P-Noy to ‘bosses’: Help me defy SC

Football World Cup 2014 final results, Catholic version: Benedict XVI trounces Francis I.

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The Land Transportation Office is warning all vehicle owners to not cover their license plates with plastic sheets, whether transparent or shaded. Or else, these will be confiscated, and their vehicles blacklisted.

The notice comes as the LTO issues new-generation security-protected plates. But it covers the old ones too, since plate numbers need to be in plain sight, unobstructed by light-reflecting or -dimming covers.

So why is this LTO official vehicle, a Mitsubishi Adventure van, roaming around town with its plate number “SHS 288” sheeted?

On the van’s sides and rear is painted the LTO tag: R5-03. Likely this denotes it as the regional (Bicol) branch-5’s third vehicle.

It was photographed along busy Epifanio delos Santos Avenue last Friday, July 11, around 9 a.m., inching through traffic, proclaiming to all that the LTO does not follow its own rules.

This seemingly small thing tells lots about our government. For us, laws are mere suggestions, and makers are exempted.

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Filipinos are fierce, willing to fight and die, especially for right. Proof: hundreds of island revolts and three national revolutions against colonizers, not to forget a rebellion against military rule, in 500 years of written history. Included are the struggles of the Moros for self-rule; not included are pre-Spanish mercenary expeditions to prop up or bring down Malay and Indochinese monarchs.

Filipinos readily rise for justice and against wrong. They quietly observe then erupt into concerted action, as in two People Power Revolts and in countless smaller battles for reforms — in the streets and the media, the courts and offices of government.

Against that backdrop of what his “bosses,” the Filipino people are, Noynoy Aquino would be well advised about defending his presidential pork barrel, the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP).

The Supreme Court unanimously has illegalized it. Now he asks the “bosses” to help him defy the 14-0 ruling. Will they, given his reasons:

• Supposedly he had to concoct the DAP after inheriting a slew of sleazy projects and practices from the hated Arroyo regime. In reviewing each one, he was criticized as under-spending, and so had to accelerate disbursing state funds to economic stimulants. Since agencies could not spend fast enough, he took away their excess funds in 2011-2013 and put them in other projects — all with good intentions. After all, the Administrative Code purportedly lets him use “savings” that way.

Those weren’t the only situations P-Noy was coming from, though. His “bosses” know that he knew how President Arroyo repeatedly had impounded slabs of Congress appropriations to dole back to it and the Judiciary — as bribes against impeachment. That’s why he, as opposition congressman then senator, had co-signed the Anti-Budget Impoundment Bill. Yet thence he went, swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other, first scrutinizing where state money was going, then spending it at will. His interpretation of “savings” he has yet to argue before the SC in a motion for reconsideration. But in the ruling he chooses to defy, the SC already has upheld Congress’ definition: two years of non-use. That makes two government branches against one; the latter must concede.

• But no, P-Noy insists that he needed to fast track. The system allegedly breeds Executive-Legislative gridlock. Now supposedly comes the pesky SC further obstructing economic progress.

Whoa! Those lines sound eerily familiar. “Gridlock” was the same justification Dictator Marcos had used in closing down Congress in 1972, and “obstructionist” in bludgeoning the Judiciary. P-Noy’s father had had to suffer and die, as tens of thousand others, for contravening Marcos.

• P-Noy would forget all that. Supposedly the World Bank in March 2012 had applauded his DAP for contributing 1.3 percentage points to GDP in the last quarter of 2011.

That’s only half the story though. The other half is that the WB corrected itself in July 2012, noting that the DAP was a mere realigning of and not fresh funds after all, representing a mere 0.01 percent of the economy at that. In 2013-onwards, the WB shut up about DAP altogether. Ibon Foundation adds that public spending even slowed down with the DAP. Hardly an economic stimulant, it was but 7.6 percent of government spending in 2011, 4.3 percent in 2012, and 1.0 percent in 2013 (see http://ibon.org/ibon_articles.php?id=415). That DAP had no meaningful effect on the “bosses” lives shows in the drop in P-Noy’s poll ratings. Speaking of which, one wonders how intense the dissatisfaction with him would be if the surveys include the 11 million overseas workers — “bosses” who have to toil away from families precisely because, DAP or no DAP, there are no jobs at home.

There’s an option for P-Noy, whose “bosses” are not about to kick him out anyway: Accept the SC verdict, promise not to do DAP again, then show that he stole nothing through a real audit.

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Why do little children get adult diseases? Why do they at such tender age have to suffer untold pain during long hospitalization despite the care of oncologists and endless specialists, then when in “normal” society bear with meanness and insensitivity, and so often retreat into their lonesome world to contemplate that life puzzle called mortality? Most of all, why is cancer?

Director Toff de Venecia takes on the thought-provoking theme of juvenile cancer in Anna Santamaria’s debut production for The Sandbox Collective. The off-Broadway smash “Dani Girl” tells of a young girl’s return bouts with leukemia and her longing for answers to many life’s basic questions, foremost of which is the heart-rending, “Why me?” But it is presented in a heart-warming musical — a child’s perspective of sickness, suffering, and sudden farewells. The performance is so superb that the audience invariably would ask one more question: “Why are those 16-year-old leads so good?”

Featuring: Rebecca Coates, Luigi Quesada, Reb Atadero, Sheila Valderrama, alternating with Mitzie Lao, Lorenz Martinez, and Pamela Imperial.

At the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, RCBC Plaza, Makati, all Fridays to Sundays of July at 8 p.m., with 3:30 p.m. matinees on Saturdays and Sundays.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).

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