Tags: Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Dispute on FM Jr.’s running to pervade poll campaign

Marcos Jr. was tried and convicted of violating the 1977 NIRC in 1995 by the Quezon City Regional Trial Court, which imposed on him the following: 1) three-year imprisonment and a fine of P30,000 for “failure to file income tax return for the year 1985” and 2) three-year imprisonment and another P30,000 fine for “failure to pay income tax for the year 1985.”

Controlling the media narrative

From what he said during those interviews, it seems that what he is trying to pass off as his platform of government mostly consists of plans to revive his father’s discredited and long-dead programs. Among them is the revival of the training program for OFWs that during the Marcos Sr. dictatorship encouraged the export of Filipino labor as a cure-all for the unemployment problem that the Marcos Sr. regime could have solved by making more jobs within the country available.

World jurists weigh in on the ATA, red-tagging

Thus, the jurist body recommended that national and local government officials – including members of the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) – must refrain from labeling HRDs as terrorists. Any credible accusation of terrorist conduct must be pursued “through the rule of law, cognizable charges, compliance with due process and the right to a fair trial by a competent independent and impartial court,” it emphasized.

The elephant in the room

Marcos Junior’s claim about self-sufficiency in rice was similarly false. There was a rice crisis during much of his father’s reign, with people lining up for the cereal for hours, and mixing rice with corn. Alternative means of generating power were indeed explored during the last years of Marcos’ rule, but these attempts, such as the corruption-ridden, badly designed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, never made any difference in assuring reliable power sources beyond the 1980s.