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Aerial survey of Metro Manila conducted as Glenda exits A Philippine Air Force helicopter crew scans the ground below for signs of damage during an aerial inspection of Metro Manila conducted by members of the NDRRMC, DPWH, DSWD, and DND after Typhoon Glenda exited Luzon on Wednesday, July 16. GMA News
Glenda uproots Malacanang’s century-old acacia An acacia tree said to be more than 100 years old inside the Palace grounds is uprooted by Typhoon Glenda’s powerful winds on Wednesday, July 16.
Celeb Scoop page 28
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UK & Europe Edition
July 2014 / Fortnightly
Volume 5 - Number 14
www.hello-philippines.com
EDITORIAL: WHY BUTCH ABAD SHOULD RESIGN, AND WHY PNOY SHOULD LET HIM GO PRESIDENT Aquino on Friday rejected an offer by Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad to resign. In the face of growing public clamor for an accounting of the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), preferably by the man who conceived of it, the President stood by his most trusted Cabinet member, adviser, and mentor. “Even our most vociferous critics grant that DAP has benefited our people,” Mr. Aquino said. To accept Abad’s resignation, he then added, “is to assign to him a wrong and I cannot accept the notion that doing right by our people is a wrong.” It was merely unfortunate, then, that the Supreme Court had assigned to Abad and PNoy a wrong, advancing the notion that, wouldn’t you know it, “doing right by our people” (or having the intention to do so) can indeed, at times, actually go so, so wrong. What the Supreme Court ultimately established about the DAP is that this refers to creatively, dubiously, and finally illegally booked “savings” transferred unconstitutionally to different branches of government, in the process making a mockery of
the separation of powers, and dangerously upsetting the fine system of checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. Some consequences of Abad’s brainchild are already manifest: Neither Malacañang, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), nor even the Commission on Audit (an independent body that got an improper allocation of DAP funds) do not quite know where to begin to account for the disbursements. The extent of how DAP has compromised every pillar and independent agency of the Republic, nobody can yet ascertain, but clearly, the questions and implications of its wanton implementation will reverberate for months and years to come. The stubborn position of Malacañang – which propounds that there are no regrets, no need to apologize, and no one to be held accountable - is therefore untenable. It is an arrogant statement at best. At worst, it perilously asks for more trouble for all of us. Malacañang asks: How can the Supreme Court on one hand praise the results of DAP, but then on the other, hold that people should be held accountable for a grotesque creation? The answer, of course, is
precisely that the Supreme Court is composed of Justices, not fascists. The Court is indeed open to acknowledging the benefits of DAP (and, actually, for that matter, of PDAF) and even allowed that people and programs that benefited in good faith need not automatically stop their programs or return the funds released to them. DAP, moreover, ostensibly allowed the government to pump-prime the economy, accelerating spending where Mr. Aquino had been accused of standing still. But all of that is merely by way not only of acknowledging the rationale behind the creation of DAP, but also of establishing how this was ultimately a self-serving trick of creative accounting. The Aquino Administration was not only slow, it was deliberately (even proudly) slow. In its first two years of office, its obsession with being squeakyclean had it sitting on its hands, on our funds, like “the worthless servant” who received one talent and went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. Smote on the cheek by public dismay, the administration created DAP to instigate some quick impression – some economists say illusion - of spending.
The problem lay in the burying. For the Constitution does not allow that as saving. And where there were no savings, there could not have been the open-ended funds to be creative with in the first place. Mr. Aquino and Mr. Abad lament: “So it seems we disagree. But why are we being punished? A justice system that presumes innocence until guilt is proven also, by definition, assumes good faith. We have done good with that money, we intended nothing but good, have we not? You said so yourself.” Two leaps in logic aggravate the exasperation of the public taken as fools. One, being called out as wrong is not the same as being punished. And two, good deeds and good intentions do not equate with good faith. Meanwhile, it is not true that the Supreme Court has already persecuted the President or any of its Cabinet men. All that the Justices have done is to underscore circumstantial evidence of bad faith. Mr. Abad is not only secretary of DBM, not only a respected professor of public policy and governance, he was a congressman, as well, Chairman of the House Appropriation Committee no less. Continue to page 4