From the Voice of the Gentle Breeze: The Church Speak

The greedy and corrupt officials of this administration continue to drain the nation’s wealth from the blood and sweat of poor Filipinos.

They gloated at the cash flow from the 12 percent expanded value added tax and further emptied the pockets of Juan de la Cruz. The P42 billion budget deficit did not stop them from amassing wealth and power at the expense of the poor. This time, corruption has taken a new face. Fattening of the pockets is done not by dipping their fingers into the government coffers but through government deals with multinational companies that are gloating over our vast track of lands, marine resources, mining and of course, the lure of cheap labor in the country.

The dwindling nation’s wealth is driving the vultures to fight over a piece of the kickback pie. You know what happens when vultures fight. It is messy and bloody.

The Arroyo camp entered into anomalous contracts including the ZTE deal, the cyber education deal, the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA), among others, without due consideration of the people’s interests. In these treasonous acts, the government virtually sold out national sovereignty to foreign business. It entered into the 329-million dollar deal with China to connect our agencies into the technology superhighway when all these agencies are cash-strapped. How ambitious of the government to venture into such project when in fact, many regional or provincial offices of our government line agencies do not have telephone connections? Granted that the government can inter-connect all these line agencies, will it translate to better services that would uplift the millions of poor Filipinos, increase job rates and shelter the growing number of urban poor who are driven out from their communities?

It is the height of lunacy that we commit the Filipino people in a 25-year loan while the next generation to come is bound to pay our ballooning foreign debt.

It has been noted that the government does not have to seek the Chinese’s expertise in order to achieve a goal like the broadband network project. The cost of this anomalous deal rose to 329 million dollars due to the huge kickbacks of the First Gentleman and officials close to the Arroyos. The crooks in Malacañang are getting bolder. Come to think of it. How much did it cost them to sell our patrimony and national sovereignty as a nation? The kickbacks that we are hearing are not only in millions of pesos but in dollars.

What will happen to us if these anomalous deals are left unchecked? Foreign business would continue to extract huge profits at the expense of the urban and rural poor. For sure, when this country is in tatters, the crooks can readily escape with their dirty money.

Now that these anomalous deals have been exposed, knives are flying around. The knives are now aimed at the door of Malacañang.The broad masses are awakened. Obviously, this regime clings at every straw that it can hold. It might succeed at creating diversionary tactics, but the ZTE scandal and the bribery issues have dealt a big blow on it political foundation. It certainly created bigger cracks in the fulcrum of its power.

As church people we are scandalized at the treasonous acts and huge kickbacks being exposed in the Senate hearings amid the extreme poverty that is stalking the nation nowadays. We condemn the liars, the thieves, and the wicked. We will not be silent while the corrupt officials are bloating in their crookedness. We must loudly resist and raise our prophetic voices against the blatant sell out of our nation’s patrimony and all these acts of shameless corruption.