What’s wrong with this country? The Philippines is about the only country in the Asia-Pacific which has not only failed to advance toward the technological and industrial age, but which has in fact retrogressed over time. And yet it is a country with probably the richest and most varied natural resources in the world and whose people have the highest literacy rate in almost all of Asia, with a diverse but mainly Christian culture that is a unique blend of East and West.
What has been the essence of this betrayal? This essence lies in the adoption of an economic ideology that has been the time-proven instrument of colonialism: The ideology of free trade.
As Dr. Henry Kissinger has so aptly reminded us, “a poor country that engages the world in free trade can only become more impoverished.” For the most part of this century, free trade has been the ruling economic ideology of the nation.
How did this come about? The answer is simple: Since we assumed independence in 1946, the developmental philosophy of the country, except during the fifties, has been free trade. We began nationhood with free trade, forced on us by Washington, and we remain with free trade today, thanks to the conditions imposed by the troika of the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We are the only nation-state in Asia committed to free trade, which explains why we are the only nation in Asia whose economy has failed to graduate from colonial status.
The reason for this in turn is to be found in What Dr. Kissinger described as the “excessive intervention” by the US in our affairs. Independence did not bring with it freedom from US intervention. From Day One of the Republic, Washington established its stranglehold on Philippine affairs. Through the Parity Amendment to the Constitution in 1946, we were forced into a policy of free trade, and to this day free trade constitutes, as the great nationalist and patriot Claro M. Recto reminded us during his lifetime, the cornerstone of American policy in the Philippines. Fault, however, cannot be laid exclusively on Washington. Responsibility must equally lie with the nation’s political and social establishment in having consistently bowed to the pressure of Washington. There lies the betrayal.
We must root out the instruments of that betrayal and it is no hard task identifying them. Those instruments are to be found in Congress, in media, in business, in the academe, in Malacañang. They are the men and women who walk the nation’s corridors of power, manipulating the levers of power and influence, and who have used their positions of privilege and influence to commit the nation to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and globalism. Their utterances, actuations and positions are matters of record.
It is these self-same men and women who have crafted the government’s open-door, foreign capital-oriented economic policies vis-à-vis Mindanao, who seek to perpetuate the betrayal of the Filipino people as a whole, and the Muslim minority in particular. These are the men and women who, if not stopped, will sell the nation to the highest foreign bidder.
These are the same men and women behind EDSA 1986, a phenomenon that could never have happened without active foreign, mainly American, intervention — the same men and women who are now moving heaven and earth to prevent the rehabilitation of the late President Marcos and his heirs, whose honor and place in history recent event have vindicated.
The reconstruction of the nation must begin with an organized movement to bring to account everyone who, by his utterances and action, created the ambience of free trade. We can start with the Senate, where GATT was ratified, with the academe, the business community and media, where the campaign to make free trade was waged. But the ultimate responsibility lies with Malacañang and its technocrats who initiated and orchestrated the campaign to make free trade this nation’s permanent commitment, and who today are orchestrating a movement to constitutionalize that ideology.
A People’s Court must be organized for the specific purpose of hauling to public trial the so-called national leaders and other government functionaries who committed this nation to free trade and GATT and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Until those leaders and functionaries are brought to justice, this nation will find no peace. Simultaneously, there must be a shadow government of the people to work out and hammer a populist program for revolutionary changes anchored on rapid industrialization, social justice and equitable distribution of wealth.
Unless this is done, the reconstruction of this nation will never take place, and we will remain a nation in chaos, and the shame of Asia.
The time for action is now!
