#Sawangsawa has been their battlecry for days on end in different social networking sites, and it has generated some buzz with prominent personalities as well.
I’m quite sure you yourself find that the Aquino government has not been working hard enough to deliver its promises to the people.
If you’re any of these, I hope to see you at the campout!
5. Your school budget has been cut. AGAIN. AND AGAIN.
If you’re a an Iskolar ng Bayan, you know an awful lot about sacrifice.
Aside from being flunked by an oh-so-self-involved professor, you know that simply imagining the reaction of reagents just won’t work.
You also know that the leaking bathroom in your dorm and the waterless comfort room in your laboratory floor are things that you ought to think to be a given in any state university.
But you also know that it damn shouldn’t. And P-Noy, cut your budget again for the second straight year, with zero peso for capital outlay, and reduced maintenance and operating budgets for most, if not all, 112 state universities and colleges.
Thus, with the way things are going, it’s not just gonna be leaking dorm bathrooms and imagined reagents soon.
But another freaking round of tuition and other fee increases.
4. You love riding the MRT and LRT
Oh the MRT. The decade-old railway has been shuttling commuters from both ends of the Metro.
Commuting daily to your Makati call center office from your QC suburb has been as easy as taking the tricycle to the public market from your inner neighborhood lot.
It has also enabled South Metro-based students to attend their classes in UP Diliman or Ateneo while going home daily to their Paranaqueville-landia middle class estates.
But guess what – the days of cheap MRT and LRTS fares are soon to be over.
Despite the protests of students and the general riding public, DOTC Sec. Mar Roxas is hell-bent on increasing the fares.
Well, Mar is not just hell-bent. In fact, he himself cut the budget.
So I guess you can start walking to Buendia from Fairview from then on.
3. Your father was a farmer. And your lolo was a farmer
Stories of parents selling their lands and carabaos just to send their kids to school are repeated over and over in all colleges and universities that many thought it was just some passing pity-thy-neighbor anecdote.
Most of these stories are true, and in fact, in the large part of the Philippine countryside, many farmers do not even have lands or carabaos to sell, such that their kids don’t even get to go to school.
Recently, the Supreme Court ordered the immediate distribution of Hacienta Luisita to around six thousand farmworkers of the hacienda.
That’s great, considering that these farmworkers had only been earning the equivalent of four cigarette sticks PER GODDAMN WEEK.
But you see, historic and landlord knee-trembling the SC decision may be, the Cojuangco landlords blindsided the farmworkers yet again, by mortgaging the hacienda to the tune of 2-billion pesos to San Miguel Corporation, the majority shares of which are controlled by no less than, well, Danding Cojuangco.
Oh, and to make things worse, P-Noy made it perfectly clear that his family will be fully compensated for the loss of their kingdom.
Meaning, the farmworkers will actually not be freed from their bondage to the land, because the State will be their new landlord, AND the landless farmworkers will have to pay the state almost triple the entire hacienda’s value in the NEXT THIRTY FREAKING YEARS.
So doing the math based on the current SC valuation, the 4,915-hectare hacienda will give P835.5 million to P-Noy’s family as ‘just compensation’.
And government, doing some Shylock douchebaggery, will be having so much cash in their hands in the next thirty years with P2.3 BILLION PESOS from the blood and sweat of still landless farmers.
That’s the Aquino family’s comprehensive agrarian reform for you.
2. You/Mom/Dad/Bro/Sis/Everyone is an OFW
I’m sure you shed buckets of tears over the cheapo Coke holiday ad.
Yes, it made me cry as well, because no family should be apart had there been jobs for our people in the country. But aside from the faux feel-good/bad moment made by a company seeking to merely sell holiday bottles, OFWs the world over are sure not to have a Merry Christmas this year.
Surely not this OFW who will spending his last days in China.
And certainly not our compatriots jailed in Saudi at the rate of FIVE OFWS A WEEK.
But you see, the problem is way troubling than an impending execution and a weekly incarceration.
Something is certainly wrong about the way our economy is run, when it is OFW compensation income that keeps the entire Philippine economy afloat.
Especially, if such remittances had propped up the Philippine economy IN THE LAST THIRTY YEARS.
Most certainly, no modern economy had progressed by relying heavily on compensation income of its migrant workers.
Not the US, nor even the much-maligned yet resilient socialist states, the Soviet Union and China, all of which seemed to know that massive industrialization and land reform are most fundamental in the creation of national wealth.
So as we see more Coke Happiness vans fetch our OFWs in time for its holiday commercials, our Filipino migrants continue suffering in all parts of the world to prop an economic policy that has been absolutely unsustainable from the very start.
1. You feel that there is truly something wrong with the system
I’m no soothsayer, but I think what you’re feeling might probably be correct.
Because if you think you and your family have become poorer over the years, that is absolutely right, because poverty had actually widened, and the top ten-percent richest Filipinos’ share in the income pie had increased over the share of the poorest seventy-percent.
Moreover, the Philippines actually ranked as one of the countries with the worst income distributions compared to its neighbouring countries, and we actually fared far worse than war-torn Ivory Coast and poverty poster boy Bangladesh.
And this data actually translates into what all of us have been bitching about all of these years – unemployment, rural landlessness, inaccessiblilty of education, health care and social services, and the utter lack of everything else which we as a people deserve from our government.
—
The battlecry of the campout is most poignant – we as a people are sick and tired of the way things are run and done in the country today.
Never again shall we bow to injustice, to hopelessness.
We shall fight, we shall struggle.
See you at the campout!
what are the tangible solutions the campout espouses? i like the concept but short of being a spinoff of the occupy wallstreet movement. whats the point. i like the idea honestly but i think it needs to be taken a step further. get people who have genuine and actual solutions to the issues being talked about and have them shared to the participants for dissemination and later discussion. in anycase i think filipinos should learn to move beyond grand gestures of political will to the real nitty gritty of nation building. we all know the problem its time to hear about creative and real solutions. my two cents
I think that’s what’s gonna happen in the three-day campout, Dino.
1. People with genuine and actual solutions
2. Shared to the participants for dissemination and later discussion
Punta ka, magparalegal tayo bukas kung pupukpukin yung mga magcampout. Hehe.
Tungkol sa number 4. Sana naman bigyan ng special space ang mga estudyante. Tapos heavy subsidy sa operations at saka much effective management. Lagi kong iniisip na sana mataas na lang pamasahe para wala masyadong tao tapos na realize ko rin na sablay yung ganoong pag-iisip. Sana naman mas effective ang management nila sa pagsakay at pagbaba ng mga pasahero, pwede naman kasi maging maayos yun eh. Kung tataas ni Mar ang pamasahe, maaring ma-decongest ang Manila pero ang maghihirap ay mga kabataan. Hindi maganda yun. I hope there will be a group discussion scheduled in this camp out. count me in terry!
Goodluck sa Campout! Sana maging successful siya.