editorial

There is a broad and popular demand for the start to a process of writing a new constitution. The PRD and Mireya rigged up a method to do this in their 2004 constitutional amendments, with the expectation that the traditional political parties would control the process and thus hang onto all the perks of their offices. Martinelli et al could submit a different method of electing and convening a constitutional convention, or might add another patch or two to the dictatorship's scheme of government.

Then Mr. Martinelli suggested, then somewhat backed away from, then had his most opportunistic or mindless followers fervently endorse, a plebiscite about adopting the death penalty in Panama.

It would be sold to the general public through a deceptive propaganda campaign that has been going on for decades now, a mind-twisting televised barrage of imported Hollywood crime fiction that grossly misrepresents the amount of and nature of violent crime, its origins and ways that it might be practically addressed. People who spend too much time in front of the idiot box have totally distorted notions of the world around them, and those who are most enthusiastic about capital punishment don't live where violence is ever-present. They learned all they "know" from watching TV, including the stations of which Martinelli is part owner.

If we had a full measure of democracy, intelligent discussion of harsh realities would not be drowned out by lurid fiction and simplistic propaganda.

But we don't have full democracy, and meanwhile the most powerful institution in Panama that opposes the death penalty, the Catholic Church, in these days of the Hitler Youth pope regularly takes dives instead of fighting for principles it espouses, so as to maintain its alliances with political and economic elites.

The death penalty is about the most abusive exercise of political power, about General Torrijos secretly torturing and murdering his underground opposition, about General Noriega killing his foes within the Panama Defense Forces, about the Conservatives' execution of Victoriano Lorenzo on the eve of Panama's independence. Nowhere has it proven to be an effective deterrent to violent crime. It's a barbarous act of revenge that demeans a society that uses it.

It's also an attractive ploy for pathetic politicians without solutions for the real problems that people face in their everyday lives. A plebiscite on it would be a bait-and-switch by a huckster who promised democratic change and delivered cheap demagoguery instead.

"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." So said Republican Senator Jim DeMint, about health care reform, in the summer of 2009.

And so we got the "death panels" rumor and the shoutdowns at congressional town hall meetings. There were all those YouTube videos that went viral enough that people started to think about their contents and realized that a veteran with government health care was arguing that he should keep his system the way it is and to Hell with everybody else, that people were attacking public education as some sort of pedophile socialism, that a lady was yelling "Heil Hitler" and mocking the accent of an immigrant from Israel and seeming to be proud of it, that there were idiots actually shouting "keep the government out of my Medicare," that the accusations and epithets didn't match the contents of the proposal.

But enough of a dent was made that Democrats started caving and the insurance and drug company lawyers and lobbyists moved in to strip the reform of much of its most important feature, the cost cutting. Polls showed that a healthy majority of Americans would have approved of simply extending the government's Medicare plan to everybody, which would have been the "single payer" public health care plan and by far the cheapest way to go.

The struggle went on and on, to the point that everyone knew that people who hate immigrants are against health care reform, that people who hate blacks are against health care reform, that people who hate churches that advocate social justice are against health care reform. Then finally that birdbrain Sarah Palin let slip that her family used to cross the border into Canada to get health care, and all of a sudden the central story line of horrible Canadian health care went up in smoke.

By the weekend of the vote the Tea Party folks were out in Washington taunting the "niggers" and "faggots," and their comrades on the floor of the House of Representatives were taunting the "baby killers." It was a close vote that followed intense maneuvering and substantial horse trading, but it was nevertheless a huge rout for Republicans who had hoped to destroy the Obama presidency over this issue.

It divided the American community in Panama, too, and one of the opponents of the reform, the libertarian conservative developer Sam Taliaferro, took it pretty hard. On his Panama Investors Blog, he complained of "unconstitutional shenanigans that have now given the US government control of another 20% of the economy."

The arcane congressional rules of procedure are not in the US Constitution, but let's let that argument pass. Although the progressive side of the American body politic had fervently hoped for a government takeover of the health care system, that also didn't happen, but let's let that argument slide, too.

The thing that Sam takes for granted, which most of the Congress and an even greater majority of the American people do not, is an economy in which one out of every five dollars that changes hands is spent on health care --- with at least 15 percent of the population left completely uninsured and another more than 20 percent with illusory insurance that does not cover what they need. It's an enormously expensive and hideously inefficient system that's a drag on the entire economy. Because of this system, it costs more than an extra $800 to build a car in Michigan as compared to making the same vehicle across the river in Ontario.

Now Sam may think that Panama is about to get this influx of American refugees, running here to get away from socialized medicine. He's probably right. The US education system is also broken, to the extent that many are the fools who come to Panama with deficient knowledge and strange misconceptions. For example, those who don't realize that we have had socialized medicine in Panama for more than 70 years.