The Communist Party of the Philippines condemns the profit-hungry oil companies for incessantly imposing increases in the prices of petroleum products over the past six weeks, resulting an ever sharper rise in the people’s cost of living and rapid decline in their standard of living.

Over the past two years, giant oil companies have been making obscene levels of profits by manipulating supplies and market prices, at the expense of the toiling masses around the globe. In 2022, the eight of the biggest oil companies raked in $382 billion in net profits, more than one and a half times bigger than the previous year. This amount represents close to four times the annual national budget of the Philippines.

Local oil subsidiaries continue to make profits and expand their businesses, with Petron leading with ₱6.1 billion in profits during the first half of this year.

All these numbers show the insatiable greed of these monopoly capitalists who make gargantuan amounts of profits that are spent on lavish and luxury living, while hundreds of millions of people around the world go hungry. In the Philippines, 80% of all families live below or at the edge of the poverty line.

The latest oil price increases come on top of sharp increases in the prices of rice and other food commodities, transportation costs, education, health service and other necessaries. This is the result of increasing reliance on imports and foreign loans, as the local economy continues to decline amid the destruction of local productive forces.

The Filipino people are outraged at the Marcos regime’s official policy of idling and ignoring the people’s pleas amid their worsening socio-economic conditions. While the new Imelda in Malacañang hosts ostentatious fashion shows for the ruling elite, Filipinos suffer from rising prices, low wages, landlessness, lack of income, economic dispossession and dislocation.

Amid rising prices and deterioration of their quality of life, the broad masses of the people are fully justified in waging militant struggle to push the demand for oil companies to roll back the prices of petroleum products substantially and for government to remove taxes on oil products.

Even as public utility drivers and operators seek fare increases to ease the effects of oil price increases, workers and other toiling people are also being roused to amplify their demand for higher wages and salaries. All other working class sectors must intensify their call for lower prices of food and other necessaries, as well as other urgent demands to defend and advance their social and economic rights.