Philippines.
government figures for siphoning millions of dollars into investments, property and personal bank accounts abroad. The scandal over the assassination two years ago of bourgeois opponent,
Benigno Aquino, continues to rumble on, with top army officers clearly implicated, and only Marcos hand-picked Inquiry and a conspiracy
Though the Impeachment will not be where
Marcos has successfully maintained a % majority — the move is a clear sign of the
Impatience of a growing sector of the spects
Philippines capitalist establishment with the anties of this degenerate and expen-
Smaller scale businesses and many of the foreign enterpises in the Philippines hostile to the monopoly control exerted over the key sugar and
Socialist Viewpoint, No 8, November 1986, Page 20 coconut industries by just two powerful while smaller growers and agricultural labourers face ruin. The once a bedrock of economy has been devastated by a slump in pricen from 65 US cents a pound 10 years ago to just 3
Only the vast empire Roberto Benedicto — with the blessing of Marcos — has weathered this storm, while other farms and mills stand idie.
Sugar is not the only industry to hit the skids. Factories are grinding to a halt as manufacturers run out of even the foreign to export their goods: the economy is actually shrinking for the second year running only unemployment and poverty are on the rite.
But as in so many comparable situations, the official Philippines "opposition"
dominated by disgruntled capitalists and politicians whose main grievance is that they have not been included in Marcos privileged elite.
Such oppositionists have little nothing in common with the interests and demands of Philippines workers struggl against super-exploitation ot the peasants and agricultural labourers. Led by Salvador Laurel, the United Democratic Nationalist Organisation looks not so much to the downtrodden as to the IMF and the White House for sup port in pushing Marcor aside and stepping
"normalise" capitalist rule in the
For the US there is much more than bank loans at stake in the future of this former colony. The Philippines harbours the largest US airforce and naval bases outside the United States. The deep water port of Subic Bay - strategically placed for the US Navy's nuclear patrols of South and East Asia and the Pacific — is regarded as literally unreplaceable, The Clark
Air Field is similarly priceless as a vast fixed aircraft carrier.
With the treaties for both these facilities up for renegotiation in 1991, and the prothat Marcos might rig himsell another election any time between sow and 1987, Reagan and State Department strategists have to weigh up his chances of combatting the growing streagth of the guerrillas of the CP.led New Peoples Army, whose forces are now estimated at anything up to 20,000, asd who are steadi-