Do you agree to abolish the pork barrel?
Before I proceed to that question, here are some information about pork barrel.
Pork barrel is the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to bring money to a representative’s district. The usage originated in American English. In election campaigns, the term is used in derogatory fashion to attack opponents. Scholars, however, use it as a technical term regarding legislative control of local appropriations.
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.After the American Civil War, however, the term came to be used in a derogatory sense. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term from 1873.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.
The Essay on Abolishing the Pork Barrel
On its face, the pork barrel system appears to be a democratic way of apportioning government resources. Inherited from the United States, this scheme is supposed to allocate funds equally to every congressional district to be used for the residents’ most urgent needs. And who know the needs of these congressional communities better than the people they elected to represent them? Legislators’ job. ...
Am I agree? Yes I am. Pork barrel I think should be abolished. Some people think some people have benefited from pork barrel money and that abolishing it will be like throwing the baby out along with the bath water. But that is
really the sort of Robin Hood mentality that has no place in a modern 21st Century society. The existence of the pork barrel is premised on the notion that the Executive branch of government is focused on the “national” level and does not think local enough. And, to follow the logic further, delegating the need for local considerations to legislators will solve that problem.
Lots of people, according to legend, benefited from Robin Hood’s altruistic banditry. But to institutionalize Robin Hoodery as a routine business-as-usual means to keep “local needs” addressed is a moronic proposition. That’s the same kind of thinking that turned jeepneys from the quaint samples of “Filipino ingenuity” back in 1946 to the enormous intractable socio-economic problem that they are today. Sure, lots of people “benefit” from jeepneys. But the jeepneys’ lack of coherence as a modern system of moving people en masse stares us in the face today like an Alcoholics Anonymous facilitator.
The parallels between the pork barrel and the jeepney are very evident. Pork barrel disbursment of “development funds”, like the jeepney, does not lend itself to a transparent system that could be governed with some semblance of coherence. And this is why the whole regime comes across — rightly so — as an institutionalised national scam. We didn’t need Janet Lim Napoles (if the allegations are true) to put the “scam” in the “PDAF scam”. The Priority Development Assistance Fund has always been a scam. Filipinos were just too dumb to realise it over the last three decades. Indeed, the pork barrel, like the jeepney infestation, are products of short-sighted populist politics. Both are products of wrong arguments that have been allowed to win for too long by a people not exactly renowned for arguing intelligently.
The Essay on “Negrenses And Bacoleños Urged: Join No To Pork Barrel Rally” By: Mark Jason M. Berio
“Negrenses and Bacoleños urged: Join No to Pork Barrel Rally” By: Mark Jason M. Berio Over thousands of angry Filipinos marched through out the different cities in the Philippines to demand for the abolition of Pork Barrel, the misused fund for legislators’ pet projects. The biggest protest due to official corruption was aimed to Benigno Aquino’s administration. Negrenses and Bacoleños urged to ...
Pork barrel apologists harp on what they describe as the “important point and outcome” of the pork barrel gravy train; “All that matters is for the beneficiaries to get what they need. In full,” to quote the pompous assertion of a certain bozo. Sounds nice on paper, doesn’t it? That’s like saying that what’s ultimately important is that jeepney passengers get to
where they want to go — even if it means allowing their means to do so to foul up traffic all over the metropolis and turn our roads into Highways to Hell in the process. If we are to use the same logic with the pork barrel, that’s like trying to implement measures to ensure that everything stolen by Robin Hood from the King is spent on putting breadcrumbs on peasants’ tables. Good luck with that “fix”. It’s no wonder Robin Hood’s men are so merry. They’re all laughing all the way to the bank.
If we want “micro level assistance” (now supposedly currently enabled by the almighty pork barrel funding) to continue, then a more systematic way of achieving that should be put in place (or done properly where it already exists) where it REALLY belongs — in the Executive Branch. We all talk about “freedom of information” like we are some kind of expert about what the term means. Yet many of our high-horsed social media barons fail to understand what it takes to mine useful information from transaction-intensive operations. You need control measures in place to capture the data in a form readily convertible to said “information”. When money is palmed over to oinking politicians at the whim of presidents starved for their “cooperation”, there will be no such information.
The short answer to idiotic calls to retain the pork barrel is that a mechanism to get resources allocated to address “micro needs” already exists in the Executive Branch.
It does not take political “experts” to see that the whole point in being a duly-elected legislator is to ensure that constituencies are well-represented when crafting laws. They should leave the execution of those laws (and the use of public funds to do so) to the Executive Branch. That is why said branch is named as such.
Essay About Philippine’s Pork Barrel
SO MUCH has been said about “abolish pork barrel system” but something seems missing. Has anyone suggested any alternative? But is pork the real root of corruption? Let us say a person is convicted of rape. When asked why he did such crime, he would say it is because he found the lady beautiful and tempting. Should everyone go and kill all beautiful women so that rape will end? That ...
Trying to “fix pork without hurting those who really need it” is like trying to modernize public transport without abolishing the jeepney.Change always hurts. Only people who lack imagination and routinely face the future with a pathetic lack of courage aspire for painless change. And we wonder why China kicks Filipino ass.
