The business sector lately grumbled a lot about this pesky problem called government “underspending,” amounting to more than P580 billion already so far in the six-year term of the Aquino (Part II) administration.
Surely nobody could blame business for voicing gripes against the government, since the problem would hamper economic growth. The government historically accounted for almost 20 percent of the yearly GDP.
In their criticism, when it occasionally reached us down here through media reports, we could detect a certain degree of hostility toward the single entity that dominated the political landscape under our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS.
And that was the Liberal Party, able to dominate most areas of the government, precisely because of the nonexistent opposition. Nobody really stood out in the shrunken ranks of the opposition, being fragmented and disorganized and all in the past five years of being political patty.
For instance, in the case of state-owned DBP, our dear leader, BS, in effect allowed the LP— or some big shots in the party— to people the bank purely with party nominees and supporters.
And now the P450-billion DBP seemed to be at the threshold of some record-breaking drops in its income!
Let us not forget the Department of Transportation and Communications, the lovable DOTC, which single-handedly destroyed the light rail line system called Edsa MRT under the Aquino (Part II) administration.
Recently the Ombudsman announced—with full media fanfare—the indictment of DOTC officials and private businessmen over the controversial MRT maintenance deal, widely condemned as the cause of the fast decay of the MRT service.
Even the administration ally in the Senate, Sen. Grace Poe, wondered out loudly why the Ombudsman spared the DOTC head, Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya, in the cases over the lopsided MRT contracts.
Bear in mind that Abaya was another nominee of the LP in DOTC, being the party “boss” as president, although he already declared that he was DOTC head for only two days when he signed the suspicious contracts.
Did he actually mean that Senator Grace and the media should turn their attention toward his predecessor in DOTC?
And that should be none other than the presumptive presidential candidate of the LP in 2016, Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel R. Roxas, aka Mar, who was even the principal backer of Abaya for the plum DOTC post.
Abaya did not bother to explain why, just two days on the job, he dared to sign the contract because perhaps it would seem that somebody actually ordered him to do it.
Still, Abaya was already the DOTC head in the many renewals of the same dubious contract, covering the past three years since 2012, when the DOTC fired the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo as MRT maintenance contractor.
What about the allegation of extortion, supposedly done by DOTC officials, with the blessing of people close to our leader, BS, over the supply of new trains and cars for the MRT?
The Ombudsman did not even try to pretend to be interested in pursuing the case.
The Palace already declared that the Aquino (Part II) administration could not do anything about the conduct of the Ombudsman, because the Ombudsman should be an independent office.
Yeah, right, and that was why, earlier on in this administration, the LP elbowed former Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez out of office, because she reportedly would not budge to some LP bigwigs regarding their “requests.”
The Ombudsman also would not suspend Oriental Mindoro Gov. Alfonso Umali, who was already found guilty of graft, because Umali was said to be a close friend of our leader, BS.
Neither would the Ombudsman look into the cases of the “third batch” of legislators involved in the PDAF anomalies, more so because the Department of Justice claimed that it did not have the time to pursue those cases.
By the way, the House of Representatives has been working on a bill to empower the Bangko Sentral to pry into bank accounts of everybody and anybody, because the BSP claimed it would need such extraordinary power to supervise the banking system.
The BSP itself has been egging the House to pass the bill, but the Bankers Association of the Philippines has been fighting it vehemently, fearing that it would lead to capital flight.
Bankers already feared capital flight as a result of the AMLC involvement in the Corona impeachment and, more recently, in the case of Vice President Jejomar Binay involving more than 200 accounts of his supposed cronies and dummies.
And so the Ombudsman could throw a tantrum all night and all day, chastising those persnickety media people who persisted on doing their jobs, asking the Ombudsman about the media tag of “selective justice” on the office.
The boys of our dear leader, BS, could also simply brush away talk about the political omnipresence of the LP in the moves of the Ombudsman, particularly in cases against “enemies” of the administration, simply as beyond Palace control.
But it would be hard for the Ombudsman, and the administration, to deny their many cases of omission.