By DIEGO MORRA
That self-criticism would have earned plaudits among millions of Filipinos had President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared so during his 4th State of the Nation Address (SONA), since telling those responsible for substandard, overpriced infrastructure projects, including the flawed 5,500 flood control projects undertaken during the Duterte administration, when Sen. Mark Villar was secretary of public works.
Even if Marcos Jr. pointed his finger at the usual suspects, four of his fingers point back at him. No one has exonerated him from his responsibility as head of government to ensure that all the funds appropriated for public works projects are spent judiciously. Of course, Marcos Jr. knows how to secure funds for his various projects, which he did when he was still a congressman representing Ilocos Norte. In those years, Marcos Jr. beat all other lawmakers in getting the money for such projects, to the amazement of other legislators.
Marcos cannot escape the blame game, no matter what he doe,s since the buck stops at the Palace. Heaping scorn on the masterminds of faulty infrastructure projects does not absolve him of responsibility for the mess that Mark Villar and other DPWH officials failed to stop. Neither did Marcos Jr. act to kick out all the congressmen and senators who had been fiddling with taxpayer money and pushing their infrastructure projects through companies they own or operated by cronies and relatives. He has not utilized the levers of power available to him to investigate, charge, and prosecute those responsible for the annual flooding, including those with more than 30 reclamation projects in Manila Bay.
For not threatening to imprison these criminals in barongs and suits, Marcos Jr. failed to get people’s attention and win their support, which is much better than the dubious favorability ratings tacked to his name by survey firms. Moreover, he did not address the issue of the oligarchs securing state assets and awards to build and operate airports, control power and water projects, build dams to tap rivers based on dubious water rights, establish renewable energy projects with generous incentives and profitable tariffs, and gain billions from the operations of the Malampaya gas field. These oligarchs, organized as the Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC) have been raking it since July 2022 without any citizen watchdog monitoring them.
Moreover, no report about the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) was mentioned, even as its executives have been working to establish agricultural estates in where landless peasants abound, and where food security is guaranteed by untrammeled food importations. MIF has not succeeded in generating jobs, and failed to spur agricultural and industrial production, its money stashed away in market placements. The so-called sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is not earning as much money as it should despite the purported sanguine prospects of the fund.
The Marcos SONA brag did not dwell on the minimum wage increases that workers have been clamoring for the past two decades. Nothing was said about palay prices guaranteed to provide a decent income for farmers. Even as farmers have clamored for the scrapping of the anomalous Duterte law called the Rice Liberalization Law (RLL), not a single word about it was delivered. These are crucial issues that leave millions of Filipinos in high dudgeon since they affect them day-in and day-out. Worse, Marcos Jr. did not vow to go hammer-and-tongs against rice smugglers and favored traders responsible for keeping grain prices high despite liberalized importations. Instead, you hear about the hype about the P20-per kilo rice, which is not sustainable, and the more the regime imports rice, the more palay farmers lose.
Of course, Marcos Jr. cannot brag about the pittance he secured in his talks with US President Donald Trump. After getting a 19% tariff on Philippine exports, he had to eat the zero tariffs on US cars, wheat, corn, pharmaceuticals and tariffs, assuring that the Philippines will be a dumping ground for highly-subsidized US products as well as a munitions manufacturing hub for the US military. Apologists have argued that the Philippines did not lose in the tariff since US exports would improve local manufacturing, ignorant as they are that the US doesn’t export capital goods anymore. These analysts, among them a defeated politician, have long been servitors of monopoly capital. They argue that only 31% of Philippine exports will be hit by the 19% tariff, unmindful of the fact that the bulk of such exports are microprocessors and electrical circuits for assembly and they all use imported inputs that would suffer from Trump’s added tariffs.
In his SONA, Marcos Jr. bragged that “there are no guerrilla forces anymore” at a time when pitched battles are being waged in several Philippine provinces as the government dithers on resuming the peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and more human rights violations are being committed. Thus far, six journalists have been killed this year, and the perpetrators of those crimes continue to ply their bloody trade. Marcos Jr. also talked about the stop-gap poverty alleviation programs that have reduced poverty levels nationwide and gushed about strides in education just as global surveys prove that more Filipino children are behind in reading, math and science. It is a shame that instead of advancing, they are retreating. It is perhaps time for the State of the Ordinary Pinoy (STOP) Address to commence.
