S1L5 - NEA is Applying the Doctrine of "Presumption of Regularity" Totally wrong

anuary (Bar Exam) is just around the corner. We have very little time to cram as much information as we can into our law students’ heads.

So for those who are asking, this is the reason why I “sneak in” some basic legal concepts using short anecdotes in my Facebook posts. I figure if I put things in real life context, sprinkle a little bit of humor in it, then my hapless students might absorb and remember the “lecture” better.

I am not particularly isolating the BENECO crisis for examples’ sake, either. It just happens that the actions of NEA are such a smorgasbord of constitutional violations that you can’t help but lecture off of them!

For example, I have never before seen such an absurd over reliance on the so-called “presumption of validity of official documents.” Someone is even saying, “my appointment is valid until annulled.”

I always tell my students don’t listen to ignorant people because you will become like them. I tell them ONLY READ THE LAW. Nothing but the law.

Presumptions are found under Rule 131, Sections 2, 3 and 4 of the Rules of Court on EVIDENCE. I realize suddenly I now have readers who are not law students, so I cannot go into a long exposition of what these provisions mean. I must only try to demonstrate them.

So imagine if our City Council, meeting with quorum and voting unanimously, passed an ordinance “Reimposing the Death Penalty for the Crime of Jaywalking, and Providing for the Immediate Imposition of the Penalty therefor. “

Can we assume that the City Council followed its internal rules regularly and properly in approving that ordinance? Sure. Why not, it's their own rules.

But suppose Pedro is caught jaywalking, and is scheduled for execution tomorrow, must we honor the “presumption of validity” of that ordinance?

Of course not.

By the time we are through in court getting that ridiculous ordinance declared unconstitutional some 2, maybe 3 years later, the dearly departed Pedro is already singing in the tenor section of heaven’s choir, executed for jaywalking under an ordinance that everybody “presumed valid until annulled.”

In fact, that ordinance was enacted “ultra vires” (beyond its powers) by the City Council. It is “void ab initio” (invalid from the very beginning) so it did not create any office, rights or privilege and could not impose any obligations on anyone.

You see there is no such thing as any order, resolution, appointment—that is “valid until annulled.” It is not found in the law. I have not read any Supreme Court decision that said an appoinment is “valid until annulled.” The validity of an appointment order, or any executive order for that matter, derives from its content.

Suppose NEA appointed its own administrator, would that appointment be valid until annulled? Of course not. So what it cannot do even in its own backyard, it cannot do in BENECO.

The key, therefore, is to look at the content of that appointment order—which we presume to have been issued with regularity in the performance of official function by NEA (are you getting the point now?).

An appointment is a certification that the person being appointed possesses all the qualifications and none of the disqualifications required for the position to which she is being appointed.

Why waste time debating about the presumption of validity of that appointment? You don’t even need a mere disputable presumption that it is valid. You can already make a conclusive determination if it is valid. Right now.

But instead of doing that, NEA is focusing on the defiance of BENECO in refusing to accept an appointment order whose validity anyone can evaluate in under five minutes.

It’s a simple matter of addressing the issue, instead of deflecting it.

If the question is: “Is the appointee a BENECO member?” The answer is NO. Not, “she scored the highest score in the final interview.”

If the question is: “Does NEA have the power to appoint the GM of a non-ailing cooperative?” the answer is NO. Not, “NEA is responsible for infusing millions into BENECO.”

If the question is: “Is the appointee an engineer, or at least a technical-oriented person?” The answers is NO. Not, “well, lawyers are ‘legal engineers’ in a way because they do statutory construction, you see the word ‘construction’ is there.”

I guess it’s a cultural thing. We Filipinos could never answer straight.

“Maganda ba yung babeng nililigawan mo?”

“Mabait. “

So some very confused lawyer has got it all wrong. What the Rule disputably presumes as valid is the regular performance of official function by public officer(s).

This presumption of validity does not extend to the PRODUCT or RESULT of that performance of function. Just like in my example above, the City Council followed its rules. They regularly performed their function in passing an INVALID ordinance. The act and the product are two different things. One has a presumption favorable to it, the other one none.

If we follow NEA’s philosophy, that a regulator cannot be questioned because all of its actions--as well as fruits of those actions-- enjoy the presumption of validity, we would be espousing a dangerous dogma that government officials can do no wrong.

That’s the equivalent of having two rules which actually operate only as one. RULE NO. 1 is “I am always right” and RULE NO. 2 is “in case I am wrong, refer to Rule no. 1.”

That's how dictatorships are born.

S1L4 - The Failure of Diligence of PNB over BENECO's Money

his is for my law students preparing for the Bar. This is on Banking Laws and Procedures (Debit Transactions):

QUESTION: Can BENECO recover the one million pesos withdrawn from its account by strangers?

Yes.

It will take some doing, of course, because law-abiding citizens who uphold the rule of law do not take matters into their own hands They take it to court where there are no guarantees Every time you go to court, there is always the risk of winning.

Was that withdrawal made by NEA? No, it seems it wasn’t. The persons who received the ONE MILLION PESOS claimed to represent BENECO, not NEA.

But weren’t those persons appointed by NEA? Not all of them, just one—the one who claims she is the general manager of BENECO. There were four others who are all directors expelled from the board by a unanimous vote in the Annual General Membership Assembly (AGMA).

So what was the basis used by the bank to approve the withdrawal?

I don’t know.

Because of bank secrecy laws—which we observe but NEA and the bank itself didn’t—we don’t know all the details of the transaction. But we know enough about banking procedures to say it’s really very rare for cash withdrawals to be made directly from a company account. It’s even rarer for any bank to release that much money to a mere messenger, no matter his rank. For an amount like that—ONE MILLION PESOS—usually it’s even the bank that delivers the cash to the company’s office.

Over-the-counter cash withdrawal from a company account is rare because the withdrawal slip has to be signed by the payee who must be authorized to sign for the owner of the drawee account. In company accounts, two or three signatories are required—sometimes even as many as five (the most I have seen, because it was an “A-and-B-and-C-and-D-and-E” joint account). There’s just not enough space for that many signatures in a typical bank withdrawal slip.

So to siphon off P1-million from an account without filling up a withdrawal slip, you need a signed check drawn from that account. Obviously, you have to steal one of those checks from the account owner, if you are not him.

Then the check can either be deposited in the payee’s account (ooooh…very traceable!) or encashed by the payee on-the-spot. If what was used was a stolen BENECO check, it should not be readily encashable because most company checks are “crossed checks”—for deposit only.

But some banks allow crossed checks to be encashed on “preferred client” courtesy but it must still go though “clearing.”

That’s when the bank verifies two things (1) is there enough money in the account to cover the check amount, (2) was the check signed by the authorized signatories.

If it was NOT signed by the authorized signatories, the bank should dishonor the check, i.e. disallow its encashment—not allow a withdrawal, in other words.

Suppose the payee himself says, “iba na ang mga signatories, kami na.” That’s a red flag, and the bank manager should consult the bank lawyer.

What will the bank lawyer do? He examines if the claim is tenable. To change the signatories, there must be a board resolution. But the resolution ITSELF must be valid, meaning it was approved by the board having met with quorum.

In the case of BENECO, quorum is SEVEN out of its eleven directors. If the resolution changing the signatories was signed by only FOUR directors, that’s a second red flag.

But how can the bank know what is the valid quorum in BENECO?

It should look at the record. When you open a corporate account, the bank makes you submit copies of (1) your Articles of Incorporation, (2) your by-laws, (3) your board resolutions naming the authorized signatories, and (4) the signature specimens of those persons. The by-laws contain a provision saying what constitutes quorum for that corporation’s board actions.

So no matter how much “shock and awe” a stranger uses to demand a withdrawal, the bank should not panic. And it cannot feign ignorance. It holds the record. It possesses ALL the information it needs to be able to evaluate a dodgy claim.

Sometimes, a court may make it easier and simpler for a bank to make that judgment call on whether to allow or disallow a withdrawal. If faced with a court order, the bank can just follow the order without asking any more questions or doing any more investigations.

What if the bank is not aware of the ongoing controversy between NEA and BENECO? It doesn’t have to be. Like I said, it has been holding the record right from Day One when the account was first opened—long before any controversy.

But didn’t the bank write to BENECO, or didn’t they call BENECO to let them know? Apparently, it did but if notice is given “a posteriori” (that’s Latin for “after the fact”) it makes no difference even if they wrote to Santa Claus or called the Avon lady—it was all moot and academic the moment that lucky fellow (or felon) walked out of the bank with his clutch bag bulging with ONE MILLION PESOS.

If you were the bank lawyer, what would you recommend?

I would recommend crediting back ONE MILLION PESOS to the BENECO account immediately, writing a profuse letter of apology to BENECO (the genuine one) and filing a police report for ROBBERY naming the persons who actually received the money, or made the representation to cause the money to be released.

Robbery? Yes, robbery, as in “unlawful taking of money, using threats or intimidation against persons.”

Otherwise, I would just tell my client candidly to just swallow hard, dig in deep with its heels and dreadfully wait for the day of reckoning, “God forbid, pag nagdemanda ang BENECO, wala tayong depensa.”

Class dismissed.

S1L3 - Senate Probe of NEA will expose its Derelect Relevance

o there’s going to be a Senate investigation into this worsening anarchy that the National Electrification Administration (NEA) is fomenting in Baguio and Benguet in its hungry grab for BENECO.

When all the chips start falling where they may, NEA may yet realize that standing up for just one woman’s career is not worth the existential crisis it will now face.

NEA is bending backward mysteriously too far to install a former PCOO assistant secretary—that’s the same rank once held by Mocha Uson—as general manager of the Triple-A rated BENECO. The problem is the woman cannot explain power generation, distribution—or even something as simple as power rate computation—if her life depended on it. She’s as unqualified to skipper an industrial electric utility firm as a peasant dancing the ballet.

But NEA’s inordinate obsession to enthrone her at all costs is giving rise to educated theories that she represents only the iceberg tip of a broader coalition of interests casting a moist eye on the lucrative BENECO. That has now, obviously, piqued the curiosity of the Senate. Is this kind of blue-collar banditry what the law created NEA for? Or has NEA outlived its relevance in the post-EPIRA regime?

For too long, the question whether NEA should now be abolished had always been pushed in the backburner. It’s time to confront the issue squarely. NEA is a relic from the missionary era of rural electrification. Back in the postwar years, electrifying far-flung barrios needed heavy capital outlays that no small utility franchise can put up. Commercial bank credit was out of the question because no bank will lend money to a small cooperative with no large subscriber base from which it can generate enough revenue to make loan payments.

Thus, NEA was created to act as conduit for international credit obtained with state guaranty which the government farmed out posthaste to small cooperatives across the archipelago. That enabled the government to extend the reach of rural electrification without enormous outlay of public funds, while making use of distribution infrastructures it did not have to put in place.

Gradually, subscriber numbers grew as did revenues for many of these pintsized utilities. Soon many of them could now afford the cost of missionary electrification using the profits from operation alone.

To be sure, these cooperatives could still use credit—especially convenient when importing operation-required commodities.

But this time, creditors have more confidence in the viability of these cooperatives that many are willing to transact with them directly, bypassing NEA.

Faced by diminishing relevance, NEA has shifted its mindset from serving coops to imposing subservience from them. No longer contented in its role as backseat driver, it now wants to take the wheel.

Arguably, the law says NEA can do that in an intervention context only. When a cooperative is foundering, finding its management skillset overmatched by the daunting complexity of keeping electricity flowing through the grid, NEA can send in astute experts to nurse an ailing cooperative back to health. But what NEA is doing right now is the opposite: sending in people even more clueless, who are doing a terrific job of destroying an erstwhile-unbroken thing. It’s like sending fleas to help a dog stop itching.

If NEA has this much time on its hands, maybe it’s because it has little or no more job to perform. So it wants to morph from credit broker to powerbroker, with a side dish of heartbroker the way it is driving Baguio and Benguet residents up in arms from total disappointment.

They underestimate the intelligence of Baguio and Benguet. They think so long as the political patronage underpinning this powergrab is kept in the lowest decibel levels, people wouldn’t know any better.

But people do know better. Heavily-armed commandos do not swoop down in predawn raids unless the go-signal is given in the Visayan tongue. People know and are itching to exact retribution at the polls.

If Al Cusi doesn’t believe that, just wait for the election results in these parts come May 2022.

S1L2 - NEA's red-tagging strategy will backfire and spook the business community

veryone in Baguio should be alarmed by the red-tagging strategy that NEA has unwisely decided to include in its arsenal of weapons against BENECO.

The business community, in particular, should be very concerned. In a recent religious gathering attended by NEA sympathizers, the brazen allegation was made publicly for the first time that BENECO was paying “revolutionary taxes” to the NPA.

Seriously?

Revolutionary tax collection in Baguio City would imply that the nation’s summer capital is now under NPA control. I wonder if responsible people cleared it first with Malacañan before countenancing the spread of loose talk like that, just to villainize BENECO.

The sudden classification of Baguio as rebel territory, true or not, has deadly serious implications. If a Baguio businessman were to receive a “revolutionary tax assessment” letter today, even as a complete prank, that businessman would put his personal safety and that of his family as his most primordial concern. It’s one thing if the scare talk was coming from mere speculating kibitzers. But if prominent interlopers purporting to represent a government agency are the ones gaslighting the rumor, that businessman would think there must be a grain of truth to it. No one can blame him for putting prudence over valor. He will fork up the money and tell his other businessmen friends their turn will come.

Imagine the climate of fear that would create in the business community. More than that, imagine its effect on the pricing mechanism for goods and services in this city if revolutionary tax was to be included as a built-in component of overhead costs of business.

This is the rub: unless NEA is stopped dead on its tracks and squarely told to drop this we-are-government-regulators-we-can-do-anything-we-want shenanigan, they will not only destroy BENECO but ruin all businesses in Baguio along with it.

Predawn blitzkriez didn’t work, bribing media is bringing little returns, scaring local banks backfired, printing bootleg receipts yielded paltry illegal collection, unleashing troll armies proved futile—the poor trolls couldn’t keep up with the torrent of MCO social media posts, many of it much too sophisticated to fake--absolutely nothing is working for the NEA invasion team.

And now the Senate is poised to subpoena them all. Nothing is working at all, you cannot imagine the amount of frustration and desperation they must be at.

Or perhaps you can. This red-ink squirting strategy must be pretty close to the last resort. It’s sending a message that NEA is prepared to burn down the house if necessary to flush everyone out.

It’s no longer enough for NEA just to deny it has anything to do with a strategy that clearly only they would benefit from. They have to go one step further and castigate their people by name who thought up this stupid idea of redtagging MCO’s.

S1L1 - How the "Rule of Law" is perverted mimics a pro-wrestling match

he best way to understand how the “rule of law” is perverted is to watch any professional wrestling match on YouTube. Pick any match where the two opponents wear ridiculous costumes that look more inspired by Halloween than by athletic design. They call it “wrestling” but the way it’s done bears little resemblance to Greco-Roman tradition. The winner is still decided by whoever can pin down his opponent’s shoulder to the floor for a full three-count. But instead of accomplishing this by an artful application of grip, counter-grip, leverage and body positioning, the “pros” wear each other down by inflicting as much pain and disorientation so that by the time one is pinned down on the floor, the poor fellow has no more strength left to put up any resistance.

At least in theory.

But in fact the whole thing is a charade. It may appear like the two wrestlers are exchanging deadly blows—and they even actually take turns hitting each other—but the blows are designed more to produce loud horrible slapping sounds than to cause any real concussions.

There’s a referee—possibly the dumbest living human on planet earth—whose only claim to being a referee is the fact that he’s wearing a regulation striped shirt. Otherwise, everytime one wrestler is using a prohibited technique (wreaking face, gouging eyes, pulling hair, tripping leg) this imbecile of a referee always happens to be looking the opposite direction. And he always looks away just long enough to miss the infraction, then by the time he focuses on the players again, the evil wrestler is already looking saintly with a halo over his head.

Meanwhile the good wrestler--the “victim” as it were--has his hand wedged between the bad wrestler’s armpits. The bad wrestler screams a fake anguished cry of pain, and the referee tags the good wrestler with an “illegal hold” violation. In other words, the referee penalizes the good guy because the didn't see (because he wouldn't look at it) the violation committed by the bad guy.

All of this is happening right before the eyes of a thousand spectators consisting of the naivé (who thinks he witnessed a real fight), the street-savvy (who knows the whole thing is scripted) and the accomplice (who is “in” on the grand con job).

The “rule of law” is bastardized exactly in the same way. The side espousing falsehood lays down his false premises while no one is looking, often with the knowledge and collusion of the regulator. Then they tweak the rules so that the act of questioning the manner in which the premises were laid down becomes an infraction in itself. Finally, when a dispute is submitted for the regulator to resolve, somebody points out that they are proceeding on a wrong premise. The regulator says, “No! What you’re doing is a violation. The rules are the rules, we have to work within the rules, we have to follow the rule of law!”

This is why you must always be leery of people who act more popish than the pope. The “rule of law” is just a subset of the “Rule of Justice” and true justice reckons with time. If you want to obtain justice, go back through the timeline and determine where the FIRST VIOLATION was committed by WHICH PARTY. That’s the starting point when you must apply the “rule of law” onwards and not just from the point conveniently chosen by the party who is deathly scared of authentic scrutiny.

Pre-Semester Frontier Post 50 - Facebook's "Artificial Intelligence" Failing to Protect MCO Accoounts

rtificial intelligence” (AI) is another one of those contradiction in terms you will inevitably have the pure annoyance of running into these days. All social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search) use it to power these protocols that recommend what videos you should watch, rank the results of any search you make, etc.

Its only redeeming virtue, to me, is when you type “idiot” in the dialog box of an image search, what comes back are endless screenfuls of Donald Trump’s face. At least AI’s got that one right. Go ahead, try it yourself—it’s amusing.

Google must have fixed that somewhat after some Republicans roasted some Big Tech execs about it at a congressional hearing. Now the search results for “idiot” is still festooned with Trump icons but this time he’s joined by a bipartisan panoply of other Republican AND Democrat caricatures. Evidently, Google widened the AI word association making it more generic, from “idiot=Trump” to “idiot=politician.” I’d go along with that still.

But more recent personal experience has only upped my cynicism about AI to think that while to err is human, to totally crash the whole system you need AI.

Mia, a friend of mine who keeps the FB account “Mia Magdalena” (I totally recommend you follow her) woke up one morning to find a couple of fake FB accounts built around a stolen image of hers and a fusion of her name with some other unrelated persons’ names. The account is as fake as a three dollar bill, but the use of her avatar and first name combination produces a convincing-enough profile that some airheaded trolls are now using to proselytize some of her following. Worse, these trolls now post messages under her pseudonym channeling the mirror opposite of her public advocacies.

These are very short messages—20 words or so—which is the thought composition limit of your average troll. As expected ‘dey mispel werds’ and could never get subject and predicate to see eye-to-eye. You'd have no trouble telling these were not her thoughts.

I was warned about this last night so I quickly blocked the accounts. But all that did was to hide their nefarious activities from my view. These trolls still lurk in the murky cyberwaters of e-manipulation. It’s an annoyance more than anything else, like a bad TV commercial jingle on endless loop that just won’t leave your head.

According to FB’s advisory to me, they decided not to take down the accounts until the trolls have posted material that was actually harmful to the public interest. They’ve gotta be kidding—or at least they should know they’ve bitten off something larger than they can chew. I am no paragon of virtue myself but I would have a hard time making that judgment call of what’s harmful to public interest and what’s not. A computer doing the same task would face the same daunting challenge faced by a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. Artificial intelligence, my foot.

I’d settle for plain old reference to registries. What is so difficult about pulling out Mia’s avatar—which is bitmapped to the last pixel—and seeing it matched to another name, no matter how uncannily similar, to conclude that the avatar had been hijacked? When is FB going to realize that the shortest path between two points is an unsophisticated straight line?

This is the problem with “artificial intelligence” and its cousin “machine learning.” They both cannot make the distinction between fact and fake except by using the metrics of user response. Perhaps if more people filed reports involving these same accounts, it might trigger a subroutine in the program code of whatever artificial “brain” these machines use. Finally it might make the mathematical inference “like < dislike = error 404”

A couple of months ago, I had a video of mine taken down by YouTube when I mentioned that some Catholics are leery about COVID vaccines because some vaccines against other diseases in the past utilized stemcells harvested from human placenta. Even that is largely a myth but is now being used by some conspiracy theorists to fuel vaccine hesitancy, the very thing my video was trying to fight.

But I got a “strike” notification from YouTube, warning me that I had violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines which prohibited uploading material that do not conform with WHO public health safety doctrines. I fired off a strongly-worded email (you can just imagine) to YouTube pointing out that they can’t just program their “machine learning” to stay on the lookout for suspect phrases and immediately jump to the conclusion that a video is “harmful to public interest.”

I said they have to bring back some human into the equation. Their AI machines are tack sharp on word- and phrase-detection but totally suck at CONTEXT analysis. Who was I kidding? I was talking to a machine!

The only “context” it knows is linking one website to another because the same Google ad appears in both. Context has nothing to do with it. I learned this the hard way—pun will become evident in a while—when I clicked on a link about Filipina weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz’s Olympic gold achievement. Done reading the main article I spied on an innocent-enough-looking link in one corner of the screen inviting me to “click to see more SPORTS.”

I should have known that disaster lurks just around the corner if I took a moment to notice that the word “sports” was in quotation marks. As soon as I clicked the link I was immediately funneled into the “bikini sports edition” of some lurid online pornsite. It featured women with voluptuous front ends that God would have taken one look at and said, “I didn’t make those!”

Unfortunately, once you are caught in the grip of these web chaining algorithmns, it's impossible to “click out” The AI program code pulls you deeper and deeper into this hedonistic abyss of cyberorgasm. It took less than 2 or 3 more clicks of me struggling to come up for air before I had all these cucumber-shaped and other vibrating toys dancing on my screen, being offered on 50% discount—free-shipped in a discrete unmarked box.

Finally, I just had to power off my laptop—and I mean literally unplug the device in a cold reboot. Otherwise the darned website reloads itself!

It’s hard to estimate the profound damage that “artificial intelligence” wreaks on culture and society on so many levels. I can’t imagine what the solution is, except maybe to try to win the war against it one tiny battle at a time.

If you get tagged by this charlatan FB account called “Mia Somngi Licoben” go the extra mile to report it to FB anyway. And then look for the genuine item “Mia Magdalena” and follow THAT.

Pre-Semester Frontier Post 49

ersona non grata” literally translates to “an unwelcome person” in Latin. It’s not a crime, so it has no penalty. It’s neither a judgment nor a decision handed down by a court, so it cannot be executed. It is always contained in a resolution, never an ordinance, so there is really no mechanism to enforce it.

This, by the way, is true of ANY resolution—which simply expresses the state of mind of, say, the city council or provincial board. But it binds no one and commands no action to be done. You cannot even touch the person declared persona non grata.

Ooops—I think we just stumbled on its meaning. You cannot touch Atty Omar Mayo? No, you can’t no matter how much you despise him.

People will be tempted to say “Who the hell came up with this stupid concept?”

I would strongly advise caution, you are messing with the Highest Power and bordering on blasphemy.

The One who invented the idea of “persona non grata” is none other than God.

After Cain committed what he thought was the perfect crime—he murdered his brother Abel with no witnesses—God told him (and I’m paraphrasing here) “You might think there are no CCTV’s everywhere but I, God Almighty, know and see everything. Where is your brother? What have you done to him?”

Cain answered, “Akala ko ba You know and see everything? Listen, God, I know this whole earth, plants, beasts, birds, mankind, and everything is your project. But I’ll have you know I am Project Supervisor here. I am not my brother’s keeper!”

If I were God I would have blasted the son of Adam (or “Saddam”) to smithereens. Instead, God put a stigma on him—a mark on Cain’s eyebrow—so that henceforth he became a “marked man” (there you go, that’s the origin of that expression). Everywhere he would go, people would see that mark and scamper away from him. It was worse than having leprosy that Cain finally had to acknowledge, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Now people are going to want to kill me too!” (Genesis 4:13, more or less)

God said, “Yes, I’m sure they’ll want to. But I put the mark on your forehead and nobody can touch you. But don’t expect anyone to fall in love with you, either.” (apocrypha)

That mark on his forehead made Cain the first person to be declared “persona non grata.” Also, it made God the first tatoo artist, for whatever its worth.

The City Council resolution declaring Atty Omar Mayo “persona non grata” puts the mark of Cain on the collective brow of NEA. Even PNB-Session may not want to touch NEA with a ten-foot pole now. If Atty. Mayo wants to explain and asks for an appointment with Mayor Magalong, his request can be denied. In fact, he cannot demand for anything from anyone in Baguio. He is unwelcome.

He can sing The Boxer, “asking only workman’s wages I come looking for a job but I get no offers, just a come-on from the whores of (Magsaysay) Seventh Avenue…I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there..lie, lie, lie, lie, lie…”

Lyrics like that underscore what a dreadful thing it is to be declared persona non grata. In international diplomacy, you can be barred entry into or summarily deported from a host country. And you lose your diplomatic immunity. It’s really the best thing to just pack up, leave and never come back.

That cute cartoon character cat “Garfield” is famous for saying, however, that “insults are wasted on the stupid and the shameless.” So there are instances when somebody declared “persona non grata” would opt to tough it out. He sticks around, reciting to himself that children’s rhyme, “sticks and stones may break my bones…but words will never hurt me!”

I say all this “red-tagging” being done by military intel people is missing the target. The only NPA commanders I’ve seen so far have been in the ranks of NEA. There’s two of them: “Ka Wawa” and “Ka Palmuks.”

Pre-Semester Non-classroom Lecture 48 - "Dura Lex Sed Lex"

aws would be meaningless without courts. Laws tell you what your rights are. But your rights end where my rights begin. It is the court that draws the line between us. Without that clear separating line telling both of us what’s yours from mine, I would claim the whole banana and so would you. The situation ends up being exactly the same as if there had been no law to begin with.

You cannot just get your way. If you want to change anything in this world, you need BOTH laws AND the court.

A study showed that right now, there are about 32 million Filipinos whose first name is either “Boy” or “Girl.” How did this happen? Quite simply, mommy is still groggy from the anaesthesia of caesarian delivery, daddy is absent and the nurse filling up the birth registry form at the hospital has an early dinner date. So rushing to finish her job, pretty nurse (call her “Mia”) just copies the name written on the baby’s wristband “Boy Dizon” or “Girl Dizon.”

Fast forward 40 years, the baby is now president of a big corporation. Top management issues a memo, for strict compliance by everybody in the company, that the president’s name is “Alexander” or “Natasha.” But when it comes time for the president to sign a contract for the company, he or she must still sign as “Mr. Boy” or “Ms. Girl” otherwise the contract is defective.

To change their names to Alexander or Natasha in a way that will be binding on the whole world (not just the employees) they have to go to court.

However, even if the court grants their petition for “change of name” the court doesn’t really erase the original names “Boy” or “Girl” from the original birth certificate. Those names stay on the record FOREVER. It just directs the civil registrar (actually the PSA now) to enter an “amendment” in the record. So a clerk literally types (aha! there goes the ONE last remaining use for the manual typewriter) on the margins something like “per court order dated 10-25-21 ‘Boy’ is hereby amended to ‘Natasha’”

Oops.

That amendment is safe for a year, because you can’t file two successive petitions within one year. Therefore, our macho company president has to be called Mr. Natasha Dizon until he can repeat the process—or undergo a sex change operation, whichever is cheaper.

You complain, but that’s ridiculous! Well, here’s your first Latin legal maxim to impress your friends with, “dura lex sed lex.”

The law is harsh, but it’s still the law.

Pre-Semester Frontier Post 47 - Why Baguio and Benguet people resent NEA's High-handedness

here’s an underlying reason why the brazen attempt of NEA to takeover BENECO is generating so much public outrage, helping galvanize opposition to what many see as a naked power grab—no pun intended. For many residents, who are coincidentally member-consumer-operators (MCO’s) too, the experience is channeling deep-seated grievance about the often-trivialized issue of self-determination.

Simply put, Baguio and Benguet are sick and tired of the imperial tyranny of Manila always telling them what to do, deciding what’s good for them, running their community life from swivel chairs in board rooms 250 kilometers away.

Manila even dictates who their congress representative should be.

This subjugation is both historical and systemic. Right at the turn of the century when Baguio was still aforming as a Townsite, the national government immediately lopped off huge swaths of land in the fledgling city, declaring them off-limits as government reservations.

Teachers Camp, Cabinet Hill, Forbes Park, PMA Reservation, Camp Allen Reservation, Supreme Court Compound, Court of Appeals Compound, DPS Compound, Engineers Hill, Loakan Reservation, Mansion House-Wright Park Reservation, Santo Tomas Reservation, Dairy Farm Reservation—if you put all these blocks of real estate together they aggregate about 43% of the city’s tiniest area of only about 58 square kilometers—all local tax-exempt.

That’s just a shade under one-half of the total real estate in Baguio that the City Government cannot collect realty taxes from. How do you manage a city with a built-in permanent 50% annual budget deficit?

That’s like trying to drive a car having a four-cylinder engine with only two pistons firing. This is why under a 1925 law, the national government is supposed to pay for half of the annual city budget, or P700,000 a year, whichever is higher. I honestly don’t know if this law is still being followed today.

But the money issue is not the annoying part. Everytime Baguio wants to do a major undertaking, Manila’s approval is usually required. The reverse is even worse; when Manila has determined it wants to do anything here, local opposition is totally vanquished, as a matter of course. “This has been approved in Manila” is the perfunctory and dismissive phrase that is euphemism for “just shut up and comply.”

For example, when the US Bases were returned to the Philippine government in 1991, one of the best conversion proposals I heard was turning Camp John Hay into a giant University Town, like Harvard in Cambridge, Massachussets. Why not? It would pay homage to Baguio’s being the educational center of the North. Camp John Hay would have made a wonderful world-class university campus, even beating UP Diliman.

But instead, the proposal that prevailed—because that’s what the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA) think-tanks in Manila endorsed—is what we have today: exclusive-to-members-only golf club at rates so unaffordable only Chinese taipans and profligate South Korean businessmen could avail of them. And they did in such monopolistic numbers it’s been suggested in half-jest to rename Camp John Hay to “Kim Jong Hoi.”

I would laugh if only it didn’t hurt so.

Right after the July 16, 1990 earthquake, the City Government enforced a policy limiting building height for new constructions to six floors. That policy wilted under Manila’s overruling. Since tall condominium projects are approved by a national, not local, agency, there’s nothing Baguio residents could do except cover their ears so as not to hear the sickening sound of chainsaws mowing down thousands of pine trees to give rise to “green-compliant” condos shooting up 12 floors—twice the ignored local policy limit.

Through all of this, residents just bit their lips, their helplessness and resentment simmering inside of them. What can they do? Beyond motherhood protest sentiments sporadically articulated by half-sympathetic media, they have little choice but to take the slap on one cheek and turn the other cheek.

Now come the gods of NEA on their high chariots telling everybody at BENECO they’re going to start calling the shots now—on Manila’s orders, of course. So, go tell your mayor to toe the line.

Oh no, you don’t.

MCO’s awoke like the proverbial docile carabao bullwhipped once too much. You may think you own the entire city, but you’re not taking away their electric cooperative—because this time you’re taking away something they really, literally own. It’s no longer just a figure of speech this time now. The hurt is no longer abstract.

If we go by history, it has always been “what Manila wants, Manila gets.” Eventually. But, as they say, there’s a first time for everything, and it’s a lesson NEA seems intent on learning the hard way.

Pre-Semester Non-lecture Analysis 46 - October 18, 2021, A Day that will life in Infamy for NEA

hat shameful blitzkrieg carried out by NEA in South Drive on October 18, 2021 was not just a shortlived takeover of BENECO’s premises. It was the beginning of a long siege that continues to this day. NEA had hoped to build a bunker in BENECO by encircling it with a human wall of anti-riot police. But when it caved in against a human wave of MCO’s with balls the size of cantaloupes, reluctantly the NEA invaders who had bivouacked in the co-op’s boardroom had to pull off a hasty retreat.

It was crudely choreographed, decoy girl drawing enough distraction allowing the main actress she was stunt-doubling for to jump out of a low window in the back.

Another one attempted a higher jump from a 2nd floor cantilevered ledge chanting in his mind R. Kelly’s song “I believe I can fly.” He broke his shinbone upon landing—the pitch was too high. No, he wasn’t gangraped leaving him unable to walk, the poor fellow tried to get up but his legs said “stay down!” Meanwhile, the policemen around him thankfully found an opportunity to shift to a lower-key mission: surrounding him to protect what little remained of his ego. That’s why he needed to cry “mob job!” it was just too embarrassing to go down THAT way.

Every night since, BENECO’s premises had been transformed from a transformer yard to a center for socio-cultural transformation. When this fiasco is over, they should put up a memorial marker there that says “On this day, MCO’s took a valiant stand to carve in granite the legacy that they proudly ended what arrogance began.”

It helped that their mayor is supportive of them. Wait—that is way too abbreviated.

For those of you who are millennials who weren’t even born yet in 1986, I’ll tell you this short true story. The title of the story is “The Untold Story of Camp Cathedral.”

The People Power revolution didn’t just happen in EDSA. It happened all over the country. People too far from Manila assembled in their own town plazas and churchyards, their ears glued to transistor radios following the blow-by-blow report of what’s happening in EDSA. Marcos ordered the AFP to break up all “illegal assemblies” wherever they formed. Fidel Ramos and Johnny Enrile countered this with their own call for “AFP units to stand down and declare your allegiance to the flag.”

Here in Baguio, people gathered at the Baguio Cathedral, alternating between praying the rosary and listening to radio reports trickling in of AFP units one by one turning their back against Marcos. First to do it was the helicopter wing commanded by Air Force Colonel Sotelo and his men who stole three Hueys from the hangar and hovered them over Malacañang and EDSA. He spoke over a radiopatch to the throngs on the ground, “Watch out, we’re going to drop something.”

People prepared to die, sure that the chopper was dropping incendiary bombs. But when what poured out over the helicopter’s skids were confetti clouds of machine-shredded yellow pages, they began to cry.

Back in Camp Cathedral, we stood outside just in front of the church cowering in the cold. The sun was beginning to sink low in the horizon. We prepared to hunker down for another long night of vigil--pretty much like what the MCO's are doing now. Everytime another report of troop movement came in, we wondered when it would be Baguio’s turn. Then it was back to praying the rosary.

Sometime between the second or third Sorrowful Mystery, a “six-by-six” Army truck packed with heavily-armed PC Scout Rangers drove up and parked near Patria. No one knew where it came from. A thin lanky lieutenant barked to his men, “Deploy!” and the soldiers quickly surrounded the Cathedral. Two of them set up a 50-caliber belt-fed mounted machine gun right in front of the Cathedral. We were sure we would never make it to the Glorious Mysteries, especially after the young lieutenant shouted to his men, “Lock and load!”

As the women began crying, the young lieutenant walked over to the mounted machinegun then. Then, to everyone’s disbelief, he swung the gun around to point AWAY from the Cathedral and towards the only approach, then told the gunner, “Nobody breaches the perimeter, understood?” the gunner snapped, “Sir, yes, sir!”

Then he walked up to the church entrance, took off his helmet, snapped a salute to Bishop Madangeng and said, “Good evening, Monsignor, me and my men are here to protect you. My unit and I stand with the Filipino people.”

The Baguio bishop took a moment to gather his composure, almost unable to believe the soldiers had not come to kill everyone. Finally, he managed to say, “thank you lieutenant. You say you’re here to protect us, do you really think Marcos would send people to harm us?”

“Just they try, Monsignor, just they try. Subukan nila.” Then the lieutenant introduced himself.

His name was Benjamin Magalong.

So a few days ago when I heard him say of the BENECO crisis, “I have made my stand as early as six months ago, and I say again, respect the will of the people!”

Six months ago? Nice try, Benjie. You’re trying to be too modest so I will rain on your parade. You took your stand thirty-five years ago. I know because I was there. And you know it.

Pre-Semester Non-Lecture Analysis 45 - PNB has reasons to be worried

f I were PNB Baguio I would be afraid. I would be VERY afraid. They allowed a third party to withdraw ONE MILLION PESOS from an account of a depositor—BENECO—without even informing the depositor except after the fact. Their only basis is unilateral representation through certification issued by the very entity making the representation. A circular self-voucher which is considered anathema in all books of sound banking practice.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, working closely with the Anti-Money Laundering Council, have imposed on all Philippine banks the strict policy standard called “Know Your Client” (KYC). I am aghast that PNB Baguio totally set aside this gold-standard banking rule just to bend over and accommodate an impostor bearing a letter printed on some official-looking government stationery. You’d think this kind of thing only happens in the movies.

But why would I be very afraid? Because only five years ago, in 2016, the BSP’s Monetary Board slapped on RCBC the biggest penalty ever in Philippine banking history, get this—ONE BILLION PESOS—for approving a hasty withdrawal from an account that a third party claimed to have the authority to withdraw from, when in fact the account held state funds diverted from the Bank of Bangladesh.

Of course, several heads rolled at RCBC, which had toiled for years to nurse the brand of the Yuchengco Group, only to suffer the biggest embarrassment in international banking because of the indiscretion of a handful of negligent managers. I don’t have the luxury of space in a Facebook post, but Google keeps all the molecular details of that blue-collar heist. The fine levied on RCBC deviated sharply from the BSP’s standard practice of only imposing a nominal fine of P30,000 per violation per day on banks found to have violated banking regulations.

The explanation is that this cavalier attitude of treating a deposit as merely an asset on paper, instead of a sacrosanct CONTRACT between two –and only two—parties erodes public confidence on the banking system, posing an existential threat to the very system of value exchange that underpins the very mechanisms that drive an economy.

Heavy words—not mine, by the way—but totally apropos given the implications on every depositor, like you and me.

Imagine if your bank tells you, “ma’am/sir may nag-withdraw po ng P1million sa account ninyo, e hindi po namin mahindian kasi ang dami po nilang pinakitang kung anu-anong documents.”

Seriously?

Now you understand why I said if I were PNB, I would be very afraid. The thing about corporate accounts is that it should never be affected by corporate intramurals. Boards of Directors of corporations all over Makati—in fact, all over the world—quarrel all the time. But have you ever heard of a bank stepping in the middle of these corporate storms and handing the corporation’s money to the group of directors it “likes”? That would make banks more powerful than courts. And that’s one more thing: when it comes to encroaching on its turf, you don’t want to mess around with courts, believe me. That’s why banks are notorious for never lifting even a finger WITHOUT A COURT ORDER.

So apparently it’s not only MCO’s that have balls the size of cantaloupes. It seems PNB Baguio can give them a run for their money—pun totally intended.

Pre-Semester Non-lecture Analysis 44 - NEA's Golden Girl May be Highly-achieved, but she's still UNQUALIFIED

ualification is a tricky issue. To run for President of the Philippines, you must be at least 40 years old, natural-born Filipino, able to read and write, a registered voter and a resident in the Philippines in the last ten years. That’s it.

But to apply as saleslady in a department store, you should have completed at least 2 years of college work, be able to communicate well preferrably in English, having computer literacy is an advantage, previous work experience definitely an edge. To prove good moral character, you must submit clearances from the Police, NBI, MTC, RTC, Prosecutor’s office, and submit at least three character references—well-respected people who can vouch for your character. You may as well throw in any certificates of seminars, trainings or workshops you’ve attended to sweeten the pot.

The qualifications for saleslady are higher than for president. You can be almost anything and still be president. Even a boxer.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the humbler the resumé, the higher you can aim. One time, Malacañan had to recall an appointee to the Commission on Higher Education when it was discovered he did not even finish college.

Ask yourself: has there ever been a time when the one appointed to head the Department of Health was not a doctor?

Has there ever been a time when the Chairman of COMELEC was not a lawyer?

Do you think it would be a great idea to appoint a veterinarian as BIR Commissioner?

“We cannot be a nation of square pegs in round holes,” the Supreme Court said in one decision where it told somebody who flunked the national medical admission test he cannot force a medical school to accept him.

But I think this was explained best by Mick Jagger when he sang, “You don’t always get what you want!”

The educational attainment of NEA’s golden girl is lofty, no question. Post-graduate studies from Down Under? Awesome. She is qualified to be appointed NEA Administrator, or head of the Energy Regulatory Commission, even secretary of the Department of Energy. In fact, she was an assistant secretary already, nothing to scoff at. That’s sub-cabinet level—why, that’s the same level once held by Mocha Uson.

Unfortunately, to be appointed general manager of an electric cooperative, you have to be an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, electronics and communications engineer, finance expert or behavioral scientist. In which of these round holes does the square peg of being a lawyer fit?

So you see, it’s not a question of how high up in the academic ladder you were able to climb. It’s about matching the competence with the nature of the work to be done. In short, it's all about finding the right tool to do the job right.

A philips screwdriver cannot twist a flathead screw. Of course, you can substitute the philips screwdriver for an ice pick. But you have to work in an ice plant. Or a halo-halo stand.