Chief Justice Puno and Oligarchy

Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno speaks his mind today without any let-up or anything to hold back, concise, clear and direct.

In fact, he hits directly to the bone of our national sickness by pointing at the oligarchy in our midst as the main, if not the primary culprit, as he launched today the upstart Moral Force Movement.

“The Philippines remain in the control of the oligarchs because the government is beholden to them”, Chief Justice Puno says, headlining the country’s most read newspaper.

Nothing should be truer than this. You could say, it is like seeing the sun in broad daylight, and Justice Puno has just to point that out clearly.

Puno enumerates the main problems of our nation today as “the lack of morality, the weakness of our ethics, the problem of inequitable distribution of wealth, the problem of poverty and the problem of peace and order.” And that the wealth of the nation is merely held by the rich few while the multitudes suffer.

The honorable Chief Justice shows why he is so incredibly different from his predecessor, and that is such a good thing for us. He becomes concern with morality and social imbalance and that could provide as a guiding post within the judiciary, becoming a role model to a very critical sector of our country, the men of laws.

I must agree to all his concerns and to supplement his views, I all see how vital is his role now, where the judiciary and the legal people could be imbibe to take a more participative role in nation-building, becoming agent of change and progress themselves. For all we know, lawyers and judges are certainly a congregation of sharp-minded and highly-capable individuals and our nation needs them, the people could look upto to them to keep in touch with the nation’s ails and fallings. A strong and responsible judiciary could eventually initiate a change that could spread easily towards other sectors of our society, for a nation to be strong and progressive; its laws should be strong and forceful, not lain within the hands of mischief and dire intentions, such as self-interest and nonchalance to the well-being of the public.

I am a bit concern if Chief Justice Puno should be a step beyond the realms of his public duty, for being so patently political despite being the highest ranking official of the judiciary, yet that could become lesser of our concern for a time that the Chief Justice shows extreme concern for the suffering of the people is so rare, and may not come again.

There are many talks that he might be running for the highest position of the land, and nothing should be improper in that. He is described in his Supreme Court official website profile as a man of prose and religion. I also think he is also a man of great concern to the plight of the Filipino people.