While sounding “nationalist” interested in the economic
emancipation of the Filipino nation and pledging to let the
Laurel-Langley Agreement, particularly parity rights, lapse
in 1974, the Marcos puppet regime enacted as early as 1967
the Investment Incentives Law which declares it the state policy
to encourage foreign investments and defines a corporation with
a maximum foreign equity of 40 per cent as a “Philippine national.”
By this definition, the U.S. can create a system of
interlocking corporations by which a “Philippine national”
already bearing and camouflaging 40 per
cent equity invests in another corporation and actually
increases foreign equity in the latter corporation
beyond 40 per cent. The law, however, clearly allows foreign
equity to exceed 40 per cent in an old or new corporation registered
with the Board of Investments and to remain so indefinitely as long as
“Philippine nationals” do not buy the shares of stock offered in the stock
exchange on the eleventh year after registration. In guaranteeing the
property rights of foreign investors, the Investment Incentives
Law goes to the extent of guaranteeing the right of nonexpropriation
and exposes the primacy of foreign investments over any pretension of the
present puppet state to sovereign rights. The ‘‘incentives” offered by the law
are unprecedentedly abusive of the sovereign Filipino people and are geared
to aggravating the colonial status of the Philippines.
An insidious propaganda drive supporting the perpetuation of the interests of the U.S. monopolies in
the Philippines has been unleashed by the counterrevolutionaries, especially by
the C.I.A. and the American Jesuits through the Manglapus-Manahan gang.
Brandishing their slogans of “peaceful revolution,” “constitutional reform” and
“profit-sharing,” the Christian Social Movement, the
Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism, the Congressional Economic
Planning Office and several other reformist groups spread the mendacious line
that the nationalization of the economy could be advanced through legislation
and through the stock market. The workers are told that they can
become capitalists and can participate in joint ventures with foreign investors
by going to the stock market to buy their own shares and putting on mortgage their future wages. This is akin to the old lie repeatedly told to the landless peasants that they can become landowners by buying land from the landlords.
There has been so much ado about another colonial Constitutional Convention.
It is publicized as a channel for changing the status quo. The actual purpose of
the Constitutional Convention, however, is to adjust the wording of the colonial
constitution to such a law as the Investment Incentives Law and the treaty of
friendship, commerce and navigation between the U.S. and the Philippines which
is now being prepared.
The broad masses of the people are reminded at every turn that they have to attract and be
hospitable to “dollar-bringing tourists,” meaning to say, the U.S. monopolies. Every town or barrio is
made to expect itself as a possible tourist spot in a clever campaign to counteract the growing sentiment
of the people against U.S. imperialism.
Rendering completely inutile the reformist view that the economic
interests of U.S. imperialism could be taken over by the reactionary
government or Filipino businessmen in accordance with “due
process’’ and “just compensation,” the Marcos puppet regime
has faithfully followed the dictation of U.S. imperialism to exhaust
the financial resources of the reactionary government and to overburden
the people with inflation and repeated devaluation. Despite the raising
of taxes, the internal debt of the reactionary government has risen
to the level of at least P6.0 billion because of the profligate spending
on projects that merely deepen the semicolonial and semifeudal character
of the economy. On top of this internal debt, an external debt of more
than $l.9 billion has been incurred mainly with U.S. imperialism.
Thus, the nation is severely afflicted with a financial crisis of unprecedented proportions.
The broad masses of the people have to suffer steeply rising prices
as a result of the rapid erosion of the purchasing value of the peso
from within and from without. Taking advantage of the financial plight
of the Philippine puppet government, U.S. through the International
Monetary Fund has dictated the devaluation of the peso at the expense
of the broad masses of the people. At the beginning of 1970, the value
of the peso sank to the level of more than P6.00 per U.S. dollar from
the previous level of P3.90 per U.S. dollar. This is the second time in
only eight years that devaluation has been imposed on the people without
any corresponding increases in their income. Since 1962, the prices
of many basic commodities have gone up by more than 150 per
cent. There is not a single commodity in the Philippines that is not
affected by the rising costs of imported fuel, equipment, spare
parts, raw materials, and the like.
The Filipino businessmen is
daily facing bankruptcy because its products are being squeezed
out of the local market and it cannot avail itself of adequate credit
assistance from a bankrupt puppet government. As a result of the
peso devaluation, the value of U.S. assets in the Philippines and also of
Philippine foreign debt has automatically increased. It is idle and downright
stupid to expect the reactionary government or private Filipino
stockbuyers to be able to buy out the U.S. monopolies.
On the other hand, the reactionary government has become
worse as a beggar of usurious foreign loans and
Filipino-owned enterprises have become more than ever subject
to takeover, assimilation or crushing by the U.S. monopolies.
Devaluation has only made the Philippines more dependent on the
U.S. dollar and has only served to aggravate the semicolonial
and semifeudal character of the economy. though the Marcos puppet
regime has flamboyantly declared so many towns in the country,
especially in Central Luzon, as land reform areas, the reactionary
government is simply bereft of the financial resources to carry
out what it hypocritically labels as a land reform program. In the
countryside of the Philippines, it has become too clear that only
by waging a people’s war can the peasantry achieve agrarian
revolution.
In the city, the proletariat is pressed hard by mass layoffs and by
the inflation caused by the workings of imperialism within and
without the country. Only the reactionary classes in Philippine
society have shared in the exploitative privileges and gains
enjoyed by U.S. imperialism. The capitalist and the big landlord
class have been extremely favored by the automatic increase
of the peso equivalent of their dollar earnings on their raw
material exports. They are the principal beneficiaries of the
various public works projects facilitating the movement of
raw material exports and finished manufacture imports.
They have received various forms of “export incentives.”
They have been extended the biggest loans in constructing and
reconstructing milling facilities. Playing up to the trick of U.S.
imperialism of using preferential trade for sugar as a lever for
increasing its privileges in the Philippines, the Marcos puppet regime
has extended the biggest loans for the construction of new sugar
mills at so many points in the country. In the disposition of
government funds and the granting of government approval for
business projects, the bureaucrat capitalists led by Marcos have
aggravated the economic crisis by exacting kickbacks on all
sorts of government contracts.
As a rabid puppet of U.S., Marcos has outdone Macapagal
in sending Filipino mercenary troops to participate in the
U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam and Indochina in general.
Despite the worsening bankruptcy of the reactionary government,
he dispatched the Philcag (Philippine Civic Action Group) to South Vietnam.
Until now, there are Filipino mercenaries there who merely
carry other labels, the Philcon, Operation Brotherhood and engineering firms.
U.S. imperialism brazenly uses its military bases and Philippine skies
and waters to conduct its wars of aggression in Asia. On U.S. military
bases here, U.S. military personnel continue to murder, rape, and commit all
kinds of abuses against the Filipino people and yet the Marcos puppet regime,
like all previous puppet regimes, has conspired with the U.S. imperialists
in holding “negotiations” that end in upholding the latter’s
extraterritorial rights. Instead of fighting for the people’s sovereignty,
the reactionary government unleashes its police and troops to attack
the anti-imperialist protest actions of the people.
The Marcos puppet regime has echoed every “new” policy and followed
every “new” step taken by U.S. imperialism. It follows Nixon’s “new Asia policy”
of “making Asians fight Asians.”
It rabidly supports the U.S.-Japanese partnership in the Pacific
and the troublemaking activities of this partnership in Asia.
It bows to the U.S. imperialist policy of reviving Japanese militarism
and making it play the role of fugleman for U.S. imperialism in Asia.
Resurgent Japanese militarism is being promoted as the
“regional leader” of Asia through the Asian Development Bank,
the Asian Pacific Council (ASPAC), the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Southeast Asian Ministers Economic Council
(SEAMEC), the “Asian Forum” and the like.
Even before the ratification of the unequal Japan-R.P. Treaty of Amity,
Commerce and Navigation, the Marcos puppet regime has encouraged
the Japanese monopolies to invade the Philippines. They now rank as
the second biggest foreign investor. Japanese commodities are being
dumped into the country and Japanese investments are penetrating
every major field of business activity. Japan today is next only to the
United States in getting Philippine raw materials and ranks first
in getting copper concentrates, logs, molasses and iron ores.
Japan’s share of Philippine foreign trade is now more than 30 per cent.
Its military vessels and fishing fleets do not respect the territorial waters of
the Philippines. In a desperate attempt to hoodwink the Filipino people about Japan,
the Marcos puppet regime is bandying about the lie that Japan is a
benevolent aid-giver and actually begs for loans from it
in exchange for the plunder of Philippine natural resources and exploitation
of the people.
Its war reparations payments which have been grabbed by the local
reactionaries for themselves are even misrepresented as gracious
aid to the people. The strategic Pan-Philippine highway is obsequiously
called the Japanese Friendship Highway.The Marcos puppet regime has
also steadily opened the way for trade and diplomatic relations
with Soviet social-imperialism and other revisionist countries in
line with the U.S. imperialist policy of maintaining a global alliance
with the Soviet Union in opposing China, the people, revolution,
and communism. In a futile attempt to deflect attention from itself, U.S.
is raising the joint oppression and exploitation of the Filipino
people by the United States, Japan and the Soviet Union. In
this connection, there is an imperialist scheme to whip up the
evil wind of modern revisionism inside the country.
The local agents of modern revisionism, the bourgeois reactionary
gang of the Lavas, are being accommodated in the arena of
bourgeois parliamentarism in the scheme to sabotage
the revolutionary mass movement.
In carrying out its reactionary policies, the Marcos puppet regime has inevitably laid out its fascist
character. Unable to cope with the political and economic crisis into which it has pushed the nation and
also unable to deceive the people with such hypocritical slogans as “this nation can be great again” or
“new Filipinism,” it has ruthlessly employed the apparatuses of the state to suppress the broad masses of
the people through selective and mass terrorism. In conducting its anti-democratic campaign, it
cynically waves the banner of “liberal democracy”
http://www.geocities.ws/kabataangmakabayan64/psr.pdf
pro-Marcos ka? basaha ning Philippine history
Originally Posted by AlbertCruz
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