Opinion Sur
Since ancient times, the conquerors combined repressing those who resisted with the deception of defenseless victims about the impact of their actions. Once subdued, they perpetrated brutal looting. Oppression changed over time and today its axis is the unbridled concentration of wealth and decision-making power. The process of deceiving, repressing, subjugating and plundering is reproduced in other ways.
Governments representing powerful minorities impose policies that favor the appropriation of wealth. They have always done so using methods adjusted to the social and economic circumstances of each era. At present, dictatorships sustain the concentration of wealth with repression, disinformation, and no popular participation. In democratic regimes, the concealment of indefensible interests and purposes prevails, repression includes that of the judicial system, the hegemonic media pilot the manipulation of public opinion, a spurious political representativeness does not comply with electoral mandates, in the economic plane new mechanisms of appropriation emerge. Concentrated power continues to subjugate majorities, plunder wealth, and capture democracies.
They plunder wealth that they do not produce or does not belong to them. They cannot justify the appropriation of value; they need to deceive and suppress those who resist being plundered. Of course, when the resources they appropriate enter their patrimonies, the current laws declare them untouchable.
Little is known about the genesis of opulence, the methods and extortions they used to concentrate wealth at such a speed. Although some of these robberies were investigated, what was unmasked remains jealously hidden from public opinion. Meanwhile, there is abundant discussion of poverty and inequalities without making the connection that those exist as an inevitable counterpart to the tremendous process of concentration. Looting materializes with regulations that restrict access to information that could explain them.
With honorable exceptions, historians who construct the official history in favor of plunderers do not explain how so few rose up with the national wealth; that remains in an induced nebula. They do not touch looters who later boast of belonging to “illustrious” lineages, nor large corporations that abused their market power and devastated the markets becoming nefarious oligopolies. This cover-up was deliberate, not only to placate possible resistance, but also to launder the criminal appropriation of resources that they need to legalize their assets. Thus, with the hypocrisy that characterizes every bandit, they can boast that they are respectable actors with the right to live without complexes or accusations.
Consequences of looting
The looters bear no responsibility for the unemployment or underemployment of the vast majority of the country. They affirm that it is not up to them but to the State the loss in purchasing power of income of the middle and popular sectors; nor do they link the tax evasion they practice to the pettiness of pensions and welfare programs.
They do not consider that they have an advantage in the distribution of income; they claim that they do not rise prices of food, medicine products, and others to increase their rate of profit, but rather that they are forced by inflation and other contextual constraints.
When they force excessive increases in utility rates or subsidies in essential services that they control (electricity, gas, transportation, communications, among others), the argument is the investments and maintenance expenses they must make, a poorly supported and poorly fulfilled reason.
They never associate their extreme wealth with the misery and loss of rights of others. That is why they are careful to invalidate any systemic analysis that shows how a succession of appropriating facts support perverse political, social, economic, media and judicial fabrics.
It is necessary to distinguish that not all the rich and corporations share the same responsibility. Some were founding actors of the concentrator dynamic, others did not help to institutionalize inequality, but took advantage of the circumstances to also obtain enormous profits. The latter are not required to close their enterprises and refrain from all productive activity. Its responsibility is to join civic coalitions that build equity, justice, and environmental sustainability. Ignoring the contemporary drama to continue profiting from the misfortune of others would undoubtedly imply complicity.
Contemporary mechanisms of subjugation and plunder
The mechanisms of subjugation and looting are several and diverse. We choose to synthesize some of the most significant ones, deriving the reader who wants greater detail to articles already published in Opinion Sur.
Economic mechanisms of value appropriation that allow them to continue accumulating wealth and with it to co-opt or buy complicities; mechanisms of manipulation of public opinion and its expectations that allow them to condition the political and economic march, impose agendas, values, and attitudes related to their interests, obtaining some electoral support; institutional set-up mechanisms to establish a judicial system that ensures impunity and hinders transformative attempts; mechanisms of destabilization or dismissal of popular-based governments to prevent the consolidation of political forces that threaten their privileges. These and other mechanisms distort the essence of a full democracy and generate an increasingly widespread phenomenon: captured democracies.
Confronted with these mechanisms of subjugation and plunder, the dominators present other models as if they were indisputable truths. When reality contradicts their postulates and conclusions, they misinform and deceive those harmed. By colonizing free-wills, they impose ways of thinking, skewed perceptions of reality; they manipulate public opinion, its values, motivations, attitudes and agendas. Other perspectives are silenced or devalued.
An example of cultural manipulation is what happens in the most recognized Business Schools. They train graduates to manage economic entities guided by criteria of maximizing profit. Little do they analyze the tremendous problems generated by unlimited individual greed and selfishness. They speak of “unwanted (but expected) externalities” that severely affect the social context. They do not teach that there are other types of large and small productive enterprises guided by criteria that harmoniously integrate social benefit and their own. First and second-degree cooperatives operate successfully around the world, also community supermarkets, popular franchises, consortiums of small exporting companies, among other associative forms of research and development, addressing the stockpiling of products, their transport, processing, and marketing.
In short, deception, repression, subjugation and looting continue to cast a shadow over humanity. That the selfishness and irresponsibility of those who have set themselves up as helmspersons of the global course led to dead ends. However, it is not inevitable that this is how petty and destructive the fate of the new generations will be. History shows that there have always been persons, peoples, nations rising up against oppression. Also, that the trajectories were never linear. Successes, setbacks, brave and scoundrels swirl in complexities always singular. From this apparent chaos of events and actors it is possible to advance in clarification and organization until new powers and leaderships are formed. It is a disputed world with dynamics and challenges that have to be addressed.
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