Jackson, Putting on the Rust Belt wardheeler lenses...

And now to put on my Rust Belt wardheeler lenses....

• How come there has never been a major arrest of the people involved in the sewer cap and storm drain grill theft for recycling racket? Really, it shouldn’t be such a hard case to investigate and litigate. If it’s true that there’s a foundry somewhere that melts these things down, then the ingots or other products of that foundry may be identifiable if they show up on the market. People who steal these things can be observed, identified and followed to the next level of the business. Items with hidden homing devices could be planted. This particular racket creates deadly traps for young children, for the blind and for those who just don’t watch their step at that particular juncture. Especially if we are to progress along the general plan of building a metro Panama sewer and sewage treatment system in the next few years, this form of theft needs to be suppressed as the severe public nuisance that it is.

• And speaking of recycling.... If Mayor Navarro and the large PRD majority on the city council are to speak of the good jobs they have done come re-election time in 2009, they would do well to be able to point to visible progress towards cleaning the bay, but they’d do much better if in addition to that they can show movement toward implementing a recycling plan of the type and scale that could largely replace the Cerro Patacon dump, which will within a few years reach its capacity.

• This year is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the German concentration camps. And then there were those who resisted to the death being sent to the camps. I think it’s about time that either the city, INAC, private persons or community organizations, or better yet some combination of these, repair the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters while that’s still possible. It’s along the Transistmica, on Via de los Combatientes del Ghetto de Varsovia, between Colegio La Salle and the gas station. This is only for the narrowest of minds merely a matter of Jewish history --- although it is very much that, too --- it’s Panama’s worthwhile recognition of a universal value by honoring one of its most outstanding examples set somewhere else, by the heroes who rose up against the Third Reich and fought impossible odds rather than board the trains.

• I take it that the reason the city street sweepers don’t have a queen is that among the classes from which they hail there are precious few monarchists. But these ladies in yellow, if they perform anything like in recent years, will teach us a lesson or two about beauty. They will do it by keeping the city clean at a time when trash accumulates in copious amounts around the Carnival area but when a lot of families will be out of town at Las Tablas, at the beach or elsewhere in the Interior.

• Will the Panama City - San Miguelito light train plan that Mireya considered but couldn’t afford to implement be forever shelved just because it was made for an odious administration of the past? I hope that current administration will take another look at it, and see if it can be reasonably built to connect Tocumen and Albrook airports, the train station, the bus terminal and Plaza Cinco de Mayo. Such a system could be a major component of an overall effort to control urban congestion, but to really get ahold of the problem politically unpopular measures to accustom people who drive in the city to pay for parking would also have to be taken. Another part of the solution, so they say, is in the works: the computerized synchronization of traffic lights along the city’s principal thoroughfares.

• I have personally witnessed a couple of times now how in the banking district and El Cangrejo to hassle people who look like tourists for money puts one at great risk of in turn being hassled by the Tourism Police. I also, while walking to the post office in Paitilla one day, got stopped by cops who were asking for ID to see if I was an illegal alien. (I couldn’t have pronounced the names of the galaxy and dimension I’m from in Spanish anyway, and because my cedula looked real enough they allowed me to go on my way.) Reasons and reasonability do count for quite a lot, but perceptions of encounters with police really are affected by whether or not the witness is the one being hassled.

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Reid, Voting no on Gonzales
Herrera, Colombia and Venezuela
Committee to Protect Journalists, Venezuelan journalist's prosecution
Noriega, The new geography of world trade
Kolker, Aid finally comes to disaster-wracked Guyana
Macías, The dynamics of Mexico's next presidential election
Emeagwali, Nothing new about globalization
Weisbrot, The hype about 2018
Leis, At the World Social Forum
Bernal, More of the same old same old

opinion

Talking urban affairs...