Economic crisis worsens
The economic crisis and the Filipino people's impoverishment have continued to worsen even as the political crisis afflicting the ruling system intensifies. The Filipino people's rapidly exacerbating wretchedness has driven them to fight for their economic interests and bring their struggle to the political realm and the arena of revolutionary struggle.
Government statistics declaring the supposed development of the economy have failed to relieve the people's hunger pangs. The much-vaunted 6.4% growth in the local economy in the first quarter of 2004 merely conjures an illusion of economic advance and a false picture of development.
In fact, the economy of the semicolonial and semifeudal system in the Philippines is in a state of chronic crisis. It remains backward, agrarian and unindustrialized.
The Filipino people are mired in poverty and their suffering grows by the day. Daily expenses continue to shoot up, especially for the people's basic necessities. Meantime, minimum wages pegged at very low levels do not even measure up to half the amount needed by a family of six to live decently. The peso's real value continues to dwindle. Unemployment levels continue to rise.
The Filipino people are outraged in the face of deteriorating economic conditions and the government's failure to address these problems.
Grievances abound:
- among workers, for relentlessly growing rates of unemployment and underemployment; for the worsening casualization of labor; for government's refusal to raise extremely low wage levels pitifully inadequate for their sustenance; for violations of their right to organize and strike in the factories;
- among peasants, for the seizure of their lands by landlords, the comprador bourgeoisie, foreign enterprises and the reactionary state, for the absence of genuine land reform, for the flooding of the local market by foreign agricultural products and the death of local agriculture;
- among rank-and-file government employees, for their very low salaries, for widespread layoffs due to the privatization and denationalization of government corporations, for bureaucratic corruption and for the repression suffered by the rank-and-file in the hands of bureaucrats;
- among the youth and students, for constantly rising matriculation and other school fees, for the dismal quality of education and the latter's focus on producing cheap labor for imperialist corporations;
- among the majority of urban dwellers, for the absence of jobs, for the demolition of their homes and the absence of permanent and decent dwelling for the poor, for spiralling water and electricity rates vis-a-vis the deterioration of such services, and for the serious lack of health services and high cost of medicines, for exorbitant prices of the people's basic necessities, for incessant hikes in the prices of petroleum products and other basic commodities, and for the added tax burdens imposed by government.
The people are furious over the greed of imperialists and the local ruling classes; continued intervention by the US government and its international agencies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and their imposition of policies that merely serve the interests of imperialists and their local lackeys; the reactionary government's obsequiousness to the imperialist policies of liberalization, deregulation, privatization and denationalization which have further ruined the country's productive forces and economy; continued government neglect of strategic industries and social services and its having ceded control over them to big foreign and local capitalist vultures; the hundreds of billions of pesos wasted in servicing debts incurred by government and the comprador bourgeoisie, gargantuan military expenditures and the plunder, criminal activities, corruption and scandalously extravagant lifestyles of big bureaucrat capitalists; over all of these things that have further condemned the people to servitude.
All of this is sure to culminate in the people's resistance. The reactionary government will definitely be confronted by protests and struggles that will break out nationwide.
The mass movement and the armed revolutionary struggle are fast advancing. Simultaneously, a political crisis is erupting, threatening to rock the regime in power. Efforts to further and expand people's struggles to achieve badly needed immediate relief from the blows of the current economic crisis are focused on the basic economic, political and social ills that lie at the root of the presently intensifying crisis.
The long-term solution to the people's impoverishment lies with ending the existing decadent, exploitative and oppressive semicolonial and semifeudal system. Only the establishment of a new revolutionary order that is free, democratic, progressive and truly serves the people's interests and welfare can thoroughly resolve the crisis and save the country from poverty and oppression.
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