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ON PDAF SCAM | My beef with pork

By: Raffy Aquino, Special to InterAksyon.com
August 22, 2013 3:17 PM

(Raffy Aquino, a former student activist, is a lawyer. He was also an officer of the Sandigan para sa Mag-aaral at Sambayanan or Samasa, a student political party at the University of the Philippines in the 1980s and 90s. This is posted here with his permission.)

The most compelling argument I’ve heard for retaining the PDAF is that it mobilizes Congress to facilitate the delivery of much-needed goods and services to the public – a vital function often held up by the corruption and irrationalities within the executive department.

Compelling as it may seem, the argument is nevertheless a false one. One of the major reasons behind the executive’s gravely flawed delivery systems is patronage politics, and one of the major drivers of patronage politics is, by definition, pork itself.

Pork is funded by ALL taxpayersbut is dispensed only to specific sectors of the population in exchange for political support for the dispensing power. Thus, by definition, whether in the US or here, pork is taxpayers’ money channeled to private ends for the benefit of narrow political interests.

In Congress, pork allows individual lawmakers to buy loyalties, feed dependencies, and reinforce their political dominance in the patron-client hierarchies within their respective districts. At the same time, the power to release or withhold the pork also allows the executive also to buy loyalties, feed dependencies, or neutralize opposition in Congress.

Pork-driven patronage politics distorts any clear and rational identification of societal needs, dissipates the resources that could have fulfilled these needs, and lames and corrupts the systems for the delivery of whatever resources remain. Thus, the public suffers, the political elites grow fat off the pork, and the entire dysfunctional system is replicated and perpetuated.

Napoles provides us citizens the perfect excuse to intervene, and hopefully break this vicious process of replication and perpetuation. And because the PDAF is a budgetary item, the call to abolish the pork should be directed, first and foremost, at Congress. In this sense, perhaps the executive’s move to suspend any further dispensation (to lawmakers) from the pork barrel may be appreciated as a veiled expression of support for the movement toward a pork-free regime.

In any event, the ball is clearly in the public’s court - or perhaps more appropriately, the knife and fork are squarely in our hands.