By Michael Lim Ubac
Philippine Daily Inquirer
After slamming President Benigno Aquino III’s proposed P21-billion fund to be doled out in cash to the poorest of the poor, Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo finds herself under scrutiny for what appears to be P2.2 billion in pork barrel going to her district in Pampanga.
“Before she left office, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo used the presidency to engineer perpetually high funding for the second district of Pampanga,†Akbayan party-list Rep. Walden Bello said in Thursday’s press conference at the House of Representatives.
Bello and another Akbayan representative, Kaka Bag-ao, said Arroyo had her own explaining to do.
Bello blamed Arroyo for the aggressive stance of the Aquino administration in reducing poverty incidence in the country.
“That, if you are in a position of having to fulfill your millennium development goals of halving the poverty rate by (year) 2015, and all the previous administration left you with, in fact, is an increased rate of poverty, then you have to be innovative and you have to devolve (the distribution of government subsidies) in the way that we have the CCT program at this point in time,†Bello said.
Bello said “GMA’s (Arroyo’s initials) highway robbery plunged Congress into a budget dilemma.â€
He said the huge sum of taxpayer’s money going to Arroyo’s district contributed to the “crisis†in the on-going budget deliberations.
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