A battle won

Photo by José F. Ponce

A battle won

The judge provisionally dismissed "patriot" militia shill Mark Boswell turned offshore hustler Rex Freeman's criminal defamation case against me. This photo was taken by José Ponce on the courthouse steps just before the hearing, as I was coming down the steps to greet some friends who came for the hearing. I want to thank everybody who donated money to the defense fund, who provided information and leads that helped in this long struggle, who gave me kind words of encouragement or otherwise lent a helping hand. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my excellent lawyers, José Yangüez and Miguel Antonio Bernal.

Yes, Boswell alias Freeman says he'll appeal. See also how some of his backers, in the course their pathetic defense of this unreformed convicted felon, defamed me by publishing about the worst lie that can be told about a journalist, by falsely accusing me of taking a bribe from a woman whom I had never met nor communicated with nor even heard of, let alone received money or anything else from.

We got involved with Susan, a consulting client whom we later discovered was trying to steal a $5 million piece of property through fraudulent manipulations. We later found out she needed this crime to bail herself out of another fraud she got caught in on another property. We put a kabosh on her plans and filed suit in what was to be a very nasty fight with other powerful people worthy of a book of its own. She had no defense other than to try and discredit us and she immediately went on a personal attack trying to smear my good name. She found a mouthpiece with an internet Panama Newspaper rag to print all kinds of nasty untruths and c-r-a-p and half truths about me. The bogus writer never knew me or had any dealings with me and had no basis for anything he wrote so he was obviously ‘fed’ this information from somewhere. Hmmmm. I wonder? When he requested an interview from me it was very clear that he had a predetermined agenda and he wanted nothing to do with the truth of the matter. He was going to print what he had in mind regardless of the truth. So I ignored him with a warning to respect the truth.

So he printed his filth for profit as he was likely paid to do.

(By Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman, published in various versions by Roger Gallo, Don Winner and several other people.)

There have also been suggestions by Mr. Winner that I forged the Costa Rican warrant for Boswell's arrest and his Colorado Bureau of Investigation rap sheet, which indicates the time Boswell served for his felony conviction for fraud and using fake ID.

Boswell, Winner, Gallo et al did all that knowing that as an opponent of this country's benighted criminal defamation (calumnia e injuria) laws, I would not invoke them in court even though I have several open-and-shut cases against these people under that section of the Penal Code.

But in their continuing attack on me and defense of Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman, Winner and his accomplices have not only violated the calumnia e injuria law. Discontented with their loss in court, they picked on the wrong people by pirating José Ponce's photo above as well as the name of this publication.

Yes, one runs all manner of legal risks just by living in Panama, even without enemies who use patriot militia tactics of filing bogus papers. Do Winner and his creepy little acolytes want to keep repeating their "Eric Jackson is crazy" mantra? (And isn't this quite ironic coming from a guy who showed up at a business rival's house armed with a stun gun and started hassling his rival's young daughter?) They will find that my senses of what's real and what's not and what's right and what's wrong are quite functional. However, the state of my mood disorders means that the legal struggles against these criminals that will continue, on several fronts, will sometimes be accompanied by a growl, sometimes by a chuckle, sometimes by a sigh.

* * *

Is it related? Hundreds of spam emails flood one of my boxes every day, and in recent weeks there has been the usual spike in such electronic attacks taking place in the months of March and September, when I ask The Panama News readers for contributions. Actually, this time it was unusually severe. This time the volume of bundled malicious spam --- most of it in the Cyrillic alphabet --- was so bad that it closed that mailbox for several days until I figured out a way to get around the electronic freeze that came with an overloaded trash box.

* * *

Yes, this is one of the months that The Panama News appeals for donations from the readers in order to keep us going, improve the publication and, sadly, help us fight the legal battles that we must. There's a mailing address at the bottom of this page to which you can send checks, and there's a black, white and red ad in the right-hand column that you can click onto for instructions about how to contribute by PayPal.

But as important, maybe more, we need contributions of labor, which are the core of a community newspaper. The proofreading by Sue and Donna, the photos folks like Allan send in, Silvio's and Clarence's opinion columns, Diego's poetry, Sparky the Wonder Dog's sage advice, the letters people send in --- these are the sorts of contributions that give The Panama News so much of its character.

And let me say again, I want to revive this publication's calendar section but that won't be possible without the help of one or more volunteers. Yes, there is competition out there, but its narrow orientation makes it insufficient for the many sorts of people --- about 50,000 strong --- who read The Panama News. This work is probably best done by committee, with different people keeping track of different sorts of things (music and dance, sports and so on). And if things work out really well, it would be nice to get the daily tides and astronomical information back into this publication after many years' absence. For the most part it's a matter of regularly reading certain sections of several newspapers and websites, looking at ads posted on various bulletin boards and other places, and most of all developing communications with various persons and institutions and listing the various events.

See, I'm proud of The Panama News and I like what I am doing, but it never meets my quality standards --- and without a lot of help it never will.

* * *

Are all these things the reasons for the longer than usual delay in getting this front page uploaded?

Actually, no.

An afternoon in court and more than a week of anxious waiting for a ruling were sort of programmed into my schedule. Computer and server problems during production are not unusual and usually get resolved within a few hours.

The deaths of my friends Lizzie Leigh and John Carlson, however, were unexpected and had me attending two very different funerals that packed the same Balboa Union Church. And then I got a call from the Darien, asking me to come out for an observance of the fifth anniversary of the death of another friend, the late Embera cacique Arcenio Bacorizo. Add an extra couple of days for all of that, but I hope that I have made it worthwhile for you, because after all the shock and tears comes the realization that life in Panama has been enriched by the work of many remarkable people, and we usually don't appreciate how valuable these people are until they're gone.

* * *

Sunburn plays a couple of walk-on parts in this issue.

I hope that you aren't one of these hardcore sun worshippers who overdoes it in our tropical sun for the fun of it, for lack of knowledge, or even in a valiant quest to win the legendary George Hamilton Cocoa Butter Classic tanning tournament. You can die of or be disfigured by skin cancer as a result of doing that. (And yes, dark-skinned people can get basal cell cancers and melanomas, too. African or indigenous genes don't give you immunity.)

However, sometimes there are things that have to be done or should be done in spite of the risks.

The Obama campaign has organizers in the field to turn out the absentee votes of Americans living in Central and South America, and in his travels around this mostly tropical region the field director of this effort, Zak Schwarzman, seems to have caught a few rays on his face. Maybe we can pass the hat to buy him a hat?

Meanwhile, just while a crisis was blowing up in his country, Bolivian President Evo Morales paid a visit to the University of Panama. José Ponce and I caught his speech in the room full of dignitaries and politicians on the video screen outside, and both of us got a bit more sun than is advisable as we waited for the speech, talking with and photographing the hundreds of indigenous Panamanians, union members and others who gathered outside, and then covering what the Bolivian president had to say.

They say that no one blabs it faster, their coverage can't be beat....

Frank Zappa

Yes, if you prefer the pirates, you could have read a stolen version of the Chinese Communist Party's Xinhua News Agency's coverage of the Morales visit almost immediately after it happened. Cutting and pasting somebody else's labor is so much quicker and easier than actually getting the story.

But the coverage in The Panama News is better. We're not CNN, and definitely aren't Fox, but The Panama News has an almost infinitely deeper and far more intelligent coverage of what's going on in Panama and the Latin American and Caribbean regions than those corporate mainstream media do. (The way that the corporate organizations missed the momentous regional reaction to the Bolivian crisis and what it means for US foreign policy in these parts was particularly egregious.) Anyway, we fill gaps that the big rich guys leave wide open and we stomp all over the guys who scan Google News, paste things about Panama onto their websites and call themselves journalists.

* * *

This issue was slightly more time-consuming on the graphic side. José Ponce's photos of life in the city do take time to edit and format, but they seem to be well received. I got out to the Summit botanical gardens and zoo one overcast afternoon, with the new jaguar exhibit at the top of the list of the things I wanted to see. There were some archival photos that had to be dug out for several of the stories herein. And in our efforts to have the full US presidential debate that's generally not available via television and the newspapers in Panama, this time we embedded some McCain and Obama videos in the opinion section.

* * *

And what about that US presidential contest?

The momentum has shifted in the Democrats' favor, in what had promised to be a big Democratic year all along. However, that momentum shift is because of a foreseeable economic disaster that has meant double-digit losses in the value of my mother's retirement fund and similar losses to countless millions of people, not only in the USA. It's nothing to cheer, even for a Democrat like me.

We have such a polite standard-bearer, and maybe that's what the American people want after all those years of politics dominated by nastiness from the likes of Karl Rove. But as lawyers in the casuistic Anglo-American Common Law system are wont to say, certain precedents are "on point" and I think that the Keating Five affair is one of these. Yes, John McCain suffered terribly for his country, and yes, he's been to Waziristan (even if he gets the leader of Pakistan's name wrong). But the choice that Americans have to make is about who has the better judgment in what is and will be a very difficult time.

And what can I say? As the son of a mad doctor I have this warped sense of humor and I still haven't stopped laughing about Sarah Palin.

But this lightweight would be just a heartbeat away from the presidency --- from the oldest person ever to start out in this office if he wins, and moreover from someone who has already had four bouts with cancer. And it so happened that McCain chose somebody who's embroiled in a scandal that's at the heart of it much like the Keating Five matter --- Palin, like McCain has an underdeveloped sense of right and wrong when it comes to keeping her public duties separate from her loyalty to family and friends.

Let's see if Joe Biden is sufficiently rude and aggressive to bring this up in the vice presidential debate. It doesn't strike me as in keeping with his character, but I don't think he'd be out of line in bringing it up.

One non-famous Michigan wag takes the GOP's predicament on the voters of Palin's state: "Alaska needs to apologize to the lower 49. Seriously." But I take the right to vote for whom one wishes too seriously to assign blame in that fashion. Let Alaskans ponder their choice as they will. However let's also compare the nominations of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin as demonstrations of the respective judgments of Barack Obama and John McCain.

* * *

If you are a US citizen living in Panama, whether you agree with me, or you think that I'm way off base for what I have written above, you ought to take part in this year's momentous choice. There is still time to get and cast your absentee ballot. Get a head start online at the non-partisan Overseas Vote Foundation website, or via Democrats Abroad or Republicans Abroad.

And if you're still soul searching, whatever your philosophy, nationality or partisan affiliation? As Dan Quayle was maliciously rumored to have said, "It's a terrible thing to have no soul." So you may want to sign up at Exedra Books and reconnect with your soul.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

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