By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant, National Democratic Front of the Philippines
DEMOCRATIC SPACE
Posted by Bulatlat.com
Volume VIII, Number 25, July 27 – August 2, 2008
The fake president Gloria M. Arroyo has such a long record of lying that no one expects her to describe the real state of the nation and indicate the solutions to the problems that have grown terribly worse under her regime. She is ever more determined to lie in a vain attempt to evade responsibility for the extremely aggravated suffering of the Filipino people. But reality cries far louder and clearer than her lies. These add insult to injury. And the outraged people become ever more resolute and relentless in their struggle.
Arroyo is poised to claim that she has nothing to do with the crisis of the domestic ruling system and that this is simply the result of external factors that would soon blow away. She is likely to repeat her lie that the economy continues to grow and that she has already laid the basis for the Philippines to become a “first world country” in the next twenty years, even as she has not undertaken any program of national industrialization and land reform. Only the most corrupt puppet of foreign monopoly capitalism can utter such complete nonsense as that the industrial development of a semifeudal agrarian economy can be achieved through wanton consumption chiefly by the local exploiting classes and through unbridled foreign borrowing and superprofit-taking by the foreign monopolies.
The Arroyo regime has subserviently followed the US-instigated neoliberal policy of monopoly capitalism or imperialism masquerading as “free market” globalization. It has kept the agrarian and pre-industrial character of the Philippine economy and has remained dependent on the export of women and men, raw materials and semi-manufactures. To cover the trade and fiscal deficits and be able to claim that the economy is ever growing, it has gone into unprecedented foreign borrowing and it has raised the tax burden on ordinary people in a bankrupt and depressed economy.
Amidst the economic and financial crisis of the US and world capitalist system, which is generating inflation and stagnation, the Arroyo regime is confronted by an international credit crunch and a drastic fall in demand for the primary and low value-added exports of the Philippines.
Buffeted by the bursting of the financial bubble in high tech stocks and then in housing in less than a decade, the US and other foreign monopoly capitalists have focused on fabricating shortages and manipulating prices in the fuel and food sectors of the global economy in order to continue raking in superprofits.
Captivated by the US-dictated neoliberal economic policy and driven by the greed of big compradors, landlords and bureaucrat capitalists, the Arroyo regime cannot offer any kind of solution or alleviation to the aggravation of poverty and the spread of hunger. The rate of unemployment is rapidly increasing. The incomes of the working people are plummeting. The prices of fuel, food and other basic commodities are soaring. The basic social services are deteriorating and yet the fees charged are ever rising.
The broad masses of the people are outraged that despite being an agrarian country, the Philippines cannot produce enough food for itself and has become the world’s No. 1 rice importer. Trade liberalization has not only prevented industrial development through the dumping of surplus manufactures but has also seriously damaged Philippine agriculture through the dumping of agricultural surpluses from abroad. Land reform and agricultural development have not been carried out. Extensive tracts of land have been taken away from agriculture and used for nonagricultural purposes and real estate speculation.
Arroyo is poised to repeat for the nth time the lie that the reactionary armed forces and police can either destroy the armed revolutionary movement or reduce it to irrelevance by 2010. She will claim again with the same or some other mocking words that it is “ideological nonsense” that fuels the armed revolution rather than the ever escalating oppression and exploitation inflicted on the people by her regime and by her imperialist and local reactionary masters. She obscures the fact that it makes excellent political sense for the people and revolutionary forces to wage an armed revolution for national liberation and democracy against the chronically crisis-ridden semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system.
The Arroyo regime has rabidly followed US military dictates, especially the US global policy of terror. It has done so to serve its own narrow interests. It has calculated that it can draw certain political and material advantages. Thus, it has allowed US military forces to enter and stay in the Philippines and bring in weapons of mass destruction under various pretexts in violation of Philippine sovereignty and territorial integrity and in violation of the 1987 constitution which prohibits the basing of foreign military forces and their weapons in the Philippines.
Under the US global policy of terror, the Arroyo regime has supported the US-instigated wars of aggression, acts of military intervention and campaigns to enact fascist laws and unleash state terrorism. It has used its servility to the US under the pretext of anti-terrorism in order to keep the loyalty of the military and police chain of command against the growing number of opponents within the armed services and to embolden her armed minions in perpetrating gross and systematic violation of human rights against the unarmed patriotic and progressive legal activists, the people in the guerrilla fronts, the broad range of opposition forces and the broad masses of the people.
The Filipino people are fighting back against the ever worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation. They are undertaking all forms of struggle, including the legal protest movement and the armed revolutionary movement. Whether or not the legal protest movement can still cause the ouster of the Arroyo regime before 2010, it has the growing determination and strength to prevent the Arroyo clique from manipulating other reactionary forces and deciding the results of the 2010 presidential elections to its advantage. The limitations of the legal democratic movement underscore the high importance of the armed revolutionary movement.
