By using Covid-19 as pretext, Duterte has been able to grab emergency powers and 275 billion pesos supposedly for mass testing, medical treatment of the sick, food and economic assistance for the people who have been deprived of livelihood by the lockdown. But the overwhelming majority of the people who are supposed to be beneficiaries of food and economic assistance have not received anything from the corrupt regime. Duterte has made a rambling and inane multi-media broadcast every week during the lockdown but he has not given any rational plan for the use of 275 billion pesos. And there has been no accounting of the disbursement of these funds.

What have become conspicuous are the use of public funds in the making of contracts for overpriced but inadequate medical supplies in the name of the fighting Covid-19, the lack of mass testing and contact-tracing, the high proportion of health workers dying due to lack of protective gear, the corruption of the bureaucrats and military officers who steal the money for food and economic assistance, the high cost of military and police operations for the lockdown, the scandalous purchase of overpriced aging Apache attack helicopters from the US, the high cost of military psywar operations and corruption in the red-tagging of the social activists and their organizations, the fake surrenders, fake encounters, fake community support projects and the fake attacks on imaginary NPA camps.

And in his last broadcast, Duterte put a great deal of emphasis on his offer of two million pesos for the head of every top NPA commander who is killed. With this kind of offer, we can expect his armed minions to manufacture more NPA commanders so that they will receive the cash reward as they have from previous fake surrenders and fake encounters. We can expect more murders being committed by military and police officers against innocent civilians who are misrepresented as NPA commanders. Duterte thinks that he is clever in offering cash reward for the killing of NPA commanders as a way of further corrupting his armed loyalists and deflecting attention from his gross incompetence and failure to perform the tasks for effecting the medical solution in the fight against Covid-19. Like his previous order to shoot dead any violator of the lockdown, his order to kill NPA commanders will result in the murder of many innocent people.

Duterte does not care that he will go down in history as a butcher of the Filipino people. He has the ignominious record of murdering more than 30,000 people in the name of the bogus war of drugs which has been unleashed to favor the drug empire of his son and Chinese partners. He thinks that he can escape the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by aiming for a fascist dictatorship. But in fact he has committed so many grievous crimes of treason, mass murder and plunder and the people are so outraged and enraged that they are eager to put an ignominious end to his regime, dynasty and cronies. The revolutionary forces of the people are being challenged by the Duterte regime to carry out lightning actions by small teams to punish the human rights violators and plunderers in their urban nests and thereby force his armed units to do guard duty in urban areas and reduce the number of his combat operatives in the countryside.###