Puno shouldn’t act like a Mafia underboss

ANTIPOLO Rep. Ronaldo Puno should stop acting like a Mafia underboss, threatening to expel Cavite Rep. Francisco Barzaga for accusing tycoon Enrique Razon of “bribing” congressmen to support former House speaker Martin Romualdez. It is not clear if Barzaga was referring to Romualdez’s speakership before he stepped down in the wake of the massive ghost-flood-control-projects scam, or to his bid in July to reclaim the post.

It is so inappropriate for this 78-year-old over-the-hump political samurai to threaten the 27-year-old “Kiko” Barzaga who, despite his faults, represents an emerging new breed of congressman. Puno protests too much, enforcing public perception that there is a lot of truth to Barzaga’s indictment of his colleagues.

Puno forgets that he is way past his political prime now; his vaunted network among local governments existed only a generation ago. More importantly, he forgets that Kiko Barzaga’s father, Elpidio, was one of the founders of the National Unity Party, which Puno officially heads, and who clearly played a leading role in the NUP’s consolidation and subsequent growth, serving as vice president for external affairs, then party chair and later national president, which made him one of the central figures shaping the party’s direction.

In contrast, Puno during this time was still licking his wounds from his failure as chief campaign manager of Jojo Binay’s presidential bid in 2016, especially as the candidate had a huge lead two years before the elections.

Puno is even showing signs of mental rust, as he issued a press statement that Barzaga’s allegations had “no logic” at all since Romualdez has had a “supermajority” of votes, and ran without competition. Puno, in his foggy mind, forgets that it could be because of massive bribes that Romualdez precisely had no competition.

Moral

Puno demonstrates that all these years he hasn’t really found a moral compass: How can he continue to support Romualdez, who has been fingered by at least three insiders to have received at least P1 billion from the ghost-flood-control-projects scam, one of the most horrific cases of corruption ever, as it stole money intended to mitigate floods in the country?

The tycoon Razon doesn’t need Puno to come to his rescue, unless the congressman is so servile to him he has rushed to volunteer as the tycoon’s spokesman. Razon can mobilize a phalanx of the country’s best lawyers, particularly those who can “reach” the judges to get Barzaga convicted of cyber libel.

However, Razon may have been ill-advised by lawyers salivating for their fat legal fees in suing Barzaga, who has that boldness of a young man to pursue a fight he sees as a crusade against the corrupt.

Razon forgets the many reasons a court suit for libel isn’t really such an attractive option: He and his conglomerate will have to face endless, media-covered court hearings, whether he did bribe or not even a single congressman. Barzaga isn’t a real politician if he can’t mobilize a hundred people to hit the streets in his support.

Is Razon willing to see demonstrators daily at his posh Solaire casinos? Will his security consultant, former police captain Michael Ray Aquino, who had been implicated in the Dacer-Orbito murder case, be willing to be interviewed by media as he confronts the demonstrators?

280,000 voters

Razon and Puno forget that Barzaga was elected by over 280,000 voters in Cavite’s 1st district, the biggest vote among the six other representatives in the province. Puno got only half of that in winning in one of the smallest congressional districts in the country.

While Barzaga has been criticizing the Remulla brothers, in line with his overarching view that the Marcos regime is corrupt, the Remullas haven’t ditched him. Who does the politically minuscule Puno of Antipolo think he is to demand the axing of a prominent son of Cavite, the province with the second biggest number of voters (2.5 million, after Cebu’s 3.4 million), whose political clans (after the Barzagas, the Remullas, Revillas and Tagaytay’s Tolentinos) despite electoral intramurals, are known to stick together?

I think Barzaga was simply not properly briefed by his father on the realities of political parties in the Philippines in his interpretation that Razon had bribed congressmen to keep Romualdez as House.

Razon is widely known in political circles as always being financially supportive of the party in power, or will be in power, a practice that most tycoons in fact follow. Barzaga would have known this, probably with some colleague bragging, even falsely, that he got some cash from the tycoon, and blurted this out.

To determine where his contributions should go in a political contest, Razon even has a professional pollster under his payroll, whose only job is to undertake intensive surveys on the likely winner in a presidential contest. As a result, he always bets early enough on the winning presidential candidate.

Bilyonaryo

Because it has recently attracted expensive names in broadcast media, such as Korina Sanchez-Roxas and Pinky Webb, the grapevine has it that Razon owns the fast-growing Bilyonaryo internet newspaper and streaming broadcast digital TV. No one believes that its two purported owners, journalists Gil Cabacungan and Rey Marfil, have the finances or the banking support to fund Bilyonaryo. A media operator working for Razon told me he couldn’t get any confirmation or denial of this report.

It is not only Razon who supports the Lakas-CMD, but also mainly the Romualdez business empire. Lakas’ gravitational pull comes from two sources. First, its control of the speakership, which makes it the gateway to the pork superhighway: flood-control multi-billions, district infrastructure, unprogrammed allocations, and agency insertions. Business groups — from major contractors to utilities — naturally orbit this power center. Not because they “fund” Lakas, but because its leadership shapes the very environment where franchises, concessions and public-private projects are decided.

Razon is certainly not unique in supporting a political party. All major political parties are being supported by several tycoons, with their members getting monthly allowances, ranging from P200,000 to P500,000.

If one wants to understand why Philippine politics looks the way it does — why parties rise and fall, why some endure without ideology, why Congress behaves more like a federation of clans than a national assembly — then one must look beyond official platforms. Parties in this country do not exist in the European sense, with doctrinal purity and disciplined cadres. They are the political expressions of business ecosystems, regional power blocs, and the economic geography shaped by a century of elite rule.

Empire

If Lakas is the party of patronage, the Nacionalista Party is the party of a business empire. It is the political expression of the Villar Group, whose tentacles extend from mass housing and shopping malls to water utilities and vertical developments from Cavite to Pampanga.

In this country where the line between the public and private is always porous, the Villar family managed to build what amounts to a vertically integrated political-economic corporation: Camella produces voters; Vista Land houses them; AllHome supplies their hardware needs; AllDay feeds them; and Nacionalista gives them their political leadership. The party’s core strength lies in the southern corridor of Metro Manila — Las Piñas, Muntinlupa, Cavite — where rapid suburban expansion created a political terrain almost tailor-made for Villar’s real estate vision. It is here where the Nacionalista machine finds both voters and economic terrain aligned with its interests. This is not corruption; this is simply the Philippine version of vertical synergy.

No party has risen and fallen as dramatically as PDP-Laban. Once a minor ideology-driven group founded by the late Aquilino Pimentel Jr., it transformed into a Mindanao behemoth under former president Rodrigo Duterte. But PDP-Laban’s strength was never doctrinal. It came from Mindanao’s business and political establishment, finally granted a national throne after decades of Manila-centric rule.

Davao’s business clans — port operators, agribusiness exporters, logistics tycoons, and the energy-focused Alcantara Group — found their interests aligned with a presidency that placed Mindanao at the center of the national agenda. These were not financiers; these were stakeholders in an economic renaissance that Duterte accelerated.

Yet as quickly as PDP rose, it fragmented, split between Duterte loyalists and opportunistic factions seeking to align with the Marcos administration. Its future depends entirely on the next moves of the Duterte family.

Titan

The Nationalist People’s Coalition remains the most enduring example of a party built around a corporate titan. Founded by the late business tycoon Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, the NPC had clear roots in the San Miguel Corp. ecosystem: agro-industrial interests, food production chains, tollways, energy plants and manufacturing networks.

The most pathetic party is the Communist Party, whose eight fronts, called the Makabayan bloc, are supported not by any political tycoon, but through the intelligence funds of Marcos himself, whose father’s strongman regime killed, maimed or imprisoned thousands of communists and communist activists.

It was Karl Marx himself 200 years ago who pointed out what we are seeing in the Philippine situation, as in most other countries — that the state is nothing but the “executive committee” of the ruling class. Unfortunately, the Philippine ruling class’ executive committee has often been bungling, inefficient and corrupt.

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Puno shouldn’t act like a Mafia underboss
Source: Breaking News PH