The tragedy of our workers is a man-made tragedy. Forty years of indiscriminately opening up our economy—bringing our industrial tariffs down to 1-4 per cent and ending all our quotas on agricultural imports—have wrecked our manufacturing and agriculture, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods and confronting people who want to have a better life with just one choice: go abroad in search of jobs.

But the total opening up of our economy to super-subsidized foreign products is just one half of the problem. The other half is the fact that the Philippines is one of the most unequal countries in Asia, where less than five per cent of the population owns over 50 per cent of the wealth. That gross inequality stems from the failure of real land reform, which keeps 450,000 hectares of the best private land in the hands of landlords. It is maintained by keeping wages low via contractualization and the fiction of manpower agencies. This policy of keeping wages low not only violates social justice but is anti-development. With low wages we have a very small national market because people have very little purchasing power to provide the demand that would trigger real sustainable economic development. Let’s face it: we really are still the “sick man of Asia.”

Technocrats and economists under the thumb of the rich and foreign institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have framed the policies that have destroyed our economy over the last 40 years. These people have had little contact with realities on the ground. As ceramics, wood, furniture, petrochemicals, shoes, textiles, and garments—you name it—went under, they were oblivious to the suffering and pain of deindustrialization. Even as vegetables, poultry, piggery, corn, and all our agricultural lines were destabilized by the massive entry of super-subsidized commodities, they were promising 500,000 new jobs a year in agriculture! We were a net agricultural exporting country in 1994, before we joined the World Trade Organization. Now we have been turned into a desert, with a massive deficit in agricultural trade of $7 billion plus in 2020.

Yet the politicians were complicit in this economic homicide, for it is they that drafted the legislation that destroyed the economy. During the Duterte administration alone, they have crafted new laws to let foreigners take over the small bits of the economy left to our small and medium enterprises—the Amendment to the Retail Trade Liberalization Law, the Public Services Act, the Amendment to the Foreign Investment Act, the lowering of the corporate income tax for both local big business and foreign corporations, the Rice Tariffication Act (RTA)that eliminated the rice quota and placed rice farming on the chopping block. The new laws under the Duterte-Dominguez duo have been the climax of the death by a thousand cuts that has marked the last 40 miserable years.

Among these politicians are my vice presidential rivals Senator Tito Sotto, who pushed the Duterte-Dominguez economic agenda through Congress, and Senator Kiko Pangilinan, who poses as a friend of the farmer even as he abstained from voting on the Rice Tariffication Act that is certain to bring disaster to our already beleaguered rice farmers. Pangilinan, in fact, essentially voted for the RTA since he voted for its financing. That financing is not to help our rice farmers adjust; it is to assist them in their transition from poverty in the countryside to poverty in the slums, just like the notorious Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act did under Fidel Ramos. It is economic euthanasia.

The May 9 elections are historic. For the first time, we have a worker running for president, Ka Leody de Guzman. For the first time, we have people running on a platform of democratic socialism. The difference is palpable during the campaign. We hear the usual empty rhetoric from the other candidates for president. Ping says the problem is government and the solution is government. Pacquiao says it’s corruption. Leni says it’s good governance. Isko is, well, Isko, who’s busy scoring pogi points and trying to bag Duterte’s endorsement.

The worst people are, of course, Marcos Junior and Baby Duterte, who are proposing a program of national unity built on national amnesia—of forgetting the thousands killed, tortured, imprisoned, and raped during the 14 years of martial law from 1972 to 1986 and the 27,000 people subjected to extra-judicial execution under President Duterte over the last six years. The reason this tandem refuses to participate in the presidential and vice presidential debates is that they have nothing to offer. Nothing.

The Leody/Walden tandem is clear about the problems and about the solutions: 750 pesos daily minimum wage, repeal of the Rice Tariffication Act and all those other terrible neoliberal laws. A tax on the wealth of the superrich. Phasing out all coal-powered power plants in less than two years. Repeal of the oil deregulation law and ending the excise taxes and the value added tax. Legalization of divorce and same sex marriage and decriminalization of abortion—we have to bring the Philippines from the 17^th century to the 21^st century!

Not only do we have a comprehensive program. Not only do we have non-politicians with spotless records running. But we have a vision for our country’s future, and that is democratic socialism.

I thank you.

Walden Bello

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