Production of the next issue is underway:
Criminal defamation charges against The Panama News editor dismissed
Editorials: Martinelli's attack ads and Bolivia's unity
Evo Morales in Panama
US citizens still have time to order absentee ballots, vote in November elections
photo
by José F. Ponce
Nothing the least bit sensational,
let alone thrilling or heroic
The
violence that stalks our capital is mostly not like the stuff you see
on TV. Mostly it suddenly appears from out of the blue and it's over in
an instant, but lasts forever. A sudden screaming argument in the park,
a bottle smashed, a face cut with the shards. When the police come
that's the beginning of longer-running legal consequences and after the
emergency room crew's work is done the psychological scars will affect
more than the man who was slashed and for some will last longer than
the physical traces of this act of violence.
Yes, we also have gangsters and psycopathic fiends and hit men, but
even then generally not as the idiot box portrays them --- for example,
"hit boy" is quite frequently more apt a description of the sicario
than "hit man."
The photo above was taken by José Ponce as he was walking by
the park
in Santa Ana and this violent argument suddenly broke out. Is the
victim completely innocent, or someone who provoked his assailant into
a sudden rage? The courts may eventually rule on that, but we won't
venture a guess. It's just the underside of life in a stress-filled
city.
José's
photos of life in our capital city
lead off this issue's culture section. A long-time Casco Viejo
resident, Vietnam veteran and lefty activist of Mexican / American
parentage and Panamanian birth, he used to do photography for the
United Farm Workers in California. He sees the city with different eyes
than mine, and way differently than all the purveyors of upscale real
estate hype want you to see it.
*
* *
September is one of the months when The Panama News asks for
contributions. The defense against obnoxious criminal charges brought
by a former Patriot militia shill who served time for fraud in Colorado
and has a Costa Rican arrest warrant outstanding has been costly,
time-consuming and an energy drain, as was the punk's intention all
along. We do need money and if you decide to help out in that way, you
may want to hit the black box that's second from the top of the ad
column on the right-hand side of this page for instructions about how
to do so via PayPal. You can also mail checks to the address listed at
the bottom of this page, or drop donations by at our office in the
Muchachas Guias building on Calle Tercera at Calle Primera in Perejil
(the street that runs behind Colegio Javier, parallel to Via
España).
However....
Some of you regular readers may have noticed that this
past issue was the first time in a very long time that I have put
together an issue of The Panama News without holes in it.
There are many reasons, and the three-week gap between
issues that the calendar we have been on for years gives us when there
are five Fridays in a month has helped.
But notice, if you want to go back into the archives,
that there typically are more articles in The Panama News than there
used to be. There are various reasons for this.
When I got "competition" that just copies other
people's work and pastes it up, I tried to keep up, but someone
stealing labor from dozens of people will usually put up more
stories than a small group of people who produce their own
work. Still, the pirates couldn't compete even
as copyright thieves, and have taken to creating bogus websites with names
similar to The Panama News in addition to all their other gutter level
tricks. The latter include supporting the convicted fraud artist and
fugitive from Costa Rican justice "Rex Freeman" in his patriot militia tactics
against me and The Panama News. They've made me work harder, and they
have brought volunteers to The Panama News.
And meanwhile, The Panama News, particularly its
opinion sections in both English and Spanish, has been getting a
reputation far and wide as a place of wide-ranging discussion not only
of the situation in Panama but the state of Latin America and the
Caribbean in general, and from time to time of the world beyond. Panama
is, after all, The Crossroads of the World and The Panama News intends
to be part of the multi-directional information flow even as the
pirates aim to reinforce the prejudices of a small-minded,
inward-looking bubble of a larger right-wing Americana from which North
Americans and Latin Americans alike are increasingly alienated.
But even as this publication has risen to the
challenge, I have been wearied by it and some time ago got to the point
that I couldn't pull any more all-nighters to keep up with the sheer
volume of the copyright piracy. So notice, for example, that
the calendar feature has fallen by the wayside.
I want to get it back, because it's an important
public service to the English-speaking community here. I'll need
substantial help to do that.
I will gratefully
accept financial contributions, but what I am especially asking for
is volunteer work to maintain and expand The Panama News, even as more
changes are underway.
We have over the past several months combined
sections, because at a certain point we will be switching over to a
constantly updating format --- which has been a nightmare for me to try
to learn --- and will want to have fewer section templates. The
calendar would belong in the lifestyle section, but really, it needs at
least three volunteers to do properly: most likely the division of
labor should be a coordinator, someone specializing in getting the
music scene covered and someone specializing in getting listings of
sports events.
It would be nice to get a few more foreign
contributors --- we do occasionally get things from San Francisco, New
York and Washington, but the coverage of things that affect Panama, and
of the Panamanian, Zonian and Afro-Antillean communities that trace
roots through Panama does leave a lot of room for growth.
It would be nice to get a bit more help translating a
few more opinions from Spanish to English, especially as we get closer
to national elections. It has been nice to get Sue some help with the
proofreading --- which, by the way, is and has been excellent.
An editorial board is being formed and there will
shortly be a new legal structure for The Panama News, and those changes
will put us in a position to grow out of our status as an informal
micro-enterprise by, among other things, finding an appropriate
business manager.
Thanks for your support, and ever onward to better
days....
*
* *
We are just coming
off of a
PRD primary campaign that was marred by the actions of an
openly partial Electoral Tribunal that, without giving the accused
party a chance to be heard, censored campaign ads.
There are those who think that attack ads degrade the democratic
process, and when they are both scurrilous and enhanced by a campaign
finance system that doesn't allow those with much money a meaningful
opportunity to respond, that can be a valid point. But then sometimes
it can all be very entertaining, and the
spoofs of Rovian-style politics can be even better.
In this issue's
Cool Internet sites
we get into some unofficial US campaign-related videos --- one deadly
serious and the other outrageously satirical --- as well as a
Romulo Castro music video and a couple of websites that supplement a
NASA thing that's found in our nature section about the
coming Canadian competition for the Panama Canal.
* * *
My erstwhile co-defendant and I
have this disagreement. Some of you may recall the Bocas del Toro /
Atlanta swindler Tom McMurrain, now a resident of a US federal
correctional institution, and how he charged Okke Ornstein and me with
criminal defamation for some stories exposing his predations that were
published in The Panama News. McMurrain also launched
a mudslinging campaign at us, and the hall of shame of the
swindler's acolytes included one Omar Wong Wood.
Now Omar Wong's own paper, El Periodico, has been sequestered by
hotelier / developer Herman Bern, in an attempt to put it out of
business. The weekly published Bern's tax returns, or alleged tax
returns, by which Bern purportedly claimed an income of some $39,000.
It would be a clear violation of the law for the government to release
Bern's tax returns, and arguably it was an illegal invasion of privacy
for a newspaper that got ahold of them to publish them. (And if someone
looks at the returns and says "So what?" I can't say I know how that
gets answered. Very rich people can show big losses as well as gains
and it doesn't seem so obvious to me as it seems to Wong that there's
something inherently fraudulent if the net realized accretions to a man
of Bern's wealth for a year end up just shy of 40 grand in the black.)
Now were I to play this by my business interests and ego I'd be in a
quandary. You see, Herman Bern has a business relationship with Mark
Boswell alias Rex Freeman, the former Patriot militia radio personality
and long-time hustler who has charged me with a crime as referred to
above. Bern's Playa Bonita resort has the perfect limited ingress and
egress controls to make it a great place to isolate otherwise
intelligent people in conditions propitious for a cult-like
indoctrination that tears down their normal BS detectors, making them
more receptive to the most outrageous propositions. Thus it's a guy
with a business relationship with Rex Freeman against a guy who was a
shill for Tom McMurrain.
* * *
It's down to the home stretch for the US election campaign and I have included the transcripts of Senator
Hillary Clinton's and former Senator
Fred Thompson's convention speeches, plus the Spanish translations of what
Obama and
McCain had to say at their respective conventions.
Meanwhile, however, a crisis in a little country far away deserves a
lot more notice by American voters, because it's a symbol of both
failed US diplomatic thinking and the damage that the Iraq War has done
to the US military. No, the Georgia crisis was not about the Russians
staging an amphibious landing in Okefenokee Swamp, but the contrast
between Washington's stern denunciations and its ability to do anything
was noteworthy.
In
Soviet days, South Ossetia and Abkhazia were ASSRs --- autonomous
soviet socialist regions within the Soviet Republic of Georgia ---
that in form ran their own affairs, but were of course subject to
this predominantly Russian party that abridged all forms of
self-determination from the individual on up. When the Soviet Union
broke up, Russia took on the role of protector of the autonomy of
these old ASSRs.
There's
plenty of ugliness to go around in this debacle, but I wonder who
convinced Georgian President Saaskavili that he could get away with
his military adventure. Was he encouraged to invade South Ossetia by
some reckless neo-con in Washington? Was it an undercover Russian
agent provocateur in his entourage?
But
in any case, from a US perspective, there are important lessons of
all this.
The
first among these is that as a result of the Iraq War the United
States has a broken and exhausted military that doesn't have
the human or material resources to do anything about any new crisis
in the world --- and McCain promises us another century of this
situation. Also, US and allied forces would be immediately pressed against the wall
in Afghanistan --- where they are already losing ground --- if the Russians decided to shut off their territory as a supply route to those fighting the Taliban.
The
second lesson is that Russia may not be a superpower but it's a major
world power that's not to be messed with by putting NATO bases and
American forces on its borders by way of bringing Georgia and the
Ukraine into the American-dominated military alliance. That's what
Russia's intervention in Georgia and the subsequent announcement of
the "Medvedev Doctrine" --- a restatement of Soviet and
even earlier Czarist Russian policies under today's conditions --- is
really about from Moscow's end.
George
Friedman, a conservative Republican who runs the STRATFOR private
intelligence company, is one of the most astute political analysts
out there and even if we disagree about some fundamental concepts,
I'd have say that what he has to say about the importance of Russia's
assertiveness on the occasion of the Georgia crisis deserves a lot more attention
and ought to form the basis for an important US foreign policy
debate.
I
support Taiwan's right to run their own affairs and I can't see where
South Ossetia has much less of a claim to the same. I say that even
as I recognize that Putin and Medvedev are not nice guys and take
notice in The Panama News of thuggish attacks on journalists in the
Russian regions of Ingushetia
and Dagestan.
Where
I differ from Friedman is that I also think that the United States
needs to stop thinking of itself as the single superpower that
dominates the world or ought to and should start acting like one
major world power among several. I concur with Friedman that a series
of wars across the Islamic world is a costly and unnecessary
distraction and that despite the vile racist president and the
benighted ayatollahs running the show in Tehran the United States
should come to an understanding with Iran about major contentious
issues. I can't agree with him about the wisdom of the United States
embarking on some sort of Cold War II against the Russians.
Georgia
as an American friend? That's a good idea. Georgia as an outpost of
an American empire? That's insane.
Georgia
as a prime example of how Bush and McCain, despite all of their
belligerent talk, have dangerously weakened American power and
influence in the world? That ought to be a topic that's raised in the
US presidential campaign.
* * *
Let
me conclude by putting in a plug for a cultural treasure that has come
to Panama from points north, and settled settled in El Valle. The Three
Sisters are swine --- the pet pigs of Reinhild and Glenn Gamboa. The
Three Sisters Cooking School is Reinhild and Glenn's project to spread
their chef skills among the community here. On September 23
in El Valle they will be presenting an introduction to French cuisine and its sauces that will surely be worth the $50.
Enjoy.
Eric
Jackson
the
editor
PS: People who are on The
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