By Sonny Africa / Executive Director, IBON Foundation
Measured against the huge problems facing the country, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s 5th SONA seemed a little small-minded.
Was the mention of cases against his cousin, former House speaker Romualdez, the pasabog? It’s early days though and the justice system’s record for big trapo fish isn’t vigorous prosecution but prolonged delay, quiet dismissal, or eventual pardon.
Mentioning him also doesn’t really make up for how, a year after the thunderous applauding of those na dapat mahiya, cases have only been filed against less than 5% of some 1,500 lawmakers, cabinet officials, bureaucrats and contractors plausibly involved in flood control project scams.
The president wasn’t even truthful that the government did all it could against high oil-shock driven prices and to help Filipinos. It declared a national emergency but didn’t use its powers to control oil prices and to freeze prices of basic goods — resulting in the third highest inflation in the region.
It also didn’t give much help, giving very little to just a fraction of those in need, maybe at most to 2.5% of the 21 million poor, low income, and lower middle class families in need.
The Php47 billion windfall profits of the oil firms just in March, from selling high what they bought low, is bigger than what the government has spent so far to help tens of millions of distressed Filipinos.
Even the most well-applauded micro measure on removing systems loss from our electricity bills is puny. What about how the biggest reason we have the most expensive power in the region? Is a handful of profit-seeking oligarch firms lording it over privatized power?
Workers and small businesses fully deserve tax cuts, amid high prices and especially after such big tax cuts on super-rich families, large firms, and foreign investors. We wonder though how he’ll manage the revenue loss without bigger taxes on super-rich families, large firms, and foreign investors, or on bilyonaryo/trilyonaryo wealth.
As it is, the 6% increase in the proposed 2027 budget doesn’t even keep up with projected 6.5% inflation this year. Austerity always hits the poor the worst.
The bragging about free trade agreements (FTAs) was anachronistic and so 1990s. FTAs and the “free market” globalization nonsense are the biggest reasons for decades-long agricultural decline and expensive food, industrial erosion and joblessness, and the slavish worship of foreign investment.
He also seemed oblivious that even his best buddy, the US, has turned its back on FTAs and embarked on aggressively protectionist America First trade and investment policy — which, he should know, includes Pax Silica.
The president thinks high-tech foreign semiconductor manufacturing and AI firms in a Pax Silica enclave disconnected from Filipino industry is industrialization. This is colonial false consciousness mistaking the US’s self-serving interests as our own.
And, as many beleaguered leaders do, of course he ended with a jingoistic rant against an external adversary to rally people around him. He didn’t even have the courage to name China though.
The president’s vow to finish his reforms reframes failure as the discipline of staying the course, while revealing a blindness to how much still needs to be done to fix the floundering economy amid profound global shifts.
It’s more urgent than ever to declare rural development, Filipino industrialization, and universal publicly-provided social services as our path to progress. Yet, instead, we have a “Bagong Pilipinas” that’s business as usual which is joblessness, poverty and hunger as usual — while oligarchs and foreign capital profit and prosper as usual.
The insistence on continuity over reinvention confirms that while the president still has the vast formal powers of the office, he enters his last two years as a lame duck walking, more concerned about his exit strategy than making great strides for national progress and the Filipino people. #
