Philippine Politics: The Pork Barrel is Dead. Long Live the Pork Barrel.

In attempting to defuse a raging populist storm over the abuse of public earmarks allotted to elected leaders, the Philippine president surprisingly announced of the proposed abolition of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) derogatorily known as the Pork Barrel. 

The Vera Files at the Yahoo.com neatly exposes on the administration’s doublespeak…

In Aquino’s own words, legislators will retain the discretion to “identify and suggest projects” for their districts under a new mechanism the budget department and Congress will hammer out.

The epitome of transactional politics, pork barrel, or simply pork, refers to appropriations and favors obtained by a representative for his or her district. The funds are discretionary in nature.

The new setup Aquino is envisioning will, in effect, not abolish pork but simply centralize the district funds—PDAF will likely just be given another name—under the executive department.

But, as important, what should be made clear is, PDAF is but one, albeit the most conspicuous, form of pork barrel.

Aquino’s speech is palpably silent on all other forms of pork barrel funds currently in the national budget that have likewise lent themselves to abuse and misuse: among others, the multi-billion-peso Public Works Fund (now called Various Infrastructure including Local Projects or VILP) in the Department of Public Works and Highways, those embedded in other government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, lump sum appropriations and other discretionary funds.

These will remain intact simply because they have not of late been at the center of mind-boggling Napoles-like scams.

Not only is the proposal to abolish the Pork a cosmetic makeover, its impending centralization also translates to a concentration of political power to the President. The executive branch will now be able to choose which constituency will be favored (their allies, their voters and their interest groups) and which constituencies will not, thereby expanding their political 'imperial' control over the local governments. This serves as a roadmap towards dictatorship. 

Importantly, the Vera Report above points to the many other forms of Pork Barrel. 

In essence, pork barrel is like any government spending programs predicated on a politically mandated coercive redistribution of resources.  Such has only been differentiated by the forms of, and by the categorical accounting treatment of expenditures or redistribution.

This serves as more validation of the great Frederic Bastiat’s legal plunder at work.

And more from the same article:

But no amount of hue and cry over the decades from within and without the halls of Congress would move governments to get rid of pork barrel.

PDAF’s predecessor, the Countrywide Development Fund (CDF), would, in fact, be introduced in 1990 by Aquino’s mother, then President Corazon Aquino, for “soft projects” in addition to the Public Works Funds and similar funds.

The Commission on Audit’s special audit on the 2007-2009 PDAF is by no means the first and only audit of pork barrel money. A string of special audits on the CDF more than a decade ago had also uncovered “scams” involving legislators and government agencies, and the demand to abolish pork had been resounding for years.

As said before since the toppling of the Marcos regime, Philippine politics has revolved around the Pork Barrel system:

So essentially, the Pork Barrel culture reinforces the patron-client relations from which the Patron (politicos) delivers doleouts and subsidies, which is squeezed from the Pork Barrel projects, to the clients who deliver the votes and keeps the former in power. Hence, the Pork Barrel system is essentially a legitimized source of corruption and abuse of power seen from almost every level of the nation’s political structure, an oxymoron from its original “moralistic” intent (unintended consequences). As the saying goes “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

The warnings Roman orator lawyer and senator popularly known as Publius Tacitus (or Gaius Cornelius Tacitus) applies to the Philippine political setting [Annals 117]

laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt (or the popular variant: The more corrupt the state, the more laws)

The Pork Barrel is dead. Long Live the Pork Barrel.