Amazing, how Gloria Arroyo can smile and at the same breadth strangle and starve us.

This past week, the President has been in high spirits as official indicators measure economic ‘growth’ last year, coinciding with the unanticipated rally of the peso against the dollar. These, and news of global credit agency Moody’s ruling out downgrading the country’s credit standing, are—so Malacanang says—the President’s moves to deal with the deficit and reform the fiscal situation coming to fruition. The benefits of foreign capital regaining faith on the country will finally trickle down to the masses. But in this country where reform means no less than the intensification of the present order of things, there is hardly anything to faithfully smile for.

The pending enactment of the bill raising value-added tax from 10% to 12% is causing much fuss both from its proponents and those who will be hardest hit—us. This, when passed, is expected to earn P35 billion, nearly half of the total P80 billion the President’s 8 priority tax measures is projected to generate. The VAT is levied on what a person consumes, so that by purchasing an item or a service, rich or poor, one is already putting something on the country’s coffers. Market fundamentalists in and out of Malacanang warn us of economic collapse if opposition crushes the bill. Solita Monsod has, for instance, reduced the situation to a choice between two evils: suffer from being taxed inequitably and unfairly, or suffer a total economic recession. We see the exact same choice being slapped at UP’s face: commercialize, or collapse. Raise tuition, or collapse. Sell property, or collapse. There is no other way.

The choice seems made for us. But whoever wanted a situation leading to such a choice that is as good as one between slow, painful, and ugly death, and death at once?

That Malacanang poses the situation such that it would elicit the response it wants betrays the fact that it has cancelled in the painful equation Gloria Arroyo’s flawless obedience to the dictates of finance capital—an obedience that is in the final analysis what has been dissipating the country’s finances. By reforming taxation, Arroyo does not mean imposing corporate tax, or lifting the tax incentives foreign businesses have been taking pleasure in. By raising revenues, she does not mean raising and imposing tariffs on imports. By austerity and belt-tightening, she does not mean putting a moratorium on unbridled debt servicing.
So goes for UP, and the whole education sector. For reforming education means methodically starving SCU’s of adequate subsidy. Improving education means making headway to income generation and fiscal autonomy. Developing education means letting Big Business bankroll and profit from instructing our youth.

In all of this, one thing is reaffirmed: a government cannot be subservient to foreign corporate interests without, at the same time, strangling and starving the Filipino people. And if there is no solution to this crisis that isn’t within the unwritten rule of this regime’s obedience to foreign capital, then it is hard to know what is— without actually having to dismantle it.

JP Corpus
Center for Nationalist Studies
University of the Philippines Diliman