Perpetuating a platform of plunder

Benigno Aquino III’s chosen presidential candidate for 2016 is running on a platform of continuity, he being not simply part and parcel of the administration in the last five years but a significant principal, as originally envisioned when picked to run with Aquino in 2010, pulling levers and operating in front of and behind the throne. As Aquino’s anointed, he is hell-bent on perpetuating the current agenda well into another six years. At the very least. 

In peddling himself via a multimillion-peso pre-campaign initiative, he chose to set himself apart from the imageries surrounding other contenders, there drawn by a well-funded public relations and publicity campaign that many described simply as demolition jobs.

Note how the dust and dirt have settled. On one leading contender, it is festering corruption accusations. On another, questions of experience, citizenship and residency. On a third, it is about educational attainment and a propensity for extrajudicial methods.

Flip this wooden penny and the counterpoint message is that he alone is squeaky clean, a true Filipino, experienced, foreign-educated and law-abiding.

We are not aware of the same mudslinging campaigns applied against Aquino’s chosen, save for the self-destructive kind he might inadvertently create from an ever-lengthening litany of faux pas each time he recklessly opens his mouth. He is his own wrecking crew, so let us leave him to his own devices and instead focus on an aberrant reality foisted on us by a platform that perpetuates toxic economic anomalies characterizing the governance model he seeks to continue.

We’ve chosen six anomalies that, under strict definitions and following the uncompromising rule of law, would statutorily, albeit, for style, allegorically qualify as “plundering public coffers to fatten the patronage pork barrel.”

The first is the subject of a petition before the courts. It involves billions of our taxes available for political patronage concealed in lump sums insidiously inserted within the General Appropriations Act for 2016 and previously hidden in both the principal and supplemental budgets the year before.

The second are billions —re-labeled and manipulated at the sole discretion of the Office of the President, following a decidedly warped definition of savings, courtesy of a pork-barrel fattened legislature. Once known as the Disbursement Acceleration Program, this now goes by other aliases.

A third is the two-thirds of P100 billion in doles cavalierly handed out by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). Unproductive, at best, these purchase instant political popularity for those normally nauseating and shunned by constituencies who might otherwise gravitate to the meritorious more than the inept.

Imagine that patronage politics is the encompassing objective of such fund embargoes. Suddenly the gambit to perpetuate makes sense.

A fourth are the billions of our taxes unspent and stashed in political tins from critical contracts recklessly reneged and rebidden to favored contractors, again, as part of the political-patronage agenda.

A fifth are the exponential billions embargoed from the stubborn refusal to aggressively spend for critical infrastructure that would have directly translated our ballyhooed gross domestic productivity statistic to inclusive growth.

Now array these against DSWD’s centerpiece poverty-alleviation program focused primarily on doles.

Consider the billions of pesos in doles deliberately drained from our taxes against the bullheaded refusal to even consider reforming a proven unjust, inequitable and archaic income-tax bracketing system that bleeds life-giving funds from those who can ill-afford a bloodletting versus high net-worth partisans and benefactors who pay relatively less taxes by employing tax-avoidance mechanisms. Ironically, finance officials estimate foregone revenues from tax reforms in the range of P29 billion and yet its allocation for doles are indecently exponential multiples of that.

If these six constitute even a partial platform fast-forwarded beyond 2016 by the administration candidate, then what will effectively be a platform that plunders will perpetuate and institutionalize.