EVERY taxpaying Filipino, not only former President Fidel V. Ramos, has the right to flay Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s truly excessive foreign travels. (Inquirer, 6/23/09)

The 51 or so foreign trips she has embarked on since 2001 are definitely unmatched in this country’s history.

If we allocate a very conservative average of two and a half days for each trip’s turnaround, that means the President had been out of the country for nearly half of a year.

Of course, the President’s lapdogs have always been quick to defend her, each one of them claiming that the benefits derived from her travels abroad have far outweighed the expenses incurred.

And so, deputy presidential spokesperson Gary Olivar boasted that the expenses have not probably reached the P1-billion mark compared with the $2.2 billion and $5.5 billion worth of investment pledges that the President recently obtained during her recent travels to South Korea and Japan, respectively.

The thing is we have always been good at counting the chickens before they are hatched.

I urge Olivar to review the President’s foreign travel expenditures for any given year vis-à-vis the investment commitments correspondingly made to her and to make an accounting as to how much of those commitments had been delivered.

Plain common sense simply suggests that when a leader commits his country to invest in another country during a state visit, it is not the pledging leader’s government but the private industries in his country that eventually make the investments.

If all the investment pledges made to GMA during her nine-year reign had materialized, why are we, as a nation, still wallowing in an economic quagmire up to now?

Let’s be realistic: political leaders even in other countries are not unlike our candidates during election season – they promise something to a visiting foreign leader (that’s protocol, isn’t it) and then forget all about it afterwards. But they don’t see anything wrong with it.
—RUDY L. CORONEL,
rudycoronel2004
@yahoo.com.ph