The P10 billion pork barrel scam: The Leviathan revisited
How can a select few in our country freely appropriate billions of people’s money to themselves without transparency and accountability? How can a select few squander so much of the people’s money without any sense of guilt? How can a select few steal billions of the people’s money without any fear of reprisal or being punished?
Now that a whistleblower had openly exposed the fraud and the affected officials are all busy denying, obfuscating, or feigning ignorance to extricate themselves out of the mess, the fact remains that the nation’s coffer had been emptied with an estimated P10 billion worth of alleged misused pork barrel fund as reporter by the Commission on Audit (COA).
Perhaps this sort of scam is not new. Maybe, it has been going on for a long time. I’d even say that these scammers simply picked up where our former greatest dictator-scammer left off.
The corruption is so endemic and embedded in our body politic that I wholeheartedly agree with President PNoy's observation on who and what is to be blamed. As he aptly puts it: “officials to blame, not just system” (The Philippine Star, August 21, 2013).
Because of PNoy’s Machiavellian utility of the PDAF and his unyielding stance against its abolition, perhaps it was the intention of his spin to displace the blame away from the rotten pork barrel system towards erring individuals. And yet, he unwittingly did recognize that the problem does exist and that it is also systemic. For me, this intersection of the personal issue with the structural issue is the crux of the matter.
Reflecting on this, I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the relevance, of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th Century philosopher who so perceptively wrote The Leviathan as he brooded on how to curb the “summum malum” (greatest evil) impulse that is driving individuals in their natural state to seize power in a sort of “bellum omnium contra omnes ("the war of all against all").
And talking of “war of all against all” one of the alleged scammers to date, owns 28 houses and condos and 30 pricey car
