Monday, July 28, 2008 Speak out: Head By Lloyd Joseph Mosqueda Deputy Secretariat Anakbayan-Cebu
PRESIDENT Arroyo is scrambling to regain some measure of public approval before her July 28 state of the nation Address (SONA). Alongside the continuous drumbeating of supposed subsidies to the poor, she is claiming credit for the postponement of weekly oil price increases as a result of Malacanang’s “appeal” to oil companies. But most people are skeptical and see through the Arroyo regime’s deceptive maneuvers.
Arroyo’s satisfaction rating (SWS June 2008 survey) plummeted to a historic low compared to the past four administrations, including that of ousted former President Joseph Estrada. It is lower than the -33% she got at the height of the “Hello Garci” scandal in May 2005. It is the fourth consecutive quarterly drop despite the “glowing” macroeconomic statistics in the earlier part of the period surveyed. To top it all, it cuts across all socioeconomic classes and regions of the country, with the decline steepest in her erstwhile bastions of support in the Visayas and Mindanao.
The latest dive in her ratings from -16% to -33% is a stark reflection of the people’s restiveness in the wake of the precipitous increases in oil and food prices that has led to an 11.4% inflation rate, the highest in the past 14 years. The deterioration of the people’s standard of living, including the AB classes, can no longer be papered over by rosy government statistics and plaudits from the IMF-World Bank, international credit agencies and multinational corporations.
With no relief in sight for the rest of the year because of the regime’s refusal to cut the billions-worth value added tax on oil and power, Arroyo’s spokespersons and other apologists have resorted to the half-truth that the economic crisis is a “global phenomenon,” to wash its hands of blame for the people’s continued glamour amidst the country’s further stagnant development and economic retrogression.
While it is true that the Philippines’ economic woes are part of the current crisis of the world capitalist system, in particular, the depression of the US economy that is at the heart of this system, it is utterly false and misleading to say that government can do nothing about it.
In the first place, the mire we find ourselves in is the result of sustained, blind and foolhardy adherence to economic policies that have institutionalized unsound economic fundamentals and disastrously combined these with a world-wide capitalist crisis unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 30s.
These economic policies have reduced the Philippines to the status of a backward, agricultural country that cannot even produce enough rice to feed its own people and with no industrial base to speak of except export processing zones. It must export Filipino brawn and brain power in order to earn precious foreign exchange with which to buy fuel and other basic and luxury imports as well as service a historically huge foreign debt. It must sell off the nation’s patrimony in the form of mineral and other natural resources already depleted by decades of unbridled exploitation by foreign investors and their local partners in order to satisfy the greed of its ruling elite.
On the day of Mrs. Arroyo’s SONA, activists and a growing number of Filipinos have more than enough bases to denounce Mrs. Arroyo as a flunky to foreign monopoly capitalist interests and a traitor to the people. Only in this sense is it helpless in the face of the latest round of economic belt-tightening wherein hundreds of thousands of families will be sacrificed.
For their part, the people are not helpless in putting an end to such an anti-people, anti-Filipino regime.
