Trump’s coddling can’t save the notoriously dirty industry when cleaner options and better jobs abound.
If there’s a war on coal, coal already lost
by Oscar Reyes — OtherWords
“The war on coal is over,” according to Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Pruitt spoke these words in a speech to coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky, where he announced the formal repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan. What he failed to mention is that if this is a war, coal has already lost.
The demand for coal has collapsed in recent years. More than half of all US electricity was produced from coal just a decade ago. Today’s figure is just over 30 percent, and continues to fall. Twelve coal-fired power stations have already closed since Trump took office.
A recent survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that around a quarter of the remaining coal units will soon be retired or converted to gas, and a further 17 percent are “uneconomic” and could also be retired soon.
Even new coal subsidies proposed by Energy Secretary Rick Perry are unlikely to reverse the downward trend. Utilities think long-term when they make investments, and would be foolish to assume that the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore the pollution caused by coal will outlast its term of office.
The decline of coal power is excellent news for the planet. Burning coal is one of the main ways we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing climate change. It also damages the health and environment of anyone who lives near mines and power stations, polluting the air we breathe while using vast amounts of fresh water.
The real challenge now is not how to save coal, but how to ensure that new, green energy jobs are created, and support is given to communities that have long relied on mining.
Energy companies and lawmakers should also ensure that coal is not simply replaced by shale gas — which pollutes drinking water and continues to damage the climate — but by renewable energy instead.
Luckily, the economics of renewable energy are getting better all the time. Residential solar power is expected to out-compete fossil fuels in over 40 states by 2020, while huge advances are also being made in energy storage and the development of electric vehicles.
The cost of wind power is also falling rapidly. A recent Energy Department report found that electricity produced by wind turbines is already considerably cheaper over the long-term than running gas turbines. Improvements in technology means that will continue to be the case even after current wind subsidies are cut.
Expanding renewable energy is good for jobs, too.
People with “green jobs” in energy efficiency, renewables, and public transportation already outnumber those employed by oil, gas, and coal companies, according to Energy Department figures. The benefits are spread widely, too: Renewable jobs already outnumber fossil fuel jobs in 41 states.
The contrast between coal and solar power is even stronger. Coal now employs just 160,000 Americans, a third of whom are miners. Solar energy, by contrast, now employs over 370,000 people and is one of the fastest growing parts of our economy.
Instead of pretending that coal jobs could return, politicians should be promoting renewable energy and the jobs that come with it. There’s little chance that Pruitt, who has close ties to coal lobbyists, would endorse such an approach.
That’s all the more reason for states to step up, putting in place transition plans that encourage a shift to renewable energy that helps workers while protecting our air and climate.
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Eloy Alfaro de Alba was Panama’s ambassador to the USA. He was also spokesman for Pipo Virzi’s Banco Universal, which was at the center of the Financial Pacific, Tonosi irrigation project, Moncada Luna money laundering and other scandals during his time with the bank.
Control of GESE goes to PRD figures
by Eric Jackson
In mid-August the US government’s drug money laundering case against the Wakeds collapsed. Yes, the Colombian nephew Nidal Waked did plead guilty to money laundering and will spend the next several years in prison. But it was about bank fraud, not drugs, for getting a line of credit from a Chinese bank for one purpose, using it for another and routing the money through US institutions in so doing. But the Clinton List is about drugs and not banking crimes, and US authorities placed Nidal Waked, his Panamanian uncle Abdul Waked and all the businesses they owned on the Treasury Department’s list of those with whom US citizens and resident aliens will be in trouble if they do business with them. Most of the Wakeds’ businesses were sold, but the two newspapers, El Siglo and La Estrella, were run by Abdul and he fought to hold onto them. Nidal never had anything to do with the newspapers, Abdul was never charged with a crime, and when the drug charges against Nidal were dropped one would think that the basis of the Grupo El Siglo – Estrella (GESE) would be gone and the ban on Americans doing business with that business would be over.
Not so, and less that a week after the Nidal Waked plea bargain Abdul Waked capitulated to US pressure and transferred 51 percent of the shares of GESE to a foundation composed of an employee of his, company president Eduardo Quirós, former Vice President under the Martín Torrijos administration Samuel Lewis Navarro and former Panamanian ambassador to the United States Eloy Alfaro de Alba. Control effectively goes to Lewis and Alfaro, who are pledging to defend freedom of expression. Aristocratic opinion is almost uniformly ecstatic. The people who work at the two newspapers — the sex and death tabloid El Siglo and the more traditional broadsheet La Estrella — are mostly relieved to see that the probability of their closure has receded, but some are also anxious about what happens next. Will political dissidents like labor leader Genaro López or law professor Miguel Antonio Bernal lose their columns? Will there be an influx of itinerant PRD publicists onto the newspapers’ staffs? Will the papers become a vehicle for the Samuel Lewis Navarro presidential campaign that some say that Martín Torrijos is trying to engineer? And might it be that the American Embassy, in a sordid and unstable political situation, is betting not so much on the PRD but trying to arrange things so that certain people in that party — former Agriculture Minister Laurentino Cortizo, who opposed the “free trade” pact with the United States; or xenophobic demagogue and legislator Zulay Rodríguez, who it is said was forced out of a judicial post at the urging of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and American Embassy after she let some Colombian drug suspects walk — from getting nominated and perhaps coming to power here?
Even were it absolutely the case, the embassy would never admit such a thing. And the 2009 Martinelli – Varela slate that was put together in a meeting at the US ambassador’s residence had nothing to do with the Americans, either, so we are told.
Lewis Navarro is one of Panama wealthiest individuals and Alfaro is also quite well to do. The former is the son of General Omar Torrijos’s emissary to Washington and key advisor during the Panama Canal treaty negotiations. The latter, also well to do, is related to past presidents of both Panama and Ecuador and some of Panamanian history’s most noteworthy diplomats. He served on the Panama Canal Authority board of directors as an appointee of the PRD administration of Ernesto Pérez Balladares.
Lewis Navarro was both president of the Banco del Istmo and Vice President of the Republic of Panama in April of 2006 when he announced to Banistmo shareholders that there was an offer to buy the bank. Thereafter, through the cabinet on which he sat there passed what was not much noticed at the time, proposed legislation to adjust the tax laws, which the Torrijos Cabinet Council passed and sent on to the legislature to be formally proposed the next month. On June 12 of that year, Lewis Navarro was in London, reportedly negotiating with HSBC about some government business. That same day in Panama the tax law went before the plenum of the National Assembly for debate. Among the provisions was a reduction in capital gains taxes on the sale of shares in certain sorts of companies from 30 percent to five percent. The law passed two days later and in the middle of July the sale of Banistmo to HSBC was announced. Under the new law there was a tax savings windfall of about $400 million that was shared among about a half-dozen people, one of them Samuel Lewis Navarro.
Banco Universal, for which Alfaro was director and spokesman throughout the Martinelli years, figured in many of the financial scandals of that time, including a lot of the activities of the now closed Financial Pacific brokerage house, the bogus Tonosi irrigation project and the laundering of proceeds from then Supreme Court president Alejandro Moncada Luna taking kickbacks for the awarding of court construction or remodeling contracts. Banco Univeral’s principal owner, Felipe “Pipo” Virzi, was vice president of Panama during the Pérez Balladares administration and is related to Ricardo Martinelli by marriage. Virzi has been in and out of jail and house arrest since his bank was shut down by the banking superintendency for defying orders to freeze certain accounts believed to be related to money laundering. It looks as if various prosecutors and courts are in the process of taking a series of dives so that the various investigations come to naught. Financial Pacific is particularly touchy, as it is most probably a murder case, the disappearance of Securities Superintendency senior analyst Vernon Ramos, who was looking into insider trading via that brokerage in shares of the now closed but not cleaned up Petaquilla gold mine’s Canadian parent company.
So the rumors and speculation about what’s in store for El Siglo and La Estrella are ongoing. Because Abdul Waked gave space to folks like far left labor leaders and political outcast anti-corruption activists whom the rabiblancos really despise, those folks are for public consumption taking a low-keyed wait and see approach to the transaction at the moment. On Twitter and Facebook, Panama’s establishment and its acolytes are generally upbeat. The most vocal critics tend to be of the left and their messages tend to be along the lines of impugning Lewis Navarro’s and Alfaro’s honesty or decrying the very notion of the US government having anything at all to say about who owns mass communications media in Panama. Those who combine these messages sometimes also talk about double standards.
The United States seized all media that could be grabbed during the 1989 invasion, and carted away all government archives with records about the Noriega regime’s dealings with the media barons of that time. With the exception of Fulele Calvo, who spent many months in jail with no charges against him, the US forces returned most of the media to their pre-invasion owners. Were files in US possession used for blackmail, or just the knowledge of their probable existence and current possession enough to assure pro-American editorial stands? We can only guess. In any case, the GESE situation is not the first time that Washington has intervened to decide who can and who can’t own a newspaper in Panama. Probably the invasions wasn’t either — in Canal Zone times and later under the US-dominated Panama Canal Commission there was a history of US agencies blacklisting or attempting to blacklist journalists so as to prevent them from working in the Panamanian media.
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One day the Israeli Labor Party felt that it needed a new leader.
That happens to this party every couple of years. The party is in bad shape. It looks more like a political corpse than a living organism. Wanted: a new leader, charismatic, energetic, enthusiastic.
So they found Avi Gabbay.
Why him? Nobody is really sure.
Avi Gabbay has no visible qualities of political leadership. No charisma at all. No special energy. No enthusiasm himself and no ability to inspire enthusiasm in others.
After serving as a government employee dealing with the mobile phone industry, he himself became the successful director of the largest mobile phone concern. Then he went into politics and joined a moderate right-wing party, and was appointed Minister for the Protection of the Environment. When the extreme right-winger Avigdor Lieberman was appointed Minister of Defense, Gabbay resigned from the government and his party and joined Labor. That was only a year ago.
He has one significant asset: he is a Mizrahi, an oriental Jew. His parents are immigrants from Morocco, he is the seventh of eight children. Since the Labor party is considered a Western, Ashkenazi, elitist grouping, these passive attributes are important. Up to a point.
Gabbay did not waste time in presenting his political identity card.
First he made a speech asserting that he will not sit in the same government with the “Joint List.”
The Joint List is the united (or disunited) list of the Arab community in Israel. It joins together the three very different “Arab” parties: the Communist party, which is overwhelmingly Arab, but includes some Jews (including a Jewish member of parliament), the Balad party, which is secular and nationalist, and a religious Islamic party.
How come these diverse parties created a joint list? They owe this achievement to the genius of the great Arab-hater, Avigdor Lieberman (see above), who saw that all three parties were small and decided to eliminate them by raising the electoral threshold. But rather than perish separately they decided to survive together. There is no doubt that their list represents the vast majority of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who constitute more than 20% of the population. Strange as this may sound, every fifth Israeli is an Arab.
The simple numerical fact is that without the support of the Arab members in the Knesset, no left-wing government can exist. Yitzhak Rabin would not have become prime minister, and the Oslo agreement would not have come into being, without the support “from the outside” of the Arab bloc.
Then why did they not join Rabin’s government? Both sides were afraid of losing votes. Many Jews cannot envision a government including Arabs, and many Arabs cannot envision their representatives sharing “collective responsibility” in a government mainly occupied with fighting Arabs.
This has not changed. It is highly unlikely that the Arabs would join a Gabbay government if invited, and even more unlikely that they would receive such an invitation.
So why make such a declaration? Gabbay is no fool. Far from it. He believes that the Arabs are in his pocket anyhow. They could not join a Likud government. By making a blatantly anti-Arab declaration, he hopes to attract right-wing voters.
His predecessor, Yitzhak Herzog, publicly complained that too many people considered the Labor party to consist of “Arab-lovers.” Terrible.
If anyone hoped that this was a one-time anomaly, Gabbay put them right. After the first blow came more.
He declared that “we have no partner for peace.” This is the most dangerous slogan of the populists. “No partner” means that there is no sense in making an effort. There will never be peace. Never ever.
He declared that God promised the Jews the entire land between the sea and the Jordan. That is not quite correct: God promised us all the land from the Euphrates to the River of Egypt. God never made good on that promise.
Last week Gabbay declared that in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians, not a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank would be evacuated.
Until now, there has been tacit agreement between Israeli and Palestinian peace activists that peace will be based on a limited exchange of territories. The so-called “settlement blocs” (clusters of settlements near the green-line border) will be joined to Israel, and an equivalent area of Israeli territory (for example, along the Gaza Strip) will be ceded to Palestine. This would leave some dozens of “isolated” settlements in the West Bank, generally inhabited by fanatical religious right-wingers, which must be evacuated by force.
Gabbay’s new statement means that after a peace agreement, these islands of racist extremism will continue to exist where they are. No Palestinian will ever agree to that. It makes peace impossible, even in theory.
In general, Gabbay agrees to the “two-state solution” – but under certain conditions. First, the Israel army would be free to act throughout the demilitarized Palestinian state. The Israeli army would also be positioned along the Jordan River, turning the Palestinian “state” into a kind of enclave.
This is a “peace plan” without takers. Gabbay is much too clever not to realize this. But all this is not devised for Arab ears. It is meant to attract right-wing Israelis. Since a Labor-led “center-left” coalition needs rightist or religious votes, the reasoning looks sound. But it isn’t.
There is no chance whatsoever that a significant number of rightists will move to the left, even if the left is led by a person like Gabbay. Rightists detest the Labor party, not since yesterday, but have done so for generations.
The Labor Party was born a hundred years ago. It was the main political force that led to the creation of the State of Israel, and led it for almost thirty years. Its power was immense. Many (including me) accused it of dictatorial tendencies.
During all these years, the main occupation of the Zionist leadership was the historical fight against the Palestinian people for the possession of the country. Except for a tiny minority, the party was always nationalist, even militaristic. It was left-wing only in its social activities. It created the Jewish workers movement, the powerful trade union (the “Histadrut”), the Kibbutzim and much more.
This social network has long since degenerated. Corruption became endemic, many scandals were uncovered (mainly by my magazine). When the right-wing under Menachem Begin finally took over, in 1977, the Labor Party was already a living corpse. It has changed its name many times (its current name is “the Zionist Camp”) but it has dwindled from election to election.
Avi Gabbay was called in as a savior. His nationalist declarations are conceived as patent medicines. No chance.
Can the Labor Party be saved at all? I doubt it.
In the last elections, after a powerful, spontaneous social upheaval, there seemed to be a new chance. Some of the young leaders, female and male, who had appeared from nowhere, joined the Labor Party and entered the Knesset. They are genuine leftists and peace activists. Somehow, their voices became quieter and quieter. Instead of inspiring the party, the party subdued them. It seems to be beyond repair.
A question never asked is — does the party really, really want to assume power? On the face of it, the answer is yes, of course. Isn’t that the supreme prize of politics?
Well, I doubt it. The existence of a parliamentary opposition is a cozy one. I know, because I was in that situation for ten years. The Knesset is a good place, you are coddled all the time by the ushers, you get a good salary and an office, you have no responsibilities at all (unless you create them for yourself). You must, of course, make an effort to be re-elected every four years. So, if you are not particularly keen on becoming a minister, with all the work and responsibilities and public exposure that this entails, you just stay put.
What is the practical conclusion? To forget the Labor Party and create a new political force.
We need new leaders, young, charismatic and resolute, with clear-cut aims, who can energize the peace camp.
I do not subscribe to the picture of a public divided between a right-wing majority and a left-wing minority, with the orthodox on one side and the Arabs on the other.
I believe that there is a right-wing minority and a left-wing minority. Between the two there is the great mass of the people, waiting for a message, desiring peace but brainwashed into believing that peace is impossible (“there is no partner”).
What we need is a new start.
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Whither Now Democracy in Spain? Mediation and Dialogue or More Violence and Alienation?
An Open Letter to Spain and Catalonia
We watched with growing concern the rising tension between Madrid and Catalonia in the lead up to the October 1st referendum regarding the future of Catalonia. Neither side is free of errors in dealing with the process, which did not start with this referendum but instead seven years ago with the Constitutional Tribunal invalidation of the 2010 autonomy statute passed by the Spanish Parliament.
While little has been done by the central government since then to adequately address the simmering issue, we would not have predicted the extreme and unhelpful measures emanating from Madrid in response to the referendum. The scenes of police brutality, violence and the use of rubber bullets against the Catalonian people on October 1st are not anything we would have expected in today’s Spain. We have joined leaders around the world in condemning the use of force in Catalonia — yet we see the apology of the Spanish government of that violence as a step in the right direction. Yet so much more needs to be done. And time is short.
While we do not take a position on constitutional issues, we believe that mature democracies find ways to allow freedom of expression. Other nations have done so with separatist referendums carried out, for example, by Scotland and by Quebec. In each case the “no” vote won. Scotland remains part of the UK and Quebec part of Canada. We believe that violent responses by a central government to desires for free expression of a citizenry only further heighten hostility and create disaffection where it might not have existed previously.
We support the calls for mediation and negotiations toward a peaceful resolution of the current stand-off between the Spanish government and Catalonia. A people who feel repressed seldom go quietly into the night.
Original signers:
Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize (1997) Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize (1976) Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize (1976) Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize (1980) Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Nobel Peace Prize (1982) President José Ramos Horta, Nobel Peace Prize (1996) Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize (2003) Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace Prize (2011) Tawakkol Karman, Nobel Peace Prize (2011)
Since this was first published on October 9, more Nobel laureates in various fields have added their signatures. However, with the arrest of prominent Catalan independence activists and Madrid’s moves to suspend the region’s autonomy and depose its elected government, the crisis has deepened.
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A key factor that affects bees is increasing urban development as people flock to cities. As cities develop, they sprawl into their surroundings, fragmenting animal habitats and replacing vegetation with hard surfaces such as concrete and asphalt. Insects, including a multitude of native bees, rely on soil and plants for foraging and nesting.
These patches occur in cities and can take the form of ravines, parks, gardens and so on.
Despite the fact that pollinators such as birds, bees and butterflies are better at moving between patches than less mobile species, a continuous habitat is always preferable. Green roofs are seen as a way to make up for ecological habitat fragmentation. But studies and guidelines about where and how to best construct green roofs for pollinators are just emerging.
A wild, non-native bee forages for pollen on the green roof of the University of Toronto’s GRIT Lab. Photo by GRIT Lab
Though domesticated bee species such as the well known European honey bee (Apis mellifera) tend to receive greater attention when it comes to declining population, wild bee species are often found to be even more threatened. Wild bee species are most commonly “solitary” as opposed to “social” and nest in the ground or in existing cavities, not hives.
Of the 20,000 or so known bee species, 85 percent or more are solitary. Rapid urbanization, through paving extensive areas of our environment and loss of vegetative cover, is having a widespread harmful impact on their habitat.
Cities are beginning to recognize the importance of creating and enhancing healthy habitats for pollinator populations that support resilient ecosystems and contribute to a rich urban biodiversity.
The City of Toronto is in the process of developing a Pollinator Protection Strategy intended to raise awareness, develop new education and training, evaluate and investment in green spaces, as well as reexamine city maintenance practices.
Research on the topic of green roofs as pollinator habitats has been fairly limited, but with cities like Toronto adopting bylaws that mandate green roof implementation, there’s an opportunity to study what design decisions are most critical to their success.
Green roof planting choices have been shown to play a part in attracting specific bee species. Sedum species, which are drought-tolerant succulent plants, have always been the most popular choice for green roofs due to their hardiness under extreme conditions, long flowering period and low maintenance requirements.
In fact, in Toronto, a great majority of green roofs are planted with sedum.
Research by University of Toronto Prof. Scott MacIvor and colleagues at the Green Roof Innovation Testing Lab (GRIT Lab) shows that when individual native bees visited sedum, their pollen loads contained other herbaceous flower sources, whereas non-native bees had more full pollen loads of sedum more often.
These findings suggest that if the majority of green roofs are planted strictly with non-native sedum varieties, it could result in a lost opportunity to bolster precious habitat for native pollinators.
It’s important to note that roughly 92 percent of Toronto’s bee species are native. So, favoring non-native plants can provide habitat for non-native bees over native bees, and could consequently lead to increased competition for those native bees.
Site matters
Despite many green roofs being opportune places for bees to inhabit, research has shown that the location of the green roof matters. The higher the roof, the fewer bees were found there. Green roofs implemented above the eighth story would not benefit from any additional nesting resources or attract bees.
This doesn’t mean that green roofs atop skyscrapers are useless, but that they should focus on other benefits such as rainwater retention, air quality improvement and thermal cooling.
In large cities like Toronto, many new high-rise buildings are being built with a “tower and podium” configuration, whereby the first few floors of the building have a wide floor area, often covering most of the block (podium), and the tower is set back from the edge of the building.
The roof of the podium is often used as communal space for the building’s occupants and presents a good spot for a biodiverse green roof that could serve bees’ needs. The study further shows that a decline in green space area within a 600-meter radius around each rooftop results in decreasing species richness (diversity) and abundance.
Toronto’s Old City Hall is seen from the green roof planted on the podium of the new City Hall.(Shutterstock)
Though the appeal of planting green roofs with sedum is evident, limiting the plant palette solely to sedum species could be a lost opportunity to promote native plant and pollinator species in urban environments.
At its worst, this practice could cause non-native bee species to have a leg up on natives as both groups compete for pollen.
It’s important to not only consider plant communities on green roofs, but also the building height and its proximity to other habitat patches to provide as much foraging habitat as possible for bees.
We still need new research into nesting opportunities for ground-nesting bees in the green roof growing medium, as well as the connectivity between ground level landscapes and green roofs, to better understand the ecological value of green roofs in sprawling urban regions.
Chestnut Headed Orpendola / Oropéndola Cabecicastaña — Psarocolius wagleri. Photo by / Foto por Kermit Nourse.
Birds of Panama: Chestnut Headed Oropendola Aves de Panamá: Oropéndola Cabecicastaña
by/por Kermit Nourse
The Chestnut Headed Oropendola is one of Panama’s most curious creatures. Their nests look like bags which hang from the tree limbs. He enters the nest head first and somehow turns around again to come out head first. The sound he makes sounds like a bubbly cough. This was a blind shot in a low light situation. He flew over my head and into the palm tree and I couldn’t see him anymore so o just pointed the lens at the noise in the tree.
La Oropéndola Cabecicastaña es una de las criaturas más curiosas de Panamá. Sus nidos parecen bolsas que cuelgan de las ramas de los árboles. Él entra primero al nido y de alguna manera se da vuelta nuevamente para salir de cabeza. El sonido que hace suena como una tos burbujeante. Este fue un tiro a ciegas en una situación de poca luz. Voló sobre mi cabeza y dentro de la palmera y no pude verlo más, así que solo apunté con la lente al ruido en el árbol.
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After elections for party delegates that attracted some 20 percent of the Cambio Democratico membership, Rómulo Roux (left) appears with the new head of the party’s women’s branch, Ana Giselle Rosas de Vallarino, and the new CD youth leader, Maidir Miller. Roux, the only member of Ricardo Martinelli’s cabinet who is not in serious legal trouble, calls it the face of change but actually it’s a younger generation of the old political caste. Photo from Rómulo Roux’s Facebook page.
Roux wins the CD delegate elections, seems set to take the party back to its old status
by Eric Jackson
A major political party would not only be a contender for national political power. It would be expected to survive the physical or political demise of its top leader. It would stand for something in most people’s eyes, whether or not they agree with that something. It would be something that its members would rather not destroy.
In some countries, minor parties stand for a belief system, a segment of society or some sort of subculture. Not so in Panama. Here the small parties are businesses. They are bets that whatever major party comes out on top in a national election, it will be short of the support it needs for a working majority in the legislature and thus amenable to deals with small formations, wherein support on key matters is exchanged for government jobs or contracts. Until 2009, that’s what Ricardo Martinelli’s Cambio Democratico party was.
Then the nation’s largest party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), at the end of a 2005-2009 Martín Torrijos administration in which it gutted the public pension system, passed out poisonous cough syrup that killed hundreds and then tried to cover it up instead of helping the surviving victims, then fell out among themselves in a brawl of broken deals and angry recriminations from which an unreconstructed Norieguista, Balbina Herrera, emerged as the nominee. The image wasn’t softened by Balbina’s promises to shut down news websites that she did not control. So, from the grubby business of the small party world, supermarket tycoon Ricardo Martinelli emerged to win the presidency by a landslide. His party didn’t come close to winning the National Assembly, but through bribery and blackmail he managed to engineer enough defections from the other parties to cobble together a legislative majority.
The looting binge, the manipulation of the legal system, the violence, the massive bribery and graft, the surveillance and appropriation of government databases for partisan uses, the tawdry moves to make himself president by proxy for another term — it all came dangerously close but Martinelli fell short in 2014. We now live in the aftermath. On paper, CD still has some 342,000 members.
The first thing that Martinelli did after losing the elections was to steal the surveillance equipment and databases acquired at public expense. The next thing he did was to threaten the legislators elected on the party ticket for the 2014-2019 term with the files he said he had on every one of them. In the first year of the next administration President Juan Carlos Varela’s Panameñista Party and the PRD, neither close to a majority in the legislature on its own, formed an alliance to keep the CD out. A year later, half of the CD deputies defied Martinelli, who by then had fled the country. Since then, amidst all the fault lines, the party has been above all divided between those who automatically follow Martinelli’s orders from Miami and those who disobey such commands. This past July, 16 of 25 CD deputies aligned with the Panameñistas and a few dissidents from the PRD to make a CD dissident, Yanibel Ábrego, the legislature’s presiding deputy. A Martinelli loyalist crowd, prone to squabbling among themselves and principally led by Martinelli’s appointee as acting party president Alma Cortés and Martinelli spokesman Eduardo Camacho, has retained control of the party apparatus and moved to expel the 16 dissident legislators from the party.
However, Cortés, Camacho and most of the other prominent loyalists are in and out of court and jail on a variety of charges. Against them for the party leadership is the CD secretary general, Rómulo Roux. A former cabinet member, he served as canal affairs minister, then briefly as minister of the presidency, before stepping down for an unsuccessful bid for the 2014 CD presidential nomination. If one discounts the cabinet when Martinelli and Varela were allies for the first 26 months of the last government, of those who came later Roux is the only minister who is not in serious legal trouble. Could it be that he’s a wily attorney from the country’s most prestigious law firm, Morgan & Morgan? Was it scruples? Was it luck? In any case, the suspense in Roux’s life has not been about whether he will get out on bail. With others calling him a traitor, he has been quietly making the rounds of party organizations and elected officials and is on pretty good terms with most of the legislators who have defied Martinelli.
On October 15 CD members went to the polls to elect delegates to local, provincial and national conventions that will culminate in the election of new national party leaders and arrangements for a primary to select the 2019 presidential nominee.
Roux put together the Renovacion CD slate, which stands for nothing in particular. By all accounts they won most of the delegates. Also at stake in the October 15 voting were the leaderships of the party’s women’s and youth organizations, and the Renovacion CD candidates for these, Ana Giselle Rosas de Vallarino and Maidir Miller respectively, won their races. Roux wants the presidential nomination and so do a bunch of others, but at this point the 2019 party standard appears to be his to lose. Martinelli’s gang may seek to change those equations by throwing those who just beat them out of the party, but it’s unlikely that the Electoral Tribunal would allow them to do this.
So what has Roux won? The Electoral Tribunal says that about 20 percent of the party’s membership took part in the internal elections. That’s a little under 70,000 people. That’s not nearly enough to win a national election, but sufficient to maintain ballot status and get one of more people elected to the National Assembly. But that was just one of the primaries, one might argue, and the turnout will be substantially higher in subsequent voting, especially in the general election. Will it? Already there are splinter parties forming and CD deputies expressing their intention to join them. A string of court victories and prosecutorial dives that gets all charges against Ricardo Martinelli and his gang off of all major charges would be a distinct possibility, and that may shore up the CD share of the fools’ vote, but that sort of exercise in corruption would likely cost the party many more votes than it would win.
Rómulo Roux has about 55,000 followers on his Facebook page — not all of whom like him — and he seems to have mustered something less to that at the polls on the 15th. Yes, he’s telegenic and will have some money behind him, but it’s very likely that most of the members on the CD rolls are just that on paper. Come 2019 the party’s vote total may well be in the five digits. And that would leave CD where it has usually been, as a family business small party.
Look at Roux’s people who won.
Ana Giselle Rosas de Vallarino is married into the political Vallarino clan, the daughter-in-law of former VP Arturo Vallarino and also related by marriage to legislator Marilyn Vallarino de Sellhorn and disgraced former Panama City mayor Bosco Vallarino. In the Martinelli administration she had a job with the government agency that oversees cooperatives, IPACOOP, and ran for legislator in 2014. At first she was declared the winner over Panameñista incumbent Jorge Alberto Rosas, but that result was challenged because government funds were used to buy votes for her. The alleged extent of it was much greater, but the Electoral Tribunal overturned the result on the basis of 99 checks, in the aggregate amount of $104,500, stolen from the IFARHU scholarship fund and used to buy votes. On the rerun Ana Giselle lost.
Maidir Miller is the son of legislator and CD vice president Mario Miller. The elder Miller has the distinction of being the only post-invasion legislator kicked out of both his party and his seat in the National Assembly by his colleagues. He was a PRD deputy from Bocas and early in the Pérez Balladares administration he was arrested for an alleged extortion attempt against some business owners. He did take the briefcase with the marked bills, but said that it was represented as something else to him. Eventually he was acquitted, but only got back to the legislature by getting elected on Mr. Martinelli’s ticket.
A family business for the political caste, in reduced circumstances not about national power but about sinecures and sales to the government. That seems to be the direction that CD is headed. If the circumstances are all that reduced there are not going to be all that many hack jobs and contracts to go around. Thus the ferocious if unequal infighting. Roux just had the unique in that party advantage of unindicted status.
Correction: In the original caption we had Roux on the right in the photo, when of course it’s him on the left.
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