Public enemy No.1

here's from my mailbox from "zion heavan"
(i don't care who this is, i have an axe to grind against this mammoth of a user.)


MASTER muzzler. Double talker.

We couldn't help but use these words to describe the Lopez family which runs Meralco for its refusal to grant media coverage of the company's stockholders' meeting on Tuesday, May 27--because we couldn't see any valid reason why they did it.

Because precisely they are the Lopezes, how could they refuse coverage of a great public event, we want to ask. Do they have anything to hide?

Or indeed, there must have been truth to what GSIS President Winston Garcia has been saying all along—-that they have been hiding so many things to the public.

So many things, and not exactly as noble as the Lopezes of great old times had wished and done for this company, among them the paper trail of the present management's magnum opus to put the burden of paying more than P400 million in their own electric consumption a year to the poor, unsuspecting millions of customers.

It's time to know the truth, time to winnow facts from fiction, but the Lopezes would prefer to deny the public of that right, reminiscent of the Spanish friars who had deprived the indios of a good education because the gift of wisdom would cause a great social storm.

By our reckoning, Garcia's series of expose on Meralco are so revolting, it only means that Lopezes had squeezed the public dry to keep them and their minions oiled.

If these are not all true, why are they afraid of a public scrutiny?

We couldn't understand why this Lopez family who emerged triumphant fighting long and hard the Marcos dictatorship would be so afraid of an hour or two of a boardroom battle.

The Lopezes¸ for the longest time the owners and managers of Meralco and the giant network ABS-CBN, should be the last family standing while promoting and protecting public interest.

We couldn't understand why this family who raised all the books on free speech through those dark years would now deprive the public they ought to serve of the same freedom to know the truth about Meralco's "system loss" charges, to "generation charges, transmission charges, metering charges, universal charges—-to name a few.

Along with the ABS-CBN employees, the Lopezes have raised hell many times--the last one was when the AFP and the police denied their reporters and cameramen free access to the Manila Peninsula siege--when their right to information was threatened.

Another sister company, ANC, always takes pride in its non-stop coverage of public hearings at the House and the Senate involving every possible scandal in the government.

In fact, the Lopezes claim that the campaign to lower electricity rates by demanding a change in management of Meralco is a result of the critical reporting by ABS-CBN, ANC, and their radio network, dzMM of what has been happening to the government.

Talk is cheap, if untrue.

Is this why Lopez management has flatly rejected a request from ABS-CBN's rival GMA 7television network to cover the stockholders' meeting live?

Indeed, it's a different story, if you are the one getting the prick of the syringe? Freedom of speech for thee, but not for you and me--the public as stockholders and consumers with as much stake in this public utility?

Didn't the people of the Lopez's TV and radio stations throw everything, including the kitchen sink, to this rival TV station which, they said, gave an inaccurate story about their own ratings? And they did so at a great inconvenience to the public they ought to serve?

Or perhaps, that is precisely the whole point of the refusal of a media coverage of the Meralco stockholders' meeting: It is not the interest of the public that is at stake here, it is the interest of the Lopezes. Nothing more, nothing less. Hindi tayo kapamilya, kaya hindi tayo kasama?

And who belongs to this family? Not those who have been robbed of hard earned money to pay high electricity rates to allow the Lopezes to live it up.

Not the Meralco employees/shareholders who were asked to sign or resign if they wouldn't allow the Lopezes to get all the proxy votes for the May 27 stockholders' meeting? What a way to stay in power!

How do the Lopezes indeed define public interest then? Doesn't this one of Meralco's most of its controversial stockholders meetings fall under public interest? And hence requires vigorous reporting?

Media coverage, the Lopezes used to say, is the best protection against oppressors, if that is how they prefer to call their critics, but how come the Lopezes are not using a great public tool that protected them during the Marcos years, that protected the great mass of people against military power called Edsa Revolution that paved the way for them to reclaim the country's biggest electricity distribution firm?

Times have changed--and how! It only exposed the Lopezes own folly that the things they did then and now was for their own good, never for the public, even if the Lopezes have managed to confuse the two different interests at their convenience. Again, master muzzler, double talker.