opinion

Despite the social stabilizing role that this institution plays, from its beginnings businessmen, in their eagerness to enrich themselves, even when it's illegal, and successive governments of corrupt politicians, have been coming to prey upon it. Since 1975, when the employers began to support the CSS's Disability, Old Age and Death Program, their payments are accounted for as operating costs --- and moreover among the lowest in the region --- they have practiced evasion of their payments to Seguro, understating salaries and other remuneration to avoid paying the CSS; falling behind in payments and stealing payments deducted from the workers' paychecks, but then having their arrearages condoned; working scams with the sale of medicines and equipment and obstructing the institution's purchases of these things for itself in order to oblige the CSS to contract for overpriced services at private clinics. The fund is taken as political booty: the governments use Seguro as a petty cash box, and moreover don't pay their obligations to it; large assets are lost as the result of peculation; the Banco Nacional pays interest to the CSS at rates below those established by law or the market; and charges only the cost of services for beneficiaries what the state would have to pay. It's this slimy attitude of the businessmen and perverted bourgeois politicians that's suffocating the sources of the CSS.

These are the same sectors that push the policy of neo-liberal capitalist globalization, privatizations, administrative concessions, liberalization of prices, elimination of duties, opening of the market, flexiblizaton of labor, elimination of early retirements, regressive tax reforms, free trade treaties, the Plan Puebla-Panama and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and who sign sell-out agreements that harm national sovereignty and dignity. These measures affect the economy's productive sectors, generating job instability, low salaries and more unemployment, thus drastically diminishing the CSS's income.

Now they attempt to finish off their ominous work with the privatization of the Social Security Fund, invoking its financial crisis --- allegedly actuarial --- without pointing to the real problems that affect the CSS's solvency, given that the essence of what they're attempting is to take the pension and retirement funds of those who are insured and, sharing the proceeds with international capitalist financiers, play the stock market roulette wheel.

If the social insensitivity, greed, narrow mindedness and servile attitudes of the Creole bourgeoisie is going to carry us to a social catastrophe, the difficult conditions of life for the Panamanian people --- with almost half of its population submersed in poverty and more than a quarter of the same in a state of indigence --- will be sharpened.

For the dominant classes the interests of large-scale international finance capital trump those of the population and thus make these global interests their domestic allies. You're dealing with a bourgeoisie without a national perspective and a "political class" without vision, both undermined by something of a genetic corruption, inherited from the merchants who sold out the country in 1903. Now, one hundred years later, they're thinking of the same thing, mortgaging us to widen the canal for multinational shipping and commerce.

The labor and popular movement's demands to submit the business government's and the popular movement's reform proposals to a wide debate, with equal access to the communications media under equal conditions, to disqualify the National Assembly as a proper forum for the discussion of such transcendental national problems because of its corruption and ineptitude, and that both proposals be democratically submitted to the popular will by way of a referendum, are just and correct.

Everything indicates that a decisive struggle for health, living conditions and life itself for the workers and their families draws near. But it's also for national sovereignty and the nation itself, given that whether the neo-liberal offensive that threatens to turn the state into a mere instrument of repression while the country is turned over in its entirety to multinational capital can be stopped depends on this battle.

We have to stop the employers and their government and make them retreat so that we don't have to swallow their unpatriotic and anti-popular proposals. The popular and revolutionary movement has to rise above the current situation and unfold its political counter-offensive in order to defeat this project of Yankee imperialism and its allies, the Creole bourgeoisie. Thus we can't allow the conciliatory and lame positions of reformism and opportunism to prosper in the ranks of the popular movement in order to play the games of the businessmen and governments of the moment, as has been done on other occasions.

This struggle has to serve to educate the popular masses about where their interests really lie and to identify their class enemies, so that the people can regain an awareness of their own power and make a qualitative leap in their organization and fighting capacity that will permit them to fight future battles to consolidate the Panamanian nation and put political power into the hands of the workers, farmers and all of the working people, as the only way to develop a prosperous society and assure the material and spiritual welfare of the currently proscribed majority.