Spin doctors of politicos at work, says ex-Chief Justice

Former Chief Justice Reynato Puno: Spin doctors have succeeded a lot in burying the truth.
INQUIRER PHOTO / NINO JESUS ORBETA

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Do not swallow every bit of information that is brought up by politicians in the run-up to the 2016 elections, former Chief Justice Reynato Puno said on Saturday.

Despite the country’s economic growth reports, more people suffer from poverty and yet the choice for a new leader to “save” them is apparently being dictated by spin doctors, Puno said during a forum on constitutional reforms at Baguio Convention Center.

“As always in these kinds of political exercises, the first victim of spin doctors is the truth,” he told an audience of religious and civil society leaders in the Cordillera, who have signed up for a movement that is pushing for constitutional amendments.

Puno is touring the country to draw support for a petition to hold a referendum on Election Day on May 9, 2016, to determine how many voters would agree to form a constitutional convention to change the charter.

The former Chief Justice said shifting power from a President to a parliament representing all sectors and economic classes through a constitutional amendment would end corruption, decentralize government and make growth truly “inclusive.”

He said his new task was “to tell the people the real reason why leaders have failed to solve [the Philippines’] stubborn problems for more than 100 years now … and we are still counting.”

Income inequality

Citing the latest economic report of Ibon Foundation, Puno said the few rich Filipinos became richer in the last five years of the Aquino administration, and their combined net worth “was equivalent to the combined incomes of 70 million poorer Filipinos.”

The scale of inequality between the rich and the poor increases because of a “stale and outmoded 1987 Constitution” that has kept power solely in the hands of a central government in Metro Manila, Puno said.

It is a continuing problem because no President has fully delegated these powers to all sectors so they will also have a voice in governance, he said.

“In the meantime, our senses are bombarded with the images of presidential wannabes—each one given a beauty parlor treatment by paid media practitioners… . Their drumbeaters go to town announcing to people that a new savior has come to rescue them from all imaginable curses of our society,” he said.

“Except for the daily doses of praise releases, none of the wannabes has informed the people about their particular program of governance and why they qualify as our new saviors,” Puno said.

“We listened to the State of the Nation Address (Sona) of our President on July 27… . As it happens every year, the political opposition tried to denigrate his achievement, especially his philosophy of ‘daang matuwid.’ Last Monday, the Vice President (Jejomar Binay) delivered his own Sona … also to dismiss the achievements of the Aquino administration,” he said.

“The spin doctors of both political [camps] are still busy distorting the meanings and nuances of both the Sona and the counter-Sona,” he said. “Politics in the Philippines has remained in the pigsty because these spin doctors have succeeded a lot in burying the truth.”

Puno said the country’s inability to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor was also the fault of a political structure that refused change.

“In modern times, dictators had to be pried away from their seats of power by nothing less than bullets and bombs… . In postmodern times, they reinvented themselves as economic messiahs of a globalized world and nobody is betting whether they would give up their power for a song,” he said.

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