Reclaim and Regain the Wealth, Sovereignty and Dignity of the Filipino People and Nation: A Vision of Genuine Change for Filipinos
By Senator Jamby Madrigal
We dedicate ourselves to a Philippine society made prosperous, progressive and pro-environment by the genuine industrialization and sovereignty of the Filipino nation and people, and by the equitable empowerment and socially just liberation from poverty of the Filipino especially of the poor and disempowered. We commit ourselves to a genuine people’s nationalism: a
We are not mere reformers, or agents of reforms that merely perpetuate the “free trade” system led by foreign capitalists only to favor a new set of Filipino cronies.. We are innovators for social justice and advocates of economic policies that benefit the majority instead of a economic and political oligarchy. We pledge to fight to realize the goals of the following New Vision for the Filipino Nation:
1. Genuine, pro-Filipino industrialization and nationalist economy: to attain genuine, pro-Filipino industrialization by developing core Filipino-controlled industries from machinery and R $ D to herbal medicine, principally for Filipino consumers, full and deep processing of local raw materials, including coconut, abaca and gold, protection of Filipino production against importation and smuggling, and prioritization of government budget for genuine industrialization.
2. Fair and equitable trade and debt: to ensure fair and just prices for Philippine exports, including coconut, banana, abaca and labor exports, now undervalued by foreign business cartels, regain national income lost from unfair trade, develop fair trade ties with countries and people’s organizations, capping debt payments, repudiating onerous debt, and demanding and exacting reparations and restitutions for previous unfair trade and onerous debt.
3. Local people’s control and anti-monopoly-cartel policy: to dismantle various foreign and local business monopolies and cartels, including petroleum, power, drugs and rice, promote and protect people’s cooperatives and alliances to replace exploitative cartels, reverse “free market” policies imposed by the IMF, WB, WTO and ADB and replace them with the pro-Filipino policies of people’s price and economic control, pro-Filipino government leadership and Filipinization of the economy.
4. Genuine agrarian reform: to work with progressive people’s organizations for a genuine agrarian reform program that truly liberates the peasants from poverty and feudalism, to stop landgrabbing and conversion to non-food uses of peasant lands, to ensure adequate farmgate prices and farm pay, and to freely distribute to peasant-tiller cooperatives and associations haciendas previously diverted from land reform.
5. Genuine, adequate pro-Filipino protection and rehabilitation of the environment: to bring about the genuine, adequate pro-Filipino protection and rehabilitation of the environment by:
a) stopping destructive logging and large-scale mining, factory, trawl, blast and cyanide fishing, conversion of mangrove forests, industrial pollution of rivers and water bodies, maintenance of landfills and waste dumpsites, the importation of toxic wastes, acidification and poisoning of the soil with synthetic agrichemicals, the spread of GMO farming, further global warming through coal-and-oil-fired power plants, and continued promotion of non-biodegradable materials and fossil fuels;
b) prosecuting and imprisoning especially the major deforesters, polluters and their political-military collaborators and protectors;
c) demanding and exacting reparations from foreign countries and businesses for the massive and wanton deforestation and environmental plunder of the country and toxic despoliation of the former
d) promoting organic farming, zero-waste management, R & D and public, pro-Filipino funding of wind, solar and other renewable energy, and people’s environmental awareness and activism.
6. Fair, equitable and nationalist treatment and empowerment of overseas Filipino workers and migrants, and adequate living standards for all Filipinos: To seek and achieve the fair, equitable and nationalist equitable and nationalist treatment of overseas Filipino workers and migrants by:
a) Fighting inadequate pay, discriminatory employment requirements, inhumane and abusive work conditions, and racist culture and anti-immigrant scapegoating;
b) Working with progressive migrant organizations for agreements, contracts and regulation that ensure adequate non-discriminatory pay, humane working conditions, adequate job security and organizing rights, for protecting undocumented migrants and political refugees against restrictions and persecution, and for ensuring adequate Philippine-based jobs through genuine, pro-Filipino industrialization, and;
c) Helping migrants return to their Filipino roots and national identity, and regain their national dignity.
And, to seek and achieve adequate living standards for all Filipinos through adequate minimum wages and wage hikes, farmgate price support, regularization of work contracts and other social justice measures.
7. Truly nationalist, pro-Filipino, and pro-people government: to uphold a pro-Filipino leadership and civil service dedicated to the goals of genuine people’s nationalism, to the championing of the Filipino’s genuine sovereignty and freedom foreign control and local repression, to ending the dictation of government policy by the I IMF, WB, WTO and ADB, to the repeal of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA), the Mining Act, the Oil Deregulation Law, the EVAT Law,
Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) and other anti-Filipino laws, to prioritizing public funding for nationalist education, preventive, nutrition-based health care and R & D, and to opposing the removal of nationalist and protectionist provisions in the Philippine Constitution.
8. Truly nationalist, independent and pro-human-rights Philippine security and peace: To foster a truly nationalist, independent and pro-human-rights security and peace by:
a) fighting for an Armed Forces of the
b) keeping the territory of the Philippines free from foreign military intrusion and nuclear weapons, stopping the interference of foreign military forces in the Philippines, and repealing the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) and the Military Assistance Pact;
c) relentlessly prosecuting human rights violators, including masterminds and perpetrators of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances of unarmed activists, abusive dislocation of communities and harassment of journalists, and
d) supporting sincere negotiations with the National Democratic Front (NDF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MNLF) based on social justice, national sovereignty and genuine reforms.
9. Selfless government service free from corruption, patronage, conflict of interest and profiteering from government office: To achieve selfless public service free of corruption, patronage, conflict of interest and profiteering from government office, by relentlessly exposing, prosecuting and punishing big-time “big fish” grafters, bribe-takers and influence-peddlers and adequately protecting whistle-blowers and anti-corruption “watchdogs”.
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10. Genuine equality, empowerment and dignity of women: Strive to attain genuine equality, participation and protection of women in all areas of life in the tradition of Gabriela Silang through nationalism-enlightened and informed involvement in government and people’s organizations, and ending patriarchal practices and beliefs including work and pay discrimination, abuse of spouses, sexual harassment and rape.
We commit ourselves to the monumental but necessary tasks that lie before us and to the sectors of Philippine society who most need and want genuine change.
To the workers, we pledge to:
1.. Promote a decent and humane standard of living among workers by supporting adequate increases in wages, including a nationwide PHP` 125 daily hike in wages across-the-board.
2. Protect workers’ job security by upholding regularization of work tenure, banning the IMF-dictated practice of “job flexibility”, contractualization and agency hiring, and heavily punishing its perpetrators!
3. Support adequate safety nets to workers against the scourge of globalization by fighting for policies providing adequate unemployment insurance and higher severance pay to employees retrenched.
4. Safeguard national sovereignty and job security by scrapping the IMF-WB policy of privatization of government corporations, services and assets such as Napocor and reversing this process through buying back and re-nationalizing Petron and other privatized institutions.
5. Defend civil rights and civilian supremacy, including the workers’ right to free expression and assembly and organizing unions in the face of union-busting by imposing heavy penalties on companies, directors and top officials, government and military personnel engaged in dismissal and harassing unionists, quelling protest actions, and intimidating worker communities through military outposts and troop presence in factories.
To the farmers, farm workers and rural women:
1. Support the enactment and implementation of a genuine agrarian reform law and program that frees farmers and farm workers from the burden of land amortization payments in the interest of just income redistribution and their liberation from feudal poverty, and that works to dismantle agricultural trading-lending monopolies, cartels and oligarchies through adequate government price support and control, and cooperatives truly empowering the grassroot rural producers.
2. Work with progressive rural organizations in seeking a pro-Filipino fair and just trade policy free from IMF, WB and WTO dictation that includes fair and just farmgate and export agricultural prices, fair compensation for farm workers, affordable prices of farm inputs, such as fertilizers and irrigation and a stop to the WTO policy of rice and vegetable importation, together with smuggling, to protect Filipino rice and vegetable farmers.
3. Pursue the fight for a genuine, pro-Filipino industrialization program that will fully process Philippine agricultural raw materials, such as coconut, principally for Filipino consumers, and supply the affordable, high-productivity goods and services, including organic fertilizers, renewable energy, irrigation and other infrastructure, in support of farm production.
4. Defend and restore the productivity, health, safety and well-being of farmers and farm workers by fighting deforestation, large-scale mining and air pollution from fossil fuels and its resulting siltation, extreme weather and destruction of lives and crops through massive flooding, by punishing and exacting reparations from its major foreign and local beneficiaries and perpetrators.
5. Defend against foreign investors and their local collaborators the protectionist and nationalist provisions in the Philippine Constitution reserving to Filipino citizens the right to own land, including agricultural land.
To the fisherfolk, we pledge to:
1. Protect the livelihood and income of small fisherfolk from displacement by foreign and local oligarchic business projects, including the demolition by the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) of fishing communities in
2. Safeguard the productivity and income of fisherfolk and their fishing grounds against the pollution and siltation by industrial, mining and logging companies.
3. Uphold the sovereignty, and exclusive fishing rights for their economic benefit of Filipino fisherfolk and the rest of the Filipino people over Philippine fisheries and territorial waters against the encroachment and poaching of Japanese, Chinese and other foreign factory, trawl and other fishers, and work towards the abrogation of anti-fisherfolk and anti-Filipino agreements such as JPEPA.
4. Promote fair trade in tuna and other Philippine fishery products through higher, fair export prices, local price support for the catch and produce of Filipino fisherfolk and just, affordable and Filipino-controlled prices of fishery inputs such as gasoline.
5. Support the pro-Filipino claim on territorial waters on the basis of the archipelagic doctrine against moves by
To the teachers, we pledge to:
1. Uphold an adequate public education budget by canceling and rechanneling government foreign debt service and unfair trade payments of at least PHP 160 billion per year for the construction of classrooms and other facilities.
2. Raise the monthly salaries of public school teachers by PHP 9,000 to Salary Grade 13, to be implemented in 3 years, or by PHP 3,000 immeidately.
3. Establish a bank or zero-interest lending fund specially for teachers.
4. Enhance the occupational health and well-being of teachers by reducing the student-teacher ratio, enacting and regulations work standards that disallow work overload.
5. To push for the enactment of the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers.
6. To promote deeper and more thorough nationalist education and attitudes, especially on nationalist economics, and also through the primary use of the Filipino language as medium of instruction.
To the government employees, we pledge to fight to:
1. Raise monthly salaries of government employees immediately by PHP 3,000.
2. Implement immediately and retroactively the salary increase provisions of R.A. 7305 or Magna Carta for Public Health Workers.
3. Do away with salary discrimination against LGU employees by repealing provisions of EO 811, giving local legislative assemblies the power to set salary rate for LGU personnel
4. Extend adequate GSIS grants rather than loans to victims of natural and man-made disasters.
5. Revoke all IMF-dictated government policies to lay-off government employees, including E.O. 366, abolishing 30% of government positions and destroying 420,000 government jobs.!
To the youth and students, we pledge to:
1. Support their struggle for education and an educational system that is not only accessible and affordable to the great majority of the Filipino people, but that also serves to enlighten them in nationalism and a spirit of selfless service to the people and country.
2. To promote educational democracy and end the school profit-orientation dictated by the IMF and WB by doubling the public education budget, removing the rationale for tuition fees in state colleges and universities and enabling the poor to enroll..
3. Push for the production of textbooks on nationalist topics and their distribution to students at subsidized rates.
4. To work for the raising of the DOST budget to over PHP 75 billion, or at least one per cent of the country’s GDP as recommended by UNESCO to boost country’s productivity and promote high-productivity instead of low-productivity call center jobs for college graduates,
To the transport sector, we pledge to:
1. Fight for affordable fuel prices by cracking down on overpricing by the petroleum cartel, instituting price control and anti-trust regulation, and re-nationalizing Petron.
2. To support transport worker health and safety and fight global warming by pushing for a major shift to environmentally-friendly fuels or energy in transport.
3. Stop the extortion of “tong” by police and traffic officers from public transport drivers and severely punish the perpetrators.
4. To push for the development of Filipino-controlled transport input industries, including energy and comprehensive automotive equipment manufacturing, not merely assembly
To the women, we pledge to:
1. Fight to protect Filipino women not only against the general ravages of globalization, poverty, underdevelopment and repression but also those specifically victimizing them, such as job and pay discrimination, sexual harassment, abuse and violence by spouses, parents , fiancés and foreign employers, rape, sexual trafficking and the desperate scramble for hazardous jobs overseas.
2. To address their special needs such as longer maternity leaves, breastfeeding facilities and breaks, day-care centers,
3. To work for the incorporation of women’s and children’s in the school system and media
To the urban poor, we pledge to:
1. Support their call for a genuine moratorium on demolition of informal settler communities.
2. Work for more adequate public housing that is more affordable and located near their workplaces.
3. Fight for Filipino-controlled industrialization of the economy to absorb urban poor Filipinos in jobs that are stable, adequately-paying and based in the
We pledge to fight for these goals. Join the fight to reclaim and regain the wealth, sovereignty and dignity of the Filipino people and nation! Join the fight for the genuine change the Filipino people and nation need and deserve! Ibalik ang yaman, paghahari at dangal ng sambayanang Pilipino!
I agree with all that you stated in your platform Madam Senator. Among all the platforms of the presidential candidates of the Philippines, yours seems to be the nearest to our organic national developmental code.
ReplyDeleteIt is organic because it is collaborating with the Philippine historical development setting. In that setting were factors of geography, climate and social. All these provided influence to the centermost factor in our development as a national unit. This centermost factor is that historical developmental intercourse between the natives of the archipelago and the iberian peoples who acted in the name of Spain during the 16th century. Thus painfully and cruelly, our filipino nation was conceived and born in 1898 when we became independent from Spain. Thus we, the newly born nation of filipinos became the heirs to all that have belonged conjugally to our historical national developmental parents. To make it sound more romantic, we can just call them our fathers or forefathers. But the most important of all of our inheritance is, our national developmental code. This is our character as filipinos which determines our national identity, cohesiveness, standards of excellence, etc., which replicated and passed on to from generation to generation.
This code was manifested from the time of our birth as a nation. We became as one nation in actions and in magnitude, we never experienced before. 19th century pictures show a Philippines with clean streets and rivers. We became the first republic in asia with a constitution equal in excellence to that of Europe. We were struggling to reinforce our excellent character and correct our undesirable ones. We were still struggling for a better unity. This is no different from a newly born biological entity undergoing a process of stabilization, trying to coordinate disjointed motors undergoing process of balance. We had our own Academia Militar. Inspite of the inferior state of our defense after having undergone stress during the just concluded revolution and being newly born, we resisted fiercely an emerging global power americans- the invaders. We resisted fiercely inspite of all the tortures and terrorism the americans inflicted on us which resulted to the death of 500,000 to 900,000 of us filipinos. At around the mid 1900s, we also resisted physically and legally, another more subtle invader- the chinese who were slowly penetrating our economic bases. We made much efforts inspite of the americans intervening to fustrate us all the time.
This national developmental code is organic, also because it is the national development we desired because it is beneficial for our nation first and foremeost. As a matter of maturation, we will further evolve to have a development that will also be responsive to the community of nations.
This code slowly degenerated during the american occupation until today. It's being organic is being replaced by synthetic development as it has become more beneficial to the americans, more harmful to us filipinos and is having a residual harm to the world. This code has been corrupted to replicate from generation to generation.
My comment is just a summary but it is already very long. If this is further shortened, the problem can never be identified as has been the case for decades.
The pathological national situation is a long developmental process which takes time to undergo a reversal developmental process.
Let us recover our inherited nation!