President GMA vs. the Catholic bishops

By Ermin Garcia Jr.

This week, the country will likely witness how the Arroyo government will strike down the institution of the Catholic Church with the planned arrests of Bishops Labayen, Yniguez and Tobias with a prayer that it can get away with it. 

Their  crime? For trying to do today what Cardinal Sin did – urging people to oust President Erap and install Vice President Gloria Arroyo.

The Church, after the Supreme Court, is now the last bastion of defense for righteous good governance in this country. If the Catholic bishops cannot act as one to defend their own, woe is our nation for soon we will be without righteous spiritual leaders.                                                   
As things stand today, the House, the COMELEC and the military are packed with Arroyo lapdogs that would think of nothing to deny outright all charges of irregularity, to discredit and attack the Arroyo administration’s detractors.

So, will the CBCP fall? Time for the prayer warriors to circle their wagons.

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DREAMING ON. Last week, Dagupan City Mayor Benjie Lim crowed that his administration may be kulelat in revenue and savings by the Commission on Audit’s reckoning, but his is rated highly in performance!

You have to hand it to Mr. Lim, he is one helluva marketing salesman.  He wants you and I to believe now the city has been in good hands despite his frequent absences in the city, doing his business in China. After all, Dagupan City, he says, has been cited as a “Dream City” after his PowerPoint presentation to the Institute for Solidarity of Asia was greatly applauded.

He ought to write a book – “Dreaming of a Dream City:  and begin scouting for a book publisher in China in his next trip.  

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BENJIE’S DREAMS.  So let’s review his dreams (a.k.a “performance”).

He dreamt of a sanitary landfill for the city in 2000. So he made the city government pay the dummy owner (his friend) of the land in San Jacinto overpriced by P9 million. Failing to deliver on this dream, he whipped up another dream. He says the land is ideal for housing project or an ideal source for water. And why not have an orchard, he added. Meanwhile the open dumpsite by the beach is piling up high.

He dreamt of a modern city hall and quickly negotiated the purchase of the Mc Adore Hotel. He told the city in 2002, “Let’s pay P10 million every year for the hotel for 5 years so we can have a modern city hall without having to construct a new one.”

Today, the building is rotting and only the other kind of rats dwell in it as permanent occupants. He has not concocted another dream for the building after his latest dream of making GSIS and SSS permanent co-owners went pfffft.

He dreamt of a mall-type public market to improve the revenues of the stallholders. He told the city he can fast-track this dream by borrowing P237 M from the Landbank. And he built what other civil engineers and architects knew was only worth P150 M at best! Today, more than half of original stallholders have abandoned the public market because of marginal revenues and high operating costs.   

He dreamt of a brightly lit city, and arranged for a thread supplier to act as a street light supplier to negotiate (public bidding is not in his management vocabulary) an P11 M project which otherwise could have cost the city only P5 M at best. Now, the city has to maintain the aesthetic lighting costing the taxpayers a lot more monthly lest the city plunges into complete darkness.

He dreamt of  flood-free city. And he immediately ordered a P50 M brand new dredging machine over and above an offer from the DPWH to provide two dredging machines to work on the rivers and minimize flooding in the city. Today, the city can hardly support the maintenance and the operation of the new dredging machine. Of late, the city continues to suffer from flooding even just from a high tide. Hindi ka na nag-iisa Malabon!

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MORE DREAMS. He dreamt of a thriving bangus industry. He concocted the formula for a fun-filled annual Bangus Festival, and immediately got everyone excited to land a forgettable line in Guinness Book of World Records. And after everyone learned to party each year, the organizing committees also learned to keep the festival’s financial books secret! Mr. Lim ordered his sidekicks whom be appointed to the committees not to be transparent, never mind that the city illegally provided funds for it. Then, he dreamt that this year’s festival should b a dry-run for his rumored bid for the congressional seat. The reported P3 M provided by the city could have provided medicines and equipment for the barangay health workers to work with.

He dreamt of a world-class bangus export industry…and immediately ordered the eviction of residents to make way for his dream Bangus Processing Plant. Fortunately, no one had to be resettled for his dream since the residents fought back and President Arroyo also backed down from her P50 M pledge for the plant. It was the initial failure of this dream that prompted him to get back at Speaker Joe de V by threatening to run against the latter in next year’s election for the 4th District seat. He blames Speaker JDV for the President’s turnaround.

He dreamt of a financially stable and developed city. He took in his gang in the Dagupan Jaycees “to run” the city’s various departments. Today, a number of “BSL Kurbata Boys” were finally told to go…not because they were redundant but because the city’s well has dried up. In a bid to reverse the dire financial straits the city found itself in, he now wants the electric poles taxed, never mind that the city’s consumers shall be made to shoulder the new tax.   

He boasted of a development plan for the city in the 21st century. But it remains in dreamland because he has not articulated it. I thought he would regale us again but for some reason he decided to keep his trap shut and did not deliver the State of the City Address this year. Yes, Mr. Lim still has not delivered what was expected of him last January.

The city is high in performance, you say Mr. Mayor? More like simply just “high up in the air”! And if the panic drawn on City Administrator Raffy Baraan’s face was any indicator when first confronted by media with the COA findings, he was telling us his mayor would soon again be pulling our leg.

How right he was. But this time the mayor outdid himself by making a bizarre claim.

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PAGING LTO. How many were killed by assassins riding tandem on either a stolen motorcycle or one without a plate number? How many hit-and-run victims failed to get justice because witnesses could not remember the number on the vehicle’s plates?

Unless the Land Transportation Office acts promptly on car-owners who sport the darkly tinted plate covers, we can expect more crimes being committed by motorists and getting away with them simply because they were allowed to have their plate numbers covered with a darkly tinted plastic case.

All motorists who cover their car plates to avoid detection must be arrested on sight, and their vehicles thoroughly searched! Why would anyone hide the vehicles’ plates if one is not entertaining criminal ideas?

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