On CIAC Piracy: Arrey's arrogant alibi

 

                                                                    Photo: CIAC FB page

By The Editor

“CIAC IS proud to conceive of this project with the inspiration of the likes of the rising San Diego Sports Arena in California, as presented at the second Clark Technical Working Group on the Enhancement of the Utilization of Clark International Airport meeting.”

Sans an iota of remorse, all arrogance is the alibi to Arrey Perez, president of the Clark International Airport Corp., being caught red-handed in a virtual act of piracy – appropriating an image of Midway Rising – a mixed-use development in San Diego, California USA by SafdieRabines Architects – for the so-called planned Clark Arena “to be Taylor Swift-ready by 2028.”

CIAC’s pilferage was first called out by the country’s “premier architecture and design discussion group on Facebook,” Arki-Talk Pilipinas, subsequently going viral and landing a space in Punto! under the head Piracy becomes CIAC on July 14.

“There was no copyright infringement intended in the course of presenting the benchmarks of our project development process to like minds and peers among national leaders and private sector stakeholders,” CIAC continued in its FB post.

Pure Machiavellian goes CIAC here – “The end justifies the means.”

Inspiration and intention, in this instance, exculpating Perez’s piracy. Which, by no means hold any ground in logic or in law. And yes, ain’t it long been a truism that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”?     

If indeed, the “San Diego Sports Arena” formed part of the inspirations to the Clark Arena project, why was it not cited during Perez’s presentation? Why was the CIAC logo appended to its image used as the backdrop, without any reference to its origin?

And no copyright infringement “to like minds and peers among national leaders and private sector stakeholders” present during Perez’s presentation?

Piracy. Plagiarism. Infringement. Determined in the misdeed, not in the mind, Sir. 

Still, CIAC may have spoken too early, if inclusively.

DOT disassociates from Perez

The Department of Tourism on July 14 clarified what it called an "erroneous information" going viral that, it said, wrongly attributed the image used in the presentation of Perez to Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco, who happened to be photographed seated in front of the pirated image during the presentation.

“Neither the DOT nor Secretary Frasco were (sic) involved in the creation or delivery of these plans made and presented by Mr. Perez,” the DOT said, asking CIAC to confirm its assertion.

The DOT’s disassociation from any involvement in Perez’s plans and presentation may be coming from Frasco’s own traumatic experience with a similar incident of viral piracy about same time last year. 

July 2023 – the DOT generated global opprobrium with its tourism campaign video Love the Philippines using stock shots of rice terraces in Bali, sand dunes in the United Arab Emirates, and an aircraft landing in Switzerland passing them off as taken in the Philippines.

Incidentally, a DOT faux pas went virtual again this weekend with a travel poster at the NAIA mislocating the Banaue Rice Terraces in Benguet. The world wonder is actually in Ifugao.

As quick in apologizing for the misconduct of the ad agency DBB Philippines in its video campaign, the DOT has taken down the poster.

But not Perez. Bokya na, humihirit pa, as the tambay-kanto is wont to say.   

Give it to this CIAC top honcho though. The enthusiasm with which he sells the Clark civil aviation complex eclipses those of his predecessors combined.

Ardent, Perez definitely is. But not exactly frank and honest, alas!   

13 new flights at CRK 

Only this February 2024, in an event in Taguig where he was the featured guest, Perez announced the Clark International Airport would introduce new local and international routes during the year. These, he said, included Taipei, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Narita, Macau, Cheongju, Coron, Bacolod, Iloilo, Davao, General Santos, Cagayan de Oro, and Puerto Princesa.
Perez’s announcement was lapped up in the national media – Clark airport to open up 13 new routes (PDI-Feb. 3, 2024), Clark airport to open 13 new destinations this year (Financial District-Feb. 3, 2024), Clark airport wants to double passenger volume to 4M in 2024 (PNA-Feb. 2, 2024), to name a few. 

The editors should have known better than to oblige Perez’s canard. They could have easily clicked the same headlines and found that 25 days to a full year ago – Feb. 28, 2023 – Cebu Pacific expanded its operations at CRK with a combined 13 domestic and international flights: namely, Taipei, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Narita, Macau, Cheongju, Coron, Bacolod, Iloilo, Davao, General Santos, Cagayan de Oro, and Puerto Princesa.

The country’s leading airline even offered bookings on Feb. 27 to March 1, 2023, for as low as PHP1 one-way base fare, exclusive of surcharges and fees. Travel period is from April 21 to Oct. 29, 2023.  

What Cebu Pacific already accomplished, Perez, in effect, brought back to the future. Where had he been all year? Clueless over what has long happened in his own backyard.

CIAC holds oversight functions on the CRK, which is actually operated and maintained by the private consortium LIPAD (Luzon International Premier Airport Development) Corp. Now, how can anyone expect CIAC to pursue even but a modicum of that mandate if its president is oblivious to facts as simple as the coming and going of flights at CRK?

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Deceitful in one, deceitful in all. In the two cases of Perez, falsus in duo too. If only for this, Perez makes proof positive of the utter irrelevance of CIAC in the grand scheme of things in Clark.

His antics, but an aggravation of that fact. Made more glaring vis-a-vis the highly tangible accomplishments of LIPAD, Clark Development Corp., and the Bases Conversion and Development Authority in transforming the former bastion of US imperialism in the Far East into an engine of national development and gateway to the world.

 

Piracy becomes CIAC

          CIAC president Arrey Perez presents Clark arena project. Photo: CIAC

“COMMENCEMENT OF PROJECT DEVELOPMENT TAYLOR-SWIFT CONCERT READY BY 2028.”

So, read one backdrop in the power point presentation of Clark International Airport Corp. president Arrey Perez on the sidelines of the “Build Better More” Infrastructure Forum at the New Clark City on July 12.

While Perez has been harping on that 40-hectare P32-billion entertainment and events center as part of the 7-Point Agenda of CIAC for at least a year now, this was the first time that Taylor Swift’s name was connected to the project, instantly sparking speculations the so-called Clark Arena would be inaugurated by a Swift concert in 2028.

Perez, however, clarified with Philstar.com, that Swift’s concert was “is only the standard they will use to design and build the Clark Arena to attract major popstars.”

“I hope by that time when we build our complex ay reading ready na tayo i-host siya (Taylor) because the Philippines has always been a music-loving industry. Whenever there are international concerts laging pumapatok especially with Clark, very easy. Nandiyan lang ‘yung airport,” so Perez was quoted as saying.

Swift dreams, vaporizing as swiftly. Thanks, and no thanks, Arrey.

As though taking Swift’s name in vain were not enough, CIAC/Perez sinned mortally – appropriating an image for its “Taylor Swift-ready” arena and imprinting thereat the CIAC logo. Sans any other accreditation visible.       

It took the the country’s “premier architecture and design discussion group on Facebook,” Arki-Talk Pilipinas to call out this seeming piracy by CIAC.

“It seems that the backdrop is stolen from Midway Rising- a mixed-use development in San Diego California USA by SafdieRabines Architects. Another bad light for the Philippines.” Posted thereat were the CIAC backdrop – with Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco and LIPAD president Noel Manankil seated in front, and the original image watermarked “SafdieRabines Architects.”

                                         Photos grabbed from Arki-Talk Pilipinas FB page)

“Clark really needs also more attractions so that we can really attract more passengers, more airlines to the airport.” So, Perez rationalized his BBM Infra forum presentation.

Not by infringing on the intellectual property rights of others though. That is plain thievery. That is a felony, Sir.  

 

 

What's up in Mabalacat? Picture tells the story

 

Commentary

What’s up in Mabalacat?

MONDAY’S flag-raising ceremony at the Mabalacat City Hall grounds took the sound and fury – okay, electricity – of a “miting de avance” as majority members of the city council took turns in their passionate panegyrics of Mayor Crisostomo Garbo before placard-waving and hurraying city hall employees, JO workers, and capitan-herded barangay folk.

 

Shared vision for the city’s progress. Exemplary governance. Dedication to public service. Commitment to the city’s growth. Upstanding leadership. Positive impact on the city and the Mabalaquenians. Thus, the honorable aldermen veritably canonized, if not apotheosized, Garbo.

What gives? Why this sudden ostentatious obsequiousness to Garbo? When, for all intent and purposes, the mayor has always had the council – save for the filibustering maverick but always outvoted Marcos Castro Jr. – at the very palm of his left hand, with the right for the petting, er, patting. And nothing of this show of force was ever staged in hizzoner’s honor except in his campaign salvoes.  

No surprise, most naturally, was Castro’s invisibility at Monday’s event. But very conspicuous in his absence was Vice Mayor Gerald Guttrie P. Aquino, Garbo’s running-mate in his twin triumphs for the mayoralty.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Photo tells the story  

OVER THE weekend, New Media Pampanga posted in its FB page a photograph of renowned businessman-philanthropist Rodolfo “Tatay Bong” Pineda and VM Aquino making the thumbs-up gesture.

The accompanying caption said Tatay invited the vice mayor “for a casual meeting” at the Pineda’s Pradera Verde Golf and Country Club in Lubao town – rubbing in the importance of Aquino, if not the significance of the meetup, with the information that he “was transported via chopper from the Mabalacat City Hall Grounds to Pradera Verde.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” So, the truism holds. Hence, New Media Pampanga did not even have to post a caption with the photograph.    

“The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface.  Now think — or rather feel, intuit — what is beyond it…’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy…” Thus, Susan Sontag in her book On Photography. Hope we put the quotation marks right.

Boundless speculations – from the magnanimous to the malicious, limitless deductions – from the sapient to the senseless did, indeed, the Tatay-Aquino photograph invite.

The most telling being Aquino as the Pinedas’ new niño bonito. Meaning, Garbo’s political patrons have shunted him aside. Meaning, he has run the course of his three-terms, and if he insisted on running for mayor in 2025, will just go the way of his predecessor, once forever Mabalacat Mayor Marino “Boking” Morales unseated from the post he kept for 21 years, his candidacy deemed void ab initio for violating the term limit.

Garbo opting to put up his daughter, board member Win-Win, for the mayoralty with him running for vice mayor is out of the equation, insofar as the Pinedas are concerned. Besides, it smacks of Boking circa 2016 – withdrawing his candidacy in favor of his wife Niña and then substituting for her at the eleventh hour. That very act that sealed Boking’s political damnation.

Garbo giving way to a Win-Win Garbo-Christian Halili tandem will get no Pineda sanction. Aquino is the chosen. No possible motion for reconsideration.

More familial than political are the reasons that factored in Tatay’s adoption of Aquino as Pampanga’s first family’s bet for Mabalacat City. The vice mayor’s mother is Precy Aquino, nee Pineda of the city’s landed gentry.

Garbo’s fall out of the Pinedas’ graces started with the controversies that hounded the city’s multi-billion-peso loan from the Land Bank for a new city hall and city center that even merited a complaint with the Ombudsman and House hearings. Any whiff of corruption is verboten to the Pinedas. Neither can they ever countenance Garbo’s lavish lifestyle.  

Tatay approves, Geld Aquino wins!

“Abac na balen.”  A new day dawning for Mabalacat City.

Ah, what immense power a photograph wields!   

 

That POGO psyche

 

HIGH WALLS. Tall gate opening to a tree-lined driveway. Multi-slot carport. Sprawling well-manicured gardens. Mansion in the middle of a man-made lake.  Rows of villas. Swimming pool. Salon and spa. KTV bar and game rooms. Entertainment center. Helipad. Underground tunnel. Hidden firing range equipped with electronic controls for pistol and rifle targets.

In the movie in our minds, images of a Colombian drug lord’s lair, or an Italian mafioso don’s casa signorile. In the reality of Barangay Señora, Porac, Pampanga, the exclusive enclave of Chinese POGO bosses.

How did it come to this?

In the China of Chairman Mao, these POGO bosses would have been instantly branded “unrepentant bourgeois,” immediately denounced as “capitalist roaders,” and promptly damned and dispatched accordingly for their betrayal of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Alas, Mao’s long dead. Interred in the deepest recesses of his people’s collective memory, his thoughts and quotes hardly remembered.

To make matters worse – in the Maoist context – more emperor than communist party chair is Xi Jinping – indeed, the embodiment of the scourge that the Great Helmsman in his Circular of May 16, 1966: warned his people against: “Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

With the sacred socialist creed abandoned, and compulsive capitalist greed enshrined, how else explain these Chinese behaving badly, be they in these POGOs or in the West Philippine Sea?