A week and a half before a change of governments, the SUNTRACS construction workers’ union will take to the streets and cause a few traffic problems to protest the outgoing administration’s moves to deny the union – and some of its leaders personally – access to banking services. It’s just making the labor militants go to other countries or take other roundabout ways to get financial services. This routine about “preventing terrorist financing” will not wash internationally, given who has shot whom in labor disputes here. But if the PRD – an affiliate of the Socialist International – has mutated into such an anti-labor outfit, Mulino and Ricardo Martinelli have long stood for the de facto prohibition of labor unions. We shall see, but it seems that SUNTRACS is warning, not calling for a nationwide shutdown at the moment.
Fragmemtation, governability and Panamanians’ will to live together
Difficult negotiations are underway about how and by whom a divided National Assembly will be run. There are social unrest warnings about Panama’s relationship with First Quantum and the copper mine it ran, and who sacrifices what to stop the Social Security Fund from bleeding out. The suggestion of an amnesty law to benefit some or all of the politicians and operatives who “stole but got things done” isn’t going over well. Nor is the suggestion that Mulino will pardon Martinelli and the latter will walk out of the Nicaraguan Embassy to run Panama through proxies.
The most charitable reading of May 5th’s voting is that on the whole Panamanians despise the entire political caste. The trial balloon of Martinelli’s top lieutenant as president of the National Assembly never got off the ground. Now they suggest a guy with no personal experience in public office who ran his family’s reputation – which does not bear any sort of close scrutiny.
There are all these challenges to the elections of legislators, and appeals of rejected challenges. A few are based on credible-sounding allegations of the use of public funds to buy votes. Most are just frivolous ploys to keep legitimately elected men and women from taking their seats and casting their votes on July 1, when the officers and committee compositions of the next legislature are to be determined.
There are a lot of things over which Panamanians can fight. There were before we voted and there still are after inconclusive elections.
Mulino can tread lightly or pick a fight. His opponents can tread lightly or pick a fight.
Better for Panama if we all step back, take stock of the situation, limit our demands and find whatever narrow consensus we can as a basis for all of us to live peacefully among one another as we try to sort out more difficult problems.
There is no snap of fingers quick exit from our predicament. One way out is a process to get a new constitution but there are all sorts of problems there, too. Simplistic demagoguery that leaves us with a new document but all the usual families in power and all the usual games in play would soon enough lead to breaches of the peace. It’s time for serious and honest reflection by the entire nation.
Jews in Israel don’t all support what the Netanyahu regime is doing. Yet in a racially mixed New York congressional district with a large Jewish minority that reliably votes blue, a Puerto Rican Democratic member of Congress from a nearby district, who takes tons of money from AIPAC and cryptocurrency hustlers, insists that an African-American colleague is an anti-Semite for opposing the massacre that’s ongoing in Gaza and US funding for it. Unattributed photo that was in Haaretz, of a protest march on May 4, 2024 in Haifa.
Among Democrats
Democrats notoriously fight about the burning issues of modern times within the party. Republicans, much less so. Usually, with country club in-crowd manners, the GOP gets in line.
These are unusual times. Donald Trump says that if he gets back into the White House there will be a dictatorship. Fascism is on the ballot this November, even if a lot of Republicans oppose this. About Israel? There are a few actual nazis in the GOP, but by and large Republicans really like the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank and advocate the arrest, expulsion from universities and firing from jobs of Americans who voice objections to this ethnic cleansing.
Democrats are divided between hawks and doves, corporate and progressive factions, and sometimes competing grouplets who put their identities before their principles. Then there are those who understand that freedom and democracy are sometimes at odds with one another, that warring nations might actually each have valid motives for their opposing stands, that a legitimate political party has more than a division of spoils at stake in an election.
Dark money, unlimited campaign spending, foreign interests buying stakes in US politics – these are Republican innovations, most notoriously a GOP-dominated Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. But there are factions of Democrats who buy right into that stuff. Within the party, they often add sleaze and bullying to the discourse.
Republican rhetoric these days sounds as if from another universe, but the worst Democrats also divorce themselves from reality. The operative who defamed Anita Hill to put Clarence Thomas on the high court now bills himself and his operations as “progressive.” A Gentile, Ritchie Torres, lectures Jews in a nearby district about the political requirements of being Jewish, and taunts critics who are not on the AIPAC payroll like he is as “losers.” This is the stuff of next week’s New York Democratic primary.
The move is on by more or less that same crew of operatives who engineered the stupidest presidential campaign of modern times, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, to take down The Squad of progressives in this year’s Democratic primary races. AIPAC, conservative Democrats indicted for bribery, the “Blockchain Caucus” and the insufferable DNC operatives who were outed by Russian leaks back in 2016 may win a few contests. But despite all the money in play, those Democrats who stand on principle will usually hold on in the face of all those attack ads.
Whichever bad ones may slip through the primaries, in the Democratic Party the tide is with the righteous, not with the cynical hustlers. After that phase, all but the most foolish Democrats understand just what the Republicans offer as an alternative in November.
Vonnegut portrait by Giovanni Scifo – Deviant Art.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Bear in mind…
We don’t need bigger cars or fancier clothes. We need self-respect, identity, community, love, variety, beauty, challenge and a purpose in living that is greater than material accumulation.
Donella Meadows
Never knock on Death’s door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!
Matt Frewer
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
Hannah Arendt
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