La lucha continua. Foto por la Coordinadora Ciudadana.
Hay que derogar la Ley 51 de la CSS
por Marco A. Gandásegui, hijo
En febrero de 2015 señalé que la Ley 51 de 2005 fue concebida para transferir los fondos de la Caja de Seguro Social (CSS) a las diferentes agencias privadas financieras panameñas y extranjeras que especulan con los ahorros de los trabajadores panameños. Ya era público y notorio que el daño que la ley 51 le hacía al programa de Invalidez, vejez y muerte (IVM) de la CSS era catastrófico.
¿En qué consiste la lógica de la legislación introducida en la CSS en 2005? Por un lado, las cuotas que pagan los trabajadores a la CSS para el programa IVM se dividirían en dos fondos. Habría un programa para quienes pagan menos de B/800 que seguiría siendo solidario. También habría un programa para quienes pagan cuotas correspondientes a un salario de más de B/800, que sería individual. Es decir, el asegurado recibiría al llegar a su edad de jubilación la suma de lo acumulado durante toda su vida laboral.
Además, los que estaban en el programa solidario en 2005 y querían seguir siendo miembros podían hacerlo. Todos los que entraban al programa de la CSS con salarios superiores a B/800 después de 2005 estaban obligados a sumarse al plan de jubilación individual.
Por el otro, las cuotas que pagan los trabajadores benefician a los especuladores, sin beneficio alguno para los asegurados. Los trabajadores sólo reciben lo aportado durante largos años de trabajo. Los fondos adicionales que generan los ahorros son transferidos en su totalidad a los especuladores. Además, si los agentes privados hacen malas inversiones y/o quiebran, los asegurados pierden todos sus ahorros.
En el caso del sistema solidario los trabajadores del presente cubren las pensiones de los trabajadores del pasado. Se parte de un supuesto lógico en este sistema. Siempre habrán más trabajadores y, también, estarán ganando más que los que pertenecían al sistema en el pasado. Esta lógica se ha sostenido en todos los sistemas de seguro social solidario.
En el caso del sistema individual, el trabajador no cuenta con una red que lo proteja de cualquier percance –enfermedad o accidente– que podría dejarlo abandonado a su suerte. El valor que tiene el “seguro social” es precisamente que ofrece un sostén. Esta es la diferencia con el seguro individual o privado que no lo ofrece.
En el caso de Panamá, las cuotas de los que menos cotizan no podrán cubrir las necesidades de los que se están jubilando en los próximos 10 años. Los que más cotizan están fuera del programa solidario y tienen sus planes individuales (que benefician sólo a los especuladores que reciben sus cuotas).
Lo peor de la situación es que los administradores de la CSS a partir de 2005 no conocen la institución, su situación financiera, ni su potencial. Un empresario ligado a la Caja confesó que “la CSS debe emitir el estado de cuenta y entregárselo a las personas que están en el sistema, con detalles de lo ahorrado en su cuenta personal y los intereses devengados”. Eso no se hace.
Un exdirector de la CSS afirmó que “en este momento tenemos información imprecisa, porque los estados financieros ameritan ser depurados y auditados”.
Agregó que “el programa de IVM siempre ha tenido un futuro incierto”. Desde hace tres años no se conoce el estado financiero de la institución. Se hicieron inversiones en compras y edificaciones sin control por parte de la CSS. Sin embargo, los responsables llevaban una contabilidad minuciosa de las ganancias que arrojaban las operaciones.
Los responsables admiten de manera cándida que los directivos sólo han pensado en hacer negocios con los fondos de la CSS. Un miembro de la junta directiva admitió que “hay una serie de compromisos que se deben pagar y si todo está bien sustentado, nosotros como junta directiva damos el visto bueno”. Parece que no importa que eso signifique hundir a la institución y todos los asegurados.
Según el actual director de la entidad, se siente obligado a pagar 1,200 millones de dólares a varios acreedores en un plazo de cuatro años. Para evitar la catástrofe puede suspender las obras y los pagos. Si lo obligan a pagar, puede extender el plazo a 2050. Un expresidente de la Cámara de Comercio dijo que “el programa no es sostenible en el tiempo”. Sólo le faltó agregar que la única solución es derogar la Ley 51 de 2005 y regresar al sistema de seguro social solidario
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The prosecution had some controversial claims about what are proscribed “weapons of war” but the judge ducked those and based the verdict on the guns being unregistered. Photo by Policia Nacional.
Judge makes a simple point about Panama’s serious gun laws
by Eric Jackson
The defense was appalled at the charges. How could a prosecutor call a submachine gun an illegal “weapon of war” if, as was claimed, it’s ability to fire on full automatic had been disabled? How can 9mm pistols be called “weapons of war” just because of their large caliber? How can a former National Police chief and national security director, working as head of security for Panama Ports when his house was raided, be denied guns? How can a man be penalized for having weapons inherited from his father, also a former National Police chief? Judge Oscar Carrasquilla held that it did not matter who the defendant is or whether the arms in question are inherently proscribed for persons other than the government to possess. Gustavo Pérez could not show any permit for any of the arms that were seized during a January 12, 2015 wee hours raid on his home that was about illegal electronic eavesdropping during the Martinelli administration. Police and prosecutors didn’t find any spy equipment but they had a warrant for Pérez’s arrest and while executing it they found two 9 millimeter pistols, a .38 revolver and a submachine gun imprecisely described by prosecutors as a Minimax. One of the pistols was registered as National Police property. Pérez had no permit for any of the firearms, so he was charged with that.
Had the judge decided to throw the book, as prosecutors had asked, the former chief could have been handed a 10-year prison sentence. The judge took into account that Pérez had not lied, stalled the case or otherwise been less than a gentleman about these charges and made the sentence 64 months instead. That’s conveniently long enough to keep him off the streets and one might presume out of police politics for the duration of the Varela administration. When one considers the extensive purge that Pérez and Martinelli carried out — more than 2,000 cops forced out, including many in the upper ranks and almost all of the nation’s homicide detectives, and the promotion of people whom the thuggish Martinelli liked to key posts — one might infer a political motive for removing Pérez from circulation.
If the judge declined to classify the weapons, he also declined to get into the motives of the acccused. A person has to have a permit for a firearm in Panama, Judge Carrasquilla ruled in a written opinion that was made public on December 2. The laws about gun registration and permits apply “even when a person holds high positions in the field of security and public order.”
Pérez also awaits trial on invasion of privacy charges and has been under investigation for some arguably improper purchases when he was police chief and later national security director. He is incarcerated where Manuel Antonio Noriega and several other politically connected prisoners are held, El Renacer Penitentiary near Gamboa.
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Questionable collateral: the Aqua Tower is being built on the sand of Playa Blanca, but it is alleged that the money was not spent on proper foundations and that the 13-story structure would thus be at risk of collapse and unable to get a proper occupancy permit. But the project is one of the assets on which bank loans and bond issues were based.
The beach real estate boom, bond market
and reputations at risk in bankruptcy case
by Eric Jackson
When a company made a bond issue, obviously it wasn’t bankrupt.
Felipe Chapman chairman of the board of the Bolsa de Valores
Notice which media are running the screaming headlines, who is making lame pronouncements and which interested parties are studiously ignored. In Cocle’s First Circuit Court, Judge Manuel de Jesús Corrales Hidalgo made a ruling in a voluntary bankruptcy case brought by the current owners of RG Hotels Inc, which was sold by its founder Rugiere Gálvez in 2014 and changed hands since. The judge held that RG Hotels was insolvent as of July 31, 2012 and that condition had been concealed by bogus records and false statements, and thus ordered a bankruptcy retroactive to that date.
The company had made two bond issues worth some $30 million, and had been granted two loans adding up to $5 million by the state-owned Caja de Ahorros after that time. Now there is a great outcry — most notably in La Prensa, which has many business ties with the companies involved in Panama Oeste and Cocle beach developments — about the injustice and destructive effects of this rare back-dated bankruptcy.
The complaint is that foreign investors will lose the money that they put into RG properties — Casa de Campo Farallon, Blue Vacation, the Ibiza Playa Coronado, the Ibiza Playa Corona, the Aqua Tower, the Las Perlas condo hotels (formerly Wyndham, before that Royalton, before that Nikki Beach) — and that this will send out an international shock wave that will harm all of the real estate developments along Panama’s Pacific beaches.
For a long time the talk — never readily proven in large part due to Panama’s corporate secrecy laws — has been that much of that sector can’t withstand close financial scrutiny. But projects that are taking much longer than promised to pre-construction buyers to complete led to a recent Supreme Court decision voiding contract provisions that prevent buyers from canceling contracts when they don’t get their condos within the promised time, buildings allegedly completely sold that have few light on at night and allegations by foreign governments of money laundering in Panamanian real estate all suggest businesses that are not what they are represented to be.
It’s not just a civil bankruptcy case, nor just a potential bursting of a real estate bubble anymore. Since this past June, prosecutors have been conducting a quiet criminal investigation of the Caja de Ahorros loans to RG. Will the scope of the probe go beyond those two transactions? There have been tales of questionable loans from that institution to politically connected people for at least 10 years, with names from the current and previous two administrations being raised — and vehemently disputed when raised in public.
The bond issues, backed by some exceptionally specious collateral with the most prominent rabiblanco law firms and brokerage houses advising their clients to purchase that commercial paper, are already a shock to the already disreputable Panamanian securities industry. The Securities Market Superintendency says that it is drafting a rule to require those who would issue bonds on the Panamanian market to first get a debt rating by an outside company. There are complaints from stock brokerages and law firms that such a requirement would make it more costly and time-consuming to sell commercial paper. The point is also made that corrupted or clueless bond raters gave the worst Wall Street fraud artists stellar ratings ahead of the 2008 crash. But had some outside firm done some due diligence on RG, they would have found among the claimed assets the 2.9-hectare Farallon de Chiru land parcel, valued by RG at $400 per square meter. But this property has no access roads, is not subdivided into lots, and has neither streets nor sewers nor water lines nor storm drains nor electrical service. For banks and brokerages the stated value was $9,487,336 but in Judge Corrales’s court it was appraised at $347,675. Then there were properties included as collateral to which RG didn’t actually hold title, and buildings sold to condo investors with pools and clubhouses which were not, on paper, part of the same properties with the buildings in which the units were sold.
There are other claims over which the old and new owners of RG are not particularly fighting with each other, but they are of a sort common up and down the beaches in “condo hotel” schemes. The way that is supposed to work is that condo owners live in their units when they want, but when they don’t they are managed as hotel units and the owners receive part of the revenue from their occupancy. RG systematically cheated the owners of this income and this practice is pretty much the norm here. For somebody who is laundering the proceeds of illegal activities abroad — maybe drugs, maybe playing Venezuela’s currency exchange black market, maybe a North American politician washing bribe money — it would not much matter. For some upper middle class snowbird who figures that a unit is like a time share arrangement, it might matter a great deal. To franchise chains like Nikki Beach, Wyndham and Royalton it also matters if systematic theft is happening under the rubric of their trademarks.
Then, all up and down the beaches, there have been land grabs ongoing since at least the Moscoso administration. Is it all well settled and too late for any of those who were unable to afford lawyers and bribes when they were thrown out to claim any rights now? Perhaps.
But do developers wanting to float bonds, and brokers who would like to sell them, want outside firms inquiring into the possible claims of the dispossessed and defrauded? And for that matter would the Bolsa de Valores and those who make their livings off of it care to have outsiders inquiring about how it is that the prices of stocks and bonds here seem to rarely have any relationship to the value of their underlying assets?
Read the charges and counter-charges in La Prensa and La Estrella and you will see prominent names from Panameñista, Cambio Democratico and PRD governments come up. (You might also be able to figure out the sympathies of those who run those respective news organizations.) Look at old hype and you will see the beach condo promoters playing up their connections with the politicians of the day, via “advertorial” stuff misrepresented as news. The judge’s back-dated bankruptcy, if it stands up on appeal, surely would be bad news for bankers and bond holders. It would maket them unsecured creditors of a business empire with assets worth under $40 million but liabilities in excess of $150 million. But how much public sympathy will there be for people who put their money down in 2012 and 2013 because they figured that the Gálvezes and their partners were tight with Ricardo Martinelli, so it was a sure bet?
For those who bought units at what is now Las Perlas because they want to live there, the equities are more compelling. They thought they owned their homes, and now they might not. The pool is dry, the grass isn’t cut, the electricity has been shut off and many have never received the deeds to the condos that they bought. What if the outcome of a bankruptcy court battle between two groups of investors is that these people, most of whom are foreigners, are tossed out onto the streets with no compensation? In that case it will be some years before anybody in Panama’s real estate sector will be able to pretend that it never happened. It will hurt, and people afraid of being hurt by others in different beach projects will start to ask uncomfortable questions about their situations.
The guest of honor and dignitaries at the opening of the Ibiza Playa Corona. BUY NOW!!! It’s going up, Up, UP!!! Or so people were led to believe.
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Accelerate expansion of antiretroviral therapy to all people living with HIV: WHO
The key to ending the AIDS epidemic
by the World Health Organization
On World AIDS Day the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasizes that expanding antiretroviral therapy to all people living with HIV is key to ending the AIDS epidemic within a generation.
“The Millennium Development Goal of reversing the HIV epidemic was reached ahead of the 2015 deadline — an incredible achievement that testifies to the power of national action and international solidarity,” declared WHO Director General Margaret Chan.
Expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has resulted in a stark reduction of AIDS-related deaths. At the same time, increasingly effective prevention efforts have reduced numbers of new HIV infections. Since the epidemic’s peak in 2004, the number of deaths has fallen by 42 percent with some 7.8 million lives being saved over the last 15 years, according to a new WHO report. The number of new infections has fallen by 35 percent since the turn of the century.
Over the last 15 years, scale-up of ART has been most dramatic in the Africa Region where now more than 11 million people are receiving HIV treatment, up from 11,000 at the turn of the century. People living with HIV in Africa are now more likely to receive treatment than people living in most other parts of the world. Globally, in June 2015 close to 16 million people out of a total of 37 million people living with HIV were taking ART.
Doubling access to testing and antiretroviral therapy
At the UN General Assembly in September, world leaders endorsed a new set of Sustainable Development Goals and milestones, including a call for ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Reducing the number of new infections by 75 percent and doubling the number of people on ART by 2020 are the first milestones towards achieving this goal.
Trial results published earlier this year have confirmed that people living with HIV who begin antiretroviral therapy soon after acquiring the virus — before the virus has weakened their immune systems — are more likely to stay healthy and less likely to transmit the virus to their partners. Those findings led WHO in September to recommend that everyone living with HIV be offered treatment.
In the effort to help countries implement the “treat all” recommendation, WHO is now presenting an additional set of recommendations on how to expand ART to all in a rapid, focused, and efficient manner.
These recommendations include using innovative testing approaches such as community or self-testing to help increase the number of people who know their HIV status; starting treatment faster in those people who are diagnosed with HIV; bringing ART to the community; and allowing for greater intervals between clinic visits for people who have been stable on ART for some time. They also highlight the importance of improving access to viral load testing and new classes of antiretroviral drugs.
“WHO applauds governments, civil society, and organizations that have made availability of life-saving antiretroviral therapy possible in the most trying circumstances. The new recommendation to expand ART to all people living with HIV is a call to further step up the pace,” said Dr. Winnie Mpanju-Shumbusho, Assistant Director General at WHO.
Preventing new infections
Reducing the number of new HIV infections remains a major focus for the vision of ending AIDS. There is increasing concern about a slow down –or even reversal — in the decrease of new infections in some countries and among some of the most affected population groups. “We must deploy all means to strengthen the HIV prevention response. The health sector can and must play a central role,” added Dr. Mpanju-Shumbusho
Already, over the last five years in Africa some 10 million men have undergone voluntary medical circumcision, a procedure that reduces their risk of acquiring HIV by 60 percent. New approaches to prevention are also emerging, including the use of antiretroviral drugs to help people at substantial risk from acquiring HIV. WHO now recommends this practice, called “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or PrEP, as an additional option to augment comprehensive prevention for people at heightened risk of HIV infection. Other elements of this package include behavior-change communication, the consistent use of male and female condoms and prevention programs for key populations, including harm reduction for people who use drugs.
The same drugs that keep people living with HIV from becoming sick also prevent transmission of the virus from pregnant women to their infants. Among the 22 countries that account for 90 percent of new HIV infections, eightt have reduced new infections among children by more than 50 percent since 2009, based on 2013 data, and another four are close to that mark.
Ingredients of success
Some low- and middle-income countries have made remarkable progress towards universal access to HIV services: 12 countries have ensured that 60 percent or more of all people living with HIV are aware of their infection and receiving antiretroviral therapy. Key ingredients of the successful HIV response in these countries are national ownership, greater focus of HIV services to reach the most affected locations and populations based on good data, and simplification of prevention and treatment services.
“The sense of urgency that was the norm during the disease’s most-destructive years must not be allowed to abate,” Dr. Mpanju-Shumbusho said. “HIV remains a major health challenge — drawing sharp attention to health system weaknesses and gaps in universal health coverage. Addressing these issues will be critical to meeting the new global targets for AIDS.”
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Adolfo “Chichi” De Obarrio, right, with the Martinellis. The modus operandi for most of the former president’s peculations was to make no-bid direct contracts with favored companies at inflated prices, with De Obarro — Ricardo Martinelli’s personal secretary — collecting 10 to 15 percent in kickbacks and distributing those illicit proceeds among the corrupt public officials and Martinelli business circle individuals involved in the transactions and the Cambio Democratico campaign fund. De Obarrio and both Martinellis have fled Panama. Photo by the Presidencia, way back when.
Some 235 pending cases, hundreds of millions in seized assets and dozens in jail, under house arrest or on the run
by Eric Jackson
Panama, like many other Civil Code legal system jurisdictions, allows lawyers to come into court and file motions on behalf of fugitives. And so it was that at a November 23 hearing on a kickback and theft case related to dried foods for school lunch programs, an attorney for the former president’s fugitive personal secretary and bag man Chichi De Obarrio moved to change the warrant to throw he guy in jail if he gets caught to house arrest. The judge summarily denied that motion but will take a month to decide whether to bind De Obarrio over for trial along with eight other people in that case. Defendants in that matter include former comptroller general Gioconda Torres de Bianchini, former education minister Lucy Molinar and public works minister Federico Suaréz, plus a cast of lesser characters, most of them former public officials. If Chichi gets locked up over the school lunch program, he will be shuttling between the jail and various courtrooms on several other cases as well.
Meanwhile the former comptroller general, along with former agriculture ministers Emilio Kieswetter and Oscar Osorio, head a cast of 11 characters named by the tax prosecutor as having stolen at least $22.6 in a Tonosi irrigation scheme that was never built and which it appears was never intended to be built. The diversion of money from that scheme, criminal prosecutors allege, involved the Banco Universal and its former leading light Felipe “Pipo” Virzi, fugitive businessmen Gabriel Btesh and Ricky Calvo, plus the Financial Pacific brokerage house. Virzi is under house arrest here, the whereabouts of Calvo, like De Obarrio, are a mystery, while by a number of reports that have not been officially confirmed Btesh is in Israel. The Financial Pacific case against Martinelli is just getting underway in the Supreme Court and with the time limit on investigations now removed it may branch off into the Tonosi matter. Co-defendants who are not legislators can’t be brought into the high court case against Martinelli, but information from that investigation may be shared with ordinary prosecutors for criminal cases arising from the same schemes and with tax prosecutors.
Overlapping both the Tonosi and Financial Pacific cases are the tax and criminal investigations into the Cobranzas del Istmo privatized tax collection scheme. In the Financial Pacific matter the insider trading investigation against Martinelli appears to be farther along than various other probes against many other players in that money laundering mill for criminals of several nations. Allegations about attempts to cover up crimes at Financial Pacific touch the Supreme Court’s presiding magistrate, José Ayú Prado and could end up in a murder case as Securities Market Superintendency senior analyst Vernon Ramos, who was handling an administrative investigation, disappeared three years ago. In the Cobranzas del Istmo case three separate criminal matters were consolidated into one case on November 21, but the Martinelli part of that probe will be separate, new suspects may be added to the ordinary criminal case and the tax prosecutor’s shoe has yet to drop.
In early October Attorney General Kenia Porcell said that her office had 234 corruption investigations underway, with 31 people being held in preventive detention and some $140 million in assets seized or frozen. But this did not count those processed by the Supreme Court, the legislature or the tax prosecutors. Since then a few of those who were in jail have been granted bail and a few more people have been jailed, there have been more asset seizures or freezes by various agencies and tax cases have been brought.
A lot of rogues’ gallery charts that have appeared in various media are not so helpful, as the presumptions about control and causation are not defined as in, say, a governmental organization chart. The more realistic way to make any such chart would be of concentric circles with overlapping segments but Ricardo Martinelli at the center. There is a reasonably good chance that a December 11 hearing will lead to a request for INTERPOL help in Martinelli’s arrest and extradition to Panama.
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Problem? What problem? This is the November canal expansion update that Canal Affairs Minister Roberto Roy, Panama Canal administrator Jorge Luis Quijano and the scandal-plagued ACP board of directors insist on showing instead of giving the public and press access to the documents about the catastrophic concrete failures in the new locks. Video by the Panama Canal Authority.
Can Quijano and Roy keep their jobs in the face of
disaster via corny information control games?
by Eric Jackson
Seven unions that represent Panama Canal workers have demanded that the Panama Canal Authority allow them to have an independent auditor review the books and documents of the Panama Canal Authority with respect to the canal expansion project. The authority, which has not shown the GUPC consortium’s report that it said was due in September after grave flaws appeared in a Cocoli Locks sill in August, has also concealed such documents as the Panama Technological University (UTP) investigators’ findings about the problem. In a press statement berating its employees for wanting to see the public records, the ACP defined itself as transparent and “subject to rigorous control” because the ACP submitted 36 reports to the National Assembly over the years of the expansion project, because the authority maintains a website and because bond rating agencies based in New York have given its commercial paper high ratings.
Facts observable by people outside of the authority’s control, however, have the ACP on the defensive. First, Minister of Canal Affairs Roberto Roy and canal administrator Jorge Luis Quijano are attempting to shield themselves from any blame by having nothing to say about the crisis. Second, Roy’s and Quijano’s underlings are generally allowing the GUPC construction consortium, which is demanding nearly double the contracted price for designing and building the new locks, to define what the problem is and how they will fix it. Meanwhile, civil engineers and people with experience in large-scale construction are saying that GUPC’s statements about the nature of the problem are grossly inadequate starting from their failure to admit defective concrete pours, and that the drilling of holes into the concrete structures and the insertion of rebar and cement into the holes is a substandard repair that’s unlikely to meet the specification of locks that last for 100 years.
The locks sill with the waterfall? The rebar already in that structure has been soaked and will rust. When it rusts the metal will expand, crumbling the concrete around it. The proper solution is not rocket science. It’s just expensive and time-consuming. The defective concrete work must be torn out and redone.
There is a problem with redoing the bad concrete work. It may bankrupt Constructora Urbana SA (CUSA), a Panamanian junior partner in the GUPC consortium. It would probably be the last straw that destroys Spain’s heavily government-subsidized Sacyr Vallehermoso, which could take down the decrepit Spanish economy with it. (Is the desperate information delay here also a bid to save the conservative Spanish government, which faces the voters in December 20 national elections? Perhaps.) Redoing the concrete would also be a major blow to Italy’s Salini Impregilo, which is in much better financial shape than Sacyr.
CUSA being put out of business would defeat the scheme that gave rise to the present problem. That company is owned by the family of former canal administrator Alberto Alemán Zubieta, who had been CEO of it before coming to work for the canal. The GUPC bid was a grossly unrealistic lowball and many people said so at the time. But there was no conflict of interest, the ACP declared, because Alemán Zubieta said that a few months before the bidding he had sold his shares in the CUSA family business.
November 25 through 30 was an auspicious time for ACP public relations manipulations. November 28 is the anniversary of Panama’s independence from Spain, making November 30 a legal holiday and November 27 a widespread unofficial day off as people went “Black Friday2 shopping or left for the Interior to make a four-day weekend. In the United States November 26 was Thanksgiving, a lot of people were traveling on the 25th to get to family gatherings, most people didn’t have to work on the 27th and the 28th and 29th were a weekend. This was precisely the time when the ACP announced to Reuters that its April canal expansion completion date might not be met, and when GUPC, apparently allowed to speak on behalf of the ACP, announced to Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency that the repairs were being done according to the GUPC’s less expensive scheme and should be done in January. Not only was information released when it was known that fewer interested people would be paying attention, but using a Cuban news agency is a good way of getting a story picked up by the world’s corporate news organizations.
There does, however, seem to be some bad news lurking out there for the ACP to minimize. A source had previously told La Estrella that there is another crack in another sill in the Cocoli Locks. Now The Panama News is told by a source whose version can’t readily be verified that there are concrete problems with the Atlantic Side locks as well. A lot of games might be played. In Panama false stories that would tend to make a party look bad sometimes get spread by such parties themselves in order to block or discredit critical journalism. Sources are sometimes wrong. Were the ACP to act like the public entity that it is instead of pretending to be a family business with secret records, these things could be readily checked.
Most likely the canal expansion story is going to get worse before it gets better. What we saw over the holidays was probably the ACP using crude techniques to manage news that will look bad. Most likely there will be a prolonged effort to conceal the most damning documents about the ACP – GUPC relationship. (After all, the 2009 contract itself has never been fully released to the public.) But we shall see. The size of problems already known to the public would make it hard to continue the sort of information management we have seen, if that is the plan.
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As politicians discuss climate policy in Paris, citizens
in Panama and many other places demand action
photos by Citizens Climate Lobby – Panama
November 29 was a day of global protest about the inability of politicians to reach effective international agreements about ways to slow and eventually stop humanity’s contribution to climate change. In a Paris that’s nervous after terrorists attacks there were restrictions on public gatherings, while in Washington a group of senators beholden to the US oil and coal industries moved to block any agreement that might be reached at the COP-21 summit. The global debate is also complicated by widespread corruption and land grabbing arising from such “green economy” schemes as carbon bond trading. But the ways to reduce the world’s climate footprint are well enough known and shown to be practical and affordable, with the only real question that remains being how to resolve or resist the claims of various economic interest groups that see their power threatened. None of this stopped the demonstrations in more than 2,400 places around the world.
Here in Panama a relatively new group, a local chapter of the international Citizens Climate Lobby, weighed in on the issue in a capital city largely depopulated during a long holiday weekend. The lobby’s attention was to things local as well as planetary, such as concerns about the destruction of Panama City’s forested areas in an urban sprawl that makes the city even more automobile-dependent.
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“Rumbo a San Carlos” — 11” X 14” — painted from a shot I took at Santa Clara.
George Scribner’s notes and new paintings
I wrote an article about the Panama Canal Expansion paintings I’ve been doing for the December issue of International Artist Magazine. The article begins on page 46 and covers my painting process over the last eight years, including painting on site and completing the finished pieces in Los Angeles. Hope you enjoy. https://www.internationalartist.com/issues/ezine/num/106
“Rubén Blades” — 9″ x 12” — SOLD — I grew up with Rubén in Panama and over the years have kept in touch. When I was directing the animated feature Oliver and Company, he graciously let us use one of his songs in the film. This painting is a small thanks.
Workshops
Ventura, CA I’ll be doing a one day Painting the Figure in the Landscape workshop at the Buenaventura Art association in Ventura, Sunday April 24. Contact me for more information, thanks.
Montrose, CA I’ll also be doing Intermediate to Advanced painting workshop at BMAI in Montrose in January 2016. Just contact me if you have any interest. The class is limited to five.
Panama City, Panama I’m planning on a workshop in Panama City in late January. Dates to be determined.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bjorg” — 16” X 20” — painted on commission.“Southbound at Miraflores Locks” — 9” X 12”
Calendars
We still have 2016 calendars (and prints) available for sale. The calendar is a collection of some of the paintings I’ve done this year. They are $25 and are available at georgescribnerart.com. All proceeds go to the send my grandchildren to college fund!
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