ATTY.Argee Guevarra to expose IBP impeachment watch group head for SWINDLING

Atty. Argee Guevarra to expose IBP impeachment watch

group head for SWINDLING activities

January 15, 2012

Ref: Argee Guevarra
Ref: 09175348830/09189028077


FORMER PARTNER TO EXPOSE IBP IMPEACHMENT WATCH GROUP HEAD
FOR SWINDLING ACTIVITIES

In a sidebar to the commencement of the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, Atty. Argee Guevarra today reacted to news reports that Atty. Trixie Cruz-Angeles, Guevarra’s former law partner, will be heading the IBP Impeachment Watch Group.

Guevarra revealed that he has personal knowledge and is in possession of documents that will expose Atty. Trixie Cruz-Angeles as a swindler and is ready to present them upon request by any interested party.

Guevarra claims that he himself was a victim of Atty. Trixie Cruz-Angeles’ swindling activities particularly how he was conned into acting as a guarantor for the lady lawyer’s liposuction sometime in 2009. Guevarra also claims those victimized by Atty. Trixie Cruz-Angeles include Belo botched butt job victim and client Josefina Norcio and international painter Zhou Jun who fell prey to the lady lawyer’s fictitious rendering of alleged (P.R.) public relations services#30

From Facebook to YouTube

Despite the Facebook brouhaha executed by no less than Malacanang’s communication team by entertaining a reported fugitive (a writer from www.barriosiete.com), President Noynoy Aquino will again be interviewed live on YouTube’s World View series…

Taken from Jojo Robles

The Aquino administration, which prides itself on being Internet-savvy, has decided to take the offensive in cyberspace. Only this time, an anti-Aquino counter-offensive is also aborning on the same virtual platform.

Tomorrow, Nov. 4, President Noynoy Aquino will become the 12th head of state to be interviewed live on YouTube’s World View series, a special presentation of the video-sharing site owned by Google. Coinciding with the worldwide interview, a cyber-rally calling for justice for the 19 soldiers killed two weeks ago in Al-Barka, Basilan will be launched on the social networking site Facebook.

Aquino’s drum-beaters say the Philippine president is the first Asian leader to be featured by World View, which was first conducted with US President Barack Obama, last January. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Spanish PM Jose Luis Zapatero are among those who have also been interviewed for the series.

The entire interview will be streamed live over the Internet from Malacañang Palace and will be conducted by Google moderator Ross LaJeunesse. The local partner of YouTube is giant network ABS-CBN, which will stream the interview on its abs-cbnnews.com/askpnoy Web site.
LaJeunesse is director of public policy and government affairs of Google Inc. in Asia-Pacific and former deputy chief of staff to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The whole interview will also be shown on ABS-CBN cable news channel ANC.

At the recent launch of YouTube Philippines, Secretary Ricky Carandang said: “Open and transparent governance has always been one of our priorities, and we have been actively exploring the ways through which social media can deepen democracy. Knowing that it can be difficult for the ordinary Filipino to view his government as accessible and transparent, we are taking the first step in coming to you.”

But while the interview itself will be “live,” questions for Aquino have already been pre-screened through the YouTube World View site from Oct. 21 to Oct. 28, and will be submitted to the President in the order in which they were voted upon. This pre-qualification process has critics wondering if Aquino will ever get to answer hard questions or just give his standard replies to softball inquiries that have already been sanitized by his propagandists.

However, ABS-CBN promised to submit questions raised by the public during the interview itself that are sent through SMS. A “chat box” for instantaneous comments from viewers will also be put up, so that viewers can also see the reactions of various viewers.

It remains to be seen, however, if the network will moderate comments before they appear onscreen. Or if any other sort of censorship will be employed during the YouTube interview.
It is also not known if Aquino’s interviewer, LaJeunesse, is aware of the various issues that confront the Philippine President. Google’s top officer in Asia-Pacific also worked on the staff of the late Senator Edward Kennedy before working for the “Governator”; he took up Asian studies at Dartmouth and graduated from Harvard Law School.

On the same day that Aquino will conduct his YouTube interview, a “virtual rally” will be held on Facebook. The rally, believed to be the first of its kind, is being coordinated by an FB group calling itself “Justice for Basilan 19,” in reference to the Army Special Forces soldiers killed two weeks ago by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Al-Barka, Basilan.

The rally will take place entirely in cyberspace and is intended to call the President’s attention to the growing unrest that has been unleashed by his administration’s mishandling of the Basilan massacre. The virtual meeting place of the rally is Aquino’s own official Facebook site starting at 10 a.m. on Friday. It will move over to the FB page of the ANC network at 4 p.m., in time for the start of Aquino’s YouTube interview, which that station will carry live from Malacañang.
“Our cause is justice for the 19 fallen heroes of Basilan and allegiance to Philippine sovereignty,” said the invitation delivered (naturally) through Facebook. “Our rally shout: The President should be held accountable for the allocation of financial aid to enemies of the state which in legal terms is treason, an impeachable offense.”

The virtual rally may introduce a new paradigm for anti-government protest actions at a time when Internet penetration in this country just keeps growing. In the same way that Filipinos have long been the world’s leading users of text messaging through cellular telephones, we are already a huge presence on the Internet – especially on Facebook.

An August 2010 comScore study showed that Filipinos already spend more time on social networks than Internet users anywhere else in the world. The Philippines has the eighth-largest Facebook population in the world, with more than 90 percent of Internet users in this country regularly accessing the site.

“Virtual attendance” in a cyber-rally, according to the organizers, requires “no traveling, no threats from rain, dust, heat, police, physical violence, stoning, water-hosing, being chased etc., no need to rush to the rally venue, no traffic to beat to get there.” “The rally does not end when attendees disperse and the protest could go on indefinitely, with a lasting effect as the messages remain,” they added.

The rally is counting on its base of almost 8,000 members who belong to the FB group put up in honor of the slain soldiers to make noise during the day. Of course, no one knows what counter-measures are being prepared by Aquino’s well-funded propagandists to stop them from flooding pro-Aquino pages and news Web sites on the day of the protest.
This should be really interesting.

Climate of accountability

"Corruption is never the act of just one person, as the recent of revelations of businessmen who have participated in the sale of used, overpriced helicopters to the police has shown..."

It takes an entire BARRIO to breed it!

By: Ernesto Herrera

What can President Aquino do in a year’s time? Perhaps more than anything it is this: set a climate of accountability that would hopefully define governance in this nation from hereon.

Mr. Aquino has been criticized for not being able to unveil sweeping policy initiatives. His critics rightly or wrongly keep harping on his lack of an economic agenda. But really, he is right to focus on the biggest challenge facing this nation: its inability to establish and enforce accountability.



Many people want to take on the mantle of leadership but are not prepared to accept the accountability that goes with it. Accountability is what Mr. Aquino solemnly promised when he was campaigning. It is what he talks about in all his speeches, even in his last State of the Nation Address.



The President knows only too well that accountability is what would bring back the people’s trust in their government and their leaders. It is what would empower our people to act responsibly, to believe that they have a stake in making this nation great again.



This early in Mr. Aquino’s tenure, we now find poll officers and even policemen speaking out about their participation on election fraud. Businessmen are coming out with their own revelations about rigged public contracts and government purchases, like those overpriced used helicopters bought by the police.



Indeed, all sorts of truths are being revealed—misused government charity funds, bloated government perks, shenanigans in the public gaming agency, and what have you.



Last week, Senator Miguel Zubiri resigned amid a controversial and still unresolved electoral protest involving him and Aquilino Pimentel III, an act that for nothing else should be praised for its delicadeza, something that has been sorely missing in the practice of politics here in the country during last decade or so, but which people now seem to expect as the norm from their politicians and public servants, from the President down to the government clerk. Again, this is because the President has set the tone.



What we are seeing is something as consequential and important as the priority measures discussed in any Legislative Executive Development Advisory Council Meeting. We are seeing a historic shift in governance. We are seeing the foundations of accountability being established.



Mr. Aquino vowed that all public contracts would be scrutinized, their negotiations made

transparent, every cent poured into them properly accounted for. Public servants would live up to their names and owe their tenure to the people they serve. They would be our servants and not our masters. Elections, the bedrock of democracy, would be fair and honest.



Most of all, he vowed that past misdeeds would not be buried and forgotten for the sake of unity and moving on, for doing so—letting the wrongdoers get away with their criminal behavior—would only ensure that our sordid history of rigged elections and public contracts, of corrupt activities and official misconduct, would be repeated in the future.



We now have a new Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales who seems intent on doing her job to run after graft and corruption. The other day she ordered the hiring of more than a hundred lawyers to serve as graft investigation and prosecution officers and assistant special prosecutors.



We expect corruption efforts to step up considerably in the coming months and for these efforts to breathe new life into existing anti-corruption laws, which were practically ignored or selectively enforced in the past administration.



The Justice department and its investigative agencies too are devoting more resources to anti-corruption prosecution and are expected to yield more and bigger cases.



The administration should ensure the enactment of the long-pending and much-needed Whistle Blowers Act and Freedom of Information Act as these will surely help the prosecutors in their ability to use government resources to bring successful prosecutions in a timely manner.



The President asked for our cooperation in fighting corruption and we should respond. Corruption is never the act of just one person, as the recent of revelations of businessmen who have participated in the sale of used, overpriced helicopters to the police has shown. It takes a village, if not a country, to breed it.



Good governance and clean government is not just the responsibility of the administration. We help create it by our own individual actions. As the President stressed in his recent State of the Nation Address, we are all accountable.



Politics, indeed, would be much better served with individual acts of commitment to do the right thing in all official transactions, and this would be best demonstrated by a President himself, a President who practices what he preaches. It all starts and ends with a President who can live up to his promise to be ethical and honest.



Now if only all of the President’s people can do the same.

STATE of our NEWS

“Our media organizations must be really scraping the bottom for newsworthy stories lately because even isolated issues are played up and blown into major controversies. Just to feature a person by the likes of Reyn aka Reynaldo Barnido means they must be really scrapping from the bottom! The Get Real Philippines blog says: “ABS-CBN makes use of a rather sneaky literary device -- juxtaposing morality mongering with its sex-charged content… Ain't Filipinos such class acts? Even in the act of high-nosed moralising, we still come across as the ethically-disturbed primitivist people that we are.””

STATE of our NEWS

Columnist Bong Austero opines: “It seems we really are not used to not having controversies in this country because in times such as the present when things are generally quiet in the political front, we tend to stir things up to create fireworks during events that should have been occasions for unity or out of the most mundane issues. A friend offers a different perspective. He says we have this predilection to self-destruct. When things are going so well, we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Take for example President Benigno Aquino III’s indelicate dig at the opposition last week during the annual Vin d’Honneur to honor the diplomatic community. PNoy’s remark struck a raw nerve because of the lack of a suitable context. Taking potshots at one’s perceived enemies at a formal occasion one is hosting smacks of illegitimate political behavior, particularly if the people being targeted comprised majority of those who graciously lent their presence at the occasion and who were there apparently in the spirit of cooperation.

We just celebrated the holiday season and greeted each other “peace on earth and goodwill to men.” PNoy’s very partisan remarks certainly shattered any lingering spirit of love, hope and peace in the air. Most surveys indicated that majority of Filipinos have high hopes for 2011 and to my mind, this included hopes for our leaders to work more collaboratively in the pursuit of the common good. The fighting words were uncalled for. We may have a minority in Congress, but they certainly are not “noisy.” We don’t hear of Representative Lagman and company strongly lambasting the President and his cabinet every day, do we?

What was annoying about the whole thing was that, really, there was no need for the whole thing. It was just simply uncalled for! What was even more jarring was Communication Secretary Ricky Carandang’s attempt at backpedaling. As can be expected in a situation where no logical defense is forthcoming, he tried to obfuscate the issue. He said that the President’s dig was not directed at anyone in particular, which made the President come across as someone just shooting blanks in the air. I would have preferred that Carandang just stood his ground; as we say in Tagalog, sana pinanindigan na lang nya.

Clearly, the tempest in the teacup was not a good start for Carandang and company. This attitude of moral superiority bordering on arrogance is what will get this administration into more trouble. Apparently, some people have not learned from the Mai Mislang incident in Vietnam.

And then there was this very amusing bit about how Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista publicly lauded a traffic aide, giving him a promotion and a cash reward for apprehending him. I understand that it took guts for the traffic aide in question to do what he did although it was clear that he did so because he didn’t recognize the mayor (he sheepishly hinted that he would have ignored Bautista’s traffic violation if he knew it was the mayor behind the wheels).

But there is something very seriously wrong when we do cartwheels because someone was simply doing his job. There is also something seriously wrong when the mayor in question goes into a celebratory mood because he was caught violating traffic rules in his own city. Bautista did not even apologize or offer an explanation as to why he broke traffic rules; in fact, the whole part about why he violated traffic rules was completely glossed over. It was as if there was tacit agreement that mayors or other powerful people in this country have the license to disobey traffic rules.

I am all for rewarding people who turn in exemplary performances in their jobs. But rewarding people for simply doing their jobs and celebrating the occasion as if it was something extraordinary—well, this certainly indicate the extent of our problem.

Our media organizations must be really scraping the bottom for newsworthy stories lately because even isolated issues are played up and blown into major controversies.

Okay, just so there is no misunderstanding -although I am aware that despite this disclaimer certain people in this country will still choose to see this piece from a very myopic perspective—let me be clear about one thing: I do not—as in absolutely do not—condone sex in public particularly in places that allow children. Let me be clearer. I do not think that people should be allowed to have sex in the beaches of Boracay, or in other public places in this country such as parks, churches, streets, malls, etc. If we come to think about it, I don’t think there is anyone in this country that actually thinks it is okay for people to have sex in public places.

Having said that, let me now express my utter bewilderment at the whole attention being heaped on what is now referred to as the Boracay sex scandal presumably involving two pairs of tourists on New Year’s Eve. Why it was referred to as a sex scandal is beyond me. It only showed the extent to which our media networks will go to sensationalize a story.

In case you were blissfully unaware of the controversy, ABS-CBN showed footages in their various newscasts last week of two couples that seemed engaged in sex acts. They said the footages were taken at around 2:00 am on a beach in Boracay after the revelry to meet the New Year. Thereupon, the mayor of the town of Malay which has jurisdiction over Boracay, a senior official of the Department of Tourism, and a number of concerned citizens including actress Ruffa Gutierrez were quoted in various news stories expressing their outrage and spewing quite a mouthful of gibberish.

What was absurd about the whole attention was that all the reports were very clear about one thing: It was an isolated incident. Malay Mayor John Yap said so. Tourism Assistant Secretary for Planning and Promotions Domingo Enerio III said so. Even the ABS-CBN people said so. It’s strange therefore that they almost burst a vein trying to pontificate about the supposed implications of the supposed sex scandal.

The honorable mayor said something about the need to pass an ordinance specifically prohibiting having sex in the beaches of Boracay, because he said there is currently no law that would justify the prohibition. Is this guy for real? There might not be a law that specifically says that having sex in public is prohibited, but I am sure there are more than enough provisions in our various laws that can be trundled to justify the prohibition. I have been working with a non-government organization doing work with sex workers for many years now and I am aware that police authorities continue to regularly patrol areas in urban centers such as parks to apprehend and harass people who are suspected of being in amorous situations. I can imagine it now: Signs being put up in Boracay and policemen patrolling the beaches to enforce the ordinance.

Tourism assistant secretary Enerio’s gibberish was even more absurd. Here’s the guy’s reaction quoted verbatim from a news report that got picked up by the global press: “Enerio said hotel owners and other establishments on the beach should post signs or warnings that say it is okay to be happy and enjoy while on the island but there are things that should be done privately, preferably in their hotel rooms. He said it was a good thing that the sex incident happened at a time when kids are already asleep, and that the act was between a couple that seem to be married and it was not done with a Filipina.” Whether the couple who had sex in public was married or not and the race of the woman was material to the whole discussion?

When nonsensical statements and non-issues such as an isolated event in Boracay are played up like they were matters of life and death on public television, then we must scraping the bottom for newsworthy stories!”