“The new constitution is the first pillar of the Another Road for Panama movement, a constitution that should protect the citizens from the abuses of power.”
Despite fake polls, mudslinging and an early PRD lead, is Lombana rising to the occasion?
by Eric Jackson
Yes, he’s an Evangelical. No, he doesn’t want to beat up queers.
Ricardo Lombana has yet to be anointed in the temples of Ricardo Martinellior Donald Trump. Don’t hold your breath waiting for those things to happen. Reverend Gantry probably wouldn’t endorse him either.
See, Ricardo Lombana has his faith, which he openly professes but compartmentalizes with a belief that church and state ought to be separate. If ever you have caught his expression when talking about the corruption that besets this land, it’s easy to believe that he got that attitude in some church that approved of Jesus Christ’s one recorded act of violence, the scene where he went after the moneylenders with a whip. But Lombana hasn’t been noticed with a scourge of chords on the campaign trail.
And so it goes when you have a religious right railing against feminists and homosexuals, and against sex education in the schools much more than against the sexual exploitation of underage girls by adult men. A religious right with leaders who were on the payroll of Ricardo Martinelli’s kleptocracy.
“I believe in the separation between church and state,” Lombana explained. “One shouldn’t bring his religious beliefs into government decisions.” But of course he would. The bit about “Thou shalt not steal,” for example.
About marriage equality, wherein Panama might recognize the marriages of same-sex couples? That one he dodges, saying that Panama should have a constitutional convention to replace the current document that dates back to the dictatorship, and that marriage equality is one of the subject that ought to be debated in that process.
Isn’t THAT diplomatic? Lombana, was, after all, a Panamanian diplomat in Washington DC during the Martín Torrijos administration. (Recall that those were years of a Panamanian government led by this country’s by then quite neoliberal affiliate of the Socialist International and a US government under the Republican administration of George W. Bush.)
Lombana makes a point of not passing out $20 bills on the campaign trail, and he doesn’t throw red meat to those looking to scapegoat someone. What kind of a campaign is THAT for Panama?
He got on the ballot in a petitioning process that had him overtake a guy who apparently had copies of government records that are supposed to be confidential, and from those paid people who forged signatures on petitions. The guy he overtook will not face a criminal investigation, but some of his campaign crew might. It was a surge in the last week of petitioning that got Ricardo Lombana on the ballot.
By all credible accounts, the PRD’s Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo is the front runner in the presidential race. But the polls that the Electoral Tribunal approves for publication are lies. They show nobody undecided, while unpublished surveys by more reputable people have shown more or less one-third of the electorate undecided. And things are volatile, as for one thing with the conviction or acquittal of Ricardo Martinelli one might expect his man for president, Rómulo Roux, to gain steam or more likely collapse.
Meanwhile, attorney Lombana keeps talking what the hate mobs will surely consider heresy on the campaign trail: “I worked to help create laws to defend the animals. My commitment is that these laws will be enforced, because animals are also Panamanians who need protection.”
Can he get away with it? Can he win? Perhaps the best indication is that people are attacking him now, mostly by way of fake documents and queer baiting from the religious right.
Figure that in the closing week or two before the May 5 election, if some of the richest people in Panama figure that Nito Cortizo can and should be beaten, a ton of money will pour into support for the chosen one. It might be Lombana.
Perusing the index of recent Facebook slop.
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“Student-athletes” make billions for others while putting their own futures at risk. Shutterstock photo.
It’s March Madness. Unionize the NCAA!
by Brian Wakamo — OtherWords
When Zion Williamson’s foot broke through the sole of his Nike shoe on February 20th, the sporting world stood still.
The consensus number one player in college basketball was playing in the biggest game of the season — North Carolina versus Duke — and suffered his startling injury in the opening minute. Williamson’s sprained knee cost Nike $1.1 billion in stock market valuation the next day.
The injury came on the doorstep of March Madness, the NCAA’s most profitable event of the year — to the tune of $900 million in revenue.
Despite the billions riding on his performance, the NCAA insists that athletes like Williamson are “amateurs” — student-athletes there only for the love of the game. It forbids them to make money off their performance, even as they support an industry worth billions. Duke alone makes $31 million off its basketball program.
Williamson has been a force of nature this season, captivating audiences and NBA scouts alike. Enticing those NBA scouts is the only way this 18-year-old can build his own future career — and any sort of injury imperils that future.
High-level “student-athletes,” after all, don’t get to spend much time being students.
A few years ago, some former athletes at the University of North Carolina sued the school and the NCAA, claiming they’d been denied a meaningful education. It’s hard to argue with that.
The athletes, in exchange for scholarships, give these schools their lives and put their health at risk. Concussions of football players have sparked lawsuits, and an injury like Williamson’s could cost a player millions in the professional leagues. If they can’t go pro — and their education didn’t do them any favors — what option do they have?
That risk is where the travesty lies. These thousands of athletes who play in the NCAA are often not allowed to enjoy the benefits of the schools they attend (and enrich). If they’re not able to make use of their education, they should be paid for the work they put in.
When college sports revenues are as high as they’ve ever been, the failure to pay the athletes is absurd — but not surprising.
Inequality of all kinds is on the rise, and the gap between the top and bottom of the pay scale is the highest since the Gilded Age of the early 1900s. The NCAA not allowing athletes to be paid — or even sign autographs for money! — is an extension of an economy where unions are busted and people have to work three jobs to make ends meet.
It needs to change. College basketball players areon average worth $212,080to their program, much more than the cost of their scholarships.
Schools should pay these athletes a share of the revenue their sport brings in. And the NCAA needs to, at the very least, allow for these people to make money selling autographs or appearing at sports camps.
Just as importantly, athletes should be allowed to unionize their teams and fight for their own rights.
Billions of dollars are going to be spent on betting on March Madness games. CBS and Turner paid around $19 billion for the television rights to the tournament. And over $1 billion in advertising is spent on the tournament.
This event is all about the money. We should spread it around to the people who make it worthwhile.
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The Golden Hooded Tanager / Tangara Capuchidorada. Found in El Nancito, District of Remedios, Chiriqui, Panama at 638 meters of altitude. / Encontrado en El Nancito, Distrito de Remedios, Chiriquí, Panamá a 638 metros de altitud.
Golden Hooded Tanager ~ Tangara Capuchidorada ~ Tangara larvata
This beautiful species ranges from southern Mexico to northwest Ecuador, where it feeds on berries and an occasional insect. You find them usually in small groups, in forest clearings, scrublands and forest edges on both sides of the isthmus. They are not on the highest of the highlands.
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Esta hermosa especie abarca desde el sur de México hasta el noroeste de Ecuador, donde se alimenta de bayas y un insecto ocasional. Generalmente los encuentra en grupos pequeños, en claros de bosques, matorrales y bordes de bosques a ambos lados del istmo. No están en lo más alto de las tierras altas.
https://youtu.be/eV1dV0uyiqY
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US Representative Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has had little to say about the flood of bogus political attack messages from Russia, Trump supporters and other pseudonymous sources that characterized the 2016 US presidential election campaign. But now he is suing the owner of this Twitter account and Twitter itself because it’s one MEAN cow to him.
Freedom of expression online: get past the slogans and into reality
This editor was in 2016 and is now one of the moderators of the Expats for Sanders Facebook group. It’s small-time, but expanded exponentially in a couple of waves back then.
In the primary season there was a flood of fake personas — most of them bots (bits computer data not backed by any sort of responsive human being) and a number of them real people operating under false pretenses. Delete those people and bots and there would often be someone screaming about freedom of speech — and almost never was such a person both human and what she or he claimed to be. There were the set-ups, men saying sexist things — the script was to call Hillary Clinton a “whore” — to be then pointed out to Clintonistas in the corporate mainstream media as proof of the vile existence of “Bernie Bros.” There was a genre of ‘I used to support Bernie but now ____’ by characters never identifiable with Sanders at any point and sometimes identifiably the opposite — when these posters were not bots.
The nomination decided, there were waves of scurrilous anti-Clinton messages, some clearly not written by anyone very familiar with American English, a lot memes posted by bots, a lot by humans under false pretenses coming from three main directions that we could discern at the time.
A minor one was actual Green activists trolling for a few recruits for the Jill Stein campaign. There were also bots and fake personas promoting Jill not because they like the Greens but to divert votes from the Democrats.
There were the online pioneering neofascists. From them there was all this “Killary” conspiracy stuff and when there were real people instead of bots one was likely to find a page full of Confederate flags, postings from Nazi sites or so on.
There was all this pseudo-ideological stuff, the main point of which was “Don’t Vote.” There was a heavy preponderance of bots among the carriers of such messages.
Later we found out that there were Russians behind many of each sort of these messages. But I was the guy who got called a Stalinist for deleting messages and blocking those people and programs that posted them.
Donald Trump’s campaign gave the Russians 75 pages of its polling data for the Kremlin to orchestrate its social media interventions in the 2016 US presidential election. Will we now hear the likes of Devin Nunes hollering about “innocent until proven guilty” and “freedom of speech?” No doubt.
But of course, like a group meeting in a hall or a bartender trying to maintain a friendly ambience, it’s legal to have bouncers who eject belligerent people who have come to disrupt the proceedings. The same goes with any social media group.
Is it freedom of the press when a president uses public funds to buy a media empire, which then becomes a partisan attack and disinformation machine? That’s what Ricardo Martinelli did, that’s what El Panama America, La Critica, NexTV and so on are and the dysfunctional Electoral Tribunal and Electoral Prosecutor carefully refuse to admit any of this. But when the tribunal is accused by the Martinelista standard bearer of telling Twitter to erase accounts so as to skew the 2019 Panamanian electoral debate, the magistrates say that it simply isn’t true, that they can’t and didn’t tell Twitter to do anything of the sort.
The game is underdeveloped in Panama, but foreign consultants do get put into play. In 2014 and 2009, the game was “call centers” that mobilized strings of real people assuming fictitious personas to write scurrilous diatribes in the comment sections below articles in the mainstream media. It still happens a bit, but in La Prensa you have to buy a subscription to play the game, some of the papers have electronic alarm systems to pull out the really flagrant stuff, The Panama News just doesn’t allow comments below articles and so on. Panamanian political slop-slinging has come into its own on Twitter and to a lesser extent of Facebook. Instagram and WhatsApp are the expanding new frontiers of this here.
As we saw the other day in New Zealand, social media fascism has reached ugly extremes. In 2016 it was Dutch intelligence — allegedly — that tipped off the Obama administration about the Russian social media game being run on US politics. The Europeans, you see, also have that problem. (Did Obama already know via National Security Agency eavesdropping, but find it a more palatable cover story to talk about a tip from The Netherlands? It will surely be a question explored for many years by historians.)
In any case there is a great hue and cry from many directions and the giants of the industry — Facebook / Instagram, Google / YouTube and Twitter — have been purging most most vicious of messengers, fraudulent accounts and hate messages. It must be distressing to Donald Trump to have had tens of thousands of his bots kicked out of the social media, but that was done. Very likely lesser Panamanian investors of the same moral cut have suffered similar losses.
Like the “free speech” auxiliaries of the fake personas I have thrown out of Expats for Sanders, Rómulo Roux cries foul. All it really ought to do is raise questions of the gutter tactics he had underway that may have been compromised.
A vintage example of boorish US political satire. Nowadays the skewering of the late US President Gerald R. Ford would be acceptable, but the recycling of an old joke about people with cerebral palsy would be considered cruel beyond the pale. Actually, Ford was the most accomplished athlete ever to live in the White House. He may also have suffered from brain damage from repeated concussions in his playing days. For a time a few people made a good living from jokes about how maladroit Jerry Ford was, but people with neuromuscular disorders usually have a hard time making a living. Panamanian culture is cruel about this, with some islands of kindness and understanding. In this campaign season too many politicians affect charity rather than stand up for rights.
And then there is Delmiro Quiroga, the cartoonist who does both some truly brilliant stuff and crap that plays on base prejudices. He’s a fixture in Panamanian popular culture and the other day he got a notice that due to “unusual activity” his Twitter account was suspended.
Delmiro deserves more of a reason than that. Even if Twitter has a right to police its feeds and eject those who promote racism, misogyny, religious intolerance, homophobia and so on.
The problem with that is the vast scale of fraud and hatred that has been injected into the overall Twitter feed. And meanwhile over on Facebook, the fascist mass murderer’s video from the mosques in Christchurch went viral and nobody reported the crime to Facebook. Just a problem in one small corner of the social media scene. If management throws out a great mass of fraud and hatred without taking the time to hear either reasonable or scurrilous objections, that might e understood. But the aggrieved should get a hearing.
It gets us down to what the social media are — an important part of modern life, platforms through which freedom of expression is exercised, and covert nefarious business plans about collecting and selling information about people.
These services are international and that complicates things, but Twitter, Google and Facebook really ought to be bought out and run as public utilities. But by whom and under what sorts of understandings? It’s not an impossible puzzle, but it is a great challenge for our times.
O people! Your Lord is one Lord, and you all share the same father. There is no preference for Arabs over non-Arabs, nor for non-Arabs over Arabs. Neither is there preference for white people over black people, nor for black people over white people. Preference is only through righteousness.
Muhammad
Bear in mind…
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary — are, in a sense, political.
Susan Sontag
Hating people is like burning down your house to get rid of a rat.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
Pearl S. Buck
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WHO experts pave the way for international governance on human genome editing
by the World Health Organization
The World Health Organization’s new advisory committee on developing global standards for governance and oversight of human genome editing has agreed to work towards a strong international governance framework in this area.
“Gene editing holds incredible promise for health, but it also poses some risks, both ethically and medically. This committee is a perfect example of WHO’s leadership, by bringing together some of the world’s leading experts to provide guidance on this complex issue. I am grateful to each member of the Expert Advisory Committee for their time and expertise.” says Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
Over the past two days, the committee of experts reviewed the current state of science and technology. They also agreed core principles of transparency, inclusivity and responsibility that underpin the Committee’s current recommendations. The committee agreed that it is irresponsible at this time for anyone to proceed with clinical applications of human germline genome editing.
The committee also agreed that a central registry on human genome editing research is needed in order to create an open and transparent database of ongoing work. The committee asked WHO to immediately begin working to establish such a registry.
The committee has invited all those conducting human genome editing research to open discussions with the committee to better understand the technical environment and current governance arrangements and help ensure their work meets current scientific and ethical best practice.
The committee will operate in an inclusive manner and has made a series of concrete proposals to increase WHO’s capacity to act as an information resource in this area.
“The committee will develop essential tools and guidance for all those working on this new technology to ensure maximum benefit and minimal risk to human health,” says Dr. Soumya Swamanathan, WHO Chief Scientist.
Over the next two years, through a series of in-person meetings and online consultations, the committee will consult with a wide range of stakeholders and provide recommendations for a comprehensive governance framework that is scalable, sustainable and appropriate for use at the international, regional, national and local levels. The committee will solicit the views of multiple stakeholders including patient groups, civil society, ethicists and social scientists.
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El Dr. James W. Porter ayudó a realizar el galardonado documental, Chasing Coral, como asesor científico principal y miembro del elenco principal. En esta escena de la película, habla sobre su programa de monitoreo fotográfico submarino a largo plazo, que fue un motivador para la película.
Ex becario del Smithsonian gana un Emmy
por Sonia Tejada – STRI
Cuando Jim Porter empezó su beca pre-doctoral en el Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales (STRI) en Panamá, a principios de los años setenta, no podría haber imaginado que su experiencia eventualmente lo llevaría a ganarse un premio Emmy.
Su película, Chasing Coral, a la que contribuyó como asesor científico y miembro del reparto, no solo ganó un Emmy como mejor documental sobre la naturaleza en 2018, sino que también recibió el Premio del Público en el Festival de cine de Sundance en 2017, un Premio Peabody en 2017, y fue reconocida como Mejor Película Documental en los Premios Satellite en 2018.
Porter, ahora Profesor Emérito de la Universidad de Georgia, contribuyó con su experiencia sobre los efectos del cambio climático en los arrecifes de coral, particularmente respecto a un fenómeno conocido como blanqueo de corales.
Este fenómeno, en que los corales pierden su color y se vuelven blancos, se ha visto en océanos cuya temperatura aumenta tan solo dos grados. El calentamiento de los mares provoca que los corales expulsen a las microalgas que viven dentro de ellos. Cuando lo hacen, pierden una de sus grandes fuentes de nutrientes. A largo plazo, esta es una de las principales causas de muerte en los corales y de la disminución de los arrecifes de coral.
Si esta tendencia continúa, los científicos predicen que hasta el 90 por ciento de los arrecifes de coral desaparecerá en las próximas décadas. Dado que gran parte de la vida marina tropical depende de los arrecifes de coral como zona de cría, la desaparición de este ecosistema sería devastador para la mayoría de los organismos que viven debajo o por encima del agua.
En Chasing Coral, los espectadores experimentan la evolución de esta catástrofe marina de primera mano, a través de los ojos de un equipo de buzos, fotógrafos y científicos, y las tomas secuenciales de cámaras submarinas con efecto de time-lapse. En la película también aparecen una serie de fotos de Porter que muestran los “antes” y “después” de los arrecifes de coral.
“Hay un enlace directo entre la investigación que hice en Panamá a partir de 1969 y la película que ayudé a hacer 48 años después”, dice Porter. “En STRI inicié las investigaciones ecológicas a largo plazo que se convirtieron en el rasgo distintivo de mi carrera y, posteriormente, en la columna vertebral de esta película”.
A lo largo de su trayectoria profesional, Porter también se ha enfocado en educar a estudiantes y al público en general, buscando formas de transformar los resultados de la investigación en información relevante para aquellos fuera de la comunidad científica. Incluso testificó ante el Congreso cuatro veces, sobre los efectos del cambio climático en los arrecifes de coral. Con este antecedente, fue fácil para él convertir la ciencia en narrativa para la película.
“Mi experiencia como profesor, investigador y dando charlas públicas se centra en la lucha contra el cambio climático”, dice Porter. “Chasing Coral documenta las amenazas del cambio climático, por lo que la película es mi contribución a esta lucha”.
El éxito de Chasing Coral no se limita a sus múltiples premios. A menos de dos años desde su estreno, se ha traducido a más de 50 idiomas y se ha proyectado en más de 100 países. También lo adquirió Netflix, donde tiene más de 250,000 reproducciones. Además, el equipo de la película lanzó una campaña para evitar que la pérdida de los arrecifes de coral pase desapercibida y para ayudar a las comunidades a utilizar la película para incubar soluciones locales para su conservación. Para obtener más información sobre Chasing Coral o formas de ayudar, ingrese en: www.chasingcoral.com.
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Olmedo Arrocha Sánchez, a veteran Panameñista activist and apparatchik, has replaced Oydén Ortega, who came to the high court as a former PRD legislator and dictatorship political operative, on the Supreme Court’s civil bench. Photo by the National Assembly.
Magistrates approved: new phase of relations between
an unpopular president and a detested legislature
by Eric Jackson
The general rule is that magistrates of Panama’s Supreme Court of Justice serve 10-year terms and only rarely get reappointed. But when Olmedo Arrocha and Abel Zamorano were sworn in on March 16, it was for a bit shy of a nine-year term for Arrocha and only until the end of this year for Zamorano.
For Zamorano it was just an upgrade of title and perhaps some perks to go with that. He was the suplente (alternate) for the sticky fingered Alejandro Moncada Luna when that partisan operative / magistrate / functionary from Noriega times was impeached and sent to prison for amassing a fortune while in public office, the legitimate provenance of which he could not explain. So Zamorano stepped in as an acting magistrate, with all the duties but with the possibility of a tenure cut short if the president had decided to appoint a replacement for Moncada Luna, along with a replacement suplente. But Zamorano by all appearances is a career judge who has served ably and honorably on a scandal-plagued and disreputable court, so it was convenient to leave him where he was and considerate to formally give him the title of a job he had been performing for years on the court’s administrative bench and plenum.
Arrocha, who just has a licenciatura in law from the University of Panama, has flitted back and forth among the general private practice of law, teaching contracts law at several schools, serving on a drugs commission that has no victory to show in any “War on Drugs,” and as acting head of the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s investment program for the Varela administration. Critics say the appointment was all about his political credentials and that his legal qualifications may meet the constitutional minimums but are unimpressive. In any case, this is an appointment to replace a magistrate whose term ended with 2017 but whose attempts at replacement had been blocked by the legislature until now. So it will be a bit less than a nine-year term for Arrocha.
In the works is another high court nomination, that of Luis Fernando Tapia, to replace Jerónimo Mejía on the penal bench. Like Ortega, Mejía was ordinarily supposed to leave office on December 31, 2017. Thus Tapia’s term, if his nomination is ratified, would also be for a bit less than nine years. Tapia has an 18-year career as court reporter, court clerk and assistant judge in the criminal court system. His qualifications to serve on the high court are denigrated by some critics. There will be hearings about that in the legislature.
The trend in the legislature was at the outset of the Varela administration a cobbled-together governability pact, then a shift to a PRD and Cambio Democratico alliance to block Varela programs and appointments. Now the Torrijistas and Martinelistas are fighting an election campaign against each other and everyone else, so this National Assembly is in a third phase.
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María Eugenia Pérez de Preciado, likely our next Electoral Prosecutor
A belated end to a national embarrassment?
by Eric Jackson
At long last! The prospect of an Electoral Prosecutor who will perform the functions of that job! The National Assembly willing, of course — and it seems likely they will approve the nominee, electoral judge María Eugenia Pérez de Preciado. On paper she has the credentials, 12 years as an electoral judge, a law degree from USMA, no heinous crimes or flagrant displays of partisan bias on her public record. There is a history here, but not especially hers.
History has been often denied and sometimes treated as a crime here, but some if it is in order to understand the appointment of María Pérez as the next Electoral Prosecutor and why it has the Martinelistas so upset.
Recall this time five years ago, and if someone wants to charge me with doing so, let them. Cambio Democratico operatives were going around with lists and gifts — detailed lists of who was related to whom, who had a government job, who was a member of which party and so on — to buy votes with bags of groceries, scholarships, building materials, home appliances or cash. By all appearances these lists were derived from confidential data stolen from government databases, but the Martinelli proxy re-election campaign pleaded that all of this was available for purchase on the open market.
Confidential government data for sale for electoral purposes? Say WHAT? But nothing officially said because Martinelli had placed a loyalist, Eduardo Peñaloza, as the electoral prosecutor who could be relied upon to look the other way, and he did.
A good way to get into an argument with the members of our political caste is to assert, with some support in the letter of the law, that the purchase and sale of votes is a crime in the first place. But they will pull out interpretations about how doing a voter a favor is not a crime, so long as it’s not with public funds not intended for that purpose and so long as there is no explicit quid pro quo.
In any case, the Martinelistas were buying votes largely with the laundered proceeds of public funds, laundered kickbacks from overpriced public contracts that by and large went into the Cambio Democratico campaign slush fund. The expectation was that a nothing of a housing minister and the first lady would be elected, Ricardo Martinelli would go on running the country through these front people and he would have a working majority in the National Assembly.
The polls said that it was probably going to work, but although they were all wrong, anyone who looked at any of the reasonably credible ones would have notices this margin of undecided voters. In Latin America “undecided” means intending to vote against the incumbent regime. Where you have a government like Martinelli’s which flaunted electronic espionage against his opponents, ousted elderly couples from their homes of decades to impress rich foreigners and had people killed over land disputes and just to prove how tough the president was, there would be people who took the gifts, told pollsters that they would vote for Cambio Democratico and in the secrecy of the polling booth did something else.
(Should it have been a surprise? In 1989 Tony Noriega sent his guardia into polling places to vote en masse and tilt an election that his nominee was bound to lose — and it turned out that those soldiers voted for the opposition.)
As it turned out Martinelli’s slate lost but had the largest caucus in the legislature. Except, of course, that many of those initially declared elected were by the thinnest of margins and the use of public funds for vote buying was in some of the most flagrant ways. Mr. Peñaloza would not hear of it, but the Electoral Tribunal magistrates brought charges by themselves, conducted investigations that Peñaloza refused to do, and ignored the electoral prosecutor’s findings that there was no harm done. A number of legislative races went to reruns and in several of these Martinelli’s men and women lost the second time around.
Not only was Ricky that much farther from having the votes in the legislature, but the first thing he did after the election was threaten the members of his party’s caucus, telling them that he has dossiers on every one of them and would take revenge if they did not follow his orders.
So many of Martinelli’s legislators were always tránsfugas — party-jumping perpetual turncoats — anyway, and the bullying split the CD caucus. That left an assembly with a third-place (17 out of 71) caucus of President Varela’s supporters, a PRD caucus feuding and split almost down the middle after two straight general election defeats, and a CD faction divided between those who would obey the former president and those who would not. For two years a governability pact was cobbled together to keep Ricardo Martinelli from paralyzing government. Then that crumbled as people and parties began to jump off of the Varela ship. For the last year and a half or so, legislators not wanting to be identified with an unpopular president had been blocking his nominees.
A crudely kleptocratic legislature, in turn, had been getting its staffing budgets blocked by the Comptroller General’s office. A civic movement to oust all incumbent elected officials has arisen alongside the budget scandals.
Arrangements seem to have been made. The comptroller is signing legislative payrolls again. The Electoral Tribunal is taking steps to suppress the #NoALaReelección movement. Stalled Varela appointments are now getting through the legislature. One of these is the replacement for Eduardo Peñaloza, who by the calendar of his term was supposed to leave office at the end of this past December. María Pérez is the one anointed by the president.
Ah, but via kickbacks from overpriced contracts for the sale price, and then by the channeling of government advertising while he was president, Ricky Martinelli has a media empire. Which is protesting about the possibility of a new electoral prosecutor in the middle of a campaign season. Which is complaining that Ms. Pérez de Preciado comes from the Electoral Tribunal apparatus rather than a party machine, so therefore must lack independence from the magistrates. But then Martinelli is claiming that he’s too mentally ill to stand trial for theft and eavesdropping, the government shrinks sort of agree and it doesn’t seem like the rants in his newspapers carry so much weight anymore.
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El general Daniel Florence O’Leary, socio invaluable de Simón Bolívar en la liberación de América General Daniel Florence O’Leary, invaluable partner of Simon Bolivar in the liberation of America
Enya – Echoes in Rain https://youtu.be/8DDHulO485k
The Men of No Property – The Bogside Doodle Bug https://youtu.be/I0uXw9vpW4k
The Cranberries – Linger https://youtu.be/G6Kspj3OO0s
The Corrs – Erin Shore https://youtu.be/Nb5voqe5C8Q
El General Bernardo O’Higgins, libertador de Chile
General Bernardo O’Higgins, liberator of Chile
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The Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a house of worship at which at least 41 people were slain.
The mass murder of Muslims in their house of worship and the proper response
by Michael Lerner & Cat Zavis — Network of Spiritual Progressives
We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives are in deep mourning for the 49 Muslims killed and at least 20 seriously injured, in a hate-filled terror attack targeting two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. The murderer, a few hours before the assault, posted a long statement filled with hatred toward Muslims and asylum seekers, using the familiar discourse of white nationalist extremists.
Many of our community will be attending various public activities to show our deep sorrow and to assure Muslims we will do everything we can to publicly oppose the teaching of hatred against Muslims just as we have stood against teaching of hatred against African Americans, Mexicans, Central and South Americans, or against asylum seekers and “undocumented’ immigrants to the USA.
We in the Western world have great responsibility for what happened in New Zealand, and what happened to 11 Jews murdered in Pittsburgh, and what happened to African Americans killed in their churches — all by white nationalist extremists. While the racism and hatred of others has been a continual theme in Western countries, it greatly accelerated after Donald Trump demonized Muslims, Mexicans, undocumented immigrants, and those seeking asylum during and after his presidential campaign to channel the frustrations of many and to direct it on the powerless. Trump, with his violent actions and threatening words (even today repeating his lie that the United States is facing an “invasion” of tens of thousands of criminals, namely, the asylum seekers on the US southern borders) is one of the major legitimizers of the growing hatred against so many innocent and decent people.
We must not let these murders be commemorated only by pious words of solidarity, but also should use this moment to develop a serious campaign against all the prevalent forms of hatred in most Western countries and insist that our media and all schools, from grade school through college, join us in systematically teaching about how hatred of the stranger/other are a huge danger to everyone in the world. Please ask your local school board, religious leaders, and elected officials to make this an important part of the required program of every student in the schools, colleges, and graduate programs that they help fund. And demand local and national media make this a major focus for their prime time programming throughout the coming years. This is a real national and international emergency.
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