Hearing but not listening By Manila Standard Today | Posted on Aug. 28, 2013 at 12:01am | 283 views 2013_aug28_editorialTHERE is hearing; then there’s listening. The Million People March rally at the Luneta, while falling short of its ambitious numerical target, certainly made its message against pork barrel heard loud and clear. The final headcount—an estimated 100,000—was still the biggest protest rally mounted during the last three years of the Aquino administration. President Benigno Aquino III heard the roar of the crowd and clearly understood its import. Many of the protesters, after all, were his original constituents—middle-class families, lawyers and other professionals, businessmen, and the religious, united by a broad-based anger over deep-seated graft that continues to persist three years or halfway into his term, despite his promises to eradicate corruption. The President wasn’t quite listening, however, when he tried rather clumsily to hijack Monday’s protest with a bogus announcement that he would abolish pork, only to say in the next breath that he would replace it with an as yet unnamed “mechanism.” Even more worrisome was the President’s steadfast refusal to give up hundreds of billions of his own discretionary funds, the Executive counterpart of the much maligned congressional pork. Subsequent explanations by the Budget secretary that the pork allocations would remain intact in the 2014 national budget confirmed what we suspected all along—that Mr. Aquino was trying to pull a fast one with his meaningless Friday declaration. A far more frank, though no less odious, stand was taken by House Deputy Speaker and Isabela Rep. Giorgidi Aggabao, a member of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, an ally of the President’s Liberal Party. Referring to the thousands that had gathered at the Luneta Monday, the congressman said: “PDAF is not for them. It is for… the dirt poor.” He added that most of those calling for the abolition of pork belonged to the upper and middle-income groups, and not the lower-income families that the funds are meant to benefit. Before the congressman dismisses out of hand the protests from the upper crust and the middle class and plays the “pro-poor” card, he ought to be reminded that it is these classes that pay his salary and make funds available to the government by way of the taxes they pay. The poor, whom the congressman pretends to champion, do not pay taxes. It is bad enough that this administration squanders tens of billions of pesos in doles to the poor with no corresponding economic benefit to the country. It is the ultimate insult that they now have the gumption to tell us that our opinions don’t matter because we are not the intended beneficiaries. It is high time that politicians stop using the poor to rob the rest of us blind. This is a practice that was intensified and perfected during the Aquino administration, and the President would do well to stop insulting us by blaming his predecessor for a problem of his own making.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:37:40 +0000
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