My unspoken opinion of that rat-bastard Rodrigo Duterte

Duterte (L) in happier times with his close friend and "spiritual adviser," cult leader Apollo Quiboloy. Duterte is now in the hands of the International Criminal Court, while Quiboloy is jailed on charges of human trafficking, sexual assault, fraud, and money laundering here in the Philippines, and is wanted on similar charges in the US. Incredibly, both are still candidates for offices in the May, 2025 elections; Duterte is running for his old seat as mayor of Davao City, while Quiboloy is running for the Senate. 

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IN my Manila Times column for Thursday, March 13, I put aside the topic that I had intended to discuss (subsidized electricity rates), and decided to ride the tsunami of the local news cycle, as the biggest story to hit this country in years happened on Tuesday. That, of course, was the arrest and speedy extradition of former president Rodrigo Duterte on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, where he has been charged with crimes against humanity for his bloody "war on drugs," first as Davao City mayor, and then during the first half of his term as president, between 2016 and 2019. 

Duterte, in a panic over potentially being hauled before the international tribunal for overseeing the murders of between 6,000 (the official government tally) and 20,000 people (the number claimed by human rights groups), withdrew the Philippines from the ICC in 2019. But, due to his habit of doing things in a half-assed manner and surrounding himself with equally doltish advisers, he neglected to read the fine print of the Rome Statute, under which the ICC reserves the right to assume jurisdiction over crimes committed prior to a country's exit from it. Nor did he withdraw the Philippines from the Interpol compact, meaning that the government would remain duty-bound to honor any warrants served by Interpol, which is exactly what happened this week. 

Early on in my career as a commentator here -- those interesting, low-income days when I was still freelancing, treating my own blog as an actual job, and doing radio -- I had no compunction at all about commenting freely on the state of politics and politicians here in the Philippines, but in the years since I've "gone mainstream," so to speak, I've become more circumspect about doing that. Thus, in my Thursday column I confined myself to addressing the mechanics of Duterte's arrest and removal from the country -- all of which happened within the span of about 12 hours -- rather than discussing him or his crimes. 

I should say "alleged crimes," but I personally saw bodies in the street, and watched the news clips, along with everyone else, where he straight-up said that he would have all the drug pushers and users killed, so yeah, I'm pretty sure he's guilty. A lot of those people weren't "drug personalities," either. 

Just because I don't express an opinion in my column because I deem that an inappropriate platform for it doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. The majority of my audience here in the Philippines might not appreciate or find any value in my perceptions about Rodrigo Duterte and the people in his orbit, but the rest of the world ought to know who this guy really is. 

Rodrigo Duterte is a pig and an intentional misanthrope, a bully to his core who delights in making people uncomfortable. He is not unintelligent, but is probably best described as impatient and incurious, bored by technicalities or complex problems. His slovenly appearance and rough way of speaking is a political act, one he honed through long years as a mayor in his hometown of Davao because it resonates with the hicks, and practiced for so long that it became his actual personality. His children are all cast from the same pretentious "every-man" mold as well, and are equally boorish, especially eldest daughter Sara, who is the Vice President of the Philippines. She is currently facing an impeachment trial in the Senate -- set to begin in July -- for embezzling millions in funds from her office and from the Department of Education, where she served as Secretary for a time before having a public falling-out with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. after questions began to be raised about the missing funds. Her response to Congressional efforts to investigate the matter was, at one point when one of her staff was detained for refusing to answer questions, to post a terrifyingly insane video rant to her social media wherein she threatened to have President and Mrs. Marcos assassinated. 

Sara's two brothers, one the current mayor of Davao and the other a congressman, are equally as charming, as is her little sister Victoria -- known as "Kitty" -- who is all of 18 years old and has gained notoriety in the past days for going completely apeshit online about her father's arrest. That has been tempered somewhat, however, by some enterprising Gen-Z non-fans of hers (I am rather proud to say that my daughter is one of them), who uncovered a number of "Kitty's" social media posts in which she extols the excessive use of marijuana. This has earned her a new nickname, "Wake & Bake," after one of her posts, which I believe was on TikTok. For those who didn't know, possession of marijuana is strictly forbidden here in the Philippines, and so this is a particularly bad look for the daughter of "kill all the drug users" Duterte. 

As far as Duterte himself is concerned, the allegations in the charges from the ICC are all true; he did explicitly order law enforcement to liberally use deadly force in pursuit of drug offenders, promised protection from legal consequences for them, and authorized a bounty system for each suspect killed or captured. He did apply violent methods against political opponents by tagging them as being connected to the drug business, and he turned a blind eye to vigilantes at the national level. While mayor of Davao in the early 2000s, he actually organized these into the infamous "DDS" -- Davao Death Squad -- and while he wasn't so overt about it as president, he made it clear enough that the police should not waste their time investigating vigilante killings. Virtually none of them, which may number from several hundred to several thousand, have ever been solved. 

Duterte also publicly admitted, while president, that he had personally killed several (the number seemed to change with each retelling) criminal suspects while he was the City Prosecutor and then Mayor in Davao; and in an admission that rattled even his diehard supporters, he confessed to having sexually molested his family's housekeeper when he was a teenager. The way that particular story was told strongly implied that she was not the only woman to have suffered that through the years, a notion that was only reinforced by his close friendship with and staunch support for Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, a Davao-based cult leader who, after hearing a performance by Billy Graham in Korea in the late 1980s, decided he was the son of God. American readers can make of that what they will. 

It is hardly possible to separate Duterte from his drug war; it was, after all, the centerpiece of his administration, at least before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the single issue he had campaigned on in the run up to the 2016 elections. But if one sets that aside for the moment and examines the rest of his record as president, it was thoroughly unimpressive; of the four presidents who have served during my time here, he was by far the worst. Although he was not as authoritarian as he is sometimes characterized, particularly by foreign media, he was by no means a champion of democracy; as president, he was simply what he always had been, a provincial mayor accustomed to managing relatively simple concerns, and relying on a combination of a reputation buoyed by shallow populism and cronyism to do so. It didn't scale up to a national level well at all, and as a result, Duterte distinguished himself as a poor administrator and even worse policymaker. 

His Cabinet was a collection of some of the most laughably ineffective yahoos and grifters this country, even with its relatively low standards, has seen for in a long time, and was only saved from being a complete disaster by a few perhaps accidentally good staffing picks, such as Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, and Budget Secretary -- later governor of the central bank -- Benjamin Diokno. Whatever they accomplished, however, was overshadowed by the farcical performance of some of his other appointees, such as Alfonso Cusi, a political party bureaucrat, as Energy Secretary, and Arthur Tugade, a lawyer and business speculator, as Transportation Secretary. Duterte's choice for Health Secretary, and the point man for the government during the Covid-19 pandemic, Francisco Duque III, had at least held the position before, but had spent more time during his years out of government service in the real estate business rather than medicine, which became apparent in the ham-fisted way the pandemic was handled. The Philippines had the world's longest lockdown -- about five months in total -- and suffered one of the most severe economic recessions in Asia. As part of the lingering fallout from the Covid-19 nightmare, Duque, along with a former official of the Office of Management and Budget, is still facing charges of graft for the improper transfer (and implied skimming) of 41 billion pesos of Health Department funds during the pandemic. 

What comes next in the strange saga of Rodrigo Duterte is unclear; but given the glacial speed at which the ICC works, it is doubtful he will leave the Netherlands alive. He is 79 years old and in poor health, and even though he can expect adequate medical care, his surviving the three or four years, at a minimum, it will take for there to be any resolution in his case is far from certain. No matter; there was something satisfying in seeing him brought to heel, and as an added bonus, his removal to the Netherlands caused most of his toxic family and coterie of thuggish buffoons to follow him. Out of sight, out of mind doesn't do people with political aspirations much good here, and so there is the happy prospect that this particularly unpleasant political clan has just been put out of business. There are still too many others, here in this country and in the world at large, and unlike some people, I have little hope that this one arrest has any greater significance as a sign of the possible end awaiting the likes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu. But if it's a small w instead of a big W, it's still a win, and I'll be happy enough to enjoy it for its own sake.

 

  

 

Starlink in the crosshairs

MY Manila Times columns from February 27 and March 11. Starlink has recently been granted a license to operate in the Philippines, and that is something that should be stopped. I’m not done yet, but these two columns are a decent start.

Comelec supports fascism with Starlink plan (February 27, 2025)

LAST week, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced that it would be deploying “about 7,000” of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet stations for use in transmitting voting results in the upcoming May elections. Whatever excuses Comelec may provide for making this ill-advised decision, an obvious conclusion that can be drawn from it is that it is apparently now government policy is to materially embrace fascism, at least when doing so may result in a small bit of convenience.

According to Comelec commissioner George Erwin Garcia, the Starlink units would be used in areas identified as having only one telecommunications provider or none at all. In justifying the choice of Starlink, Garcia was quoted by news reports as saying, “Starlink will provide around 200 megabits (Mbps) per second bandwidth, ensuring that election returns can be transmitted in real time,” adding that he expected that the results of the May polls could be provided with “unprecedented speed.”

I would certainly not accuse Garcia of lying about that, but he certainly seems to be uncritically repeating whatever sales pitch he was given by the Starlink people. So far, there have been no published tests that indicate Starlink operates reliably at anywhere near 200 Mbps. Starlink’s own website for business customers, who can presumably pay more for higher speeds, only advertises download speeds of between 40 and 200 Mbps, upload speeds of 8-25 Mbps, and latency (the time it takes to connect to the network in order to upload or download something) of between 20 and 60 milliseconds. The most recent test results I could find online were from late July of last year, wherein Starlink’s median download speed was 48.14 Mbps – about half the 94.42 Mbps of the country’s fixed broadband operators – its median upload speed was an equally unimpressive 12.63 Mbps, compared with 94.13 for its ground-bound competitors, and its average latency was 50 ms, roughly twice that of the fixed broadband providers.

Anecdotally, on the three different occasions I have had a chance to connect to Starlink in rural areas of the country, most recently in Palawan, the performance of the network has been no better than a weak cellular data signal. On my latest trip when I needed to be online to do a bit of actual work, I could not connect for more than a few moments at a time; using my phone as a wi-fi hotspot with my regular old, technically boring Smart data signal saved the day.

Certainly, in those areas where there is no internet connectivity whatsoever, a slow and intermittent Starlink connection is better than nothing. But the unimpressive performance of Starlink generally, and the uncertainty about its reliability in some places may very well raise questions about whether or not something as important as voting tabulations should be entrusted to it.

Those questions may become even more pointed when the cost of the system is considered, which as far as I could determine from a diligent online search, has not been officially disclosed. Back in mid-2022, when the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) was working on an initiative to provide internet connectivity with Starlink in rural areas, one of the challenges DICT said it was trying to resolve was the budget, as the equipment for each ground unit – the lower-cost residential type – cost $599 (or P34,660), with each having a monthly subscription fee of $99 (P5,729). If Comelec opts for the presumably better-performing Starlink equipment for business customers, those units cost P153,942 each, according to Starlink’s website, with monthly connection plans starting at P3,920. With 7,000 units needed, an estimate of the total cost for Comelec’s plan thus ranges from about P283 million, up to about P1.1 billion.

Surprisingly, security is not one of the biggest concerns with using the Starlink system, although Musk has candidly said on a number of occasions that the system gathers a large amount of data which he sees no problem with using as he sees fit. Recently, a conspiracy theory has made the rounds in the US that Musk used Starlink to manipulate the results of last November’s presidential election. While Musk is the target of several lawsuits accusing him of election interference, those pertain to his use of his Twitter (now called X) social media platform to spread disinformation; Starlink was actually not used by election officials in the US – as transmitting results over the internet is generally considered unsafe – save for in one county in California. Even then, so long as the data being transmitted is securely encrypted, there is not much that Starlink can do with it. It can collect geolocation and time of use data, and that certainly will be collected and stored by Musk’s minions, for whatever purpose it might serve, but the actual voting data should be safe, provided Comelec does the rest of its job properly.

Nevertheless, Comelec’s decision to willingly hand over hundreds of millions of pesos in public funds to the personal coffers of an avowed fascist is questionable in the extreme. Not just any right-wing nutjob, but an avowed fascist who, apart from being in the midst of carrying out an authoritarian coup in the US, has engineered the sudden cancellation of at least P20 billion in development funding from the Philippines, to the severe detriment of many of this country’s public health, education, livelihood, and governance capacity-building goals; is accused of election interference on behalf of right-wing extremists in three different countries other than the US; and about whom a soon-to-be published biography says, “there is no evidence he has any intellectual achievements.” Associating with this kind of individual in any sense, let alone doing business with him, is mockery of Comelec’s mission to ensure free and fair democratic elections. Even if the Starlink product was the most fantastically capable and advanced internet service the world has ever seen – and it is quite far from being that – the moral hazard simply cannot be overlooked or justified.

      

Comelec’s internet provider enables enslavement of Filipinos (March 11, 2025)

THE decision by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to procure internet services from Elon Musk’s Starlink for the upcoming midterm elections at first seemed to be merely morally and practically questionable judgement, but recent news reveals that it is far worse than that. Signing a contract with Starlink was an utterly reprehensible decision and a gross dereliction of duty. Whether that action violated any laws, I am not qualified to say, but it is possible that it ran afoul of laws and rules on government procurement.

On February 27, which was coincidentally the same day my first column about Comelec and Starlink was published (“Comelec supports fascism with Starlink plan”), Wired published an in-depth report (https://www.wired.com/story/starlink-scam-compounds) on the use of Starlink by the “scam hubs” in Southeast Asia, mostly located in Myanmar and Cambodia. These are the very same compounds where tens of thousands of foreign workers – including Filipinos numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands – are enslaved, tricked by offers of legitimate work and then forced to work on various online scams.

The conditions in these compounds are appalling, as described by the people who are fortunate enough to escape from them. Workers are subject to torture if they try to escape or do not meet their quota for scams carried out successfully. Living conditions are miserable, and the workers are not paid – or if they are, their pay is withheld and applied to a massive fee ($15,000 is commonly mentioned) those who control these scam hubs demand to secure a worker’s release. In reality, because they are carrying out criminal activity on a massive scale, none of the enslaved workers are ever allowed to leave; in the unlikely event that a worker manages to pay off the fee, the amount demanded is simply increased.

SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company responsible for Starlink, was formally notified as far back as July 2024 that its services were being used to carry out criminal activity, in a letter sent to SpaceX’s attorneys by the deputy district attorney of Santa Clara County in California. The deputy DA, whose concern was for victims of online scams in her area, “offered to share more information to help the company in ‘disrupting the work of bad actors’,” the Wired article said.

Neither SpaceX nor Starlink replied to the deputy DA’s letter, the article reported. Likewise, Wired reported that it had “sent SpaceX a list of questions about the alleged use of Starlink at scam compounds, including coordinates of suspected scam compounds where phones have connected to the Starlink network. SpaceX did not respond to the request for comment.” This, despite its terms of service clearly stating that “SpaceX may terminate services to users if they participate in ‘fraudulent’ activities or if a system is used in unauthorized locations. In addition, in a post on Twitter (X) addressing the use of Starlink in Russia and Dubai (it is neither officially available nor supposed to work at all in either of those countries) back in February 2024, Starlink said, “If SpaceX obtains knowledge that a Starlink terminal is being used by a sanctioned or unauthorized party, we investigate the claim and take actions to deactivate the terminal if confirmed.”

According to those conditions, none of the scam compounds in Myanmar – there are about 40 of them in the Myawaddy region – should be able to use Starlink, as the country’s military junta has banned it. However, enforcement is obviously non-existent due to the country’s ongoing civil war, and Starlink, despite having been informed of the situation, has turned a blind eye to it and not acted to cut off the service. In fact, according to local reports in Cambodia, Starlink has recently agreed to increase its service in that country, including in the rural areas where an estimated 100,000 people are held as slaves in scam compounds. The Wired article, citing UN data, said that there were another 120,000 in Myanmar.

How many of those are Filipinos is unknown, but the accounts of 12 Filipinos who were among 250 people who were rescued last month when the Myanmar military raided the compound where they were held suggested there are hundreds more.

The only way a government or anyone else on the ground can block a Starlink internet connection is by physically removing the receiver unit. Starlink, however, can easily block connection for any ground terminal, or even for entire geographical areas; for example, it blocked the service for all of Russia, in accordance with sanctions imposed by the US government when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet the company’s response to its system being used by slave labor in Southeast Asia has been to ignore the notifications, and even expand its service in the areas where these scam hubs are mostly located.

This entire situation instantly renders Starlink ineligible to be a contractor for projects by any of the international ODA agencies, multilateral banks and funding organizations, and UN agencies, under the procurement rules each of them follow. Yet Comelec, either through sheer ignorance and failure to carry out proper due diligence, or through an intentional lack of concern that Starlink facilitates the enslavement in foreign countries of Filipino citizens, has gone ahead and signed a deal with Starlink to provide 7,000 ground stations for connectivity in remote and isolated areas of the country.

Doing business with Starlink makes Comelec complicit in the human trafficking of Filipinos, as well as thousands of other innocent victims from other countries, and Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia owes the country an immediate explanation for it. If Comelec was unaware of Starlink’s support for slavery and internet crime and is only learning about it now, that indicates a very sloppy job on Comelec’s part of vetting a potential service provider, but the proper authorities can address that. The correct thing for Comelec to do in this case is to immediately cancel the Starlink contract.

If, on the other hand, Comelec was aware of the manner in which Starlink facilitates criminal activity and has refused to take action despite being informed about it, and then went ahead and signed a contract with Starlink anyway, that is simply unacceptable. Severe consequences by the authorities with oversight of Comelec should follow.

(Image: Starlink satellite burning up over Switzerland last year; from a Twitter post)

 

A ‘movement’ without a goal cannot win

OVER the past couple of months, I have become increasingly more discouraged with the reactions of “the left” – that term bothers me, but as a shorthand designation for “those who are opposed to Trump, the MAGA cult, and fascism” it works well enough, for now – to the daily atrocities being carried out the cabal that has seized power in the US. The reason I am discouraged is that, despite the pretense of “a movement” against Trump, there is no direction, no goal.

What I see instead is a lot of expressed outrage in social media posts, on YouTube channels, in the bulk of the content on Substack, and more and more frequently, in the streets – but all of it preaching to the choir, aimed at audiences who share the same outrage, and none of it with a message any more substantial than, “bad things and bad people are bad, and we dislike them.”

Don’t get me wrong; the outrage is entirely justified and based on reality. I share the same outrage, and I believe that every person who believes in basic human norms should be outraged, too. But outrage implies “the current circumstances are unacceptable, and must be changed,” and there’s where “the left” seems to lose it. Changed to what? I have yet to hear anyone suggest an end goal.

As I see it, there are only two possible goals that can be pursued, and I think that both of them are so intolerable to Americans who are living in a situation beyond their imagination that they are paralyzed. One goal would be to make the dissent so disruptive that Trump and his regime will have to change their ways – respect the Constitution and the rule of law, and respect basic rights and civilized norms instead of practicing institutionalized racism, discrimination, and misogyny. The other goal would be to overthrow the regime, remove the offending leaders of that regime from human society one way or another – kill them or lock them away forever – and replace it with a proper government.

Yes, I recognize that both of those options are problematic, but it’s got to be one or the other, and unless the American people – or at least enough of them to make a difference, which I think is easily possible – pick one or the other, there will be no change to the current woeful state of affairs.

No, check that. Things will get much, much worse.

America now is Germany in 1936 or 1937. The people behind the MAGA seizure of power have been preparing a long time for it – the first version of Project 2025 was written in 1980, and there has been one produced for every presidential election since – and now that they are in power, they are not going to be easily dislodged. Nor are they going be dissuaded from continuing their rapid dismantling and plunder of the federal government, nor stripping away the rights of everyone they consider inferior by the courts, or by “peaceful protest”; anything stronger, such as general strikes, might make a difference, or they might be violently put down. Either way, “the left” is too diffident, too spoiled, and too uncoordinated to pull that off, so it’s irrelevant, at least for now.

The Christo-fascists did not spend better than 40 years preparing for this to give it up easily, and if anyone still believes there will be anything like a legitimate election in 2026, and especially in 2028, they are a fool. The only way there will be is if the current regime is made so fearful of a threat to their survival that they “toe the line,” so to speak, and behave like a proper American government, or if they are removed – whether that’s on the gallows, in front of a firing squad, or in the bowels of a supermax prison, never to be seen or heard again makes no difference.

I think the first option is quickly becoming less and less likely to be successful as time goes on, but I don’t think it’s impossible, yet, if people act forcefully. The second option, of course, works every time; but that kind of effort needs leadership and it needs bravery, two things that the would-be resistance is completely bereft of at the moment.

So what are we doing? Are we going to fight back in some way that matters, or are we going to be this generations Good Germans?