You don’t just pick up one of these and put it in your pocket. Steel girders, each about 22 feet long and worth about $5,000 apiece, on the premises of the Junta Comunal in the Panama City corregimiento of Las Cumbres. These are just a few of hundreds of missing pieces. Various cover stories have been, are being and no doubt will be concocted, but these criminal investigators from the Public Ministry are treating it as part of a massive theft from the Ministry of Public Works. Public Ministry photo.
The circular finger-point
Might the decisive evidence come from document examiners looking for post-dated public records? Perhaps. If the investigation gets that detailed.
Might a pattern emerge from the known destinations of the steel girders that have been recovered? It probably already has, but prosecutors don’t want to tip their hands in an ongoing investigation.
Whether or not we believe the versions given by former Minister of Public Works Rafael Sabonge, at first hearing they sound like swan songs at the end of a disgraceful on-and-off career in government service.
Will the case proceed from the confession of some knowing truck driver, machine operator, supply depot guard or minor functionary threatened with doing time that really ought to be served by somebody else? Could be.
It looks like one of the final looting sprees of the Cortizo administration, but we shall probably see the who, what, when and where of it in more detail, perhaps in a criminal trial.
Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool. The US federal indictment of the company through which he worked alleges that the Russian government funded him to the tune of $100,000 per show. Wikimedia photo by Gage Skidmore.
Free expression and the online US election rumble
You wouldn’t expect RT, Radio Havana, Iranian television or Somali pirate radio to have nice things to say about US foreign policy. Maria Butina, convicted and imprisoned in the USA for acting as an unregistered foreign agent – not a spy, but a saleswoman for Russian gun manufacturers – now works as a legislator in Russia’s Duma and might have interesting things to say about the United States. A free nation and thoughtful individuals ought to be able to hear such stuff, so long as we know who’s speaking.
A string of Republican podcasters covertly financed by Vladimir Putin’s government? American media influencers surreptitiously paid by the Ayatollah’s government to sway US public opinion? Front people for governments allied to the United States seeking to affect US foreign policy without disclosing who and what they are? A Democratic lawmaker bribed to secretly promote Egyptian interests from inside Washington power circles?
Been there, seen those sorts of things over many years.
It’s election campaign season in the United States and the country is particularly vulnerable to the covert manipulation of the most gullible voters. Putin ran this game in 2016 with some success, but by 2020 the accusation that some commentator was or is a “Russian bot” worked against such tactics, at the cost of dumbing down US political discourse.
Let’s allow foreign powers to have their say, so long as they are identified as such. That’s one of the ways in which free people defend their democratic institutions. And if Americans who see or hear those message are rude in their scorn, that’s free speech too.
The late Texas Governor Ann Richards.
Wikimedia portrait by Clarkwrichards.
In politics your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
Ann Richards
Bear in mind…
All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.
Norman Thomas
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