Time to ask what went wrong with EDSA

It's time — for both the administration and opposition alike as well as civil society and the church — to ask just what went wrong with Edsa, because something very wrong obviously happened to it.

And unless we get to the bottom of just what went wrong, we shall never get to the bottom of just what is happening to us, and something very wrong is happening to us — that everyone knows including Malacañang.

What went wrong may be gleaned immediately from the statistics of unemployment and the peso-dollar rate, the latter being a good indicator of inflation.

Unemployment and peso-dollar rate

Those figures tell you at a glance what went wrong. Joblessness rose along with the rise in the peso-dollar rate, which means a rise in prices. So, in a nation already burdened by mass poverty prior to Edsa, add increasing joblessness to rising prices and you have a sure formula for hunger.

Which is exactly what we have now, as officially determined by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute of the Department of Science and Technology (FNRI-DoST) in late 2003 when it released a finding that eight out of 10 households are hungry.

What then went wrong?

What went wrong is simply this: That for the personal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, the “people power” governments substituted the institutional dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank (IMF-WB) group, and that group today exercises a dictatorship over the economy — as well as over our politics — far more rigorous, vicious and comprehensive than the Marcos dictatorship ever did.

Toward what end was the IMF-WB dictatorship directed? It was directed toward the end of returning this country to the regime of absolute free trade that prevailed during the Commonwealth period. Meaning, no limit to imports, no tariffs, no controls. And that, as our experience during the Commonwealth period showed, meant no industries, no industrialization.

But if we had no industries then, we at least had a fairly viable agricultural sector. Today, however, even that sector is gone — liquidated by import liberalization and our commitments to the World Trade Organization.

The difference between then and now is that in the pre-war period, the industrial countries had not yet taken to exporting the surplus of their agriculture. What they were exporting was the surplus of their industries, and so free trade during the Commonwealth, while suppressing this nation's industrialization, at least allowed our agriculture to survive.

But all that changed in the last 20 years or so. Industrial nations now export both their surplus in industry as well as their surplus in agriculture and that explains why a regime of free trade today has led to the destruction not only of our domestic industries but of our agricultural sector as well.

One other crucial factor also exists today which did not exist during the pre-war period. And that is China.

Before World War II, China was an impoverished country, with no industry to speak of, and with an agricultural sector that could not feed its people.

Today, China is both an industrial and an agricultural dynamo, exporting huge surpluses of industrial as well as agricultural goods.

You do not have to be a whiz to figure out what happens when this country opens up to the world — including (and particularly) the China of today. It means plain economic suicide and that's where our free trade economists, working as proxies of the IMF-WB, have brought us to.

In economic terms, China has overwhelmed even the US and that's why the US today has been reduced to the status of a Third World economic power.

The American economy was first done in by Japan in the 1960s, and now China is completing the process of American's economic destruction which Japan had started.

Marcos at least attempted to restrain, even resist, the import liberalization agenda pressed on him by the IMF. He put a tight lid on agricultural imports and maintained a system of selective import controls on manufactured goods, coupled with fairly high tariff levels.

But that's now a thing of the past. Following people power, the rule came to be: No tariffs, no import controls, selective or otherwise.

Result? Even a giant foreign-owned enterprise, Caltex, had to terminate its 50-year-old refining operations, Hacienda Luisita had to reduce operations to a bare minimum and National Steel had to close shop — all on account of import lib.

That's IMF-WB dictation for you — which Marcos at least resisted, even if only half-heartedly — and that's exactly what went wrong.

So let's stop this nonsense of celebrating Edsa. To celebrate it is to celebrate hunger and the dictatorship of the IMF and the World Bank.

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