In the United States, the president is fielding embarrassing questions, senators and representatives are putting on tough poses and public confidence in big business and its major accounting firms has crashed.

It’s not about nothing, but conservative Senator Phil Gramm is right to warn about the possibility of bad legislation that could be passed in the hysteria of the moment. On the other hand, the critiques of those left of the mainstream, who point to appointees with conflicting loyalties and to special interest legislation that helped Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom and Global Crossing get away with what they did for so long, are also valid.

The Democrats are not in a good position to benefit from the business scandals that they are trying to pin on the Republicans. If George W. Bush was Enron’s candidate, the same could be said about many a liberal Democrat in the Congress. And if Enron’s candidate had lost in the 2000 photo finish presidential race, then Arthur Andersen’s main man on Capitol Hill, Senator Lieberman, would have been vice-president.

In any case, though deformed in its framing by compromised and posturing politicians and further distorted by corporate mainstream media with their own conflicts of interest, the issue is at least being debated in the United States.

The Panamanian economy has also been harmed by the collapse of Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing, all of which had investments or plans to make investments here. We also have investors who have been cheated with the assistance of books cooked by Arthur Andersen, which was fined $100,000 for practices that came to light in the collapse of Grupo ADELAG. Moreover, our most notorious and politically best-connected "offshore finance guru," Marc Harris, has absconded.

Here in Panama, these things are not part of the national political dialogue. Not only that, Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, the most flagrant of many Harris supporters in the Panamanian government, continues his services to The Harris Organisation by way of his continued prosecution of Harris’s criminal defamation complaint against journalists who reported the story.

Here, when Enron collapsed, the Moscoso administration hired the manager of its Panamanian subsidiary to handle this country’s relations with that Enron tentacle and the other privatized state industries in which the government retains a minority stake.

Here, the Moscoso administration’s former immigration director Erick Singares defied the Supreme Court by putting a Chinese fugitive on Marc Harris’s private jet for an illegal deportation. The court demanded a criminal investigation, which seems to be going nowhere, and then after removing him in the wake of complaints from the US Embassy, Moscoso appointed Singares to a diplomatic post in Venezuela. The Chávez government rejected Singares as the undesirable thug that he is, but nary a peep was heard from the Panamanian political class about it. Maybe that’s because the PRD is notorious for having played the same games that Singares did.

Maybe the biggest difference between the reaction to financial scandals with political implications in Panama and the United States is that there damage to the credibility of economic and governmental institutions is taken seriously enough to be discussed, while here most political and business leaders don’t seem to care.

Panamanians should care, because the scandals do matter. Our economy is in the pits for a variety of reasons, most notably a business downturn on the international level, but the notorious corruption in both our public and private sectors and our highest government officials’ acquiescence or complicity in all the scams discourages national and foreign investors alike. The generalized corruption that the Moscoso administration has come to exemplify is the principal obstacle to this country’s economic recovery.

We've all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating people up.

Sugar Ray Leonard

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

Agatha Christie

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

James Thurber

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