Partido Federal ng Pilipinas footed 40% of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s campaign bill through party treasurer Antonio Ernesto “Anton” Floirendo Lagdameo Jr., grandson of his father’s close business associate. The remaining cost was covered by today’s opulent names in real estate, retail, construction, and shipping industries.
A total of 67 donors contributed P624.7 million to help Ferdinand Marcos Jr. win the presidency, based on his own declarations to the Commission on Elections (Comelec).
PCIJ researched each of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s donors to track relevant family, political and business ties. We found that relatives of his father’s known supporters, tycoons and donors who own companies that are barred from making political contributions bankrolled his presidential bid in the May 2022 elections.
Is this alternate history? No. It is melodrama. It’s the Marcoses using cinema to re-create themselves as family wronged by history. The problem with that is how the audience will take this, given that we have been fed with that soap-opera theme for decades of rich families being wronged.
Effigies of newly-elected Presidents always come as a challenge. The effigy should reflect the country’s political condition.
Marcos Jr.’s priority is to ensure that the neoliberal policies that his predecessor President Rodrigo Duterte passed are maximized to create the most favorable environment for big businesses, including foreign capital. To become an investment destination, the administration will provide massive tax breaks to corporations through the CREATE Law and provide foreign companies more profit-making opportunities with the amended laws on public services and foreign investments.
“We vow to continue the claim for reparation and recognition of thousand more victims by pushing for a better reparations law. We vow to continue to claim our hard-won non-monetary benefits, as mandated in RA 10368 or Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013. We will continue to resist the historical distortion peddled by the Marcoses and their apologists, and the return of the $6 billion more that the Marcoses stole from the Filipino people.”
“Marcos Jr.’s top priorities are not in sync with what poor Filipinos need – lowering of prices of food and basic commodities, wage hike, contractualization, affordable housing, end to human rights violations and extra-judicial killings, and resumption of peace talks.”
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“The form and name is new, but basically, what we were 50 years ago is the same with what we are today.”
“If BBM does not believe government data that the inflation rate in the country has reached 6.1 percent, we, the poor, will express the true suffering that we are experiencing due to high prices of essential goods.” By JOSH AVENGOZA Bulatlat.com MANILA — Urban poor groups are concerned that their situation would worsen if their…