The national budget has been skewed in favor of political patronage at the expense of social services. The politics of “ayuda”, the giving of aid purportedly to help the poor, is now seen as the path to electoral victory.
RTL can only generate huge tariffs by letting traders run wild, importing rice without control and killing any chance for Filipino farmers to maintain their market share.
The English “gift” for foreigners is the German “Gift” for farmers and poor Filipino citizens. “Gift” in German is poison, toxin or venom and the proposal kluged by the indefatigable lawmakers under the baton of the Marcoses and Romualdezes is a deadly “das Geschenk” for the entire Filipino people sellout.
There is this Gang of Four that is throwing wrenches into the peace process between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP.) It is comprised of Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., National Security Adviser Eduardo Año, Jonathan Malaya of the National Security Council (NSC) and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC.)
No less than 12,000 families have been victimized by the eruption of Mt. Kanlaon in Negros Occidental on Dec. 9, followed by another eruption on Dec. 23 that sent columns of ash blanketing the sky and drifting to Panay. All told, 45,000 people felt the brunt of the volcanic activity, forcing them leave their communities and seek shelter in evacuation centers.
It will be to the Marcos’ regime’s great shame that such a corrupt budget will have the president’s signature affixed by the end of the year.
The power of the purse supposedly exercised by the two houses of Congress has become a myth and the crafting of the annual appropriations proposals reduced to an opportunity to haggle over money, particularly before an election year.
The Prado decision could be a precedent for all those who have sued the government and its intelligence operatives for running berserk and using the so-called “whole of nation approach” to attack individuals and organizations as “communists” and “terrorists” who should be stripped of their bank accounts, designated as the nation’s scourge and clapped in prison for eternity.
The Senate, as currently constituted, will be blind, deaf and mute in the event that the House of Representatives calls the dare of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio for her to be impeached for culpable violation of the Constitution, loss of trust and confidence, graft and plunder, and tried before the upper chamber.
Pres. Bongbong Marcos continued Duterte’s legacy of bloated CIFs and even shared the bounty with Duterte’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte. He provided her P125M of her own confidential funds in 2022 and P650M in 2023 to do as she pleased. We now know where that went.
