Pork Barrel Essay

2540 Words11 Pages
Why rationalize bad practice? Abolish pork barrel The pork barrel system must be abolished, not just reformed. Otherwise, I demand a corruption rebate. Carmel V. Abao Published 3:18 PM, Aug 17, 2013 Updated 10:00 AM, Jul 11, 2014 The wheels of justice have started to turn. An arrest warrant has been issued against Janet Lim-Napoles and her brother. While Napoles and her ilk have to be held accountable for the scam, we should not lose our sight on the bigger, more fundamental problem: how to stop our political system from churning out more Napoleses. That the pork barrel is a source of corruption is an “open secret.” Many have come to refer to “cuts” or “kickbacks” from pork as “SOP” or standard operating procedure. It is public awareness of this open secret that is now fueling public disgust: people know that their hard-earned taxpayers’ money is repeatedly being squandered by elected officials. Everyone knows about the roads that lead to nowhere, the funds for fertilizer that were distributed to local governments of non-agricultural highly urbanized cities, the daycare centers without toilets, the substandard roads and bridges, and many others. The list of “secrets” is very long and quite old. The Napoles scam could simply be the straw that will finally break the camel’s back. People are not surprised; they're angry and frustrated. Paulit-ulit na lang, kailan ba ito titigil? It is thus alarming and saddening that PNoy’s earliest response to the scam was simply an off-the-cuff sarcastic remark. He first said that “the fertilizer fund scam was a bigger scam,” obviously insinuating that the Arroyo administration under which that scam unfolded was more fertile ground for corruption. READ: Pork abolition up to Congress Arroyo, though, did not have a “daang matuwid” or an anti-corruption campaign. It was PNoy himself that set this bar. Based on this alone, his

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