MARCOS'S EMERGENCY POWERS BID IS A BAND-AID ON A GUNSHOT WOUND

We condemn President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s request for emergency powers to suspend excise taxes on oil as a deceptive maneuver that ignores legislative solutions already within Congress’s reach. Bills calling for the outright and permanent removal of the excise tax and VAT on petroleum products are already pending in the House. There is no need for new discretionary presidential powers — what is needed is the political will to act on these measures now. This request for so-called flexibility is a smokescreen that keeps the people begging for temporary concessions from the President instead of enacting laws that decisively remove these burdens and dismantle the oil cartel.

We are equally alarmed by the Palace’s evasive and dismissive economic briefing, where officials acknowledged a potential negative GDP impact from rising oil prices yet refused to revise growth targets. Their statements reduce a genuine crisis to a numbers game — citing Dubai crude at $76 to $78 as if that is cause for complacency, while ordinary Filipinos already reel from weekly price hikes triggered by the war that the United States and Israel have unleashed in the Middle East. This is deception, and the Filipino people deserve better.

The answer is not to concentrate more power in the hands of one man. We call for the urgent passage of our oil industry reform bills — the scrapping of excise tax and VAT on oil products, the renationalization of Petron, centralized oil procurement, regulation of the downstream industry, and unbundling of oil prices. Huwag nating hayaang lokohin tayo. Ang sagot ay hindi flexibility para sa iisa, kundi kongkretong hakbang para sa kapakanan ng nakararami.