Fighting the newspapers’ racket

By Ermin Garcia Jr.

Finally, two executive judges dared not only to think out of the box but dared to help pull poor litigants, who have been unfairly boxed in by what was originally  a well-intended law crafted in the early days of martial law, out of the rut.

I refer to Judges Ulysses Butuyan and Emma Parajas of the Tayug Regional Trial Courts who recently decided on their own to finally set free all litigants in their respective courts from financial enslavement by abusive newspaper publishers.             Thanks to the two judges, litigants (or petitioners) in their salas will now be free to choose and negotiate for reasonable rates for the compulsory publication of their judicial notices.

Their decision now allows a poor petitioner for a foreclosure to save as much as P10,000-P15,000 in publication costs being charged by unscrupulous publishers!

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Presidential Decree 1079 was issued by President Marcos in a bid to win the support of the print media. Specifically, it required all trial courts to raffle all judicial notices to accredited community newspapers to enable the latter to earn revenues at a time when advertising support for them was practically nil owing to the advent of martial law.

At that time, there averaged only about 2 to 3 community newspapers in a province and everyone strictly complied with the decree’s provisions. Publication rates were minimal.

The Supreme Court, however, felt compelled to step into the picture in the mid-90s and issued implementing guidelines after a number of newspapers were reported to have begun charging excessive rates to the gross disadvantage of the captive and hapless petitioners.

By then, it was no secret that the law became the source of a major racket among pseudo but enterprising newspaper publishers. A single raffled judicial notice then meant P20,000 in instant profit by printing no more than 50 copies of a 4-paged copy-and-news printed material (for compliance purposes)!

I recall how The PUNCH was pilloried for months by some 15 newspapers in the province when it exposed the racket in 1994. I was even sued for several counts of libel by one notorious “publisher” who was adamant that he was protected by law in charging any exorbitant rate he fancied, and petitioners had no choice over it.

To illustrate how the abuses started, The PUNCH which was already publishing for more than 35 years then, charged only an average of P5,000 per foreclosure notice while others that had been “publishing” for a year or two found it justified to charge P15,000! Woe to the petitioner whose notice was raffled to one of the racketeers in our midst.

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ROOKIE TODAY, TONG-MAN TOMORROW.  I received a disturbing report from a friend in Lanao del Norte. According to him, police recruits are being asked to pay P350,000 up front to ensure their enlistment in the police service!

If that is happening in Mindanao, is it possible that the same racket is operating in the province? If true, then we can kiss the prospect of seeing an upright and professional police force goodbye, at least not in the next 10 years if this is not stopped today! To recover his/her “P350,000 investment”, the newly recruited P01 will have to find ways to mulct and extort some P100 a day in the next 10 years without fail!

A more dangerous prospect is when these new recruits decide to be more daring and enterprising, determined to recover their costs in a year or two.  And if they get away with it, it would not be difficult to imagine what would eventually become of them.

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RAIN FOR ALL REASONS. I never imagined that Pinoys would one day pray for rains in the same fervor that American Indians did their rain dance. Sure, we always prayed for God’s mercy, to alleviate sufferings of people caught in calamities but for rain? Never.

So when Cardinal Rosales issued the prayer for all Catholics to read two Sundays ago, for the rains to pour, I was one of the many skeptics who thought praying for rain was absurd. But I still ended up praying with the others in Church because I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask for nature to run its course.

So when the rains poured a day after I joined the prayer, I was awed and dumbfounded. I told myself “Wow, God listened to Pinoys this time.” (I just wished He had listened more in the past, but I am one who counts my blessings, so I longingly looked up the sky and offered my humble thanks).

Then when the prayed-for-rains became a nightmare in a matter of 24 hours in Luzon, Pinoys panicked and started looking for another type of “miracle-worker”.

“Will someone please learn to make a prayer to stop the rain?”

How easily we forget. We’ve always had a prayer that worked especially when prayed by children. It went like this -“Rain, rain go away, come again another day”

Take it from me, it worked a hundred-fold for me when kiddies’ outdoor games was still for me. (I stopped reciting it when I learned that some indoor games are definitely a lot more fun with the rains pouring on the roof, flood or no flood).

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UNRAVELING THE AFP. Last week, I met a recently retired army major who served in Mindanao. He showed me the scars from bullet wounds on his hand and back (where a bullet is still embedded). He had been in over 100 encounters. I felt honored meeting him.     

Curious about how veterans take to current events in Mindanao, I asked him about his thoughts on the ongoing government offensive in that island. For some reason, I had expected him to say the new offensive is justified given what the Abu Sayyaf and the bandits among the MILFs had done to the 10 marines, decapitating and mutilating them. I was wrong.

With a forlorn look in his eyes, he said he strongly suspects that the whole thing was staged and manipulated to help boost the political agenda of a number of uniformed men with stars on their shoulders. In fact, he believes that the decapitations were done not by the Abu members but by a group that sneaked in on the marines’ position. I asked him how that could possibly be. “You’ll see” came his uneasy reply.

I thought that was sheer speculation on his part but was it a coincidence that Senator Antonio Trillanes recently volunteered a starkly similar information leading to a scenario implicating men in government as the ones responsible for the marines’ deaths.

What’s happening to our armed forces under our kabaleyan General Hermogenes Esperon?  

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GOODBYE MR. CHAM. Our belated condolence to the family of George Chua Cham, whose father, Domingo, died at the ripe age of 96! The great old man Cham was one of the early supporters of The PUNCH in its early years. It was under this circumstance that I met George who was sent by his father to meet me in my office in early 70s when I took over management of the paper, to reiterate his family’s continued support for The PUNCH.

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/punchline/)

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