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What Republicans are saying

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SHS
Is it true that she will now join Ronald Ziegler in some sort of hall of fame? Altered White House photo.

The GOP message…

  



 



 

https://youtu.be/YfymPE6z6wE


 

https://youtu.be/fRCQYUYzDm0


 



 



 


 

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What Democrats are saying

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Mayor Pete
“If the US is perceived as seeking to dominate the world as a matter of just calculation around our interests, then I think it’s going to be morally suspect, and it’s going to arouse a lot of resentment around the world and ultimately be self-defeating.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg
photo by Lorie Shaull

Dem say…

 


 


 


 


 


 

https://youtu.be/AhxeWphPu-A

 

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Odebrecht / FCC bribe case widens with Cort behind bars

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Via Brasil
The Via Brasil viaduct and corridor project, a $174.5 million job which the comptroller general says was overpriced by $41.7 million. Attorney Mauricio Cort, former public works minister Pepe Suárez and two others are named as suspects in a rigged bid and bribery / kickback scheme with respect to this project. Photo by MOP.

Public works bribe scandals widen and connect with alleged key figure now jailed

by Eric Jackson

Mauricio Cort is a Panamanian lawyer who organizes international money laundering webs. Fingered in a number of countries’ legal systems as such with respect to bribes that the Brazilian company Odebrecht paid out, in November of 2018 he struck a plea bargain with Panamanian prosecutors n which he paid a $50,000 fine in lieu of serving four years in prison for his dealings with that company.

Then, earlier this year, allegations began to surface with respect to his work for the Spanish company FCC, also a major public works construction contractor in Panama. In February of 2017 a former outside counsel for Odebrecht, Rodrigo Tacla, now convicted and turned state’s evidence in Spain, recounted a tale of how, when Odebrecht and FCC were in a consortium to build Line 1 of Panama City’s Metro commuter rail system, Odebrecht proposed to bribe Metro secretary general (and minister of canal affairs) Roberto Roy. However, Tacla alleged, Roy who preferred to paid through FCC, given Odebrecht’s notoriety.

Roy indignantly denied it and any dealings between FCC and Roy would have been hearsay to Tacla. Nothing came of the tale at the time, largely due to a decision by Judge Lania Batista that the Odebrecht case was taking too long for her satisfaction so no other suspects or defendants could be added to the case.

Now, Panamanian attorney Mauricio Court is reported in the Spanish media to be under criminal investigation in the tiny Pyrenees mountain money laundering jurisdiction of Andorra for his work on behalf of FCC.  The Andorrans allege that in 2010 Cort, known for similar work on behalf of Odebrecht, was put in charge of procuring contracts for FCC, then majority owned and controlled by Esther Koplowitz. Cort would get a 4% cut of each contract won, and ultimately these included the Luis Chicho Fabrega Hospital in Santiago, the Electoral Tribunal headquarters in Curundu, in a consortium with two other companies excavation on the Pacific entrance to the new Panama Canal locks, repair work on the Centennial Bridge over the canal and the Via Brasil viaduct corridor. These, in addition to the 2010 contract for the Metro’s Line 1. Cort was involved all told in more than $2 billion in Panamanian public works contracts, if one adds the published numbers for those projects.

Andorran police say that through a chain of shell companies and accounts in the Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), which is and has been in trouble for several years over many money laundering cases. It is alleged that hundreds of millions of illicit dollars made their way through BPA to Ricardo Martinelli’s two fugitive sons via shells that Cort set up.

Consider the Panamanian institutions that would have been witting accomplices or unwitting dupes if the corruption allegations are all true with respect to all of those projects. The Panama Canal Authority. The Electoral Tribunal. The Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Public Works. The Metro. All of this between 2010 and 2014, unless there have been political limits imposed and the practices continued into the Varela administration.

Taken in a June 21 raid on his home in Costa del Este, and with his law office raided simultaneously, Cort was ordered held in preventive detention over the Via Brasil project. Pepe Suárez and two other individuals are also named in the case. Suárez is out on $2 million bail. If Cort received anything like the amounts specified in the deal with FCC alleged by Andorran police, he should be able to pay if he is given bail terms comparable to those that Suárez received.

What does FCC have to say about it? That company was acquired between 2014 and 2016 by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. Company spokespeople decline to comment on the grounds that it involves people who no longer work for FCC.

TE
The Electoral Tribunal headquarters. Given the institution’s much praised financial automomy, what sort of political fallout would there be if magistrates or other top officials there are found to have taken bribes from FCC? Photo by the Tribunal Electoral.
 

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¿Wappin? It’s a terrible thing to have no soul

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Stevie
Stevie Wonder. Photo by Tom Beetz.

Alma Profunda / Deep Soul

Isely Brothers – This Old Heart of Mine
https://youtu.be/5sD8tuRCsec

Malo – Suavecito
https://youtu.be/2Y7zrudDdx8

The Supremes – Baby Love
https://youtu.be/9_y6nFjoVp4

The Soul Fantastics – Will Cry Together
https://youtu.be/j6GaeDW0teg

Bob Marley – No Woman, No Cry
https://youtu.be/jGqrvn3q1oo

The Four Tops – Are You Man Enough?
https://youtu.be/faaxsHyyIzY

Zahara – Umsebenzi Wam’
https://youtu.be/Ha1QaoTGfKs

Joan Osborne – What Becomes of the Broken Hearted
https://youtu.be/gA0GcXV2njY

Los Silvertones – Old Buzzard
https://youtu.be/txBn_MF6SC0

Carla Thomas – Gee Whiz
https://youtu.be/rd2RJCnf3DI

Mad Professor & Aisha – Jah Protect I
https://youtu.be/HjQn0hjudfo

Martha and the Vandellas – Jimmy Mack
https://youtu.be/obvSFWvgBhg

Stevie Wonder & Ariana Grande – Faith
https://youtu.be/Xob4-t8A_RI

Culture – Selection Train
https://youtu.be/uRrbHhRfpqw

Donny Hathaway – Someday We’ll All Be Free
https://youtu.be/cv1B0ejhFVE

 

 
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Convergencia Sindical, Tercerización

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Gandasegui, The Monroe Doctrine then and now

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MD 3
The Monroe Doctrine was pronounced in 1823, first in a letter to Russia, whose ambassador suggested that its holdings in Alaska might expand down the West Coast into what is now California but was then part of Mexico. It was also prompted by a suggestion by France, which had invaded Spain, that it wanted to recolonize countries in the Americas that had become independent. The original doctrine, included a commitment to stay out of European conflicts. Things evolved. The policy expanded into a US claim to determine the affairs of Latin American and Caribbean lands. The bit about the United States staying out of Europe’s wars was dropped. The Monroe Doctrine is a shifting US policy, not a principle of law.

The Monroe Doctrine and
Mr. Bolton’s regional wars

by Marco A. Gandásegui, hijo

The Monroe Doctrine was formulated in 1823 by the US secretary of state at the time, John Quincy Adams, and directed at European powers. It explicitly said that any intervention by them in the Western Hemisphere would be considered an offense against the integrity and sovereignty of the United States. In effect, the United States reserved what later became Latin America as its own territory. All of the US governments of the 20th century made it clear that this most expansive interpretation of the doctrine was no longer in effect. Until now.

The Panamanian governments have perhaps been the most affected by the US territorial claims. The 20th century was a permanent struggle to exercise sovereignty over the entirety of its territory, despite the American power that occupied a strip of 500 square miles across the Isthmus of Panama. The Monroe Doctrine was complemented by the corollary of Theodore Roosevelt which is synthesized in his famous cry: “I took Panama and let Congress debate.” The president-elect, Laurentino Cortizo, must have this historical background in mind when he assumes power in about 10 days.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser just said that “today we proudly proclaim so that everyone can hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.” It is another moment, different from 1823, when Washington looked towards Europe. Bolton looks at China, a new emerging Asian power, which has a growing economic presence in Latin America and, in particular, Panama. American politicians have always considered, and so they say, that the continent is their “back yard.” Recently, US Vice President Mike Pence said that his country can not intervene in any country in the world, with the exception of those in Latin America.

In the early nineteenth century the official US policy consisted of preserving the status quo when it came to relations with Spanish America. When the Venezuelan generals Francisco Miranda and Simón Bolívar, at different times, asked Washington for support for the revolutionary struggles for the independence of the region, the United States declared itself neutral. In spite of this, it sold arms to the Spanish Crown to suppress the uprisings from Mexico to Argentina, including through Greater Colombia. The Monroe Doctrine was made known in 1823, four years after the Angostura Congress, two years after the independence of Panama and a year before the battle of Ayacucho sealed the triumph of the independence armies. It was three years before the Amphictyonic Congress summoned by Bolívar in Panama City.

The US plan, announced by President Jefferson in the early nineteenth century, was to wait for each Spanish colony to fall like ripe fruit for Washington to harvest, without firing a shot and without bloodshed. He bough the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, which included the huge Mississippi River watershed. It was expected that the rest of the region would be under US control. Although northern Mexico was later taken, the plan did not develop as expected. From the end of the 19th century, the USA found the formula to appropriate the natural riches of the region without the need to annex the Latin American territories (with the exception of Puerto Rico).

In the case of Panama, the United States is interested in retaining its dominance over the transit route that joins the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. All US maritime trade from one ocean to the other passes through the Panama Canal. It is a place of great geopolitical importance. The United States wants neither Panama, nor regional movements, let alone extra-regional factors, to destabilize the correlation of forces. It is no accident that Bolton seeks refuge in the Monroe Doctrine to wage war on what the United States considers its “back yard.”

 

 

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Juneteenth, then and now

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the band
June 19, 1900 in Texas: the band assembles for an Emancipation Day celebration.
Photo, by Grace Murray, from the North Texas State Library.

Juneteenth, 1865 and 2019

by Eric Jackson

Then

When did slavery end in the USA? There are various points of reference.

In many US jurisdictions it legally ended well before the Civil War.

In the history that most American kids are taught, it ended with the Emancipation Proclamation – but that was Abraham Lincoln’s military decree that only applied to slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the Union, not to such slave states that didn’t secede as Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri.

By lawyerly and other accounts it ended after the Civil War with the passage of the 13th Amendment, which prohibited involuntary servitude except when imposed by due process of law – but ask most competent jailhouse lawyers or many a black scholar and you are likely to be told of how the exception tended to become the rule in many cases with the advent of Jim Crow, then nearly a century later with the War on Drugs.

And then there was Juneteenth.

Texas seceded from the Union and sent troops to the serve in the Confederate Army, but very little of the Civil War’s combat took place in that state. After General Grant led the Union forces to a blood-soaked victory at Vicksburg the Mississippi came under complete Union control and those parts of the country in rebellion west of the river were cut off and, save for the overall naval blockade, largely ignored.

Texas was spared the grinding horror of trench warfare that Northern Virginia saw, and the incendiary devastation of General Sherman’s march through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea. Except for a small and static beachhead on the Gulf of Mexico the Grand Army of the Republic didn’t extend its lines into Texas. Unlike in other parts of the South, Texas slaves didn’t massively drop their tools and seek the protection of Abraham Lincoln’s troops. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and in any case the Texas press was de facto and de jure censored during the Civil War. Unlike many of their counterparts to the east, African-American slaves in Texas didn’t know that the Emancipation Proclamation had been decreed in early January of 1863.

By the middle of June in 1865, General Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Lincoln had been assassinated and federal troops were in Texas. However, a political decision had been made to let slavery linger just a bit, until that season’s cotton crop was in. But finally, on June 19th in Galveston, black slaves were gathered and the Emancipation Proclamation was read to them.

Texas is a big state and it took a little while for word to get out, but June 19th – Juneteenth – is taken in that state and among many African-Americans everywhere as the end of slavery. It’s a legal holiday in some US jurisdictions.

Gen. Granger
When General Granger issued this order, Texas, like the other former Confederate states, was under military occupation and martial law. In any case one of the common badges of slavey was a code of restrictions on black people traveling, to prevent both runaways and the organization of slave revolts. So if the US Army at that time forbade the movement of former slaves, it was not actually a new rule.

The context back then

Abraham Lincoln, like so many politicians before and since, had a personal story which for political purposes embellished certain aspects and downplayed others. He was “Honest Abe,” who as a young man made a living swinging an ax to split logs into rails and studied by candle light and then as an apprentice in a law firm to raise himself to a higher station in life. He was the brooding depressive, married to a difficult woman from a higher rung on the social-economic ladder, who managed his predicaments in ways that most probably helped him to better understand the woes of others.

By the time Lincoln rose to political prominence, he was a prosperous attorney with some important corporate clients. A single term in the US House of Representatives promised to end his political career once and for all because he was against the Mexican War, but it also attracted new and richer clients from among the growing Northern industrial interests to his law practice. In particular there were the railroad companies.

Lincoln disapproved of slavery but did not run for president on a platform of abolishing slavery. He ran to be steward of a bitterly divided country, as the man with a plan to stitch together this huge North American empire into a greater and more harmonious republic.

In particular, there was the railroads’ plan to do this by uniting the USA by a continental network of rails. At the time, the world had only one ocean-to-ocean railroad, the one built across Panama largely by West Indian laborers under the auspices of an American company. For the United States the plan was that railroad companies would get federal concessions across territories not then incorporated as states, with land not only to set down rails but also large rights-of-way to sell in order to establish farms and towns that would be natural customers for rail services. It was a monopolistic plan by men who later came to be known as prominent Robber Barons.

But the thing about the railroad companies’ plan was that it wasn’t too compatible with slavery’s spread to the west. It was about immigrants and poor families from the East establishing family farms and business centers to serve those farmers. The expansion of slave plantations along the tracks would give a planter class bargaining power with the railroads that small farmers and small businesses would not have. Given the habits of the planter aristocracy, it likely would have meant the unsustainable practice of exhausting the soil’s productivity and then abandoning it to repeat the process with as yet untilled land. Slavery’s spread meant limited population and limited business opportunities from the railroads’ perspective.

So Lincoln ran for the presidency opposing the western expansion of slavery. The problem with this was that the admission of new states in which slavery was prohibited would end the slave owners’ power in the US Senate. Before the Civil War the slave states had enough votes to block anything that needed a two-thirds supermajority to pass the Senate and, with a few Northern allies, could usually thwart anything inimical to plantation owners’ interests in that chamber of Congress. No matter that they represented states in which most white people didn’t own slaves and saw their economic aspirations hemmed in by the power of the slave-owning minority.

In an 1860 election in which Democrats split along section lines and among pro- and anti-slavery factions and the old compromising Whigs were extinct, Lincoln and the industrial interests carried the day via the Republican Party. The South moved to secede and Lincoln’s plans for a stewardship presidency gave way to a war presidency.

That war brought industrial power and economic aggression front and center. The Confederacy had more of a military culture and better generals, but the Union had a larger population and far more industrial might. More than 600,000 people died, with the Union taking the most casualties. The Industrial Age came to the old tactic of trench warfare, especially with the deployment of repeating rifles and Gatling guns.

The Confederates figured that their white men would put on gray uniforms and go fight the Yankees while slaves fed those armies. Black people had other ideas. They fled to Union lines en masse whenever possible. What the noted scholar and activist WEB Du Bois called a general strike added to the Union strategies.

The basic Northern strategy, once it became clear that secession was a serious threat, included a naval blockade of the South, Northern cavalry tearing up sections of Southern railroad tracks, control of the Mississippi and the burning of Atlanta and much of the rest of Georgia. But more was needed to collapse the Confederate economy.

Lincoln accelerated black flight from servitude with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, and as a lot of Northern white men were resisting the draft while all these black men were arriving in Union camps, began to enlist blacks into the Grand Army of the Republic. On the barrier islands of the Confederate East Coast the abolitionist hero of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, was put to work guiding Union soldiers from plantation to plantation, where they told the slaves that they were free and encouraged to them to leave the farms and granaries upon which the Southern armies depended barren and untended.

The Confederacy was crushed and its relatively untouched appendages like Texas fell with it. Even if, at war’s end, slaves were still picking cotton in the fields of Texas.

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

13th Amendment to the US Constitution
ratified December 18, 1865

In the intervening more than a century and a half

The United States never did go back to chattel slavery as a matter of law, but there was a lot of backsliding. In the 1870s there arose the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, which had among its purposes an end to black voting, the withdrawal of federal occupation troops from the former Confederate States, the closure of such Reconstruction agencies as the Freedmen’s Bureau and the eviction of black farmers from lands redistributed to them in parts of the South during and after the war. The disputed election of 1876 featured widespread KKK terrorism and resulted in an agreement among white politicians to end Reconstruction.

There arose the Jim Crow system, wherein black people were disenfranchised, dispossessed, sent to prisons or chain gangs on often the most scurrilous of charges, and in many cases lynched across much of the South and in some Northern Klan strongholds like Indiana as well. The mean and ignorant white slave gang overseers gave way to a generation of mean and ignorant white chain gang guards.

Tiny cracks began to appear in that wall. Black educational institutions arose. The NAACP and other civil rights organizations were founded. A black intelligentsia, from the musicians of New Orleans to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and far more widespread than that, arose to new prominence. Black nationalism arose and established international ties, with a man from Jamaica who had once practiced journalism in Panama, Marcus Garvey, as its most prominent US figure for a time. The conscription of African-Americans for the trench warfare of World War I introduced many of them to the African colonial subjects of Britain and France and fed into Pan-African sentiments.

But against that, and against all progress, after World War I there was a second iteration of the KKK. This time not only anti-black but also anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. It was big in the states of the old Confederacy, but also had strongholds in the North, the most notorious but far from the only one being the state of Indiana.

That second wave of the Klan crashed on the realities of the 1930s and 1940s. The AFL unions had been mostly whites-only, but labor’s big upsurge was led by CIO unions that welcomed blacks. If Southern segregationists were part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, influential voices like those of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that the New Deal would not be only for whites.

As war clouds gathered, German agents, then without any legal requirement to register as such, worked the US press and the halls of Congress. And on the streets, the US affiliate of the Nazi Party, the German-American Bund, marched for white supremacy alongside the Ku Klux Klan.

World War II discredited racism. The horrific results of Nazi racial policies came into the glare of an international spotlight as the concentration camps were liberated one by one. President Harry Truman integrated the US Armed Forces. The color line broke down in Major League Baseball. Led by black religious figures and labor leaders, a new civil rights movement emerged.

There arose a third iteration of the KKK to oppose this, but their murders of civil rights activists and the brutality of police forces under their influence shocked the American conscience. The violent hatred and public rejection of it led to the signing, by a president from Texas, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A neofascist rams his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017. A woman was killed and several other people injured. In the wake of this Donald Trump said that some of the Nazis in Charlottesville were “fine people.” If somebody, as in 2016, tells African-Americans that it’s “woke” to abstain from voting when there is a white supremacist on the ballot, that argument is likely to get a more hostile reception than back then. Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Ryan Kelly. 

The modern racist reaction

Then came Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, which ultimately shifted most white racists into the Republican Party. Nixon also began the “War on Drugs,” aimed largely at getting nonwhite people and hippies convicted on felony charges that would disqualify them from voting in many states.

Nixon’s disgrace was in some ways the crowning victory of the Black Power and antiwar movememts, but Watergate was really not their doing. In fact it was largely a process that unfolded when the enemies of black political power and peace activism, the circle of FBI leaders around the Machiavellian white supremacist J. Edgar Hoover, turned on Nixon because he had installed an outsider, a sleazy crook named L. Patrick Gray, to head the FBI after Hoover’s death. The leaks to The Washington Post by “Deep Throat,” much later identified as FBI administrator Mark Felt, were of information gleaned from FBI surveillance of the White House on Hoover’s shift.

Felt was no friend of progressives, and neither were the new breed of university administrators who arose after the campus revolts of the 1960s and early 1970s. Like Felt, the new caste was adept at pressing political buttons in which they didn’t believe, at exploiting the extremes of identity politics. Catch them lining their pockets at public expense and they were likely to find a way to call you a racist or a sexist. Should it have been a big surprise? After all, when Malcolm X was assassinated by a rival faction of black nationalists, two of his three bodyguards were undercover agents, one from the FBI and the other from the New York City Police Department.

The GOP shifted inexorably to the right over several decades, until in 2016 its winning ticket was headed by a white supremacist whose father had once been arrested in a KKK riot. There were serious milestones along the way, a big one the end of old concepts of bipartisan comity in the Congress starting in about 1994.

The 2016 Trump victory happened in large part due to low voter turnout, which in turn was promoted by online memes aimed at black people – sometimes originating in Russia – arguing that it’s somehow “woke” for African-Americans to abstain from voting.

There has never been such an indiscreet president of the United States as Donald Trump. His open calls for foreign intervention in US elections, made on the 2016 campaign trail and repeated as he prepares for the 2020 campaign, are unprecedented. Members of his campaign staff were convicted of violating the foreign agent registration laws that were passed to counter covert German lobbying. His declaration that there are “fine people” in the Nazi ranks shocked many.

Trump intends and has moved to transform America, with different particulars but in a similar sense to how such 20th century European fascists as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco intended to transform their countries. He has gone a long way toward breaking up the Cold War alliances, economic “globalization” and old Washington customs.

There was a strong mid-term election reaction in 2018, but in the Georgia and Florida governors’ races vote suppression techniques helped white supremacists defeat black Democratic candidates.

Juneteenth, 2012 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Photo by Amherst Media.

Gains, losses, fragmentation and missed opportunities of the Obama years

Abraham Lincoln’s initial intention was to preserve and heal the nation and to only gradually transform it through economic development. He intended his presidency to be an exercise in good stewardship.

Another president came from Illinois 168 years after Lincoln’s election. Like Lincoln, Barack Obama also took the reins of a deeply troubled nation, and saw himself as a steward rather than a transformer, a man dedicated to preserving the republic through modest, gradual changes.

A cabal of billionaire swindlers had, through leading economic institutions, marketed misrepresented mortgage-backed securities and the bubble burst in 2008. About one-third of the equity in the US economy was wiped off the books in an instant. The US financial superstructure and key industries like auto manufacturing were threatened.

Obama and the Democrats may not have had the votes in Congress to do otherwise, but they bailed out the bankers and industrialists while leaving the people who were being foreclosed and evicted to fend for themselves. Obama’s signature reform of the US health care system was left incomplete by its concessions to predatory insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

All the while, white racist extremism exploded in myriad ways. There was the “Birther” hoax, a white racist conspiracy theory promoted by among others Donald Trump, which holds that Obama isn’t and never was a US citizen. There was the Republican congressional wall against passage of any sort of immigration reform. There was a proliferation of extremist white militia groups and alt-right racist ideologies. There was a spike in racist violence, both by armed extremist civilians and by police who felt entitled to brutalize black people. Obama could be the steward who called for calm, understanding and public order. He went to great lengths to avoid being portrayed as an angry black man or as a transformational radical.

The antiwar candidate who bashed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries for her vote for the Iraq War and promised to get America out of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq instead led the country into disastrous new foreign interventions in Libya, Syria and by backing coups in Honduras and Ukraine. It was bound to demoralize and split the Democratic Party, and it did.

A Democratic establishment that had tried to avoid fundamental issues of economics, and of war and peace, found its discourses limited to identity politics. And even those appeals featured long silences.

Couldn’t talk about why there were all these Hondurans fleeing on foot into the United States. Couldn’t talk about the massacre of blacks in supposedly liberated Libya. Apart from universal horror at the atrocities by the minions of a wannabe caliph, Democrats couldn’t make a coherent case of why “our” jihadis in Syria were different and better than “their” jihadis.

Democrats could and did make belated and tepid acknowledgments that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people have human rights that ought to be respected. But party leaders and candidates by and large wouldn’t talk about homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism or countless other prejudices among core Democratic constituencies except to – often speciously – accuse insurgent candidates and their supporters of these things.

But the Republicans could and did touch some of those buttons. It was the bread and butter of the Russian online campaign.

awakening
An awakening in progress.  How many candidates, campaign workers and voter registars will be working Juneteenth crowds this year and next? Wikimedia chart.

Now

Now we are into the 2020 presidential election cycle, with some important state and local elections this year. What does Juneteenth mean in 2019?

It’s mostly a matter of how scant or full a measure of freedom African-American voters will accept. That decision will be made by black people largely in terms of whether and how they vote. White journalists, historians and activists will observe and comment along with their counterparts of other races. But black people will decide.


 

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Editorials: Continuity or change? and Evidence tampering

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Tribunal Electoral
Word comes from across the Atlantic that police in Andorra are looking at the financial activities of Panamanian lawyer Mauricio Cort, who has also been named as a suspect in Odebrecht’s money laundering and bribery activities. He’s under investigation as a suspected intermediary in bribery by the Spanish construction company FCC of a number of Panamanian officials. One of the contracts said to be involved was the construction of the Electoral Tribunal headquarters. Think of how serious this would be for a critical national institution. Photo by the Electoral Tribunal.

Continuity or change?

With less than two weeks before a new administration and legislature takes office, we are lulled into a sense that nothing much will change, with some hopes that certain things will. Nito Cortizo’s personality is one thing, but soon enough the character and interests of the National Assembly will come to the fore to select two very important people, the next Comptroller General and the next Attorney General. Pick two sycophants and corruption gets even more of a lock than it has had. Pick two capable and zealous defenders of the public trust and all of a sudden the crooks have more to fear. Those are the legislature’s choices, not the president’s.

Meanwhile several of the re-elected legislators are named by the comptroller with respect to crude abuses of public funds. Also, renewed questions from across the ocean cast shadows on the Electoral Tribunal, the Panama Canal Authority, the usual suspects at the Ministry of Public Works and so on.

And then there are the trials of the Martinelli gang, with phalanxes of lawyers deployed to get the courts to declare that 1+1=6, no corruption ever happened and it’s the most fundamental of rights that the the sticky fingers get to keep the money.

The constitutional reforms that Cortizo has embraced can only with great charity be called cosmetic. They are “cosmetic” in the sense that Tammy Faye Bakker’s make-up was. No self-respecting pig would want to wear THAT lipstick. If Nito insists on presenting it to the voters, he will lose that beauty contest and the rest of his presidency will be undermined.

Perhaps we can get some presidential leadership that comes down against all the old games in other ways. These games are of ancient date – the no-show employees on the payroll, the overpriced public contracts with kickbacks, the rigged contests and so on – but they have been carried to extremes in the post-invasion administrations. It was worst of all under Ricardo Martinelli but all of the parties in the legislature are left tainted. Nito says he won’t, and he shouldn’t, try to take over the courts. But surely there are other ways to tell people that certain games he will neither play nor accept and use presidential power to enforce that.

What if this is to be a continuity administration? Can Panama afford more of the same? Not really, but we might carry on as before and make it through five years without a huge crisis like a bankruptcy, a foreign invasion or bodies lying in the street. Let’s hope that this is not Nito’s bet.

 

Messing with evidence

It appears that National Security Director Rolando López was the author of seven of some 500 emails presented as evidence in the wiretapping and theft case against Ricardo Martinelli. If he was indeed trying to run a fraud on the court, that’s a very serious matter.

Concealment of evidence – like how Martinelli disappeared the spy equipment and its hard drives – is a serious matter that does not get taken seriously in the Panamanian legal system. Fabrication of “evidence” is even worse.

The public is owed a full and truthful explanation. The courts will have to decide which proffered documents are genuine and which are doubtful. Martinelli is not owed an acquittal as his media outlets and his most obnoxious sycophants are proclaiming.

 


Bear in mind…

 

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.
Mark Twain

 

 

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

 

The point of quotations is that one can use another’s words to be insulting.
Amanda Cross
 
 

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Book chapter: General Noriega (pana, gringo and dog views)

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woof woof
Noriega’s Dobermans weren’t actually dogs…. Photo from the Biblioteca Nacional

General Noriega

Mahatma Gandhi once noted that much can be discerned about a society by the way it treats animals. Maybe it’s hypocritical for a guy wearing a leather belt to agree too strongly with this, but nevertheless there is a ring of truth to it.

Perhaps a better measure is the way that a society treats its criminals. THIS Panagringo writer, by birth a citizen of two nations, finds himself at odds with both. One criminal in particular, the late Manuel Antonio Noriega, is an example of this. The man was in his 80s, had spent decades behind bars and along the way was hobbled by a stroke. He fell gravely ill and it became clear that he wouldn’t be making any full recoveries. A decent society lets such an offender out of prison, if only to a hospital bed, to spend his last days with family, friends or just hospital staff whose mission is not punitive. Anyway, that’s how this reporter sees it.

In the end Panama let its former dictator go to a civilian hospital, but many Panamanians objected.

Almost any Panamanian above a certain age could be said that be one of Noriega’s victims. He led the country through hell and more than once suppressed the majority of voters who didn’t want to go there. (The Panamanians who were his ACCOMPLICES almost never admit it, but there were an awful lot of those, too.)

Could he try to shift blame? He could and he did. Set aside the “true reason” for the years of economic strangulation that preceded the 1989 US invasion and you’d have to be petty to deny that the suffering that flowed from the sanctions was externally imposed. That was his argument. He blamed a civilian informant for the death in government custody of Father Héctor Gallego, the Catholic parish priest in Santa Fe de Veraguas. Having concealed evidence, he left his accusers to their proofs with respect to people trying to overthrow him whom he had fairly obviously had killed. His apologists noted that in most places those who try to overthrow the government by force of arms or by acting in concert with a foreign power risk being killed for this.

Two staples of gringo popular culture with respect to guys who have people killed are:

1. “He has forfeited his life. Why should money be wasted on feeding him? Execute him.” and

2. “Lock him up and throw away they key.”

In US politics more people in prison serving longer sentences under more brutal conditions has very often been a winning election platform. Only in relatively recent times, after a long experiment that was largely conducted under the guise of “The War on Drugs,” have many Americans looked around and, whatever their opinion of the justice or injustice of it all, noticed that it was both expensive and ineffective.

And your “law and order conservatives?” Often mere racists. Often professing to be devout Christians, who more often than not haven’t much read the Bible. Often devotees of a strange put popular secular religion that treats the US Constitution as a sacred text, although by and large they haven’t read that, either. But there, among the first 10 amendments, one will find a ban on “cruel and unusual” punishments.

Like insisting that a crippled old man who did terrible things die in a cage? You won’t find debate notes or 18th century historical practices to argue that the authors of the Bill of Rights specifically meant to prohibit that. Within modern international standards the general opinion would be that such stuff is cruel and unusual, notwithstanding the contrary practices of a few notorious countries.

Noriega was let out of prison but never went home. He died in a hospital bed with family members at his side.

Most Americans who would have preferred a maximum of suffering imposed on the person of Manuel Antonio Noriega don’t actually know very much about what he did.

Yes, he turned a blind eye toward cocaine smuggling via Panama at a time when US operatives were engaged in this to raise money to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. He let some others do that, too. He was not a drug dealer himself.

No, he did not declare war on the United States. He did, however, see it coming. If he prepared by passing out assault rifles to his Dignity Battalions militia, the main effect of this was a massive post-invasion crime wave. Men with AK-47s descending on upscale restaurants and robbing everyone on the premises became a feature of those immediate post-Noriega times.

But then, the gringo side of this reporter is impressed – not in a positive way — with a certain quirk about how most Panamanians view the legacy of Manuel Antonio Noriega. Ask the strongest critics of the former strongman to enumerate his crimes, ask those Panamanians who were offended that he didn’t die in prison, and one count is almost always missing.

Here was a soldier – a general – who deserted his post under fire.

Anyone who loves and understands dogs for their best qualities would see the contrast. Instead of a “maximum leader” who when in power had difficulty distinguishing himself from God, wouldn’t most Panamanians have been better served by a leader who was as loyal to them as their dogs are?

fulita
 

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¿Wappin? Would’ve been the Friday playlist, but for a chip running out

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Tessa Murray
Tessa Murray of Still Corners. Photo by acb.

If the sky doesn’t turn blue today, there’s this
Si el cielo no se vuelve azul hoy, hay esto

Big Daddy Wilson – Walk A Mile In My Shoes
https://youtu.be/gUm_VC3vBt4

Lee Oskar – Lee’s Blues
https://youtu.be/DTEX2hNIy44

Still Corners – Black Lagoon
https://youtu.be/LB_M44NCwUY

Bunbury – Lady Blue
https://youtu.be/AY8z7ZXJ-Vg

Donnie Hathaway – For All We Know
https://youtu.be/KEHRrMYqmI4

Beth & Joe – I’d Rather Be Blind
https://youtu.be/UEHwO_UEp7A

Lauryn Hill – I Gotta Find Peace Of Mind
https://youtu.be/pb7KjMTgK-Q

Of Monsters and Men – Little Talks
https://youtu.be/5E-OqIBvsRg

Emmylou Harris – Tougher Than The Rest
https://youtu.be/sq0MVlwL-SE

Semito – Ungowami
https://youtu.be/Su33VoF0suI

Cienfue – La Décima Tercera
https://youtu.be/AGa0ntjZLUk

Bad Bunny – Callaíta
https://youtu.be/acEOASYioGY

Prince – Free
https://youtu.be/qnE775jB0Ik

Natalie Merchant – Motherland
https://youtu.be/A2JbLUVt0Z0

Conscious Woman (Female Rasta Roots Reggae)
https://youtu.be/iV9ZKPl_ajQ