The pork barrel issue has further laid
bare the ruling classes’ greed and their apathy at the glaring gap between their
affluence and the wretched lives of the toiling masses... The sharpest
criticisms must be trained at the Aquino regime which has shrewldy benefited the
most from this system.
EDITORIALThe huge 26 August demonstration at the Luneta Park in Manila and various other places here and abroad was an indicator of the Filipino people’s widespread anger at the pork barrel system. Through this protest, the people demonstrated their wrath at the bureaucratic plunder of public funds and their use by the ruling Aquino regime to dominate reactionary politics.
The pork barrel issue has further laid bare the ruling classes’ greed and underscored their deliberate refusal to heed the people’s grievances and their apathy at the glaring gap between their affluence and the hard, deprived and wretched lives of the toiling masses.
Only at the middle of its six-year term, the Aquino regime is now severely isolated from the broad masses of the people.
It now faces the widespread hatred of the middle strata of professionals, teachers and other employees, doctors, nurses and health workers, church people and lawyers. All of them were at the receiving end of Aquino’s attempts to entice them with propaganda on reform and good governance.
The huge protest action and continually expanding movement against the pork barrel comprise an important leap in the widespread participation of ordinary folk in political action.
The people’s burgeoning anger is rooted in the deepening and expanding socio-economic crisis. It demonstrates the limited capability of the Aquino regime’s propaganda to deceive and lull the people into believing its promises of “righteous road” reform even as the system and the ruling reactionary state are putrefying.
Aquino’s attempts to alleviate the crisis have only succeeded in further infuriating the people and stoking the fires of protest. His announcement that he would abolish the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) infuriated the people no end as he also declared that he would maintain and “reform” the system of giving pork barrel funds to congressmen.
Despite the people’s urgent cry, Aquino insists on maintaining his own pork barrel that is estimated at more than a trillion pesos. The Aquino regime’s special accommodation of Janet Lim Napoles, widely believed to be one of the reactionary congressmen and senators’ co-conspirators in corruption, has also fueled the people’s ire.
The Filipino people must advance their national-democratic struggle against bureaucrat capitalist corruption. The expansion of the protest movement against the pork barrel and corruption must encourage the further expansion and intensification of the economic and political struggles of workers, peasants and other exploited and oppressed classes for their democratic rights and interests.
Alongside their cry against corruption, they must intensify the demand for social justice, for land, jobs and humane wages, for increasing funds allocated to public education, health services, subsidies for farmers, housing for the urban poor and subsidizing the prices of basic commodities, water, electricity and oil, among others.
They must thoroughly expose the Aquino regime’s pretensions, assail its anomalous use of state power for the benefit of relatives and friends of the ruling clique, and hold it accountable for defending the rotten system of corruption.
The united front of forces opposed to corruption and the pork barrel system must be further expanded. The progressive and revolutionary forces must march at the forefront of the struggle against the pork barrel and corruption. They must maintain their own initiative and standpoint even as they give their all in expanding links and cooperative relations with the democratic and positive forces generated by the broad protest movement.
The sharpest criticisms and blows must be trained at the ruling Aquino regime which has shrewdly benefited the most from this system and is now defending it to the fullest. The broad forces desirous of reform must be encouraged to take a stand and take action. Simultaneously, we must sharply expose and resist the reformists who cling to the coattails of the ruling Aquino regime and pretend to be anti-corruption, when their yellow leaders have, in fact, also benefited from corruption.
We must expose the systemic and deeply seated cancer of the country’s social and political system. We must amplify the cry to end the pork barrel system of Congress and Malacañang for corruption and political patronage.
We must expose the roots of bureaucrat capitalism and advance the demand to end the ruling semifeudal and semicolonial system. We must raise the people’s anger at the pork barrel to the level of widespread propaganda on the social and historical roots of rampant government corruption and link it to the anti-imperialist, antifeudal and antifascist struggle.
Ang Bayan is the official news organ of the Communist Party of the Philippines, issued by the CPP Central Committee. It provides news about the work of the Party as well as its analysis of and standpoint on current issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment