If there’s anything that continues to catch the ire of the people today, it's the unstoppable oil price hikes, soaring prices of basic commodities, surging costs of poor public utility services, weakening social services, crippling taxes hitting mostly the poor and middle class, and all of them for their debilitating environmental costs.
Who is to blame? Who is responsible and accountable for all this? The international market? Global oil cartels and monopoly players? Chinese? Talibans?
The key answer is not somewhere else but here, in the sanctum of ruling powers in the Philippine state.
Philippine government has for almost four decades, under different presidencies, been pursuing neoliberal policies of economic liberalization, deregulation, and privatization.
All that simply means the elimination or easing of state control over economic activities, industries, and public service utilities to encourage economic development on the assumption that the private sector, domestic and international, given greater autonomy and possessing resources and capabilities, can spur competitive and sustained economic growth.
For the government, legislatives, and executives, this means kowtowing to the whims of the big boys clubs and enforcing state laws and policies already tailored to the plans of the former—a role of a politician and policeman rolled into one.
What have been the results of the state’s pursuit of neoliberal policies and the private sector's dictating economic activities and the development track of the nation?
Some of them have controlled and improved public utility services, infused investments with government loans, modernized technologies and improved digital connectivity, developed growth centers, increased competitiveness of industrial production, and constructed hundreds of big malls nationwide.
Notwithstanding, the crippling impact of these neoliberal policies obviously outweighs their benefits.
Raking super profits has been the order of the day, with meeting and satisfying public interests secondary, and worse, environmental costs neglected to the far end.
Industry and business monopolies have been forged and widened, dislodging small players, mostly Filipino nationals.
Massive and frequent importation of industrial, service, and agricultural goods and basic items, including sugar, onions, tomatoes, flour, etc., has subverted our local agricultural, industrial, and service sectors and paved the way for the rise of new trading mafias.
Urbanization spread like wildfire, converting thousands of frontier agricultural lands and protected areas to subdivisions, condominiums, hubs of skyscrapers, tourism infrastructure, and economic zones, shutting doors and spaces to mass housing, public parks, walkable streets, and other concerns of public interest.