By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

The panic index at the Palace is at fever pitch with the President trust rating plummeting double-digits at 14% from 47 to 33. Worse, everywhere you go in Metro Manila, at least, everybody seems to be awaiting the showing of an alleged “pulvoron” video involving the President.

Latest to come out in social media is a purported casing mission of operatives of the Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) with the possibility of entrapping a certain “Bonget”, an actress and friends having a drug session at Rizal Tower in Rockwell center in Makati sometime in 2012.

At the rate it is going, it seems to push the incumbent Marcos Jr to resign or fight it out with dictatorial powers. But whichever way it goes one thing sure is that the people will not tolerate a drug addict running the country.

Since this President cannot be removed by impeachment because the Speaker of the House of Representatives is his cousin, or even if impeached, can afford to buy out a determinant vote in the Senate to avoid conviction, the prospects for the “people power” factor has been increasing.

Former president Rodrigo Duterte has led protests in Davao and Cebu opposing the administration’s wrong priorities in calling for charter change. He is of the opinion that the present dispensation merely wants to extend their term limits.

But what is ominous is a show of force by one religious sect conducting a well-organized weeklong prayer rally at the Liwasang Bonifacio in Manila, with an average of 5,000 attending, expressing dissent over how its leader, Pastor Apollo Quiboloy has been tried by publicity by this government.
That location is less than three kilometers and about a 20-minute walk to Malacanang Palace.

But many wish to avoid any more “Edsa’s”, the first removed Marcos Jr’s father Ferdinand in 1986 sending the Marcos family to exile in Hawaii, and the second forced a “constructive resignation” Erap Estrada in 2001. There is always that prospect of a foreign power deciding the final outcome.

The popular hope is for a patriotic military to intervene and turnover leadership of the country to a revolutionary government, led by a benevolent civilian-led junta, that would turn the government from a dysfunctional unitarian trap set by the Americans onto a simplified federal-parliamentary form. The mandate is in our Constitution, in Article II Section 3 providing that “The Armed Forces of the Philippines is the protector of the people and the State.”

After thirty years of revolving door mal-governance that saw the transfer of many government assets to the private sector, thus shifting from public service to private profiteering, gnawing corruption and incompetent public policies from Cory Aquino the mother to Noynoy her son, the people elected a populist city mayor from Mindanao who hated drugs, communist terrorists and the Americans.

The “promdi” (one who is raised from the province), however, was a stickler for the rule of law and had priorities that improved overnight the country’s micro-economics aiming for a single digit poverty incidence. Overnight, his friendship with Xi Jinping energized tourism to the country by as much as 5x, sent hundreds of thousands of micro and small medium investors converting Binondo and other Chinatowns in the country into a distribution hub for rural commerce, catapulted our exports to China incentivizing our farmers and farm workers, and poured in infrastructure projects, through grants and soft loans in a pace unseen in previous administrations.

Ironically, the son of the former dictator emerged as the mayor’s successor. But after pledging to pursue the development vision of his father and continue the mayor’s egalitarian policy, Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. trashed his own political and economic positions of almost two decades and abandoned his election promises to the people. 

Sass Rogando Sassot, an eloquent political scientist, attempts to provide an explanation: “Why did Marcos shift in his decade long foreign policy stances? The answer cannot be disentangled from the fact that his family’s assets are frozen in banks in Western countries to the tune of several billion dollars. And this is his best shot to recover all of them, which have been frozen for over three decades. It’s a tit-for-tat that Marcos surely cannot refuse.”

This President’s priority is to modernize the military, allegedly to protect the sovereignty of the people against foreign aggression, ostensibly China. But what he has done is to surrender the policy-making to foreign intervention, in reality by the United States. What a freaking oxymoron!

This agenda represents only 6% of the peoples’ most urgent national need according to the December 2023 survey of Pulse Asia. Most of the preference centered on economic issues with curbing the runaway inflation at 72%.

And so, governance has come to a virtual atrophy in addressing the basic and prior needs of the people, punctuated by the towering price of rice and electricity on one hand and galloping corruption and repression of liberties, on the other.

In order to divert the attention of the people from their grumbling stomachs and disappearing disposable incomes, President Marcos Jr. has added four more air force sites to the existing five bases under the Enhance Defense Cooperation Agreement, major military exercises whose phalluses creatively monikered as promoting “interoperability” are directed towards China, and “poking the bear” strategies arising from deliberate disinformation involving South China Seas to fish for a false flag blaming the Chinese.

Marcos has no control whatsoever of the country’s situation. He goes to Australia, Germany and Czech Republic acting as the agent of the United States in a slow build-up to a version of NATO in Southeast Asia, to complete what former US President Brack Obama’s pivot-to-Asia-Pacific of 60% of its military presence. Shortly in three days, he will sign a trilateral pact with Japan and the US and possibly extend the Enhance Defense Cooperation Agreement for another ten years.

Formula to atrophy

With its lawfare and information war in the South China Seas, experiencing a dead-end as he could only get a small minority to agree with him that China is a potential enemy, the charlatans, demagogues, sycophants, bigot have resulted to ad hominem attacks against those opposed to the President’s sinophobic actions.

A friend of mine in the academe said it is totally insane to make preparations, as Marcos and his American masters are doing with their maritime cooperative activities in the South China Seas to foster enhanced interoperability between the two allied forces, with a concentrated focus on advancing maritime security.

He said it is like testing how the Philippine jeepney will jibe with a used Chevy Suburban in a grand-prix versus the Chinese Hongqi at a time when Huawei is already going 6G against the Apple I-Phone.

“That’s a lot of fart,” he quipped.

For the meantime Marcos seems to be focused on wagging the dog for another American war to support the pockets of its military industrial complex.

His Department of Foreign Affairs is busy blocking eleven Chinese proposals, some of which the Philippines requested since his state visirt to China in January 2023. The legal luminaries who have displaced the true diplomats the department insist on saying China’s positions are unconstitutional but are reluctant to release details for public perusal.

As a result, the Chinese factor which can make a big difference in curbing inflation through cheap trade and infusion of new money is blockaded from entering our micro-economy. As a result, the liquidity stays at the level of the macro-level benefitting the oligarchs instead of the ordinary citizens.

Statistics say two million have been added to the poverty line since last year, but Aboitiz Energy Corp. who made Php27.5 billion in profits in 2023 has been gifted by a behest loan of Php20 million allegedly for renewal energy development. No wonder with so much liquidity presidential crony Sabin Aboitiz was able to recently purchase Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

On the other hand, the Presidential Communications Office has run out of hyperboles and idioms to repair the presidential image and has been allegedly instructed by the First Lady to crack down on government critiques to the point of unearthing skeletons in the closets of journalists, opinion writers, academic analysts and vloggers.

Articles against Marcos appearing in mainstream and social media are being peppered by troll attacks. ‘A suspicious hitlist surfaced in social media and our law student researchers are still verifying the probable source and veracity.

Earlier, some congressmen and some senators like Risa Hontiveros started maligning Sonshine Media Network Inc. and its titular head Apollo Quiboloy and some anchor persons.

Repeating mistakes

In sum, we are back to 1982 when foreign intervention has marginalized not only economic opportunities but human rights.

If the trend continues, the junior might repeat history in the same way his senior exited power. When in 1982, the Americans started tightening the financial noose on Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, instead of looking an alternative solution, the senior dug into his perceived friendship with Ronald Reagan, after dancing with the latter’s wife Nancy during his state visit to Washington DC that year.

Little did he know that soonest he and Imelda returned to the Philippines, George Schultz and Paul Wolfowitch had already organized meetings for his removal some through the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the neo-conservative and synarchist wing of American politics with a commanding presence in both Republican and Democratic parties in representing the military-industrial-complex also known as the Deep State, had already started plotting for his downfall.

In 1983, former Philippine senator Ninoy Aquino was assassinated at the Philippine tarmac. In 1984, the World Bank and the International Monetary fund shut all loan windows to the Philippines resulting in the closure of most factories sending the economy to a virtual halt. In 1985, Marcos Sr. conceded to White House pressure for him to seek a fresh mandate from the people. The snap elections was held on February 7, 1986 and 18 days later he was on his way to Hawaii to meet his eventual death there.

Note that CSIS is in the stable of this presidency through the UP Institute of Maritime Affairs for the Law of the Sea, through its funder Stratbase-Albert del Rosario Institute chaired by Manny Pangilinan. This presidency already has the fifth column deeply entrench not just in its policy-making but for a possible regime change.

The question is how short will Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos last?

   

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