#2024 Philippines election

[shelivesingalaxies]

If it is too difficult to strengthen and make sure our Philippines coast guards are not bullied, can you at least ensure that they and their families are well provided for with proper healthcare and insurance?

May God have mercy on our country - the Philippines, our citizens - the Filipinos, the old and elderlies who cannot afford good healthcare and have to work because they need to eat despite being weak, the breadwinners (the widows and widowers and those who are children and singles too but had to take over when their father died) still paying lots of taxes and supporting their families even if it means forgetting their original dreams, the children and young adults who could barely eat three times a day, much less attend school and focus on education, our bullied Philippine Coast Guard, our teachers who have to pay for resources with their own money for good teaching materials, the students who need to limit their study hours because they have to share rooms, our commuters who are mostly employees who come to work, already exhausted because our transportation systems are too poor and in dire need of improvement, and everyone else. Everyone else. Every single Filipino.

Please. Please treat us well. Stop the corruption. Raise our moral. Dear government, you are there to serve. And we are here to support. But please treat us well and prioritize us. Do not waste our taxes on your own propaganda and on elevating yourselves. The real ones who need help are everywhere. The real ones who need our funds are everywhere. Do you feel their pain? Do you see us? We have been enduring for far too long. Do not hire people who are incapable and have their own motives. Do not waste money on poor materials and poor planning. Hire loyal and competent ones. Let them sign contracts that call for accountability. Let there be an audit team consisting of concerned and talented workers with a true heart to help ensure the work is properly done and the Filipinos are blessed with improvement. Let there be transparency in your spending to ensure every cent is accounted for and used for the right cause. Please treat OUR country and OUR people right. Respect OUR rights and OUR welfare, not another country's.

Pretty please. Do it well.

Please HELP our country beloved - the Philippines.

[hedgehog-png]

[tomorrowusa]

Philippine Nobel laureate Maria Ressa literally wrote the book on standing up to dictators.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

She spoke to Ali Velshi about what she has been calling the "Philippinization of America".

Ms. Ressa says that given the Philippine example with President Duterte, six months is all Trump needs to consolidate power in his hands.

Trump appointments are something we should be especially wary of. And we should begin now by opposing his wildly unqualified cabinet nominees. If you live in a state with GOP senators in Washington, you have a special responsibility to lobby them to oppose the pervy and corrupt people Trump wants to place in government.

Contacting U.S. Senators

Don't think it can't happen here. It already has.

@dnlfelix

[toxinoire]

To the Americans that see this post:

Omg election disappointment twin (I'm Filipino and some similar bullshit happened in our elections back un 2022).

I'm so sorry dude

[araneol]

why would u let a felon run for president

[ricisidro]

U. S. Election 2024 and the Philippines:

A Kamala Harris win would likely continue current multilateral alliances and support for a rules-based approach in the region, strengthening military and economic partnerships.

A second Trump administration could shift to a more bilateral relationship and maintain trade, investment, and development aid.

#Election2024 #ElectionDay #ForeignAffairs #ForeignPolicy #EconomicRelations #EconomicPartnership

#foreigninvestment #ForeignAid #MilitaryAid #MilitaryPartnership #multlateralrelations #bilateralrelations

[textsearchaccessgooglemicrosoft]

CARTER

[catdotjpeg]

LOOK: Multisectoral groups marched along Commonwealth Avenue earlier today as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered his third State of the Nation Address (SONA) at the Batasang Pambansa to assail his failed promise of a Bagong Pilipinas [trans. New Philippines]. For the groups, Marcos’s Bagong Pilipinas is a grand sham. Amid promises of better living conditions, 46 percent of Filipinos rated their families as food poor—the highest since 2008—according to the latest survey of Social Weather Stations. “[H]inaharap [ng ating mga kababayan] ang realidad na mataas ang presyo ng mga bilihin, lalo na ng pagkain—lalo’t higit, ng bigas,” said Marcos in his speech earlier, affirming bleak realities on the ground. On top of a cost of living crisis are poverty wages that fail to meet the family living wage of P1,190, as estimated by economic think tank IBON Foundation, the P35 wage hike in the National Capital Region (NCR) enacted last week was dismissed as an “insult to minimum wage workers” by Leticia Castillo of human rights alliance Defend NCR. Such wage hike is far from the P150 raise being lobbied in Congress by labor groups under the National Wage Coalition. Castillo also decried the persistence of red-tagging and vilification of activists perpetrated by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict. From July 2022 to June 2024, 3,419,044 cases of threat, harassment, and intimidation were recorded by human rights group Karapatan. The number of political prisoners also climbed to 755 as of last month. These human rights violations run contrary to Marcos’s establishment of a Special Committee on Human Rights, which was labeled “toothless” by Human Rights Watch. Marcos’s claim of a bloodless drug war is also inconsistent with the 359 drug-related killings—34.3 percent of which were committed by state agents—recorded during his second year in office by research project Dahas. Moreover, despite claims of an independent foreign policy, the Philippines under Marcos remains dependent on the US and its unequal treaties, said Liza Maza of MAKABAYAN. Last year, Marcos announced the creation of four new US military bases in the country under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the US. Such treaties with the US have been criticized for intensifying tensions with China and the broader Indo-Pacific region. Clarice Palce of Gabriela and Ronnel Arambulo of Pamalakaya raised their worries of the Philippines being dragged into a stand off between two global superpowers which will only worsen the poor living conditions of Filipinos. The program ended with a symbolic destruction of the effigies of Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte. The broken UniTeam will be challenged by the Makabayan Coalition which will field a complete senatorial slate including ACT Teachers Party-list Representative France Castro and Gabriela Women’s Party Representative Arlene Brosas in the 2025 midterm elections. Photos by AJ Dela Cruz, Marcus Azcarraga, Audrey Sanchez, and Sarah Gates

-- Philippine Collegian, 22 Jul 2024 9:45pm PHT

[not-so-rosyyy]

this 2024 US elections is giving me severe war flashbacks to the Philippines 2022 presidential elections where we all thought for sure a woman who was a public servant and human rights lawyer would win because of the staggering amount of people supporting her both online and offline in rallies and how her candidacy inspired grassroots door-to-door campaigns funded by and led by thousands of passionate citizens all over the country (literally unprecedented for any candidate ever)....only for her to be defeated by that dumb son of the dictator who murdered dissenters and looted our nation five decades ago.

but anyways! i'm really hoping for the best and rooting for Kamala to win. because as someone living in a country whose socio-political and economic conditions are tied closely to the US, i don't even wanna think about the ramifications of Trump 2.0 on my people and the rest of the world.

[mariacallous]

Americans on November 5 will be electing a wartime president. This isn’t a prediction. It’s reality.

Neither candidate has yet spoken plainly enough to the American people about the perils represented by the growing geopolitical and defense industrial collaboration among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This axis of aggressors may be unprecedented in the potential peril it represents.

Neither candidate has outlined the sort of generational strategy that will be required by the United States to address this challenge. Irrespective of whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, this will be the unavoidable context of their presidency. One will become commander-in-chief at the most perilous geopolitical moment since the Cold War—and perhaps since World War II.

In that spirit, Washington Post columnist George F. Will this week compared the 2024 US elections to the 1940 US elections, when the United States hadn’t yet formally declared war on Imperial Japan, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s Italy.

What was different then was that one of the two candidates, incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sensed he was about to become a wartime president and was acting like it. FDR, wrote Will, “was nudging a mostly isolationist nation toward involvement in a global conflict” with his 1937 “quarantine speech” on aggressor nations and through his subsequent military buildup.

FDR’s opponent was Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, who like FDR was more internationalist than isolationist, in the tradition of his party’s elites of that time. “In three weeks,” Will writes, “Americans will not have a comparably reassuring choice when they select the president who will determine the nation’s conduct during World War III, which has begun.”

The point is that just as World War II began with “a cascade of crises,” initiated by the coalescing axis of Japan, Germany, and Italy, so today there is a similar axis—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Will reckons our current global crisis began no later than Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.

This isn’t the first time that I have quoted diplomat-historian Philip Zelikow in this column. Writing in Texas National Security Review this summer, Zelikow reckoned that the next president has a 20-30 percent chance of being involved in worldwide warfare, which he differentiates from a world war in that not all parties will be involved in every aspect or region.

Zelikow, who recently expanded on these ideas among experts at the Atlantic Council, reckons that the next three years mark a moment of maximum danger. Should the United States navigate this period successfully, alongside global allies and partners, the underlying strengths of the American economy, defense industry, tech, and society should kick in and show their edge over those of the authoritarians.

The problem in the short term is that the United States is facing challengers in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may see a window of opportunity in the United States’ domestic distractions, a defense sector not yet adequate for emerging challenges, and an electorate that questions the value and necessity of US international engagement. Both leaders might calculate that acting more forcefully against Ukraine and Taiwan now could produce a greater chance of success than a few years in the future.

Wrote George Will: “From Russia’s western border to the waters where China is aggressively encroaching on Philippine sovereignty, the theater of today’s wars and almost-war episodes spans six of the globe’s 24 time zones.” He says this is what “the gathering storm” of world war looks like, borrowing the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs.

Will charges the two presidential candidates with “reckless disregard” for failing to provide voters “any evidence of awareness, let alone serious thinking about, the growing global conflagration.”

If that sounds like hyperbole to you, it’s worth reading FDR’s third inaugural address in January 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted Congress to declare war on Japan the following day.

“To us there has come a time,” said Roosevelt, “in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock—to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of isolation, the real peril of inaction. Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit.”

War isn’t inevitable now any more than it was then. When disregarded, however, gathering storms of the sort we’re navigating gain strength.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered,” Roosevelt concluded, “our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”

[jangillman]

Worth the Read – Be an Informed Voter in 2024

Understand the web of political and media connections shaping our landscape:

Political and Media Connections

• Michigan’s Governor: Formerly employed by George Soros.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom: Nephew of Nancy Pelosi.

• Adam Schiff’s Sister: Married to George Soros’ son.

• John Kerry’s Daughter: Married to the son of an Iranian mullah.

• Chelsea Clinton: Married to George Soros’ nephew.

• ABC News Executive Ian Cameron: Married to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser.

• CBS President David Rhodes: Brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser.

• ABC Correspondent Claire Shipman: Married to Jay Carney, Obama’s Press Secretary.

• Reporter Matthew Jaffe (ABC/Univision): Married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s Deputy Press Secretary.

• ABC President Ben Sherwood: Brother of Elizabeth Sherwood, Obama’s Special Adviser.

• CNN VP Virginia Moseley: Married to Tom Nides, former Deputy Secretary for Hillary Clinton.

These connections reveal a “stacked deck” between politics and media. If you’ve ever suspected bias, this might explain why some stories get buried.

Investigations and Conflicts of Interest

• James Comey: Led investigations into the Clinton email scandal and Foundation but recommended no prosecution.

• Peter Comey (James Comey’s brother): Held an executive role at DLA Piper, the law firm auditing the Clinton Foundation, which donated $50,000 to $100,000 to the Foundation.

• Douglas Emhoff: Former DLA Piper executive, now taking leave—husband of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Voting Machines and Influence

• Dominion Voting Systems: Serves 40% of U.S. voters, operating in 30 states. Texas rejected it.

• Admiral Peter Neffenger: Biden transition team member and former Smartmatic board president.

• Smartmatic: Partnered with Dominion in 2009 and has been linked to election controversies in Venezuela and the Philippines.

• Lord Mark Malloch Brown: Longtime Soros ally, chairs Smartmatic and the Open Society Foundation.

Financial Ties and Influence

• Blum Capital Partners: Dominion investor, tied to Richard Blum—husband of Dianne Feinstein.

• Paul Pelosi: Another major investor.

• Nadeam Elshami: Former Pelosi aide, now with Dominion Voting Systems.

Dominion has also donated between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation, suggesting deeper financial and political interconnections.

This web of relationships shows how deep political and corporate interests intertwine. Stay informed as you approach the 2024 elections.

DRAIN THE SWAMP! MAGA 2024 🇺🇲

[arkipelagic]

[long post] finally watched the kingdom (2024), here are my thoughts:

1. as i expected, it had very weak worldbuilding.

the point of divergence from real world history to their fictional history was the three paramount rulers of luzon: rajah matanda, rajah sulayman, and lakan dula existed. the current dynasty is descended from lakan dula and the seat of power for the kingdom of kalayaan is in manila. therefore, the characters are tagalog (and kapampangan?) descent — yet they utilize aspects of classical visayan culture for an inexplicable reason: the tattooing culture, the employment of babaylans rather than catalonans, and the bakunawa motif.

despite the oft-times awkward placement of exposition throughout the film, there is none provided to explain how it is that spanish and other european & american powers failed to colonize the archipelago. was it a coalition of asian powers (e.g. filipino-chinese-japanese) against european ones? or were europeans already weakened at the time of the would-be conquest? was it a matter of manpower or technology? diplomacy and collaboration with foreigners in exchange for nominal freedom?

in addition, there’s no explanation for why the modern tagalog culture resembles classical visayan ones more than their own. if rajahs matanda and sulayman & lakan dula existed and resisted colonization, then it only makes sense the current population would only be muslim as these rulers were increasingly islamized. rajah matanda is famously related to bruneian royalty. tagalog elites ceased growing their hair long, ceased eating pork, and ceased tattooing by the time the spaniards came. the general population was still animist-polytheistic, but realistically they would come to accept islam just as their rulers did without the implementation of catholicism by spanish proselytizing.

i think the people behind this film were either too attached to the visayan image of a precolonial philippines or too scared to alienate their majority christian viewers by portraying a muslim-majority alternate philippines. they even forego using malaysia and indonesia as cultural inspirations and relied on the monarchal thailand instead.

also, again there is no explanation as to how the kingdom of kalayaan includes visayas and mindanao — nor why they are still called that. (“mindanao” came from the corruption of “maguindanao” after the maguindanao sultanate which, at the time of the colonial writers describing the land, ruled majority of the island. if there were no colonization though, then it must be called something else OR the maguindanao sultanate somehow encompassed the whole of the island at its fictional peak.) classical visayans rejected islam whereas mindanao was split between muslims and animists. it makes no sense to have disparate ethnoreligious groups in all three major islands to unite under the same manila-based animist monarchy.

there is, however, some interesting and casual shows of culture and customs. for example, igorot men wearing their traditional attires without humiliation from non-igorot characters living in the cordilleras; the prince being served alcohol by a servant who presents it with two hands while bowing; and the elevation of sabong as a hybridized boxing-wrestling sport.

2. the beginning scene (i.e., native fishermen being illegally apprehended by a foreign navy; a thinly veiled allusion to chinese harassment of filipinos in the west philippine sea) is too on-the-nose, as with other scenes in the film.

in the beginning, for example, we see villagers discussing who they wish to succeed the king. the camera pans to merchandise worn on their bodies, e.g., rubber bracelets announcing their “team.” very reminiscent of the previous election.

3. it’s an action-heavy production but the camera work, direction, choreo, and/or editing amount to very stilted scenes. regardless, the acting — especially from cristine reyes and piolo pascual — were believable.

4. little time to explore the deeper motivations and backgrounds of the antagonists. there is a separatist movement but it ends before the film does; we meet only the leader of the otherwise faceless movement. there is then a plot twist and a post-credit scene involving a different antagonist.

the themes as well! towards the end the writers introduce the concept of the fallibility of memory, which unfortunately amounted to little emotional impact due to restricted time and no hints leading up to its reveal.

tl;dr: this could have been better if the worldbuilding were different and if it were a limited series instead of a film.

[tomorrowusa]

Just in time for the US elections, Philippines authoritarian former president Rodrigo Duterte freely admits he employed a death squad.

The 79-year-old, making his first public appearance on Monday since his term ended in 2022, said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his presidency, during which as many as 30,000 people were killed in a “war on drugs”. “My mandate as president of the republic was to protect the country and the Filipino people. Do not question my policies, because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country,” he said. Duterte had entered the hearing walking with a stick and was defiant throughout, often cursing as he addressed senators.

None of what he's proud of doing had anything to do with Philippines law or international standards of human rights.

“I can make the confession now if you want,” Duterte said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they were not policemen, they were also gangsters.” “I’ll ask a gangster to kill somebody,” Duterte said. “If you will not kill [that person], I will kill you now.” When asked by senators for further details of the death squad, he said he would give more information at the next hearing. Duterte also said that he ordered officers to encourage criminals to fight back and resist arrest, so that police could then justify killing them. “What I said is this, let’s be frank, I said encourage the criminal to fight, encourage them to draw their guns. That was my instruction, encourage them to fight, and if they fight, then kill them so my problem in my city is done,” he said, in comments reported by Rappler, an independent news outlets.

When voters fail to keep lowlifes like Duterte, Putin, or Trump out of power they get lawless gangsterism and corruption.

If some shithead claims "only I can solve the country's problems" then it's probable that this person is one of the country's problems.

[stele3]

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/deadliest-israeli-strike-yet-central-beirut-leaves-gruesome-scenes-2024-11-25/

[azspot]

It is unfortunate that the 2024 election, like the two previous ones, should mostly be about the unique danger posed by Donald Trump, and that once again the results will likely be determined by just a few thousand votes in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The country and the world face serious challenges that Trump’s issue-light candidacy has obscured or distorted. Too many Americans are now struggling to afford housing, medicine, and even food. The wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza threaten to grow into larger conflicts involving neighboring countries and, possibly, the United States. China is rattling its saber in Taiwan and the Philippines, testing the strength of U.S. alliances. Meanwhile, the climate crisis grows worse by the year. Kamala Harris’s record is far from perfect, and much of her agenda remains rather vague. When it comes to the atrocities taking place in Gaza, she has offered noble-sounding condolences but promised no real change from the unacceptable status quo; should she win in November, that will have to change.

Trump Is Dangerous as Ever