Doable solutions

After smelling like roses for much of 2024, all the impressive investigations conducted by the House and Senate committees went up in smoke in the final weeks of December.

- ANA MARIE PAMINTUAN

This was due to public indignation over the 2025 budget that turned out—after just a few session days at the hands of the bicameral conference—to be a barely concealed outlay meant to finance patronage and the election campaigns of Marcos 2.0's super majority allies in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Overnight, the skewering of the Dutertes and their minions in the bloody war on drugs, the scandals over fake Pinoys and Alice Guo were eclipsed by indignation over the budgeting hocus-pocus that led to substantial cuts in funding this year for education, health, agriculture and the conditional cash transfer, among others.

Instead, the proposed funding for these sectors was shamelessly diverted to the new congressional pork barrel, to the unconditional cash transfer under the Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita or AKAP (P21 billion for congressmen, P5 billion for the Senate) and to government crooks' favorite source of kickbacks and ghost projects, the Department of Public Works and Highways.

During the regime of the elder Ferdinand Marcos, the so-called martial law babies were often faulted for being apathetic toward the abuses of the dictatorship. Even the Catholic Church, in those years of martial law, was also seen to have turned a blind eye to the abuses, pursuing instead "critical collaboration" with the regime of "FM."

Today, because of advances in communication technology, public indignation over government abuses can be expressed instantly. And at least people don't seem to be apathetic toward the PPP budget (pork, patronage and plunder) for 2025.

With lawmakers' abuse of the power of the purse plumbing the depths of shamelessness, people are expressing outrage.