Despite assurances, labor rights mean nothing to Torrijos

A Torrijos administration that breaks its labor contracts

In 2006, by way of "negotiations" with a PRD front group that has no membership and then the breaking of the ensuing strike by the teachers' unions, the Torrijos administration imposed upon the nation's public school teachers a contract that called for a series of modest pay raises, one of them to start in January of 2008. In 2005, the Torrijos administration signed a contract with one of the Seguro Social employees' unions that called for a pay raise starting in January of 2008.

We are now in January of 2008 and both the teachers and the social security workers are getting short paychecks. They are told that there was some "mistake" and that the pay raises contracted for long ago were not in the 2008 budget the President Torrijos sent to the National Assembly that his party controls to be rubber-stamped. The government workers will just have to wait, they are told.

Of course, the ad agencies of the cartel that the president's father-in-law created don't have to wait. Torrijos is spending tens of thousands of dollars per day on narcissistic advertising that glorifies himself and his administration. There's plenty of money for such frivolous spending on the president and his entourage, and a PRD majority on the Electoral Tribunal makes it "legal."

Oh, and coming from the United States? George W. Bush and Charles Rangel tell us that, based on the assurances that they have received from the Torrijos administration, Panama certifiably protects labor rights. (Cops and company goons shooting down unarmed labor protesters? We can be sure that Bush and maybe even Rangel will, if confronted with the truth, just mutter things about communists and ignore all of that.)

This is not the fantasyland of inside the Washington Beltway. This is Panama and we have a government that has once again deliberately gone out of its way to insult and cheat unionized workers.

Now some in the retarded inbred aristocracy of a few dozen families may stand up and cheer, or at least beep the horns of their BMWs in approval. However, real businesspeople will be rightfully concerned about a president whose word is worthless and a government that doesn't pay its bills. And for every driver who tools down the road for the purpose of impressing everyone with his or her wealth, there are many others who drive because they have to be someplace on time and they are not amused when the government provokes labor protesters to block the streets.

Will the inconvenienced drivers thus be prepared for more government propaganda against organized labor? Some will be, and this is a matter about which the unions need to think carefully when planning their responses to Martín Torrijos's tawdry political insults.

These latest insults are so crude that the unions would really have to blow it for Torrijos to gain much public support from them. But now let's see if the unions can show more sophistication than they have in the past and exact a fitting political price from the fortunes of the PRD for this latest cheap trick.

The threat that was never there

Pulling another Gulf of Tonkin Crisis to provoke a war with Iran, are you, Mr. Bush? Apparently the reality that Americans, led once to a disastrous war by the lies you told, won't believe you again just flies right over your head.

Because people don't believe you, news media paid attention to the video broadcast by a disreputable government that disputed their word, so your government responded with its own video --- and it turns out that neither video showed Iranian speedboats placing objects in the US Navy ships' paths or charging as it to attack. Moreover, the allegation that the Iranian boats issued a threat was also shown to be a lie.

Iran's President Ahmadinejad is a disgraceful trash-talking racist, a maker of ugly if empty threats, an irresponsible character who got to his position only because some reactionary ayatollahs threw the more progressive candidates off of the ballot. He's not Saddam Hussein, and the weapons of mass destruction allegations coming from the White House against Iran for so many months are now nearly universally accepted to be false, but Ahmadinejad is rightfully a pariah.

Still, the American people don't want war with Iran, the Iranian people don't want war with the United States and nobody who thinks with any intelligence and independence believes in this contrived Straits of Hormuz "crisis." The worst of it from the American perspective is that the US Navy was drafted into this deception and has been placed in a position to take the fall for the president's dishonesty. It's not the Navy's fault, it's the commander in chief's.

Bear in mind...

But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.

Mark Twain

The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.

Bess Myerson

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream --- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.