The hasty ratification of the controversial P500 billion Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) is thoroughly infuriating. Although unsurprising since the Congress and Malacanang have always been home to the greedy ruling classes, the display of flagrant avarice of these bureaucrat capitalists led by Marcos is still sickening to see. While crisis after crisis kill ordinary Filipinos, these congressmen and senators are no better than a dog chasing a bone in their haste to pass MIF. This signifies the grandest scheme for their bureaucratic corruption under the new regime.

It is clear how reactionary lawmakers are apathetic towards the country’s welfare. Even while the whole nation flounders in its tens of trillions of debts and the economy barely hangs on its last threads, they insisted on passing the said law. What’s worse is that its approval came well before the deliberation for what should have been the most pressing bills concerning genuine agrarian reform, the 21 bills on improving the workers’ situation, bills for disaster relief and additional ayuda.

Rather than allocate the people’s hard-earned funds to projects that cater to the farmers, workers, urban poor and the other disenfranchised, the regime chose to gamble the public coffers in projects that only the ruling few will benefit from. Marcos Jr.’s MIF will probably end up the same way of Marcos Sr.’s coco levy funds, Arroyo’s fertilizer scam, Noynoy Aquino’s priority development assistance fund (PDAF) and the rest of the past regimes’ billions of pretentious projects—into the pockets of the ruling classes.

Bureaucrat capitalists’ patent greed and even more aggressive abuse of power shows how completely rotten the current system is. In its wake, the people have a clear mandate: to prevent history from repeating itself. They must persist in challenging and opposing the MIF. They must not allow it to end up like projects such as coco levy funds which until the end did not benefit the people but has continually enriched the biggest capitalists in the country. The entire reactionary government’s betrayal of the Filipino people’s welfare must not go unheeded.