What makes Duterte froth at the mouth?

You want to know why Duterte is raving?

President Rodrigo Duterte admits that the Philippine economy is in the “doldrums” two years into his macho rule.

Strikes are erupting across Metro Manila and nearby provinces to the south, east and north of the capital. For the first time in almost half a century, rival labor groups marched together on Labor Day, roaring their demand for the fulfilment of Duterte’s campaign pledge to end contractual labor practices that have withheld job security, just wages and social benefits from more than a million workers.

The government’s “tax reform” program ( Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion) has turned out to be a runaway TRAIN full of the highjacked earnings of poor Filipinos.

Inflation, now at a five-year high, has also eroded whatever savings given to middle class workers. Only the rich, who pass on higher excise taxes and an expanded value-added tax list to consumers, have really benefited from TRAIN.

The peso is at its weakest in nearly two decades. The languishing currency is expected to push inflation higher in a country that imports almost everything needed in the manufacturing sector and even much of food staples after 50 years of neglect of the agriculture sector.

False notion of ‘stability’

How has the Philippines arrived here from the “doing well” period of mid 2016?

Sure, there’s a lot of trouble in the world and smaller countries get bronchitis when giants get the sniffles.

But that’s not just it.

A capricious, unpredictable and violent government is bound to scare away investors, except the ones who junk all legal, social and politics niceties for profits (the corrupt, in short).

Duterte started his rule literally with guns blazing. More than 4,000 mostly poor drug suspects have been killed in police operations. Law enforcers reported last month that 22,000 more deaths were being probed.

Duterte billed his drug war as the salvation of Filipinos. The D and E classes, the biggest segments of the population, have turned cynical in the face of brutality without due process, sending his trust ratings down.

No amount of manufactured noise from the government’s social media machinery, now reduced to a plaintive echo chamber, could stop thar tide.

The new economic woes saddled on the poor are not going to rekindle their trust in a President who has pledged to block cries for justice, promoted killers among the police, and reneged on anti-corruption pledges by reassigning and even promoting aides caught facilitating shabu shipments and coddling extortionists and shakedown artists.

While weaker in capacity than the middle class on social media, the poor can be intractable once roused by injustice. Duterte fears this latent power and, in the guise of yet more salvation dreams, he has ordered a new round up of poor men and youth for the most flimsy of reasons – loitering in the streets to escape the suffocating hovels of Manila’s slum areas.

Rumblings

Simply put, a policy of burdening the poor to sustain Duterte’s love affair with the country’s richest folk cannot be sustainable.

The rumblings among workers and peasants, the cries of fisherfolk denied entrance to traditional fishing grounds by Duterte’s Chinese masters, the sound of bombs in Mindanao, the seething landscape of frustration in Marawi – growing wider with the derailment of a new autonomy law for country’s southern Muslim minority – all these add up to an unstable environment.

You can’t build a vibrant economy on the backs of angry, outraged people. They will flail and send you flying.

So, Duterte has vowed to correct his neglect of the economy, which also sags from the fallout of the Marawi war.

How?

Federalism. Charter change.

A charter change that would get rid of all those hard-earned, fragile social, economic and political gains of the post-Marcos dictatorship period.

A charter change that would offer our lands and waters to foreign powers, offer foreign firms control of key industries that have not yet been grabbed by previous administration’s policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatisation.

A charter change that would fulfill the President’s vow to “choose investors” for indigenous peoples, stomping on their right to self-determination.

Yes, the proposed charter will now allow Congress to oversee this obscenity, the same congress controlled by political dynasties that also own most of the disposable lands that will be offered up to foreigners.

Final solution

But it won’t be enough for them to earn gazillions from the lands they have fought to keep beyond the reach of agrarian reform.

The biggest prizes up for grabs are ancestral lands, the last pristine areas of this country. Lush, beautiful surface and under the soil, a bounty of minerals.

Duterte is raving because he knows the tough challenge faced by charter change. Surveys show majority of Filipinos do not want it.

On Monday, June 25, even his businessmen allies balked at federalism, seeing this as the wet dream of local warlords (who also control Congress).

Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr., president of the Philippine Exporters Confederation Inc. and honorary chair of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Duterte’s experts there is no urgent reason to push through the risks of charter change.

“If it fails, who will pick up the pieces?” Ortiz-Luis asked.

Duterte desperately needs charter change. Federalism is just an excuse.

He needs a new Constitution that strips the judiciary and constitutional bodies of oversight powers over government neglect and abuse. He needs a new Constitution with a transitory period that would allow him dictatorial powers – control of the executive, the legislative and judicial branches.

He needs that control to offer sweetheart deals to unscrupulous partners, most especially China and the US, because his autocratic ways have turned off other democracies.

He intends to get those lands by any means, including the proposed new anti-terror measure that would legislate full-scale attacks on indigenous peoples, environmentalists – anyone who stands in the way of the new generation of carpet baggers.

That is why he has scuttled the peace talks on the cusp of landmark agreements on comprehensive reform and national industrialization.

Duterte sees only war and conflict as solutions to his problems. Forget the country, forget the poor he bowed to during campaign sorties.

He still shivers at the rush of praise and cheers as he bombed to rubble the country’s Islamic city, whose rehabilitation will be undertaken by Chinese state firms and Malaysian companies (where the same Chinese conglomerates have stakes). He has shut off Marawi’s residents from councils that decide the fate of their homeland.

Duterte will either ram home charter change to get the powers he needs. Or he will use the draconian anti-terror amendments. Either way, his goal is clear: Tyranny.

Whether he succeeds or not depends on us Filipinos.