THE parade of presidential candidates with real chances of winning makes you sick in the stomach. As you sink into near-depression with the certainty that all of them — career politicians and vacuous political newbies/cum social media celebrities (the despot’s son is a candidate) — will just uphold the economic and political status quo, a news flash that was quickly relegated to the archives reported something new: that a labor leader filed his papers to run for president. (OK, there is a mainstream candidate with real integrity, but we all wish she has the grit and spine of Nancy Pelosi.)

Ka Leody de Guzman, the president of a national labor organization, will run for president in 2022 under a labor party. For us who have always maintained that amid the current gloom and doom hope springs eternal, that filing for a presidential run stirred hope within the ranks of the working and peasant class. For the faceless and voiceless Filipinos like me who yearn for real change, maybe, just maybe, our political moment has finally arrived.

The shared sentiment is this. Finally, we have a presidential candidate who can untether the country from the tight grip of neoliberalism.

On neoliberalism, I remember a prescient commentary written by British political activist George Monbiot in The Guardian after the Trump election in 2016 and before the Covid rampage in 2020. In the Guardian column, Monbiot wrote:

’The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology — neoliberalism — becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatize remaining public services, rip holes into the social safety nets, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.’

In the regime of Covid from 2020 up to now, under a reign of unfettered neoliberalism favored by strongmen like President Duterte, the ’self-hating state,’ indeed, did all the things that Monbiot stated in his piece.

With nary an uproar from the political mainstream, the Duterte-controlled Congress passed during the Covid pandemic its centerpiece fiscal legislation, a corporate tax cut to be done in phases until it reaches a rock-bottom 20 percent. Billed as the investment and job generator, the Create Act on the corporate tax cut was, in reality, a paean to the neoliberal dream of less government. An act of weaning Big Business, represented by the corporations and its fat cows, from the government’s taxation mandate. The biggest goal of neoliberalism is to cut government into the size of a peanut crumb and chipping away at taxes for business — while passing the burden of taxation to ordinary wage earners — is a major step in that direction. The Pandora Papers dramatized how the superrich can have it both ways — get lower taxes via legislation and register offshore accounts to dodge taxes and avoid accountability and scrutiny. And how hollow and cynical the Create Law’s passage was.

If you were observant enough, the moves that complemented the tax cuts have been low-key privatization of local water utilities that used to be under the Local Water Utilities Administration (this is now being done in many areas of Central Luzon ), the removal of the protective cover on upland areas to give way to mining and exploration permits, the efforts to weaken under the Covid regime the rigorous procurement laws to fast-track purchases (almost always marked by impossible corruption ) from the private sector. The ’self-hating state sinking its teeth into every organ of the public sector.’

The House of Representatives, a clueless rubber stamp of the executive branch, is the main institutional swamp where neoliberals pursue the agenda of chipping away at the previously sacrosanct protection of strategic economic sectors and parts of the national patrimony.

Under the guise of a seemingly forward-looking economic amendment to the Constitution, the House has approved the tearing down of the equity provisions on strategic sectors such as telecommunications, media and public utilities. The Senate, so far, has resisted teaming up with the House, not on the fundamental grounds of protecting the sectors but out of fear that the House will then take the next step of introducing political amendments.

As the institutions pander to the whims, whiles and whimsy of Big Business, the ’small government’ dream is also — literally — the official policy on the delivery of social safety nets to Covid-battered Filipinos. The policy of austerity bordering on cruelty in the grant of safety nets — called ayuda — has been condemned by mainstream economists who have pointedly asked, ’fiscal prudence for what?’

Even former Economic Planning secretary Ernesto Pernia has tweeted on the negligible fiscal support to the suffering poor.

Ka Leody de Guzman is the only presidential candidate with a platform aimed at untethering the country from the clutches of runaway neoliberalism. The start is the reordering of the labor-capital relationship. The other is pushing capital into accepting a more equitable way of sharing profits. He will join the ascendant global movement to tax the rich more. Enhancing and protecting trade union rights and peasant rights will be high up in the state priorities.

An interventionist government, but doing intervention work for the common good, will be the big break from the current and pervasive neoliberal order. State revenues that will be shored up from taxing the rich more will be plowed back into education and health concerns. The patrimony, instead of being given away and parceled out to cronies, will be protected. Ka Leody will also push for strong antitrust and antimonopoly laws. Build, Build, Build will be scrapped in favor of an education and health-centric investment agenda.

Big government will be back, but big in the sense that the intervention would be in sync with an economic gospel preached by Pope Francis, a more equitable and fair sharing of income and opportunities.

Marlen Ronquillo