Propaganda statement posted to the CPP Website (Aug 8):
Intensify tactical offensives and mass struggle to oust Aquino
CPP Ang Bayan
Benigno Aquino III was met with one of the biggest rallies in his four-year rule during his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 28. The nationwide demonstrations attended by more than 60,000 people manifested a new and higher level in the struggle against the US-Aquino regime. Throughout the country, the cry in the streets was Oust Aquino!
The mass actions reflected the Filipino people’s growing anger at the Aquino regime’s corruption and mendacity, its puppetry, treason and fascist brutality. More and more sectors are ready to take action against the increasingly isolated Aquino regime. The Filipino people’s rumbling anger threatens to erupt in the face of their worsening situation and Aquino’s enforcement of increasingly deleterious antipeople and pro-imperialist policies.
The ruling Aquino clique is now deathly anxious in the face of its worsening political crisis. Days before the SONA, Aquino came out on national television to spew the most biting remarks against the Supreme Court and all other sectors that assailed his anomalous use of the nation’s coffers under the DAP. He followed this up with a call to the people to wear yellow or hang and display any yellow item in the belief that he enjoys widespread public support.
Contrary to Aquino’s objectives, this gambit only succeeded in fuelling the people’s anger against the regime. Thus, Aquino used other tactics to court pity and sympathy. He once again employed the empty slogans of the “righteous road” and “inclusive growth.” He invoked his mother and father whom he practically portrayed as saints. The day after, the Aquinos’ “Yellow Army” went on the offensive and floated the idea of “one more term” for Aquino to create the illusion of widespread support by the “silent majority.”
No one, however, has bought these tactics designed to manipulate public opinion. Aquino failed to hoodwink the people and derail them from the path of struggle. In a desperate attempt to conjure illusions of change and progress, Aquino came out with one lie after another in rapid-fire fashion: that his government acted with dispatch to rescue the victims of typhoon Yolanda, that there are measures in place to provide jobs to the people, that the economy has developed and poverty reduced, that government has been cleaned up, that peace has been achieved and that criminality rates have subsided, among other prevarications.
But the illusions of change and progress being conjured by Aquino are exceedingly untenable, as it has become obvious to the Filipino people that Aquino sits on a throne atop the bureaucrat capitalist dung heap in order to use the nation’s coffers and his privileges as president for the political gain of his clique, his friends, relatives and fellow landlords. Despite widespread condemnation of the pork barrel system, Aquino has fouled up the 2015 budget, designing it as a means of extending his clique’s hold on power.
It is the concrete conditions of the Filipino people that teach them the need to trod the difficult path of struggle in order to defend and advance their national and democratic aspirations. Unemployment and underemployment levels are unprecedentedly high. The majority of the people are mired in poverty. Landlessness and landgrabbing continue without letup. It is clear to the people that Aquino’s claims of “development” are a big lie, pleasing only the big foreign banks and capitalists and their local big capitalist cohorts.
The freedom-loving people are enraged at Aquino’s defilement of Philippine national sovereignty. His signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement or EDCA which paves the way for the construction of US military bases in various parts of the country comprises the height of Aquino’s puppetry.
The people hold the US government accountable for the military support it provides the Aquino regime. The hands of Aquino, the AFP, the PNP and other coercive forces of the state are stained with blood in their suppression of the people and defense of the interests of foreign mining companies and plantations. Killings, massacres, abductions and illegal arrests, threats and abuse continue unabated. For Aquino, the peace talks are nothing but a big show.
It has become self-evident to the people that the Aquino regime is no different from previous regimes in its basic economic policies, its subservience to US imperialism and its repression of the people. The people are determined to put an end to the US-Aquino regime’s rule and advance their national and democratic struggle.
A broad protest movement to oust the Aquino regime is spreading in campuses, factories, communities, markets, offices, churches and other places. The growing call for Aquino’s impeachment threatens to explode in a gigantic mass movement of hundreds of thousands marching in the streets.
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) fully supports the intensification of people’s struggles to oust the US-Aquino regime. Along with strengthening the mass movement in the countryside, the CPP directs the New People’s Army (NPA) to intensify armed struggle nationwide. The NPA must continue seizing and maintaining the initiative in launching ever more tactical offensives against the state’s armed forces in order to weaken it and inspire and provide greater momentum to the mass movement to oust Aquino.
