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One of the national scholarship fund’s offices. IFARHU photo.
…as if there would be no tomorrow
The new director of the IFARHU national scholarship fund says that upon the change of administration, the fund was found to be insolvent. This follows months of revelations about abuses there, wherein needy and excellent students were denied, but kids of politically connected parents, and a lot of connected people who aren’t kids, got large grants out of the fund.
With a ridiculous candidate like Gaby Carrizo, it’s easy to see where some of the more predatory party members figured that it would be more than five years in the political wilderness for the PRD so they needed to take what and when they could or forget it.
Now it’s up to the Mulino administration to see to it that those who improperly received don’t get to keep what was taken, and those who wilfully and knowingly stole are punished for that.
Beirut under Israeli bombardment.
The Middle East War did not begin a year ago today
Read the Old testament. Read the inscripted words of ancient Mesopotamian kings. Read the complete histories – not just one side’s perspective – of all of modern Israels’s wars. Then considered what Mr. Netanyahu meant by promising “unprecedented” retaliation for the Hamas offensive.
It’s time to cut off weapons and money for more of this, and to bring war criminals to justice.
The Middle East War did not begin a year ago today
Read the Old Testament. Read the inscripted words of ancient Mesopotamian kings. Read the complete histories – not just one side’s perspective – of all of modern Israels’s wars. Then consider what Mr. Netanyahu meant by promising “unprecedented” retaliation for the Hamas offensive. It’s an announcement of criminal intent.
It’s time to cut off weapons and money for more of this, and to bring war criminals to justice.
Cuban independence activist José Martí, a Wikimedia photo of an 1891 oil painting by Hermann Norman.
Gratitude, like certain flowers, does not grow in the heights and flourishes best in the good soil of thehumble.
José Martí
Bear in mind…
I was elected by the women of Ireland, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system.
Mary Robinson
The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail.
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The year since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliation have demonstrated once again that neither has learned anything from decades of horrific violence as they continue to miscalculate each other’s intentions and resolve.
A Year Of Reckoning
by Alon Ben-Meir
Israeli-Palestinian relations have reached a new nadir in the year since Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliation. Never since Israel’s establishment in 1948 has their relationship reached this level of bloodthirstiness in the quest to completely destroy the other. Both Israel and Hamas have miscalculated the other’s intentions and resolved over the years to rid themselves of each other. The repeated violent encounters and wars over the decades have changed nothing, only poisoning one generation after another and planting the seeds for the next cycle of violence, which led to the horrific attack of October 7.
Israeli-Palestinian relations have reached a new nadir in the year since Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliation. Never since Israel’s establishment in 1948 has their relationship reached this level of bloodthirstiness in the quest to completely destroy the other. Both Israel and Hamas have miscalculated the other’s intentions and resolved over the years to rid themselves of each other. The repeated violent encounters and wars over the decades have changed nothing, only poisoning one generation after another and planting the seeds for the next cycle of violence, which led to the horrific attack of October 7.
Although Hamas expected a major retaliatory attack by Israel, they gravely miscalculated the extent to which Israel would go to counter Hamas’ unprecedented savagery they inflicted on Israeli civilian communities on a holy day, no less, that evoked the horrific memories of the Holocaust. Crossing this red line shattered any restraints to destroy Hamas that Israel might have otherwise exercised.
On its part, Israel underestimated Hamas’s capability to wage such an assault. Israel further underestimated Hamas’ resiliency and fighting abilities, something Prime Minister Netanyahu should have known because he made it possible for Hamas to arm themselves, train tens of thousands of fighters, and build hundreds of miles of tunnels, with time to prepare to wage such a violent assault.
Hezbollah has also miscalculated Israel’s intentions and strategy. Though immediately following the beginning of Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah came to Hamas’s defense by engaging Israel in a violent tit-for-tat confrontation, it miscalculated its approach, which ideally suited Israel’s strategy. It gave Israel the time needed to effectively decimate Hamas’ fighting forces and infrastructure, and then turn its focus on Hezbollah. Finally, Hezbollah fatally underestimated Israel’s technological prowess and unsurpassed intelligence capability, which decapitated most of its top commanders, including Hezbollah’s Secretary General Nasrallah, and crippled the organization’s fighting capability, at least at this stage of the conflict.
Iran came quickly to the realization that the years of heavy investment in Hamas and Hezbollah has not yielded the benefits it had expected. Iran has also bitterly realized that its arsenals—an array of ballistic missiles and drones—are no match for Israel’s air defense systems and that its air defense systems are ineffective in the face of Israel’s superior air force and precision missiles that can penetrate its air space with impunity.
The USA has its share of miscalculations as well. The Biden administration stood firmly behind Israel; it had no strategy as to how to end this conflict before it engulfs the entire region. Yes, the United States lived up to its commitment to protecting Israel’s national security; it has, however, enabled Israel, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, to act as it pleases against the Palestinians, sidestepping the fact that Israel’s ultimate national security rests with Israeli-Palestinian peace.
I cite the above brief review of the miscalculations made by all direct and indirect parties to the conflict to demonstrate that regardless of how this war against Hamas and Hezbollah ends, very little will change the dynamic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unless both sides accept the inevitability of coexistence.
Whereas Hamas is now crippled militarily, it remains a viable organization and will reconstitute itself simply because Israel cannot eradicate a nationalist movement. A growing number of Palestinians cheered Hamas’s attack because they saw no other way to end their suffering unless they rose against the Israeli occupation. A new generation of Palestinians is now poised to continue their struggle against Israel and will pass the mantle to the next generation until they realize their aspiration for statehood.
Israel can win every battle against the Palestinians for generations to come, but it will never win any war that will subdue the Palestinians for good. The Palestinians are there to stay, and no power or circumstance will make them go away. Israel must come to terms with the Palestinians’ rights. If there is one thing the Israelis should have learned from the past 57 years, it is that the occupation will never be sustainable. More than seven million Palestinians who live in the West Bank, Gaza, and in Israel proper, which is roughly equal to the number of Israeli Jews, will not be subjugated to second-class status or occupation, no matter how painful and how long the fight against Israel will last.
By the same token, although Hezbollah will come out of the violent confrontation with Israel bruised and battered, it too will regroup and prepare for the next round of hostilities with Israel as long as there is no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s experience with Hezbollah over the past two decades offers a good lesson to every Israeli that as long as Iran views Hezbollah as the front line in its defense against Israeli and/or American attacks on its soil, Tehran will continue to finance and arm Hezbollah regardless of the extent of its losses in the current conflict.
Iran, too, would realize if it hadn’t learned already that its aspiration to destroy Israel is nothing but a perilous nightmare. Iran must reconcile itself with Israel’s irrevocable reality and understand that any credible threat against Israel’s existence is tantamount to suicide. Iran has now witnessed how the two prominent members of its “Axis of Resistance” have fared — Hamas is decimated, and Hezbollah is crumbling before its eyes.
Finally, it is time for the United States to understand that while its iron-clad commitment to Israeli security is necessary not only to protect Israel but to safeguard its own strategic interest in the region, it must now put its foot down, stop preaching about a two-state solution, and start acting on it. The United States should make its continued political, military, and financial support of Israel conditional upon Israel’s moving earnestly toward a two-state solution.
In the final analysis, the US unconditional commitment to Israel’s security did not produce peace. It has only prolonged the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Israel took comfort in America’s unconditional support regardless of its continuing, nearly six decades-long, brutal occupation.
The question is, will Israel, the Palestinians, and the players that support them, have learned anything from Hamas’s attack on October 7? If they have not, the horrific Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliation will only be another tragic chapter in the dark, dismal annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. Added: Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.
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When you get old and buzzardly, spend a lot of time on social media and identify as male and single, you get all these incongruent friend requests from improbable online personas.
Not just porn, sextortion and pedophilia — Martinelli
was extradited under the Cyber-Crimes Convention
by Eric Jackson
The National Assembly has turned its attention to computer crimes. Not especially the ones we have seen from and within Panama’s political caste – the massive theft of confidential government records for partisan / personalist campaign purposes; the viral spread of scurrilous montages alleging things about the sexuality of political adversaries;; hacking that shuts down, even erases, critical websites; all manner of interception of supposedly private communications. (The Cyber-Crimes Convention specifically provides that the extradition principle of specialty does not apply, no matter what the fugitive sticky fingers and money launderer holed up in the Nicaraguan Consulate may claim.)
Having passed out of committee, the full legislature is now considering proposed Bill 61, which criminalizes a lot of sleazy online practices, with most of the discussion revolving around extortion, the sexual recruitment of minors by adults and pornography. For some crimes under the proposed law, a person could be sentenced to 20 years in Panama’s hellish prison system.
The international players on the scene – Israeli and Italian hacking companies, skullduggery arising from the US and Chinese rivalry playing out on the isthmus, West African criminal organizations, thuggish multinational corporations deep-sixing their data via Panama – those are not much addressed here.
It is not, however, as if what’s left isn’t real. Ricardo Beteta Bond, more or less the founder of Panama’s gay liberation movement, puts it this way:
Cases of scams, extortion, theft and even assault are common.The ease with which one can create a profile and contact others, together with the promise of anonymous encounters, has been used by malicious individuals to perpetrate criminal acts.
So would President Mulino sign it? Would someone in the legislature or the rabiblanco media dare to bring up the history of cyber-crime in our political history? We shall see.
In Spanish, read the proposed law — ACTUALLY, YOU CAN’T BECAUSE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY NOW BURIES INFORMATION ABOUT BILLS IT IS CONSIDERING, WHICH USED TO BE EASILY AVAILABLE ON ITS WEBSITE.
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Sandy Koufax at Dodger Stadium circa 1962, California Historical Society photo. The Hall of Fame southpaw hurler famously declined to pitch on major Jewish holidays, including when in 1959 when the Dodgers’ rotation would have had him starting on Rosh Hashana and in 1965 when he would otherwise have been slated to pitch on Yom Kippur.
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Renaissance man Kris Kristofferson – singer, actor, activist, veteran, Rhodes Scholar and “one of the greatest songwriters of all time” – has died at 88. Known for meticulously crafted songs of regret and longing – despite a voice “like a barking bullfrog” – he was also “an epic human with the biggest heart” who advocated for farmworkers, peacemakers, political prisoners, the Nicaraguan and other liberation struggles. What he wanted to emerge from his songs and shows, he said, was “a belief in the human spirit.”
Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas to a military family that moved around a lot, finally settling in San Mateo, California where he was a high-achieving student and short-story writer dubbed “Straight Arrow.” In 1958, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he got a master’s degree in English Literature and planned to write novels; in later years, he used to joke that between him and Bill Clinton, “We’ve cleared up any lingering myths about the brilliance of Rhodes scholars.” Returning to the U.S., he enlisted in the Army; during a three-year-tour in West Germany, he boxed, learned to be a helicopter pilot and played in an Army band. On his return, he planned to accept a gig teaching at West Point until he took a fateful side trip to Nashville, where he quickly grew enamored of its burgeoning singer/songwriter scene and decided to join it. His mother disowned him, telling him that regardless of what he might achieve, it would never match “the tremendous disappointment you’ve always been.”
But the good and dutiful student flourished in his new-found freedom, figuring if he didn’t make it as a songwriter he’d get enough material to become a(nother) Great American Novelist. By then married with two kids, he sometimes wrote multiple songs a week, on the side working as a janitor at Columbia Recording Studios and as a part-time helicopter pilot; according to an apocryphal story, he once landed on Johnny Cash’s lawn so he could hand him demo tapes of every song he’d written. His raspy “lawnmower voice” didn’t help his performing career, but his songs – rich, mournful, introspective – quickly took off; starting in the 1960s, they were covered by covered by dozens of artists and earned multiple Grammys. Several became legendary: Help Me Make It Through the Night, Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, and Me and Bobby McGee, with the iconic lines, “Freedom’s just another word/ For nothin’ left to lose.” Tragically, he never heard Janis Joplin’s version until October 1970, the day after she died.
Years later, Kristofferson said his songs’ lyricism simply sprang from his experiences. As his marriage fell apart, he wrote Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down: “Cause there’s somethin’ in a Sunday/That makes a body feel alone.” “Many of the people I admire are figments of our own imagination,” he said. “I was just writing about what I was going through. One critic compared his craggy voice to the “grit and softness of ancient stone, worn smooth by time and elements.” But his writing represented “a seismic shift” in country music before it got bastardized into the pop country Steve Earl calls “hip hop for white people who are afraid of black people.” Many credit Kristofferson – troubadour, storyteller, member of the freshman class of “outlaw” singer-songwriters – with elevating and humanizing country music into a new and better art form. You could break down the country capital of Nashville, Bob Dylan once said, into “pre-Kris and post-Kris…He changed everything.”
En route, Kristofferson became an actor, starting with Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie in 1971. It was a commercial and critical flop, but he went on to over 50 films in the next two decades, including Scorcese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn in 1974 and an award-winning turn in A Star Is Born with Barbara Streisand in 1976. After that role – a musician destroyed largely by alcoholism – Kristofferson stopped drinking, a move widely applauded. Alcohol, he said, had helped him feel “handsome and bulletproof”; it also almost derailed him. He went on to play, terrifically, a sadistic sheriff in John Sayles’ 1996 Lone Star. “He could dig for the simple truth of a character,” said Sayles, a deeply political filmmaker. “Just as important, Kris Kristofferson knows how to wear the boots.” In 2018, he took on his final movie role as the estranged father of songwriter Blaze Foley in Ethan Hawke’s graceful Blaze. One reviewer praised Kristofferson’s “a wonderful, albeit brief performance.”
Kristofferson also long and consistently spoke out against injustice, beginning with a 1972 concert to benefit Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. He protested nuclear power, supported Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, did benefits for Farm Aid and Amnesty International, played and spoke up for the release of Nelson Mandela, wrote a tribute to Gandhi, Jesus, and MLK Jr., performed at Obama’s White House. In the 1980s, he traveled to Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, wrote songs about other Latin American liberation struggles, decried US support of Contra terrorism in Nicaragua and the first Gulf War; that work inspired 1990’s concept Album Third World Warrior: “They’re killing babies in the name of freedom/We’ve been down that sorry road before,” with what became a catchphrase, “Don’t Let the Bastards (Get You Down).” When Bush invaded Iraq, he switched up some of the lyrics: “They’re bombin’ Baghdad back into the Stone Age/Around the clock non-stop.”
Kristofferson happily conceded other people sang his songs better than he could, though after joining longtime friend Willie Nelson for the 1984 film Songwriter, he argued he could still “sing better than Willie Nelson says I can.” The next year, he and Nelson began to record and tour with fellow outlaws Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash in the supergroup The Highwaymen; he once said that, when they invited him, he felt “like a little kid who’d climbed up on Mount Rushmore and stuck his face up there.” In 1991, on the brink of the Iraq War, they did an interview with New Zealand TV host Paul Holmes, who asked each what they thought was wrong with the USA. They spoke of too much hate, bitterness, money for the military, “our obligation (to) straighten those things out.” Not much, said Kristofferson, except it “reminds me a lot of the flag-waving and choreographed patriotism we had in Nazi Germany, with a lap-dog media cranking out propaganda that would make a Nazi blush. Other than that, we’re doing pretty good.”
Later he toured again with his band Border Lords, often playing small roadhouses. “Kris doesn’t know what the word ‘commercial’ means,” said a friend. “He could go on stage performing Me and Bobby McGee every night. Instead (the) audience might hear 25 songs about the Sandinistas.” Over time, he had triple heart bypass surgery and memory issues diagnosed as Alzheimer‘s that turned out to be Lyme disease. He released three quiet albums – This Old Road, Closer to the Bone, Feeling Mortal – and retired from it all in 2021. He died at home in Maui, Hawaii amidst his eight kids and his third wife Lisa Meyers, who helped navigate the last few years but balked at the term “manager”: “He’s unmanageable. Even if someone tells him to have a good day, he’ll say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.'” Still, he was there to console Sinead O’Connor being booed at a 1992 Dylan tribute concert after she’d ripped up the Pope’s photo to protest sexual abuse in the Church. He was there to give her a hug and tell her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” “It costs nothing to be a decent human being,” notes one fan. “God speed Kris Kristofferson.”
The Pilgrim
And he keeps right on a changin’ for the better or the worse And searchin’ for a shrine he’s never found Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse Or if the going up is worth the coming down He’s a poet he’s a picker he’s a prophet he’s a pusher He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned He’s a walking contradiction partly truth and partly fiction Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home
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Generous Nigerian princes and Uzbek potassium barons for Trump
If you believe that you probably were not born yesterday – odds are you are middle aged or a bit older.
People who have been taken by con men will go to great lengths to deny it. That’s who the MAGAs are: people who have swallowed the bait offered by a lifelong fraud artist.
US citizens who have not been taken really do need to register and vote, and Donald Trump really does need to move into jailhouse accommodations befitting a man convicted of fraud.
Mulino before the General Assembly. United Nations photo.
Mulino at the UN
This was an underwhelming discourse, bound to yield few positive results for Panama. Worse than the speech was some of the praise of it published by Panamanian lawyers afterward. The attempt was made to lead people to believe that those of our law firms that organize corporate shells are some variety of freedom fighters, like the underground railway conductors who helped slaves to escape to free states in the years before the United States had its Civil War.
As in helping the wold’s oppressed millionaires escape from “tax hells” and, for a fee, secrete their wealth in foreign numbered bank accounts. They make it even sound like a patriotic defense of Panamanian sovereignty.
The biggest hole in that line of argument is that the great majority of Panamanians do not share in any of the proceeds of this racket, but do tend to get treated as suspects on those occasions when we try to do business in this world.
Black Skin White Masks illustration by BiLewis.
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
Frantz Fanon
Bear in mind…
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
Leonardo da Vinci
I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.
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The retirement system that works is the solidary one
by Richard Morales
The debate over Social Security pensions is political rather than technical. Its future, rather than a figure, depends on answering a question that is far from a number and places us in the realm of humanity: How do we want to live tomorrow? It doesn’t happen the other way around. It doesn’t start by discussing how to pay, but rather what we need to pay. A life? An old age? A prosperous old age?
For decades, Panamanians supported a retirement that met the basic needs of life. There is a social consensus that every person who has sacrificed their life time working should be guaranteed an adequate income until their last days. Currently, in the debate over the future of the CSS there are two alternatives: a solidarity system — we all support each other — or one of individual accounts — each person is responsible for their own future.
Let’s start with individual accounts. These do not guarantee a retirement. They provide savings and a minimum return. The experience in countries such as El Salvador, Chile, Poland or Kazakhstan is that they pay 20-30% of your salary. However, this system creates a thriving business for those who collect commissions for managing the funds, even if they lose their savings through speculation.
The solidarity system, on the other hand, can offer a pension as a right. This model depends on the contributions of the generations that work in the present and that contribute to the retirements of the generations that worked in the past. It is not a proportion of your savings as an individual, it is a pact of solidarity between parents and children, grandmothers and descendants, which transforms a portion of the wealth produced by the collective work of society into a guaranteed individual income in old age. Today you retire with 60% of your best salaries — which is insufficient, but it is superior to individual accounts.
The sensible thing to do would be to improve pensions, not worsen them. However, the government and business associations are leaning towards their deterioration. At the beginning of the debate, they only want to discuss profitability: reducing costs — that is, pensions — and increasing their potential profits. Therefore, their spokesmen say that solidarity is impossible, that only a system of individual accounts is viable.
It’s a dishonest argument. First, because it relies on the recent crisis of the institution caused by Law 51 of 2005 —which removed contributors from the system — to argue that it is financially unsustainable. It does not discuss the business evasion of contributions, nor the precariousness of the work force after the reforms to the labor code in 1995 — which deepened informality and made it impossible for a large part of the salaried workers, particularly the young, to contribute. Nor does it address the proliferation of special economic zones with thousands of salaried workers who do not contribute. We must talk about history, because there are the causes and also the responsibility of those who today say they are concerned about the institution, but have historically been complicit in the embezzlement.
Second, it is possible to build a modern solidarity system that is financially, institutionally and technically viable for the next century. Only by merging the mixed subsystem of individual accounts with the defined benefit solidarity system would we have sustainability in pensions until 2038, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). With that time gained, we could — starting from the Panamanian reality and strategic planning for the future — establish the origin of the financial resources according to the contributory capacity of workers, companies and the state, design an institutional architecture with effective and efficient management, establishing the appropriate parametric criteria, in terms of the amount of pensions and periodic adjustments, retirement age, density and number of contributions.
Panamanians do not deserve to grow older being poorer. Let us design an exemplary pension system, one that is supportive, managed in an equitable, sustainable, transparent, effective and highly useful manner, which will allow our final years of life to be prosperous. Let’s make it a reality without impositions, with the participation of all.
Richard Morales is an economics professor at the University of Panama and ran as an independent for vice president in last May’s elections.
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