Six years ago, I made the only recorded resignation on a question of principle in the history of Congress, owing to irreconcilable differences with the Aquino III administration that the party I then belonged to supported. I resigned in protest at the administration’s tolerating corruption in its ranks despite a promise to combat corruption, the president’s refusal to take command responsibility for the tragic loss of lives in the Mamasapano Tragedy, and Aquino’s entering a new military agreement with the United States.
In 2016, I placed a run for the Senate far behind the overwhelming priority of attending 24/7 to a wife dying from cancer. Though focused on trying, without success, to keep a beloved partner alive and retreating into academic life, I did not disengage politically in the next few years. I felt, however, that my time could best be spent being a civil society activist pushing government to adopt positive policies from outside the electoral arena. Even before Duterte came to power, I told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that “Duterte would be another Marcos.” In 2017, I helped bring together a coalition of organizations and individuals, Laban ng Masa, that would offer a truly progressive, socialist-oriented alternative to the current political system. Over the last five years, I have published extensively locally and globally, analyzing and documenting the atrocities perpetrated by the Duterte administration and its transgressions of democracy. I became an active participant in the Free Leila de Lima movement to bring justice to one of the most vilified victims of Duterte’s machinery of lies. Owing to these activities, Duterte’s Philippine News Agency branded me “one of the administration’s staunchest critics.” Meant to discredit me, I wear these words as a badge of honor.
As the 2022 elections neared, I was urged to run for president. I declined, however, owing to my desire to spend my remaining years in academic work and to my conviction that that role could be better fulfilled by someone much younger and more vigorous. My hopes were fulfilled when the distinguished labor leader Leody de Guzman decided to accede to popular pressure to run, to the enthusiastic endorsement of Laban ng Masa, labor, and other groups.
Preventing the Triumph of the Axis of Evil
In the third week of September, I left the country to fulfill my yearly commitment to teach for two months at one of the US’s most progressive universities, the State University of New York at Binghamton. While teaching here, I watched with increasing alarm Bong-Bong Marcos’ filing his candidacy for president and Bong Go’s filing his for vice president. Since Bong Go is Duterte’s ever loyal slave, the dark design has become clearer: the Marcoses’ relentless ambition to reconquer the county is now joined to President Duterte’s determination to protect his dynasty and escape punishment for taking the lives of over 20,000 Filipinos. These developments have convinced me that the country is facing its most perilous moment of the last 36 years: the return of a Marcos autocracy backed by the entrenched power of Duterte in the police, military, and bureaucracy.
It is to prevent the electoral triumph of this axis of evil that I have given in to the draft to run as Leody de Guzman’s vice president under the banner of both Laban ng Masa and Partido Lakas ng Masa. When the country is in peril, one cannot confine oneself to teaching, writing books, or enjoying meals with a 20 per cent seniors’ discount.
The current candidates for president do not have the capability nor the will to defeat this axis of evil. Pacquiao, Lacson, and Isko Moreno are too tied up with their previous alliance and friendship with Duterte to have the moral authority or credibility to assume this task. Alam naman natin hindi sila tunay na oposisyon. They know only the politics of compromise, not the politics of resistance. While Leni Robredo’s personal integrity is above question and she is truly anti-Marcos and anti-Duterte, her trapo-filled Senate slate shows that she still has to break free of her cordon sanitaire of advisers who are enmeshed in the old discredited brand of transactional reform politics to which people have given the disdainful term dilawan.
The Only Ticket with a Program
My alliance with Leody is not simply anchored in opposing the Marcos-Duterte axis of evil by appealing to the need to preserve democracy. For people will give up on democracy and support enemies of democracy like Marcos and Duterte if what they face in their daily life is a most undemocratic existence, where they exist powerless in a society where the top one percent controls most of the country’s land and resources, where poverty engulfs over 30 per cent of the people, where most farmers do not own the land they till, where the powerful and rich can get away with anything while the poor and powerless are left with nothing. Our people yearn to live with dignity, but the daily blows of poverty and the arrogance of the few rich and powerful deprive them of even that. Who can blame those who fall victim to the revisionist history that maliciously transforms the collective nightmare of the Marcos years to a “Golden Age”?
The Laban ng Masa ticket offers the only well-thought out comprehensive program of social transformation offered by any of the candidates. No one knows what Sotto, Moreno, Pacquiao, and Marcos have to offer except everything under the sun. In contrast, should Leody and I win the elections, we will immediately move to:
- dismiss all personnel of the incompetent and corrupt IATF and appoint genuine and clean medical professionals to win the battle against Covid 19;
- institute judicial proceedings against Duterte for crimes against humanity and fully cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation of him;
- revitalize government efforts to regain the Marcos’s stolen wealth and initiate prosecution of Bong-Bong Marcos and other Marcos family members for their role in concealing that wealth;
- tax the rich to up to 3 per cent of their wealth and channel the proceeds to a program of investment and income redistribution to bring about a dynamic economy;
- Institute smart economic planning and end the neoliberal policies that have destroyed our agriculture and industry by repudiating our ill-advised commitments to the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank;
- eliminate the illegitimate debt foisted on us by oppressive foreign debtors and end the massive debt overhang that prevents the needed expenditures on health, education, and social welfare;
- massively expand the now-stalled agrarian reform program to redistribute all land to our farmers;
- end contractualization now, PERIOD!;
- eliminate all laws that restrict the enjoyment of equal rights by women, the LGBTQ community, and indigenous peoples, and wage a campaign to do away with the prejudices and customs that reproduce discriminatory beliefs and practices.
- initiate emergency measures to address the climate and environmental crises.
We will, in addition, reduce our diplomatic relations to China to a minimum if Beijing does not end its violations of Philippine sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea and oppressing our fisherfolk. And, minutes after assuming office, we will notify Washington that we are ending the Visiting Forces Agreement, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, and the Mutual Defense Treaty.
Pacquiao, Moreno, Marcos, and Lacson will promise the moon and the sky and everything nice. Leody and I, in contrast, offer a tough program of real reform that cannot succeed unless most of our people rally behind it to defy the rich and the powerful that will lose by it. What we are saying is that if we are elected, the only way the rich and powerful can stop us from implementing this program is by killing us.
We are not preaching class war. But we are warning the rich and the powerful, “You can no longer continue oppressing our people.” We are telling the rich and the powerful, “You cannot rule in the same old way. If you do not get out of the way, the people will take you out of the way.”
Tama na ang pang-aapi niyo sa masang Pilipino.
Fighting for a Socialist and Democratic Future
So, our fellow Filipinos, Leody and I are running not only to prevent a return to a sordid past that would be brought about by the triumph of the Marcos-Duterte axis of evil. We are running as well for a future where our people are truly free of poverty and inequality and are united by solidarity instead of being divided into the powerful and the powerless.
Tama na ang paghati nila ng lipunan sa mga may kapangyarihan at mga walang kapangyarihan!
Some people call what we are fighting for socialism. Some say it is social democracy. Call it what you will—but make no mistake: We are fighting for a fundamental transformation of our society, to finally end the chains of bondage, oppression, and shame that the rich and the powerful have placed on 90 per cent of our people. We are, in short, engaged in an electoral insurgency to complete the national revolution that Gabriela Silang, Rizal, Bonifacio, and Mabini began and died for and left for this generation to finish.
Sabi nila takot ang Pinoy sa tunay na pagbabago. Sabi nila hindi mo mapapakilos ang Pinoy kasi duwag siya. Sabi nila madaling bilhin ang boto ng Pilipino. Limang daang piso, sabi nila, ang presyo ng Pilipino. Ito ang tingin ng mga makapangyarihan sa atin. Ipakain natin sa kanila ang mga salita nila.
Mabuhay ang masang Pilipino!
Walden Bello
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