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Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
Let’s get a good, if painful, Seguro Social compromise
The Social Security Fund (Caja de Seguro Social or CSS) is in trouble, both on its retirement and disability pensions (IVM) and health care system sides. It has been looted for years, in an ubroken chain back to dictatorship times. It has been funded by a system that encourages all sorts of dodges – outright evasion, “costs of representation,” things included or excluded from the calculations.
Half of our work force is in the tiny businesses of the informal sector, not paying into, nor taking out of the system. Yes, an informal worker can go to a Seguro Social clinic and be served, for a small, generally nominal, fee. Yes, the fund has been raided to give stipends to those who don’t qualify for pensions.
A big drain has been on the investments of the fund’s resources. Sweetheart deals with the politically connected, gifts that disappear into the banking sytstem, outright embezzlent and so on have abounded.
We get proposals from the worst of the business sector and the political caste, amounting to “We keep what we stole and all you other folks pay more and receive less.” We get these foward-looking proposals for draconian penalties by those expecting anything but uniform application. We get all these fingers pointed at the poorer half of Panama’s work force, who toil in the informal sector.
We have not had a full and honest accounting, which would be a herculean task. We do know enough about the numbers to know that some painful moves will have to be made. Will we get a GOOD deal? That would be one that just about everybody dislikes.
Will after the special election to fill the House vacancy created by Matt Gaetz’s departure, the district still represented by a Republican who does his hair in a perv wave? Cropped from a Wikimedia photo by Gage Skidmore.
Coming to the USA…
An unusual and difficult period is coming for the American people. A rapist and convicted felon is taking over and making noises like he expects none of the political and constitutional checks and balances to apply to himself and his entourage. He’s chosen a shorteye perv to head the Justice Department.
How brutal does he want the fight to be? Maybe enough to bring in North Korean troops or the Russian Army, for all we know. He will face resistance, no matter how extreme he gets.
Time for Democrats to get real, get positive and get better leadership. As in, to pick up the pieces after a severe defeat and carry on the fight, not so much among ourselves as against the Republicans and their corporate base. Let’s end Trump’s effective presidency in by-elections to come and in the 2026 midterms.
The late Petra Kelly, founder of the Green movement who was shot dead way before her time, has a street in Munich named after her. Unattributed Wikimedia photo.
If we don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
Petra Kelly
Bear in mind…
What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
Wendell Phillips
The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
Emma Goldman
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
It would not be El Valle without the emblematic golden frogs. The symbol lives on, but the amphibians almost didn’t. An outbreak of chytrid fungus infection nearly made the whole lineage go extinct but some scientists have made and are making a valiant effo0rt to bring the golden frogs back from the brink.
On a misty Thursday morning in El Valle
photos and captions by Eric Jackson
Fish baskets, but not only. There are people who find ways to make these woven split-bamboo baskets decorative, but people find even more ways to use the things.
In Panama you should wear a hat to at least partially block the sun and rain. There are several varieties here but the Panamanian genre is far from fully represented in this vendor’s corner. If it’s a gorra — a baseball hat — Panama is this county of New York Yankees fans. You need to go elsewhere to get a Coclé Leña Roja or Detroit Tigers hat.
Don’t be so stereotypical as to equate molas with all there is to Panamanian indigenous art. this Guna applique and mostly reverse applique needlework is one of the symbols of our nation.
Gotta be shod. While warm weather invites barefooting, you can pick up infections that way. Panamanian footwear is nothing nearly so sinister at the Colombian stuff.
See, if you want to play along with the band but you’re not THAT sophisticated of an instrumentalist.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
When escaping to freedom on the Underground Railway, slaves would avoid the roads and their armed white militia patrols — the original “Second Amendment People” — and wade in streams, rivers and lakes to break the trail of their scent that the slave catchers’ dogs would follow. We don’t know who wrote this traditional song, but it was to educate the resistance of that time.
What will be the music of this coming resistance period?
In a way, it was a trap that Democrats walked right into, notwithstanding history’s warnings.
Didn’t Richard Nixon, the former carnival barker and ultimate corporate politician, get elected to the US Senate by calling actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, a proud union member, an elitist?
Now Donald Trump, against the opposition of an overwhelming majority of American writers, composers and performing artists, has portrayed Kamala Harris as the candidate of the elites. A guy whose own accomplishments are largely matters of fiction, whose fortune derives from his grandfather the pimp, whose best-paying job was in that excretion of television culture, a “reality TV” show in which he fired people, portrayed the most creative people on the US cultural scene as “elitists” and tens of millions of voters bought that.
Yes, there were all these entertainers who sang, played and shared the stage at Kamala rallies but as it turned out the best cultural response to Trump from the blue side came from a South African.
It’s as if Democrats had fully bought into the neoliberal culture of celebrity, that actors and musicians, rather than skilled working people with their own intellects and things to say, are these market commodities whose value can be expressed in dollars and cents. That in a campaign season that partly coincided with a Screen Actors Guild strike. That’s behind us now, and the USA and the world are going into a new political and cultural period. Back then, beatniks and jazz were at the forefront of the popular cultural resistance to the McCarthy era of the 50s. The hippies and the black militants, and their cultural expressions, were the better part of the events leading to the night they drove Dick Nixon down.
A new period is coming, most probably not to a tune bought or stolen from an entertainment corporation. The new resistance needs its own, popular songs and symbols.
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US Army Sergeant Michael Smith uses a dog to torture a terrified Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. US Army photo.
“This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse,” said one of the Iraqi plaintiffs.
‘Big day… for justice’: Virginia federal jury finds contractor liable for Abu Ghraib torture
In a landmark verdict cheered by human rights defenders around the world, a federal jury in Virginia found a US military contractor liable for the torture of three prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s.
The jury ordered CACI Premier Technology to pay each of the three Iraqi plaintiffs $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, for a total of $42 million. It is the first time that a civilian contractor has been found legally responsible for abusing Abu Ghraib detainees.
The lawsuit against CACI—filed in 2008 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Suhail Al Shimari, Asa’ad Al Zuba’e, and Salah Al-Ejaili—alleged that company officials conspired with US military personnel in subjecting the plaintiffs to torture and other crimes.
As CCR noted Tuesday:
The plaintiffs brought their case under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 federal law that allows foreign nationals to seek redress in US courts for certain violations of international law. This historic outcome follows 16 years of litigation, more than 20 attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed, and a previous trial in which the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Never before this case had survivors of US post-9/11 torture testified in a US courtroom. It also featured testimony from US generals, CACI employees, and former [military police officers] involved in the torture.
“Today is a big day for me and for justice,” said Al-Ejaili. “I’ve waited a long time for this day.”
“This victory isn’t only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation,” he added. “This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse.”
For Abu Ghraib torture victims, the arc of justice has taken 20yrs, but finally a US court has ordered a military contractor, CACI, to pay them millions of dollars in damages for the torture inflicted on them. Excellent news! https://t.co/bRu7x4EQAs
CCR legal director Baher Azmy said that “our clients have fought bravely for 16 years in search of justice for the horrors they endured at Abu Ghraib, against all of the challenges this massive private military contractor threw in their way over the years to avoid basic accountability for its role in this shameful episode in American history.”
“We are awed by our clients’ courage and by the power of their testimony in court, and we are grateful that this jury knew enough to credit their story over the deflections of CACI,” Azmy added. “We thank the jury for affording our clients the measure of justice they came to a United States court to seek.”
Like Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib became a byword for US torture during the Bush administration as it waged a worldwide war on terrorism following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The prison’s worldwide notoriety stems from the leak and publication in 2004 of photos showing US troops torturing and abusing Abu Ghraib detainees, both living and dead, often with smiles on their faces.
A 2004 investigation by US Army Lieutenant General Anthony Jones and Major General George Fay found that CACI employees participated in and encouraged the torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners.
Investigators found that employees of CACI and Titan Corporation (now L3 Technologies) tortured Abu Ghraib detainees and encouraged US troops to do likewise. Dozens of Abu Ghraib detainees died in US custody, some of them as a result of being tortured to death. Abu Ghraib prisoners endured torture ranging from rape and being attacked with dogs to being forced to eat pork and renounce Islam.
A separate US Army report concluded that most Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent, with the Red Cross estimating that between 70-90% of inmates there were wrongfully detained. These include women who were held as bargaining chips to induce suspected militants to surrender.
Eleven low-ranking US soldiers were convicted and jailed for their roles in Abu Ghraib torture. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the prison’s commanding officer, was demoted. No other high-ranking military officer faced accountability for the abuse. Senior Bush administration officials—who had authorized many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used at prisons including Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay—lied about their knowledge of the torture. None of them were ever held accountable.
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Trying to figure it out, but more immediately to fix it
We have been here before.
In 2008 a bot coming from China sucked up all of our bandwidth and shut down the website. The immediate thought was that it was this obnoxious guy, a competitor at the time and a shill for every scam that would pay him to be such, behind it. We took steps to get thepanamanews.com back up, and only some time later did we get a clue about who it actually was. A new website host added a “most viewed articles” feature and by using that and following up it turned out that a few weeks before we had run an article about a Falun Gong event in Parque Omar some weeks before. SOMEBODY connected this article, via London and Prague, across China’s Internet firewall. Hundreds of thousands of people in China saw it. Falun Gong is officially deemed an “evil cult” by the Beijing authorities and here’s this little website in Panama defying their blackout ban, albeit without a thought about publishing in China? The Chinese government, or somebody working on their behalf or thinking that he, she or they were doing so, retaliated against us. Sometime after that the US and Chinese governments came to an uderstanding or sorts and China eschewed such Internet warfare.
In 2013, 2014 and 2015 a series of hacks shut down The Panama News website several times. We think from surrounding circumstances that it was one politically motivated person and his camp in Panama, using the Israeli NOS company’s Pegasus system, then various more ordinary criminal elements piling on to send out spam ijn the name of our website’s dedicated email address. After a series of battles we regained control of our name and website and set up a WordPress site. There were immediate attacks with bundles of spam messages in the comments section, aimed at overloading and shutting down the website. That’s why we have no comments feature on the website itself. Make your comments on one of our social media extensions, the Facebook page or the Twitter / X account. We are fairly sure on whose behalf the Pegasus attack was made and have some compelling clues about who the computer nerd who actually did it was. None of it would stand up in a Panamanian court, although in a US process that includes interrogatories, depositions and compelled production of documents we might have a winning case. Whether we could afford the litigation is another matter. Almost certainly the US National Security Agency has files that would indicate who did what and even more certainly they would not share such data to help The Panama News.
NOW we use the usual log-in button for our wordpress.org website and get a message coming from somebody calling themselves wordpress.com, demanding payment to register our website with them. It’s a criminal hacking scam and if it’s very widespread is a major attack on the small, independent online news media. We found a way back into our website but so far not a way to complain to wordpress.org. We are working on it.
Knowing the published history of WordPress hacks, there has been a rash of them that were used to send out illegal commercial spam messages. If you get some email saying that it’s from The Panama News or from WordPress – most probably purporting to sell you some product or service – it’s something that belongs in your spam file. For one thing, we are reader supported and do not sell ads. Malicious jerks MAY be able to buy off The Washington Post or The Los Angeles Times, but not The Panama News.
Bear with us. We are not omniscient, nor do we have the resources to hire Internet sleuths to chase down and expose the hackers and the people who employ them. We ARE, however, doing the best we can to protect our readers. Hence this message. If you have anything to report, do so on our Facebook page or via our Twitter / X account.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.
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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
}The last two summits of BRICS countries have raised questions about the coalition’s identity and purpose. This began to come into focus at the summit hosted by South Africa in 2023, and more acutely at the recent 2024 summit in Kazan, Russia.
At both events the alliance undertook to expand its membership. In 2023, the first five BRICS members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – invited Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join. All bar Saudi Arabia have now done so. The 2024 summit pledged to admit 13 more, perhaps as associates or “partner countries.”
On paper, the nine-member BRICS+ strikes a powerful pose. It has a combined population of about 3.5 billion, or 45% of the world’s people. Combined, its economies are worth more than US$28.5 trillion – about 28% of the global economy. With Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as members, BRICS+ produces about 44% of the world’s crude oil.
Based on my research and policy advice to African foreign policy decision-makers, I would argue that there are three possible interpretations of the purpose of BRICS+.
A club of self-interested members – a kind of global south cooperative. What I’d label as a self-help organization.
A reforming bloc with a more ambitious goal of improving the workings of the current global order.
A disrupter, preparing to replace the western-dominated liberal world order.
Analyzing the commitments that were made at the meeting in Russia, I would argue that BRICS+ sees itself more as a self-interested reformer. It represents the thinking among global south leaders about the nature of global order, and the possibilities of shaping a new order. This, as the world moves away from the financially dominant, yet declining western order (in terms of moral influence) led by the United States. The move is to a multipolar order in which the east plays a leading role.
However, the ability of BRICS+ to exploit such possibilities is constrained by its make-up and internal inconsistencies. These include a contested identity, incongruous values and lack of resources to convert political commitments into actionable plans.
Summit outcomes
The trend towards closer trade and financial cooperation and coordination stands out as a major achievement of the Kazan summit. Other achievements pertain to global governance and counter-terrorism.
When it comes to trade and finance, the final communiqué said the following had been agreed:
adoption of local currencies in trade and financial transactions. The Kazan Declaration notes the benefits of faster, low cost, more efficient, transparent, safe and inclusive cross-border payment instruments. The guiding principle would be minimal trade barriers and non-discriminatory access.
establishment of a cross-border payment system. The declaration encourages correspondent banking networks within BRICS, and enabling settlements in local currencies in line with the BRICSCross-Border Payments Initiative. This is voluntary and nonbinding and is to be discussed further.
creation of an enhanced roles for the New Development Bank, such as promoting infrastructure and sustainable development.
a proposed Br Grain Exchange, to improve food security through enhanced trade in agricultural commodities.
All nine BRICS+ countries committed themselves to the principles of the UN Charter – peace and security, human rights, the rule of law, and development – primarily as a response to the western unilateral sanctions.
The summit emphasised that dialogue and diplomacy should prevail over conflict in, among other places, the Middle East, Sudan, Haiti and Afghanistan.
Faultlines and tensions
Despite the positive tone of the Kazan declaration, there are serious structural fault lines and tensions inherent in the architecture and behavior of BRICS+. These might limit its ambitions to be a meaningful change agent.
The members don’t even agree on the definition of BRICS+. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa calls it a platform. Others talk of a group (Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi) or a family (Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jianan).
So what could it be?
BRICS+ is state-driven – with civil society on the margins. It reminds one of the African Union, which pays lip service to citizens’ engagement in decision-making.
But it would need to cohere around shared values. What would they be?
Critics point out that BRICS+ consists of democracies (South Africa, Brazil, India), a theocracy (Iran), monarchies (UAE, Saudi Arabia) and authoritarian dictatorships (China, Russia). For South Africa this creates a domestic headache. At the Kazan summit, its president declared Russia a friend and ally. At home, its coalition partner in the government of national unity, the Democratic Alliance, declared Ukraine as a friend and ally.
There are also marked differences over issues such as the reform of the United Nations. For example, at the recent UN Summit of the Future the consensus was for reform of the UN security council. But will China and Russia, as permanent security council members, agree to more seats, with veto rights, on the council?
As for violent conflict, humanitarian crises, corruption and crime, there is little from the Kazan summit that suggests agreement around action.
Unity of purpose
What about shared interests? A number of BRICS+ members and the partner countries maintain close trade ties with the west, which regards Russia and Iran as enemies and China as a global threat.
Some, such as India and South Africa, use the foreign policy notions of strategic ambiguity or active non-alignment to mask the reality of trading with east, west, north and south.
The harsh truth of international relations is there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. The BRICS+ alliance will most likely cohere as a global south co-operative, with an innovative self-help agenda, but be reluctant to overturn the current global order from which it desires to benefit more equitably.
Trade-offs and compromises might be necessary to ensure “unity of purpose.” It’s not clear that this loose alliance is close to being able to achieve that.
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