Con Colombia continúan las muestras en el Cine Universitario
Una muestra de cine colombiano es la próxima actividad que presentará el Cine Universitario, del 9 al 12 de mayo, en esta nueva etapa en la que vuelve a ofrecer al público de la ciudad y de la Universidad de Panamá, lo mejor del cine del mundo, esta vez en colaboración conjunta con la Embajada de Colombia.
Cuatro películas recientes y multipremiadas conforman esta Muestra, que se presentarán así, martes 9: EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE, de Ciro Guerra, premiada en el Festival de Sundance y en Cannes; miércoles 10: LA SIRGA, de William Vega, premiada en Cannes, La Habana y Mar de Plata; jueves 11: LOS HONGOS, de Oscar Ruíz, con premios en Locarno y Rotterdam, y viernes 12: LA TIERRA Y LA SOMBRA, de César Augusto Acevedo, también premiada en Cannes.
Tandas de 3, 5 y 7 pm y con entrada gratis. El Cine Universitario está ubicado dentro del Campus Central de la UP, antes de la Farmacia Universitaria.
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La vaina racista de la diputada Zulay Rodríguez, una cosa que fue sacada de su página de Facebook despúes de varias horas y muchas protestas por la mayoría no fula de su circuito en San Miguelito.
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España es centro de blanqueo. O, dicho de otro modo, la lucha contra el blanqueo falla aquí más que una escopeta de feria. Incluso la OCDE (blanda contra el fraude fiscal) advierte a España de que la levedad de penas contra el blanqueo de dinero sucio hace de este Reino lugar privilegiado para evasores de impuestos y blanqueadores.
Pilar Blázquez nos explicó que en España la falta de castigos de verdad que teman los blanqueadores, convierte la lucha contra ese delito en un brindis al sol. Porque, aunque el Servicio de Prevención de Blanqueo de Capitales (SEPBLAC) hace su trabajo, analiza documentos y cruza datos en un modélico proceso para descubrir blanqueadores, la acción se frena cuando hay que castigar a los culpables. Que un caso de blanqueo acabe con cárcel para blanqueadores y cómplices es excepción, no regla. Según el Grupo de Acción Financiera Internacional (GAFI), equipo de la OCDE supervisor del blanqueo en el mundo, “las penas de prisión por blanqueo de capitales en España son muy bajas, no son disuasorias y el crimen organizado y los evasores fiscales ven España como lugar donde operar sin riesgo”.
También Estados Unidos señala a España como país benévolo con el blanqueo y la OCDE denunció que en España ha habido pocas investigaciones de blanqueo en años y aún menos condenas. Pero no porque falle el SEPBLAC, que hace su trabajo. Falla quien decide sancionar o no. Que suele ser que no. No olvidemos que quien decide sanciones es la Comisión de Prevención de Blanqueo de Capitales del Ministerio de Economía. Es decir, es el gobierno del Partido Popular que, hasta la fecha, no ha mostrado entusiasmo alguno para acabar con el blanqueo y quienes blanquean.
Pero tal delito es posible por una verdad incontrovertible: el dinero negro fluye a su antojo por el sistema bancario internacional, como fluye el dinero legal con el que se camufla. Y ese libertinaje de capitales continuará mientras haya centros offshore, paraísos fiscales, consultoras fiscales y bancos cómplices. Los hay y habrá porque los pretendidos intentos de acabar con esos estados de cartón piedra de fiscalidad tramposa y dañina, que son los paraísos fiscales, son retórica y marear la perdiz. Voluntad política de acabar con el blanqueo, cero.
Da igual que además el blanqueo financie organizaciones terroristas, narcotraficantes y otras tramas criminales. Se impone la minoría rica que no ceja en su voluntad de no pagar impuestos. Recordemos que, según cálculos conservadores de la propia OCDE, las grandes empresas eluden pagar casi un cuarto de billón de dólares anuales con enredos de filiales, delegaciones, servicios vinculados, activos intangibles y otras trampas presuntamente legales que revelan la ausencia de voluntad política de gobiernos y entidades globales para acabar con el fraude fiscal. Y, si añadimos las grandes fortunas que evaden y eluden impuestos a placer, el volumen del fraude fiscal deviene obsceno.
La Oficina de Naciones Unidas contra Drogas y Crimen pide soluciones drásticas contra el blanqueo que hace legales 2 billones de dólares anuales. Pero no parece que se consiga, porque evasión de impuestos y blanqueo de dinero van de la mano y la minoría rica insiste en no pagar los impuestos que debe. Que el mayor receptor de inversión extranjera en 2013 fueran las casi despobladas Islas Vírgenes británicas indica que hay blanqueo para tiempo. O que haya 234 bancos en las Islas Caimán con solo 50.000 habitantes. O que la pequeña isla británica Jersey en el Canal de la Mancha maneje más de 350.000 millones de dólares en fondos de inversión. Sin olvidar al gran paraíso fiscal que es Estados Unidos que, mientras impone multimillonarias multas a bancos suizos y de la Unión Europea, por posible blanqueo de estadounidenses fuera del país, mantiene Delaware, Reno, Wyoming, Nevada o Dakota del Sur como auténticos paraísos fiscales. ¿Quién da más?
¿Por qué el blanqueo es un delito nefasto? Porque los Estados recaudan mucho menos y se vulneran derechos ciudadanos por no haber adecuados servicios públicos esenciales. Además crece la desigualdad y hay más incertidumbre, más pobreza y más sufrimiento, porque los Estados dejan de cobrar cientos de miles de millones de impuestos legítimos y obligatorios. La evasión de impuestos impide que el Estado cumpla sus deberes con la ciudadanía.
Xavier Caño Tamayo es periodista y miembro de ATTAC Twitter: @xcanotamayo
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The warlike gestures also play out here in Panama.
Tulsi’s peace campaign
by Tulsi Gabbard
In the last few months, the thing I have found the most personally alarming, as a citizen and as a soldier, is the virtual evaporation of any movement or motion for peace in the United States.
We have seen our new president dangerously escalate conflicts in North Korea and Syria with little or no regard for the consequences on the ground and for the inevitable blowback such actions have to our country. Even as he employs bigger and flashier weapons in an attempt to impress and intimidate, there is a disturbing lack of opposition to these reckless acts.
Make no mistake, these interventions weaken us strategically and increase human misery, even when they are embarked on with humanitarian intent.
There is no denying that the regime change wars in Iraq and Libya that were propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering have in fact increased human suffering in those countries — many times over.
As a direct result of our intervention in Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, human suffering there has increased dramatically. Terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda took advantage of the Maliki Shia-led government that persecuted and oppressed the Sunni people. ISIS therefore gained a stronghold in Iraq, kidnapping, terrorizing, and killing thousands and thousands of innocent people.
In Libya, when the United States led the bombing campaign to overthrow Gaddafi, which began with a no-fly zone, the result was incredible loss of life, total chaos, with Libya resulting in a failed state, and a haven now for ISIS and other terrorist organizations.
There is no reason to believe that escalating the regime change war in Syria or initiating military actions on the Korean peninsula will be any less disastrous.
We can’t help anyone anywhere, try as we might, if we don’t have strict principles about when, where and why we intervene. We must have realistic appraisals and criteria of what conflict means in the regions where we initiate it and here at home.
But we can’t start this conversation in a vacuum. With both parties on Capitol Hill intent on fanning the flames of war, will you join me in starting a nationwide conversation about the true costs of war?
Join me in starting the conversation that no elected official seems to want to have.
Join me in talking about peace.
Aloha,
Tulsi
[Editor’s note: Antiwar Democrats well know that the hawks in our party and war industry donors will target anyone in public office who objects to military adventure for defeat in a primary or general election race. To avoid that, you may want to donate to US Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s peace campaign byclicking here.]
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The first tiny little loofah of the season. If it survives the bugs and the elements to get big enough to eat, should it be grown bigger and too fibrous to eat in order to provide the seeds for the next crop?
Rainy season gets underway in Cocle
photos and captions by Eric Jackson
A street on which none of the residents own cars — but some ride horses.
The bamboo, having shed some of its leaves in the dry season and somewhat depleted from a little construction project, will come back to its old glory with a bit of rain.
Just in case the water system goes down again, part of the runoff from the roof gets collected. These are some of the smaller containers. Let’s see if the papaya seeds germinate in the cans.
One of the many species of mimosa, this one has especially large thorns.
Will this rainy season bring tropical fevers? Cecropia leaves are medicinal for those.
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Why didn’t the high court’s erstwhile presiding magistrate, Alejandro Moncada Luna, seen here on the right posing with former US Ambassador Jonathan Farrar, benefit from the prevailing pattern of impunity for public corruption? Diplomats had to be nice to him but by almost all accounts people who had close exposure to the guy, including his colleagues on the court, nearly universally hated him. Moncada Luna is in El Renacer Penitentiary, trying to get legislators to release him on account of poor mental health. Photo by the American Embassy.
Patterns of crime and impunity
by Eric Jackson
Evidence of a consistent pattern of conduct relevant to serious violations of international humanitarian law under the Statute may be admissible in the interests of justice.
Rules of evidence, international courts for the
former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone
How does a political caste that embraces all branches of government, which has been caught red-handed at severe and systemic corruption, get away with it? They may not. But the hope of the guilty who want to go unpenalized is that by way of a long-running pantomime act, the impression of exhaustive investigations that lead nowhere will leave the public exhausted and bored with the story. Then the guilty will say that it’s “old news” and that nothing was ever proven, so nothing ever happened.
The problem is that in the course of that repetitive mime show certain patterns become consistent, and certain facts come out in each show, to the point that it’s hard for any serious observer to be fooled. But in corrupted courts everywhere, the dismissal of such patterns and their exclusion as proof is common. Defense counsel and biased judges will dismiss damning facts as just isolated coincidences that don’t really mean anything. “It’s just circumstantial evidence,” is one typical dismissive response, even though many of the strongest criminal cases are based on circumstances rather than the testimony of witnesses to the crime.
A pattern of impunity: the Panamanian people are told that a situation will be thoroughly audited or investigated, but it ends up that the probe is only partial, leaving out times and persons when the only reason to do so is for political convenience.
Did Comptroller General Federico Humbert tell us that he was going to audit all of the Odebrecht contracts? He hasn’t done so with respect to those contracts that bear his own signature of approval. He hasn’t done that with respect to contracts that implicate President Varela or Metro Secretary and Canal Affairs Minister Roberto Roy. He hasn’t gone back into the contracts of the Torrijos administration.
Now, however, we are treated to an audit of five contracts that were awarded by the Martinelli administration on one day, March 29 of 2011, all of them having had bidding on February 11 of that year. Only two of these, the Cinta Costera III and some historical preservation work in Panama City, were Odebrecht contracts. The road from where Tumba Muerto crosses the Transistmica and becomes Avenida Domingo Díaz — or more commonly the road to Tocumen Airport — was a contract with a consortium including Mexico’s ICA and Costa Rica’s Constructora Meco, while the other two were parts of the Via Brazil makeover that was done by Spain’s FCC.
The audit of the five contracts found a consistent pattern of serious overcharges. Consultations with specialists from Panama Technological University, the Chamber of Construction, the Chamber of Commerce and the Panamanian Business Executives Association agreed, compared what was paid to the market value of similar work elsewhere, and pegged the overcharges at between 13.7 percent for the Cinta Costera III and 29.5 percent for one part of the Via Brazil work. All told these five contracts that were made on one day involved more than $318 million in overcharges, some 18.4 percent more than should have been paid.
Are we told that the pattern in the FCC and ICA/Meco contracts followed the pattern shown in worldwide revelations about Odebrecht overcharges? Should we take less notice of that than the downplayed accompanying announcement that Humbert’s audits of Odebrecht are concluded?
Yes, the comptroller general has sent his results to the attorney general, who so far has not been getting many convictions for the five years of in-our-faces corruption by the Martinelli administration. Former President Martinelli, hiding out in his posh Miami condo, has media in which he acquired controlling interests in deals financed by government advertising that will tell you that there are no convictions because there were no crimes.
And what about the more than a dozen criminal cases against the ex-president that are percolating in the high court? There, too, we have a pattern of impunity. Only cases falling outside the specific provisions of the 1904 US-Panamanian extradition treaty have come to the point of arrest warrants being issued. US authorities — who have their own long-running pattern of conduct that allows wealthy Third World thug politicians refuge in the United States if they bring a long of money to stash in US banks — have the perfect excuses to ignore the INTERPOL red notices. Notwithstanding that, Washington always has the option to tell an unsavory former foreign head of state to get out. Speculation is rife about why neither former President Obama nor current President Trump has done this with respect to Martinelli. There is no transparency about such matters so those who talk hardly ever know.
Are any Panamanians fooled? Polls suggest few if any are. In Dichter & Neira’s mid-April poll, 81 percent of Panamanians said that there was little or no government transparency. By a margin of 72 to 18 percent those polled were against the recent Supreme Court decision not to investigate legislators who by all appearances stole from funds meant to be spent on public projects in their circuits. About the only thing that most Panamanians believe in is soccer — and some of the former leading lights of Panama’s FEPAFUT soccer federation are facing trial for corruption.
You never know when some incident might set off a social explosion with far-reaching political implications but those things are rare. And then if you look at the global pattern of Odebrecht bribery, that company paid off not only those in power who have the ability to steer contracts, but also those not even close to power whom might have the power to raise hell about such contracts. Were the usual radical suspects here also paid off? We should not be surprised if they were.
The more usual post-invasion political pattern in Panama is that in two years’ time President Varela’s Panameñista Party loses the presidential palace and many or most legislators lose their jobs. The political parties and various politicians are busy trying to tweak that pattern — there are already billboards up on the Pan-American Highway for various 2019 presidential candidates — but the basic result is likely to be in line with an established pattern.
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She would make it easier for Americans here to get banking services.
Two bills in the US Congress that may be of
great importance to Americans living here
Perhaps it’s good news or perhaps it’s bad news that arises amidst the bad news of a US Congress with a largely fanatic majority and a largely anachronistic minority, both of which appear to be mostly ineffective. Probably it’s a mixture of both and probably nothing will change, but US citizens ought to pay attention and perhaps contact the senators and representatives from the states and districts from whence they hail.
The United States is one of very few countries that taxes on the basis of citizenship rather than residency within the country. We could argue back and forth the reason for this and the justice of that scheme, but in any case politicians from both major parties have for years legislated to enforce it against those who would hide money from the Internal Revenue Service in foreign jurisdictions. Or is it about US banks claiming dibs on the accounts of Americans, compelling them to use money laundering centers in states like Nevada instead of in countries like Panama?
One of the enforcement laws is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act — FATCA — which in general compels Americans with $10,000 or more in an overseas bank or brokerage account, or invested in a corporation such as the ones in which many upscale Panamanian homes are held, to report this to Uncle Sam. The penalties for failure to comply can be draconian and there are non-disclosure penalties for banks and brokerages with US citizen clients as well. A lot of banks use the FATCA requirements as an excuse to reject all American depositors other than the ultra-rich ones. It’s now hard for a US citizen to get a bank account in many countries, including Panama. Moreover, foreign citizens married to Americans in effect have to reveal their financial affairs to US authorities due to the requirements of FATCA and other US tax laws. These requirements have led thousands of people to renounce US citizenship.
A lot of politicians in Washington have temporized, have been driven by stereotypes or have entirely ignored the issues due to the perception that those who live overseas but vote in their states or districts are too few to affect their own electoral prospects. In the Republican ranks there are those who like any and all tax dodges for the rich and would thus repeal FATCA altogether. On both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle there are those relatively few who would switch from citizenship to residency as the basis for income taxation. And then there is the “safe harbor” proposal for which Democrats Abroad has been working for several years. It would make FATCA inapplicable to those who live in the countries where they have accounts. Few of the Americans for whom Panama is a place to hide money actually live here. The US citizens who live here are rarely in Panama for tax reasons.
Thus there is Representative Carolyn Maloney’s exemption from FATCA’s application to accounts in Panama (or any other foreign jurisdiction) held by people who live in Panama (or another country in which they hold accounts). It doesn’t mean that the very rich don’t have to declare their interest and dividend income and doesn’t change the citizenship basis for taxation. It just spares most American citizens living abroad and the banks and brokerages in which they have accounts from a lot of paperwork and some potentially onerous penalties for minor infractions. Maloney is a Democrat from New York with a fair number of foreign-born residents in her district and more than the average number of absentee constituents who cast their ballots for or against her from abroad. She’s one of the few members of Congress who has paid a lot of attention to the six to eight million Americans living outside the USA. Her proposed Overseas Americans Financial Access Act, which follows the 2015 recommendation of the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service, would make life easier for Americans living in Panama. It’s worth a few calls or emails to Congress to boost this proposal.
He would tax money transfers from the USA to anyone in Panama.
Then there is Alabama Representative Mike Rogers and his Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, enrolled as HR 1813. This is an act of financial aggression aimed at all Latin American and Caribbean countries, said to be for the purpose of discouraging “illegal aliens” and raising funds to build Donald Trump’s wall along the Mexican border.
The argument is that people come to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean to work and send money back to families in their countries of origin. In a lot of countries such remittances are an important source of financial sustenance for many families. Thus Rogers, one of those Republicans who likes to raise taxes, would impose a two percent tax on all money transfers from the United States to anywhere in Latin America or the Caribbean.
There is no practical, legal and fair way to limit this tax to just foreign citizens in the USA, to just those foreigners who are in the United States without proper documents, or to just the services like Western Union and MoneyGram. There are laws against discrimination on the basis of national origin — which were never all that popular with Rogers’s white Alabama constituents to begin with. To shut down transfers through the most popular services would move them over to ATMs, PayPal, bitcoin operations or other alternatives. It’s also not practical to restrict the tax to only certain classes of people on the receiving end.
What it all means is a tax on all money transfers, including from Americans in the USA to Americans in Panama. It would be a tax on electronic commerce of all kinds, including the donations of readers in the USA to The Panama News.
The Border Wall Funding Act is both malicious and impractical. It would make life more expensive for US citizens — and the Panamanian relatives of US citizens — living in Panama. It would require a new layer of federal bureaucracy to enforce. It would impede small businesses in both Panama and the United States. It’s a bad idea, bad enough that US citizens living in Panama should make sure to be registered to vote back in the places of last residence in the States and contact the senators and representatives from these places to object to this.
Bear in mind…
How do you govern a country which has 246 different kinds of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle
Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
Black Elk
If the truth doesn’t save us, what does that say about us?
Lois McMaster Bujold
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Hundreds of thousands of scientists and their supportersrecently took to the streets, marching in favor of science-based policies. How did our science-denying president respond?
“Rigorous science is critical to my administration’s efforts to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection,” he claimed. “We should remember that rigorous science depends not on ideology, but on a spirit of honest inquiry and robust debate.”
Is he joking? No seriously, I’m really asking.
Did he have to hurry away from the press to hide the laugh he was bursting to contain after that whopper came out of his mouth?
Let’s take a look at Trump’s record on science so far:
He put Myron Ebell — described by Business Insider as “a man who denies basic science” — in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Ebell’s qualifications? He worked at an ideological libertarian think tank. He has no science background.
These cuts won’t just harm conservation, regulation, and other goals Trump doesn’t like but are necessary if we want to continue living on a hospitable planet. The cuts alsoeliminate thousands of government jobs directly, and cut programs that help Americans create jobs and stay competitive in the global market.
In short, I can’t name a US president who was more hostile to science than the current occupant of the White House. So he’s got some nerve to even utter the word “science.”
No wonder scientists felt compelled to leave their labs and computers and march in the streets in perhaps the first mass demonstration by scientists in modern history.
As a social scientist myself, I know what goes into a scientist’s quest for knowledge and truth. In each step of the process, a scientist must examine their own results and seek critique from peers, and ask whether our fallible human brains have somehow made an error in uncovering the truth of the world we live in.
Those of us who do this for a career are serious about our endeavors. It takes a lot of humility, because we must always be prepared to admit when we’re wrong for the sake of uncovering the most accurate results possible.
Most of us do our work because we love it, but also because we feel passionately that we’re making our world a better place — whether we’re working on new cures for fatal diseases or attempting to find a more sustainable and clean form of energy.
It’s heart-wrenching to see an administration reject this work we’ve devoted our lives to simply to score political points, especially when we know what humanity stands to lose by ignoring science.
Trump, for example, might do well to trust the climate scientists who are predicting sea level rise before he finds his precious Mar-a-Lago under water.
But instead he turns a blind eye, enacts destructive policies that ignore science, and then gaslights the entire nation with a joke of a statement about his own purported belief in rigorous science.
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