Editorial: FRENADESSO has a point about methodology

FRENADESSO is right to insist on proper methodology

One need not have to have watched or participated in politics, litigation or economic negotiations for very long to know the phenomenon of the procedural argument raised in bad faith for the purpose of obstruction. On the other hand, one need not be a grade school graduate to understand and reject the "heads I win, tails you lose" procedure in a coin toss.

Knowing the difference between good and bad faith is a bit trickier, because mind reading is ordinarily not one of the human faculties and thus one must indirectly infer intentions from surrounding circumstances when it's possible to do so.

In most of Panama's mainstream news media, most egregiously in El Panama America and La Estrella and on the MEDCOM channels, there is a steady drumbeat of propaganda about how FRENADESSO, the umbrella group that forced the Torrijos administration to at least temporarily back down on a Seguro Social reform package that over time would have tens of thousands of elderly Panamanians sleeping on the sidewalks and eating out of garbage cans, is acting in bad faith and obstructing the national dialogue about social security by insisting on a change in methodology for the talks.

Well, now, everybody knows that SUNTRACS leader Genaro López --- now the nation's most important labor leader, whose union is the heart of FRENADESSO --- is a commie radical. He says so himself. But any honest person who has observed how he and his union have behaved in negotiations over the years would also have to admit that SUNTRACS is very astute about what the market will bear and routinely signs and lives up to contracts that provide for substantially less than all-out communist revolution.

To listen to the redbaiting in the media mentioned above, one easily sees the false syllogism that maintains that leftists always have a sinister hidden agenda, those with sinister hidden agendas always act in bad faith, and thus FRENADESSO (the labor-left coalition) is acting in bad faith (when it makes certain procedural demands). It would be even easier to discredit such thinking by noting the source, but since the government, the wealthy elite families and their allies have silenced almost all dissenting voices --- most recently the entire news department at FETV --- there are few other news outlets to point out the conflict of interest that all of the above-mentioned media have, because they are all interlinked with the banking and insurance consortia that want to profit from the private management of a big chunk of the Seguro Social retirement fund.

Viewed dispassionately, FRENADESSO's most important procedural argument makes all the sense in the world. If it is not accepted the result is likely to be further turmoil and aggravated political instability, even if FRENADESSO is outmaneuvered and defeated in this dispute.

The Torrijos administration, like the Moscoso administration before it, several international financial institutions, the private banking and insurance industries and the media aligned with these forces have all based their Seguro Social policies on a statistical lie. They have over a period of several years sounded the alarm about red ink in the Social Security Fund and to illustrate their case have compared the money paid into the system by workers and employers to the money paid out to retirees, dishonestly excluding the figures for the fund's income from its investment from the equation.

In any labor negotiation, when the employer pleads poverty the union has every right to demand that the books of the enterprise in question be opened as the prerequisite for continued discussions. The boss who demands concessions from his or her employees without revealing all pertinent facts is acting in bad faith.

What happened here is that the national dialogue was set up to exclude the strikers and in the days before FRENADESSO came to the table the pro-government and pro-business rump at the initial talks set up an agenda that does not include the revelation of all pertinent economic facts about a public institution, the Social Security Fund.

FRENADESSO is absolutely reasonable when it demands that all cards be put on the table and that the talks proceed on the basis of a sober analysis of all of the facts and figures, rather than on the basis of hysterical propaganda spun by people and institutions that have sordid hidden agendas of their own.

The mud that's now being slung in defense of an opaque and dishonest methodology is just Martín Torrijos's attempt to say "heads I win, tails you lose." However, even if the president has all of the major media and all of the resources of the ad cartel that his father-in-law heads on his side, most Panamanians aren't about to fall for that scam.

Bear in mind...

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Jane Addams

In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates for the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as points of reference.

Augusto Roa Bastos

I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious.

Glenda Jackson

editorial