WE witnessed with sadness how international financial agencies, the movers and shakers of the Davos World Economic Forum, and the most globally influential print, cable and TV media, including the New York Times, collaborated with President Benigno Aquino 3rd, Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, et al. They endorsed the false Aquino claims and helped make the Filipino and international public believe that President Aquino has seriously and rigorously launched an anti-corruption campaign. They also gave statements and speeches heaping praise on President Aquino for making the Philippine economy “the new Asian miracle economy.”
Now that the truth is beginning to come out of the President’s, Budget Secretary Abad’s and Secretary Purisima’s blanket of lies, the World Bank, the ADB, the big wheels of the Davos World Economic Forum, the New York Times and the other media superpowers must help re-establish the truth. Justice demands no less than that.
In the course of making himself and his new regime look great, President Aquino mercilessly—and dishonestly and unjustly—made President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo look like a villain who made the Philippines “the sick man of Asia” by running an abominably corrupt regime.
That was forgivable in a group of politicians campaigning to win votes against a ruling party. But Aquino and his gang made their untruthful campaign platform the basis of their way of governing our country. It revealed President Aquino’s ignorance and incompetence, and also his viciousness, when he lied, saying in his first nationally televised speech as the new president of our country, in his 2010 SONA, that he had found the nationally treasury depleted. He used the word “budget” and not “national treasury” which was properly abundant in cash. He accused the Arroyo administration of unbridled corruption, as he had done during the campaign.
He thus created the emotional environment to allow him to have President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo arrested. But it also created what he thought was the justification for the cancellation of Congressionally approved budgets for monumental infrastructure projects that would have stimulated the Philippine to greater heights had they not been cancelled. His unjust vilification of the GMA administration also justified his suspension of projects that had been launched earlier.
And that became the reason for the creation of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), which is the most boldly venal scheme ever tried by anyone in the Executive branch of our trinitary republican system to divest the Legislative branch of its constitutionally assigned task of being the master of money matters and appropriations (the “power of the purse.”)
But in their (Sec. Abad’s and the others) greed, or in President Aquino’s incredible ignorance and incompetence in these matters, they cancelled too many projects. What the cancellations did was stop the momentum of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s programs to shoot the Philippine economy’s star to the highest heavens. The 2010 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rate of growth in 2010—the product of Mrs. Arroyo’s planning and exertions—was a globally envied 7.63 percent. After the cancellations and suspensions—decreed by President Aquino, perhaps on the advice of Secretary Abad and Secretary Purisima, our economy became sick! In 2011, the GDP growth rate dropped from 7.63 percent to 3.64 percent. Unemployment increased! Poverty and hunger sharpened! They made our country a “sick man of Asia.”
Did President Aquino and Secretaries Abad and Purisima kneel before Quiapo Church or the Baclaran shrine to Our Mother of Perpetual Help, and cover their heads with ashes as monarchs of old did whenever they committed sins against God and their people?
No, they did not. Instead they told the most cruel and bare-faced lie of all. They said that they were curing the condition of the “Sick man of Asia” with their unconstitutional and illegal invention—the DAP.
True enough in 2012 the GDP rate of growth rose again—to 6.82 percent—and in 2013 to 7.16 percent. But these figures were still below Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s 7.63 percent growth rate in 2010 (which would have most likely been much higher had Aquino and Abad not cancelled projects.)
They fabricated a narrative that President Aquino rescued the Philippine economy from the comatose state the previous administration had caused.
And World Bank, ADB, Davos bigwigs agreed!
They should recant. They should be more honest than Aquino, Abad and Purisima—and help tell the Filipino people the truth.
For if they don’t, the Filipino people—many of whom still think President Aquino is a superman-saint—will be doomed to living a lie and suffering poverty for being so ignorant and deluded.
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