Because this week we got back from our excursion a day before our blogs were due, many of us including myself had to cram in all of the four readings from this week into yesterday, which to be fair was not really all that much. But because of this my head has been bombarded with so many ideas and I have been having trouble getting them into an orderly fashion in my mind. I will try my best to put down the things I have found crucial from this week as well as try to share things I have witnessed on our trip to the Visayas.

The main thing I wanted to touch on is the idea of corruption within the government. Obviously in this case I want to talk about the Philippine and American governments. Corruption is something that has been coming up repeatedly in our time here in the Philippines. I feel that most people in the U.S. and in the Philippines would not deny that there is corruption in the government. It seems like it is just a given and I find it sad that we can just accept this. I am not saying that I am particularly making a change but when given specific examples of things that the governments are doing that are oppressing people it really appals me. A perfect example is what Grace Chang was talking about in her article about migrant Filipino workers. She was talking about how the big banks set up plans for countries to get out of debt called structural adjustment policies (SAP). Sounds harmless enough and isn’t a plan to get a country out of debt a good thing? Not really when, as she says, they include, “cutting government expenditures on social programs, slashing wages, liberalizing imports, opening markets to foreign investment, expanding exports, devaluing local currency, and privatizing state enterprises”. This brings me to the point that all corruption seems to need is a good front. When you call all of these things a SAP it sounds like a good thing. I do not know for sure if the Philippines has gone through an SAP but by reading the symptoms it sounds very possible. When we had our talks with Anakbayan they stressed that fact that one of the Philippines’ problems is that they are export oriented and import dependent. These are two of the examples from Chang’s list: liberalizing imports and expanding exports. It is much easier for those on top to keep things corrupt and stay on top when the country cannot even get along on its own. One of the major problems with being export oriented is that you end up taking land that the people once used to farm on to feed themselves and turn it into a place to create things that the people of the country are not even going to get to enjoy for themselves. It is incredibly inefficient to any sort of independence and one of the may ways the people on top are able to stay there. I find it incredible that those who are in power can manage to ignore “their people” when I read about examples of the taking of land like the one in Chang’s article about the people in India. She gives an example of how the rice crops that the people were using to feed themselves were turned into shrimp farms for export to Japan and orange orchards for export to the U.S. to make orange juice. One lady even ran in front of the bulldozers begging them not to but of course it had no effect. I just literally do not understand how one person or group of people can get to the point of seemingly having no conscience. Do they just pass the blame to someone else or have they really gotten to the point of desensitisation?

When we were on our trip through the Visayas this past week we spent a good amount of time staying on the island of Mactan. While we were there we were fortunate enough to have a local lady, Kathy, show us around and give us the rundown on everything. One thing that was really interesting, especially as I am making the connections now, is that we passed a gigantic export processing plant on the island and Kathy informed us that around 500,000 people work there. This is a staggering number on its own but upon further investigation I found that the island’s population is only about 250,000! If that does not say something about the Philippines export orientation then I do not know what would. Import and export though are of course not the only means of corruption.

As Chang and Perenas have mentioned extensively in their articles this week, a huge factor in the government corruption is the mistreatment of women, especially of those going to work overseas. These women that are just trying to make a better life, often for their families more than themselves, are being completely taken advantage of. These women are already having to struggle to save up money in the Philippines to be able to afford the trip to the states or to Italy or wherever they may be going. I find it to be salt in the wound if you will that for many of these women, as Chang notes, have to go through a recruiter which cost $7,000 to $9,000. This goes towards paying the recruiter, paying a lawyer to set up their visa, and the rest to the hospital. The worst part is that all of these people work for the hospital so its basically a monopoly over these women. Since the minimum wage here in the Philippines, which is the most people are maybe making if they are lucky, is approximately $10 per day, you can imagine that they wont exactly have seven grand just laying around. Because of this the hospital sets up a wage deduction which then basically forces the nurses to stay with that company in order to pay off their debt. Sadly, in reading Parenas’ article we see that a college educated person makes more in the U.S. doing “unskilled” labor than utilizing their degree in their home country. These people are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

These sort of situations make it seem, even to me at times, that most everyone in the U.S. is part of problems like these. But of course many people in America are treated unfairly as well in different ways. A perfect example of this general mistreatment is seen once again in Chang’s article. She mentions how people in the U.S. getting government assistance are not even given proper care. Instead of the government sending disabled and elderly folks to proper care facilities, they save $30,000 or so per year and give them a caregiver that has little to no experience with medical procedures. As you may expect many of these people are the Filipina/o workers from overseas. The government saves money by underpaying these nurses and simultaneously pockets the savings from neglecting the patients.

To continue looking at both sides of corruption, those guilty of it and those against it, we can look once again at the very beginning of the relationship between the Philippines and America. The entire situation of the U.S. in the Philippines was all for U.S. gain and based entirely on corrupt intentions. We have been studying this relationship a lot during our time in the Philippines and the things I hear still cease to amaze me in the worst way possible. In Schirmer’s article he has an account from someone from the Boston Evening Transcript who said that those who were close to McKinley, the President that led the war, said that he was “...fully convinced of the need for white supremacy...”. Of course it was a different time back then but I still cannot imagine how someone with this mindset could be the leader of our country and use those ideals to attack an innocent nation. It seemed his ideas were carried on by the soldiers in the Philippines as we see another quote from Schirmer’s article, this time from a soldier from, sadly, Washington state as he says, "our fighting blood was up and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces". There are obviously so many problems with this statement and its things like this that make it near impossible to sympathize with America on any aspect of the Philippine-American war and the ensuing colonization.

As I said though I would like to look also at the other side, at those Americans who were not down with the situation in the Philippines. I have been taking in so much of the negative side of this historical dilemma that I had not thought too much about the fact that naturally there were those Americans that were against the war. The outspoken group that formed against the situation was the anti-imperialist league. They were actually pretty large in number and fairly outspoken but unfortunately it seems that they did not have a huge impact on the situation. I would like to think that if I were around during these times that maybe I would have been a part of their league. I sometimes think about what kind of person I would have been had I been around back then. I would like to think that I would have sided with this league and been against imperialization. Its nice to know that at least some Americans recognized that they had not so long before endured their own revolution and were able to sympathize with the Filipino people.

In continuing to look at all sides of corruption there is still one more aspect to explore which is the idea that there were also corrupt Filipinos. I had not thought about the idea that if the Filipinos had created their own government right off the bat after the Spanish left that their government might too have had its own set of hierarchies. This would not have been the fault of the Filipino citizens because just as it is now, those that already had the money and power would have been the ones to take control and set things up in their favor. The prime example of that was Amilio Aguinaldo who was the Philippines’ first official president after claiming independence from Spain in 1898. He is portrayed by many as a hero but really it was Andres Bonafacio who initiated the revolution. Aguinaldo had what Bonafacio did not, money and social status. Unfortunately, as we see so many times in history, this seemed to pay off. He had Bonafacio executed on bogus charges and took his place as leader. Rafael notes in his article that Aguinaldo, “was more anxious to negotiate an arrangement with the Spaniards that would leave him and those of his class relatively secure in their positions of local power”. Its sad to see that even in his country’s time of need he could still be just as corrupt as any politician.

As we can see there always has been, is, and will likely always be corruption on all sides of every situation. There is still no question that in the case of the U.S. and the Philippines the U.S. is still at the root of many of the problems but it is that 1% at the top of the social pyramid in the Philippines that help perpetuate the problems. In taking in all of these negative truths the question I arise at is: is it worse to know all of these things and dwell on them or to not think about them and go on about your life? I just think the latter would be pretty difficult.