"Our people deserve no less."
Let me begin my first piece at the start of the third decade of the 21st century by wishing one and all a peaceful, hopeful and blessed New Year. May the next decade bring us closer to our dream of becoming a mid-level developing nation, with increasingly solid and sustainable productive sectors employing a growing labor force and with stable governance institutions dedicated towards a truly harmonious and equitable society. We remain hopeful this can be achieved as we come around as people united to meet the many challenges ahead.
So it is well that President Duterte has outlined his administration's unfinished business in the remaining two and a half years of his term. Thus, while he remains committed to his robust war on illegal drugs and corrupt practices, he has vowed to more forcefully implement his Build, Build, Build program even as he has equally emphasized his desire to overturn, as it were, the bastions of avaricious and abusive structures which have socialized the unwarranted privileges and wealth of certain sectors on the back of the masses of our people.
Not that he or even the masses themselves are against the working rich or those who have dedicated themselves to just and honest labor. Not at all. The call is specific: it is against an environment which unduly rewards passive, rent-seeking undertakings founded on manipulative practices. It is actually a call to level the playing field, so to speak, and ensure that opportunities for growth and, yes, profits are indeed available to those who truly contribute to productive operations and wealth creation. It is, in the final analysis, a call to conscience to ensure that the nation's resources and wealth are responsibly used and optimized for the greater good. The recently passed anti-poverty law should serve the administration in good stead as it outlines the steps towards lifting the masses of our people from the bondage of poverty and dehumanization.
In this regard, it may interest President Duterte and his administration to pay closer attention to the travails now affecting the world's pre-eminent economic and military power—the United States—as it struggles to sustain that age-old adage of being the "land of the free, home of the brave and bastion of opportunity." The book "The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto" written by award-winning public intellectuals, Travis Smiley and Cornel West, may serve as a guide.
As the book's blurb starkly states: "Record unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nation—these are the realities of 21st Century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor."
"With 150 million Americans of all races, colors, and creeds…persistently poor or near-poor, the highest numbers in over five decades, Smiley and West argue that now is the time to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America before it's too late."
"By placing the eradication of poverty in the context of the nation's greatest moments of social transformation—such as the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage and the labor and civil rights movements—ending poverty is sure to emerge as America's 21st century civil rights struggle."
Indeed, lifting the vast majority of peoples in any country, rich or poor, should be the most critical agenda of all countries as we enter this third decade of the 21st century. Our people deserve no less.