estimates of sampling error and a description of any weighting or estimating procedures used.
7.    Which results are based on parts of the sample rather than the total sample, and the size of such parts.
8.    The method, location and dates of data collection.

If we had such counterparts to these private associations, we would not be seeing the extravagant claims for opinion surveys and the excesses by pollsters that we see today. We would have polling firms that are a lot more modest about their work, and a lot more careful about their pronouncements regarding the opinions and sentiments of our 94 million people.

And we would not be searching in vain on their websites for their survey samples and how they were created, the names of politicians they had invited to participate in the survey at P100,00 for every “rider question” about themselves, who accepted the invitation, and what “rider” questions were thrown in.

Tatad also castigated the news media’s “unwitting part in allowing opinion poll results to dominate  public perceptions of the campaign. This would not have been possible if dubious opinion polls had not been reported so energetically in the media without an iota of analysis. The public would have had a better appreciation and understanding of public opinion polling had the media been a little more critical and vigilant.”

He also cited the elements missing in the conduct of local polling:

•    Adherence to Professional Standards and Ethics
•    A Well-developed, Intelligent, Yet Doable Research Design
•    A Carefully Drawn and Used Representative Sample
•    A Well-designed Questionnaire
•    Well-trained and Professional Interviewers
•    Careful Coding and Tabulation of Raw Poll Data
•    Thorough and Insightful Analysis

The red flags the former senator are certainly informative as they are troubling, to this writer’s mind.

I do not know if there is material time for the remedies he proposes to be acted upon, and if the sectors concerned will pay heed.

But the mind games at work with these surveys can quite thoroughly undermine elections in the same way that dagdag bawas does.

Further readings here:

http://www.historians.org/projects/giroundtable/Polls/Polls_Intro.htm

http://knol.google.com/k/the-need-for-an-electoral-reform#

An important aspect of crime investigation is modus operandi. It’s evident that Villar’s MO in several housing projects is to acquire and develop raw lands where DPWH plans a road project or can be realigned to traverse. He’s used his positions as House Speaker, then Senate President to use his pork barrel funds or make budget insertions to hasten road construction, inflate the property’s collateral value and borrow housing development funds from government lending institutions.

Up to now Villar maintains he’s from a poor Tondo family. Using as baseline his 1992 statement of assets, liabilities and net worth when first elected to Congress his said net worth even under the most favorable conditions is beyond the realm of statistical probability.

That’s why overseas Filipinos through emails to me suspect Villar’s candidacy is to make the presidency a “safe harbor” to escape prosecution. To this end he’d buy the office with his ill-gotten wealth.  Consider that Villar’s campaign spending is as though money’s getting out of fashion like the wartime notes issued by the Japanese during WW II.

Although Pamusa isn’t allowed to get involved in partisan politics, we can investigate Villar’s wrongdoings in furtherance of our anticorruption efforts. We will run an information campaign in March through April up to election to ask the following questions, to wit:

Villar claims to have come from a poor family, how’s he able to amass billions of pesos of personal net worth?

What’s Villar defense to former Senate President Franklin Drilon’s charge that Villar’s company, Crown Communities Iloilo, bought 12.7 hectares in Jibao-an, Pavia, Iloilo from farmer CARP beneficiaries and converted this first-class irrigated rice land into a residential enclave, Savannah Subdivision?

Under the law it’s illegal to convert first-class irrigated agricultural land into a subdivision exactly what Villar did in developing the Savannah Subdivision. Hence, Drilon’s charged Villar of the crime based on tax declarations and other documents obtained from the Iloilo provincial government.

How come Villar only obtained the Department of Agrarian Reform’s approval to convert the agriculture land into a residential area in 2007 seven years after construction of the subdivision started in 2000? Hence, multiple counts of criminal acts were committed for five years before the conversion was approved. DAR should’ve filed court action against Villar and other officers of the company owning Savannah Subdivision unless, of course, he had fixed it.

Drilon added that Villar used P4 million of his pork barrel funds to build a 585-meter national road that led right into the entrance of Savannah. “This is the only public works project of Villar in the province,” said Drilon at the Iloilo press conference.

Drilon said that Villar, not content with the 12-hectare Savannah property, bought the adjoining rice lands almost surely covered by CARP and expanded the residential community to a total of 250 hectares. The farmers had no choice but to sell their property, said Drilon, because their irrigation supply had been cut off with Villar’s conversion of the Savannah property which was the primary source of water in the area.

Villar’s workers back-filled the canals to classify them as non-serviceable, another crime, with the value of Villar’s Pavia property in Iloilo shooting up to P3,500.00 per square meter from less than P150.00 per square meter.

The destruction of Iloilo irrigation canals whose costs should be charged to Villar the same way the Senate is asking him to reimburse the government of close to P7 billion for the feasibility studies, engineering design and plans, and other preparatory work wasted when Villar’s pressured DPWH officials to change the C-5 road extension alignment to “snake” through and provide ingress and egress for 23 Villar-owned or controlled housing subdivisions.

Drilon said that the access road to Iloilo’s Savannah Subdivision was paid with Villar’s pork barrel and is jokingly called C-5 and a half. Regardless if it’s only half a kilometer, it shows the lack of decency on Villar’s part to set aside the interest of CARP beneficiaries to be able to pursue his profit motives.

This is a sample of Villar’s social conscience he’d bring to the presidency, which all decent Filipinos should stop by all means.

The C-5 controversy is a tip of the iceberg. As objective people dig deeper they’ll see Villar’s MO similar to Mafia’s criminal enterprise has also been perpetrated in other subdivisions owned or controlled by Villar’s group of companies.

Another example of Villar’s criminal MO involved a property bought by Northwinds Prime Properties Inc. (a Villar company) for over P120 million from Sta. Lucia Realty and Development Corp. then mortgaged to Capitol Development Bank (a Villar-owned thrift bank) under the name of ADR Farms in the amount of P150 million (Northwinds making P30M profit) on July 4, 1996. The property was used as collateral for a P1.5 billion emergency loan from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and eventually sold to RCBC Savings Bank by Capitol Bank and finally bought back by Palmera Homes Inc. (another Villar company) for development.

This is clearly a criminal act of Capitol’s officers led by Mrs. Villar that involved the BSP accepting an over-valued collateral more than ten times its acquisition price in a highly questionable private business transaction whose benefits solely accrued to Villar’s owned Capitol Bank, Palmera Homes Inc. and, of course, himself.

As usual, Villar dismissed the charges the same way he did the Senate Committee Report No. 780 on the C-5 road extension scandal which, according to Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, a Harvard-trained lawyer, presents a strong case against Villar and if the issue was brought to court and handled by a good prosecutor, the presidential aspirant “will end up in jail.”

Filipinos supporting Villar should ask themselves if he won’t be worse than Marcos or GMA if, God forbid, he’s elected President of the Philippines.

For comments fcwenceslao1034@gmail.com.

*Frank Wenceslao is president of LA-based Philippine Anticorruption Movement USA, Inc. (Pamusa) authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice to work with and submit evidence of corruption against current and former Philippine public officials and people that have colluded with them in conjunction with the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC).

Leading presidential aspirant Noynoy Aquino has thrown the gauntlet and his closest rival, Manny Villar, has accepted it: mano-a-mano, a one-on-one presidential debate.

It was a masterful ploy by Aquino, hurling the debate challenge during the presidential forum hosted by foreign correspondents, the latest forum Villar has skipped.

So Villar’s handlers were forced to issue a statement on their boss’s behalf, employing the worn out condition for the debate not to turn into a mudslinging match.

Fair enough.

The Aquino-Villar debate  harks back, in a way, to that first ever American presidential debate: the 1962 face-off between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon that saw JFK capturing the imagination of US voters, projecting himself as physically more fit than Nixon and the man who was taking Americans to their Camelot.

Filipinos are surely not dreaming of Camelot.

They simply  hope to  find a new President with a genuine electoral mandate, one with a program of government that can help the Philippines shed its dubious monicker of being Asia’s sick man afflicted with the ailment akin to end stage cancer: CORRUPTION.

History records that up to 70 million American saw the televised three-part ‘Great’ Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960.

We are now a nation with a burgeoning population of 90 million.

With radio and television straddling are entire archipelago, the Aquino-Villar debate surely holds the promise of providing the defining phase of the May 10 elections.

Permit this writer to propound the suggested issues for the two candidates to address:

•    National security as it relates to the insurgencies, and RP-US relations;
•    Reproductive health;
•    Social justice as it relates to agrarian reform;
•    The state of public education and the academic skills of our youth compared with our neighbour countries;
•    The business climate and foreign investments as these relate to the national patrimony; and
•    The fight against corruption as it relates to the civil service and local governments.

The list can be longer.
My own hope is for both men to be able to speak to the issues with prevarication and give as a true sense that either of them can lead us out of the morass many believe we are sinking in.

Let the debate begin.

Postscript:

The other contenders are crying foul, saying Aquino,and Villar can’t jusr have the stage all to themselves.

Get real, guys.

Are we headed for a new day of enlightened governance where  institutions work in harmony and give flesh to a democracy of checks and balances?

Or will we be treated to governance marked by the political gridlock between a reformist executive and a legislature with the Speaker of the House dispensing patronage politics as mastered by tradpols and power brokers?

We ask these in the face of the haughty trial balloon let loose by subalterns of outgoing President Gloria Magapagal Arroyo: that she will be installed as Speaker after she handily wins the congressional seat for Pampanga’s 2nd district while 160 other Lakas-Kampi-CMD congressmen are re-elected.

Add to that number the sitting Cabinet members seeking seats in either the Senate or the House without being required to resign, thanks to that abomination of a Supreme Court decision that threw  out the age old prohibition on civil servants using their positions to engage in partisan political activity.

With expectations that LP standard bearer Noynoy Aquino will win on May 10, Filipinos may end up having political adversaries separately heading the executive and legislative branches, with Arroyo appointees imperiously holding fort in the Supreme Court.

What we’ll have then is the legislative mill setting its activities at cross purposes with Malacanang.

A school of thought may posit that Aquino as President would have the edge given its control over the newly enacted P  1.5-T national budget.

Still, Arroyo as Speaker may very well still buy the loyalty of the larger majority of congressmen given Congress’s own huge budget and ability to make noise about the release of pork barrel allocations.

A legislature hostile to the Executive can also attempt to delay action on reforms initiated by an Aquino presidency.

Verily, at the very outset Aquino will be expected to exercise steely political will and prevent a potentially obstructionist Speaker from holding hold his young presidency hostage.

It ain’t all that gloomy, some may even say

What if Manny Villar scores the upset his henchmen claim he will.

With critics portraying the NP standard bearer as Gloria’s Trojan horse then you’ll probably have more of the status quo: an administration unwilling to be accountable for its actions and adept at the politics of obfuscation.

Imagine that: a President Villar, and a Speaker Arroyo.

How’s that for ‘a government of the people, for the people, and by the people’?

Postscript

A fourth, more dreadful scenario could actually be added here: the failure of elections.

I leave that for others to reflect on, for now,

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Women wailing,
Children moaning,
The noise! the noise!

Do you hear the bell toll?
Clang! Clang! Clang!

Can you not survey the field of battle?
There! Dancing in the field, Opportunities Hidden in the Numbers!
Can you not see the the starving and the dying?
the poaching and pillaging pensions?
Can you not feel their anguish?

We’re here! We’re here!

The bell it tolls and you stand there,
in your neutrality lamenting great expectations lost,
in your ivory towers wailing Political Cowardice!

Do you hear the bell toll?
Clang! Clang! Clang!

We’re here! We’re here!
Ride Uruguayan thoroughbred! Ride racehorse!
Carry our Yellow rag!

Do you hear the bell toll?
Clang! Clang! Clang!

NO!
The Yellow Rag waivers,
The Yellow Rag falls,
Raise it! Raise it!!!

Do you hear the bell toll?
Clang! Clang! Clang!

The Orange Darkness rolls,
Great mother of storm!
It comes! it comes!

Will the storm swallow our tomorrows whole?
The Yellow Rag bloodied, dirtied tattered!
Raise it! Raise it! Fly it!

Stand loose, we stand lost,
Stand together, we stand free!

For whom does the bell toll?
It tolls for our raison d’être,

For whom does the bell toll?
It tolls for thee, can you not see?

For whom does the bell toll?
Clang! Clang! Clang!
It tolls to start Requiem,
We come to bury our tattered Tomorrows.

It is widely held belief that Senator Manny Villar’s heavy spending in political advertisements was the chief factor that helped him narrow the gap between himself and presidential race frontrunner Senator Benigno Aquino III in the latest SWS and Pulse Asia opinion poll surveys.

The common belief goes that you need money to buy ads. The more ads you place, the more chances of getting your message across to voters. Therefore conventional wisdom goes that, in an election, the one who has the largest war chest wins. Even Noynoy bought it.

Certainly, money is a factor in an election. But does money, as the conventional wisdom dictates, necessarily translate into votes on polling day?

I used to believe the conventional wisdom until I got hold a few years ago of the 2005 New York Times bestseller Freakonomics, authored by economist Steven Levitt with Stephen Bubner. “Indeed, election data show it is true that the candidate who spends more money in a campaign usually wins,” writes Levitt. “But is money the cause of the victory?”

To figure out the relationship between money and elections, Levitt suggests considering the dynamics involved in campaign finance. “Let’s say you are the kind of person who might contribute $1,000 to a candidate. Chances are you’ll give the money in two situations: a close race, in which you think the money will influence the outcome; or a campaign in which one candidate is a sure winner and you would like to bask in reflected glory or receive some future in-kind consideration. The one candidate you won’t contribute to is a sure loser,” Levitt muses.

“Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that won him the votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money?”

Levitt says the answer to that question is very difficult to answer because voter appeal can’t be measured in numbers just like economic data. “It can’t, really – except in one special case. The key is to measure a candidate against … himself.”

You can gauge the money’s impact if you have two candidates running against each other in two consecutive elections, Levitt explains, and compare their spending and the election results. So Levitt pored over decades of U.S. election data.

“As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time – indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972,” Levitt finds.

“What do the numbers have to say about such cases? Here’s the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are.”

So, the key to victory is to tell voters who you are, make sure that what you say matters to voters, and get your message across clearly. If people buy what you’re saying, you win – whether or not you’re selling truth or lies.