Philippines president Duterte says 'time to say goodbye' to America
Source: The Guardian
President Rodrigo Duterte met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping Thursday, state media said, as the Philippines leader seeks closer ties with the Asian giant while blasting his US allies.
Duterte is in China for a four-day trip that is expected to confirm his tilt away from Washington and towards Beijings sphere of influence.
The two leaders were to hold official talks and sign a series of cooperation documents, the official Xinhua news service reported.
Duterte is hoping to take advantage of Beijings deep pockets to score a raft of trade and infrastructure deals.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/20/philippines-president-duterte-says-time-to-say-goodbye-to-america
The Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has announced his "separation" from the United States.
He made the comment at a business forum in the presence of Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli at Beijing's Great Hall of the People during a four-day state visit to China.
It follows Mr Duterte's admission that a close economic partnership with China is his nations only hope following a cooling of relations with the US.
Maybe because I am Chinese, I believe in sincerity, he said in an extended interview with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, when asked why the Philippines had changed its policy towards China.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/rodrigo-duterte-partnership-with-china-is-only-hope-for-philippines-a7371141.html
tenaciousdem
(104 posts)to bad rubbish. The man is a thug of the highest caliber. How this man ever became President of the Philippines is mind boggling!
DFW
(54,448 posts)Blustery rhetoric and an opposition who didn't take his chances seriously enough until it was too late.
JI7
(89,279 posts)Which does not speak well of that country .
Even trump will get far more support than he should while still losing.
DFW
(54,448 posts)There are proportionately less well-educated Filipinos than there are well-educated Americans. The proportions show: while the less-educated support the one with the anger and the easy slogans, the better-educated tend to go with the one who says flat-out there are no simple solutions. This goes for both countries, and is why Duterte could win while Trump cannot.
PunksMom
(440 posts)He's a nut case, see ya bud.
Mc Mike
(9,115 posts)AngryAmish
(25,704 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)Democat
(11,617 posts)He wouldn't be the first Philippines president to go that way.
Grins
(7,239 posts)Known him since 3rd grade. Visited the P, met a beautiful woman there and married her, has kids - and twice a month he and his fellow locals take a weekend to go into the bush and train, military style. Serious. Training. Everyone armed.
Training to fight President Duterte?
No. The Chinese! That's the big dragon they fear, esp. with the incursions by China into the South China Sea. They figure shit's-going-to hit-the-fan one day on this, so time to get prepared. And they want the US Navy to come back!
And now Duterte does this?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Apparently they're good with being a Chinese colony so long as the law against murder doesn't get enforced.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)China owns the South China Sea now that its rabid little lap dog Duterte is in the process of giving it to them.
Anyhow, time to cancel not only our military bases but all forms of aid there.
harun
(11,348 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)That's not going to produce any more $$.
It'll just cause us to divert our resources to our true friends in the region, Japan and South Korea.
I hope making an enemy of the US was worth the ability to commit murder with impunity to Filipinos.
Tempest
(14,591 posts)awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)Yavin4
(35,450 posts)He's trying to hedge off China's influence in Asia.
harun
(11,348 posts)Yavin4
(35,450 posts)geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Yavin4
(35,450 posts)The purpose of the TPP was to hedge off Asian nations from forming economic alliances with China. It's not good for those nations to be reliant upon China, and it's not good for us.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)One that has beefed up environmental and labor protections.
Yavin4
(35,450 posts)Did you see that China is building a new capital city in Egypt? Think they're doing that out of the goodness in their hearts?
Coventina
(27,215 posts)broadcaster75201
(387 posts)nt
Maven
(10,533 posts)TomCADem
(17,390 posts)China will be the most influential player in the Pacific Rim with the U.S. taking a more isolationist role, so it is a smart move for Philippines to see which ally will be a more consistent presence.
moondust
(20,017 posts)against the U.S.? You know, more than just the street thug political jibe about "that big bad U.S. bully that bosses us around like we're not a world power. Yeah."
At least he'll be closer to home in terms of disrespect for human rights. Maybe China is bribing him to sell out.
Downtown Hound
(12,618 posts)This man is a typical bully and a coward. He acts tough and full of machismo when he's confronting the weak like drug addicts and dealers, but throw a real oponent like China at him and he cowers and plays nice instead of standing up to them. What a loser.
haele
(12,684 posts)It's very easy to say one is fighting a war against drugs and drug users when one is intent on getting the upper hand in a turf war in the very same industry.
Sadly, drug abuse tends not to go down in these types of wars - so long as the economy can't support the amount of population in a location, incidents of self medication to addiction to numb the pain of "failure" and the amount of petty drug sellers that support that self medicating will always replace the poor disposables and/or unlikables that are murdered because of some tin-pot dictator's populist "law and order" push allows some people to get rid of others they don't like.
Rather than actually recognize why some people turn to drugs or might be tempted to start selling, and work at correcting the underlying problems, it's easier and more acceptable to authoritarian societies to just to put a bullet in the back of someone's head because they deviated from the accepted norm, then go on to the next "criminal" you can kill until the excess population is winnowed down enough that there's enough jobs and resources for all the good little peasants that are left.
The problem with these types of draconian laws is that there is no actual justice, and no actual fix that keeps the situation from continuing to occur. There will always be people with addictive personalities that don't fit in - the lazy, the crazy, the "just off" type of people; and if there is a lack of acceptance and opportunities for them to keep them from becoming drug addicts, there will always be the small-time sellers that can also be sacrificed for political expediency.
Right now, Dutarte's just getting rid of his excess of young unemployed/exuberant males in a way that allows him to look strong and moral to people who are tired of the results of decades of a severe lack of services and resources that would otherwise create a drop in crime while improving the overall lives of the general population; while in the meantime, he's making sure he can make trade deals with a stronger country that won't think there's anything wrong with his way of controlling his population.
Haele