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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (15447)	3/16/2007 12:19:42 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217944

Elmat, You are wrong about the nature and the position of the cliques in the Philippines. Unlike LATAM there is no blanco or even mestizo ruling class there, despite being a Spanish colony for nearly as long a period as Mexico. There is a single oligarch family, the Sorionos, who tend to have blonde headed Tagalog speaking kids, but they are more of a curiosity than anything else. Of course there is probably a fair amount of Spanish blood in the gene pool there, people joke about having a "Spanish" nose, but it is pretty evenly spread around. The Philippines is completely free of the ugly racism that prevails in Mexico and elsewhere in LATAM. Elroy has described this here in great detail, pointing out that the "1000 Families" of Mexico are really white Spaniards and are unrelated in any way to the Indians who make up the vast majority of the population. And also a considerable number of the current crowd of Filipino oligarchs arose from poverty, more than you would likely find anywhere in LATAM, this probably being at least in part a result of the lingering positive influence from the American colonial period. You really can't tell a rich Filipino from a poor one by their appearance alone, and this is especially true when they are traveling, as wealthy Filipinos often will intentionally dress like their house servants so as to not attract bandits or highwaymen, this I think being a very old Filipino tradition. GATT has been a DISASTER for the Philippines and you are mistaken that the leadership there resisted, and resist they did for years, to protect their own selfish interests. I watched this develop there from the 1980's and unlike here in the US the topic dominated the news back then and the leadership there very openly stated to the public what was at stake and what was likely to happen if the whole GATT program was accepted. What finally emerged was a fifteen to twenty year "phased in" tariff schedule and the damage has been being felt for several years now. Pressure was brought to bear against the Philippines by all the usual evil suspects, the World Bank, the IMF, UN agencies, ect.; even the Bush 41 administration played its part and the action by the Philippine Senate in 1992 to throw out the US bases, Clark and Subic, was largely a result of this US pressure over GATT. And of course, there was FRAUD also, as vast sums were deposited in the offshore accounts of Filipino delegates and individual politicians. This I know FOR A FACT. It has been a disaster there. Urban poverty is much worse than before. Likewise in the countryside. The only way the Arroyo government has been able to prevent an outright revolution is by the continuous assassination of dissidents, probably on a much larger scale than even the martial law government of the Marcos era. GATT is the reason for this, make no mistake. Slagle