EXCERPT FROM TIGLAOS DAP: A tale of bribery, greed, and Hacienda Luisita: The root of this DAP saga is the Hacienda Luisita case. By July 2011, President Aquino had told his key inner circle that by hook or by crook Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona must be removed. He claimed that the Gloria Arroyo-appointee would impede his anti-corruption campaign. Aquino’s real reason was that he and his Cojuangco clan had become desperate to reverse the Supreme Court decision issued that month. The ruling voided the fake land reform in 1989 of his family’s Hacienda Luisita (which then agrarian reform secretary Florencio Abad implemented) and ordered the hacienda’s land to be distributed to its farmers. The Cojuangcos, according to the Supreme Court, should be given fair and just compensation of P173 million, or Hacienda Luisita’s 1989 value when the landlords undertook their fake land reform program. The landlord clan wanted P10 billion, its present market value. Aquino’s appointee to the Supreme Court, the very inexperienced classmate of his, Lourdes Sereno, couldn’t convince the Court to increase the payment to the clan from P173 million to P10 billion. I was told then that Sereno herself told Aquino that there was no way for her to sway the Court if Corona remained as chief justice. He had to be removed, and that could be done only through impeachment. The problem obviously is that Congress would have to be bribed for that to happen, and the existing source for the bribes, the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), wasn’t enough to push the legislators to undertake such an unprecedented action, even if Aquino and Congress more than tripled the pork barrel fund from P7 billion in 2010 to P22 billion in 2011. Enter Aquino’s brain trust, Abad. He wasn’t appointed to the Budget post for nothing. If Abad could tutor pork-scam queen Janet Lim Napoles on how to use non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to steal taxpayers’ money, as she alleged in her affidavit, he certainly had the expertise to advise Aquino how to create a secret slush fund out of the budget. This is the DAP, whose illegal, unconstitutional features the Supreme Court decision analyzed in much detail. manilatimes.net/dap-a-tale-of-bribery-greed-and-hacienda-luisita/108872/
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 18:31:51 +0000
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