By Kat Ulrike
Instead of addressing numerous challenges of the Filipino people the current Marcos administation, in connivance with Speaker Martin Romualdez and others prioritises amending the constitution with the goal of opening and depending further the country to Foreign Direct Investment. This venture tends to downplay that of basic social problems like low wages, rising costs of commodities, slow-paced industrialisation and domestic-based development, lack of genuine agrarian reform, and pseudo-"sovereignty".
By pursuing this "Charter Change", the Marcos administration wanting to enact 100% Foreign Direct Investment and Foreign Ownership of local businesses, domestic utilities, and national patrimony, making the national economy be at the hands of foreign profiteers in connivance with local despots and at expense of the stuggling masses.
Contrary to the establishment's blame on the current constitution for national woes, it is not in the constution but rather in this continuing-past of subservience to entrenched interests both local and foreign. By looking back at history previous administrations been subservient to unequal agreements and enacting oppressive policies at the expense of the people, while pretending to uphold justice and democratic rights. And contrary to these proponents, the Philippines is lenient if not lax when it comes to Foreign Direct Investment, yet far from its neighbours in South East Asia. It is not surprising if these advocates wished for unbridled, unregulated kind claiming these what the international market needed in today's societies.
Regardless of the statements coming from the administration and its apologists, the toiling masses demand for right wages, better jobs and working standards, genuine agrarian reform, national industrialisation and domestic based development, and defending human rights and national sovereignty. The current regime may've promised and parroted such sentiment, but the neoliberal-oriented "Charter Change" being peddled as a panacea for social ills but rather consolidates interest-seekers at the expense of the toiling masses. Those being "left out after EDSA" are rather fooled by the very rotten order whose personages wanting not just "through and through" economic liberalisation but also political power through term extension while pretending promising the vulnerable with "social justice" through "Charter Change".
Folk! Changing the charter by the very rotten order is not reform! It is consolidation of interests! A counterreaction to an existing reaction!