Lame duck looters

For Martín Torrijos, Balbina Herrera and the outgoing majority in the National Assembly, there is a presumption that Panamanian politics is stuck on a pendulum. They think that in five years Balbina will run again and win, that the PRD will be swept back into power and pick up where they left off.

Maybe it's not such a far-out expectation, given an electorate that gives so many votes to a legislator who never shows up for the assembly session, and so few votes to candidates who don't pass out goodies.

However, most of the political patronage sources will soon be out of the PRD's hands. They may, however, be counting on a few remaining cards. They have packed the civil service rolls with party members whose proven loyalty is certainly not to the Panamanian people, and in the likely legal brawl over this maneuver, they will control the courts. They have signed many long-term contracts, and because of corporate secrecy laws we don't even know how many of these are with companies owned by top party members, their relatives or big campaign contributors. And then there are the proceeds derived from organized crime.

We don't know with any precision how much of the estimated $110 million that was spent on this past election cycle was derived from gangsters. We do know, however, that some of the transactions between organized crime figures and PRD officials, the transfer of duty exonerations on luxury cars, were made more or less openly and with a well founded expectation of impunity. We do know about the real estate partnership between Martín's and Balbina's campaign manager and a convicted French bank embezzler. We do have good reason to believe that Martín's former coast guard chief derived great wealth from sources that have not been credibly explained and must be presumed to be from the drug cartels.

So if everything goes as planned, the PRD old guard expects that five years from now people will have forgotten about all the last-minute contracts, all the last-minute charges against the public treasury, all the well connected wastrels on the planilla and all the scandals and abuses of these past five years. They expect that the same people who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by their own and their entourage's scandalous conduct will be back to do it all again.

If tens of thousands of tithing PRD activists remain on the public payroll and in positions to sabotage all of the new administration's programs, they may be right. If a rumored Martinelli-Torrijos "non-aggression pact" means that the investigations of the David Murcia payoff allegation, the art theft from the first lady's office and so many other scandals are quashed, they may be right.

But maybe, either due to a little known peeve that Martinelli harbors or due to the limits of public tolerance being surpassed, the pendulum on which the looters who are leaving office count will have its motion disrupted. Maybe we are just before the dawn of an era in which crooks are arrested.

Let us not diminish Sonia Sotomayor's scholarship or ethics by suggesting that she puts her prejudices or social allegiances above the rule of law. She was nominated to the federal bench by a Republican, raised to the US Court of Appeals by a Democrat, and has a solid 17-year record of excellent jurisprudence that anybody can review in the pages of the Federal Supplement.

Still, there is a noteworthy decision, issued when she was a federal district judge, that working men and women should rightfully take as reason for hope. In an epoch of union busting, when so many of the federal and state labor laws were circumvented, "interpreted" to be dead letters or otherwise overridden, and when the cutting edge of economic activity was in international agreements that contained illusory promises about labor standards but whose principal purpose was to assist corporations to flee to low-wage, non-union jurisdictions, an important labor case came to Judge Sotomayor's docket. The Major League Baseball team owners were trying to smash the players' union.

Baseball players who last in the big leagues may be millionaires, and as celebrities their private lives are often in the public eye at embarrassing moments. Drug scandals haven't helped, either. For people who want to demonize organized labor, the Major League Baseball Players Association is an easy union to vilify.

But what if the players "get put in their place?" Who gets the billions of dollars that their highly skilled labor generates? The television network executives? The baseball team owners? Who pays to see CEOs play?

The owners --- with the exception of one, a labor lawyer who wouldn't go along with the scheme --- wanted to turn baseball into one more non-union, or company union, or ineffective union, sector of the US economy.

And Judge Sotomayor, brushing aside all of the corporate lawyers' expensive arguments, zeroed in on the economic realities of the situation and the fundamental right of working men and women to organize themselves and bargain collectively to promote their economic interests. She ruled against the rich and powerful, probably against public opinion, and against the strong current then flowing in US labor relations, and upheld the players' right to bargain collectively.

If the change that Barack Obama promised and the American people voted for is going to be anything of substance, it must be accompanied and enforced by a resurgence of organized labor. And just like labor's great upsurge in the 1930s and 1940s was assisted by the likes of Justice Frank Murphy --- in his roles as politician and jurist --- this generation of working people needs justices like Sonia Sotomayor to repair the legal and economic damage wrought by those who put labor unions on the run and exported much of the productive capacity upon which all aspects of US power in this world ultimately rests.

editorial