Excerpt

Excerpt from the book (Hunger, Corruption and Betrayal: A Primer on US Neocolonialism and the Philippine Crisis. A. Lichauco, 2005)

The foreign debt is both the symbol of our economic slavery as well as the weapon which enables others to keep this nation enslaved. And that explains the people’s descent to degeneracy.

When you look at the common run of Filipinos today and dig into the depth of their nature and the inner springs of their political behaviour-as in the last elections-you know that you are no longer looking at human beings but at deprived and desperate beings subsisting under sub-human conditions and desperately clutching at straws that offer promise of improvement in their lives.

And so in this only Christian nation in Asia, mothers must sell their bodies and their babies, and the bodies of their daughters too, fathers must sell their kidneys, the poor must sell their votes, of course, and soldiers are dispatched to battle with TB, even as child mendicants become as common a sight as uncollected garbage and the sick contemplate suicide.

That is the human condition of the vast majority of and therefore that is the state of the nation.