Chief Justice Corona: I Fear a Creeping Communist Conspiracy

" Like a rockstar"

Someone asked the Chief Justice if he wants to face Pnoy and what would he tell him. “ I don’t want to face him,” says Renato Corona, the controversial Chief Justice now being crucified by Pnoy, “ I want to face the Filipino People.”

Corona has since faced the People many times over, the last one when he went the rounds, so to speak, and entertained questions before the media. He went the usual---going thru live radio interviews, granting several interviews with print journalists and even face television cameras. When he did, some of those who interviewed him, probably even deliberately misquoted him or entirely wrote a different thing about him.

" Justice is blind. But what with the exposed
right breast?"

Shortly after his wife, Cristina, ushered us inside his office at the Supreme Court building, Corona was, at first, sceptical. Probably, he was thinking, what would a bunch of bloggers do to change things for me. I already did the rounds. Now, he says, someone just told him not to grant interviews anymore. He confided with us that he rarely reads newspapers nowadays.

When Corona said that, I felt that my time going there was wasted. I was sick with tonsilitis, and I just tried my best to rise from my bed, drank all the medicines that I could take, just to get myself ready for this interview.

I was one of about twenty bloggers from Blogwatch.ph brave enough to face the beleaguered Chief Justice. Conventional wisdom dictates that you don’t party with a man who’s the target of government. With the kind of government we have right now, who is to say that in the next few days, I will not be persecuted and inhumanely treated like the Chief Justice? With a government that uses public money to spite and hit its political enemies, anyone is fair game, I, included.

If I’m hit, I’m far from being a Corona, who has the entire institution behind him. I only have my balls. I’ll probably recoil and declare it a day. But, like Corona, I’ll never retire my pen, no. Just like what Corona said, when a magistrate feels something that he should do and he feels that he should articulate it, he does so without fear.

Like Corona, I don’t fear the wrath of government. I always side with Right. When I see that this person is being unjustly treated, I side with him. Behind all these talk, about impropriety, about the Chief Justice being a lapdog of Gloria Arroyo, of him amassing great wealth, and of Corona being biased in favour of Gloria, lie the true reason---dominance.

We all know Aquino to be the fair-haired boy of Big Business. Aquino spent his adult years as a business man, serving the Hacienda for ten years. Noynoy is not like his father, who sacrificed his entire life trying to understand the plight of the masses. Noynoy is different. 

Noynoy understands and subscribes to the language of Big Business. Fact is, I think the true reason why he wants nothing more than a Judiciary as a lapdog is he does not want any problem when his government enters into deals with private companies over big ticket government projects. 

This is the only time in the history of this country that we see government selling each and every asset it has to Big Business. Every single utility, every single construction project is being bidded out. Government is not building industries. It is tarrying in its mandated job so that Big Business comes in and fills the gap.

Kumbaga, Big Business profits from government's tardiness and lack of action and vision.

Corona belongs to a different generation, a generation who believes in the rule of law, as the bedrock of democracy.

" What I'm fighting for", says Corona shortly after granting us the privilege of sharing bread with him, " is the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and preservation of democracy. I am not doing this alone. I am protecting the very institution which the people go to in times of distress."


" What's the message that this administration is sending to members of the judiciary---if this can be done  to the highest ranked official of this institution, so much so to the judges and justices. "


" They say that the reason they are doing this to me is because I assert influence over other members of the Tribunal. If this is true, then, look at the latest case where I took part of. There was only one who sided with me. In the Hacienda Luisita case, I took the extreme side and only one sided with me. The rest took their individual stance. "


" What I fear would happen is if this boils over, is the weakening of this institution. You know, this is a strategy of the Left. The Left wants to weaken the Supreme Court, the Judiciary, so that they can do whatever they please."


" What I fear the most is Communism taking over our government, of rising prices, of widespread poverty and of extreme unemployment. With a coopted legislature, who, then, would side with the people? Whom will the people go to, when every single institution has been coopted already by the Executive?


During the dark days of the Marcos regime, the Supreme Court served only as a bastion of democracy. People go to the Supreme Court to assert their rights.


Now, under this administration, who then will serve as a check to balance the power between and among institutions?


One asked if what he is fighting for is legitimate considering that the post of Chief Justice is an institution, and he is the only one being persecuted.


" You cannot separate the Chief Justice with the personality occupying the post. The Chief Justice is the one who occupies the post. "