By Diego Morra
“Makibaka, Huwag Matakot.” This should be the call for tomorrow’s double-rally, one at the Luneta and the other at the EDSA Shrine. It is very seldom for the Filipino people to agree on any single issue and the horrible plunder of flood control projects (FCPs) is one such issue that shows how incompetent the Philippine government has been in controlling legislative greed and executive larceny. Graft is always a conspiracy as it requires several partners to commit a crime, erase the evidence or absolve themselves through other bodies like the Commission on Audit (COA.)
After 1972, the opposition to fascism intensified starting 1976, when both armed and unarmed components found the dictatorship weakening. Today, both factions contending for political power have shown themselves to be incompetent and wallowing in the mud of graft. The Filipino people have had enough of absentee Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, who has admitted that she hates big crowds and has little patience for the hoi polloi, the very same market of the Duterte cult and whose members were the principal victims of the tokhang “anti-drug war” initiated by now Sen. Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa when he was police chief.
True to her anti-people bent, her operators are now busy spreading intrigue against the organizers of the twin protest marches tomorrow, one at the Luneta in the morning and another in the afternoon at the EDSA Shrine Quezon City. Addicted to violence as she is, her trolls and crones disseminate the canard that the protests against the plunder of P1.9-trillion in ghost, incomplete and substandard flood control projects (FCPs) would be violent and Malacanang would naturally use the occasion to impose martial law, 53 years after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. imposed the same after plotting bombings from Plaza Miranda to at least a dozen places in Metro Manila and the suspension of the privilege of habeas corpus in 1971.
Earthquakes, typhoons and other natural and man-made disasters, including one being hatched by Sara and her ilk, should not prevent the sovereign people from indicting the key players of the current political order, Sara included, as the respondents in the people’s lawsuit against graft and corruption. Fear has never been s surefire antidote to raging political, social and economic protests. Former Sen. Raul Manglapus, better known as a jazz musician, used it to prevent hundreds of thousands of activists from demonstrating against the Marcos Sr. regime in 1971. “Stay at home, buy your canned goods,” was an advice justly ignored that worsened Manglapus’ political isolation and made him the butt of jokes.
The Manglapus bit is now being recycled after generals, retired and those currently in service, backed the expression of popular disgust at the private appropriation of public funds to finance the bourgeois vices of contractors, pandering for their ostentatious display of wealth, from Rolls Royces to Bentleys, Hermes bags to expensive wardrobe like the ones worn by Kitty, Baste and the other Dutertes, the double mansions in the provinces, villas in California, penthouses in New York and their fetish for private jets and yachts. One lawmaker also owns one, but it comes from his service to another criminal syndicate. Why do they want violence to attend the September 21, 2025 Trillion-Peso March and the indignation rally at the Luneta? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Sara and the pathetic Duterte cult had been demanding that Marcos Jr. resign and turn over the reins of government to their goddess. As ignorant as Sara as they are, they refuse to acknowledge that Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio had been remiss in her duties as secretary at the Department of Education (DepEd), where she has been absent most of the time, and where P12.2-billion of her expenditures were disallowed by the Commission on Audit (COA), just as millions of her expenses as Davao City mayor were also disallowed by the audit body, including the huge fund for 11,000 dubious contractual employees. The audit did not include the P1-million daily budget for waste management approved by Rodrigo Duterte and managed for eight years by a businesswoman who ended up residing in Forbes Park.
Waxing ecstatic over the investigation of Ako Bicol Rep. Elizalde Co and the resignation of Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez as Speaker, Sara scored the Marcos Jr. administration for not kidnapping Co and arresting Romualdez. As it is, Sara wants Co to be treated the way her father was bundled off to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity. Co is on the dock for hot having the decency to cut clean from the construction companies that he, his brother and sister own, all of which bagged infrastructure projects in Bicol and elsewhere. Agriculture Secretary Franco Laurel has also spoken about rejecting the attempt of Rep. Co to secure the allotment of 3,000 containers of imported fish. The plea is akin to monopolizing fish imports to the detriment of Laurel, who formerly headed the fishing giant Frabelle Corp., and Malabon Rep. Toby Tiangco, whose family is in the fishing business since 1948. Wasn’t Co’s company also involved in the computer supply deal with DepEd?
The Filipino people owe it to themselves to show their spine, their true grit and their courage despite the threats posed by the Duterte and Marcos factions, both of which are being rejected by the sovereign people for committing the worst crimes imagined by Philippine law. Forthwith, the protests must be held with zeal, ardor and a commitment to never stop until fiscal immunity is dealt its just desserts. September 21 should commence as a commemoration of the fascist takeover of 1972 and the people’s rejection of administrations that will be punished for stealing the country blind. Call it kleptocracy, or understand it in the context of fascism as a system of rampant cronyism and corruption as well as fraudulent elections. Franklin Roosevelt also tagged fascism as “the ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.” The struggle between the Marcos and Duterte factions is premised on that. “Makibaka, Huwag Matakot!”
