editorial

Land titles

Should people who have been living on and working a piece of land for several decades have an easy and affordable way to formalize their ownership by adverse possession into a land title? Of course they should.

Should people who honestly got rights of possession from Reforma Agraria, or bought right of possession land from those who honestly acquired their rights, similarly be allowed to quickly and cheaply get title to their land? Hardly anyone disagrees with that, and certainly The Panama News does not.

But there has been a lot of corruption over the years, and there are some landholdings acquired by political or family ties to those in power, or improperly acquired over lands that the law or the rights of those already in possession. On many of these properties the government should be issuing eviction notices rather than land titles.

And then there are other kinds of property rights that should not be trumped by new or old documents. The inhabitants of fishing villages that have existed for a long time on beach areas that constitutionally can't be privately owned by anybody should be allowed to live and work in peace, and moreover ought to receive various forms of assistance to improve their situations. The nation's beaches should be respected as the public recreational assets that the law provides that they are, notwithstanding anybody's concession to establish and operate a resort. Public access to the beaches should be maintained as established in the law. Many other public easements that are in regular use, particularly those established for roads, ought to trump anyone's land title or concession agreement. That all of these forms of land tenure have been disrespected is one of the hallmarks of the lawlessness of post-invasion Panama.

And then there are the collectively held indigenous lands. The establishment of comarcas were milestones in the struggles for sovereign rights for Panama's first nations, but they in no way resolved all issues, even within the comarcas. Some groups, like the Naso and the Bri Bri, don't have comarcas. Others, like the Wounaan, the Bugle and the Bokota, find themselves as ethnic minorities in comarcas dominated by other groups with different languages and cultures. The government insists that whatever properties indigenous people control within their comarcas, these do not include water or mineral rights. And then there are the many indigenous communities that, either because their land was not contiguous to the comarcas or because someone covets what they have, were left outside of the comarcas with their collectively held lands hanging in legal limbo.

There is a need for a host of further agreements between Panamanian society in general and its government in particular on the one hand, and the indigenous people who live here on the other. It would be unrealistic to expect that the Martinelli administration can resolve all of the outstanding issues.

However, one thing that can and should be resolved is the collective land rights of indigenous communities outside of the comarcas or inside of comarcas dominated by other groups. Why should it be so difficult to issue titles that say that a particular community owns a particular piece of land? These might not be the papers that a bank would accept as collateral for a loan, but they would be titles that serve to defeat interlopers, titles that serve as the basis for proper compensation when eminent domain is declared for some road or other public project.

Although it can be carried out in any number of abusive ways, there is nothing inherently wrong with President Martinelli's aim to establish formal titles to all privately held real estate during his administration. From a public administration and tax policy point of view, it's a necessary thing for the government to do. But to do it right, easements and traditionally shared property interests should also be recorded and protected.

The insurance companies and their fake patriots

Back in the 1920s, the US financial industry was hardly regulated and had placed major bets on several dubious propositions: that the post-World War I boom would last forever; that somehow markets would be found for production well beyond the means of the American people to buy; that growth would make the illusory value of watered stock real; that the debts of America's World War I allies were payable, through German reparations or otherwise. It all came tumbling down in October of 1929, and once the United States got a new president there came a time of tinkering with the economy in attempts to get the country moving again. Along with the New Deal came a new set of fundamental preventive regulations for the financial industry. The securities exchanges were regulated. Firewalls were built to keep the insurance funds, the banks and the brokerages separate. Interstate banking in individual savings and home loans was by and large prohibited. The idea was to limit the size and effect of speculative bubbles.

Starting in the late 70s and picking up steam during the Reagan administration, but continuing under both Democratic and Republican congresses and administrations, a politics driven largely by money grouped around a few constellations of industries seduced the Washington politicians into tearing down the New Deal firewalls in the financial sectors. Along the way several long-shot bets were made: that an economy and way of life based upon relatively cheap fuel and the internal combustion engine can last forever; that real estate prices are forever headed upward, to the point that bad lending practices don't much matter because the collateral will cover the mistakes; that American industrial production (and later, many skilled services) could be moved offshore in order to cut costs and yet there would still remain a viable US market to consume an ever-increasing array of goods and services; that Wall Street could indulge in elaborate new forms of gambling --- on dubiously priced real estate, on "dot com" companies with nothing but the sketchiest ideas behind them, on "derivative" financial paper with little relationship to anything that's real, on Ponzi schemes, on the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the industrialized world --- and come out a net winner.

Now the chickens have come home to roost, many to find their perches in foreclosure. The bottom line reality is that the US economy can't go on as it has for the past 30 years or so.

A large portion of the American public is in a state of denial, those in control of the economic decisions that have led to this crisis are tenaciously clinging to arrangements that serve nobody but themselves, and many of the politicians in Washington are beholden to those who both created the economic crisis and bankrolled their campaigns.

Now comes Barack Obama, with a mandate to reform a broken health care system. Now also come the insurance companies, the private hospital chains, the Republican Party and the mobs that these opponents of all change other than lower taxes for the rich can whip up. The effects of their TV ads and such outrageous fabrications as Sarah Palin's claim that kids with Down's Syndrome will have to face federal "death panels" are showing in the polls, and these people smell blood in the water.

But they have stretched too far. Ignoramuses screaming that they don't want the government to take over their Medicare may impress themselves, but most Americans take them to be fools. When man flaunts a pistol at a place where President Obama is to appear and carries a sign that advocates the watering of the tree of liberty, it is taken by everyone who is familiar with the sayings of Thomas Jefferson as an implicit assassination threat, one of the 30 or so that come to the attention of the Secret Service every day (a number which represents a 400 percent increase as compared to the previous administration). When they find out that behind the "grass roots" tea parties is former House Republican leader Dick Armey, and that an alleged "patients' rights" group that opposes health care reform is run by an aide to a former GOP congressman who's in prison for his role in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal, most Americans will see the "popular uprising" for what it is.

Those aren't the grass roots, they're Astroturf, and there's only so much fakery that will be tolerated when the issue is real. In this case it's very real and very urgent: for most Americans the US health care system is still broken and still in need of fundamental reform.

Bear in mind...