Why NOT Vote for Manny Villar - From a Blogger

We keep on seeing  the ad of Manny Villar with the message"tatapusin niya ang kahirapan" (roughly translated, "he will put an end to poverty"). Really?  When he can't even solve a local water crisis in his own turf according to Carizza, a blogger? Here goes:

To Mr. Manny Villar

I’ve e-mailed you thru your inconsistent website about 6 months ago, telling you my almost-dramatic story of having to wake up at 4 in the morning and arriving home late at night and stressing myself on my everyday 2-hour one-way trips to school. And I told you, that the bigger stress is that even at that early and that late, there is no freakin’ water!

You do realize that you control Camella Homes that spread throughout the country and the whole Manuela subdivisions, in which in one we are housing, and the Prime Water Corporation that’s supposed to be taking care of our water supply, don’t you? AND, you do realize that THAT water supply is only available at 6-8 am and 4-8 pm, right?

Now here’s what I want to say, really, with all due respect.

You son of your mom! How on earth do you expect us to be making full use of the water that we pay for when we are up at 4 am with no single drop of water coming out of any faucet to go to school? Does it not bother you that my mom washes our clothes at 6 am and finishes at 8 to find that the water ration had been out an hour before? How can you not be aware that we can not wash the dishes until the afternoon and the water we use for washing rice and cooking is the same purified drinking water that we call for to be delivered? Maynilad had been allowed in the subdivisions nearby except in those that you owned and to what other purpose but to reassure you keep your wealth? I do not want to be thinking bad about you, but really, you have not answered my call for action six months ago, and yes, this problem is getting worse. There had been no water in the morning, and we can only bathe at night and reserve water for 2 hours just so that we have some to use the next day.

I had hoped that if you win President, life in Las Piñas would be better, and I’m still hoping it eventually would, as your dynasty proceeds to dominate the politics in this city.
So you may as well start by fixing that stupid water problem.

• Source: http://bit.ly/d1uDHw

Perry Scope: The Politics of 'Faking Poverty'

I would like to share with critical thinkers an incisive article written by Perry Diaz with the catchy title . . . .

The Politics of ‘Faking Poverty’

A little over a week ago, columnist Billy Esposo’s article, “How Manny Villar lied and used the death of his brother Danny,” created a maelstrom of controversy that unleashed a torrent of criticism against presidential candidate Manny Villar for his claim that his family was so poor that his brother died because they couldn’t afford to buy him medicine.

It all started when Villar, in his “PANATA (Advocacy)” TV commercial, said: “Nakaranas na ba kayong … mamatayan ng kapatid dahil wala kang pera pangpagamot (Have you experienced losing a brother because you did not have the money to provide him proper medical care)?” It was a tear-jerker “testimonial” of how poor Villar’s family was when he was growing up. It earned him sympathy and respect. His poll ratings started to shoot up and came to within two percent of presidential frontrunner Noynoy Aquino. Instantly, Villar’s rags-to-riches life story became the talk of the town. His success became everybody’s dream.

He was believed, emulated, adored, and loved. Suddenly, poor people were captivated by Villar’s magic, enthralled in virtual reality of a good life under the presidency of the man who broke the yoke of poverty and became one of the ten richest men in the country today. And captivated they were… until the truth set them free.

Faking Poverty

Truth came in an outpouring of articles written by some of the country’s best journalists: Billy Esposo, Lito Banayo, Solita Collas-Monsod, Conrado de Quiros, Manuel L. Quezon III, and many more. Their articles tell incontrovertible proof and compelling arguments that Villar lied about the death of his brother.

But what is sad is why Villar used the death of his brother to gain sympathy to increase his chances of winning the presidential elections? It was a calculated risk realizing that if he pulled it off, he would fulfill his dream of becoming president of the country. However, I’m pretty sure that he was also aware that if the truth came out, it would bring him down.

He took the gamble… and lost.

In an attempt to control the self-inflicting damage to his candidacy, Villar’s media people started spinning stories insisting that Villar was dirt poor. They’re saying that Danny was admitted to the charity ward of FEU Hospital. If that was the case, then Villar’s family didn’t have to worry about buying medicine for Danny — the charity ward would have provided for all the medicine Danny needed to recover from his illness.

But Danny’s illness was a complication from leukemia which at that time was incurable. Danny was terminally ill when he was admitted to the charity ward. So when Villar said in his TV commercial, “Nakaranas na ba kayong … mamatayan ng kapatid dahil wala kang pera pangpagamot,” he lied. It was farthest from the truth.
Plagiarizing campaign ads

Recently, another controversy arose from one of Villar’s ads. Journalist Toto Causing exposed another Villar “fake” when he posted, “Manny Villar has been accused of plagiarizing the television advertisement campaign of a presidential candidate of Argentina, Lopez Murphy.” Causing stated: “Dubbed as the ‘upside-down’ advertisement, Villar’s TV ad narrated lines as each line is highlighted downwards and after reaching the most bottom line he narrated it again but reading each line in the upward direction. It turned out that Villar actually copied the advertisement of Argentina’s presidential candidate.” The Villar ad and the plagiarized Murphy ad can be viewed at www.GlobalBalita.com, “Did Villar commit plagiary in his campaign ad?”

Now, not only is Villar faking poverty, he is plagiarizing campaign ads.

Politics of ‘identifying with the poor’

Identifying with the poor is a popular election campaign strategy particularly in a country where the people are predominantly poor. “I’m poor, I’m one of you,” would resonate well with the marginalized sector.

Former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada successfully used that strategy when he entered politics. He used the moniker “Erap,” which is “pare” spelled backward, to identify with the poor, whose men commonly used “pare” — a contraction of “kumpare” — to address each other.

When he launched his presidential bid in the late 90s, he used the slogan, “Erap para sa mahirap” (Erap for the poor). It catapulted him to the presidency garnering the highest margin in presidential elections since the time of Marcos. The fact that he was born in Tondo, an impoverished district of Manila, helped seal his identification with the poor. But, most importantly, he showed a genuine sincerity in his sympathy and concern for the poor.

The late President Ramon “Monching” Magsaysay was the most successful politician in terms of identifying with the poor. Although he came from a middle-class family, Magsaysay projected himself as coming from humble background — he once worked as a car mechanic. When he was Secretary of Defense under President Elpidio Quirino, he started the “Land for the Landless” which eventually broke the backbone of the communist Huk insurgency. With the slogan, “Magsaysay is my Guy,” he won the presidential elections in 1953 defeating his former boss Quirino by 68.9% of the vote.

Politics of ‘faking poverty’

It did not then come as a surprise that Villar used the same strategy that Magsaysay and Estrada used successfully to win the presidency. However, Villar had a big problem: he is filthy rich. And that would not bode well with the poor. But he had one thing that he could use to his advantage: like Erap, Villar was born in the poor district of Tondo. All he had to do was embellish his life story.

To make the story short, Villar fashioned, or faked, a new image of himself — a rags-to-riches success story: the poor boy who fulfilled everybody’s dream of becoming rich. He would have succeeded had he not falsely used the death of his brother in his campaign commercial. That fake campaign commercial opened a can of worms that eventually gnawed acidly at the manufactured façade he built around his persona.

As a result, his campaign started to crumble. The latest Pulse Asia survey conducted on March 21-28 showed Noynoy Aquino pulling ahead of Villar: 37% for Noynoy, 25% for Villar. There is a trend that is showing a steady support for Noynoy. However, Villar’s ratings continue to slide from a high 35%, which was within 2% of Noynoy’s 37%, in the January 22-26 Pulse Asia survey.

In politics, once your ratings start to fall, your challenge is how to stop the gravitational pull. And like a meteor falling from space into the stratosphere, gravity takes over and what happens next is the spectacular disintegration of the meteor.

Is Villar’s meteoric rise going to disintegrate like a meteor falling from the sky?

Facebook: MY OPINION OF MANNY VILLAR 1

Tony Hidalgo responding to his friend named "Tong":

MY OPINION OF MANNY VILLAR 1

Yesterday at 9:55am

Tong,

Whatever the merits of your abstract argument about the presumption of innocence, let me assure you and the brods that Manny Villar is far from innocent. He is as crooked and greedy as they come.

Winnie Monsod has made a very good case about his crookedness in the Paranaque road projects that passed through his properties at his behest as a lawmaker, enabling him to sell some of his land to the government at much more than market prices and to reap many millions in property appreciation from the government roads.

He is also guilty of making billions out of government funds for socialized housing through a questionable, unsustainable scheme that nearly destroyed our financial system in the 90's.

It's a bit complicated, but I was right there, trying to stop what was essentially Villar's scheme as Secretary General of HUDCC (housing). Fortunately, we succeeded (Dept. of Finance, Pag-Ibig Fund, SSS, GSIS, HUDCC, HIGC-I was head of the multi-agency Task Force that did this) and avoided a financial disaster in the Philippines that would have preceded the similar one that recently hit the US and hurt the world economy.

It started when Cory became president. Villar, through the CREBA he controlled, drafted a socialized housing law to spur low-cost housing in the country. Cory approved it with her emergency powers, not seeing through Villar's scheme.

To oversimplify, the law required the SSS, GSIS, and Pag-Ibig Fund to put billions of pesos of their funds each year into a fund for mortgages for low-cost housing (defined initially as 150T max, later going up to 250T through the years). This fund would be managed by the National Home Mortgage Finance Corp. (NHMFC - an agency of HUDCC). The NHMFC then established quotas for allocating the annual common funds of SSS, Pag-Ibig, and GSIS based on the building capacities of registered developers. The largest quotas every year were for the Camelia and Palmera (C & P) company of Villar which got a very large chunk of the funds for their home mortgages.

Within the annual quotas under the law, builders could submit completed mortgages and NHMFC would promptly buy them at their face amounts and pay the builder. It was the builders actively sold mortgages in the malls and everywhere else, approved the papers, and submitted them to NHMFC. NHMFC only checked to see that the amounts of mortgages submitted by the builders were within their annual quotas before paying, it did not check the credit-worthiness of the borrower or even if the papers were genuine in that the stated borrower was a real person and the house being mortgaged actually existed.

The situation the law created was unique in the entire world. The pooled funds of SSS, Pag-Ibig, and GSIS were effectively put into the hands of developers, who built the houses, found buyers willing to take out mortgages, approved the mortgages, submitted them to the NHMFC, and got the money in a few months. In effect, the builder controlled the credit funds and approved the loans using funds that were not theirs but were funds of SSS, Pag-Ibig, and GSIS.

This was a clear conflict of interest, for the builder would maximize his profits from easy credit and would not bear the cost of mortgage defaults. Naturally, lots of problems arose in just a few years -- fake mortgages to ficititious borrowers, nonexistent houses sold to noexistent buyers, and the more common case: real, but substandard, houses, hastily sold to buyers who clearly did not have the capacity to pay back the loan during the agreed loan period. By the time HUDCC took action to correct the anomalous situation in 1996 under my coordination, some 42 billion had been disbursed in mortgages under the Villar scheme. Only a little more than 20 percent of the loans were being repaid by borrowers, more than 70 percent of the mortgages had been defaulted or were in serious arrears.

This drew the attention of the World Bank and the Dept. of Finance, for the SSS, GSIS, and Pag-Ibig Funds are retirement funds. The funds are commtted to future returement obligations to the contributing members. If the housing mess continued, the SSS, GSIS, and Pag-Ibig would default on its retirement obligations, creating a financial crisis for the country.

All of us who changed the housing program to give the control over their housing funds back to the SSS, GSIS, and Pag-Ibig, who would be more careful in screening mortgages to make sure they would be paid for they would bear the penalties of mortgage defaults -- we were all harrassed by Villar and his minions in the CREBA who slapped law suits on us and attacked us in the radio, TV, newspapers, etc.

The Makati regional trial court found in our favor and threw out the CREBA-Villar law suit. For a long while, we lost in the media wars and were painted as anti-poor bureaucrats. But the furor eventually died down and the reformed housing program we fashioned has stood the test of time. Since 1997, the repayment rates of socialized and low-cost housing mortgages have high enough to make the program sustainable. The looming financial crisis was averted and we are now in better shape than the US, which did nothing to reform its own defective housing mortgage system.

Of course, the share prices of C & P homes of Villar collapsed, for everyone knew that the company was profitable only for as long as it could bilk government funds. But then Villar found other rackets and the rest, as they say, is history.

Tony Hidalgo

Get Real: Awesome (claims)

What's your take about this write-up?

By Solita Collas-Monsod
Philippine Daily Inquirer
03/27/2010

AN ORGANIZATION I BELONG TO, THE Movement for Good Governance (MGG), has, as one of its objectives, raising the level of discussion and quality of information during the election campaign, so that the information that voters obtain on candidates are not just those provided by the candidates themselves (which are naturally going to be self-serving) but have been subjected to scrutiny for either feasibility (as in their platforms, which require the assessment of experts) or authenticity (in regard to their claims, which require investigation and drudgework). That way, the voter will be in a much better position to choose their leaders for the next three or six years.

Manny Pangilinan's TV5 has picked up on MGG's work and will jointly sponsor a five-part special series that will in effect showcase the results of this scrutiny. And since Sen. Manny Villar's TV and radio ads far outnumber the ads of his opponents, they provide much more grist for an investigator/evaluator's mill.

Take the ad, for example, which roughly translated goes something like this: "Have you experienced sleeping on a short bench in the market? Or the death of a brother because you had no money for medicine/proper health care, so you were helpless? Well, I, too, have experienced all that. Which is why, when God blessed me with a good life, it became my vow to help those who have nothing. If I really wanted to get richer, I would just go back to being a businessman. If I could get out of poverty, I can also do it for you. This is my vow: to end poverty." The TV ads are highlighted by a 1962 picture of the young Manny and his younger brother Danny-the year that Danny died-as well as a Villar family picture.

The message being conveyed is simple and powerful: he was dirt poor, but God got him out of poverty; and he has vowed to do the same for others. And he is sincere: he is not running for president to make money-because if he only wanted to get richer, all he needed to do was go back to being a businessman. It is indeed a great ad. One viewer's reaction was: Awesome.

Awesome, indeed. Because documents sent to me turn those assertions on their head, so that the only thing accurate about the ad may be the family pictures.

First there is the matter of the copy of a death certificate of Daniel Bamba Villar indicated as issued by the NSO. According to that document, Daniel Bamba Villar, son of Manuel Villar and Curita Bamba, address xx (number illegible) Bernardo Street, North Balut, Navotas, died at the Far Eastern University Hospital on Oct. 13, 1962, at the age of three years and eight months, of cardio-respiratory failure due to leukemia (there is something about red cells, but the writing again is illegible), after a 13-day hospital stay. In the space for informant, the signatory is Manuel Villar, father.

Now, that Daniel Villar was brought to a private hospital-FEUH had the same reputation then as Makati Medical or Manila Doctors or St Luke's would have now-rather than, say, a government hospital like the Philippine General Hospital, or San Lazaro, does not necessarily disprove the Villar ad contention that his family was poor. It is not unusual for families, however poor, to do what is necessary in order to secure the best care for their children, and damn the consequences. That it was Funeraria Paz (one of the two top funeral parlors at that time), as indicated on the same death certificate, that took care of the funeral arrangements, again does not necessarily contradict the "I was poor" contention, for the same reason.

But then, Villar does not just say in the ad that his family was poor. He said his brother died because there was no money for medicine or medical care. That appears to be clearly contradicted by the certificate.

Moreover, there is the matter of the address provided by Villar senior: apparently, from pictures and on-site investigation, Bernardo Street in North Balut is part of San Rafael Village, a gated community, equivalent at that time to FilAm Homes in Quezon City. A copy of the Transfer Certificate of Title for the property-which is a 560-square-meter lot-has also been provided. Now anyone who can afford to buy a 560-square-meter lot (the TCT shows that Villar senior borrowed P16,000 from the GSIS for the release of the title-which at current prices is roughly equivalent to P1.266 million) is not exactly consistent with being dirt poor.

Finally, there is the matter of Senator Villar's assertion that if he just wanted to get richer, all he needed to do was get back to being a businessman. Again, the documentary evidence: his Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN) for 1992-the first year he joined government as a congressman-showed that his net worth was P75 million. After nine years of being a congressman, and eight years of being a senator, his most recent SALN (2008) shows a net worth of P1.047 billion. Being in public office surely has paid off for him.