By Jose Maria Sison
November 26, 2019

The chief plunderer Duterte, his agents headed by Cayetano and the big private contractors have been been so preoccupied with stealing from a 17-billion peso budget for the 30th Southeast Games that they have forgotten the actual needs of the Filipino and foreign athletic delegations.

Right from the start, the Duterte regime has been culpable for a big plunder scheme by allotting a budget of more than 6 billion pesos and then borrowing from a Malaysian bank 11 billion pesos (which is denominated in US dollars) for the construction of facilities. In sharp contrast, the budget for the Games in 2005 was only 300 million pesos.

The scandal about the extremely overpriced cauldron at 50 million pesos has been merely a symptom of the colossal scale of plunder in the misuse of 17 billion pesos for the benefit of the king of corruption Duterte, his contractor cronies and his political agents like Cayetano.

Long after the scandalous mishandling of food, transport and accommodations for the athletic delegations from various countries, the Filipino people will be suffering a higher tax burden and deprivation of social services as a consequence of the higher debt burden and the costs of bureaucratic corruption.

A major feature of the evil character of the Duterte regime is the rapid rise of local and foreign public debt as a result of corrupt bureaucratic purchases and projects which are always overpriced to accommodate the plunderers in power and their business cronies.

In time to come, even after the Duterte regime is gone, its legacy of treason, plunder, mass murder and swindling will continue to weaken the semicolonial and semifeudal system and will keep fertile the ground for the Filipino people’s new democratic revolution through people’s war. ###