I’d hope that others jump in for other races, and don’t leave DA Panama up to people who were elected to do a job and did not do it during last year’s midterm election campaign.
I am for a well coordinated coalition of the different strains of Democrats, people concerned with doing the work more than flaunting the titles.
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A rent-a-crowd cries fraud outside the Cambio Democratico headquarters, before moving its protest to the Electoral Tribunal. This posed video from the Twitter feed of one of Ricardo Martinelli’s communications media. It’s much less than viral, which is an indication of Martinelli’s appeal to Panamanians these days.
It should have taken just a couple of hours
More than a day later and still no official word on the Cambio Democratico internal election results?
Yes, early on the official party leadership, headed by Rómulo Roux, admitted that there will have to be some reruns in several corregimientos. It was usual things like ballots printed without all the candidates listed, polls not opening on time, self-appointed goons keeping people from voting with made-up-on-the-spot “rules” and so on. But only in a few places.
So, with only a few exceptions, shouldn’t the official outlines of the result have been known rather quickly?
It turns out that some time ago the legislature, at the insistence of the Martinelli people among others, decided to leave the running of and vote counting in party elections to the party organizations. The Martinelistas accuse Roux and his faction of failing to pay the Electoral Tribunal to run the intra-party elections of convention delegates and the leaders of the CD women’s and youth organization, and fault them for that.
Say WHAT? It’s this terrible offense for a political faction NOT to pay election officials? Only in Panama.
The announcement will belatedly be made, and from observers at the polling places it seems that Roux and his entourage will be re-elected to the party leadership and that Ricardo Martinelli and his proxy Yanibel Ábrego will continue to allege fraud. Then, upon receipt of a complaint in acceptable form, the Electoral Tribunal may look into the allegations.
Even if Ábrego’s team pulls out a narrow victory in the end, it’s not the smashing and obvious victory need to maintain Ricky Martinelli’s aura as a sure winner in 2024.
On the other hand, wipe away all the dishonest Martinelista slop thrown at Roux, and still there remains the image of a party leader who couldn’t manage something like unquestionably fair and efficient elections in his own party.
So Roux intends to have himself declared the CD presidential candidate for 2024. As a corporate lawyer, he does seem to be the type who would be a worthy fiduciary for a rich person to retain in defense of his or her fortune. Not, however, the sort of president for working people to trust to defend their interests.
Martinelli and Ábrego? They are not to be trusted to guard what belongs to the public, nor really, what belongs to anyone rich or poor other than themselves.
It’s very unlikely that Roux or Ábrego will be the next president of Panama. Perhaps, if he can get another winning streak in the courts going, Martinelli might be. However. The glitter has rubbed off of him, such that he couldn’t convincingly win his old party back. The patina will dull considerably more as Panamanians observe his upcoming corruption trials.
It’s likely that both Roux and Ábrego will be figures on or supporting different coalition slates next year. Many are the conventional wisdoms that might be disproven. Some bad years not entirely of politicians’ creation — after scandalous post-invasion decades — may have taken us to a breaking point.
There is no obvious front runner in the 2024 presidential race, but the possibilities for coalitions are beginning to fall into place. Stay tuned.
Let the guy have his say, and understand how abominable it is.
The torture lawyer defends the untenable
Former Harvard Law School professor and renowned attorney Alan Dershowitz says it’s against the law and the Bible to indict Donald Trump for paying Stormy Daniels to remain silent about his sexual activities with her during the 2016 campaign.
Well, not the most heinous offense. Nothing like the incitement of a violent attempt to overturn the will of the American voters as expressed in the 2020 election. Nor like attempts to pressure state election officials to commit fraud about the same matter, nor the procurement of fraudulent “electors” also for the purpose of thwarting the proper succession of the presidency.
ALSO not as heinous as trying to strong-arm the president of Ukraine into framing Joe Biden’s junkie son Hunter for offenses the younger Biden did not commit, nor as bad as trying to pressure former Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela into overriding this country’s condominium owners’ rights and the decision of a US bankruptcy court in order to keep The Trump Organization as the management of that mobbed-up knockoff of the Burj Al Arab in Punta Pacifica. In those cases it was a matter of soliciting, perhaps attempting to extort, foreign emoluments that US presidents are not supposed to accept.
Dershowitz, the learned gentleman who in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States advocated the institution of torture warrants to make bad guys confess their secrets? US law didn’t get such warrants, but US politics got a string of shameful scandals, with untenable defenses under US and international law, at places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base and Guantanamo Naval Station. Low-ranking servicepeople like Private Lynndie England and several others took the hit. The intellectual authors of this crime wave, the people of power or influence, were not charged.
Donald Trump rode into power on the crest of a great moral crisis. He validated, or tried to validate, all sorts of brutality, dishonesty and disloyal relations with foreign powers. Perhaps the stolen documents case will shed light on the extent of the latter situations.
But for Dershowitz to distinguish going after Trump over payoffs to silence a Stormy Daniels for the purposes of a US presidential campaign from going after Al Capone for tax evasion after things like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre really is a nonstarter. Taxes were one of Capone’s lesser crimes, and payoffs to Stormy Daniels were one of Trump’s more petty offenses. It doesn’t mean that Americans should put up with that stuff as a feature our US political campaigns.
Archimedes’ Lighthouse, a sculpture by Dominique Rolland in René Lévesque Park in Montreal, Quebec. The lights originally planned for it were not installed because it’s believed that they could interfere with navigation on the adjacent St. Lawrence Seaway. City of Montreal photo.
There is a time when quiet courage and audacity become for a people at the key moments of its existence the only form of adequate caution. If it does not then accept the calculated risk of the great steps, it can miss its career forever, exactly like the man who is afraid of life.
René Lévesque
Bear in mind…
Trust in God: She will provide.
Emmeline Pankhurst
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
Marcel Proust
Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.
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This ever-expanding hole in Panama’s forest, from which toxic sludge leaks into the water. CIAM photo from 2018 – it has gotten worse.
For a referendum on mining
by Miguel Antonio Bernal V.
To be able to speak of democracy in our times, citizen participation is a prerequisite. Otherwise, one of the main political rights of the citizen, which is the source of public power, is being violated.
The prevailing authoritarianism, protected by the militaristic constitution imposed 50 years ago on our country, is supported by the erroneous belief that the exercise of the vote is a right and a duty, but only to participate in the designation of representatives in the government: representantes, mayors, legislators, the president.
In this amputated and kidnapped democracy in which we live, the right of citizens to participate in the making of decisions of general interest, through means of direct democracy that are inherent to them as citizens, such as the revocation of mandate, town meetings, popular consultations, citizen assemblies, plebiscites and referenda, among others, have been cut off.
A basic instrument of citizen participation today is the referendum, a political right through which citizens intervene directly to express their will in any public matter that may affect the state.
In a matter of great transcendence like mining in Panama — in this specific case the contract signed by the Panamanian government with the First Quantum mining company — went behind the backs of the citizens. It’s therefore necessary that we demand a referendum so that, through it, and in use of our political rights, we Panamanians can all decide in a participatory and democratic manner what to do about the exploitation of our mineral resources.
We still have time to redouble our efforts to achieve citizen participation in this decision. The prevailing authoritarianism seeks to impose it on us, but that clearly goes against our interests as a country, as Panamanian citizens.
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A finales de septiembre del año pasado Eric Jackson, un demócrata activo además de editor de The Panama News, publicó esta noticia, un artículo de AP que salió en una filial local en español de la cadena Telemundo. Era la temporada de la campaña electoral de mitad de mandato, sobre algo que los demócratas estaban intentando hacer para ganarse el apoyo de los votantes hispanos en Florida. Resultó que los republicanos ganaron a lo grande, especialmente entre los cubanoamericanos, el año pasado en el sur de Florida. Pero Jackson, superviviente de la violencia con armas de fuego, pensó que la táctica de campaña era lo suficientemente notable como para publicarla en L@s Demócratas, una página de Facebook que está principalmente en español y cuyo objetivo es movilizar el apoyo a los demócratas. Jackson creó la página varios años antes, y la dirige.
In late September of last year Eric Jackson, an active Democrat as well as the editor of The Panama News, posted this news story, an AP article that ran on a local Spanish-language affiliate of the Telemundo network. It was midterm election campaign season, about something that Democrats were trying to do to gain Hispanic voters’ support in Florida. As it turned out, the Republicans won big, especially among the Cuban-Americans, last year in South Florida. But Jackson, a survivor of firearms violence thought that the campaign tactic was noteworthy enough to post on L@s Demócratas, a Facebook page that’s primarily in Spanish and aimed at mobilizing support for Democrats. Jackson created the page several years earlier, and runs it.
El 18 de marzo, casi seis meses después, Facebook comunicó que bloqueaba la publicación porque era spam, es decir, una publicación en la página de otra persona que no es relevante para el contenido y el propósito de esa página.
On March 18, nearly six months later, Facebook said that it was blocking the post because it was spam — a post on someone else’s page that’s not relevant to the content and purpose of that page.
El Sr. Zuckerberg, quien dijo que votaría por los republicanos el año pasado, pretende conocer y dictar el contenido de una página de los demócratas, para los demócratas, ¿qué tiene que ver con los mensajes demócratas durante una campaña electoral? ¿O ordenó la creación de un algoritmo para decir eso? Probablemente nada tan personal.
Lo más probable es que su empresa se inclinó ante una serie de quejas de los republicanos de Miami, ya sabes, la organización local que tiene a los Proud Boys, contra L@s Demócratas y contra Eric Jackson. Esta vez, Facebook advirtió sobre las prohibiciones en la sombra, que parecen haber estado vigentes durante bastante tiempo.
¿El INCIDENTE ANTERIOR? Un sargento del Ejército de EEUU, Humberto Arango, de Coral Gables, entró en un grupo de Facebook en el que Eric Jackson publicó un artículo sobre los problemas de Ricardo Martinelli, dada una declaración severa de la administración Biden de que el tipo es un ladrón y los problemas legales del ex presidente panameño aquí. sargento Arango comenzó con esta diatriba racista sobre que él es un “verdadero panameño” y Eric Jackson no lo es, defendió a Martinelli, hizo comentarios homofóbicos y amenazó con represalias no especificadas contra Jackson.
Imagínese si Jackson corriera ese tipo de diatriba contra cualquier ciudadano estadounidense de ascendencia latinoamericana. Probablemente habría una próxima prohibición por razón de discursos de odio.
¿Quien que cuando donde? El editor tiene sus sospechas, pero no pruebas sólidas.
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Mr. Zuckerberg, who said he was voting Republican last year, purports to know and dictate the contents of a page by Democrats, for Democrats, what’s germane to Democratic messaging during an election campaign? Or he ordered the creation of an algorithm to say that?
Probably nothing that personal. It’s more likely that his company bowed to a series of complaints from Miami Republicans — you know, the local organization that has the Proud Boys in it — against L@s Demócratas and against Eric Jackson. This time Facebook warned of shadow bans — which seem to have been in effect for quite some time.
The PREVIOUS INCIDENT? A US Army Sergeant Humberto Arango, of Coral Gables, came into a Facebook group in which Eric Jackson posted an article about Ricardo Martinelli’s woes, given a stern Biden administration declaration that the guy’s a crook and the former Panamanian president’s legal problems here. Sgt. Arango started in with this racist screed about he´s a “real Panamanian” and Eric Jackson is not, defended Martinelli, made homophobic comments and threatened unspecified retribution against Jackson.
Imagine if Jackson ran that sort of a screed against any US citizen of Latin American heritage. There would likely be a hate speech ban forthcoming.
Who, what, when, where? The editor has his suspicions, but no solid proofs.
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To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
The Panama News is and has been since the Martinelli administration under heavy electronic attack. On a day after the high court has confirmed the prison sentences of Martinelli’s bag man and national security director for illegally acquiring electronic hacking equipment and programs that have never been recovered, the editor wonders — but lacks proof.
Among the reasons why The Panama News
is so much a social media publication…
by Eric Jackson
Uh huh. The Martinelli gang got the Pegasus electronic spy system from the Israeli company NOS, and though courts were prevailed upon to rule that Don Ricky knew nothing about it, two of his top guys are going to prison about it. That gear, said to have been last seen in one of Martinelli’s business offices, has never been recovered.
Then, post-Martinelli, WhatsApp messages to and from his successor, Juan Carlos Varela, were intercepted and published. There has been a big international scandal about NSO having a hand in THAT sort of thing, too. It is also said that the messages of the American Embassy here were intercepted, but that’s all very hush-hush, national security and all that. (See, these days you don’t have to breach US security, you can just embarrass the US government and you may be accused of being a spy.)
Means, motive, opportunity, previous methods of operation? These things tend to count for nothing in the Panamanian courts. Is it a holdover from the three qualified eyewitnesses rule of Arab Spain’s Islamic Law? More like corruption of more local and recent vintage, I think.
Whatever the editor might suspect, stating those suspicions as fact would surely draw criminal defamation charges.
But the constant electronic attacks on The Panama News websites? Those are a reality. Which leads to more of our publishing via our Facebook, Twitter and Mastodon feeds, which are not as easily shut down. EXCEPT if a communication from the “right” person or agency gets a shadow ban imposed.
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A school in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, was closed for several days due to an “invasion of poisonous spiders”. Experts claimed they were not aggressive, but the school was closed, alarm spread and some media outlets were quick to call them “eight-legged monsters”.
In another case, the alleged severity of a spider bite on a woman triggered alarm in Mallorca (Spain). Social networks were flooded with messages and photographs of bites. Although the Conselleria de Salut and the leading hospital on the islands made it public that there was no health alarm and experts explained that no dangerous spiders are present in Mallorca, messages continued for days and days on social media.
Such news is likely to produce fear, a visceral reaction often sought by the most sensationalist tabloids. These stories do not remain in the local or regional press, but are disseminated on a global scale almost immediately.
The news carries with it political or social actions that can be costly, often unnecessarily so. For example, not taking children to school for several days or environmental pollution from unnecessary pesticide treatments. They also fuel a global sentiment based on misinformation: spider panic.
Contrary to the impression we get from reading these news stories, the risk of being exposed to a spider is minimal. Studies in Switzerland estimate that the annual probability of being bitten by a spider is between 10 and 100 cases per million inhabitants. Another study in Australia found that only 6% of confirmed spider bites were of medical importance.
The global spread of misinformation about spiders
A recent study by more than 60 researchers, published in the journal Current Biology, has examined the global spread of misinformation about spiders. This collective effort has resulted in the compilation of more than 5,000 news items on spider-human encounters published on the internet between 2010 and 2020.
The news items were evaluated in terms of their quality (presence or absence of errors) and their level of sensationalism.
Almost half of the news items analyzed contained errors or inaccurate information, such as incorrect identification of the spider involved. Some articles report species that do not even live in the area, and sometimes there is no certainty that the bite occurred.
In up to 43% of cases, the news stories used sensationalist language. Although the language used in the news was less sensational when experts in arachnology had been consulted.
Errors often started at the regional level, and the story was amplified in national and international media. According to experts, this is a defining characteristic of modern misinformation: the amplification of small errors that support a false narrative. It is as present in spider news as it is in political news.
The likelihood of a country being a distributor of sensational news stories about human-spider encounters was positively related to several factors. These included the proportion of sensational news stories published in the country, the presence of spiders considered deadly, and a high number of internet users.
There are more dangerous spiders in Australia than in almost any other country, yet news about spiders is accurate and rarely emotionally charged. According to the analysis, the UK generates the most misinformation about arachnids, despite having very few dangerous venomous spider species.
The implications of the misinformation generated are no less significant. They reinforce a feeling of public animosity towards these arthropods. This leads to what we mentioned at the beginning of the article: the avoidance of their presence in public or private spaces, and the use of unnecessary pesticide treatments. Moreover, false alarms may lead to school closures or tourism suffering.
The first clear spider-like representations date back to 10,000 years ago. Because of their distribution, occupying all continents and habitats, as well as their biology and ecology, they have been admired and feared in equal measure.
They have often been associated with divinities, with creative powers (due to their great fertility, ability to make and weave silk and their cunning) and destructive powers (related to their hunting ways and the presence of poison).
All spiders, with the exception of the Uloboridae family, produce venom, but this, with rare exceptions, is imperceptible to humans. They use it, along with silk, to trap or immobilize their prey.
Only four genera of spiders have been described whose venom is of medical interest (Phoneutria, Loxosceles, Latrodectus and Atrax), and only 4% of the known species may be dangerous to humans. This means that of the approximately 45,000 known species, more than 43,200 are harmless.
Once the criminalized view of arachnids has been debunked, the best thing to do when faced with a spider is to be kind to it, because it is a natural treasure.
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What happened in 2018 was effectively allowing SVB and other banks to still benefit from insurance without having to pay for it. Economist Dean Baker, from the Beat The Press Facebook page.
This big bank bailout brought to you by Donald J. Trump
There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB):
It was a bailout
Donald Trump was the person responsible.
The first point is straightforward. We gave a government guarantee of great value to people who had not paid for it.
We will get a lot of silly game playing on this issue, just like we did back in 2008-09. The game players will tell us that this guarantee didn’t cost the government a penny, which will very likely end up being true. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t give the bank’s large depositors something of great value.
If the government offers to guarantee a loan, it makes it far more likely that the beneficiary will be able to get the loan and that they will pay a lower interest rate for this loan. In this case, the people who held large uninsured deposits at SVB apparently decided that it was better, for whatever reason, to expose themselves to the risk by keeping these deposits at SVB, rather than adjusting their finances in a way that would have kept their money better protected.
This would have meant either parking their deposits at a larger bank that was subject to more careful scrutiny by regulators, or adjusting their assets so that they were not so exposed to a single bank. They also could have taken ten minutes to examine SVB’s financial situation, which was mostly a matter of public record.
For whatever reason, the bank’s large depositors chose to expose themselves to serious risk. When their bet turned out badly, they in effect wanted the government to provide the insurance that they did not pay for.
This brings us to the second point; this is Donald Trump’s bailout. The reason this is a bailout is that the government is providing a benefit that the depositors did not pay for. It also is, in effect, a subsidy to other mid-sized banks, since it tells their depositors that they can count on the government covering their deposits, even though they are not insured and the bank is not subject to the same scrutiny as the largest banks.
This is where the fault lies with Donald Trump. It was his decision to stop scrutinizing banks with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion that led to the problems at SVB.
Prior to the passage of this bill, a bank the size of SVB would have been subject to regular stress tests. A stress test means projecting how a bank would fare in various bad situations, like the rise in interest rates that apparently sank SVB.
If regulators had subjected to SVB to a stress test, they would have almost surely recognized its problems. They then would have required it to raise more capital and/or shed deposits.
But Trump pulled the regulators off the job. This is wrongly described as “deregulation.” It isn’t.
Deregulation would mean both eliminating the scrutiny of SVB and ending insurance for the bank. (In principle that would mean ending all deposit insurance, not the just the insurance for large accounts that is at issue here.)
What happened in 2018 was effectively allowing SVB to still benefit from insurance without having to pay for it. It is comparable to telling drivers that they don’t have to buy auto insurance, but will still be covered if they are in an accident. Or, perhaps a better example would be telling a restaurant that it is covered by fire insurance, but it doesn’t have to adhere to safety standards.
It is dishonest to describe this as “deregulation.” It is the government giving a subsidy to the banks in question. It is understandable that the banks prefer to describe their subsidy as deregulation, but it is not accurate.
Anyhow, this bailout is the Donald Trump bailout. He touted the 2018 bill when he signed it. We are now seeing the fruits of his action.
Dean Baker is the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
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