Bagong Pilipinas, Same Old Story
The 2025 State of the Nation Address (SONA) delivered by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. was, as expected, a circus of illusions and empty promises meant to deodorize the rotting carcass of a state in deep crisis. Marcos Jr. touted supposed economic growth, foreign investment inflows, and infrastructure projects as signs of a “Bagong Pilipinas.” But beneath the rhetoric lies the enduring reality of a semicolonial and semifeudal state, ruled by a corrupt and fascist regime fully subordinated to US imperialist interests.
More than anything else, Marcos Jr.’s SONA was a report card to his US masters and to the local ruling classes, signaling that the Philippine reactionary state remains open for plunder and repression, and that the US-Marcos regime remains committed to its historic role as a puppet of US imperialism.
Bureaucrat capitalist corruption in full display
Marcos Jr., heir to a political dynasty that once pillaged billions from the Filipino people, stands as the current representative of the ruling class, with full use of state power to serve the interests of big landlords, comprador bourgeoisie, and transnational corporations, especially in mining, energy, and agribusiness. Since Marcos Jr. came to power, the personal wealth of the country’s top three billionaires – Manny Villar, Ramon Ang, and Enrique Razon – has surged by 50 to 100%, a staggering indicator of how state policy has been designed to concentrate wealth further into the hands of the big landlords and big comprador bourgeoisie.
Massive infrastructure allocations under his “Build Better More” program primarily benefit real estate tycoons and logistics magnates through sweetheart deals, land speculation, and right-of-way arrangements. The Maharlika Investment Fund redirects taxpayer money and state pension funds into opaque ventures, likely to serve as slush funds for his cronies. Meanwhile, public-private partnership schemes transfer risk to the state and guarantee profits for private capital. Budget allocations for military operations, intelligence, and confidential funds totaling billions of pesos, serve both to fortify the fascist machinery of the state and to grease the hands of loyal generals, legislators, and contractors. This systematic funneling of public wealth to private pockets is a defining feature of bureaucrat capitalism in full display under the Marcos Jr. regime.
At one point, Marcos Jr. dramatically castigated unnamed officials for their role in corruption-tainted and poorly executed flood control projects. As the putative head of the GPH, Marcos Jr. cannot wash his hands of his regime’s failures by scapegoating his own appointees. His finger-pointing only exposes his inability to take accountability, even as successive typhoons disproportionately affect the urban poor and rural communities left at the margins of the reactionary state’s priorities.
Marcos boasted about billions in foreign investment pledges, but did not say a word about the mass dislocation of the national minority, farmers, and urban poor communities that these projects entail. He celebrated inflation “control” and agricultural production increases while peasants suffer under rising input costs, rice import dependency, and landlessness.
Marcos also boasted of accelerating land title distribution to farmers, claiming that the administration is committed to ensuring that “those who till the land must own it.” In truth, 68% of the land titles distributed under his term fall under the parcelization of collective Certification of Land Ownership Awards (CLOAs) through the World Bank-funded SPLIT program which does not transfer new lands to the landless, but merely fragments previously awarded lands, weakening collective landholding and allowing more maneuver space for landlords to reconcentrate ownership back to their hands. Meanwhile, the much-hyped New Agrarian Emancipation Act has benefited only a fraction of the country’s farmers, and even then, primarily through token debt condonation rather than any substantive transfer of land ownership. None of these schemes amount to genuine agrarian reform, which demands free land distribution and sufficient support services.
Similarly hollow was Marcos Jr.’s claim of creating more employment opportunities for Filipinos. But without national industrialization, the jobs generated are largely low-wage, temporary and informal – lacking job security and social protections. Many of the country’s newly graduated students find themselves either unemployed or underemployed, trapped in contractual service jobs or pushed toward informal gig work. For an increasing number of Filipinos, the only viable option remains to migrate abroad under an expanding and exploitative labor export program that commodifies Filipino labor while absolving the state of its responsibility to build a self-reliant economy.
Still a puppet of US imperialism
Despite his rhetoric of an “independent foreign policy.” Marcos Jr. has firmly re-entrenched the Philippines within the neocolonial grip of US imperialism. While he waxed poetic about national sovereignty, the reality is that the Philippines today is being transformed into a forward military base for US war efforts in the Asia-Pacific.
His regime has aggressively expanded military, economic, and political ties with the US, and allowed the construction of four additional Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites (bringing the total to nine), strategically placed across Northern Luzon, Palawan, and other key areas that place the Philippines within striking distance of China. These sites are not for “humanitarian assistance” or “disaster preparedness” as they claim, but are forward-operating bases for US military assets, prepositioned weapons, and logistical operations in preparation for future conflict in the Asia Pacific. The regime’s treachery deepened further with the approval of an ammunition manufacturing facility in Subic Bay, effectively turning Philippine territory into a military production zone in service of US war efforts.
Beyond military subservience, Marcos Jr. also acted as Trump’s economic lapdog. In a humiliating display of neocolonial servitude, Marcos Jr. “negotiated” with Donald Trump to reduce US tariffs on Philippine exports down from 20% to 19% – a measly 1% reduction in exchange for the entry of US cars, pharmaceuticals, wheat and soy products tariff-free into the Philippine market. While the US protects its own industries and sets the terms of “free trade,” the Marcos regime willingly dismantles what little remains of the country’s manufacturing, agriculture, and health sovereignty. It further opens the door for a flood of cheap US goods that will severely displace local producers, farmers, and small businesses, all while deepening dependency on imperialist supply chains.
Marcos Jr. continues to uphold the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), and other lopsided military and economic arrangements that keep the Philippines under US tutelage. While waving the flag of his so-called Bagong Pilipinas, Marcos Jr. is in fact deepening the country’s role as a pawn in the brewing war between US and China. He willingly places the Filipino people at risk of inter-imperialist conflict, offering our lands, labor, and lives in service of a war that does not serve the Filipino people’s interests.
Consolidation of fascist rule
Perhaps the most dangerous element of Marcos Jr.’s regime is its consolidation of fascist rule. While dressed in democratic garb, the reactionary state today is actively suppressing dissent, criminalizing dissent, and militarizing civilian governance.
The SONA did not mention the thousands of political prisoners languishing in jails, the red-tagging of journalists, environmentalists, labor leaders, and indigenous defenders, or the continuing extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of activists. The Anti-Terrorism Council wields arbitrary powers to silence critics, and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) is a tool of terror, corruption, and repression.
Under the gloss of “peacebuilding” and “development”, Marcos Jr.’s National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD) is nothing more than a rebranded blueprint modeled after the US Counterinsurgency Guide meant to crush the revolutionary armed movement. It continues the legacy of the “whole-of-nation” approach, mobilizing civilian agencies, local government units, and even schools and religious institutions as instruments of military intelligence and psychological warfare.
What made Marcos Jr.’s SONA particularly laughable (if not outright delusional) was his claim that “no more guerilla fronts exist” – which is easily disproven by the successive tactical offensives of the New People’s Army (NPA) in recent times across Mindanao, Bicol, Eastern Visayas, and Southern Tagalog, among other regions. Instead of diminishing, the armed revolutionary movement continues to expand its ranks, gain political strength, and consolidate revolutionary bases in the countryside.
Toward genuine liberation
The revolutionary movement stands in sharp contrast to the lies and illusions peddled by Marcos Jr.’s in his fourth SONA. While the Marcos regime sings lullabies of progress, the masses are awakened by persistent crises and chronic poverty. They now rise up and resist across the archipelago, taking up arms to join the NPA and fulfill the Filipino proletariat’s historic task of winning the national democratic revolution.
source: NDFP
Cocoa Hoto (real)
in reply to MariandKurokoHeadpatter • • •notice how zero Nekos at Work users have made an appearance
they fear us