More bag of tricks from Glo

More bag of tricks from Glo Editorial Daily Tribune 12/22/2006 As if it has never been caught with its hands in the cookie jar, Gloria's scheme and scam gang is again trying to slip in an obvious political racket for use in the coming national elections. The 2007 budget is again on the brink of a stalemate between Gloria and her stooges in Congress and the Senate over a P4.7- billion program to supposedly feed school children. Even at first glance, the program reeks of a scam. The Department of Agriculture (DA) is again figuring prominently in the Gloria scheme as a conduit for the importation of 1 million metric tons of rice for the school feeding program. Sen. Edgardo Angara, apparently giving the purpose of the program the benefit of the doubt, has questioned the need to import rice to feed school children. Rice importation has long been suspected as a huge source of illegal funds in this administration. Importation or outright smuggling of the grain has been associated with a person in Malaca who has a lot of weight to throw around. A grains depot in a supposed transhipment port in Quezon has been the center of the grains smuggling which is essentially done through the usual misdeclaration of imports, say 1 ton of grains is declared when the actual weight is about 3 tons of imports. The 1 million metric tons of imports for the program would make the country the biggest rice importer in Asia. Just this year, the country imported 1.5 million metric tons without the school feeding program. It is harder to envision the altruistic goal of the program than ascribing sinister motives behind it. With the Joc-Joc Bolante fertilizer scam, which has a similar dole-out character of an alibi as the feed the school children program, still being tucked, with a lot of effort, away under Gloria's skirt, the school feeding program would likely fall the same way. Malnutrition cannot be expected to be treated with the handing out of bags of rice as the shallow purpose of the program envisions. What would effectively be Gloria feeding the school children and their parents would obviously be the administration candidates that would expectedly be all over the rice packagings. Gloria's absence of credibility, as borne out by every independent survey done on her, reflects in everything that she does from the the Charter change (Cha-cha) campaign to the various photo opportunities that she pretends as her way of immersing with the people. But that is not the end of it, as there is now yet another scam in the making the school feeding program. It would not be a big surprise if the 2007 budget stalls as a result of an expected insistence by Malaca to have the program budgeted. Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita may be right in saying the school feeding scheme would not be an election gimmick since it forms part of the yearly political stunts of Gloria anyway. With Cha-cha practically in the works again, expect more of the same sleight of hand that Gloria would undertake as she turns her attention to getting a winning ticket going in the 2007 elections, a hard task with the kind of credibility she has built up with the people over the years. She knows that not only would the 2007 elections serve as a referendum on her administration, but also that there is a more fearsome future for her should her congressman-allies, a sizable number of them, lose to opposition congressmen which would then lead to her facing an impeachment bid that may well end up in a conviction by Senate trial. By hook or by crook, Gloria apparently would be working to keep her allies in the majority in Congress and this means pouring in more of the stolen public funds into the candidacies of her administration bets. If she did this in 2004 for herself and her congressmen, when she still had the support of her elite civil society, to force her way into retaining power and position, she certainly will do so again, and more desperately, since her political survival hinges on the number of congressional allies to be voted in by the electorate. It would not be malnutrition that the Gloria scheme would be addressing but the flagging political health of her administration.
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