Siftings
The Bolante Homecoming – A Halloween Scare?
The possibility of its extent is staggering, mindboggling, heart-lacerating and stomach-puking! I refer to the greed/avarice of one person or persons that has led this government to get into deals for megabucks kickbacks such as the infamous ZTE broadband deal. The fertilizer scam may just be the tip of an iceberg that goes down deep into the country's agricultural life, what with farmers' dependence on government support, etc., to produce the staple food on which the whole nation depends for sustenance and survival. If I am being emotional at this point, I beg for understanding. How many times has our government let the people down? Once upon a time, there was the coconut levy fund which a tycoon "borrowed" and which has never been returned to the coconut farmers who are still in dire need of the fund. As of last night, according to former Solicitor General Frank Chavez, the P720 million scam may actually be running to billions, taking the money that could have improved the produce of rice farmers and improved their lives.
And this is just one of many scams that this mis-government seems to be involved in, being run, as of last account, by the most corrupt president this country has ever had.
How greedy can Greed get? Are we in the throes of another conjugal dictatorship of greed, another kleptocracy? One recalls the conjugal dictatorship which resulted in billions of US aid money and other sources having been siphoned off to the bank accounts of the dictator and his wife and cohorts, while poor Filipinos die of hunger and poverty-related diseases in the metropolis, or fall in forests and mountain passes from the bullets of the military in encounters which are the results of the gross indifference of concerned public officials to the real plight of idealists seeking justice for their downtrodden countrymen? Meanwhile, one may ask: what happened to the money and assets sequestered from the Marcoses? Have they gone to feed the poor, house the homeless, heal the sick and provide jobs for the countless jobless and jobseekers, so that our college graduates do not have to toil abroad in order to put food on the family table? Is there any one among our government officials who can enlighten us on this matter? What has happened to the Presidential Commission on Good Government, I really want to know!
Meanwhile, Jocjoc Bolante's coming home is going to raise the bogeys of election cheating and rigged results all over again. It will remind everyone that the sitting president is no longer trustworthy, maybe has never been. What gall, to make bare-faced apologies to a whole nation and go on state visits with the issues of corruption and kickbacks peeping out of her pockets, oozing out of her nose and ears, while the countrymen she is supposed to lead and protect are dying from disasters, rebel gunfire, hunger and disease.
This Halloween, the bogey of Impeachment is rearing its head, and its accompanying ghosts or rattling skeletons or whatever are getting out of their hiding places: poor investments, economic downturn, higher rate of unemployment, etc. These on top of the global economic crisis.
But justice cries out that Bolante should come out with his story despite the possible consequences. Despite the fact that, in the history of the Philippines, not one high-rating scam or crime or chicanery has ever found its proper ending: in the eventual Revelation of Truth and Justice, in the Restoration of the Deprived to their proper places, in the Triumph of Good over Evil! My use of capital letters in the previous sentence is my way of saying that these wishes remain abstractions seeking physical reality and realization to change our national life, and get it out of the swamps and bogs of a Halloween nightmare that our government officials have led us into!
Can the next elections get us out of them? The latest call of the CBCP that the sitting prresident should be replaced is way too late. The good bishops should have rallied behind the nation when the Garci tapes were first revealed. And now, it's a whole term too late. The whole system has been contaminated, and we seem to be too weakened to move. We need more than a miracle.
Can Jocjoc provide the means to the miracle which Jun Lozada tried to inspire but which fizzled out? Only Time can tell! -- with a straight face.