PH Orgs Join the Global Call to Fight Against Inequality, Tax the Rich, Scrap the 2025 National Budget
- Media Communications
- Jan 17
- 3 min read
Quezon City, Philippines — Philippine civil society organizations, climate justice groups, and mass-based alliances, joined the 2025 Fight Inequality Alliance (FIA) People’s Assembly, held at University of the Philippines-Diliman, today, January 18, 2025, drawing a line to billionaires who take control of political power, wealth, and resources, amidst the world’s crises.
Every year, global elites representing 1% of the global population are meeting for the World Economic Forum. “This month, they would again formulate prescriptions of the global economy, discuss the future of our planet and economies without a clear direction and interest in ending the widening gap of inequality and marginalization of the 99%. In a table where money talks, they attempt to downplay the structures that perpetuate inequality and dictate to governments what they should do on continuous siphoning of wealth from Peoples of the South while the 99% are forced to settle with failing incomes, extreme poverty, and destituteness,” Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ) National Coordinator Ian Rivera said.
The Philippines mirrors this stark reality. Dubbed the most corrupt, the 2025 National Budget shows the glaring negligence of people’s welfare and social services. The existing environmental programs of the government are not only reactive but also fail in protecting natural resources and ecology. The PMCJ has been establishing, not only on the local but also on the global scale, that the fund for climate change adaptation and mitigation should not be accessed through loans. The outstanding budget deficit is Php 1.5 trillion while the debt burden will reach Php 2 trillion. Overshadowing expenditures for social services, debt service payments would cover more than 32 percent of the national budget.
Various sectors are one in the call to scrap the 2025 National Budget as it only serves the rich and few. “These are the consequences when the state leaders only listen to the super-rich and not the voices of the marginalized who suffer the crisis they have created. In these convoluted times, it is time to flip the script and demand the government to push corporations and billionaires to pay their fair share for the decades-old extraction of wealth and resources from poor and developing countries,” Rivera added.
The Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) has long argued that it is a great injustice that the poor and the marginalized, and the middle class are made to shoulder more of the burden of paying for debts, and funding climate response as well as essential public services. “The ultra-rich, who benefit the most from the current system, are allowed to evade responsibility. The proposed Solidarity Contribution Law, a wealth tax bill that the FDC pushed for and drafted, and Rep. Cendaña and Rep. Hataman have courageously sponsored, is long-overdue legislation which seeks to correct, if only partially, this injustice," FDC Secretary-General Rovik Obanil said.
House Bill No. 11127 aims to exact tax contributions from the wealthy few. Filed last November 2024, authors said in the bill’s explanatory note that it will help plug an “asymmetry in tax contributions among socioeconomic classes.”
"With the country’s Php 16.09 trillion debt resulting in ever higher debt servicing, we must continue to push for alternative measures to ensure that, this time, the onus is placed, not on the poorest, but the richest segment of the population," Obanil added.
“Year after year, the world gets worse. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 is the warmest year on record, officially breaching the 1.5oC. US President-elect Donald Trump officially withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. The Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues to kill hundreds and thousands of Palestinians each day. Philippine President Bongbong Marcos signed a law promoting the fossil gas industry. All these awful news and updates boils down to grave injustice, affecting various sectors, especially the vulnerable ones. Perpetrators should answer to their atrocities by literally paying for their crimes,” Rivera stressed. ###
FOR INQUIRIES:
Sheila Abarra
Senior Media and Communications Officer
Philippine Movement for Climate Justice
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