The Shadowed Ledger: Power, Appropriation, and the Ontology of Public Theft in Philippine Governance
The Shadowed Ledger: Power, Appropriation, and the Ontology of Public Theft in Philippine Governance Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ June 21, 2026 In the labyrinthine architecture of modern democratic states, where sovereignty ostensibly resides in the collective will of the people, the mechanisms of budgetary allocation emerge not merely as administrative tools but as profound metaphysical instruments. They encode the very essence of the social contract: the transubstantiation of private labor—taxes extracted from the citizenry—into purported public goods. Yet, as Michel Foucault might observe in his analytics of power, or as Jacques Derrida could deconstruct in the aporias of justice and gift-giving, these ledgers are sites where the boundary between stewardship and predation dissolves. The case of budget realignments under former Philippine House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez exemplifies one such dissolution: the alleged transfer of billions of pesos into Maintenance and Other Op...
