Editorials: The Mine; and Fox lies

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poisoned river
MiAmbiente inspectors investigate a toxic spill from the copper mine. MiAmbiente photo.

The new copper mine contract is a bad deal for Panama

Panama has a new agreement with a company that cheated us for years on the old agreement. Why should they be trusted now?

The serious environmental damage appears unlikely to be mitigated in any serious way. The poisoning of our land and waters appears destined to continue for another generation.

There is no industrial policy to go along with the contract. Nothing requires that some of the ore dug out of that immense hole will be processed into things made out of copper in Panama, creating industrial jobs for Panamanians.

We got rooked.

 

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Highlights from a screenshot of a news feed by another company – to someone who has checked the boxes to say that he’s really not interested in what Fox News has to report. But through others who take a dim view of Fox, and through so many “new media” that have been created so that dishonest ultra-right media get through to people who specifically don’t want their appeals to base emotions, the hate literature is ubiquitous.

Let’s not insult the smart and noble swine by making the comparison

OH! They weren’t there to support freedom of the press when this editor was being prosecuted for criminal defamation for publishing THIS about one of their militia movement buddies who took his hustle to Panama. This editor won that case, but there are still Fox freaks in the gringo community here who take to the Internet to say the opposite.

They’re not there to support freedom of the press against red state book bans today, either.

But now that, caught in palpable lies in lawsuits brought by two voting technology companies – tales that the perpetrators admitted in depositions that they knew were false before they broadcast them – Murdoch, Carlson, Bartiromo, Ingraham, Hannity et al plead for constitutional protection. Now the company complains that the people whom its leading lights knowingly defamed are waging a “PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”

The January 6 riot, aimed at disrupting the process of inaugurating a duly elected president, was the most notorious offense. But Fox and some lesser wannabes on the far right have for years been using falsehoods to incite violent passions – rages that on that January 2021 day and on a number of other occasions have gotten people killed.

When the guy who adapted an old US advertising strategy to German racist politics, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the genocidal schweinhund made reference to Teutonic traditions to frame himself as the martyr. Except in the Goebbels Nazi Götterdämmerung, that guy also murdered his own six children. No gods died that day in 1945, just an evil and twisted propagandist and one last batch of his innocent victims.

It’s just a pair of civil lawsuits to grind their way through the courts. Just a couple of the many hoaxes. The Australian billionaire who took out US citizenship will surely die of the complications of old age before the legal consequences of what he and his hirelings did become final. And leave it to others, the more direct perpetrators of the January 6 attack on the US Constitution, the rule of law, the power of truth and the persons of a bunch of police officers who were just in their way and members of Congress who were targets of ginned-up fury.

But there should be some other consequences, prior to that, which ought to be quite severe. An already long overdue result should be that the Fox liars get shunned by other journalists. Not allowed to join reputable press organizations, not given seats at White House press briefings, not hired to teach journalism at any university, given ALL DUE RESPECT – which on a professional level is none.

It may be too time-consuming and expensive a legal battle, but one of the consequences should be that, like in the cases of Nazi concentration camp guards who emigrated to the USA and were outed only decades later, the US government ought to move to strip Rupert Murdoch of his American citizenship. The dude lied in the oath that he took to get his US passport.

 

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Albert Einstein becomes a US citizen. Library of Congress photo.

Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.

Albert Einstein

Bear in mind…

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.

Clare Booth Luce

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.

Rene Descartes

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Pearl S. Buck

 

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