EDITORIAL - Corruption in even more evil forms

Over the past several weeks, we have been hearing complaints about supposed aid for victims of supertyphoon Yolanda that have not been given, nearly two years since the world's strongest typhoon in recorded history wiped out many places in the Visayas. The aid is to be in the form of emergency cash assistance but not only is the cash missing, but so is its emergency measure, making the promised assistance meaningless and a farce.

But why is the emergency cash assistance for Yolanda victims missing? There are two reasons why. First, those who are to distribute them have kept them locked up for future use, most likely in 2016. Second, the international response to the humanitarian crisis had been so swift and massive that those who are to distribute them no longer felt the need and the urgency to give them.

When you go to the areas devastated by Yolanda, it is true the people there have largely moved on. They have rebuilt their homes or moved into new ones built for them. The immediate pangs of hunger have long been quieted. Some schools have been repaired, a few new ones built. Many are still in tents but, yes, life does go on even with little or no government help.

As you go through these rising communities, you cannot help but notice many things that bear testament to their foreign origins. The government did not import them. They are part of the massive international relief effort that came even before our own government even managed to gather its own wits. This is not a wild claim. Those who can are free to go and check. Look up at the roofs of the schools and they all proclaim one thing -- donated by a Buddhist foundation.

If those who are to give the emergency cash assistance have found other purposes for the aid, let them in their depravity wallow in their secret sins. After all, it is no secret what they do and what they have been doing. They wouldn't have gained such notoriety over the years if they didn't. What cannot be countenanced is when they grab credit for assistance that are clearly not theirs, assistance that came from the goodness of the hearts of those who live beyond our shores.

May God in his righteous power strike those who brazenly claim credit for assistance they did not actually give. May those who take a bow about billions that never actually reached their intended beneficiaries get their just come-uppance. May the generations in whose name credit has been grabbed for schools that were really built with foreign hands and funds remember who to call when payback time comes.

It is bad enough that thick-faced corruption has become the backbone of political power and influence in this country, it is worse when not even calamities and human misery can temper the greed that fires up the corrupt. Corruption has not ebbed one bit despite the self-aggrandizing claims of some. When even a person who lost everything gets milked some more of the aid that is supposed to assuage his misery one bit, you know corruption has reached even greater heights.