Once again we witnessed a puppet and fake president distort the real state of the Filipino nation to mask a crumbling regime. she used as an excuse the world recession, concealing poverty and inadequate social services with pompous statistics and a twisted view of economic development based on ever increasing exploitation. She claimed strong governance committing unbridled human rights violations and repression.
From this falsified picture of our national life, she charted national policies that will further exploit the masses with continued tax burdens through Katas ng E-VAT as one major source for enriching her family and big time bureaucrats, allowing oil price hikes, increased prices of basic commodities and services and nailing workers wages to please both the big compradors and imperialists alike. Her regime kept denying peasant masses of farmlands by expanding multi-national agribusiness and landlord monopoly by extending the bogus land reform.
In Mindanao, which contributes a bigger share of the countrys GNP, her policies includes one that sets aside real industrialization and which compromises our patrimony in favor of US, Australian, Japanese and Canadian mining firms. There is continuing expansion of multi-national agri-business and other superprofit investments that plunders the islands natural wealth and seriously threatens its ecology.
Although it is obvious that she is politically isolated, she insists on her presidential legitimacy and claim political stability despite her dwindling satisfaction rating. She chose not to mention her regimes record of rampant human rights violations because she knows that this is one issue she cannot defend in public. She chose not to waste fighting words against the CPP-NPA-NDF before her term ends because it is obvious that instead of crushing the revolutionary movement with its vicious Oplan Bantay Laya II campaigns, the NPA is getting stronger, launching widespread and intensive tactical offensives nationwide.
In the last six months alone in Mindanao, the NPA launched more than 100 tactical offensives, confiscating high power rifles enough to arm a company. It inflicted more than a company of fatalities and undetermined a number of wounded enemies. Last year 2007, the regimes priority target to dismantle the north-eastern Mindanao region failed dismally. In the recent six months, they shifted their focus to southern Mindanao region even though they have not yet achieved their minimum goal in north-eastern Mindanao. However, they were met by a series of successful NPA tactical offensives.
Frustration and defeat forced the regime to augment their 10 battalions in southern Mindanao with one mechanized battalion and two field artillery batteries from Luzon. Almost half of the Philippine Army battalions are now deployed against the NPA in Mindanao. Yet, Gloria Macapagal Arroyos generals still prides to prate that they are winning based on statistics of dead NPAs without proof of body counts and rehashed and fake surrenderees.
The beleaguered regime desperately needs a relief in the armed conflict with the Moro groups in Mindanao so it can concentrate its forces against the NPA. Arroyo proudly announced a breakthrough in the GRP-MILF talks as if the age old Bangsamoro problem in Mindanao can be solved in a stroke of a pen in a memorandum of agreement (MOA). History and the current reality show that the Bangsamoro problem should be addressed in the context of resolving our semi-feudal and semi-colonial system.
It is true that the world recession is caused mainly by capitalist overproduction and global plunder and has tremendous negative effects on our country because the US and other imperialist countries are not just involved in plundering but they also pass their crisis to their semi-colonies such as the Philippines. This situation validates the correctness of the NDFs program for self-reliance by establishing national industrialization based on strong agriculture. But, the US-Arroyo regimes policy of subservience to imperialists economic interest makes it impossible to have our own basic industries. Her servitude to foreign interests in agriculture and her bogus land reform can never develop self-sufficiency and strong agriculture because the landlord, the imperialist agribusiness and imperialist trade keeping us merely exporter of cash crops and net importer of the countrys food requirement.
It is only through the NDFs socialist perspective that the country can develop strong agriculture as the basis to establish national industrialization. This can only be possible through a peoples democratic revolution!
(sgd) Ka Oris
Spokesperson
NDF-Mindanao
July 30, 2008
