pork barrel, corruption, poverty (updated)

 “The President has said that PDAF is the share of the people … In theory, PDAF is really a good thing.” 

that’s abigail valte speaking for the prez (i wonder who fed her those lines).  and here’s senator chiz saying the same thing in other words:

“The PDAF system is a way to listen to the opinion of those on the ground – what each district and barangay needs and not just dictated by the secretary (of the various departments).

but but but, clearly, the benefits of the pork barrel that the people get to share in, aside from dole-outs and scholarships for the relatively few lucky ones, are quickie projects without longterm impact on the people’s economic well-being.  read interaksyon.com‘s analysis: From waiting sheds to roads leading nowhere, pork barrel leaves trail of waste 

Human Development Network Foundation coordinator Toby Monsod said pork barrel has created the “divide-by-N” syndrome.

“The divide-by-N syndrome is the mechanical and feckless dissipation of government funds across localities instead of their rational allocation to where these might have the most impact,” Monsod said on the sidelines of yesterday’s launch of the 2012/2013 Philippine Human Development Report.

Among such wasteful uses of public funds are the construction of countless bridges that lead to nowhere, dirt roads interrupted by occasional concrete paving and half-roofed schools, she said.

…”The congressman will always give pork barrel to something that they can see immediately, and people can say ‘thank you,'” Monsod said.

“In other words, the projects become segmented in that sense. For example, if you have P100 million, you can build a strategic road connecting two municipalities. But if you have to divide it up between 20 mayors, it becomes P5 million per mayor. What you have is welcome arches all over the place,” she said.

…The latest Philippine Human Development Report cited the country’s 87 airports, many of which are within two hours away from each other. The report also pointed to 140 seaports, 40 of which hardly have any traffic.

“This results in an annual allocation of maintenance funds so spread out as to be ridiculously small,” the report said.

“The consequence is you give up projects, you give up connective infrastructure and other interventions that have … spillover effects, have longer term benefits. That’s the consequence. So if you want to keep the pork barrel, this is what you’re giving up,” Monsod said.

indeed.  it should be obvious by now, into the pork barrel’s third decade post-EDSA, that whatever they call it — countrywide development fund, congressional initiative allocation, or priority development assistance fund — pork barrel by any other name stinks just as bad.

it should be obvious by now, even to the president’s fanclub, that the pork barrel scheme is an epic failure as aid to national development.  whether it’s the president’s or the senators’ and reps’ pork barrel, it’s spent mostly just for show and short-term gratification of constituents, and such an extravagant show at that, in aid of papogi points for the next elections.

even if there were no bolanteses or napoleses, even if no one were diverting the monies into ghost ngos or sticky legislative pockets and private bank accounts and ritzy condos and grand mansions here and abroad, palpak pa rin ang pork barrel as “share of the people” because it is a scatter-brained disorganized affair that encourages corruption while failing to address the people’s long-term needs.

the senators and congressment addicted to pork could say, of course, that long-term development isn’t their mandate, after all,but the president’s.  and they do need funds to dole out to poor constitutents who are forever asking for help pang-ospital at panlibing, pangmatrikula at pantawid.  but really, magkano ba ang napupunta sa ganitong gastusin?  surely just a small fraction of the 70 M that each rep gets, and even a smaller fraction of the 200 M that a senator gets, EVERY YEAR.

take note: in cory’s time

With an initial funding of P2.3 billion, the CDF was supposedly designed to support small local infrastructure and other priority community projects, which were not included in the national infrastructure program of massive and expensive projects.

… each lawmaker was assigned P12.5 million of CDF every year. In succeeding years, the amount grew steadily as “special purpose funds” and insertions in the budgets of executive departments and agencies started to creep into the national budget. At the time, legislators drew amounts for their pet projects from at least five different sources of pork barrel allocations.

The first of these funds is the School Building Fund, which was originally part of the budget of the Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS, now the Department of Education or DepEd). Created in 1995, the School Building Fund allowed each legislator access to P4.5 million a year, supposedly for the construction of school buildings in his or her district.

and then in fvr’s time:

In 1995, each legislator was also allotted P500,000 for the construction of farm-to-market roads, using funds from the budget of the Department of Agriculture (DA)

In addition, the legislators also allotted themselves P30 million each per year from the Public Works Fund (PWF).

Each lawmaker also had at least P15 million in Congressional Initiative Allocation (CIA) every year.

CIAs are budget items incorporated in allocations for various agencies over which legislators exercised the power to direct, how, where, and when these amounts were to be disbursed. Most of these funds were inserted in the budgets of DepEd, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), and the Department of Health (DOH).

Parreño wrote that the higher the rank of the legislator, the bigger the CIAs he could get. Senior committee chairpersons, for instance, could then draw up to P100 million per year in CIAs, he added.

and then in erap’s time:

In the year 2000, the CDF morphed into what is now known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF. Under the PDAF system, each district and party-list representative gets P70 million a year, while each of the 24 senators, P200 million a year, of pork allocations.

House members may spend a maximum of P30 million on “soft” projects (education, health, and other social services projects), and the remaining P40 million, on “hard” or infrastructure projects. The senators, meanwhile, may spend P100 million on soft projects, and another P100 million on hard projects.

tama naman si miriam, we voted them into congress to craft laws and serve as check and balance to the executive and judicial branches.  what business do they have with roads and bridges at kung anu-ano pang infrastrucutre na madalas ay sub-standard naman ang kalidad dahil nga napupunta sa mga komisyon ang mas malaking bahagi ng pondo?

and take note how the PDAF has grown by leaps and bounds from arroyo’s time to aquino’s now.  here is agham.org‘s compilation based on data from the dept of budget and management website:

PDAF through the years
2008      7,892,500,000.00       7.89 B
2009      9,665,027,000.00       9.67 B
2010     10,861,211,000.00      10.86 B
2011     24,620,000,000.00     24.62 B
2012     24,890,000,000.00     24.89 B
2013     24,790,000,000.00     24.79 B
2014     27,000,000,000.00     25.2 B

and what about presidential pork?  read ‘President has P1-trillion pork barrel,’ or so former national treasurer leonor briones and bayan muna partylist rep neri colmenares reportedly suspect, based on the palace’s proposed 2.6 T budget for 2014 that’s more than 500 B larger than the 2013 budget of 2.06 T.

such gargantuan amounts for spending and nothing to show for it other than a people increasing in number and in poverty, and, worse, a national debt that has ballooned to P5.325 trillion ($129.2 billion), rising by some P400 B per year since 2010.

this is not to say that it’s because of the pork barrel alone that we remain a poor undeveloped basket-case of a third world country.  rather, it’s because the larger development strategy, i.e, the import-dependent export-oriented development program imposed on us since the foreign-debt crisis in marcos times, administration after administration, simply doesn’t work, the benefits do not trickle down, have never trickled down, to the masses.  yumayaman lang lalo ang mayayaman na, forget “inclusive growth.”   and this is where, i suppose, the pork barrel scheme comes in, the president’s as well as the legislature’s, as compensatory mechanisms?  while waiting kuno for the benefits to trickle down to the poor, pork barrel na lang muna, sabay conditional cash transfers at kung ano-ano pang dole-out gimmicks?

what a waste of good money.  what if, instead, the president channelled all that cash into an economic development program inspired by the vision of a sustainable, modern and diversified, domestic industrial economy.  read giovanni tapang’s National industrialization is not passe:

Having a sound industrial policy that focuses on modernizing agriculture and shoring up our capability to locally produce capital goods is key to the establishment of a modern and diversified industrial economy. We need to build, among others, our own base metals industry, chemical industries, machinery manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, electronics, industries for food processing, textile, garment, mass housing and agricultural commodities. Having these built here in the country would not only address the problem of producing our basic needs but would also secure jobs for many so that they will stay home instead of going abroad.

The objective of building these industries is to maximize self-sufficiency in the local industrial production of capital, provide intermediate and consumer goods for domestic needs and to ensure food security and self-sufficiency in the country. In generating and mobilizing domestic capital, we create real jobs and ensure rapid and sustained economic growth.

National industrialization is the opposite of the current pattern of production, investments and trade where it is the export of extractive raw materials and agricultural products that is a primary activity in the country. In turn, we import most of the things that we need as finished goods as well as agricultural commodities and capital. Local value added is usually only on labor done in reassembly or repackaging of manufactures for export most of which have a very large import component.

The large service sector and the ever growing number of overseas Filipino workers signal the urgency of our need to build domestic industries in order to stem unemployment. Manufacturing is as small as it was in the 1950s in terms of percentage at slightly less than a quarter of the total economy while services rose to its current levels of nearly 50 percent of GDP. In this sense, the need for national industrialization is really decades old. This historical need does not make it passe, it only makes it more urgent.

alas, the powerful ones that we elected into office are obviously, yet again, not up to the challenge.  we really should all level up, choose more intelligently next time around.  a senate investigation of the pork barrel scam should help enormously, especially if it’s televised.  says conrado de quiros   :

… televised congressional hearings and impeachments are an education unto themselves. The Erap impeachment, which had the deepest impact on public consciousness, shows just how deep that can be. For the first time, people began talking like lawyers. For the first time, the citizens got to have an appreciation of law, not as lokohan but as an instrument of justice. Unfortunately, Gloria replaced Erap and that education swiftly unraveled, the lessons went for nothing. What lessons may be imparted by a televised hearing of the pork scam can always be conserved, strengthened, and promoted, over the next three years. P-Noy will still be president then.

Particularly today, with the Internet, cellphones, the social media, and other instruments of rapid and mass communication, the prospects for the public weighing in on the hearings multiply tenfold. I repeat my proposition yesterday: Government alone cannot stop corruption, it needs the public to help in it. It needs the outrage of the people to stop it. It needs the fury of the people to stop it. It needs the condemnation of the corrupt by the people to stop it. It needs the people marching in the streets, or its modern equivalent in Facebook, text messages, and blogs, shouting at the top of their voices, “Tama na, sobra na, tigilan na,” to stop it.

Alongside an ardent campaign launched by government or civil society, or both, to make people realize that taxes are their money, that the corrupt are kawatan, no more and no less than pickpockets and snatchers, that corruption is in fact stealing from them, who knows? Maybe that televised hearing can rouse enough public interest and indignation to spark a cultural upheaval. That’s what an education is.

hear, hear!

traffic and the class divide

stark show of the class divide:  the traffic problem solved in favor of car-owners, never mind the masses of public transpo commuters who are oppressed, disenfranchised, marginalized enough.

TAMING THE ROAD RAGE |5 things MMDA missed in its ban on provincial buses
Transport woes
TRAPIK !?@#$%^&*!  A Way Out of Our Traffic Mess
Traffic scheming

SONA’s deafening silence on coco levy loot atbp.

i was only half-listening to the prez until he started talking coconuts…aha, here we go, i thought, let’s hear your plans for the coco levy loot (160B and counting).  alas, nothing, as in zilch, as though it doesn’t exist.  nothing, too, about the problem of aged unproductive trees that we’re not allowed to cut down without first getting permits and paying fees.  worse, the president’s best answer to the low productivity of coconut lands is nothing new.  intercropping is an old idea.  we’ve tried it and it doesn’t work, unless of course yours is a large-scale operation with lots of capital.  to be sure, i emailed what the prez said to my coco farmer sibs based in tiaong and got this reply today:

The State of the Coconut
By Luis Umali Stuart

I listened to the SONA on the radio, and drew close when coconuts came up, since I still have a stand of them up the hill. From the ground here, my immediate thoughts:

Procy* is from these parts and when it comes to cocos he pretty much knows the score, it’s a job cut out for him.

1. The real problem is that world prices for copra have fallen drastically, largely on a challenge from palm oil. Two years ago we were netting up to P4.50 per nut on lean months, now it is down to P1.50 almost year-round. Even “buko” (murà here) down from P6 to P3.

2. The market for coconuts is now shifted to higher-technology, higher-value, processed coconut products – virgin coconut oil from the meat, activated charcoal from the shells, coirflex and planting media from the husks, coco sugar from the water, packaged buko juice. These are where the reported gains are coming from, but are really only viable largescale, and require considerable capitalization. Large landholdings are the early beneficiaries (Villa Escudero I underatand has a thriving VCO operation.)

3. To participate in the new industries, avail of financing and incentives, small coconut farmers must organize into cooperatives, always easier said than done. Coconut farmers are producers, they are not businessmen and cooperatives are serious business, there is enormous paperwork involved. In the end it is rural businessmen and do-gooders that set up these cooperatives, who naturally end up controlling the whole shebang, turning the producers into the same cut-rate suppliers that serve the copra industry.

(And let’s face it. Pinoys are not a cooperative bunch. We have been so well-divided-and-ruled for so long perhaps that we really only trust the very closest to us. Even our vaunted bayanihan spirit, at least hereabouts, is not instinctive, there is always a promise of food and drink and and cigarettes after, it’s a small party limited to short friendly chores requiring many people.)

4. To help the small scale coconut farmers (under five hectares?), Procy’s sell to the president is “intercropping.” Give them something else to earn from, forget the coconuts, he means, and he’s got all these other products lined up: kape, cacao, saging, chickens… to intercrop with the niyog. None of which is new. The Silang (Cavite) project in the 60s of the rural reconstruction movement (that bred Juan Flavier and Boy Morales) was a showcase of intercropping (coconuts with papayas cum pineapples). But it now seems to be the focus, radically giving up the coconut industry to the more poised financially for the new directions in the market. In this regard the old small farms have been quickly outflanked by new players opening new sites.

5. The message for the small coconut farmers, is to stop relying on the coconuts and get off your butts, start working the land around your old trees, and intercrop. What would be new is if it will turn out to be worth all the work this time. Will the market and right prices be there when the critical days of harvest come, or will it be quickly cartelized by deft middlemen as usual? Will there be post harvest support and dependable technology inputs for more efficient processing and storage?  Otherwise all this crop diversification business doesn’t work. I suggest to Procy, if he wants farmers to really intercrop, he should be fielding futures buyers everywhere now with ready checkbooks for these startup crops, and then everyone will get to work.

6. Material inputs for the intercopping seem to be in place as claimed. Last October (21012) this forwarded text from my sister Babes: “tita, eto po ung contact sa alaminos laguna PCA, incharge of coco seedlings distribution… namimigay po cla normally 100 seedlings per person.” Bobby de Guzman (Candelaria) got some of these free trees himself (in San Pablo) with start up free-range chickens for their farmland in Dolores. I have heard also of ECA giving away coffee and cacao seedlings. Obviously one has to run around for these freebies, but they are out there, if only for the fleet and able.

7. It would be great if government can bring these offerings around farmgate to farmgate. Farming is a hunkered down life, and true farmers venture little outside their cozy soil-based comfort zones. They aren’t ones to run around playing government’s games, they (I) must be reached out to. The government must “missionarize” the farms, or it can never hope to suck the farmers in.

8. But we know, new and greater efforts require new and greater funding, and I dream of crop futures and farmgate services for small farmers with the coconut levy fund in back of my mind, if it should ever get in the hands of honest people, i.e.

The fund is again unmentioned in the SONA, simply because there is not anything good or clear to report. I heard recently that the SC has finally (?) decided vs Danding and given it all (?) to the coco farmers. This is obviously good news, but Noynoy can claim no victory nor promise anything from it. Indeed, what legal tricks are still open to Danding’s formidable lawyers so well-paid from the looted funds? The best thing about it is that we know where this bulk of the fund is and how much it is now worth.

For us coconut folk from whom this fund was extorted in the 70s under duress of martial law, following its trail and the long story of machinations that have kept it in Danding’s hands all this time, we all yearn to put the perpetrators in their place and fully recover this wealth. Still and all, I have grave misgivings where these funds are headed.

From my vantage, the coconut levy fund was a scam from the get go. I don’t have the dates, but the levy was well in force and being collected when I started in Santol in ’77. It was amounting, I think, to 10c per kilo of shelled nut (at P1/kg it was a whopping 10%). The buyers would return with booklets of stubs for us to fill up, equivalent to our contributions, loads of them for they were in small denominations and we soon gave up trying to keep filling them up. Until a while later, news came of scholarships being handed out. I dug them up and filled up hundreds if not a thousand. Aling Nene rushed to sign them up. We were to get “certficates” of a sort in return. But very soon after, that cocofund office in town closed, and we never heard of scholarships again nor ever saw any of our certificates.

In all these years following the progress of the levy fund chase, I have not once seen or heard of a list of its so-called beneficiaries nor ever met anyone with any kind of certificate in hand. Nor have we ever received any communication from any source that would suggest that we are on anybody’s list as true contributors to the fund. My very strong suspicion is that there is no true list, and that whatever list of beneficiaries exists, or should suddenly surface, is spurious.

At least in these parts, many of the farmers and coconut lands that were squeezed to build the fund are long gone, to the great beyond or other parts, the trees the way of the powersaw in the spate of land coversions in the face of CARP. If by some magic, the coconut levy fund should actually metamorphose from its shady beginnings into some real support fund for coconut farmers, I would be very surprised and declare it a holy day for the overwhelming power of good intentions. (2013 Aug 01)

*proceso alcala, secretrary of agriculture

behn cervantes

i never met him, i mean, we were never introduced, not even in the 80s when i was “running around town” (more like flitting around) with mitch valdes and i had really close encounters with showbiz peeps.  but i did have a rather unforgettable brush with him that he may not even have  been aware of, haha.

it happened in some studio set where peque gallaga was directing the pilot of a satiric sitcom that would have starred, if memory serves, mitch,  behn, and elvira manahan (this was at the height of her talk show, two for the road), and joey reyes was writing the script.  i was there because the sitcom was not the entire show.  half would be a talk show of sorts on current issues, and i was writing that.  and it was a good idea to be around because peque might have something to tell me bigla about writing my half — it was quite a radical format, i wasn’t sure, i didn’t see yet how, it would work (and never found out because the producer backed out).

so anyway.  i was behind the cameramen of course, along with other crew, staff, mirons.   there were no seats, standing room only.  except for one lounge chair, yung you’re half-reclining na, that was empty; i gathered that it was for the director, and while he was busy, one or another would take it briefly, pahinga ng paa, but it was mostly unoccupied, until one of the guys offered it to me (i must have been ready to sit on the floor or something).  so i took it.

not long after, ms. manahan and behn arrived.  they had to wait, though, stand around, until direk was ready for them, and siyempre, medyo imbiyerna ang mga lola na there were no seats around.  they had noted the one lounge chair, of course, and little me in it, on it, and i swear, when i stole a look at them, behn caught my eye, looked down his nose at me, and made irap, lol.  not that it was a laughing matter at the time.  i could have vacated the seat at once, left it free for them to take it over, if behn hadn’t been so isnooty.  had he given me even just the faintest smallest smile, i’d have smiled back, sabay get up and offer ms. manahan the seat myself.  instead, i sat on, went back to whispering nonsense with one of the guys for another minute or so, and got up in my own good time.

and then, again, i may have imagined it all.  right now, hearing that behn is in asian hospital with a septic infection, no visitors allowed, it doesn’t matter.  what matters is that he has a heart for nation, and he was one of the true machos, along with lino brocka, in the war against marcos all the way to EDSA.  stories of behn cervantes are writ large in the pages of martial law history, and i salute him.

Awards and Behn Cervantes
By Pablo A. Tariman

ONE wonders how actor-director Behn Cervantes feels about the sudden deluge of recognition coming his way.

Read on