SOCIAL media went ballistic the other day after floods paralyzed Metro Manila and adjacent provinces, even forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee their totally flooded homes. Netizens mocked the boast that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. made in his State of Nation Address (SONA) just two days before the floods made the metropolis a watery hell:

“More than 1,500 flood-control projects have been finished and more are being built in the entire country.” His boast was belied by the calamitous floods the next day.

One viral post had an image of Marcos when he was delivering his SONA, with the caption: “Iba ang sabi, iba ang gawa.” Political analyst Malou Tiquia posted a question: “Who are the contractors of the GAA (General Appropriations Act) 2023 P244.5 billion and GAA 2024 P300 billion flood control projects?”

Poverty may have even worsened

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. spent an hour and a half delivering his State of the Nation Address (SONA), rattling off so many details we don’t really care about nor have the capacity to cross-check their veracity. However, he uttered only 84 words, or 1 percent of his 9,035-word-long speech, about a topic that is the main concern of Filipinos: poverty.

I suspect he was not really keen on discussing poverty as he knew that he had done very little — if at all — to reduce poverty. Still, though, he boasted: “We have lifted nearly two-and-a-half-million Filipinos out of poverty.”

Marcos’ claims are extremely dubious that these border on being falsehoods. I question Marcos’ figures not to deprecate his two-year administration so far but to alert him that the rosy economic figures his officials are giving him — such as the trade secretary’s claim that foreign direct investments have a total of $19 billion when in reality the figure is just $3.3 billion — are erroneous, and could lead to complacency in undertaking urgently reforms to boost the economy.

Based on the figures I present (see tables), Marcos did not lift 2.5 million Filipinos out of poverty.

His regime so far could have even pushed 13 million Filipinos into poverty.

THIS sorry country has so many issues for me to report in this column. But as a human, I have to express my outrage again and again over the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Yes, it was Hamas that provoked the carnage when it killed 1,139 Israelis and 373 soldiers in its raid on Israel on October 7 last year. But nothing can justify Israel’s campaign of genocide against Gaza, which murdered at least 40,000 Palestinians, half of whom are women and children.

Reports of Israelis raped and babies killed have been incontrovertibly proven as fake news spread by the famed — or notorious — Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The Mossad also failed to explain why, for all its reputation that it is even better than the US CIA in intelligence-gathering, it miserably failed in detecting an attack that involved all of the Hamas’ forces right at its backdoor.

TRADE Secretary Alfredo Pascual boasted a few weeks ago that $19 billion worth of investments pledged during the 24 foreign trips of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have already been actualized or have commenced implementation “as of June” this year.

That is a lie. Even if one assumes that Marcos’ or his wife’s sheer charm or eloquence convinced some foreign companies to invest in the Philippines, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas data show that actual direct investment inflows into the country (excluding reinvestment of earnings, which aren’t inflows) in the first 21 months of Marcos’ rule totaled only $3.3 billion, or a sixth of Pascual’s figure of $19 billion.