The Marcos regime was roundly condemned by various sectors over recent claims made by its economic officials that Filipinos need only ₱64 a day to be not considered food poor. Marcos is brazenly fooling the people to obscure the true number of people suffering and facing hunger in the Philippines.

With Marcos having set a very low standard of decent living, his government now claims that only one in ten Filipinos are poor. Marcos demonstrates outright contempt of the majority of Filipinos who every day toil hard but do not make enough wages or income to meet the needs of their families.

Marcos and his officials are deliberately concealing the true cost of living in the Philippines. He weaves an illusion that Filipinos are increasingly “middle class”, to hide the fact that the majority of Filipinos are mired in poverty.

The impossibly low statistics on hunger and poverty serve Marcos’ policy of pegging wages and salaries of workers and ordinary employees to the lowest possible level. For the past two years, Marcos has turned a deaf ear to demands for substantial increases. Public school teachers and government employees were grossly insulted by his recent boast of a ₱26/day wage that amounted to mere crumbs dropped from the Malacañang banquet tables.

The standard of living of the masses of the Filipino people is rapidly deteriorating. Under Marcos, the prices of food, especially rice, as well as fuel, transportation, electricity and other basic necessities and services, have skyrocketed. Wages remain low, and government-mandated increases are measly. The daily amount to meet the minimum standards for decent living for a family of five is now around ₱1,200.

In the face of the huge gap between wages and salaries, on the one hand, and the basic needs of Filipino families, on the other hand, workers and the masses must fight for the recognition of their basic social and economic rights. They should assert, in particular, their right to a higher standard of living and a better quality of life, and to needed wage increases, jobs and livelihood.

The public should hold the Marcos regime to account for its utter failure to curb the sharp increases in the prices of basic goods, services and other commodities, and for its policy of wage suppression. The Marcos government has failed to do anything to fulfill its claimed responsibility as a state that ensures the welfare of its people.

Marcos’ neoliberal economic policies are centered on attracting and relying on foreign investments, import liberalization, unbridled debt, and the imposition of additional taxes. These are the cause of the worsening economic crisis and the deterioration of the condition of the masses. These serve the interests of foreign capitalists, their local big business partners, big landowners and bureaucrat capitalists. They run away with billions of pesos from government infrastructure projects, plundering the nation’s wealth and exploiting cheap labor.

These policies have resulted in a steady decline in local production of food and other basic necessities, an increase in the prices of consumer goods, acute unemployment (especially among the youth), extremely low wages, the dispossession of livelihood and the displacement of fisherfolk and the poor, land grabbing, economic dislocation of peasants, environmental destruction and plundering of the country’s national resources.

The policies of the Marcos regime add fuel to the grievances of the broad masses of the people. Their hatred for Marcos is deepened by his efforts to recover the hundreds of billions of pesos of wealth stolen by their family during his father’s dictatorship. Their discontent is further exacerbated by Marcos’s squandering of billions of pesos in jetsetting, Malacañang banquets, control over the smuggling of rice, sugar and other commodities, outright bribery in government projects, control of the Maharlika Investment Fund to promote the business of his cronies, and other cases of corruption.

Worse, Marcos uses the armed forces of the state to sow fascist terrorism against the people to oppress the people, destroy their unity and crush their resistance.

In the face of this situation, national democratic forces must work hard to arouse and unite the broadest ranks of the people, especially the masses suffering under Marcos. The consciousness of the masses must be thoroughly raised to help them see how their suffering and hunger are not the product of fate, which cannot be resolved through resilience, nor should be tolerated. They should see that this is a direct result of the policies and programs of the Marcos regime and its foreign imperialist masters.

The broad masses should be enlightened about the need to come together and take action through various forms of resistance to defend their rights and advance their interests. Their ranks should come together in the form of unions and various types of organizations in factories, urban and rural communities, schools, offices, and so forth.

The struggle of the Filipino people against the anti-people and anti-national Marcos regime is part of the overall struggle to end the semicolonial and semifeudal system by waging a national democratic struggle, through various forms of resistance, especially, through armed struggle. The rule of exploitative and oppressive classes must be put to an end. As the most concentrated expression of this rotten system, the fascist, puppet, oppressive and oppressive US-Marcos regime is the central target of the people’s resistance.