A case for resistance

 

 

After the August 26th people march at Luneta, September looks like a spirited month for Filipinos to sustain and maintain their opposition to the pork barrel system.

 

It’s not just the congressional pork barrel, known otherwise by its euphemism, the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), that the people want to abolish, but also the presidential social fund or discretionary fund which is many times larger than the pork Congress allots to its members.  

Public protests against pork barrel intensify after the August 26th people march
in Luneta. Photo by AFP.

The president’s pork is reported to be more than 1.5 trillion pesos, and that easily makes the P25-billion congressional pork barrel a drop in the bucket. With that amount of money at the discretion of the president, there is a lot for a corrupt president and his cabinet of close allies and friends to be tempted to plunder.

 

What enhances the opportunity and motivation to steal from this enormous fund is the absence of review by the Commission on Audit (COA) and congressional oversight. Right now, the current administration dips into this fund whenever the government needs money to finance the President’s favourite programs like the conditional cash transfer fund (the 4Ps) and public-private partnership projects. Money for national emergencies due to unforeseen natural events such as typhoons and other calamities also comes from this fund, which the administration uses as a blanket justification for its discretionary spending.

 

Where does this president’s huge discretionary fund come from? It’s all easy money – royalties ($1 billion this year) from the Malampaya Deepwater Gas-to-Power project, a consortium between Shell, Chevron and the Philippine Department of Energy which was criticized as a sell-out by the Philippine government to foreign corporations; revenues from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) operation of casinos and slot VIP Clubs; the sale of sweepstakes and lotto tickets by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO); and, revenues from other income-generating public corporations which are too many to enumerate here.

 

The Aquino government faces a September offensive of protests from various sectors of Philippine society for its stand on pork barrel. Aquino has been ambivalent on whether to scrap PDAF although it is Congress which has the power to repeal the dreaded pork barrel legislation. But the President remains adamant to preserve his discretionary fund which he said is exclusively for the purpose of implementing the government’s social programs and its response to national emergencies and calamities.

 

First off, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has called for prayer vigils across the country on September 7 which coincided with Pope Francis’ plea for a “Day of Atonement” as Catholics around the world celebrate the vigil of the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Pope has asked all Catholics to offer prayers in atonement for their sins against world peace and in particular pray for the restoration of peace in Syria.

 

For its part, the CBCP also declared September 7 as a day of atonement for Filipino Catholics for sins against peace in our country. “According to our moral judgment, the present pork barrel practice in government is fertile ground for graft and corruption. Promoting the politics of patronage, it is contrary to the principles of stewardship, transparency and accountability. It is immoral to continue this practice,” the CBCP further said.

 

On September 11, Filipinos from different faiths will hold a prayer vigil at the Edsa Shrine under the initiative of a new movement called Edsa Tayo. There will be an inter-faith prayer, the lighting of the vigil candle and Freedom Flame, and some singing, all part of the continuing protest after the August 26th march to completely abolish pork barrel. According to the organizers, “Edsa Tayo will only be the kick-off a wider prayer vigil.”

 

Two days after Edsa Tayo, militant groups will also hold a mass action against the pork barrel system on September 13 at Rizal Park in Manila. Then on September 19, millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) will temporarily suspend their remittances to the Philippine government, which organizers dubbed as “Zero Remittance Day,” in support of the growing nationwide movement to abolish the pork barrel system.

 

President Noynoy Aquino’s spokesperson Edwin Lacierda immediately downplayed the planned demonstrations. He questioned why the organizers of the September 11 prayer vigil decided to hold their rally on the birth anniversary of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Lacierda likewise belittled the announcement of Migrante International that some 112 Filipino migrant workers’ organizations from all over the world have agreed not to send remittances as part of the protest. He doesn’t think OFWs would be able to hold their remittances because it’s their families who would eventually  suffer. 

Anti-pork barrel protests zoom in on President Noynoy Aquino for insisting
that he should keep his presidential pork. Photo by anti-pinoy.com

Lacierda and his boss, by extension, both miss the point of these September rallies. The Edsa Tayo organizers insist that they never thought of celebrating the birthday of the late dictator and that September 11 was just a convenient date.

 

But President Aquino and his spokesperson showed their brazen lack of appreciation of the OFWs’ decision to suspend their remittances. Overseas Filipino workers agreed not to remit on September 19 as a symbolic protest and a political exercise for Filipino immigrants to collectively demonstrate their outrage on issues that affect them. OFWs chose September 19 because it was on this day when the Philippine government implemented the Overseas Workers Welfare Assistance Omnibus Policies (OOP) that effectively made the $25 contributions to the Overseas Workers Welfare Fund mandatory per contract.

 

Describing the Overseas Omnibus Policies as “anti-migrant,” Migrante International said the Zero Remittance Day on September 19 will enable the voices of OFWs “to be heard in the call to abolish the pork barrel and re-channel funds for the people’s interest, including more efficient services and welfare assistance to overseas Filipino workers in distress.” Filipino migrant organizations from all over the world agreed not to send remittances to their families in the Philippines to express their outrage against the “widespread corruption, patronage politics and social injustice” in the Philippines.

 

The Zero Remittance Day by Filipino overseas workers is more than symbolic. It is beyond expression of their collective indignation. More than anything else, it is imagination in action, a call for resistance that could signal the beginning of more protests of civil disobedience against the current administration.

 

One Philippine newspaper wrote in its editorial that migrant workers have the right to be angry. These workers sacrifice their future so that the families they leave behind can afford a better life. With their income remittances, they have long been considered a lifeline to our troubled economy. But when the leaders they elect betray their trust, their hopes of returning to a better country are likewise crushed.

 

But not just migrant workers have the right to be angry. Every Filipino must be enraged with a government that doesn’t follow what it says. “Kung walang korap, walang mahirap,” the Aquino government proudly proclaims. Yet, its actions betray its words. Poverty is on the rise because this government is no match against corruption, more so with its complicity with the very venal act it condemns.

 

Our migrant workers are showing us the way to peaceful resistance. Their call for Zero Remittance Day is based on the belief that the pork barrel system is immoral, unjust and a dangerous policy. It is the kind of civil disobedience that is justified because it challenges a government that tolerates its own injustice to the people. Henry David Thoreau wrote of this form of civil disobedience as accomplishing a “peaceable revolution.”

 

While President Aquino and his administration may deem the migrant workers’ decision to suspend their remittances on September 19 as ineffective, perhaps absurd because it would affect their families even more as Lacierda claims, the harmlessness of such entirely symbolic protest may serve a higher purpose. It shows that collectively, Filipinos, short of a true revolution, are not without the means to redress their grievances. It also demonstrates other ways in the people’s arsenal of protests which they can unleash against a government that is not merely corrupt but also insensitive to their outrage.

 

There have been many historical instances of civil disobedience, such as those of Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Civil disobedience is a classic way of expressing defiance toward government and unwillingness to support its policies. Other forms of civil disobedience like boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, sit-ins like the Occupy movement, and general strikes will make it more difficult for a government to function. True, there could be public discomfort, but not for a long time, because the government will become more responsive and sensitive to the purposes of civil disobedience.

 

Rallies, prayer vigils, disobeying morally repugnant laws and policies, and other forms of public demonstrations must continue against the pork barrel system until the government engages the people in a moral dialogue toward an acceptable resolution. On the other hand, the government should not resort to heavy-handedness by using its coercive powers in silencing the people’s protest.

Boulevard of broken dreams

 

 

A million or so Filipinos marched Monday, August 26, to Rizal Park, formerly known as Luneta, to collectively show their outrage against the system of pork barrel that has been at the front and centre of Philippine politics for quite sometime. Janet Napoles, the pork-barrel queen, made sure this issue won’t die down as she continues to elude authorities. The euphoria of last Monday’s protest is over now and we’re back to base one, with reality staring down hard at us.

 

Even before the march, President Noynoy Aquino has already pronounced he would abolish the Priority Assistance Development Fund or PDAF, the congressional pork barrel. Although at first Aquino was for retaining PDAF because he believes that it has some benefits to local governments and other civil organizations like cause-oriented NGOs, he had to backtrack after realizing the huge swell of opposition on the eve of the people’s march. The truth, however, is he could not unilaterally make this decision on his own without involving Congress.



Protesters during the August 26th one million people  pork barrel march at Rizal
Park demanding the abolition of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF),
Congress' pork barrel and the president's pork barrel. Photo courtesy of Demotix.

Malacañang lauded the people who marched last Monday calling them Noynoy Aquino's new allies in his campaign against corruption. Naturally, people were mad because President Aquino stood his ground in preserving the much bigger presidential pork barrel, the discretionary funds he can use anytime at his will without congressional approval, especially the billions of dollars paid as royalties to the Philippine government from the Malampaya gas project.

 

With PDAF’s abolition uncertain and the president’s pork barrel safe in place, perhaps what the people need to do next time is to assemble another protest, but bigger and more boisterous, not in Luneta but in front of Malacañang.

 

Assuming another protest march would make the President eventually buckle down to pressure, both congressional and presidential pork barrels even if they are abolished will not solve the problem of corruption. The sum total of all stolen possessions by politicians, their families and cronies, past and present, is still much larger, enough to make the whole nation shudder. We need a bigger intervention, one that is not only going to wipe out pork barrels, whether presidential or congressional.

 

French political thinker Charles-Louis de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu, wrote about the corruption of principles and the decline of the state in De l’Espirit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws):

 

“The corruption of each government begins almost always with the corruption of its principles…

 

“Once the principles of a government have been corrupted, even the best laws become bad and will turn against the State, whereas when principles remain healthy, bad laws may have the effect of good ones because the force of principle carries everything with it.

 

“Few laws are not good when the State has not lost its principles, and, as Epicurus relates in speaking of wealth: ‘It is not the liquor which has become corrupted, but the vessel that holds it.’”

 

This observation doesn’t apply only to the Philippines but also to its model of governance, the United States, a far more advanced political system. In a 2005 Harper’s Magazine article, “The Great American Pork Barrel,” Ken Silverstein outlined how a simple piece of legislation like the Foreign Operations bill could undergo a startling metastasis.

 

Calling it the biggest single piece of pork barrel legislation in American history, Silverstein noted that the aforementioned bill started with a mere nine earmarks (Americans call their pork barrel as earmarks) but ended with 11,772 separate earmarks scattered throughout the bill.

 

Silverstein wrote: “There was$100,000 for goat-meat research in Texas, $549,000 for “Future Foods” development in Illinois, $569,000 for “Cool Season Legume Research” in Idaho and Washington, $63,000 for a program to combat noxious weeds in the desert Southwest, $175,000 for obesity research in Texas. In the end, the bill’s earmarks were worth a combined total of nearly $16 billion—a figure almost as large as the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture and roughly twice that of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

 

Napoles’s P10-billion pork barrel scam simply pales in comparison. Nor the presidential pork barrel which was reported to be largely allotted for calamity funds. The pork barrel system in both the US and Philippine settings obviously protects incumbents of Congress and the President. There is very little incentive to reform the system. As what has happened in the Philippines, the most President Aquino, for instance, can do is to mouth his slogan of “matuwid na daan” which is nothing but an empty shibboleth.

 

Keith Ashdown, who served as research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and a nationally recognized expert in tracking political paybacks and corruption, calls the American pork barrel or system of earmarks as one of the most fundamental rights of members of Congress, whether one is Republican or Democrat. “Getting between a lawmaker and an earmark is like trying to take a rib eye away from a dog,” says Ashdown.

 

Since 1822 when US President James Monroe limited financial support from Washington “to great national works only,” the pork barrel has become central to America’s national political culture. It has long been a foregone conclusion that whenever the federal government builds a road, or erects a dam, or constructs a power plant, members of Congress will artfully pad the bill with hometown “pork.” In fact, this is the same political culture that the Americans transplanted in the Philippines during their colonial administration of the islands.

 

Filipino politicians are astute learners of the American political system. With the hue and cry about pork barrel, President Aquino is now suggesting reforms that would in effect only streamline the means of corruption. Eliminating the PDAF and introducing a more palatable program with virtually the same purpose will not solve the problem. 

Filipino seafarers join protest vs. pork barrel system and corruption. Photo by
Edgardo Tuangtuang, courtesy of Migrante International.

The trust of the Filipino people in their leaders is now at a record low. In fact, it has been in the dumps since the two decades of martial law regime under Ferdinand Marcos. Despite a resurrection of trust in the early stages of the Cory Aquino administration, we have never fully recovered, especially after the years of plunder under Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

 

President Noynoy Aquino, with his awkward and lacklustre leadership and policies, has failed to restore trust in government. All the president’s men—Lacierda, Ochoa, Abad, and others—can do is to keep on refurbishing Aquino’s image as trustworthy even if he is a weak leader.

 

Political cynicism is growing in leaps and bounds, and if the President and the men around him continue to be in a state of denial, which the smug yellow media helps to foster, the last three years of the Aquino administration will surely be headed towards a boulevard of broken dreams and failed promises.