A Chilean citizen casts his vote at Chile’s embassy in Panama City. It’s in a referendum about whether to replace the 1980 constitution imposed by the country’s military dictatorship of that time, and by which means a proposed new constitution should be drafted. Photo from the voter’s Twitter feed.
Everyday scams
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
The current administration, very early on, chose to abandon the classic routes of corruption to take the road of daily scams.
More people than they should have wanted – with a sui generis masochism – to deceive themselves into believing that the joint criminal enterprise that presented itself as a collection of political cherubs was going to lead the country to better places. However, reality has forced them to open their eyes, even when there are any number of members of the local population who remain prostrate before the governmental fallacy and their day-to-day thug populism.
There are still those who insist that the public money that the administration uses for their personal enrichment does not belong to anyone. But it’s ours and not theirs. And, that public money that they cheat us on a daily basis, denatures the purposes for which it exists. Citizens must force the administration to use the public treasury with with absolute transparency and permanent accountability.
However, it’s not like that. Every day we see how existing inequalities keep increasing. The quality of life rapidly declines, while public goods and services have become veritable mirages. Our social, political and economic rights are mocked by the daily practices of a lumpen-presidentialism desperate to make us believe that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, that the banking system should be supported and not health, education and public safety.
Now that they have begun with their vaunted “dialogue” – to unveil their true purposes with respect to the Social Security Fund and the IDAAN water and sewer utility. Let´s see how gladly the party leaders, business establishment and corrupted union bureaucrats pull off robbery, embezzlement and other acts of piracy against the citizens..
During the first half of the 19th century, the wealthiest French business owners had as their slogan “Enrichissez vous” (“Get rich”). Under those watchwords they imposed a moral mechanism that opened the doors to widespread corruption that eroded society. The ghost of the corruption scandal of the Universal Canal Company, is reborn again today in Panama. Our archives of scams, fraud, embezzlement, perversions of justice, etc. are tales of high-ranking officials, untouchable ministers, deputies’ ghost employees, compromised judges, magistrates and prosecutors, unethical attorneys, comptrollers who look the other way and others united in a joint criminal enterprise. They have seized the treasury for their personal purposes.
We citizens must put a stop to this maelstrom of daily scams. We must defend our right to dignity. We must repudiate the lax attitudes toward those who misgovern us. Only an originating constitutional convention that they don’s control will be able to allow us to devise the necessary controls to stop the irrational exercises that we have seen from our political powers that be.
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