God isn’t on the ballot

Will the membership of the US Senate be decided on the basis of improper sexual conduct by men? Could be. The men of neither party are totally innocent and pure, and that’s not a reason to dismiss the complaints as of no practical consequence. Americans are at an uncomfortable social moment when changes must be made in the culture.

Will the next Panamanian National Assembly have a new contingent from an Evangelical political party? Ah, but we know this particular crowd of Evangelicals — who should not be taken to represent ALL Evangelicals — and we have seen their interactions in politics. It’s sordid stuff.

Some years ago the Catholic Church got institutionally sick of the “God’s representative in secular politics” pretense and banned most political activity by its priests. Some good men like Father Drinan, the Democratic representative from Massachusetts, had to retire. But of course both Testaments of the Bible are full of tales of political stands by men trying to adhere to God’s guidance and the Vatican still finds itself taking stands on controversial political issues, even if its priests can’t run for office on such stands. And still, an Archdiocese of Metro Panama that took from Richard Fifer of the Petaquilla gold mine scam also is shown to have taken from the Brazilian criminal conglomerate Odebrecht and the archbishop’s plea that the church did not know has the thud that inspires incredulity rather than the ring of truth.

God isn’t on the ballot. Not in the special election in Alabama, not in the 2019 general election in Panama. The values and judgments of believers of all denominations — and of those whose value systems are non-religious — will play large roles in all of those decisions and they should. On basic questions like about how it’s wrong to steal, to take bribes, to oppress those with different beliefs, most of the faithful of the different religions tend to strongly agree. There is a common denominator of ordinary decency. There will be different opinions on various issues and there are rival political tribes, but the underlying value of decency, stripped down to its essentials, ought to have an important role in our decisions.

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A history of idiocy

by Uri Avnery — Gush Shalom

I am furious. And I have good reason to be furious.

I was going to write an article about a subject I have been thinking about for a long time.

This week I opened The New York Times and lo, my yet unwritten article appeared on its opinion pages in full, argument after argument.

How come? I have only one explanation: the author — I have forgotten the name — has stolen the ideas from my head by some magical means, which surely must be branded as criminal. A person once tried to kill me for doing the same thing to him.

So I have decided to write this article in spite of everything.

The subject is idiocy. Particularly, the role of idiocy in history.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that sheer stupidity plays a major role in the history of nations.

Great Thinkers, compared to whom I am a mere intellectual dwarf, have pursued other factors to explain what has turned history into a mess. Karl Marx blamed the economy. The economy has directed humankind from its earliest beginnings.

Others blame God. Religion has caused awful wars, and still does. Look at the Crusades, which for almost two hundred years raged in my country. Look at the 30-year War which devastated Germany. No end in sight.

Some accuse Race. Whites against Red Indians. Aryans against Untermenschen. Nazis against Jews. Terrible.

Or geopolitics. The White Man’s Burden. The Drang-nach-Osten.

For many generations, Great Thinkers have been searching for some deep explanation for war. There must be such an explanation. After all, terrible historical events cannot just happen. There must be something profound, something sinister, which is causing all this untold misery. Something that has accompanied the human race from its very beginnings, and that still directs our destiny.

I have adopted most of these theories in my time. Many of them impressed me very much. Great thinkers. Deep thoughts. I have read many thick volumes. But in the end, they left me unsatisfied.

In the end it hit me. There is indeed one factor common to all these historical events: foolishness.

I know that this sounds incredible. Foolishness? All these thousands of wars? All these hundreds of millions of casualties? All these emperors, kings, statesmen, strategists? All fools?

Recently I was asked for an example. “Show me how it works,” an incredulous listener demanded.

I mentioned the outbreak of World War I, an event that changed the face of Europe and the world forever, and which ended just five years before I was born, My earliest childhood was spent in the shadow of this cataclysm.

It happened like this:

An Austrian archduke was killed in the town of Sarajevo by a Serbian anarchist. It happened almost by accident: the planned attempt failed, but later the terrorist happened upon the duke and killed him.

So what? The duke was a quite unimportant person. Thousands of such acts have happened before and since. But this time the Austrian statesmen thought that this was a good opportunity to teach the Serbs a lesson. It took the form of an ultimatum.

No big deal. Such things happen all the time. But the powerful Russian empire was allied with Serbia, so the Czar issued a warning: he ordered the mobilization of his army, just to make his point.

In Germany, all the red lights went on. Germany is situated in the middle of Europe and has no impregnable natural borders, no oceans, no high mountains. It was trapped between two great military powers, Russia and France. For years the German generals had been pondering how to save the Fatherland if attacked from the two sides simultaneously.

A master-plan evolved. Russia was a huge country, and it would take several weeks to mobilize the Russian army. These weeks must be used to smash France, turn the army around and stop the Russians.

It was a brilliant plan, worked out to the finest detail by brilliant military minds. But the German army was stopped at the gates of Paris. The British intervened to help France. The result was a static war of four long years, where nothing really happened except that millions upon millions of human beings were slaughtered or maimed.

In the end a peace was made, a peace so stupid that it virtually made a Second World War inevitable. This broke out a mere 21 years later, with even larger numbers of casualties.

Many books have been written about “July 1914,” the crucial month in which World War I became inevitable.

How many people were involved in decision-making in Europe? How many emperors, kings, ministers, parliamentarians, generals; not to mention academicians, journalists, poets and what not?

Were they all stupid? Were they all blind to what was happening in their countries and throughout their continent?

Impossible, one is tempted to cry out. Many of them were highly competent, intelligent people, people versed in history. They knew everything about the earlier wars that had ravaged Europe throughout the centuries.

Yet there you are. All these people played their part in causing the most terrible war (up to then) in the annals of history. An act of sheer idiocy.

The human mind cannot accept such a truth. There must be other reasons. Profound reasons. So they wrote innumerable books explaining why this was logical, why it had to happen, what were the “underlying” causes.

Most of these theories are certainly plausible. But compared to the effects, they are puny. Millions of human beings marched out to be slaughtered, singing and almost dancing, trusting their emperor, king, president, commander-in-chief. Never to return.

Could all these leaders be idiots? They certainly could. And were.

I don’t need the examples of the thousands of foreign wars and conflicts, because I live in the middle of one right now.

Never mind how it came about, the present situation is that in the land that used to be called Palestine there live two peoples of different origin, culture, history, religion, language, standard of living and much more. They are now of more or less equal size.

Between these two peoples, a conflict has now been going on for more than a century.

In theory, there are only two reasonable solutions: either the two peoples shall live together as equal citizens in one state, or they shall live side by side in two states.

The third possibility is no solution — eternal conflict, eternal war.

This is so obvious, so simple, that denying it is sheer idiocy.

Living together in one state sounds logical, but is not. It is a recipe for constant conflict and internal war. So there remains only what is called “two states for two peoples.”

When I pointed this out, right after the 1948 war, the war in which Israel was founded, I was more or less alone. Now this is a world-wide consensus, everywhere except in Israel.

What is the alternative? There is none. Just going on with the present situation: a colonial state in which 7 million Israeli Jews oppress 7 million Palestinian Arabs. Logic says that this is a situation that cannot go on forever. Sooner or later it will break down.

So what do our leaders say? Nothing. They pretend to be oblivious to this truth.

At the top of the pyramid we have a leader who looks intelligent, who speaks well, who seems competent. In fact, Binyamin Netanyahu is a mediocre politician, without vision, without depth. He does not even pretend that he has another solution. Nor do his colleagues and possible heirs.

So what is this? I am sorry to have to say it, but there is no other definition than the rule of idiocy.

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An agenda for the people’s Internet

by Sally Burch — ALAI

Since the Internet is now almost ubiquitous and it is we who bring it to life and give it content, does it make sense for us to remain simply as users of services that the big corporations of the sector offer us, under their own conditions? Or should we be taking part in how it is developed and have some power of decision over how our contributions are used? Finding the answers to these questions will be one of the great challenges of this century.

It is worth recalling that when the web was born, about a quarter of a century ago (1993), and the use of the Internet began to expand, many popular and citizens groups welcomed it as a chance to democratize communication, share information, ideas and knowledge and to weave horizontal networks. It coincided with the period of growth of struggles of social movements against neoliberalism, especially in the global South. Internet became an indispensable tool for linking popular and citizens’ struggles across the planet, generating people’s media, interconnecting academic research, facilitating community development initiatives and much more. The people’s Internet[1] took shape and multiplied through countless initiatives in connectivity, software, programs, platforms, content, websites, etc. One might say that Internet became the friendly face of globalization.

From the end of the twentieth century, there was a rapid increase in private investment in the sector; digital social networks appeared and access became massive. In parallel, large private platforms came to predominate, where today the majority of Internet interactions are concentrated, under the control of a handful of mega-corporations. The people’s Internet, based on the commons, is still alive, but increasingly pushed to the margins by the corporate offensive.

Now we are rapidly entering a new phase: the era of the Internet of things, of the digital economy and artificial intelligence. Mass data collection provides the main input and source of value of this economy: data are sold to advertisers, processed through algorithms that control ever more areas of our lives and fed into artificial intelligence systems. They are prey for surveillance programmes, spying and cyberwars. Those who gather and control data concentrate power and wealth. The big Internet corporations and security services take advantage of regulatory vacuums (both national and international) in order to impose their rules. Citizens are powerless to defend their rights or develop autonomous projects.

It was through awareness of this situation that the initiative behind the Internet Social Forum (ISF) took shape, as an autonomous world space of social and citizens’ organizations from diverse social sectors, to debate and seek answers to this situation. It was agreed to do so under the umbrella of the process of the World Social Forum, with its affirmation that “another world is possible” in the face of the neoliberal proposition that “there are no alternatives.”

In support of this initiative, in 2017 various Latin American organizations [1] set up a process of interchange to stimulate the formulation of proposals and initiatives from a regional perspective. With a combination of virtual and face-to-face exchanges and dissemination on these issues, this process led up to the Meeting “Dialogues for a People’s Internet: Our America towards to the Internet Social Forum” (Quito, September 27-29, 2017).

The Meeting prioritized three areas of debate: 1) knowledge; 2) WTO/ e-commerce, work and territory; 3) democracy, security and the State. The dynamic began by situating the global and regional context in these three areas, and then focused on interchange on the issues in view of establishing a regional agenda. Moreover, various experiences of the people’s Internet were shared.

Priorities: Rights and data protection

In the discussion groups, proposals were formulated [2] for the region as well as for the global Internet Social Forum (programmed to take place in India in 2018), both in the field of public policy, as well as for citizens’ action and initiatives. From there, some common lines of action and transversal themes emerged, in particular: human rights and data protection.

Consequently, several priority actions were identified for the coming months, including:

– To establish a broad communications campaign to raise awareness among social organizations, the general public and public authorities on the present tendencies in the Internet and digital technologies, since many of these issues are new and their implications are still not evident for the majority of the population, or even, in many cases, for those responsible for public policies. Among the priority issues are: data management and its impacts on democracy; artificial intelligence and algorithms and the urgency of establishing norms; security and privacy and how to differentiate the tools to be employed, whether for disseminating public information or for undertaking private interchanges (secure messaging channels); implications of the proposal to negotiate e-commerce in the WTO; the danger of cyberweapons; electronic government and its role in promoting citizens’ participation…

– As an urgent priority, to develop public debate in each country and develop criteria for legislation on questions relating to the protection and handling of data and against digital violence. As a contribution to this debate, it was agreed to share experiences and proposals among different countries, taking into account, among other criteria:

• Guarantees for the security and privacy of persons, as a priority.
• Creation of data protection agencies that guarantee the protection of citizens. Data should be decentralized and not concentrated in the hands of the State.
• Guarantees for transparency in the handling and use of personal data in the public and private sectors.
• Personal data or those that allow the identification of a person should be declared non-tradable. Precedence to the protection of personal data over consumption and services.
• Limits and norms for the use of biometric registers.
• Establishing that public data cannot be stored on foreign servers

In that respect, the need was also seen for public debate to re-signify the nature of data: in particular that they should not be considered as commercial goods, but rather as a social good useful for public policies. This also implies defining which data should be public or open and which should be private. The data that States produce should normally be considered public; those that are tied to individuals are those that need protection.

– To share and systematize inputs and experiences that feed into citizens’ action, such as a guide of free and open source software programmes and security tools for different needs; a compilation of good practices for the people’s Internet; inputs on legislation and public policies in different areas; training materials.

In addition, for the agenda of the coming months, it was agreed:

– To take part in the campaign to raise awareness and the mobilizations to reject the negotiation of e-commerce in the World Trade Organization –WTO– (as well as in free trade agreements) since this is an offensive from the big digital transnationals and their governments to deregulate the whole sector in their favour and guarantee that they can exploit data without any restrictions.

– To promote proposals on digital rights for the Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights, whose first session of negotiation was programmed for October 2017 in the UN Human Rights Council.

– To support the world campaign against killer robots and cyberweapons.

– To channel proposals towards regional integration bodies, in matters of technical sovereignty and digital rights.

– In preparation for the global Internet Social Forum, to further develop the debates on these themes in international spaces such as: the parallel events to the Ministerial Meeting of the WTO (Buenos Aires, December 9-14, 2017); the World Social Forum (Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, March 2018).

It was also proposed to establish the bases for a universal declaration on the access, use and development of the Internet, as a regional contribution to bring to the global Internet Social Forum.

Public policies

The discussion groups also formulated various proposals referring to public policies. Among these, there is the need to consider the Internet as a public good or essential service, with universal access, rather than a market service; and that Internet service provision be considered a public service.

Regarding security and surveillance, there is an emphasis on a conception of human security (as opposed to considering only the security of the infrastructure or the owners). This implies typifying the violation of privacy and digital violence, differentiating the juridical goods violated and the type of actors: state, company, person. There is also a call for transparency in the use of public budgets in security agencies and the evaluation of their effectiveness (e.g. surveillance cameras).

In addition, it is necessary to create a legal framework to regulate the application of artificial intelligence and to guarantee the transparency of algorithms.

With respect to technological sovereignty, emphasis was placed on peoples’ sovereignty, under a premise of the public interest. There is agreement to promote the obligation of using free software in systems of public interest, in particular in the educational system, with incentives for the local development of software. And laws should be promoted to guarantee network neutrality: that is to say, equal treatment of all sources, without favouring certain companies or control policies. It is also proposed to undertake action to remove intellectual property management from the penal area and place it under civil law.

Similarly, it is important to promote South-South cooperation, for example for intraregional connectivity infrastructure (fiber-optic ring, satellites); public and citizens’ collaborative laboratories for the creation of artificial intelligence; manufacturing of telecommunications components; the development of regional Internet platforms responding to regional interests and to reduce dependency on the large transnational platforms, among others.

The educational curriculum among other aspects should contemplate Science, Technology and Society in a transversal manner; promote critical education; promote understanding of the Internet as artefact and culture; promote the conscious use of technologies and its impacts on society and the importance of privacy and encryption.

Regarding questions of labour and the popular economy, policies are required to guarantee the rights of workers in the face of the tendency towards more precarious work resulting from automation and the mode of operation of the new digital enterprises (for example, transport companies that do not recognize their drivers as employees). And policies for promotion of e-commerce that favour the SMEs and national rural producers, instead of creating dependency on transnationals.

Towards a people’s Internet

The people’s Internet is being built through a multitude of actions developed by distinct sectors. It is important to strengthen the ties among them. Some of the ideas mentioned include:

– That citizens take back control of the digital world, by producing their own contents that respond to their identities, interests, concerns and diversity. (For example, to diversify the contents in Wikipedia). And that includes employing our power to use or abandon abusive social networks or companies.

– To generate teaching material and distribute it; to form brigades for training and raising awareness; to engage in training activities with respect to free technology and culture.

– To propose interchanges, information, analysis on the impact of technological changes in labour (precarious work), farming, the environment, cities, etc. To call attention to negative proposals in areas such as geoengineering, the green economy, genomes, that are likely to be further empowered by digital technologies.

– To seek convergence between the technology sectors, techno-politics, popular movements, citizens’ organizations and public sector entities, in order to construct an organized social force to promote this agenda.

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Panama, between the USA and China

by Marco A. Gandásegui, hijo

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, is finishing an Asia trip that included five countries that are key to Panama’s future. In his visit to China in particular the two most powerful world leaders met. Moreover, it was a meeting of the canal’s two most important users. Between these two economic powers, more than 80 percent of all the maritime traffic through our waterway was represented. Moreover, Trump visited Japan and South Korea, the next most important users after the two previously mentioned.

President Varela should take advantage of the opportunity to add to Trump’s trip. Perhaps the agenda will have another tone, but they will discuss the same problems. Like Trump, Varela would have to put two intimately related topics on the table. In the first place, he has to as if the policies that were recently approved by the Chinese Communist Party Congress will affect that giant country’s foreign commerce, and by the way, transits through the Panama Canal. Second, China apparently decided to give another boost to the so-called “Silk Road.” It’s looking toward Central Asia and Europe, but Beijing also would give a privileged place to Latin America.

Trump has a dual agenda for his trip. On the one hand, recall that for the East Asian countries Washington has geopolitical intentions to continue as the power that dominated the region in the second half of the 20th century. On this chess board the United States plays a key role in keeping the conflict with North Korea going. On the other hand the US president attents to resolve problems related to its trade deficit, especially with China. Trump insists that China’s President Xi cooperate with his policy of generating more industrial jobs in the USA.

In Panama’s case, all indications are that the Chinese have three objectives. The first refers to the Panama Canal and the need to keep it in service for their global policy of world commerce. The second is related to investments that it plans to make in Panama for the short term: land transport, agro-industry and tourism. The third and last is perhaps the most audacious on the part of the Chinese: to turn Panama into its center of operations to consolidate trade and economic ties with the entire Latin American region.

The Chinese also have plans for the immediate future and also over the long term. Trump moved quickly and his tour of the Far East is proof of that. There is fear in the United States that China — which freed itself from Western domination in 1949 — could make a qualitative and technological leap — economic and military — in the 21st century. China has, at present, an economic potential equal to that of the United States. Its financial capacity will be equal to or greater than that of Washington in a few years. Trump’s specialists say that at some point in the 21st century they will have the same military power. The enormous cultural power of the United States is sometimes overlooked, and how this propaganda machine has prevailed over all resistance in the whole world. Could China match the US in the field of media, social networks, cinema, music and other areas that Washington dominates? Will the Chinese be thinking about this challenge for the 21st century. or will they postpone it for the 22nd century? They do not show signs of being in a hurry.

So before finishing a year in the White House, Trump went to China.

For Panama’s part, it will have to put together a working team with reference to relations with China in the short term but also with a long view. The team can’t be partisan and much less of those who try to benefit by any sort of “checkbook” policy. Panama has to propose its own investment plan for the Panama Canal area’s next 10 years. Moreover, it has to identify its priorities for national development, through about 2040, and what that implies in terms of investment in transportation infrastructure, agriculture and industry. Finally, Panama has to propose, over the long term (think 2060) a strategy to turn itself into a center of regional operations, with global projections, with maritime, air and land transport dimensions.

Trump surpassed us. He has a lot more people working on the matter in his administration. Panama has to get to work, to prevent China from taking possession of the isthmus without us realizing it.

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