G loria M. Arroyo really thinks that we, the Filipino people, are 92-million idiots.

A stimulus package is over an above already-appropriated and approved budget. What she has done is package all government programs and called them a stimulus package.

These programs are still looking for funding, and may not even be funded at all, and so where is the stimulus?

The stimulus is to ensure leviathan government expenditures instead of belt-tightening. Public expectation is being set at a possible reversal of recession factors. But what really is the presidential agenda?

Arroyo's stimulus is a smokescreen to providing a broad and wide base of funds to fleece for her own fundraising for 2010 and beyond.

*Editor’s Note: Readers may like to browse a related article that proposes alternative to the Arroyo Dispensation’s economic-stimuli package, An Overseas-Filipino Political Party’s Rx for the "Great Economic Depression" in the Philippines

In my recent trip to Manila, I found out that whistleblowers no longer use the acronym "SOP" or "standard operating procedure" when referring to the 10-to-20-percent regarded as "given" to be lost in transactional corruption.

Under the Arroyo regime, a new acronym has surfaced. This is "RTS" or "return to sender" where more than half or fifty-percent of what Malacañang devolves to the departments and bureaus as program funds are expected to be returned to the private pocket of the First Kotong to add to their "survival fund" after they move out of power in 2010.

The war chest is intended to finance their candidate in the 2010 elections who will serve as their "liability" insurance after Gloria Arroyo exits from power. If their candidate loses, the First Kotong have gathered billions more to fund their legal and propaganda defense as scores of criminal-and-plunder cases hit the outgoing President soonest her presidential immunity is lifted. 

All this RTS is public money. The Arroyos thought Jocjoc Bolante perfected the modus operandi using the fertilizer scam as model... until patriotic whistleblowers came out of the woodworks. But instead of slowing down as the Philippine economy decreased in real productivity relying primarily just on OFW remittances. What is more disturbing is that the First Kotong even picked up steam and has gone to full throttle in their kleptocracy not sparing even World Bank-funded projects, thanks to a pliant-and-corrupt military brass.

So what to watch is not the stimulus but the RTS from the stimulus.

What disturbs me is the impunity and seeming lust for danger Gloria perpetrates in all this. Never mind her Assumption Convent education and sterling Dadong Macapagal pedigree, she has more than trebled her expertise at using the people's money never to stimulate production but accumulate more and more ill-gotten wealth.

Obviously, she has not read George Santayana who said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

The ghost of Marcos is still roaming Philippine politics, and if Marcos for all he was, was not vindicated by history, how much more this kleptocrat-penguin turned plunder- leviathan who turned a genuine opportunity to reform the nation into another bacchanalian feast for the ruling class. # # #