No family ties bar to press coverage

Former first lady Marta Linares de Martinelli, who ran for vice president in 2014 using funds stolen from the Panamanian people, has been to family court. She is suing reporters and editors at La Prensa for writing about members of her family — her jailed husband, herself and her two fugitive adult sons who are wanted for laundering huge sums of Odebrecht money. This, she says, is a violation of family privacy. She actually seems to have a judge who is going along with it.

So there we have it, folks. Notwithstanding the Panamanian constitution’s ban on discrimination according to social class, some young man from the slums caught with a small amount of some illegal drug gets paraded in front of police and prosecution video cameras, but those with the proper surnames, their crimes must go unreported. The rabiblancos would have their “too inbred for public scrutiny” exception to freedom of the press.

A judge who entertains such a motion should be removed from the bench. A lawyer who brings such a motion should face fines and professional sanctions. The Martinelli family should continue to get full press coverage for their improper acts, and now that they are pulling this maneuver deserve the full attention of satirists, songwriters, caricaturists, poets, columnists, regueseros and comedians. Let the Martinellis’ arrogance become a legend of Panamanian culture that outlives us all.

Tick tock, Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, stands convicted of concealing and failing to pay taxes on the proceeds of his lobbying for pro-Putin Ukrainian politicians. Donald Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, stands convicted of violating federal campaign laws — at the direction of Donald Trump — by making payoffs to ensure that tales of the president’s escapades with prostitutes did not get told before the election and of concealing the fact that these payments were campaign expenses.

Cohen’s convictions come on a guilty plea. He will cooperate with federal prosecutors. He was Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer for many years. Aside from that — or maybe it was why Trump chose him in the first place — he has been a long-time associate of sundry mob interests, especially including Russian mobsters.

Manafort may die in prison without ever telling his story to prosecutors or anyone else. Or he may flip on Donald Trump and turn into a devastating witness. The exact relationship between Russian and allied interests and the 2016 campaign is not public knowledge and is the heart of the special prosecutor’s investigation. Manafort would probably know all or most of that stuff. So would Cohen.

Cohen’s admission is a direct accusation against Trump, that the president conspired to violate campaign laws. As bad as this matter may get for Trump, the gist of suspected “collusion” is a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws by soliciting, using and concealing foreign assets or services improperly donated to the Trump cause.

At the end of it all, the easiest case to prove against Trump is obstruction of justice. That can be made by reference to his public statements and official acts alone.

With these multiple hooks firmly embedded, how might Trump beat the rap? Impeachment by the US House could happen but conviction by two-thirds of the US Senate is extremely unlikely, even it the Republicans get crushed in November and Democrats get majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump is trying to fend off such a defeat by suppressing the votes of those likely to opt for the Democrats, especially but not only African-Americans and members of the various Hispanic minorities, while revving up his white supremacist base that’s just under one-third of the electorate. By jamming through the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court he might get an arcane procedural path to presidential impunity.

However, on the same day that Manafort was found guilty and Cohen pleaded guilty Trump suffered election setbacks as well. His endorsement of Foster Friess, a hedge fund billionaire and opponent of birth control pills whose alternative for women is to insert an aspirin tablet in their vaginas after unprotected sex, failed spectacularly in the Wyoming Republican gubernatorial primary. In Alaska there were fewer surprises, but the unpopular independent who is the incumbent governor may, by dropping out or seeing his support collapse, hand the state’s top office to former US Senator Mark Begich rather than to a Republican who closely identifies himself with Trump and mustered but 40,000 or so votes en route to winning the GOP nomination in that state of about 740,000 residents.

The bitter Tuesday gravy was the indictment of a California Republican US representative for allegedly dipping into campaign funds to support his personal lifestyle.

This very bad day for Trump also comes on the heels of other indications that his authority is waning. After it was announced the president said it was a joint decision, but the Pentagon brass told him that his plans for a Veterans Day military parade in Washington were off. The Federal Reserve chair he appointed is ignoring Trump’s commands about interest rates. His senior Justice Department appointees show no sign that they are about to end the special prosecutor’s probe as Trump wants.

What’s an alarmed and annoyed nation to do? The first thing is a matter of popular culture, ranging from the reserved to the ribald: make the president the object of public derision. The second and more important thing to do is register, vote, and send in a new Congress that will block the president’s appointments and legislative initiatives as they debate proposals for a post-Trump era.

What do YOU do, if you are a US citizen living abroad? Register and vote. You can register and order your ballot online at votefromabroad.org OR fvap.gov OR overseasvotefoundation.org. Do this now, so that if someone tries to take away your right to vote you will have some time to challenge it.

Bear in mind…

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Uri Avnery, Israel’s visionary of peace

by Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc

Gush Shalom grieves and mourns the passing of its founder, Uri Avnery. Until the last moment he continued on the way he had traveled all his life. On Saturday, two weeks ago, he collapsed in his home when he was about to leave for the Rabin Square and attend a demonstration against the “Nation State Law,” a few hours after he wrote a sharp article against that law.

Avnery devoted himself entirely to the struggle to achieve peace between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people in their independent state, as well as between Israel and the Arab and Muslim World. He did not get to the end of the road, did not live to see peace come about. We — the members of Gush Shalom as well as very many other people who were directly and indirectly influenced by him — will continue his mission and honor his memory.

On the day of the passing of Uri Avnery, the most right wing government in the history of Israel is engaged in negotiations with Hamas. Ironically, the same kind of demagogic accusations which were hurled at Uri Avnery throughout his life are now made against Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

In the history of the State of Israel, Uri Avnery will be inscribed as a far-seeing visionary who pointed to a way which others failed to see. It is the fate and future of the State of Israel to reach peace with its neighbors and to integrate into the geographical and political region in which it is located. Avnery’s greatest opponents will ultimately have to follow in his footsteps — because the State of Israel has no other real choice.

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Who’s the enemy? Whose enemy?

by Eric Jackson

Politicians who incessantly lie dislike those who contradict them about factual matters. That’s the gist of Donald Trump’s complaint.

That the man has a following is largely a product of people using certain media — this medium, that medium, the other medium but certainly not any conspiratorial singular “media,” something that rightfully does not exist in the English language — to spread disinformation.

Not “misinformation,” which is unintended error. Nor even a slant, which is the choice, interpretation and ordering of facts to make a point, fair or unfair as it may be, generally a point consistent with a particular world view. From championing the “Birther” fraud to the screeds of all those Russian bots and troll, Trump rode into office on a wave of lies.

From a Gringo perspective, do we want to get into worship of the purportedly holy framers of the US Constitution, and in our “originalism” pontificate on what they meant about the press? The folks who do this are generally fools.

First of all, there were no reporters at the Constitutional Convention, although one of the great founding figures of American journalism, Benjamin Franklin, was there as one of the main protagonists. It was held behind closed doors, with delegates bound by an oath of secrecy about the proceedings.

Second, there was no such thing as a media corporation at that time. There wasn’t even the business corporation as we would know it. Corporations were rare, limited purpose, state-chartered entities in an economy of sole proprietorships and business partnerships.

Third, the original document didn’t even mention freedom of speech, the press, or peaceful assembly. But the American people of that time would not stand for such an omission. Thus the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, had to be passed to get the Constitution ratified. The First Amendment freedom of the press was by popular demand, not the design of the Constitution’s framers. And that popular demand? It was rooted in what had become a custom in the American colonies well before they separated from England. Publish the truth and it could not be libel, the Americans said, contrary to what was the law back in the British Isles at the time.

So a republic was born, with this class of sole proprietors of varying ethics publishing little pamphlets, broadsheets and posters on their rudimentary little presses. The American press of the late 18th and early 19th century was on the whole highly partisan. Federalist rags ran scurrilous — and TRUE — tales about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Democrat rags compared John Adams to the by then quite mad King George III. Founding generations of American sickies read both sides and giggled. The republic survived.

A slick move by one of the men who convinced America to ratify the Constitution — Alexander Hamilton — gave rise to the business corporation as we know it. The Industrial Revolution — large and rapid printing presses, railroads and telegraphs — created the basis for large media corporations of national scope, and the technological changes kept coming.

There were unscrupulous people, and those who thought of themselves and their actions in the holiest of terms, who used their freedom of the press to incite wars, genocide or rebellion. As the First Amendment applied only to the federal government (“Congress shall make no law…”) many states in the run-up to the Civil War did make laws against the press, in particular slave states prohibiting abolitionist literature. Those exercising freedom of the press increasingly advocated war, genocide and rebellion, and some 600,000 people were killed in a conflict that among other things, gave rise to the 14th Amendment’s protection of fundamental freedoms from the states’ actions.

After that war industrial combines arose, and among the “robber barons” were the captains of the news industry of that time. Their business rested on advertising and among the techniques that the American ad agencies pioneered was The Big Lie — the lie so endlessly repeated that people ended up believing that it was true. It was a great way to sell cigarettes, or guns, or as German activists of the 20s and 30s discovered, racist politics.

After the war and crimes incited by THAT, one of Germany’s media barons, Der Sturmer publisher Julius Streicher, was tried at Nuremberg and hanged as an enemy of all humanity.

Streicher well deserved it. But an activist from the American Indian Movement whom I met at a gathering of people seeking amnesty for political prisoners in the USA told me that Americans were worse: “The Nazis tried to hide what they were doing. The Americans massacred our people and they put it on movie and television screens to entertain kids.”

The Cold War came and went, and in the course of it so many of the Nuremberg Principles became dead letters. But in the aftermath of massacres in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, it was decided that the ban on incitement of genocide is still good law, as infrequently as it gets enforced.

The media corporations went through so many of the changes of industrial and technological progress, giving its main proprietors greater powers to judiciously use of arrogantly abuse, giving rise to new codes of ethics, giving voices to new forces good and evil. One of the things that happened along the way was a conflation of “the press” with “media corporations,” as in the First Amendment was no longer considered an individual right, a guarantee that every individual could gather and publish information and opinions, but as an exclusive property of the large media corporations. So that the hippie selling the underground newspaper on the street could be hassled or arrested. So that the muckraker operating on a shoestring could be excluded as a “real journalist” and prosecuted as a spy. So that the reporter not embedded among soldiers or police could be treated as an enemy of the state. So that for a price, pompous criminal lawyers could prosecute journalists on behalf of pompous fraud artists whom the journalists exposed, and the corporate mainstream media would remain silent because those being prosecuted, not being employed by some oligarch’s medium, could by definition not be “real journalists.”

Some of these are realities I have lived, both in the United States and in Panama.

Meanwhile, the forces of technology and economics have devastated the once masters of the press. The advertising supported model of the news business has largely collapsed. The ownership of the large media has by and large passed into the hands of tycoons from other industries, many of whom know and care little about the ethics or history but very much wish to suppress any unflattering coverage of their businesses or those companies’ partners.

From the ragtag individuals who owned crude printing presses in the early days of the USA, we are back to the ragtag individuals who own computers and cameras and publish online today. Yeah, Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim will make the distinctions about who is the “real press,” but online nazis, many of them Russian impostors, beat them and the American people with online Big Lie campaigns in 2016. And now Donald Trump would move in for the kill.

There are political adversaries who legitimately use mass communication media to further their causes. Then there are the often pseudonymous purveyors of disinformation, defamation and violent hatreds that can’t be supported by any truthful argument. These are the enemies of the people and by and large they are in Donald Trump’s camp. How did Spain’s center-right “newspaper of record,” El Pais, just put it about one of Trump’s friends, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones? “Ultraderecha paranoica” — paranoiac ultra-rightist, and by the way “incendiary” and “offensive.”

But “for balance” and business interests will establishment elites now come after me?

So yes, I condemn what Trump is doing and saying against the press, but I do not worship at the media barons’ altar. I just use my freedom of the press.

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