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I’ll be doing workshops in Sonoma and Westlake Village in January 2017. In February 2017 I’ll be in new Smyrna Beach Florida. Here’s the link to my site and more information.
El Nancito is a community in eastern Chiriqui’s Remedios district, not far from Tole and not far from the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. On Independence Day they had a parade with 26 marching bands from area schools. Most of the participants were indigenous, but the holiday is national and pomp and ceremony were rather mainstream Panamanian.
The norm for this part of a presidential term is that the president has a reasonably strong grip on the legislature, but within the National Assembly there are more deputies asking “What’s in it for me?” or “What’s in it for my constituents?” or “What’s in it for my party?” for straightforward appeals to patriotism or good government to be all that effective. Thus, within a framework set by the executive branch, the end of a legislative session tends to feature frenzied horse-trading and the high probability of the madrugonazo, the reprehensible and unpopular amendment suddenly inserted into the law at in a wee hours meeting.
This legislature, however, is broken into five major pieces and several smaller chunks, with no party close to holding a functional majority. The two largest caucuses, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and Cambio Democratico (CD), are each split in two. The president’s Panameñista Party holds only 17 seats in a 71-member assembly. Add an independent, the sole Partido Popular deputy and a few who still sport the moribund MOLIRENA party ticket and it all gets down to haggling to get anything at all done. Meanwhile, after rebellions that have weakened by not definitively deposed the PRD and CD bosses, would-be de facto successors are trying to put their parties back together in time for the 2019 elections. Figure about six dozen calculating control freaks in a room where control is hard to come by and calculations difficult to make. The control levers of momentary contention would be one of the three seats on the Electoral Tribunal and the writing of election laws that will apply in 2019. The rules for the selection of delegates to a constitutional convention ought to be a more immediate question, but all factions are terrified of that prospect because none of them can be assured to control such a process. They put that off and they avoid provoking a constitutional crisis that would make such a special election unavoidable. Within the alliance of Panameñistas, a PRD faction and a CD faction that holds a legislative majority, they try to avoid controversies that might break that up. It enhances the risks and reduces the opportunities for political hardball.
The budget
What if they get so jammed up that they can’t pass a budget? Then under the constitution the previous year’s budget repeats itself even if it never precisely can, at least not without government workers denied their contractual raises walking out on strike. President Varela sent the deputies a budget calculated not to inflame, and deputies made changes that are unlikely to cost any of them their jobs. The end product was $21.675 billion budget, $just $5 million more than the president asked. The raise was for salaries to pay local vice majors and the representantes’ suplentes, the expense of which was partially offset by cuts elsewhere. Nearly half — 49.1 percent — is the general operating fund, the lion’s share for salaries. More than one-third — 34.9 percent — is capital outlay, with road widening and connecting roads between the bridges and San Carlos, sewer and sewage treatment works in the metro area and across the canal in Arraijan and La Chorrera, and the renovation of Colon’s city center as the more noteworthy big ticket items. The rest goes toward payments on the national debt. Spending on the canal and various authorities are largely “off the budget” and dealt with separately.
Elections impasse
The Electoral Tribunal, after a long process of public hearings, presented a set of proposed election law reforms that gave the parties protection by making it harder for independent candidates, limited campaign spending to 50¢ per voter and restored the “plancha” method of transferring the votes of less successful candidates on a party ticket to their parties’ leading vote-getters in multi-member legislative circuits. In committee the spending cap was raised to $5 per voter, which split the ultra-rich power brokers between those who would like to see their costs reduced and those who would like to see their political dominance enhanced, enraged political reformers and delighted the television stations. An avalanche of 30 proposed amendments came down before the echoes of the public outcry died out and the possibility of passing the law in the regular session evaporated. Election law changes will come up in a special session if the president calls for one, or when the next session starts in January.
At the end of December the term of electoral magistrate Erasmo Pinilla ends and his replacement is a hot-button item. Pinilla came to the Electoral Tribunal from the PRD, and although people resign from parties and at least pretend to have no partisan loyalties with they take such judicial posts, with Pinilla gone the tribunal has one magistrate with PRD roots and another from CD. The Panameñistas figure that they ought to get the other spot but the warring factions of the PRD are united in rejecting that, or at least rejecting the president’s party’s favorite nominee. A divided CD leaves the Panemeñistas short of the votes they need by aligning with those anti-Martinelli CD deputies who are otherwise their allies in the legislature. Thus the appointment of a new magistrate, which was supposed to happen in the regular session, was also put off.
In the middle of this the PRD held its party congress on October 30, with the leader of on of the Torrista factions winning the secretary general post and the other faction’s leader getting re-elected as party president. Pedro Miguel Gomzález, the new secretary general and leader of those PRD deputies who formed a coalition with the Panameñistas and a CD faction to control the National Assembly, appears to have the upper hand within the party against president Benicio Robinson, who has more legislators in his group than does González in his. But it seems that after a bitter intra-party fight there is now a move toward some sort of unity and this is being played out over both the election of a new magistrate and in the disputes over election laws. Either in a special election or early next year in the next session, look for a negotiation between a somewhat united PRD and other factions that will probably bundle election laws and the choice of a new magistrate into a compromise. But it might turn out to be best for the Panameñistas or CD or both to walk away from any deal with the PRD and use that posture as a springboard for their 2019 campaign.
Also passed, securities law reform
The Securities Markets Superintendency is a surviving bastion of opacity, corruption and conspicuous displays of wealth by functionaries whose salaries wouldn’t support that. Plus, it has been more or less stripped of jurisdiction over securities trading other than through Panama’s puny Bolsa de Valores. So the legislature just passed a law to replace the superintendency with a new Securities Markets Commission, which will also have jurisdiction over shares traded over the counter. There was very little argument. A number of those who might be expected to argue are fugitives, here and subject to criminal proceedings or so closely aligned to people ensnared in high-profile corruption cases that it’s prudent for them to shut up about it. With the world looking askance at Panama’s entire financial system, Panama really did need to clean up this corner of the house in the wake of the notorious court ruling that insider trading from Panama of shares not traded on Panama’s Bolsa de Valores is legal.
Not passed, but not killed, sex education
Panama has a high rate of teenage pregnancy and strong public support for sex education in the schools. Legislation to provide for such instruction passed in committee this year, but was returned by the National Assembly plenum for more study after a furious campaign by churches. A lot of that campaign was by zealots who believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible except for the bit about false witness, so back in the Labor Committee, where the measure was sent, the objections were systematically addressed. No, the schools will not be passing out contraceptives. No, the contents of sex education materials and lectures will not be kept secret from parents. The proposal is coming back to the legislature in January.
Deep-sixed, university rectors’ re-election
The audits and criminal investigations following the end of the University of Panama’s generation under Gustavo García de Paredes are not close to over and the people who brought an end to that do not propose to start such a thing again under a new rector. Over at the Tecnologico, which seceded from the University of Panama in the 1970s, there is also no urge to have an entrenched machine. But a move was made in the legislature to specifically allow public university rectors to be re-elected and this was to entrench the leadership of the National Autonomous University of Chiriqui. The bill was jammed through committee, but after protests from almost every corner of Panama’s academia it was pulled off of the assembly’s agenda. This thing isn’t coming back anytime soon. UNACHI is going to have to choose new leaders.
FBI Director James Comey revealed on Wednesday that the Bureau was investigating Hillary Clinton’s ties to Bill Clinton. But there was no way the FBI could divulge the results of its Clinton-Clinton probe before Election Day. “We have reason to believe that the ties between these two individuals go back to the nineteen-seventies,” he said. “This will take some time.”
Andy Borowitz
The New Yorker, November 2
Comey knows better. When an investigation is opened, the FBI must shut up and either indict or drop the probe. That’s been the protocol since J. Edgar Hoover illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr.’s philandering and played the tapes for the amusement of the Kennedys and Hoover’s male cronies. This was followed by an anonymous FBI letter sent to King suggesting he should commit suicide rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
I am in favor of government transparency, but not when it collides with basic human rights, or interferes with an election, a violation of the 1938 Hatch Act. The public announcement of the dropping of the Hillary Clinton emails probe should have been left to the Department of Justice and accompanied by a ‘no comment,’ rather than Comey’s lengthy obiter dictum. As for the Anthony Weiner computer files, Comey had no mandate to disclose the launching of that investigation or to qualify the files as ‘pertinent’ to Clinton but not necessarily ‘significant.’
FBI protocol and government ethics forbid Comey’s showboating described above. It creates a trial by innuendo and can weaken a prosecution via the intimidation of witnesses, destruction of documents, or the disappearance of the defendant. More generically, in A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More responds to the argument that government lawbreaking can be justified for the greater good. More countered: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, the laws all being flat?”
Prediction: Within a few months, no matter who is elected, James Comey will be gone. Ostensibly — ‘for the good of the Bureau.’
Phil Edmonston
Chair, Democrats Abroad Panama
I am a Democrat and I voted for Hillary Clinton for president. I am also a journalist. I am a believer in freedom of information, open meetings and in general “government in the sunshine.” I have also over the years been an activist for the cause of amnesty for political prisoners, including those in the United States. These things sometimes put me at odds with the Obama administration, with the FBI or with Hillary Clinton.
Did the FBI stumble across new information about an emails investigation that had found only a gaffe but no crime, but determine that the new data needed to be evaluated? I think it was the right of Congress to know, irresponsible purveyors of bad fiction that the institution’s GOP leaders might be. The fanciful and downright paranoiac Republican spins, and the reminder that not only Hillary Clinton’s husband but the estranged husband of her aide Huma Abedin tend to get into problematic situations, do not help the Clinton campaign. However, I think that American voters will understand that the Democratic candidate for president is Hillary Clinton and will make their choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as it is.
And what about the FBI releasing 16-year-old documents about a presidential pardon? If someone had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for that material, it should have been released. If the FBI director decided without such a request to introduce this stuff into the late stages of an election campaign, that’s obnoxious.
The FBI, like the armed forces, ought to be subject to the control of democratically elected civilians. As an institution, do they dislike the use of the constitutional pardon power? That’s not their decision and if it were the country would have taken a step toward an unchecked police state.
But what’s the best protection against both a police state and corruption in high places? A fully informed public.
Eric Jackson
Communications Director, Democrats Abroad Panama
On this day in 1903, Panama became its own country in a coup organized by a mostly US-owned railroad company and backed by local members of the Conservative Party and the military forces of the United States. The shape of what was created soon emerged: rather than a fully independent republic, a US protectorate bisected by a US colony. But Panamanians, including the Liberals, who were starved, battered and exhausted from a recently concluded vicious civil war, accepted that and moved on from there.
Panamanians who were not Conservatives and who did not especially love the Americans accepted it because life as part of Colombia held the prospect of endless civil conflicts and weird decisions about the isthmus by people in Bogota who were motivated by other concerns. Separation from Colombia was not a nationalist revolution, but it gave Panamanians a chance to establish a national existence that suits us. Panamanian nationalism emerged in the effort to make the country whole and sovereign despite the impositions of the United States, and to make the Panamanian people prosperous and sovereign despite the impositions of these grasping little local elites. There has been much progress in both of these endeavors, but there have been setbacks and neither Panama nor Panamanians are as free as ought to be the case.
Today we celebrate the difficult birth of a dream that lives and grows stronger despite everything. The world may stereotype us, the official response to real things that the world points out may be unreasonable denial and we may suffer from lapses of confidence or courage. Still, in our unique and sometimes downright strange mix we know who we are and we care about this country.
1. Introduction
The Internet and the electronic networking revolution, like previous technological shifts, holds out the promise of a better and more equitable world for all. Yet it is increasingly evident that certain elites are capturing the benefits of these developments largely for themselves and consolidating their overall positions of control. Global corporations, often in partnership with governments, are framing and constructing this new society in their own interests, at the expense of what is required in the wider public interest.
Several core sectors in wealthy, developing, and less developed countries alike are already seeing major disruption and transformation: retail shopping by Amazon, media by Facebook, the hotel sector by AirBnB, taxis by Uber. And Google and Apple are well advanced in digitally valorizing and commodifying the minutest aspects of our personal and social lives. On the surface, many of the new services and delivery models seem benign, even positive, and indeed they do bring tangible benefits to some people and institutions, so much so that many are willing participants in relinquishing personal data and privacy.
However, deeper analysis reveals shifts below the radar, triggering more fundamental societal changes and generating new forms of inequality and a deepening of existing social divisions. Unchecked, these could be forerunners of digitally-enabled business models and institutional dynamics that seriously undermine rights hard-won by workers and citizens and that significantly erode welfare regimes and, ultimately, democratic institutions. Analytical rigor and engaged activism must be applied to critique these emerging social and business models and to develop appropriate alternatives that actively promote social justice.
This applies particularly to the internal transformation of sectors, enabled by micro data aggregation and analysis at a global level. “Big data” is thereby creating new paradigms across many areas — for instance the idea of “smart cities” is presented as the new model of data-based governance potentially supplanting political and democratic processes. Yet these changes — unlike those at the consumer level — are largely invisible. They are transforming the terms and conditions by which people are employed and work, the knowledge they have access to, basic economic power relations, and ultimately the rights to which people are entitled. The implementation of these paradigms can, and will, impact everyone as their influence spreads through social and economic sectors and enters the mainstream in all countries, and for all socio-economic classes.
Challenging these dynamics is vitally important, and urgent, in the fast moving formative period of a new social paradigm, where almost all industrial-era social institutions are being undermined by the transformative force of a networking and data revolution. It is now, at this ‘design phase,’ that the engagement of progressive social movements will be most fruitful.
Yet while the dominant actors are densely networked and well on their way to shaping the digital society in their interests, progressive forces are only at the early stages of defining the contours of the issues and identifying the problems, usually around one specific issue; very little progress has been made in networking, developing appropriate collaborations and alternatives, strategizing and moving into action at a broader level.
The Internet Social Forum (ISF), through its various events and actions, will offer a response to this based on the real struggles of those fighting for social justice. It will build a dynamic and productive space for dialogue and action across different social sectors and interest groups that can raise awareness, inform, educate, and mobilize global civil society to bring about political change. From this space we will actively seek out and implement concrete and coherent alternatives. These will guide and energize the emerging innovative social movements, and lead toward a more sustainable development path that reinforces human rights and social justice outcomes.
The idea of launching an ISF first took root as a legacy of civil society’s accomplishments during the two UN World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 and 2005. However, with hindsight, ISF collective members now perceive that the vision and scope emerging from these were focused too narrowly on concerns about the Internet and ICTs and not enough on how these could and now are transforming cultural, political, social and economic life. As a Thematic Forum of the World Social Forum, and in pursuit of its principles, the ISF takes inspiration from its maxim: “Another world is possible” in this domain too.
The ISF process is still in its early days, but the ideological machines advancing a new normal are already moving into high gear. Utopian futures are being sold to the public: a world of free services and growing convenience and leisure. Such futures must be radically critiqued and exposed for what they are — the latest wave of technology-enabled capital accumulation. This wave is particularly dangerous given the transformational potential of these technological changes and their timing during an era in which neo-liberalism — despite being debunked in theory and practice — still firmly drives the global agenda.
As the challenge to much wider societal issues grows, and the dangers of undermining hard-won gains in social justice across sectors (health, education, environment, gender equality, economic development, etc.) become very real, the ISF facilitating group calls upon social justice movements around the world, as well as other concerned individuals and organizations, to engage with the ISF process.
2. Disturbing global trends
Global society is now on the brink of a profound shift, driven by the rapidly emerging dominance of a new breed of transnational and neo-liberal corporate entity, equipped with a persuasive rationale for why private industry should not only play a part in but also lead in solving many of society’s most severe and urgent problems. Concerns over how the evolution of the Internet is impacting the social and economic environment, including the new areas of risk such as data mining and surveillance, pale into insignificance against the alarming possibilities that open up as this new big data driven paradigm enters the fabric and formative structuring of mainstream economy, society, and culture.
The first generation of transnational Internet and social media corporations stand accused, with some justification, of weakening collective identity, eroding any sense of privacy, and diminishing citizen or even consumer capacity for action. Other corporate players, from agro-chemicals to hospitality, many of them new, as they move to networking and data-centered business models, are poised to fully exploit this “new normal,” transforming one social and economic sector after another into machines for profit generation, very often at the expense of public services and spaces, and of rights and freedoms won over many generations.
Moreover, computer algorithms/artificial intelligence increasingly become a part, not only of surveillance, but also of policing, credit provision, education, employment, healthcare and many other areas, including in the public sector. There is a thus a growing risk of inheriting and entrenching the bias of data collected by institutions leading to a deepening of racist, sexist, ethnic, social class or age discrimination.
Social justice activists and movements everywhere must be concerned with these hugely significant issues and developments. Through concerted action, social justice activists are also essential to stemming the tide of these troubling trends and to developing alternative perspectives and options.
In the global context, current internet governance structures are largely under the control of corporations and their friends in major governments. Such strategic partnerships seek to remold global governance structures to align more with corporate interests and the interests of capital than with the broader public interest, even while appearing to include all ‘stakeholders’ as partners in decision making. Ultimately it is, at least in effect, part of a broader implicit agenda intent on replacing existing democratic global governance structures, however flawed, with even more opaque and ‘top-down’ governance by corporations. This would render national governments, even where they genuinely represent the public interest, and ‘bottom-up,’ participative, democratic processes, ever more redundant against corporate forces.
In essence, we are witnessing an assault, slowly but inexorably gaining momentum, on numerous fronts, but most importantly on the very idea of social justice. Its outcome, if successful, would be to dramatically reduce the significance of participatory democratic structures as core and legitimate goals for society.
To fully grasp the risks involved with these disturbing trends, to strategically build opposition to them, and to design and build effective alternatives, we need to initiate and sustain deep exploration of these dynamics coordinated around long-term engagement in actions focused on systemic change.
3. Building alternatives, together, through the ISF
Strategically interconnected neo-liberal interests across the globe are intent on capturing forever the power of these technologies to further their dominance. The alternative is not just to slow down, or even halt, this process, but to reclaim these technologies so that they promote and advance social justice.
Although the digital is connected to social justice through its impact in specific sectors — governance and democracy, education, health, labor rights, public services including welfare, gender equality, environment, and so on — it cannot be understood and addressed from within each sector in isolation. In addition to a sector-specific understanding and response, it is important to address the phenomenon as a meta-level or infrastructural element as it envelops new and emerging social structures and dynamics as a whole. Most sectoral response has focused on practical applications (or, at best, specific adverse impacts) of the digital phenomenon, and not its structural constructs and directions, which in any case are difficult to articulate and address from within any one sector. Yet in its very form and the nature of its impact, the digital revolution calls for a holistic, cross-sectoral response.
A space is needed that facilitates and nurtures social-justice oriented reflective learning and action on what all this means, and how best to address it. This is why the ISF seeks to engage with those already involved in social justice struggles across a whole range of issues and sectors.
Thorough analysis and critique as well as positive intervention experiences will reveal insights into how these same technologies can be turned towards social justice and democracy ends.
Among questions to be addressed are:
The ISF collective would discover, document, and support promising alternatives such as the following, illustrative, list:
The Internet Social Forum collective encourages interested groups or persons to contact us by writing to: secretariat@internetsocialforum.net
What’s the most important party office for Panama’s Democratic Revolutionary Party? At its inception all of those technicalities paled before the power of the commander of the Panama Defense Forces. After the 1989 invasion until the wake of the 2014 elections, it was the secretary general. Then legislator Benicio Robinson tightened his grip on the party presidency and by some rule changes and the acceptance of a pliant secretary general (Carlos Pérez Herrera) he assumed much of the role that the secretary general had previously played. But Robinson then lost control over much of his party’s legislative caucus, much meaningful influence over the legislature and prestige in the eyes of a lot of party members via his suggestion of an alliance with fugitive former President Ricardo Martinelli.
In a showdown that culminated in an October 30 party congress, slates led by Robinson and the leading PRD dissident legislator, Pedro Miguel González, did battle. But they didn’t actually run against one another. Robinson sought re-election as president with former President Ernesto “Toro” Pérez Balladares on his slate as the candidate for secretary general, while González sought the secretary general post on a slate with former health minister Camilo Alleyne running for president. More than 4,000 delegates were eligible to vote and the elected both Robinson and González, with 2,112 votes and 2,413 votes respectively.
The individual vote counts may not much reflect their relative prestige within the party, because González was surely boosted by that very Panamanian sentiment that one term as president of the republic should be all that a person gets. As he did on his way to the presidency in 1994, Toro sought to use the secretary general post as his stepping stone. But as the general electorate decided in the 1998 re-election referendum, the PRD delegates decided that Panama has had enough of Toro. Pérez Balladares apparently recognized the significance of the delegates’ decision in a Twitter message: “The party has chosen its course. They didn’t share my vision. I respect them and I wish them luck.”
If Toro is now effectively out of the running for the 2019 PRD presidential nomination, that leaves former agriculture minister Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo as the top contender in the polls, with some people mentioning Comptroller General Federico Humbert as another possible candidate. Cortizo quit over the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement, whereas Humbert has impeccable establishment credentials. González said that the PRD would return to its roots as the party of the campesinos and indigenous people but that characterization would surely be disputed from several angles.
It does appear, however, that the González slate has more votes than the Robinson people at the sharply divided upper levels of the party. Robinson’ pliant secretary general? Carlos Pérez Herrera sought to be the party’s first vice president, serving under Robinson, but he was defeated by Doris Zapata of the González slate, 1,975 to 1,551 in a three-way race. González ally Miguel Sierra won the second vice president post, and by most counts, including González’s without any expressed contradiction from Robinson, there will be the votes to revise the party statutes and presumably trim the powers that Robinson added to the presidency.
In the legislature there seems to be a truce within the PRD, with both factions closing ranks to block the Panameñista choice for a new magistrate on the Electoral Tribunal, a deadlock that probably means a special legislative session to deal with that appointment and the also stalled changes to the Electoral Code. An attempt at a package deal on those matters is to be expected and it might signal a new set of alignments in the National Assembly.
