The great tragedy of the Philippines is that the people have been kicked in the face for 400 years. The Spanish. The Americans. The Japanese. Then, the Americans again and continuing to today. The challenge is to perceive the "rescue" of the Filipinos by the Americans during WWII as little more than the big guy reclaiming it's property lost to the Japanese. The Filipino people were little more than objects in the path between two violent giants.
The Filipino people have been kicked in the face for 400 years, which should give us pause to allow for their continued obedience to US corporate and state power. No one wants to be kicked around all the time. After a while, a culture will either go insane, or be subject to genocide. Filipinos are capable of looking around. They can see what the Euro-Americans did to the Native Americans. They killed most of them—better to live and pretend, than to be exterminated. During the Philippine-American War, the Americans made it quite clear that if it were necessary, they'd be exterminated. We Americans knew best. We were killing them for their own good. As in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the globe today, the people were told to obey, or else. Better to have a few cultural twitches than to choose "or else."
Thus, the Philippines is like the United States, only more honest. There, in the Philippines, the rich directly control the army, wherein the army directly controls the people. All the while, there is not even the pretense of a fig leaf covering Congress. It's controlled directly by the wealthy. No sense in bothering with any pretense. If you step out of line in the Philippines—if you're a journalist, or an elected official, or a community organizer, your head is blown off.
—All the better for maintaining the "efficient labor force" for Intel and others.
Here, in the US, our heads are blown off figuratively, but no less efficiently, in public schools and as we stare blankly into the abyss of TV.
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