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It’s the latest media purchase by the billionaire class, a group that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post), Boston Red Sox owner John Henry (the Boston Globe), billionaire Glen Taylor (the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (the Las Vegas Review-Journal).
Some have praised this growing trend, arguing that wealthy individuals are journalism’s last, best hope. And there are notable cases of rich philanthropists, like Pierre Omidyar and Gerry Lenfest, making significant donations toward public service journalism.
Nonetheless, potential hazards arise when news outlets increasingly rely on private capital and billionaires’ largess.
The upside of privatizing the news
Private ownership of news organizations is, of course, nothing new.
Since at least the late 19th century, most major US magazines and newspapers have been owned or controlled by wealthy individuals or families. Often these owners distinguished themselves by their commitment to journalistic excellence: at The New York Times, the Ochs-Sulzberger family; at the Los Angeles Times, the Chandlers; and at the Washington Post, the Grahams. In the magazine world, Condé Nast, privately owned by the Newhouse family’s Advance Communications, continues to produce magazines highly regarded for their journalistic rigor, from the New Yorker to Wired.
Between the 1970s and early 2000s, however, media companies increasingly became publicly traded stock corporations that often expanded into large chains. Gannett, owner of USA Today and over 100 other daily newspapers, and Sinclair, proprietor of 173 television stations, are currently two of the largest publicly traded media companies.
In contrast to a private company — which can forgo profits if it chooses — a publicly traded company has obligations to maximize shareholder value. Emphasizing profitability often comes at the cost of professional excellence or civic commitment, even at media companies like the Washington Post, where the founders retained control of voting stock after going public in 1971.
As Kathryn Weymouth, the last Graham family publisher of the Washington Post, remarked when she passed the baton to Bezos: “If journalism is the mission, given the pressures to cut costs and make profits, maybe [a publicly traded company] is not the best place for the Post.”
So compared to Wall Street control, private ownership has many potential advantages. As Bezos has demonstrated, a private owner can absorb short-term losses in service of long-term gain. While most news organizations are still in austerity mode, the “new” Washington Post is increasing staff and budgets. Many believe it’s also dramatically improving its quality and impact.
How benevolent is the billionaire model?
But private ownership is no guarantee of either commercial or professional success. And not all private owners are the same. Today, one of the fastest-growing forms of private media ownership is the investment company, linked to hedge funds or other forms of private equity.
These companies are just as focused on profits as a publicly traded firm — and perhaps even more willing to close down a media outlet when its economic performance is sub-par. The largest investment groups include New Media/Gatehouse (125 daily newspapers, now larger than Gannett), Digital First Media (62 daily papers), and Tronc/Tribune (owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and 17 other dailies).
Exhibit A is Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul and conservative activist who bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015. He kept the purchase secret at first, and his representatives reportedly pressured the newspaper’s staff to cover Adelson and his allies in a positive light.
In more subtle ways, private ownership also raises concerns about partisan bias, self-dealing and lack of transparency. Donald Trump has exploited these vulnerabilities by posting tweets attacking the “AmazonWashingtonPost” and has threatened government anti-trust investigations of Amazon to try to intimidate Bezos.
Though Trump’s motives are suspect, the concern is valid: As Amazon gains market share in industry after industry, the potential for the Washington Post to have serious conflicts of interest increases exponentially.
Laurene Powell Jobs’ purchase of The Atlantic via her Emerson Collective (a nonprofit limited liability company) is comparable, in some ways, to the Poynter Institute’s ownership of the Tampa Bay Times. In both cases, nonprofit organizations are overseeing entirely commercial news outlets.
Of course, The Atlantic isn’t a newspaper with any pretense of objectivity. It’s a magazine, both online and off, with a point of view that also provides space for other views. Like the Washington Post, it’s been profitable in recent years. With attention-grabbing journalism and skillful use of social media, The Atlantic is netting significant earnings online without cannibalizing its print magazine, whose circulation is growing as well. Behind the scenes, The Atlantic also generates revenue from organizing corporate and government forums and special events.
This model may be a formula for economic success, but is it an unalloyed boon for democracy? The Atlantic’s digital rise has been fueled by sponsored content (now 60 to 75 percent of its total revenues) — a type of advertising that tries to be persuasive by looking like news — while the magazine’s profitable off-the-record salons can, as one media columnist has argued, have a corrupting effect by driving “a measurable quantity of political discourse out of the public sphere and into the private.”
What about the public interest?
In fact, The Atlantic and the Washington Post are the bright and shiny faces of an increasingly oligarchic media system in the USA. The oligarchs’ values and priorities, however, may not align with democratic objectives. Their business model — and definition of journalistic success — tends to exclude audiences or issues that cannot be monetized. High-end advertisers favor content that appeals to high-earning demographics, which can skew coverage away from concerns of the working class and poor.
So instead of reaching out to underserved readers, these billionaire-owned news organizations may exacerbate economic and racial divides by privileging views and voices more in line with higher socioeconomic groups. We shouldn’t be surprised: The biggest beneficiaries of a highly stratified economic system are unlikely to take the lead in addressing inequality.
Under Bezos’s stewardship, the Washington Post was conspicuous for its harshly critical coverage of Bernie Sanders’s inequality-focused candidacy. Powell Jobs is no doubt sincere in her reformist zeal, yet her single-minded push for educational “innovation” conveniently shifts attention from the massive imbalance in resources available to low-income versus high-income school districts. While the new media oligarchs might value profits less than their Wall Street compatriots, they may be more determined as “thought leaders” to shape — and limit — public policy debate.
Instead of being in thrall to these benefactors, it’s important to redouble efforts to truly democratize the ownership and funding of our media system. One way is to increase government support for US public media, the worst-funded in the Western world.
Research shows that public media tend to be more independent, ideologically diverse and critical of dominant policy positions compared to commercial news organizations. Furthermore, strong public media systems correlate with higher political knowledge and democratic engagement. Public media are also the best positioned to withstand various kinds of market failure, which will likely only worsen in the coming years.
Numerous sources can help fund public options and foster structural diversity in our media system, ranging from spectrum auctions generating revenue to support local journalism to having Facebook and Google pay into an investigative journalism trust. Tax incentives and policy protections can ensure a commitment to public service and bottom-up governance by citizens and journalists instead of absentee owners. Indeed, one possible silver lining to commercial journalism’s struggles is a renewed search for structural alternatives, especially public and nonprofit models.
These are obviously long-term solutions. In the meantime, a truly diverse media ecology could have public-spirited oligarchs playing a positive role. But when they become the dominant players — as is increasingly the case today — they may threaten, more than strengthen, our democracy.
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¿Pronto para ser condos de lujo vacíos para los lavadores de dinero del mundo?
El Distrito Norte
por Marco Gandásegui, hijo
El nuevo Distrito Norte que aprobó la Asamblea Nacional de Diputados, y que espera la sanción del Ejecutivo, tiene más de mil kilómetros cuadrados y una población que supera los 200 mil habitantes. Aún más importante, contiene dentro de lo que serían sus fronteras las fuentes de agua que alimentan a la ciudad de Panamá (un millón de habitantes) y al Canal de Panamá (principal exportador de servicios del país: B/2,500 millones). Además, el distrito Norte se ha convertido en los últimos 40 años en ‘ciudad dormitorio’ para trabajadores que viajan todos los días a la ciudad de Panamá. El 90 por ciento de los trabajadores son migrantes de otras regiones del país que vienen en busca de nuevas oportunidades para ellos y sus familias. Todos estos antecedentes – agua potable para la ciudad capital, agua para el Canal, espacio para los trabajadores que llegan en busca de nueva oportunidades – constituyen problemas que no son contemplados por la ley que pretende crear el Distrito Norte.
Más aún, hay una fuerte presión por parte de inversionistas urbanistas en construir nuevas barriadas de lujo en el área. En la actualidad, hay regulaciones muy estrictas sobre este tipo de construcciones por los efectos negativos que tendrían sobre la cuenca del río Chagres (que provee de agua potable a la ciudad y del líquido precioso al Canal de Panamá). Por lo menos uno de los diputados que presentó la ley para crear el Distrito Norte a la Asamblea es promotor de estas nuevas urbanizaciones.
La propuesta de los legisladores de la Republica es incompleta y desordenada. (No tiene una justificación y tampoco presenta una consulta realizada en las comunidades). Es importante participar en el debate en torno a la pertinencia de crear un nuevo distrito en el norte del actual distrito de Panamá.
Hay que contestar algunas preguntas sencillas. ¿Cómo beneficiará el nuevo distrito al país? ¿Qué beneficios recibimos todos los panameños? Además, ¿cómo se beneficiará el nuevo distrito Norte? ¿Cómo se beneficiarán sus habitantes y otros residentes del nuevo distrito? Los beneficios para el país se pueden medir tanto por los aportes que haga el nuevo distrito a la economía, así como a la cultura. Asimismo, por el ordenamiento territorial y las conexiones que pueda establecer con los demás distritos de la Republica (77 en total). No existe un plan en la ley, tampoco una estrategia, ni propuesta alguna para determinar como beneficiará el nuevo distrito al país. Tampoco existe una idea de cómo el distrito Norte podría beneficiar a todos los panameños. La Asamblea Nacional (de Diputados) al debatir una ley tiene que recordar que legisla para todos los panameños.
También hay que ver como se beneficia el área norte del Distrito de Panamá con este cambio político-administrativo. Según los proponentes, el nuevo Municipio ‘Norte’ tendría acceso directo a todos los impuestos locales, sin necesidad de pedirle al Municipio de Panamá un centavo. En la actualidad, el Municipio de Panamá le transfiere a los 4 corregimientos del Norte más fondos de los que generan esas divisiones administrativas. No es casual que el alcalde del Distrito de Panamá se siente algo contento con la idea de deshacerse de esa carga financiera que representaría el posible futuro distrito Norte.
La población no se siente parte de la propuesta de los diputados que quieren crear el distrito Norte. Opinan que hay más corrupción envuelto en la ley que ya aprobó la Asamblea, pero que el Presidente todavía no sanciona. La propuesta no habla de centros de salud, escuelas o de seguridad en las comunidades. Todo indica que tiene otras prioridades.
Hay indicios que el proyecto del nuevo distrito fue concebido en las oficinas de abogados que trabajan con inversionistas que quieren construir barrios de lujo en esos corregimientos. La iniciativa puede beneficiar a unos pocos pero no a la población que supera los 200 mil habitantes y crece a una tasa muy alta.
¿Necesitamos más distritos en la región metropolitana? No tengo los elementos necesarios para opinar con autoridad. En todo caso, requieren estudios más serios. El área ‘Norte’ tiene 1,028 kilómetros cuadrados. Comparado con San Miguelito (50 km2) o la ciudad de Panamá (150 km2) es un territorio monstruoso. Sin planificación y sólo para negociar la construcción de barriadas exclusivas, no se justifica la creación de un Distrito Norte. Hay que regresar a las comunidades y coordinar con su gente para saber qué quieren.
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OneOctober morning in Richmond, Virginia, 32-year-old Joseph Coxwatched his friends and neighbors go to the polls for the first time.
The fight to get to that moment had been long, bloody, and vicious. But as a black man newly eligible to vote after a lifetime of discrimination, Cox did something that would’ve seemed incomprehensible only a decade before: He won an election.
Racist white politicians worked to find new justifications for stripping the voting rights of African American men (women could not yet vote), alleging voter fraud and implementing heinous tactics like literacy tests, poll taxes, and voting roll purges.
The fact that thousands of African Americansvoted and held elected officeduring Reconstruction only to face a brutal Jim Crow backlash underscores an important theme in our country’s history: Voting rights have been won, then weakened, and then lost before.
Today, too many people take for granted that the advances achieved during the civil rights movement are still firmly in place. But progress is neither promised nor irreversible.
The latest incarnation of the long right-wing campaign to weaken voting rights isDonald Trump’s “Election Integrity” Commission, which Trump convened after absurdly claiming that he only lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally. But there’snot one shred of evidenceof widespread in-person voter fraud in the United States.
The same sham justifications used to prop up voter suppression tactics during the Jim Crow era — claims that such measures preserve the integrity, efficiency, and sustainability of elections — are being unapologetically recycled today.
Trump’s new voter suppression commission, which met for the first time in July, isled by some of the most strident opponents of voting rightsalive today — people who’ve built careers on stripping the voting rights of thousands upon thousands of eligible voters of color.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who co-chairs the commission, is among the worst.
After requiring Kansans to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote — a move that blockednearly 20,000 eligible voters — a federal court said Kobach had carried out “mass denial of a fundamental right.”
Kobach also promotes the “Interstate Crosscheck” program that claims to identify in-person voter fraud. But in reality, the Washington Post reports, the system “gets it wrong over 99 percent of the time” — putting voters at risk of losing their most essential right.
Another member is Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer described by former colleagues as “the point personfor undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”
Of course, no one should be allowed to vote twice in an election. But voter impersonation isbasically non-existent. While the commission might claim to be about promoting the integrity of our elections, their true task is to find justifications for laws that make it harder for members of certain communities to vote.
The history of voting rights in America is a one filled with both progress and regression.
When I think of Joseph Cox winning his right to vote in Richmond in 1867, and when I think of my grandparents having to fight for that same right in that same place all over again a century later, I wonder how so many Americans have forgotten the fragility of this precious right.
I wonder how so many are blind and indifferent to the assault on the right to vote — a right people fought and died for — happening right before our eyes today. We’ve seen these attacks before. And not all of us have forgotten.
Diallo Brooks is the director of outreach and public engagement at People For the American Way.
The struggle for voting rights, not long before passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Washington Area Spark/ Flickr
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The property in question, with the mouth of the Rio Cañaveral at the bottom left and the beachfront purportedly acquired stretching up toward the east. A basic pointer about rights of possession land: if it’s not lived upon, nor used to grow crops, graze animals nor as business premises, it’s probably not “possessed” such as to support any claim to right of possession. Yeah, you can get a lawyer to tell you otherwise. You can also get a lawyer to handle your purchase of the Bridge of the Americas.
A trial and an arbitration over a land scheme
by Eric Jackson (most of this was broken in La Prensa over several years)
In 1997, after years of agitation and promises, the Pérez Balladares administration created the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca. There were complications. The Bugle — a minority that speaks Buglere rather than Ngabere which is itself divided among folks in the Veraguas highlands and along the Caribbean coast (the latter sometimes known as the Bokota) — were not all happy about being a minority within a larger indigenous entity. Ngabe politics are fractious. And then there were and are non-indigenous people living within to comarca, and pockets of indigenous populations that would not fit within a contiguous semi-autonomous commonwealth. When the comarca was created out of parts of Veraguas, Chiriqui and Bocas del Toro there were a few non-contiguous parts and guarantees for the property rights of the non-indigenous farmers and fishers already living within the entity’s boundaries.
Come 2004, the Panamanian government and the United Nations agreed to list more than 28,000 hectares of wetlands in the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca under the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty signed in Ramsar, Iran and designed to protect wetlands, particularly those of importance to migratory birds or of endangered species. Thus was born the Damani Guariviara Protected Area. Development that would adversely affect the wetland is prohibited there, as it is in all sites designated under the Ramsar accord.
Come March of 2010, one Feliciano Baker Valdes filed suit in a Bocas del Toro court to confirm squatters’ rights that he claimed to two beachfront parcels east of Rio Cañaveral, just under 220 hectares in all. Baker does not claim that he had rights of possession by actually having possessed the property. He says that he bought these rights in 2009 from attorney Evisilda Martínez.
Baker got Andino Archibold, the mayor of the comarca’s municipal district of Kusapin at the time, to sign off on his claim. The mayor would not have the authority to do this in any case, and the money claimed to have been paid did not register in the district’s accounts. Various third parties began offering the property, including an American who wanted to advertise it in The Panama News. University students from the comarca got wind of scheme and began to denounce it and Archibold. Residents of Kusapin began to complain to the regional government and others of helicopters frequently coming and going at the beach.
That June the two parcels, along with another adjacent 485 hectares, were sold by Baker to Desarrollo Ecoturistico Cañaveral, a company owned by Costa Rican legislator Antonio Álvarez Desanti. Mr. Álvarez Desanti is neither an ignoramus nor a back bencher. The attorney and businessman has twice presided over Costa Rica’s legislature. He was part of then President Laura Chinchilla’s delegation on a 2013 state visit with Ricardo Martinelli in the Palacio de las Garzas. In the 2018 presidential elections Álvarez Desanti will be the candidate of the National Liberation Party (PLN), one of his country’s historic major parties.
The Costa Rican politician said that his plan was to build a $40 million hotel on the beach. In a meeting with the now fugitive but then Martinelli administration tourism minister Salomón Shamah, the latter promised that if the permits were secured then there would be Panamanian government subsidies for the hotel project. Ricardo Martinelli’s cousin, attorney Francisco Martinelli Patton, handled the paperwork for the purported sale to Álvarez Desanti’s company.
In the Public Registry, the sale was said to be for $72,000. In a bank account set up by Baker to receive the payment from Álvarez Desanti, a $250,000 transaction was recorded. Whatever was claimed to have been paid by any party to the transaction to the municipality does not show up in any bank records.
In September of 2011 Willy Jiménez, the president of the Ño-Kribo Regional Congress (that is, overseeing the part of the comarca that used to be in the province of Bocas del Toro), filed a criminal complaint with the Public Ministry’s anti-corruption prosecutor. He cited falsified documents in local offices, including purported witnesses to prior possession of the property by persons who did not live in the area and never had. Afterward, however, Jiménez seemed to change his mind. The regional government signed an agreement with Álvarez Desanti’s company to approve the hotel. But by that time local residents were up in arms and filed their complaints against not only those whom Jiménez cited but also Jiménez himself.
But Martinelli’s minister of government, Jorge Ricardo Fábrega, came to the would-be developer’s defense. He said that the registered rights of possession to the property were not new and that in any case the beach is not part of the comarca so indigenous authorities or citizens have no standing to complain. By mid-2013 Álvarez Desanti was claiming that the complaints against the transactions and those involved had been dismissed.
A year later, Martinelli had lost his proxy re-election bid, all the paperwork for the project was not done and no public official was willing to sign or issue anything for the hotel project to proceed. Meanwhile the deal had already gone sour in the weeks before the 2014 elections, as the situation looked ugly enough to become an annoying campaign issue for the ruling Cambio Democratico party. In February of 2014 a local judge in Bocas opened a criminal investigation of the matter. The following month Álvarez Desanti filed for arbitration before a World Court panel in the United States, claiming that Panama had improperly stripped him of his property. He’s asking for $100 million in compensation.
Baker and Archibold go on trial for forgery and fraud on August 10. The arbitration case in pending.
So who’s making out like a bandit? Perhaps the US law firm of Hogan Lovells. This past May the Varela administration approved $3.77 million to hire them to fend off Álvarez Desanti’s claims before the World Court arbitration panel.
Background: one reason why we don’t do real estate ads
A digression about the evolution of our practices here. The Panama News does not take ads anymore, either paid display ads or the former free unclassifieds that we used to to. This story, in retrospect, is an illustration of one of the reasons why we don’t do that, apart from the primordial consideration that by going ad-free we can use certain content that is subject to cooperative commons restrictions that allow free use but not for commercial purposes.
Long about 2009, there was this American who wanted to place a real estate unclassified ad in The Panama News, seeking to sell a large tract of beachfront land east of Rio Cañaveral. But a faint bells rang from the past. Hey, isn’t this part of the Ngabe-Bugle Comarca, the lands of which are not supposed to be for sale to outsiders? Hey, isn’t this part of an internationally recognized and legally protected wetland area, more or less off-limits for developers?
Indeed — part of the Damani Guariviara Wetlands, protected by international treaty and nationl law in 2004. The Ministry of the Environment now, and its precursor the National Environmental Authority, then and now said and say that on the 24,089 hectare site there were and are no structures.
But this man said he had rights of possession and the approval of comarca authorities. Checking the man further, he was not registered to sell real estate in Panama and several people warned that he was a cut-out, a front for someone without rights or with very dubious rights to various properties trying to sell these to gullible foreigners. So his ad did not run. It was for the sale of the property that is the basis of the ongoing court cases discussed above.
We were not so quick to catch the one from the guy who was trying to sell a house in the Azuero to liquidate and conceal marital assets in the course of a divorce. He didn’t tell us that but SHE did and the ad came down. But the guy with the development in Boquete that was based on the appropriation of marital assets in violation of a US divorce decree? THAT angle was not known until after the fact, and his ads ran. But we routinely omitted the various ads for properties that allegedly included privately owned beaches, because that’s clearly illegal, no matter what the practices might be.
Looking up property titles and right of possession registries in this country is an arcane art, designed that way to provide income for lawyers and opportunities for swindlers in and out of public office. But there are rules of thumb. Rights of possession are essentially registered squatters’ rights, and such right depend on actual possession. To buy rights of possession to a parcel of land that nobody works, on which nobody grazes animals, on which no structure has been built is to buy from someone who is not in possession and thus has no interest to sell. It can get more complicated than that, but the abandonment of a property for which rights of possession are registered means that those rights are extinguished.
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We get more signs of military unrest. Given Venezuela’s history, Latin America’s history, the severe and intractable nature of a Venezuelan economic collapse and a Venezuelan civilian politics that’s about bitter power struggles with hardly a thought for what to do about the country, a military coup would not be a huge surprise. The Bolivarian army stepping in to depose a Bolivarian president who is in the process of tearing up the Bolivarian constitution? Might happen. Any number of other possibilities, most of them awful, may be in store for Venezuela instead. If there is an afterlife, poor Simón Bolívar — who experienced comparable bitterness in his lifetime.
What should it mean for Panama?
First of all, that President Varela uncritically joins with President Trump in efforts to topple President Maduro makes it reasonable to suspect that the present policy of Panama would sign away Panama’s sovereignty as an independent republic. Perhaps the worst victims along the way would be other sister Latin American republic from which this country would serve as a springboard for an attack from the north. Panama should work with other Latin American countries, and only act to the extent that there is a consensus, to assist Venezuela past its troubles. A return to servile foreign policies of the past is a concern for Panamanians, not just for the people in other countries that are targets for foreign intervention.
Second, Panama can’t solve the terrible individual problems of the millions of Venezuelans. Asylum for political figures facing arrest over political charges is a traditional expression of Panamanian neutrality and assistance for peace processes, but it should first be fairly impartial as the tides of fortune move in and out and second should not be a license for anybody to use Panama as a platform from which to direct, arm or incite a civil war in another country. The many Venezuelans who have already come here? The hatred against them needs to stop. So long as they obey our laws their integration into Panamanian society should unfold. But our own economy is weak and we just can’t take in a much more populous nation whose real income has been cut in half over the past few years. One thing should be certain for Panamanians: anyone who would become president of Panama running on a platform of hating our neighbors would ultimately turn on fellow Panamanians as well. That person is unfit to hold that office which she or he seeks.
Third, Venezuela has a large outstanding debt to Panama, but as a nation Venezuela also helped Panama through some of our hard times. As the chaos lifts Panama should be generous, astute and looking out for Panama’s needs in negotiations to settle the debt. A process in which Goldman Sachs gets dibs on Venezuela’s oil revenues and what’s owed to Panama gets forgotten ought to be an unacceptable outcome here.
Bear in mind…
Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.
Dorothy Parker
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
Margaret Mead
All who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea.
Simón Bolívar
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The Hiroshima firestorm, by survivor Keiji Nakazawa.
Hadashi no Gen / The Barefoot Gen / Gen Pies Descalzos
an autobiographical anime classic by Keiji Nakazawa
un anime autobiográfico creado e ilustrado por Keiji Nakazawa
Today, August 6, is a day to remember in world history. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb to be used against human targets was dropped on Hirohsima, Japan. Debates linger about how necessary or unnecessary, how justified or how criminal it might have been. The world has moved on. But this past week the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved stronger sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles tests and accompanying threats. You can read propaganda of both sides, and some other perspectives as well, about the personality of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and the nature of his regime. But to begin to fully understand the controversy, you need to know that some of Kim’s missiles have been fired over Japanese territory, and that for historical reasons Japan has a particular set of attitudes about nuclear weapons. How better to understand the genesis of this attitude than through the art and also eyewitness account of Keiji Nakazawa, who as a boy survived the bombing of Hiroshima? Hoy, 6 de agosto, es un día para recordar en la historia del mundo. El 6 de agosto de 1945, la primera bomba atómica que se utilizó contra objetivos humanos fue detonada sobre Hirohsima, Japón. Los debates continuan sobre lo necesario o innecesario, lo justificado o lo criminal que pudo haber sido. El mundo ha seguido adelante. Pero la semana pasada el Consejo de Seguridad de las Organización de Naciones Unidas aprobó por unanimidad sanciones más fuertes contra Corea del Norte por sus pruebas de armas nucleares y de misiles balísticos, y las amenazas acompañantes. Puede leer la propaganda de ambos lados, y algunas otras perspectivas también, sobre la personalidad del dictador Kim Jong Un y la naturaleza de su régimen. Pero para comenzar a entender completamente la controversia, es necesario saber que algunos de los misiles de Kim han sido disparados sobre territorio japonés y que por razones históricas Japón tiene un conjunto particular de actitudes sobre las armas nucleares. ¿Cómo comprender mejor la génesis de esta actitud que a través del arte y también la cuenta de testigo presencial de Keiji Nakazawa, que como un niño sobrevivió al bombardeo de Hiroshima?
The Barefoot Gen, dubbed into English.
Hadashi no Gen / Gen Pies Descalzos, japonés con subtítulos en español.
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Prime Minister Netanyahu is in trouble about a questionable arms purchase, so an argument over the death penalty serves him at the moment.
Wistful eyes
by Uri Avnery
The whole world watched with bated breath while the days passed. Then the hours. Then the minutes.
The world watched while the condemned man, Muhammad Abu-Ali of Qalqiliya, waited for his execution.
Abu-Ali was a convicted terrorist. He had bought a knife and killed four members of a family in a nearby Jewish settlement. He had acted alone in a fit of anger, after his beloved cousin, Ahmed, was shot and killed by the Israeli border police during a demonstration.
This is an imaginary case. But it resembles very much what would happen if a real case that is now pending were to take this turn.
There is no death penalty in Israel. It was abolished during the first years of the state, when the execution of Jewish underground fighters (called “terrorists” by the British) was still fresh in everybody’s mind.
It was a solemn and festive occasion. After the vote, in an unplanned outburst of emotion, the entire Knesset rose and stood at attention for a minute. In the Knesset, such expressions of emotion, like applause, are forbidden.
On that day I was proud of my state, the state for which I had spilled my blood.
Before that day, two people had been executed in Israel.
The first was shot during the early days of the state. A Jewish engineer was accused of passing information to the British, who passed it on to Arabs. Three military officers constituted themselves as a military court and condemned him to death. Later it was found that the man was innocent.
The second death sentence was passed on Adolf Eichmann, an Austrian Nazi who in 1944 directed the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the death camps. He was not very high up in the Nazi hierarchy, just a lieutenant-colonel (“Obersturmbannführer”) in the SS. But he was the only Nazi officer with whom Jewish leaders came into direct contact. In their minds, he was a monster.
When he was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, he looked like an average bank clerk, not very impressive and not very intelligent. When he was condemned to death, I wrote an article asking myself whether I was in favor of his execution. I said: “I dare not say yes and I dare not say no.” He was hanged.
A personal confession: I cannot kill a cockroach. I am unable to kill a fly. That is not a conscious aversion. It is almost physical.
It was not always so. When I had just turned 15, I joined a “terrorist” organization, the Irgun (“National Military Organization,”) which at the time killed lots of people, including women and children, at Arab markets in retaliation for the killing of Jews in the Arab rebellion.
I was too young to be employed in the actions themselves, but my comrades and I distributed leaflets proudly proclaiming the actions. So I certainly was an accomplice, until I left the organization because I started to disapprove of “terrorism.”
But the real change in my character occurred after I was wounded in the 1948 war. For several days and nights I lay in my hospital bed, unable to eat, drink or sleep, just thinking. The result was my inability to take the life of any living being, including humans.
So, naturally, I am a deadly enemy of the death penalty. I greeted with all my heart its abolition by the Knesset (before I became a member of that not-very-august body.)
But a few days ago, somebody remembered that the death penalty was not really quite abolished. An obscure paragraph in the military code has remained in force. Now there is an outcry for its application.
The occasion is the murder of three members of a Jewish family in a settlement. The Arab assailant was wounded but not killed on the spot, as usually happens.
The entire right-wing clique that governs Israel now broke out in a chorus of demands for the death penalty. Binyamin Netanyahu joined the chorus, as did most members of his cabinet.
Netanyahu’s attitude can easily be understood. He has no principles. He goes with the majority of his base. At the moment he is deeply involved in a huge corruption affair concerning the acquisition of German-built submarines. His political fate hangs in the balance. No time for moral quibbles.
Putting aside, for the moment, my personal mental disabilities concerning the death penalty, judging the problem on a rational basis shows that it is a huge mistake.
The execution of a person who is considered a patriot by their own people arouses profound anger and a deep desire for revenge. For every person put to death, a dozen others arise to take their place.
I speak from experience. As already mentioned, I joined the Irgun when I was hardly 15. A few weeks before, the British had hanged a young Jew, Shlomo Ben-Yossef, who had shot at an Arab bus full of women and children, without hitting anyone. He was the first Jew in Palestine to be executed.
Later on, after I had already forsworn “terrorism,” I still felt emotionally involved whenever the British hanged another Jewish “terrorist.” (I take pride in having invented the only scientifically sound definition of “terrorism” — “A freedom fighter is on my side, a terrorist is on the other side.”)
Another argument against the death penalty is the one I described at the beginning of this piece: the inherent dramatic effect of this penalty.
From the moment a death sentence is passed, the entire world, not to mention the entire country, gets involved. From Timbuktu to Tokyo, from Paris to Pretoria, millions of people, who have no interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, get aroused. The fate of the condemned man starts to dominate their lives.
Israeli embassies will be deluged by messages from good people. Human rights organizations everywhere will get involved. Street demonstrations will take place in many cities and grow from week to week.
The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people, until then a minor news item in newspapers and on TV news, will be the center of attention. Editors will send special correspondents, pundits will weigh in. Some heads of state will be tempted to approach the president of Israel and plead for clemency.
As the date of execution grows nearer, the pressure will grow. In colleges and in churches, calls to boycott Israel will become shrill. Israeli diplomats will send urgent alarms to the Foreign Office in Jerusalem. Embassies will strengthen anti-terror precautions.
The Israeli government will meet in urgent emergency sessions. Some ministers will advise commuting the sentence. Others will argue that that would show weakness and encourage terror. Netanyahu, as usual, will be unable to decide.
I know that this line of argument may lead to a wrong conclusion: to kill Arab assailants on the spot.
Indeed, this is a second discussion tearing Israel apart at the moment: the case of Elor Azaria, a soldier and field medic, who shot at close range a wounded Arab assailant lying on the ground and bleeding profusely. A military court sentenced Azaria to a year and half in jail, and the sentence was confirmed on appeal. Many people want him released. Others, including Netanyahu again, want his sentence commuted.
Azaria and his entire family are enjoying themselves hugely at the center of national attention. They believe that he did the right thing, according to an unwritten dictum that no Arab “terrorist” should be allowed to remain alive.
Actually, this was openly pronounced years ago by the then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir (who himself, as a leader of the Lehi underground, was one of the most successful “terrorists” of the 20th century). For that he did not need to be very intelligent.
From whatever angle one looks at it, the death sentence is a barbaric and stupid measure. It has been abolished by all civilized countries, except some US states (which can hardly be called civilized.)
Whenever I think about this subject, the immortal lines of Oscar Wilde in his “Ballad of Reading Gaol” come to my mind. Observing a fellow prisoner, a convicted murderer, awaiting his execution, Wilde wrote:
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon the little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky…
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To go to the Spanish-language website of Transparency International in Panama, click here.
A stride toward justice
by Libertad Ciudadana (Panama’s chapter of Transparency International)
In this historic moment in the anti-corruption struggle through which the republic lives, the announcement made on August 1 by the nation’s attorney general, Kenia Porcell, that this past July 26 she signed an agreement for effective cooperation with the Odebrecht company, is a necessary step toward attaining justice.
With this agreement there begins the handover of information for which all of Panamanian society awaits. This will lead to effective investigations by the Public Ministry in the course of this inquiry into the conduct of three administrations, which cannot be put off.
From now on we insist that the Attorney General’s office maintain a flow of communication, which will generate an accompanying civic vigilance. We want to see not only fines and frozen money, if we are not to be witnesses to impunity in the end, by way of knowing the terms of the accord and evaluating its benefits for the country.
Taking into account that the administration of justice is composed of both the Public Ministry’s investigative phase and the trial phase before the courts, we demand that both institutions fulfill their roles, so that there are strictly legal trials of all those who were involved, so that the criminal schemes that were used are known and that the proper restitution is made.
In case information exists that includes officials with special immunities, we expect that this will be sent to the proper institution, whether it’s the National Assembly or the Supreme Court, that these will be resolved by persons uninvolved in the Odebrecht corruption scheme and free of conflicts of interest, and that all of those responsible account for their actions — whoever may fall!
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