Press Release
July 22, 2009

Press statement of Senator Loren Legarda

ON OBAMA-GMA MEETING

US President Obama should heed well the advice of an official of the Washington think tank Heritage Foundation not to make any statement that would appear to encourage President Arroyo to change the constitution to perpetuate her hold on power. This would be viewed not only as an interference in Philippine internal affairs, but worse as a repudiation of President Obama's oft-stated principle for adherence to democratic principles.

Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation, is well informed when he said that Filipinos are "obsessed" with with the possibility that GMA would "hang on to power" after 2010 and that any move to this direction would have a "destabilizing" effect on the country.

The Filipinos are not only "obsessed," they are enraged against what they perceive to be a plot by GMA and her allies to call an illegal constitutional assembly to amend the Constitution to enable her to continue in power at 2010. Such a move would not only lead to further destabilization, it could lead to turmoil and another people power.

ON 'UNDERSPENDING'

The suspicion by monetary officials that the "lag" in government spending in the first half of the year is politically motivated is unnerving. According to the Department of Finance, government spending during the period reached only P699.1 billion, which was below the P736.5 billion target.

This is surprising since the Congress has appropriated a P330 billion stimulus package to cope with the effects of the global economic crisis. The package was in addition to the national budget and is therefore expected to boost government spending to promote more economic activity, including consumption spending and employment opportunities.

The only plausible explanation for this strange and irresponsible behavior is that the administration is "saving" money for a downpour of government spending during the election year of 2010. The first time our country reached the 7 percent GDP growth was in 2007 during an election year, following another spending spree in 2004, all due to election spending. In other words, the administration is again planning to rope up the Filipino people using their own funds, or cooking them in the cauldron of electoral fraud using their own fat.

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