Nylenin Czar Marcos’s True Legacy Marcos was elected President in 1965, just as the United States launched the disastrous and futile war in Indochina. The fact that the United States used its bases in the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Airfield in Luzon, as launching pads for the Indochina War, fed a domestic insurgency by the Maoist New People’s Army (NPA). Marcos was then treated as a close friend and ally of the United States. Even when he declared martial law in 1972, with the Indochina War still raging, the Administration of President Richard Nixon raised no objections. But Marcos was not only concerned about “counterinsurgency” in declaring martial law. When he was elected President in 1965, the Philippines was still essentially a colonial economy, although the United States had granted full independence on July 4, 1946, as had been promised by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Productivity was low in both agriculture and industry: agriculture lagged as the Philippines relied on special access to U.S. food exports, and industry was confined to process industries, rather than the development of basic industries. Marcos set out immediately to establish Philippine food self-sufficiency in rice and corn. This also required breaking the control of the landed aristocracy left over from the Spanish imperial era. Marcos was the first President of the Philippines who did not rise from this elite class, but was a “commoner” trained as a lawyer. As President, he focussed on basic agricultural infrastructure, especially irrigation, in the major food-producing regions of Luzon and Mindanao. Credit facilities, mechanization, and the introduction of high-yield rice varieties, which needed irrigation, resulted in the elimination of rice imports by 1968. Land reform, primarily a political problem, remained illusive. However, when Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, among his first acts was a proclamation that the entire nation was to be considered a “land reform area,” and a declaration that all tenants working land devoted primarily to rice and corn were to be the owners of that land, up to a specified limit. Despite the enraged opposition of the oligarchy, the program proved to be extraordinarily successful. Coupled with the infrastructure and mechanization improvements, a quarter of a million peasants became land owners, and grain productivity increased by half. Another major step after the declaration of martial law was to contract with Westinghouse for the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant—which was to be the first (and would still be the only) commercial nuclear power plant in Southeast Asia. While nuclear power is clearly the only sane solution to the energy requirements across the region, the sad saga of the Bataan Nuclear Plant symbolizes the pure evil of the policies enforced by the “economic hit men.” As originally contracted, the plant should have cost about $1 billion, and produced 1,200 MW of electricity by 1984. However, after the hysteria generated by the anti-nuclear “Nuclear Club of Wall Street” (see EIR, Dec. 3, 2004) following the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant in Pennsylvania, the Carter Admistration imposed retroactive safety regulations which contributed to more than doubling the cost of construction. Then, after the overthrow of Marcos in 1986, one of the first acts of the new Presidency of Corazon Aquino was to mothball the fully completed, but never used, Bataan Nuclear Plant. The Philippines has been forced to pay countless billions in debt service, and pays still today over $155,000 per day, for this nuclear facility, without having drawn one watt of electricity from the state-of-the-art facility. Two further nuclear power facilities which were planned to provide 1,880 MW of electricity by 1991, were also scrapped. Nuclear energy was not the only innovation of the Marcos regime. In 1979 Marcos announced a plan for 11 major industrial projects, with the intention of shifting the focus of the nation’s industrial economy from consumer goods to basic heavy industry. Included in the plan were steel, petro-chemical, pulp and paper, a copper smelter, aluminum, phosphate fertilizer, diesel engines, gas and oil, a coconut industry, and the nuclear power program.
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 11:06:43 +0000
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