Press
Release
October
5, 2012
The
Partido ng Manggagawa (PM) today decried as “hypocritical” the move by Kilusang
Mayo Uno (KMU) and its allied organizations to disqualify Akbayan as a
party-list group. “Our political differences
with Akbayan do not detract from the fact that they are as genuine a party-list
as adobo is an original Pinoy dish,” asserted Renato Magtubo, PM
national chair.
“KMU claims that Akbayan is not anymore a party of the
marginalized since it is in coalition with the Aquino administration and its
leaders are already in government. But the same was the political objective of KMU’s
allied party-list groups when it forged an alliance with a different
presidential candidate who just so happened lost in the last elections,” Magtubo
explained.
Meanwhile
PM called on the Comelec to make good on its declaration that it will rid the
party-list system of “jokes, fakes and frauds.” “It is high time that the
party-list system is cleansed and loopholes are plugged so that it does not
become a backdoor entry for trapos who could not compete at the congressional district
level. Despite its flaws, the party-list remains an opening for progressive
groups to gain a foothold in Congress so as to advance the struggle for social
reforms and social change,” Magtubo insisted.
Magtubo
is a nominee of the PM Coalition whose petition for accreditation as a
party-list organization is pending at the Comelec. PM Coalition is comprised of
labor organizations like PM, the Philippine Airlines Employees Association
(PALEA), United Cavite Workers Association, Solidarity of Cebu Workers and the
Yellow Bus Labor Union in Mindanao.
“We
commend KMU for exposing bogus party-list organizations like Mikey Arroyo’s Ang
Galing Pinoy. But we cannot support their claim against Akbayan is which simply
based on partisan and sectarian politics. Even as KMU and Akbayan are in partnership
with rival factions of the ruling class, open or otherwise, their constituencies
and programs nonetheless both remain representative of the so-called
marginalized sectors,” Magtubo added.
“I
remember that Akbayan is one of a few and brave progressive parties that pioneered
participation in the party-list elections at a time when others criticized it
as reformism and equated revolutionism with waging guerilla war in the mountains.
Of course these erstwhile extremist groups later made a 180 degree turn without
explanation and then pioneered unprincipled alliances with class enemies,”
Magtubo elaborated.
Together
with Etta Rosales of Akbayan, Magtubo was one of the original party-list
representatives who won in the first party-list elections in 1998. In their
first term, Magtubo and Rosales exposed the payola attending the passage of the
EPIRA Law that groups now lambast as the root cause of the high electricity
costs in the country, which is the most expensive in the world.
