Denis Doherty (Australia) and I were on a commercial station TV show last night for a 45 minute interview about the Obama "pivot" into Asia-Pacific. The award-winning show reaches a regional audience in the Luzon area.
We had to drive about an hour to reach the studio through city traffic and then the major highway connecting Manila and the Subic Bay region. Along the way we passed miles of rice fields. There is great poverty in many parts of Manila as people live in make shift cardboard shacks with rusty tin roofs. Just across the street from one such place was a golf course surrounded by a tall fence. So the rich and poor exist along side each other here.
The Philippines is under great pressure to increase their military spending to buy US weapons systems which would then make their military "interoperable" with Pentagon forces. In the age of high-tech satellite driven war that would mean the US would essentially control the Filipino military. So one way you can think of it is that the US is getting other countries like Philippines and South Korea to help pay for the expansion of the US war machine.
Two days ago I read an article in a local newspaper that reported a new "coalition" was forming to advocate for the Filipino government to expand its military spending. One of the groups listed in the new coalition was a global warming group which made me sick to see.
I can promise you that any hopes of successfully dealing with climate change will be smashed by global increases in military spending. It's going to come down to this - either we convert the military industrial complex now to sustainable production (solar, wind, mass transit, etc) or we bake together sitting inside our tanks, warships, Humvees and the like.
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