I was still at the 19th International Hot Air Balloon Festival when the National Transformation Council held a presscon last Saturday, which was opened to the press and what his eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal read to the press is now being misunderstood even by the press for the simple reason that people like Fr. Jojo Aquino came up with their own opinions that the Cardinal merely read the paper written by the NTC.
Frankly speaking… I know that there is a massive campaign by the Malacañang sycophants to sow confusion in light of what Cardinal Vidal has said… and the Cebu media unknowingly is playing into their hands. If you don't believe that the Cardinal is part and parcel of the NTC then you are free to ask him again. Remember, Cardinal Vidal agreed to chair the NTC so what was written and what was announced is not just the thoughts of the Cardinal, but the whole NTC all over the country.
The media was invited to the Oct. 1, 2014 NTC conference at the ALU Building in the Port Area where again Cardinal Vidal officiated the Holy Mass and Archbishop Ramon Arguelles read the Cebu Declaration asking the Aquino Regime to step down in light of what former Congressman Glenn Chiong showed in his PowerPoint presentation detailing how the Commission on Elections misused the Precinct Count Optical Scan in both the 2010 and 2013 elections. That presentation was hard evidence of the massive electronic Dag-Dag Bawas and it triggered more declarations for Aquino to step down!
But before the presentation of Atty. Glenn Chiong, Pastor Greco Belgica also gave a full report on the case that he filed before the Supreme Court against the Disbursement Acceleration Program and the Priority Development Assistance Fund, which has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Alas, only a sketchy report about the NTC Declaration came out of our local newspapers, because no one had an idea of what the NTC was advocating. Mind you, this was before the SAF debacle.
But since the Feb. 13th declaration by the NTC, as read by Cardinal Vidal, the NTC has suddenly become mainstream news, especially with former Defense Secretary Bert Gonzalez who was tagged as a coup plotter by Sen. Antonio Trillanes, IV. But in the morning program "Umaga kay Ganda" of Anthony Taberna in ABS-CBN last Tuesday and in Karen Davila's Headstart an hour later, Bert Gonzalez clearly pointed out that he was not supporting any coup by the military but he was for People's Power.
People's Power against the Aquino Regime would be the biggest irony of ironies! In the first place, Pres. PNoy Aquino cannot say that calling for People's Power is illegal simply because the Aquino political family benefited from the first People's Power in 1986.
Yet 29 years after the first EDSA, the Filipino people are fed up with People's Power because it has not brought the needed change for the betterment of the Filipino people. But the last 29 years was certainly great times for the people belonging to the political elite who have mastered the art of stealing from the "Kaban ng Bayan" using fake NGO's as reported in the case of Janet Lim Napoles. This is why we need to change our government.
What the NTC is advocating is political reforms that would literally clean the slate and reshape the political landscape of our nation. But then, the people who do not want reform are the politicians, which is why the nation has stagnated for so long because there is no money for hospitals or medicines, schools and infrastructure because of the cancer of corruption.
Now that the NTC has become mainstream news, the Cebu media is in a frenzy, asking what the NTC is all about and who the members are. I was also asked by our Freeman reporter how many members there are but I told him that I don't have any idea simply because the NTC already held conferences all over the country. Let me refresh our readers what the NTC had been doing last year…in a column that I wrote last Dec. 8, 2014:
"The first NTC Assembly was held in Lipa City and hosted by Archbishop Ramon Argüelles last Aug. 27th and this was followed here in Cebu on Oct. 1st at the ALU Building and hosted by his eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal. This was followed last Nov. 11th in Butuan City hosted by Arch. Pueblos de Dios and then last Dec. 3rd in Clark, Pampanga. Archbishop Emeritus Fernando Capalla hosted the NTC in Davao.
While the Lipa, Cebu, and the Clark NTC's had only an attendance of one thousand delegates, the NTC assembly in Butuan had nearly two thousand delegates and the Davao City NTC had more than three thousand delegates, which included two factions of the Moro National Liberation Front. I was on the table with Dr. Mashur Jundam, a retired UP Professor on Islamic Studies who is not the national chairman of the MNLF." That's the NTC!