[Part 8 from Development As Colonialism by Edward Goldsmith from the Sierra
Club book THE CASE AGAINST THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, copyright 1996 by Mander and
Goldsmith]
When Third World countries have nevertheless succeeded in developing
a modest domestic economy, the World Bank and IMF, in league with U.S.
government officials and transnational corporations, have set out
systematically to destroy it, a process that could not be better
documented, in the case of the Philippines, than by Walden Bello and his
colleagues in their book Development Debacle: The World Bank in the
Philippines (1982). This book, based on eight hundred leaked World Bank
documents, shows how that institution, in league with the CIA and other
U.S. agencies, set out purposefully to destroy the domestic economy of the
Philippines so as to create those conditions that best favored TNC
interests. Achieving this goal, Bello and his colleagues point out, first
meant sacrificing the peasantry and transforming it into a rural
proletariat. The standard of living of the working class had to be reduced
since, as a Bank spokesman said at the time, ?wage restraint? is required
to encourage ?the growth of employment and investment.? Meanwhile, the
local middle class that depended for its very existence on the domestic
conomy had to be annihilated to make way for a new cosmopolitan middle
class dependent on the TNCs and the global economy.
Clearly, such a drastic social and economic transformation of an
already partly developed country could not be achieved by a democratic
government. This explains why it was decided to provide dictatator
Ferdinand Marcos with the funding he required to build up an army capable
of imposing such a program by force. As Marcos himself put it at the
time:,?Only an authoritarian system will be able to carry forth the mass
]consent and to exercise the authority necessary to implement new values,
measures and sacrifices? (Bello and others 1982). In essence, this is what
he did. Martial law was declared by Marcos, and the people were bludgeoned
into accepting the transformation of their society, economy, and natural
environment.
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