THERE was a practice during the Noynoy Aquino administration to hand earnings of government owned and controlled corporations (GOCC) to the President in a ceremony prepared for that purpose. The BCDA group gets first row like Pagcor which remit annually several billions and the Land Bank of the Philippines some billions too. The other state agencies handed their earnings and they belong to what they call the “billionaires club”. This year, Clark Development Corporation will remit their earnings in 2018 (after expenses) of P1.7 billion to the national treasury, according to President Noel F. Manankil, the hardworking chief executive officer of the state agency.
All those billions of pesos remitted by these GOCCs to the president in that ceremony goes afterwards to the national treasury for both houses of congress, the House of “Representathieves”, er, I mean Representatives and the Senate will pass the national budget. That's where “disasters” happened. And Senator Panfilo Lacson is our “hero”. For he is relentless in exposing the pork laden budget, one of the biggest sources of corruption in our country. A deadlock looms in the bicameral conference committee between the two houses. A re-enacted budget is a possibility.
In the meanwhile, I remember calling the attention of the public regarding TV documentaries about children crossing rivers because of a lack of a connecting bridge in going to their school. When you see a classroom filled with kids and the classrooms had already seen better days, when you see no dryer for the palay harvest, when you see an almost impassable road with passengers crowded on top of a jeepney, you may scratch your head and ask yourself: “Nasaan napunta ang pera?”
I totally disagree with lawyers and their clients indicted with plunder and graft cases that the justices of the Sandiganbayan maybe swayed by public clamor to jail the guilty. It is for everybody to see how they dipped their hands on the money intended for the public, and them feigning innocence would want you to throw up. MGA HIPOKRITO. PINAPAPAKAIN SA NAKAW ANG PAMILYA NILA. MAHIYA NAMAN KAYO.
If as alleged that Janet Lim Napoles pocketed something like P15 billion, then how much money lined up the pockets of these thieves in government. The kind of money stolen in the past many years I believe can even make a concrete road of all the rice paddies in the country. We have nobody to blame but the people themselves. These solons are there in congress and in the Senate because you voted them to office.
In the early years, when I was still in high school, the people then voted for senators like Jovito Salonga, Jose Diokno, Lorenzo Sumulong, Benigno Aquino, Ambrosio Padilla, Arturo Tolentino, Lorenzo Tanada, Soc Rodrigo. There was also then Rogelio de La Rosa, a Kapampangan movie actor who was a senator. Compare these names to the present occupants of the senate, and you can arrive on a conclusion. Yes Virginia, there was pork barrel already in those years, but the senators didn't have sticky fingers.
As a matter of fact, in the United States of America, pork barrel is given each congressman and senator each year, and was a matter of right by each for past many decades. Not a single cent was pocketed. That's why they have a strong democracy.
Those senators and the hundreds of congressmen suspected of pocketing millions of the people's money must be rich even before Napoles thought of the pork barrel scam. Why then they got involved in this illegal and immoral undertaking? You are some kind of stupid if you can't smile a rat when you are offered fifty percent commission? They fell into it, because love of money is a bottomless pit.
So naive to steal more money, when you already have bundle of them, which in ten lifetimes cannot be exhausted. Each one of us have only one lifetime. No one lives forever. And the good lesson to remember is that the only money you have are the money you spent.