ConCom recommendations selling out Filipinos to save Gloria

As expected, GMA's Cha-Cha is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to appease the few who remain loyal to the President with nothing in store for the benefit of the vast majority of Filipinos.

The Con-Com's recommendations are best met with a resounding rebuke from the masses, and workers in particular stand to gain nothing from the Commission's belated attempts to pass its work as consultative and participatory. Nothing in its recommendations would prove that these have widespread public support.

Most appalling is the scrapping of elections in 2007, which essentially means that GMA will stay in power against all odds, thereby erasing any accountability on her part for the mess that was the 2004 Presidential elections. This would make the Con-Com a complicit ally in making sure that GMA stays securely in power well into the future despite the massive opposition to her continued rule.

Worse, the Con-Com is toeing elitist interests in its set of proposals. In its suggestion to limit parliamentarians to college degree holders, for example, it blissfully ignores the state of the country's education system. A college degree is no guarantee that one won't turn out to be a thief, a liar and a cheater. The Con-com is trying to impose false standards on uprightness and accountability.

And yet it won't hesitate to sell out Philippine interests to foreign control and domination as it gives a nod to foreign ownership of our resources, lands and even media outlets.

It would also do away with the saving grace of the electoral system - the Constitutional provision on party-list representation. By doing this the Con-Com is erasing any chance for the marginalized - including workers - to have a say in governance, at a time when our rights continue to be trampled and mocked by government with its continued pursuit of deregulation and liberalization resulting in massive loss of jobs.

The Con-Com is insulting workers' intelligence when it tries to pass off its suggestions as a means for "the economy to take off". Workers are well aware that it's not the form of government but those in charge of it that have to go. The Con-Com, made up of representatives of big business and elitist interests with no background in actual groundwork, is toying with ideas with dire consequences. Their sales pitch of Cha-Cha is more like a ploy to assert elite domination of the political system than a genuine desire to effect change.

The Con-Com ignores the fact that change is contingent upon replacing the elites that continue to plunder our economy and devastate our polity with their narrow and vested interests. No amount of charter change will erase poverty and injustice for as long as the likes of GMA are in power.

The APL therefore calls on the public to soundly reject the Con-Com's proposals and we call on the legislature to ignore this invaluable waste of taxpayers' money and chalk this insult up as another act of plunder. GMA once again used our money to sanitize her image and devise a plot for her to stay in control when she shouldn't even be President by now.