Marcos has already fallen from his horse
I MEAN President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., after completing two years of his six-month presidency, has fallen from the horse that was his vast political support that brought him to power in 2022. This is supported by two recent surveys by different polling enterprises:
– The PulseAsia survey done last month shows Marcos’ approval ratings dropping 13 percentage points from 68 percent in December 2023 to 55 points in March. Compare that to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s approval rating, at 88 percent in June 2018, in the same duration of two years of his administration, or in June 2018.
– The University of the Philippines professors’ OCTA Research polls undertaken last month show only less than a third of Filipinos, or 31 percent, support Marcos and his administration, while 20 percent support the Duterte family and their political allies. Add those who “support the opposition” and those “who do not support the administration, the Duterte family and the family,” and we have a huge 53 percent of Filipinos who do not support Marcos.
The OCTA findings are highly unusual as Filipinos’ support for an incumbent president diminishes below 50 percent only after he has finished half his term.
Duterte
One would have to be in a cocaine stupor not to believe the polls. Marcos won the presidency because half or even more votes came from Filipinos who believed in Duterte’s leadership, integrity and wisdom. He left the presidency with a high 82 percent satisfaction when his term ended in June 2022, by far the highest ever posted by a Philippine president (next highest was Benigno Aquino 3rd at 29 percent).
Yet for some reason still unreported, Marcos politically stabbed Duterte in the back, ignoring him and his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte. A Duterte ally, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was denied the House speakership that she had been promised, and later even removed as deputy speaker, to be replaced by some obscure congressman.
Pointing to a Marcos plan to politically bury Duterte, the President undertook a campaign to charge and jail Kingdom of God head Apollo Quiboloy, the former president’s biggest supporter, politically and, sources allege, financially. It was the Americans who actually were responsible for inventing what I think are trumped-up charges, with a sex-harassment accusations made by a dubious US-based former follower and money laundering charges based on undeclared dollars being brought into the United States in his private jet.
Whatever the results of Marcos’ campaign against Duterte and Quiboloy, this has been a body blow to the President’s support that he will never recover from, with the former president still enjoying enormous popularity. One villainous quality that Filipinos detest is ingratitude.
Genius
It’s been a series of missteps in Marcos’ first 20 months at his post. He thought he was a genius in organization and agriculture that he occupied the agriculture portfolio for 15 months — and visited the department’s offices only three times. That was a disaster: prices of key agricultural commodities such as sugar, onions and even garlic went on a roller-coaster ride. During his leadership of the Agriculture Department, the Philippines became the world’s biggest rice importer, as little was done to manage the rice supply.
He spent much political capital setting up the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF), which nearly all economic and business associations advised against. Supposedly a sovereign fund financed by surpluses, the MIF instead sourced its funds from the national government (P50 billion), Land Bank of the Philippines (P50 billion) and Development Bank of the Philippines (P25 billion). This meant reducing the funds that these institutions intended to finance pro-poor ventures that the regular banks do not go into. Nothing much has been heard from the MIF since its formal takeoff in July 2023.
The administration launched an attempt early this year to revise the Constitution in a way that would abolish the Senate and set up a parliamentary system that would allow Marcos to continue in power after his term ends in 2028 and even usher in a dynasty, with his cousin House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez and then his sons to succeed him — his father’s dream. Some P5 billion would have been used to fund this “Cha-cha” movement, drawn from existing funds in the budget approved by Congress for poverty alleviation programs. For the first time ever in this administration, the Senate exposed the plot and stopped it in its tracks.
Marcos will go down in history as the most world-touring president, visiting 17 nations; he has gone to the US alone four times. In every trip, Marcos would announce that he secured billions of dollars in “investment pledges.” So far though, none of his billions of investments pledged has seen the light of day: the normal ho-hum pace of direct investments into the country has not changed at all.
The blatant misinformation the Marcos regime has been claiming is that during his 17 trips he has secured P72 billion in investments has been exposed by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) itself.
In one of its press releases, the DTI said that over a third ($27 billion) represents projects in the “planning stage” with no documentation at all, and another third, $29 billion, are investments where a memorandum of understanding or letter of intent has been signed. In short, these are mostly general intentions, none of which have materialized so far. Filipino taxpayers spent at least P200 million for the President and first lady’s tour of the world — with their sons and other hangers-on — with little if any contribution to our well-being.
Government’s desperation to concoct figures was so evident in October when it claimed that Marcos’ trip to Saudi Arabia resulted in “investment agreements worth $4.26 billion with Saudi businesses.” Most of this, though, or 87 percent, according to the Presidential Communications Office press release, was “a human resource services agreement worth $3.7 billion between Al-Jeer Human Resources Co.-ARCO and Association of Philippine Licensed Agencies.” How in the world can a personnel recruitment company — and in what kind of business — invest $3.7 billion here?
It turns out that the Saudi company isn’t at all investing that astounding amount of $3.7 billion in the Philippines. It’s an estimate by one bureaucrat of the total amount of salaries for an undetermined number of years for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) recruited by the Philippine agencies in the country and deployed by the Al-Jeer Human Resources Co. Ridiculous: In DTI’s attempt to claim that there will be a massive inflow of foreign capital into the country, it classified OFW remittances as foreign investments.
Worst
The worst thing the Marcos administration has done that spells its doom is its belligerent stance toward China, which is really just a tiff over a tiny shoal at the edge of Palawan, which 99. 99 percent of Filipinos aren’t aware that it exists and which is totally of no use to us.
The Americans amazingly manipulated this issue to frighten Marcos into agreeing to be a vassal, a protectorate of the US, to be used as a pawn by the Americans to stop China’s rise and to prevent the superpower’s rogue province Taiwan to be restored back to its control.
The remarkable achievement of EDSA I, of restoring our independence from the US, has been reversed, and by the son of the dictator it toppled.
All of the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states have done the opposite, which is to distance themselves from the US and draw closer to China. Do we have a genius president who can see what people like Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong and Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim cannot?
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Marcos has already fallen from his horse
Source: Breaking News PH
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