For a while now, I’ve been at loss as to what to blog. Scenes of devastation and the actual loss of life and property to millions of Filipinos was overwhelming. It didn’t feel right blogging about anything else where almost everything else will pale in gravity. Class guilt perhaps, the very fact that I am able to blog in convenience indicates that, unlike majority of Filipinos who are poor, I am “unaffected.” For a while, blogging in the time of crisis reeked of insensitivity. Some people say blogging and online social media networks played a crucial role in the relief and rescue operations. I agree. But then again, the people who need the relief aren’t online, and prolonged online “involvement” seemed to me like a convenient excuse not to immerse with the people and get dirty with the actual operations. Posting and re-posting relief and rescue operations has to translate into actual relief and rescue operations. Many times, especially during the immediate days after the typhoons, they do, as proven by the thousands who flocked to organized relief operations. With an inept and inutile government, private citizens and civilian organizations needed to fill the vacuum in social services. But for how long? Especially when all those volunteers go back to their schools and to their workplaces?
Posts tagged with capitalism
Changing the constitution of different countries worldwide has been in the agenda of the lobbying efforts of multinational financial institutions and corporations the past years, in an effort to open up their national patrimonies and natural resources to foreign exploitation and ownership.
If you think it’s all about the personal and political motives of our politicians, it’s worse than you think. All charter change attempts by all Philippine presidents after Corazon Aquino have a common motif–amendments to our nationalist economic provisions, to allow the wanton foreign exploitation of our natural resources and foreign ownership of our public utilities. Even with the 1987 Philippine Constitution in place (and its 60-40 ownership restrictions in many national industries), the country’s rich natural resources have only been exploited, through legal loopholes, by local and foreign corporations for profit instead of serving its potential of lifting the millions of Filipinos who continue to suffer from abject poverty out of their tragic situation. The current attempt at changing the Philippine Constitution will not only seek to extend the Arroyo administration’s hold on power, but will also legitimize the economic plunder of our country.
All the more reasons to reject the Arroyo administration’s current attempt at Charter Change.
Faced with Recession, US at the Forefront of Amending RP Constitution
The latest report on Foreign Trade Barriers of March 2009 on the Philippines by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) explicitly states the “[aim to reduce or eliminate] the most important foreign barriers affecting US exports of good and services, foreign direct investment [and] intellectual property rights.”
Apart from Politics, Pressure from WTO, US, EU Drives Cha-Cha Bid
The political dimension of charter change has dominated the national agenda. But the constant driving force behind all the attempts since the last decade to modify the Constitution has been the external pressure coming mainly from the WTO, the US, the EU and other rich countries to create the sort of policy environment that will allow globalization to fully thrive in the Philippines.
Labor Day or Mayo Uno was also a day when Filipino workers’ organizations and unions, together with allied organizations, reiterated and reaffirmed the call for the approval of the P125 across-the-board wage increase which the government has slept on for the past decade, despite the fact that even if it was approved today, it would already be short of the average cost of living.
The government and big business line, of course, is to equate wage hikes with job cuts and to ultimately pit jobs and wages against each other, where the contradiction is not supposed to exist.
Contrary to claims of government officials in cahoots with big businesses, a P125 wage increase is doable. Just look at the profit margins of any big business in the country. An IBON Foundation study, for one, claims that “the increasing labor productivity of local workers, or the ratio of national output to employment, has been steadily increasing over the past decade.” It added that “between 1999 and 2006, labor productivity has increased by 56.3% in nominal terms and 13.1% in real terms (taking inflation into account). This shows that employers could afford to grant the P125 wage hike, which would necessarily trim their profit margin but will certainly not push them to bankruptcy.”
The unwillingness of government and big businesses to pay their workers decent wages, is simply a manifestation of, aside form the excessive greed of CEO’s and capitalist junkies, the inherent unjust character of the current capitalist order.
From Quiapo, the demonstrators proceeded across Quezon Bridge onto Liwasang Bonifacio, where the annual Labor Day program, led by KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno) and Anakpawis, is held.
[This is my simple contribution to Blog Action Day 2008.]
The most prevalent idea being perpetuated by mass media and other traditional establishments with regards to how poverty could be solved is the notion that it’s all up to the individual’s hard work and perseverance. Nasa sipag at tiyaga lang ‘yan. Kayod lang nang kayod. Mag-trabaho lang nang mag-trabaho. Dadating din ang asenso.
To reinforce this idea, it’s not seldom that we are made witnesses to countless life stories of individuals who rose from poverty rags-to-riches style. Just this weekend, over ABS-CBN, we are made audience to TV biographies of the country’s business tycoons and how they achieved their status through “hard work” and how they return to the poor their riches through humanitarian efforts and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) projects.
This, however, is the reality: anumang sipag at tiyaga ang gawin ng malawak na sektor ng manggagawa, karamihan sa kanila ay hindi talaga aasenso. Not in a prevailing order that thrives on the cycle of inequality that it perpetuates. The success stories we are being made to witness and admire are mere exceptions rather than the norm. Surely, if it’s all up to sipag at tiyaga, then most of our employees, workers and farmers, whom we pride to be hard-working, should be experiencing economic security. Don’t you ever wonder why such is not the case? After all, who benefits the most from the hard work of workers? We are simply being made to pin our hopes and be content with the way things are done and not strive or fight for something better.
Indeed, when it is not coupled with genuine reforms and changes in the core orientation of our economies and in how our governments are run, mere sipag at tiyaga will never be enough to lift the vast majority Filipinos, and even the rest of the world’s poor, out of poverty.
I can’t seem to fulfill my plan to isolate myself and become a law school monk. Every once in a while I can’t help but turn the TV on and watch some entertainment or some shows off CNN. I would sigh at how pathetic some news commentators, short of sounding like capitalist paid hacks, spin the news of the global capitalist crisis into something barely positive. Every morsel of positive detail is being used to salvage the perception of capitalism’s inevitable collapse. It’s like everyone’s in denial. This was bound to happen because of this system’s inherent characteristic. France, Iceland, Singapore, Japan, even the USA is on recession. Those who speak of free market policies have suddenly now shut up and allowed state intervention to bail out greedy private financial institutions. What happened?
Okay. So even if I turn the TV off and go back to studying, I still end up losing my focus. Every half an hour or so I would get up from my study table and walk around the house trying to do something else. More often that not, I’d end up just playing with Tisay and watching cartoons with her.
Victor Villanueva
law student, national democracy activist, film school graduate, photography hobbyist