Floods: Climate change as convenient excuse

Half a month’s rain fell on Luzon last Saturday. That’s climate change. And it’s a convenient excuse of corrupt, inept officials for the floods, destruction, and general misery Filipinos are now suffering.

The telltale signs of officials’ faults were everywhere. Garbage either clogged drains or blanketed waterways. Since early July thousands have been hospitalized for deadly leptospirosis, from rat piss, also due to street trash. Uncollected basura results from provincial and city officials’ dependence on briber-contractors. In breach of law they have not built sanitary landfills and materials recovery plants, or taught residents to segregate and recycle, or relocated squatters from creek-sides. The easier money is from ghost employees at the provincial capitol and city hall. Besides, the squatters are loyal voters.

Roads and drains that needed no repairs were torn up in May-June, for supposed asphalt overlay and deepening. Works were left unfinished. Government inspectors didn’t care; they’d already been paid off by absentee constructors. They didn’t apprehend overloaded trucks that rutted the highways. When rains came in July-Aug. construction debris naturally caused floods. Now all roads and drains need rehab; more kickbacks.

Land-use officials let residential subdivisions be erected in geo-hazard zones – again for bribes. Result: landslides in the new developments, floods around them. People were left wondering why there are now floods even on hilltops and plateaus.

When Storm Ondoy dumped on Metro Manila and Rizal one Saturday all of Sept. 2009’s expected rains, officials swore never again. They’d preserve remaining greeneries, dredge Laguna de Bay and tributaries, and dig a spillway out to Manila Bay. Nine years hence, none of those have happened. On the contrary, the mountain quarries have encroached into remnant forests. New road works even concreted American-era drain outlets to the Pasig River. The capital city has become the country’s stinkiest, noisiest, dreariest.

Defying direct orders from the Supreme Court, all cities and towns around Manila Bay spewed garbage onto the sea. National regulators merely watched. Lake authorities have let new posh subdivisions in Laguna-Cavite eject waste onto the Lake of Bai, while they grab prime land on the other side. In Bulacan political dynasts continue to turn rivers and basins into private fishponds; hence, floodwaters stand year round in once dry barangays. More dynasts have allowed illegal nickel and magnetite black sand mines in Zambales, Pangasinan, Ilocos, and Cagayan, inducing more mudslides, floods, pollution, disease, and hunger.

Not to forget, those rainfall alerts from disaster officials uselessly are texted two to three hours late. By then commuters and motorists already hopelessly are trapped in floods.

Costs to lives, health, property, the economy, and opportunities are incalculable.

We’re seeing the breakdown of the Philippines.

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Police are to enforce a price freeze during this calamity-induced food shortage. For food sellers long victimized by a few mulcting cops, price freeze means “presyong pulis” (police special offer), that is, free. It’s the modern term for the age-old “tong.”

Literally meaning “hall” in Cantonese, “tong” is a secret society, usually criminal, that exacts “protection tax” from immigrants. The term found its way into the Manila underworld. The Chinese coast guard’s confiscating good catch from Filipino fishermen near our Scarborough Shoal – that’s “tong.”

Our officials are so bold to stop “pulis patola” from “tong” extortion. But they can’t confront the alien that’s exacerbating our food shortage.

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Rody Duterte’s bloody war on drugs can’t win. Although 4,300 street pushers have been slain in nightly police raids and 25,000 others by vigilantes and rival narco-gangs, they thrive. That they can die of suffocation and sickness in 3,800-percent congested jails doesn’t scare them. The illicit earnings are big.

That’s because there’s an inexhaustible market of four million shabu (meth) addicts. They must be weaned away from the vice. Yet, even if only one in every five of them, or 800,000, need six-month rehab, only 35,000 at a time can fit in specialized clinics nationwide. More than two million of the addicts surrendered to their barangays for medical help at the start of police house-to-house visits. They were sent home to wait for the social workers – who never came.

At the top of the crime pyramid are the untouchable shabu makers, importers, and distributors. Those crime billionaires are able to buy their way out of arrest and prosecution. Convicts among them live like kings, with prison wardens and guards at their beck and call. Some are even in high police and elective posts, the narco-generals and narco-politicos. They bring in shabu from China, whose expansionist strategy is to soften resistance from idiotized Philippine islanders. The Chinese accomplices have historical knowledge: British opium profiteers in the 1800s addicted 12 million Chinese.

Now they’re buying off Customs bureaucrats. When exposed, the first batch of drug-linked Customs appointees merely were transferred to other posts. The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency chief who had exposed them became Customs chief. The crooks there ran circles around him and continued to let shabu into the ports. Now it’s the successor at the PDEA who’s doing the exposing. What next, another rigodon?

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).

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