The Legacy of Philippine Opposition Leader Ninoy Aquino

by Reese Erlich



Filipinos still remember the disaster that hit their country thirty-five years ago.

Philippine leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr., the leading crusader against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, was brutally murdered after he stepped off a plane in the Manila airport on August 21, 1983.

His murder set in motion the People's Power Revolution of 1986, which brought his wife Cory Aquino to power. Their son Benigno Aquino III served as elected president from 2010 to 2016.

In the years since his death, Ninoy has become almost a saint in the Philippines, an apostle of spirituality and nonviolence.

But in a 1981 interview I did with him in Boston, Ninoy emerged as far more complex. While professing nonviolence, he admitted ties with a group that bombed tourism hotels in Manila. While professing to be a man of the people, he revealed himself as a coldly vindictive and profane politician. His legacy continues to impact contemporary Philippine politics as seen in the election of right-wing authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte.

Ferdinand Marcos was elected Philippine president in 1965 but imposed martial law in 1972 and ruled as a brutal dictator for fourteen more years. The United States backed Marcos almost to the very end. U.S. corporations had major investments in the Philippines, and the Pentagon maintained two important military bases there as well. As always, U.S. military and corporate interests were more important than democracy or human rights.

Ninoy and Cory Aquino both came from wealthy and powerful families who had fallen out with Marcos. Ninoy was arrested in 1972 for opposing the dictatorship and spent over seven years in prison. In 1980, Marcos allowed him to travel to Houston for heart surgery.

Then Aquino landed a fellowship at Harvard University where he met with many Filipino exiles and students. He told me of an incident that revealed he wasn't the saint his supporters would later claim. It was about a business administration student who refused to meet with him, saying Marcos might see it as black mark on his parents.

"Fuck you," Aquino recalled saying to the student, still seething as he recalled the incident months later. "What about your black mark with me? What if I come to power? I have all your names and I will remember you."

As with other historical figures, it matters how Ninoy Aquino is remembered.

"Ninoy was an old-school politician, but he couldn't abide by the injustice and impunity of the Marcos regime," Rene Ciria-Cruz told me in a recent interview. Ciria-Cruz was a Marxist and anti-dictatorship activist in the 1980s, and is now U.S. bureau chief for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

In 1983, Aquino returned to Manila with a plane full of supporters and journalists. He was shot as he walked onto the tarmac. Marcos's military officers were later convicted of planning the assassination.

"I met him before he went on his fateful trip home," recalled Ciria-Cruz. "He had fantasized about flying his plane, filled with bombs, into the presidential palace. We thought it was just macho posturing. But it also became clear that he was approaching his fight not as a personal rivalry with Marcos but with a real concern for the country."

Aquino was interested in talking with me because just months before our interview, I had interviewed members of the New People's Army, which was led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. The communists had become a growing political force because of their staunch opposition to Marcos. The party carried out a Maoist strategy of people's war in which the peasants in the countryside would surround the major cities and bring down the regime. The NPA aimed its armed actions against politicians, businessmen, the military and police, although civilians were inevitably killed.

The Aquinos, on the other hand, were social democrats who initially called for nonviolent struggle to restore democratic institutions and reform the crony capitalism of the Marcos regime. Unable to participate in elections, however, the soc dems, "as abbreviation happy Filipino activists called them," turned to armed struggle as well.

Clandestine groups known as the Light a Fire Movement and the April 6 Liberation Movement set off bombs in hotels to discourage tourism and hurt Marcos's economy. They intended only to destroy property, but one U.S. tourist was killed and thirty-three other civilians were wounded.

The Marcos administration accused Aquino of leading the Light a Fire Movement, which Ninoy publicly denied. In December 1980, Imelda Marcos, the president's politically powerful wife, met with Aquino in New York. In my interview, Aquino let slip his support for the terrorist tactics.

Referring to the bombings, Aquino told me Imelda Marcos was "candid enough to admit that we have caused damage to tourism and foreign investments." I asked him who were the "we."

"All the opposition groups I suppose," he replied rather lamely, knowing that his allies were bombing the hotels. He had let the cat out of the bag. Aquino went on to admit that he had the ability to stop the bombings if the Marcos regime made concessions.

Anti-Marcos activist Ciria-Cruz said Aquino was connected with Light a Fire, "but he was most likely not the leader who determined and knew all the details."

Several Light a Fire leaders later became prominent officials in the Cory Aquino administration.

The social democratic effort at armed struggle failed militarily, with some of the leaders getting caught smuggling arms through the Manila airport. But after Ninoy's assassination, Cory Aquino took the reins of the anti-Marcos opposition. By February 1986, mass demonstrations and a rebellion in the military forced Marco to flee to the United States and brought Cory to power.

She carried out many of Ninoy's policies, according to Ciria-Cruz. "Cory's publicly declared goal was to reestablish liberal democracy and its institutions, to be merely a transition government, and that was it." She didn't fight to eliminate poverty or develop an independent foreign policy.

"I think Ninoy would have done the same thing," Ciria-Cruz continued. "I didn't detect any predisposition for groundbreaking social reforms from both of them. Other traditional politicians disenfranchised and marginalized by Marcos became resentful of the U.S., if not openly nationalistic, which led to the willingness of some politicians to remove the U.S. bases after Marcos was ousted."

Ninoy's son Benigno Aquino III, president of the Philippines from 2010 to 2016, carried out many of the same centrist policies and did little to fight poverty, establish full rights for workers or implement land reform. Corruption remained rampant.

In 2016, right-wing populist Rodrigo Duterte took advantage of popular discontent with the centrists. Like Trump, he talked tough about helping ordinary people. He promised to crack down on drugs and corruption, the Filipino version of draining the swamp.

Duterte has arrested more than 50,000 people on minor offenses, such as public intoxication or using drugs. He has jailed one senator on trumped-up corruption charges and is trying to arrest another.

Critics have compared Duterte to Marcos. David Borden, a leader of the U.S.-based Stop the Drug War.com, told me Duterte has created "a dangerous situation for anyone who criticizes the president, and he is a danger for democracy."

Filipinos are increasingly opposed to Duterte's policies. The lasting legacy of Ninoy Aquino may well be the need for another Filipino uprising against a dictatorial ruler.

Will Trump Be The American Duterte?

DWT isn't the only news source which has noted the scary similarities between Trump and Filipino authoritarian crackpot Rodrigo Duterte. This week Adrian Chen fleshed out the claims-- and fears-- for New Yorker readers: When A Populist Demagogue Takes Power. He's using a war against drugs to have anyone he wants killed with impunity-- over 3,000 since he took office in May.

A foul-mouthed, homophobic bully and compulsive liar, Duterte paints himself as a rebel opposing the Philippines' entrenched elites, who he has termed "feudal." Like Trump, he keeps promising to behave more presidentially. and sometimes he does-- for a few days.

Duterte does not, as he has put it, “give a shit” about human rights, which he sees as a Western obsession that keeps the Philippines from taking the action necessary to clean up the country. He is also hypersensitive to criticism. “Duterte’s weakness is, really, he’s a tough guy,” Greco Belgica, a Filipino politician and an ally of Duterte’s, said. “You do not talk down to a tough guy. He’ll snap.”

...Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues, laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino journalists. Ernie Abella, Duterte’s spokesman, recently pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its “creative imagination” when interpreting Duterte’s comments.

...What began as a reaction to a personal slight has led to a dramatic shift in foreign relations. Duterte has increasingly, if fitfully, signalled his intention to distance himself from the United States, the Philippines’ closest ally, in favor of China, which previous governments have viewed warily. In September, he called for the withdrawal of a contingent of U.S. military advisers and for the end of annual joint combat exercises between the two nations. (Last week, he approved limited exercises.) During a state visit to Beijing in October, he announced a “separation” from the United States. “America has lost now,” he told a group of Chinese businessmen. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines, and Russia.”

As Erwin Romulo, a former editor of Esquire Philippines, told me, “There are no slow news days anymore in the Philippines.”

Duterte has an eighty-six-per-cent approval rating in the Philippines, but his break with America has proved controversial. Opinion surveys regularly find the Philippines to be among the most pro-American countries. The language of instruction in schools is English, and basketball is a national obsession. Around four million Filipinos live and work in the U.S., and the country is one of the Philippines’ most important trading partners. American interests have typically made up a large proportion of foreign investment in the Philippines. In the Manila Standard, the widely respected former President Fidel Ramos compared Duterte to the captain of a sinking ship. Even many on the Philippine left, who decry U.S. influence, worry that Duterte may be trading one imperial master for another.

Duterte’s pivot to China is a rebuke to the Obama Administration’s foreign-policy shift away from the Middle East and toward Asia. But a senior State Department official said that he thought the talk of a complete realignment with China was largely bluster. “The issue is not so much what he says—the issue is what he does,” the official said. He pointed out that the U.S. and the Philippines are so deeply entwined that it would take longer than one Presidential term to unravel their ties. “That said, if he’s absolutely determined, he could do a lot of damage to the U.S.-Philippine relationship.”

Since the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in 1986, the Philippines has been a democracy, if an often dysfunctional one. Duterte’s actions challenge the liberal Western values that are enshrined in the Philippine constitution. Although he styles himself a revolutionary, Duterte seems uncertain about what kind of order will replace the one he aims to overthrow, or whether he will be around to see it. He often intimates that he may not live to finish his term, whether because of overwork and age-- he is seventy-one-- or something more sinister. “Will I survive the six years?” he asked recently. “I’d make a prediction: maybe not.”

...Duterte's campaign had a rocky start. In a speech announcing his candidacy, he rambled on for more than an hour, offering an account of personally killing kidnappers and setting their car on fire, pledging to kill “up to a hundred thousand criminals” when elected, and boasting of his womanizing. “If I can love a hundred million and one, I can love four women at the same time,” he said.

Duterte’s language confirmed his image as a political outsider. “It was something people could relate to,” Pia Ranada, a reporter at the news Web site Rappler, told me. She said that Duterte came across as “the father who would protect you but also the masa leader, the populist leader who will look after your interests, who cares for you because he’s one of you.”

On the campaign trail, Duterte typically wore a plaid shirt and jeans. On the rare occasions when he wore a barong, a formal embroidered shirt, he rolled up the sleeves. He spoke not in the English-Tagalog mixture of the capital but in a creole of English, Tagalog, and Bisaya known as Davao Tagalog. At the beginning of the campaign, he ushered Ranada and another journalist into his house in Davao and showed off the traditional tabò, or water dipper, that he used to bathe. His one extravagance was a large collection of shoes, which he joked was the only thing that he had in common with Imelda Marcos.

This was not quite true. Duterte took from the Marcos years an ability to play both sides of a messy conflict. Marcos, who died in 1989, in Honolulu, is still surprisingly popular in the Philippines; most of his loyalists never lost faith, and many younger Filipinos look back at the charismatic leader with a kind of secondhand nostalgia. During the campaign, Duterte courted Marcos loyalists assiduously, making it a priority to rebury Marcos in the national Heroes Cemetery. He reportedly considered Marcos’s son, a fifty-nine-year-old senator named Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr., as a running mate, and he praised the elder Marcos, saying that he would have been the Philippines’ best President, “if he did not become a dictator.”



Nicole Curato, a sociologist at the University of Canberra, was doing field work in the slums of Tacloban, a provincial capital in the central Philippines, and saw the excitement inspired by Duterte’s candidacy. “It was a very do-it-yourself campaign,” she said. To attract crowds to rallies, politicians typically rely on a strategy known as hakot, in which poor Filipinos are given a free meal, a couple of hundred pesos, and a campaign shirt, and are bused from the slums to the city plaza, where they cheer for the chosen candidate. But Curato said that Duterte’s supporters borrowed money to get to the plaza themselves. Duterte is perpetually late, which meant that supporters might be kept waiting in the sweltering heat for as long as seven hours. Yet it seemed not to bother them. “People were really crazy about him,” Ranada told me. “It’s the only word for it.”

Duterte relied on an army of volunteers to publicize his campaign on social media. The Philippines has among the highest rates of social-media use in the world, in large part because millions of Filipinos employed abroad use it to keep in touch with their families. Overseas workers were a crucial segment of Duterte’s supporters. Since they were spread out all over the world, they could post pro-Duterte messages on Facebook at all hours. One of Duterte’s most rabid supporters was a pop star and sex blogger named Mocha Uson, the leader of a girl group called the Mocha Girls. When Duterte was accused of sexism, she posted on Facebook an account of how, when the Mocha Girls came to Davao, he was always a gentleman, unlike most mayors, who tried to arrange liaisons with them.

Duterte won in a landslide, earning six million more votes than Mar Roxas. Many people saw his victory as a protest against the political élite’s continuing inability to address the country’s problems. Duterte’s predecessor, the reformist Benigno Aquino III, had some success addressing corruption and introduced some economic reforms, but Filipinos saw little change in their lives: they still endured hellish commutes on crumbling roads; they continued to be victimized by crime, corrupt police, and a broken justice system; and about a quarter of them still lived in poverty. If these were the fruits of liberal democracy, many thought, perhaps it was time to try something new. “It’s a repudiation of the past six years of a regime that claims to be after good governance, participatory democracy, but really it doesn’t deliver the goods,” Curato said.

In June, Duterte held a victory party at the Davao City Crocodile Park. In a speech in front of two hundred thousand supporters, he received the loudest applause when he addressed drug dealers. “You sons of bitches,” he said. “I will really kill you.”

During Duterte’s first hundred days in office, the drug war was carried out with a distinctly Filipino mixture of high drama, mass spectacle, and enigmatic violence. In early August, in a speech at a naval base, Duterte read out a list of more than a hundred and fifty politicians and police officers who he alleged were involved in the illegal drug trade, the first of a number of “narcolists” that he released in the following months. It was a tactic from his days as mayor, when he went on his weekly television show, Gikan Sa Masa, Para Sa Masa, and read lists of names of alleged criminals and drug dealers, many of whom ended up as victims of the D.D.S.

In Duterte’s first three months as President, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has been monitoring the killings, listed more than fourteen hundred drug users killed by police and vigilantes. Front pages were filled with photos of the bloodstained victims, bound and gagged with duct tape, who had been shot in the head or garrotted; cardboard signs around their necks served as a warning to others. In the slums of the big cities, police carried out Operation Tokhang, or “knock and plead,” visiting the homes of people who were suspected of involvement with drugs and urging them to turn themselves in. Government reports boasted that seven hundred thousand “drug personalities” surrendered in the first two months in mass ceremonies in malls, city plazas, and auditoriums. An administration official told me that the Guinness Book of World Records expressed interest in certifying it as the biggest mass surrender of criminals in history.

From Davao, Duterte brought with him Ronald (the Rock) dela Rosa, who had served as the city’s police chief, and made him head of the Philippine National Police. The federal police are notorious for corruption, and Duterte has promised to clean up the force, calling out “ninja” cops who resell drugs confiscated in busts. But he dismissed those killed by police as “drug-crazed” maniacs who had resisted arrest, and claimed that murders attributed to the vigilantes were the result of gang wars. In August, Dela Rosa announced that the campaign had already cut the crime rate in half. The killings have done little to diminish Duterte’s popularity. “It’s part of this narrative that killing has been normalized,” Curato, the sociologist, told me. “Before, it’s the state that turns a blind eye on it, and now a broader society is also willing to just turn a blind eye on the culture of violence.” Extrajudicial killing is common enough that there’s a slang term for it: “salvaging,” which, according to the writer Jose F. Lacuna, derives from the Tagalog salbahe, meaning “wild” or “savage.”

Not long after Duterte took office, the Philippine Commission on Human Rights started a task force to investigate the extrajudicial killings. Chito Gascon, the head of the C.H.R., has warned Duterte that he risks prosecution by the International Criminal Court if he fails to halt them. In September, I met with the leader of the task force, Gwen Pimentel-Gana, at her office. Above her desk hangs a portrait of her father, Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., a Senator who was imprisoned by the Marcos regime.

Pimentel-Gana told me that in the first sixty days of the Duterte administration the commission opened more than two hundred investigations into extrajudicial killings, slightly less than half as many as were opened during the entire six years of the Aquino administration. “We now will have to tell the government,” she said, “in your fight against crime or in your fight against drugs, do not forget that lives of people are sacred.”

When I asked her whether Duterte’s rhetoric was encouraging the killings, she was equivocal: “It’s so difficult sometimes to try to interpret what he’s saying, because one time he says, ‘I’m not for human rights.’ The next time he says, ‘All those who are abusing their authority will be punished.’ ” I asked her about the difference between her tone and that of Human Rights Watch, which has declared the drug war a “human-rights calamity.” She replied brusquely. “I will talk like a Filipino, O.K.?” she said. “An ordinary worker—he goes home every night and, for the first time, when he passes through the narrow streets of his home in a shanty or what, he does not see any more drunkards or people smoking on the streets or children running around and being just left there, abandoned. He sees clean streets, peaceful at night. What would you say?”

Yet an overwhelming number of those killed in Duterte’s drug war have been poor. When asked recently about criticism from anti-poverty groups, Duterte explained that poor people are easier targets. Rich people do drugs on private jets, and “I cannot afford the fighter planes,” he said. Jose Manuel Diokno, a human-rights lawyer, told me, “Those who have a name or have some influence or hold some position who are implicated in the drug trade are given an investigation, they’re given due process. But poorer people whose names appear on the list are just simply killed.” Diokno is the dean of the law school at De La Salle University, in Manila, and the head of the Free Legal Assistance Group, founded by his father during the Marcos era to provide legal assistance to victims of martial law; his father was an opposition senator who was imprisoned for two years without charge.

We spoke on the forty-fourth anniversary of the declaration of martial law. Diokno was preparing to lead a candlelight vigil that evening. He said of that period, “A small segment of the population were branded as Communists. They were depicted as people who are godless, who have no regard for human life. The reasoning then was, since they are like that, then they are not human.” He continued, “Instead of being branded a Communist today, you’re branded a drug user or a drug addict or a drug pusher.”

As you probably already know, Duterte hates Obama. Not so, Trump. He says he can get along just fine with the President-elect. After all, they have an awful lot in common. And Duterte is giddy that Trump isn't going to be lecturing any other authoritarians about human rights. As for deporting Flipinos in the U.S.-- whose remittances account for 3% of his country's GDP-- Duterte seems to think Trump will be fair-minded about how he does that. Tuesday he told reporters that Trump's win was "a well-deserved victory... I trust in his judgment that he would be fair in the matter of the treatment of illegal immigrants. I cannot talk for the illegals because, whether President Trump or anybody else for that matter, an illegal is always an illegal.

Duterte’s volatility and willingness to castigate anyone he disagrees with earned him the nickname “Trump of the East” when he was campaigning as the alternative candidate in a presidential election he won in May by a big margin.

His warm words for Trump contrasts starkly with the abuse he poured on incumbent Barack Obama, who he told repeatedly to “go to hell” and called a “son of a bitch” for daring to voice concern about the death toll in Duterte’s drugs war.

Wanna watch some real stupid? Take a look-- you'll be seeing years of this kind of clueless crap:

Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump-- Separated At Birth?

I've been saying for some time now that to grasp what a Trumpanzee presidency would be like it's important to just go beyond Mussolini, Hitler and even Putin. I've suggested looking at how quickly Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan moved to consolidate power in the aftermath of a half-assed coup attempt-- seizing control of the media, the judiciary, the army and any other institution that could be the source of dissent. Over 60,000 people have been detained or suspended from military units (including 40% of the country's generals), the judiciary, universities, newspapers and the civil service. Erdoğan has cowed the political opposition parties completely and has threatened, repeatedly, to reinstate the death penalty-- retroactively. The coup against Erdoğan failed-- if there even was a real coup-- but the coup by Erdoğan has been stunning success.

Erdoğan seems to have the sense to detest Bay Trumpanzee and recognize him for the parody he is. Now, the new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte (AKA, Digong), a crude, primitive fascist... he's even more like Trump than Erdoğan. Yesterday many Americans heard of him for the first time when he called President Obama "the son of a whore" and Obama canceled a meeting with him scheduled for today.

Before winning the presidency in a May 27, he had been the mayor of Davao City for 22 years. In the 6 way race, he drew just 39% of the vote, far from a majority, but no other candidate was close:

• Rodrigo Duterte- 16,601,997
• Mar Roxas- 9,978,175
• Grace Poe- 9,100,991
• Jejomar Binay- 5,416,140
• Miriam Defesnsor-Santiago- 1,455,532
• Roy Seneres- 25,779

He was a controversial populist mayor, linked with a vigilante mob, the Davao Death Squad that was known for murdering suspected criminals, particularly drug dealers. Earlier in life he was expelled from school a couple of times and shot a fellow student in law school. More recently, he has been criticized by Amnesty International, the UN's Human Rights Council, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, and Human Rights Watch for his role in extrajudicial murders of suspected criminals. In 1994, the Manila Times published an editorial warning the Filipinos about Mayor Duterte, deploring "the mentality of lawlessness and vigilantism" which encourages private warlords and businessmen vigilantes to kill persons they believe have done them wrong, including journalists exposing corruption and human rights activists exposing abusive police and military men. They pointed out that his death squads had summarily executed hundreds of petty criminals, including children.

Much like Trump, when there were complaints about how he behaves-- a serial philanderer like Trump, he's a sexist pig and woman hater who's condoned rape; he also cursed Pope Francis a couple years ago-- he vowed to act presidential if he's elected. He said he would become "prim and proper... almost, I would become holy." Sounds like they have the same source of narcissistic inspiration. That was before called Obama a son of a whore and a son of bitch over the weekend and before he had cursed out the U.S. ambassador out and called him a "faggot" earlier this month. And before he threatened to quit the UN and start his own version.

Time Magazine has covered Duterte more rigorously than most U.S. publications and they reported that the death total from vigilantism since he was inaugurated has climbed to over 2,400. It doesn't seem like a safe country to visit, although the State Department hasn't issued a travel warning yet.

Figures released by the Philippine National Police (PNP) on Sunday showed that 1,011 alleged drug users and dealers have been killed in police operations since Duterte began his six-year term on July 1, Agence France-Presse reports. A far higher number-- 1,391-- has been chalked up to “deaths under investigation,” most of them believed to have been killed by vigilantes.

The 71-year-old was elected by a landslide in early May on a campaign promise to rid the Southeast Asian nation of crime, particularly the drug trade. He has exhorted his citizens to “kill drug dealers” themselves and told police that he will support them wholeheartedly in doing so as well.

The results of his invective have been shocking, with an average of around 37 people per day killed in extrajudicial fashion. Representatives from the United Nations as well as international human rights groups have condemned the rampant slaughter, to which Duterte’s response has been dismissive.

“I don’t care about human rights, believe me,” he said in early August.

"Believe me." Know any other psychopath who ends his sentences that way? Duterte has threatened to impose martial law if anyone tries interfering with his anti-drug campaign. Of course, it can't happen here because... because... because... Oh, it just can't.

The Bombast Of Monsieur Trumpanzeè Turns A Large Republican-Leaning Group Against The GOP-- Pinoy Power!

There are over 3 and a half million Flipino-Americans (Pinoy) living in the country, some of whom are descended from immigrants who started coming in significant numbers in the 1700s. Filipinos are the second largest Asian-American group, after Chinese-Americans. Though a plurality of Filipinos consider themselves independents (45%)-- slightly more identify and Republicans than Democrats-- Filipinos are generally socially-conservative and have tended to vote Republican. They voted for Bush in landslide numbers and it wasn't until Obama's 2008 race that that started turning around. The states with the biggest number of Filipino-Americans are California (about a million and a half), Hawaii, Illinois, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Florida and Virginia.

Stupidly and quite gratuitously, Señor Trumpanzee alienated the entire group last week by labeling the Philippines a terrorist nation and announcing he would cut back on Filipino immigration. I heard about it from a very conservative elderly woman who live-in the neighborhood and has never voted for a Democrat in her life-- and never thought she would. But now she says she's going to vote for Hillary and says she threw away her "Make America Great Again" baseball cap. "He's an ignorant and hateful man," she told me last week. "A bad man with no soul. I hope God opens his heart."

Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a story about why Flipinos are so angry with Trump and how he was able to galvanize the whole community against the GOP. "When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump," wrote John Wildermuth, "suggested that immigration from the Philippines should be stopped because it’s a terrorist nation, he likely ended any chance he may have had to compete for the Daly City vote." But the reverberations went well beyond the sizable Filipino community in Daly City.

Trump “is doing what he usually does, which is speaking without thinking,” said Mike Guingona, a councilman in Daly City, where a third or more of the 104,000 residents are Filipino Americans or of Filipino descent. “For someone to make such a broad and sweeping statement without any evidence is unacceptable.”

Speaking last week at a rally in Portland, Maine, Trump said allowing even legal immigration and tourism from countries plagued by terrorism is “pure, raw stupidity.”

Since last year, Trump has called for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States, and said last month that his position has “gotten bigger ... I’m talking about territories now.”

While he declined to say what nations would be included in a potential ban, he listed the Philippines as an example of where a resident legally moved to the United States and was arrested and sentenced last year to 25 years in prison for terrorist activities. However, there’s no evidence Filipino terrorism has permeated the U.S.-- it’s a homegrown movement that generally stays there.

“We’re letting people come in from terrorist nations that shouldn’t be allowed because you can’t vet them,” Trump said. “You have no idea who they are. This could be the biggest Trojan horse of all time.”

But while it’s one thing to talk about banning immigration and tourist visits from countries like Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Somalia and Yemen, which Trump also did in his speech, putting the Philippines in that group is something entirely different, especially for the Bay Area.

A 2013 study by the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice found that Filipinos are the largest Asian ethnic group in the state, with 1.5 million residents, just ahead of the Chinese. More than half of those residents were born in the Philippines. In 2010, the Bay Area alone had nearly 500,000 Filipino or Filipino American residents.

For Democratic Alameda Assemblyman Rob Bonta, the state’s lone Filipino American legislator, Trump’s statement is nothing more than “divisive and hateful rhetoric.”

Trump’s proposal “is a direct attack on the Filipino community,” said Bonta, a former Alameda city councilman who was brought to California as an infant. “It’s a really important issue for the Filipino American community to focus on.”

In many ways, the concerns of the Philippines resemble those of Mexico, a country Trump has slammed for allowing millions of its residents to enter the U.S. illegally. Immigrants from both countries maintain close ties with relatives in their home countries, regularly traveling back for visits and celebrations. Both countries also depend heavily on remittances, money U.S. immigrants send to relatives in their native countries.

“I know people who go back and forth to the Philippines a couple of times a year or more,” Bonta said. Restrictions on travel in either direction would be devastating for families, he added.

Limitations like those Trump proposes would be disastrous for the Filipino community in Daly City and elsewhere, said Guingona, who is running for San Mateo County supervisor.

“It would be cutting what keeps us together,” he said. “We’re not just talking about immigration, but about people coming here to visit friends and relatives.”

...Reaction to Trump’s call for tough immigration restrictions in California and other areas with a large Filipino population has been harsh.

“Donald Trump has expanded his bigoted attacks to include Asian-Pacific Americans,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), who was born in Taiwan. “It is more than just offensive. It is dangerous.”

“Donald Trump’s latest rant suggesting we ban immigration from countries like the Philippines that are helping us fight terrorism is another example of his reckless rhetoric that’s based on fear and division,” said Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, where people of Filipino descent make up about a quarter of the population.

There was even more outrage in the Philippines itself, where one Filipino legislator has filed a bill in the country’s House of Representatives seeking to bar Trump from entering the country.

“Maybe (Trump) is speaking in broad strokes and he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about,” Ernesto Abella, a spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte, said in an interview with a state-run radio station.

Philippines Community Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said in an Aug. 5 statement that it was unfortunate Trump mentioned the Philippines in his anti-immigration speech.

Trump “has even professed his love for the Philippines during the (2012) launch of his 57-story luxury apartment” building, Trump Tower, in Manila, Andanar said. “He did say, ‘I’ve always loved the Philippines. I think it is just a special place.’” The building in Manila licensed Trump’s name-- he was not the developer.

Maybe they'll have to change the name, the way they're doing in Baku, where Trump is detested by the Azerbaijanis after his outspoken bigotry against Muslims offended the entire country. My friend at the RNC, more aware than Trump of the Republican-friendly nature of Filipinos, told me this goes beyond just Filipinos. Do you know how many people only know Filipinos because it's who their nurses or their parents' nurses or relatives' or friends' nurses were. People remember them as the day-t0-day care-givers and lifesavers, sometimes more than doctors. The nurses are hands on. Trump should keep his yap shut about ethnic groups. The fucker doesn't ever learn."

Manny Pacquiao-- Another Shabby Right Wing Icon

Yesterday, far right fanatic Bryan Fischer was whining on twitter how "ANOTHER rich guy takes his money - and his tax revenue - out of US because taxes are too high." And that was Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino boxer and the congressman representing Sarangani province back home. Since being sworn in on April 16, 2012 he's been representing Sarangani's 500,000 mostly poor farmers from his two beautiful homes in Los Angeles. He's in L.A. making millions doing commercials for NIKE, for detergents, medicines, telecomm companies, cheap beer, clothing and for anyone else who will write him a check. Lately he's been pretty unwelcome around L.A. He decided to spout off about how marriage equality offends his religious feelings.

I don't follow boxing and I would have never heard of Manny Pacquiao except that I have a Filipino friend who told me about how Pacquiao is still friends with two former boyfriends, who he used to have sex with back in the Philippines and still spends time with here in L.A. Oops... how Republican! He plans to run for president of his own country so he's been making plans to move back there, which seems like a sensible thing to do. And it's probably better to be a congressman if you live there and not here. But he made a commotion this week by telling the media he's leaving the U.S. because federal taxes are too burdensome. The sleazy little hypocrite has made tens of millions of dollars... but taxes are too high. Grover Norquist, the guy who wants to drown the government in a bathtub, is on the case: “Pacquiao’s concerns lie with the federal income tax. As Nevada is one of the nine states that do not have an income tax, Las Vegas has grown to become the home for major bouts because fighters do not have to worry about the state taking a bite out of their winnings or purse... Unfortunately, Nevada’s economic benefit is now overshadowed by the federal income tax rate... [F]or boxers who stand to earn over $1 million per fight through winnings, pay-per-view revenue shares, fight bonuses, and other forms of taxable income, they will be taxed at the top marginal income tax rate of 39.6 percent.”

Always so tragic when multimillionaires are asked to pay their share! In all likelihood, he'll be apologizing as fast as golfing millionaire Phil Mickelson did for the same kind of selfish, greedy comments. In Pacquaio's case, though, he should be encouraged to go back to his own country and stay there.

I know for sure that Pacquiao, like so many conservative homophobic hypocrites, has sex with young guys but I'm not claiming that he has-- or conservatives like Steve Southerland (R-FL) and John McCain (R-AZ)-- have sex with corpses. I ran across a discussion of what Erich Fromm referred to as the "necrophilious character" in Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gommorah and it seems sadly relevant, not just to Pacquiao and Bryan Fischer but to the right-wing's bizarre and dysfunctional sexual obsessions in general.

In his 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm analyzed the phenomenon of necrophilia, concluding that it extended beyond the traditional concept of erotic attraction to rotting flesh and also manifested itself in "malignant aggression... unalloyed from sex, in acts of the pure passion to destroy." The necophilious character, Fromm wrote, is passionately attracted "to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly... It is the passion to tear apart living structures."

Together with his research partner, Michael Moccoby, Fromm surveyed a diverse group of research subjects for necrophilious, "anti-life" tendencies. Across the board, Fromm detected a profound link between necrophilious character traits and right-wing ideology. "The study asked the respondents a number of questions that permitted correlating their political opinions to their character..." Fromm wrote. "In all of the samples, we found that anti-life tendencies were significantly correlated to political positions that supported increased military power and favored repression against dissenters."

Fromm identified necrophilious characteristics as among the most dangerous of any society. "They are the haters, the racists, those in favor of war, bloodshed and destruction," he wrote. "They are dangerous not only if they are political leaders, but also as the potential cohorts for a dictatorial leader. They become the executioners, terrorists, torturers; without them no terror system could be set up..."

Want to rethink the Republican Party's conservative base? A bit?

Sex Tourism-- Philippines... And Jamaica: Unrestrained Capitalism Taken To The Extreme

Not the Philippines, not Jamaica-- snow, cold... Sweden

One of my friends has taken to fantasizing out loud about "Swedish girls." He should just go get a dvd; I'm sure there are scores of them on the topic. Instead he keeps asking me about planning a trip with him to Sweden. I should probably tell him that since 1999 it's been illegal to hire a prostitute in Sweden-- and that 10 years later Norway adopted the same approach. It's not illegal for the prostitutes to offer their services... it's illegal for the johns to buy them though (the Kvinnofrid law... try the Google). Brothels are also illegal. I suggested he take his fantasies to Bangkok. I don't know if they have Swedish girls in the brothels-- Roland tells me there are foreign girls working there these days-- but I suspect that if you have enough money to spend, you can get whatever you'd like there... kind of a Randian Republican dream market. Alas, he's programmed against Asian women. Plenty of Caucasians aren't. Asian sex tourism is rampant.

The other day the U.S. Ambassador to the Phillipines, Harry Thomas, was forced to apologize to the whole nation after claiming that 40% of male tourists to that country are there for the sex. He sent a cellphone text Friday to Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, who was on a visit to Vietnam, expressing regret for his comments.

"I should not have used the 40% statistic without the ability to back it up. I regret any harm that I may have caused," Thomas said in the text message, which was released to journalists.

The US embassy spokeswoman Tina Malone said Thomas "offered his deep regret" for his comment made during a conference last month.

The US would continue to be a "strong and dedicated partner of the Filipino people in combating the global scourges of human trafficking and sexual tourism," she added.

Thomas also told the conference on human trafficking in the Philippines last month that the sex tourists included Americans and that it was "something I'm not proud of." He urged Philippine authorities to prosecute all foreign sex tourists, including Americans.

The Philippines is trying to revive its tourism industry and erase its reputation as a sex tourism hotspot.

Wikileaks had posted several U.S. diplomatic cables about the rampant sex trade industry-- including the exploitation of children-- in the Philippines. "Sex tourists reportedly came from Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia to engage in sexual activity with minors," said a leaked embassy cable dated February 17, 2010... "In 2009, the Bureau of Immigration deported two foreign sex offenders and pedophiles, and in a joint program with the Australian Federal Police denied entry to 19 Australian sex offenders upon their arrival in the Philippines. The government also cooperated with the US in prosecuting American nationals under the terms of the U.S. PROTECT Act of 2003, which criminalized the commission of child abuse by American nationals overseas, including child pornography and other sexual offenses against a minor." Another leaked cable named Sabang Beach in Puerto Galeraand the province of Mindoro Oriental as well known destinations for sex tourism.

Trafficking of Philippine women and children for sex is an international business. And according to Rene Ofreneo, a former Philippine labor undersecretary and an expert on the sex trade, "the number of prostituted persons in the Philippines is about the size of the country's manufacturing workforce." That same report cites a recent study that showed there are about 75,000 children, who were forced into prostitution due to poverty. The Washington Times reported that "Teen-age girls are being forced into prostitution due to the Asian economic crisis. In Davao City, the Philippines, there are more than 1,000 prostituted teen-age girls; customers pay as little as from 50 cents to $2.50. This rise in prostitution increases the spread of AIDS, especially as contraceptive costs have gone up with the currency collapse and bankrupt government cuts in distribution programs." Most of the customers are Filipinos but the country is one of the top destinations for pedophile sex tourism, much of it financed with Japanese capital.

A Philippine Adventure Tour costs $1,645, including round trip airfare, hotel accommodations and guided tours to the bars where men purchase sex from prostitutes for as little as US $24. Tour owner and operator Allan Gaynor promises that customers "never sleep alone on this tour" and recommends that the customer have sex with a different girl every day "two if you can handle it."

...13,000 Australians, second in number to Americans, a year visit Angeles City, a center of prostitution surrounding the former Clark U.S. Air Force base in the Philippines... Men from Australia and Great Britain are primary suspects as perpetrators of child prostitution in the Philippines. Two of the three-pedophilia cases recently decided by Philippine courts involved British nationals, although there are reportedly more Australian suspects.

Maybe this is where Ambassador Thomas got his statistics:



Maybe while hubby's away exploiting child prostitutes in southeast Asia, his wife is off on a little sex tourism of her own though: