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Numbers

HE SAYS

Aldrin Cardon

10/27/2008

Amid the financial crisis gnawing at the strongest economic pillars of the world, Gloria Arroyo is seeing numbers at a capricious pace.

At best, she churned out a hypothetical number that somehow exposed what she doesn’t want us to know — that the Philippines is vulnerable to the crisis as any country dependent on the United States and other big capitalist enterprises are.

The hypothetical number refers to the $10 billion fund supposedly coming from the World Bank. In Gloria’s hypothetical world, these would cushion whatever downfall would follow the US economic crunch on this side of the world. Only, it doesn’t exist, and she was rebuffed by the Worled Bank, reiterating there is no such money.

For a day, however, it gave Gloria some additional blush-ons. Some extra points — numbers — that made her look good. It also gave her some strong pillars to lean on as suspicions the Philippine economy is not as strong as it is being seen on the surface.

That’s how Gloria wants us to see, a strong Philippine economy that we see only in television advertisements, all of them paid for by government-owned corporations which use the money to propagandize what good things Gloria and her bright boys could claim.

Just a sample: 2001, this and this amount; 2002, these numbers; 2003, these figures; 2004, go figure…

Yet, in what could be a clear admission of jitters that are sending Malacañang into wild night chills, she announces a need to create a P100 billion buffer fund to insulate the Philippines from whatever effects the US recession would have on our crawling economy.

On the surface, whatever buffer fund available could help an ailing economy, but with the kind of negative numbers churning out of Malacañang since Day Two of Gloria’s reign, we cannot help but feel the night chills, too. Even in broad daylight.

It’s a copy of George Bush’s bailout plan, though she doesn’t have the $700 billion George Bush has to save his nation from falling into its first real — not hypothetical — depression the Americans last saw in 2009.

It’s not the New Deal, but it would open opportunities to prosper in many deals — some of them could be shady, like the ZTE (remember?) — that all of us would want to avoid.

And then, it grew to P145 billion, with even our money becoming part of the deal. What? I would not part with a cent to save Gloria from her mess, no!

Didn’t she waste enough money through her dole-outs, another copy of Bush’s allowance package to unemployed Americans, many of them losing their jobs recently. That cost us P4 billion. Ahhh, numbers.

But it would hurt us later, really.

Even if government is aiming to boost our confidence in the banking system by doubling the insurance of our deposits, anxiety continues to grow as many among us have learned our lessons from, say the near collapse of the pre-need insurance system in the recent past, that we won’t easily bite what is being offered in the table, even if it is being served on a silver platter.

It’s the plans to pump-prime the economy that the people are afraid of, it’s their experience with government under Gloria’s reign that they have become wary of.

Anomalies have been exposed and they have not been acted upon, putting Arroyo in the list of the most corrupt. In the minds of the people, she has become the worst president this country ever had.

The deportation of Joc-joc Bolante, the man behind the P728-million (numbers!) fertilizer fund scam, from the US isn’t helping Gloria any.

Bolante would only revive questions of people’s faith, or lack of it, in Gloria. And even if she pumps more billions into member her clique’s pockets, there is nothing left that could save her from the mess around her.

Ahh, the numbers.

There seems to be a dizzying waltz of ones and zeroes in Gloria’s mind, non-hypothetical binaries that meld into beautiful pictures in your photoshop, or great accounting figures in your excel. But the programs in Malacañang’s hard drive deceive, if they don’t cheat us outright.