The GOP candidate in North Carolina’s special congressional election. From his Twitter feed.
GOP voices
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What Democrats are saying
Last year in North Carolina, Republicans thought that they had stolen a congressional seat by fraud. But they got caught at it and a new election was ordered. The Democrat who was robbed, Iraq veteran and small businessman Dan McCready, is running again. The GOP has dredged up an amazing bigot and backed him up with a ton of dark money, the election is on September 10 and polls show a statistical tie. Says the Democrat: “When I built a business or served in the Marines, we never cared if you were a Democrat or a Republican. We cared about getting the job done. It’s time we had new leaders who put country over party – and got the job done for North Carolina families.” Photo from the McCready campaign’s website.
Dem voices
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The prospects for legislators’ licenses to steal
Legislator Benicio Robinson (PRD – Bocas del Toro) is also head of the Panamanian Baseball Federation (FEDEBEIS), which is funded by the government via PANDEPORTES. This is a bill of lading for the purchase of fabulous invisible bats which have not been located. The scheme is one of the targets of the comptroller’s audits, which the legislature is moving to shut down.
End game for Porcell, Humbert and any semblance of accountability?
by Eric Jackson
Via their record-setting jam-through of Gerardo Solís as the next comptroller general, their public statements and their actions, it now appears that the National Assembly’s leading deputies intend to go on looting the government as before. At the moment the modus operandi is to distract attention whenever anyone asks about what they stole. Thus the most inflammator demagoguery, with a supporting cast of Internet trolls foreign and domestic
The main target at whom the deputies’ venom is now spat is Comptroller General Federico Humbert. He has his political baggage but also has a clear constitutional duty to oversee ALL expenditures of public resources, including by legislators. He gets accused of picking on politicians whose offices he audits.
For his part, Gerado Solís says that he will not be a look the other way and do nothing about corruption that he manages to see kind of comptroller. But the man has a record in public life that led the most flagrantly offending deputies to give him their most enthusiastic support. From a wealthy family, he began his political life as a Norieguista, serving as campaign treasurer for the dictatorship’s failed presidential candidate in the 1989 elections, the nullification of which was a contributing factor to the US invasion later that year. He was the campaign spokesman for the PRD’s Ernesto Pérez Balladares’s campaign in the 1994 elections, and got a job in the Ministry of the Presidency after that. In that post with Pérez Balladares he received a $10,000 check for a training seminar, but has resisted all questions about where and for what this training was. In that administration he served as director of the Social Emergency Fund, where most infamously he burned invoices and other financial records of his time in that office, claiming that this was justified because they were bulky. Solís was then for a brief moment the acting head of the Ministry of Education and then Housing Minister, before being appointed to a 10-year term as Electoral Prosecutor. As Electoral Prosecutor he was there for the 2006 canal expansion referendum, where he helped oversee the use of government funds for the “YES” side only and can be expected to approve a similar practice to rig any 2020 referendum on “constitutional reform.” After his time as Electoral Prosecutor Solís served as Electoral Magistrate until he decided to run for president in 2014. In that election cycle, however, he dropped an independent candidacy and instead ran for vice president on Juan Carlos Navarro’s losing ticket. In the PRD primary for the 2019 presidential election, Solís finished in fifth place with negligible support. The man figured in the diplomatic cables from Panama that came out via WikiLeaks some years ago: see, e.g., https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09PANAMA756_a.html.
Comptroller General Federico Humbert’s and Attorney General Kenia Porcell’s terms end on December 31. Some of the more strident members of the National Assembly are threatening to shorten those terms, but that they will be unable to do without the compliance of the Supreme Court, which would have jurisdiction over any impeachment. The high court is playing short-handed with holdovers and alternates filling a number of vacancies for President Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo to fill.
Also in the remainder of this year, the legislature will be making alterations to business groups’ constitutional change proposals, surely to armor themselves against accountability for their actions. They’d have to pass their finished proposal by the end of December, pass it again in January, submit it to the voters in a referendum within six months – or else wait at least six months. Talk now is of a bedsheet ballot of dozens of constitutional change proposals that would confuse the voters and suppress turnout, but we shall see. There are ongoing public hearings, which are drawing party activists and some curious observers. None of the well known advocates of a new constitution are attending these with any hope of making any positive change.
But, given a string of notorious court rulings and the shortened time period, what’s in store on the legal front for the rest of this year?
The acquittal of former president Ricardo Martinelli on illegal wiretapping and theft charges formally gets handed down on August 26 and after that look for appeals to the Supreme Court. There may also be civil lawsuits against Martinelli, or perhaps administrative moves to recover assets from the former president. On the other side of the balance Martinelli threatens to charge the witnesses against him with perjury, which moves will not prosper until a new attorney general takes office next year.
The cases against a number of current and former legislators look set to proceed, but the accused would surly interpose delays until a new attorney general would be in place to drop the charges.
At the end of July the Supreme Court, which had been investigating deputies Athenas Athanasiadis (PRD – Boquete) for putting employees of her family’s chicken company on the legislature’s payroll; Aristides De Icaza (CD – La Chorerra) for writing checks to cash or to imaginary employees from his office account and then depositing the money in his personal account; and Jorge Alberto Rosas (Panameñista – San Felix) for paying employees of his law firm on the legislature’s dime devolved those cases to the Public Ministry. Those investigations had been ongoing since mid-2018 and if the “principle of law” on which Martinelli walked – that evidence developed by the high court and then passed on to a lower court does not count – those matters might get timed out even though the proofs are rather straightforward.
Comptroller General Humbert has filed 11 complaints against other legislators and several employees of the National Assembly. Former legislators’ cases, and those of unelected employees, go to Attorney General Porcell and prosecutors of the Public Ministry she heads. Given time constraints those cases face dubious futures.
Current legislators, and one guy who was defeated for re-election but became a member of the Central American Parliament, have their cases investigated and perhaps tried by the Supreme Court. A change of attorney general would not much affect those but a notorious and long-running non-aggression pact between the National Assembly and the Supreme Court may decide these things. High court magistrates can only be investigated and tried by the legislature, while legislators can only be investigated by the high court and the general rule has been that the two institutions leave each others’ feeding troughs alone.
Meanwhile Humbert, blocked by the current and former leadership of the National Assembly from entering the legislature’s premises to investigate its members’ years-long looting binges, searches up other avenues. For example, looking at the Panamanian Sports Institute (PANDEPORTES) records for their documentation of when legislators stuck their sticky fingers in that till. For example, looking at those bank records on which he can get his hands. Before he goes he is likely to send more stuff on to the high court or the attorney general.
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¿Wappin? “…but I did not heed the deputy” / “… pero no escuché a la diputada”
Mongo Santamaria. Graphic by Danny PiG.
The beat of troubled times
El ritmo de los tiempos difíciles
Mongo Santamaria – Afro Blue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbE7jf_Hp5w
Congas de Milagros Blades y Oscarito Cruz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYUdoaueDxY
Egguie Castrillon – El Rey Del Timbal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCg3yKkVeFQ
Babatunde Olatunji – Oya (Primitive Fire)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41p2a0zqMMY
Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders – Journey in Satchidananda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQtEFdyhgdE
Kokoroko Afrobeat Collective – Colonial Mentality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnKDK1iklo
Cymande – Dove
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcL8SvyKtE4
Santana – Future Primitive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5_es8ldBc
Yomira John – Hombre Cobarde
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRkh5fL9E00
Helen Humes – Blues Ain’t Nothing But a Woman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs1Aa383BCI
Bonnie Raitt – Angel from Montgomery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toJ3ZYWRh24
John Lee Hooker – Bad Like Jesse James
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ZVrR6lD4s
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – Ella and Louis (1956)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqOaQgD_2KA
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UN says land clearing and farming are major climate change drivers
Farming emits greenhouse gases, but the land can also store them. Johny Goerend/Unsplash, CC BY-SA
UN: land clearing and farming contribute one-third of the world’s greenhouse gases
by Mark Howden, Australian National University
We can’t achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement without managing emissions from land use, according to a special report released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Emissions from land use, largely agriculture, forestry and land clearing, make up some 22% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Counting the entire food chain (including fertiliser, transport, processing, and sale) takes this contribution up to 29%.
The report, which synthesizes information from some 7,000 scientific papers, found there is no way to keep global warming under 2℃ without significant reductions in land sector emissions.
Land puts out emissions – and absorbs them
The land plays a vital role in the carbon cycle, both by absorbing greenhouse gases and by releasing them into the atmosphere. This means our land resources are both part of the climate change problem and potentially part of the solution.
Improving how we manage the land could reduce climate change at the same time as it improves agricultural sustainability, supports biodiversity, and increases food security.
While the food system emits nearly a third of the world’s greenhouse gases – a situation also reflected in Australia – land-based ecosystems absorb the equivalent of about 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This happens through natural processes that store carbon in soil and plants, in both farmed lands and managed forests as well as in natural “carbon sinks” such as forests, seagrass and wetlands
There are opportunities to reduce the emissions related to land use, especially food production, while at the same time protecting and expanding these greenhouse gas sinks.
But it is also immediately obvious that the land sector cannot achieve these goals by itself. It will require substantial reductions in fossil fuel emissions from our energy, transport, industrial, and infrastructure sectors.
Overburdened land
So, what is the current state of our land resources? Not that great.
The report shows there are unprecedented rates of global land and freshwater used to provide food and other products for the record global population levels and consumption rates.
For example, consumption of food calories per person worldwide has increased by about one-third since 1961, and the average person’s consumption of meat and vegetable oils has more than doubled.
The pressure to increase agricultural production has helped push about a quarter of the Earth’s ice-free land area into various states of degradation via loss of soil, nutrients and vegetation.
Simultaneously, biodiversity has declined globally, largely because of deforestation, cropland expansion and unsustainable land-use intensification. Australia has experienced much the same trends.
Climate change exacerbates land degradation
Climate change is already having a major impact on the land. Temperatures over land are rising at almost twice the rate of global average temperatures.
Linked to this, the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves and flooding rainfall has increased. The global area of drylands in drought has increased by over 40% since 1961.
These and other changes have reduced agricultural productivity in many regions – including Australia. Further climate changes will likely spur soil degradation, loss of vegetation, biodiversity and permafrost, and increases in fire damage and coastal degradation.
Water will become more scarce, and our food supply will become less stable. Exactly how these risks will evolve will depend on population growth, consumption patterns and also how the global community responds.
Overall, proactive and informed management of our land (for food, water and biodiversity) will become increasingly important.
Stopping land degradation helps everyone
Tackling the interlinked problems of land degradation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and food security can deliver win-wins for farmers, communities, governments, and ecosystems.
The report provides many examples of on-ground and policy options that could improve the management of agriculture and forests, to enhance production, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and make these areas more robust to climate change. Leading Australian farmers are already heading down these paths, and we have a lot to teach the world about how to do this.
We may also need to reassess what we demand from the land. Farmed animals are a major contributor to these emissions, so plant-based diets are increasingly being adopted.
Similarly, the report found about 25-30% of food globally is lost or wasted. Reducing this can significantly lower emissions, and ease pressure on agricultural systems.
How do we make this happen?
Many people around the world are doing impressive work in addressing some of these problems. But the solutions they generate are not necessarily widely used or applied comprehensively.
To be successful, coordinated policy packages and land management approaches are pivotal. Inevitably, all solutions are highly location-specific and contextual, and it is vital to bring together local communities and industry, as well as governments at all levels.
Given the mounting impacts of climate change on food security and land condition, there is no time to lose.
The author acknowledges the contributions to authorship of this article by Clare de Castella, Communications Manager, ANU Climate Change Institute.
Mark Howden, Director, Climate Change Institute, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Hightower, How COOL NAFTA 2.0 isn’t
Trump’s new trade deal would encourage multinational meat packers to abandon America’s family ranchers. This uncured pork belly slice – jobs in Iowa, or in Brazil or Asia? And which country’s laws and practices will determine the chemicals that may be in the animal feed? You won’t have any right to know. Wikimedia photo by Rainer Zenz.
Where’s the beef in NAFTA 2.0?
by Jim Hightower – OtherWords
“MAGA,” blusters Donald Trump — Make America Great Again!
America’s ranching families, however, would like Trump to come off his high horse and get serious about a more modest goal, namely: Make America COOL Again.
COOL stands for Country-of-Origin-Labeling, a straightforward law simply requiring that agribusiness giants put labels on packages of steak, pork chops, and other products to tell us whether the meat came from the United States, China, Brazil, or wherever else in the world.
This useful information empowers consumers to decide where their families’ food dollars go. But multinational powerhouses like Tyson Foods and Cargill don’t want you and me making such decisions.
In 2012, the meat monopolists got the World Trade Organization to decree that our nation’s COOL law violated global trade rules — and our corporate-submissive congress critters meekly repealed the law.
Then came Donald Trump and his Made-in-America campaign, promising struggling ranchers that he’d restore the COOL label as a centerpiece of his new NAFTA deal. Ranching families cheered because getting that “American Made” brand on their products would mean more sales and better prices.
But wait — Trump has now issued his new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and — where’s the beef? In the grandiose, 1,809-page document, COOL is not even mentioned once.
Worse, it slaps America’s hard-hit ranching families in the face, because it allows multinational meatpackers to keep shipping foreign beef into the US market that doesn’t meet our own food safety standards. Aside from the “yuck” factor and health issues, this gives Tyson and other giants an incentive to abandon US ranchers entirely.
To stand with America’s farm and ranch families against their betrayal by Trump and the Big Food monopolists, contact the National Farmers Union: NFU.org.
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Editorials: Medical boards; and Should Dems run on race?
Striking physicians assemble in Panama City a few years back. That was an argument mainly about pay and benefits, but the doctors also worked and sometimes fought for years to get a professional licensing system with which they AND their patients could live. Now some legislator wants to change that and didn’t even ask them about it? Big provocation. Archive photo by Kermit Nourse.
Dumbed down health care on the National Assembly’s agenda?
Q: “Why couldn’t Jesus get a license to raise the dead in Jerusalem?”
A: “’Cuz he got nailed on the boards.”
A joke doctors’ kids would tell on the Sunday school bus
way back when, especially around the time of Holy Week
The problem? As a PRD legislator from Colon, Mariano López, puts it: “Many doctors come out of the universities and are not permitted to become interns because they have to take an exam that some don’t pass.”
So now we are told that Law 43 of 2004, as amended in 2008 and with implementing regulations decreed after that, must give way some as yet unspecified bit so that those Panamanians who flunk the certification or recertification exams can get job in Panama’s public and private health care system.
Panama’s public and private health care systems have their problems, which are amenable to various solutions that might work. One of which is not eliminating or dumbing down the Technical Council of Health’s certification exams. Demagoguery may be a specialty but it’s not one of the healing professions.
Anyone with any knowledge of US society and history knows what it’s all about — he’s spouting racism to mobilize white voters in places and social strata that he figures would be important to get himself re-elected. The racist violence that he incites he will deny in one way or another. The question is how Democrats respond. Do we reject this stuff and defend our people, but mainly talk about what we would do for the country? Or do we make 2020 an identity politics election and focus mainly on the constituencies whom Trump has insulted?
Should Democrats run on race in 2020?
Really, it’s a suggestion brought up by very few Democratic candidates or leaders. There are candidates touching issues like reparations for slavery, the fate of undocumented people who have been in the USA for years, past stands on issues like mass incarceration for drugs that have disproportionately affected racial minorities and whether association with Barack Obama insulates a candidate from hard questions.
But leave the outright racial appeals to Donald Trump and his party. Within the Democratic Party leave the unseemly assertion of identity politics to the most insecure and grasping of the apparatchiki who, like in 2016, are already calling dibs on hack jobs and consulting contracts, the spoils arising from victories yet to be won and far from assured.
The Democrats, however, have a large and talent-rich field of presidential primary candidates. Assurances will be given to constituencies with this or that identity that their members will not be short-changed or brushed off in order to play to the prejudices or demands of some other group deemed more important. But the questions around which Democrats’ primary choices will be made and on which the campaign will be waged in the fall of 2020 are on their bottom lines economic. How does American confront ever more severe climate disasters – who gains what and who eats which losses? How does America fix the world’s most expensive but far from the best health care system? Can America afford a tax system in which the rich hardly pay? Can America afford wars all over the place with no notion of what victory even is and certainly no end in sight? Can Americans have an education system that gives individuals the freedom and capacity to decide what to do with their lives and also gives the collective nation a well trained and creative talent pool that can compete in any sphere with any other nation?
Let Trump and his crowds hurl the racial insults. The would-be Democratic presidential nominees have their various homeland renovation plans.
Within the Democratic ranks, let those who play variations on the “I’m ____ – you owe me this nomination / job / contract / party leadership post” theme be quietly checked off as unqualified. But let’s not eliminate anyone from consideration over some identity politics pecking order, either.
Yes, if you identify yourself as an Aryan nationalist, Democrats WILL dismiss you. Democrats reject all of those ugly hatreds. But the issue is America’s future. Look for that in the upcoming debates.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anaïs Nin
Graphic by Waldo Saavedra
Bear in mind…
Literature is huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.
Goethe
There can’t be a republic in which the people are not secure in the exercise of their own faculties.
Simón Bolívar
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Libertad Ciudadana, In the face of impunity
Profound rejection. Photo and alteration by Eric Jackson.
To the citizenry in the face of impunity:
insist, persist, resist and never desist
by Libertad Ciudadana, the Panamanian chapter of Transparency International
Last week three cases bore evidence of the profound collapse of the administration of justice in Panama:
- The acquittal of all of those involved in a scheme in which Caja de Ahorros funds were used;
- The cutoff of time to investigate the Odebrecht case; and finally, this past Friday, August 9,
- The not guilty verdict in the case against former president Martinelli for the illegal interception of communication and various forms of theft related to that.
We have seen justice, instead of being effective, equitable and relevant, turned into a weapon of impunity and the undermining of social and democratic cohesion by way of the destruction of the rule of law and for practical purposes the non-existence of the separation of powers.
The institutional crisis in the administration of justice in this country, which engulfs both the Public Ministry prosecutors and the courts, didn’t arise in one week. It comes from more than a decade, since what was drawn up and established in the State Pact for Justice’s judicial reform road map, the commitments of which have for the most part gone unimplemented, like the judicial civil service. The provisions which that have been implemented, like the accusatory penal system, have been marred by favoritism in the appointment of judges without regard to the civil service laws, which has inundated the system with justice operatives without true independence, people who by all appearances are susceptible to intimidation and corruption and without any mechanism to get effective accountability for their judicial actions. Judges appointed by magistrates who, in turn, are the products of executive appointments for the most part bear the marks of conflicts of interest, inexperience, cronyism and the characteristics forge in mutual impunity pacts with the legislature, which in turn also does not fulfill its role as a balance to executive power.
Former president Martinelli’s case is particularly decisive because the Supreme Court accumulated several criminal cases for public corruption begun against him but did not include those in the extradition process. How can it be expected that the citizenry would like or could obey the law in a system that only guarantees impunity for some and delay for others?
As citizens in a democracy – imperfect as it is, but still a democracy – it’s up to us to act, to demand compliance with the judicial reforms, to support the State Pact for Justice, to incessantly insist and persist in the face of the forces of corruption who want nothing to change because the system serves them as it is.
Of the Public Ministry and the judicial branch we demand: courage, audits and evaluations of every office and every authority, change and modernization of the procedures, investigation of and sanctions for those justice operatives whose performance has been deficient or who have intentionally or negligently omitted their legal duties.
Of the executive branch: that President Laurentino Cortizo keep his word, which he gave upon signing the 2019 Transparency Challenge, and include it among the priorities of this government plan, to wit he promised:
“To nominate independent magistrates and prosecutors, without political, business or family ties to myself or any member of my cabinet, in strict compliance with Law 4 of 1999 concerning equal opportunities.”
If we want to do away with impunity, we need the best justice operatives: upright, independent, with judicial experience and brave in the face of corruption. The executive can help to improve, or can continue to worsen, the independence of the institutions.
We call upon the citizenry to resist corruption in all of its forms and to persist in the search for solutions. We will be publishing a call to convene and unite forces and look for solutions. We conscious citizens with a democratic calling are more than they are.
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Bernal, The legitimacy crisis
Miguel Antonio Bernal. Archive photo by Eric Jackson.
The legitimacy crisis
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
The events that are happening in our country make the nature, the dimension and the depth of the crisis we are going through, displace most of the horrors through which we have lived over the last half century.
The crisis of the prevailing political regime’s legitimacy is not just that. It is a crisis that goes much further, with very atypical characteristics. It occurs “cold,” that is, without large mobilizations. It comes in a context of exhaustion of the regime imposed by the militarist constitution.
Inserting ourselves politically into the evolving crisis is imperative if we really want to find a favorable alternative — or any sort of exit for the civic and democratic sectors.
The moral heart attack that, as a result of the legal epilepsy imposed by the Martinelli process, has given us the “not guilty” verdict, will end up sinking the branches of government and their institutions. Without further delay we must leave the fake dichotomy of the not anymore versus the not yet.
The most peaceful, progressive, participatory and popular exit is a constitutional convention. But this process will not crystallize at will. The power brokers idolize the militarist constitution and the status quo of tormenting social, economic, political and cultural inequalities on which they are well fed.
The constitutional convention process must be the result of a determined citizen participation, supported by the concrete claims of the major majorities for which the constituent will be the catalyst element, the lowest common denominator, which will allow the integration of a citizen force that can determine events.
Today, the civic sectors that are jaded and disgusted with the current state of the government, with the decomposition of its branches, with corruption and impunity, with the permanent disappointment of their aspirations as human beings, must set aside the contemplative attitudes of spectators Those who are fed up must assume responsibility as actors since the events will occur with or without them. People have to get involved so that the results are favorable. In a nutshell, long suffering constituents, or protagonists of a new constitutional convention. There is no other way.
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Constitutional follies
Rude questions about Panamanian law…
by Eric Jackson
IT SAYS RIGHT HERE IN PANAMA’S CONSTITUTION…
“ARTICULO 19. No habrá fueros o privilegios ni discriminación por razón de raza, nacimiento, discapacidad, clase social, sexo, religión o ideas políticas.”
[There will be no immunities or privileges nor discrimination on account of race, birth, disability, social class, sex, religion or political ideas.]
So, if a member of the political caste or a family member of one of these beats the rap for, say, running down and killing a little girl on a road in Colon province, or, say, misrepresenting the value of a beach mansion for tax purposes, or, say, conducting a vast and warrantless electronic espionage campaign against the Panamanian people, or, say, stealing vast sums of money from government coffers by way of overpriced public works contracts from which a skim is kicked back to members of the political caste – IF THERE ARE NO IMMUNITIES OR PRIVILEGES NOR DISCRIMINATION ON ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL CLASS, doesn’t everyone else have the same right to engage in legal fictions like the ones upholding such practices?
Or for that matter, doesn’t society have an equal right to indulge in legal fictions? As in, perhaps, ‘You say you were born in Panama to human parents and have this piece of paper that says so, but we are adopting the legal fiction that you were not, and thus that you don’t properly exist on this planet’?
Oh, I am told that there is a fix in the works, wherein “civil society” groups that represent the interests of and are largely composed of the most pompous and inbred of Panama’s wealthiest families get to determine whom elected presidents might appoint to the Supreme Court.
Sometime next year I get to vote “NO” on this proposed change? Will do, even if who gets heard in the referendum campaign will be rigged by the political caste and the elite families and there won’t be anyone whom ordinary people can trust counting the votes.
Oh, LOOK! Dr. Jekyll has slugged down a test tube of the formula and – it’s Mr. Rogers! And…
“…Can you say “constitutional crisis?”
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