MANILA, Philippines, Sept 15, (AP): The Philippine president on Monday encouraged the public to express their outrage over massive corruption that has plagued flood-control projects in one of Asia’s most typhoon-prone countries but said street protests should be peaceful. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. vowed that an investigation by an independent commission would not spare even his allies in the House of Representatives and the Senate, where several legislators have been identified and accused in televised congressional hearings of pocketing huge kickbacks, along with government engineers and construction companies.

Marcos first spoke about the corruption scandal in July in his annual state of the nation speech. Unlike recent violent protests in Nepal and Indonesia, street rallies against alleged abuses in the Philippines have been smaller and relatively peaceful. Outrage has largely been vented online, including by Catholic church leaders, business executives and retired generals.

A planned protest on Sept. 21 in a pro-democracy shrine in the Manila metropolis near guarded upscale neighborhoods, where some of the corruption suspects live in affluence, is expected to draw a larger crowd. Police forces and troops have been placed on alert. "If I wasn’t president, I might be out in the streets with them,” Marcos said of anti-corruption protesters. "Of course they are enraged, of course they are angry, I’m angry," Marcos added, calling on the protesters to demand accountability.

"You let them know your sentiments, you let them know how they hurt you, how they stole from you, shout at them and do everything, demonstrate, just keep it peaceful.” But Communications Undersecretary Claire Castro said over the weekend that "people who have ill intentions and want to destabilize the government" should not exploit the public's outrage.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, Jr. and military chief of staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. issued a joint statement late Friday rejecting a call for the country’s armed forces to withdraw support from Marcos in response to public outrage over the corruption scandal. They did not elaborate, but underscored that the 160,000-member military was non-partisan, professional and "abides by the constitution through the chain-of-command.”