In a European class society, the ruling class invariably blame the “sans-culottes,” those who wear “sabots” or working-class shoes with wooden soles (incidentally, it is the root word for “sabotage”) and those who labor themselves to death for 14 hours a day for their own penury, and the peasants for being the nobility’s burden during the Irish famine.

In India, the British led by Winston Churchill instigated a famine in India by controlling food production and shipping grain away from Indian producers to satisfy the rumblings of British bellies, tossing millions of Indians—children, adults and the elderly—into funeral pyres before their date with the angel of death was due. Similarly, in our class society, the poor have been tagged as the usual suspect for anything unfortunate that happens. They are blamed for choosing the unfit as presidents in exchange for some filthy lucre, and condemned for being eternal followers, not citizens with moral compass but zombies who are alive but mentally dead.

Now, the very same victims of flooding, those who inhabit near the waterways and barely earn the minimum wage daily are now the culprits, most guilty for the deluge that fell on July 24, 2024, as if they wished Typhoon Carina to dump its wrath on Metro Manila. They are not lily-white, no doubt, and some may have taken liberties with tossing their trash into waterways after they had gone uncollected for weeks. This bad habit should end and consultants asked by taipan Lucio Tan to help cut down detritus along the Pasig River suggested that the garbage beds be placed on riverbanks, which does not really solve the problem.

Let us be gracious with the victims and see that the problem with floods lies squarely on those who have thought that cutting logs illegally in the upper reaches of Rizal province and the nearby Sierra Madre mountains was a profitable investment and those who have quarried and mined for years in Montalban, Baras, San Mateo and other towns, including one failed politician and Cabinet member. There are 19 mining operations in 3,622 hectares of land in Rizal along with both Kaliwa-Kanan dam, which necessitated uprooting Remontado and Dumagat residents and cutting down trees, and Wawa dam, a reservoir that residents nearby said depends on Wawa River, which only hosts an ample water supply during the rainy season.

Looking beyond garbage as a cause of perdition in Metro Manila, congressional investigators should focus on the huge 23 reclamation projects that threaten to create a separate republic in Manila Bay. These projects, Jonila Castro, Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE) advocacy officer and AKAP KA Manila Bay spokesperson, cover 47,000 hectares, all for the benefit of plutocrats and dubious investors from the US and China, and nothing for the teeming urban poor in Metro Manila or for the fisherfolk of Navotas, Malabon, Cavite, Bulacan, Pampanga and Bataan.

With the quarries and illegal loggers in Rizal doing their worst to worsen soil erosion and water runoff to deliver millions of tons of silt downstream and the reclamation projects blocking the natural waterways emptying into Manila Bay, Kalikasan-PNE said backflows guarantee that Metro Manila will continue to be a lake as typhoons batter Luzon. No amount of congressional investigation will produce a solution to the reclamation bonanza under the Marcos Jr. and Duterte administrations.

Castro said Congress might as well look into the 2,500-hectate San Miguel Corp. (SMC) Aerocity Project that sits on poldered land in Taliptip, Bulakan, Bulacan that has been protected by mangroves and other natural defenses and which SMC chief Ramon S. Ang developed by reclaiming land from the sea. The volume of land he has reclaimed is equal to the volume of water that Manila Bay lost. Ang has already won tax perks for his airport and export processing hub despite protests from fisherfolk and environmental advocates who don’t find any future for Ang’s airport, which has been hyped as serving an overestimated 15-million travelers a year. Clark Airport suffers from low passenger traffic.

Congress will certainly find something irregular and anomalous in the 5,500 flood control projects completed by the administration but it also has to understand that the many projects funded by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) also involve lawmakers who compete for higher allocations for their districts, with many of them choosing who the contractors should be. It should also find that the 23 reclamation projects in Manila Bay, when viewed from the air, already eats up a substantial portion of the bay. Why there should be private appropriation of the waterway is already obscene; why they were allowed to go on after a “freeze” on such projects under two presidents is a valid issue that lawmakers sworn to do justice to everyone must resolve.