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Hartmann, When the Supreme Court enabled the hustlers

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Because of key decisions by the court equating money with free speech, the US political system is now overrun with grifters, con artists, and career criminals. Clarence Thomas, from the Supreme Court’s archives. Photo by Steve Petteway.

How the US Supreme Court unleashed
a corporate criminal takeover

by Thom Hartmann — Common Dreams

Republicans in the Senate yesterday killed legislation passed through the House that would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed: not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did.

Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, we learned Wednesday, is going to spend $42 million on the midterm elections, focusing on flipping evangelical Hispanics toward the GOP.

Leonard Leo, head of The Federalist Society so famous for providing Trump and McConnell with rightwing judges to pack federal courts and the Supreme Court, recently received a $1.6 billion contribution, tax-free.

So much money is sloshing around in our political system — both what we know of and the billions in truly dark money that we know nothing about — that honest politicians are buried and actual criminals are stepping up.

Donald Trump‘s phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was probably the clearest illustration of this recent incarnation of his lifelong criminality. Although it’s rapidly being eclipsed by his theft and probable sale to foreign dictators of classified documents.

Over the last 40 years, career criminals like Trump have increasingly moved out of the business world and the streets and into politics, something for which we can thank the Supreme Court.

There are, among us, a small number of individuals who are career criminals. They have literally spent their entire lives skirting or outright breaking the law, and not only believe the law doesn’t apply to them, but actually delight in getting away with their crimes.

Because all of us have, at one time or another in our lives, broken a law or told lies; we tend to assume that these career criminals are just like us but only got caught in that one unlucky moment, like that time you drove home after a second glass of wine, or made up an excuse to tell your boss.

But they’re not like you and me. There’s something fundamentally different about these people. And the failure to recognize that goes to the core of the crisis within the Republican Party and our overall political system today.

Back when I was in my late teens, I got a job as a manager of a GNC store in a mall in Okemos, Michigan. There was a test that I had to give to all job applicants to determine their “honesty.”

The test asked really weird questions, along the lines of:

“One of your very best employees just came to you to return some money to the till, money that she had borrowed from the till because a few months back she needed it to help pay for an emergency medical procedure for her child. She has saved up to pay the money back, and is now trying to do so. What do you do?”

Or: “Your mother just called and told to you that she’s been shoplifting at the local store when her food stamps run out and your younger sister is really hungry. What do you do?”

The test, from a national testing chain, went on with 20 or 30 similar questions. In almost every case, the only correct answer to the multiple choice test was, “call the police and send them to jail.”

I protested to my district manager, saying that I would’ve flunked the test, or would’ve had to lie to pass it. There’s no way I turn in my mother or call the police on somebody with a sick child.

My manager pointed out to me that the only way to pass the honesty test is to lie on it, and it was actually designed that way. They expect people to say that they will call the police even for the tiniest of crimes. I protested that I thought that was crazy, that we were requiring people to lie to pass an honesty test, and that made no sense at all to me.

What he explained was that there’s no test in the world that can tell if a person really and truly will or will not call the police on anyone. But the test does tell whether a person understands the difference between right and wrong.

“I know it’s hard for you to realize or believe,” he said as I recall, “but there are some people who literally don’t know what is right and what is wrong. And the people who don’t have that basic understanding, or do know but don’t think the rules apply to them, are the ones most likely to steal from us or let their friends come shoplifting.

“The test expects people to lie by representing themselves as being honest, because to lie on the test they would first have to know the difference between right and wrong, so they could lie and say that they would always do the right thing.”

One of the big challenges the American media and our political system have with Donald Trump and a number of his enablers is that, like the people I was testing to filter out from our potential pool of employees, they are actually career criminals with no deep understanding of, or respect for, right and wrong.

They may know the words and concepts, but truly believe they don’t apply to them.

Donald Trump has been scamming, grifting and stealing his entire life, going all the way back to stealing his father’s money from his parents and his siblings. He is a career criminal.

Many of the people he surrounded himself with are, similarly, career criminals even though they appear to have had high profile, high powered positions in government or industry.

Even Forbes magazine called Trump’s commerce secretary, billionaire Wilbur Ross, a professional “grifter” for all the scams he has perpetrated in his career, and now we learn that Clarence Thomas’ wife was allegedly in on trying to overthrow our democracy.

While fundamentally dishonest people has been a problem for our society and business community for centuries, it has particularly become a problem in our political world since 1976 and 1978.

That was when the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that billionaires or corporations giving massive amounts of money to politicians and political parties is no longer considered bribery or corruption but, instead, is “free speech“ protected by the First Amendment.

Never before in all of American history had bribing politicians been considered free-speech, until the Buckley v Valejo and First National Bank v Belotti Supreme Court decisions as I laid out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

In 2010, conservatives of the Court doubled down on these decisions and even expanded their scope with Citizens United.

The result after these SCOTUS decisions was an ocean of corporate and billionaire money flowing into politics, sweeping Ronald Reagan into the White House on a tsunami of cash from the fossil fuel industry.

In the 40+ years since then, billionaire and corporate bribery of politicians has become the norm, and even institutionalized with national and state-based “policy networks,” PACs and SuperPACs, and dark money groups like the ones affiliated with Mitch McConnell that just poured tens of millions into this year’s elections.

All this money now sloshing around in our political system has produced the result the dissenting Supreme Court justices worried about.

It’s become a giant magnet that draws career criminals and authoritarians into politics, and then helps them become fabulously wealthy as they do the bidding of the corporations and wealthy people who fund their elections and careers.

It’s normalized the “revolving door” where people go into government positions, particularly in regulatory agencies, and make decisions that benefit giant corporations while drawing a modest government paycheck, only then to leave government and pick up multi-million dollar a year jobs in the industries they were regulating.

Trump is a career criminal, and he has surrounded himself with career criminals. Just look at their mob-like meeting just a week or so ago on one of his golf courses: it was right out of The Sopranos.

But he and many of his criminal Republican allies could never have gained power if the Supreme Court, back in the 1970s, hadn’t struck down the “good government” laws that came out of the Nixon bribery scandals and other laws to keep money out of politics, like the Tillman Act that dates back to 1907.

Because of these Supreme Court decisions equating money with free speech, our political system is now overrun with grifters, con artists and career criminals.

Even worse, this dark money spree Republicans are enjoying courtesy of rightwing billionaires and giant corporations is also empowering the recurrent criminal underbelly of the political world itself: authoritarians.

Authoritarians like Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, and Trump each came to power through manipulating the political system in ways that, if not overtly in violation of criminal statutes, were certainly so dangerous to democracy that they’re rightly described as “crimes against the nation.”

Job one of the new Congress must be to overturn these corrupt Supreme Court decisions and get big money — and the criminals it draws and empowers — out of American politics.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

 

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Martinelli plays youth movement, Italian far right, other cards

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Anton office
The youth movement card — Ricardo Martinelli is pumping up a young woman, Lourdes “Lulu” Castillo, to be the next legislator from Anton. It’s a sprawling municipality and swing circuit, but how valuable is a Marinelli endorsement? Most polls say that the former president is well situated for a 2024 comeback, but court developments suggest that by then he stands a very good chance of being a convicted criminal who’s ineligible to run. This is his latest party’s youth organization office on the Pan-American Highway in Anton. He also has volunteer groups active in the corregimientos. It represents a head start on the others if you don’t count the PRD political patronage machine.
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He’s promising more jobs and more cash, and revenge against everyone who calls him a crook. From his Twitter feed.
Martinelli, a dual Panamanian and Italian citizen, is celebrating a far right victory in Italy (as well as Sweden and other parts) and mostly ignoring the recent trend toward the left in much of Latin America. At the moment it would be a problem for him to go to Italy, as he’s wanted for hiring men to stalk and electronically spy upon a former mistress in Spain, so there would be a warrant in force for all of the Eurpean Union. Plus, after his two sons testified in a US federal district court in Brooklyn that they laundered some $28 million of Odebrecht bribe money for him, Uncle Sam would probably also be looking for him to be extradited and tried there.
Tick, tick, tick, ka-BOOOM!
Tick, tick, tick, ka-BOOOM! What’s a right wing politician without a conspiracy theory these days? Whether literal or figurative, any bombshell that the vice president may have in store for Martinelli is most unlikely to produce a Carrizo or a PRD victory in 2024. Should the derogatory Panamanian Spanglish word be used? It would be surplus. Panamanian voters generally throw the party that holds the presidency out of power in the next elections, and in this summer’s crisis Gaby Carrizo has shown his slickest moves to be incredibly clumsy. And if the ailing President Cortizo is unable to finish his term? By stepping up to that challenge Carrizo would make himself constitutionally ineligible. By declining the top job the VP would perhaps demonstrate even worse characteristics to the voters.

Stay tuned, folks. The editor is no prophet, but think about how unstable Panama could get over the next year and a half. Martinelli ineligible to run, the last Panameñista president convicted of Odebrecht kickbacks, people fed up with the PRD, most people unhappy with the way things are, nobody able to fully capture the public imagination? It might happen that way.

 

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Kosher rules don’t much change, but what observant American Jews eat evolves

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gefilte fish
Gefilte fish balls for Rosh Hashana. Wikimedia photo by Ovedc.

“Traditional” Jewish American foods keep changing: cookbooks and how Jews mark Rosh Hashana

by Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan

The end of August inaugurated the Hebrew month of Elul, when Jews all over the world start getting ready for the High Holidays: the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashana followed 10 days later by the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

Rabbis are polishing their sermons for one of the few times they can be confident of a large congregation ready to hear what they have to say. Cantors, who lead congregants in worship, are practicing the special nusach, melodies used during the High Holidays for prayers. Choir leaders meet with their group members to rehearse hymns and other songs. And those who cook are thinking about the meals they will serve.

Although Yom Kippur is a day of fasting, it is preceded by a large dinner and concludes with a meal to break the fast. Rosh Hashana, by contrast, summons up many meals. A large, multicourse feast opens the first evening, to be followed by another full dinner midday on the first day of the holiday and then a third substantial meal for the second day of the holiday. These feasts traditionally include fish, soup, meat, vegetables, fruit, bread, wine and, of course, a sweet dessert.

The wish for a sweet year gets expressed in food. Honey is a key ingredient. So are apples, since they are plentiful in this season.

As a historian of American Jews, I have been fascinated by the changing character of what are considered “Jewish” foods as expressed in cookbooks. These recipes have shaped the foods that American Jews have eaten, guiding what scholars call “vernacular religion,” or religion as it is lived.

Jewish American cookbooks across the 20th century have influenced the shifting tastes of American Jews’ vernacular religion, even as they have often reflected those tastes.

How kosher food changed in America

Judaism possesses an elaborate system that determines what food observant Jews can eat and which ones can be eaten together. Following these guidelines is called “keeping kosher”: either something is kosher and can be eaten or it is not.

In the United States, the growth of industrial food production for profit stimulated a wide array of products that could receive a symbol that labeled them as kosher. These range from the Orthodox Union’s OU symbol to a simple K to symbols that have a male rabbi’s name attached to them indicating his approval of the product. These multiple branding systems mean that Jews encounter a supermarket of Jewish choices, allowing each individual to decide just what products to buy.

Some people buy only products labeled “glatt kosher,” a reference that originally referred to meat and the inspection of an animal’s lungs. In the United States, Jews expanded the definition to emphasize a stringency that labeled only some foods sufficiently kosher to be eaten. Other people adopt a wide range of individual options.

Some reflect the prosperity of American Jews, such as having two sets of dishes, silverware and pots – one for meat and the other for dairy. Other variations register Jewish desires to enjoy “eating out” and tasting tref, or nonkosher, combinations.

Still other versions of kosher stem from industrial food production and the development of labels that allow each consumer to decide just which ones they will follow. The result leads to a kind of personalized form of kosher practice, one potentially with almost infinite variety.

As literary scholar Josh Lambert observed in his essay “One Man’s Kosher is Another Man’s Treif,” “my parents have never tasted swordfish, but adore caviar. In other words, they – like many people – have a kashrut [kosher] standard that makes sense to nobody but themselves.”

Cookbooks and changing tastes

This diversity leaves American Jews, especially women who still do most of the food preparation in Jewish homes, with a complex conundrum. Which foods should they cook? How should they cook this food? Should they turn to recipes handed down by mothers and grandmothers? Or should they try something new and different?

The conundrum is not new. Jews initially came to the United States as immigrants. Many left behind their parents and grandparents. Most possessed a limited knowledge of food preparation. Into this gap stepped women who wrote cookbooks.

Although the earliest Jewish cookbooks date to 1815 in Europe, the first American Jewish cookbook did not appear until 1871. Esther Levy’s “Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers” was published in Philadelphia.

Aunt Babette’s 1889 “Cookbook” soon eclipsed Esther Levy’s. Bertha F. Kramer, who wrote the “Aunt Babette’s Cookbook,” included American foods alongside Jewish ones, promoting integration of two types of foods.

Soon competition flourished as other publishers and writers saw the potential market with increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving on American shores.

These Jewish cookbooks, written in Yiddish and German as well as English, guided women in how to prepare traditional Jewish foods even as they also promoted American food, such as apple pie. In a sense, they stepped into the breach within families caused by immigration, teaching their readers what to do and how to do it. Many also included explanations of the kosher system as well as holiday menus.

Even after Jewish families became intergenerational, and children often had access to traditional Jewish recipes through their grandparents, the popularity of Jewish cookbooks did not diminish. As Joan Nathan wrote in her 2004 “Jewish Holiday Cookbook,” “Like many Jews in America, I have become passionately involved in discovering my roots.” And that passion has led her, as a food writer, to seek “to discover the origin” of Jewish dishes and their ingredients along with the recipe.

Bagels and Jewish history

Wicker basket with bagels in itBagels came to be seen as Jewish food even though they have no particular association with Jews.
Photo by Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Moment via Getty Images

The ongoing interest in Jewish food as expressed in diverse cookbooks prompted Nurith Gertz, an Israeli scholar of Jewish culture, and me to include excerpts – both recipes and the stories often told that accompanied them – from Jewish cookbooks in an anthology for The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.

We recognized the recipes and the stories told around them as forms of vernacular Judaism – what Jews, especially American Jews, turned to when they wanted to cook Jewish food. Jewish foods as presented in recipes formed part of Jewish culture just as much as poetry and sermons, paintings and memoirs.

One of the recipes we decided to include was one for baking bagels by Matthew Goodman in “Jewish Food: The World at Table.” The round roll with a hole in it arrived in America with Jewish immigrants. Over the course of the 20th century, the hole grew ever smaller and the bagel ever more plump. But the bagel makers’ union kept a pretty tight lock on the two-step process of making bagels – first boiling, then baking – until frozen bagels were introduced.

After frozen bagels came all sorts of other innovations, like blueberry bagels, not to mention bagels that were only baked and so not particularly chewy. As it turns out, Jews began to celebrate bagels as a distinctively “Jewish food” as they became more popular: Bagels were leaving the Jewish fold and starting to be seen as an American food, with no particular associations with Jews.

Although bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon are still popular among American Jews to break the fast at the end of Yom Kippur, many Americans put all kinds of foods on bagels, including lots of nonkosher combinations.

Jewish food on the move

Only some of what American Jews ate for Rosh Hashana a century ago, or even 50 years ago, endures today.

Chicken soup and gefilte fish, which came to the United States with Russian Jews as foods associated with the Friday evening meal at the beginning of the Sabbath, are still part of the Jewish American palate. But brisket and even turkey have retreated before preferences for tastes such as Moroccan or Persian chicken dishes or vegetarian stews drawn from less familiar Jewish cultures.

I particularly miss a sweet dessert called taiglach. The small cubes of baked dough drenched in spiced honey, decorated with nuts and shaped into balls appeared on our table only during the High Holidays. Everyone pulled pieces to eat and licked their fingers. Neither my mother nor my grandmothers nor I ever made it – although my more adventurous sister did. We bought it from Jewish bakeries. But those bakeries are long gone.

The memory remains, as does the wish for a sweet new year that can be tasted.The Conversation

Deborah Dash Moore, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

¿Wappin? Intensive Soul Transplant / Trasplante Intensivo de Alma

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BWAHAHAHAHA!
BWAHAHAHAHA! Whit Bissell and his werewolf formula were the crudest of precursors! Now we have SOUL TRANSPLANT TECHNOLOGY!!! Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, 2019. Vivian Caccuri – A Soul Transplant © Hendrik Zeitler. ¿Estás lo suficientemente enfermo como para desear saber cómo se traduce al panameño?

To bind the wounds of broken hearts
Para vendar las heridas de corazones rotos

Patti LaBelle – On My Own
https://youtu.be/KsH63qJlIMM

Los Mozambiques – El Niño y El Perro
https://youtu.be/3CZiavWtv6Y

Jimmy Ruffin – What Becomes of the Broken Hearted
https://youtu.be/cQywZYoGB1g

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
https://youtu.be/H-kA3UtBj4M

Joss Stone – Stoned at Luna Park (2015)
https://youtu.be/10lpglxnM0I

Gladys Knight & The Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia
https://youtu.be/uw_t_o-LluM

Sam Cooke – A Change is Gonna Come
https://youtu.be/wEBlaMOmKV4

Johnny Rivers – The Poor Side of Town
https://youtu.be/vAI24i825_E

Aretha Franklin – Gospel Concerts in Watts (1972)
https://youtu.be/Ib4YX7bjtUc

Cry to Me – Solomon Burke
https://youtu.be/h1U2GfCGIEs

Chaka Khan – Through the Fire
https://youtu.be/TjWmw-8-OEk

 

Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

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.

Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.  

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Dinero

Editorials: Nito the lame duck, Ballot time for US citizens here

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Nito
President Cortizo delivers bags of soccer balls and other sports equipment in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. It’s a traditional political thing, and here it seems to be a matter of the presidency delivering the goods to local activists to distribute. ‘Here’s a soccer ball for your kid in exchange for your vote’ isn’t something unique to the PRD but it’s a multipartisan sort of politics that is enshrined in the dictatorship’s constitution under which we live. It’s also a sorry substitute for kids having enough to eat, access to medicine, a relevant and high-quality education and a future in a society that has justice within the rule of law. Photo by the Presidencia.

They think they can go back?

With July’s protests ended and the talks that arose from them having run their course, all of the worst people in Panamanian public life are laughing at those less wealthy than themselves for falling for the ruse. It has to be a terrible letdown for President Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo Cohen.

He made a good agreement and gave us some reasonable decrees to lower Panama’s high medicine prices. But those would take a bit of time to fully implement and meanwhile pharmacies are generally not stocking price-controlled medications, some that do have them available have defied the price controls, bureaucratic obstacles to the establishment of independent pharmacies’ medicine importation and wholesaling cooperatives loom and we see little or no promised relief on food prices. The automotive fuel subsidies are unsustainable over the long haul — as is the subsidy on tanks of cooking gas — and many gas stations make it a terrible pain to refuel at the promised price-controlled rate.

Nito killed a notorious and expensive subsidy to developers, originally created in the name of “tourism promotion,” but NOW the legislature is moving to revive it. They’re also defying the president and the courts to revive the practice of multiple salaries on the public payroll. In a bunch of local governments the politicians are giving themselves big pay raises.

On the world stage, Nito, who has been ailing, did not go to New York to speak at the UN, but sent Vice President Gaby Carrizo to speak in his place. What Panamanians and the world heard was not a description of how Panama tackled high medicine prices at least as well as most of our Latin American neighbors have. Nope. What we heard was a plea to the world community to solve a problem created in Panama by a little clique of monopolistic hustlers. Like those who thought a bloody US invasion of Panama was just the remedy we needed, this iteration of the PRD is again betting on foreign intervention as the solution to national problems that we should solve.

Is the thinking that the July protests failed, so now those who provoked them can go back to what they were doing, only taking sterner measures to slap down anyone who complains about it?

And is the thinking within the ruling party that they will be voted out in 2024 anyway, so now’s the season to smash and grab?

Another ugly cycle, except moved forward a bit because the president has some health problems? Like the wheel of Panamanian politics runs eternally, but the wheel of karma doesn’t?

It isn’t just a higher mean temperature on the planet. Winds of change are blowing around the world and across the region. These are unpredictable, but it does seem likely that the corny old tricks won’t be able to withstand them.

 

For more information and the links you need, go to https://www.votefromabroad.org

 

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The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

Ida B. Wells

Bear in mind…

The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad.

Tommy Douglas

If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.

Stephen Hawking

We cannot feast on global resources while the world’s poor struggle to survive on inhospitable lands. It is as simple as that. It is the rich who are making the world poorer. Environment and Poverty are one crisis, not two.

Petra Kelly

 

 

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What Latin American and Caribbean leaders said at the UN General Assembly (II)

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Bolivian President Lucho Arce proposed “expanding our restricted vision of human rights and democracy. … We should overcome the capitalist order that puts us into a steep, dangerous and unlimited race of consumerism, putting humanity and the planet at risk. Rather, let us build a more just, inclusive and equitable world.” From his Twitter feed.

What they said at the UN General Assembly

click on the links to the videos, most in official English translations, of what they said

Lucho Arce, Bolivia
https://youtu.be/58uzWQ0JRNg

Mia Amor Mottley, Barbados
https://youtu.be/vfBNZPDSXXM

Andrew Holness, Jamaica
https://youtu.be/pxQxFeBUEW0

Guillermo Lasso, Ecuador
https://youtu.be/3jlhlgcJ2wY

Pedro Castillo, Peru
https://youtu.be/IslcdxjM_kU

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador
https://youtu.be/VLCTv_cv-jk

Mario Abdo Benítez, Paraguay
https://youtu.be/vFbnYaRPuMA

Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Guyana
https://youtu.be/w05V6Iw2dD4

 

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Las termitas y el cambio climático

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Termites
Un estudio que abarcó seis continentes exploró el papel de las termitas y los microorganismos en la descomposición de la madera. Experimentos de descomposición de madera en el bosque tropical de Isla Barro Colorado en Panamá. Foto por Carolina Sarmiento.

Las termitas podrían tener un rol importante en el cambio climático

por STRI

A la mayoría de la gente le estorban las termitas, ya que se comen la madera en las casas y comercios. Sin embargo, este tipo de termitas representan menos del 4 por ciento de todas las especies que existen.

En general, estos insectos son fundamentales en los ecosistemas naturales, especialmente en los trópicos, donde ayudan a reciclar la madera muerta de los árboles. Sin ellos, el mundo estaría lleno de plantas y árboles muertos.

Una nueva investigación en la que participaron científicos asociados al Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales (STRI), y más de 100 colaboradores alrededor del mundo, reveló que pronto las termitas podrían tener un impacto mayor a nivel global debido al cambio climático.“La cantidad de carbono que se almacena en la madera depende en gran medida de las tasas de descomposición y sabemos que estas varían según el clima y tipo de ecosistema”, dijo Camilo Zalamea, investigador asociado de STRI y profesor asistente en la Universidad del Sur de Florida. “Los estudios regionales han demostrado previamente que las tasas de descomposición de la madera por microorganismos se duplican con un aumento de temperatura de 10°C, pero antes de la publicación de nuestro artículo, se sabía menos sobre la sensibilidad climática de otros actores esenciales en la descomposición de la madera como las termitas”.

Liderado por la profesora de biología de la Universidad de Miami, Amy Zanne y publicado en Science, el estudio realizó experimentos de descomposición de madera en 133 sitios en 20 países y seis continentes, incluyendo la Isla Barro Colorado, la Reserva Forestal Fortuna y el Volcán Barú en Panamá. Uno de sus hallazgos fue que las termitas son muy sensibles a la temperatura y la lluvia y que su actividad podría aumentar, incluso más que la de los microorganismos, a medida que la tierra se vuelve más seca y caliente.

“Las termitas tuvieron sus mayores efectos en lugares como sabanas tropicales, bosques estacionales y desiertos subtropicales”, dijo Zanne. “Con el aumento de las temperaturas, su impacto en el planeta podría ser enorme”.

Aunque los microorganismos y las termitas descomponen la madera muerta, existen importantes diferencias entre ellos. Los microorganismos necesitan agua para crecer y consumir madera, mientras que las termitas pueden funcionar con niveles relativamente bajos de humedad.

“Los microorganismos son importantes a nivel mundial cuando se trata de la descomposición de la madera, pero hemos pasado por alto en gran medida el papel de las termitas en este proceso”, agregó Zanne. “Esto significa que no tenemos en cuenta el efecto masivo que estos insectos podrían tener para el futuro ciclo del carbono y las interacciones con el cambio climático”.

Como si fuesen unas vacas diminutas, las termitas liberan metano y dióxido de carbono al descomponer la madera, que son dos de los gases de efecto invernadero más importantes. Por lo tanto, con el cambio climático y el aumento de su actividad a futuro, las termitas podrían contribuir cada vez más a las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero.

“Con las tendencias actuales de cambio global en las que esperamos que muchas áreas del planeta experimenten climas tropicales el futuro, es probable que aumente el efecto que las termitas podrían tener en la descomposición de la madera, pues se prevé que las termitas tengan acceso a ecosistemas donde actualmente no están presentes”, dijo Zalamea.

Un ejemplo de esto es la expansión y aumento de abundancia de termitas en ecosistemas como los de clima Mediterráneo, los cuales actualmente se están “tropicalizando”.

“En nuestras zonas de estudio en la cuenca mediterránea las tasas de descomposición por parte de las termitas fueron mucho menores que las que hemos visto en regiones tropicales como Panamá”, dijo Guillermo Peguero, investigador post-doctoral en STRI que también participó en el estudio. “Sin embargo, nuestros resultados apuntan a que esto podría cambiar en el futuro, lo cual podría acarrear cambios muy considerables en el balance de carbono de toda la biosfera”.

2
Camilo Zalamea, uno de los co-autores del estudio, en la Isla Barro Colorado en Panamá, uno de los sitios donde se realizó el experimento. Foto por Jorge Alemán, STRI.

 

3
Se realizaron experimentos de descomposición de madera en los bosques nubosos panameños del Volcán Barú y la Reserva Forestal Fortuna. Foto por Jim Dalling.

 

Experimento de descomposición de madera en un sitio de la cuenca mediterránea de los Pirineos. Foto por Guillermo Peguero.
 

Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

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At the UN General Assembly: four takes from heads of American states

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Petro at the UN
“War is just a trap that brings the end of time closer, in a great orgy of irrationality. From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace.” Colombian President Gustavo Petro, at the UN. Photo by the Colombian Presidency.

What they said at the UN General Assembly

click on the links to videos of the official English translations of what they said

Gustavo Petro, Colombia
https://youtu.be/rFIBY0tDoSg

Xiomara Castro, Honduras
https://youtu.be/261VgCIFK70

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil
https://youtu.be/2fu5Hl84Qdg

Gabriel Boric, Chile
https://youtu.be/qizf-MfeYPk

 

 

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Texas lawman on the trail of wannabe president

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Sheriff Javier
“Forty-eight migrants were lured,” said Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, “under false pretenses.” Photo from the Sheriff’s website.

Texas sheriff says migrants were preyed upon by DeSantis

by Kenny Stancil — Common Dreams

A Texas sheriff has launched a criminal investigation into interstate flights of asylum-seekers organized recently by Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who immigrant rights groups and legal experts have accused of human rights abuses.

“I believe there is some criminal activity involved here,” Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said Monday at a press conference, though he did not mention DeSantis, who is suspected of using the false promise of refugee resettlement benefits to beguile 48 Venezuelan asylum-seekers onto flights from the San Antonio Migrant Resource Center to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

“But at present,” added Salazar, “we are trying to keep an open mind and we are going to investigate to find out what exact laws were broken if that does turn out to be the case.”

The elected Democratic official “railed against the flights that took off in his city as political posturing,” The Associated Press reported. “But he said investigators had so far only spoken to attorneys representing some of the migrants and did not name any potential suspects who might face charges.”

Julio Henriquez, an attorney who has met with several of the people who were flown from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard on two planes last Wednesday, said last week that the asylum-seekers were lied to about their destination and “had no idea of where they were going or where they were” when they ended up on the wealthy Massachusetts island.

According to AP:

In San Antonio, a Latina woman approached migrants at a city-run shelter and put them up at a nearby La Quinta Inn, where she visited daily with food and gift cards, Henriquez said. She promised jobs and three months of housing in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

The woman, who introduced herself to migrants as Perla, promised jobs, housing, and support for their immigration cases, said Oren Sellstrom of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which offered free consultations.

In Salazar’s words, the asylum-seekers were “preyed upon” and “hoodwinked.”

“Our understanding is that a Venezuelan migrant was paid what we would call a ‘bird-dog fee’ to recruit approximately 50 migrants from an area around a migrant resource center… in San Antonio,” said Salazar. “Forty-eight migrants were lured… under false pretenses into staying at a hotel for a couple of days.”

“At a certain point they were shuttled to an airplane, where they were flown to Florida, and then eventually flown to Martha’s Vineyard, again under false pretenses,” he continued. “They were promised work, they were promised the solution to several of their problems.”

When the planes stopped in the Florida Panhandle, migrants were given a map of Massachusetts and a brochure, a copy of which was obtained by journalist Judd Legum.

As Legum noted:

A brochure distributed to migrants says that they will be eligible for numerous benefits in Massachusetts, including “8 months cash assistance,” “assistance with housing,” “food,” “clothing,” “job placement,” “registering children for school,” and many other benefits.

None of this is true. The benefits described in the brochure are resettlement benefits available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the United States. These benefits are not available in Massachusetts to the migrants who boarded the flights, who are still in the process of seeking asylum.

The document is evidence that suggests that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime.

“DeSantis clearly does not know the legal difference between refugees (who are eligible for resettlement benefits) and asylum applicants (who are not),” Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney, told Legum. “It’s legally no different than promising someone who you know to have had no military service that they will be eligible for veterans benefits.”

The brochures “are either evidence of criminal intent or criminal stupidity,” Cameron added.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has asserted that travel to Martha’s Vineyard was voluntary, ignoring claims that asylum-seekers were lied to about their destination and evidence that they were lied to about their eligibility for refugee resettlement benefits.

Not only has Florida’s governor defended his move to snatch up migrants in Texas, but he also vowed last week to keep shipping more of them to “sanctuary” jurisdictions he deems pro-immigrant.

“Our view is that you’ve got to deal with it at the source, and if they’re intending to come to Florida or many of them are intending to come to Florida, that’s our best way to make sure they end up in a sanctuary,” DeSantis said Friday.

In response to the criminal probe launched by Salazar, DeSantis’ office issued a statement alleging that they had done migrants a favor.

“Immigrants have been more than willing to leave Bexar County after being abandoned, homeless, and ‘left to fend for themselves,'” DeSantis spokesperson Taryn Fenske said. “Florida gave them an opportunity to seek greener pastures in a sanctuary jurisdiction that offered greater resources for them, as we expected.”

Based on the information gathered so far, said Salazar, four dozen asylum-seekers were involuntarily transported across the country for “little more than a photo-op, video-op,” after which they were “unceremoniously stranded in Martha’s Vineyard.”

Bexar County’s probe comes as Massachusetts State Representative Dylan Fernandes (D), US Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), US Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), and others continue to push the US Department of Justice to open a federal investigation.

DeSantis is following in the footsteps of Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has bused at least 8,000 migrants to Washington, DC, since April—including hundreds to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home in recent days—and roughly 2,200 to New York and another 300 to Chicago, with some passengers requiring hospitalization for dehydration and other ailments.

The pair of far-right governors, progressive radio host and author Thom Hartmann wrote over the weekend, “should be looking at jail time or serious civil fines for engaging in this heartless, racist sport.”

 

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Culinary considerations from living near the edge…

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piva nuts
Pivas, pixbaes, pifás, pibas, palm peaches, Bactris Gasipaes – there is a bewildering array of names for this ancient Panamanian staple, which is endemic to much of the tropical Americas. Photo by Kristof Zyskowski & Yulia Bereshpolova’s Cataloging Nature.

Starch staples survival don’t have to be boring,
but if you have kittens in the house…

by Eric Jackson

Woke up this morning and turned on the computer. I saw that the “productive sector” — how some rich people who produce hardly anything by themselves like to style themselves at the moment — are on the offensive in the most offensively obsequious media, telling us that Panama’s big problem is that the teachers in the public schools are overpaid and ineffective. 

Then I looked over at the stool that I use as a side table for newspapers, reference books, coffee cups, plates and so on. I noticed signs of predation. The plate with the peelings and seeds from last night’s snack, which I will fashion as piva nuts here, had been knocked over and things that were on it were scattered. The peelings and the plastic plate were nearby. These are not all that interesting to a kitten. The seeds from the piva nuts? Those are round enough, hard enough and the right size to be of great interest to a kitten. The several seeds were scattered about three rooms. A piva seed plays something of the same function for a kitten as a soccer ball does for a 10-year-old kid.

The pivas? I was coming out of El Machetazo in Penonome and this woman was selling little bags of the cooked starchy nuts for a dollar. A fellow citizen, like me scraping by on the informal economy. It wasn’t just a matter of class solidarity that attracted me to buy. I like these things, too. Plus I can spin some health reasons, even if this batch was eaten in not such a healthy way, with a bit of salt sprinkled on the pulp. I might have eaten it in other ways, like with mayonnaise, or dipped in garlic butter. Or….

But it should be peeled and the seed in the middle removed, for starters. However you are going to consume them, remove these parts. Even if eating the skin will not make you die.

If you really are on poverty rations, a cheap and starchy diet, piva nuts can keep you from dying. There is a hint of this in Panamanian history, something that the schools here scrupulously don’t teach the kids.

C’mon — bowdlerized education here? Like in those US states wherein mention of slavery is officially prohibited “CRT?” 

Something like that. Ever since Panama has been an independent republic, there have been historical topics thought best left unspoken, especially around kids. Panama’s history of religious persecution from the start of the Spanish Conquest onward is one of these. So is the religious context of Henry Morgan’s attack on Panama. So are the religious politics of Latin America’s independence from Spain, and especially the recurring religious warfare of the period when Panama was a part of Colombia. 

(How DARE this guy call Colombia’s troubles of those times religious? It was Liberals against Conservatives. With the Conservatives favoring Roman Catholicism as the official state religion, and Liberals advocating a secular republic, at or near the top of the list of the main parties’ many differences.)

And what does that have to do with piva nuts? It’s a side topic of mass starvation in Panama City under Conservative rule, in the 1899 to 1902 Thousand Days War, and into the early days of the Republic of Panama, which was the product of a 1903 Conservative coup instigated by the Panama Railroad Company and backed by the US administration of Teddy Roosevelt. Saying nasty things about the Conservatives of back then, even though their party is long extinct, is saying unflattering things about the Proceres, the alleged fathers of our country, and some of the “better” Panamanian families. But the truth of the matter is that there was mass starvation in that wartime economy, even if mention of that was strictly forbidden by strict Conservative censorship of the press.

So how does the record come down to us? In early 1904, more than a year after the Thousand Days war ended and nearly a year after the Liberal guerrilla General Victoriano Lorenzo was executed in the Casco Viejo’s Plaza Francia, the US Army sent its first medical mission to Panama, and they started out with studies. The Americans found Panama City’s leading cause of death to be not yellow fever, nor malaria, but beriberi.

Beriberi is a starvation disease. Try to subsist on white rice alone and you risk contracting it. It’s something you get from the lack of thiamine (also known as Vitamin B1) in the diet. You can die from it. Eat a diet of brown rice (arroz integral) and you will avoid it.

After a disastrous Liberal charge into machine gun fire at the war’s outset, the Conservatives controlled Panama City. But Cocle was the city’s breadbasket, and its agricultural production was disrupted by a ferocious civil war and then came under General Lorenzo’s control. Panama City was increasingly subject to Liberal roadblocks. The Conservatives controlled Panama City, Colon and the connecting railroad, and could and did import bags of white rice. But they did not make proper provisions to feed the population.

So, what does it have to do with my decision to buy some piva nuts from the lady?

If you are to live on a meager, starch diet, vary the starches so that you are less vulnerable to deficiency diseases. Brown rice is better than white, but also more expensive. If you are putting potatoes into your starchy mix, leave the skins on and eat them. If bread is in the rotation, better whole wheat than white. Putting yucca, otoes and/or ñame into the mix would be a good ideal. Vary your starch staples and you vary the vitamin and mineral mixes of the things on which you survive. Trying to get through poverty eating just white rice is so boring that it could bore you to death. Of beriberi.

So, anyway, you’re a bit more upscale at the moment. What to do with piva nuts now? Try this:

Ingredients (no need to be exact)

  • Piva nuts
  • Bacon (lonja or other)
  • Water
  • Onions
  • Potatoes
  • Carrots
  • Salt
  • Sour cream
  • Sherry

Directions:

  • Cut the bacon into bits and fry it to where it at least starts to brown. Set the meat AND the grease aside to add later.
  • Steam the pivas to be fully cooked enough to eat. Let them cool and then peel them remove the pits cut them into chunks and put them in pot with a cover with a bit of salt and simmer them until quite soft, then mash them.
  • Add more water if necessary, and cut up carrots, potatoes and onions. Mash and stir as you go. Add water if need to keep it as a viscous liquid. Add the bacon bits and grease and continue to simmer.
  • To get that perfect consistency, you may want to run the mix through a blender.
  • You got this orangey glop with the flavor sort of like you want it now? Heat it up again, add a dollop of sour cream and a bit of sherry, stir to mix it all in well, remove from heat.
  • You have a modified Jackson family recipe for Piva soup.
 

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