President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III (photo from www.gov.ph)
The Aquino Administration submitted its budget proposal for 2011 to Congress this week. It is through the budget where one can see the priorities of the government, in how much it intends to spend on various programs of government. For 2011, the government under the Aquino administration intends to spend P1.645 trillion.
In his budget message, the President claimed that the spending proposal of the government for next year is anchored on “reform”. The budget claims to have a “bias to the poor and the vulnerable”. However, right at the onset, it is still oriented towards severe austerity, masked with the euphemism “fiscal responsibility,” a government spending orientation that has been the standard policy for decades. It is a policy intended not to simply ensure that the “meager resources” of the government are spent wisely for the people, to ensure that the government is able to pay its foreign and local creditors its monstrous, anomalous and scandalous debt.
Just to show you how scandalous and hypocritical the government’s budget orientation is, the Aquino Administration proposes to pay foreign creditors and financial institutions a whopping P823.27 billion next year (P357.09 billion in interest payments, P466.18 billion in principal amortization not formally included in the P1.645 trillion total budget). According to the initial budget analysis and report of IBON Foundation, the increase in interest payments alone “is the largest absolute increase in interest payments in the country’s history and, at a 29.2% increase from the year before, is the second largest percentage increase after the 32.6% growth in 2000.”
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Last night, I was supposed to get a respite from my usual evening classes in law school. I went home from our House of Representatives office in the middle of the afternoon after going through a check-up at the Congress’ medical facility. I hadn’t been feeling well since I woke up that morning. I remember waking up in the middle of the night with chills. I felt feverish (though the doctor said I didn’t have fever), I had a very bad headache, I was having a bad runny nose, and the beginnings of a bad cough. In other words, I felt like I was coming down with the flu.
I took a nap late in the afternoon, then I woke up early in the night to a morbid spectacle on live TV. The early evening news programs had been extended. The usual soap operas had given way to a hostage drama on simultaneous nationwide broadcast. Apparently, it was also syndicated on major global news networks. Then, unexpected turn of events happened rapidly one after another right before our very eyes. From the dramatic arrest of the hostage-taker’s brother, and his relatives wailing pleas to stop the arrest, to the actual firing of bullets from the bus, and the tenseful reporting made by the TV commentators, to the bloody end of it all.
I couldn’t believe we were seeing it all on TV! Despite the lingering moralist thought that I shouldn’t patronize this blatant sensationalism, and the ugly thought that people were dying at the very instant in the same frames and footage we were witnessing, I couldn’t take my attention off from the intense series of events. Admit it or not, we were all glued to our TV sets. How can we explain ourselves? It felt really wrong, but we couldn’t resist not to miss a second of it. Sure, we find police thrillers and action movies gratifying, but we all enjoy it with the comfort of knowing it is all faux. But last night, it was real.
There’s probably some psychological explanation to it.
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It’s been over a week since I started attending classes at the University of Santo Tomas. The feeling of being a clueless freshman wandering around campus without having the privilege of knowing anyone, it’s an amusing but all too familiar feeling. It brought back memories of being a high school freshman in Ateneo and a college freshman in UP Diliman. And I missed that feeling. It feels likes starting anew in a different environment with a clean slate, and I have the privilege of starting it right, of being anonymous, of just being another face in the crowd, with lessons learned from mistakes of the past.
The Sampaloc campus is also quite beautiful, with its paved walkways, manicured gardens and plazas, old and new buildings. It may not be as expansive as Diliman or Loyola Heights, but its very compactness makes one feel like being embraced by a small but diverse community. Walking to class in the late afternoons has been a pleasure. I find pleasure walking among hundreds of students loitering around the gardens and plazas. In Diliman or Loyola Heights, I can walk around campus without bumping into anyone. I walk out of the walls of UST and I find myself in the busy streets of Sampaloc, Manila.
These are of course, impressions of face value. In the next four years (or more? might even be less?) I will surely experience various disappointments and struggles. As I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, there will come times when I will find myself in conflict with university rules, though, it’s not a prospect that I fear, confident of a sense of judgment of what is right and fair. There will come times when I will find myself holding on to my motivations for wanting to become a lawyer, there will be times I will want to just quit school for various reasons. But for now, here’s to looking forward to being a “Thomasian”.
Kabataan Party-List Rep. Raymond 'Mong' Palatino, flanked by his family and national officers of Kabataan Party-List, takes his oath as re-elected Congressman before Senator Francis 'Chiz' Escudero
Last Friday, we had our first nominee, incumbent Congressman Mong Palatino take his oath as re-elected Representative of Kabataan Party-list before Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero, one of the more prominent legislators closest to the youth sector.
It was a short and simple gathering over lunch. Our regional leaders were also present, as we were also holding our National Council meeting during those days.
More than two hundred youths from different universities and communities in Metro Manila marched yesterday, June 15, 2010, to the gates of Malacanang to protest the worsening crisis in education
Yesterday was the first day of classes for most schools, colleges and universities in the country. As millions flocked to their respective campuses, more than 8 million of our fellow Filipino youths and children will not even get to step inside a classroom. This marks one of the highest number of out-of-school youth in our nation’s modern history.
In Gloria Arroyo’s nine years in office, the nation has experienced budget cuts in education, tuition and other fee increases left and right and as mentioned, the highest out-of-school and drop-out rates in years.
Despite the constitutional guarantee that education is a right of each and every Filipino, going to school has increasingly been such a financial burden to millions of Filipino families, if they can get in a school at all. Even public elementary and high schools, with up to 61,343 in classroom shortage and 54,060 in teacher shortage, cannot accommodate all Filipino children, nor can they provide the kind and quality of education needed for national development. The Department of Education itself declared that there are as many as 5.6 million out-of-school children.
The students were able to squeeze past through the barbed wire barricades of Mendiola and march to Gate 7 of the Presidential Palace
The nation’s public universities, on the other hand, has been suffering budget cuts almost every year forcing them to extract tuition and other fees from their students and forcing them to sell resources which would otherwise have served their constituents. The Philippines actually has the lowest percentage of youths studying in state universities. In other countries, state universities and colleges accommodate majority of college-age youths. In the Philippines, we force them to either enroll in private institutions with steep tuition rates, or to not enter college at all.
While our parents’ wages have been stunted for decades, the government has allowed tuition rates in private schools and public universities to escalate. It has in fact almost doubled since Gloria Arroyo became President. In 2001, the national average cost per unit in colleges and universities was at P257.41. In 2010, it has almost doubled to P501.22. In Metro Manila where most of the country’s colleges and universities are located, it is worse. From P439.59 per unit in 2001 it has ballooned to P980.54 per unit in 2010. These don’t even take into account the long list miscellaneous fees being implemented by schools, which hide the real cost of education.
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law student, film school graduate, student leader, youth activist, Kabataan Partylist legislative officer