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A Friday morning shopping excursion to El Valle

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cruciferoius
This was a Friday morning in the dry season. Saturday and Sunday mornings draw more customers, and there will be more things on sale at the El Valle public market. Plus, it’s plague time, which has reduced the population in or visiting El Valle in general, and keeping people from going out. Nevertheless, this market always seems to have vegetables and fruits that are hard to find anywhere else. This and other photos on this page by Eric Jackson.

A weekday morning trip to El Valle

by Eric Jackson

Internet connectivity issues and an overslept morning put this excursion off for a few days. The main shopping aim was to find a new chacara, preferably one of the huge ones meant for long haul carries to be worn on the head, but short of that at least a better and more Panamanian shopping bag that I had, one with a sufficiently long carrying strap. It’s not about being decorative, nor authentic.

I don’t actually carry mine as traditional in the Ngabe and Bugle cultures. I tie a knot to shorten the strap and carry it over one shoulder, and not with the strap crossing my chest. Urban muggers don’t get to easily grab and strangle with the strap.

But as adapted to my way of using it, a chacara is a spacious, expansive, durable bag, better than the great majority of the shopping bags you get in the supermarkets. For rainy times, and to hide things, you put them in waterproof opaque smaller bags and put those in the chacara.

Do you want to help the poorest of Panama’s poor? Don’t give your money to some white socialite or holy man. Buy indigenous products. Carry a chacara rather than a nylon knapsack imported from Asia.

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Part of the arts and handicrafts section of the El Valle public market. Up and down the street from the market you will find other places that sell various hand made in Panama items. I found and bought a useful chacara at one of those stores. The ones at the market were smaller than what I wanted this time. Perhaps in one of the stalls that were closed for the day they had what I was looking for in stock.

Just finding a bag was not the whole mission, though. I was working as a reporter, taking notice, with my Rust Belt informed but knowing of Panama urban policy eyes all the way there and back by bus.

Do I want to get into lurid scandal mode? The road is new, but has some divots in it. Look carefully at the little holes that have yet to be patched and you will notice how thin the layer of asphalt is. This was a late Varela administration contract with the Spanish company FCC. At the time the company was in the process of being sold to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. But sometimes in public works contracting, the people get rather precisely what they paid for. Let me note the construction standard without spinning a conspiracy theory.

Along the road uphill to the rim of the ancient volcanic crater that’s El Valle, there is the economic devastation of plague times. At a glance, I categorize certain businesses I pass as closed, out of business or abandoned. I categorize certain project in the works as advertised but not underway, started but paused or abandoned. It’s very imprecise without getting out and making inquiries, and even then there is a lot of wishful thinking out there. On the road up, so many businesses from the little informal stands to the stores and restaurants and bars were not open on this day. A lot of the smaller enterprises appeared as if they would never again open for business. There were many for sale signs on the real estate. There were a bunch of green MiAmbiente signs advising of environmental permits for projects that are not visibly underway. Hard times drive, but all hope isn’t abandoned and it seems that in every village along the way at least one of two tiny holdouts were open to sell fonda food or handicrafts, and most of the mini-supers were going concerns. There was some small-scale home construction here and there.

Go over the rim and down into the town, and the visible signs of economic activity were brighter. A few places abandoned, some things out of business, a bunch of establishments closed — but mostly a town open for business, even if there were few customers.

Moreover, during these difficult days El Valle has been investing in its people and its future. Bicycle paths, not only for the tourists but to make it so much easier and cheaper to live and work nearby. Renovations to the public market. Young artists decorating the benches around town. Somebody tending the plants in the public planters. Not much litter. It pleases the bureaucratic eyes.

Yes, El Valle has things going for it that other corregimientos of Anton don’t. We on the poor sides of town should still pay attention to what they are doing right.

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This reporter has some serious tree and shrub replacements to do on his finca in El Bajito. The market is far from the only place to go, but it’s one of the places to go to see the offerings of the area’s plant nursery industry.

So, what did this budget-conscious guy buy? 

  • A chacara, measuring 13 inches wide by 16 inches deep when laid flat, but these things expand with use.
  • A small bunch of finger bananas, the sweet little primitivos.
  • Risking death by chocolate overdose and getting goo all over myself, a wonderful brownie.
  • AND, as my bath towels are getting ratty, a kitschy towel meant more for lying on a beach, but which will do: “Godzilla vs Kong — one will fall!” (My bet is on the Japanese lizard with radioactive breath.)
  • Plus, the cost of getting there and back — $3.75 each way, a $1.50 bus ride from Las Uvas to El Valle. Not a bad way to blow $7.50 and add to the photo archive.
If you know about the Thousand Days War, El Valle was not quite the epicenter, but things did happen around it. Cocle was a terrible war zone, and it was not just Liberals versus Conservatives, but the latter representing those who wanted Catholicism to be the official religion and the former opposed to having any official religion. So on the same side of the street as the market in one direction, there is the town’s beautiful Catholic Church, with its museum. Go the other way on the same side and you will find the museum and shrine to Victoriano Lorenzo, El Cholo Guerrillero, the martyred Liberal general who won Cocle but was betrayed and executed in Panama City’s Plaza Francia.

 

 

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¿Wappin? Soul Sessions

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“Alma” translates to “soul”
“Soul” significa más que eso 

Kany García & Camilo – Titanic
https://youtu.be/JpexDfRHlFQ

Bill Withers – 1973 BBC Concert Complete
https://youtu.be/qtT_8pEjHgo

Grace Slick – Ballad of the Chrome Nun
https://youtu.be/-gQeesy15SI

Chaka Khan – Live 2021
https://youtu.be/gFUTB_7U0zg

Burning Spear – Marcus Garvey
https://youtu.be/FPsof0JVjcs

Alicia Keys – NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
https://youtu.be/uwUt1fVLb3E

Los Silvertones – Mi Soledad
https://youtu.be/MnGk_XN4p_A

 

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Dinero

Inflation in the fast lane

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AM

Woke up this morning and…

The price of fuel at the drive up pumps is up. Under Panama’s system there are slight regional variations but in Panama province and Colon 95 octane gasoline is now more than a dollar a liter – $1.033, or $3.90 a gallon. The farther away from the importers’ terminals, the more expensive, most of all in Changuinola where that same liter of 95 octane will set you back $1.083. This reporter rides the buses, which fill up on subsidized prices and have price controlled fares. The higher price gets paid one way or another, through reduced public services and a higher national debt even for those who don’t directly pay.

 

 

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SIELAS, Plazo de huelga en DHL

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SIELAS
De la cuenta de Twitter de SIELAS.
shut 'em down
 

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To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.

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Plague days errands by bus, with eyes wide open

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Anton
Waiting in Anton for the bus back to El Bajito to fill up. It was a slow day there, and in Coronado, where I went in the morning to get the Claro chip recharged. Not that many customers in the stores, not that many people riding the buses, not that many buses. Slow when I got back, as shortly after I returned the wireless Internet connection went out. So I process the photos. And write. Photo by Eric Jackson.

Slow and dangerous times

by Eric Jackson, a day’s errands

The night before, I posted the yellow caution warning with notice that 26 COVID deaths had been reported the day before. I conked out early and slept well. So well, in fact, that one of the things I had in mind would have to wait for another day. I’ll get to it soon enough, but to go to the El Valle market in the morning by bus from where I live, I need to start out early.

The chip renewal? Two major ways: take the Anton bus and head out to Coronado from there, or take the Penonome bus and go to the Claro office across from Super 99. First bus to come by was San Juan de Dios to Anton, and when it pulled in just before the pedestrian bridge the Anton to Panama bus was waiting. And waiting. With another longer than usual wait at Rio Hato. Few people walking around, nobody waiting at the bus stop. A few passengers did come along. There weren’t the other buses coming along to prompt us more quickly on our way.

In Coronado, at Claro, at the dollar store, at El Rey, no waiting. Billboards, except for those advising that some particular business was close by, were almost entirely empty. A couple of formal businesses that had been there on my last visit weren’t anymore. Although they weren’t getting lots of customers either, the informal vendors were as numerous as before, maybe a bit more so.

Both there to Coronado and back, the obvious signs of businesses smashed into and left abandoned have stabilized, Probably a bunch of the people who were doing that are now in jail. Some of the places are boarded up, with for sale signs. At one place, the rubble is gone and what was a fonda is now a barbershop. Like hermit crabs after a wave has washed over, popular capitalism is quick to be back on its feet.

Breakfast was a tepid caramiñola from a stand a lady set up under the north side of the pedestrian bridge. The spot was hit, 75¢ was cycled into the informal economy.

The bus for the return trip filled up, with a lot of the folks boarding headed toward some of the upscale places: Punta Barco, Rio Mar, Bijao, Decameron, El Riu Playa Blanca. More than used to be the case before COVID.

There are more gringos on the buses and at the bus stops. Or at least, folks whose appearances and manners of carrying themselves suggest such. Yeah, yeah – here I go like one of the cops who hassles people for ID, looking for foreigners whose papers aren’t in order. But there are certain looks. Might be hard to tell the American from the Canadian from the German. But then you go by the Riu and there’s a blonde woman outside, squatting on her haunches while smoking a cigarette and pecking at a cell phone and that suggests German to me. They guy with the Rough Riders cap may not be an actual Canadian, but he probably is. The two women going to Bijao, who had bags of groceries and didn’t seem to know exactly where the bus would stop seemed like American tourists to me. Maybe I am wrong on all scores. I don’t think so.

As this epidemic wears on, there are more older folks in Coronado who look worn out, whose clothes – like mine – don’t fit so well. COVID, directly but even more so indirectly, has taken a toll on all of us. To much isolation, too much fear, too many economic setbacks, too much bad news. Did we hippies get too pretentious about our generation back then? Despite knowing the history, did we harbor plenty of doubts when our parents were referred to as “the greatest generation?” They left their marks, good and bad, and they survived their ordeals. We’ll survive ours and leave memories and records good and bad. Turns out that situations change, but the human condition doesn’t all that much. How we have behaved in these trying times will not be forgotten.

Back to Anton in search of a fried chicken lunch and something to bring back to make the livestock’s dinner more interesting, the usual fonda had fewer selections from which to choose. It’s a function of fewer customers. Pieces of bofe would be the preference for both dogs and cats. The dogs like chicharrones as well or better, but they’re not so nutritious. Some of the cats will eat those things if broken up small and some won’t, but they really don’t fulfill a cat’s cravings for meat. No bofe. Chicharrones to go, chicken for lunch, then pick up newspapers and kitten chow next door. Then get on the bus and wait.

And while I’m waiting, read about all the postures taken in the face of a bad economy.

The people that are doing better than ever? I know they exist, but I don’t know any of them. The people whose dreams fall well short of probability? Surely I am one of them. The people who are just muddling through as best can be done? Aren’t we all?

When a reader complains on my Facebook page that I don’t write enough “happy news?” I call them like I see them. You can get plenty of triumphalist spin from the government ministries’ Twitter feeds if you need that stuff. It’s plague times. Better days are ahead, but they’re not here now.

 

 

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Labor: SUNTRACS and CAPAC negotiate

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los compañeros
The construction workers and their union can look pretty formidable on the streets — which is the point, or at least one of the main ones. Photo from the SUNTRACS Twitter feed.

Are we about to see a construction strike?

by Eric Jackson

The epidemic’s generalized economic misery has a lot of people out of work, a lot of those who have jobs working fewer hours, some of those who have government jobs and almost all of those who have government contracts not being paid on time, and trips to the grocery stores to get basic items more expensive each time.

The banks were taken care with a billion-dollar subsidy soon after COVID’s arrival and there have been make-work jobs and other sinecures for PRD activists, but things are closing in on them, too.

You can see it from the bus. Lately, if riding on the nation’s main drag in Chiriqui, people may have seen it in a delay while rice farmers were blocking the road to demand higher prices from the government. For the rice growers, it’s not just the hike in the cost of living, but also increased prices for the fuel and chemicals that they use to produce their crops. Down that same Pan-American Highway in Panama Oeste, is that an upscale residential development with nobody tending the guardhouse and the gate open?

The master construction contract between the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC) and the Unitary Syndicate of Construction and Similar Workers (SUNTRACS) expires on July 1. Contract talks are ongoing right now. The union is talking a 26 percent raise phased in over the life of a four-year contract. Management is talking a one cent per hour raise every year of the next four.

SUNTRACS and CAPAC are both keenly aware of what the market will bear. Each has in its own way gained a hardcore militant reputation.

It’s a PRD administration and the bad blood goes way back to the dictatorship when dozens of militants in the leftist underground to which the SUNTRACS founders and current leaders trace roots were disappeared and killed by soldiers and police. Under the last PRD administration, that of Martín Torrijos, there was a concerted campaign of police and company goon violence and the promotion of campany unions aimed at crushing SUNTRACS. Labor activists died, but CAPAC ended up settling with the union.

The leftist movement from which the union arose has its own electoral expression. It hasn’t gotten anyone elected to public office. SUNTRACS isn’t aligned with any of the opposition parties or independents in the National Assembly. At the moment they’re sounding the alarm about Rubén Blades and Ricardo Lombana urging their followers to join forces. Even most SUNTRACS members don’t vote for the Broad Front for Democracy (FAD). It’s fashionable for political observers in the rabiblanco media and pundits for the political parties and business organizations to bash SUNTRACS. Nevertheless, time and again construction workers who may be otherwise social conservatives have shown that that they do want hardcore militants negotiating with the boss for them. They’re willing to put their bodies on the line – usually just standing in the road, but over the years there have been some pitched battles, too.

CAPAC tends to see itself as the engine of Panama’s economy and until recently there seemed to be no limits on its less honest members’ impunity. As to government contracting the Odebrecht and Blue Apple scandals may have set some limits. As to residential construction and business towers, it’s still kind of the wild west in their industry. Except that notwithstanding generally irrelevant public building inspection, banks will hire competent inspectors to see that they don’t lend money with junk for collateral. Except that word does get around about developers to avoid. Except that money can be and often enough is lost on real estate projects and developers can go and have gone barkrupt. Except for the union.

So, by next July will the epidemic be declared over, MAGAs fleeing the downfall of the white race in the USA come swarming to Panama’s beach and mountain enclaves and a company office in one of Panama City’s skyscrapers be all the rage? Would that set the stage for SUNTRACS to up its demand for not only the moon, but a thick layer of green cheese? Would CAPAC counter that they can only afford a thin topping of yellow American pasteurized process cheeselike imitation food stuff?

Judging from the past, looking into the future from a troubled present, the odds are that although a strike may intervene with the government coming down on the side of management, SUNTRACS and CAPAC will settle on some middle point. We are probably not headed for four more plague years, but the nation’s and the world’s recovery are likely to be slow and tumultuous. That’s what all of the credible international institutions whose job is to project such things are saying. Perhaps there will be an agreement designed to take the uncertainties into account, perhaps with tiny raises now but wage talks to re-open during the next master contract’s term. Perhaps a one-year contract. Perhaps a deal with a cost of living provision. These folks know all the tricks.

One of the bottom lines, though? Construction workers’ families don’t go hungry while construction executives get fabulously richer. Rice farmers don’t go broke as the price of rice in the supermarkets rises. Otherwise that’s likely to result in ever more strikes and road blockages, and not just by this union and these farmers. Nito won’t be able to just push a button and have them all taken away. Nor press another button to turn on the green cheese machine and make everyone who likes the stuff happy.

 

 

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Editorials: Broken system and starts on fixes; and Klan politics in the USA

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Don Ricky
Likely just under one-third of Panamanian voters know what they want in the 2024 elections — a $10 soccer ball for their kid, or a $20 bag of groceries. But a scattered majority doesn’t want the guy who stands for those things, doesn’t want this guy reading our email and wants the money that was stolen the last time around returned to Panama’s treasury rather than seized by the US treasury. From Ricardo Martinelli Berrocal’s Twitter feed, letting the editor know that he’s being followed.

No anointed savior, but a path is opening

I cannot endorse Lombana, as some believe I did, because I do not know his position on these issues. I clarify, I do not ask him to explain them to me, in private: he must explain them to the country, if perhaps those points have already been contemplated and resolved for him and his team.

Rubén Blades

What are those issues to which the notable entertainer and former tourism minister and presidential candidate refers?

    1. “The dismantling of the political patronage state” — which entails the replacement of the heart and soul of the dictatorship’s 1972 constitution under which Panama still lives.
    2. “The creation of new administrative structures and paradigms” — also implicitly a new constitution. and
    3. Changes in laws, regulations and codes to clarify gaps, eliminate privileges and do away with the present impunity.

Those are some minimum requirements for most voters who are serious about change. Lombana’s support for the ill-fated initiative for a parallel constitutional convention raises some questions about where he’s really at on these questions.

Then there are other important matters that must be clarified if Lombana’s initiative is to attract critical support.

What about economics? Does he have anything to say about monopolistic practices? What about the land grabbing by the politically connected, which goes on and has gone on for years? Are we to be a natural resources extraction economy, or base our development on environmental conservation? Does Lombana have anything practical to say about formalizing the tiny enterprises of the huge informal economy? What guarantees would he give of the rights of employees to form unions and bargain collectively?

(That latter point Blades does not mention, but he is a member of a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild.)

Is there a structural ambiguity that lets SUNTRACS run the country if one of its leaders becomes president, or lets the Chamber of Commerce run the country if one of its leaders is elected, without some massacre of the losing side? Would Lombana address the ever more evident facts of a failed economic globalization on corporate terms, and offer a different direction? Is his objection merely to the grasping political caste, or also to their wealthy backers?

A party that’s a slate of independents is bound to have shades of difference about most of these questions. A smart candidate will know the push and pull of democratic processes and leave certain details to that uncertainty. But “trust me” won’t work this time — that credit card is maxed out for jaded voters.

All those questions left hanging, and those about alliances if Otro Camino gets its spot on the ballot, we are seeing movement toward a politics where nothing much changes other than who is collecting the tolls. We should be encouraged.

 

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A newspaper cartoon from the days of the Ku Klux Klan’s first iteration. Today Donald Trump and his followers intend to revive the disenfranchisement and intimidation of black voters. For a larger version of this graphic, click here.

They just need to be overwhelmed

Well, now we know. The Republican National Committee has endorsed the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot, including as it does the physical assaults against the Capitol Police and the vandalism of the building. Four GOP state attorneys general are investigating GoFundMe for that company’s “crime” of declining to provide a conduit for Americans to finance the blockade of Canada’s capital city by right-wing anti-vaxxers. Many states have passed vote suppression laws aimed right at African-Americans and other constituencies expected to vote for Democrats. The racial gerrymandering this time around is extreme. White supremacist Republicans are running against the teaching of any history that includes black people, and some of them are threatening people with guns.

What to do? What the Freedom Riders did. What was done in the 2020 Georgia runoff. Register, vote, encourage and assist others to register and vote, litigate, defy the bullies notwithstanding the personal danger that it may entail. Take our casualties, but overwhelm them.

At this point the primary season is about to begin, and Democrats need to nominate candidates with something positive to offer. The negatives of Donald Trump and his political party will play themselves out. Nominal Democrats who reach out to the white supremacists, or who from fear of them won’t bring themselves to say that black lives do matter, of course need to be weeded out. But well beyond that there is a need for candidates who soberly recognize how bad the US economy has become for most Americans, and who offer some reasonable steps to remedy the situation.

Democrats win not by screaming at the bad guys, but by talking about bread and butter. And by refusing to be frightened away from doing that.

  

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If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Bear in mind…

Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Bruce Lee

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is not worthy of a human being to give up.

Alva Myrdal

 

 

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US senators re-introduce bill to scan all electronic messages

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Spy Data Spyware Eye Hacker Computer Surveillance
Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. Graphic by MaxPixel. 

Highly unpopular EARN IT bill would scan all online messages

by Joe Mullin — Electronic Frontier Foundation

People don’t want outsiders reading their private messages—not their physical mail, not their texts, not their DMs, nothing. It’s a clear and obvious point, but one place it doesn’t seem to have reached is the U.S. Senate.

A group of lawmakers led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition. Let’s be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. It’s a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online—backups, websites, cloud photos, and more—is scanned.

New Internet rules, From Juneau to Jackson

The bill empowers every US state or territory to create sweeping new Internet regulations, by stripping away the critical legal protections for websites and apps that currently prevent such a free-for-all—specifically, Section 230. The states will be allowed to pass whatever type of law they want to hold private companies liable, as long as they somehow relate their new rules to online child abuse.

The goal is to get states to pass laws that will punish companies when they deploy end-to-end encryption, or offer other encrypted services. This includes messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, as well as web hosts like Amazon Web Services. We know that EARN IT aims to spread the use of tools to scan against law enforcement databases because the bill’s sponsors have said so. In a “Myths and Facts” document distributed by the bill’s proponents, it even names the government-approved software that they could mandate (PhotoDNA, a Microsoft program with an API that reports directly to law enforcement databases).

The document also attacks Amazon for not scanning enough of its content. Since Amazon is the home of Amazon Web Services, host of a huge number of websites, that implies the bill’s aim is to ensure that anything hosted online gets scanned.

Separately, the bill creates a 19-person federal commission, dominated by law enforcement agencies, which will lay out voluntary “best practices” for attacking the problem of online child abuse. Regardless of whether state legislatures take their lead from that commission, or from the bill’s sponsors themselves, we know where the road will end. Online service providers, even the smallest ones, will be compelled to scan user content, with government-approved software like PhotoDNA. If EARN IT supporters succeed in getting large platforms like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services to scan, they might not even need to compel smaller websites—the government will already have access to the user data, through the platform.

A provision of the bill that purports to protect services using encryption (Section 5, Page 16) doesn’t come close to getting the job done. State prosecutors or private attorneys would be able to drag an online service provider into court over accusations that their users committed crimes, then use the fact that the service chose to use encryption as evidence against them—a strategy that’s specifically allowed under EARN IT.

It’s hard to imagine anyone daring to use this supposed defense of encryption. Instead, they’ll simply do what the bill sponsors are demanding—break end-to-end encryption and use the government-approved scanning software. Just as bad, providers of services like backup and cloud storage who don’t currently offer user-controlled encryption are even less likely to protect their users by introducing new security features, because they will risk liability under EARN IT.

A lot of scanning, not A lot of protection

Senators supporting the EARN IT Act say they need new tools to prosecute cases over child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. But the methods proposed by EARN IT take aim at the security and privacy of everything hosted on the Internet.

Possessing, viewing, or distributing CSAM is already written into law as an extremely serious crime, with a broad framework of existing laws seeking to eradicate it. Online service providers that have actual knowledge of an apparent or imminent violation of current laws around CSAM are required to make a report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a government entity which forwards reports to law enforcement agencies.

Section 230 already does not protect online service providers from prosecutions over CSAM—in fact, it doesn’t protect online services from prosecution under any federal criminal law at all.

Internet companies are already required to report suspected CSAM if they come across it, and they report on a massive scale. That scale already comes with a lot of mistakes. In particular, new scanning techniques used by Facebook have produced many millions of reports to law enforcement, most of them apparently inaccurate. Federal law enforcement has used the massive number of reports produced by this low-quality scanning to suggest there has been a huge uptick in CSAM images. Then, armed with misleading statistics, the same law enforcement groups make new demands to break encryption or, as with EARN IT, hold companies liable if they don’t scan user content.

Independent child protection experts aren’t asking for systems to read everyone’s private messages. Rather, they recognize that children—particularly children who might be abused or exploited—need encrypted and private messaging just as much as, if not more than, the rest of us. No one, including the most vulnerable among us, can have privacy or security online without strong encryption.

Senate to US public: can we please have a surveillance state now?

In their “Myths and Facts” sheet, the bill’s supporters have said the quiet part out loud. Some of the document’s falsehoods are breathtaking, such as the statement that internet businesses are provided “blanket and unqualified immunity for sexual crimes against children.” It (falsely) reassures small business owners who dare to have websites that the government-ordered scanning they will be subject to will come “without hindering their operations or creating significant costs.” And it says that using automated tools that submit images and videos to law enforcement databases is “not at odds with preserving online privacy.”

The Senators supporting the bill have said that their mass surveillance plans are somehow magically compatible with end-to-end encryption. That’s completely false, no matter whether it’s called “client side scanning” or another misleading new phrase.

The EARN IT Act doesn’t target Big Tech. It targets every individual internet user, treating us all as potential criminals who deserve to have every single message, photograph, and document scanned and checked against a government database. Since direct government surveillance would be blatantly unconstitutional and provoke public outrage, EARN IT uses tech companies—from the largest ones to the very smallest ones—as its tools.

The strategy is to get private companies to do the dirty work of mass surveillance. This is the same tactic that the U.S. government used last year, when law enforcement agencies tried to convince Apple to subvert its own encryption and scan users’ photos for them. (That plan has stalled out after overwhelming opposition.) It’s the same strategy that UK law enforcement is using to convince the British public to give up its privacy, having spent public money on a laughable publicity campaign that demonizes companies that use encryption.

We won’t waver in our support for privacy and security for all, and the encryption tools that support those values. This bill may be voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee in just a few days. We’ve told the U.S. Senate that we will not back down in our opposition to EARN IT. We need you to speak up as well.

 

Joe Mullin is a policy analyst at EFF, where he works on encryption, platform liability, patents, copyright, and free expression online. Before joining EFF, Joe worked as a reporter covering legal affairs for the technology website Ars Technica, and American Lawyer’s magazine group. Earlier in his journalism career, Joe wrote for The Associated Press and The Seattle Times. He has a bachelors degree in history and a masters in journalism, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Outside of his work at EFF, Joe enjoys trail running and cycling.

 

 

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¿Wappin? Songs to learn a language / Canciones para aprender un idioma

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Cruz Park
Celia Cruz Park in Union City, New Jersey, where there is a large Cuban-American community.
Parque Celia Cruz en Union City, Nueva Jersey, donde hay una gran comunidad cubanoamericana.

Escucha, lee las traducciones y aprende
Listen, read the translations and learn

Rubén Blades – Plástico
https://youtu.be/uJHBeT8-cfE

Aretha Franklin – Respect
https://youtu.be/x1n4L3OLZOs

Carla Morrison – Todo Pasa
https://youtu.be/Bd_xmsyI5HM

Peter Tosh – Mystic Man
https://youtu.be/yNPoRSwQdmE

Arlo Guthrie – Victor Jara
https://youtu.be/F5jjnuGN1Cw

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
https://youtu.be/ZxhbpA6kJHc

Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms
https://youtu.be/9ki1wCprH-s

Nina Simone – Tomrorow is My Turn
https://youtu.be/GchAs0FjmIs

Joss Stone – Right to be wrong
https://youtu.be/5fZ64d9oVuE

Cultura Profética – La complicidad
https://youtu.be/JluOWij67w4

Neil Young – Cowgirl In the Sand
https://youtu.be/N96sdokN5Rc

Mon Laferte & Enrique Bunbury – Mi buen amor
https://youtu.be/q9rs_wsx4ZI

Romeo Santos – Propuesta Indecente
https://youtu.be/N7RPw6zY440

Celia Cruz – La Negra Tiene Tumbao
https://youtu.be/XIqu9U6tcgQ

Taylor Swift – All Too Well
https://youtu.be/uZoovJErnWo

 

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Mural universitario de Chuchú Martínez

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Chuchú

Dedican mural a Chuchú Martínez en aniversario de su muerte

por Roberto Enrique King – GECU

Con motivo del aniversario de la muerte del escritor y académico panameño José de Jesús Martínez, conocido como Chuchú, acaecida el 27 de enero de 1991, se realizó un acto en su homenaje por medio de la dedicatoria del mural pintado por el artista guna Ologwagdi en la fachada del Grupo Experimental de Cine Universitario (GECU) de la Universidad de Panamá.

El mural fue realizado especialmente para la producción del documental Chuchú y el General, que narra la historia del reconocido poeta y dramaturgo, también catedrático universitario con doctorados en filosofía y matemáticas, quien en 1974 se enlistó como policía raso en la Guardia Nacional y fue asignado a la escolta del General Omar Torrijos, dando inicio a una cercana amistad que se mantuvo hasta la muerte del militar en 1981.

Este documental estaba programado para una proyección especial en salas comerciales en esta fecha de aniversario, pero fue pospuesta hasta que haya mejor situación sanitaria en el país, por lo que, para no dejar pasar la fecha por alto, sus directores y productores convocaron a esta cita alrededor del mural para este acto simbólico.

La pintura representa distintos momentos de la vida y circunstancias políticas, sociales y literarias de Martínez, una especie de hombre del Renacimiento por su alcance y dominio intelectual y académico, y en este sencilla, pero significativa ceremonia, estuvieron presentes para recordarlo y homenajearlo familiares, amigos y miembros principales del equipo del mencionado trabajo cinematográfico.

 

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