May 2015
Known in the Filipino American community for her ties to Ramar Foods, a company which infamously used U.S. law to appropriate the Magnolia brand from the San Miguel Corporation without any licensing whatsoever, Grace Poe has been in the news lately for being tapped by the current Philippine president as a candidate in the next election.
NOT A DEMOCRACY, BUT CELEBRITY RULE
by Rigoberto Tiglao
May 10, 2015
President Aquino’s disclosure that he intends to tap Senator Grace Poe as his and the Liberal Party’s presidential or vice-presidential candidate in the 2016 elections wasn’t at all surprising.
His first choice, Mar Roxas hasn’t, as it is usually put, been “rating well in the polls,” registering pathetic single-digit popularity scores. And if he doesn’t control the next administration, Aquino is likely to end up in jail, what with such obvious anomalies under his term as the P157 billion Disbursement Allocation Program (DAP), which was essentially his hijacking of funds for purposes other than those authorized by Congress.
Aquino has issued about 5,000 SAROs (Special Allotment Release Orders) for purposes of payments unauthorized by the appropriations law, which could translate to that number of separate charges of technical malversation, and taken as a whole, of plunder.
If the next President isn’t his puppet, Aquino at best could spend his life in hearings at the Sandiganbayan, and at worst inside a prison cell. He himself and his sister, indeed, have shown some signs of anxiety over the possibility of Aquino ending up in jail.
It was a psychological slip of the tongue, revealing his deepest fears when he told an audience of Filipinos in Chicago a few days ago: “I’m the only politician in my family’s generation, I might be next [to be jailed]. Every generation in the family, someone gets jailed.”
Tapping Poe, who has zoomed up in popularity polls, for the presidency would be an appealing plan for Aquino. Right now, the talk is for Poe to run for the vice-presidency on the assumption her popularity would lift that of Roxas somehow, just enough — in a four or even five-corner fight — for the tremendous resources of this administration to buy off the required slim margins for victory.
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Fernando Poe, Jr. spent his entire life making movies, and seemed to hate involvement in politics and any social issue. Yet he nearly won as President because of his celebrity status, his name recall. Filipinos could not distinguish between his movie persona as “Panday” and FPJ, the beer guzzler.
Senator Poe… spent most of her working life as an immigrant in the US, working, according to her official website, as a “teacher, a product liaison officer, and a product manager.” She doesn’t seem to be too proud of her working experience in the US, as neither her website nor the Senate databank shows what exactly was the nature and scope of her job in the US, although I remember she worked for some years in a US government agency in a clerical or mid-level job. She has to settle once and for all whether she got to be a US citizen during her stay there for decades.
Read Mr. Tiglao’s full article on The Manila Times website.
Elsewhere: “She is a trapo, a traditional politician, dealing in power and favor, debts and personal advantage… over her mandate to take care of citizens.”
