Oozing

The Supreme Court may have declared it unconstitutional. But now we are sure the pork barrel is alive and well.

The politicians are fighting tooth and nail over the allotment of project funds. In the process, they have unwittingly given the nation a peak into how the hard-earned taxpayers’ money is transformed into lard and efficiently looted by the political lords.

The national budget, it seems, is oozing with pork. Never mind that the Supreme Court has declared pork allocations unconstitutional. When it comes to hiding it, and then stealing it, trust our politicians to be extremely creative in circumventing the spirit of the law.

Over the past few years, we heard congressional leaders threaten rebellious legislators they would not get allocations for their districts. Through the length of the Noynoy Aquino administration, opposition congressmen were denied projects for their localities.

 We had a first inkling of the war over pork now raging when a shouting match broke out months ago between the then chair of the House Appropriations Committee and the freshly installed House Majority Leader. The subject of that skirmish was never fully disclosed. We were told only in the vaguest of terms that it was about some P50 billion the former House leadership had stashed (or “parked”) in various items in the budget.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson complained, a couple of weeks ago, that current House Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had P2 billion allotted for her district. It turns out, this was not the real scandal. Former Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez had many times that amount allocated for this home district even as he was ousted from his post.

Over the last week, congressional leaders tried to focus the issue on Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno for allegedly “parking” funds and favoring a big contractor. Some have even called for Diokno to resign.

This is all very strange. In principle, the Congress has power over the purse. They had ultimate control and responsibility for how public funds are allocated. How could they blame officials of the Executive Branch for something completely under the control of the Legislative Branch?

Former Speaker Alvarez was being unusually candid when he said the ongoing fracas is really about control of the Road User’s Fund. This Fund, collected from vehicle owners, is suspiciously allocated equally to all the congressional districts regardless of the amount of roads they have to maintain. If the Executive Branch takes control of this fund, notoriously spent with few controls, the legislators will lose opportunities to loot it.

At the rate this scandal over fund allocations by legislators is unfolding, the Napoles scam will begin to look like small change. But as it unfolds, passage of next year’s budget will probably be held up. The nation stands to lose even more because of this.

We are cursed by having a political class honed to raiding the public coffers.

Ineffectual

The conclusion of the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) held in Katowice, Poland was delayed by a day. The Conference is supposed to forge common action on the basis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Geopolitics and national interests stood in the way of achieving a fuller agreement on how the world might reverse the calamitous progression of climate change.

The final document made progress on specifying reporting protocols for all the participating nations. But that falls woefully short of what is actually required to reverse the process of climate change. By and large, that document is utterly ineffectual to save humanity from itself.

COP’s annual meetings have become some sort of empty ritual where, on one hand, alarms are raised over global warming and, on the other hand, nations put their immediate interests ahead of saving the planet.

This year’s meeting was preceded by the release of the UN-supported report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is a chilling report that says failure to cap global warming at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the outcome will be absolutely catastrophic beyond the medium term. Should present trends continue, global warming could be as high as 3.3C above pre-industrial levels.

We now know that, unless global warming is reversed, the ice covering Greenland will melt into the sea. That could potentially raise sea levels by 23 feet and submerge nearly all the world’s major cities.

We now know that in a few more years, climate change will wipe out corals. This will eradicate the areas where fish spawn, leading to a severe decimation of marine life we rely on for food.

We now know that climate change will bring forth more severe weather conditions that will threaten millions. It will wipe out vegetation in the face of creeping desertification. Famine and food shortages will happen.

Despite knowing all of these, humanity has so far failed to come up with an effective global regime to reverse the trend towards annihilation. Nations are not willing to yield sovereignty to a global climate regime. Economies fret about the costs of adopting effective counter-measures.

When Donald Trump became president, he promptly withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement intending the cap global warming at 2C. That he could so cavalierly defy science and imperiously take that tragic step tells us how helpless our global institutions are in the face of ignorant leaders.

Without an effective global regime to enforce common action to quickly reverse climate change, we are totally vulnerable to self-inflicted destruction. We will all be like Nero who fiddled while Rome burned.