COMMENTARY
The President’s ‘Death Wish’

It seems the President has a death wish. She has displayed her unflagging loyalty and devotion to the U.S. government and big capitalists. She has declared war on civil liberties. She has declared war on workers. She has also declared the escalation of war against peasants in the countryside.

By Carlos H. Conde
Bulatlat.com

At the rate she’s going, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will have virtually declared every one of her critics as terrorists by the time she finishes her term in 2004. I say this because, a few days ago, the President went one step farther in her efforts to please her masters (the U.S. government and big capitalists) by declaring as terrorists members of trade unions.

To her, trade unions strike terror in the hearts of capitalists. Nothing, of course, can be farther from the truth. Trade unions are essential elements of a democracy. Their existence deters capitalists and employers from abusing their workers. If not for trade unions, all of us who receive daily wages will not be enjoying the rights that we take for granted nowadays, such as eight-hour workdays, wage increases, benefits, insurance, etc.

Mrs. Arroyo’s attack against unions (her statement is actually a directive to government agencies and the police to start busting unions and arresting union leaders) benefits only the capitalists who have expressed their supposed reluctance to invest in the Philippines because of these unions, thus giving her the impression that unionism is the cause of our economic backwardness. These greedy capitalists hate unions because they don’t want to share their profits with their workers. If they could drive down the wages of their workers, they would.

In this day of the so-called globalization, countries are in fact trying to outdo each other in lowering wages, supposedly to attract more foreign investors. The entry of China in the World Trade Organization (WTO), in fact, has rattled countries such as the Philippines, whose leaders now believe that the only way to compete against such economic behemoths as China is to exploit their workers even more.

This is the context of Mrs. Arroyo’s recent attacks against labor unions. She is just making a follow-up on the liberalization bill she introduced in the Senate years back and which is now the cause of so much distress in our local industries. This bill not only liberalized so many local industries, which caused the displacement of workers – it also gave rise to the massive contractualization of labor, so that workers now can never expect to enjoy security of tenure and benefits due them.

The effect of all this is that the labor sector will become restive. They will realize that they have so much to lose, so much to suffer under this regime and, mark my word, they will rise up, as they have always done, simply because they will not have any choice.

It seems the President has a death wish. She has displayed her unflagging loyalty and devotion to the U.S. government and big capitalists. She has declared war on civil liberties. She has declared war on workers. She has also declared the escalation of war against peasants in the countryside by sending the U.S.-trained troops that went after the Abu Sayyaf to go after the Communists, who are in the countryside.

She seems to have forgotten that the revolutionary movement in the Philippines has been active for more than 30 years and is growing. Not even Marcos, not even the full might of the U.S. under his regime, vanquished it. The military had hoped that the purges within the movement in the ‘80s would lead to its self-destruction; that did not happen. And now, largely because of the government’s own doing, it is gaining strength from the people who continue to suffer from corrupt regimes.

What then makes President Arroyo think that she can vanquish the Communists this time around just because she has in her command Filipino soldiers who have been trained by the U.S. military – soldiers, by the way, who have failed to completely eliminate a dozen or so supposedly ragtag bandits in Basilan and Sulu? She’s obviously deluded, and delusion is always the first mistake a repressive regime makes. Bulatlat.com

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