Thursday, May 9, 2013

Filipinos Rally To ‘Save the Nation’

24 International EIR May 10, 2013
LaRouche Movement Breakout

Filipinos Rally To
‘Save the Nation’

by Michael Billington
May 1—On April 20, the international La-
Rouche movement emerged as a significant political
force in the Philippines, with the first national
conference of the Save the Nation
movement, organized by Philippines LaRouche
Society chairman Butch Valdes, in conjunction
with a number of institutions representing scientists,
engineers, journalists, and others.
Nearly 200 people, including representatives of
organizations who spoke for thousands more,
gathered in Manila; 20 of them made brief presentations.
The Save the Nation institution was built
largely through a weekly two-hour radio show
hosted by Valdes on the nationwide Radio Mindanao,
DZXL 558, on Sunday evenings (also
heard over the Internet by the Philippine worldwide
diaspora). Valdes focused on his Three
Urgent Steps:
• Nuclear power, including opening the
mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, closed on the
eve of its opening in 1986 by the coup carried out
against nationalist President Ferdinand Marcos led by
George Shultz and the then-emerging neoconservative
forces in the U.S.;
• A science-driven agricultural revival to attain
food self-sufficiency;
• A moratorium on payment of the foreign debt,
based on the clear evidence that the debt is illegitimate.
This program represents an all-out rejection of the
current government’s insistence on prioritizing debt
repayment above the welfare of a population which is
becoming increasingly stricken by poverty and
hunger.
But Valdes also insisted, repeatedly, that there was
no solution to the problem within the Philippines itself,
since the entire world was careening into economic
chaos and a threat of global thermonuclear war. He educated
his rapidly expanding audience that only a global
solution, beginning in the U.S., based on the three-point
program proposed by Lyndon LaRouche would work:
Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment
banking; restoration of a credit system through
the establishment of a Third National Bank; and largescale
infrastructure projects.
Valdes has regularly hosted LaRouche spokesmen
on his program, often including Michael Billington,
EIR Asia correspondent, for briefings on the international
crisis and the LaRouche movement’s campaigns.
A Call to Action
Valdes opened the conference by introducing Billington,
who spoke on behalf of the international La-
Rouche movement.
In his keynote address, Billington presented an
overview of the onrushing collapse of the trans-Atlantic
nations and their bankrupt financial system, and a
discussion of the history of empire, and the leaders who
arose throughout history to combat the collapses
brought on by those empires. He reviewed the three
points of the LaRouche Plan, using historical examples
to show that human advances only come from defeating
the system of empire itself, and noting that that any
world war today would be thermonuclear, and thus, the
imperial principle must be abolished for good.
EIRNS
Butch Valdes, chairman of the Philippines LaRouche Society, addresses
the April 20 conference, which was organized to “Save the Nation.”
May 10, 2013 EIR International 25
Valdes then invited the spokespersons for
the other participating organizations in the
Save the Nation movement to speak for a few
minutes each. What ensued was an outpouring
of praise for the work of Valdes and the international
LaRouche movement, and a call to
action, not only from the participating organizations,
but from others who were attending
the conference. Many of these people had been
unknown to Valdes, but they had been listening
to his weekly radio show for months, or even
years, and at this point, felt compelled to
attend, join, and speak out as participants in
this battle.
These included: the head of the national engineers’
association; the head of a national
farmers’ association; the head of a nurses’ organization
which is fielding candidates for the Congressional
elections this month; two community organizers
from provinces outside Manila; two retired military
officers—one a general who is a Muslim, who spoke
about the Jews, Christians, and Muslims fighting together
against the Roman Empire; the other a colonel
who, in his own words, presented an idea often promoted
by LaRouche, that development must come
first, as the basis upon which to end wars and establish
true peace based on the benefit of both sides; the head
of a government workers organization from another
province; former Sen. Kit Tatad, who praised La-
Rouche as the only person who had known all along
what was happening, and what was going to happen,
and told the truth; and numerous other professionals
and representatives of labor organizaitons.
Elaborating the Program
Archbishop Oscar Cruz, the former head of the
Bishops Conference, and the most outspoken of the
leading clerics in the Philippines, spoke next about how
Valdes had opened his eyes to the scope of the global
crisis and the necessary solutions. He described the
“three monkey” problem (see no evil, hear no evil,
speak no evil), and that he could see that those who attended
had decided not to be monkeys. He reviewed the
“three urgent steps” of the Save the Nation movement,
giving his full support for the program. Such an endorsement
in the heavily Catholic Philippines carries
significant weight.
The afternoon session focused on the scientific
issues, beginning with a doctor of nuclear medicine,
followed by Mohd Peter Davis, the representative of
the LaRouche movement in Malaysia. Davis reviewed
the role of empires throughout history in destroying
food capacity, as a weapon in restricting
population growth, and the British Empire’s current
effort to reduce the world’s population to a billion
inhabitants. He countered with the role of science,
focused on his “Deep Tropical” discoveries for
animal production in the tropics, as covered in EIR
over the years.
The nuclear engineer who had overseen the building
of the Bataan nuclear power plant then gave a stirring
presentation on its history, its safety, and the urgency of
finally opening the plant today, 17 years after it was
sabotaged by the Washington coup which removed
Marcos, and placed Cory Aquino in power. Aquino’s
son Noynoy is the current President, and a vacuous
figure with no credentials other than his mother’s name
and a subservience to the insane President in Washington,
Barack Obama.
In the final presentation, Valdes reviewed the
“three vital steps,” describing how “politics, ignorance,
and ill-will” had destroyed the promise of the
Philippines that had existed under Marcos, and insisting
that no one could consider this conference to
be a “normal seminar,” but rather a meeting of those
self-selected to prevent the nation from dying, as
part of the fight to save civilization worldwide. He
reviewed LaRouche’s Triple Curve and the “bankers’
arithmetic” which had seen the nation pay its debts
twice over, but end up with more debt than it began
with.
EIRNS
Valdes, Archbishop Oscar Cruz, and author Michael Billington, at the
Manila conference.
26 International EIR May 10, 2013
The discussion period concluded with the question:
“Where do we go from here?” Valdes answered:
“Where do you go from here?” He called on each
member of the audience to take the message of the
conference back to their friends, their political representatives,
and others. Time is short, but the opportunity
great, he said. The emotion and enthusiasm with
which the Philippine National Anthem was sung by
the audience at the end, captured the sense of mission
and intention of the event.
The American System Tradition
The Save the Nation movement has intersected
two interrelated phenomena in the Philippines—the
MacArthur/Roosevelt tradition, and the legacy of President
Marcos.
The U.S. victory in the 1898 Spanish-American
war ended the imperial power which had controlled
the country for over 300 years. American control was
problematic, as Anglophiles in the U.S. flirted with
colonialism, but in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
declared that the Philippines would be granted
full independence in ten years time, and appointed
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose father had been
Governor-General of the Philippines, to be Field Marshall
in Manila, to build a Philippine Army and prepare
the nation for independence.
The MacArthurs’ commitment to the core American
anti-imperial values of progress, education, and national
sovereignty, built tremendous support for them
and for the United States, among Filippinos.
World War II intervened, during which MacArthur
led the military liberation of the Philippines from Japanese
imperial control. The pledge of independence
was upheld in 1946, although Roosevelt’s death in
1945 allowed a partial subversion of that independence.
The second phenomenon which helped to shape
the Save the Nation movement is the legacy of Ferdinand
Marcos, who was President of the Philippines
from 1965 to 1986. In that time, Marcos built Southeast
Asia’s first nuclear power plant, made the Philippines
self-sufficient in rice production for the first
time in modern history, established a broad-based
heavy industrial development plan, implemented water-
control policies to end the deadly annual flooding,
and established scientific and cultural centers, not
only for the Philippines, but for all of Southeast Asia.
For these “crimes,” and not for the alleged crimes of
corruption, Marcos was deposed in one of the first
regime-change exercises orchestrated by the emerging
British-dominated neoconservative interests in
the U.S.
Billington, in his keynote address, reported that he
had just visited South Korea, and that flying in from
the beautiful, modern city of Seoul to the decaying,
poverty-stricken city of Manila was “heartbreaking.”
South Korea and the Philippines were in a very similar
condition in the 1950s—impoverished, devastated by
war, and totally dependent on outside support. Korean
President Park Chung-hee and Philippine President
Marcos, who admired each other, had similar plans—
nuclear power, heavy industrial development, rural
development, infrastructural transformation—but
Park was able to carry out his plans, while Marcos was
ousted by Washington, which wanted to “make a horrible
example” of the Philippines: that in the future,
Third World nations would not be allowed to break
free of their chains, and especially that they would be
forbidden to have access to nuclear power.
It is time to reverse that legacy.
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