Let us bow off the beaten path of the usual yearenders. In this issue analysis, we look at how the Filipino people fared in 2007: What they went through in their daily lives, how they behaved in politics, what signs they saw written on the wall of faith - or despair.

Many families today see their future in giving up a son or daughter for an overseas work that they believe will pull them up from the rut of poverty they have known all their lives. In most cases, both parents work abroad thus enabling them to send their children to college. Children eventually end up working overseas also – whether in the cold deserts of Uzbekistan, in the war zones of the Middle East, or the menacing oilfields of Africa - with jobs often far different from the courses taken in college or technical school. In the year 2007, some 1.013 million Filipinos bade goodbye to their families to fly to 190 destinations, surpassing the yearly one-million deployment of contract workers by 1.3 percent.(1) The scene of tearful departures as 2,800 Filipinos leave the airports everyday has become just a routine.

Government takes pride in overshooting the yearly target of labor export, attributing to labor deployment the remittances that reached $11.9 billion this year. It aims to better that in 2008 with a target of $14 billion in remittances.

Do Filipinos believe that President Gloria M. Arroyo has solved the unemployment problem in the country? The statistics of the increasing number of Filipinos in search of work abroad makes that claim absurd, worse, a bad joke. The costs of this labor draft are epic, even – in terms of families ruined, of contract workers left to the abuse of their employers and recruiters, racial and job discrimination, of beheadings, and of suicides committed every now and then. In one month alone in the U.S. east coast this year, four Filipinos took their lives, two of them grade school teachers.

For the rest of the Filipinos, a job in another country will remain elusive. This is because fewer youths are able to complete their education while the quality of learning is fast deteriorating. Recently, the Department of Education (DepEd) revealed that the number of children enrolled in elementary schools dropped from 90.10 percent in schoolyear 2001-2002 to 84.4 percent in 2005-2006. The dropout rates posted record levels: 10.57 percent in the elementary level and a bigger 15.81 percent in high school. As a result, only five out of 10 enrollees finished grade school, down from six four years ago; of those who went to high school, only five graduated compared to six four years ago.

Out-of-school youth

Consequently, the number of out-of-school children (ages 6-15) increased by 200 percent, from about 1.87 million to a staggering 3.1 million.(2) The quality of education is way below standard, with achievement rates of Filipino grade and high school students particularly in science and mathematics among the lowest in the world.

The education budget earmarked for 2008, which is P141 billion – assuming this will be spent transparently and cleanly - is not enough to address the perennial shortages of classrooms, seats, textbooks, and teachers totaling 50,000.

Among most people, getting children to school let alone college has not just been an uphill battle but a battle lost given that daily subsistence is only less than $2. Income inequality has become severe: the US$12.4 billion net worth of the country’s 10 richest families is equivalent to the combined yearly income of the poorest 9.8 million households.(3) This horrendous income gap is the result of the concentration of economic wealth among a few transnational corporations and the domestic oligarchs, no thanks to the globalization policies championed by the Arroyo government. For instance, the latest agriculture census shows that less than one-third of total landowners still own more than 80 percent of the country’s agricultural land. Fifty-two percent of the farms in the country covering 51 percent of total farm area remain under tenancy, lease, and other forms of tenurial arrangement.(4) Seventy percent of the country’s poor lives in the rural areas.

Although the skewed socio-economic structure yields the endemic poverty, efforts to ease the economic burden of the people in 2007 were shattered by Arroyo’s pro-business policies including a wage freeze and shooting down bills that would have increased the daily minimum wage of the poor. The current minimum wage covers only 45.6 percent of the required “living wage” of P793, as estimated by the National Wages and Productivity Commission (NWPC). It is even worse in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), considered the country’s most depressed area, where the daily income is equivalent to only 17 percent of the required daily wage. Who says that the country will achieve “first world” status in 10 years?

Bigger story

The figures tell a bigger story: In September 2007, 21.5 percent of families said they had suffered from hunger, without having anything to eat, at least once in three months. The record surpassed previous surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) of about 19.0 percent.(5)

Too, the faces of hunger can be found palpably in urban poor communities where the population has increased by 11 percent since 1997 to about 30 million today.(6) Four out of 10 urban poor households live in 600 slum areas nationwide, in squalor along railways and waterways, under bridges, and on dumps.

Already pressed down by the horrible economic and social inequities, the Filipino people took severe blows from the country’s political crisis and repressive conditions. In two high-profile bombings – at Makati’s Glorietta II mall on Oct. 19, and at the Batasang Pambansa Complex that followed – 17 people were killed, including employees of Congress and the Basilan representative. The blasts took place amid renewed calls for Arroyo’s resignation over the ZTE-National Broadband Network (NBN) scam, the bribery scandal attending it, and the cash handouts to several government officials.

The year 2007 also proved to be dangerous for many Filipinos who without fear or favor advocate for social reform, peace and justice – for those who devote their life to the poor. Although the Arroyo government came under increasing local and international pressure to stop shooting down its critics, its iron hand used in the guise of counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism led to the summary execution of 68 more activists, the disappearance of 26 others, as well as 29 victims of torture, illegal detention of 116, and the forced evacuation of 7,542 villagers.(7) The other face of this “silent war” however rages in the rural countryside where the people have endured the brunt of state terrorism through militarization, death squad operations, harassments, and other atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them living in the provinces, lost their right to vote in the May 2007 elections due to intimidation by government troops for their alleged leftist sympathies. As the year ended, around 2,500 Manobos and Visayan settlers in Surigao Sur who had been forcibly evacuated by military operations found their homes ransacked, their rice and animals gone. Soldiers did it, community leaders said.

Efforts to protect the rights of victims of political persecution through the Supreme Court’s (SC) “judicial activism” particularly the issuance of the writ of amparo have been thwarted by the Arroyo government, with the courts issuing them shamed even more by this blatant show of military arrogance and supremacy. Until such legal mechanism and other measures are able to whip those who live by the gun into line, public alarm about the breakdown of the rule of law and the judicial system will remain valid. Mothers who cry for the surfacing of their sons and daughters abducted by the military must seek justice elsewhere.

If the year brought more pain, bullets, and bombs to the people, it was the other way around for the oligarchs as they feasted on the fraudulent elections and the disenfranchisement of voters. As expected, they retained 80 percent of the seats in Congress while Arroyo, through alleged bribery and adroit distribution of pork barrel funds under her control, averted a third attempt at impeachment against her. Malacanang in tandem with traditional politicians continued to mangle the Party-list system by fielding their own candidates and parties in the mid-term elections. Anticipating fraud and violence, however, the Filipino voters through various election watchdogs tried to guard the ballot, protect votes cast for the people’s representation in Congress, and moved for electoral reform. In the end, the May 2007 polls became a bigger proof that elections are a myth in a political system long dominated by the oligarchs.

Illegitimate presidency

Years of what is popularly seen as an illegitimate presidency, unbridled and unparalleled corruption, harsh economic conditions, and political repression brought widespread dissatisfaction among the Filipino people and lack of trust in government in 2007. This was shown in credibility and performance ratings of Arroyo in surveys conducted by the Pulse Asia and SWS that revealed nationwide distrust for her increasing from 37 percent in July to 46 percent in October, with a disapproval rating of 39 percent.

Arroyo also topped the list of the most corrupt Philippine presidents in recent history, with 42 percent of respondents saying so compared to Marcos’s 35 percent. It is partly because of this that the Philippines was rated recently by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries in the world; it was also second in the whole of Asia.

Two years ago, amid calls for Arroyo’s resignation 60 to 80 percent of the people wanted her out of the presidency. In the latest corruption survey, two out of 10 respondents said they wanted Arroyo removed by any means.

Economic uncertainties and periods of political turbulence marked 2007 but an increasing number of Filipinos ended the year with expressions of disquiet and with ominous signs that seeing more of the same in the year ahead could unfold some unexpected events.

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(1) In 2006, there were, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 8.2 million overseas Filipinos. Of these, 3.8 million were documented Filipinos; 3.5 million permanent residents or immigrants mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia; and 875,000 were undocumented.

(2) Bulatlat.com, Aug. 12-18, 2007, citing a report by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT).

(3) Rosario Bella Guzman, “The Philippine poverty situation: Beyond poverty measures, inequality grows,” IBON Features, May 10, 2007.

(4)IBON, ibid.

(5) Mahar Mangahas, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct. 6, 2007.

(6) IBON Foundation report, March 2007. Seven regions have recorded a 20-percent increased in their urban poor families.

(7) Figures cover only January to October, 2007. “Dangerous regime, defiant people,” latest report of the human rights alliance Karapatan. As of October 2007, the number of victims of extra-judicial killings (EJKs) since 2001 has reached 890.