Marcos vows to stay away from poll mudslinging

MANILA — Vice presidential candidate and Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has vowed to stay away from the mudslinging that accompanies the election season.

Interviewed over the weekend on Cebu Catholic TV Network in Cebu City, Marcos said he would not be provoked, adding that mudslinging would not solve the country’s problems. He said he would stick to presenting his platform in his campaign.

“Will mudslinging create one more job? Will insulting somebody else, trying to put them down, help feed a child? None of these things are useful, none of these things achieve anything except more disunity, more polarization,” he said.

“I will not be goaded or somehow baited to be part of the mudslinging or part of the insults that are going back and forth. I just see that there is no place [for that] because when I talk to people, ordinary Filipino citizens, they don’t ask me how bad another person is. What they ask me is, ‘what can you do to help me?’” Marcos said.

The son and namesake of the late president and dictator has been the target of protests wherever he goes by victims and survivors of martial law when murder, torture and abductions were ordered from the top.

Marcos Jr. has refused to apologize, much less fully acknowledge, the human rights violations under his father’s rule.

In the same interview, Marcos said he was opposed to the merger of the Land Bank of the Philippines and the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) because this would deprive farmers of a means to financial support.

The merged entity would become a commercial bank and “we will lose the agricultural banks truly responsive to the needs of our farmers,” he said in Filipino.

He said farmers currently had great difficulty obtaining credit from banks and other financial institutions. The merger, he said, would deprive farmers of a bank created specifically for their needs, further worsening their condition.  He pointed out that farmers comprised 70 percent of the country’s poor.  SFM