*By Terri Ridon, a fraternity brother and former UP Student Regent
10. In the last nine years, there had been no real and substantial increase in the budget of Philippine education, while debt servicing is automatic and a topmost priority.
9. Instead of increasing the education budget, she permitted the unabated increases of tuition and other fees not only in private schools, but in state universities and colleges too.
8. Every March, students and youth who graduate are without work, and if they do get work, never for jobs they studied for. Worse, students don’t even get to graduate or study at all!
7. The bloody human rights record under her regime – political killings, enforced disappearances, forced evacuation of communities – has already surpassed the glorious achievements of the Marcos dictatorship.
6. US troops are permanently stationed in the Philippines, 24/7, in violation of the country’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity, with GMA affirming the Visiting Forces Agreement.
5. She had been involved in the country’s worst plunder of our national coffers – the Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard, the ZTE-NBN Deal, and all other alienation of basic industries in favor of foreign interests.
4. She is working hard to force Charter Change despite the conduct of the 2010 elections. Why else would La Gloria run in Pampanga?
3. Working people’s wages remain below the daily cost of living, while she had occasion to spend lavishly on dinners and luncheons in her trips abroad.
2. Genuine agrarian reform remains a pipedream for the impoverished and landless peasants. She instead signed into law a much-discredited extension of the failed CARP.
1. She is the number one defender of the country’s ruling yet rotten system – stifling genuine economic development through puppetry to foreign capital and narrow feudal interests while trampling upon people’s political rights.
Enough of GMA!
Fight for a Genuine People’s Agenda Now!
