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Pork Barrel
islander:
pork barrel
noun, INFORMAL
-used in reference to the utilization of government funds for projects designed to please voters or legislators and win votes
History and etymology
The term pork barrel politics usually refers to spending which is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support, either in the form of campaign contributions or votes. In the popular 1863 story "The Children of the Public", Edward Everett Hale used the term pork barrel as a homely metaphor for any form of public spending to the citizenry. However, after the American Civil War, the term came to be used in a derogatory sense. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term from 1873. (wikipedia)
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islander:
Pork barrel originally came from storing meat. By the 1870s, references to "pork" were common in Congress, and the term was further popularized by a 1919 article by Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review, which reported on certain legislative acts known to members of Congress as "pork barrel bills". He claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving slaves a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout. More generally, a barrel of salt pork was a common larder item in 19th-century households, and could be used as a measure of the family's financial well-being. For example, in his 1845 novel The Chainbearer, James Fenimore Cooper wrote: "I hold a family to be in a desperate way, when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel." (wikipedia)
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islander:
GOTCHA
Pork barrel now 14 times larger than when outlawed
Jarius Bondoc
The Philippine Star
February 4, 2019
As Filipinos were securing their locales from terrorists the past week, lawmakers were busy securing personal pork barrels. Pork plunder is as heinous a crime as mass murder. Both fetch life sentences. Yet terror bombers and lawmakers fear not the consequences. All believe in impunity to do wrong – and even go to heaven for it. Pork barrel partakers have a clear edge over terrorists, though. None of the former goes to jail.
In recent days individual lawmakers’ pork barrels were found to be larger than earlier reported embedded in the 2019 national budget. Lone anti-pork senator Panfilo Lacson at first discovered P2.4 billion for Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo alone, plus P1.9 billion for then-House Majority Leader Rolando Andaya. In defense, the latter spread the guilt around that 99 other congressmen had pork slabs bigger than Arroyo’s. Two of those favored congressmen even got P8 billion and P5 billion, Andaya said, while the 195 others P60 million each. Even the senators had about P8 billion.
That’s around P270 billion, exposed or admitted at the start of Senate hearings on the national budget.
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islander:
As that unfolded the House of Reps summoned Budget Sec. Benjamin Diokno for questioning. The House leaders knew he had allotted P52 billion in the 2019 budget for public works of the faction they had just deposed. Part of that, in fact, was the P60-million pork reward each to the 195 congressmen who went along with the leadership coup d’état. Those clearly were “lumps sums”, one of the Supreme Court’s definitions of pork in outlawing it in 2013. But that’s of no worry to the lard-greedy. What they demanded to know was why Diokno had “parked” most of that P52 billion in Bicol region. Was it for his in-laws there, a vice governor and a mayor, allegedly to commission as usual from bogus flood control projects? So were divulged new ruses for pork barrels. Billions of pesos were being thrown into dikes, ripraps, and canals whose dimensions were easy to fake and costs to pad. And while the projects mostly were in Bicol, the parked funds were in the names of congressmen as far north as Luzon, west as Visayas, and south as Mindanao.
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islander:
Diokno disavowed knowledge of the in-laws’ businesses, and justified the flood controls in this onset of climate change. He did admit, though, that the outlay not only was P52 billion but P71 billion. In chorus congressmen and senators denounced that P19-billion extra. They moved it to health services, but kept quiet about their individual pork barrels.
Came the time last week to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the 2019 budget. Lacson proposed open conferences by the bicameral committee. For, in that committee is where funds are juggled or inserted post-legislation – another of the SC’s definitions of forbidden pork. Congressmen and senators made a show of inviting the press in the earlier hours, but closed the doors by nightfall. The House panel publicized that they’d scrutinize the senators’ own lump sum and post-legislation insertions. That was the signal for horse-trading to begin.
Beforehand Lacson smartly had detailed to the Senate President amounts that certain agencies requested as additional funds. Totaling P30,497,826,800, only P3,965,935,000 was for drug enforcement reviewed by his sub-committee; P26,531,891,800 were for others, stated in open plenary deliberations. He posted them on his official pinglacson.net website while challenging other conferees to be as transparent.
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