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Politics : About that Cuban boy, Elian -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chalu2 who wrote (5410)	5/16/2000 2:10:00 AM
From: average joe	Respond to of 9127

I've never been in a big foreign city where you could appreciate the air quality.

To: chalu2 who wrote (5410)	5/16/2000 2:16:00 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

I know a really interesting guy living in the Philippines (well I know him in the sense that I met him on SI)- I'll ask him to come over and talk about this. I think you would like him and find him very interesting.

To: chalu2 who wrote (5410)	5/16/2000 7:35:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9127

There are certainly places in and around Manila, and in many other places in the Philippines, that would match anyone's conception of hell. This is true of most developing countries. Our relations with the Philippines remain good because of the simple assumption that what is not Communist, and therefore bad, must be Capitalist, and therefore good. This is an oversimplification: the economy and society of the Philippines, like those of many developing countries, are in fact neither Communist nor Capitalist, but feudal. We have traditionally allied ourselves with feudal elites in the developing world because both we and the feudal elites see Communism as a threat to our interests. We assume that the enemy of our enemy must be our friend, though this has not, in many cases, proven to be the case: feudal elites are often most unreliable allies, and their inherent inefficiency makes them ideal targets for subversion. A Communist revolutionary has no better friend that a Batista, a Somoza, or a Marcos. Since we are discussing sugar, an example that deals with sugar: The Philippine sugar industry has been dominated for a century by a few landed families. Since World War II the industry has survived by protecting the local market against imports: the sugar barons have allowed the production apparatus to crumble, while spending lavishly on their own private amusements. In the early 1980's an ill-planned attempt by the Marcos crony who held the industry as his personal fiefdom to manipulate the world market left the country with an enormous glut of sugar, and forced even the domestic prices below the cost of production. The sugar barons simply stopped planting. There are thousands of families on the island of Negros who survive as itinerant cane cutters - the whole families work, including children, and the wage is sub-subsistence. When the industry shut down, they starved. Oddly, they starved while staring at tens of thousands of acres of unused arable land. I suppose one could legitimately ask whether cutting cane under threat of punishment is significantly different from cutting cane under threat of starvation.