“(The President) has damaged the moral fabric of society and therefore has lost the moral right to lead the nation. (He has) subverted and violated the Constitution by corrupting Congress, intimidating the Judiciary, taking over the Treasury, manipulating the automated voting system, and perverting the constitutional impeachment process.”
- Cardinal Ricardo Vidal, (Archbishop Bishop Emeritus of Cebu), a native of Marinduque.
Written by Tribune Wires, 3 October 2014
Calls for the resignation of President Aquino have become louder, with the Cebu Assembly of National Transformation Council (NTC) adding its voice to an earlier call from the Lipa Declaration.
Last Tuesday, some 5,000 people from Cebu City and various parts of the Visayas and Mindanao came together to promulgate the Cebu Assembly of the National Transformation Council (NTC) at the Mariners’ Compound, ALU-TUCP, Pier 1, Cebu City.
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| Cardinal Ricardo Vidal, native of Mogpog, Marinduque |
Led by Cardinal Ricardo Vidal, archbishop emeritus of Cebu, Archbishop Ramon Arguelles of the Archdiocese of Lipa, Archbishop Romulo de la Cruz of the Archdiocese of Zamboanga City, and Bishop Juan de Dios Pueblos of Butuan City, the Assembly was also attended by various leaders of the United Church of Christ of the Philippines, the Ustadz from Mindanao as well as various sectoral and professional leaders, elements of the MILF, led by Ed Kabalu and MNLF, leading educators from the RVM Sisters and Daughters of Charity, and various civic organizations.
The Cebu Assembly of the NTC, which featured the signing of the 4-page NTC document, echoed the call of Cardinal Vidal and the other bishops for President Aquino to step down from office, for as Cardinal Vidal had stressed in his talk, “(The President) has damaged the moral fabric of society and therefore has lost the moral right to lead the nation.”
This was the same call and the same message issued to then President Ferdinand Marcos in the mid-eighties demanding his resignation by reason of his having lost his moral right for destroying the moral fabric of society by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines led by its then president, Archbishop Vidal.
The Cebu prelate said: “We noted with great pain that while the moral and spiritual crisis and its political and economic effects continued to deepen, the national political leadership consistently failed to show the will or the capacity to respond to these ills in any appreciable measure.”
Vidal said Aquino has “subverted and violated the Constitution by corrupting Congress, intimidating the Judiciary, taking over the Treasury, manipulating the automated voting system, and perverting the constitutional impeachment process.”
It will be recalled that, to get then Chief Justice Renato Corona impeached by the House of Representatives, and on an overkill of numbers, Aquino had bribed the legislators with soft and hard projects in the hundreds of millions funded by the unconstitutional and illegal Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), wherein the Supreme Court had ruled that the acts committed by the creator, implementor and others involved cannot be washed away by claiming good faith, saying that good faith must be proved in a court of law.
To get the Chief Justice convicted by the Senate, Aquino was said to have bribed the senators with hundreds of millions to convict Corona, also through the DAP.
Aquino has also been threatening the justices of the Supreme Court after it ruled that acts committed from the DAP, as unconstitutional and illegal.
There have also been serious allegations of Aquino and his Commission on Elections (Comelec) having rigged the 2013 senatorial elections, with the proof being the 60-30-10 voting pattern nationwide favoring his nine senatorial candidates, which voting pattern is statistically impossible. Also, it has been found that there were invisible vertical lines in the ballots intended to invalidate the votes of the opposition candidates.
It will be recalled that Aquino’s aunt in law, Tingting Cojuangco, earlier bared that there was cheating during the 2013 senatorial polls, saying that her nephew, President Aquino, was aware of the cheating, and even gave an unnamed general P30 million “to clean up” the evidence of electoral fraud.
Of the electoral fraud, Vidal’s statement read: The total absence of any official effort to reform the automated election system, which was thoroughly corrupted and debased by the Commission on Elections in its effort to produce “machine-made” and “de facto” high government officials during the 2010 presidential and the 2013 senatorial elections, but which the administration is once again preparing to use in the projected 2016 presidential elections, without restoring the safety features and accuracy mechanisms, which the Comelec had illegally removed in the previous two elections.”
The Cebu Church leader, who said he received a congratulatory message of support from the current Archbishop of Cebu Jose Palma, who is currently in Rome on official visit, stressed to the Cebu Assembly that the transformation efforts are aimed toward correcting the “political dysfunctions” that the nation is currently witnessing and that these are “mere symptoms of the problems, but more importantly, the roots of the crisis as well.”
Aside from calling on President Aquino to step down from office, the Cebu Assembly also called for the prosecution and punishment of the politicians who were involved in the misuse and abuse of the PDAF and the DAP that run into P150 billion, as well as the establishment of a “People’s Truth Commission” to determine and unravel the accountability and any consequent liability of high officials of the Aquino Administration.
Vidal also slammed Aquino, saying: “The total failure, if not downright refusal, of the Aquino regime to comply with a direct order of the Supreme Court to file criminal charges against all the lawmakers and members of the executive department and the Commission on Audit who were involved in the grave misuse of the priority development assistance fund (PDAF) and the DAP, both of which the court had unanimously declared unconstitutional.”
While three opposition senators and their aides were charged, none of the allies of Aquino nor his secretaries, such as Budget chief, Florencio “Butch” Abad and others were charged. Instead, they were all absolved by Aquino.
The Assembly, a direct successor of the Lipa Declaration launched in Lipa last Aug. 27, 2014, also called on the abolition of the “utterly corrupt” Comelec and the establishment of an honest and credible electoral system needed to restore the integrity and credibility of the electoral process and provide a systems change toward national transformation. It also demanded the revamp of the badly discredited Philippine National Police.
In calling for the removal of all the officials of the government from the President down, who are found guilty of culpability, the Cebu Assembly called upon the NTC to immediately organize an alternative government of men and women of integrity and proven worth, to run the government so as to prevent a political vacuum. - The DAILY TRIBUNE
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| A hamlet in Mogpog, Marinduque |
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