Reds Told to Expand, Launch More Attacks

The way for the reactionary state to cover the deficits in trade and in the budget has been to engage in ever greater amounts of foreign and local borrowing from year to year. This is also the way how the Arroyo regime has been able to conjure the illusion of growth in gross domestic product, even as the borrowings and other resources are used for debt service, consumption at all levels, unbridled profit-taking by the multinational firms and cronies of the regime and the overpriced and graft-ridden state contracts for the equipment of the bureaucracy and the military and for substandard infrastructure projects.

The data for the foreign and local borrowings of the Philippine reactionary state are always understated through certain devices from period to period. The latest available figure places the national debt at PhP3.871 trillion or US$81.91 billion excluding the so-called contingency liabilities in which the state assume the liabilities whenever the state or private corporate borrowers fail to fulfil their obligations. The Arroyo regime has the distinction of having borrowed PhP2.83 trillion from 2001 to 2006, overshadowing the PhP1.51 trillion total borrowings of the Aquino, Ramos and Estrada regimes in 14 years, from 1986 to 2000.

In recent years, the Arroyo regime has been increasingly compelled to borrow from the global commercial market by selling bonds and to take tied loans or credit lines from China, Japan and other countries. It has also resorted to increasing the tax burden on the people but the collection of tax revenues has continued to decline because of bureaucratic corruption and the depression of the Philippine economy. The current economic and financial crisis of the world capitalist system is already resulting in such adverse conditions for the Philippines as the global credit squeeze, the rapid deterioration in terms of trade and larger budgetary deficits due to decreasing tax collection in a further depressed economy. The Philippine peso has started to rapidly depreciate and will further depreciate at an accelerated rate.

The yearly claim of the growth of the gross domestic product by the Arroyo regime does not show the distribution of income and the aggravation of poverty in the country. On the contrary, it covers up the fact that most of the social wealth created by the people and the foreign and local borrowings flow into the hands of the foreign multinational firms and banks, the big compradors, the landlords and the corrupt bureaucrats. The growth of the GDP does not signify socio-economic upliftment of the people but exposes how much they are fleeced by their exploiters.

Under the current conditions of economic crisis and depression in the Philippines, the political crisis of the ruling system is becoming more bitter and more heated than ever before. The contradictions among the factions of big comprador and landlord politicians are sharpening. The anti-Arroyo factions are encouraged by the growing democratic mass movement against the Arroyo regime and are gaining ground over the Arroyo ruling clique by exposing the regime’s corruption, human rights violations and servility to foreign interests.

The Arroyo regime is terribly afraid of impeachment or ouster from power and possible prosecution for its high crimes against the people. Thus it is using the coercive apparatuses of the state to intimidate the legal opposition. It has gone to the extent of kidnapping and threatening the life of a government official who has agreed to testify before the Senate against the ruling clique in the National Broadband Network scam fixed by big comprador bureaucrats on the Philippine and Chinese sides.

Under the direction of the US-instigated global war of terror, the Arroyo regime has used state terrorism under Oplan Bantay Laya not only to seek the destruction or weakening of the armed revolutionary movement but also to intimidate and destroy the broad range of opposition forces. It has engaged in extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture of progressive legal activists and the filing of false charges against the progressive opposition leaders not only to destroy the legal forces of the national democratic movement but also to frighten the anti-Arroyo reactionary forces and discourage them from going into a broad united front with the legal patriotic and progressive forces.