Posts tagged with rally

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June 16, 2010

First day of school

More than two hundred youths from different universities and communities in Metro Manila marched yesterday, June 15, 2010, to the gates of Malacanang to protest the worsening crisis in education

Yesterday was the first day of classes for most schools, colleges and universities in the country. As millions flocked to their respective campuses, more than 8 million of our fellow Filipino youths and children will not even get to step inside a classroom. This marks one of the highest number of out-of-school youth in our nation’s modern history.

In Gloria Arroyo’s nine years in office, the nation has experienced budget cuts in education, tuition and other fee increases left and right and as mentioned, the highest out-of-school and drop-out rates in years.

Despite the constitutional guarantee that education is a right of each and every Filipino, going to school has increasingly been such a financial burden to millions of Filipino families, if they can get in a school at all. Even public elementary and high schools, with up to 61,343 in classroom shortage and 54,060 in teacher shortage, cannot accommodate all Filipino children, nor can they provide the kind and quality of education needed for national development. The Department of Education itself declared that there are as many as 5.6 million out-of-school children.

The students were able to squeeze past through the barbed wire barricades of Mendiola and march to Gate 7 of the Presidential Palace

The nation’s public universities, on the other hand, has been suffering budget cuts almost every year forcing them to extract tuition and other fees from their students and forcing them to sell resources which would otherwise have served their constituents. The Philippines actually has the lowest percentage of youths studying in state universities. In other countries, state universities and colleges accommodate majority of college-age youths. In the Philippines, we force them to either enroll in private institutions with steep tuition rates, or to not enter college at all.

While our parents’ wages have been stunted for decades, the government has allowed tuition rates in private schools and public universities to escalate. It has in fact almost doubled since Gloria Arroyo became President. In 2001, the national average cost per unit in colleges and universities was at P257.41. In 2010, it has almost doubled to P501.22. In Metro Manila where most of the country’s colleges and universities are located, it is worse. From P439.59 per unit in 2001 it has ballooned to P980.54 per unit in 2010. These don’t even take into account the long list miscellaneous fees being implemented by schools, which hide the real cost of education.

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May 15, 2010

Labor Day in Manila 2010

Thousands of workers marched on the streets of Manila together with hundreds from other sectors of society to commemorate Labor Day

More than two weeks ago, I marched in my third Labor Day rally in Manila, together with thousands from different sectors of society, to commemorate international workers’ day. Being the last Labor Day celebration under the Gloria Arroyo government, the theme of the mobilization was centered on ensuring her departure from the Malacanang, her nine-year regime having been characterized by record high unemployment, depressed wages and grave abuses of workers’ rights, and on ensuring the people’s commitment to prosecute her for her administration’s sins and failures. Being a few days before the national elections, the celebration was also an opportune time for various sectors to demand from all the candidates a pro-people and nationalist labor platform, a discussion of which has been all but silenced with all the shallow and petty mudslinging that characterized the three-month campaign period.

Reps. Liza Maza & Satur Ocampo marching with leaders of workers' unions and other sectors

Rainier Sindayen, Chairperson of the University of the Philippines Diliman student council, leads the chants as the thousands marched through Quezon Boulevard onto Liwasang Bonifacio

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April 3, 2010

The campaign for greater state subsidy continues

Friends and supporters of the "PUP 5" jubilantly welcomed the five student leaders as they were released from detention at the Manila Police District HQ

It’s been almost a week since the tuition-hike saga of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines concluded with the successful junking of the proposal. It was formalized at the meeting of the university’s Board of Regents last Monday, after weeks of relentless protests by militant students to stop the almost 2,000% rise in tuition. Last Monday, the police also released the five student leaders after the PUP administration dropped charges of “robbery” against them. They were detained after they tried to bring to the office of the government’s Commission on Higher Education (CHED) some of their dilapidated chairs as a sign of protest. The reconciliation of sorts with the university administration came after representatives of Kabataan Partylist and other student leaders from PUP met with the PUP President and demanded the release of their comrades. In the meeting, the PUP President conceded and eventually surrendered to the democratic interests of the students and committed to supporting the campaign for greater state subsidy for the largest state university in the country instead of imposing a tuition hike.

The developments in PUP highlight one thing, now that the university administration has taken the side of the students and the people. The trail of responsibility for the neglect of our state universities and colleges ends at the gates of Malacanang and Congress. It is through the proposals and policies of the government, with the prodding of its foreign multinational lenders, that funding and support for higher education in the country has been on the decline. Despite increasing enrollment in the country’s public colleges and universities, state funding for such institutions has been dwindling over the decades. This year, state universities will get P3 billion pesos less from 2009. The same trend can be seen in countries across the world, from Greece to the United States, as indebted governments bow to the policy dictates of multinational creditors.

The continued neglect of our country’s state universities, notwithstanding the victory at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, sets the context that makes it imperative for the scholars of the people, and the rest of us, to continue fighting for the people’s right to education.

Students from PUP Manila and the University of the Philippines marched together to Plaza Salamanca in Manila to pledge their continuing fight for greater state subsidy for education and other social services

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March 20, 2010

PUP students protest proposed 2,000% tuition hike

Yesterday, hundreds of students of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Manila walked out of their classes to protest the proposed almost 2,000% tuition hike in the largest state university in the country. Agitated students threw out dilapidated armchairs and desks from the balconies and piled them up in front of the main arts building. They even set them up in flames to show their disgust at the school administration and the government for its neoliberal policy of abandoning tertiary education in the country.

The Polytechnic University of the Philippines offers the lowest tuition rate in the country at P12 per unit (around a quarter US dollar). This affordable rate has made PUP accessible to the 50,000 Filipino children it accommodates every year in its numerous campuses across the archipelago. Many of the students are children of ordinary wage earners, rank and file employees, overseas workers and peasants.

When the University of the Philippines administration planned to raise its tuition by 300% in late 2006, we were afraid it would set a precedent that other state universities would use to justify similar tuition hikes as prescribed by the government’s foreign lenders, which was one of the reasons we vehemently opposed the move.

We were right. State college EARIST (Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute of Science & Technology) increased its tuition a year later, using the UP situation as a justification. State universities have since then been imposing various dubiously-named fees as a result of budget cuts imposed by the government.

Overseas, foreign governments from Greece to the US are also cutting down on the budgets of their state universities and colleges and other social services in order to make do with decreasing government revenues and to accommodate gigantic debt payments to multinational lenders. Students have been confronting such attacks on their rights with forms of protests such as walk-outs. Students of state universities in California, for example, staged massive walk-outs last year, even going as far as barricading their schools in order to protest the budget cuts to be imposed by the state government.

Anti-student and pro-government formations have branded the PUP students as hooligans. The final message of the TV report on the protest, however, was succinct in addressing such accusations. “Mawasak na raw lahat ng gamit sa paaralan, huwag lang ang karapatan ng mamamayan sa edukasyon.” (In the first place, the chairs that were burned were those dilapidated ones that were already unusable). The students and the people have no other alternative but to fight for their rights.

Protests will continue throughout the next week leading to the March 29 PUP Board of Regents meeting that will decide on the tuition hike proposal. Let us support the campaign of the students of PUP. Let us join them in the streets as they fight for greater state subsidy for education. Ang laban nila ay hindi lang laban ng PUP, kung hindi laban ng lahat ng kabataan para sa karapatan sa edukasyon. Mabuhay ang mga iskolar ng bayan!

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November 3, 2009

A collective struggle privatized: ‘Ang laban ni Ninoy at Cory’

I am reposting this excerpt from this blog post from Viewer Discretion with regard to the recent political music video advertisement of presidential aspirant Noynoy Aquino.

If there is anything stark about how election campaigns are shaping up, it is that there is a general agreement that the current Arroyo administration is so horrible, so corrupt, and indeed so dark (ang “paligid ay madilim”) that there is an urgent need for a way out. But decades of personality politics and the class-biased nature of our democracy and elections have and will still practically forbid the possibility of having any presidentiables from the middle/working class by mere virtue of the huge costs of an election campaign. The song “Hindi Ka Nag-Iisa” reflects this hopelessness—and more strikingly, the passivity of the bourgeoisie (“ang Pilipinas ay naghihintay, kami ay susunod”).

Of course, to deflect focus on this passivity, the song uses images of activism and rallies (“magkapit-bisig tayo”), which is strange because these are the very techniques that many petty/bourgeoisie deem “outdated” and “ineffective.” Apparently, the image of a mass demonstration (most notably used in Boni Ilagan’s historical documentary “Sa Liyab ng Libong Sulo,” definitely a more progressive and highly contextualized use of the sulo imagery, which you can watch online in six parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6) remains acknowledged as the most powerful tool in the collective struggle for social change—and while those in a comfortable social position are wont to avoid it like the plague, they are also quick to use it in pursuit of their own interests.

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