#title:Sabsab<br>
@@@@@<h1>Sabsab</h1><!-- Cordillera People's Democratic Front, Simon "Ka Filiw" Naogsan Sr., Spokesperson, August 26, 2009 </em><br><br>
The Cordillera People's Democratic Front joins the enraged Filipino masses in denouncing the latest acts of extravagance and insensitivity by Gloria Arroyo and her entourage for spending more than a million pesos for "simple" dinners while on a working visit to the US. The Cordillera people have a term that aptly describes this despicable gluttony –"sabsab." Aside from their dinners, Arroyo and her entourage spent $3,500 per day for her Waldorf Astoria suite and $950 per day for each of the 60 rooms at for the congressmen and others in her entourage.<br>
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The Commission on Audit reported that Gloria Arroyo racked up P2.7 billion in expenses in her 57 foreign trips since 2003. Her US junket at a time of her regime's so-called austerity and poverty alleviation program reflects the extreme levels of her hypocrisy. The cost of her so-called simple dinners in the US would have gone a long way in increasing the number of barangay health stations from the present 580 out of 1,174 barangays, or reducing the backlog of 16,400 seats, 647 classrooms in the Cordillera. Five (5) of the six Cordillera provinces belong to the poorest 20 provinces in the country. While Arroyo and her cohorts junket, Cordillera peasants struggle to eke out a living in harsh terrain.<br>
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Gloria Arroyo's frequent and expensive trips abroad are just a small part of her vast web of corruption. There are other scandals such as the ZTE-NBN deals, the colossally overpriced Diosdado Macapagal Highway, and the overpriced and substandard Cordillera SONA road projects where half the Halsema road still unfinished even at the cost of P30 million per kilometer.<br>
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Presidential apologist Gary Olivar adds insult to injury when he declares that had it not been for "the fruits of Arroyo's trips, the economy would be in a worse position today." The CPDF asks, what benefits have accrued to the national minorities of the Cordillera? On the contrary, every foreign trip made to entice foreign investments, the natural richness of the Cordillera is dangled as a prize ripe for the picking.<br>
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Who is Cong. Ferdinand Romualdez who supposedly paid for Gloria Arroyo's $20,000 simple dinner in New York? It would interest the Cordillera people to know that Romualdez sits in the Executive Committee of Benguet Corporation, one of the three largest mining firms in the region. Is the lavish dinner, in gratitude for the release of the PCGG of the previously sequestered assets of the Marcoses in Benguet Corp, such that the Romualdezes now own more than 44% of the mining firm? Romualdez also has investments in other mining firms such as Lepanto and Atlas Mines and in Aboitiz Equity, which now operates one of the dams in the Cordillera region.<br>
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For the national minorities, the true feasts will be partaken when corrupt regimes are ousted, and when a truly representative people's democracy that is taking rootin the countryside has finally emerged victorious.<br>
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