GMA’s Cha-cha: On Track – to the Death Chamber
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The problem with GMA’s Charter change agenda is that it cannot prove that a more liberalized, restrictions-less, 100%-tariff free and 100% foreign-owned and dominated economy would usher in more progress and make lives better for the country’s poor majority.
By Ren Jalaluddin Ropeta
Moro-Christian Peoples’ Alliance
MANILA — Isn’t President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Cha-cha (Charter change) train leading us to the death chamber after all?
The problem with GMA’s charter change agenda is that it cannot prove that a more liberalized, restrictions-less, 100%-tariff free and 100% foreign-owned and dominated economy would usher in more progress and make lives better for the country’s poor majority.
No matter what sense of logic — business or politics-wise — we apply, the proposed harmonization of the charter to globalization policies would be like sentencing the nation to death.
The Arroyo government is going full blast into the bandwagon created by the World Trade Organization, which has an undeniably vile reputation for having subject third world economies into bankruptcy, humongous foreign debts and dire poverty.
With the Philippines, it is no different and it would be no different if we further unguard the constitution with its remaining nationalist trappings. Since we entered into the GATT-WTO, we have become dependent on import and export resulting to the fall of our national industry.
Sure, we can eat all the M&Ms we like, but we hardly have a self-produced quality rice available for local consumers. Such basic commodities which in the first place, we should be capable of producing on our own would still have to be exported to provide our needs. Inflation has worsened and to cover this up — a 2-step VAT increase has just recently been forced into our mouths. Resultantly, our biggest export, the OFWs, our unsung heroes, have had to work degrees harder just to keep their families, and the peso, alive.
Come to think of it, endless charter amendments proposals have surfaced from the country’s cream-of-the- crop economists, including Arroyo herself, as to how to solve economic crisis, but none ventured on the idea of National Industrialization — a move to develop our national industry and resources based on our own strength and needs, free from the imposition of foreign capitalists as well as from their plundering motives.
And then we, the “not-so-intelligent lot-who-oppose-chacha” are labeled as anti-development when we speak of these economic and social ills. Where’s the justice in that?
With all these in mind, isn’t GMA’s Cha-cha train leading us to the death chamber after all?
(The author is the vice-chairperson of the Moro-Christian Peoples’ Alliance.)
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