front page
That time of the year again...
We’re getting into dry season’s back stretch, but winds are still strong and the chances of rain are still low, which makes it an ideal time to fly a kite. The Association of Chinese-Panamanian Professionals, with support from the Republic of China (Taiwan) Embassy and the Arrocha Pharmacies, thus holds the annual Kite Fair and Competition out at Amador during this season. It’s a family-oriented event, and by no means just for Chinese families.
This year’s kite fair was well attended, and was but one of several events to be held throughout the year to mark the 150th anniversary of establishment of Panama’s Chinese community. You may or may not know that last year the Episcopalians observed the 150th anniversary of the Anglican denomination’s organization of its first church here. So what happened here a century and a half ago? The California Gold Rush enhanced Panama’s importance as a transit country, and shortly thereafter the first Atlantic-Pacific railroad, the Panama Railroad, was built under American direction by an international work force that included the founders of this country’s permanent Chinese, West Indian and American communities.
Back to the subject of the time of year it is, March is when teachers and students are getting ready to go back to school; the national baseball tournament is playing itself out down here; NCAA basketball’s March Madness is about to start up in the states; watermelons, cashews and tangerines are in season; the Legislative Assembly is back in session; and The Panama News conducts its semi-annual fundraising appeal.
The Legislative Assembly passed a more limited window of amnesty for the more than 15,000 Panamanian businesses in debt to Seguro Social than had been originally proposed. Had it been a matter of putting 10 percent of the arrears down and negotiating an arrangement to pay the rest, it would have already been done. But businesses that have arrears have in general been given until the end of April to pay the entire outstanding principal in order to avoid all the late fees and interest. To meet that deadline we would have to raise much more money than we have raised in any previous appeal to get this problem behind us. It still wouldn’t solve all of this newspaper’s economic problems, but it would put Panama’s English-language newspaper on a much more solid footing.
And of course, there are people who don’t want that to happen.
For example, Attorney General Sossa's Public Ministry served me with notice of a March 25 pretrial hearing about our Seguro Social debt, an extraordinary move to cut short the grace period that other debtors are getting. (Yes, there is this debt that must be paid --- now by March 24 --- but notice that from the start the question that the prosecutors have repeatdly asked me and others has been "Why haven't you shut down The Panama News.")
For another example, this pathetic Atlanta dot-com hustler Tom McMurrain, who found his way to Bocas del Toro and now promises suckers a too-good-to-be-true 10 to 30 (used to be 20 to 30) percent annual return on investment in his tropical farms. His publicist Tomás Cabal offered on behalf of undisclosed principals to buy me out, an offer that I could and did refuse. Later the Journalists Against Corruption correspondent in Panama, Michelle Lescure, said that at a meeting with Cabal, McMurrain et al, she learned that McMurrain’s gang were the undisclosed principals. McMurrain has also brought a bogus criminal defamation charge against me --- one that doesn’t even specify what it is alleged that The Panama News published that is false. But now that McMurrain has enlisted the aid of this country’s notoriously corrupt Attorney General José Antonio Sossa in his effort to force The Panama News to sell out to him, it will take money to pay court costs and lawyer bills to resist this gangland tactic.
The Panama News, despite good readership figures and slowly rising ad sales, thus finds itself in a more delicate than usual financial predicament at this moment.
So please donate generously, making your checks out to “Eric Jackson” with a notation that it’s for The Panama News, and sending them to:
The Panama News
Apartado 55-0927 Estafeta Paitilla
Panama, Republic of Panama
(We don’t have a company bank account since Citibank shed itself of The Panama News and all its other longtime small business clients, and money orders don’t work in Panama even if they say on their faces that they’re international money orders, so this is the way that we have to deal with money at the moment.)
Now that I’ve made the fundraising appeal, which is necessary to this paper’s survival but which I really don’t like to do, let’s get back to this issue.
This issue’s Editorial is about Haiti, Venezuela, ungovernability and the risks that Panama runs. Notice that the corporate mainstream media sent word around the world that Aristide resigned and voluntarily left Haiti, based on NOBODY’S eyewitness account. The one eyewitness who has had anything to say about it, Aristide himself, has since said that he was forced to sign a paper and removed from Haiti at the point of an American gun. US and French authorities have been sequestering the former Haitian president in the outer boonies of the Central African Republic and the denials have all come from US political operatives who were not present when Aristide was removed. So what’s the truth? I don’t know, but one useful guide is the legal principle that the person who conceals evidence should be presumed to be doing so because it is adverse to his or her interests. Plus George W. Bush is notoriously untrustworthy --- a man who led the United States into a war that has no end on the horizon for a lie about weapons of mass destruction --- and that fact needs to be taken into the balance as well.
Ah, well. Most likely the truth will eventually come out. It usually does.
But not, of course, if our notorious attorney general gets his way. Sossa has been on an international public relations offensive against Bobby Eisenmann, the Fundacion Libertad leader and former La Prensa publisher. We shall see how that goes, but given that Sossa long ago called the Panamanian press a “criminal element,” I found it unsurprising that he didn’t get a standing ovation after he laid this trip on the Inter-American Press Association.
Another prominent controversy that’s playing itself out down here is an argument between the daughter of Mireya Moscoso’s campaign treasurer and the former manager of Mireya’s coffee plantation on the one hand and the nation’s maritime lawyers on the other, about an expensive monopoly that the former have imposed upon the thousands of ships flying the Panamanian flag. This is being done in the name of ISPS code compliance, that is, the effort to keep Osama's boys from setting off a ship bomb in a major port. (Yes, there is more to it than that, but a journalist usually wants to lead with the essential facts.)
Where to put a given story is often a difficult decision, and in this issue we could have had a very large Community section. As that section turned out, we not only look at the kite fair, but also ponder the 19th century history and legend of Ran Runnels with the Panama Historical Society, remind everyone of the Girl Scouts’ five-kilometer run and take note of the upcoming Afro-Panamanian Cultural Festival. Really, there is a good argument for including this issue’s two stories about the Theatre Guild of Ancon among the Community pages as well, but instead one of them is in the Arts section and the other among the Reviews.
And of course, this online community otherwise known as The Panama News readership goes way beyond the isthmus. We can see that in the Dining page, which comes to us from the Zonian diaspora in Germany this time.
Do you think that GERMANY is far away? Then check out our leading Science section feature. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is the existence here of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, that part of the website is usually heavily skewed toward the life sciences. This time, however, we get substantially more eclectic, including outer space, the Panama Canal’s latest electronic improvements and the multidisciplinary issue of traffic safety in the mix.
The Travel section was intended to be about traffic safety this time as well, but strange things on video screens set the stage for an exercise in gonzo journalism. Gotta do it every now and then, and it’s easier knowing that if things get too weird my own personal Wonder Dog --- Sparky --- is loyally standing guard.
Enjoy.
News | Business | Editorial | Opinion | Letters | Arts | Review | Community | Fun | Travel
Galleries | Calendar | Outdoors | Dining | Science | Sports | Español | Front Page | Archives
|
|
|
