If the motives of the US are so obvious to you, and ur (no offense) a regular guy/girl I'd imagine the smartest people of ur country can see this as well, yet they take the "hand out". Why not say thanks but no thanks? Only whores or despardos take hand outs, if ur country was desparate shame on them for being in such a bind and letting themselves be taken advantage of.
The smartest of our people then was President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Our dictator who ruled for more than 20 years and later decided to declare Martial Law. HE WAS AN AMERICAN PUPPET! and he controlled everything! all big businesses, media, I mean everything! Our people cannot do anything. If you're against him, you will end up a political prisoner or be shot. Not even a foreign country would dare fight Marcos because its just being against America. Nobody can remove him from office except the Americans, which did happen when our people decided "no more!" and marched to the streets in 1996. After he was removed by the Americans, our next President worked on removing the U.S. bases here. Marcos' wife, Imelda, stole jewelry, money, and anything she wanted. She can even walk in any bank and ask for a suitcase of money and nobody can question her. Are you familiar of Imelda's 3,000 pairs of shoes? Those 20+ years were the greatest time of the Americans in our country.
There were even famous intelligent Americans who were opposed to the American imperialism. The 1898 Treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War essentially allowed for the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. A Filipino independence movement begun earlier in the decade to free the islands from Spanish rule now was directed against the new foreign ruler, America. While many, if not most, Americans favored annexation, there were notable opponents, including William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, John Dewey, William James – and Mark Twain. They, along with many others, formed the Anti-Imperialist League, which briefly served as the organizational center for opposition to the developing American Empire.
Twain told the New York Herald on October 15, 1900: “I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
