Bulatlat

Juan de la Cruz, the Filipino Everyman, is now awash in a sea of crises – from political crisis to crises in the prices of rice and other prime commodities to poverty. This sorry state of affairs is aggravated by recent developments – a kidnapping in Sulu, and a storm that resulted in a shipping tragedy.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has recently approved a bill seeking to exempt minimum wage earners from paying income tax and increase personal exemptions for other workers and employees. The new law is supposed to provides relief for millions of ordinary Filipinos reeling from the present economic crisis.

At no point in the country’s history have the Filipino masses and even middle classes had it this bad. Tuition, transport fare, costs of health services, power rates, and the prices of food are at all-time highs.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been making much of the government’s P 2 billion subsidy for the poorest power consumers. This, she said, is a product of the value-added tax (VAT) on power, which contributed considerably to the increase in power rates in the last few years.

Former House Speaker Jose de Venecia’s threat to testify in the Senate investigation on the controversial National Broadband Network (NBN) deal between the Philippine government and China’s ZTE Corporation has caused the public to eagerly await the probe’s resumption.

Crispin “Ka Bel” Beltran, labor leader and progressive lawmaker, was that kind of figure who could be called a “people’s statesman.” To the very end of his illustrious and colorful life, his concern above all was the plight of the working people, not only in the Philippines but throughout the world.

The possible surfacing of two new witnesses to the National Broadband Network (NBN) scam has been met with stiff resistance by Malacañang and its henchmen, mainly former Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, former Armed Forces chief Hermogenes Esperon, and Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita.

Before the present rice crisis broke out, the multitudes of ordinary Filipinos had already been hard-up, with wages lying way below the costs of living. Their plight has worsened with the steep rise in prices of rice – the country’s staple food – and other food products, as well as that of oil, a prime commodity.

The Arroyo government insists that what the country is experiencing now is not a rice crisis, but merely a problem in rice prices. There are even recent studies showing that the present rice supply is slightly more than enough to feed the entire population.

The recent Supreme Court decision affirming the “right” of former National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA director-general and now Commission on Higher Education (CHED) chairman Romulo Neri to invoke executive privilege in refusing to answer questions regarding his conversations with President Arroyo on the government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) deal with China’s ZTE Corpo