I have often pointed out that Duterte is popular despite being targeted by "human rights" organizations which represent the opinions of the churches and the often corrupt politicians who influence them by making speeches on how they are being persecuted by the evil dictator for defending human rights, while they take bribes from drug cartels and those smuggling drugs etc.
StrategyPage article today pretty well says the same thing.
This secret and persistent approach to revealing and eliminating corruption, especially crooked senior police and civilian officials is making Duterte a lot of enemies in the government. It is anti-corruption efforts like this mean that Duterte remains popular. His current approval rating is 78 percent. That is down from 84 percent shortly after he took office in 2016. Approval peaked at 85 percent in late 2016 and hit a low of 75 percent earlier this year. There are many foreign critics of the Duterte war on drugs but for the people most affected by it there is approval.
Article on this in the Phil Inquirer has more details and names names.
A “secret special report” released by President Rodrigo Duterte has identified active and former top officials of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Bureau of Customs who were allegedly involved in the illegal drug trade.---------------------
Al J has an article on the street kids eating food in garbage, and they blame this on the drug war.
except, of course, it predates Duterte. Remember all those reports on Smokey Mountain? And next month there will be oodles of reports about people living in cemeteries (in the mausoleums there).
wikipedia article on Philippine street kids. Much of this comes from a 1998 report, which notes 1.5 million street kids back then.
a 2017 article says there are 1.6 million street kids.
more here.
and the problem of street kids is world wide, as people move into the cities to find work, but the family falls apart, often due to alcohol and drug use by the father, so mom finds a new boyfriend to support her who doesn't want her kids, who end up on the street, and who often drift into petty theft and getting high (on alcohol, glue sniffing etc).
But never mind. AlJ is sort of to the left of Mother Jones: They have excellent reports, like this one, but many are "ain't it awful" cherry picked reports that don't go into details that go against the meme, which right now is anti Duterte.
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