The big picture

Until we accept that the problem is endemic in the presidential system we have developed as government there will be no solution to the pork barrel mess.

In theory the pork barrel system is a way through which tax funds are coursed through legislators who are expected to know better the needs of their constituency. They do not actually handle the money but choose where it should be spent on.

Therefore pork barrel is in itself only a way so these go to projects that lawmakers think are most needed by the people in their districts. It is expected that they should know better than the national government what the local needs are. That is as far as the congressmen/women are concerned.

It is different with our senators elected at large. They have the whole country to decide where their pork barrel goes. This is one of the reasons why there were proposals that the senators also be elected by districts. They are holding too much funds at their discretion.

Under a presidential system that requires a lot of money to get elected, the lawmakers’ foremost concern is how to get back their campaign investment plus the fact that poor constituents expect returns for their votes mostly in cash.

I remember going to the house of one congressman and seeing lines of people wanting money for a funeral or a scholarship etc.  In the end with so much discretion on the part of the lawmaker on what to do with his pork barrel, the temptation grows bigger to just give crumbs to the poor and pocket the rest of the allocation because they will be elected anyway.

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The lawmakers do not actually handle the money. They merely choose how it is spent. That is how the Napoles scam comes in, someone to justify the diversion of the pork barrel to their own pockets.  It has been going on for years but never in the magnitude that we now have under the Aquino administration. It is shielded by “good” intentions to rid the government of corruption. 

That is how it has become possible to hide corruption because it is said that this government is doing the right thing. How else do you explain why he is popular according to the surveys? False. Until the underlying problem of a presidential system of electing officials on the basis of money and popularity, we can expect more of the same.

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 That is why the pork barrel mess must be tackled in the context of a flawed presidential system. This was the subject the Tanggulang Demokrasya forum at the Aristocrat restaurant recently and published in the column of my colleague, Federico Pascual, “From Election Fraud to the Pork Barrel”that summarized TanDem’s Adolfo Paglinawan’s report.

In short, there is an agenda being pursued to concentrate power in the executive. It is being done in stages.  First is to emasculate the Supreme Court by paying off the senators with pork barrel. Next is the fraud in the 2010 elections and now the pork barrel scandal that has tarred any potential rival candidates in 2016. Neat. It is an agenda on how to eliminate opposition.

Someone opined that the pork barrel scam was already known to the executive and used as a threat to the senators to toe the line. That seems plausible but how to answer the fact that without Bernard Luy’s illegal detention, there could not have been a Napoles expose. It seems more true to say it was karma in operation.

So we come now to the bigger question and this I consider the biggest threat of all – the Smartmatic-PCOS elections of 2010 and 2013. From hereon all elections will be decided by machines and the machines will have the secret program to decide who wins or who loses. Goodbye to democratic governance.

Let us see what the Supreme Court will do with the TanDem petition to nullify the 2010 elections. It violated the Constitution and various statutes. Our elections were turned over to a foreign group which is unconstitutional. Therefore we had a failed election.

Under the Charter, elections are to be managed by the Comelec. Tandem cited that it was criminal that Comelec “dropped minimum safeguards required by the Automated Election Systems Law, namely the UV-ray scanner that would detect fake or misplaced ballots and the Voter Verification that would confirm to a voter that the machine’s reading of his ballot coincides with the persons he voted for.”

Benigno Aquino III was proclaimed president-elect with about eight more million votes still unaccounted for.

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While all eyes are on the Napoles scam and blame is being put on senators and congressmen, less attention is being paid on the presidential pork barrel that exceeds one trillion pesos (or some P1.5 trillion if proceeds of the Malampaya Natural Gas Project are included).

Of this humongous amount the money that went to the PDAF for senators and congressmen was only 1.7 percent of this amount. We should begin asking what that presidential pork is being used for since we still do not have the promised PPP projects online. There has been no improvement on the lives of ordinary people, not just the poor but also the middle class are now feeling the pinch.  You just have to be a housewife to know that it is getting harder and harder to make both ends neet.

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I think if we are to have dictatorial rule we must at least know what the vision is of the would-be dictator. Does he have a vision of what he will do with so much money at his discretion?  With the Smartmatic-PCOS elections I don’t think there will be a great need to bribe senators or congressmen except that if they don’t toe the line they do not get elected. For the foreseeable future we will have only a repeat of 2010 elections as we had last 2013 and expect it on 2016.

Until today, there’s still been no answer to the incredible results of a 60-30-10 formula for the senatorial canvass in all levels. “The pattern is statistically improbable, says Tandem. Moreover there are still some 18,000 PCOS machines that remain unaccounted for.

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In a corporation, the problem of accountability is neatly solved with incompetent managers simply fired by their stockholders.