Prospects under a Duterte presidency (2)

Central Committee,  Communist
Party of the Philippines, May 15, 2016

Conclusion

3. CHALLENGE for significant reforms under Duterte

Duterte’s rhetoric has raised high the people’s expectations for substantial and accelerated reforms.

As an avowed opponent of US meddling, Duterte has the unique opportunity to end the 70-year chain of US puppet governments since the 1946 Roxas regime.

He can undo Aquino’s legacy of national humiliation for having served as a pawn in the US “Asia pivot” strategy by allowing the US to restore its military bases and maintain permanent presence of its warships, jetfighters, drones and interventionist troops.

To countervail Aquino’s puppetry, he must withdraw his stand to let  the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) stand. He must immediately notifiy the US government of his intent to abrogate the Edca which was signed as an executive agreement in April 2014.. He must rescind the Edca-sanctioned use of five AFP camps in the Philippines as US military bases and facilities.

He can serve the US notice to end the unequal Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) and the Status of Forces Agreement (SFA) as well as the Mutaul Defense Treaty of 1951, the parent agreement and source of all military iniquities.

He can immediately send home US Ambassador Goldberg for interference in Philippine internal affairs and ask that the US government send a replacement.

Duterte can be the first Philippine president to pursue an independent foreign policy, one that is not beholden to and dependent on the US. Towards this, Duterte must condemn US war-mongering and US-China saberattling and oppose militarization of the territorial sea by the US and Chinese military forces. He must not allow the US military to use the Philippines as base for its interventionism. If he does so, he is bound to be the Philippines’ first world-class president who stood for Philippine sovereignty and prevented the military buildup in the region.

He must oppose the US demand to effect charter change to remove the remaining restrictions against foreign ownership as requirement for Philippine integration into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, dubbed as the “dirtiest deal ever”.

Corollarily, he can pursue a policy of developing mutually beneficial economic and trade relations with China with an aim of ending economic and trade dependence on the US. He can pursue a policy of engaging China in bilateral talks to peacefully resolve the South China Sea conflict and opposing US military presence in the area. He can take advantage of the availability of low-interest funds from China’s Asian International Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) to support the development of local industry and manufacturing.

Duterte can choose to forge agreements with oil producing countries such as Venezuela, Russia or Iran for state centralized procurement of cheap oil which has been a non-option so far because of the US-defined Philippine foreign policy.

As an ardent anti-crime and anti-corruption advocate, the challenge is for Duterte to prioritize the biggest criminals. The small-fry criminals will disappear without their big fish protectors and sharks up high in the bureaucracy and military and police organization.

He can immediately carry out the arrest and swift prosecution of Benigno Aquino III, Florencio Abad and the biggest criminal perpetrators of the trillion-peso DAP swindle and prevent them from leaving the country. He must follow-through with the prosecution of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and ensure that she is held criminally responsible for the anomalous ZTE broadband deal and other corruption cases, including fraud in the 2004 elections.

The biggest drug lords and criminal syndicates continue to expand their operations under the protection of the top generals of the AFP and PNP. To address the widespread drug trade, Duterte will have to risk subjecting the top echelons of the military and police to a major shakedown to weed out, charge and punish the criminals. Street-level drug pushers and users must be rehabilitated through employment and by establishing centers for medical and psychological rehabilitation from drug abuse.

Duterte has rightly declared his plan to prioritize agriculture, education and health. He must immediately address the urgent needs of the toiling masses of workers and peasants.

To develop agriculture, Duterte is challenged to heed the clamor for genuine land reform which is both an urgent economic and social justice measure. Genuine land reform is the free distribution of land to the peasant tillers and producers. The fake land reform of the past 30 years was a burdensome real estate transaction where peasants were made to pay for the land that they have already earned through years of feudal exactions.

Duterte must cancel all unpaid amortization as well as absorb loans where land titles were collateralized under the prenda system. He can work with organizations of the peasant masses to effect genuine land distribution of Hacienda Luisita, as well as Hacienda Dolores and many other feudal land holdings. He can put an immediate stop to the widespread land-use conversion of farmlands and privatization of public lands that have resulted widespread eviction of peasants and national minorities from their lands.

As an economic policy, genuine land reform can unleash the productive potentials of the peasant masses as owners of land and expand the local market for manufactured commodities.

A correlated national industrialization policy must be geared, among others, towards the mechanization of agriculture in order to boost food production and processing to ensure sufficient supply of low-priced rice, poultry, meat and vegetables. Irrigation facilities must be expanded and subsidized for free use of the peasant producers.

Duterte has declared he is not much of an economist and said he will listen to the experts. Unfortunately, the supposed experts he is set to appoint are technocrats and big businessmen who excel at neoliberal economic policies and and serve foreign big capitalists, and not at promoting domestic economic growth and production. They advocate the economics of “attracting foreign investments” and “easing restrictions” as sought by the US and foreign big capitalists.

In framing economic policies, Duterte should listen first to the workers and peasants, rather than big business and technocrats who advocate the same failed economic policy of more than half a century. This is decisive. Failure to do so will in the end prove his regime to be not simply part of the neoliberal continuum.

To aim for rapid Philippine independent economic modernization with balanced and integrated development of heavy, medium and light industries, Duterte must repudiate the neoliberal thrusts of liberalization, privatization, deregulation and denationalization of the previous regimes. Advancing land reform and national industrialization will generate jobs and end the need for such palliatives as the conditional cash transfer (4Ps) that only perpetuate the people’s poverty and smokescreen the deterioration of public social services.

The Duterte regime must heed the demand of workers and employees for a national minimum wage and the abolition of the regionalization of wages. He must end contractualization and take back his earlier statements against unions and workers rights. Without their unions, workers have nothing to defend themselves against attacks on wages.

In education, Duterte is challenged to scrap the K-12 program which generalizes technical and vocational education to produce cheap contractual labor for export and for export-oriented semi-manufacturing. He must reverse the policy of state abandonment of education and uphold state policy of providing free education for all.

He can push for the integration of education with independent economic modernization through the promotion of research and development in the fields of agricultural production, energy generation, manufacturing, computer technology, new materials and others. To leave a lasting legacy of patriotism, he must gear education to a patriotic cultural renewal by rewriting history from the point of view of the Filipino people instead of its colonial subjugators.

In public health, Duterte is challenged to revoke the policy of privatization of public hospitals and uphold the state policy of providing free public health care for all. He can end the Philhealth milking cow system of private health insurance and instead ensure that everyone is given access to free health care.

He must deliver the basic social services demanded by the people and recast the national budget to allot sufficient funds for education, health, housing and such.

Furthermore, Duterte must cancel Aquino’s highly questionable PPP contracts, including the MRT Cavite extension, which gives the Ayalas, Cojuangcos, Consunjis, Pangilinans and other big bourgeois compradors undue advantage in using state funds and state-guaranteed loans and government assured profits.

In the field of human rights, Duterte must effect the release from prison of close to six hundred political prisoners who continue to suffer from detention, mostly peasants and workers, who are facing trumped-up charges. Duterte can effect their release from prison as a boost to his government’s effort to uphold human rights and as a turn back on his endorsement of vigilante killing.

He must pave the way for the return of the Lumad evacuees by ordering the pull-out of the operating troops of the AFP from their schools, communities and land and allow the people to re-open their communityun schools. He must heed the demand for justice of the Lumad people and recognize their all-encompassing rights as a national minority people, as well as those of other minority groups.

He must undertake steps to punish all violators of human rights of the past 30 years. He must put a stop to extra-judicial killings. He must heed the demand to put an end to the US-instigated Oplan Bayanihan “counterinsurgency” operations and militarization of the countryside.

4. Challenges to the Filipino people and revolutionary movement

While engaging the Duterte regime in peace negotiations and possible alliance in order to advance the national and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people, the revolutionary forces will continue to relentlessly advance the people’s armed resistance and democratic mass struggles. While open to cooperation and alliance, they must relentlessly criticize and oppose any and all anti-people and pro-imperialist policy and measure. There will be no honeymoon with the Duterte regime.

While incoming GRP President Duterte has displayed progressive aspects, the revolutionary forces are also aware that he is mainly a part of the ruling class political elite.

For the past four decades, he has served the system as a bureaucrat and implemented its laws and policies. He has worked with foreign and local big capitalists, plantation owners and big landlords who expect returns under his regime. The masses of workers, peasants and farm workers in Davao City have long-suffered from the oppressive and exploitative conditions in the big plantations and export-oriented contract-growing businesses.

In his policy pronouncements, Duterte has yet to declare a clear deviation from the dominant neoliberal economic thinking which has brought about grave hardships to the Filipino people for more than three decades.

Indeed, world history has seen the rise under certain conditions of anti-US leaders in countries dominated by the US. In recent years, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (1999-2013) and Bolivia’s Evo Morales (2006-present) have stood militantly to defend their country’s right to self-determination.

Their anti-imperialism allowed their government to free large amounts of resources such as land and oil from foreign control and accrue these to the people in the form of increasing state subsidies for education and public health. On the other hand, while clearly benefiting from their government’s anti-imperialism and increasing resources for the delivery of social and economic services, the broad masses of workers and peasants continued to suffer from oppression and exploitation because foreign big capitalists and landlords remained dominant in other fields of the economy and state power.

The worsening conditions of the semicolonial and semifeudal system, the deepening factional strife among the ruling classes, the prolonged recession of the US and the rise of China as a competing imperialist power are among the prevailing conditions where we find the rise of political maverick Rodrigo Duterte as GRP president.

The Filipino people and their revolutionary forces keenly look forward to the possibility of forging an alliance with the Duterte regime within a framework for national unity, peace and development. Duterte’s mettle is about to be tested. Will he walk his talk and take on the opportunity to stand up against US imperialism? Or will his bombast end up as empty rhetoric?

Duterte must heed the people’s mounting clamor for land, jobs, wage increses, free education, public health and housing, reduction in the price of commodities, defense of Philippine sovereignty against US intervention, defense of national patrimony and economic progress and modernization, an end to corruption and crime in the bureaucracy, military and police.

If he fails or refuses to heed the people’s clamor, he is bound to end up a mere historical anomaly and suffer the same fate as the Estrada regime.

The Filipino people are ever ready to intensify the people’s war to advance the revolution and mass struggles to amplify their democratic demands.

The New People’s Army must continue to carry out the tasks set forth by the CPP Central Committee to intensify the people’s war by launching more frequent tactical offensives and seizing more arms from the enemy.

Armed with a strategic and historical point-of-view, the Filipino proletariat and people know fully well that only a people’s democratic revolution can decisively and thoroughly end imperialist and local big bourgeois comprador and landlord rule by overthrowing its armed state.

By intensifying their struggles, the Filipino people are bound to attain more and more victories in the years to come. The people’s war is set to press forward under the Duterte regime.