Some four to five hundred students from various schools and universities, and out of school youths from different communities in Metro Manila trooped to Mendiola this afternoon to demand that the government take action to protect the youth and the people from another wave of tuition hikes that’s happening alongside spiraling prices of basic commodities, public utilities and social services, from train fares to electricity rates. These are happening in the context of massive unemployment and poverty and stunted minimim wages.

WHAT CAN THE PRESIDENT DO
The usual hecklers and Malacañang apologists claim that the President has no power to control prices, as these are at the mercy of “free market” forces. Remedial solutions, however, are well within the powers of the President. With regard to tuition increases, for example, the President only has to order the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education to exercise their regulatory powers and regulate the implementation of tuition hikes in schools and universities across the country, if not impose a moratorium altogether. The Price Act (Republic Act 7581) allows him to put a price cap on basic necessities. He can suspend the collection of VAT especially on oil products and electricity. He can order the audit of profits and stocks of oil companies to stop its overpricing (by as much as P8.00 per liter) by private profiteers. He can withdraw the implementation of fare hikes in Metro Manila’s mass transit railways, and the toll hikes in the highways as these are well within the regulatory powers of the Government on public utilities and services.

Truly, a government that willingly refuses to wield its police power to provide the people relief from the onslaught of price hikes has no business telling them they can’t expect any wage hike. With P404.00 a day as minimum wage in Metro Manila, how do you expect a family of six to survive when the cost of living for such a family in the capital is P957.00 a day? (Un-updated estimate of cost of living, might be beyond P1,000.00 today).

GENUINE SOLUTIONS
On top of the remedial solutions, the only way Government can genuinely address the problem of poverty in the country is by addressing its root causes. Government must decisively reverse the backward import-dependent, export-oriented orientation of the Philippine economy. It must provide the people the economic capacity to afford all the basic necessities and services they need, not merely to survive in the strictest sense of the term, but to live meaningful and prosperous lives.

As an example, in order to address persistent and massive poverty among farmers and peasants who comprise the largest sector of the Philippine population, genuine agrarian reform must be implemented. This will not only allow farmers to own the land they have been tilling, but this will also raise the rural incomes and lift many of them out of poverty and will unleash the country’s agricultural potential.

There’s also the need to implement a national industrialization program, foster and protect domestic manufacturing in order to provide stable jobs for millions of Filipinos and decisively break our heavy dependence on foreign capital which has only head us to become overwhelmingly vulnerable to the whims and caprices of foreign profiteers.

WHAT IT DOES INSTEAD
In this classic situation we see whose side this kind of Government takes the cudgels for and whose interests it primarily serves. Unless the President reverses the economic policies of his predecessors, including his mother, based on the discredited dogma of neoliberal and “free market” economics imposed by foreign creditors and self-righteous economists, then he proves to be no different from any of them. The people’s struggle for genuine social change thus continues.

Further reading:
(1) EDSA and the Economy 25 years after
(2) A regime of high prices: Aquino’s apathy towards the poor