This is in reaction to the news report, “SC, Congress debate ‘pork’ legality” (Inquirer.net, 9/3/13).
It is not really the legality or illegality of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF or pork barrel) that is the point. Of course, it is not illegal! Otherwise, all of our past and present presidents and lawmakers who included the fund in the General Appropriations Act year after year should go to jail. The point is the monumental evil it has introduced into our political system and to Philippine society as a whole.
Consider this. Gloria Arroyo conveniently used the pork barrel against the litany of impeachment cases that hounded her presidency. President Aquino has used it to bribe (sorry for that word, but methinks that’s an open secret) the senators into removing Chief Justice Renato Corona. There are two grave ironies here! First, the congressmen who prevented Arroyo’s impeachment were the same congressmen who, not unlike a river suddenly flowing from Arroyo’s camp to P-Noy’s after May 2010, filed the impeachment case against Corona. And two, while the senators who tried Corona had miserably failed to present an iota of proof that the former chief justice had enriched himself in office, most of these senators now appear to have connived with Janet Lim-Napoles in stealing billions of the people’s money through the pork barrel fund. If the inevitable political patronage attached to the fund is not evil, I do not know what is!
And so, to hell with Sen. Franklin Drilon’s and President Aquino’s last hirit for the retention of the PDAF. Ask the common tao—the child in the street, or even a simpleton—and they will tell you that, with it in place, no amount of control measures in our budgeting system may ever restore the people’s faith in it; much less obliterate the evil that it has created in our midst and times. The die is cast: The pork must go, the lawmakers’ and the president’s. Lest this nation go to the dogs!
—RUDY L. CORONEL,
rudycoronel2004@yahoo.com