Checking for COVID-19 at the Policlinica in San Carlos. CSS photo.

A possible “new normal”
Ending the pandemic

part 3 of 3, by Eric Jackson

Nazis who believe in the positive virtues of “weeding out the weaklings” among humanity tend to love this latest coronavirus. The Republican governor of Alabama also embraced this eugenics doctrine when she ordered her state’s hospitals to deny the use of respirators to the “mentally defective.”

We, the “weaklings,” are sometimes wont to indulge in evil chuckles. Like when the various flavors of fanatics who demonstrably oppose masks, and shutdowns where and when it gets bad, get sick and die. Made a big show of attending Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally without a mask and died of COVID-19 not long afterward? It’s a tragedy, but then so is the demise of the guy who drives onto the wrong side of a freeway and punches the gas pedal to the floor.

Not a laughing matter that there will be lasting demographic effects.

Not just a much higher death rate among the elderly, but also lasting effects among a lot of those struck by the virus who don’t die. Hearing problems. Kidney problems. Neurological issues. Permanently damaged lungs. The medical literature about the aftermath is bound to grow, and the human legacies upon which it will be based will be the stuff for more proposed nazi final solutions.

It’s likely to be as severe a political defeat for those kinds of people as it was for their ideological forebears when the films of what liberating Allied troops found at the concentration camps were shown to worldwide audiences.

More immediately, though, many of the elders of social sectors that have traditionally been in worse health and received worse health care will be gone. Part of ghetto scenes worldwide will be an extra need to care for those with chronic conditions caused by COVID-19 infections.

In the USA, these demographics are bound to exacerbate a previously existing generation gap within African-American communities. In St. Louis the toppling the Clay dynasty by nurse and Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush may be the most noteworthy event but that’s far from the whole story. A new alignment among black voters realigns the Democratic Party.

In Panama, initial success at keeping the epidemic under control foundered on the class prejudices of the rich and Nito’s eventual compulsion to the pander to these. Unpaid and underprotected health care workers, all the police officers who got sick, most of these will survive and let’s see how many of them will vote for the PRD next time.

The ongoing scandals about the widespread corruption in the Varela and Martinelli administrations may officially end with court findings that nothing ever happened. Nobody will believe it. Of all the political forces in the field, the two biggest left standing would be MOVIN and the left. MOVIN criticizes the obvious corruption but has little to offer in the way of a way out of Panama’s predicament and represents a small upscale base. The left has not surmounted more than a half-century of faction fighting, even if they generally do understand the basic problems and offer some rational responses. So Panama comes out of the pandemic not only economically depressed, but with something of a political vacuum.

And how will it end? The march of science is likely to determine the possibilities, and then social and political things add complications.

Will there be a vaccine? What percentage of people who get it will be immunized, and for how long?

A shot that’s 80 percent effective for 100 days might be just enough, but only if governments get hard-nosed about it.

You’re a Christian Scientist, or that variety of Orthodox Jew who opposes vaccinations, or a New Ager anti-vaxxer? That kid who’s not vaccinated is not allowed into a school. There are all sorts of places – business establishments, government offices, public transportation… – where you are not allowed without showing your vaccination card. Foreigners who preach against vaccinations get to do so back in from whence they came.

For a short-lived vaccine, Panama needs to get its supply in place and then vaccinate everybody at once. Part of that process would be preparations to treat bad reactions, as typically happen with some people with almost every vaccine. Make almost everyone immune all at once, then very carefully monitor and isolate any infections after that. This, and not some laissez-faire nonsense about letting everyone get sick, is how you get herd immunity.

What if a vaccine is developed and gets used as a political weapon by a country that has a monopoly to pursue other ends in less powerful countries? Might a country like Panama decide to wait for the next offer? It might even become the essence of a “national liberation struggle.”

Lots of ifs, and among them possibilities of reputations destroyed by present claims of a vaccine that turn out not to be.

With a vaccine or without, COVID-19 will be with us for a very long time. Just like yellow fever still lurks in some our our remote areas, mostly in the bodies of a few jungle animals. With bad luck and bad sanitation, notwithstanding an available vaccine, that old scourge could also come storming back to infect much of the Panamanian population.

What this reporter expects – opinion, not news, here – is a useful if not perfect vaccine within the next year, and permanently altered social and economic landscapes in the wake of this traumatic experience.

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Will the shedding of these parasites be part of Panama’s healing process? The extradition, trial, conviction and incarceration in the United States of the Martinelli Linares brothers would be a favor of sorts to Panama. But on the down side, we have just been taught a valuable but very painful lesson. Should we quickly unlearn it? We relied on Uncle Sam to rescue Panama again, but the United States can’t rescue itself at the moment, let alone Panama. The gringos aren’t this country’s salvation. Panamanians are. Photo by the Guatemalan National Civil Police.

A possible “new normal”
Panamanian independence

part 2 of 3, by Eric Jackson

The late Raúl Leis once said at a business leaders’ gathering that Panama is usefully seen as two countries, one that lives like Switzerland and the other that lives like Somalia. The polymath playwright / sociologist / educator / activist then became a symbol of what Panama when he died. It was an easily demonstrable wrong post-operative prescription for medication after minor eye surgery. As in medical malpractice provable and giving rise to compensation in almost every legal system in the world, but the way the Panamanian system the Leis family had no recourse.

In more recent news, President Cortizo says that he’s not negotiating with Carlos Slim’s construction company, FCC, over a deal about late charges and other sums owing with regard to a City of Health complex. That project was originally conceived as a center for medical tourism, where people from around the world, but particularly the ultra-expensive United States, would come for sundry health care services.

But not from the world’s top specialists. We’re a small country, so in almost any field the majority of the world’s best will not be Panamanian. In the event that a Panamanian rises to world renown in medicine or some other scientific field, usually she or he emigrates to a place where the pay is better and there is more respect for professionals.

But hey, that leaves plenty of work for the locals, writing doctors’ notes for criminal politicians to submit to overly tolerant judges to get their trials delayed.

Let me not pick on the doctors, especially not at this moment. I am, after all, the son of a mad doctor, expert in his field despite the substance abuse and madness. And I know Panama’s health professionals to be well educated and to practice at a generally high standard notwithstanding a lack of legal accountability. And I know that most of Panama’s health care professionals have made great efforts and great sacrifices during the current crisis. Some of them have given their lives in service of their patients. As an observer of politics and labor relations here, I also have to take notice of doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists and other health professionals perennially at the forefront of social justice and anti-corruption movements.

But monopollistic dibs, very real fears of insult or oppression, a political culture in which the first question is “How much do I get,” a snob culture in which the most expensive and allegedly prestigious brand is always the most appropriate technology and – voilla! An arguably reasonable national development project becomes an international shark feeding frenzy. SOMEBODY got something, but most Panamanians, in ways that we may not directly and clearly see, got to pay for it.

It’s not as if this way of doing business is a secret in the world. A lot of the most prestigious firms avoid doing business here because of it. A lot of the world’s top musicians won’t play Panama because of its reputation for sharp-dealing promoters. The top people in the licensed professions are by and large banned. Probably worst of all, our universities get hardly any international professors and, if you believe all those rankings that Latin American media love to publish, our schools languish at well below mediocre levels.

In any case, we don’t get much medical tourism – Havana, Tijuana and Medellin stomp all over us in that field – and when the pandemic hit we didn’t have a tourism-oriented City of Health to press into national service.

As these words are written Panama edges up toward 1,900 COVID-19 deaths, the economy is a shambles for most people and international economists are talking about a coming “lost decade” for Latin America’s prospects.

How bad is it for us? Consider that in July of 2019, as the Cortizo years were beginning, the top subject of business commentary was about who would eat the losses from unsold inventory – mostly real estate units, but inventories of many kinds. All those empty condo units in the money laundering towers. All those half empty shopping centers grabbing at each others’ tenants. Luxury items without enough upscale buyers. Merchandise piled up in the warehouses of a Colon Free Zone which, until Venezuela’s strangulation, Colombia’s import substitution policies and now a general regional economic decline, has been the main wholesaling and warehousing district for northern South America, the Caribbean and Central America.

Affordable housing, our own food, manufactured goods of any sort? Panama has for decades been producing ever less of that stuff.

The canal business? Yes, the ACP has jacked up tolls and reports record earnings. But notice that they have been looking at schemes to take over the ports, get into recreational investments, take over the nation’s water supply as a for-profit business. The canal will attract business as long as it operates, but its business outlook is a complex matrix. In 2006 we were told it wouldn’t happen, but already we lose business to Arctic routes. The foreseeable end of the fossil fuel economy changes our customer base and what the ships that pass through here buy. 3D printing changes not only the way things are made, but what they are made out of, the weight of these things and where they are made – all of which affect what the Panama Canal’s market will bear. The Nicaragua Canal isn’t happening, but railroads across South America and further up the Meso-American Isthmus probably will be and those will offer alternatives to the Panama Canal.

And then there is money laundering – ahem, “offshore asset protection.” The rest of the world, in many cases hypocritically so, is sick of it. The State of Delaware, the City of London and so on may be as bad or worse offenders, but the extreme concentration of wealth that has been globalization on corporate terms is politically unsustainable and so will be tax havens where the ultra-rich squirrel away their assets. (And yes, Uncle Sam defines “money laundering” as related to drugs, certain forms of graft and other rackets it doesn’t like, but not men defrauding ex-spouses in divorce settlements, nor the Trump gang’s post-prison expatriate living funds.)

Panama is just small enough to be picked upon and just brazen enough to provoke attention. Even our ship registry, also created to avoid taxes, unions and regulations, is fairly or unfairly the focus of international criticism of late. An economy based on impunity through anonymity, and law firms designing international chains of shell companies and numbered bank accounts can’t be sustained. For one thing, no matter what the cryptocurrency hustlers tell you the US National Security Agency is not the only entity in the world that’s capable of intercepting and decoding the electronic trails of financial transactions.

The money laundering economy is doomed. Not only by world demand, but because so few Panamanians share enough in its proceeds to defend it.

So where does Panama go after it crawls out of the pandemic hole? Don’t look to the political caste for salvation or even good ideas. Good thing that Panamanian society is fairly nonviolent, because those people are playing the same old games, the political parties are all discredited and anyone now standing in the wings represents a tiny social base. We could have a bloody revolution, but more likely, given our history, a police coup.

Whoever or whatever ends up on top, the way forward is for a country that produces things.

A country that grows our own food, with an agricultural export sector on the side, not at the center of Panamanian farming. Which harvests seafood from restored natural hatcheries like mangrove forests and coral reefs and from industrial hatcheries – fisheries that hire a lot of people to chase off poachers and let Panamanians bring in sustainable catches.

If we mine copper, some of what is dug up here gets processed in Panamanian foundries and factories into objects made out of copper.

The Chinese or the Americans or whoever want to locate factories here to make products destined for nearby markets? Fine, so long as it involves neither slavery, sweatshops nor poisoned communities.

And what else? All of the things you probably never thought of, from Panama’s largest productive sector, the informal economy. But let it become more formal and prosperous. Like by allowing people to register as doing business under an assumed name or as a sole proprietorship, without the lawyer and CPA bills of incorporation, without the bans on bank accounts and post office boxes.

Ah, but the “What’s my cut?” and “Who’s ever heard of YOUR family?” and “I’m tight with the functionary who can shut you down so I can take over” crowds stand in the way. Panama has little chance of a happy recovery from the current woes unless and until such obstructions are removed.

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Joe Biden on the campaign trail. In law school he would have learned that identifying the issues involved is an essential part of getting the answer right. His opponent has never figured this out and moreover, couldn’t care less. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

A possible “new normal”
US power in the world

part 1 of 3, by Eric Jackson

Joe Biden is a child of the Cold War, whose rise to political leadership coincided with the rise of an economy globalized on corporate terms. As the senator from the corporate tax haven State of Delaware, he would have no great moral objection to that neoliberal order.

But he is also a politician who has tacked with changing times, and who has several times had to rearrange things in his personal life in the face of devastating setbacks. Back in the 70s it was the hippie radicals, not Joe Biden, saying that gay men and lesbians should be able to live their lives with dignity and the same full set of rights and privileges that others have. But it was Joe Biden who, during the Obama administration, announced that public policy was finally coming around to recognizing the LGBT communities and individuals as full citizens.

Biden came to the Democratic nomination through the intervention of a billionaire openly proclaiming first priority for a foreign power. That’s what Mike Bloomberg, “Democratic Majority for Israel” and the half-billon-dollar mudsling against Bernie Sanders are all about. But it’s now a genuine doubt whether Bibi Netanyahu can cling to power in Israel. Whether Israel’s planned final liquidation of the Palestinian lands can come to pass and be sustained is another big question. As it stands now a large portion of American Jews object to Netanyahu, annexation, apartheid and AIPAC.

There is certainly no majority among Democrats for this stuff. But where to go if the old paradigm of acceptability, when Golda Meir in the name of her then nominally socialist party could declare the Palestinians to be “cockroaches” and no Democrat in Washington would be heard to object, when a white supremacist could blow up the federal building in Oklahoma and the first question on CNN was whether it was “terrorists” – meaning Muslims – can no longer be sustained?

Yes, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were kept away from the recent Democratic convention, the Republican who lied to the UN and the American people to gin up the disastrous invasion of Iraq got to speak, and one of Biden’s aides set off on a Muslim-baiting screed that was not repudiated by the candidate. But despite primary opponents who tried to ride Joe Biden’s coat tails with the backing of dark corporate super PAC money, Tlaib and Omar were re-elected. The Obama administration’s intervention in Syria has failed and that verdict will not be reversed. Rank-and-file Democrats may on the whole still want to honor an old American promise to guarantee Israel’s existence, but we are much closer to J Street than to AIPAC about how that might be done. Moreover, what happens in the Holy Land will not just be up to Democrats, nor to Americans, nor for that matter the Israelis and Palestinians who live there.

The days when Washington can snap its collective bipartisan fingers and make the Middle East, Africa, a large part of Asia and the Americas south of the US border fall into an orderly line are over. That the old Republican generals, spymasters and economic hit men pine for the good old days will not suffice to restore any mid-1950s imperial grandeur. The Cold War is over. Even if the neocons want another one, America can’t afford it.

The Russian threat? Vladimir Putin is wily and ruthless. But while Donald Trump is a militant ignoramus and Putin isn’t, there is a pathos that the two men share. They both lead the damaged shells of old superpowers and use bluster, smoke and mirrors to project holograms of strength.

You would expect that Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, would both recognize current realities and refrain from the banana republic practice of inviting foreign powers to intervene in US domestic affairs. If this writer judges it right, not even Israel, notwithstanding the primary campaign boost he got from Mr. Bloomberg.

Biden is going to recognize China as the main geopolitical rival of the United States. He’s also going to recognize the perils its expanding ambitions pose to traditional if currently neglected or insulted friends like Japan, South Korea and the western European countries. And not only to them. Also to troubled giants led by reprehensible strongmen, Russia and India. Also to the entire Muslim world. Biden will notice how Chinese business has all but run the US competition off the field in Latin America.

Donald Trump hasn’t a clue about world realities. He cares only about his personal fortunes and not about the lives and aspirations of the American people. There are too many such people on both sides of the US major parties political divide. Joe Biden isn’t one of them.

But what to do? The Biden coalition sinks, along with Kamala Harris’s ambitions, if America blows its diminished resources on foreign adventures. Surely Joe knows that. A sparing, principled foreign policy in which the United States rarely acts alone is what America can afford. Leadership that works with friends who have common interests rather than sullen bullied lackeys who have been threatened into line is what would work for America.

Mainly, though, a “new normal” that works for Americans is, whatever you want to call it, a new deal that puts people back to work. One that builds the cities and transportation systems and schools and factories and energy grid that’s needed for a better tomorrow. A successful Biden administration would be Americans looking inward to rebuild America.

And you know what? In a better educated, more across-the-board prosperous and more just America, there would be political “herd immunity.” The pathetic Internet troll farms by which foreign powers try to manipulate US divisions would be ineffective.

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