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opinion
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Keeping Panama stupid Dumb all over --- a little ugly on the side.... Frank Zappa There were three weeks between issues again, and lots of stories to cover. However, a certain thread runs through many of them. To wit: · President Torrijos met with the Catholic bishops to reveal details of the Panama Canal expansion plan. As these were not then published in Panorama Catolico, can we safely presume that these details were sufficiently sinful that priest-penitent privilege applies? · President Torrijos met with business leaders to reveal details of the Panama Canal expansion plan. As these were not then published in any of the dailies' business sections, can we safely presume that these details are to be treated as private proprietary information and in our culture that means a monopolistic blunt instrument by which the public interest gets bludgeoned about the head, shoulders and pocketbook? · President Torrijos met with the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) board of directors to know the details of the final phase of studies about the Panama Canal expansion plan, after the previously cited two meetings. If we are to take the president's website at its word, must we therefore conclude that in his previous two meetings, Martín didn't know what he was talking about? · In an earlier wave of propaganda about the Panama Canal expansion project, one of the selling points was that with the dirt and rocks from the excavations for a new set of locks, we'd build a causeway just west of the Pacific entrance to the canal, at the end of which would be a "mega-port" adjacent to the former Howard Air Force Base. But now ACP apparatchiki are telling us that there wouldn't be the money to do both a new port development and a third set of locks, that any port development would have to be a separate private project. That leads to other questions, namely what will happen with the tens of billions of cubic meters of rock and dirt to be excavated for the canal's expansion. Would this valuable public asset be given away to certain well-connected private developers? Would it be discarded as cheaply and short-term conveniently as possible, regardless of which wetlands, fisheries and potential tourism assets are destroyed? By taking the excavated material out of the equation, would the ACP be presenting the voters with a lower public cost estimate than the actual expense, using the trite private developer technique of "externalizing costs?" · Meanwhile, over at the university, the PRD fake diploma mill crowd shut down the campus for a week to exclude students while they decide which of the campus radicals have been sufficiently obsequious to retain control of which university concessions, which bulletin boards, and so on, and which groups are going to lose these perks because they are have not committed themselves to the re-election of a rector who signs fake diplomas and refuses to clarify incongruous claims about his own supposed doctorate. · In the biology department, jackasses are braying about how, even though it has no PhD program, its four-year graduates ought to replace the brilliant team of international scholars that has been assembled by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. They have convinced the legislature --- not one member of which ever attends a scientific lecture --- to pass a biologist licensing law to that effect, and university administrators and their acolytes are now attacking the moral solvency of anyone who suggests that the politicians are making false promises to poorly educated students. · Out in the provincial backwaters, many a teaching position is left unfilled, but meanwhile there are hundreds of people with education degrees mobbing the metro Panama education office looking for assignments in the capital. These people had been told, you see, that because foreigners would be excluded from teaching in the public schools, they would have jobs awaiting them when they got their diplomas. · Some very bright young high school graduates from the Interior have had their hopes for a university education dashed. They don't have the money to buy worthless degrees from the many absurdly deficient private "universities" that the University of Panama dons have been convinced --- or more likely bribed --- to charter, and they can't pass an English test to get into the University of Panama. Oh, yes, they did study English in school --- in classes taught by people who can barely speak or read English themselves, thanks in large part to the ban on foreign teachers and in another large part to Panama's racist foreign policy that keeps us from having better cultural and educational relations with our neighbors in the English-speaking Caribbean. · The university, and the legislators, have for many years promised that a foreign service law favoring graduates in the University of Panama's school of international relations would do away with all the political games and reserve Ministry of Foreign Relations jobs for people with those specialized degrees. It hasn't happened, but meanwhile Manuel Antonio Noriega's daughter won a competition and got a job with the ministry. The funny thing was, she wasn't competing against all those jobless international relations grads, but only a handful of other people. Somehow it was arranged that most of the people who had been promised these jobs over the years were not informed of this competition. And of course the former dictator's other daughter got a job with the foreign ministry on the strength of being a Panamanian citizen living in the Dominican Republic (so it was said), without the formalities of a foreign service exam competition. And thus one of the major facets of "Patria Nueva" is revealed in sharp detail. President Martín Torrijos, his economic guru Ricaurte Vásquez, his indispensable rector Gustavo García de Paredes et al apparently think you are stupid. For sure they are arranging things so that the next generation will be even more stupid. That's the common denominator of all these stories. Ah, but among all of us doofuses there are plenty who realize just how ignorant we have been kept, and quite frankly resent it. More and more people have the temerity not to feel stupid just because they don't know the things that are being kept secret from them --- things like the financial details of the canal expansion plan; things like the particulars of the presidency being used as a stage prop for the stock manipulations of former Cocle governor Richard Fifer who is charged with embezzling public funds; things like why, despite all of the posters about how the government is taking a hard line against men who have sexual relations with minors, the Torrijos administration allows the Canadian multimillionaire convicted child molester Ronald H. Kelly to live in Panama. It's a matter of time before the Panamanian people turn upon the man they elected by a landslide in 2004 in a major way. Maybe it will be in a canal referendum, maybe in a new wave of mass protests against another one of Vásquez's allegedly brilliant economic policies, maybe in a rejection of the PRD in the 2009 elections. Then, in one way or another, Martín or members of his inner circle will probably claim that it's because people are stupid. And will they be right? To the extent that they think that most people will never be able to distinguish public relations hype from full disclosure, the question still hangs in the balance. To the extent that they think that most people are still favorably impressed by all the corny old political games the PRD administration and legislature have played with us, they are clearly wrong. To the extent that they expect the electorate to keep running in the PRD-Panameñista hamster wheel and maintain the political rotation that makes politicians rich and most people just dizzy, they may very well be right. Well, dim-witted rodents we may be, but woe to the political class on that inevitable day when we get feral enough to go for a run outside their cage.
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