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Bernal, The authoritarian base: corregimientos displacing municipalities

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the fallen
The 1968-1989 dictatorship was not just a bunch of institutional changes. These are the faces of 21 of the more than 100 people killed or disappeared by the dictatorship. Collage taken from the Panama Escuela Vieja page.

Corregimiento vs. Municipality

by Miguel Antonio Bernal V.

With the intention of legalizing, legitimizing and even “institutionalizing” the coup, the military proceeded, in 1972, to impose a constitution that disorganized the constitutional evolution of Panama.

Said statute, in its original version, stipulated in its Article 5:

The territory of the Republic of Panama is distributed in Provinces and these in Districts, divided into Corregimientos that constitute the political base of the State…

This imposition, rather than provision, decapitated the municipal regime contemplated in the 1946 Constitution, which provided:

Article 5: The territory of the Republic is divided into autonomous municipalities, grouped into provinces…

The municipality or municipium, emerged in Ancient Rome and was named after the main city that was governed by its own laws. “From here the word autonomy was also born, whose original meaning is the condition of an entity or territorial district to be governed by its own rules. Municipalities as a territorial entity and their government (municipality) are older than the State.

History teaches us that absolute monarchs suppressed municipal autonomy and sometimes the municipal corporation itself. Officials outside their jurisdiction, called corregidores, were imposed on them. The municipalities were buried many times and many others were reborn. Stronger than despotisms, they projected themselves into the future and have reached our days endowed with strength and autonomy.

We cannot lose sight of the fact that: in ancient Greece, the birth of the city and politics took place, to the extent that the city is not different from the State (The State is the city and the city is the State). The Greek polis was founded on democracy, it integrated the citizen who assumed it as his own: “In this way, the city was the first form of political participation and the setting for the construction of the triad made up of the city, the State and the citizenry.

The municipality, considered to be “the primary school of democracy,” was restored to our 1946 Constitution thanks to the Constituent Assembly that originated it, after the failed “provincial city council” imposed by the 1941 Constitution.

The abolition of the 1946 Constitution by the 1968 military coup d’état opened the way for the imposition of the corregimientos as a territorial and political base, which would serve thereafter as support for the authoritarian political regime established by the dictatorship and that today, still predominates.

 

 

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Tedros, Taking global health to a new level

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Tedros
World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. WHO archive photo.

Keynote speech at the Berlin World Health Summit

by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Your Excellency Chancellor Olaf Scholz,

Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

Guten Abend, it’s an honor to be here.

Vielen Dank to you, Chancellor Scholz, and the government and people of Germany for your hospitality.

My thanks also to you for your patronage of the World Health Summit, together with me and our fellow patrons President Emmanuel Macron and President Macky Sall.

I would also like to thank Professor Axel Pries, and your colleagues, for your partnership as co-hosts of the World Health Summit for the first time.

About 14 years ago, I received a call asking me if I was interested in joining a committee to start a new health conference in Germany.

Thank you Dr Detlev Ganten, the past President, for that surprise many years ago, and for your leadership.

The first World Health Summit was held in 2009, which as you remember, was the same year that the world last experienced a pandemic, of H1N1 influenza.

We are at a similarly decisive moment now, as the world emerges from the most severe health crisis in a century.

The theme of this year’s World Health Summit is “taking global health to a new level”.

It sounds great. But what does it mean?

Let me suggest three things.

First, taking global health to a new level means we need a new global agreement, or global accord, based on a shared vision.

At exactly the moment when the world needed to come together to face this common threat as one, the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a lack of cooperation and coordination.

We can only face shared threats with a shared response, based on a shared commitment to solidarity and equity.

That is what the pandemic accord that countries are now negotiating is all about: an agreement between the nations of the world to work together – not in competition with each other – to prepare for and respond to epidemics and pandemics.

In 1968, at the height of the Cold War, countries across the ideological divide came together to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Today, it remains as relevant as ever.

In the same way, the global accord now being negotiated will underpin the global approach to epidemics and pandemics for decades and maybe even centuries to come. That’s why we call it a generational agreement.

I need to be very clear: this accord is being negotiated by countries, for countries, and will be adopted and implemented by countries, in accordance with their own national laws.

The claim by some that this accord is an infringement of national sovereignty is quite simply wrong.

It will not give WHO any powers to do anything without the express permission of sovereign nation states.

If nations can negotiate treaties against threats of our own making, like nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, tobacco, and climate change, then surely it makes sense for countries to agree on a common approach to a common threat that we did not fully create and cannot fully control – a threat that comes from our relationship with nature itself.

Such an agreement will provide an essential framework and foundation for other initiatives to keep the world safe.

Which leads me to my second suggestion.

Taking global health to a new level requires a new global architecture that is coherent and inclusive.

Just as the pandemic exposed political vulnerabilities, it also exposed technical and operational vulnerabilities in the world’s collective ability to prevent, detect, and respond to outbreaks and epidemics.

It’s clear we need new and better tools to build a new and better architecture.

Several parts of that architecture are already being constructed:

Stronger financing through the newly-established Financial Intermediary Fund, as His Excellency the Chancellor indicated – and thank you for your generosity;

Stronger global surveillance through the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, which opened here in Berlin last year;

Stronger accountability through the Universal Health and Preparedness Review, which is now being piloted in four countries;

And a stronger WHO, thanks to the historic commitment by Member States at this year’s World Health Assembly to make our financing substantially more predictable, flexible and sustainable.

A new agreement and a new architecture are essential. But we also need fundamental changes to the conditions that shape the health of the world’s people.

Which brings me to my third suggestion:

Taking global health to the next level means a new global approach that prioritises promoting health and preventing disease, rather than only treating the sick.

By and large, the world’s health systems do not deliver health care. They deliver sick care.

Many countries spend huge sums treating diseases that could be prevented for a fraction of the cost.

That’s why I am calling on all countries to make a paradigm shift towards promoting health and preventing disease, recognizing that health starts not in hospitals and clinics, but in homes, streets, schools, workplaces.

Making this shift requires a reorientation and rebalancing of health systems towards primary health care, as the foundation of universal health coverage and health security.

It also requires changes in how governments approach health, and fund it.

Health can no longer be just the business of the health ministry or the health sector, but of the whole of government, and the whole of society.

Health must be a primary consideration in urban planning, tax policy, transport, education policy, commerce, trade, finance, infrastructure and so on.

That means health can no longer be a junior portfolio in government, as it is in many countries, but must be elevated, because healthy and secure populations are the foundation for healthy and secure societies and economies.

Chancellor Scholz, Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

We live at a time when around the world, global peace is under threat, and must be protected and promoted with strong and principled leadership.

Equally, we live at a time when global health is under threat, and must be defended with equally strong and principled leadership.

Over the next 48 hours, we have the opportunity to forge the path ahead together.

Importantly this week, we also have the opportunity to commit the resources to finish the job of consigning polio to the history books.

Thank you Chancellor for announcing the funding from Germany. Vielen dank.

We have come so far. We’re so close. Now is the moment for all of us to work with determination, cooperation and innovation to give future generations the gift of a polio-free world.

So what does it mean to take global health to the next level?

A new global agreement;

A new global architecture;

And a new global approach.

Because health is not a cost, it’s an investment;

It’s not simply an outcome of development, but the means;

It’s not a luxury, but a fundamental human right.

As I often like to say, Gesundheit ist ein Menschenrecht!

Vielen Dank. I thank you.

 

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A Saturday cat food run’s glimpses of the local economy

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Anton piquera
Saturday afternoon bus riders, waiting for their rides from the town of Anton to the various corregimientos of the sprawling municipal district. Photo taken by Eric Jackson while waiting on the Altos de La Estancia bus. It was Saturday the 15th, so figure that those with regular jobs with regular paydays were out in greater numbers, having just been paid. But still, more shoppers in the stores — not HUGE increases but significant ones — than on similar Saturdays over the last two and a half years. It suggests something of an economic recovery.

At a casual glance…

by Eric Jackson

Out the front gate, onto the tarred but not finished street. Jobs and contracts for PRD folks, a frustrating pain when cats and dogs come in, having walked on it. makes a mess of my flip flops and feet.

On the road out to the highway the representante had other PRD crews putting in speed bumps. Jobs for some, building materials sales for some, not sure if there was much wise planning put into it. I’m pretty sure that few of the people who live in Juan Díaz de Antón were asked what we thought about it — I know I wasn’t.

Also along that road, and once the bus into town got to the intersection with the main highway, multiple untended roadside stands. Some becoming overgrown with weeds, some obviously still tended, but closed. On a weekend? Might it mean that high fuel prices just keep the numbers going to the Interior for a couple of days down? Might it mean that people forced from regular jobs and into the informal economy have found more regular, better-paying work again? Might it mean that people still out of formal work have decided that the money to be made selling from these places makes it an unprofitable investment of time and resources? Hard to say.

In Anton, some of the little stands from which people informally sell things are also unoccupied. I did spend a buck to get a bag of six tangerines, and another buck to get a package of masks, from two of the vendors still working. I got some little plastic tubs of manjar from another. At one of the panaderias I got two bags of michitas, a dollar each.

In the supermarkets the prices remained high. $1.19 for a pound of chicken livers that sold for 69¢ just a few months ago. A lot of the price controlled items not in stock. Shelf life milk is way up, but the small cans of price controlled powdered milk were still available. Infant formula — just looking, no babies to feed in my life — is also way up, and that may have something to do with the Similac recall as much or more than the economy in general.

Tasty if not the healthiest poverty rations lunch at Lissy’s. Two hojaldres, two pieces of crusty fried chicken, a bottle of Coke. The cheap goodies that I bring home to the furry kids — deep-fried chicharrones, bofe or beef heart strips — were all out. As in people so far out on the margins that they are feeding themselves more, and their dogs and cats less, on these things.

Prices in generally were higher so that with the money in my pockets I couldn’t afford all the things I had hoped and expected to buy. I skipped the cheese curls for the cats, the paper towels for this enormous and depressing clean-up job that I confront at home. I bought a smaller bag of cat food than planned. Price controlled rice and lentils, those I bought in the planned quantities. Didn’t top off my coffee stash.

Picked up my usual hard copy of one of the decadent bourgeois newspapers — Karl Marx used to pore over such thing in his London exile, too — but only glanced at the self-serving pronouncements of business group leaders. I never buy Ricky Martinelli’s rags, nor pay for necro-porn tabloids. But you do want to know what the mainstream is reporting from behind their online pay walls. THEN, upon closer inspection, more opinion and analysis and less boots-on-the-ground reporting. The rabiblanco press is also hit by layoffs, so it seems.

I’m not and never really have been assimilated to the “time is money” gringo obsession. Not even when up in the States working at jobs where “billable hours” are the coin of the realm. Seeing no Juan Díaz bus waiting, and the San Juan de Dios bus almost full, I got on the other waiting bus for a bit longer wait, which I mostly spent reading but also looking for pictures to take. That’s the Altos de La Estancia bus, which eventually goes to the rim of the old volcano crater, at the bottom of which is El Valle. I get off much sooner than that — El Bajito is along the way.

This bus is, I believe, a family business. A middle aged man does the driving. A decades-younger woman, or sometimes a younger than her man, are the usual secretaria or sometimes secretario. There are not many women who work on the buses that I take from points A to B in Panama. I like to see the exceptions, and not JUST because I’m this dirty old man. To prosper, Panama needs to be a more equal and a more equitable society. For one thing, if things get more outrageous than they usually are, angry people might start blocking the roads again and it takes forever for the bus to get to point B.

No stops at farm supply places on the way back. Especially on the Altos de La Estancia buses, there usually are. But we are into the season of the heavy rains, and with the seasons vary the cycles of local agricultural activity. Yes, the livestock still need to be fed, but when the ground is so squishy it may not be time to plant or to fertilize.

On to my stop. No apparent gang activity. No young man on a bicycle watching who gets on or off the bus and texting or calling after he sees. That sort of stuff more or less stopped after some people went to prison for invading my home last year.

Past the Martinelista house of the pleasant Evangelical hotel worker, with the Don Ricky banner flying out front. Past the PRD house, with the yellow-striped pickup that the representante drives parked out front. Onto my street, with some of the dogs in the local pack who are regular dinner guests waiting. By now they KNOW not to jump on me with their tar-stained paws. Nobody had broken in, or if someone did, she or he left no obvious traces.

It’s a rough economy out there. It seems like the hopelessness and despair are diminished, but these are still hard times in Anton.

 

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The Republican threat to Social Security

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RS talking BS
Senator Rick Scott of Florida, head of the Republicans’ US Senate campaign committee, is promoting legislation to “sunset” Social Security. He says it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will go away. Let us recall that the USA used to have an assault weapons ban until a GOP Congress “sunsetted” it. Here he talks budget priorities, advocating a new Cold War with China before a right-wing audience. Photo from Senator Scott’s website.

Social Security ‘in grave danger’ if GOP retakes Congress, advocates warn

by Jake Johnson – Common Dreams

Social Security and Medicare defenders warned Tuesday, October 11 that the popular government programs will be “in grave danger” if Republicans win control of Congress in the upcoming midterms, pointing to new reporting on GOP plans to use a looming fight over the nation’s debt ceiling to pursue benefit cuts.

Citing interviews with four House Republicans hoping to serxve as chair of the chamber’s budget committee, Bloomberg Government reported that “Social Security and Medicare eligibility changes, spending caps, and safety-net work requirements are among the top priorities” for the GOP if it retakes the House in next month’s elections.

Representatives Jason Smith (R-MO), Jodey Arrington (R-TX), Buddy Carter (R-GA), and Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) signaled that “next year’s deadline to raise or suspend the debt ceiling is a point of leverage” to extract concessions from Democrats, including potentially raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security benefits, the outlet noted.

Such a strategy would fit with the House GOP’s recently released policy agenda, which opens the door to Social Security and Medicare cuts—something Republican candidates have repeatedly hinted at on the campaign trail despite the programs’ popularity.

“Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary—it’s got to be on entitlements,” Carter told Bloomberg Government on Tuesday.

In a statement, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman stressed that “entitlements” is “a term with pejorative underpinnings” that Republicans frequently use “in hopes that voters don’t understand what they’re saying.”

“But it’s clear what their intentions are: reaching into the American people’s pockets and stealing their hard-earned benefits,” said Altman. “Republicans plan to use the debt limit as the hostage to demand these cuts, even though Social Security doesn’t add a single penny to the deficit. If Republicans take control of one or both chambers of Congress, our earned benefits are in grave danger.”

The debt limit is a completely arbitrary figure that establishes the amount of money the Treasury Department is legally allowed to borrow to cover US financial obligations.

As long as the debt ceiling remains intact, failure to raise it once the Treasury Department reaches its borrowing limit could result in a default and a financial crisis. Treasury is set to hit its current borrowing limit early next year.

In recent years, Republicans have used recurring debt ceiling fights as opportunities to push spending cuts and other austerity measures—and it appears as if they plan to draw from the same playbook once again following the November midterms.

“Republican politicians are dripping with animosity towards our Social Security and Medicare,” Altman said Tuesday. “Even with an election less than a month away, they can’t stop themselves from talking about their burning desire to cut and end these so-called ‘entitlements.'”

In a column last month, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explained that Democrats have the power to prevent the GOP from weaponizing the debt ceiling to push Social Security cuts and other elements of their right-wing agenda.

Short of eliminating the debt ceiling entirely, as some Democrats have advocated, “they can use the reconciliation process to pass a 2023 budget outline (with only Democrats and no Republicans), which would allow them to raise the debt limit (again without Republican support) to an amount unlikely to be reached for President [Joe] Biden’s full term and well beyond,” Sargent observed.

“If Democrats don’t use their power to act against this threat,” Sargent wrote, “it will be a serious dereliction of duty.”

 

 

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Small antiwar protests in dozens of US cities

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no nukes
“Anyone paying attention should be worried about the rising dangers of nuclear war, but what we really need is action,” said one organizer. Massachusetts Peace Action and the Center for Nonviolent Solutions gather in Worcester, Massachusetts. From the Peace Action Facebook page.

Protests in 40+ US cities demand deescalation
as poll shows surging fear of nuclear war

by Julia Conley – Common Dreams

As new polling showed this week that Americans’ fear of nuclear war has steadily grown since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, anti-nuclear campaigners on Friday called on federal lawmakers to take action to mitigate those fears and ensure the United States is doing all it can to deescalate tensions with other nuclear powers.

Anti-war groups including Peace Action and RootsAction organized picket lines at the offices of US senators and representatives in more than 40 cities across 20 states, calling on lawmakers to push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, the revival of anti-nuclear treaties the United States has exited in recent years, and other legislative actions to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

“Anyone paying attention should be worried about the rising dangers of nuclear war, but what we really need is action,” Normon Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction, told Common Dreams. “Picket lines at so many congressional offices across the country convey that more and more constituents are fed up with the timidity of elected officials, who’ve refused to acknowledge the extent of the current grave dangers of nuclear war, much less speak out and take action to mitigate those dangers.”

 

The most recent polling released by Reuters/Ipsos on Monday showed that 58% of Americans fear the USA is headed toward nuclear war.

The level of fear regarding a nuclear conflict is lower than it was in February and March 2022, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. But experts said Friday the polling shows sustained fear about nuclear weapons that has been rare in the United States.

“The level of anxiety is something that I haven’t seen since the Cuban missile crisis,” Peter Kuznick, a history professor and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, told The Hill. “And that was short-lived. This has gone on for months now.”

Chris Jackson, senior vice president of Ipsos, told The Hill that he didn’t “recall any time in the last 20 years where we’ve seen this sort of level of concern about the potential for nuclear apocalypse.”

Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons last month, saying the US set “a precedent” for using them when it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and adding that he would use “all available means” to defend Russia.

The New York Times reported this week that “senior American officials say they have seen no evidence that Mr. Putin is moving any of his nuclear assets,” but that they are also “far more concerned than they were at the start of the [Ukraine] conflict about the possibility of Mr. Putin deploying tactical nuclear weapons.”

Campaigners at “Defuse Nuclear Action” picket lines on Friday called on members of Congress to allay those concerns by:

• Adopting a “no first use” policy regarding nuclear weapons, to restrict when the president of the United States can consider a nuclear strike and signal that the weapons are for deterrence rather than the fighting of wears;
• Pushing for the USA to reenter the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which it withdrew from in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which it left in in 2019;
• Passing H.R. 1185, which calls on the president “to embrace the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of US national security policy;”
• Redirecting military spending, which makes up half the country’s discretionary budget, to ensure Americans have “adequate healthcare, education, housing, and other basic needs” and that the United States is taking far-reaching climate action; and
• Pushing the Biden administration to take nuclear weapons off “hair-trigger alert,” which enables their rapid launch and “increases the chance of a launch in response to a false alarm,” according to Defuse Nuclear War organizers.

“We’re sick of members of Congress acting like spectators instead of initiating measures that the US government could take to reduce the terribly real risks of global annihilation,” Solomon told Common Dreams. “The absurdly muted response from members of Congress is intolerable—and it’s time to publicly hold their feet to fire.”

The power held by President Joe Biden, Putin, and the leaders of the world’s other seven nuclear powers is “unacceptable,” wrote Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action, in a column on Thursday.

“However,” he added, “the current crisis brings with it the opportunity to re-engage on nuclear disarmament issues at the grassroots level in order to show our government it needs to get serious about reducing, not exacerbating, the nuclear threat.”

In addition to Friday’s pickets, campaigners are organizing a Day of Action on Sunday, with supporters holding demonstrations, handing out fliers, and prominently displaying banners calling for a deescalation of the nuclear threat.

 

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Jackson, A matter of solidarity more than geopolitics

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Free Sasha! Born and educated in Russia, with a Ukrainian surname, speaking a different set of languages, creating in different media, of a different gender and sexual orientation, several decades younger — but she’s ONE OF US. Russian artist Alexandra Skochilenko in detention awaiting trial for “spreading fake news” against the Ukraine War at a St. Petersburg grocery store. Prosecutors allege that she’s a member of a “radical feminist protest group,” of which she said she had never heard, let alone joined. Photo by Alexey Belozerov.

Successor to a workers’ paradise where feminism, lesbianism, and pacifism are deviant crimes?

by Eric Jackson

Them, us and those others

Per capita, the average Panamanian’s ghosts of the past tend to be fresher and more numerous the roughly analagous ones of the average US citizen. At least so far as domestic war casualties are counted. 

Was General Noriega a monster? Let’s not deny. But let’s also acknowledge that most of the hundreds of people who died in the US assault on El Chorrillo had nothing to do with Noriega’s monstrosities. A monster slain, so at least one of the few wars since 1945 that the Americans can be said to have won? Ah, but who won or lost a war is a matter of the political outcome. Are Panama’s money laundering industry, and the chronically wretched actions of so much of today’s Panamanian political cast thus the tasty fruits of Operation Just Cause? I’m sure the American Embassy would find a way to deny it.

Collective guilt, comparative oppression, “The Big Picture” and all that offer no comfort to the old man whose wife was killed in the December 1989 invasion and whose remains were disappeared because George H. W. Bush’s ability to deny that it ever happened trumped the survivors’ right to mourn and bury their dead according to their customs and beliefs. If a gringo makes that observation, the shouting and questioning about loyalties begin.

So, because US forces did it, does it take away the gringo who protested the Panama invasion’s right to say anything when the forces of another country do more or less the same thing to the people of yet another country?

Panama has customs, policies, laws and treaties about neutrality.  That Russia is bigger than us and could beat us up isn’t the big reason why we should not prohibit the passage of Russian ships through our canal. Much less should be go full MAGA and try to do that with respect to Ukrainian vessels. Neutrality is a reasonable defense, wherein we give nobody a reason to attack us, nor to destroy our principal industrial asset, the canal.

Why should we have taken sides in the US vendetta against Venezuela? Having years ago resisted US pressures against trading with Cuba, should we now bow to Washington’s demands about contracting with Chinese companies, or Chinese demands about our relations with Taiwan? We can get into all sorts of historical, economic and above all power politics arguments about those things. Especially, from a Panamanian perspective, if we get more servile than sovereign.

But what about solidarity? Shouldn’t those whose city has been bombed oppose it when someone other than the ones who bombed us bomb someone else? Shouldn’t those of us who protested and went to jail over an atrocious war our country was waging feel a special bond when citizens of another country protest and go to jail for acting out against their nation’s bullying war against someone else?

Fascism matters

Does it matter when a deputy of the party that General Omar Torrijos founded gets up in the National Assembly and broad-brush smears Colombians as “scum?” Even when the general’s dad was a Colombian who ended up as a school administrator in Veraguas?

Do the daily suggestions of death, imprisonment and/or great bodily harm on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or political belief spew from the MAGA camp against people unlike themselves?

Should gringos take sides in the former case? Should Panamanians align themselves in the latter case?

So many panas, and so many gringos, will say something like “Huh?” about these things. But Vladimir Putin doesn’t and it becomes the world’s problem.

We can see who gets featured on the RT channel. The MAGAs call it a hoax, but we know what the bots coming out of Russia hyped not only in US elections, but in those of the UK and a bunch of European countries. Donald Trump, Zulay Rodríguez, hatred and fear of immigrants, white supremacy, Brexit, Farage, Le Pen, VOX. And we know about the money coming from Russia, often through church or oligarch donors, to the “Christian” far right — the CitizenGO network and all sorts of other feminist-bashing and gay-bashing outfits. We know the cultural content of Putin’s domestic policies in Russia.

Yeah, he said that he had to order his troops into Ukraine because of Nazi influence there, but Vladimir Putin is the sugar daddy for neofascist, bigoted hate groups around the planet. Ukraine may seem like a side show, a weird war movie in a very foreign corner of the world, but it’s push come to shove by a guy who wants a less tolerant Panama, an undemocratic United States.

There are plenty of indifferent Panamanians, who don’t mind if our government bends to the wishes of racists and xenophobes, who think that the queers should be all rounded up, to whom Russian thugs running Spaniards out of the leading roles in human trafficking and the brothel business on the isthmus is no big deal but Panamanian women getting a better lot in this society is a big threat. There are lots of Americans who don’t mind rigged elections, especially if they get rigged so that there are fewer black elected officials.

So, if you are anti-fascist and hold a US passport, maybe in addition to a Panamanian one, that makes you a hypocrite for opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Uh huh.

You need not ignore the malevolent designs of the neoconservatives, you need not renounce all of your criticism of US policies that also led into today’s conflicts. You can understand the Russian Navy’s fervent desire to keep its bases in Sevastopol and Tartus, and know all about the Cap of Monomakh and Kievan Russia. None of that makes Ukraine Russian. That sort of thinking you might get from Zonian MAGAs, who dream of restoring Panama as an American protectorate with a colony cutting through its transit zone. It’s nostalgia for bad things gone downright dangerous.

Antifascist solidarity, and an across-the-board anti-imperialist attitude, do not require a person to be a simpleton. A gringo of a progressive bent need not be so subtle and complex that she or he misses the intention of a Proud Boy to deliver a punch to the face. A pana need not be so concentrated on the past as to see the players on the field in Panama today. A history major should never be so foolish as to think that it’s a dead subject. History’s an ever-developing subject, with all sorts of twists and turns. A political activist shouldn’t be afraid of making history, instead of just crying about it. Involvement with the aim of making some changes is actually what activism is all about.

Time to wake up, folks. And if there comes a need to fight, there also comes a need to know for and against whom and what to fight, and how to fight smart. Maybe those are lessons that come easier to those who were beaten up and locked up long ago.

 

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Beluche, Una fábula de Esopo traducida a nuestros tiempos

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Aesop
Tomado de una ilustración de un libro de Milo Winter de 1919.

La guerra Rusia-Ucrania y la parábola de la zorra y el león

por Olmedo Beluche

Nicolás Maquiavelo en El Príncipe, entre tantos consejos interesantes que da a Lorenzo de Medicis, “El Magnífico”, gobernante de Florencia en las últimas décadas del siglo XV, aborda en el Capítulo XVIII el “modo en que los príncipes deben guardar la fe dada”. Maquiavelo parte su reflexión del problema de saber gobernar con la ley y con la fuerza; preferentemente con la primera, pero “como a menudo no basta”, es preciso “hacer buen uso de uno y otro juntos”.

De allí la disquisición pasa a la parábola de la zorra y el león, animales a quienes el gobernante debe imitar según las circunstancias. Por supuesto, la zorra encarna la astucia (y el arte de engañar) y el león la fuerza (que es capaz de espantar a los lobos que le amenacen).

Dicho lo cual, Maquiavelo analiza el problema de si el gobernante (príncipe) debe cumplir siempre sus promesas, compromisos y tratados. Para señalar que no hay que tener ninguna fidelidad a los compromisos si se convierten en un perjuicio. Y concluir que: “El que supo obrar como zorra tuvo mejor acierto”.

Entonces el problema no es faltar a la palabra empeñada cuando la necesidad o conveniencia te lo indiquen, sino “tener la habilidad de fingir y disimular”. Porque, dice Maquiavelo, “el que engaña con arte halla siempre gentes que se dejen engañar”.

No es necesario que el gobernante posea siempre las virtudes de: “manso, fiel, humano, religioso, leal”, pero sí es necesario “parecerlo”. Agrega que “hay que saber entrar en el mal, cuando hay necesidad…” pero hay que ser “circunspecto, para que cuantas palabras salgan de su boca lleven impreso el sello de las cinco virtudes mencionadas; y para que tanto viéndole como oyéndole, le crean enteramente lleno de bondad, de buena fe, integridad, humanidad y religión”.

Esta astucia en el mentir es útil al gobernante porque: “Cada uno ve lo que pareces ser; pero pocos comprenden lo que eres realmente”.

A mi juicio esta parábola cae a pelo con la actual guerra entre Rusia y Ucrania. En la cual Vladimir Putin, el presidente ruso, aparece como el “león” con el uso descarnado de la fuerza, dejando ver claramente su comportamiento de potencia que apela a las armas para imponer sus intereses, y que de manera casi ingenua ha renunciado a una justificación de sus acciones que sea capaz de convencer, primero a la ciudadanía rusa, y mucho menos a los ucranianos y al resto del mundo, de sus actos y decisiones.

Putin renunció a la parte de “zorra” que debía tener para ser un gobernante virtuoso bajo los consejos de Maquiavelo, y se ha visto simplemente vestido de “león”. Con lo cual se ha enajenado aliados, y logrado casi nulo apoyo de la gente, ni siquiera dentro de Rusia, donde tampoco ha sabido jugar la carta del nacionalismo, con la que la derecha siempre saca buenos dividendos.

Por el contrario, el bando occidental de esta guerra, encabezado por el presidente norteamericano, Joseph Biden, y sus aliados-subordinados europeos de la OTAN, han visto desde el principio como hábiles “zorras” que han logrado disfrazar sus intereses imperialistas en esta guerra detrás del ropaje de defensa de la “democracia”, los “derechos humanos”, la “autodeterminación nacional”, etc.

Con el apoyo de los medios de comunicación de masas, el gobierno de Biden y la OTAN, apelaron a los fantasmas del pasado, sobre todo los que hacen estremecer a la pequeña burguesía europea, disfrazando a Putin como una reencarnación de Atila, Iván el Terrible, el sultán otomano y Adolfo Hitler.

Biden, la OTAN y los medios lograron convencer a la gente en Europa de que la invasión a Ucrania era un primer paso en un proyecto expansionista ruso que no acabaría hasta llegar, por lo menos a Berlín. La opinión pública europea ha sido convencida de que Putin pretende, al menos, retrotraer sus fronteras a lo que fue la Unión Soviética y los estados del este europeo tras la “cortina de hierro” antes de 1989.

La astucia zorruna de la OTAN logró que cundiera el pánico en toda Europa, y con la torpeza política de Putin, lograron llevar a su molino la opinión pública de los países vecinos de Rusia para terminar de meterlos a su alianza militar, haciéndoles creer que es una “acción defensiva”. Con lo cual, siguiendo los consejos de Maquiavelo, Biden y la OTAN faltaron al compromiso de no expandirse hacia el este, ni acercarse a las fronteras rusas, como se le había prometido a Gorbachov, y fueron astutos como la zorra.

Putin al apelar al león va perdiendo la guerra políticamente, que es el primer paso antes de poder ganar por las armas. Biden disfrazado de zorra va ganando la guerra políticamente, sin siquiera haber puesto ninguna baja en el combate y sin que haya caído ninguna bomba en su territorio.

La disputa no es solo por Ucrania, sino principalmente por Europa, que es la gran perdedora, pase lo que pase. Rusia ha perdido su influencia política, económica y cultural en Europa porque sus pueblos se han asustado tanto al ver a Putin vestido de león, que decidieron echarse ciegamente en manos de la zorra norteamericana, subordinándose militar, política y económicamente. Las clases trabajadoras europeas ya están pagando la factura de la guerra, con los aumentos de los presupuestos militares y con la carestía de los combustibles, en favor de los intereses norteamericanos, no delos propios europeos. Y si la guerra escala a un nivel nuclear, serán los primeros que se calcinen.

Europa ha sido tan cegada por la zorra norteamericana que no alcanza a percatarse que el león ruso apenas puede sostener la ocupación sobre el este de Ucrania, donde vive una población mayoritariamente rusa en términos étnicos. Así que la supuesta pretensión de que el león se va a tragar los países bálticos, Escandinavia, Polonia, etc., es una evidente exageración para sostener un miedo que ha vuelto a convertir a buena parte de la población europea en cómplices de la proscripción completa de una etnia, la rusa, en el sentido cultural, deportivo, incluso de sus ciudadanos. Incluso se ha instalado la censura sin que nadie lo note.

Lo ha expresado claramente Josep Borrel, secretario de relaciones exteriores de la Unión Europea (UE), apelando al lenguaje zorruno que mete miedo entre su ciudadanía: “Europa es un jardín… y el resto del mundo es una jungla” (News.Eseuro.com, 13/10/22), en consecuencia, hay que cuidar el jardincito de los bárbaros que amenazan nuestras fronteras. La interpretación es libre, no solo se trata de Rusia, sino que los migrantes africanos y del medio oriente pueden sentirse aludidos.

Previamente había dicho Borrel. “Sin esta guerra no éramos conscientes de que Europa está en peligro” (Euronews, 5/9/22). Con mucha astucia, esa es la idea que han instalado en la mente de millones europeos para justificar su estrategia militar y política frente a Rusia con el respaldo de la “opinión pública”.

Una buena pregunta es: ¿Por qué el discurso de la zorra norteamericana, exceptuando a algunos gobiernos lacayos, no ha calado en la gente de otros continentes? ¿Por qué lo ven como un conflicto distante que no les afecta? ¿O será que ya se ha visto tantas veces actuar a la zorra norteamericana, se han escuchado tantas veces sus falacias, y se han visto sus mentiras desnudadas por los enormes crímenes de lesa humanidad que se han cometido?

La burguesía y la clase dirigente de Estados Unidos, siendo conscientes de sus intereses imperialistas y sus convicciones racistas, siempre se han cuidado de presentarse como víctima y no como victimaria, siempre ha esgrimido para justificar sus crímenes las apelaciones a la democracia, los derechos humanos, el combate a las drogas, etc.

Acá, al sur del mundo, ya se conoce el pelaje y la retórica zorruna de Estados Unidos y la OTAN, porque hemos sufrido reiteras invasiones, intervenciones, golpes de estado, sabotajes, etc. Por eso, contrario a Europa, no levanta mucho entusiasmo la zorra yanqui cuando habla de Ucrania, la gente se encoje de hombros, mira para otro lado y piensa: hipócritas.

visto tantas veces actuar a la zorra norteamericana, se han escuchado tantas veces sus falacias, y se han visto sus mentiras desnudadas por los enormes crímenes de lesa humanidad que se han cometido?

La burguesía y la clase dirigente de Estados Unidos, siendo conscientes de sus intereses imperialistas y sus convicciones racistas, siempre se han cuidado de presentarse como víctima y no como victimaria, siempre ha esgrimido para justificar sus crímenes las apelaciones a la democracia, los derechos humanos, el combate a las drogas, etc.

Acá, al sur del mundo, ya se conoce el pelaje y la retórica zorruna de Estados Unidos y la OTAN, porque hemos sufrido reiteras invasiones, intervenciones, golpes de estado, sabotajes, etc. Por eso, contrario a Europa, no levanta mucho entusiasmo la zorra yanqui cuando habla de Ucrania, la gente se encoje de hombros, mira para otro lado y piensa: hipócritas.

 

Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

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¿Wappin? Wee hours all day sounds / Sonidos de la madrugada para todo el día

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Nashville
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss go rockabilly with Nashville studio musicians. From an NPR video.

It’s Friday. The world is still here.
Es viernes. El mundo sigue aquí.

Alanis Morissette – Ironic
https://youtu.be/lTWgUZLAmhs

Prince & Maceo Parker – Musicology
https://youtu.be/YMCg3k9yUXw

Playing For Change – Hasta la Raíz
https://youtu.be/cUaKBGnn2DQ

Camila Moreno – Millones
https://youtu.be/T0KUY3WmF7E

Stax Volt Tour 1967, with Otis Redding, Booker T. & The MGs, Sam & Dave
https://youtu.be/kUk1WTAReyE

Buffalo Springfield – For What It’s Worth
https://youtu.be/hBoh6CO80tk

Erika Ender – Despacito
https://youtu.be/6azxfINS5vE

Bob Marley – Redemption
https://youtu.be/15_fvQr1pWQ

Taylor Swift – Wildest Dreams
https://youtu.be/dBDAnru7tnI

Dua Lipa – Love Again
https://youtu.be/_wDqVnA9Qik

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
https://youtu.be/srn5Cd9yR3Y

 

 

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As the president shuffles his cabinet his party is in increasing disarray

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PMG
In some eyes Pedro Miguel González is a wanted man and in others, wanted in a different way. The former legislator and former secretary general of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) followed in his father’s footstep in holding both of those posts. The 1989 invasion was a watershed for both. After the invasion the father, Gerardo González, and fellow legislator Balbina Herrera were the core of a rebuilding process that brought the party back to power. The son was a reputed organizer of an urban guerrilla force to oppose the Americans. When George H. W. Bush came to Panama in June of 1992 to take a US election year victory lap, a US Army vehicle was ambushed and Sergeant O. Zak Hernández was slain in the attack. At Parque Porras Balbina was part of creating a disturbance when Bush tried to speak, the police fired tear gas and Bush had to flee the scene. The Americans, and the Panamanian administration that was installed in the invasion, accused Pedro Miguel Gonzalez and several others of killing Herández. The US charge was terrorism resulting in an American citizen’s death. Panama acquitted González. The US warrant and possible death penalty are still outstanding. After his trial in Panama the younger González got elected to the legislature, and later was elected by the PRD as its secretary general. Although nowadays he holds no significant public or party office, he is to many a respected senior statesman in the PRD ranks.

PRD succession was thought to be a done deal, but some senior voices say not

by Eric Jackson

President Cortizo is rearranging his cabinet, with accompanying whispered truths and published tall tales about the why and wherefore of some of the moves and those who are running are making expected gestures. However, some veteran political voices are speaking clearly about the ruling PRD situation, options and predicament. 

The conventional wisdom had it that Vice President José Gabriel “Gaby” Carrizo is the next PRD leader and presidential standard bearer. However, Carrizo came to his position from the world of business, where he was a corporate lawyer representing banker clients, rather that through the ranks of the PRD. Much worse for him, when President Cortizo was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer this past June and went to the United States for some advanced medical consultations, Gaby was left in charge of the country, played many of the corny old political plots very badly, and saw the country explode into protests that nearly paralyzed the entire economy while the boss was away. For the past few generations Panamanian voters have ousted the party that holds the presidency at every opportunity anyway — there is no shortage of adages about why — so the notion was that Carrizo would be the nominee in 2024, run credibly but lose, then come back to become president in 2029.

But former legislator and party leader Pedro Miguel González has been an outspoken critic of that notion, openly in recent interviews with La Estrella and on the Panamá En Directo radio show. On the radio, he stated the basic backdrop to the 2024 campaign in stark terms. “Everything we achieved with respect to economic matters in the last 11 years has been practically lost.” To blame it all on the VP would be quite a stretch — which González does not make — but to have seen Carrizo address a huge national economic crisis prompted by unpaid teachers, high unemployment, labor right being flouted and above all high inflation as if none of the old economic equations or pecking orders had changed is to have recognized a weak candidate-in-waiting.

Then, when people were being driven from their homes by floods and landslides in Chiriqui, Carrizo was in the province not to be seen lending a helping hand. He was instead recruiting new party members ahead of what’s sure to be a contested presidential primary in 2023. At this point in the back stretch of the current five-year political cycle, people generally join the ruling party in hopes of a job for a year and a half or some lesser payoff. In many cases over the years, a bag of groceries has been enough to secure the desired vote.

It was tone-deaf political behavior that left Panama City’s former PRD mayor and the party’s unsuccessful 2014 presidential candidate Juan Carlos Navarro appalled. “Unacceptable,” Navarro declared on his Twitter feed. “Totally ill-advised and out of place to be doing political registrations in the midst of floods and danger to our population. Hopefully they’ll reconsider, give us a change of direction, begin to listen and solve the serious problems of the country in their last two years.”

As González sees it, there are at least three major political currents running within the PRD. He identifies himself with a “Torrijista” tendency said to follow the style and traditions of the late General Omar Torrijos. Then there is the big business oriented faction, from whence hailed 1984 PRD candidate and banker Nicky Barletta — who won by fraud and was then deposed, each time at General Noriega’s behest — and after him arguably former banker Ernesto “Toro” Pérez Balladares. Lately there is a xenophobic, gay-bashing, banker-bashing neofascist tendency best exemplified by Zulay Rodríguez, current legislator and former head of the PRD Women’s Front. Zulay is gathering signatures to run as an independent even while a member of the PRD, and González expects her to mantain her lead in the race to gather signatures and be on the ballot.

The policy of party members being allowed to run as independents, or sign petitions for people running as independents, is controversial. Entertainer and former Tourism Minister Rubén Blades has never been a PRD member but he did serve in the cabinet of Martín Torrijos’s 2004-2009 PRD administration. On his website the actor and musician with the University of Panama and Harvard legal education poses the question at this point in the following way:

Who are the figures that lead in the counts to obtain such [ballot spots]? They are all militant members of political parties. And who have signed to give them their lead? 65% are signatures of members of political parties. In Panama, the laws are expressly created in an ambiguous way, to allow interpretations that produce eternal conflicts, litigation and continuous payments for legal representation, the continuous suspension of the process, the prescription of cases, and the maintenance of institutional impunity that encourages and protects against corruption. How are we going to consider Zulay Rodríguez, the current PRD deputy and the one who has collected the most signatures at the moment, as “independent”? But as we see, everything is possible in the “abattoir of illusions” that defines the Panamanian political process.

To Pedro Miguel González, “What we are living through … is a caricature of what a Torrijista government should be.” Notwithstanding the party’s membership growth as a political patronage machine, he noted in La Estrella. “This elephantine growth that the PRD has had,” he opined, has weakened the party from within.

Did the events of this past July tell us that Panama is unstable? Are the astroturf movements and political postures of the wannabes convincing anyone that there is a viable alternative waiting in the wings?

Get into Panamanian history and when all major political forces are discredited and times are tough, the police or military — they used to be combined in the old Guardia Nacional — have tended to step in. The spasms of brutality and catastrophic end of the 1968-1989 dictatorship may have made those sorts of politics passé, but what’s a troubled country to do?

“I think there is a very similar situation, González told La Estrella. “If we lived through similar circumstances from a geopolitical and regional point of view and a coup d’état was still viable, you would undoubtedly have the breeding ground for a coup.”

In any case, the former legislator and party boss is warning of a big disaster if the current administration tries to impose the PRD’s next presidential candidate.

Now THERE is the stuff of which the tall tales of petty people get spun. White House photo.

It has gotten so bad that in Ricky Martinelli’s media, based on unnamed sources he’s claiming that Erika Mouynes was dismissed as Minister of Foreign Relations because when she was in the United States she posed for a photo with Joe and Jill Biden, which photo op was not made available to Gaby Carrizo. Not to believe anything that Martinelli or his newspapers say, but the country has serious problems — and this is how frivolous the political discourse has become. 

 

 

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The feds are slower, but states are also moving in on the Trump crime wave

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AG Tish
Tish James, from her Twitter feed.

What New York’s Attorney General says

by Letitia James

Since we filed our lawsuit, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued to engage in fraudulent business practices.

Today, we are acting to immediately stop this ongoing fraud.

Trump doesn’t get to play by different rules. We’re asking a court to:

  • Prevent the Trump Organization from moving assets to evade liability.
  • Appoint an independent monitor to oversee any new financial disclosures made to banks and insurers to ensure they are not fraudulent.

We will not allow Donald Trump and the Trump Organization to continue this fraud or evade accountability.

No one is above the law.

 

Contact us by email at fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

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