While he was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, Rodrigo Duterte evoked tremendous controversy both at home and internationally owing to his bloody “war on drugs.” As many as 30,000 Filipinos, according to human rights groups, were victims of his presidency’s most publicized and cruelest policy—a war he waged on his own citizens. Last week, he was again the center of international attention, with his dramatic arrest on the tarmac of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It is a move that has divided the country: embraced as a long-overdue action or condemned as an illegal encroachment. It reflects the 16th president’s continuing ability to set Filipinos against one another.

Like so many of my compatriots, I took to social media, where I declared that I was among those who fully support Duterte’s extradition to face trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague,

so that he can be tried for the extra-judicial execution of some [tens of thousands of] Filipinos, most of them committed before the Philippines withdrew from the ICC in 2019 and for which crimes, therefore, Duterte is legally liable. The procedures for his arrest were observed, with meticulous respect for the due process that he never granted his thousands of victims.… Duterte’s being brought to justice was an obligation incurred by the Philippine state that transcended the temporary holders of its permanent powers and duties.… [The] the sooner he is extradited to the Hague so he can be accorded the just process he deserves, the better.

At a press conference after Duterte’s arrest, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. asserted that the government had no choice but to honor a warrant of arrest delivered by Interpol, which is authorized to serve warrants issued by the ICC, owing to its “responsibilities” as a member of the “community of nations.” To most Filipinos, pro- or anti-Duterte, Marcos Jr. was being disingenuous—he handed Duterte over to the ICC not only to fulfill his government’s international obligations but also, if not mainly, to eliminate a powerful rival. Had it not been for an ongoing struggle for power between the Dutertes and the Marcoses, the ICC’s most momentous action yet since it was established in 2002 would not have been possible.

Duterte apparently underestimated the Marcos family’s willingness to get rid of him; he also let his contempt for the ICC get the better of him. His confidence that the court is a toothless body was reflected in a statement he made in 2023: “I would like to reiterate my statement, you sons of bitches in the ICC, I don’t care. You know why? Early on in my presidency, if you were listening, I said I would stake my name, my honor, and the presidency.”

In an expletive-filled testimony at a hearing in the Philippine Senate in October last year, Duterte was confident enough that he was untouchable that he confessed proudly to running a death squad in Davao City, while he was mayor there, before he became president: “I can make the confession now if you want,” he said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they were not policemen, they were also gangsters.” “I’ll ask a gangster to kill somebody,” he added. “If you will not kill [that person], I will kill you now.”

In retrospect, Duterte’s failure to appreciate the danger posed by his brazen disregard for international law and his mistaken sense of invulnerability were of a piece with a string of mistakes that began in 2021, when Sara Duterte-Carpio, the former president’s daughter, agreed to run on the same ticket as Marcos Jr. for the vice presidency of the country. The political wedding had not been the elder Duterte’s idea; he had little respect for Marcos Jr. and had denounced him as a cocaine user prior to the elections. Duterte was convinced that if Sara were to run for president, she would win, and in late 2021, preelection polls showed her winning 20 percent of the vote, with Marcos Jr. trailing at 15 percent. But his daughter took the advice of her friend Senator Imee Marcos, Marcos Jr.’s sister, who had promoted the projected union with the Marcos dynasty as a “marriage made in heaven” and eventually convinced Sara to take the subordinate role in the partnership.

The former president’s primary concern was that, once in office, his daughter would be outmaneuvered by the Marcos family. And indeed his fears seemed to be confirmed by a series of developments after the elections. First, Marcos Jr. decided to sideline the vice president, giving her a portfolio that handled the country’s education policy (naming her secretary of education) instead of a more substantial role she desired in directing military policy as secretary of defense. Then the House of Representatives—which has been run as a fiefdom by a cousin of Marcos Jr., Speaker Martin Romualdez—denied Sara a “confidential intelligence fund” for 2024 after her office could not account for how it spent an earlier slush fund of 125 million pesos ($2.2 million) in just 11 days.

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The final provocation, as far as Duterte was concerned, was when Marcos Jr. and Romualdez endorsed amending the Constitution, which Duterte interpreted as a way to make Romualdez prime minister and derail Sara’s plan to succeed Marcos Jr. via the presidential election in 2028. The constitutional changes would make the Philippines a parliamentary system, abolishing the presidency or turning it into a ceremonial position, and making the head of the ruling party in the lower house of parliament the head of state. Such a move would favor Romualdez, who is not popular enough to win a presidential election but has the loyalty of the majority of members of the House.

The former president could no longer hold back. In late January of last year, at a rally in Davao City, he called Marcos Jr. a “drug addict,” and denounced his plan to change the Constitution, warning that, like his father, Ferdinand Sr., he could be ousted. Rodrigo Duterte’s younger son, Sebastian, the mayor of Davao, duly called on Marcos Jr. to resign.

A few months later, Sara gave up her position as secretary of education to protest what she saw as a concerted effort to oust her and discredit her family. Sara then escalated the war of words, making public statements about her daydreams of decapitating Marcos Jr. and announcing to the world that she had already hired a killer to take out the president, his wife, and Romualdez if she were harmed. She added for emphasis, “No joke, no joke.” That threat was what Romualdez was waiting for to get his allies in the House of Representatives to successfully impeach Sara last month. Perhaps the most prominent of the articles of impeachment was this threat of assassination, which Sara later claimed was not at all serious and made at the heat of the moment.

Political analysts are divided over the domestic impact of Duterte’s arrest and upcoming trial, where preliminary proceedings took place at the ICC last week. Some are of the opinion that his supporters will eventually become demoralized as the trial drags on and the initial outbursts of anger are likely to subside. For others, Duterte will be turned into a martyr who will return triumphant from his Elba. To them, the sight of Filipinos protesting at the prison complex at Scheveningen in the Hague, where Duterte is being detained and will be held while on trial, and the outpouring of support for the former president on the Internet, are indications of the anger that is just beginning to build up. A prominent Japanese scholar of Philippine politics, Wataru Kusaka, of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, has warned precisely of such a development: “Duterte is ready to be a martyr, a real hero dying for Filipinos, which is likely to boost votes for the Duterte allies [in the May 2025 elections]. Those who are laughing at and beating him must be careful with the scenario. He and his allies intentionally exploit the popular martyrdom narrative.… Accumulated humiliations against underdogs have always sparked backlash. This may not be the end of the story.”

If punishment for massive violations of basic human rights and due process is what unites Duterte’s critics, it is the ardent belief that Duterte saved the country from criminals and the drug cartels that brings together his supporters. Also important is the cleavage between the northern Philippines or “imperial Manila,” the regions the Marcoses and their key allies hail from, and the poorer provinces of the south, where people feel that themselves and their grievances are represented by the Dutertes.

Duterte’s allies have been calling for another “People Power,” the show of force that toppled Marcos Sr. in February 1986. It is likely, though, that the most significant short-term consequence will be Sara’s conviction in the Senate, with her family’s disheartened allies likely to fold before the Marcos juggernaut. Should she be convicted, Sara will be banned from holding public office, meaning she won’t be able to run for the presidency in the coming presidential elections in 2028. (Marcos Jr. has proposed holding a referendum on changing the Constitution around the same time as the midterms.)

International reaction from quarters expected to be pro-Duterte has so far been surprisingly muted. Donald Trump, as of this writing, has not made any public statements about the arrest even though his ire for the ICC is well-known: In February, he issued an executive order prohibiting the ICC from investigating and prosecuting US officials and American allies, notably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. China, meanwhile, has taken the former president’s side, warning the ICC to “avoid” politicizing the issue and refrain from exercising “double standards,” but this carries little weight with the court since, like Washington, it still not a signatory to the Rome Treaty that established the ICC in 2002.

The response from liberal and progressive quarters, on the other hand, has been jubilant, though some have claimed that while the arrest of Duterte is to be welcomed, “he’s low-hanging fruit,” as one American friend put it to me. For the ICC to validate itself as an international court, this friend said to me, it should more seriously pursue the likes of “Netanyahu and his co-genocidal generals, Biden, Blinken, Harris.” The ICC’s record in its nearly quarter century of existence may justify the skepticism: It has convicted only six men of crimes against humanity, all of them from the Global South and none of the stature of Duterte.

Duterte, I don’t think, is low-hanging fruit. If the former Philippine president is tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, this will be a win not only for his thousands of victims and their families but also for global justice and international law, the sort of victory that can only strengthen the ICC and give it the determination and stamina to go after the so-called bigger fish.

Nearly a week after Duterte’s arrest, tensions continue to rattle the Philippines. But with Duterte in prison and Sara in the Hague to provide moral support, there is no figure on the ground around which the so-called DDS (Die-hard Duterte Supporters) can rally around for big mass actions in Metro-Manila. Not surprisingly, energies are being channeled back to campaigning for the midterm elections in May. Everyone knows that the result of the polls will be a gauge of the relative strength of the two dynasties that are at war.

Manila—Here in the Philippines, we’re famous for political soap operas. So it is not surprising that Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte’s threat to have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., assassinated made headlines globally. In a few weeks, Duterte went from imagining herself cutting off Marcos’s head like a samurai executioner to announcing to the world that she had already hired a killer to bump off Marcos, his wife, and one of his cousins “if I get killed.” And she added for emphasis, “No joke. No joke.”
 

Return to Form

To those who have followed the vice president’s career, the last few weeks have witnessed her return to form after a spell of presenting a relatively pacific demeanor in public. The daughter of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte first came to national attention in 2011, when as mayor of the southern city of Davao, she repeatedly punched a city marshal carrying out an eviction order on national television.

I myself have faced Sara Duterte’s ire—not physically, as in the case of the poor Davao marshal, but politically—when I was running against her for the vice presidency in 2022. For calling attention to likely cases of corruption during her tenure as Davao’s mayor, I received what is called a sanbon zuki, or triple punch, in Japanese martial arts: I was declared a “narco-politician,” a label that carried the implicit threat of being extrajudicially executed; declared persona non grata in Davao by the City Council; and rewarded with a charge of cyber-libel, for which I was arrested and am still on trial in that city.

Even as Sara Duterte was threatening Marcos Jr, his wife, Lisa, and his cousin Martin Romualdez (the speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives), her father, the former president, was himself making headlines, suggesting that the country’s military “do its duty to the country” in the face of what he denounced as “fractured governance” under the current regime. What many interpreted as a call for the generals to stage a coup d’état followed on the heels of his defiantly admitting, during expletive-ridden testimony in the Senate, that he ran a death squad targeting criminals while he was mayor of Davao City.

In other words, it’s now total war between the Marcoses and the Dutertes.
 

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End of the Affair

It seems only yesterday that the country thrilled to the political romance between Sara and Bongbong (Marcos Jr.’s nickname), culminating in the triumph of their ticket in the May 2022 national elections. The pair ran on a platform with a single word, “unity,” without taking a stand on any issue. While Sara and Bongbong tried to convey national unity above political differences, jaded observers of the country’s dynastic politics pointed out that unity in this case actually meant an agreement to share power between the most powerful family in the north of the country and the most powerful from the south, with little regard for the national interest. Given this alliance of convenience, the betting among political analysts was not on whether the current split would take place but when.

The political wedding was not the elder Duterte’s idea; he had little respect for Marcos and had denounced him as a cocaine user prior to the elections. Duterte père was convinced that if his daughter were to run for president, she would win, and in late 2021, preelection polls showed her winning 20 percent of the vote, with Marcos Jr. trailing at 15 percent. But his headstrong daughter listened instead to her friend Senator Imee Marcos, Bongbong’s sister, who had described the projected political union with the Marcos dynasty as a “marriage made in heaven” and eventually convinced Sara to take the subordinate role in the partnership.

The former president’s primary concern was that, once in office, his daughter would be outmaneuvered by the Marcoses. After the election, his fears seemed to be confirmed by a series of developments. First, Marcos decided to give the vice president not the post of secretary of defense (that she had publicly hankered for) but the relatively toothless one of secretary of education. Then the House of Representatives—which has been run as a fiefdom by Romualdez—denied Sara a “confidential intelligence fund” for 2024 after her office could not account for how it spent an earlier slush fund of 125 million pesos ($2.2 million) in just 11 days.

The final provocation, as far as the patriarch was concerned, was when the president and Romualdez endorsed amending the Constitution, which Duterte interpreted as a way to make Romualdez prime minister and derail Sara’s plan to succeed Marcos Jr. via the presidential election in 2028. The constitutional changes would make the Philippines a parliamentary system, abolishing the presidency or turning it into a ceremonial position and making the head of the ruling party in the lower house of parliament the head of state. Such a move would favor Romualdez, who does not have enough popularity to win a presidential election but has the loyalty of the majority of members of the House.

At that point, the former president could no longer hold back. In late January of this year, at a rally in Davao City, he called Marcos a bangag, a slang word for “drug user,” and denounced his plan to change the Constitution, warning that, like his father, Ferdinand Sr., he could be ousted if he pushed through with it. Rodrigo Duterte’s younger son, Sebastian, the mayor of Davao, duly called on Marcos Jr. to resign.

Instead, it was Sara who gave up her position as secretary of education a few months later to protest what she saw as a concerted effort to oust her as vice president and discredit her family.
 

Deus Ex Machina

As of a few weeks ago,it seemed that the Marcoses held the winning cards. Then a deus ex machina materialized in the form of the results of the US elections: Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. This deprived Marcos Jr. of the chosen successor to his strongest ally, Joe Biden.

Since Marcos Jr. came to power in 2022, Biden has embraced him fully and rehabilitated him and the Marcos family on the global stage, despite the fact that his late father’s name is still a synonym for unbridled corruption and his mother, Imelda, is mostly remembered as the last word in feudal extravagance owing to her fabled 3,000 pairs of shoes.

In advance of Marcos Jr.’s first visit to the United States as president in 2022, Biden assured him that a standing order calling for his arrest for contempt of court should he step on US soil would not be enforced. That contempt order had been issued by a Hawaii district court in 1995 owing to Bongbong’s refusal to pay $2 billion worth of civil damages awarded to victims whose human rights had been violated by his father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

The quid pro quo came when Marcos granted Washington four more bases—in addition to the five it already had in the Philippines—and the virtual outsourcing of the country’s defense policy to the United States in the latter’s effort to make the Philippines a forward base for the containment of China.

Kamala Harris became especially close to Marcos when, at Biden’s bidding, she visited Palawan, the “front line” of the Philippines’ territorial conflict with China, in November 2022, after which she declared that an “armed attack on the Philippines Armed Forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the South China Sea would invoke US mutual defense commitments.”

What is important in this context is that a Harris succession was Bongbong’s insurance policy, since the Armed Forces of the Philippines—a colonial creation of the US that has been armed and supervised by the Pentagon since its inception—has never gone against Washington’s preference as to who wields power in the country.

With Trump’s election, all bets are off. While Trump is likely to escalate the trade and technology war he initiated against China during his first term, his proto-isolationist goal of building an economic and security wall around Fortress America might make him less inclined to continue the dangerously aggressive military containment of China that Biden began—in which game the Philippines is a critical pawn.

Pulling back from Biden’s open-ended global engagements, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila not to count on Biden’s “ironclad” guarantee of an automatic US military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea (like the sinking of a Philippine vessel). Clarita Carlos, Bongbong’s former national security adviser, has warned her ex-boss on television that Trump has said he would not “waste one American life for what he called ‘rocks’ in the South China Sea.”

Trump takes everything personally, and he is unlikely to preserve the close friendship that Marcos Jr. had with his predecessor and Harris. On the other hand, although as a rough-edged populist Trump was often compared to Rodrigo Duterte—whose presidency lasted the whole of Trump’s first term—the US president never developed more than a friendly relationship with his Philippine counterpart.

But the uncertainty of the Washington transition may provide the Dutertes with a great opportunity to fish in troubled waters. The prospect of a major change in the relationship between Washington and Manila might, in fact, have been a factor in Duterte’s recently thinly veiled appeal for a coup against Marcos.

The Dutertes continue to have a sizable base of popular support. Though recent surveys register a decline in Sara’s trust and satisfaction ratings, they also show her approval ratings to be virtually tied with Bongbong’s. Moreover, Marcos Jr.’s poll performance in his two and half years of office has been far below that of the elder Duterte, who left office with a 75 percent approval rating despite blunders in his administration’s response to the Covid 19 pandemic and his own grisly war on drugs, whose excesses cost as many as 27,000 lives and made him the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

To counter the presidential propaganda machine machine that now regularly pumps out news about Sara being corrupt, unstable, and violent, the Dutertes have highlighted the administration’s failure to deal with inflation, Marcos Jr.’s alleged cocaine addiction, and his image as a “weak president” manipulated by his wife, Lisa, and his cousin House Speaker Romualdez. Having served along with Marcos Jr. in the House of Representatives in 2009, I can attest that criticisms of Bongbong as an “airhead” with little interest or capacity for effective governance have some basis in fact. Bongbong lacks the elder Duterte’s ability to combine Machiavellian maneuvering with a populist appeal.
 

From Entertaining Soap Opera to Violent Reality?

As the country’s dynastic war intensifies, partisans of both sides are busy rallying people to take sides in the conflict. Particularly prominent has been a former senator, Antonio Trillanes III, who has urged the liberal opposition and the left to drop their long-standing distrust of the Marcos family and come together in a united front to prevent the Dutertes from returning to power, invoking the principle of uniting against the lesser evil. Indeed, some sectors have already withheld or reduced their fire on the Marcoses and focused it on the Dutertes.

Others have cautioned against such an approach. To Herbert Docena, a respected independent voice on the left, this strategy is a mistake—one that will simply allow competing elites to use progressive forces for their own ends but eventually leave them high and dry. In a recent post on Facebook that calls attention to past examples of alliances with rival dynasties that merely served to marginalize and discredit progressives, Docena warned:

There are those, neither pro-Marcos nor pro-Duterte, who are goading us to effectively side with the Marcoses first now and help them as they crucify the Dutertes, thereby attempting to mobilize the working class in favor of one dynasty against another, as if nothing was learned from the disastrous tactic of siding with the Aquinos against the Marcoses in 1986, with the Arroyos against the Estradas in 2001, with the Aquinos against the Villaroyos in 2010, or with the Dutertes against the Roxas-Aquinos in 2016. There is a way to escape this vicious cycle: support neither the Marcoses nor the Dutertes and concentrate on building up the autonomous power of the working class and other oppressed groups so we will never again become cannon fodder in the bloody, internecine games of our country’s corrupt dynasties.

It remains to be seen if a critical mass of citizens will eventually heed such calls for a “plague on both your houses” stance. In the meantime, most Filipinos appear to have fallen into their usual roles as spectators or bettors in a high-stakes ruling-class conflict that increasingly has the potential to turn from soap opera into violent reality.

“Amarriage made in heaven,” gushed Senator Imee Marcos before her brother, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., sealed a deal with Sara Duterte, daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, to run as a duo in the lead-up to the 2022 national elections. Marcos Jr. would be president, Sara Duterte his vice president. The most influential dynasty of the northern Philippines had joined forces with the most powerful one from the south.

That marriage is now over, with Vice President Duterte’s resignation from her cabinet position as secretary of education on June 19.

Marcos Jr.’s father ruled the Philippines for over two decades, first as elected president, then as dictator. In 1986, a popular insurrection known as the EDSA Uprising ousted the elder Marcos, but his family maintained a large following in the northern Ilocos region on Luzon, the country’s largest island. Rodrigo Duterte was the first president from Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island, and during his term in office, from 2016 to 2022, Sara Duterte essentially inherited the mayorship of the family’s bailiwick, the city of Davao. The two families were never particularly close, though Rodrigo Duterte had won some gratitude from the Marcoses for allowing Marcos Sr. to be buried in the national heroes’ cemetery, despite strong opposition to it.

Working together, Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte were so confident of victory that they ran on a single-word platform: “Unity.” Their ticket announced no public policy positions, and they boycotted the presidential and vice presidential debates that would have forced them to articulate a political program. It worked; the “UniTeam” swept the elections.

Students of Philippine politics know that dynastic alliances are strictly for convenience. So it was not a surprise when the union eventually came apart. Still, the unraveling of their political marriage has been notable for three reasons. First, the drama, which has seen the two sides lob sensational accusations at each other. Second, the stakes: The vice president’s father could actually end up at The Hague. And third, the breakup’s entanglement with the struggle for hegemony between China and the United States.

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For all its potentially deadly consequences, the fight for power in the Philippines has not been without its moments of comic opera. During a carefully scripted television interview in April, the first lady, Liza Marcos, who is widely assumed to be the behind-the-scenes decision-maker, reached back to 1970s Filipino slang for the term “bad shot”—meaning an unwelcome individual—to describe the vice president. This was most likely a response to Rodrigo Duterte calling her husband a “crybaby” for being America’s protégé during Marcos Jr.’s trip to Washington for an anti-China photo op with US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. At a meeting with the press afterward, a reporter asked Marcos Jr. 
about Duterte’s needling. Instead of ignoring the question, Marcos Jr. responded by taking Duterte’s barb seriously, pleading, “Did you see me cry?”

Toward Rupture

The political wedding was not the elder Duterte’s idea. (He’d called Marcos Jr. a cocaine user, among other things.) The Duterte patriarch was convinced that if his daughter were to run for president, she would win, and in late 2021, preelection polls showed Sara winning 20 percent of the vote, with Marcos Jr. trailing at 15 percent.

Duterte Sr.’s primary concern was that, once in office, his daughter would be outmaneuvered by Marcos Jr. After the election, his fears were confirmed by a series of developments. First, Marcos decided to give the vice president the secretary of education post rather than the national defense one she had publicly hankered for. Then the House of Representatives—which has been run as a fiefdom by Speaker Martin Romualdez, Marcos Jr.’s cousin—denied her a “confidential intelligence fund” for 2024 after her office could not account for how it spent an earlier slush fund of 125 million pesos ($2.2 million) in just 11 days.

The nail in the coffin of the alliance, as far as Rodrigo Duterte was concerned, was when the president and Romualdez endorsed amending the 1987 Constitution, which Duterte interpreted as a way to make Romualdez prime minister and derail Sara’s plan to succeed Marcos Jr. via the presidential election in 2028. The constitutional changes would make the Philippines a parliamentary system, abolishing the presidency or turning it into a ceremonial position and making the head of the ruling party in the lower house of parliament the head of state. Such a move would favor Romualdez, who does not have the popularity to win a presidential election but has the loyalty of the majority of members of the House.

At that point, the former president could no longer hold back. In late January, at a rally in Davao City, he called Marcos a bangag, a slang word for “drug user,” and denounced his plan to change the Constitution, warning that, like his father, he could be ousted if he pushed through with it. This was seen as a veiled appeal for a coup against the president. Rodrigo Duterte’s younger son, Sebastian, the mayor of Davao, duly called on Marcos Jr. to resign.

The Palace Hits Back

The Dutertes’ tantrums did not go unanswered at Malacañang, the presidential palace. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been trying to get the government to cooperate with its investigation of Rodrigo Duterte for thousands of suspected extrajudicial executions that took place during the so-called war on drugs under his regime. Like its predecessor, the current administration initially declined. But in November of last year, the head of the House of Representatives’ Human Rights Committee filed a resolution urging the administration to work with the ICC in its investigation of Duterte and his accomplices—a move that could not have advanced without the blessings of House Speaker Romualdez.

In recent weeks, former Duterte officials, such as his ex-spokesman Harry Roque, have denounced the administration for allegedly allowing ICC investigators to enter the country. Antonio Trillanes, who says he is acting as a go-between for the administration and the ICC, claimed recently that an arrest warrant could be issued for Duterte as early as the middle of this year.

Not surprisingly, panic has gripped the Duterte camp, with Roque saying that making Duterte accountable to the ICC is “not as simple as putting him in a private plane and bringing him to The Hague.” He added, “Legally, the court has no jurisdiction, and we will exhaust all legal remedies, including of course the fact that it is mandatory to face Philippine courts first before they can actually bring an accused to the ICC.” (Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC in March 2019, but his administration is liable for any crimes committed before 
that date.)

The prospect of an ICC arrest hanging over Duterte is emerging as part of the administration’s strategy of defanging the former president and his family. The other part involves highlighting allegations that Duterte betrayed the country by making a “gentleman’s agreement” with President Xi Jinping of China to refrain from asserting Philippine sovereignty over disputed territory in the South China Sea. The Duterte camp might have brought this latest controversy on themselves, since it was Roque—known for his inability to control his speech—who disclosed that Duterte had made a verbal agreement with Xi not to send construction materials to an old naval vessel that the Philippines had deliberately grounded years ago on a strategic coral reef, Ayungin Shoal, to serve as a symbol of its sovereignty over the area. With Chinese Coast Guard ships now regularly intimidating and attacking Filipino fishermen and supply missions to Philippine military detachments in the distant outposts, the revelation was explosive. As if on cue, Marcos Jr. said he was “horrified” by the news, while Duterte scrambled for an explanation for his apparent subservience to the Chinese leader.

To some observers, Malacañang is toying with the Dutertes the way a cat toys with a mouse before pouncing for the kill. The president denies that he wants to extradite Duterte to The Hague, but his allies’ actions belie this. Duterte left office with a 75 percent approval rating, and publicly flogging him for caving to the Chinese leader is one way the administration can erode his popularity and prepare the ground for his extradition should that become necessary.

The Marcos-Duterte power play has also served to distract from the government’s inability to address the country’s economic problems. The inflation rate in March was 3.7 percent, the agriculture sector is dying, and manufacturing has nearly vanished after 40 years of neoliberal policies, leaving the economy largely dependent on the $37.2 billion in remittances that overseas workers send home each year.

The Cost of Containment

The latest political games also distract from the steps Washington has taken to strengthen its military presence in the Philippines. In early 2023, the US acquired four more bases on the archipelago, adding to the five it had already received from the administration of Benigno Aquino III over a decade ago. After enduring six years of defiant rhetoric from Duterte, Washington was happy to back Marcos Jr.—notwithstanding the fact that the US helped oust his father in 1986, when it shipped the dictator from Manila to Honolulu.

Yet there is more than meets the eye in Marcos Jr.’s 180-degree turn from his predecessor’s pro-China stance. Marcos Jr. may not have a clear idea of his country’s national interest, but he likely knows where his family’s interests lie. The Marcoses have stashed an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion of stolen wealth abroad—most of it in countries subject to Washington’s financial reach, places like Italy, Austria, Australia, the Antilles, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, and even the US itself. Marcos Jr. must be all too aware that the United States froze $58 billion worth of assets belonging to Vladimir Putin’s allies in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Marcos Jr. were to fail to follow Washington’s lead on China, the US could ensure that the same thing happens to his own family’s wealth.

Duterte’s allies have tried to stir up popular feelings against Marcos’s obedience to the US, decrying his policies as making the country a sitting duck in the event of a hot war between the US and China. They are not wrong, since US bases in the Philippines would not be used to defend Philippine territorial interests in the South China Sea or to assist Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. Washington’s real intent is to build up the Philippines as a launching pad for a potential attack on the Chinese mainland.

The problem faced by anyone opposed to the US buildup, whether they are opportunistic Duterte allies or long-standing critics on the left like myself, is that China’s unilateral claiming of over 90 percent of the South China Sea (called the West Philippine Sea in Manila) and its high-pressure water-hosing of Philippine fishing boats and Coast Guard vessels have made Beijing the bully and the US a savior to many Filipinos. In a recent survey of attitudes in Southeast Asia toward China and the US, over 83 percent of respondents in the Philippines favored the US over China, with the top concern for over 90 percent of them being Beijing’s behavior in the South China Sea.

Washington took advantage of the recent water-hosing incidents and summoned Marcos Jr., along with Japan’s Kishida, to a veritable council of war on April 11, at which Biden extended what he said was an “ironclad” commitment to retaliate for intimidation of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. If Washington ever moves to classify water-hosing incidents as an attack, such an incident could trigger a response under the Cold War–era US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty.

But water-hosing is not the only possible trigger of conflict between these nuclear superpowers. The South China Sea is filled with rival warships performing naval “exercises”; among the latest visitors are vessels from France and Germany, US allies that have been dragooned far from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. US and Chinese warships have been known to play games of chicken—heading at each other and then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet could result in a collision. Fears that the South China Sea will be the next site of armed conflict are reasonable.

A Solution Ignored

Demilitarization of the South China Sea is obviously the most desirable solution—one which I promoted while serving in the House of Representatives of the Philippines a decade ago. In the spirit of advancing this, I published a piece in The New York Times in 2016 outlining confidence-building measures between members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China, and the US. This proposal is even more urgent now, so it is worth laying out here:

First, since it is the fear of military encirclement by Washington that is driving China’s behavior, the Philippines and China should engage in bilateral talks to reduce tensions between our countries. The aim of these talks should be military de-escalation, not to settle the territorial question. One possible proposal could be a freeze in China’s base-building activities in exchange for a freeze in the implementation of E.D.C.A. [the US-Philippine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement].

Second, with the Philippine-
China bilateral talks, ASEAN and China can start the long-postponed multilateral talks to govern the maritime behavior of all parties with claims to the South China Sea.

Third, should these two measures succeed, ASEAN and China should negotiate the demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea, with the goal of signing a multilateral treaty that would be binding on all parties, including third parties like the U.S. Such an agreement would require the Philippines to abandon the E.D.C.A. and China to dismantle military structures in the South China Sea.

These measures, if successful, would pave the way for the fourth step: Talks aimed at a final settlement of the territorial issue.

All of this fell on deaf ears in the Philippines, and neither Washington nor Beijing would have any of it either. Eight years later, the situation is even more tense. In the absence of any rules of conflict resolution, the only thing preventing conflict is the balance of power. But balance-of-power regimes are prone to breakdown, often with catastrophic results—as was the case in 1914, when the collapse of the European balance of power led to World War I. With Washington aggressively marshaling Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, the five carrier task forces of the US Navy, NATO, and the newly created AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance into a confrontational stance against China, the chances of a rupture in the East Asian balance of power are becoming more and more likely—perhaps just a collision or a water-hosing incident away.

A Losing Hand?

With the US agenda in the region increasingly reliant on Marcos Jr., Washington has become the president’s insurance policy. Rodrigo Duterte has admitted to talking to some retired Philippine generals, but he denies he was inciting them to a coup. But if he was, in fact, sounding them out for such a move, he was probably talking to the wrong people. The Philippine Armed Forces, a US colonial creation, are unlikely to move against Marcos without the Biden administration’s permission, and as far as Washington is concerned, Marcos Jr. is currently playing his assigned role perfectly.

Duterte knows he is playing a losing hand. Being a seasoned politician, expert in the ways of power, he understands that should the Marcoses and the US decide his presence has become a liability to Washington’s grand design, he could well find himself on a plane to The Hague. If the Americans could pluck a sitting head of state like Marcos Sr. in 1986 and ferry him against his will to Honolulu, how much easier would it be to repeat the exercise on an ex-president with no formal powers? Toward the end of his six-year term, Duterte knew that the only chance he stood of being safeguarded from the ICC was if his daughter succeeded him. Her decision not to run for president—whatever her reasons at the time—is now turning out to have been the dynasty’s biggest mistake. The patriarch’s choices are fast narrowing to two: go gently into that good night of political marginalization, or spend the rest of his life in a cell at The Hague.

Duterte’s likely inclination is to fight, and his daughter’s resignation from Marcos Jr.’s cabinet clears the deck for an all-out dynastic war that could have international consequences. Unfortunately, it is the Filipino people who will be the biggest victims of the latest episode of this Pacific Game of Thrones.

The Indian government has an elephant’s memory and a newt’s skin. Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize–winning author, has once again been charged with sedition in a revival of a 2010 case against her and former professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain. She joins nearly 50 people associated with the independent journalism site Newsclick who have been subject to the Indian government’s crackdown on freedom of speech. Whether because of Roy’s long-standing opposition to successive administrations’ treatment of the poor, or for Newsclick’s recent, internationally circulated coverage of farmers’ protests, the Indian government is acutely sensitive to changes in its operating environment. Words cut Prime Minister Narendra Modi deep, and now the administration is fighting back. These are the worst attacks on India’s fourth estate since Indira Gandhi’s 1975–77 Emergency Period—and they have been made possible by The New York Times.

The Indian government has justified its NewsClick crackdown on the grounds that “funds have been fraudulently infused by one Neville Roy Singham, active member of propaganda department of Communist Party of China.” And how did the government come to learn of these supposed connections? Through an August New York Times article titled “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.”

Singham lives in China, but he’s neither a party member nor an employee of the Chinese government. The Times’ evidence that he might be a puppet of the Chinese government included his being retweeted by Chinese state media and sitting near a Communist Party official while “jotting in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle.” Also, his home is apparently equipped with an “always follow the party” banner and a Xi Jinping plate. It’s a classic case of innuendo posing as journalism.

Times reporters were told categorically that the charitable organization funding Newsclick had never received funding from “from any foreign individual, organisation, political party, or government (or from any of their members or representatives.” Roy can’t be a member of the Chinese Communist Party because he’s not Chinese. The paper didn’t include these facts. Absent any evidence to the contrary, the Times simply ignored them. The reporting contained no specific charges. The paper merely encouraged readers to look at some factoids—and then squint to conjure their own fantasies of malfeasance. The Indian government obliged.

Journalism in India has never been an occupation for the faint-hearted. British colonial-era laws give the government sweeping powers over freedom of speech. The Modi administration has, however, been more brazen in the targeting of its perceived enemies. Under a 2019 amendment to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Indian government can designate individuals as terrorists, without evidence. Delhi police cited this law in its charges against Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, Newsclick’s founding editor in chief and head of human resources, respectively. Purkayastha has been a stalwart of the Indian left, and is particularly concerned with democratizing science; he founded the Free Software Movement of India in 2010.

Roy in turn is accused of “provoking enmity between groups,” “imputations prejudicial to national integration,” and “public mischief.” All this for observing in a 2010 seminar that the Indian government itself didn’t think that the disputed territory of Kashmir was “an integral part of India.” Roy and Newsclick are far from alone. In February this year, the offices of the BBC in Delhi and Mumbai were raided, phones and computers confiscated, and journalists encouraged to complete a survey following the release of a BBC documentary critical of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Before them, several other Indian journalists were charged and imprisoned for their reporting.

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May 2026 Issue

Modi’s anxieties mirror those of his administration: neuroses about the South Asian diaspora, inferiority to China, domestic dissent, and the possibilities of criticism on the international stage. Newsclick led the reporting about the single biggest embarrassment that Modi has faced: the world’s largest protest over laws to deregulate agriculture. The Times piece was catnip to the BJP mandarins.

Under other circumstances, the Times might reasonably claim not to have been able to anticipate the Indian government’s weaponizing of its reporting against Indian journalists. But the Times was told what the consequences of their reporting would be for the Indian press in no uncertain terms by one of Newsclick’s contributors, Kavita Krishnan, during the course of their research. (Yes, she’s also a member of the Indian Communist Party—a completely legal organization.)

We have no quarrel with good journalism. Philanthropy itself is profoundly antidemocratic and deserves the full scrutiny of the fourth estate. The Gates Foundation, for instance, funded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in a billion-dollar effort to combat hunger in 13 countries. Eight years later, hunger was up by 30 percent and AGRA has changed its name, so that it is no longer an acronym; it now stands for nothing at all. This is a topic that richly deserves Times coverage, but it chooses to focus instead on a nonexistent Chinese-funded conspiracy.

We offer the Gates Foundation example not because we’re practicing a generalized whataboutism but because we struggle for good reasons why the Times might publish a piece that is based on such flimsy material knowing that fellow journalists would suffer. Perhaps it is to show the right that it is being “evenhanded” and is capable of also roasting the left as it skewers Donald Trump and his allies. But this false equivalence vastly underestimates the threat from the right to American liberal democracy.

To us, it makes more sense to understand the Times as supine. It has followed the contours of liberal dominion, reporting on a millionaire but ignoring a billionaire, even if that reporting comes at the cost of those risking their lives to speak truth. If India is a thin-skinned behemoth, perhaps the Times is a wrasse, picking clean the teeth of sharks, hoping that its service to the powerful will save it from becoming a meal itself.

hen the news broke in early February that Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had struck a deal allowing the United States to dramatically expand its military presence on the archipelago, many people reacted with surprise. After all, the US military’s relationship with the Philippines is a politically sensitive subject, and Marcos had made noises about staying out of the rapidly escalating conflict between the US and China that is fueling Washington’s buildup in the region. The announcement of the deal—in which the United States will be allowed to occupy four military bases in addition to the five it already operates—also came just a month after what was touted in the Philippines as a triumphant visit by Marcos to Beijing, where he reportedly secured $22.8 billion in investment pledges and exchanged warm words with President Xi Jinping.1

But those who have followed the Marcos family’s relationship with the United States—or, indeed, the long saga of American intervention in the Philippines—were hardly surprised. The deal was less a bold break with the status quo than a reminder of a colonial relationship—first explicit, and then implicit—that has existed now for over a century.2

When the US annexed the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, it was mainly because of the opportunity provided for projecting American naval power onto the vast Asian land mass. The military bases Washington established there became the most visible evidence of a continued US presence after the Philippines became nominally independent in 1946, and their unwelcome existence spawned a nationalist movement seeking US withdrawal from the islands, which eventually came about in the early 1990s. Ever since then, the US has been finding new ways to maintain its influence, and with this deal it is announcing that it is back—with a vengeance. It all amounts to nothing less than the American repossession of the Philippines, nearly 125 years after the US first took control of the islands.3

The deal also heralds the return of another long-running thread in Philippine history: the close and complex ties between the US state and the Marcos family.4

For reasons personal, political, and financial, Marcos has a strong stake in not alienating Washington—even if that means giving the Pentagon an even greater ability to run the show in his country.5

t is just the Philippines’ bad luck that Marcos is president at a time when Washington is intent on maximizing the country’s strategic value.6

If geography is indeed destiny, the Philippines is Exhibit A. Perhaps no one captured its enduring geopolitical value better than Gen. Arthur MacArthur (father of the more famous Douglas), who led the American expedition that subjugated the country in 1899. The Philippines, the elder MacArthur wrote,7

is the finest group of islands in the world. Its strategic location is unexcelled by any other position in the globe. The China Sea, which separates it by something like 750 miles from the continent, is nothing more nor less than a safety moat. It lies on the flank of what might be called several thousand miles of coastline; it is the center of that position. It is therefore relatively better placed than Japan, which is on a flank, and therefore from the other extremity; likewise India, on another flank. It affords a means of protecting American interests which with the very least output of physical power has the effect of a commanding position in itself to retard hostile action.8

These words have a very contemporary ring as the Philippines once again becomes a key pawn in Washington’s increasingly militarized strategy to contain China.9

Both Manila and Washington maintain the fiction that the recently announced deal does not create US bases but rather provides Washington with “access to Philippine bases.” (The five bases that the US already controls are also administered under this technicality.) This charade is necessary because Article XVIII, Section 25, of the Philippine Constitution, which was adopted in 1987 following the ouster of the elder Marcos, states that “foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate.” Moreover, cloaking the bases in Philippine clothing means the US does not have to pay for them, bringing the country back to the early 1970s, when Washington maintained the sprawling Clark Air Force Base and the strategically located Subic Bay Naval Base, along with a number of smaller military facilities, without compensating the Philippines.10

he establishment of several new foreign bases has puzzled many who still have vivid images of the hasty US exit from the massive Subic Bay and Clark bases in 1991 and ‘92. While that departure—which supposedly marked the end of the American military presence in the region—has been largely attributed to the Philippine Senate’s rejection of the basing agreement negotiated between Washington and the administration of President Corazon Aquino, three other factors played a role. One was the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in 1991, which Washington saw as severely disrupting operations at Subic Bay and Clark—both of which were located quite close to the volcano. Another was the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year, which led to the removal of the Soviet Pacific fleet as a major competitor to American naval power in the area. A third was the de facto alliance between China and Washington, a key element of which was Deng Xiaoping’s policy of adopting a low military profile and focusing on economic development with the help of American capital. These considerations all contributed to Washington’s decision to put a cap on the rent it was willing to pay to retain the bases, leading many Philippine senators to reject the deal out of national pride.11

It was during this same period—the early 1990s, which were marked by Washington’s complacency toward the Philippines—that China began to make its moves in the South China Sea. The most significant step was the creeping occupation of Mischief Reef, which lay within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines, under the pretext of building “wind shelters” for Chinese fishermen. It was most likely the increased Chinese activity in the area, along with the sharpening of the China-Taiwan conflict in 1995 and ‘96, that motivated the US to reestablish an active military presence in the Philippines.12

In 1998, the US and the Philippines signed a new Visiting Forces Agreement, which provided for the periodic deployment of thousands of US troops to participate in military exercises with their Filipino counterparts. This was followed by what eventually became a permanent deployment of US Special Forces in the southern Philippine island of Basilan as part of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Like foreign bases, foreign troops were constitutionally banned from being permanently stationed in the Philippines; so to get around the ban, the Special Forces and other US troops were portrayed as being in the country on a “rotational basis” in order to engage in exercises with Filipino troops and provide them with “technical advice,” and without the authority to use firearms except in self-defense.13

China’s territorial incursions became bolder and more frequent in the 2000s, and in 2009 it submitted its controversial Nine-Dash-Line map to the United Nations. The map claims as Chinese territory some 90 percent of the South China Sea, including significant sections of the EEZs of five Southeast Asian states: Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Things came to a head during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III, who served from 2010 to 2016. Chinese Coast Guard vessels began aggressively driving off Filipino fishermen from their traditional fishing grounds. One of the richest of these was Scarborough Shoal, some 138 miles from the Philippines—in other words, firmly within the country’s 200-mile EEZ. After a two-month-long confrontation between Chinese and Philippine vessels in 2012, the Chinese ended up seizing the shoal.14

Aquino’s response was twofold. The first was to elevate the issue to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, which eventually declared China’s claims invalid. Not surprisingly, China did not recognize the court’s ruling. The Aquino administration’s more consequential move was to enter into the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the Obama administration. The agreement—using the now-standard workarounds to evade the prohibition on foreign bases—places no limits on the number of bases, weaponry, or troops that the US can have in the country, although it explicitly bans bringing in nuclear weapons. Presented as an executive agreement and not as a treaty, the deal drew anger from Philippine nationalists, who demanded Senate concurrence. The Supreme Court sided with the government, however, ruling that the deal was not a treaty and thus did not need Senate approval.15

President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016 was heralded as bringing about a major shift in relations between the US and the Philippines. Duterte moved closer to China, downplaying the significance of the ruling in the Hague and refusing to take up the cudgels for Filipino fishermen chased off their traditional fishing grounds by Chinese Coast Guard vessels. He also successfully promoted a populist anti-American image by harnessing the undercurrent of resentment at colonial subjugation that has always coexisted with admiration for the United States in the Filipino psyche.16

For all his anti-American posturing, though, Duterte was more bark than bite. He did not interfere with the close relationship between the US and Philippine militaries, which came into play when US Special Forces assisted Philippine troops in the bloody retaking of the southern city of Marawi from Muslim fundamentalists in 2017. Nor did he ever follow through on his 2020 vow to abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement. Indeed, by the end of his term Duterte was extolling the VFA; voicing approval of the AUKUS security pact joining Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US; reestablishing the Philippines-US Bilateral Strategic Dialogue; and launching expanded joint military exercises with the United States. While not repudiating his close relationship with China, Duterte ended his presidency in June 2022 on a cordial note with Washington that contrasted sharply with the bitter row with Barack Obama that launched his term.17

hief among the issues fueling the American buildup in the Philippines is the unresolved status of Taiwan, at the northern edge of the South China Sea.18

While the United States recognized Beijing as the sole government of China in 1979, it nevertheless committed itself to continue arms sales to Taiwan—and left deliberately (or, as some put it, “strategically”) ambiguous what the US would do if China were to forcibly assert its sovereignty over the island.19

While Beijing considers its sovereignty over Taiwan nonnegotiable, its strategy has been to promote cross-straits economic integration as the main mechanism that would eventually lead to reunification. In Taiwan, however, being tough on Beijing plays well with voters, and nothing plays better than the threat to declare formal independence or assume the trappings of a sovereign power. Whenever Taiwanese leaders display such behavior, Beijing has felt compelled to put them in their place. In certain circumstances, Beijing has gone beyond words and resorted to sending missiles to the waters around Taiwan. Taiwan President Lee Teng Hui’s visit to the United States in 1995 was one such occasion, as was, more recently, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. While both events created diplomatic crises, the first had momentous strategic consequences.20

In 1995, China launched missile drills to teach Taiwan a lesson following Lee’s US visit. It did so again in 1996 after Taiwan held its first democratic presidential election. The Clinton administration responded by sending two supercarriers, the USS Independence and the USS Nimitz, to the Taiwan Straits in March 1996. This was the biggest display of US power in the region since the Vietnam War—and it was intended to underline Washington’s determination to defend Taiwan by force. Washington’s intervention was cold water splashed on Beijing’s face, for it revealed just how vulnerable the coastal region of eastern and southeastern China, the industrial heart of the country, was to US naval firepower.21

It was this realization that prompted the change in China’s strategy that has been unfolding over the past two decades. As analyst Gregory Poling notes, “One can draw a straight line from the [People’s Liberation Army Navy’s] humiliation in 1996 to its near-peer status with the US Navy today.”22

Overall, China’s strategic posture remains defensive, but in the East and South China Seas, the country began a “tactical offensive” aimed at enlarging its defense perimeter against US naval and air power. Defense analyst Samir Tata writes:23

As a land power, the Middle Kingdom does not have to worry about the unlikely possibility of a conventional American assault on the mainland via amphibious landing by sea, parachuting troops by air, or an expeditionary force marching through a land invasion route. What it is vulnerable to is US control of the seas outside China’s 12-nautical-mile maritime boundaries. From such an over-the-horizon maritime vantage point, the US navy has the capability to cripple Chinese infrastructure along the eastern seaboard by long-range shelling, missiles, and unmanned aerial bombing.24

In response to this dilemma, China has evolved a strategy of “forward edge” defense consisting of expanding the country’s maritime defense perimeter and fortifying islands—and other formations in the South China Sea that it now occupies or has seized from the Philippines—with anti-aircraft and anti-ship missile systems (A2/AD, or “anti-access/area denial” in military parlance) designed to shoot down hostile incoming missiles and aircraft in the few seconds before they hit the mainland. Though A2/AD is defensive in its strategic intent, what has enraged China’s neighbors is the unilateral way that Beijing has gone about implementing it, with little consultation and in clear violation of such landmark agreements as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.25

eijing’s unilateral acts in the South China Sea have provided ammunition for the US containment strategy toward the country, which has been operative since the Obama years. But Washington’s rhetoric is now eliciting worries among some governments in ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, that they are being drawn into a regional confrontation that is not in their interests. Particularly alarming has been the recent leaked memo from Gen. Mike Minihan, who leads the US Air Mobility Command, declaring, “My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025.” Minihan, it bears noting, is not the first member of the US command to predict conflict with China in the near future. Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said in October 2022 that the United States should prepare to fight China either sometime that year or in 2023. Even earlier, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson, said that the Chinese threat to Taiwan would “manifest” in the next six years, by 2027.26

Even without such statements, the level of hostile activity from all sides in the South China Sea dispute has been alarming. During a visit to Vietnam that I made as a Philippine congressman in 2014, top Vietnamese officials expressed concern that, owing to the lack of agreed rules of engagement, a collision by American and Chinese warships “playing chicken”—according to them, a common occurrence—could immediately escalate to a more intense level of conflict.27

Like the Philippines, Vietnam has criticized Beijing’s moves, and its vessels have traded water-cannon fire with Chinese Coast Guard ships in the South China Sea. The aggressive posture of the Biden administration, however, has led Hanoi to assume a posture of neutrality in any brewing superpower confrontation. In a recent visit to Beijing, the secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that his government would continue to hew to its “Four Nos” approach to foreign policy in the region: that is, that Vietnam would not join military alliances; would not side with one country against another; would not give other countries permission to set up military bases or use its territory to carry out military activities against other countries; and would not use force—or threaten to use force—in international relations.28

ut the Philippines is not Vietnam, and Marcos has no record of discerning the national interest in his years as a politician, much less advocating or standing up for it. On that front he falls short even of Duterte, who claimed he became a nationalist while in college in the 1960s.29

What Marcos is very conscious of, though, is how high the stakes are for himself and his family should he make the wrong decision in the intensifying conflict between Washington and Beijing.30

Members of the Marcos dynasty are said to have been apprehensive about visiting the United States ever since they last left it in the early 1990s, after coming there as exiles following the uprising that ousted Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986. The reason is a standing $353 million contempt order against the younger Marcos related to a US court judgment awarding financial compensation from the Marcos estate to victims of human rights violations under the dictatorship. Marcos has avoided complying with the contempt order, which was issued by the US district court in Hawaii in 2011. A new judge extended the order to January 25, 2031, which would render Marcos vulnerable to arrest anytime he visits the United States during his term, which ends in 2028.31

Marcos also cannot be unaware of how the US, with its global clout, has often been able to freeze the assets of people linked to regimes it considers undesirable, the most recent example being the holdings of Russian oligarchs connected to President Vladimir Putin in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Marcos family has $5 billion to $10 billion in landholdings and other assets distributed throughout the world, in places such as California, Washington, New York, Rome, Vienna, Australia, the Antilles, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Singapore. Being on the wrong side of the United States, especially in a dispute as central as the US-China conflict, could have devastating financial consequences for the Marcos family.32

With this veritable sword of Damocles hanging over him, Marcos is not someone who would dare cross Washington. Indeed, when it comes to negotiating an independent path between two superpowers, he is the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time—which is another way of saying that from Washington’s point of view, he’s the right person at the right place at the right time. Nearly 125 years after Adm. George Dewey made his grand entrance into Manila Bay, unleashing a chain of events that ended with the colonization of the country, the Philippines—thanks in no small measure to Marcos—has returned to its unenviable status as a strategic possession of the United States.33

hat went through my mind was this was my last hour on earth,” Leila de Lima told me as she recounted her terrifying experience of being taken hostage by a desperate fellow detainee at the Philippine National Police’s Custodial Center in the heart of Metro Manila. Blindfolded and tied hand and foot to a chair, she was told by her captor that if the vehicle he had demanded did not arrive by his self-imposed deadline of 7:30 am, she should prepare herself to exit this existence with him, pressing his long knife to her breast to make the point.

“The mistake he made was to ask for water,” she said, and when a seemingly unarmed policeman came to hand him a plastic bottle, he was briefly distracted, enabling the policeman to quickly pull out a small pistol hidden in his pocket and shoot him in the head at point-blank range. “I was quickly hustled out, and it was only when the blindfold was removed that I saw my legs splattered with blood.”

Along with Russian democracy leader Alexei Navalny and journalist Julian Assange, former senator Leila de Lima, whom I recently interviewed in custody, is probably the world’s best-known political prisoner. The only reason she was even in jail on October 9, 2022—when the hostage-taking took place—was the arbitrary decision of one man, former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte’s Vendetta

De Lima was placed in jail nearly six years ago when the Philippine Justice Department charged her with the “non-bailable” offense of participating in the illegal drugs trade. At the time, as the chairperson of the Philippine Senate’s Committee on Justice and Human Rights, the recently elected de Lima was heading up an investigation of extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s then-ongoing “war on drugs”—as well previous executions in the southern city of Davao, where Duterte had been mayor for the better part of nearly three decades.

Duterte had de Lima jailed on “evidence” fabricated from the testimonies of convicted drug dealers at the New Bilibid National Penitentiary—the very same prison that de Lima had ordered raided for illegal drugs while serving as secretary of justice in the preceding administration. The sheer effrontery of the move to smear her for allegedly receiving funds for her campaign for the Senate from drug lords stunned many people, making them question their initial common sense or instinctive reaction that the accusation was utterly false.

But what disarmed many of her potential allies was Duterte’s parallel attack on de Lima’s character, painting her as “an immoral woman” enjoying a Lady Chatterley–like sexual liaison with her driver. In a masterful move, Duterte dredged up both gender and class prejudices in the patriarchal mind of the Filipino male, whose unspoken code is that while a married man may have many liaisons, it is a no-no for a married woman to have an affair—and doubly so if the woman is from the upper or middle class and the man is from the lower class. The senator’s marriage, in fact, had already been judicially annulled, but Duterte and his minions conveniently swept that fact aside. “He knew that to succeed in railroading me to jail, he had to first destroy me as a woman,” de Lima told me.

Recantations

Nearly six years after those tumultuous events, which included hearings in the House of Representatives, where her character was ripped to shreds by the president’s attack dogs, hardly anyone still believes the charges brought against de Lima. The key witnesses against her have all recanted their testimonies, saying they were coerced into making them. One critical witness died under suspicious circumstances at the national penitentiary, where suspicious deaths regularly occur, allegedly after making it known that he planned to recant his testimony.

One of three cases accusing de Lima of involvement in the narcotics trade has already been dismissed. The government has lost its principal witnesses in one of the two other cases, while its remaining case is crumbling thanks to the sheer incredulity of the so-called witnesses’ accounts under questioning—and the absence of any physical evidence of money changing hands. So what’s preventing the Marcos administration from releasing her? The official line is that her case is no longer with the executive but with the judiciary. “But that doesn’t hold water,” says de Lima. “The executive filed the case against me, and it can withdraw the case if it wants to. It doesn’t need to wait for the judge to rule on it.”

Why Marcos Jr. Can’t Let de Lima Go

It’s not that the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the dead dictator, is unaware of the negative effect of de Lima’s continued detention. US Senators Dick Durbin, Ed Markey, and Patrick Leahy are but a few of the many international political figures who have pressed him to release de Lima. In fact, Marcos Jr. called her immediately after the hostage incident to convey his concern, offering to transfer her to another jail to pacify the local and international outcry at her continued detention in proximity to dangerous criminals.

“The hold-up is political,” asserts Fhilip Sawali, the former chief of staff of de Lima’s Senate office. Marcos is not willing to cross swords with Duterte. For the former president, de Lima’s rotting in jail is not only payback for her daring to investigate his human rights record; he also knows that with the International Criminal Court bearing down on him, de Lima is the one person who has the facts that can convict him and potentially send him to the ICC Detention Center cell in the Hague—facts gathered while she was chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights and later head of the Senate’s Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

Marcos Jr. fears destabilization by Duterte loyalists entrenched in the bureaucracy, the police, and the media. Although his daughter Sara ran for vice president on Marcos’s ticket, Duterte has distanced himself from Marcos, who was widely perceived to be the presidential candidate that Duterte referred to—but never mentioned by name—as a cocaine user in the run-up to the May 2022 elections.

The assassination of a radio broadcaster critical of Duterte, Percy Lapid, in October brought relations between Marcos Jr. and Duterte to a new low—which has also complicated the chances of de Lima’s being released soon. The head of the Bureau of Corrections, a Duterte appointee, was implicated in the killing, forcing the head of Marcos’s Department of Justice to suspend him. At that point, media people close to Duterte sprang into action, harshly criticizing the justice secretary. The talk in Manila is that the Duterte loyalists’ aggressive rhetoric was meant to warn Marcos’s people about following leads that might point to someone higher than the implicated official. Fearful of the consequences of worsening relations with a figure whose loyalists remain planted strategically throughout the government, Marcos is afraid to even grant de Lima bail, much less withdraw the case against her.

The years in detention have not been a total waste, since de Lima, a lawyer by profession, has eagerly plunged into scores of books on philosophy, political science, sociology, and economics provided by sympathizers. But she is anxious to get out—not only to be reunited with her family but also to begin working to support herself since, having lost reelection to the Senate, she no longer has a salary. She will not, however, accept a deal where she would be placed under house arrest. She is fighting for full exoneration via the withdrawal of the charges or being proclaimed innocent by her judges, though she is willing to pay whatever it would cost to post bail while the courts decide on the cases against her. She continues to be “cautiously optimistic” about being released, claiming to see signs of impartiality in the judges presiding over her remaining cases.

Seeking a Reckoning

Being exonerated or declared innocent is not her end goal, she tells me as my visit nears its close. She reminds me that she will not rest until she ends what she began over 12 years ago, when she was still the chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights investigating the role of Duterte in the killings conducted by the fearsome shadowy outfit known as the “Davao Death Squad” while he was still mayor of that city. Her ultimate objective is to put Duterte in jail for crimes against humanity. It is in this connection that some friends have told her that, paradoxically, she might be safer within prison walls than on the outside, where she could be vulnerable to attempts by Duterte’s people to permanently silence her—as happened to Lapid.

However de Lima discounts the idea of remaining at the police custodial center, saying that the hostage incident convinced her that her life is equally vulnerable in prison. On the possibility of being assassinated once released, she says, “I am willing to take that risk. There is no substitute for freedom.”

As I bid goodbye to Leila de Lima, I am very much aware that I am taking leave of an authentic hero—who will long be remembered for enduring punishment for doggedly standing up for human rights in a dark era in our nation’s history, for standing firm against all the falsehoods and misogynistic abuse thrown at her, for her iron determination to make accountable a despot many regard as responsible for the extrajudicial execution of some 27,000 of our compatriots who were tagged as “addicts.” Though she still awaits release, she has prevailed.

On August 8, 2022, officers of the Philippine National Police (PNP) arrived at my residence at 62 Moncado Street, BF Homes, Quezon City, to arrest me on charges of two counts of cyberlibel. The arrest was made shortly before 5 pm, which made it impossible to process bail, forcing me to spend the night in custody at the PNP’s Camp Karingal in Quezon City. At around 4 pm the next day, August 9, I was released from detention after posting a cash bond of P48,000 (approximately $860) for each count, for a total of P96,000 ($1,720).

My arrest and detention has been widely seen as the first major assault on democratic rights under the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who assumed power barely six weeks ago. This is likely the reason for the massive outrage and outpouring of support both nationally and internationally that was triggered by the incident.

The charge of cyberlibel was lodged in March 2022 by Jefry Tupas, former press information officer of then-Mayor Sara Duterte, after my communications team made a post on Facebook referring to Tupas’s presence at a party in Mabini, Davao de Oro, on November 2021, where illegal drugs were in use. The party was raided by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. Despite many news items that explicitly asserted that she was present at the party, Tupas claimed she was defamed by me, then sued me to the tune of P10 million (roughly $180,000), in addition to pressing criminal charges. She did not press charges or sue any of the many journalists and news agencies that wrote about her attending the party.

The case is clearly a case of political persecution. Tupas was incidental to a question raised by the Facebook post regarding Sara Duterte’s management capabilities as a  mayor. Both Sara Duterte—the daughter of outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte—and I were running for vice president of the Philippines at the time. It was in this context that I posed the question of whether Duterte as mayor knew of her subordinate’s presence at the party. That Duterte felt there was something wrong with her press information officer’s presence at a party where illegal drugs were being used was indicated by her firing of Tupas after news spread about the incident.

The Facebook post by my communications team was raised in the context of my challenging Duterte to appear in the national debates that were then being held to determine candidates’ qualifications for high office. Instead of Duterte participating in a number of televised debates—as all the other candidates for vice president did—her camp not only filed the cyberlibel charge against me; it also had the city council of Davao declare me “persona non grata” and labeled me a “narco-politician,” a charge that has negative implications for my physical security in a country where thousands have been extrajudicially executed for being allegedly drug users and peddlers. It was clear the moving force behind these efforts to intimidate me was then–vice presidential candidate—and now vice president—Sara Duterte.

The charge of cyberlibel lodged against me is a brazen case of weaponizing the law against critics. This is a dangerous trend in the Philippines, where 3,770 cases of cyberlibel have been filed, many of them by personalities seeking to silence their opponents. The most infamous of these has been the case lodged against Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, chief executive officer of the pioneering online news and information source Rappler. Owing to this, calls to decriminalize libel and cyberlibel by concerned citizens have increased.

My lawyers have filed a petition to the secretary of justice to review and dump the Davao City prosecutor’s judgment that there is “probable cause” to charge me with cyberlibel. Until the secretary rules on the matter, court proceedings, including my arraignment and preliminary hearings, are in abeyance.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. knows that his vice president’s initiative is political to the core. Will he allow a case that so clearly threatens freedom of speech to spoil his efforts to project a positive image for a citizenry deeply divided by his family’s controversial return to power?

Manila, The Philippines

n February 13, the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation bungled the serving of an arrest warrant to Maria Ressa, the founder of the scrappy news site Rappler. Plainclothes officers delivered it to her so late that she couldn’t post bail before the 9 pm deadline, forcing her to spend the night in detention. Live-streamed by Rappler reporters, the arrest for cyberlibel stemmed from a seven-year-old story and ignited a local and international firestorm. Former US secretary of state Madeline Albright and CNN talk-show host Christiane Amanpour condemned the jailing of Ressa as an attack on the freedom of the press.

The outpouring of anger suggests, as Ressa herself has pointed out, that President Rodrigo Duterte may have finally “crossed the line,” and that this may be the start of pushback against the president’s dictatorial ambitions. Ressa spent only one night in jail, but the support she received is a warning to the administration that silencing Rappler won’t come without a cost.

Ressa is not the first Duterte foe detained in the Philippines. The president’s foremost nemesis, Senator Leila de Lima, is entering her third year in prison on dubious drug-trafficking charges. De Lima’s indefinite detention is a reminder of the lengths to which Duterte is willing to twist the law to muzzle anyone who opposes him. The legal attacks against de Lima became one blueprint for Duterte’s repression; he used it against Ressa, and he will almost certainly use it again. But de Lima’s continued defense of human rights—even from behind prison walls—provides a model for others who hope to turn the tide against the current regime.

A Rivalry’s Origins

Duterte’s vendetta against de Lima began a decade ago. As chair of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) during the administration of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–10), de Lima investigated institutions and people regarded as untouchable. In 2009, she summoned Duterte, who was then mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines, to publicly respond to charges that he maintained a vigilante group that had murdered hundreds of people, including street children and those accused of petty crime. The hit men were not much of a secret. At the time, the killers would leave notes on bullet-riddled corpses: “Addict. Don’t be like me,” and the warning would be signed: “Davao Death Squad.”

Making Duterte answer to allegations of mass murder was a bold move. But Duterte painted de Lima as an emissary of “imperial Manila” meddling in local affairs, and her probe evoked hostility from Davao City officials and many local citizens. With hardly anyone willing to stand up to him, Duterte must’ve felt safe when he ordered a hit on de Lima as she visited a quarry where the remains of death-squad victims were said to be disposed, according to the testimony of one of the would-be assassins. De Lima escaped death, the gunman said, only because she happened to avoid the spot where they’d planned to ambush her.

With Davao residents largely unwilling to participate in the investigation, the CHR couldn’t finish its report on the Davao Death Squad. The next year, President Benigno Aquino tapped de Lima to be his secretary of justice, and she shifted her focus to combating corruption. But Duterte is not one to forgive or forget. In 2017, she wrote to me from prison that Duterte had a CD of a recording “where I said that I would prove that there is a DDS [Davao Death Squad] and he’s behind it. When he became president, he said in a public event that he would make me eat the CD.” And yet during his campaign for president, Duterte admitted that the death squad existed and that he had links to it.

Inevitable Clash

When Duterte was elected president and de Lima senator in May 2016, it was inevitable that his authoritarianism and vengeful streak would clash with de Lima’s dedication to human rights. In September of that year, de Lima convened a series of hearings on extrajudicial killings, the initial focus of which was exposing the Davao Death Squad. Since Duterte came to power, deaths were mounting from the War on Drugs, but the instrument was no longer a shadowy vigilante force but the National Police. By the time of the hearings, as many as 1,500 suspected drug users had already been gunned down, according to the police chief’s own admission. Currently, estimates of those killed either by police or vigilante groups range from 5,000 to over 20,000.

Duterte saw the investigation as a threat, especially since a hit man who claimed Duterte himself ordered the killings was one of the star witnesses. In response, Duterte unleashed a massive smear campaign to discredit de Lima and, according to de Lima’s counsel, ordered his secretary of justice to concoct drug-trafficking charges. Sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with Duterte, an ambitious congressman, Harry Roque, sought to disgrace de Lima’s character by turning a congressional probe into a salacious inquiry into de Lima’s relationship with her former driver. Later, Duterte made Roque his spokesman—despite the fact that Roque had once denounced Duterte as a “self-professed murderer.”

With Duterte at the peak of his popularity, other members of the opposition only tepidly defended her. “No one really came to my rescue,” De Lima wrote me in 2017.

The charges against de Lima were so obviously a frame-up that four regional trial-court judges inhibited themselves from hearing them, likely not wanting to sully their reputations by declaring her guilty.

Perhaps worried that giving de Lima her day in court would allow her to publicly attack Duterte, the administration decided to indefinitely detain her. It seems Duterte tried to give her a choice: Fade away from the public consciousness in jail, or admit guilt and submit to the president.

All it would likely take for de Lima to secure her release is an act of contrition and a vow never to stand in the president’s way again. But she brushed aside that option in a letter to me, “By pleading to an offense—any offense—that I did not commit in exchange for some promise, I would be selling my mandate, not serving it. It would be tantamount to admitting that I am being charged, detained, and oppressed for reasons other than the simple and incontrovertible fact that I dared stand up to the president in order to defend the human rights of our people.”

Refusing to Disappear

De Lima, however, did fear disappearing, Count of Monte Cristo–like, from the public’s memory, and so she and her Senate staff set out to make sure her voice could still be heard. About three times a week, she sends out a “Dispatch from Crame”—the prison where she’s being held—to prove that she can still perform her role as senator. Through this correspondence, de Lima sponsors legislation and communicates her views on various issues. Her jailers haven’t made this easy. She has no cell phone, computer, access to the Internet, or even air conditioning. Her requests for personal and legislative furloughs were all denied. No foreign visitors, including parliamentarians, have been allowed to see her.

But local news outlets like Rappler and international media and human-rights organizations like the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights have helped keep her in the public eye.

It is clear now that de Lima was a test case for how Duterte would deal with his enemies. The next prominent victim was Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. Concerned that impeachment followed by a trial in the Senate could make Sereno a martyr, Duterte’s minions came up with a legal maneuver that shocked the judicial establishment: Duterte’s solicitor general, Jose Calida, declared the chief justice’s appointment by President Aquino six years earlier void ab initio, because she failed to file the proper asset-disclosure paperwork when she was a professor at the University of the Philippines.

Perhaps overconfident from its humiliation of Sereno, the administration decided to move against Rappler, which had been in its crosshairs for its fearless coverage of the War on Drugs and Duterte’s ceaseless drive for power. The Duterte administration charged Rappler with tax evasion, cyberlibel, and violating the foreign-ownership-of-media provision of the constitution.

For once, Duterte’s attacks have backfired. Unlike de Lima, who was systematically vilified before her arrest, Ressa enjoys widespread support among most of the media, who see her as one of their own. On February 23, opposition groups rallied to condemn the move toward dictatorship. Despite the backlash, Duterte appears determined to jail Ressa, close down Rappler, and, more broadly, seize dictatorial powers.

The Fight Ahead

De Lima says she is heartened by the rage provoked by the Rappler arrest, but she also knows Duterte remains popular despite it. She once observed that the people in Davao did not cooperate in her investigation of the Davao Death Squad owing to their being “under the spell of Duterte.” With Duterte as president, she thinks something similar has happened. She wrote to me: “People feel invested in the person they supported, and they do not want to believe that he is capable of destroying an innocent human being for personal vengeance and political power, because if they admit that, they believe that they also have to admit that they made the wrong choice.… People are perhaps not yet prepared to face certain truths.”

But de Lima is cautiously confident that “the time will come when they will be forced to acknowledge the truth”—although, she added, “it might take more lives to be sacrificed before that happens.”

Duterte may succeed in shutting down Rappler, as he succeeded in jailing de Lima, but with each assault on democracy, his image as a no-nonsense reformer becomes harder to sustain. Stopping Duterte won’t be easy, but more and more people, especially among the young, are drawing inspiration from Leila de Lima’s stubborn refusal to surrender.

Dear friends:

I’m writing to you on the eve of your going to the polls to determine the future of your wonderful country.

I think it’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of Brazil hangs in the balance. It’s also hardly hyperbole to assert that the election will have massive geopolitical significance, since if Brazil votes for Jair Bolsonaro, the extreme right will have come to power in the Western Hemisphere’s two biggest countries. Like many of you, I’m hoping for a miracle that will prevent Bolsonaro from coming to power.

When I visited Rio and São Paulo in 2015, I observed that the political rallies mounted by the opposition to then-President Dilma Rousseff contained a small but vocal fringe element calling for a return to military rule. Little did I suspect then that that fringe would expand into a massive electoral movement in support of a self-proclaimed advocate of strongman rule.

The Amazing Twins

It’s amazing to many of us here in the Philippines how similar Bolsonaro is to our president, Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte has spoken about how he wished he’d raped a dead female missionary. Bolsonaro told a fellow member of parliament that she didn’t deserve to be raped by him. Duterte has spoken in admiration of our dead dictator Ferdinand Marcos and decreed his burial at our heroes’ cemetery. Bolsonaro has depicted the military rule in Brazil over three decades ago as a golden age.

A friend asked me a few days ago, only partly in jest, “Is there a virus going around that produces horrible boils like Bolsonaro and Duterte?” I thought about her metaphor and thought there was something to it, but rather than being the result of a communicable disease, I think that authoritarian figures emerge from internal suppuration in the body politic.

Before I go further on this, however, let me just give you a sense of what’s happening in the Philippines, since this could very well prefigure Brazil’s future if Bolsonaro gains power, as the polls now indicate, on October 28.

Is This Your Future?

Our lovely Philippine president promised to “fatten the fish in Manila Bay” with the cadavers of criminals if he got elected.

He may not have delivered on his promises to improve the economic and social welfare of our people, like ending contractual employment or banning mining, but on this promise he has delivered: The number of the alleged drug users and dealers he’s murdered, mainly through extrajudicial execution, is between 7,000 and 20,000, the actual figure being toward the higher end.

Even if we just take the lower end, the number of those killed would place the Duterte anti-drug campaign as one of the most murderous enterprise in the recent history of Southeast Asia—with first place going to the Khmer Rouge genocide in the late 1970s, and second place going to the Indonesian military’s massacre of Communists and alleged Communists in the mid-1960s, both of which claimed hundreds of thousands of victims.

Underpinning Duterte’s anti-drug campaign is an eliminationist perspective based on the president’s view that shabu—the local term for meth—“would shrink the brain of a person, and therefore he is no longer viable for rehabilitation.” These people are the “living, walking dead,” who are “of no use to society anymore.”

Elsewhere, I have described Duterte’s approach as “blitzkrieg fascism,” in contrast to “creeping fascism.” In the latter, the fascist leader begins with violations of civil and political rights, followed by the lunge for absolute power, after which follows indiscriminate repression.

Duterte reverses the process. He starts with massive, indiscriminate repression—that is, the killing with impunity of thousands of alleged drug users—leaving the violation of civil liberties and the grab for total power as mopping-up operations in a political atmosphere where fear, coupled with a desire to cozy up to a strongman, has largely neutralized the opposition.

In the past 30 months, the president has removed the chief justice of the Supreme Court; achieved undisputed control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate; imprisoned his chief political opponent in the Senate and is about to imprison another; forced most of the media into self-censorship mode; gained the support of most of the rank and file of the military and the acquiescence of the high command; and put a third of the country under martial law. There’s been little outcry from the public on these moves; indeed, his popularity ratings remain quite high.

This last item, the continuing popularity of the president, leads me to the subject of what Brazil and the Philippines have in common.

One cannot explain the emergence of Duterte without taking into account the terrible disappointment with the record of the liberal democratic republic that came into existence with the ouster of Marcos in 1986.

A deadly stranglehold on the democratic process came about owing to several developments. One was the elites’ hijacking of the electoral process as a mechanism to compete among themselves while perpetuating their collective class rule over the people. Another was the combination of the absence of land reform and the imposition of Washington’s neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which produced continuing high levels of inequality and poverty.

When you add to this witch’s brew a third ingredient—the failure of successive administrations to address the crime problem—then it’s not surprising that more than 16 million voters, some 40 percent of the electorate, saw the tough-guy, authoritarian approach that Duterte had cultivated for 30-plus years as mayor of the southern frontier city of Davao as precisely what the country needed.

As the novelist Anthony Doerr said of pre-war Germans, Filipinos were “desperate for someone who can put things right.” Our middle class, it must be pointed out, was the sector that was most enthusiastic about Duterte, the same middle class that 30 years earlier had led the ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Brazil’s Dreary Descent

Brazil has experienced the same dreary descent into democratic crisis. Liberal democratic politics became mainly a means by which the entrenched elites protected their wealth and power.

Even the progressive President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva dared not put in place measures of social and economic reform, but tried to perform an end run with a state-financed cash distribution program for the poor, the Bolsa Família, which, while alleviating poverty significantly, did little to change Brazil’s status as one of Latin America’s most unequal countries. Also, through anti-democratic parliamentary shenanigans and judicial manipulation, the center and center right impeached Rousseff and made sure Lula would not again become president.

Corruption there has been as pervasive as in the Philippines, but here one cannot simply blame the right. One of the biggest disappointments for progressives, not only in my country but globally, was the way your Workers’ Party (PT), which had caught people’s imagination in the 1990s as an insurgent force against corruption, became itself enmeshed in corruption, notably the $3.7 billion Petrobras kickback scandal, in which so many members of the PT were involved.

In this regard, a pro-PT friend told me during my visit to São Paulo, “The PT rose to power as a party known for our militant stance against corruption. Now we’re made to look as if we invented corruption.” I can understand his dismay, but the PT has only itself to blame. Engaging in corrupt practices, even when the aim is to gain votes to push progressive legislation in parliament, as some PT supporters justified it, ends up destroying the moral compass of a progressive party.

When you add to right-wing intransigence and the PT’s succumbing to the system’s pervasive corruption the failure to meaningfully address escalating drug-related crime, especially in Rio and other major cities, then Bolsonaro, like Duterte, becomes less of an enigma.

You know all of this, of course, but I simply repeat it to underline the fact that liberal democracy has lost the confidence of vast numbers of people in both our countries, and they have voted—or are about to vote—into power people who have essentially promised to end it. If there’s anything pro-fascist forces the world over have learned from Hitler, it’s that one can come to power through democratic means. But once in power, make sure you never provide the electorate with the opportunity to snatch it from you.

How Do We Respond to the Rise of the Extreme Right?

How can the left respond?

The first line of defense for pro-democracy forces is to ensure that the extreme right doesn’t come to power. Having failed that, we now face the challenge of how to remove these forces from power—of course, through democratic means.

Allow me to propose some steps that we can take to regenerate the appeal of democracy.

First of all, the times call for a progressive politics that goes beyond demanding a return to the old discredited elite democracy, where equality was purely formal, to one that has as its centerpiece the achievement of genuine economic and social equality, whether one calls this socialism or post-capitalism. This program must call for stronger state and civil society management of the economy—one that moves it beyond capitalism, with a strong dose of radical income and wealth redistribution, while championing democratic processes, secularism, diversity, and the rights of minorities.

Secondly, while a great many people, especially from the middle classes, share what we might call, to borrow a term from Antonio Gramsci, an “active consensus” supporting authoritarian politics, a great many of the poorer and more marginalized classes either keep the extreme right at arm’s length or limit their support to “passive consensus.” We must focus our counter-mobilization on these sectors.

Third, while we must strive to educate the public on the roots of crime and people’s participation in the drug trade in poverty and inequality, democrats must not be seen as insensitive to people’s concerns about crime. We may not agree with his solution, but we cannot ignore Thomas Hobbes’s insight that one of the reasons the state came into existence was in response to people’s desire for protection of their life and limb. Moreover, while it is the middle class that is most afraid of crime, it is the poor who suffer most from it.

Fourth, right-wing parties and personalities, like Duterte and Bolsonaro, are strongly misogynistic at a time when women’s struggles for their rights are on the ascendant throughout the world. So it is very critical that women in great numbers play a central role in the politics of the anti-fascist movement. Women, when mobilized, are one of the strongest bulwarks against fascism.

Fifth, many progressive and liberal personalities and parties that played key roles in the old liberal democratic political arena have been discredited, along with the liberal democratic system. The Philippine liberal icons Cory Aquino and her son Noynoy Aquino belong to the past, just like the PT figures Dilma and Lula. Thus, while we must construct broad coalitions, it is imperative that new faces, new political formations, and new ideas come to represent the progressive response to fascism. The youth, one must emphasize, are a central battlefield in this conflict, and we’re losing ground among them.

Let me end this missive by repeating what I told a recent conference on human rights here in Manila:

The world we are in today is one that is pretty much the same as in the 1930s, when forces of the extreme right are on the offensive and the fate of progressive democratic politics hangs in the balance. The last few years have buried Francis Fukuyama’s deterministic idea that liberal democracy was every country’s future, just as before Fukuyama momentous events buried the equally deterministic notion that socialism was the wave of the future. The future emerges from the clash of movements and ideas, one that is marked by great uncertainty and contingency. There is no guarantee that our side will prevail, but we will certainly lose unless we resist in a way that combines determination, passion, and wisdom.

In solidarity,

Walden Bello, Manila, Oct. 25, 2018

Conventional wisdom holds that China is on the ascent and the United States is in decline, that China’s economy is roaring with raw energy and that Beijing’s “Belt and Road” mega-project of infrastructure building in Central, South, and Southeast Asia is laying the basis for its global economic hegemony.1

Some question whether Beijing’s ambitions are sustainable. Inequality in China is approaching that in the United States, which portends rising domestic discontent, while China’s grave environmental problems may pose inexorable limits to its economic expansion.2

Perhaps the greatest immediate threat to China’s rise to economic supremacy, however, is the same phenomenon that felled the US economy in 2008—financialization, the channeling of resources to the financial economy over the real economy. Indeed, there are three troubling signs that China is a prime candidate to be the site of the next financial crisis: overheating in its real-estate sector, a roller-coaster stock market, and a rapidly growing shadow-banking sector.3

China’s Real-Estate Bubble

There is no doubt that China is already in the midst of a real-estate bubble. As in the United States during the subprime-mortgage bubble that culminated in the global financial crisis of 2007–09, the real-estate market has attracted too many wealthy and middle-class speculators, leading to a frenzy that has seen real-estate prices climb sharply.4

Chinese real-estate prices soared in so-called Tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai from 2015 to 2017, pushing worried authorities there to take measures to pop the bubble. Major cities, including Beijing, imposed various measures: They increased down-payment requirements, tightened mortgage restrictions, banned the resale of property for several years, and limited the number of homes that people can buy.5

However, Chinese authorities face a dilemma. On the one hand, workers complain that the bubble has placed owning and renting apartments beyond their reach, thus fueling social instability. On the other hand, a sharp drop in real-estate prices could bring down the rest of the Chinese economy and—given China’s increasingly central role as a source of international demand—the rest of the global economy along with it. China’s real-estate sector accounts for an estimated 15 percent of GDP and 20 percent of the national demand for loans. Thus, according to Chinese banking experts Andrew Sheng and Ng Chow Soon, any slowdown would “adversely affect construction-related industries along the entire supply chain, including steel, cement, and other building materials.”6

The Shanghai Casino

Financial repression—keeping the interest rates on deposits low to subsidize China’s powerful alliance of export industries and governments in the coastal provinces—has been central in pushing investors into real-estate speculation. However, growing uncertainties in that sector have caused many middle-class investors to seek higher returns in the country’s poorly regulated stock market. The unfortunate result: A good many Chinese have lost their fortunes as stock prices fluctuated wildly. As early as 2001, Wu Jinglian, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading reform economists, characterized the corruption-ridden Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges as “worse than a casino” in which investors would inevitably lose money over the long run.7

At the peak of the Shanghai market, in June 2015, a Bloomberg analyst wrote that “No other stock market has grown as much in dollar terms over a 12-month period,” noting that the previous year’s gain was greater “than the $5 trillion size of Japan’s entire stock market.”8

When the Shanghai index plunged 40 percent later that summer, Chinese investors were hit with huge losses—debt they still grapple with today. Many lost all their savings—a significant personal tragedy (and a looming national crisis) in a country with such a poorly developed social-security system.9

Chinese stock markets (now the world’s second-largest, according to The Balance, an online financial journal) stabilized in 2017, and seemed to have recovered the trust of investors when they were struck by contagion from the global sell-off of stocks in February 2018, posting one of their biggest losses since the 2015 collapse.10

Shadow Banking Comes Out of the Shadows

Another source of financial instability is the virtual monopoly on credit access held by export-oriented industries, state-owned enterprises, and the local governments of favored coastal regions. With the demand for credit from other sectors unmet by the official banking sector, the void has been rapidly filled by so-called shadow banks.11

The shadow-banking sector is perhaps best defined as a network of financial intermediaries whose activities and products are outside the formal, government-regulated banking system. Many of the shadow-banking system’s transactions are not reflected on the regular balance sheets of the country’s financial institutions. But when a liquidity crisis takes place, the fiction of an independent investment vehicle is ripped apart by creditors who factor these off-balance-sheet transactions into their financial assessments of the mother institution.12

The shadow-banking system in China is not yet as sophisticated as its counterparts on Wall Street and in London, but it is getting there. Ballpark estimates of the trades carried out in China’s shadow-banking sector range from $10 trillion to more than $18 trillion.13

In 2013, according to one of the more authoritative studies, the scale of shadow-banking risk assets—i.e., assets marked by great volatility, like stocks and real estate—came to 53 percent of China’s GDP. That might appear small when compared with the global average of about 120 percent of GDP, but the reality is that many of these shadow-banking creditors have raised their capital by borrowing from the formal banking sector. These loans are either registered on the books or “hidden” in special off-balance-sheet vehicles. Should a shadow-banking crisis ensue, it is estimated that up to half of the nonperforming loans of the shadow-banking sector could be “transferred” to the formal banking sector, thus undermining it as well. In addition, the shadow-banking sector is heavily invested in real-estate trusts. Thus, a sharp drop in property valuations would immediately have a negative impact on the shadow-banking sector—creditors would be left running after bankrupt developers or holding massively depreciated real estate as collateral.14

Is China, in fact, still distant from a Lehman Brothers–style crisis? Interestingly, Sheng and Ng point out that while “China’s shadow banking problem is still manageable…time is of the essence and a comprehensive policy package is urgently needed to preempt any escalation of shadow banking NPLs [nonperforming loans], which could have contagion effects.” Beijing is now cracking down on the shadow banks, but these are elusive entities.15

Finance is the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese economy. The negative synergy between an overheating real-estate sector, a volatile stock market, and an uncontrolled shadow-banking system could well be the cause of the next big crisis to hit the global economy, rivaling the severity of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and the global financial implosion of 2008–09.16

Instead of War…

Rather than gearing up for a military face-off in the South China Sea or engaging in a trade war with Beijing (which no one will win), the United States and its allies might be better advised to prepare for the threat that China’s economic weakness poses to the US economy and, indeed, the world’s.17

Global financial reform—a task urgently needed (but never undertaken) after the 2008 financial crisis—is one area where cooperation would immeasurably benefit China, the United States, and the rest of the planet. The loss of $5.2 trillion during this February’s global financial meltdown has highlighted the necessity of putting stronger restrictions on the global movement of speculative capital before it spawns a bigger crisis in the real economy. The regulation of dangerous real-estate-backed securities and derivatives—the same types of instruments that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, and which are now making their appearance in Asian markets—should be a top priority.18

When it comes to trade, there are far better strategies than a trade war to deal with Beijing. It is true that the export of jobs to China by US corporations, supported by free-trade and globalization enthusiasts in government, has been a major cause of the deindustrialization of significant parts of the United States, but the solutions lie in building bridges, not walls. First, we need formal or informal trade agreements to limit select industrial exports to the United States, much like the Reagan-era arrangements with Japan to limit automobile exports bought time for the US car industry to retool and recover. Second, we need an industrial policy, drawing from the current playbook of Germany and China, in which an activist state channels private and public investment and promotes job creation in cutting-edge industries, such as renewable-energy-based infrastructure and transportation.

None of this is as simple—or as foolish—as a military face-off near the Chinese coast. Too often, for America’s national-security managers, the US military is a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail. But as US officials begin to address the rise of Chinese power, they would do far better to understand the stake that the United States and the rest of the world now have in a healthy Chinese economy, and worry more about avoiding its economic implosion than about planning for a military explosion.19

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct a production error that previously omitted the last paragraph. It has now been restored.

In 2016, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte placed his country prominently on the global radar screen—too prominently, in the opinion of some Filipinos.

Duterte’s campaign to rid the Philippines of drug users and pushers through extrajudicial executions elicited shock even among the most hardened observers. And his now legendary cursing of President Obama as a “son of a bitch”—part of an angry farewell to a long-standing alliance with Washington and an embrace of China—upended Asian geopolitics.

Despite his bloody reign, Duterte remains popular, with the latest domestic poll giving him a trust rating of “excellent.” What makes Duterte tick? What drives many of his admirers to exclaim that they’re ready to die for him?

Fascism comes in different forms in different societies, so people expecting fascism to develop in the “classic” way often fail to recognize it even when it’s already upon them. In 2016, fascism came to the Philippines in the form of Duterte, but this event continues to elude a large part of the citizenry—some because of their fierce loyalty to the president, others out of fear of admitting that naked force is now the ruling principle in Philippine politics.

Why Duterte Fits the “F” Word

At a panel I was part of last August, one month after Duterte ascended to the presidency, there was considerable hesitation in using what panelists euphemistically called the “F” word to characterize the new executive. There is an understandable reluctance to use the term “fascist,” undoubtedly because the word has been applied very loosely to all kinds of movements and leaders that depart, in some fashion, from liberal democratic practices.

However, there are a few broad characterizations of a fascist leader that could unobjectionably apply to Duterte. In this scheme, a fascist leader is (a) a charismatic individual with strong inclinations toward authoritarian rule who (b) derives his or her strength from a heated multiclass mass base, (c) is engaged in or supports the systematic and massive violation of basic human, civil, and political rights, and (d) proposes a political project that contradicts the fundamental values and aims of liberal democracy or social democracy.

If one were to accept these elements provisionally as the key characteristics of a fascist leader, then Duterte would easily fit the bill.

A Fascist Original

Having said that, Duterte is nevertheless an original sort of fascist personality.

His charisma is not the demiurgic sort like Hitler’s, nor does it derive so much from an emotional personal identification with a “nation.” Duterte’s charisma would probably be best described as carino brutal, a Filipino-Spanish term that denotes a volatile mix of will to power, a commanding personality, and gangster charm that fulfills his followers’ deep-seated yearning for a father figure who will finally end what they see as the “national chaos.”

Duterte is not a reactionary seeking to restore a mythical past. He’s not a conservative dedicated to defending the status quo. His project is oriented towards an authoritarian future.

He is best described, using Arno Mayer’s term, as a counterrevolutionary. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, however, he’s not waging a counterrevolution against the left or socialism. In Duterte’s case, the target is liberal democracy—the dominant ideology and political system of our time. In this sense, he is a local expression as well as a pioneer of an ongoing global phenomenon: the rebellion against liberal democratic discourse that Francis Fukuyama had declared as the “end of history” in the early 1990s.

Counterrevolutionaries aren’t always clear about what their next moves are, but they often have an instinctive sense of what would bring them closer to power. Ideological purity isn’t high on their agenda—they put a premium on the emotional power of their message rather than its ideological coherence.

The low priority accorded to ideological coherence is also extended to political alliances. Duterte’s mobilization of a multiclass base while ruling with the support of virtually all of the elite is unexceptional. However, one of the things that makes him a fascist original is that he’s brought the dominant section of the left into his ruling coalition, something that would have been unthinkable with most previous fascist leaders.

But perhaps Duterte’s distinctive contribution to fascism is in the area of political methodology. The stylized paradigm has the fascist leader or party begin with violations of civil rights, followed by a power grab, then indiscriminate repression. Duterte turns this “Marcosian model” of “creeping fascism” around. He begins with impunity on a massive scale—that is, the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug users and pushers—and leaves the violations of civil liberties and the grab for absolute power as mopping up operations in a political landscape devoid of significant organized opposition.

A Product of EDSA

Duterte’s ascendancy cannot be understood without taking into consideration the debacle of the EDSA liberal democratic republic that was born in the anti-Marcos uprising of 1986. (It’s named EDSA for the long thoroughfare in Metro Manila where the main actions of the rebellion took place.)

In fact, EDSA’s failure was a condition for Duterte’s success. What destroyed the EDSA project and paved the way for Duterte was the deadly combination of an elite monopoly of the electoral system and neoliberal economic policies with the priority placed on foreign debt repayment imposed by Washington.

By 2016, there was a yawning gap between the EDSA republic’s promise of popular empowerment and wealth redistribution and the reality of massive poverty, scandalous inequality, and pervasive corruption. The EDSA republic’s discourse of democracy, human rights, and rule of law had become a suffocating straitjacket for a majority of Filipinos, who simply could not relate to it owing to the overpowering reality of their powerlessness.

Duterte’s discourse—a mixture of outright death threats, coarse tough-guy talk, and frenzied railing coupled with disdainful humor directed at the elite (whom he called “conos,” or cunts)—was a potent formula that proved exhilarating to his audience, who felt themselves liberated from the stifling hypocrisy of the EDSA discourse.

Fascism in Power

Probably no fascist personality since Hitler has used the mandate of a plurality at the polls to reshape the political arena more swiftly and decisively than Duterte in 2016.

Even before he formally assumed office, the extrajudicial killings began; the elite opposition disintegrated, with some 98 percent of the liberal “Yellow Party” joining the Duterte Coalition; and Duterte achieved total control of both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court, shying away from a confrontation, chose not to challenge the president’s decision to have the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, buried in the national Heroes’ Cemetery. A traditional bulwark of defense of human rights, the Catholic Church, exercised self-censorship, afraid that it would be a sure loser in a confrontation with a popular president who threatened to expose bishops and priests with mistresses and clerical child abusers.

A novice in foreign policy, Duterte was able to combine personal resentment with acute political instinct to radically reshape the Philippines’ relationship with the big powers, notably the United States. What surprised many, though, was that there was very little protest in the Philippines at Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation toward China, given the stereotype of Filipinos being “little brown brothers” to Washington. What protest there was came mainly from traditional anti-American quarters which evinced skepticism about the president’s avowed intentions.

Here, Duterte again showed himself to be a masterful instinctive politician. While ordinary Filipinos often admire the U.S. and U.S. institutions, there’s a strong undercurrent of resentment at the colonial subjugation of the country by the U.S., the unequal treaties that Washington has foisted on the country, and the overwhelming impact of the “American way of life” on local culture. One need not delve into the complex psychology of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic to understand that the undercurrent of the U.S.-Philippine relationship has been the “struggle for recognition” of the dominated party. Duterte has been able to tap into this emotional underside of Filipinos in a way that the left has never been able to with its anti-imperialist program.

The anti-American comments from Duterte supporters that filled cyberspace following President Obama’s criticism of Duterte’s executions were just as fierce as their attacks on local critics of his war on drugs. Like many of his authoritarian predecessors elsewhere, Duterte has been able to splice nationalism and authoritarianism in a very effective fashion, though many progressives have seen this as mainly motivated by opportunism.

What Surprises Await the Philippines?

What are the chinks in Duterte’s armor? And what are the prospects for the opposition?

One vulnerability is the health of the president. Duterte has been candid about his medical problems and his dependence on the drug Fentanyl, reportedly a strongly addictive substance that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and has the same effects as heroin. The age factor is not unimportant either, considering that the president is turning 72. Hitler became chancellor at 44 and Mussolini became prime minister at 39. For the successful pursuit of an ambitious political project, one’s energy level is not unimportant.

More problematic is the issue of institutionalizing the movement.

The force driving Duterte’s electoral insurgency has not yet been converted into a mass movement. So Duterte is leaning on Jun Evasco, the secretary of the cabinet and a longtime Duterte aide, to fill the breach by coalescing a “Movement for Reform,” which was launched in August 2016. Evasco’s vision is apparently a mass organization along the lines of those of the left-wing National Democratic Front, where he cut his political teeth.

This won’t be easy since, as some analysts have pointed out, he would have to contend with competing projects from Duterte’s political allies—like the Pimentels, the Marcoses, and the Arroyos—who would prefer an old-style political formation that brings together elite personalities. Needless to say, a political formation along the lines of the latter would be the kiss of death for Duterte’s electoral insurgency.

A bigger hurdle would be failure to deliver on political and social reforms. Practically all of the key political and economic elites have declared allegiance to Duterte, so it’s difficult to see how he can deliver on his political and economic reform agenda without alienating key supporters. The Marcoses, who still have their ill-gotten wealth stashed abroad; the Arroyos, who have been implicated in so many shady deals; and so many other elites, many of whom have cases pending, are not likely to be disciplined for corruption, especially given their very close links to Duterte. Nor will the Visayan Bloc, which has come in full force behind Duterte, agree to a law that will extend the very incomplete agrarian reform program. Nor will the big monopolists like Manuel Pangilinan and Ramon Ang, who have pledged fealty to Duterte, submit without resistance to being divested of their corporate holdings.

This is not to say that Duterte is a puppet of the elites. Having a power base of his own that he can easily turn on friend or foe, he is beholden to no one. Indeed, one can argue that most of the elite have joined him mainly for their own protection, like small merchants paying protection money to the mafia. The issue, rather, is how serious he is about social reform and how willing he is to alienate his supporters among the elite.

The same goes for economic reform. Ending the increasing contractualization of Philippine employment (or ENDO, for “End of Contract”), one of the president’s most prominent promises, is currently bogged down in efforts to arrive at a “win-win” solution for management and labor, and all the major labor federations are fast losing hope the administration will deliver on this. As for macroeconomic policy, any departure from neoliberal principles on the part of orthodox technocrats like Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and National Economic Development Authority Director General Ernesto Pernia is far-fetched.

Again, the question lies in how convinced Duterte is that neoliberalism is a dead end—and how willing he is to incur the loss of confidence on the part of foreign investors by pursuing a different program.

Social and economic reform is Duterte’s Achilles heel, and the president himself is aware that popularity is a commodity that can disappear quickly in the absence of meaningful reforms. Dissatisfaction is fertile ground for the build-up of opposition.

This spells danger for the country in the medium term. Even if he’s able to quickly create a mass-based party, Duterte would likely still need to resort to the repressive apparatuses of the state to quell discontent and opposition. This may not be too difficult a course to follow. Having led a bloody campaign that’s already claimed over 6,000 lives, the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of permanent emergency rule would be in the nature of “mopping up” operations for Duterte. It would be a walk in the park.

The Elite Opposition

Does the opposition matter, though?

The elite opposition is extremely weak at this point, with most of the Liberal Party having joined the Duterte bandwagon out of opportunism or fear. An opposition led by Vice President Leni Robredo, who resigned from Duterte’s cabinet after being told not to attend meetings, is not likely to be viable. While undoubtedly possessing integrity, Robredo has shown poor judgment, receptiveness to bad advice, and little demonstrated capacity for national leadership—and is, in the view even of some of her supporters, largely a creation of Liberal Party operatives who wanted to convert the name of her deceased husband, former Department of the Interior and Local Government head Jesse Robredo, into political capital.

Moreover, her continuing ties to the double-faced Liberal Party and the former administration easily discredit her among both Duterte supporters and opponents.

The Left in Crisis

This brings up the left.

Duterte’s rise to power created a crisis for the left. For one sector of the left—like Akbayan, the social democratic party that had allied itself uncritically with the neoliberal Aquino administration—Duterte’s ascendancy meant their marginalization from power along with the Liberal Party, for which they had essentially become the grassroots organizing arm.

For the traditional left, or what some called the “extreme left,” Duterte posed a problem of another kind. While the National Democratic Front and Communist Party had not supported Duterte’s candidacy, they accepted Duterte’s offer of three cabinet-level positions dealing with agriculture reform, social welfare, and anti-poverty programs. They also accepted the president’s offer to initiate negotiations to arrive at a final peace agreement between the government and rebellious Communist factions.

For Duterte, the entry of personalities associated with the Communist Party into his cabinet provided a left gloss to his regime, a proof that he was progressive—or “a socialist, but only up to my armpits,” as he put it colorfully during his victory speech in Davao City on June 4, 2016.

It soon became clear that Duterte had the better part of the bargain. As the regime’s central policy of killing drug users and pushers without due process escalated, the left’s role in the cabinet became increasingly difficult to justify. This dilemma was compounded by the fact that no new land reform law was passed that would allow agrarian reform to continue, there was little movement in the administration’s promise to end contractualization, and macroeconomic policy continued along neoliberal lines.

The left, however, found it hard to shelve the peace negotiations, from which they had already made some gains, and to part from heading up government agencies that gave them unparalleled governmental resources to expand their mass base.

Duterte had again displayed his acute political instincts. Knowing that the traditional left was at ebb in its fortunes, he gambled that they would accept his offer of cabinet positions. And having accepted these, he knew, they would find it extremely difficult to part from them. The price, the leaders of the left realized, was their association with a bloodthirsty regime.

The Communist Party and its mass organizations tried to alleviate the contradiction by issuing statements condemning Duterte’s bloody policies. But this only made their dilemma keener, since people would ask why they continue to provide legitimacy to the administration by staying on in the cabinet. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Duterte brought the left into his regime—and in doing so, he’s been able to sandbag it and subordinate it as a political force. So far, that is.

Whether he’s fully conscious of it or not, Duterte’s ascendancy has severely shaken all significant political institutions and political players in the country, from right to left.

Civil Society Mobilizes

Where real opposition to Duterte has developed over the last six months has been from civil society.

A leading force is I Defend, a broad grouping of over 50 people’s organizations and non-governmental organizations, that has waged an unremitting struggle against the extrajudicial killings. Another is the coalition against the Marcos burial. While Duterte has painted these formations as “yellow,” the reality is that most of their partisans are progressives that are as opposed to a neoliberal “yellow restoration” as they are to Duterte’s policies. Others are newer and younger forces drawn from the post-EDSA and millennial generations that have become alarmed at Duterte’s fascist turn.

This growing opposition doesn’t seek a reprise of 1986, when an uprising toppled the dictator Marcos—perhaps heeding Marx’s warning that history unfolds “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” It’s increasingly realizing that the fight for human rights and due process must be joined to a revolutionary program of participatory politics and economic democracy—to socialism, in the view of many—if it is to turn back the fascist tide. There is no going back to EDSA.

What the opposition still has to internalize is that opposing fascism in power will not be, to borrow a saying from Mao, “a dinner party.” It will indeed be exceedingly difficult and demand great sacrifices. Moreover, there is no guarantee of success in the short or medium term. Fascism in power can be extraordinarily long-lived. The Franco regime in Spain lasted 39 years, while Salazar’s Estado Novo in neighboring Portugal went on for 42 years.

Like the anti-Marcos resistance four decades back, the only certainty members of the anti-fascist front can count on is that they’re doing the right thing. And that, for some, is a certainty worth dying for.

Orlando Letelier’s essay on the Chicago Boys and their role in the brutal neoliberal transformation of Chile has withstood the test of time. A few weeks before his assassination, Letelier was able to capture in detail the misery to which the Chilean disciples of Milton Friedman had visited on his country and accurately spelled out what they still had in store for it. The irony, he noted, is that Friedman and the Chicago Boys might have been driven by free-market doctrine, but the end result of their policies was to further the monopolization of the economy by the Chilean capitalist class.

Another ironic fact that Letelier pointed to was that among the victims of these doctrinaire policies was the Chilean middle class, which had been played a key role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

The roles of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Chilean elites, the Chicago Boys, and the Chilean military in the coup that overthrew Allende and the neoliberal transformation of Chile under Pinochet have been well-documented and widely studied. There have, however, been few studies of the role of the middle class, which served as the mass base of the counterrevolution. Yet this angry middle-class mob was one of the central features of the Chilean political scene leading up to the coup.

When I arrived in Chile in 1972, people on the left were constantly being mobilized for marches and rallies in the center of Santiago, and increasingly, the reason for this was to counter the demonstrations mounted by the right. My friends brought me to these demonstrations, where there were an increasing number of skirmishes with right-wing counter-demonstrators.

I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants in these events, and a reluctance to be caught out alone in leaving them, for fear of being harassed, or worse, by right-wing groups. The revolution, it dawned on me, was on the defensive, and the right was beginning to take command of the streets. Twice I was nearly beaten up because I made the mistake of observing right-wing demonstrations with El Siglo, the Communist Party newspaper, tucked prominently under my arm. Stopped by Christian Democratic youth activists, I said that I was a Princeton University graduate student doing research on Chilean politics, which I was. They sneered at me and told me that I was one of Allende’s “thugs” imported from Cuba. On one occasion, the miraculous arrival of a Mexican friend saved me from a beating. On the other occasion, my fleet feet did the job.

I looked into the faces of the predominantly white right-wing crowds, many of them blond-haired, and imagined the same enraged faces at the fascist and Nazi demonstrations that took control of the streets in Italy and Germany. These were people who looked with disdain at what they called the rotos, or “broken ones,” that filled the left-wing demonstrations, people who were darker, many of them clearly of indigenous extraction.

Over the next few months, I interviewed both people on the right and people on the left on the rise of the counterrevolution. Some respondents on the right saw Allende and the Unidad Popular (UP) as a “minority government” out to impose themselves on the majority through “questionable” constitutional measures. Others saw the “constitutional road to socialism” as simply a cover for a plot to impose a “Stalinist dictatorship.” Still others saw the appeal to the middle class as “pure demagoguery” meant to lull the middle class into complacency as the left set about to “destroy democracy.” Most of the right-wingers I interviewed were Christian Democrats, who saw former Christian Democrats who had joined the UP and even such true-blue Christian Democrats as Radomiro Tomic, Allende’s rival in the 1970 elections, as “people who had been fooled by the Communists.” Practically all had become entrenched in their position of great suspicion, disdain, or hostility to the left.

I remember going to Valdivia, with an American friend, to look up a Christian Democratic farmer that had been recommended by a fellow graduate student at the Princeton sociology department. After a couple of weeks of intensive interviewing and documentary research in Santiago, I thought I would relax a bit and enjoy the famed Chilean hospitality.
 We were warmly received by the farmer and his family, which included a son and two teenage daughters. A goat was slaughtered for us and we sat down to a hearty dinner on our first night. Then our host started cursing Allende, calling him simply a tool for the Communist Party to “impose its dictatorship on Chile.” The Socialist Party of Allende was no better than the Communists, and the Izquierda Cristiana, composed of former Christian Democrats that had joined the Unidad Popular, were “traitors.” My friend and I kept our politics to ourselves and tried to guide the discussion to more innocuous topics. I wanted to interview him on his views, I said, but we could do that after dinner. He said fine, but after a few minutes, he again began on his anti-leftist tirade.

The next day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner was more of the same hospitality punctuated by lengthy invectives against “communists who will take away my property and give them to the rotos.” Finally, at dinner on our second day, I could no longer tolerate his litany of “crimes of the left” and said I actually thought Allende was fighting for social justice and the land reform he was trying to push would actually benefit medium farmers like him and would negatively impact only the big landholders.

Chileans, I had been told, could be really friendly and hospitable until they smelled your politics, after which you either became a really close friend or you became an outcast. My friend and I became outcasts, and our not being asked to breakfast the next day was a clear sign that we had overstayed our welcome.

This experience brought home to me how ghettoized Chile’s classes were, how class formed such gulfs between the elite, the middle class, and workers. Chile’s roughly equal electoral division between the National Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Unidad Popular reflected class solidarities that were difficult to bridge. My experience in Valdivia confirmed my worst fear, that is, that the Unidad Popular had lost the middle classes and that this did not stem so much from what its policies actually were than from deep-seated fears that the gains of workers and the lower classes would only come at their expense.

Interviews with people on the left brought up a uniform response: that the middle class was being misled and manipulated by the right wing to believe that their class interests were with the rich rather than with the working class. Most believed in the Unidad Popular’s formula for revolution, that a broad alliance between working class, middle class, and constitutionally oriented sectors of the upper class would be the social engine of revolutionary transformation. There was a discounting of the independent dynamic of the middle sectors, a view of them as a passive mass that would respond to their “real” class interests, which lay in an alliance with the working class. Later, in the United States, after the September 11 coup against Allende, I would encounter this same perspective, which assigned most of the blame for the coup against Allende to external forces, rather than to the dynamics of class conflict and counterrevolution.

The danger of an inflamed middle class that saw its status and interests threatened from below, pushing it to a counterrevolutionary position that was abetted but not manipulated by the elite, was confirmed as I read up on the events leading up to Mussolini’s taking of power in Italy and Hitler’s ascent to power during the Weimer Republic in Germany.

I left Chile around March of 1973, after having witnessed two milestones in middle-class radicalization toward the right, the strike of small-truck owners and the marches of middle-class women banging pots and pans. The right by then controlled the streets, mounting demonstration after demonstration and subjecting people identified with the Unidad Popular to harassment and beatings. The left still mounted demonstrations, and the streets still resounded with the happy chant, “El que no salta es momio” (“He who does not jump is a reactionary”), but the mood of defensiveness had deepened.

After the coup of September 11, progressive analysis of the event and actions leading up to it focused on the role of the United States, which was seen as directing or working intimately with Pinochet and the leadership of the National and Christian Democratic parties. That a counterrevolutionary mass base had been central in the overthrow tended to be omitted, or if it wasn’t, the tendency was to regard it as largely a force manipulated by the CIA and the elites.

The reality, however, was that, contrary to the prevailing explanations of the coup, which attributed Pinochet’s success to US intervention and the CIA, the counterrevolution was already there prior to the US destabilization efforts; that it was largely determined by internal class dynamics; and that the Chilean elites were able to connect with middle-class sectors terrified by the prospect of poor sectors rising up with their agenda of justice and equality.

In short, the US intervention was successful because it was inserted into an ongoing counterrevolutionary process. CIA destabilization was just one of the factors that contributed to the victory of the right, not the decisive one. This was not something that progressives wanted to hear then, since many wanted a simple black-and-white picture, that is, that the overthrow of Allende was orchestrated from the outside, by the United States. Being of the left, I could understand why politics demanded such a portrayal of events. Being a sociologist, I realized that the situation was much more nuanced.

This brings up the question of what to expect from the middle class in conditions of severe class conflict. Among both liberals and progressives at that time, it was common to portray the middle class as an ally of the working class and the lower classes generally and to consider that it was by and large a force for democratization. But Chile showed that, contrary to this assumption, the middle classes are not necessarily forces for democratization in developing countries. In fact, when the poorer classes are being mobilized with a revolutionary agenda, the middle classes can become a mass base for counterrevolution, as in Germany and Italy in the 1920s when the middle class provided the foot soldiers of the fascist movements.

It was a phenomenon that I was again to encounter 40 years later, when I had a front row seat to middle-class mobilizations against the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand. Yingluck was a stand-in for her brother Thaksin, who had revolutionized Thai politics by mobilizing the rural poor. Supported by the middle class and dominant section of the Thai elite, the military seized power in Thailand in 2014 and has maintained an iron grip on power since then, in spite of the pleas of middle-class political formations that had supported the coup, like the Democratic Party, for a return to civilian rule.

Seymour Martin Lipset famously posited the thesis that the middle class was a force for democratization in the developing world. After observing counterrevolutionary movements against the lower classes in Chile and Thailand, I see instead a Janus-faced class: a force for democracy when it is fighting elites defending their power and privileges, a force for reaction when confronted with lower classes seeking a revolutionary transformation of society.

Yet, as Orlando Letelier pointed out, the tragedy of the middle class is that, after serving as a mass base for reaction, it also becomes eventually one of the victims of the counterrevolution.

International reports about the recent election in the Philippines invariably refer to its result as a “political earthquake.” The metaphor is accurate.

A year ago, few believed that Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao, would be the next president of the Philippines. Duterte had achieved a reputation as a Filipino “Dirty Harry,” a strongman who boasted that he got rid of criminals and drug pushers by wiping them off the face of the earth. When questioned about the 1,000-plus extrajudicial executions alleged to have taken place under his watch, he simply growled that criminals had no human rights and were not entitled to due process.

He was the outlier in Philippine politics, the one who didn’t buy into liberal values and liberal democratic discourse. He seemed to take perverse delight in peppering his talks with curses like putang ina (“son of a bitch”) and calling people who irritated him bakla (gay) or cono (cunt)—his special term for people coming from elite families.

Not surprisingly, many have likened him to another political outlier: Donald Trump.

Underestimating Duterte

A year ago, the contest seemed to be between Vice President Jejomar Binay and Manuel “Mar” Roxas II, the secretary of the interior who was outgoing President Benigno Aquino’s anointed successor.

Aquino’s Liberal Party machine felled Binay by exposing the various ways Binay’s family had siphoned off billions of pesos from their bailiwick, the city of Makati. It may have been a political demolition job, but it was all true.

Next to suffer the ruling Liberal Party’s wrath was Grace Poe. A neophyte senator, Poe was thrust into the presidential race by people who thought her name would translate into political gold. Poe’s father was Fernando Poe Jr., a beloved action star widely believed to have been cheated out of the presidency during the 2004 elections. In the Liberal Party’s calculation, a Roxas-Poe tandem would be unbeatable.

When Poe refused to run as Roxas’s vice president, her candidacy became the object of legal challenges. One disputed her being a natural-born Filipino—a qualification to run for the presidency—owing to her being a foundling. Another asserted that Poe, who returned to the Philippines after living in the United States, did not meet the necessary period of residency in the country. The cases against Poe went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which—after a bitter struggle—refused to disqualify her. But the damage had been done, and the fingerprints of the presidential palace were all over the place.

Meanwhile, Duterte’s star was on the rise.

He was, however, going ballistic. To his boasting about killing criminals without due process, he now added threats about killing workers if they went against his development plans, which alarmed the labor unions. With his mouth seemingly running ahead of his mind, many partisans of the administration thought Duterte was on the road to self-destruction.

They were wrong.

A Difficult Sell

Yet if the ruling Liberal Party could demolish two of its leading opponents, it had a harder time selling its chosen candidate.

To a great extent this was Aquino’s doing, since he’d convinced Roxas to make his campaign theme the continuation of the administration’s “Straight Path” initiative. Aquino wanted Roxas to be seen in the public eye as the inheritor of his anti-corruption campaigns. Instead, the administration burdened Roxas with two major millstones.

One was the scandal surrounding a secret, multibillion-peso slush fund concocted by the administration that involved the arbitrary, illegal, and unconstitutional management of public funds.

The other was the disastrous Mamasapano raid, where 44 members of the National Police’s Special Action Force were killed, along with 17 members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It was a bungled counterterrorist raid, done mainly to serve Washington’s interests rather than Manila’s—and for which Aquino refused to accept command responsibility. It hung like a specter over his administration.

But Roxas had his own share of problems. Though regarded as personally clean, he was widely seen as inept, if not a klutz.

Put in charge of the recovery effort following the catastrophic Typhoon Hainan (or Yolanda), he was blamed for the massive mismanagement that attended the effort. Having served as head of the Department of Transportation and Communication, he was also seen as responsible for the administration’s failure to untangle metropolitan Manila’s mass transit and traffic mess. “Analysis paralysis” became the scornful description of his management approach.

Meanwhile, Duterte’s trash talk wasn’t leading, as the Liberal Party hoped, to self-destruction.

While there were five candidates, the media largely structured the contest as being between Roxas and Duterte. And, in a style befitting Donald Trump, Duterte found his rival’s number: a tendency to react quickly and hotly to real or perceived slights.

Thus Duterte needled Roxas on the latter’s claim to be a Wharton graduate in his official biography. Technically, Roxas was right—he had an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But Duterte was also right that Roxas was guilty of misrepresentation, since the common assumption is that a “Wharton graduate” is one who has an MBA from the school. No amount of explanation from Roxas could deter Duterte from continually bringing up the issue of misrepresentation.

And the more angry and exasperated Roxas got, the more he lost points with Filipinos, who think that the one who loses his cool in a debate (pikun) loses the argument.

An Electoral Insurgency

While Roxas, a man with a lily-white upper class background, stumbled, Duterte found himself becoming the medium of an electoral revolt.

This first became evident on the Internet.

Seemingly out of nowhere, an army of Duterte netizens emerged when it became apparent that he was considering a run for the presidency. Euphoric and aggressive by turns, they waged war on those who expressed reservations or criticisms of their idol. While some engaged in spirited debate, others resorted to threats. One female environmentalist and Duterte critic, for instance, was threatened online with rape.

The response was often similarly base. Some anti-Duterte netizens retaliated against attacks, for example, by calling the Duterte camp “Dutertards.” Philippine politics had never before seen a cyberwar this fierce.

Surveys showed Duterte drawing support from all classes. His anti-crime message obviously resonated with the upper and middle classes, but it also found fertile ground in poorer, drug-ravaged neighborhoods, whose residents didn’t think Duterte was exaggerating when he said the drug problem in the Philippines was worse than in Mexico.

But it was the candidate’s railing against corruption and poverty, his obvious disdain for the rich—the conos, as he called them—and above all, his coming across as “one of you guys” that acted as a magnet to workers, the urban poor, peasants, and the lower middle class. From mid-March on, he had the momentum, climbing to the top of all the surveys and not yielding the lead once he got there. In city after city, thousands attended his rallies, often waiting six or seven hours in sweltering temperatures to hear the man.

Traveling throughout the country during this period in my own campaign for the Senate, the excitement was palpable to me. I encountered the same story everywhere, and it was not apocryphal: As one campaigner put it, “People are making their own posters and tarpaulins. Dirt-poor tricycle drivers are paying for Duterte stickers. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Spontaneity and improvisation and grassroots momentum have been the hallmarks of the Duterte campaign,” I observed in a Facebook post during the campaign. “Duterte, more by instinct rather than plan, simply set fire to emotions that were already just below the surface…I am disturbed by the Duterte movement and fear a Duterte presidency, but we risk gross misunderstanding of its dynamics and direction if we attribute its emergence to mass manipulation. It is, simply put, a largely spontaneous electoral insurgency.”

As the campaign moved to a climax, Duterte seemed to make a fatal mistake when he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary during a prison uprising in Davao in 1989. Instead of condemning the violence, Davao quipped that “the mayor should have been first in line” to violate the woman. This triggered fury in many quarters, especially among women’s groups, and censure from the Australian and US ambassadors. But the incident barely dented his numbers.

Then Roxas brought out the heavy artillery: Senator Antonio Trillanes, the same administration ally who’d spearheaded the demolition job on Vice President Binay. He claimed that Duterte had stashed billions of pesos in multiple accounts that he hadn’t disclosed. Yet the polls simply shrugged that revelation off.

A Class Disconnect

It became clear to me then that what Duterte actually stood for was drowned out by what people wished him to be: the bearer of their fears and hopes, and the sword that would bring about the radical measures they felt were necessary to contain the rot of the system.

In panic mode three days before the election, President Aquino staked all the moral authority he thought he’d built up over six years on publicly branding Duterte a “dictator” and calling on Filipinos to reject him. “For some reason,” I wrote at the time, Aquino “doesn’t realize that people see him not as part of the solution but as part of the problem, and that the more he exhorts the people to behave in a certain way, the more they will go in the opposite direction.”

The disconnect between the upper-class president and the electorate, in short, was deafening.

On May 7, the last day of the campaign, while his rivals struggled to bring mere hundreds to their final rallies, close to one million people jammed Manila’s Luneta Park to hear their idol Duterte. He was in fine form, peppering his speech as usual with curses, but also burnishing his populist appeal. As one observer, social critic John Silva, wrote:

Now I get it. The media’s relentless attacks, besmirching Digong Duterte for his looks, his vulgarity, his shameless sexuality, his death threats for criminals who prey on children and the poor, actually all this has a lot to do with the threat he poses for the forty richest families who control most of the country’s gross national product and the media. It’s the scary threat of spreading the wealth threatened by a candidate whose house in Davao is about the size of a Forbes Park [an exclusive residential area for the super-rich] pool cabana.… So, it’s class war, at least for now, in print, on the airwaves and in cyberspace.

The Coming Fury?

So, in the aftermath of Duterte’s smashing victory, where he gained over 38 percent of the vote, what’s in store for the Philippines?

When it comes to foreign policy, no one really knows. During one of the presidential debates, he said that his solution to the Philippines’ territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea would be for him to go—alone!—to one of the reefs claimed by the Philippines but occupied by China. He’d plant the Philippine flag, he promised, and then leave it up to the Chinese to deal with him, even kill him. Many thought he wasn’t joking. (One thing is certain, though: Influenced by an anti-imperialist outlook since his student days, Duterte trusts the Americans even less than he does the Chinese.)

And economic policy? He said he’d be content with copying the blueprints of his rival candidates, since “I’ve been copying from my seatmates since I was in Grade Three.” And again, many did not see this as a joke.

What’s not in doubt is that the country is in for draconian policies when it comes to drugs and crime. There’s also no doubt that, with all the expectations he’s aroused, there will be populist measures promoting income distribution and less talk about promoting economic growth, since the electorate is visibly tired of rapid growth without poverty reduction. His announcement that he would appoint people connected with the Communist Party to head up the departments of agrarian reform, the environment, labor, and social welfare, for example, was received by many to be an opening salvo in a move to the left.

With the anger, frustration, and resentment that accumulated under a succession of corrupt or inept administrations dominated by competing dynasties now bursting into the open, the Philippines is headed for stormy seas. Social warfare is on the agenda, and the country is likely to experience something akin to the Yellowshirt versus Redshirt conflict in Thailand in the years leading up to the military coup of 2014.

This realization was brought home to me shortly before the election, when I ran into a former student who was a Roxas partisan. “I hope that migrating will not be the only option for people like me,” he said. Lower-level staff at the international agency he worked at had gone for Duterte “because they want to get up there right now. I can’t tell them that it took two generations for my family to reach white-collar status because they won’t listen to me. They want it right now.”

It’s always amazing how the stock market pulls big surprises on those who should know better.

The momentous rise in share prices in the Shanghai stock exchange from mid-2014 to the middle of this year, when the composite index shot up by 150 percent, should have been a strong indication of what Alan Greenspan labeled “irrational exuberance”—the sign of an impending collapse of stock prices that are far above the real value of assets being traded.

But like Greenspan during the 2008 Wall Street crisis, neither Chinese investors, foreign investors, nor the Chinese government seemed prepared when the market cratered earlier this summer. The Shanghai composite index plunged by 40 percent in a few weeks’ time, triggering a global collapse of stock prices and forcing Beijing to intervene and buy up market shares—and, when that failed, prompting it to devalue the yuan.

Buoyed by a $585 billion stimulus following the US crash of 2008 and the European sovereign-debt crisis the following year, China had appeared to ride out the storm its Western trading partners unleashed upon themselves several years ago. It was only a matter of time, many analysts thought, before Beijing and the BRICS countries would replace the traditional economic hegemons as drivers of the world economy. This optimism proved short-lived.

Now, in fact, the Beijing stock-market collapse marks the deepening of a new stage in the contemporary crisis of global capitalism.

The Struggle Over Economic Strategy

When then-President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao launched China’s massive stimulus program—the biggest in the world in relation to the size of the economy—their aim went beyond providing temporary relief as the country’s main export markets in the United States and Europe faltered. The stimulus was intended to be the cutting edge of an ambitious drive to make domestic consumption, instead of exports, the center of gravity of the economy.

That plan made economic sense—not only because export markets were volatile, but also because over-investment in exports had left considerable underused capacity in the economy. It would place more purchasing power in the hands of the vast majority of peasants and workers, who had been disadvantaged by the priority given to export-oriented industries and profits. And politically, it would help China’s leadership fend off international complaints about the massive trade surpluses the country was running.

The problem was that the shift would also entail transforming the composition of winners and losers in the new China.

The country’s export-oriented growth has created a set of political and economic interests that have congealed into a powerful lobby over the last 30 years. This includes government planning bodies like the National Development Reform Commission and the Ministry of Finance, both of which had fathered the strategy of export-led industrialization; export-oriented state and private enterprises; local government and Communist Party bodies in the coastal provinces; and state-owned construction firms whose infrastructure projects undergird the export-led strategy.

One key interest of this lobby has been the undervaluation of the yuan to make Chinese exports competitive. Another has been keeping interest rates low—in fact, negative, when inflation is taken into account—so that people’s savings can be re-loaned at low rates to favored export-oriented firms and construction companies. Economists have termed this policy “financial repression.”

Alongside the small and medium entrepreneurs serving local markets, the losers include workers, peasants, and the general population in their roles as savers and consumers—in short, as the economist Hongying Wang put it, all those who have “suffered from the financial and public finance systems that have deprived them of their fair share of the national wealth.”

The export lobby didn’t just neutralize the plan to make domestic consumption the cutting edge of the economy. It was also able to hijack the massive stimulus program that had been intended to place money and resources in the hands of consumers. According to statistics Wang cited from Caijing Magazine, some 70 percent of the stimulus funds went to infrastructure, while only 8 percent went to social welfare expenditures like affordable housing, healthcare, and education.

Financial Repression Sparks Speculation

This “financial repression” has had particularly pernicious consequences.

With little money to be earned from their bank deposits, a great number of the Chinese public gravitated toward the real-estate and property markets. This move was encouraged by the authorities, who were worried about the public’s discontent with the lack of profitable outlets for their savings. This encouragement included easing lending requirements at state banks to allow people to invest not only their savings but also borrowed cash.

Speculation in property was the investment of choice for many years. But as in the United States during the subprime property bubble, the market attracted too many investors, leading to a bust at the beginning of 2014. The price collapse led to thousands of unfinished skyscrapers, ghost cities, abandoned housing projects, and virtually deserted shopping complexes like the New South China Mall in Guangdong, which had been promoted as “Asia’s biggest mall.” This was like Thailand during the Asian financial crisis in 1998, but on a much, much bigger scale.

After the real estate debacle, investors fled to the stock market. With China’s stock-market value going above $10 trillion and the Shanghai index rocketing upward by 150 percent between mid-2014 and mid-2015, the market seemed both a safe and highly rewarding bet. Hundreds of thousands of small-time investors rushed into the casino, many betting with money borrowed from Chinese state banks.

When the Shanghai index reached its highest point in mid-June, a Bloomberg analyst observed that the previous year’s gain alone was “more than the $5 trillion size of Japan’s entire stock market. No other stock market has grown as much in dollar terms over a 12-month period.”

A steep, 40 percent plunge in the Shanghai index followed. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese investors posted huge losses and are now in debt. Many lost all their savings—a significant personal tragedy in a country with a poorly developed social security system.

Political Consequences

Anger at the government’s failure to avoid the rout is building. Alert to the threat of stock-market losers taking to the streets, Beijing has tried to deflect the blame toward stock-market analysts and brokers. Authorities have made nearly 200 showcase arrests, even staging a televised “confession” by one business writer that he’d spread false rumors about the markets.

With the economic crisis deepening, the anger and resentment of those who were stripped bare of their savings are now joined to the fear of the unknown that’s stalking many in the middle class. Indeed, China’s modern middle class—which emerged only in the last quarter-century of rapid growth—has no experience with the grim prospects of a real economic downturn.

Added ingredients to this volatile brew are increasing mass protests by peasants and workers over a variety of grievances, including environmental pollution, land-grabbing by local authorities, and lack of workers’ rights. According to the China Labor Bulletin, strikes have become the “new normal” in China: There were some 1,378 workers’ strikes and protests in 2014—more than double the 2013 figure and triple 2012’s.

Over the last three decades, the Communist Party of China has replaced the delivery of socialism as the basis of its legitimacy with the delivery of rapid growth and a rich capitalist economy. Indeed, one of the key reasons the party has found it so hard to give up the export-oriented growth model is that it regards this strategy as a tried and tested mechanism of achieving high growth.

What matters now is how the current government of Xi Jinping will manage citizens’ expectations in a period of much slower growth, increasing joblessness, greater inequality, and escalating discontent. Will it continue to tread softly around the powerful set of interests that have dominated society for 30 years? Or will it muster the courage to lead the way to a new development paradigm, one based on domestic consumption and greater equity?

This September marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Yet even seven full decades since Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945, fallout over the bitter conflict continues to shape the politics of the countries that fell under Japanese imperial rule.

The war left its mark not only on relations between Japan and its neighbors, but also on class politics within these countries. How each country handled its collaborator classes, in turn, has had a considerable impact on how they’ve responded to the current Japanese government’s push to revise the country’s “peace constitution” into irrelevance.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Philippines, where postwar US authorities helped rehabilitate erstwhile collaborators with the Japanese occupation in the name of fighting communism. Generations later, it’s led to the grandson of a despised Philippine collaborator endorsing the remilitarization of his country’s former occupiers—by the grandson of a war criminal, no less.

History certainly works in mysterious ways.

Horrors of the Occupation

One month before this year’s anniversary, one of my favorite cousins passed away at 100 years of age. During the war, her husband left their house in Manila to serve as a medical doctor in the Filipino-American army, which retreated to the Bataan Peninsula as invading Japanese forces advanced. She never heard from him again.

It was only three years later, after Manila was liberated by General Douglas MacArthur’s troops and Filipino guerrillas, that she learned her husband had been summarily executed, along with three other doctors, while trying to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. Many of his comrades suffered the same fate upon their surrender to the Japanese. During the weeklong Bataan Death March alone, the Japanese killed 18,000 of their 72,000 Filipino and American prisoners—a mortality rate of 25 percent in just seven days.

My cousin was left with three young children to raise alone, a situation shared by many women during the Japanese occupation.

The Japanese military regime in the Philippines was unrelentingly brutal. Innocent people suspected of aiding the guerrillas were routinely tortured and executed. My uncle was bayoneted and left for dead when he refused a Japanese officer’s order to take down the American flag at his school. My father was beaten with a baseball bat in Fort Santiago, the Spanish-era fortress in Manila that the Japanese converted into a prison and torture center. He was lucky to survive.

Young women and girls, some as young as 11 or 12, were rounded up to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops. Nobody knows for certain how many Filipinas were forced into sexual slavery, but historians estimate that up to 200,000 women from the Philippines, Korea, China, and other countries occupied by the Japanese suffered this fate. Some 400 of these “comfort women” have surfaced in the Philippines since the 1990s, but this figure is probably only a fraction of those who were actually forced into sexual service. Many others preferred to keep silent.

Overshadowing even the Bataan Death March as a war crime was the indiscriminate killing spree that Japanese naval infantrymen unleashed in Manila as the war drew to a close. Filipino author Joan Orendain has rightfully asserted that the “Rape of Manila” rivaled the better known Rape of Nanking in its brutality, with “100,000 burned, bayoneted, bombed, shelled, and shrapneled dead in the span of 28 days.” Unborn babies “ripped from their mothers’ womb provided sport: thrown up in the air and caught, impaled on bayonet tips.” Rape was rampant, and “after the dirty deed was done, nipples were sliced off, and bodies bayoneted open from the neck down.”

Abe’s “Apology”

With this record of atrocities, one would have expected that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent remarks on the war—in which he admitted that Japan had caused “immeasurable damage and suffering” but asserted that “generations to come” must not be “predestined to apologize”—would elicit the same negative reaction in the Philippines that it did in China and Korea.

Abe, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement, should have “made a sincere apology to the people of victim countries, and made a clean break with the past of militarist aggression, rather than being evasive on this major issue of principle.” South Korea’s ruling party, for its part, criticized the Abe statement “because it did not directly mention remorse and apology for Japan’s past history of aggression, but only expressed them in a roundabout way in the past tense.”

In both China and South Korea, resentment and suspicion of Japan continue to boil just beneath the surface.

On the contrary, remarks by top Philippine officials were positive. “Japan has acted with compassion and in accordance with international law,” said a presidential spokesperson, “and has more actively and positively engaged with the region and the world after the war.”

Contrasting Trajectories

The different responses stem from the unique political and economic trajectories of the three countries. Three considerations are important:

First, for China and Korea, the anti-Japanese struggle was a central element in the forging of their nationalist identities, or what Benedict Anderson famously termed their “imagined community.”

The Chinese Communist Party has projected itself as the central figure in the victorious “patriotic war” against Japan (though many historians are of the opinion that it was the Communists’ rivals—the Nationalists—who did most of the fighting and dying). Both Korean states see themselves as emerging from the anti-colonial struggle against Japan, which annexed and colonized the peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

For the Philippines, in contrast, the official narrative puts the elite-led revolution against Spain in the late 19^th century as its nationalist centerpiece—with the subsequent American annexation of the country painted in largely positive terms and the Second World War depicted as a violent but brief episode on the way to independence.

Second, the three countries have contrasting economic relationships with contemporary Japan. For China and Korea, Japan isn’t just a former military overlord but a contemporary economic rival. Trade and investment relations with the Japanese are seen as a necessary evil to acquire the needed resources and technology to beat them.

In the case of the Philippines, Japan was never seen as an economic competitor but a source of development aid, investment, and jobs. Japan’s image as a wartime enemy was transformed beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Japanese corporate investments starting producing local jobs in appreciable numbers. Meanwhile, Philippine migrant workers in Japan’s entertainment and sex industries sent back remittances to their families that enabled not only their survival but their social mobility.

Elite Collaboration, Popular Resistance

But perhaps the main factor explaining the different attitudes toward Japan is the class factor.

In Korea, the politics of remembrance was boosted by the destruction of the prewar landed elite that collaborated with the Japanese—the Korean civil war of 1950-53 and the subsequent land reform all but wiped these elites away. In the Philippines, in contrast, the politics of forgetting was facilitated by a postwar whitewashing of the elite’s role during the occupation.

Once the pillars of US colonial rule, after the Japanese invasion most Philippine elites swiftly switched sides and collaborated with the Japanese. A complex kind of class war ensued, in which the national and local elites worked closely with the Japanese while the masses for the most part hated the invaders and waited for the Americans to return, as promised by MacArthur.

Scores of guerrilla groups formed, the best known and most effective being the communist-led Hukbalahap, which chased away the hated landlords in Central Luzon even as it fought the Japanese. But aside from the “Huks,” there were other, less ideological outfits that were headed by lower-class or middle-class figures—like the charismatic Marcos Villa Agustin, or “Marking,” a former bus driver whose units operated from the Sierra Madre mountain range in Luzon to terrorize not only Japanese soldiers but also local elites.

The end of the war saw impassioned calls from the resistance to try the elite collaborators as traitors. Among the most hated servitors of Japan was Manuel Roxas, the director of the Rice Procurement Agency, who’s described in an authoritative study as having “organized the extraction of rice from peasant farmers to supply the Japanese military” and “was thus the collaborator most clearly identified in the minds of peasants with the betrayal and abuses suffered during the occupation.”

However, the returning General MacArthur intervened to save his pre-war friend Roxas from hanging, an act that anticipated Washington’s rehabilitation of the reviled elite in order to contain the communist-led guerrilla forces.

Laundered and provided international respectability by Washington, Roxas bribed, intimidated, and terrorized his way to victory during the presidential elections of 1946. Shortly before his unexpected death in 1948, Roxas issued the infamous Proclamation No. 51, which granted amnesty to accused collaborators. Reflecting the acute class enmities triggered by the experience of the occupation, one of the reasons cited for the decree was the fact that “the question of collaboration has divided the people of the Philippines since liberation in a manner which threatens the unity of the nation at a time when the public welfare requires that said unity be safeguarded and preserved.”

The first decades of the postwar era were thus marked by a contradiction in the popular mind between the memory of legendary resistance to the Japanese and the reality of continuing domination of national politics by a largely collaborationist elite—one that had been whitewashed by Washington in the name of the anti-communist struggle with the dawning of the Cold War.

So unlike the Chinese and South Korean governments, the Filipino political elite soft-pedaled war damage claims against Japan; extended a warm welcome in the 1950s to Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, a class A war criminal and the grandfather of Shinzo Abe; and did little to help Filipina comfort women in their struggles for an apology and restitution from Tokyo.

Japan Rearms

This history informs the Philippine response to Abe’s drive to subvert Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution—the so-called “Peace Clause” that prohibits Japan from engaging in offensive warfare—in order to promote his strategy of “Collective Defense,” which would deploy Japanese troops in offensive operations outside Japan.

China and South Korea have sternly condemned Collective Defense, seeing it as part of a comprehensive right-wing program to deny Japanese war crimes, refuse restitution to Japan’s sex slaves, bring back old-style Japanese nationalism, and erode the Japanese people’s still dominant pacifism. Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s reaction, on the other hand, could hardly be more different.

While acknowledging that “there’s been some debate on the Japanese government’s plan to revisit certain interpretations of its constitution,” Aquino asserted during his state visit to Japan in late June 2014 that “nations of good will can only benefit if the Japanese government is empowered to assist others, and is allowed to come to the aid of those in need, especially in the area of collective self-defense.” He added that he did “not view with alarm any proposal to revisit the Japanese constitution.”

This was, at the very least, inappropriate meddling in Japanese domestic politics, one that some analysts say was calculated to influence Japanese public opinion at a time when the majority of Japanese had come out against the country’s remilitarization. A poll released at around the time of the Aquino visit found 56 percent against collective self-defense and only 28 percent in favor. Yet on July 1, 2014, fortified by support from the visiting Aquino, Abe gutted Article 9, resorting to a cabinet decision to skirt parliamentary approval and the requirement for a referendum.

The drastic endorsement of a move opposed by the majority of Japanese as well as Japan’s neighbors is difficult to explain as stemming solely from the Philippine government’s desire to gain an ally in its territorial disputes with China in the West Philippine Sea. Other countries in East and Southeast Asia, even those directly threatened by China’s moves, have been careful not to endorse Tokyo’s new doctrine of power projection beyond Japan—Vietnam being a prime example. Most are worried that the Abe doctrine is intended not so much to assist allies against China’s moves but to support the Japanese leader’s strategic aim of developing a nuclear weapons capability, exercising a more aggressive posture, and rewriting history.

Grandfathers and Grandsons

One element that hasn’t been adequately examined, but which is likely to have played a role in Aquino’s endorsement, is his class memory.

Aquino comes from a class whose experience of the Second World War was very different from that of ordinary Filipinos. Aquino is better known as the son of two icons in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship, Cory and Ninoy Aquino. But he’s also the grandson of Benigno Simeon Aquino Sr.—who is chiefly remembered as the Japanese-designated speaker of the National Assembly during the puppet regime, and earlier as the director general of the country’s only political party during the occupation.

Possibly the only reason Aquino Sr. escaped death at the hands of Philippine partisans was that he spent the closing months of the war in Japan. Brought back to the Philippines one year after the cessation of hostilities, he was arraigned on charges of treason at the People’s Court before being released on bail. However, he died before he could take advantage of his friend Manuel Roxas’ general amnesty for local quislings like him.

Did psycho-biographical factors play a role in Aquino’s unquestioning endorsement of Abe’s moves? It’s inconceivable that one whose parents or grandparents suffered under the Japanese occupation would have provided such enthusiastic support for Abe’s quest to project Japanese military power. True, Filipinos have generally become more positive towards Japan, but few would cross the line that Aquino did.

So one is left with the question: Was it more than coincidence that a dangerous new course for the region would be launched by the joining of hands of Aquino, the grandson of a despised collaborator, and Abe, the grandson of a war criminal?

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Next to climate change, inequality is the burning issue of our time. In this regard, the evidence presented by Thomas Piketty, the United Nations and other sources is quite conclusive: the current rates of global inequality are unprecedented.

In his celebrated book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty marshals a massive amount of data to show that rising inequality has been the norm since capitalist growth took off in the eighteenth century. Now, he says, things are likely to become even worse.

The only period when there was a reversal of this flow, Piketty writes, occurred in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when what he calls “exogenous shocks”—such as wars and the social revolutions they triggered—forced capitalist elites to make economic concessions. These social compromises were largely mediated by Keynesian or social-democratic political regimes. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, inequality had resumed its onward march under democratic regimes implementing neoliberal policies.

Piketty’s remarks are unsettling to believers in democracy, which includes most of us. One of the things he seems to be saying, at least implicitly, is that democratic regimes—whose rise in the Global South paralleled the rise of neoliberalism in the North—don’t really work when it comes to containing economic inequality. Of course they enshrine formal political equality and institutionalize majority rule. But they are ineffective at bringing about greater economic equality.

My generation came of age—from the 1970s to the 1990s—fighting to oust dictatorships and bring about democracy in the Third World. One of our most potent arguments against authoritarianism was that it promoted the concentration of income in dictatorial cliques allied with transnational capital. We said that democracy would reverse this process of impoverishment and inequality. From Chile to Brazil to South Korea to the Philippines, fighting against dictatorship was a fight for both democratic choice and greater equality.

Yet the evidence now seems to clearly indicate that we were wrong. What Samuel Huntington called the “Third Wave” of democracy in the Global South went hand in hand with the spread of policies that hobbled the fight for greater economic equality from the outset.

Democracy and Land Reform

The Philippines offers a classic case study of the limits of liberal democracy. In the twenty-nine years since we overthrew the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, many of us who fought for democratic institutions also prioritized agrarian reform, believing that this was the central project that would bring about more equality.

Things at first appeared to be headed in the right direction. With the ouster of Marcos in 1986, not only was a constitutional democracy set up, but a sweeping land-reform law—the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, or CARP—was passed to give millions of peasants title to their land. In contrast to the coercive programs in China, Vietnam and Cuba, redistribution would be accomplished peacefully.

Over the next few years, however, competitive elections were reduced to a mechanism whereby members of the elite fought one another for the privilege of ruling while consolidating their control over the political system. Indeed, the vast majority of those elected to Congress came from either the landlords or the big capitalist families. One of the victims of this entrenchment of class power was CARP.

Stymied by a combination of coercion, legal obstructionism, and the conversion of land from agricultural to commercial and industrial purposes, the agrarian-reform process stalled. Ultimately, fewer than half of the original 10 million hectares designated for redistribution had been disbursed to peasants by 2008—some twenty years after the program was launched. Indeed, with little support in terms of social services, many peasants ended up reselling their land back to the landlords, while others lost their recently acquired land to aggressive legal action.

It was at this juncture that I and several other parliamentarians sponsored the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms, or CARPER. We had a hell of a time getting this law passed, but we finally managed to do so in August 2009. What made the difference were the peasant strikes and marches—including a 1,700-kilometer march from the southern island of Mindanao to the presidential palace in Manila—and efforts by activists to disrupt congressional sessions.

CARPER was a strong law. It plugged many of the loopholes in the original CARP, allocating some $3.3 billion to support land redistribution, seed and fertilizer subsidies, and agricultural-extension services. Most important, CARPER mandated that the distribution of all remaining lands had to be completed by June 30, 2014.

CARPER appeared to promise a new beginning. But despite monitoring and constant pushing by agrarian-reform advocates, the process of land acquisition and distribution proceeded at a snail’s pace. Thanks to landlord resistance, bureaucratic inertia and a lack of political will, some 550,000 hectares—including much of the best private land in the country—remained undistributed as the deadline arrived.

In a last-ditch effort to save the program, I personally appealed to President Benigno Aquino III, with whom my party is allied, to fire his timid agrarian-reform chief and appoint someone who would not be afraid to apply scorched-earth methods to the recalcitrant landlord class. The president—a scion of one of the biggest landed families in the country—refused.

Even as the landed elite was relying on the mechanisms of liberal democracy to subvert agrarian reform—including by exploiting loopholes in the legislation and waging expensive legal battles in court—foreign powers like the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were seeking to refashion our economy along neoliberal lines.

They succeeded.

Democracy and Structural Adjustment

Ultimately, it was not dictatorship but a democratically elected government that passed the automatic appropriations law that allowed foreign creditors to have the first cut of the Philippine budget. It was not a dictatorship but a democratically elected government that brought down the country’s protective tariffs to less than 5 percent, thus wiping out most of our manufacturing capacity. It was not a dictatorship but a democratically elected government that brought us into the World Trade Organization, opening our agricultural market to the unrestrained entry of foreign commodities and leading to the erosion of our food security.

Today, even as the elites battle it out in the Philippines’ thriving electoral arena, the rate of poverty—at nearly 28 percent—remains unchanged from the early 1990s. True, the economy has grown—but all of the studies show that the rate of inequality in the Philippines remains among the highest in Asia, underlining the fact that the fruits of growth continue to be appropriated by the top stratum of the population.

This isn’t to say that key reforms have not taken place. A reproductive-health law critical to advancing women’s rights was passed in the teeth of opposition by the Catholic Church. Civil-society pressure forced the abolition of the pork barrel, unprogrammed government funds given by the executive to members of the legislative branch in order to keep them on a short leash. A conditional cash-transfer program was instituted to provide direct income support to more than 4 million poor families. These, however, were small oases of reform in an overwhelmingly conservative social landscape.

Today, I sit in a legislative chamber in which roughly 80 percent of the members come from old and newly rich local elites—people who personify the Marxist dictum that economic power translates into political power and believe that this is the natural order of things, even as they declaim against inequality and corruption and extol democracy at every turn.

A Global Trend

The Philippine experience has been repeated throughout the Global South. Ironically, the liberal democracy we fought for in order to free ourselves from dictatorship became the system for our subjugation to local elites and foreign powers.

Even more than dictatorships, Western-style democracies are, we are forced to conclude, the natural system of governance under neoliberal capitalism, for they promote rather than restrain the savage forces of accumulation that lead to ever-greater levels of inequality and poverty. In fact, liberal-democratic systems are ideal for the economic elites, since they feature periodic electoral exercises that promote the illusion of equality, thus granting these systems an aura of legitimacy. The Philippines, it might be noted, has long been painted as a “social volcano.” This volcano does occasionally shake, rattle and roll, but it never quite explodes the way real volcanoes do. A key reason is that the electoral system serves as a safety valve, holding out the possibility of change “if only the right people are elected to office.”

Toward a New Democracy

However, the solution to the crisis of inequality is not to abandon democracy, as the Jurassic right would like (including the nostalgic pro-Marcos fringe in the Philippines), but rather to deepen it. To reverse this situation requires not just an alternative economic program based on justice, equity and ecological stability, but a new, more direct and more participatory democratic system.

People power must be institutionalized for periodic interventions against corruption and accumulated power, not abandoned once the insurrection has banished the old regime. Among the most important features of this new democracy, representative institutions would be balanced by the creation of other institutions enabling direct democracy. Civil society would organize itself politically to act as a counterpoint to—even a check on—the dominant state institutions. Citizens would nurture and maintain a “parliament of the streets” that could be brought to bear on the decision-making process at critical points: the institutionalization, if you will, of a parallel “people power.” Citizen socialization must move away from the idealization of liberal-democratic reforms and instead bring people together in the formulation of new, more participatory democratic arrangements. Likewise, equality—in the radical French Revolution sense of the term, not simply the bourgeois notion of “equality of opportunity”—must be brought back to center stage.

Finally, unlike in a liberal democracy—where most people participate in decision-making only during elections—political participation must become a constant activity, with people evolving into active citizens.

Theorizing the features of a “new democracy” is one thing; bringing it about is another. What forms of struggle must we employ to leap from the old to the new regime? We must not give up the battle for reform via the mechanisms of representative electoral democracy, but we should combine it with political mobilization outside the parameters of the liberal-democratic regime. Insurrectionary methods, exactly like the people-power uprisings in the Philippines, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, must be part of the repertoire of progressive groups.

Triggers of Change

The big question is: How do we bring about such fundamental reforms at a time when organized elites and disorganized, quiescent citizenries appear to be the norm in both the Global North and Global South?

Noting that “the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying,” Piketty asks whether the only real solution lies in violent reactions and radical shocks, such as the wars and revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps we are in for some of those violent reactions and radical shocks. Perhaps the current developments in Iraq and Syria are not marginal events, but rather explosions that will sooner or later occur in other regions, including the North. When the political explosions occasioned by inequality and the search for identity are combined with what many foresee as the dire social consequences of the climate apocalypse, then perhaps we are not too far away from catastrophic change after all.

Will liberal democracies survive and manage these exogenous shocks as they did in the mid-twentieth century? This is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, they may just as easily be overcome by internal and external pressures, leaving future historians to wonder—as the philosopher Richard Rorty puts it—why the golden age of democracy lasted only about 200 years.

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Read the full issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Walden Bello, a Nation contributor since 1976, was until 2015 a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines. An earlier version of this piece ran on teleSUR. 

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus. An earlier version appeared in Telesur English, which graciously gave its permission to reprint it.

Early in the morning of January 25, commandos belonging to the Special Action Force of the Philippine National Police crept into the southern town of Mamasapano—a stronghold of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The elite Seaborne Unit had come for Zulkifli Abdhir, a Malaysian bomb maker better known as “Marwan.”

By the end of the morning, dozens lay dead.

The episode has severely discredited the administration of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, jeopardized decades of progress on peace talks with Moro separatists and underlined the perils for developing-world governments that put themselves at the beck and call of Washington.

The commandos were able to kill Marwan, who’d sat high on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists.” But then all hell broke loose. The insurgents woke up and opened fire on the intruders, forcing the commandos to leave Marwan’s body behind. They had to content themselves with cutting off the corpse’s index finger to turn over to the FBI.

As they retreated, nine of the Seaborne commandos were killed. They radioed for help, but they were told that the “Quick Reaction Force” charged with covering their withdrawal was already pinned down in a flat cornfield with little cover. Over the next few hours, that separate unit of thirty-six men was picked off one by one by Moro snipers. Only one of the thirty-six survived, by running for his life and jumping into a nearby river.

All in all, forty-four policemen died in the bloody battle. Moro fighters estimated that eighteen of their combatants and about four civilians were killed.

A timely rescue effort was not even mounted, since an infantry battalion in the area wasn’t informed till late in the morning that the commandos were under fire. When ceasefire monitors finally reached the cornfield late in the afternoon, long after the battle ended, they found corpses that had been stripped of their weapons and other gear, some exhibiting wounds that indicated they had been shot at point-blank range.

Biggest Casualty: Moro Autonomy

The “Mamasapano Massacre,” as it has come to be called, upended Philippine politics.

The biggest casualty was the Bangsa Moro Basic Law that was in the last stages of being shepherded through the Philippine Congress. Known as the BBL, the bill was the product of nearly five years of intensive negotiations between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to put an end to almost fifty years of fighting in the southern Philippines. It would have created an autonomous region for the Muslim Moros, a fiercely independent people that have long resisted integration into the broader Filipino polity.

With emotions among the Christian majority running high, congressional approval of the BBL was thrown into doubt, threatening an eventual return to hostilities. Some politicians rode on the incident to stoke the latent anti-Muslim prejudices of the dominant culture—not just to derail prospects for Moro autonomy, but also to advance their own political ambitions.

Under congressional questioning, the facts of the raid were extracted piece by piece—on national television—from high-level administration officials. Their feelings seemed to run the gamut of guilt, grief, disbelief and resentment at not being “in the know” about the planned incursion.

The decisive element in the unraveling of the operation, it appears, was the deliberate withholding of information from key people at the top of the police and armed forces hierarchy. Only the president, the Special Action Force commander and the national police chief, Gen. Alan Purisima, knew about the mission. Though suspended from office on corruption charges, Purisima—a trusted aide of the president—was effectively in charge of the operation, bypassing the acting police chief and the secretary of the interior, who knew nothing of the mission until disaster overtook it.

Emerging in the hearings was the following portrait of the tragedy: The officials who conceived and implemented the operation to nab Marwan chose not to inform the top people in the police and military leadership. They also ignored and subverted the carefully negotiated procedures for territorial access worked out among the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the government and third-party monitors.

The Liberation Front fighters—along with fighters from a die-hard separatist group, the Bangsa Moro Islamic Freedom Fighters—responded that morning to what they perceived as a large invasion force. Once the battle began, it became very difficult for their leaders to realize the intent of the commando contingent and get their forces to disengage.

It seemed evident, too, that some wounded policemen were finished off execution-style, though it was not clear which group was responsible for these atrocities.

Washington’s Hand

The big puzzle for many was why a government that was in the last stages of negotiating an autonomy agreement to end fifty years of warfare would endanger this goal—said to be a major legacy priority for President Aquino—with a large-scale commando intrusion into Moro territory without informing its negotiating partner.

To an increasing number of people, the answer must have something to do with Washington.

Indeed, Washington’s fingerprints were all over the operation: There was a $5 million bounty placed by the Americans on Marwan’s head. A US military helicopter appeared in the area after the long firefight, allegedly to help evacuate the wounded. Marwan’s finger disappeared after the battle and showed up at an FBI lab in the United States a few days later.

Filipino officials have remained tight-lipped on the question of US participation in the raid, invoking “national security” or choosing to make revelations only in secret executive sessions with the Senate. Thus it has fallen on the media to probe the US role.

Perhaps the most reliable of these probes was conducted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which found that US drones had pinpointed Marwan’s hiding place, guided the commandos to it and provided the capability for real-time management by the Philippine commanders away from the battlefield. American advisers, the paper claimed, were the ones who had vetoed informing top officials of the police, the armed forces and the Liberation Front of the planned raid on the grounds that news of the action would be leaked to Marwan.

Finally, the original plan was to have a fused team of Seaborne Unit commandos and the Quick Reaction Force. But that was reportedly rejected by the American advisers, who favored having the Seaborne Unit carry out the raid itself and the Quick Reaction Force provide cover—a plan that proved disastrous. The Seaborne Unit, it emerged, had been trained by “retired” Navy Seals and functioned as the Americans’ special unit within the special forces of the Philippine National Police.

The full extent of US involvement remains to be unearthed, but it’s now clear to many that taking out Marwan was a major priority for Washington—not Manila. As one congressman put it, the Mamasapano tragedy was a case of “the Americans fighting to the last Filipino.”

Into the Bunker

As the details of the American role emerge, the pressure is on President Aquino to admit complicity in a Washington-directed operation, which he has so far refused to do.

Aquino has come under intense fire from nationalist quarters that earlier criticized him for negotiating a military pact that allows the United States to use Philippine bases to implement President Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia” strategy to contain China.

Already under attack for putting a suspended police general in charge of the fatal mission and refusing to admit command responsibility for it, the charge of laying down Filipino lives for an American scheme appears to have forced the president further into his bunker, creating the widespread impression of a drift in leadership that, it was feared, coup plotters and other adventurers—of which there is no shortage in the Philippines—could take advantage of.

There is a personal postcript to this. As a sitting member of the Philippine House of Representatives, I withdrew my political support for President Aquino when he refused to accept command responsibility for the operation. Since my party, Akbayan, remains allied to the administration, I resigned as the congressional representative of the party.

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

From Germany to Belgium to France, European countries have been on a manhunt for terrorists in the wake of January’s shootings at the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo and a Parisian kosher supermarket. The pursuit has been especially intense in Belgium, where officials describe their targets as jihadist sleeper cells about to mount new terrorist attacks.

But while top forces have been mobilized against migrants who have supposedly left Europe to train with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), only to return and wreak havoc in Europe, there’s another explanation for recent attacks.

The real breeding ground for extremism stems from the treatment of immigrant groups within Europe. Racial, ethnic and religious discrimination have driven a generation of young migrants to radical movements as a solution to the absence of job prospects, poor education, deteriorated neighborhoods, lack of respect and repeated bouts in jail. Ironically, the crackdown on these communities in the aftermath of the attacks could potentially escalate the problem.

Rather than focus its attention on outsized warnings about terrorists being trained abroad, European countries would do well to oppose the anti-immigrant movements at home and promote a left that can organize not only the traditional working class, but immigrants as well.

Fanning the Flames

The fear coursing through the public, and motivating public officials, is not surprising.

After all, the Western media have painted an image of thousands of home-grown jihadists returning to Europe to sow terror after they’ve received military training in Yemen, Iraq and Syria at the hands of Al Qaeda and ISIS. CNN, among the most sensationalistic of the media sources, has warned its global audience that “as many as 20 sleeper cells of between 120 and 180 people could be ready to strike in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.” And, as the narrative goes, European security agencies are barely able to follow up on them.

The sense of entering an exceptional period has been reinforced through high-profile media appearances by so-called security experts like US Senator John McCain, Interpol chief Jürgen Stock and former CIA chief Leon Panetta.

McCain has declared the threat to the West so great that only deploying American “boots on the ground” to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria will stem the terrorist tide in the West. Stock has urged hitting suspected terrorists “before they hit you.” And Panetta has said that the terrorist assault is now entering “a much more dangerous chapter” that will require more coordinated surveillance and action on the part of US and European security forces. He has warned that ISIS and Al Qaeda “are engaged in a much more aggressive effort to conduct violence not only in Europe, but I think it’s a matter of time before they direct it at the United States as well.”

The Real Threat

How much is reality and how much is fantasy when it comes to the so-called sleeper cells remains to be sorted out. What is a real threat is the treatment of migrant communities in Europe, which—to borrow Panetta’s words—is entering a new, more dangerous chapter.

In their official responses to the Paris events, Western European governments have mainly called for inclusiveness and assimilation for migrants and the Muslim community. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it in a speech preceding a Muslim solidarity rally, “Islam is part of Germany…. I am the Chancellor of all Germans. And that includes everyone who lives here permanently, whatever their background or origin.” Or as German President Joachim Gauck later said at the rally, “We are all Germany.”

But despite these words of inclusivity, migrants throughout the continent fear that the real solution entertained by increasing numbers of white Europeans is the one proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He declared bluntly: “We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people. Therefore, immigration must be stopped. That’s the Hungarian stance.” Ironically, Orban said this after attending the January 11 “Unity Rally” in Paris, where thousands of Muslim migrants participated, bearing the slogan Je suis Charlie.

Although these dynamics have touched many countries, France has become the epicenter of the continent’s struggle over migration. It’s home to more than 4 million Muslim immigrants, the largest such population of any country in Europe. And in France, anti-immigrant forces have a particularly vocal spokesperson in Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front party.

In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, Le Pen called not only for “restricting immigration” but also for “stripping jihadists of their French citizenship,” a proposal that many migrants took to apply to more than just active jihadists. What’s more, Le Pen’s National Front is on a roll, having won 26 percent of the vote, or 4.1 million votes, in the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament—a result French Prime Minister Manuel Valls described as “a shock, an earthquake.”

And Le Pen’s influence is likely to remain strong—recent polls predict she’ll be the frontrunner in round one of the 2017 presidential elections.

Missed Opportunities

The situation that led to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been in the making for a long time, and addressing it earlier might have prevented some of the damage.

A decade ago, massive riots rocked the banlieues, the miserable suburbs of French cities. The 2005 riots lasted twenty successive nights and resulted in the burning of 9,000 vehicles and the destruction of eighty schools and many business establishments. They brought to the eyes of France and the world the desperation of migrant communities who inhabited the suburbs, and the tremendous resentment felt by their young people. As Mary Dejevsky of The Independent wrote, the riots offered a glimpse of the “France that is marooned between town and country, shut away behind ugly concrete walls, confined inside rotting tower blocks…the France that has failed.”

It was in these banlieues that the Charlie Hebdo gunmen—the Kouachi brothers Cherif and Said—were born, raised and worked.

Things could have gone differently. The riots could have been taken as an opportunity to truly integrate communities that had been defined as French but lacked the opportunities available to other French people. Yet for ten years, hardly any substantial reform took place to speed up the migrants’ assimilation and improve their living conditions.

One reason for the lack of reform was, paradoxically, rooted in the ideology of the French Revolution. As a French immigration specialist noted, “Our approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal, is part of the problem. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities are being told they do not exist.”

French official ideology is so intent on erasing particularities that the government does not allow statistics to be broken down by religion or ethnicity. As Guy Arnold explains in his book Migration: Changing the World, the result of these ideological blinders is a “resentful society of supposedly equal French citizens that has grown up in the heart of France’s capital under the blind eyes of successive governments that have simply not wanted to know.”

The treatment of immigrants has been further complicated by another legacy of the French Revolution—the core principle of laïcité, or secularism. The separation of church and state has always been strict in France. But in recent years, it has bordered on intolerance, with a devastating impact on relations between Muslims and the dominant society.

Invoking the idea of laïcité, a movement drawing support from left to right was in 2004 able to pass a law banning the hijab, a scarf that covers the head and chest, in public schools. This was followed in 2011 by another law, again with support across the ideological spectrum, that criminalized hiding one’s face in public. That law effectively banned two other traditional items of clothing worn by Muslim women: the niqab, a veil that covers the entire face except for the eyes, and the burqa, an outer garment that covers the body from head to toe.

Some analysts claim that it was not so much the ideology of laïcité that was at fault. Rather, they blame doctrinaire ideologues and self-interested politicians who allowed the issue to run out of control. Those same public figures could have appealed to common sense and tolerance, allowing these regular items of female Muslim dress to become parts of a diverse sartorial scene, as in Britain and the United States.

Failure of the French Model of Assimilation

A third reason for the absence of reform was the smug conviction among technocrats that the “French model of assimilation” was on the whole working, with the 2005 riots being merely a rough patch on the road.

In the “French model,” according to analyst Francois Dubet, “the process of migration was supposed to follow three distinct phases leading to the making of ‘excellent French people.’ First, a phase of economic integration into sectors of activities reserved for migrants and characterized by brutal exploitation. Second, a phase of political participation through trade unions and political parties. Third, a phase of cultural assimilation and fusion into the national French entity, with the culture of origin being, over time, maintained solely in the private sphere.”

What the technocrats didn’t face up to was that by the 1990s the mechanism sustaining the model had broken down. In the grip of neoliberal policies, the capitalist economic system had lost the ability to generate the semi-skilled and unskilled jobs for youth that had served as the means of integration into the working class for earlier generations of migrants. Youth unemployment in many of the banlieues reached 40 percent, nearly twice the national average. And with the absence of stable employment, migrant youth lacked the base from which they could be incorporated into trade unions, political parties and cultural institutions.

Impeded by ideological blindness to inequality, political mishandling of the Muslim dress issue and technocratic failure to realize that neoliberalism had disrupted the economic ladder to integration, authorities increasingly used repressive measures to deal with the “migrant problem.” They policed the banlieues even more tightly, with an emphasis on controlling young males—and, most notably, they escalated deportations.

When Nicolas Sarkozy took office as president of France in 2007, deportation became the preferred method of dealing with migrants. With his interior minister given free rein, a record 32,912 migrants were deported in 2011, a 17 percent rise from the year before. The minister, Claude Gueant, regularly engaged in explosive anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, linking Muslim immigrants to crime and drugs and asserting that Muslims praying in the street led to the “French no longer [feeling] at home.”

As the 2012 presidential elections drew near, Muslim- and immigrant-baiting became the means by which Sarkozy tried, unsuccessfully, to cut into Marine Le Pen’s right-wing base in order to stop Francois Hollande from being elected president.

Where Was the Left?

Notably absent as a decisive force shaping the politics of migration was the left.

That’s because, for the most part, the left had marginalized itself. The Socialists largely bought into the technocrats’ assimilation model, while the Communist Party oscillated between hostility to, and uneasy acceptance of, migrants. Failing to understand how capitalism was creating new strata of marginalized workers, the Communists largely stuck to representing, servicing and protecting their traditional industrial working-class base. Indeed, the Community Party initially displayed hostility to migrants—the party leadership voted to limit migration in 1980, and local governments dominated by the party opposed migrants’ entry into housing projects. Currently, although the party now supports the regularization of undocumented migrants, the Communists and the migrant community view each other with mutual suspicion.

This is not to say that the militant left made no efforts to organize migrants. Small Maoist groups dabbled in mobilizing them in the 1970s and ’ 80s. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist project, many progressive activists shied away from working with unorganized sectors of the working class, which they regarded as a failed agent of change.

Meanwhile, other former activists evolved into union bureaucrats. A number of militants became active in the largely middle-class-based anti-globalization movement, while some of the most promising progressive intellectuals, like the now celebrated Alain Badiou, moved from politics (he had founded the Marxist Leninist French Communist Union that had tried to organize migrants into class-conscious workers) to philosophy.

Over the past decade, one issue in particular eroded the already tenuous ties of the left to the Muslim migrant community. While all sectors could unite against racism and Islamophobia, a debilitating debate about the hijab split their ranks. Some viewed its use in public places as a violation of laïcité, while others defended the right of women to wear it.

As class politics ossified, ethnic, cultural, national and racial themes came to dominate public debate both inside and outside the banlieues. For the youth of the banlieues, the vacuum created by the absence of the left had critical consequences. As Dubet put it, “the traditional character of the left-wing activist supporting the population’s collective protest is disappearing behind the religious figure embodying the alternative route for a dignified and moral life in a city ‘outside the real world,’ in a community protected from a society perceived as being impure.”

Reading accounts of their trajectory, one cannot but entertain the possibility that under other circumstances, Cherif and Said Kouachi would probably have been ripe for recruitment into a progressive movement. But with no figure on the secular left to provide guidance to their feelings of injustice and their idealism, others filled the vacuum.

In Cherif’s case, it was Farid Benyettou, a devout Muslim of Algerian descent, who tirelessly held discussion groups with impressionable young men, encouraged them to join the jihad and set up, according to one investigative report, “a pipeline for young French Muslims” to travel to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda network in Iraq.

The rest, as they say, is history.

An Inevitable Ascendancy?

The real threat in France, and in Europe more broadly, is not the fantasy of a thousand jihadist sleeper cells poised to wreak havoc on society. The real threat is the repression of migrant communities by national security states. These have come with the backing of a significant segment of the majority population that has been mobilized by right-wing forces.

These forces are becoming increasingly sophisticated in popularizing their reactionary project. In her recent op-ed in the New York Times, Marine Le Pen invokes the name of the liberal icon Albert Camus and deploys republican discourse: “We, the French, are viscerally attached to our laïcité, our sovereignty, our independence, our values. The world knows that when France is attacked it is liberty that is dealt a blow…. The name of our country, France, still rings out like a call to freedom.”

Some commentators have interpreted this new style as a move “into the mainstream.” They are mistaken. It is extremist intent masked in secular republican discourse. What is unmistakable, though, is the confidence with which Le Pen now speaks to the West. It is the confidence of one who feels she is in the antechamber of power.

Is the ascendancy of Le Pen and similar far-right leaders inevitable?

In France, as in Europe as a whole, the relationship between the dominant society and the migrant community is a story of missed opportunities, timid initiatives and failures in leadership. It is also a story of abdication. A central actor—the organized left—that had played a role in the integration and amelioration of the conditions of earlier oppressed and exploited communities deserted the scene, leaving the field to racists and religious fundamentalists.

A secular left that could bridge the growing gulf between communities by asserting—beyond real differences of religion, culture and ethnicity—the overriding common interest of people as workers that are exploited and divided by an aggressive neoliberal capitalism, and rally them around a transformative emancipatory project, is still Europe’s best antidote to the brewing maelstrom. Whether the European left is up to the challenge, however, is another story.

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

As I peered at Jennifer Laude’s serene face in the open casket, I saw the wound on her forehead that was barely concealed by the mortician’s makeup. I did not see the bruises on her neck and shoulders, but I was told they were severe. “They seemed to have been inflicted by a martial arts move,” said a mourner familiar with the autopsy. “That may have been one of the causes of death, along with drowning.”

A few days earlier, on October 11, Jennifer, a transgender woman, was found dead in a hotel room, her face immersed in a toilet bowl. The murder took place in Olongapo, a city adjoining the former US naval base at Subic Bay. Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton of the US Marine Corps was identified as Jennifer’s companion entering the motel room and then leaving the crime scene after about fifteen to twenty minutes.

The case has become a cause célèbre. It is destabilizing US-Philippine relations and highlighting the difficulties of the Obama administration’s push to root out the entrenched anti-gay culture of the US military.

Walking Weapons

Jennifer’s violent end, with no guns or knives involved, might be linked to Pemberton’s martial arts training, say some who have closely followed the case. Pemberton, it turns out, is scarcely out of the Marines’ famous (or infamous) boot camp, where martial arts skills are drilled into recruits. As a letter from one recruit (reproduced in Hamilton Nolan’s blog linked to the Huffington Post) notes:

We learn a ton of martial arts, which is technically called MCMAP–Marine Corps Martial Arts Program–but I call it Karate and ninja training, which my DI’s [drill instructors] don’t like one bit. It started with boring punches and kicks, tiger shulman tae kwon do style, but now we’re learning throws, counters, elbows, stomps, bayonet attacks, bayonet defenses, etc. all of which we do at full speed and intensity on each other. (sometimes w pads but often not). If the DI’s think we’re going easy on each other, they flip a shit.

The MCMAP shit is incorporated into our PT workouts, one of the best workouts we did was the martial arts conditioning course: 2 min of jab straight hook vs. a recruit w a pad throw a recruit over your shoulder, carry them back and forth btwn 2 cones 30 yards apart somersault (sp?) back and forth 30 yards apartment roundhouse kicks drag a recruit back and forth for 30 yards elbow strikes choke counters knee strikes run 1/2 mile punch blocks/throws crawl (low) in sand for 100 yards body squats run 1/4 mile.

Needless to say, the enraged marine that fate brought face to face with Jennifer Laude on the night of October 11 at the Celzon Lodge in Olongapo had been trained to be a walking weapon.

Homophobic Socialization

There is another thing that boot camp drills into raw recruits: homophobia, and plenty of it. With the repeal of the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the Pentagon, discrimination against gays and lesbians is now supposed to be banned in all US armed services, with heavy penalties for violations. But according to the same anonymous recruit’s account:

Don’t ask Don’t Tell…may have been repealed, but the USMC sure hasn’t adapted. We’re called faggots 10-50 times a day… ‘Yeah, you would think that’s a pushup, faggot,’ etc. Any time we fuck something up, the DI’s tell us ‘you stupid fucking thing. That’s more wrong than two boys fucking.’ One captain, when giving an ethics class, and talking about how one mistake can change your life/identity told the entire company ‘you can be a bridge builder your entire life, but you suck one dick and you’re a cocksucker till you die.’

With thousands of such walking weapons from the most homophobic of America’s armed services prowling Olongapo’s streets on R&R after testosterone-raising military exercises, the murder of Jennifer Laude was an event waiting to happen. The volatile mix of training in the lethal arts and aggressive homophobic socialization was likely to be among the factors that led Pemberton to cross the line from anger to murder that fateful night. And violence such as that meted out to Jennifer is likely to occur again and again, as the United States stations more and more troops in the Philippines in pursuit of Washington’s grand geopolitical design to contain China.

A Dangerous and Useless Presence

The murder of Jennifer has placed the spotlight on two security agreements that the Philippines has with the United States: the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). One of the key motivations of those who opposed the agreements was to prevent the civilian population from again becoming collateral damage as victims of rape, murder and hate crimes, as many of them were before the withdrawal of the big US bases in 1992.

The rape of a Filipina named “Nicole” by another US Marine, Daniel Smith, in 2005 confirmed the anti-VFA movement’s worst fears. Now an even more brutal crime has taken place. There are people, like President Benigno Aquino III, who say that the Nicole and Jennifer cases are “isolated incidents,” that these are outweighed by the benefits allegedly brought by the presence of US troops. Such assertions are increasingly hollow, especially since Washington is not committed to defending the territories and maritime zones claimed by Manila in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) in the first place. The United States has stated that it won’t intervene in sovereignty disputes in the Spratly Islands.

To prevent future incidents, some have proposed tighter regulation of shore leave or more intensive instruction of US troops on the “rules of engagement” with the civilian population. But those opposed to the US military presence are not satisfied with these half measures when the troops are not needed in the first place, since they do not promote the national security of the country.

After keeping him aboard the USS Peleliu docked at Subic Bay for nearly two weeks after the murder, the United States flew Pemberton by helicopter to Fort Aguinaldo, a Philippine base near Manila, where he is presently confined in an air-conditioned van and guarded by US Marines. This anomalous situation has provoked demands for the Philippine government to take genuine and full custody of the suspect. Many are worried that the United States is not serious about turning Pemberton over, even after conviction. They cite the case of Daniel Smith. Instead of turning him over to Philippine authorities, the United States spirited Smith out of the country when the victim inexplicably “recanted” her testimony.

The Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs has stated that under the terms of the VFA, the United States could maintain custody of the accused until after prosecution and conviction. The secretary of justice contradicted this, saying that with Pemberton in a Philippine military facility, the government already had custody of the suspect. Meanwhile, President Aquino told the media he would not be present at Laude’s burial because “I don’t attend wakes of people I don’t know. I find it…uncomfortable in trying to condole with people who don’t know me.” All this has created the image of a hapless and insensitive government that appears hesitant to secure justice for one of its slain citizens.

Obama’s Troubled Anti-Discrimination Policy

As the Philippine government flounders, the Obama administration has been confronted with the reality that despite its repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the banning of discrimination against gays and lesbians may be facing rough sailing in the armed services. The brutal slaying of Jennifer and the continued homophobic socialization of recruits indicate how difficult it may be to uproot deep-seated attitudes and institutional practices. It is not surprising that a Marine is in the hot seat. The Marine Corps carried out the fiercest opposition to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, with Gen. James Amos, until recently the Marine Corps commandant, claiming that the change could cost lives because of the impact on “discipline” and “unit cohesiveness.” A few months after the banning of anti-gay discrimination, Amos reversed himself, claiming the Marines had “adapted smoothly and embraced the change.” The Laude murder and the continued employment of anti-gay slurs as a psychological disciplinary tool in boot camp call this judgment into question.

On the hot and sunny day of October 24, Jennifer Laude was finally laid to rest in Olongapo. Hundreds of people were in attendance, but other than myself and the chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, Philippine national government authorities were markedly absent. In my eulogy, I called Jennifer “a symbol of our suffering motherland” and called for “justice for Jennifer and justice for our country.”

Taking into account the lopsided history of US-Philippine relations, that demand was, in the view of the skeptics, a tall order.

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy in Focus.

The term “BRICS”—which refers to the bloc of emerging economies in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—was coined years ago by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill, who saw the countries as promising markets for finance capital in the twenty-first century. But even if O’Neill had not invented the name, the BRICS would have emerged as a conscious formation of big, rapidly developing countries with an ambivalent relationship to the traditional center economies of Europe and the United States.

The BRICS served notice that they are now an economic alliance that poses a challenge to the global status quo during their last summit in Brazil in mid-July, when they inaugurated two path-breaking institutions intended to rival the US- and European-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank: a Contingency Reserve Arrangement, with an initial capitalization of $100 billion, which can be accessed by BRICS members in need of funds; and the New Development Bank, with a total authorized capital of $100 billion, which is open to all members of the United Nations. Both institutions aim to break the global North’s chokehold on finance and development.

But while the BRICS countries have made plain their desire to loosen control of the global economy by the United States and Europe, they’ll have to confront some serious problems at home.

Benefiting from Globalization

The BRICS have been among the key beneficiaries of corporate-driven globalization, owing their rise to the marriage between global capital and cheap labor that has followed the fuller integration of formerly non-capitalist or dependent capitalist countries into the global capitalist system over the past thirty years. This union was among the factors that kept up the rate of profit and raised global capitalism out of its crisis of stagnation in the 1970s and ’80s.

Make no mistake: the BRICS are capitalist regimes—albeit with large central apparatuses capable of controlling workers.

In China, for instance, though the Communist Party leadership retains its socialist rhetoric, the reality is that thirty years after Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market reforms, the country now represents—in the words of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek—”the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the ‘dirty job’ of controlling the workers.” Zizek says China “seems to embody a new kind of capitalism,” with “disregard for ecological consequences, disdain for workers’ rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new world force.”

The other BRICS states may not have the same coercive and extractive power as the Chinese state, and three of them—Brazil, South Africa and India—are electoral democracies. But all have relatively powerful central bureaucracies that have been the key instrument in the technocratic transformation of their economies. Lula’s Brazil, it might be noted, inherited the developmental state forged by the Brazilian military-technocratic elite that produced the so-called “Brazilian Miracle” in the 1960s and ’ 70s. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress stepped into a centralized state apparatus that had been honed not only for repression but for extractive exploitation by the apartheid regime. And of course, Putin’s Russia inherited the old super-centralized Soviet state.

While there might be a healthy discussion on whether all of these regimes might be called neoliberal, there can be no doubt that they are capitalist regimes, prioritizing profits over welfare, loosening prior restraints on market forces, spearheading the integration of the domestic to the global economy, following conservative fiscal and monetary policies, exhibiting close cooperation between state elites and dominant forces in the economy, and, most importantly, relying on the super-exploitation of their working classes as the engine of rapid growth.

Contradictions with the Center Economies

Although the BRICS have been major beneficiaries of corporate-driven globalization, their integration into the world economy has been marked by a complex relationship with the traditional center economies of Europe and the United States.

True, some of them, particularly China, have developed investment regimes extremely hospitable to foreign capital. But all have also manipulated foreign capital to accumulate technological and management expertise to eventually wean themselves off foreign financiers. Even as they have re-energized global capitalism as a whole, they have pursued decidedly nationalist goals of enhancing their own clout vis-à-vis the traditional centers of global economic, political and military power.

This is exhibited most sharply in the relationship of China to the United States. American consumer demand has driven the rapid growth of China’s export-oriented economy, but China is increasingly challenging the hegemony of the US dollar as the global means of exchange. It is also supplanting the United States as the main investor and trading partner of many countries in Latin America—America’s so-called “backyard.”

If competition is pronounced at the economic level, it is even fiercer at the geopolitical level. In recent years, Beijing has moved from its policy of “peaceful rise” on the global stage to overtly challenging the military power of the United States and Japan, two economies with which China is deeply integrated, in the Western Pacific. At the same time, Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States—two blocs with which Moscow has developed significant economic ties, especially when it comes to finance and energy—have deteriorated as Russian President Vladimir Putin has pushed back against NATO’s expansion onto Russia’s doorstep.

From Engines of Growth to Stagnation

In 2001, O’Neill identified the BRICS as the “drivers of global growth.” The next few years appeared to prove him right, as their performance on all key indicators—including GDP growth rate, per capita income growth rate and rates of return on investment—surpassed those of the United States and other economies in the North.

When the global financial crisis broke out, the BRICS at first seemed to be dragged down by the collapse of their markets in the North, with their growth rates slowing down significantly in 2008. However, recovery was swift, triggered in some countries by countercyclical stimulus programs. In China, for instance, a $586 billion stimulus program—which was, in relation to the size of the economy, bigger than Obama’s $787 billion stimulus in the United States—reversed the economic contraction not only in China but also in neighboring economies that had become greatly dependent on Chinese consumers to absorb their products.

It was in this context that Nobel Prize laureate Michael Spence predicted in his book The Next Convergence that the BRICS would replace the United States and Europe as the key engines of the world economy. In a decade, Spence confidently predicted, the BRICS’ share of global GDP would pass the 50 percent mark. Much of this growth, he said, would stem from “endogenous growth drivers in emerging economies anchored by an expanding middle class.” Moreover, as trade among the BRICS increased, “the future of emerging economies is one of reduced dependence on industrial-country demand.”

Hardly had Spence’s book come out when the performance of the BRICS put paid to his rosy predictions. Beginning in 2012, the stagnation of the global economy engulfed the BRICS in earnest, revealing the stimulus-triggered recovery of 2009 to be a short-term affair rather than a passing of the baton. Brazil’s growth rate dropped from 5.3 percent in 2010 to 1.5 percent in 2012, India’s from 8.2 to 3 percent, Russia’s from 4.9 to 2.5 percent and China’s from 9.8 to 7.2 percent. The near simultaneous slowing down of the BRICS’ growth was accompanied by foreign capital outflows, which plunged currency values, increased inflation and exacerbated inequality.

The Crisis of Export-Led Growth

Export-oriented manufacturing based on the exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers from parts of the world formerly independent from or peripheral to global capitalism was the mode of integration for most of the BRICS into the international economy. This strategy focused priorities, incentives and resources on the export sector, depressing domestic demand and creating dislocations in the domestic market. With its dependence on the now stagnant or contracting markets of Europe and the United States, however, the export-oriented strategy has entered into severe crisis.

China’s crisis illustrates the difficulty of breaking away from the model of export-oriented production. China’s stimulus program was meant to help transition the country to a new domestic-demand centered economy, where growth would be driven by Chinese consumers rather than foreign importers. After achieving some initial success, however, China then reverted back to its reliance on exporting products to US and European markets. According to Yu Yong Ding, one of Beijing’s most influential economists, the dependence of millions of Chinese workers on the export sector “has become structural. That means that reducing China’s trade dependency and trade surplus is much more than a matter of adjusting macroeconomic policy.” The retreat back to export-led growth reflected the powerful influence wielded by a set of forces from the reform period that, as Yu put it, “have morphed into vested interests, which are fighting hard to protect what they have.” The export lobby—which brings together private entrepreneurs, state enterprise managers, foreign investors and government technocrats—remains the strongest lobby in Beijing. Staying with the export-oriented model was a dead end, according to Yu, since China’s “growth pattern has now almost exhausted its potential.” As the economy that most successfully rode the globalization wave, China “has reached a crucial juncture: without painful structural adjustments, the momentum of its economic growth could suddenly be lost. China’s rapid growth has been achieved at an extremely high cost. Only future generations will know the true price.”

Social Conflicts on the Rise

The crisis of the export-oriented model is likely to exacerbate social conflicts in the BRICS, which were already intensifying in the period of rapid growth. The most explosive problem is rising inequality.

In Brazil, which has one of the highest rates of inequality in Latin America, the payback came in the form of riots throughout the country in 2013. The outbursts were triggered by an explosive combination of transportation fare hikes, deteriorating public services and the displacement of urban residents and corruption connected with the construction of infrastructure for the World Cup.

In South Africa, the illusion of BRICSdom fostered by the 2010 World Cup was shaken by the protests of miners that climaxed with the infamous Marikana massacre, in which troops fired on strikers and killed forty-four people in August 2012. Marikana exposed a developed-country infrastructure coexisting with one of the world’s most unequal income structures.

In China, “mass incidents”—a euphemism for protests—doubled between 2006 and 2010, rising to 180,000, according to the Chinese Academy of Governance. The causes were varied, ranging from land grabs to official corruption to environmental degradation. Protests against pollution and other forms of ecological destabilization appeared to be particularly numerous and underlined the authorities’ subordination of quality of life to the goal of high growth rates. In China and the other BRICS as well, the notion appeared to reign that there was a trade-off among environmental protection, labor rights and development. In 2010, however, a successful strike for higher wages by workers at a Honda plant in Nanhai inaugurated a new era of resistance, this time with the workers who had served as the backbone of export-oriented manufacturing in the lead. In June 2011, it was the turn of thousands of poorly paid garment workers in Zengcheng, the so-called “blue jeans” capital of the world, to protest with riots and strikes. These events were a dress rehearsal for the strikes involving some 30,000 workers in Dongguan, near Guangzhou, which hit the manufacturing subcontractor Yue Yuen, perhaps the largest producer of branded footwear in the world, this past April.

The movement appears to be growing. “More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform,” noted a writer for the progressive journal Jacobin, “China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes—there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.”

The BRICS and the Global South

Despite their exploitative practices at home, the BRICS portray themselves as paragons of the global South, providing the leadership of such blocs as the “Group of 77 and China” in international climate negotiations and the “Group of 20” in the World Trade Organization.

However, critics of the BRICS say that their investment and trade practices belie their benevolent posture toward developing countries.

Much of this criticism is directed at China. Although China has poured billions of dollars in aid into sub-Saharan Africa—much more, in fact, than the World Bank—it has also been criticized by local populations for bringing in Chinese workers instead of hiring local labor, for flooding retail markets with Chinese products and for supporting repressive regimes with economic assistance. In Southeast Asia, China’s economic diplomacy is said to be geared toward dividing the region’s collective stand on the South China Sea issue, isolating in particular the Philippines and Vietnam.

Although many of these criticisms are valid, the rise of the BRICS is a good thing for the South. In the geopolitics of development, the BRICS currently fulfill the role that the Soviet Union once played, which was to provide a pole that developing countries could play off the United States as they struggled to achieve political and economic independence. The dark period of unipolar domination by the United States, with its neoliberal institutions and ideology, has come to an end with the emergence of the BRICS bloc, and this is an extremely positive development.

The Future of the BRICS

With export-oriented production and globalization now in crisis, the question emerges: what is the future of the BRICS? It is certainly possible that the BRICS will not break with their current paradigm of growth. However, there are serious discussions in ruling circles about ways to surmount the current crisis.

One option is for the BRICS to become more integrated with one another and with other developing-country economies, along the lines of the “South-South Trade” or “South-South Cooperation” strategies that have long been propounded by many progressive economists. Further integration is one of the key topics in the BRICS summits that now take place every two years.

There is, however, one problem with this solution: the fruits of integration would be limited if that integration involved highly unequal societies with restricted demand, since large parts of the population would be left out of the market.

The other solution, which the BRICS elites are not too enthusiastic about, is for the BRICS to adopt policies aimed at radically reducing income inequality and thus creating vibrant domestic markets. This would involve no less than promoting social revolution in these countries, since powerful interest groups have congealed around the current economic regimes.

Even more fundamentally, assuming that the BRICS can break with export-led growth, can the pursuit of policies promoting greater equality be undertaken within these countries’ current capitalist frameworks, where profitability remains the elites’ central concern? The elites in the BRICS are dealing with the challenge of transformation in diverse ways.

In India, the new BJP government of Narendra Modi seeks to revitalize the Indian economy by opening it up more fully to foreign investors and radically cutting down the country’s budget deficit à la Tea Party partisans in the United States. This seems to be a prescription for continuing and deepening the past twenty-five years of conservative economic policies and thus is unlikely to succeed in surmounting the country’s stagnation.

In this area, the bellwether among the BRICS is again China, where the current leadership is very much aware of the consequences of the previous leadership’s failure to cultivate a domestic market invigorated by radical asset and income redistribution. Whether Xi Jinping succeeds where Hu Jintao failed remains to be seen.

Whatever strategies the BRICS follow in the coming period, their competition is likely to intensify with the center economies, even as their long pent-up domestic pressures are released in a staccato of internal social explosions.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/brics-challengers-global-status-quo/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/class-war-thailands-military-coup/Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Raj Patel,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Walden Bello,Foreign Policy In Focus,Walden Bello,Foreign Policy In Focus,Walden Bello,Foreign Policy In Focus,Walden Bello,Foreign Policy In Focus,Walden Bello,Foreign Policy In FocusMay 27, 2014

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

After declaring martial law on Tuesday, May 20, the Thai military announced a full-fledged coup two days later. The putsch followed seven months of massive street protests against the ruling Pheu Thai government identified with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The power grab by army chief Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha came two weeks after Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, was ousted as caretaker prime minister by the country’s Constitutional Court for “abuse of power” on May 7.

The Thai military portrayed its seizure of power as an effort to impose order after two rounds of talks between the country’s rival factions failed to produce a compromise that would provide Thailand with a functioning government.

Deftly Managed Script

The military’s narrative produced few takers. Indeed, many analysts saw the military’s move as a coup de grâce to Thailand’s elected government, following what they saw as the judicial coup of May 7.

It is indeed difficult not to see the putsch as the final step in a script deftly managed by the conservative “royalist” establishment to thwart the right to govern of a populist political bloc that has won every election since 2001. Utilizing anti-corruption discourse to inflame the middle class into civil protest, the aim of key forces in the anti-government coalition has been, from the start, to create the kind of instability that would provoke the military to step in and provide the muscle for a new political order.

Using what analyst Marc Saxer calls “middle class rage” as the battering ram, these elite elements forced the resignation of the Yingluck government in December; disrupted elections in February, thus providing the justification for the conservative Constitutional Court to nullify them; and instigated that same court’s decision to oust Yingluck as caretaker prime minister on May 7 on flimsy charges of “abuse of power.” Civil protest was orchestrated with judicial initiatives to pave the way for a military takeover.

The military says that it will set up a “reform council” and a “national assembly” that will lay the institutional basis of a new government. This plan sounds very much like the plan announced in late November by the protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, which would place the country for a year under an unelected, unaccountable reform panel.

The military’s move has largely elicited the approval of Suthep’s base of middle-class supporters. Indeed, it has been middle-class support that has provided cover for the calculated moves of the political elites. Many of those that provided the backbone of the street protests now anticipate the drafting of an elitist new order that will institutionalize political inequality in favor of Bangkok and the country’s urban middle class.

The Thai Middle Class: From Paragons to Enemies of Democracy

The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset once celebrated the Thai middle class as paragons of democracy. But in recent years, middle-class Thais have transmogrified into supporters of an elitist, frankly antidemocratic agenda. Today’s middle class is no longer the pro-democracy middle class that overthrew the dictatorship of Gen. Suchinda Krapayoon in 1992. What happened?

Worth quoting in full is an insightful analysis of this transformation provided by Marc Saxer:

The Bangkok middle class called for democratization and specifically the liberalization of the state with the political rights to protect themselves from the abuse of power by the elites. However, once democracy was institutionalized, they found themselves to be the structural minority. Mobilized by clever political entrepreneurs, it was now the periphery who handily won every election. Ignorant of the rise of a rural middle class demanding full participation in social and political life, the middle class in the center interpreted demands for equal rights and public goods as ‘the poor getting greedy’… [M]ajority rule was equated with unsustainable welfare expenses, which would eventually lead to bankruptcy.

From the perspective of the middle class, Saxer continues, majority rule

overlooks the political basis of the social contract: a social compromise between all stakeholders. Never has any social contract been signed which obligates the middle class to foot the tax bill, in exchange for quality public services, political stability and social peace. This is why middle classes feel like they are “being robbed” by corrupt politicians, who use their tax revenues to “buy votes” from the “greedy poor.” Or, in a more subtle language, the “uneducated rural masses are easy prey for politicians who promise them everything in an effort to get a hold of power.”

Thus, Saxer concludes, from the viewpoint of the urban middle class,

policies delivering to local constituencies are nothing but “populism,” or another form of “vote buying” by power hungry politicians. The Thai Constitutional Court, in a seminal ruling, thus equated the very principle of elections with corruption. Consequently, time and again, the “yellow” alliance of feudal elites along with the Bangkok middle class called for the disenfranchisement of the “uneducated poor,” or even more bluntly the suspension of electoral democracy.

Impossible Dream

However, the elite-middle class alliance is deceiving itself if it thinks the adoption of a Constitution institutionalizing minority rule will be possible. For Thailand is no longer the Thailand of twenty years ago, where political conflicts were still largely conflicts among elites, with the vast lower classes being either onlookers or passive followers of warring elite factions.

What is now the driving force of Thai politics is class conflict with Thai characteristics, to borrow from Mao. The central figure that has transformed the Thai political landscape is the exiled Thaksin Shinawatra, a charismatic, if corrupt, billionaire who managed through a combination of populism, patronage and the skillful deployment of cash to create a massive electoral majority. While for Thaksin the aim of this coalition might be the cornering or monopolization of elite power, for the social sectors he has mobilized, the goal is the redistribution of wealth and power from the elites to the masses and—equally important—extracting respect for people that had been scorned as “country bumpkins” or “buffaloes.” However much Thaksin’s “Redshirt” movement may be derided as a coalition between corrupt politicians and the “greedy poor,” it has become the vehicle for the acquisition of full citizenship rights by Thailand’s marginalized classes.

The elite-middle class alliance is dreaming if it thinks that the Redshirts will stand aside and allow them to dictate the terms of surrender, much less institutionalize these in a new Constitution. But neither do the Redshirts at present possess the necessary coercive power to alter the political balance in the short and medium term. It is now their turn to wage civil resistance.

Since the coup, about 150 people have been reported detained—including Pravit Rojanaphruk, a prominent reporter for Thailand’s Nation newspaper known for his criticism of the anti-government protest movement that precipitated the military’s intervention.

What now seems likely is that, with violent and nonviolent civil protest by the Redshirts, Thailand will experience a prolonged and bitter descent into virtual civil war, with the Pheu Thai regional strongholds—the North, Northeast and parts of the central region of the country—becoming increasingly ungovernable from imperial Bangkok. It is a tragic denouement to which an anti-democratic opposition disdaining all political compromise has plunged this once promising Southeast Asian nation.

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

As US President Barack Obama descended on the Philippines, Manila and Washington were rushing to complete negotiations on an Agreement on Enhanced Defense Cooperation (AEDC) between the two countries.

The Philippines’ territorial disputes with China are one major reason for this new agreement. With Washington’s help, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III wants to make the Chinese respect the Philippines’ claims in the Scarborough Shoal, the Spratly Islands, the continental shelf and its 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

The truth of the matter, however, is that the deal will do no such thing.

What the agreement boils down to is that the Philippines will give the United States the right to operate bases in the country—for no rent—without the guarantee of US protection of the Philippines’ island territories.

A Raw Deal

According to Philippine officials, the new agreement is governed by the US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), which they say obliges Washington to come to the Philippines’ defense in the event of an attack on Philippine territory, including its possessions in the West Philippine Sea. Here they cite Article V of the MDT, which says “an armed attack on either of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific, or on its armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific.”

That is not the way the United States sees it. Indeed, the US government has not deviated from the position explicitly stated several years ago by Morton Smith, a US Embassy spokesperson. According to researcher Roland San Juan, Smith asserted that the Spratly Islands claimed by the Philippines are excluded from the scope of the treaty because the Philippines raised its claim to them more than three decades after the MDT was signed in 1951.

This is in contrast to Washington’s implicit support for Japan in its territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. “I restated the principles that govern longstanding US policy on the Senkaku Islands and other islands,” US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said of his April visit to Beijing. “We affirmed that since [the Senkaku Islands] are under Japan’s administrative control, they fall under Article 5 of our Mutual Security Treaty.” Article V of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty provides that “an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.”

During his recent state visit in Japan, Obama reiterated this commitment to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. But he will not make the same promise to President Aquino in Manila when it comes to the Philippine possessions in the South China Sea.

Unlike the Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands claimed by the Philippines, the Senkakus were under the administrative control of the prefecture of Okinawa when the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was signed and were thus covered by the restoration of Okinawa to Japan’s control in 1972. “At first glance,” said former Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, “the disputes China has with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal in the SCS [South China Sea] appear similar to the ECS [East China Sea] with Japan because the US is a treaty ally of the Philippines. Actually, however, the two situations are different. In the case of Scarborough Shoal, the Philippines did not have undisputed ‘administrative control’ prior to the 2012 confrontation over the islet. Second, the US is not directly involved in the Scarborough Shoal dispute because its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines does not obligate Washington to take sides over sovereignty questions.”

If the deal does not provide for US support for the Philippines’ territorial claims in the South China Sea, then what’s in it for the Philippines? Most likely an increase in military aid, including a few antiquated Hamilton class cutters. If so, this is a very poor return for a larger US military presence and a grant to operate US bases out of Philippine installations. This is essentially what the deal is all about, though given local sensitivities and a constitutional ban on foreign bases in the Philippines, both parties studiously refrain from calling the concentration of US personnel, facilities and war equipment “bases.”

Pacific Pivot on the Cheap

So what’s in it for the United States?

The US government has always said that its main interest in the South China Sea is “ensuring freedom of navigation.” The first thing to note here is that although China claims the South China Sea as a domestic waterway in its notorious Nine-Dash-Line claim, the threat of its interfering with freedom of navigation has always been remote. China is not about to court world condemnation by enforcing its domestic shipping regulations on a busy waterway through which an estimated one-third of international trade passes. Nor does it have the capability to do so, and won’t for a long time to come.

But even if the Chinese were to pose a threat to international navigation, the United States would not need a Philippine outpost to accomplish its stated goal of protecting international shipping. Even after Washington lost its Philippine bases at the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the South China Sea firmly under control throughout the 1990s. According to analyst William Berry, during the Mischief Reef crisis in 1995, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Joseph Nye “stated that if any conflict in the South China Sea threatens freedom of the seas, then the United States Seventh Fleet was prepared to provide escort services so that freedom of navigation could be protected.” That this was no bluff was revealed in 1996 during the Taiwan Straits crisis, when two aircraft carrier battle groups were deployed swiftly and with ease out of Yokosuka, Japan, to show Washington’s support for Taiwan. And again in 1998, a US carrier battle group was sent near the Spratlys, apparently to send a message to all parties that the United States would protect freedom of navigation in international waters, once again showing its ability to act without relying on a base in the Philippines for logistics. Indeed, the elimination of the Subic and Clark bases in the Philippines was probably a big plus for the US Treasury, since it did away with the great cost of maintaining large fixed bases.

So why does the United States now want a higher military profile in the Philippines? The answer lies in what one might call Washington’s “exhibitionist syndrome”—that is, the imperative it feels to “show the flag” to its allies and to China. And if it can do so in an inexpensive way, with a quid pro quo involving just a few of what the Americans call “Excess Defense Articles” like antiquated cutters, then all the better. This is what John Feffer characterizes as Pacific Pivot on the cheap. As Frank Chang of the Foreign Policy Research Institute writes, “It clearly offers the United States a cost-effective way to enhance its presence in Asia, something that Washington has wanted to do for a long time.”

But for the Philippines, the increase in obsolete military donations from Washington will be more than offset by the negative strategic consequences. First of all, the coming agreement will draw the Philippines farther away from a resolution of its territorial disputes with China, and it will be marginalized by the dynamics of a superpower conflict. Second, it will turn the Philippines into another of Washington’s “frontline states” like Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all the detrimental and destabilizing effects such a status entails—including the subordination of the country’s economic, social and cultural dynamics to Washington’s security needs. Third, it will move the region farther away from the negotiation of a collective security agreement, which is a far better alternative to volatile balance-of-power politics, where a simple thing like a ship collision can lead to a bigger conflict.

From Balance of Power to Collective Security

The Philippines’ territorial conflicts with China are real, but the way to resolve them is to rely on international law and diplomacy, and this is terrain in which the Philippines has a big advantage. The Philippines’ submission of a 1,000-page “memorial” delineating the country’s entitlements in the West Philippine Sea to the United Nations Arbitral Tribunal at the end of March was a giant step in this direction. Beijing knows it does not have a leg to stand on in international law, which is why it has been pushing the Philippines to drop the case on pain of “damaging bilateral relations.”

The Philippines must maximize its diplomatic options as well, where it also has an advantage over Beijing. It must press its ASEAN partners to remind Beijing of China’s commitment to negotiate a binding code of conduct on maritime behavior in the West Philippine Sea, which it made at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brunei in June 2013. It was pressure from ASEAN and internationally that forced Beijing to make this commitment, and it will be consistent pressure that will force it to follow through.

The Philippines should also prepare the ground at the United Nations General Assembly for the eventual introduction of a resolution condemning Beijing’s unilateral annexation of over 80 percent of the South China Sea, brusquely disregarding other littoral states’ rights to their continental shelves and 200-mile EEZs. There’s a very good recent precedent: Beijing’s aggressive annexationism is essentially similar to Russia’s gobbling up of Crimea, which the General Assembly condemned a few weeks ago.

The strategic aim of these diplomatic efforts must be to bring about a collective security agreement for the region that would include ASEAN, Japan, the two Koreas and China. The ASEAN Regional Forum was headed in this direction in the 1990s, despite the opposition of the United States, which arrogated unto itself the role of enforcer of stability in the region. Its momentum was unfortunately derailed by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which swept the rug from under the credibility of ASEAN’s major states. Although the process will be difficult, it is time to revive this project of collective security, since the unstable and volatile balance-of-power politics favored by Washington is not a viable mechanism for regional peace and security.

With the impending basing agreement with the United States, the Philippines is headed right back to its position during the Cold War, when it played the role of handmaiden to the US containment strategy by hosting two huge military bases. The small window of opportunity to forge an independent foreign policy that the Philippines gained with the expulsion of the US bases in 1992 will disappear with this latest pact with Washington.

It seems these days that whenever Mother Nature wants to send an urgent message to humankind, she sends it via the Philippines. This year the messenger was Haiyan (known in the Philippines as Yolanda).For the second year in a row, the world’s strongest typhoon barreled through the Philippines, Haiyan following on the footsteps of Pablo, a k a Bopha, in 2012. And for the third year in a row, a destructive storm deviated from the usual path taken by typhoons, striking communities that had not learned to live with these fearsome weather events.

That it was climate change creating these super-typhoons was a message not just to Filipinos but to the whole world, whose attention was transfixed by the images of destruction and misery the storm left in its wake. The message that nature was sending via Haiyan was especially meant for the governments that assembled on November 11 in Warsaw for the annual climate change negotiations, or Conference of Parties (COP 19).

Is it a coincidence, ask some people who are not exactly religious, that both Pablo and Haiyan arrived at the time of global climate negotiations? Pablo smashed into Mindanao during the last stages of COP 18, in Doha last year. To reinforce Haiyan’s message, Commissioner Naderev Sano, the top negotiator for the Philippines in Warsaw, went on a hunger strike when the talks began.

It is doubtful, however, that the governments at COP 19 will rise to the occasion. For a time earlier this year, it appeared that Hurricane Sandy would bring climate change to the forefront of President Obama’s agenda. It did not. While trumpeting that he was directing federal agencies to force power plants to cut carbon emissions and encourage movement toward clean-energy sources, Obama will not change the US policy of nonadherence to the Kyoto Protocol, which Washington never ratified. Although 67 percent of Americans believe in climate change, Obama does not have the courage to challenge the fanatical climate skeptics in the Republican Party and the business establishment.

Washington’s military-led relief effort in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan should not obscure its fundamental irresponsibility regarding climate change, not only when it comes to curbing emissions but also on the matter of aid to developing countries suffering the consequences of the carbon-intensive economies of the developed world. Large-scale compensation is out of the question, says State Department envoy Todd Stern, who also said at a London seminar in October that “lectures about compensation, reparations and the like will produce nothing but antipathy among developed country policy-makers and their publics.”

It is also unlikely that China, now the world’s biggest carbon emitter, will agree to mandatory limits on its greenhouse-gas emissions, armed with the rationale that those that have contributed the most to such emissions, like the United States, have also refused to accept mandatory emissions cuts. And as China goes, so will Brazil, India and many other industrially advanced developing countries that are influential voices in the “Group of 77 and China” coalition. These governments seem to be saying their carbon-intensive industrial development plans are not up for negotiation.

According to the Durban Platform agreed on in 2011, governments are supposed to submit emissions-reduction plans by 2015, which will be implemented beginning in 2020. To climate scientists, this leaves a dangerous gap of seven years when no mandatory reductions can be expected from major polluters. Every year counts if the world is to avoid a rise in global mean temperature beyond 2 degrees Celsius, the accepted benchmark beyond which the global climate is expected to go really haywire.

Countries like the Philippines are on the front lines of climate change. Every disastrous climate event reminds them of the injustice of this crisis—they have contributed least to climate change, yet they are its main victims. Their interest lies not only in accessing funds for ”adaptation,” like the Green Climate Fund, which would funnel $100 billion a year from rich countries to poor countries, beginning in 2020, to help them adjust to climate change. Given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, these frontline countries must push all major greenhouse gas emitters to agree to radical emissions cuts immediately.

During last year’s Doha talks, a leader of the Philippine delegation cried when he pointed to the ravages inflicted by Pablo. It was a moment of truth for the climate talks. This year, the delegation must convert tears into anger and denounce the big polluters for their refusal to take steps to save the world from destruction. Perhaps the best role island-states can play is by adopting unorthodox tactics, like disrupting the negotiations to prevent the conference from falling into the familiar alignment of the rich North versus the Group of 77 and China. That configuration guarantees deadlock, even as the world hurtles toward the overheated planet the World Bank has warned will be a certainty without a massive global effort to prevent it.

Aura Bogado looked at how the poor bear the brunt of climate change.

This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

It seems these days that whenever Mother Nature wants to send an urgent message to humankind, it sends it via the Philippines. This year the messenger was Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda.

For the second year in a row, the world’s strongest typhoon barreled through the Philippines, Yolanda following on the footsteps steps of Pablo, a k a Bopha, in 2012. And for the third year in a row, a destructive storm deviated from the usual path taken by typhoons, striking communities that had not learned to live with these fearsome weather events because they were seldom hit by them in the past. Sendong in December 2011 and Bopha last year sliced Mindanao horizontally, while Yolanda drove through the Visayas, also in a horizontal direction.

That it was climate change creating the super typhoons that were taking weird directions was a message from Nature not just to Filipinos but to the whole world, whose attention was transfixed on the televised digital images of a massive, angry cyclone bearing down, then sweeping across the central Philippines on its way to the Asian mainland. The message that Nature was sending via Yolanda–which packed winds stronger than Superstorm Sandy, which hit New Jersey and New York last October, and Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005–was especially meant for the governments of the world that are assembling in Warsaw for the annual global climate change negotiations (COP 19), beginning on November 11.

Is it a coincidence, ask some people who are not exactly religious, that both Pablo and Yolanda arrived at the time of the global climate negotiations? Pablo smashed into Mindanao during the last stages of the Conference of Parties (COP 18), in Doha last year.

To reinforce Haiyan’s message, Commissioner Naderev Sano, the top negotiator for the Philippines in Warsaw, went on a hunger strike when the talks began.

COP 19: Another Deadlock?

It is doubtful, however, that the governments assembling in Warsaw will rise to the occasion. For a time earlier this year, it appeared that Hurricane Sandy would bring climate change to the forefront of President Obama’s agenda. It did not.

While trumpeting that he was directing federal agencies to take steps to force power plants to cut carbon emissions and encourage movement toward clean energy sources, Obama will not send a delegation that will change US policy of non-adherence to the Kyoto Protocol, which Washington signed but never ratified. Although 70 percent of Americans now believe in climate change, Obama does not have the courage to challenge the fanatical climate skeptics that fill the ranks of the Tea Party and the US business establishment.

It is also unlikely that China, now the world’s biggest carbon emitter, will agree to mandatory limits on its greenhouse-gas emissions, armed with the rationale that those that have contributed most to the cumulative volume of greenhouse gases, like the United States, must be forced to make mandatory emissions cuts. And as China goes, so will Brazil, India and a host of the other more industrially advanced developing countries that are the most influential voices in the “Group of 77 and China” coalition. What the governments of these countries seem to be saying is that the carbon-intensive industrial development plans they are pursuing are not up for negotiation.

Dangerous Gap

According to the Durban Platform agreed on in 2011, governments are supposed to submit carbon emissions reduction plans by 2015, which will then be implemented beginning in 2020. To climate scientists, this leaves a dangerous gap of seven years where no mandatory emissions reductions can be expected from the United States and many other carbon-intensive countries. It is increasingly clear that every year now counts if the world is to avoid a rise in global mean temperature beyond 2 degrees Celsius, the accepted benchmark beyond which the global climate is expected to go really haywire.

Countries like the Philippines and many other island-states are in the frontlines of climate change. Every year of massive and frequent disastrous climate events like Yolanda and Pablo reminds them of the injustice of the situation. They are among those that have contributed least to climate change, yet they are its main victims. Their interest lies not only in accessing funds for “adaptation,” such as the Green Climate Fund that would funnel, beginning in 2020, $100 billion a year from rich countries to poor countries to help them adjust to climate change (contributions so far have been small and slow in coming.) With typhoons and hurricanes now on the cutting edge of extreme weather events, these frontline countries must push all major greenhouse-gas emitters to agree to radical emissions cuts immediately and not wait until 2020.

Unorthodox Tactics

During last year’s Doha negotiations, one of the leaders of the Philippine delegation cried when he pointed to the ravages inflicted on Mindanao by Pablo. It was a moment of truth for the climate talks.

This year, the delegation must convert tears into anger and denounce the big climate polluters for their continued refusal to take the steps needed to save the world from the destruction that their carbon-intensive economies have unleashed on us all. Perhaps the best role the Philippine delegation and the other island-states can play is by adopting unorthodox tactics, like disrupting the negotiations procedurally to prevent the conference from falling into the familiar alignment of the rich North versus the Group of 77 and China. Such a configuration guarantees a political deadlock, even as the world hurtles toward the four-degree-plus world that the World Bank has warned will be a certainty without a massive global effort to prevent it.

Here’s how you can help in the Philippines.

Correction: At publication, this article incorrectly stated Monsanto’s contribution to the World Food Prize Foundation from 1999 to 2011 was $380 million. The correct figure is $380,000.  

The Nation and Foreign Policy In Focus are pleased to announce a new partnership to promote a more progressive US foreign policy. Each week, The Nation will post several FPIF articles on its website to provide greater visibility to progressive voices from around the world. Complementing The Nation’s coverage of domestic and world events, the FPIF articles will provide in-depth analysis of the issues that demand greater public and policymaking attention such as global military spending, climate change, human rights campaigns, economic inequality and ongoing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Nation/FPIF coverage will also highlight concrete alternatives that can make the world more peaceful, more just and more sustainable. Foreign Policy In Focus is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2013.

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This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy in Focus.

The GMO wars escalated earlier this month when the 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief technology officer, Robert Fraley, responsible for development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The choice of Fraley was widely protested, with eighty-one members of the prestigious World Future Council calling it “an affront to the growing international consensus on safe, ecological farming practices that have been scientifically proven to promote nutrition and sustainability.”

Monsanto’s Man

The choice of Monsanto’s man triggered accusations of prize buying. From 1999 to 2011, Monsanto donated $380,000 to the World Food Prize Foundation, in addition to a $5 million contribution in 2008 to help renovate the Hall of Laureates, a public museum honoring Norman Borlaug, the scientist who launched the Green Revolution.

For some, the award to Monsanto is actually a sign of desperation on the part of the GMO establishment, a move designed to contain the deepening controversy over the so-called biotechnological revolution in food and agriculture. The arguments of the critics are making headway. Owing to concern about the dangers and risks posed by genetically engineered organisms, many governments have instituted total or partial bans on their cultivation, importation, and field-testing.

A few years ago, there were sixteen countries that had total or partial bans on GMOs. Now there are at least twenty-six, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

Restraints on trade in GMOs based on phyto-sanitary grounds, which are allowed under the World Trade Organization, have increased. Already, American rice farmers face strict limitations on their exports to the European Union, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and are banned altogether from Russia and Bulgaria because unapproved genetically engineered rice “escaped” during open-field trials on GMO rice. Certain Thai exports—particularly canned fruit salads containing papaya to Germany, and sardines in soy oil to Greece and the Netherlands—were recently banned due to threat of contamination by GMOs.

The Case against GMOs Gains Strength

The case against GMOs has strengthened steadily over the last few years. Critics say that genetic engineering disrupts the precise sequence of a food’s genetic code and disturbs the functions of neighboring genes, which can give rise to potentially toxic or allergenic molecules or even alter the nutritional value of food produced. The Bt toxin used in GMO corn, for example, was recently detected in the blood of pregnant women and their babies, with possibly harmful consequences.

A second objection concerns genetic contamination. A GMO crop, once released in the open, reproduces via pollination and interacts genetically with natural varieties of the same crop, producing what is called genetic contamination. According to a study published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, Bt corn has contaminated indigenous varieties of corn tested in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Third, a GMO, brought into natural surroundings, may have a toxic or lethal impact on other living things. Thus, it was found that Bt corn destroyed the larvae of the monarch butterfly, raising well grounded fears that many other natural plant and animal life may be impacted in the same way.

Fourth, the benefits of GMOs have been oversold by the companies, like Monsanto and Syngenta, that peddle them. Most genetically engineered crops are either engineered to produce their own pesticide in the form of Bacillus thurengiensis (Bt) or are designed to be resistant to herbicides, so that herbicides can be sprayed in massive quantities to kill pests without harming the crops. It has been shown, however, that insects are fast developing resistance to Bt as well as to herbicides, resulting in even more massive infestation by the new superbugs. No substantial evidence exists that GM crops yield more than conventional crops. What genetically engineered crops definitely do lead to is greater use of pesticide, which is harmful both to humans and the environment.

A fifth argument is that patented GMO seeds concentrate power in the hands of a few biotech corporations and marginalize small farmers. As the statement of the eighty-one members of the World Future Council put it, “While profitable to the few companies producing them, GMO seeds reinforce a model of farming that undermines sustainability of cash-poor farmers, who make up most of the world’s hungry. GMO seeds continue farmers’ dependency on purchased seed and chemical inputs. The most dramatic impact of such dependency is in India, where 270,000 farmers, many trapped in debt for buying seeds and chemicals, committed suicide between 1995 and 2012.”

Some studies have sought to counter these accusations against GMOs, but they have been discredited by revelations that they were funded by biotechnology firms or conducted by researchers close to them.

The Philippines as GMO Battlefield

The key battleground in the battle over GMOs has shifted, over the years, from the developed to the developing world. The GMO advocates have deployed their big guns to convince African, Asian and Latin American governments to shift to GMOs. Among them are Bill and Melinda Gates, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, and Oxford economist Paul Collier, who argues that Africa needs a new “Green Revolution” based on genetically engineered seeds because it missed out on the first one, which was promoted by chemical-intensive agriculture.

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The Philippines is one such battleground. Even as many other countries have tightened their controls over GMOs, the Philippine government has become more and more liberal in its granting of licenses for GMO production. According to Greenpeace Southeast Asia, it has allowed the importation of sixty genetically modified plants and plant products for direct use as food and feed or for processing, an additional eight GM plant varieties for propagation, and twenty-one modified plant varieties for field testing in Philippine soil. Despite concerns about its impact on the environment, Bt corn now has 750,000 hectares of Philippine land devoted to it. According to Greenpeace Southeast Asia spokesman Daniel Ocampo, no GMO application has ever been rejected, which is rather shocking given the controversy over their use.

A key reason for the liberal treatment of GMOs is the revolving door among government, academia and corporations. For instance, three of the most recent directors of the prestigious Institute of Plant Breeding of the University of the Philippines at Los Banos have either joined biotech multinationals or gone to work on projects funded by them. They also serve as members of or advisers to government bodies that oversee biosafety.

Judicial Restraints on GMOs

Anti-GMO activists and farmers have nevertheless made headway. Even as some make direct action forays like uprooting Bt eggplant field experimental sites, others have worked on the legal front. This paid off recently when the Philippine Court of Appeals—acting on a petition brought before it by Greenpeace, the NGO Masipag and several individuals—stopped the field testing of Bt eggplant on the grounds that there was no scientific consensus or legal framework for the introduction of Bt products. Importantly, the court also ruled that all stakeholders—not just industry or government scientists—should get to provide input on the introduction of GMOs like Bt eggplant.

In a sign of desperation, the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, one of the respondents in the case, argued that a ban on field testing of Bt eggplant would “violate academic freedom.” The court ruling stated, however, that, “Like any other right, the right to academic freedom ends when the overriding public welfare calls for some restraint. The right to academic freedom does not, in any way, give the respondent UPLB unbridled freedom to conduct experimentation, studies and research that may put to risk the health of the people and the environment which are equally protected under our fundamental law.”

It is unlikely, however, that this victory will discourage the GMO lobby from making the Philippines into a springboard for the introduction of Bt crops to the rest of Southeast Asia. Aside from Bt eggplant, the GMO advocates are pushing genetically altered “Golden Rice,” potatoes, soybeans, canola, cotton, sugarbeet and alfalfa. There’s big money in these crops, and the only thing that stands between the transnational corporations and big money are those pesky farmers, environmentalists and consumers.

Unfortunately for the biotech corporations, more people are listening to the words of scientists like Dr. Oscar Zamora, vice chancellor of the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, who says: “For every application of genetic engineering in agriculture in developing countries, there are a number of less hazardous and more sustainable approaches and practices with hundreds, if not thousands, of years of safety record behind them. None of the GE applications in agriculture today are valuable enough to farmers in developing countries to make it reasonable to expose the environment, farmers and the consumers to even the slightest risk.”

Jessica Valenti lays out the rules for writing about rape.

Manila

Many Asians absorb what is happening in Wall Street with a combination of déjà vu, skepticism and “I-told-you-so.”

For many, the Wall Street crisis is a replay, though on a much larger scale, of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which brought down the red-hot “tiger economies” of the East. The shocking absence of Wall Street regulation brings back awful memories of the elimination of capital controls by East Asian governments, which were under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department. That move triggered a tsunami of speculative capital onto Asian markets that sharply receded after sky-high land and stock prices came tumbling down.

Treasury Secretary Paulson’s proposed massive bailout of Wall Street’s tarnished titans reminds people here of the billions the IMF hustled up after ’97 in the name of assisting them–money that was used instead to rescue foreign investors.

So Asian governments and financial players are skeptical about Washington’s talk of re-regulating the financial sector, and, although their central banks and sovereign wealth funds are flush with cash, they’re wary about being drawn into the Wall Street maelstrom. Among East Asian official funds, only Singapore’s Temasek and the China Investment Corporation have stepped up to the plate. Temasek pumped over $4 billion into Merrill Lynch a few months ago, but only after driving a hard bargain. CIC invested $5 billion in Morgan Stanley last December but refused the troubled investment bank’s recent desperate plea to increase its share of the firm. Initially seen as a potential savior, the Korean Development Bank turned down the overtures of Lehman Brothers a week before the latter’s historic collapse into bankruptcy.

Trillions of dollars of Asian public and private money are invested in US firms and property, with the five biggest Asian holders accounting for over half of all foreign investment in US government debt instruments. Funds from Asia have become a key prop of US government spending and the middle-class consumption that have become the driver of the American economy. With so much of Asia’s wealth relying on the stability of the US economy, there is not likely to be any precipitate move to abandon Wall Street securities and US Treasury bills.

At home, however, there are growing worries, and consumer advocates, NGOs and academics are demanding more transparency about how much the local banking system is exposed to Wall Street’s toxic assets. In the Philippines, there are calls from civil society groups for the banning of derivatives trading, the return of capital controls and the renegotiation of the country’ massive foreign debt now that the international banks are in a weak position.

There is, moreover, resignation throughout Asia about the inevitability of a deep US recession and its likely massive impact on the East: the United States is China’s top export destination, while China imports raw materials and intermediate goods from Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia to shape into the products it sends to the United States. Despite some talk a few months ago about the possibility that the economic fate of Asia could be “decoupled” from that of the United States, most observers now see these economies as members of a chain gang shackled to one another, at least in the short and medium term.

Greater regional integration is now seen widely as a healthy antidote to a global integration that has run out of control. Some elements of regional economic cooperation are now in place, notably the so-called “ASEAN Plus Three” formation, which unites the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with China, Korea and Japan in a mechanism to facilitate bilateral exchanges of funds in the event of a financial crisis. Eventually this arrangement could become a full-blown regional monetary fund.

On the other hand, NGOs and social movements, while in theory supportive of integration, distrust a process monopolized by governing elites they view as unaccountable. Active participation of civil society, they insist, must be central to the crafting of such regional formations.

AP ImagesA child in Abuja, Nigeria, waits for food.

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico’s status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work–many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, “It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this–to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated.”

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world’s largest importer of rice. Manila’s desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country’s top economists that the “search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one.” Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments–roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines’ road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support–a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines’ 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico’s joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country’s two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines’ joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports–much of it subsidized US grain–farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of “high-value-added” crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. “Our small producers,” he said, “are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment.”

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls “de-peasantization”–the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: “Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.”

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent’s peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank’s wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank’s encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001–46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets… [are] crowding out more productive spending.”

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers’ groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers’ groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant’s Path). Via not only seeks to get “WTO out of agriculture” and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative–food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via’s platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class for itself,” contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage–and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers’ movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital’s vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, regarded as the father of microcredit, comes at a time when microcredit has become something like a religion to many of the powerful, rich and famous. Hillary Clinton regularly speaks about going to Bangladesh, Yunus’s homeland, and being “inspired by the power of these loans to enable even the poorest of women to start businesses, lifting their families–and their communities–out of poverty.”

Like the liberal Clinton, the neocon Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, has also gotten religion, after a recent trip to the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. With the fervor of the convert, he talks about the “transforming power” of microfinance: “I thought maybe this was just one successful project in one village, but then I went to the next village and it was the same story. That evening, I met with more than a hundred women leaders from self-help groups, and I realized this program was opening opportunities for poor women and their families in an entire state of 75 million people.”

There is no doubt that Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, came up with a winning idea that has transformed the lives of many millions of poor women, and perhaps for that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. But Yunus–at least the young Yunus, who did not have the support of global institutions when he started out–did not see his Grameen Bank as a panacea. Others, like the World Bank and the United Nations, elevated it to that status (and, some say, convinced Yunus it was a panacea), and microcredit is now presented as a relatively painless approach to development. Through its dynamics of collective responsibility for repayment by a group of women borrowers, microcredit has indeed allowed many poor women to roll back pervasive poverty. However, it is mainly the moderately poor rather than the very poor who benefit, and not very many can claim they have permanently left the instability of poverty. Likewise, not many would claim that the degree of self-sufficiency and the ability to send children to school afforded by microcredit are indicators of their graduating to middle-class prosperity. As economic journalist Gina Neff notes, “after 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren’t able to meet their basic nutritional needs–so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business.”

Indeed, one of those who have thoroughly studied the phenomenon, Thomas Dichter, says that the idea that microfinance allows its recipients to graduate from poverty to entrepreneurship is inflated. He sketches out the dynamics of microcredit: “It emerges that the clients with the most experience got started using their own resources, and though they have not progressed very far–they cannot because the market is just too limited–they have enough turnover to keep buying and selling, and probably would have with or without the microcredit. For them the loans are often diverted to consumption since they can use the relatively large lump sum of the loan, a luxury they do not come by in their daily turnover.” He concludes: “Definitely, microcredit has not done what the majority of microcredit enthusiasts claim it can do–function as capital aimed at increasing the returns to a business activity.”

And so the great microcredit paradox that, as Dichter puts it, “the poorest people can do little productive with the credit, and the ones who can do the most with it are those who don’t really need microcredit, but larger amounts with different (often longer) credit terms.”

In other words, microcredit is a great tool as a survival strategy, but it is not the key to development, which involves not only massive capital-intensive, state-directed investments to build industries but also an assault on the structures of inequality such as concentrated land ownership that systematically deprive the poor of resources to escape poverty. Microcredit schemes end up coexisting with these entrenched structures, serving as a safety net for people excluded and marginalized by them, but not transforming them. No, Paul Wolfowitz, microcredit is not the key to ending poverty among the 75 million people in Andhra Pradesh. Dream on.

Perhaps one of the reasons there is such enthusiasm for microcredit in establishment circles these days is that it is a market-based mechanism that has enjoyed some success where other market-based programs have crashed. Structural-adjustment programs promoting trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization have brought greater poverty and inequality to most parts of the developing world over the last quarter century, and have made economic stagnation a permanent condition. Many of the same institutions that pushed and are continuing to push these failed macro programs (sometimes under new labels like “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers”), like the World Bank, are often the same institutions pushing microcredit programs. Viewed broadly, microcredit can be seen as the safety net for millions of people destabilized by the large-scale macro-failures engendered by structural adjustment.

There have been gains in poverty reduction in a few places–like China, where, contrary to the myth, state-directed macro policies, not microcredit, have been central to lifting an estimated 120 million Chinese from poverty.

So probably the best way we can honor Muhammad Yunus is to say, Yes, he deserves the Nobel Prize for helping so many women cope with poverty. His boosters discredit this great honor and engage in hyperbole when they claim he has invented a new compassionate form of capitalism–social capitalism, or “social entrepreneurship”–that will be the magic bullet to end poverty and promote development.

Manila

“People power” used to be synonymous with the Philippines. In February 1986 Filipinos captured the imagination of the world when they rushed into the streets to support a military uprising and ousted strongman Ferdinand Marcos. Fifteen years later, in January 2001, they again surged into the streets to bring down President Joseph Estrada, widely believed to be the recipient of hundreds of millions of pesos from illegal gambling activities.

Today, however, they are largely absent while another president stands accused, this time of stealing elections.

Intercepted telephone conversations between President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and an electoral commissioner during the elections of May 2004 showed her attempting to influence the outcome of the polls. Unable to deny it was her voice on the taped intercepts, Arroyo publicly apologized for a “lapse in judgment.” But instead of defusing the situation, the admission triggered widespread calls for her to resign.

In early September 2005, nearly three months after the scandal broke, Arroyo blocked a bid to impeach her, clinging to power despite a recent poll giving her the lowest overall performance rating among the country’s five most recent presidents. Those numbers were not, however, translated into numbers in the streets. The biggest rally anti-Arroyo forces could muster numbered, at most, 40,000. In contrast, hundreds of thousands had clogged the main highway running through Manila, popularly known as EDSA, for days on end in 1986 and 2001.

What happened? asked Manila’s veteran street activists. Why were the people no longer protesting a clear-cut case of electoral fraud by a president who was already vastly unpopular owing to ineptitude, uninspiring leadership and widely believed allegations of corruption even before the telephone intercepts surfaced? The truth is that while people dislike Arroyo, they are also deeply disillusioned with the political system, which has come to be known as the “EDSA State.” Conversations with middle- and lower-class citizens inevitably produce the same answer to why they’re not out demonstrating: “Well, whoever replaces her will probably be as bad, if not worse.” Intrigued at the discovery that only a handful of students in my undergraduate class in political sociology at the University of the Philippines, the traditional hotbed of activism, had attended the rallies, I posed to them the question, Is this democracy worth saving? Two-thirds said no.

Rather than taking to the streets, people are fleeing in large numbers to Europe, the United States and the Middle East. Some 10 percent of the Filipino labor force now works overseas, and one out of every four Filipinos wants to emigrate. It is estimated that at least 30 percent of Filipino households now subsist on remittances sent by 8 million expatriates.

Cynicism about democracy here is understandable if one considers that it has served as a mechanism for frenzied competition for political office among elite factions while enabling them to maintain a united front against social and economic change. Some Filipinos point out bitterly that while authoritarian Vietnam reduced the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty from 51 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2003, the Philippines could only bring it down from 20 percent to 14 percent in the same period. They decry the fact that at 0.46, the Philippines’ Gini coefficient, the most reliable measure of inequality, is the worst in Southeast Asia.

These statistics come alive with a tour of metro Manila’s vast shantytowns, where conditions of urban squalor are unparalleled in the region. During a recent visit to the sprawling Tatalon slum in Quezon City, I heard a constant refrain from people I interviewed that all recent administrations were the same in one respect: They had done absolutely nothing for poor people, though a few conceded that “Erap [Estrada] has a heart.”

Some analysts say that while “elite capture” of electoral processes contributed to the failure of the EDSA State, it has not been the only critical factor. It was also doomed from the start by external actors. In this view, one of the key reasons the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund shifted their support in the mid-1980s from the discredited Marcos dictatorship was the regime’s inability to impose policies needed to repay the $26 billion in external debt to financial institutions. The new democracy, which had a legitimacy the dictatorship lacked, became Washington’s favored instrument for the imposition of a harsh “structural adjustment” program.

Debt repayment became the national economic priority of the fledgling government of Corazon Aquino, which legislated “automatic appropriation” of the full amount needed yearly for servicing the foreign debt. With up to 50 percent of the budget allocated to debt service in some years and the remainder eaten up by operational expenses and salaries, hardly anything was left over for capital expenditures, dooming the country to stagnation. Not surprisingly, by mid-2005 the foreign debt stood at more than $56 billion, with as much as 88 percent of government revenues going to service the total public debt. Committed to Aquino’s “model debtor strategy,” successive administrations dug a deeper and deeper fiscal hole. It is ironic that today Aquino marches against Arroyo, when she herself helped forge the policy that helped doom Arroyo. Thus, between elite capture of electoral processes and externally imposed economic policies, the EDSA State stood little chance of success.

The Philippine situation is not unique. Indeed, it illustrates the trajectory of what Samuel Huntington christened the “third wave” of democratic expansion, beginning in the mid-1970s, when repressive regimes from Southeast Asia to Latin America were swept away. Great hopes at the end of the era of dictatorships had turned to bitter disappointment by the beginning of the millennium. A 2004 poll conducted by the United Nations Development Program showed that 55 percent of Latin Americans surveyed said they would support authoritarian regimes over democratic ones if the shift would solve their economic woes. A reversal of the third wave, say some analysts, has in fact already begun with the destruction of Pakistani democracy by Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 1999, an act that enjoyed substantial support among the middle and poorer classes alienated by corrupt and ineffective democratic governments under competitors Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

With the distant Marcos era now viewed through rose-tinted glasses by many in a younger generation of Filipinos who did not experience the depredations of dictatorial rule, there is a danger that, as in Pakistan, a return of authoritarianism lies in the country’s future. Unlike in Pakistan, however, it may not be through the agency of the country’s small and fragmented military, though scores of young officers are said to be seething with discontent. Indeed, many do not rule out a self-initiated “executive coup” à la Marcos on the part of President Arroyo–a move they see in a recent executive order greatly restricting street protests. A large cause of concern on the part of die-hard EDSA democrats is that the political forces that would bar such a return are in very bad shape. The “elite ins” and “elite outs” are locked in a bitter war of attrition, with the middle ground fast disappearing. The left is dominated by an aging, authoritarian Communist Party that has oscillated opportunistically between allying with one faction of the elite or another in classic 1930s “united front” fashion, with each swing, paradoxically, seeming to move it further from power. There are reports, though, that its armed wing, the New People’s Army, is attracting fresh recruits in some areas as poverty and corruption make people more desperate.

Philippine civil society was once one of the most dynamic in the region, and there were hopes that it would act as the counterweight to the state in the new democratic dispensation. But successive waves of civil-society actors have joined elite-dominated governments that used their rhetoric of “people’s empowerment” and “sustainable development” while co-opting them–indeed, in some cases turning them into hard-line apologists. Some of both Estrada’s and Arroyo’s leading partisans were once prominent human rights and social justice activists. “Civil society” is no longer the resonant term it once was, connoting partisanship for justice, equity and clean politics. Indeed, it is now cynically regarded by some as a stepping stone to political power.

So, as it enters its twentieth year, the EDSA State limps along, devoid of vision and inspiration, increasingly shorn of defenders, awaiting the coup de grâce that nature, which always abhors a vacuum, seems poised to inflict. The pessimism is palpable, yet there are those who will not fatalistically accept either democratic entropy or a return to authoritarianism. The hope, they say, lies in the fledgling pluralist “New Left,” which is fighting to liberate democracy from its imprisonment in the EDSA system. Represented by such formations as the coalition Laban ng Masa, or “Struggle of the Masses,” and the Citizens’ Action Party, better known as Akbayan, this movement has called for the president to resign while keeping its distance from the current working alliance between elite politicians and the old left. It advocates the immediate establishment of a “transitional revolutionary government” and promotes a program of democratic renewal that links participatory governance with radical social reform. These new progressives are fresh and committed, but they concede that they are in a race against time.

Manila

When US and British forces crossed into Iraq at dawn on March 20, I was in transit from Damascus to the Philippines. At the Gulf city of Dubai, I bade goodbye to Maha, a refugee from Iraq who had fled Baghdad a month earlier. She said she was lucky she had a husband, a trader, waiting for her in Dubai. “I feel ashamed leaving,” she confessed. “But there’s no way we can resist. Our people have no arms. But my brother and sister, they’re staying, and they and their children will fight.”

Also at Dubai, I met Maricon Vazquez, the chief nurse of one of the biggest hospitals in Kuwait, who, like me, was heading for Manila. One of the estimated 60,000 Filipino workers in Kuwait, she worried that a long war could dislocate her and millions of other foreign workers. I also met Garzon, a Syrian businessman; his great fear is that Syria, whose ruling party shares the same Baath Arab socialist ideology as Iraq’s, is the next candidate for regime change. “They can always resort to the charge that we sponsor terrorist groups against Israel,” he said.

I arrived in Manila to find the country divided between a furious antiwar movement and a government that is one of Washington’s staunchest allies. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wasted no time declaring that “we stand beside the coalition forces in the fight to redeem [Iraqi] freedom.” Yet the government’s posture is not totally scripted by Washington. Government spokespersons fanned out to tell the people that one of the main reasons the Philippines sides with the United States is that its construction firms and its workers will have a share in the “rebuilding” of Iraq.

I had gone to Baghdad as part of an “Asian Peace Mission,” and my thoughts keep returning to our encounter with the students of Baghdad University on March 16. At the College of English, Professor Abdul Zaater Jawad had told us, “We are intent on finishing the syllabus, war or no war.” Students in a class on Shakespeare were discussing Romeo and Juliet when we interrupted them, seemingly determined to carry on with life as usual. Yet the conversation immediately revealed that they know what lies ahead and have come to terms with it.

What do they think of George Bush? “He is like Tybalt, clumsy and ill intentioned,” said a young woman in near-perfect English, alluding to Romeo’s tormentor. What do they think about Bush’s promise to liberate Iraqis? Answered another student, “We’ve been invaded by many armies for thousands of years, and those who wanted to conquer us always said they wanted to liberate us.”

Youth and spring are a heady brew, and we all felt sadness as we sped away. Some of those eager new fans of Shakespeare will not see another spring. And for no other reason than the empire’s need to engage in a stupendous demonstration of its might.

Brenner’s World

Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz may be celebrity economists, but it is an economic historian whose earlier work focused on the origins of capitalism in late feudal Europe who has turned out the most compelling and comprehensive account of the crisis gripping contemporary global capitalism.

UCLA Professor Robert Brenner’s recent work is a solidly argued and empirically impeccable restatement of the centrality of overproduction in capitalism–a problem that has preoccupied thinkers as diverse as Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Joan Robinson, Ernest Mandel, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. Brenner’s distinctive contribution is to sketch out the specific dynamics and consequences of overproduction or underconsumption in the era of integrated, globalized production and markets. The picture he draws is not one of corporations denationalized by economic integration and states whose powers have been eroded, as in much current writing on globalization. In Brenner’s global economy, state elites battle to gain a competitive edge for their corporate elites. But if national competition is central, so is the common interest among the competing elites of the central economies to expand the global economy. The trajectory of the US economy is largely determined by this volatile relationship of competition with and dependence on the other global capitalist centers of Europe, Japan and–though to a much lesser degree–East Asia.

The Argument

In Brenner’s view, the post-World War II era is divided into a period of dynamic global economic expansion from the late 1940s to the early 1970s and one marked by persistent crises and uneven growth since then–a relatively dismal period broken only by the seven-year US boom in the 1990s. Whereas in the first phase, the United States, Europe and Japan derived mutual benefit from global expansion, from the early 1970s on, economic growth became largely a zero-sum game, in which one center economy’s advance was purchased with stagnation or recession in its neighbors.

Since the 1970s, the key problem for the center economies has been a chronic tendency toward overcapacity and thus a steady decline in profitability. Disposing of old capital stock, increasing productivity and regaining profitability has been an urgent need of each center economy, but achieving it has run into opposition from established monopolies, organized labor and powerful rival center economies.

By delinking the dollar from the gold standard and effectively devaluing it, the Nixon Administration hoped to steal a march on its rivals. It was, however, left to the Reagan Administration to decisively restore the American economy’s edge, and this it did via three mechanisms: breaking organized labor to hold down wages; maintaining high interest rates to attract capital to the United States; and engineering the infamous “Plaza Accord” in 1985, which drastically pushed up the value of the yen and set the stage for the “relentless rise” of the mark to make the Japanese and German manufacturing sectors bear the lion’s share of adjustment. In a global economy marked by overcapacity, the result was eventually to push both Japan and Germany into recession and lay the ground for greater US competitiveness and profitability in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The effect was, however, two-edged, for even as US manufacturing regained profitability, it was also threatened by the prolonged recession that settled over Japan and Germany, which degraded the capacity of these economies to absorb US exports, which had served as a key engine of the US manufacturing recovery. In an increasingly integrated global economy, Brenner points out, “the fact remains that while the US economic revival took place largely at the expense of its leading rivals, that it had to do so was ultimately at the cost of the US economy itself.” Consequently, Washington under the Clinton Administration engineered the “reverse Plaza Accord” in the mid-1990s, when the value of the dollar was allowed to rise relative to the yen in an effort to help spark an export-led recovery in Japan. Just as the Plaza Accord had essentially been a rescue operation of US industry by Japan and Germany, so was the Clinton-Rubin reversal of the rising dollar a US-engineered bailout of Japan’s crisis-bound manufacturing sector.

This move, however, failed to spark sustained economic revival in Japan. And a great part of the reason was that the global overcapacity problem had become even more acute owing to the Japanese conglomerates’ moving a great many of their labor-intensive manufacturing operations to China and East Asia, precisely to escape being rendered noncompetitive by the rising yen. But even as it failed to reactivate the Japanese economy, the reverse Plaza Accord played a key role in undermining the competitiveness of the Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian economies whose currencies were tied to the rising dollar. When these economies, with their sizable markets, collapsed during the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, the global crisis of overproduction intensified.

Tied to an increasingly integrated but keenly competitive global production system and market, the US manufacturing sector saw its profits stop growing after 1997. By the end of the decade, the gap between capacity and output was, according to The Economist, the largest since the Great Depression. By April 2001, practically all key industrial sectors were suffering tremendous overcapacity, with the worst situation existing in the telecommunications sector, where only 2.5 percent of the infrastructure laid down was being utilized.

With manufacturing and the rest of the “real economy” ceasing to absorb investment profitably, capital migrated to the speculative sector, where a period of hyperactive growth in high-technology stocks was carefully nursed by the low-interest-rate policy and “New Economy” talk of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Grounded in the illusion of future profitability of high-tech firms, the dot-com phenomenon extended the run by about two years. “Never before in US history,” Brenner contends, “had the stock market played such a direct, and decisive, role in financing non-financial corporations, and thereby powering the growth of capital expenditures and in this way the real economy. Never before had a US economic expansion become so dependent upon the stock market’s ascent.”

But with the profitability of the financial sector being dependent on the underlying, actual profitability of the manufacturing sector, the finance-driven growth ultimately had to run out of steam. The dizzying rise in market capitalization of nonfinancial corporations from $4.8 billion in 1994 to $15.6 trillion in the first quarter of 2000 represented what Brenner characterizes as an “absurd disconnection between the rise of paper wealth and the growth of actual output, and particularly of profits, in the underlying economy.” The loss of $7 trillion in paper wealth in the stock market collapse that began in March 2000 represented the rude reassertion of the reality of a global economy crippled by overcapacity, overproduction and lack of profitability. With the mechanism of “stock-market Keynesianism” having been exhausted, the capacity of the US economy to avoid a serious and prolonged downturn has been greatly eroded, though Brenner is cautious about writing it off.

Missing: Kondratieff and China

The Brenner canvas of postwar expansion and decline has a remarkable affinity to the theory of the early Soviet-era economist Nikolai Kondratieff that capitalism moves forward in fifty-to-sixty-year “waves” that ascend, crest and descend into a deep trough. Yet, surprisingly, The Boom and the Bubble does not contain a single reference to Kondratieff.

This is intriguing.

Perhaps Brenner is trying to distance himself from deterministic interpretations of Kondratieff, which have either posited the exploitation and exhaustion of new technologies as the central driver of long-wave activity or proclaimed the inevitability of a massive, Great Depression-like crisis.

If this is the case, Brenner is right to be wary of sounding apocalyptic, given the resiliency that has enabled US-dominated global capitalism to surmount crises in the past five decades. He fails, however, to discuss the factor that should serve as the greatest reason for caution: China. China’s potential role of serving as an exit strategy for the current crisis of overcapacity is underlined by the fact that it has absorbed a yearly average of $45 billion in foreign capital since the late 1990s, making it by far the biggest recipient of foreign investment in the South. China is, however, still focused on export-oriented production, making it a critical contributor to global overcapacity. Should China turn toward a strategy of hitching capitalist growth principally to the expansion of domestic purchasing power, it could turn into the engine that would ward off, perhaps for a few decades, the specter of global stagnation. Already China is the world’s largest market for cellular phones, and troubled Ericsson’s move to establish a manufacturing base there indicates that key players in the crisis-ridden telecom sector see their salvation in China.

Missing: The Crisis of Reproduction

Barring a sharp turn by China’s leaders, the likelihood of a Kondratieff-like deflationary–if not depressive–phase is really great at this point. One is not likely, however, to draw this grim conclusion from an analysis that hews narrowly, as Brenner’s does, to developments at the level of production, to the dynamics of overproduction. Focused at that level, the furthest Brenner can go is to state that “it is not easy to see what forces exist to push the economy forward.”

However, what is unique about the current conjuncture is the coming together of a crisis of production and a crisis of reproduction of the system, the latter referring to the re-creation of the political and cultural context necessary for global capitalism to survive and thrive. Global politics, the dynamics of cultural hegemony and the interplay of key institutional actors are what is missing in Brenner’s broad canvas, and these are the elements whose interaction will determine whether or not the consequences of the crisis of overcapacity can be contained.

Despite capitalism’s famed resiliency, containment of the crisis at the level of production is increasingly less of an option owing to the current intersection of the crisis of overproduction with three related “superstructural” crises–something that either did not occur earlier in the post-World War II period or was marked by much less intensity.

The “crisis of legitimacy” refers to the increasing inability of the neoliberal ideology that underpins today’s global capitalism to persuade people of its viability as a system of production, exchange and distribution. The disaster wrought by structural adjustment in Africa and Latin America; the chain reaction of financial crises in Mexico, Asia, Brazil, Russia, Argentina and on Wall Street; and the massive combination of extensive fraud and spectacular wiping out of investors’ wealth have all eaten away at the credibility of the system. The legitimacy of the transnational corporation–the engine of the system–is at its lowest in years, with more than 70 percent of Americans claiming even before Enron erupted that corporations had too much power over their lives. Also plunged into a crisis of credibility are those institutions that serve as capitalism’s system of global economic governance–the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization–making them the weak link in the system.

Paralleling this crisis is mounting disaffection with Washington- or Westminster-type liberal democracies that have served as a central stabilization mechanism for global capitalism in the South–a site that hardly makes an appearance on Brenner’s stage yet has constantly been a critical point of vulnerability in the stable reproduction of the system globally. In places like the Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil and Venezuela, popular disillusionment with socially riven, economically stagnant electoral democracies oiled by money politics is rife among the lower classes and even the middle class; in the case of Pakistan, it is one of the factors that allowed General Musharraf to seize power.

But the crisis of legitimacy of liberal democracy is not limited to the South. It is also shaking up the United States, Japan and Europe. Beneath George Bush’s post-9/11 poll popularity continues to stir the widespread pre-9/11 feeling that, owing to overweening corporate influence, plutocracy and not democracy is now the US system of government. Despite Washington’s current posturing about punishing corporate fraud, the spectacular developments on Wall Street are perceived as a moral collapse in which both economic and political elites are implicated.

In Japan, ineptitude is the key characteristic associated by citizens with the interest-group-ridden conservative democracy that has presided over a decade of stagnation and decline.

While there is also much concern about corporate control of political party finances in Europe, an even greater subverter of democratic legitimacy is the widespread anger over the nontransparent process that technocratic elites allied to corporate elites have–in the name of European integration and technocratic and market rationality–eroded the principle of subsidiarity by funneling effective political and economic decision-making upward to techno-corporate structures, at the apex of which stands the European Commission, that are largely unaccountable to electorates on the ground. Electoral revolts like those associated with Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and the assassinated Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands are manifestations of deep alienation with technocratic democracy.

Finally, there is the strategic crisis brought about by politico-military “overextension.” While there may be factions in Washington that see “military Keynesianism” as a way out of the current economic impasse, in fact the military equation at this juncture might be more of an unraveling factor. The recent expansion of US military influence into Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Asia and Central Asia may communicate strength. Yet, despite all this movement, the United States has not been able to consolidate victory anywhere–certainly not in Afghanistan, where nascent anarchy, and not a stable pro-US regime, reigns. Indeed, it is arguable that because of the massive disaffection the United States has created throughout the Muslim world, Washington’s political-military moves, including its pro-Israel policies, have worsened rather than improved the US strategic situation in the Middle East. This sense of being strapped into the roller coaster of overextension is probably what accounts for the reluctance of some factions in the Pentagon to follow the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz lobby’s push to invade Iraq. Meanwhile, even as Washington is obsessed with terrorism in the Middle East, political rebellions against neoliberalism are shaking up its Latin American backyard.

Kondratieff’s portrait of crisis was hardly deterministic. In his schema it was the volatile interaction of production and political and ideological crises that facilitated the descent of the long waves from crest to trough in the 1880s and again in the 1930s. The situation today, more than fifty years after the beginning of the post-World War II economic ascent, is analogous. Robert Brenner provides us with an insightful guide to the roots and dynamics of the crisis of the system of production, one that is more reliable than most of the treatises turned out by the hotshot deserters from the collapsing neoclassical paradigm. But his superb analysis of the crisis of production needs to be supplemented with an exploration of the parallel crisis of the system of reproduction to bring home both the depth of capitalism’s contemporary crisis and the volatility of the conjuncture.

Manila

The Bush Administration’s opening of a so-called second front against terrorism in the Philippines has stunned people here with its swiftness. Less than three weeks after the decision was jointly announced by Washington and Manila in early January, the first wave of US troops landed in Zamboanga City, about 460 nautical miles south of the Philippine capital. The reality of this new front in another distant land was brought home to many Americans by the crash of a US helicopter in treacherous waters on February 22. Officially tagged an accident, the tragedy took the lives of ten US soldiers, eight of whom belonged to an elite Special Forces unit.

Not surprisingly, the national debate in the Philippines, which a decade ago closed down two massive US bases it had hosted, has turned ugly very quickly. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has taken to calling opponents of the deployment “anti-Filipino” and “Abu Sayyaf lovers,” referring to the terrorist group that is ostensibly the target of the mission, while critics have warned that the decision will precipitate the downfall of her administration. In one of those quicksilver transformations for which Philippine politics is famous, ex-senator Juan Ponce Enrile, widely regarded as the man who torpedoed the impeachment proceedings against former President Joseph Estrada a year ago, is now feted in some quarters as a nationalist for his public stand that the deployment violates the Philippine Constitution.

The US plan calls for the immediate deployment of 660 troops in western Mindanao. Some 160 of these are members of the Special Forces, who are to be assigned to the war-torn island of Basilan, about seventeen miles southwest of Zamboanga, in what is being labeled a “training exercise” with 3,800 Filipino troops. Two advisers will be assigned to each company of 100 soldiers engaged in a search-and-destroy mission against the Abu Sayyaf. These advisers are not supposed to engage in combat, though the terms of engagement allow them to fire in self-defense.

Even before the operations are under way, however, controversy already attaches to the issue of who will command these advisers. The Philippine government said Philippine Army officers would exercise authority over the US troops, while the Pentagon insisted that its soldiers would not function under foreign command. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon won, with the final terms of reference, released on February 12, setting forth a potentially messy dual command structure in actual field operations.

But that is a minor tempest compared with the larger issue of whether the US advisers should be in the Philippines at all. The deployment clearly violates the Philippines’ 1987 Constitution, which says that no foreign troops are to be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty. The one full-fledged treaty the Philippines has with the United States, the cold war-era US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951, commits the two governments to jointly repelling external aggression aimed at each other, while the Visiting Forces Agreement, signed in 1998, legalizes and regulates US participation in military exercises designed to counter external attack. Neither allows the use of foreign troops in quelling local insurgencies or criminal activities like the Abu Sayyaf’s kidnapping spree.

The Abu Sayyaf was created in the early 1990s by young Islamists alienated from the two big rebel groups fighting for independence for the Muslim people of the Philippines, the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The MNLF was regarded as too secular and the MILF as not fundamentalist enough by the Abu Sayyaf founders, who wanted to bring all Muslims in Mindanao–the country’s second-biggest island–under an Islamic state where Muslims would be able to practice Islam in its “purest and strictest form,” as its key intellectual, the now-deceased Aburajak Janjalani, put it. Many people in Mindanao, however, are skeptical about the ideological protestations of the Abu Sayyaf. Some regard it as just another of western Mindanao’s numerous bandit groups, whose invocation of Islam is designed to confer respectability on its criminal activities. Others see it as a creation of the Philippine military originally designed to weaken the MNLF and MILF but that, like Frankenstein’s monster, evolved beyond the control of its minders.

The kidnappings for ransom that the Abu Sayyaf engages in are not what makes it unique–such kidnappings are a dime a dozen throughout western Mindanao–but rather their spectacular character. It made millions of dollars in ransom money after it hit the resort island of Sipadan two years ago and made off with a multinational set of victims it kept as hostages for months. Hardly had that shock worn off than it snatched more than a dozen guests and workers from the Dos Palmas resort on the island of Palawan last May and ferried them in high-speed boats to Basilan, more than 300 miles away. This time, there were three American captives, missionary couple Gracia and Martin Burnham of Kansas and Guillermo Sobero of California. Sobero was beheaded early on, while the Burnhams are still in the Abu Sayyaf’s hands, along with Filipina nurse Deborah Yap.

Philippine security officials claim that links were forged in the early 1990s between representatives of Osama bin Laden and the Abu Sayyaf. However, not even President Arroyo claims there is evidence that ties continued after 1995. Some Southeast Asian police investigators have, in fact, suggested that people suspected of being agents of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, such as Farathur Raman Al Ghozi, a recently arrested Indonesian accused of a number of bombings, have ties to the insurgent MILF rather than to the Abu Sayyaf.

Why the Philippines?

So why rush to the Abu Sayyaf stronghold of Basilan? Undoubtedly, a key incentive for President Arroyo is the aid that Washington has promised her administration in return for her declaration of fealty to President George W. Bush. About $100 million in military aid has been committed to the badly underfunded Armed Forces of the Philippines. Even more critical are the billions in economic aid and foreign investment promised by Washington and Wall Street during Arroyo’s visit to the United States last November. The centerpiece of her program to jump-start the Philippine economy during this period of global recession is massive economic support from Washington. For her, the global antiterrorist campaign is first and foremost a business proposition, and she made this very clear when she emerged from her meeting with President Bush in Washington in November and boasted to Filipino reporters that “it’s $4.6 billion, and counting.”

Beyond the promise of massive aid, President Arroyo perceives a positive political fallout from the coming of the Americans. She is banking on the popularity of a hard line against the Abu Sayyaf among Mindanao’s Christian majority. This group enthusiastically supported the aggressive military campaign against the MILF launched by Arroyo’s predecessor, Joseph Estrada. Although Estrada was ousted by a middle-class-based popular uprising in January 2001, the Christian majority still voted overwhelmingly for his allies during the congressional elections last May. Arroyo figures that bringing in US troops to stiffen a badly performing Philippine Army will bring a significant bloc of votes over to her side in time for the 2004 presidential elections. “I wish the administration would just say that it is basing its decisions on what it thinks is the popular mood rather than attempting the impossible–trying to prove that the American troop deployment is constitutional and legal,” says Wigberto Tanada, a former senator who is the main convener of an anti-interventionist alliance called Gathering for Peace.

When it comes to Washington’s motives, many here see the Bush Administration’s choice of the Philippines as a second front in its global antiterror campaign as having been made in haste and as the result of a process of elimination. Somalia evokes memories of the disastrous 1993 Ranger raid that led to the withdrawal of US troops; Yemen and Sudan are unknown, forbidding territory; and action against Iraq is–at least for now–precluded by the absence of consensus among the key policy-makers. In these circumstances, the Philippines–with a fiercely supportive head of state, being a former colony and possessing a familiar culture–stood out.

Representative Etta Rosales of Akbayan (Citizens Action Party), one of the country’s most respected legislators, feels there is an even deeper reason: In her view, the United States has been pushing hard to reintroduce a US military presence in the Philippines ever since it lost its bases in 1991. An effort to push through an Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement similar to that negotiated with Japan met strong opposition both in and out of government in the mid-1990s. Strong lobbying by the Pentagon, however, produced the Visiting Forces Agreement in 1998, which reopened the gates through which US troops poured in under the guise of conducting military exercises with their Filipino counterparts. Exercises normally have had a duration of a few weeks. But the 2002 “Balikatan” (Shoulder-to-Shoulder) Exercise in Basilan is projected to last six months, and its aim, suspects Rosales, is to lay the ground for a longer-term and more intensive military presence. “They were simply waiting for the perfect moment, and the Abu Sayyaf’s alleged links to Al Qaeda provided the perfect excuse,” she contends.

The Caldron of Basilan

The US Special Forces will find their Filipino allies demoralized by antiquated and inadequate equipment and very low pay. Probably the only reliable fighting unit in the armed forces is the Marines. The army’s reputation is so bad that many residents of Basilan swear that a few months ago, the Abu Sayyaf were able to break out of encirclement in the town of Lamitan by paying off the Scout Ranger units that had the bandits and their hostages in their grip. The biggest problem that the Special Forces will face, however, is Basilan itself; as journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria put it in their Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao, Basilan, an island of some 1,370 square kilometers, is a “war laboratory,” where “battalions of young soldiers are trained to become tough and where senior military officers are stationed before they are promoted.” Its literacy rate is the lowest in western Mindanao, and half the population lives in poverty.

Basilan’s social history is a microcosm of forces that have transformed the region of Mindanao and made it a land of permanent war. Muslims belonging to the Yakan ethnolinguistic group form the majority, but large numbers of them have been dispossessed by a migrant Christian population that streamed into the island with the logging concessions, agribusiness firms and multinational corporations, some of which arrived as early as eighty years ago. José Torres Jr., a specialist in Basilan society, estimates that today Muslims constitute 71 percent of the population but Christians own 75 percent of the land, with ethnic Chinese controlling 75 percent of local trade. The result is a combustible mixture that has produced unending streams of resentful recruits first for the MNLF, then for the MILF and the Abu Sayyaf.

Until now, the Abu Sayyaf, which is estimated to number from a few hundred to a thousand in western Mindanao, never had a significant mass base in Basilan. But recent military actions, like the arrest of scores of Muslims on such flimsy grounds as being related to suspected members of the terrorist group, is creating precisely that base. While Christians favor the Americans’ coming, Angelina Ludovice, a respected community organizer in Isabela, the provincial capital, warns that “Muslims now see the whole thing as directed at them.”

Unlike Afghanistan, Basilan is a typical setting for an insurgency: Forests and communities overlap, creating both physical and popular cover for combatants. The hunt for combatants easily leads to abuses against civilians, turning many into insurgents. Yet while the insurgency has a mass base, so does the counterinsurgency, for the place is riven by a deep ethnic and religious divide that continually threatens to produce communal bloodshed. Now with the threat it poses of tilting the balance of forces sharply in favor of the central government, the military and the Christian community, US intervention may yet accomplish what has so far eluded the Muslims: an operational unity among the rival organizations of the Abu Sayyaf, the MILF and the MNLF.

There is, however, one thing that Christians and Muslims share, and that is the fear of bombing. Both communities, says Ludovice, know about the intense bombing that accompanied the Afghanistan campaign, and they worry that the same thing can happen in Basilan. So far, news about what the Americans will bring to the training refers to infantry tactics, lessons in night-flying, skills in night-fighting with night-vision goggles and sophisticated surveillance work. What made the difference in Afghanistan, however, was precision bombing, and it is hard for many Filipinos to believe that massive air power will not be employed against suspected Abu Sayyaf strongholds. With Basilan’s ecology of overlapping forests and communities, the results of such a campaign could be devastating in human terms.

In short, the slightest acquaintance with Basilan’s tortured history reveals the folly of the US deployment. For even if the Special Forces and their protégés do decimate the Abu Sayyaf, the unchanged conditions of ethnoreligious discrimination, inequality and poverty will continue to breed extremist responses. Only an aggressive program of social and economic reform will break the cycle of injustice and terrorism. The Americans may leave after six months, but it will be the locals who will be left with managing a situation that is worse than before.

The Manila Scene

As in Basilan, things are coming to a head in Manila. Seemingly confident just a few weeks ago, President Arroyo is now prone to utter sharp words about her critics in public. There are now daily demonstrations at the US Embassy, and on February 11, Gathering for Peace, perhaps the most powerful coalition of opponents of the US troop deployment, was born. Scores of people at the event sang “Bayan Ko” (My Country), the melancholic theme song of the struggle to oust the US military bases in the late 1980s and early ’90s. One of the leaders of that campaign, Professor Roland Simbulan of the University of the Philippines, told the crowd, “We’re in the minority now. So what’s new? We were also in the minority at the beginning of the anti-bases campaign, but in the end we built up a solid patriotic majority.”

While Gathering for Peace was being launched, the film Black Hawk Down was playing to large audiences in Manila theaters. A friend who has seen it says, “I thought this was a pro-war film. It actually makes a powerful case against intervention.” True–underneath the patriotic gore, the film about the disastrous 1993 Delta Force and Ranger raid in Mogadishu actually gives off two powerful lessons, perhaps inadvertently. One is that US units like Delta Force, the Rangers and Special Forces are veritable killing machines. The second is that even when you kill large numbers of people–and in less than twenty-four hours, the Americans killed more than a thousand Somalis–you can’t prevail against an enraged population that does not want you around. A few weeks after the raid, the United States withdrew from Somalia.

As US troops prepare to plunge into Basilan’s witches’ brew of insurgents, terrorists, bandits, warring communities and inhospitable jungle, one has a feeling that history, cunning and inscrutable, might this time deal the Americans a hand that is less like Afghanistan and more like Mogadishu. Indeed, to have an operation begin with a helicopter crash does not augur well for its outcome. “Abu Sayyaf 10, US Zero” is the comment making the rounds in Manila.

NOVEMBER 14

A final declaration for the fourth WTO Ministerial Session was finally issued on November 14 after negotiations that extended well past the original deadline. Trade czars Robert Zoellick of the United States and Pascal Lamy of the European Union are hailing the agreement as launching a new global round of trade negotiations. Many analysts dispute this, saying that negotiations on investment and competition policy–which are are the top of the US and EU agenda–cannot be launched until after the fifth ministerial in 2003, and only after a "written consensus decision" is issued by the WTO.

Overall, however, the declaration was a defeat for the developing countries whose demand that the ministerial focus its work mainly on implementation issues connected with the previous trade round–the so-called Uruguay Round– which received only perfunctory mention. Developing countries did win an important concession giving public health precedence over patents, which the pharmecutical industry had strongly resisted, but as a number of observers have pointed out, the declaration leaves unchanged the language of the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), which could serve as the basis for future legal challenges to their efforts to override pharmaceutical patents. The European Union successfully watered down developing country demands for getting rid of agricultural export subsidies and the United States refused to accede to developing country demands that it accelerate the phaseout of its textile quotas.

Yet the developed countries' victory may well be short-term since their arm-twisting was greatly resented and resisted by the poor countries. The declaration, in fact, could only be finalized after India agreed to abstain at the last-minute, after resisting for hours. The legacy of the Doha summit may well be the continuing erosion of legitimacy of the WTO.

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NOVEMBER 13

As the Fourth Ministerial entered its final day of intense negotiations on November 13, developed and developing countries still seemed to be locked in a stalemate on a number of key issues, including agricultural subsidies, trade-related intellectual property rights and public health, a review of anti-dumping rules, and extending WTO coverage to investment, competition policy and government procurement. The future of the WTO hangs in the balance. Members of the WTO secretariat say that the organization cannot afford another Seattle in Doha. Failure to create consensus around a Ministerial Declaration may well lead to an unraveling of the trade body.

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NOVEMBER 10

About 100 NGO delegates staged an anti-World Trade Organization demonstration on Friday, immediately before the opening of the trade body's fourth ministerial session in Doha, Qatar. Standing on both sides of the entrance to the huge Al Dafna Hall at the Sheraton Hotel, the protesters, with tape on their mouths, held up signs saying "No Voice at the WTO," calling attention to the lack of democracy, transparency and civil society input into the organization's decision-making processes.

After over 5,000 delegates had filed in, the demonstrators started chanting "What do we want? Democracy!" An effort by Jose Bove, the French anti-McDonalds activist, to lead the demonstrators into the hall was at first repelled by Qatari security forces. A few moments later, however, the demonstrators were allowed in. Fulfilling a pledge made at an open session earlier in the day by Crown Prince Sheik Jassim bin Hamad, security forces did not arrest or detain any of the activists.

Desperate is the only word to describe the actions of the trade superpowers represented at the meeting. Tremendous pressure is being exerted on developing countries to endorse a new round of trade negotiations. The weapons include manipulation of the WTO's undemocratic system of decision-making and blunter forms of trade blackmail.

Intense Security

Massive security preparations have turned Doha, a city of over 600,000, into a high security zone, to the consternation of ordinary Qataris, many of whom claim that the United States is exaggerating the dangers of holding the conference in the Gulf city. The security arrangements have isolated the conference site and are making transportation to and from hotels an exercise in resourcefulness for many delegates.

An armed attack by an allegedly deranged Qatari gunman on a munitions base on the outskirts of Doha, used by the United States, earlier in the week has heightened the tension. Even before that incident, the office of the US Trade Representative had moved to gather representatives of US NGOs from their separate lodgings to join the US official delegation at the Ritz Carlton, which has been converted into an armed camp, with logistical connections to US warships waiting in the Gulf for possible evacuation of American delegates. There is more than enough space in the hotel, since the number of people in the official US delegation has shrunk from about 300 to fifty.

So paranoid is the US security force at the Ritz Carlton that they prevented Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland-based think tank Food First, from riding on the same bus from the hotel to the conference site after they discovered that she is an Indian citizen. She said that they also refused to give her access to US official briefings or provide her with a security phone and gas mask, which they were distributing to other members of the American entourage.

The dramatic shrinkage in the number of official delegates is not confined to the US delegation. The Canadian delegation, usually one of the biggest, is down to fifty. Says Maude Barlow, a noted critic of her government's trade policies: "People were suddenly all getting sick or disabled at the last minute, and to try to cover the cost of the government plane, they even invited me for the ride to Qatar."

Differing Priorities

The smaller number of key actors from the United States and other members of so-called "Quad" (European Union, Canada and Japan) is not, however, likely to change the dynamics of the conference.

The majority of developing countries want the Ministerial to focus on matters related to the implementation of the commitments made under the Uruguay Round. This position was laid out in a recent declaration of the Group of 77, which identified "104 implementation issues" that needed to be "meaningfully resolved, with urgency before the Fourth Ministerial Meeting and without any extraneous linkages."

Developing countries have been groaning under the weight of implementing the twenty-eight different agreements that comprised the Uruguay Round agreement, while the big trading powers have refused or been slow to implement their commitments to provide greater market access in agriculture and textiles to developing countries or cut back the massive subsidization of their agricultural interests.

The European Union and the United States, on the other hand, have put some of their differences aside–temporarily–to present a common front for a new round of trade negotiations that would focus on expanding the mandate of the WTO to cover the so-called "new issues" of investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation. Essentially, these are the same issues that formed their common agenda of global economic liberalization prior to the disastrous WTO Ministerial in December 1999. Learning from Seattle, the EU and United States have de-emphasized their disagreement on agricultural trade issues, and the United States apparently does not intend to make the linkage between trade and labor standards–a key point of conflict with developing countries in Seattle (and, for different reasons, also an issue of great concern to US labor unions)–an issue in Doha.

Controversial Draft Declaration

The proposed draft declaration for the Ministerial meeting is an example of the sort of underhanded tactics that the big trading powers are resorting to. According to Aileen Kwa, a Geneva-based analyst who monitors the WTO for Focus on the Global South, the draft does not emphasize the developing countries' stated priorities of implementation issues, the "Special and Differential Treatment" of developing countries, greater access to developed country markets, and reviews of the agreements on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and services (GATS).

Instead, the draft projects an alleged consensus on negotiations on the issues of competition, investment policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation that are the priorities of the minority of rich and powerful trading countries. "Despite clearly stated positions that the developing countries are unwilling to go into a new round until past implementation and decision-making are addressed," says Kwa, "the draft declaration favorably positions the launching of a comprehensive new round with an open agenda."

The draft has been openly denounced by Nigeria as "one-sided" and "showing not much regard for our countries." Bitter complaints from the poor countries prompted Stuart Harbinson of Hong Kong, chair of the WTO General Council, to walk out of a briefing in Geneva last week. Many governments are incensed that the draft fails to acknowledge the strong stand they have made on the principle that nothing in the Trade Related Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) shall prevent them from taking measures to protect public health by overriding patents.

The draft was a product of consultations conducted among an inner circle of about 20-25 participants–the so-called Green Room process–that effectively excludes most of the members of the WTO. In the lead-up to Qatar, this exclusive process has already held two "mini-Ministerials," one in Mexico at the end of August and another in Singapore on October 13-14. How one gets invited to these meetings is very murky. Kwa cites the case of one ambassador from a transition economy who was promised an invitation to a Green Room meeting by the WTO Secretariat but never got one.

Then there was the case of an African ambassador who wanted to attend the Singapore mini-ministerial: When he approached the WTO secretariat for an invitation, he was told that it was not hosting the meeting. When he tried the Singapore mission in Geneva, the response was that the mission was simply coordinating the meeting and was not in a position to send out invitations. Developing country disaffection with the Green Room process was one of the reasons the Third Ministerial collapsed in 1999. At that time, Charlene Barshefsky, then US Trade Representative, admitted that the WTO decision-making process was non-transparent and inequitable and had to be changed. Stephen Byers, the UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, was even more emphatic, saying that the "WTO will not be able to continue in its present form. There has to be fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of all 134 of its members."

That moment of candor was, however, forgotten quickly as the developed countries realized that in an organization like the WTO, where the developing countries are in the majority, the big powers can only dominate through such non-democratic mechanisms as the Green Room and the so-called "Consensus System." Barely two months after Seattle, Michael Moore, WTO director general, told developing countries at the UNCTAD X gathering in Bangkok in February 2000 that the green room/consensus system was "non-negotiable." And there the matter has lain since.

Capitalizing on Tragedy

The trade superpowers have not wasted any opportunity to push for a new trade round. The smoke had not yet cleared from the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York before US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick seized on the tragedy to press for even greater trade liberalization via the WTO and other mechanisms, asserting that free trade was one of the best ways of countering terrorism. Others have been more brazen: At a recent conference in Budapest, David Hartridge, an influential senior official at the WTO Secretariat, openly declared that the September 11 terrorists and activists against corporate-driven globalization shared a propensity for "violent behavior" and warned people from going to Geneva for demonstrations against the WTO in mid-November because "there will be violence."

While the developing countries held the line in the months after the disastrous collapse of the Seattle Ministerial in December 1999, many observers fear that their resolve might now be weakening in the face of concerted pressure from the developed countries. Aside from being subjected to the WTO's exclusionary decision-making process, some countries are being bludgeoned more directly. According to Shefali Sharma of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the United States has sent letters to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and several other countries revoking their preferential trade status on some trade agreements owing to their opposition to liberalization of government procurement, which is at the top of the US agenda for the Ministerial.

Last Hurrah?

The powerful trading countries may well get their way and ram through a declaration that agrees to a comprehensive round of trade negotiations in Doha. But the greatest obstacle to trade liberalization may no longer be the developing countries but the global economy itself, which is contracting very quickly owing to the very interlocking of economies brought about by globalization and liberalization. In both developed and developing countries, pressures to save domestic industries, focus on domestic-demand-led growth, and counteract the vulnerabilities of export-led economies at a time of a deep global recession will probably stymie any significant movement toward more liberalization. The Fourth Ministerial may well turn out to be the last hurrah of the WTO and the project of radical economic globalization of which it was the crown jewel.

Genoa; Sunday, July 23

Organizers of the anti-G8 protest in Genoa say that 200,000 people came from all over Italy and Europe to join the mammoth demonstration yesterday. In contrast to Friday, the day seemed to be relatively peaceable…until the evening. At around 11 pm, while I and several media people were filing stories, the police barged into the Genoa Social Forum press center in search of “anarchists.”

“Prensa, prensa,” we shouted, our hands held high, as baton wielding carabinieri pushed us and commanded us to sit on the floor. We were captives for the next hour, but things were worse at the high school next door which served as temporary quarters for people coming from out of town. About 200 police in full riot gear crashed into the building, rounding up Nazi-style about twenty young people suspected of being anarchists.

Still things were less chaotic than the day before. I will never forget Friday.

The police van came careening down the Via Giovanni Tomaso Invrea, moving crazily from one side of the narrow street to the other in pursuit of protesters. I flattened myself against the wall, and it missed me by two feet. Another six inches and it would have mowed down the man in front of me. “Assassino, assassino,” people screamed as the vehicle stopped a few yards away. A bald carabinieri opened the door and glared at us.

Everything happened so quickly. Just twenty-five minutes before, at around 2:15 pm, a column of around 8,000-10,000 people, led by the famed specialists in civil disobedience the Tute Bianche, were marching down the Via Tolemaide, with marshalls using megaphones announcing, “This is a nonviolent march. We believe in nonviolence.” The goal of the marchers was to reach the twenty-foot wall of iron that the authorities had erected around the Group of Eight meeting site at the Piazza Ducale about two kilometers away.

They never reached the wall. At the foot of the hill, at the intersection with Via Corsino, carabinieri hidden in a small side street started firing tear gas in an unprovoked attack that scattered the advance ranks of the march where there were many reporters and television crews.

The Battle of Genoa had begun.

Throughout the next four hours, the battle unfolded in the narrow sidestreets and the small piazzas of the Corso Torino area, with the battle lines shifting constantly. The police would attack with teargas, vans and armored personnel carriers. The protesters would retreat, then come back with stones and bricks ripped from the pavement. Huge trash bins were turned over to serve as barricades. “Genova Libera! Genova Libera!” would erupt from the crowd everytime the police were forced back.

At 4:20 pm, I had my first glimpse of an injured man being carried away by the first aid personnel of the Tute Bianche. It was at around the same time that one person was shot dead by carabinieri in the same vicinity. Ambulance sirens blared constantly. Later I would find out that about 150 people had been injured during the day–about fifty of them being members of the media.

I also learned later that there were acts of civil disobedience throughout the day, the most dramatic apparently being that of a woman from the so-called “Pink Bloc” of marchers who tried to scale the steel wall to place grappling hooks on it, only to be hosed down brutally by the police when she had got nearly to the top.

Unfortunately, the anarchists–the so-called “Black Bloc”–were also around. Despite efforts by mainstream demonstrators to dissuade them with dramatic pleas for nonviolence, they went about burning a couple of cars, including an Alfa Romeo. They also moved down Genoa’s beautiful seafront drive, the Corso Italia, selectively breaking windows–breaking those of banks and car companies while leaving those of restaurants untouched. “Capitalism kills” with an anarchist logo alongside was painted on walls.

Many protesters were very upset about the antics of the few hundred anarchists in a global assembly of about 100,000 people. Fabio Bellini, a 25-year-old Genoan, told me: “It is right to demonstrate against the G-8. It’s right to fight for a better world, and that’s why I’m here. But I don’t understand the window breaking. I’m sad for Genoa.” Pam Foster, the coordinator of the Halifax Initiative in Canada, asked: “Why did the police go after peaceful demonstrators but take their time dealing with the anarchists?”

The antics of the Black Bloc were the subject of many passionate debates when the protesters streamed back to the convergence center at Piazza Kennedy at dusk. Observing one of these spontaneous arguments, Han Soeti of Indymedia-Belgium commented, “There are reports that instead of arresting anarchists, the police were escorting some of them to critical areas. I heard the same thing in Prague and Barcelona.”

It is, however, for the new Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, that the protesters, both Italian and non-Italian, reserve their greatest anger. During the struggle at the Corso Torino, Gino Pierantoni, another Genoese, told me, “I don’t know where you will find truth in this mess. But I am sure that a great part of the blame rests with this man, who really is incapable of leading this country.” Berlusconi is regarded as having militarized the situation, going against the moves of the local government, which tried to accommodate the protest movement. A retired Italian general who headed the United Nations peacekeeping force in Beirut in the seventies summed up the feelings of many Italians when he commented that he did not know why Berlusconi assigned 20,000 carabinieri to Genoa when he only needed 2,500 troops to keep the peace in the whole of Beirut.

As in Seattle, Washington, DC, and Prague, organizers of what has been the biggest anti-globalization protest so far are worried that the street battles and the antics of the anarchists might overshadow the message that they wanted to deliver to the G-8. Over several months, the Genoa Social Forum was able to line up about 600 groups behind a pledge of non-violence. It also sponsored a week-long teach-in, involving international speakers, with topics ranging from “Who Needs Trade Liberalization?” to “Mechanisms for Global Democracy” to “Alternatives to Globalization.” Among those who delivered talks were anti-globalization gurus Susan George, a critic of neoliberalism, and José Bové, better known as the man who dismantled a McDonalds restaurant.

The G-8, however, was deaf to the protests on the streets. While Berlusconi delivered a carefully crafted statement saying he was “saddened” by the death of the demonstrator, he also said it was not connected to the G-8. To add insult to injury, the G-8, on the evening on July 20, issued a statement in which it encouraged the launching of a new round of trade negotiations in Quatar. Opposition to a new round and the World Trade Organization was what had brought thousands of people from all over Europe and the world to Genoa.

The reign of Philippines President Joseph Estrada came to an abrupt end on January 20, when he vacated the presidential palace after being deserted by his key aides and under threat of physical eviction by hundreds of thousands of protesters. Even before his actual departure, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the vice president, was sworn in as his successor. The final crisis of the scandal-plagued presidency had been precipitated a few days earlier, when a majority of the senators acting as jurors in his impeachment trial voted to suppress evidence that Estrada kept billions of pesos in several secret bank accounts. The action triggered what many now call “People Power II,” after the popular uprising that ousted the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

For more than a month before his sudden exit, the impeachment trial of Estrada had transfixed this country of more than 70 million people. He was accused of bribery and corruption, the chief charge being that he had orchestrated a massive nationwide operation to siphon off to himself, his family and his cronies the proceeds of a popular illegal numbers game called jueteng.

Estrada’s bête noire was Luis “Chavit” Singson, a provincial governor and former sidekick who said he was assigned by Estrada to be the point man for collecting proceeds from jueteng, which rakes in billions of pesos yearly from lower-class Filipinos. What caused Singson to break with Estrada was his being cut out of the gambling take. An appeal to Estrada did not work, leading Singson to threaten that he would go public about his role. After he managed to foil what he claims was an attempt to assassinate him, Singson, realizing that he had to go for broke, put himself under the protection of Jaime Cardinal Sin and contacted the press. The country has not been the same since.

The impeachment trial was the nadir of a presidency that had very auspicious beginnings. Estrada, popularly known as “Erap,” swept the May 1998 elections with the largest plurality ever in presidential contests, riding on the slogan Erap para sa mahirap (“Erap’s for the poor”) and capitalizing on his image as an action star portraying Robin Hood characters in Manila’s mean streets. A man whose experience in administration was largely limited to serving as mayor of a small city, the ex-actor benefited from deep discontent with the performance of the two previous presidents, who had succeeded in squandering the promise of the 1986 “People Power Revolution” that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship. As a result of making repayment of foreign debt the national priority, slavishly implementing IMF-dictated structural-adjustment policies and failing to follow through on land reform, Corazon Aquino ended her term in 1992 with 47 percent of Filipinos living in poverty–about the same proportion as in 1965, when Marcos became president. Her successor, Fidel Ramos, put poverty alleviation and social reform behind neoliberal restructuring of the economy. An inflow of $19.4 billion in foreign investment between 1993 and 1997 triggered a boom that turned into a rout when, following the collapse of the Thai baht in July 1997, speculative investors in Manila, as in the rest of Southeast Asia, rushed for the exits and brought the economy down in the process [see Bello, “The End of the Asian Miracle,” January 12/19, 1998].

Estrada’s victory in 1998 was a veritable cri de coeur from the vast lower classes. He assembled around him a diverse cast of characters that included former backers of Marcos, former opponents of Marcos, well-known businessmen, figures from the left, arrivistes and interesting, if not sinister, people. The line between the legitimate world and the underworld became blurred. His cronies included Mark Jimenez, a Filipino-American businessman wanted by the US Justice Department in connection with illegal campaign donations to the Democratic Party. Also prominent in the presidential retinue were magnates and magnates-on-the-make from the increasingly economically powerful Filipino-Chinese community who were not reticent about bankrolling Estrada’s campaign or the favors they expected in return.

Though he was later accused of lying through his teeth, the candor of the new president when it came to his personal life seemed refreshing to many. He gloried in being a high school dropout and raised anti-intellectualism to a virtue. He admitted to having several wives–at last count, at least five–and a numerous brood. Estrada loved to recall his telling the scandal-scarred Bill Clinton, “I have the sex and you have the scandal.”

Upon assuming office, Estrada knew that one of the things he had to do was calm Washington’s worries about him in connection with the leading role he had played in seeking the termination of the US military bases agreement with the Philippines in 1991 and his flirtation with populist economics. Even before he won the election, he sent a high-level team to meet with World Bank and IMF officials to assure them that he would continue the free-market, antiprotectionist policies of his predecessors. And, indeed, over the next two years the most consistent policy of his administration, one that persisted through scandal after scandal, was its relentless push for more liberalization, deregulation and privatization. The IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank were reticent about Estrada’s record of governance even at the height of the crisis, and this was not unconnected to his having denationalized retail trade and nearly completed the privatization of the National Power Corporation.

The other gesture toward Washington was the signing of the Visiting Forces Agreement, which allowed the reintroduction of US troops into the Philippines to participate in joint military exercises after an eight-year hiatus following the termination of the bases in 1991. With neighboring Indonesia collapsing into chaos and China perceived as an incipient threat to the US military presence in East Asia, normalizing the traditionally close military ties with Manila was important to Washington. The Clinton Administration was impressed with Estrada’s going against strong nationalist sentiment to secure a Senate vote ratifying the Visiting Forces Agreement, and over the next two years its posture toward Estrada and his foes was one of studied neutrality.

The “Presidency for the Poor” never got off the ground. Land reform was derailed by powerful landlords allied to Estrada, like former Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., while the Department of Agrarian Reform was deprived of funds for land acquisition by a Congress dominated by the president’s party. Policy-making as a collective Cabinet exercise practically disappeared. Karina Constantino-David, who resigned as Estrada’s top housing adviser after sixteen months, said that policy discussion at Cabinet meetings was aborted because “the president’s attention span would not go beyond ten minutes.”

The volatile mix of corruption and the disappearance of basic governance led to the collapse of the stock market, precipitate decline of foreign investment and rapid depreciation of the peso, as local and foreign businesses exchanged pesos for dollars and invested them in better climes. When the Singson revelations hit the public in early October of last year, the peso swiftly plunged to hit fifty pesos to one dollar, compared with forty to one at the beginning of the year. The Makati Business Club, the voice of the capitalist establishment, asked the president to resign, as did most of the country’s most influential trade associations. But it was not only the economic elite who turned against Estrada. He managed the feat of uniting against him both management and organized labor, the right and the left, while the middle class provided the fodder for the massive demonstrations that rocked Manila in the weeks leading up to the impeachment trial.

In response, Estrada initially tried to stoke the fires of class war, calling his opponents peninsulares, a nineteenth-century term for Spaniards posted by Madrid to govern the Philippines. But he discovered that his magic with the masses had waned, and while the poor were not joining the middle class in opposing him, neither could he drum up spontaneous support from them. His aides were reduced to renting crowds for his counterrallies, with the going rate being 500 pesos ($10) per head.

The crisis of the Estrada presidency has pushed Filipinos to come to terms with the fact that their system of governance has many flaws. It is, however, the nexus between crime and the state that has been highlighted by the recent events. Crime and corruption are prominent features of governments the world over, but in a “normal” state, the sources of corruption are forces that subvert the machinery of government from without; the mafia is not indigenous to the government. In the Philippines, on the other hand, the mafia is the state.

Even before the Marcos period, the pattern was for local or regional politicians to absorb petty criminals or toughs into their warlord bands, to be used to muscle into, control and expand lucrative sub rosa activities like illegal gambling, prostitution or protection rackets, which served as additional mechanisms to squeeze the economic surplus from the citizenry that could be deployed for increasingly expensive electoral struggles. The martial-law dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the seventies and early eighties was another important step in the “mafiazation” of government. Marcos-linked political clans like the Singsons of Ilocos Sur were able to bring to a new level–the provincial and in some cases the regional–the organization and control of activities like jueteng, prostitution and drugs.

At the same time, the expansion and centralization of the central administrative machinery that marked the Marcos years opened up tremendous opportunities for economic mobility for middle- and lower-middle-class bureaucrats. With the traditional elite maintaining its tight control over land and the private sector, the state became the choice arena for entrepreneurship by restive and ambitious elements from the more modest classes.

Also volatile in its consequences was the massive expansion of the security forces amid economic stagnation. The result was the proliferation of thousands of low-paid condottieri who hired themselves out to local and national politicians. By the end of the Marcos regime, not a few officers had discovered that their command over men and firepower could be translated into successful entrepreneurship in the form of kidnapping the rich–especially rich Chinese–for ransom. Why, they reasoned, should this extremely profitable business be left to petty gangsters? Indeed, when regular gangsters sought to organize independently of the military and police, they found out the hard way that the men in uniform would brook no competition. Some observers contend that this was the significance of the total liquidation of a Jesse James-like outfit, the Kuratong Baleleng Gang, while under government custody in 1995, an operation carried out by security elites closely associated with then-Vice President Estrada.

From a sociological point of view, the most interesting item to come out of the revelations of Singson is that the main project of the Estrada administration was to centralize crime under the presidency. Under Estrada, the most profitable criminal activities, like jueteng, were to be rationalized, with a bureaucracy stretching from the president to the smallest jueteng collector, paralleling and intertwining at key points with the formal hierarchy of government. What was exposed in the jueteng scandal was probably only the tip of the iceberg. Many Filipinos are convinced that the worlds of prostitution, drugs and kidnapping were on their way to becoming equally centralized. Had the Estrada project not been disrupted, the president would have become the apex of both the state and the underworld. This was the real “Erap Revolution”–and Filipinos, particularly the middle class, had thought the man was stupid!

The state-mafia nexus is the reason that many people in this country who felt Estrada should go evinced hesitations when it came to the question of succession. At the onset of the current crisis, Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo left the president’s Cabinet and called for Estrada’s resignation. She did not, however, meet with enthusiastic support. The biggest apprehension stemmed from her political and personal ties to Bong Pineda, one of the country’s top gambling lords, from whom Singson collected jueteng proceeds meant for Estrada. In fact, she was the main sponsor at the wedding of one of Pineda’s children, and such ritual kinship in this country bespeaks close personal ties. Arroyo was also accused, like Estrada, of concealing her net worth by not declaring her ownership of property in San Francisco worth $4.6 million. So, not surprisingly, many feared that the country would be getting rid of Estrada only to deliver the presidency to somebody who might be equally compromised with crime.

As the country is caught up in euphoria over Estrada’s departure, such fears have momentarily subsided. But as a newly assertive citizenry gives the new president a long, hard look, it will be difficult for her to continue to give evasive answers about her links to the Pineda family. Prior to her ascent to power, she could get away with answers like the one she gave the South China Morning Post: that “she had no choice but to officially deal with Lubao mayor Lilia Pineda [Bong Pineda’s wife].” With the massive disgust with corruption that now prevails, she will find it hard to avoid a public accounting of her ties to the Pinedas and a public repudiation of the powerful gambling couple.

Many Filipinos also remember Arroyo as the person who led the fight to ratify the Uruguay Round establishing the World Trade Organization in the Senate. Accession to the WTO, she claimed, would bring about prosperity for the Philippines, especially for the agricultural sector. Opponents of GATT/WTO brought up solid empirical evidence that the treaty would have a negative net effect, but posing as the all-knowing economist, she dismissed them all as “protectionists” who would condemn the country to poverty.

Five years after accession to the WTO, the critics have been proved right: The WTO has been bad for the country, especially in agriculture, where it has had a devastating impact. The 300,000-person poultry industry is on its last legs, having been ravaged by cheap, subsidized US chicken-parts imports. Corn and vegetable farmers have also suffered irreparably from cheap imports. The safety nets that Arroyo promised farmers never materialized, and today Washington continually threatens to bring the Philippines to the court of the WTO on a variety of issues, including maintenance of the local-content policy in the automobile sector.

Prior to her becoming president, Arroyo said she would renegotiate commitments the Philippines made to the WTO. This remains to be seen. The United States will scream if she makes one move in this direction, and alienating the United States is probably something that is farthest from Arroyo’s agenda at this point. Indeed, pressures for accelerated liberalization will increase from Washington and from the World Bank, the IMF and the Asian Development Bank. The privatization of the National Power Corporation remains to be completed, and this is the top priority that these agencies are likely to push on Arroyo, as they did on Estrada.

The United States has made known its displeasure with Arroyo’s flirting with sectors of the left during the past three months, as she strove to garner the broadest support possible for her quest to oust Estrada. With containment of China likely to come to the top of Washington’s agenda for Asia and with the continuing instability in neighboring Indonesia preoccupying the Pentagon, the Bush Administration is likely to press for the expansion of joint military maneuvers begun under Estrada.

These issues, as well as those of land reform, income redistribution and environmental protection–all of which were rolled back or neglected under Estrada–will push Arroyo to make her policy preferences explicit, a move she has so far avoided with the excuse that she desires “consensus” from her supporters on the key points of a comprehensive agenda. Progressives are not confident that social reform will be a priority for Arroyo, citing her training as a neoclassical economist and her closeness to many of the same neoliberal advisers who surrounded her partymate, former President Fidel Ramos.

Nevertheless, the mere fact that the massive preoccupation with corruption and cronyism under Estrada may now give way to a resumption of debates on issues having to do with the country’s economic and political direction is very welcome. For one cannot help but feel that we Filipinos are back at square one. It is now fifteen years since the civilian-military uprising that ousted Marcos in 1986. Yet we are stuck in the politics of anticorruption and anticronyism, of good and evil, where the agenda remains the Marcos-era one of ousting a crook from power. Fifteen years have gone down the drain–fifteen years that could have been devoted to creating a political system that would lift the country from the mire of underdevelopment, inequality and poverty.

The hope is that debate over policies will now come to the forefront. But the continuing fear is that this will not come about unless the new regime makes decisive moves to roll back corruption and destroy the links between the state and organized crime. Periodic bouts of middle-class outrage, such as those of 1986 and 2001, are vital, but everyone knows that the traditional interest-groups that dominate politics in “normal times” are waiting for the current wave to recede before trying to reassert themselves.