Until the end of his term as the fifteenth president of the Republic, President Benigno Aquino III has remained faithful to the ideology of the rich, the influential, and the powerful. PNoy is the only son of President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, heiress of the well-to-do landed Cojuangco-Sumulong clans of Tarlac and Rizal respectively, and the eleventh president of the Philippines, and the late Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. PNoy's administration bragged about a very high economic growth that never trickled down to the poor much less the poorest of the poor.

Immediately prior to the end of his term, President Aquino III crowned his presidency with the ultimate cruelty of a veto of the nursing law, that could have pegged the minimum hiring rate of registered nurses at Twenty-Five Thousand Pesos, and could have provided a total, coherent, strategic framework for the practice of the nursing profession, especially in the light of the ASEAN integration and in the expansion of the global labor markets in a borderless, free trade zones for our human capital. If he did not like the hiring rate, he could have retained the other very useful provisions of the law. But he betrayed the hundreds of thousands of Filipino nurses.

Due only to his unwavering loyalty to the business sectors that control the cost of medical care and monopolize hospital business, by a single stroke of his pen, totally went against the decision of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. By his powerful veto power, the outgoing president totally ignored the well-being of the nurses who are largely overworked, underpaid, and usually exploited and unrecognized. The President has not seen, nor felt the long and difficult struggles of the nurses as they go on with their selfless work, and unqualified devotion to their patients, day, night, and even on holidays and way into the grave yard shifts and the high risks and hazards of their jobs.

This is the same President Aquino who vetoed the law that would have increased the SSS retirees' pensions by a measly two P2,000. His lame attempt at reason was that he believed the SSS high priests and bureaucrats' crooked prognosis that the SSS funds would be depleted after two years or so. This is the same president who allowed the SSS commissioners to amass indecent amounts of perks, allowances and bonuses, while the pensioners are gifted with pittance, insufficient even to keep their bodies and souls together, in the twilights of their sad and lonely lives.

This is also the same president under whose administration, the DAR failed or refused to distribute to the tenant-beneficiaries of the Comprehensive Agrarian Law, the Hacienda Luisita, his family's thousands of hectares of landholding. This is also the president who is alleged to have rewarded senators with much pork barrel for voting to impeach the late Chief Justice Renato Corona. This was exposed by Senator Jinggoy Estrada, who was jailed for alleged plunder or so. Corona headed the Supreme Court that ordered the distribution of Hacienda Luisita to the tenants. And so, we have reasons to conclude that the outgoing president is not only anti-labor but also anti-poor. The only good news is that his term will soon end, and his successor is one who will do exactly the opposite of what PNoy did and the lot that he did not do for the people.

josephusbjimenez@gmail.com.