Bagong Alyansang Makabayan’s Holy Week Reflections for PNoy : “Behold the cross of the Filipino people and end their calvary ...”

April 19, 2011
Bagong Alyansang Makabayan’s Holy Week Reflections for PNoy :
“Behold the cross of the Filipino people and end their calvary ...”

The patriotic alliance of progressive forces Bagong Alyansang Makabayan in Southern Mindanao Region (Bayan-SMR) joins the entire Christendom in the observance of Lent.

The conditions faced by Filipino people are akin to Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

Runaway inflation, incessant oil price hikes, joblessness and lack of economic opportunities have nailed our people leaving them bereft in helpless agony. The yoke is passed from generation, and borne by majority of the Filipinos, the working class, the peasantry, the urban poor, the exploited professionals, youths and students, the national minorities, the women.

More of our countrymen are driven to find work abroad. They enter all sorts of jobs where they are most vulnerable. They are supposed to be contributing to the country’s productivity but they are out and away from home and their families because their country could not provide jobs and better opportunities.

Injustices abound. The disparity between the rich and the poor remained. The 20 richest earn the combined income of 52 million families in a year of work, while top corporations’ profits increase by many hundredfold.

Wages are oppressive while social services are left at the exploit of private hands. Budget for education, health and housing are very low compared to military spending and debt payment. The economy is falling. We have been ever dependent on export of cheap labor and raw materials, as all these benefit a few who get richer.

Filipino workers are overworked and underpaid without due benefits. Their tenure is largely unprotected and while they struggle to form unions so they can collectively bargain for their rights, they are instead met with repression.

The peasants slave themselves to work in lands they do not usually own and yet are ironically, most vulnerable to hunger. They find that the money they make could not keep pace with the steady increases in the price of goods and basic commodities. They can hardly buy their own tools and farm inputs that have been overpriced. As always, they live in danger of being driven out from their lands, by landlords, if not, by the large mining companies and plantations that lay claims on the land they till.

The urban poor lack employment, and if they are lucky, they work in jobs whose incomes are wanting and irregular. They squeeze themselves along the city’s sewers and slums. The toll of incessant oil price increases fall heavily on them, and they are mostly hungry, and homeless and in perpetual danger of cruel eviction.

The women are in oppressed economic conditions and have yet to break free from discrimination of their gender wrought by society’s male-dominated outlook. They suffer much from the crisis being the ones at the center of running the household. They have health needs specific to their gender that remain neglected by the government. They are not free and safe.

Our professionals are poorly paid and hit most by corruption and neglect in the bureaucracy while our youths and students, largely uncared for, are not given better chances of developing into becoming productive citizens. Many of them could not go to school because education is unaffordable. Poverty has pushed most of them to misery instead of growing healthy, productive and supposedly become the country’s reliable productive human resource.

The widening and deepening crisis manifested in the way people’s suffering have worsened behooves reflection, especially on the part of the President upon whom the greater responsibility to govern the nation’s life greatly rests.

We are asking Pnoy to heed the people’s call for meaningful change, and not to take the path of short-term, temporary solution that only waste people’s money.

We are tired of an economy tied to imperialist domination. We bear the burden of a country subjected to the role as providers of cheap raw materials and cheap labor to the economies of superpowers. We are tired of the fact that our people are overworked and exploited, that land and capital are in the monopoly of a few who benefit from the existing social order, and that government is run by them who comprised the few who own much of the wealth.

We urge Pnoy at this time of reflection to start lifting the cross of its people borne by reconsidering changes: the choice to carve the path of the country to national industrialization where government controls and develops our economy to serve the needs its own people rather than the dictates of the outside; the choice to uphold national sovereignty instead of supporting foreign control; the choice to ally yourself with the poor who voted for you instead of the ruling class and exacting accountability on them who committed crimes against the nation; the choice to uphold your people’s rights instead of intensifying repression of their political and human rights.

To decisively end the Filipinos’ calvary is your good chance of redemption.


BAYAN SOUTHERN MINDANAO REGION (BAYAN-SMR)
For Reference:
FRANCHIE BUHAYAN
Secretary General
Mobile Number: 09106671009