Last week Budget Secretary Florencio Abad got a mild “stoning” from a group of students at the University of the Philippines. It was not quite the biblical stoning which the scribes and Pharisees had failed to give the woman caught in adultery in the New Testament, but the objective seemed more or less the same.

Abad’s crime had nothing to do with adultery but rather with the massive diversion of public funds through the pork barrel system. This is technically known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund and the Disbursement Acceleration Program, both of which the Supreme Court, by a unanimous vote, has declared unconstitutional.