Editorial: Expose and oppose the pro-imperialist and antipoor "reforms" of the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime!
Macapagal-Arroyo's act during her state of the nation address (SONA) delivered on the opening session of the 12th Congress on July 23 was cheap gimmickry and full of propoor pretensions. She skippped describing the country's critical condition and merely presented her government program which was filled with lofty promises and adorned with slogans for "fighting poverty".
The framework of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime's new program was merely lifted from the Ramos regime's bankrupt Medium Term Philippine Development Program (MTPDP) and the Estrada regime's version of the latter, "Angat Pinoy 2004". The slogan "fight against poverty" was also copied from the ousted regime.
The regime's newly garbed MTPDP has no essential content other than that of imperialist "globalization". It is merely a perpetuation by the Macapagal-Arroyo regime of the old semicolonial and semifeudal basis of the poverty, backwardness and oppression afflicting the Filipino people. Only this time, it has been enhanced with a lot of embellishments that masquerade as programs that ensure the welfare of the poor.
The program has four elements: (1) business for job creation; (2) agricultural modernization; (3) ensuring the welfare of impoverished sectors of society; and (4) justice in government.
"Business for job creation"
For Macapagal-Arroyo, the solution to widespread unemployment and poverty in the country relies on the continuing and further advancing imperialist "globalization". She turns a blind eye to the more widespread, weightier and more bitter reality of exploitation, oppression and suffering this brings to the people, especially the toiling masses.
At the core of all the "reforms" bandied about by the regime are the further implementation of liberalization, deregulation, privatization and denationalization of the country's remaining strategic industries and public untilities.
The passage of the Power Reform Act was the regime's opening salvo in implementing its "reforms". This can only lead to intervention by foreign monopoly capitalists, the further strengthening of their cohorts among the local electric service monopolies and their accumulation of excessive profits. All of this will be detrimental to consumers of electricity and the people (for a more extensive discussion on the Power Reform Act, refer to the primer prepared by the CPP Information Bureau).
Currently a raging issue is the privatization of the Social Security System (SSS), the government agency that administers the insurance needs of private sector workers and employees. Total insurance funds of the agency's 23 million members amounting to P174 billion will be placed in the hands of private foreign and local companies.
Within the next three to four years, the regime hopes to effect a leap in economic growth based mainly on the development of information and communications technology (ICT). But ICT development in the country has been confined to only two minor aspects-proliferation in the use of cellphones and pirated compact disks-with the most important aspects remaining undeveloped. Because of such proliferation, cellphones, telecommunications equipment and acccessories and electronic and electrical equipment now count among the country's biggest importations. A large chunk (13.3%) of the country's miniscule income growth for the first six months comes from cellphone services and the reproduction of compact disks. Almost P48 billion or 55% of total new investments approved by the Board of Investments (BOI) in the first half of the year has been allotted to the expansion of the coverage of telecommunications companies. But cellphone texting and viewing and listening to pirated films and music on compact discs are hardly fundamental to the lives of the broad masses and cannot be relied upon to spur genuine economic advance in the country. Being the "text capital of the world" has diverted a great deal of the country's capacity and productive resources.
Another aspect of ICT that the regime likewise hopes to enhance is computer software development and data management. But the regime's objective of propagating the use of computers and telecommunications nationwide is not likely to happen, much less its goal of transforming the Philippines into the internet service center of Asia. The present limited scope of line interconnections, facilities and the limited use of computers, the internet and telecommunications nationwide, especially in rural areas, coupled with government inefficiency in managing and developing related infrastructure present a big obstacle. A very small percentage of the population (8.3%) has cellphones and only 4.1% has landline telephones. Less than 1% has computers and an even smaller percentage has internet access. Even more fundamental obstacles are government corruption, the low salaries of employees and the exodus of many professionals and skilled workers abroad to earn higher incomes.
There is no basis for concluding that the ICT industry in the country on its own can prosper especially at a time when it is plummeting wordwide, especially in the US and even in the so-called tiger economies like Singapore and Taiwan.
The regime also hopes to develop the country's ICT industry and infrastructure by attracting foreign investments through the enactment of laws that will completely deregulate and privatize the industry in the country.
The regime's hopes of invigorating small and medium enterprises is nothing but a wild dream. This will not come to pass so long as the biggest obtacles to setting up national industry exist: imperialist domination and stifling of the national economy, the dominance of neocolonial trade and the absence of any genuine program to advance national industrialization, the backwardness of the vast countryside, corruption and anomalies in government and the policy of depressing workers' wages.
Agricultural modernization
Still another of the regime's pipe dreams is to create a million jobs in agriculture and fisheries within a year through the continued implementation of the Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA). The AFMA, which was enacted in 1997, aggressively entices foreign capital to invest in agribusiness and stresses the production for export of crops such as asparagus and cutflowers, instead of rice and corn for consumption. Instead of helping the dwindling coconut industry, on which more than 25 million people rely, the regime is letting in investors from Malaysia, even allotting 160,000 hectares for them to set up palm tree plantations in accordance with its program of implementing AFMA. Palm oil competes with coconut oil in the international market. Thus, the setting up of such plantations in the country will cause hundreds of thousands of coconut farmers and agricultural workers to lose their jobs.
Under the AFMA, widespread land-use conversion has been stepped up. This has further ruined the capacity of local food production and made the country dependent on the importation of rice, corn and other foodstuff. One year after AFMA was enacted, palay production fell to its lowest level since 1987. Corn production likewise fell to its lowest level since 1984. What AFMA has created are not jobs but further unemployment and hunger in the countryside.
With the extent of government corruption, not much can be expected no matter how big a budget is allocated for agriculture and fisheries. Funds are depleted at the top, with a very small amount trickling down for actual project implementation.
Aside from this, a more fundamental and primary obstacle to agricultural development and widespread job creation in the countryside is the centuries-old and unresolved problem of feudal and semifeudal relations in agriculture and the growing lack of land to till among the majority of peasants. Any agricultural development program not anchored on the implementation of genuine land reform will come to naught.
With frontier lands having long been exhausted, Macapagal-Arroyo's promised distribution of 100,000 hectares of public lands annually is dubious. Most of it will likely be in the form of fake distributions of land to national minorities and settlers who have long owned, lived in and tilled the lands "distributed" to them. In reality, such lands are private but untitled, and are merely being called "public" just so government could claim that it has distributed some land. To claim other land from already meager forests and watersheds will only be detrimental to the environment.
Since the regime has done nothing to smash the economic and political power of landlords, its promise of distributing 100,000 hectares of private lands every year will remain a mere promise. This is likewise such a low target compared to the 10.3 million hectares that should be covered by land reform, 7.66 million hectares of which are privately owned by landlords. Up to now, only 3% of the latter has been actually covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).
The widespread perpetuation of conversion of agricultural lands for industrial, commercial, tourism and residential purposes is likewise inconsistent with the regime's claim that it is serious about land reform, especially since such lands have already been covered by CARP.
The Macapagal-Arroyo regime ignores the grave problem faced by farmers and the people regarding the dumping of imported agriomcultural and other products from other counBltries, due to "globalization" and repressive treaties entered into by the government like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). This problem will worsen within Macapagal-Arroyo's term, especially by 2004-05 when the Philippines is set to fully implement its commitments to the GATT-WTO.
Ensuring the welfare of impoverished sectors of society
Macapagal-Arroyo has said that she ackowledges the public's grievances against rising prices and inadequate wages. But her acknowledgment of the conditions of workers who are in dire straits due to low wages is all for show. She has done nothing save from saying that she hopes "Congress or the wage boards would decide on the appropriate salaries". Her call to businessmen to voluntarily advance expenses for the temporary Emergency Cost of Living Allowance (ECOLA) that would anyway be credited against any wage increase, along with her offer of other cheap substitutes to an actual wage hike, are all indications of her lack of interest in raising workers' wages. On the other hand, she has quickly granted several pay hikes to AFP and PNP forces.
The regime likewise claims that it closely watches oil prices. Yet it has been inutile in the face of two successive oil price hikes in the short period that Macapagal-Arroyo has been in office.
The government says that it would also sell cheap rice to the poorest of the poor through the "Tindahan ni Gloria Labandera". This is but a copy of the previous regime's "Erap Rolling Stores" scheme. But the selection of beneficiaries and those who would be issued passbooks so they could avail themselves of cheap rice would have to pass through the wringer of proadministration politicians.This Pwould merely serve as an instrument for corrupt politicking. Worse, this is merely a scheme to cover up the withdrawal from the National Food Authority of its role of directly selling rice to the public, and is in preparation for the eventual privatization of the NFA and the liberalization of rice importation.
Up to 150,000 poor families per year would supposedly be granted the right to buy their own houses. But the regime has not laid out any means by which the urban poor, jobless as they are, would be able to pay for these houses. The more fundamental issue that must be resolved on the part of millions of the urban poor is the problem of widespread unemployment.
Macapagal-Arroyo is reviving the Emergency Employment Program (EEP) that was first launched under the term of her father, former Pres. Diosdado Macapagal. This was copied from Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which supposedly addressed the severe depression that hit the US from 1930-40. Macapagal-Arroyo hopes that her EEP will create jobs for 20,000 people annually. She would have them employed in some token jobs just so they could bring home some pay. This scheme is absurd since the employment that it would generate would not be in necessary and productive jobs but in contrived ones. Even during Diosdado Macapagal's time, the EEP was a butt of jokes and criticism and was a failure.
With Macapagal-Arroyo's myriad promises to the urban and rural poor, she has tried to make it appear that her regime has shifted its priorities in their favor. But nothing has changed in its lopsided priorities: Like its predecessonr, the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime has not discarded the Automatic Debt Appropriations Act that continues to allot the biggest chunk-40% of the national budget-to service foreign debt which has now gone up to $53 billion. Because the suppressive and unproductive AFP and PNP remain on top of the regime's list of priorities, their budget for modernization, salary increases for officers, soldiers and policemen, CAFGU expansion and others has even been increased.
"Justice in government"
No matter how much Macapagal-Arroyo calls for morality in government, she can do nothing to decisively rid it of anomalies, especially within the higher levels of the bureaucracy for so long as the existing reactionary and decadent state has not been decisively eradicated and radically replaced. Corruption within the state is set by the encompassing semicolonial, semifeudal and bureaucrat-capitalist system of governance and politics in the country. The Philippines remains a client state of the US, led by the big landlord-comprador-bourgeois classes and serves only as a milch cow of the ruling classes and their minions. Service to the people is confined to speeches, remains only on paper and is mere posturing. Macapagal-Arroyo pretends to be clean because it was the people's intense anger at brazen corruption and plunder that brought down the president she succeeded. She witnessed how the mass movement against serious anomalies in government rose in tumult and knows that it could well be trained on her regime if it should be revealed that severe corruption continues up to the present.
This early, however, the foul smell of corruption has already reeked out of the palace. The president's husband, Miguel Arroyo and others close to him are now in the thick of controversy. His hand was apparent in the appointment of close friends and business associates to lucrative government positions. One example is Pantaleon Alvarez who was appointed DOTC secretary, as well as two other close friends of Arroyo who were appointed vice chairman/general manager and media consultant of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
Department of Justice secretary Hernando Perez has also been implicated in the precipitate grant of a $450-billion dollar energy project at the Caliraya-Botocan-Kalayaan Power Complex to Impsa Engineering Ltd., an Argentine company, without undergoing the requisite bidding. This was the very first project approved by the regime, less than a week after taking power.
Macapagal-Arroyo rationalizes her penchant for reconciling and giving way to various VIP privileges and caprices demanded by the Estradas in relation to their prosecution and trial. She claims that she is merely being sensitive to the sentiments of those who continue to support Estrada. In reality, she fears incurring the ire of the Iglesia ni Cristo and El Shaddai leaderships, who both support Estrada. It is clear that the regime's support for the all-out prosecution and speedy trial of the Estradas is negotiable. The only thing that prevents the regime from granting numerous concessions and compromises and pushes it to go all-out in prosecuting the Estradas is the close and militant vigilance of progressive and democratic organizations.
In this regard, there is need for the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime to pursue the cases against the Marcoses and immediately recover and return to the people the Marcoses' ill-gotten wealth. The same goes for the indemnification that 10,000 former political prisoners of the Marcos dictatorship should have received after having won their case against the dictatorship.
Before the resumption of peace talks between the GRP and the NDFP, the regime should have released all political prisoners. But there are more than two hundred of them still in prison, with their numbers swelling in the first six months of the regime.
In the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime'als first five months alone, 50 major incidents of violations of human rights and inter- onational humanitarian law have been documented. Among the victims are 322 individuals (including 61 women and 27 minors); 103 families; and 50 communities. Not included are Moro people arrested without warrant in Basilan and other Moro communities in Metro Manila due to the AFP and PNP's failure to put an end to the Abu Sayyaf bandit group.
After the saturation drives in urban poor communities in the first week of May, Moro communities in Basilan and Metro Manila were also subjected to zoning, with residents being arrested and abused. The regime rode on its declaration of a "state of lawlessness" to wage total war, forcibly evacuate the civilian population, ransack homes and conduct warrantless arrests. Right after the successful release of New People's Army prisoner of war (POW) Army Maj. Noel Buan, the AFP and PNP launched operations and attacked vast areas of Mindoro where Major Buan had been held for a long period and released. The AFP also launched vicious operations in Central Luzon to clear the area for the peace of mind of US troops participating in Balikatan 2001 (in May) and CARAT 2001 (in June), as part of the implementation of the Visiting Forces Agreement between the US and the Philippines.
In continuing the peace talks between the NDFP and the GRP, both parties have ratified anew the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL). But the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime has as yet done nothing to uphold and propagate it among its armed forces. Instead, the US-Macapagal-Arroyo regime's militarism and puppetry have worsened. Thousands of people are being victimized by the regime's counterrevolutionary war and violations of human rights.
The AFP perpetually fails in its fight against the Abu Sayyaf because a number of military officials are in cahoots with the bandit group, primarily those who are at the frontline (such as 1st Infantry Division commander Brig. Gen. Romeo Dominguez, 103rd Brigade commander Col. Juvenal Narcise, 18th IB commander Maj. Eliseo Campued and two other captains under Narcise). From the beginning, the establishment of the Abu Sayyaf has been an AFP project meant to divide the Bangsamoro revolutionary forces. Nonetheless, the regime (especially the militarists within it) is using the AFP's fight against the Abu Sayyaf bandits as an excuse to once more push their cherished militarist and fascist proposals. Among these are the proposed institutionalization of the National ID system, expansion of the CAFGU and the legitimization of vigilantes. Militarists within the regime are once again pushing for such measures not only to eradicate the Abu S | 
