“The world's most elusive criminal is the government.” ― Tamerlan Kuzgov

 

 RIGHT-HANDED DISHONESTY

By admtlsur: They say that right-wing business politicians don't need to steal because they already have enough money. Their followers also claim that politics is a form of pollution. That the direction of a society must be in the hands of business leaders, whom they euphemize as "markets."

In some ways, anti-politics, questioning activists, and the perpetual thematization of corruption related to public administration are some of the most widely used devices to defenestrate and obstruct social commitment in government.

While the media's gaze persists in dissecting the faults—more or less serious—of those who promote social inclusion, wealth distribution, and the fight against all forms of discrimination, the tentacles of conservative power hide the scams, crimes, embezzlement, and outright theft of public assets generated by corporations and businessmen-turned-politicians. The operations of criminalizing politics, known as lawfare, have as their counterpart the camouflage of the gigantic corruption cases of the global right. The mainstream media portrays them as exceptions and seeks to disconnect one from the other. Javier Milei's scam involving the Libra cryptocurrency, the greed of his sister, and his entourage, speak volumes of an obsessive attraction to money.

                                     “Open your eyes as wide as you can and take note of where you are, why you are, and who you are with?”  .- Qamar Rafiq

The same orientation that drives the New York tycoon, now president, who began as an associate of mafia families to develop his real estate empire. Trump has surfed the sexual abuse case in which he was convicted. He has managed to obscure a second sentence for defaming his victim. He has managed to paralyze the cases for promoting a coup d'état in 2021 and has obscured the case of disbursements to a prostitute to obtain her silence, falsifying her sworn accounting statement. Once he assumed his second term, the red-faced tycoon fired twelve prosecutors working on the criminal cases against him.

Conservatives, neoliberals, and neofascists often champion republicanism and the separation of powers. That enthusiasm ends when some judicial official decides to remain faithful to the Constitution and rules that the frauds must be brought to trial. Mauricio Macri has been convicted in the Argentine Post Office Case. He owes the state and society $700 million, but he managed to halt the case thanks to the sympathy of the Supreme Court. Previously, while he was president, he shamelessly attempted to benefit from a 98 percent discount on that amount. Macri came to power with 214 cases accumulated between 2007 and 2015. He added another 144 criminal charges during his four-year term.

 “Anyone who wants to tackle corruption must be willing to go all the way. There are no shortcuts.” — Oby Ezekwesili.

In Spain, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is accused of benefiting her partner and brother with healthcare-related businesses during the pandemic, the same period in which 7,291 elderly people died in nursing homes due to the negligence of authorities led by Ayuso. In France, Marine Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison and barred from running for office after it was proven she embezzled European Union funds. In Brazil, fascist military leader Jair Bolsonaro is preparing to face a jury after the Federal Supreme Court charged him with an attempted coup d'état, following his loss to Lula da Silva. One of the most cited intellectuals of neoliberalism is Ludwig von Mises, who died in 1973. In his 1927 book, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition—five years after Mussolini's March on Rome and four years after Hitler's attempt to seize power through his Munich Putsch—he established his position on these political maneuvers, which helped avoid the ramifications of socialism: "It cannot be denied that fascism and similar movements that seek to establish dictatorships are full of the best intentions, and that their intervention, for the moment, has saved European civilization."

  “One politician can not make a government. He needs accomplices.”- Ljupka Cvetanova

Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro, Ayuso, and Le Pen are the most revealing expression of dishonesty. They make the fight against corruption a smokescreen for their triple constitutive intention: to enrich themselves at the expense of the sacrifice of the rest of society, to favor the privileged sectors, and to discipline those who try to build more equitable models of coexistence. They are not decent. They are boastful criminals and—above all—bloodthirsty fratricidals.

Author: Jorge Elbaum