And, as everyone knows, we have never had a real land reform program in the Philippines during over half a century of American rule – in converting direct colonial rule to neo-colonial indirect rule, the U.S. had to continue to support an oligarchy, a landlord class to administer the State and its ideological apparatuses. So they prevented any attempt at real land reform.

So all land reform programs we have had are really a mockery of any genuine break-up of large estates and distribution of arable land to peasant farmers. Look at Hacienda Luisita, large areas of Negros, Mindanao, and elsewhere. So that is one of the major reasons why the Philippines has not developed and prospered. And that is because we still have a ruling bloc, our local power elite, at least 260 family dynasties indeed, that are entrenched by feudalized electoral “shows” and that prevent any kind of modernization if you like, modernization of the economy by way of capitalist industrialization… The country continues to have a very unequal division of wealth, and therefore of political power, based on the fact that only a minority owns or controls the large productive resources, primarily land and other natural resources and of course now, a tiny privileged minority owns many of the large businesses, enterprises, banks and they also administer or influence the State agencies, the courts, legislature, barangay trapos (village traditional politicians), including the military and police.

Based on that – in fact, under Arroyo’s irredeemably corrupt tenure, the conditions are worsening, as IBON researches document the gradual breakdown of the educational and health care systems– we don’t really have any kind of efficient, modern, self-sufficient industrial economy, the country is plagued with the unrelieved immiseration of the population, dire poverty is almost 70-80 percent. Mass hunger ravages whole communities. This is not a secret anymore, despite the huge remittance of OFWs, the appreciation of the value of the peso relative to the dollar, and proliferating “call centers” around the country.

The unemployment problem has grown worse. So you have everyday, about three thousand Filipinos leave the country and you have about more than a million people leaving the country every year to find work in the Middle East, in Hongkong, in Taiwan, in Japan, in Singapore, in Europe, practically anywhere in the world – in cruise ships everywhere – you will find Filipino workers, seamen, domestics, etc.

So we have the continued rule of an oligarchic minority in the Philippines, they control the land, the resources, so there is an unequal distribution of wealth, there is poverty, in fact, endemic mass hunger now threatens the survival of whole communities. Alejandro Lichauco, one of our few progressive economists, has pointed out recently that hunger has become a very, very serious problem in the Philippines, which has never been a real problem even in the worst time of the Marcos period. Hunger has deepened and widened, and so this is a clear symptom of intensifying inequality and the repressiveness of the whole system, politically and economically, and that is why I am told that most Filipinos have given up hope. Someone said the Philippines is the only nation in the world distinguished by the fact that most of the citizens want to flee, to escape… Have we come to this impasse, this crisis?

The Marcos dictatorship, in response to backwardness at home and corporate globalization abroad, started this whole process of encouraging migration, instigating people to seek work abroad, instead of developing the economy to provide jobs at home. And the successive administrations, from Aquino to Ramos, Estrada and now Arroyo, have not initiated any kind of real transformation of the economy for the reasons I have already adduced. They couldn’t, whatever the good intentions of some technocrats and the hired intelligentsia. In fact, these neo-colonial “puppets,” as (Jose Maria) Sison would call them, have suppressed any kind of change, real democratization of the political economy, demonstrating total servility to the policies imposed by the US through direct influence on the AFP/PNP (Armed Forces of the Philippines/Philippine National Police), the State administrators, and through the IMF (International Monetary Fund), World Bank, WTO (World Trade Organization), etc.

And this is the explanation why we have now more poverty and exploitation, dialectically more protest and resistance (both legal and armed), and more inhumanity, thanks to Arroyo’s killing machine and its U.S.-sponsored terrorist operations.

Sonny, you have been visiting the Philippines frequently… I mean retrospectively, how would you differentiate the Marcos era from the current GMA era?

Well, the Marcos government started out really with many grandiose programs of the “New Society” because Marcos, although he was elected in the old so-called democratic system, had I think four years of the presidency. And he was re-elected again for another four years but it was through, a kind of questionable process, well, cheating, actually. Elections in the Philippines since nominal independence have been characterized by fraud, manipulation, bribery, coercion, all kinds of trickery and deception – the tried and true formula of “guns, goons, and gold” that you will encounter again in this coming May election.

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