POLITICIANS have found the perfect antidote to the nosy media.
Troll farming has produced benefits that go beyond meat and milk. Public opinion is bent or shaped by an army of social media robots, anonymous or otherwise, organic or otherwise, who may be unleashed to attack and defend under the baton of a concert master.
Before the advent of social media, a “troll” is a term in folklore used to depict an ugly creature who hid in caves spooking people.
***
Today a troll is one who cyberbullies by harassing and attacking others in social media. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and generally hateful speech is the modern weapon of choice against those who do not conform to what the trolls are selling as the popular will.
Trolling subjugates the victim to submission and attracts others to a bandwagon of bullies.
Critics need not be silenced. Their voices can now be drowned in a charivari of irreverent, fallacious, and crooked social media campaigns funded by those who seek power, or those who, when in power, strive to hold power in perpetuity.
***
There are muffled voices of protest to the grant of confidential and intelligence funds to civilian agencies of government.
The fear is that some of these funds may have been earmarked for the troll farms of politicians.
For example, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “KoKo” Pimentel III said last week that the Office of the Vice President can still function without the requested P500-Million in confidential funds for 2o23.
After all, the OVP has been gifted with more than three times the budget of the former holder of the office.
Pimentel made sense when he said that “intelligence work or law enforcement work is not your assignment. So as much as possible we will reduce or delete confidential funds.”
***
In the tedious allocation of scarce resources, the Department of Education, which the Vice President also heads, has somehow managed to snag P150 Million in confidential funds from the national budget. This translates to P650 Million in such funds at the disposal of the Vice President.
Emphasis must be placed on “scarce resources.”
Please take note that the combined allocation for confidential funds placed at the discretion of the Vice President has almost equaled the total OVP budget for 2022 under the former Vice President.
***
Taxes paid by you and me are the principal source of income by which the government operates. Those employed in the public and private sectors feel it by the automatic deductions in their salaries. Everyone feels it in the imposition of taxes on the purchase of goods and services.
The other sources of revenue do not generate as much cash for the government. Shortfalls are barely covered by the sale of capital assets (public lands and buildings), grants or aids, and public borrowings.
There certainly is a reason why Congress holds the proverbial purse of the government. As direct representatives of the people it is their duty to wisely apportion public expenditure.
***
It is the executive department that proposes the national budget.
Even then, the legislature has been assigned the power of the purse in that it thinks of the taxes needed to fund the activities of government, enacts the law by which to apportion the taxes that it had raised, and computes the amount of money that will make those activities possible.
That is the function and duty of Congress as an institution.
Have the individual members of Congress complied with their constitutional duty to guard the public purse?
Or are they acting as a “super-majority” that seeks to dictate the outcome of the next presidential elections?/PN
