Tuesday afternoon at the piquera in Anton. Into the second week of the strike and the day after the president make his speech to the nation, the protesters were unimpressed, the roadblocks were still up and stores in Anton were beginning to run short of produce from Chiriqui, things imported from Costa Rica or Colombia and meat and poultry in general. All of which is reflected in the paucity of local route buses and passengers waiting to board them. Photo by Eric Jackson.
The nation can’t and shouldn’t stand for more of the same
Right. We hold a “consultation” that is promised to be binding but constitutionally can’t be so, because it is too close to next May’s general election.
The company may or may not continue digging up and exporting copper in the meantime, under the old contract that was struck down by the Supreme Court or the revised version that has brought unprecedented crowds of protesters onto the streets, not only of the capital but of all the major provincial towns. In the meantime both the company and the PRD government continue to bombard us with propaganda in favor of the mine.
So we have a snap “referendum” in which PRD and company operatives go around with bags of groceries, cash or whatever to buy votes in favor of the mine? Have they budgeted for police and Electoral Tribunal protection of such hoodlums going around our neighborhoods committing the crime of buying votes?
The discredited legislature is going into special session to quickly jam through Plan C. By and large the nation is not amused.
After all of the years of high court scandals, it’s the opportunity of our Supreme Court magistrates to rescue a bit of institutional credibility. Let’s hope that they quickly and definitively strike down this latest version of thhe contract and make any consultation or referendum moot.
Understand, however, that a trap is being laid here. A bogus election in which the opponents of strip mining refuse to participate could be left to the company and the PRD and be presented as a “democratic mandate” for the mine. If this December vote is held, strip mining opponents must quickly mobilize and crush the government’s proposal under the weight of popular opinion. THEN continue the political offensive through the May general election, to retire every politician who has played corny games for the benefit of a company that has ripped us off.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, responding to a censure resolution brought to us by the colleague who warned the USA about the threat of “Jewish space lasers.”
The ugliness that’s today’s US House of Representatives
Shall the realm of what’s acceptable in US public discourse range from the Putin Republicans to the Netanyahu Democrats? That’s the way that those who brought machine gun fire into campaign ads want to have it.
Meanwhile the United Nations numbers the children who have been killed in the latest Israel war against Gaza in the thousands. Should we never mind that the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel killed some 1,400 Israelis, almost all of them non-combatant civilians? Of course not. But one war crime does not cancel out another.
Rashida Tlaib, who got her start as an elected public official when the Jewish Michigan state representative for whom she worked as a staffer boosted her to succeed him, does make the occasional error. However, she ably represents her district and defends many Americans who don’t have ties to that part of Michigan but find themselves the target of concentrated hate.
How many Republicans will vote for paranoia about Jewish space lasers and against Muslims in their midst? How many DEMOCRATS will do that? What percentage of the US House of Representatives will wimp out in the face of AIPAC money and attack ads?
It’s men and women like Rashida Tlaib who make the United State of America the land of the free and the home of the brave, to the extent that its people live up to those ideals. Stand by Rashida and her defense of human rights.
Malcolm X, in January of 1964, met with Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm is the taller man on the right side of the photo. Both would be slain by gunmen. Library of Congress archive photo by Marion S. Trikosko.
Truth does not change, only our awareness of it.
Malcolm X
Bear in mind…
Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.
Barbra Streisand
No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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