“If the truth threatens power, it will be buried under noise” is the singular quote which best describes the attempts by a visibly squirming corrupt ruling class to control the flood control thievery stories.
Spoken by the late American progressive theorist Noam Chomsky, the quote speaks to the idea that those who hold power can ably cast spells of misleading cacophonies should their mystifying sorceries over the power structures no longer suffice.
Chomsky’s quote, in fact, contextualizes the Palace’s snarl to the House last week to “clean your house first.” The Palace took strong umbrage to some House members’ spin “shifting the blame for their own corruption and failures onto the executive branch.”
Agitated Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin didn’t identify who the House culprits were nor did he elaborate on what he meant. But the Palace press office said his remarks were in response to the House’s failed attempt to return the proposed 2026 national budget to the executive over erroneous entries.
Immediately, the Palace’s bellicosity was seen as the opening round of hostilities between two branches of government.
But, upon further reflection, the brewing tiff could also be handily perceived as a small bubble bursting on the surface of a boiling cauldron.
A boiling cauldron which is stewing an elitist, numb ruling class whose menace not only ate into our body politic but also imperiled our very bodies and souls once turbocharged by unending rains and floods.
So, before the brewing tiff shrinks into just another melodrama, emptied of all resonance, we all must be reminded that our swelling communal self-awareness about the massive flood control frauds is also an ongoing exorcism of malevolent corruption and brazen privilege by a shameless few, now fearing jail time and asset forfeitures.
We have no choice but to proceed with an exorcism too. For, as eminent Filipino sociologist Randy David said last week, “The real face of corruption has yet to be exposed. It is embedded in the elaborate system that allows a few to transfer much of the nation’s wealth into their pockets — by both illegal and legal means.”
Amid the storm over the flood control frauds, therefore, the noisy cornucopia of “guilty consciences” and due diligence promises is elaborate hypocritical double-speak by an unraveling ruling class.
In fact, our senators and congressmen are precisely giving up, without too much difficulty, nothing of real consequence to the country — their staged hypocritical apologies won’t change things for the better.
Our senators and congressmen, in short, are just waiting for the storm to blow over, for the devastating floods to subside.
In other words, our ruling political class has no real appetite for relinquishing its stranglehold on political institutions and bureaucratic processes, which they have learned to abuse and exploit for ulterior ends, much less undertake genuine reforms and proper management of these institutions and processes.
At this point, we should be wary of the ruling class’s mischievous gumption to vigorously push misconceptions that the equally greedy contractors — the ones who gave corruption a public face and have become the lightning rod of public anger and mud-throwing protests — acted alone in raiding the public coffers.
The hollow talk of our ruling political class to go after fraudsters is but a lame attempt to make us forget the commonsensical epithet in corruption — there is no corrupt contractor without a corrupt politician.