If you got your priorities right, you would have every reason to feel optimistic and outraged at the same time crossing into the new year. That’s because while gains in personal freedoms may be in prospect, setbacks are the case for basic public services.

For the optimism, the inspiration is the trial-court decision fining two red-taggers P2 million. It is nothing short of a landmark decision, if you ask me, given the eternity of hopelessness preceding it. It may well work as an institutional deterrent against the state and military predisposition to brand the slightest tendency to lean left as subversive. It’s a predisposition developed from a postwar indoctrination — thanks to our last colonizer, the United States, and much of the rest of the West — that demonized communism, or, in any case, socialism that went too far to suit their neocolonialist designs.

The example-setting ruling is actually in keeping with a Supreme Court pronouncement making it a crime to tag just anyone as a member of the communist party, thus prejudging them complicit in its plot to bring down the government by force of arms. 

Red-taggers have been encouraged in recent times by a new technology, one that allows them to snipe at targets from a not-easily-tracked perch in cyberspace. Moreover, in recent years, they have been emboldened by a law (the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020) that has given rise to what constitutes an official department for Red-tagging (the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict), the department with which the fined Red-taggers are in fact affiliated.

The Anti-Terrorism Act would itself seem a superfluous law, one that duplicates other laws in the amplitude that weighs down our legal system unnecessarily. Indeed, that law fails to define distinctively the very crime it punishes — terrorism — but then it gave an official excuse to Red-taggers and others with a similar mania.

Having upheld the constitutionality of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Supreme Court appeared to sort of walk back and cue in the lower courts accordingly when it declared Red-tagging as a threat to “a person’s life, liberty, and security.” 

But while we may feel lifted in a rare and no small way by all that, I don’t know that the feeling is enough to assuage the outrage over the “corrupt budget” — that’s exactly what the economist Cielo Magno called it, and I couldn’t agree more; indeed, I’d have joined her out in the street, if only I had been up to it, for an even more activist venting of the outrage.

The national budget is actually a good place to look if you want to have an idea of the kind of Congress that passed it, an idea of the quality of its commitment to public service. And this Congress takes the cake: it helps itself to our money in amounts far beyond what it deserves as our mere hireling, including money meant for our health, our protection, particularly from a neighbor’s bullying, and our children’s education. It’s not unlike our own hired cooks gorging themselves, then throwing us their leavings.

Always keen to suppress or sanitize any remembrance of his family’s own past, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the plundering dictator’s son, says he will exercise his veto power over the budget and disallow outlays he feels undeserved. But that’s as far as his power goes: he cannot reapportion the outlays; he has to return the budget to Congress for a reworking, which it might just do under threat of presidential veto and popular censure.

Not to be overlooked, the budget scandal provides ammunition to Vice President Sara Duterte. Although she has been herself a beneficiary of budgetary misappropriations, in far more scandalous proportions in fact, and therefore has no right to open her mouth on the issue, she can still seize on it for propaganda — to get back at Congress for its own hypocrisy. It was at public hearings in Congress that she was revealed for the monstrous confidential fund that her office, with her obvious approval, had spent and then tried to pass off as legitimate by presenting fraudulent receipts. 

Doubtless, Sara Duterte has the greater potential than Congress to do worse. The budget is reworkable, she is not. She comes from a family intent on perpetuating itself in power but now desperate, its electoral capital being continuously eroded by revelations of its boundless notoriety. Sara is daughter to Rodrigo, the president who ceded our strategic and mineral-rich western sea to the expansionist Chinese bullies and, operating by death squad, left thousands killed extrajudicially in his war on drugs. 

Sara Duterte is definitely the big bad news, although a still developing one, yet to ripen fully for targeting. And she’s doing that nicely on her own, opening her mouth with little or no connection to reason, only to her delusional sense of presidential possibilities.

So, first, the budget. – Rappler.com