When corruption stares us in the face

How time flies indeed. It's already one week since we had our New Year's Eve revelry and that entire week is now history! It is now apparent that the Philippine government continues on its path of self-destruction. I have no doubt anymore that the Aquino Regime only plays lip service when Pres. Benigno  Aquino III says that we are his "Boss." There are two huge issues that apparently the Aquino Regime continues to push despite their being hounded by controversies. That's the continued use by Comelec of the Smartmatic and the increase in the fares of the Metro Rail Transit.

Let me quote this report from the front page of the Inquirer last Monday entitled "Smartmatic bags P1.2-B Poll Contract, Comelec hit!" There are unresolved, so-called "Hanging concerns" but Smartmatic has bagged the P1.2-billion contract to refurbish the Commission on Elections' 82,000 Precinct Count Optical Scan voting machines for the May 2016 presidential polls."

This is tantamount to your having bought a new car in the Year 2010 and it had a lot of defects. But your car dealer tried to fix it but when the year 2013 came… it had gotten worse. Now you end up having the same lousy shop/dealer fix your car when it could not fix it before. So this brings us to ask that question that was already asked many times by so many pundits: What is the hold of Smartmatic against Comelec…that it won its new contract with a breeze? This is corruption staring at our faces, folks!

How many times have we said it in this corner that the Comelec has virtually handed over the elections of this country to the hands of this Venezuelan company! Shame on Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes for not giving the Filipino people the transparency that he is mandated to give. With this P1.2 billion contract, there is no doubt that Smartmatic would erase all the evidence that many people like what Ateneo IT Professor Alex Muga discovered, that the phenomenon called 60%-30%-10-%, which stands for 60% Liberal Party, 30% UNA, and 10% for those who also ran in the 2013 polls.

If the Germans, the French, and most recently the Australians have returned to the simple paper and pencil ballot, it is due to their experience that electronic voting can be tampered with electronically and the only way to keep the sanctity of the ballot is by going back to plain pencil and paper. These are nations with real working democracies. But with a difference, they are all having a parliamentary form of governance. This is why we have been asking for change in our system of governance because the top ten most corrupt democratic nations are centralized presidential form of government.

Again it makes me wonder what the people behind the Cebu Citizens Involvement and Maturation in People's Empowerment and Liberation think of this latest caper by the Comelec? If they are truly our election watchdogs, they should be barking foul by now. Unfortunately, C-Cimpel has become one of the Comelec's deodorants. How sad for us Cebuanos when our so-called watch dog can no longer help us.

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The other major concern of the Filipino people was written by Amando Doronila last Monday regarding the problems that train commuters in Metro Manila are having with their new increased fares. Like what we said before, we in Cebu do not have the luxury of having a mass transit system like the MRT and LRT in Manila. Yet we are subsidizing the people of Metro Manila who do not pay the proper amount for their fares.

We are happy that finally the Aquino Regime has recognized this highly unequal scheme, but with the world prices of oil products, I strongly believe that increasing the MRT and LRT fares at this time is wrong timing. If the fares have to increase, it should be in phases so as not to jolt the commuters into extremely high fares in this era of low oil prices. But alas, the Aquino Regime refuses to listen and have already implemented the new fare scheme.

As Doronila pointed out, "Commuters are up in arms as they realized that they have been chained to decisions that offered no hope of riding safe trains. Their worst fears were confirmed by the MTR Hong Kong Audit report that rated the condition of Metro Manila's rapid mass transport system.

This "Final Report for Assessment Survey of the MRT 3 System" conducted by the Hong Kong group was issued after its investigation from Aug. 7 to Sept. 5, 2014. The survey was commissioned by the MRT 3."

The audit report showed that the track conditions in the MRT is "most alarming and requires immediate attention. Major and extensive defects exists." Yet the Aquino Regime increased those fares despite the risks. If this were an airliner, they would never be allowed to fly! So now the Aquino Regime should fix the broken system right away or worse things will happen.

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