A more dangerous president

Despite his earlier vow to stay in Tacloban and oversee the post-Yolanda/Haiyan relief operations, President B. S. Aquino III left the devastated area upon learning that the Supreme Court had ruled against the pork barrel system, otherwise known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund, declaring it unconstitutional by a vote of 14-0-1.

For Aquino, the High Court’s ruling, penned by his most recent Court appointee, Associate Justice Estela M. Perlas Bernabe, must have been a disaster far more devastating than the 7.2 earthquake that hit Bohol and Cebu and the super-typhoon that flattened Tacloban combined. While the two major calamities, coming so close to each other, killed thousands, displaced hundreds of thousands, and turned an entire city into a wasteland (in the case of Tacloban), they posed no immediate threat of pulling the plug off the administration’s artificial life-support system.

In contrast, the SC ruling might just do that.

The PDAF consists of a regular annual allocation of P200 million per senator and P70 million per congressman to fund projects of their own individual choices. In theory, they merely identify the projects, usually in response to requests from local government officials, non-governmental organizations, peoples’ organizations, or civic organizations; then the various departments and agencies concerned implement them, in cooperation with the Department of Budget and Management.

By law, no appropriation is ever released to the lawmakers, and no part of the proceeds goes to them. However, through sheer manipulation, they have been able to exact a percentage of the proceeds---at first small, then increasingly larger---in collusion with personnel of the DBM, the implementing departments and agencies, the Commission on Audit, and the usual contractors.

The practice could not possibly exist without the express or implicit cooperation and consent of the President, who approves every PDAF release to his favored allies or withholds it from his critics and adversaries. Thus, the PDAF is really the President’s “pork,” rather than that of the lawmakers’.

Is it graft? It is, but permissive Philippine society has allowed it to exist because of its “patronage politics.” With few exceptions, members of Congress, like the President, spend hundreds of millions of pesos (billions in the President’s case) to get elected to their low-paying jobs; once elected they are looked upon by a great many of the voters as ambulant Automated Teller Machines whose main function is to dispense cash to every open palm. This kind of patronage allows them to justify their graft, which always nets them much more than they give away, and the public, with its ambivalent view of morality in politics, finds it pointless to raise hell so long as it looks like benign graft.

But things got out of control when some lawmakers were reported to have been able to access at least P10 billion of “pork” over a period of time to fund ghost projects through bogus NGOs allegedly controlled by one Janet Lim Napoles. The scandal took an even more terrifying criminal dimension when it was revealed that Aquino had used the PDAF, the DAP, and the same “pork barrel queen” to bribe members of Congress to impeach and remove Renato Corona, the sitting SC chief justice, and to railroad the passage of the widely opposed, anti-Catholic and foreign-dictated population control measure called the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act.

This has rendered Aquino impeachable on all the legal grounds enumerated in the Constitution (except treason), namely: “culpable violation of the Constitution, bribery, graft and corruption, other high crimes, betrayal of public trust.” But because Congress has been bought, and could again be bought, the possibility of impeaching Aquino has remained a distant illusion, a wishful thought. But the Court’s nullification of the PDAF may have altered that perspective. This is probably why Aquino left Tacloban in a huff as soon as he heard the SC verdict.

A new game has begun. And neither Aquino nor we (we, the people that is) can take anything for granted. As soon as the SC ruling was out, the first word we heard from Budget Secretary Florencio Abad and Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. was about a supplemental budget, purportedly for Tacloban’s relief operations. Of course, Tacloban would need such a budget if the President’s humungous calamity fund has been exhausted, and the donations from foreign governments and institutions are not significant enough. The long-term rehabilitation and recovery program would need a much bigger multi-year budget. But Abad and Belmonte seem to be unwittingly letting a strange-looking cat out of the bag when they say a supplemental budget is needed because our lawmakers had lost their PDAF.

There is reason to fear that since the President has not been judicially restrained, he might continue declaring certain appropriations, inappropriately, as “savings” and using them as part of his DAP, as happened to the P1 billion-outlay for the rehabilitation of the Tacloban airport long before Yolanda/Haiyan struck. Aquino declared it as “savings” and realigned the P718.75 million for some other purposes. Now, the entire airport is gone, and must be rebuilt from scratch, with only P281.25 million for it.

Worse, Aquino might choose to convert the “unused portion” of the PDAF into “savings” and channel them through his DAP to fund projects secretly recommended by allies who have just lost their PDAF. What the SC has abolished, Aquino could surreptitiously and selectively restore by subterfuge. He is fighting for survival, and he has become a more dangerous president. He cannot afford any of the lawmakers he had previously corrupted to believe that just because the PDAF no longer exists they had become free agents who could start toying with the idea of impeaching and removing a machine-elected president.

fstatad@gmail.com

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2013/11/22/a-more-dangerous-president/