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Why the Marcoses’ comeback is more tragic than ‘Shame on you’

in Editorial

Forgive and forget. Move on. Really?

As years go by—after the Filipino people finally ousted the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—it gets better and better for the Marcoses. They haven’t returned the estimated $10-billion they stole while Ferdinand Marcos was dictator and tyrant, and Imelda Marcos and two of eldest children, Imee and Bongbong, have occupied various government posts.

With a huge war chest that can only grow bigger with time, they are being served by a platoon of lawyers, allies at various levels of reactionary government, PR people, false historians, and keyboard warriors, and most of all, by the same bureaucrat capitalist system that nurtured them in power.

It lets them amass wealth at the cost of thousands of lives and the Philippines’ genuine agricultural and industrial development. It helped to pluck them out of reach of People Power and allowed them to spend five years of lavish and loud exile in Hawaii. Upon their return, towing the embalmed body of their dictator patriarch, this system welcomed them back into the fold as they slowly carved back their fiefdom.

INCHING THEIR WAY BACK TO POWER

Imelda Marcos twice attempted to run for President—in 1992 when she lost and in 1998, when she withdrew from candidacy in the middle of the campaign. In between her two presidential bids, Imelda won a seat in Congress where she served as Leyte representative for three years from 1995 to 1998. In 2010, Imelda again won a seat in Congress, this time representing the province of Ilocos Norte.

Starting from their base at Ilocos Norte, the two elder Marcos siblings took turns being governor or Ilocos Norte Representative from 1992 to 1998. It was 24 years since dictator Marcos was ousted when Bongbong Marcos entered the Senate in 2010. It took longer for Imee Marcos to enter the national scene via a Senate seat in 2019.

It was only in Bongbong Marcos’s first stab at vice-presidency in 2016 that they tasted their first defeat in what some reports call their ‘spectacular comeback.’ Unaccustomed to setback, Bongbong lodged an electoral protest he can’t let go of even after three years.

Since their inglorious, forced exit in 1986, the family of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos has now positioned itself back as close as possible to Malacañang.

But for Bongbong Marcos’s defeat at the 2016 national polls, he would have been just a heartbeat away from the presidency, a very real threat to the Filipino people considering Duterte’s illness. If Marcos Jr had “won” the vice-presidency, Duterte would have had added to his legacy the Marcoses’ total rehabilitation. As things stand now, two of the Marcos siblings are running among the pack that’s circling Malacañang.

The Marcoses is one big example of bureaucrat capitalism.

To this day articles are being written about how the dictator Marcos ‘smartly’ looted the national coffers, put up companies and seized stakes in strategic businesses, and how he ‘transformed’ the armed forces and the police to make it partisan and more corruptible than usual. US propped him up and let him use the state forces it had established, trained and armed for their own imperialist ends, facilitated by its favored local puppet. Marcos, their ‘son-of-a-bitch’ as then President Ronald Reagan said, only became a ‘problem’ to imperialist US when the people were protesting in millions. The local armed communist revolution was growing by leaps and bounds and had led the fight against the dictatorship and its imperialist master.

IT TAKES A CORRUPT SYSTEM TO REINSTATE THE MARCOSES

Marcos’ ouster will always be a historical triumph of the Filipino people’s collective power— both the armed and unarmed, those in the open and underground struggles. The ongoing turbo-charged rehabilitation of the Marcoses under Duterte, however, is as loud a reminder as we all can get that, no, the people cannot stop at just ousting the current, most abusive tyrant.

The system that breeds such ilk needs also to be smashed.

This system has proven to have merely continued the puppet presidency and imperialist domination of the country.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), in a statement issued in 2018 pinpointed that the “successive reactionary regimes failed miserably to address the clamor of the Filipino people for swift justice. Every ruling regime allowed the Marcoses to return stage by stage. None carried out a decisive act of justice fearing this will rouse demands for the same measures to be meted against them over the same crimes they themselves commit while in power.”

At the outset, Cory Aquino, responding to insistent public demand, established the PCGG (Phil. Commission on Good Governance) to go after the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. But, her administration emasculated it by ordering it to seize nothing and work instead through the courts. This was of course peanuts for the dirty-moneyed Marcoses.

The US imperialist’s rescue of their once serviceable puppet continued even after the Marcoses returned to the Philippines. The US redacted transactions involving US organizations in their records. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to disclose what they knew, reportedly prompting a veteran of PCGG to call the US and Marcoses “partners in theft.” The US likely has loads of damning information on the kleptocracy and rights abuses of the Marcoses. Not only does it enjoy control of the local state forces, it’s also been known to keep tabs on even its “allies,” according to a declassified report on the CIA’s eavesdropping on conversations of government leaders such as that of the Philippines.

With clues from the US and their latest puppet on how the Marcoses were to be cossetted since the late 80s, Marcos died in Hawaii without being punished by the Filipino people. His widow, Imelda, returned to the Philippines with her three adult children in 1992. She was greeted by an avalanche of graft cases. But with their political allies regaining government posts, she never had to worry about jail time or threats of warrants of arrest.

Imelda was convicted at least twice for graft, once in 1993 for a fraudulent land deal and in 2018 for illicit financial dealings with Switzerland-based NGO’s.

But she remains free to this day. In the 2018 conviction, under Duterte, she was asked to pay bail of only P300,000, despite the gravity of the case and the amount of what’s stolen. The conviction is turning out into a ploy to fasttrack the movement in the case.

After more than five administrations (including two Aquinos), more than 90 lawyers and personnel of PCGG at the increasingly frustrating trail of seeing signs of billions of hidden wealth, only to be whisked away before their eyes, and the precious precious length of time that’s gone by, the Marcoses still have much of the ill-gotten wealth. Some of it were divulged in the upheaval of disclosures regarding Panama papers, where the ultra rich keep their money away from taxes and prying eyes. By now it’s clear the graft cases against the Marcoses were only to placate the angry masses.

MARCOSES’ FINAL REHABILITATION UNDER A MARCOS CLONE

The might of people’s victory in the ouster of Marcos and the underlying desire for genuine democracy is such that it took the Marcoses more than three decades before bureaucrat capitalism can ease them into Malacañang as ‘honored’ guests.

The Marcoses managed to do it under another puppet president they supported as candidate, who publicly claims he idolizes Marcos, and who looks back at his father’s political career as one that had benefited from the Marcoses.

And, before we forget, a president who evidently wants to be another dictator and tyrant. He himself has reprised many Marcosian tactics.

Despite his anti-corruption posturing, Duterte early into his term stunned the nation in allowing Marcos’ frozen remains to be buried, after at least two postponements due to protests, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016. The most brazen of post-Edsa puppet presidents at helping the Marcoses, he nevertheless balked at having the requisite public pomp expected for a true heroes’ and former president’s burial. It took him a year before he set out again to glorify the Marcoses. The Philippine government commemorated Marcos in postage stamps.

Under Duterte the corruption cases against the Marcoses that dragged on for more than three decades are being thrown out one by one.

In August and October 2019 several ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses, 27 to 31 years in court, were dismissed for lack of evidence from government lawyers, or for their failure to attend court hearings.

The bulk of their massive loot remain undisclosed to the people they stole it from. Estimates of what the PCGG managed to recover ran from just one to two billion dollars. The precious works of arts bought with stolen money inadvertently would show in Imeldific shots in her posh digs, but they always disappear when investigators come knocking. The money they extorted from coconut farmers were partially recovered but each succeeding administrations made it difficult for the coconut farmers and real owners of the fund to fully recover it.

PEOPLE MUST CLIP THE MARCOSES’ GREED: FROM ILOCOS NORTE TO MALACAÑANG

Looking thus at the Marcoses’ rehabilitation in power, it is not true that horrors repeat itself. It gets more horrendous in Part 2.

Unapologetic, flushed with their success, they are greedy for more.

They’re spoiled believing they can get away with it, again and again. They’re coming back to do more of the same on a vehicle much bigger and ratcheted up by their original loot, oiled by blood, sweat and tears of injustices to those they had oppressed, and covered by the same imperialist power that continues to lord over the country as long as their puppets dutifully run it to the ground for their businesses and military interests.

More than three decades since the world applauded the Filipino people’s uprising that booted out the Marcoses, these Marcoses have not been taken to account for the thousands of human rights violations and humanitarian crimes committed to maintain the dictatorship.

Now the maturing children, beneficiaries of dictator Marcos’ loot and network of allies and cronies, are out and about for another chance in Malacañang. They are intent as well in whitewashing their family’s crime, Imee Marcos chose the committee on culture in the Senate. Like father like daughter, she faked her academic achievement and when confronted about their family’s crimes, she tells the Filipinos to ‘Move on.”

Against the Marcoses’ rehabilitation and whitewashing, against presidents desiring to be another Marcos, the Filipino people “have no other recourse but to take revolutionary action and overthrow the ruling system and class rule of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists. Only be wielding revolutionary power—democratic people’s power—can they subject the biggest criminal and fascist oppressors to just punishment with full decisiveness and dispatch,” the CPP said.###

#NeverAgain
#NeverForget

—–
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ON DUTERTE’S SCHEME OF FASCIST DICTATORSHIP AND THE GROWING PEOPLE’S RESISTANCE

in Statements
Jose Maria Sison, NDFP Chief Political Consultant
July 29, 2019

http://tiny.cc/p2pgaz

Friends among academics, journalists and political activists have repeatedly asked me whether Duterte is proceeding to establish a fascist dictatorship as a result of successfully rigging the 2019 midterm elections and obtaining overwhelming control of Congress and the local governments.

I have dared to say that Duterte is stubbornly on the road of establishing a fascist dictatorship through charter change and ensuring that he is succeeded by someone who can protect him from prosecution for his grave crimes against the people. Duterte is publicly saying ad nauseam that there must be charter change to give him absolute powers or else he would proclaim a “revolutionary government”.

My friends abroad have also asked me how the Filipino people are responding to Duterte’s scheme of fascist dictatorship. I am quick to point out that Duterte is truly hated by the people despite his incredible popularity ratings by paid poll surveys and the recent rigged elections. The people will certainly rise up as soon as Duterte pushes charter change to give himself absolute powers.

The people despise Duterte for waging a “war on drugs” that has murdered 30,000 poor people and that has installed himself as the supreme protector of drug lords and smugglers who continue to benefit from the expanded and thriving illegal drug trade. Close friends and relatives of Duterte have been exposed as key players in the illegal drug trade.

In considering his role in the illegal drug trade alone, Duterte has become the biggest crime lord and has converted the military and police as his private killing machines. Aside from the lopsided official transactions of his dummies with Chinese banks and corporations, he connives with Chinese criminal triads in the illegal drug trade, casinos and other criminal enterprises.

He has become the No. 1 corrupt official. He is the chieftain of his alliance with the biggest plunderers in the previous regimes of Marcos, Estrada and Arroyo. He has been in connivance with them in the 2016 and 2019 elections and in various major types of corruption involving his presidential office. He has caused the Supreme Court to junk the plunder cases and convictions of his allies and has let them go scotfree.

The Filipino people have gone through the historical experience of the 14-year Marcos fascist dictatorship. They remember that it was a time of unprecedented oppression and exploitation by a Filipino tyrant but it was also the time that the revolutionary forces grew from small and weak to big and strong.

The Filipino people are thoroughly disgusted with the tyrannical, treasonous, brutal, corrupt and mendacious character of the Duterte regime in the last three years. They hold Duterte responsible for the aggravation of the crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system.

The crisis conditions abet and yet limit his capabilities for either coercing or deceiving the people.

The broad masses of the people and even the overwhelming majority of government employees are outraged by the militarization of Duterte’s cabinet and civilian functions and the colossal amounts of public funds for intelligence, military equipment, military campaigns of suppression and doubling the salaries of soldiers and policemen under the slogan of “whole-nation approach” to end the revolutionary movement.

The social economy remains underdeveloped and stagnant, ever exploited by foreign monopoly capitalism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. The people are groaning under the weight of soaring prices of basic commodities, joblessness, landlessness and low incomes perpetuated by the absence of genuine land reform and national industrialization, the system of landgrabbing, short-term work contracts and the rapid population growth.

The escalating acts of brutality and mass murder are driving the people to greater open resistance to the Duterte regime. Those who are most threatened by red-tagging, arrests and summary execution by the regime are finding their way to the urban underground and onward to the ranks of Red fighters in the people’s war in the countryside.

The revolutionary movement is now far more extensive and deeper and is far more experienced and tempered than during the period of the Marcos fascist dictatorship. The armed revolutionary forces can actually move freely in 90 percent of the Philippines and can strike at will any weak point of the enemy forces.

In contrast, the size and strength of the military, police and paramilitary forces of the Duterte regime cannot cover even only ten percent of the Philippine population and territory at any given time. Wherever they are, they engage in all kinds of abuses and atrocities, including extortion, mass murder, torture, arson and forced evacuations, and thus they incur the ire of the people.

The forces of the reactionary military are overconcentrated in Mindanao due to prolonged martial law. They can focus on only a few areas in the Visayas and Luzon. Their combat strength is further reduced by psy-war and intelligence operations under the pretexts of “peace and development” and “community support program” and by staging fake localized talks, fake surrenders and fake encounters.

The reactionary military officers take over civilian functions and civilian structures, including public schools, clinics and barangay halls. They are hated most when they red-tag people and murder them to be able to collect cash rewards and merits for fake encounters. They lay open and vulnerable to the tactical offensives of the people’s army the deployment of small detachments, checkpoints and patrols. They cannot avoid travelling single file on the highways and country roads.

In any particular area, where the reactionary military or police can concentrate and advance in superior strength, the targeted units of the people’s army retreat and observe the deployment of enemy units in order to determine their weak points. The enemy units ultimately become the targets of ambushes, raids and other guerrilla offensives. Thus they unwittingly transport and supply arms to the people’s army.

When the reactionary armed forces seek to encircle the forces of the people’s army, the latter have the options of counter-encircling the weak points of the former within the contested area or shifting to another area where the enemy forces are far weaker. Retreat for active defense and shifting of forces are tactics available to the people’s army to evade a superior enemy force and seek better circumstances for launching tactical offensives within the shortest span of time.

It is publicly well-known that while the people’s army gives full play to tactical offensives in order to seize weapons from the enemy, it can also engage in a wide range of actions that compel the enemy to be on the defensive, merely doing guard duty. Such actions include punitive missions against tyrannical and corrupt officials, harassing enemy camps, sniping, use of command-detonated explosives and the sabotage or destruction of enemy facilities.

Should the Duterte regime proclaim nationwide martial law as in 1972, outlaw all urban-based legal democratic forces critical of it and inflict violence on them, the revolutionary movement can be expected to intensify the people’s war and administer justice by arresting and punishing all human rights violators and plunderers, thus forcing the military and police to deploy more armed personnel for protection of these brutal and corrupt officials.

Common sense tells us (sharpened by theoretical and practical support from Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) that the Duterte regime cannot engage in red-tagging and acts of terror without facing fiercer responses from the armed revolutionary movement. Duterte cannot engage in the most brutal acts of butchery and bloodletting without facing the risk of drowning in the same sea of blood that he creates. This is a point that is easily understood by anyone from the developing situation in the Philippines.

So far according to published reports, the people’s army has carried out competently guerrilla warfare within the current strategic defensive of the people’s war. It has shown determination to wage only the battles that it is capable of winning. It is also increasingly heeding the clamor of the broad masses of the people for accelerated punitive actions against those reactionary officials who have incurred blood debts and plundered the economy and public resources.

Duterte’s threat of imposing a fascist dictatorship on the people through a nationwide martial rule and suppressing all democratic rights does not frighten the revolutionary forces of the people but pushes them to undertake punitive actions against the fascist dictator and his brutal and corrupt subalterns. The declaration of nationwide martial law in 1972 by the fascist dictator did not frighten the people and the revolutionary forces but emboldened them to strengthen their ranks and intensify the people’s war.###

#FightTyranny
#OustDuterte
#JoinTheNPA

—–
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43 CASUALTIES OF AFP AND PNP IN NEGROS

in Statements

Not less than 43 soldiers and police is the recorded casualty in three tactical offensive by the New People’s Army under Mt. Cansermon Command (MCC) in Negros since June 22- July 18.

Last June 22, a unit of MCC – NPA conducted a sniping operation which resulted to 3 casualties on the side of the 94th IBPA in the hinterlands of Sitio Bulo, Brgy. Bantolinao, Manjuyod, Negros Oriental. The soldiers killed are part of the team securing the area for the medical mission sponsored by Police Regional Office 7(PRO 7).

While conducting combat and clearing operation, the joint force of 94th IBPA and 704th Regional Mobile force Batallion we’re ambushed through the use of command detonated explosives (CDX) and exchange of firefight in Sitio Cambugtong, Brgy. Bantolinao, Manjuyod, Negros Oriental. More than 20 recorded casualty on the fascist reactionary side. To save face, only 1dead and 2 wounded was reported to the public.

Meanwhile last July 2, a unit of MCC-NPA foiled the raid attempt of 11th IBPA in Sitio Small Samac, Brgy. Nalundan, Bindoy, Negros Oriental. The unit of MCC-NPA launched a counter offensive and positioned for ambush. The gunfight ensued for an hour which resulted to 10 dead and 6 wounded on the side of the military. No casualty on the NPA side and the unit successfully maneuvered outside the enemies encirclement with the guidance of guerilla tactic’s in warfare.

On othér news, four police killed in an ambush in Sitio Yamot, Brgy. Mabato, Ayungon, Negros Oriental. Aided by a substantive Intel report the enemies plan to conduct another record round of oplan sauron was deferred. Confiscated from their possession are 4 canik 9mm pistol, 9 magazines and 135 ammunition, and a list of names of their targets.

The series of successful tactical offensive was conducted by MCC-NPA to need the call for justice for the victims of extra judicial killings especially for the innocent victim’s of Oplan Sauron 1 and 2.

Oplan Sauron or Synchronized Enhanced Management of Police Operations (SEMPO) is the current fascist move of the Duterte régime to brutally attack the people of Negros. It is characterized by surprise and synchronized attack of target locations; planned arrest or killing of targets. Since its inception last December 2018, it already claimed 21 victims killed and almost 100 illegally arrested on false charges. it has also resulted in forced evacuation and destruction of crops and livelihood of the people.

Dionisio Magbuelas, Spokesperson

Mt. Cansermon Command-New Peoples Army

July 25 2019
http://tiny.cc/lzpgaz

#DefendNegros
#RevolutionaryJustice
#FightTyranny
#JoinTheNPA
#ServeThePeople

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The Revolutionary Movement of the Filipino People is Indestructible due to Oppression and Exploitation

in Statements
­

Chief Political Consultant / National Democratic Front of the Philippines

June 18, 2019 | https://is.gd/nMr1N1

Duterte and his political agents and armed minions keep on boasting that they can destroy the revolutionary movement of the Filipino people. However, they keep on moving their deadline because every previous deadline proved to be false.

The revolutionary movement of the Filipino people is indestructible because of its just cause of national liberation and democracy against foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

As long these three evil forces oppress and exploit the people, the ground will remain fertile for such revolutionary forces as the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA) and the National Democratic Front (NDFP) to thrive.

No party or group of traditional politicians servile to US imperialism and representative of the exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords are capable of taking initiative away from the revolutionary forces that uphold and carry out the people’s democratic revolution.

The revolutionary movement is indestructible because of the objective semicolonial and semifeudal conditions that have given rise to it and because every major revolutionary force knows how to preserve itself and increase its strength through struggle.

The CPP ceaselessly engages in ideological, political and organizational building. It has thus become a formidable force nationwide and it is deeply rooted among the toiling masses due to its correct revolutionary theory and practice and its general program of people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war.

The NPA is under the correct leadership of the CPP and is effectively carrying out the strategic line of people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. It integrates revolutionary armed struggle with agrarian reform and mass base building, which includes the building of revolutionary mass organizations and local organs of political power.

The local organs of political power constitute the People’s Democratic Government. It is led by the CPP and the NDFP ensures the unity of the people in their millions through the mass organizations and alliances. It is the revolutionary government of workers and peasants which is fighting to get rid of the counterrevolutionary government of the big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists subservient to US imperialism and other imperialist powers.

Whenever the Duterte regime unleashes any kind of offensive of whatever kind or scale, the revolutionary forces retain their revolutionary integrity, increase their strength through struggle, respond to threats promptly and effectively and launch counteroffensives to isolate and destroy the people’s enemy part by part.

Duterte is incompetent to talk about the destiny of the Filipino people and their revolutionary movement. Even if he is incoherent most of the time, he is sometimes coherent, such as when he admits that he is overwhelmed by Philippine problems and wishes to hang himself. He himself is currently the most most notorious personification of bureaucratic corruption in the Philippines.

Duterte and his political and military agents think that they can discredit and destroy the revolutionary movement of the Filipino people by pursuing the anti-communist line. But neither socialism nor communism is in the agenda. The Filipino people and the revolutionary movement are focused on carrying out the people’s democratic revolution as the prelude to the socialist revolution.###

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Signs of a De Facto Martial Law?

Do you see the signs? Now, do the test 🙂 CHECK YOUR SCORE #DuterTerorista #FightTyranny #MakibakaWagMatakot —– VISIT and FOLLOW

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