The Pork Barrel Controversy is heating up again
Some Notions and Definitions
At the outset let us be clear: pork barrel funds are government monies spent to benefit particular politicians or their chosen favorites, usually under guise of undertaking projects for the common good.
The latest definition includes massive government spending in agriculture, in the military, in medicine, in public works – and, incredible as this may sound, in mere scraps of paper with no reality other than as worthless scraps pointing to non-existent groups and activities – in other words, “ghost projects.” Such projects, all so neatly packaged and fraudulently documented, effectively place government money directly in the hands of politicians and protected bureaucrats, to the tune of billions of pesos yearly, which have been as incredibly undetected for long periods of time by custodians like the COA (the audit commission) and the assigned media – who must be reasonably presumed silent partners in such a grand conspiracy.
Like most sub-systems of corruption, pork barrel, too, was invented in the US of A. It was transported here during the American occupation of this archipelago.
It is said that a practice in pre-American Civil War days was to give slaves their slated pork in barrels, literally speaking. Yes, even slaves had to have their occasional pork to eat, as it was in the beginning during the Roman Empire when the law of giving the slated meat to slaves was very strictly enforced, so they could have bodies strong enough to go back to slave work the next day.
In the USA, during the time of slavery, the ugly scene was of slaves rushing upon the barrel-with-pork as they grabbed as much of it as they could for themselves.
Members of Congress, in their rush to get their local appropriation items (their pork) were often perceived as behaving so much like those slaves rushing to the pork barrel for their chronic feeding frenzy.
To behave like slaves, did they have to have a master? Who was it? Doesn’t Congress have the power of the purse in the sense of funds appropriation and, therefore, should it not be called its own master? Yes, but opening the purse and releasing the funds – making the money available at last – is the power of the executive (“the government,” “the DBM,” the President). Follow the money and know – who the real boss is. Before that, it is also the power of the executive to propose the budget, which then the legislature approves after debate and modifications, amendments and final version.
In a parliamentary form of government, the executive and the legislative are one – populated by the same members of parliament who form real political parties with distinct platforms of government. The majority forms the actual government and the minority, in opposition, forms a shadow government that is ready to take over when the former falls.
In the parliamentary form, bringing the bacon home to the various districts is unabashedly the job of each Member of Parliament. The system allows the MPs (Members of Parliament) – in fact, encourages them, expects them – to perform this function in all transparency and with all their negotiating skills. The “parl” in “parliament” (parlez in French or parla in Italian) – precisely refers to the Members’ power of persuasion.
Healthy Separation?
In our presidential form of government, the executive and the legislative claim to be separate, not one; they believe their separation is a healthy check-and-balance situation designed to prevent corruption and tyranny.
But after all the checks, what is the real balance? Well, at the end of the day, howsoever long it has taken, the masters of the system are able to ensure that: first, the executive gets all the money it needs and, second, the legislative gets all the gravy it desires. Only in this way can such a system function. Kennedy, the poster boy of the American presidency, called this process “the art of compromise.” Indeed, it could be quite an art,
Whenever the executive overdoes it, it will be accused of tyranny; whenever the legislative overdoes it, it will be accused of corruption. The compleat politician has to function like an artist performing this calibration.
In reality, the executive and the legislative function are two sides of the same coin of governance in our presidential form. That’s the system. Neither side will change it, not in this administration as already announced clearly by both the President and the leaders of the two houses of Congress. Pork is fast becoming an agenda item custom-made for “outsiders” – coup plotters, revolutionaries and people power enthusiasts, or one for the top issues of the 2016 elections.
It’s the free flow of money – well-nigh unhampered – that brings a solid unity of those two branches of government. It doesn’t matter who the President is and who the members of Congress are. The same members of Congress who did all the bidding of Arroyo became fast lap dogs of her successor administration, condemning without acknowledging what they did together with the former President and unabashedly organizing a new united front in record time – for instance, against the head of the judicial branch, who was feared as a possible spoiler of the new unity due to the constitutional independence of his branch and his perceived closeness to the former President who appointed him to his job.
When one understands this, one can see why some families have made it their full-time business to be in government – why they must hog up on wealth kicked back by pork and be able to pay the price in guns, goons and gold to maintain “dynasties” and the oligarchic status quo.
Needless to explain, the term “pork barrel” indicating current reality has also been retained by common parlance – but not officially. At one time it was called the Countrywide Development Fund (CDF) before it came to be known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).
In a normal legislative season, senators would expect to pig out to the tune of a minimum P200 million each in pork barrel allocations while representatives would have much less – some P70 million each – because there are just so many more of them. For the next Fiscal Year, PNoy has asked Congress to approve a budget of trillions with a minimum 27 billion pesos set aside for the top food preference of Congress – pork.
He wants to make sure, however, that, given the Napoles controversy, in the next fiscal year the administration cannot be accused of allowing all the pork to end up in the pockets of the legislators or their favourite ghost-makers but, truly, in the projects of district constituents or, in the case of the senators, in concretely identifiable areas of endeavour.
How does Malacanang hope to accomplish this, if it really wants to? By the method of line-item budgeting. In the past, the hard portion of the lawmaker’s budget was tucked under the budgets of the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Department of Transportation and Communication, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies. The administration would now have us rest assured that pork can be more easily identified as pork and beans as beans. But the whole menu, critics point out, will still be pork and beans reflecting the executive–legislative power sharing.
Benhur against Napoles: the unexpected explosion
A man is “kidnapped” and after he “escapes” he blows the whistle on his cousin and former boss, whose confidante he has been these many long years. Brandishing an Israeli first name and a Chinese last name, Benhur Luy is a Filipino all right and he may yet have accomplished something the almighty COA and the praise-release media could not do one bit for the Filipino people – namely, expose at last the billions upon billions of moneys plundered under their very noses by their political leaders of the past so many years.
In his “whistle-blowing,” Luy made no claims to patriotic motives. He simply revealed that, upon the orders of Napoles, he was forcibly detained from December 19, 2012 to March 22, 2013 in a condominium unit at the Pacific Plaza Tower in Bonifacio Global City because she didn’t like the fact that he was planning to get into her line of work – a most unique area of endeavour. Luy was rescued by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) after his parents Arturo and Gertrudes reported their son’s disappearance. For spilling the beans, Luy is now under the protective custody of the government.
What kind of beans did he spill? The kind that said: lawmakers received commissions equivalent to 40 to 60 per cent of the amount of the PDAF [pork] in exchange for the right they gave operators like Napoles to determine the implementing agency and fund beneficiary. “Commissions” may, indeed, sound neutral and value-free. In simple truth it refers to the humungous part stolen from the people by many of their legislators (not all, of course).
Earl Parreno’s earlier study
In early 1998, according to Earl Parreno, Finance Secretary Salvador Enriquez told reporters that up to 45 per cent of pork barrel funds were lost to “commissions.” The decisions regarding which projects get how much money primarily depended on how big a cut there was for legislators, not on the actual needs of the people. Unfortunately, projects aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, or upgrading the quality of education – were also the kind from which the most amount of money could be lopped off to line legislators’ pockets through their operators of choice.
“Commissions,” “rebates,” “discounts”— cuts and kickbacks have many names – the effect is the same: robbery done by the powerful on the very poor. Many suppliers told Earl that the legislators like to have their “commissions” or “discounts” in cash because checks or other modes of payment may leave paper trails. The payments are made either at the congressmen’s homes or offices, in hotel lobbies (the lobby of Sulo Hotel in Quezon City is said to be a favourite), or restaurants. Some prefer having the payments routed through third parties but others have no qualms about accepting the commissions themselves.
Delivery can sometimes be funny. Women suppliers bring big bags when they go to the Batasan – full of money – sometimes amounting to millions – usually tucked inside brown envelopes. After the suppliers have made the rounds, the bags are noticeably flatter: from almost a foot high to only a half-inch pile of bills left.
A long long list
The list of lawmakers whom Napoles served is understandably kilometric, given the plundering facility offered. This way, too, she allegedly earned a few billion pesos a year the past ten to eleven years.
With so many clients, her minority percentage in each deal would still be gargantuan, after the summing up was done. As collateral result, there was silence in the COA front, and the media remained clueless. The whole thing had fast become a candidate for the Perfect Crime award.
This whole thing reminds some senior citizens of the Stonehill caper back in the early sixties because it had begun to look like anyone and everyone could be implicated by fast-hand Harry (Stonehill). But this one is different in that the amounts are plain staggering. And the initial listing of the implicated makes one ask, “Who, of the legislators, is not there?”
The Face Book releases of her pretty daughter’s lifestyle more than revealed the kind of inexplicable wealth that should have already attracted the BIR hounds and the COA sleuths. But they were nowhere. Do they even exist? Oh yes, like in the movies, they tend to be great Monday morning quarterbacks. They arrive on the scene when everything is over. Listen to a COA celebrity telling Mareng Winnie on TV that her report is almost done and will be released, anytime soon. She adds, in a coy attempt to solicit the listener’s praise and support, that Luy’s revelation is just the tip of a very huge iceberg: “Wait till our report comes out…” But why are we being made to know all this only now, billions of pesos later?
PerryScope on the Pork
There are so many people who know the modus operandi of such as is alleged in the Napoles style, if one goes by the post-mortems in the coffee shops. Many take it for granted that that’s the way it is- the reality of our Philippine condition, the unreformable basis of doing government business in this country, the main reason why politicians spend and spend to win because, anyway, (and are there still people who don’t know?) the returns on investment are incredibly high.
The “Napoles” could be the case of a big-time operator or, as already mentioned, merely the tip of a much bigger iceberg. The practice has been going on for decades involving other operators and hundreds of lawmakers. It took a whistle-blower for the most selfish of reasons at the right time to blow this whole thing out of the deep water and make some media and the majority populace reflect at last: how much longer can we tolerate this? Is the President the only person who does not know?
To give credit where it is due, let us quote a popular blogger, Perry Diaz, who wrote a few years ago the following lines that never quite made it to the mainstream.
He said in his article, “Power of the ‘Pork’” (February 3, 2010), published in his blog site “PerryScope”: “In 2009, Sen. Francis ‘Chiz’ Escudero introduced Resolution No. 900 ‘urging the Senate Committee on Finance [headed by Drilon] to cause the immediate review and accordingly propose the repeal or amendment of Presidential Decree No. 1177 and Book VI of Executive Order No. 292, specifically all provisions pertinent to budget preparation, disposition and management, with the end in view of reverting to Congress the power of the purse as prescribed by the Constitution.’”
Escudero had been complaining that then President Arroyo had “been exercising her power to impound pork not because of any lofty purpose but to give out or withhold political favor to help her allies and to strangle her political opponents -” underscoring nonetheless the fact that a President who wants to can do something about the congressional piggery.
It turned out that Arroyo was preparing for her own congressional comfort while still President of the land. She would make sure that her district would get a lot of projects funded by ‘multilateral lending agencies’ from Japan and South Korea.
Congressman Walden Bello remarked: “While she was president, she [Arroyo] had contracted with foreign aid agencies to be able to funnel over the next few years billions of pesos into the 2nd district of Pampanga. Sinabi ni [Public Works Secretary Rogelio] Singson kahapon, he’s helpless kasi his hands are tied, kasi these were committed by foreign aid agencies like the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Korea Development and Cooperation Fund” [as quoted in the PerryScope article].
The word “helpless” in the mouth of Singson should not be pleasing to the ears of PNoy, one would think, or the “hands tied” attitude. In the very least, since they have proclaimed Arroyo topnotcher in their Order of Battle against corruption, why not unleash the COA and BIR dogs on her and see whether she’s not operating in the category of a Napoles, and then make a comparison/contrast of her with other legislators’ handling of their favourite food.
So, now it was time for her successor to institute reforms in one of the primary roots of the national tree of graft and corruption, the pork barrel system. But sad to say we got the opposite in no uncertain terms. Instead of abolishing the pork barrel system, the would-be reformist administration doubled the pork barrel allocations. “On top of each of the 278 congressmen’s P70-million ‘pork barrel,’ they were given an extra P75 million each to be used for infrastructure projects in their districts. The extra pork barrel for each congressman consisted of P50 million from the budget of the Department of Public Work and Highways (DPWH) and another P25 million from the Road User’s Tax,” PerryScope Diaz wrote.
What’s PNoy trying to do – merely engaging in the art of compromise? – trying to placate legislators who threatened to block the passage of the national budget then on grounds of “unequal budgetary allocations,” due mainly to Arroyo’s unbelievably large DPWH “pork barrel?”
Or does he really believe there’s nothing he can do, given the co-equal power of the legislature? Are our current prosecutors up to the job? Is it right to assume that anyone can be bought except our prosecutors and investigators?
Should he not rather push even harder for the passage of the Freedom of Information law if he wants more help to come directly from the power of a well-informed people, and do something vintage Aquino? But he does not seem to believe so.
Is there nothing at all that one can expect in terms of substantive change and reforms the next three more years or less? FINIS.