By Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
June 30, 2019

Duterte’s anti-people achievements for his reign of greed and terror are “awesome” to his own presidential spokesman and are “highly popular and satisfactory” to the pollsters, troll armies, broadcasters and columnists in the Duterte payroll.

Below are the “achievements” that Duterte has attained through the escalation of the people’s oppression and exploitation in a chronically worsening ruling system of big compradors, landlords, and brutal and corrupt officials like him:

1. Inciting and ordering the mass murder of 30,000 people labeled as drug suspects and assuring the criminals in authority with impunity, presidential protection and rewards in order to project an image of a strong man for the purpose of mass intimidation,

2. Becoming the supreme protector of drug lords and worsening the drug addiction problem through massive smuggling and distribution of shabu and other illegal drugs in connivance with Chinese criminal triads based in China and the Philippines,

3. Destroying Marawi City with Philippine and US air power and bombs, killing thousands of people , displacing the huge number of residents from their homes and livelihood, leaving them stranded in makeshift quarters and pocketing the foreign funds for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the city,

4. Deliberately sabotaging the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations in order to serve the criminal ambition of fascist dictatorship by scapegoating the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, bloating the budget for the military and police and militarizing the civilian agencies of the reactionary government,

5. Bribing the military and police by raising their salaries ahead of more deserving public servants such as teachers, nurses and so on and corrupting the military and police by rewarding them with cash and promotions for murdering those labelled as drug suspects and as rebel suspects,

6. Engaging in unprecedented corruption in the misuse of the presidential budget and off-budget discretionary funds and in the misappropriation of allotted public funds for infrastructure projects, social services, intelligence, communications, representation and other purposes,

7. Red-tagging and branding as communists and subjecting to extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations the toiling masses of workers and peasants and the patriotic and progressive organizations whose social activists uphold, defend and promote human rights and aim for social and environmental justice,

8. Using martial law in Mindanao and designation of large areas of Luzon and the Visayas as trouble spots for the purpose of state terrorism, plundering public funds and natural resources, and rigging the 2019 elections in advance.

9. Absolving the plunderers like the Marcoses, Arroyos, Estradas, Enriles and the like through the corrupt Supreme Court and collaborating with them in the control of government and abuse of the people and in rigging the electoral, administrative, legislative and judicial processes against the people and the patriotic and progressive forces,

10. Rigging the 2019 mid-term elections through massive vote-buying at the grassroots level and manipulation of the automated electoral system at higher level in order to ensure absolute control of the executive and legislative branches of the reactionary government.

11. Laying the ground for charter change in order to give the president as tyrant or fascist dictator absolute despotic powers under the pretext of fake federalism and/or bogus anti-terrorism in order to preempt the arrest of Duterte for plunder or human rights violations,

12. Military campaigns of suppression against the peasants and indigenous people to deprive them of their land and make way for the foreign corporations and their local partners to thrive in mining, logging, plantation and real estate business and continue the wanton destruction of the environment,

13. Perpetuating the program of bogus land reform, subjecting the peasants to worse feudal and semifeudal conditions and offering to the aggrieved toiling masses and indigenous peoples with graft-afflicted dole outs in a futile attempt to turn them against their own revolutionary movement,

14. Adhering to the neoliberal policy of pressing down wages for workers under the system of short-term contracts and keeping far lower wages for agricultural workers in order to raise corporate profits and using brute force to suppress workers’ strikes and their demands for better wage and living conditions,

15. Increasing the public debt and tax burden by leaps and bounds and aggravating the domestic socio-economic and political crisis due to profit remittances by foreign monopoly firms, debt repayments, consumption dependent on further foreign debt, bureaucratic corruption, military overspending and the ever growing trade and budgetary deficits,

16. Making the masses of consumers pay for the heavier tax burden and thereby causing the prices of basic commodities to soar even while the incomes of the working people are depressed and the problems of underdevelopment and mass poverty have worsened,

17. Ever stressing overseas employment as the way out for the workers and intelligentsia from unemployment and poverty, designing education as training for docile employment abroad and removal of Philippine history and the national language from the curriculum in order to rob the students of patriotic values and ideas,

18. Selling out to China the sovereign rights of the Filipino people over the exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea and its rich marine oil, gas and other mineral resources, which if utilized for the benefit of the people are so many times more than enough to industrialize and develop the country,

19. Receiving commissions and other forms of bribes for Duterte himself, his family and his cronies for overpriced infrastructure and other projects and high interest loans from China under terms that are violative of Philippine sovereignty, extremely onerous and calculated to make the Philippines a debt colony of China,

20. Perpetuating the treaties, agreements and arrangements that make the US the dominant imperialist power in the Philippines and getting logistical support from the US under Oplan Pacific Eager in order to wage state terrorism against the people and the revolutionary movement, and

21. Squeezing the Philippines with the regime’s double puppetry to US and Chinese imperialism and subjecting the Filipino people to the worst consequences of inter-imperialist contradictions between the US and China and the rapidly worsening crisis of the world capitalist system.

I invite everyone to add to the above list because Duterte’s anti-people achievements for his reign of greed and terror are abundant and cannot be easily exhausted. I have tried to list down the most serious crimes and policy errors that he has committed against the Filipino people.###