Category: america

“Let me get my shoes” #TrumpTheater

Sunday midmorning I was transfixed by CNN’s veritable loop of the minute or so when Trump was shot at and bloodily nicked in the right ear. He ducked and disappeared under secret service peeps until the coast was declared clear. But there was no rushing him off the stage to safety, oh no, first he had to “get his shoes” — I knew then that he was fine — and next he took a BIG MOMENT to stand tall in the embrace of secretservice and to raise his right fist sabay sigaw ng FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! to an ecstatic MAGA crowd. WHAT.A.SHOW.

Was it staged, as many are saying on social media, or was it the real McCoy, a failed assassination attempt? Easy to speculate and imagine behind-the-scenes conspiracy scripts of all kinds, from all sides, but first let’s hear it from the FBI. And maybe the CIA?

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The Mass Psychology of Trumpism
In the minds of his most ardent supporters, the ex-president is both more and less than a person
By Dan P. McAdams

120 years of America

These days find me wondering, what if, ano kayâ, kung hindi tayo sinakop nasakop ng America after we had won the war against Spain in 1898.  Ano kayâ kung hindi tayo masyadong naniwala sa pangako na ikaaangat, ikabubuti, ikagiginhawa, ng Pilipinas ang pagsuko sa Amerika. A century and some 20 years later, maliwanag na kalunus-lunos ang sinapit, tuluyang sinasapit, ng nakararaming Pilipino. Worse, nasabit na tayo nang bonggang-bongga sa hidwaang Amerika-Tsina. 

Sharing here excerpts from two opinion essays: ‘Separate and equal’ by Michael Lim Ubac and In the Philipines, Haunted by History by Gina Apostol. Good to be reminded what we’re up against, still.

‘SEPARATE AND EQUAL’ 
by Michael Lim Ubac
June 13 2024

… History tells us that neither Spain nor the US acknowledged the provisional government established by Aguinaldo in 1898 or the formal declaration of independence ratified by the Malolos Congress in 1899. Instead, Spain ceded the Philippine archipelago to the US for $20 million on Dec. 10, 1898, through the Treaty of Paris. The treaty relinquished Spain’s control of Cuba and gave away its other colonies, such as Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, to the US. It also sounded the death knell for over four centuries of the Spanish Empire, and provided the US with a renewed sense of confidence—a sense of manifest destiny, as it were, for its future as a Pacific power.

This still-evolving American foreign policy would logically undermine the goals for self-determination of the nascent Philippine republic. With virtually all of the Philippines outside Manila already under the control of Aguinaldo’s forces after shaking off the Spanish yoke, Filipino revolutionaries and at least seven million Filipinos were prepared to settle and enjoy the benefits of hard-fought freedom. But when Private William Grayson, a member of the Nebraska Volunteer Infantry Regiment, opened fire on Filipino soldiers at 9 p.m. on Feb. 4, 1899, that shot ignited what would become the Filipino-American War. The rest is history.

One vote. Strategically, the McKinley administration saw Manila as an ideal location to defend US interests in China against European interventions. The presence of the US could also increase American influence in the far east. But the Treaty of Paris had a polarizing effect on American politics. It was narrowly ratified by the Senate on Feb. 6, 1899, with just one vote more than the necessary two-thirds for approval.

In 2011, while researching at Harvard’s Widener Library, I stumbled upon a pamphlet that contains excerpts from a three-hour speech of US Sen. George F. Hoar on April 17, 1900, during the debate on the ratification of the treaty. Hoar vigorously opposed the conquest of the Philippines, describing the archipelago as “a nation entitled as such to its separate and equal station among the powers of the earth by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Hoar could not fathom why America had to civilize a country like the Philippines, which already had a “written constitution, a settled territory, an independence it has achieved, an organized army, a congress, courts, schools, universities, churches, the Christian religion, a village life in orderly, civilized, self-governed municipalities; a pure family life, newspapers, books.”

Hoar acknowledged the intellectual prowess and patriotic fervor of Filipinos, saying it had “statesmen who can debate questions of international law, like [Apolinario] Mabini, and organize governments, like Aguinaldo; poets like José Rizal; aye, and patriots who can die for liberty, like José Rizal.” He added: “No people can come under the government of any other people, or any ruler, without its consent.” Hoar then asked his colleagues whether it was justifiable to “crush that republic, despoil that people of their freedom and independence and subject them to our rule.”

“Is it right, is it just, to subjugate this people? To substitute our Government for their self-government, for the Constitution they have proclaimed and established? … Are these mountains of iron and nuggets of gold and stores of coal, and hemp-bearing fields, and fruit-bearing gardens to be looked upon by our legislators with covetous eyes?” he asked.

Hoar’s questions are still relevant today, even though the international context has evolved. Since 1946, the Philippines has had a trusted economic and military ally in the US. The Philippines remains valuable geopolitically to the US even as its economy is closely tied to China.

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IN THE PHILIPPINES, HAUNTED BY HISTORY
By Gina Apostol
April 28, 2012

THE Philippines is haunted by its relationship with the United States. I remember the day, in 1991, when the Military Bases Agreement between the two countries was rescinded. The headlines yelled, finally: Freedom! But worrywarts held on to their beads. Clark Air Force Base and Subic Naval Base were America’s largest overseas outposts — powerful vestiges of colonial rule decades after the American occupation, which lasted from 1899 to 1946, had ended. In American history books those decades have fallen into an Orwellian memory hole: lost or abridged.

On the Philippine side, however, the relationship with America looms like Donald Barthelme’s balloon, a deep metaphysical discomfort arising from an inexplicable physical presence. In Barthelme’s story “The Balloon,” a huge glob inflates over Manhattan, affecting ordinary acts of puzzled citizens for no apparent reason. American involvement in Filipino affairs sometimes seems like that balloon, spurring fathomless dread. Bursts of anxiety over the bases’ return pop up every time America finds a new enemy.

The high-level April 30 [2012] meeting between the United States and the Philippines in Washington occurs during a standoff between Beijing and Manila over disputed territories. Hillary Rodham Clinton has called the contested portion of the South China Sea “the West Philippine Sea,” fanning Chinese ire and Filipino nationalism alike over obscure islands known by most as the Spratlys. (They have oil, and China wants it, too.) And tensions have not been soothed by joint military training exercises featuring 6,000 American and Filipino troops practicing so-called mock beach invasions on the coast facing China. Indeed, as America pivots to Asia and China rattles Manila, old phantoms are rising.

… The bases haunt us because they emerged during a dreamspace, when we still believed in our capacity for revolution. America “friended” the Philippines during our 1896 war against Spain then “unfriended” us when it paid Spain $20 million dollars for the islands in 1899. The building of military installations began apace, in step with the trauma of our sense of betrayal.

We agitated against the Clark and Subic bases during the Marcos years, that conjugal dictatorship propped up by American good will. There are photographs of the Marcoses with every American president since 1965, many on Wikicommons: Imelda dancing with the sweaty and the suave: with Nixon, as the Vietnam War waxed, and Reagan, as the cold war waned. A brutal war against ill-equipped, proto-Maoist insurgents kept the Marcoses, and American guns, in business. It’s no surprise that the bases became a linchpin in our constitutional debates after we threw out the dictator in 1986.

… Our brand-new 1987 Constitution banned foreign bases, but America’s lease wasn’t up for four more years. Pundits quipped that only an act of God would kick the bases out. God obliged. Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, pulverizing Clark Air Force Base and devastating Subic. America abandoned Clark and moved to renegotiate the bases treaty. I remember the day the Senate rejected the treaty because my own child was newborn, of age with the country. President Corazon Aquino, a sugar heiress whose family made a fortune during World War II providing alcohol to American G.I.’s, reluctantly signed it in 1991.

A smoldering volcano, Mount Mayon, had heralded the arrival of American forces in 1899, and in a seismic mirror Pinatubo ushered them out — a nation foretold by tectonic shifts. In between the acts, rubble remains.

American policy has always benefited the Filipino elite — the Marcoses, the Macapagal-Arroyos and the current presidential family, the Cojuangco-Aquinos, are among the handful who have reaped a bonanza. The interests of the oligarchy are the ties that bind. Our spectral angst is not so immaterial: our dread is drenched in military dollars and haunted by civilian blood.

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The National Interest

#AtinAngAyungin #AtinAngRecto

On the one hand, I’m glad former president Duterte and his Davao cohorts are on the side of more than 7 of 10 Filipinos vehemently against the Romualdez-Marcos chacha train(wreck).  On the other, I’m aghast that they’re so against PBBM rescinding Duterte’s “status quo” agreement  with China, the regional bully that some 7 of 10 Filipinos do not trust, and rightfully so, for obstreperously laying claim to and encroaching on our territorial waters and resources.

The threat, “that there will be trouble” if we dare bring construction and repair materials to the grounded BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin, or if we dare dig for oil and gas in Recto, should not stop us from standing up for our rights the way Indonesia and Malaysia did two years ago. Read Jarius Bondoc‘s 2023 column on Recto (Reed) Bank. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2023/08/30/2292356/drill-recto-gas-oil-now-our-national-survival

Recto is 120 miles from Palawan, well within the Philippines’ 200-mile exclusive economic zone. It’s 650 miles from Hainan, China’s nearest province, thus outside its EEZ. The Hague arbitral court affirmed that in 2016. China can’t claim it by (an) imagined “nine-dash line.”

Recto has proven reserves. In 2013 the US Energy Information Administration estimated it to hold 5.4 billion barrels of oil and 55.1 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s 63.5 times more oil and 20.5 times more gas than Malampaya, whose lifespan is only 24 or so years.

The Philippine government has long awarded Service Contract-72, covering Recto. Manuel V. Pangilinan’s PXP Energy Corp. and subsidiary Forum Energy Ltd. are ready to drill.

Trespassing Philippine EEZ, Chinese gunboats chased Forum’s vessels away several times. In 2020 the Duterte admin contemplated joint exploration with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Talks failed as CNOOC’s terms violated the Philippine Constitution.

Forum remobilized foreign partners to drill. President Rody Duterte stopped it after receiving a call from Beijing, [Justice Antonio] Carpio recounts. “Twice Forum lost millions of pesos in false starts. Let it proceed now under Philippine Navy protection. National survival depends on it.”

Defy China.

“Let’s do it the way Malaysia and Indonesia did two years ago,” Carpio proposes.

… Beijing also claims Malaysia’s EEZ and Indonesia’s Natuna Isles. Invoking our Hague ruling as support, Malaysia held naval exercises with the US and Australia while drilling oil nearby. Indonesia invited a US aircraft carrier to sail by while drilling in Natuna.

On both occasions Beijing shrieked about owning the entire South China Sea by historical right. Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta ignored it. They’re reaping benefits from their petroleum resources, Carpio notes.

The Philippines can install rigs while holding drills with the US Navy under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. As well, with the British Admiralty because Forum was incorporated in London. A petroleum-sufficient Philippines will ease world demand and prices.

And here’s Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino in a recent Manila Times column: https://www.manilatimes.net/2024/04/17/opinion/columns/gentlemen-and-the-status-quo/1941929

To those who would have us tremble before China’s might, fearful that it may unleash its volley of munitions against us, Justice Antonio Carpio, who has studied both the facts and the law on this case, allays such fears. China will think long and hard before it pushes the button of hostilities because it is cognizant of the Mutual Defense Treaty, which both the Philippines and the United States understand it today. There are those who urge the Philippines to junk the treaty and have long touted the line that the MDT did not cover such scenarios as armed hostilities against the Philippines initiated by the PROC. We now know that to be untrue. The US-Philippines Bilateral Guidelines as well as recent public statements of US President Biden leave no doubt about this.

Lately, China has dealt “the victim card” — naively echoed by some Western news outlets and chat programs. It claims to be the victim of a scheme of encirclement by the US, Australia, Japan and India — quaintly called the Quad. But it will be good to remember that this strategic alliance was born not from some smoky bar where the leaders of these countries had nothing better to do than to conjure alliances to threaten other countries. It arose rather when it had become undeniable that China was relentless in its expansionism, when border tensions with India were approaching boiling point, when it became apparent that its Belt and Road Initiative had allowed it strategic access to points it deemed crucial for its maritime, military and political ambitions. [bold mine]

Notwithstanding the fact that the PROC has thumbed its nose at the arbitral ruling in favor of the Philippines, one will not fail to notice that in every discussion on the South China Sea-West Philippine Sea dispute, the arbitral judgment that was resoundingly in our country’s favor comes up because a binding legal pronouncement as to our rights is always significant and undeniably confers ascendancy on us. It is in this light that I have long advocated that the unresolved disputes over territory should now be the subject of a case before the International Court of Justice or by some other competent international forum.

If this seems like putting undue trust in the workings of international law, my riposte has been constant: It is only the adherence of the community of nations to a rules-based order, the dominance of international law, that the fundamental principle of sovereign equality of States can be a reality in a world of glaring inequalities.

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Rumblings by Iris Gonzales

Regional bully by Boo Chanco

A sellout of our sovereign rights by Joel Ruiz Butuyan

Can we defend our nation without America? Yes by Ricardo Saludo

Of disadvantageous treaties, sedition, and espionage by Jemy Gatdula

‘Coercive tactics’ by Ana Marie Pamintuan

The problem with Israel…

…is that it has always wanted all of Palestine. It would seem that the attitude was is one of entitlement–the world owes them–given the Holocaust. Who would have thought that they’d treat the Palestinians as badly, as cruelly, as inhumanely. Who would have thought that world leaders would allow it. Time for this batch to level up. Here’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman begging Biden to push for a two-state solution.

Israel Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake
by Thomas L. Friedman
October 19, 2023

I have great admiration for how President Biden has used his empathy and physical presence in Israel to convince Israelis that they are not alone in their war against the barbaric Hamas, while trying to reach out to moderate Palestinians. Biden, I know, tried really hard to get Israeli leaders to pause in their rage and think three steps ahead — not only about how to get into Gaza to take down Hamas but also about how to get out — and how to do it with the fewest civilian casualties possible.

While the president expressed deep understanding of Israel’s moral and strategic dilemma, he pleaded with Israeli military and political leaders to learn from America’s rush to war after Sept. 11, which took our troops deep into the dead ends and dark alleys of unfamiliar cities and towns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, from everything I have gleaned from senior U.S. officials, Biden failed to get Israel to hold back and think through all the implications of an invasion of Gaza for Israel and the United States. So let me put this in as stark and clear language as I can, because the hour is late:

I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now to destroy Hamas — and does so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests.

It could trigger a global conflagration and explode the entire pro-American alliance structure that the United States has built in the region since Henry Kissinger engineered the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

I am talking about the Camp David peace treaty, the Oslo peace accords, the Abraham Accords and the possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing could go up in flames.

This is not about whether Israel has the right to retaliate against Hamas for the savage barbarism it inflicted on Israeli men, women, babies and grandparents. It surely does. This is about doing it the right way — the way that does not play into the hands of Hamas, Iran and Russia.

If Israel goes into Gaza and takes months to kill or capture every Hamas leader and soldier but does so while expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank — thereby making any two-state solution there with the more moderate Palestinian Authority impossible — there will be no legitimate Palestinian or Arab League or European or U.N. or NATO coalition that will ever be prepared to go into Gaza and take it off Israel’s hands.

There will be no one to extract Israel and no one to help Israel pay the cost of caring for more than two million Gazans — not if Israel is run by a government that thinks, and acts, as if it can justifiably exact its revenge on Hamas while unjustifiably building an apartheidlike society run by Jewish supremacists in the West Bank. That is a completely incoherent policy.

Alas, though, a senior U.S. official told me that the Biden team left Jerusalem feeling that while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel understands that overreach in Gaza could set the whole neighborhood ablaze, his right-wing coalition partners are eager to fan the flames in the West Bank. Settlers there have killed at least seven Palestinian civilians in acts of revenge in just the past week.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials told me, the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority, making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.

Netanyahu should not allow this, but he has trapped himself. He needs those right-wing extremists in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges.

But he is going to put all of Israel into the jail of Gaza unless he breaks with those Jewish supremacists.

Unfortunately, the senior U.S. official told me, Israeli military leaders are actually more hawkish than the prime minister now. They are red with rage and determined to deliver a blow to Hamas that the whole neighborhood will never forget.

I understand why. But friends don’t let friends drive while enraged. Biden has to tell this Israeli government that taking over Gaza without pairing it with a totally new approach to settlements, the West Bank and a two-state solution would be a disaster for Israel and a disaster for America.

We can help, we can even insist, that our Arab and European allies work to create a more effective, less corrupt and more legitimate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that, after some transition in Gaza, could help govern there as well. But not without a fundamental change in Israeli policy toward the PA and the Jewish settlers.

Otherwise, what began as a Hamas onslaught against Israel has the potential to trigger a Middle East war with every great power and regional power having a hand in it — which would make it very difficult to stop once it started.

In the first week of this conflict, the supreme leader of Iran and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, appeared to be keeping very tight control of their militiamen on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders are letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets and that they might attack American targets if the United States intervenes. They smell the logic of how much an Israeli invasion of Gaza could help their goal of driving America out of the whole region.

On Thursday, a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea shot down three cruise missiles and several drones, apparently launched by the pro-Iranian Houthi militia in Yemen, that might have been headed toward Israel. More missiles, likely from pro-Iranian militias, were fired at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

So many rockets are now coming from the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia in South Lebanon that we are one degree away from a full-scale missile war between Israel and Iran’s proxies — and very possibly directly between Israel and Iran.

Israel is not likely to let Iran use its proxies to hit Israel without eventually firing a missile directly at Tehran. Israel has missile-armed submarines that are probably in the Persian Gulf as we speak. If that gets going, it’s Katie, bar the door.

The United States, Russia and China could all be drawn in directly or indirectly.

What makes the situation triply dangerous is that even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday.

As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and Islamic Jihad rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that Islamic Jihad accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The Arab street was on fire, and a meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled.

If people cannot talk openly and honestly about a misfired rocket, imagine what will happen when the first major Israeli invasion of Gaza begins in our wired world, linked by social networks and polluted with misinformation amplified by artificial intelligence.

That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End Hamas Once and for All” — and carrying it out, if possible, with repeated surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership but also draw the brightest possible line between Gazan civilians and the Hamas dictatorship.

But if Israel feels it must reoccupy Gaza to destroy Hamas and restore its deterrence and security — I repeat — it must pair that military operation with a new commitment to pursue a two-state solution with those Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza ready to make peace with Israel.

The hour is late. I have never written a column this urgent before because I have never been more worried about how this situation could spin out of control in ways that could damage Israel irreparably, damage U.S. interests irreparably, damage Palestinians irreparably, threaten Jews everywhere and destabilize the whole world.

I beg Biden to tell Israelis this immediately — for their sake, for America’s sake, for the sake of Palestinians, for the sake of the world.