Multiplication: a lost science for some of the high and mighty

Multiplication --- we need it, but some only know how to divide...

Basic arithmetic I: This is one of the fundraising months at The Panama News and we really do need more contributions than we usually get at this time.

The government is making all sorts of pronouncements about how wonderful the Panamanian economy is, but in fact:

Real tourism is down regardless of how many people pass through Panama as an air hub or on business.
Real estate sales are still slow, especially to the English-speaking community because, among other things, the community is shrinking a bit as the government gets scary, the cost of living is no longer so comparatively cheap as it once was and Panama's safety as a refuge from tax collectors and other creditors comes into question.
Very little of the spending on big public works projects is making its way to the small business sector.
Some advertisers are wary of putting their messages in media that don't grovel before President Martinelli, because he gets into these vindictive moods and his behavior is ever more erratic.

All this is a real problem for The Panama News. It's not quite as desperate for us as in the mid-1998 to mid-2002 economic free fall --- mainly because we have lower overhead and a much larger readership than back then --- but we really do need a lot of small contributions and a few big ones to go on.

Complicating matters is the collapse of Panama's postal service, such that if a check mailed to us actually arrives, it tends to arrive so late that it has become stale. That adds to the long-standing problem that a small business like ours can't have a bank account in Panama because it doesn't move enough money for any bank to accept it as a customer. (The more recent bankers' refusal to open accounts for anyone with US citizenship or a company whose owners include Americans is just gravy.)

Send your contributions by PayPal. Of course, without a bank account in North America we are limited there, too, but fortunately we have an alliance with Henry and Nora Smith's Paradise Services that allows The Panama News to piggyback on their PayPal account.

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Are you into marlin fishing? The Great Marlin Race is an opportunity to pursue your pastime and participate in scientific research at the same time.

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Basic arithmetic II: The country is in something of a political and constitutional crisis at the moment and the administration of the guy who ran on a platform of being crazy --- well, it's going nuts. The president and his minions are making elementary mistakes in electoral math.

Martinelli seems to be driven by short-term lust for power, intensive hatreds and the mistaken assumption that everyone else is on the same ethical plane that he is.

Sure, he may bribe, blackmail and bully his way into an unconstitutional second round of presidential balloting in the next elections, and may even have himself declared eligible to run for another term. But a lot of good that will do him if his party finishes third or fourth, as polls suggest that it would if the elections were held today.

He hates the left, hates labor unions, and wants to drive the PRD to extinction. But to have a chance in the next elections, the electoral math says that he should want one, or better yet two, labor/left slates on the ballot drawing away votes that would otherwise go to the PRD. Instead he resorts to crude power plays to keep the left off of the ballot.

Now that the opinion polls tell Mr. Martinelli that the electorate is not amused, his reaction is something like that of a deer in the road at night, paralyzed by the headlights. And although The Panama News does not have good access to the Presidencia or Martinelli's inner circle, we can reasonably guess from what has gone on before that the president was warned by people close to him about the consequences of his course of action, and rashly ignored the warnings.

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Do you know even a little bit of Spanish? Then listen to one of Martinelli's main spokespeople, Cambio Democratico legislator and representante Sergio Gálvez, rail against Panama City's mayor, who renounced his Panamanian citizenship to become an American, but later had his suspended political rights as a Panamanian restored by the National Assembly. Bosco Vallarino is a truly awful excuse for a mayor, a stupid man with base motives. But listen to the vicious anti-Americanism that Gálvez expresses, and understand that recently it has been something we have heard in the courts and from a pro-Martinelli crowd in the Casco Viejo. Government demagogues are whipping up anti-American passions for the first time since General Noriega was in charge. We have always had people here who dislike the gringos --- for many years they have been an all but invisible minority --- but the sea change in Panama's political culture is that now that Martinelli is making his big push to establish a one-party state, expressions like this are now coming from his party.

The move to strip the mayor of his citizenship by inserting an amendment in legislation to change election laws is another move to trash Panama's constitution, which does not allow for the cancellation or suspension of somebody's citizenship except under very narrow conditions if a person is a naturalized Panamanian, when a person has renounced his or her citizenship or as a penalty imposed after conviction for a crime after due process of law. The incompetent and crudely corrupt mayor presents an easy target whom nobody but his financially interested hangers-on cares to defend. However, it's not only dual citizens but all Panamanians who have an interest in opposing this latest assertion of extra-constitutional power. Martinelli has called himself "the Anti-Chávez" and puts on this posture as the right-wing mirror image of Venezuela's president, but notice that, as annoying as Hugo Chávez can sometimes be, he hasn't moved to strip other Venezuelans of their citizenship.

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I ran into an American "sovereign citizen" the other day. He's thinking about moving to Panama, which has been worked for many years by people pushing variants of the Posse Comitatus argument about the US constitution and why the US federal government in general and income taxes in particular are illegal. Meanwhile, we have a few people in the American community making vigilante noises. People like this would put all Americans living here at the mercy of hateful demagogues.

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Let's take a jazz break --- not just a jazz break, but an opportunity to hear the Danilo P&eactue;rez Trio incorporate some traditional Panamanian themes into the universal idiom that's jazz:

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The English-speaking community lost a very important member with the recent passing of Elisabeth Borer. Let us hope that people will be there to continue her work with the British Aid Society.

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All of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables are released, including all of the cables from Panama. State Department folks don't like it and US authorities are playing in various legal systems to get revenge, but they are part of history now and are quite informative even if mostly not sensational. (It's not the job of diplomats to send sensational reports back to their governments, even if sometimes they do need to report astounding events and situations.)

Want to know Panama's unpublished economic history? Then you really ought to read the embassy's take on the old Interoceanic Regional Authority as of late in the Moscoso administration --- not as your only source, but as an important one. Want the embassy's shocking but rather conservative take on the international drug cartels' infiltration of Panama's construction and real estate sectors? (And three guesses at just who the "MAJOR RESORT DEVELOPER" is. The more interesting factor is why the embassy selected this businessman and his silent backers to remain nameless.) Want a thumbnail sketch of what the Colon Free Zone is and how it works? Would you like to have some suggestion of how the two PRD politicians from Colon province, Lalo Antonio and Nelson Jackson, were ripe to be blackmailed into jumping to Martinelli's Cambio Democratico? It's there.

The official US government position about the contents of WikiLeaks cables is that they don't comment about stolen property. But these reports were available to the members of the US Congress and to US trade negotiators. To the extent that these people spin fantasies about what goes on down here for public consumption as part of their free trade sales pitches, public discourse needs to be yanked out of their control and illuminated by WikiLeaks. That possibility, multiplied by hundreds of other foreign policy situations, is the main reason why Washington is so upset with Julian Assange.

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Canal expansion work. Painting by George Scribner, from El Faro / Panama Canal Authority

The WikiLeaks revelations also fill in pieces of the canal expansion story that Panamanians --- and international lenders --- have a right to know. Early on, the embassy knew details of how the project was to be financed which indicated that the "Yes" campaign's "self-financing" mantra was deceptive. They knew not very long after the referendum of an alarming technical issue and that the canal affairs minister at the time, Ricaurte "Catín" Vásquez, who had built up this weird cult of international financial analysts and think tank people who lionized him as some sort of miracle worker, wanted to get out because the realities of what was happening were starting to make him look bad. They knew about the loud arguments that Catín's successor, Dani Kuzniecky, had with the canal administrator over transparency issues. Those of us who were skeptical all along have been cut off from information by the ACP information control apparatus, but it's not as if things are so easy for them to hide, even if they have erased all of the stuff on their website from the referendum campaign days so as to avoid comparisons with present-day realities. The WikiLeaks data add details to a story about opaque government and dishonest propaganda, but they are not in themselves stunning revelations.

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Check out this thing, by some of Panama's young musicians who have since gone their separate ways, and who combine a bunch of different influences in their music:

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Another totalitarian move by the Martinelli regime comes in the guise of "pro-labor" legislation. The government proposes to determine who is a "qualified" journalist who will be allowed to work in the news media, and then set up a minimum wage for journalists that most of the small news media can't afford to pay. Community media like The Panama News would be effectively prohibited. The government and the ad cartel would determine what news you would get, from which source.

On the Facebook page that is an extension of The Panama News, a Martinelli supporter makes the taunting argument: "Which are the media that are not favored by advertising agencies or the state, that survive?"

We do. Our 18th birthday is coming up in a few months. KW Continente and other independent radio stations do. By and large, El Siglo and La Estrella do.

The Panama News doesn't really pay a living wage. We have not had a payroll as such for many years. This is a hand-to-mouth micro-enterprise, and it is a distant dream for José Ponce to be able to fix up his home or for either of us to have our own transportation. We do not live according to the standards of most of the readers, but toward the lower end of the Panamanian economic scale. We are not whining for sympathy about this --- we have made our choices in life --- but stating a fact.

Do you want news media unbeholden to the self-proclaimed "Anti-Chávez?" Do you want the people whose labor brings you The Panama News to improve our standard of living? Then lend us a hand:

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It's popular among a large minority of Americans to deride science in the most conspiratorial of terms. The attack on science comes from religious fundamentalists on the one hand and from corporations seeking to deny responsibility for the problems their products cause on the other. The oil companies are financing this propaganda campaign that portrays climate change as this hoax financed by George Soros and Al Gore --- relying on some the same "think tanks" that spun the notion that the decades of medical research showing that smoking was unhealthy were a pack of lies.

Of course, science has its ethical issues and its uncertainties --- science is, after all, the systematic investigation of the uncertainties in the world around us in the hope of arriving at more sophisticated understandings of it --- but far from being automatons who take orders from sinister bosses about what to believe, scientists tend to be an argumentative and skeptical lot. Sometimes the weight of scientific opinion is wrong, but never is it the product of an overarching fraudulent conspiracy. The frauds get discovered and run out of those circles.

And where do the political and economic interests fall with respect to recent discoveries by scientists associated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute that the faster growth of tropical forests that's induced by climate change may put more carbon into the atmosphere that it absorbs, due to the increase in decomposing leaves and other factors? This raises as many scientific questions as it answers --- whether this applies to all forests or just tropical ones, and to all trees or just some are two that come immediately to my mind. Then there are the economic and public policy questions. Does this mean that planting or preserving forests doesn't really help to absorb greenhouse gases? Does this mean that carbon trading schemes are based on faulty assumptions?

I expect that both environmentalists and polluters will be tempted to spin this latest discovery in their direction. I also expect that scientists will take many a closer look at the questions raised and that the body of knowledge upon which decisions ought to be made will be larger and more sophisticated. I'm not exactly sure how it will affect my current notions about what ought to be done about climate change, but this I believe and will continue to believe: everyone has a right to an opinion, but as imperfectly as it may be understood, there is only one body of facts. People who alter facts to fit their beliefs are not only foolish, they are quite often dangerous.

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One idea is not equally as valid as any other idea. However, intimidating shows designed to reduce the appeal of a particular idea often end up having an opposite effect. Banning a book can make it a best-seller. The Panamanian government could have behaved far more obnoxiously, but the way they received it probably enhanced the sales of Paco Gómez Nadal's book, even if it's not what they wanted to do.

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Finally, let's get back to the wide-ranging world of Panamanian music, and this old gem by Alfredito Payne:

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
editor & publisher

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