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Norieguista campaign ruling

Balbina Herrera's word is worthless. That's a terrible thing to say about a politician, but in the case of her public promise to support Juan Carlos Navarro for the 2009 PRD presidential nomination, it's documentably true.

Navarro presented documentation of that truth, in the form of television ads showing Balbina making that promise.

So what did the old batallonera do? Did she argue that conditions had changed to the extent that it was unreasonably to expect her to comply with her former commitment? Did she say that her videotaped promise was taken out of context? Did she counter with any direct statement of her own about the issue?

Balbina did none of these things. She went running to Boris Barrios, the Electoral Prosecutor, who sprinted to Electoral Tribunal magistrate Eduardo Valdés Escoffery, who immediately, without opportunity for a full hearing that would allow Navarro an opportunity to be heard, banned Navarro's ads. Also prohibited were ads by Ricardo Martinelli, who served as a minister in the Moscoso administration, linking Panameñista candidate Juan Carlos Varela with Mireya Moscoso.

Shallow and totalitarian minds will consider the election authorities' action a victory for civility in public discourse, a welcome ban on scurrilous negative campaigning. But there was nothing the least bit scurrilous about Navarro's argument, and if the logic in Martinelli's ad was a bit specious its flaws could be easily enough pointed out by Varela and his supporters.

What we got was the unwarranted censorship of public discourse in both cases, and in Navarro's case pseudo-legal protection for political infidelity. The “protection” against negative campaigning is at the price of preventing open discussion of things that ought to be open to debate.

The ruling in favor of Herrera is also the latest in a string of actions by Panama's election authorities that suggest partiality --- the de facto acceptance of the use of Housing Ministry funds to pay for a “women's leadership luncheon” that was really a campaign rally to promote Balbina's political fortunes and the fine imposed on Navarro for publishing an apparently legitimate poll by a company that had been previously vetted by the Electoral Tribunal but now fell afoul of some obscure new registration requirement are recent examples that come to mind, and these are just tiny ripples in the wake of the massive illegal use of public funds to bankroll scurrilous ads by one side only in the 2006 canal expansion referendum. Then there have been some 100,000 names stricken from the voter lists, and by no means are all of them people who have died or emigrated. Then there was the long vote count after the PRD's internal elections in January and the bribery and arm-twisting that ensued to effectively reverse the rank-and-file's rejection of President Torrijos's leadership.

It adds up to a disturbing trend toward the kind of election rules we had under Noriega's Electoral Tribunal, which was headed by the notorious Yolanda Pulice. There is now a very good reason to fear that we will not have credible elections next May.

A strike against economic misery?

There may be a few Panamanians who have enhanced their fortunes due to the highest inflation that the country has seen in more than a generation, but if one wants to be honest this is not a problem for which we can fairly blame on our local aristocracy. Our inflation is primarily about the sunset of the petroleum age and an Iraq War that drove oil prices through the roof, and about subsidies in the United States to change the use of vast stretches of farmland from growing corn for food to growing corn for ethanol. Increased demand for goods and services caused by the emergence of China and India as major economic powers have also played their part.

But if our local ruling class didn't create the global inflation spike, they made it less bearable for most Panamanians by way of the extreme inequality in distribution of income and wealth that they created over many years. In a more immediate sense, it's the poorest Panamanians who are suffering increased hunger and homelessness in these inflationary times and the blame for that has to lie with President Torrijos, the Chamber of Commerce and the leadership of CONATO. Yes, CONATO has some genuine labor unions, but the company unions, PRD fronts and labor racketeers run that organization and they agreed with the Chamber of Commerce and ultimately with the president to a minimum wage increase that didn't make up for the inflation that had already happened, let alone for that which was expected. Marcos Allen made a big show of being a strong labor leader by throwing dissenters in those talks out of the CONATO delegation, but all that he really demonstrated is that he's an enforcer for management, not a leader of the working class.

Now the CONUSI labor federation and its largest member SUNTRACS, which had already been thrown out of CONATO, along with a number of other unions that represent the needs and aspirations of their members, are moving toward a national strike to demand a general wage hike, a freeze on the prices of basic household staples and a laundry list of other demands that collectively add up to more respect for ordinary Panamanians on the part of the economic and political elites.

Torrijos and CONATO are caught in a squeeze. To conserve their power or appearance of influence they feel the need to smash the strike movement, but to maintain any credibility with working people they need to advocate something like the militant labor movement's principal demands. All their motions add up to an unconvincing charade.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce as an organization doesn't want to hear anything about a general wage increase, but other business leaders are saying that if labor gets an across the board raise, then management should get this or that in return. The division is between those who are frozen in their shortsighted greedy disdain for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder and the status quo based upon that on the one hand, and those who realize that the situation is getting untenable and want to work out an arrangement that allows them to go on conducting business at a reasonable profit on the other hand.

And all the president's men? They're asking for secret police and powers to suspend any and all liberties in order to smash the labor militants.

A one-day strike to emphasize grievances? Totally justified. A longer strike designed to bring the national economy to a halt until working people get redress for their complaints? That's also no sin but it's a risky proposition. This country's true labor movement must make a tactical decision about this on the basis of sober assessments of the balance of economic and political forces and the will of the rank-and-file.

Let's understand the limitations that labor and management face here. Yes, there could be a much more equitable distribution of wealth in Panama and there should be, but even so it gets to the point where a nation can't consume more than it produces no matter how it divides the wealth. Yes, it would be a viable move to control the prices of rice and certain other staples --- but not down to the cost of production or below, unless there are some substantial subsidies. To address the squeeze that working people face in any meaningful way government and business leaders would have to snap out of this trance into which the voodoo cult of market worship has put them.

There are people in the labor movement, in management circles, in the PRD and in the opposition parties who, for their own various reasons, welcome the political showdown that a prolonged national strike would represent. The thinking of a fair number of these people is surely based upon wrong assumptions. This may be a time for confrontation, but it's surely not a time for reckless “all or nothing” thinking. Anyone considering tactics of increasing tension should also think in terms of an end game strategy in which a settlement is negotiated and tensions are dissipated.

With or without a national strike, Panama really does need to get down to the business of negotiating a new and sustainable social contract.

Bear in mind...

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Editorial, Campaign censorship and strikes
Sirias, Daniel Ortega's predicament
Jackson, Does Bobby use the right hairspray to be mayor?
Obama, Social Security
McCain, Remarks to the Disabled American Veterans
Lutty, The American Dream
Human Rights Watch, Uribe's parapolitics maneuver
Bryant, Colombia and NATO
Reavey, Brazil's nuclear ambitions
Sweeney, The Bolivian recall election
Narula & Quiles, Venezuela and the United States
Reporters Without Borders, Website trashing in the South Ossetia conflict
Nasser, Jerusalem's "security vacuum"
Denis, Functional cooperation in the Greater Caribbean
Pilgrim, Melting ice and Caribbean waves
Leis, Education and dignified work
Bernal, Cops' human rights
Letters to the editor

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