“The infamous $20,000 dinner tab of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is an act of opulence that has no place in these times of crisis,” said Mr. Leon Dulce, Data Visualization and New Media head of the Computer Professionals’ Union (CPU). “It doesn’t come as a surprise though; this is, after all, just a taste of the government’s blatant abandonment of their constituency’s welfare.”
CPU has released an information design on the education sector at http://www.cp-union.com/cpunion/datavisualization. CPU's Data Visualization team aims to propagate progressive analysis through images of scientifically gathered data on issues affecting the Filipino people. Information design is an approach to visually represent data for campaigns.
Under the 2009 national budget, the education sector continues to suffer severe budget deficit, receiving only half of the 6% of the GDP standard pegged by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Questionable government priorities are indicated in the information design, where a cadet from the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) is subsidized P8,219 a day, as compared to a Polytechnic University of the Philippines student who is only subsidized P43 a day. “A cadet can get almost all needs; computers, dormitories, uniforms, food and training tools while a PUP student won't even get a good lunch,” described Mr. Dulce.
“It also doesn’t help that the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration has unscrupulously engaged in what is apparently a record-setting number of scams, scandals and controversies,” Mr. Dulce added. Citing comparative statistics in the information design, Mr. Dulce noted that “the P532 million overprice of the Diosdado Macapagal Highway could have been spent to pay for the average tuition of 1.22 million college students, for instance.”
In support of the general campaign to hold Arroyo accountable for her regime’s transgressions to the Filipino people, CPU continues to provide its technical support and expertise to various progressive organizations.
“Even as the end of Arroyo’s regime nears, the spectre of her continued rule remains,” warned Mr. Dulce. “We will continue to utilize all information and communications tools and technologies to expose their wrongdoings and to promote causes that aim to fight these attacks on democracy.”
The information design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.# # #
