The regime's food coupons are crumbs for a starving people
The burdens it has imposed on the people causes the US-Arroyo regime to fear the ire of a starving and impoverished populace. Hence, after years of obscuring the people's real living conditions and boasting about the regime's supposed economic successes, Arroyo announced this October that she would be distributing food coupons to the poorest sections of society.
Arroyo made the announcement a day after the Social Weather Station released a survey indicating that 15.1% of the people were starving. According to the survey, one in seven families across the country had nothing to eat at least once in the past three months.
The program, meant to be a public relations gimmick, is set to be implemented in November, with the Department of Social Welfare and Development and the Department of Education (DepEd) as the lead agencies. The plan is to distribute food coupons in schools, with the DepEd identifying the most indigent students who would serve as the program beneficiaries. The food coupons may be exchanged for rice and other foodstuff from the National Food Authority and other select stores. The system thus shuts off the vast majority of families that are unable to send their children even to public schools because of extreme poverty.
It is an outrageously insulting project. In the three years that Gloria Arroyo has held office, various burdens have been mercilessly imposed on the people. Her regime continues to peg the meager wages of workers and the salaries of ordinary employees but has allowed the prices of petroleum products, electricity, food and other commodities and expenses to shoot up. It continues to carry out the policy of contractualization and mass layoffs of workers. It has been pushing for the imposition of additional tax burdens on the people. It continues to champion the policies of liberalization, privatization and deregulation at the cost of the Filipino masses' added suffering.
Arroyo claims that she could not bear to see the people go hungry�thus the distribution of food coupons. In reality, however, it is the regime that has exacerbated poverty and hunger among the people. The project's only purpose is to shore up Arroyo's sagging popularity. It is also doubtful whether the bankrupt Arroyo government actually has the wherewithal to come up with the billions of pesos needed to carry out the project.
It is but right for the people to continue their struggle for more just living conditions, to intensify the struggle for higher wages and salaries and the struggle against more taxes and rising prices and expenditures. Above all, it is but right for them to join the revolutionary struggle that will put an end to the present system that is starving the Filipino people.
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