you define corruption as the appropriation of taxpayers’ money for personal gain, then this is corruption pure and simple. One sanctioned not just by long-held practice and tradition but by law.
All of which only shows how deeply rooted and tangled corruption is, and how beyond presidential resolve you need other things to push it back. Chief of them public opinion, public pressure, public opprobrium.
Someone like Enrile decides to play Santa Claus with your money, you can’t fight it legally, short of fighting to amend, or scrap, the law itself. But you can fight it morally, by public opinion, by heaping scorn on those who practice it—not quite incidentally by making sure that their children do not get voted into public office and that the values of their fathers are visited upon them.
You can fight it by telling the senators, whether they got P1.6 million or P250,000, whether the division of spoils is “hating kapatid” or hating gabi: You should be ashamed of yourselves you have the gall to accept things like this while the street children sleep in the streets, while the traffic cop grows tubercular from inhaling the traffic smoke. You have a heart, you have a conscience, why don’t you donate all that money to the cause of the NHA employees so their retirement pay, which is nowhere near what you get in a month, will remain intact?
I’m glad the commentators have been riled by this, but the question is, when will the public follow suit? When will we all get furious at this? When will we all go beyond making text jokes out of this? When will we start mounting a campaign against the kapal in the way we have done against the epal? This is appalling too, this is disgusting too:
This is corruption, too.
via Corruption, too | Inquirer Opinion.
Giancarlo Angulo's Blog