Lost Causes

Did you like Arturo Alejandro Muñoz’s piece “Writing in a Bucket of Water”? You’re going to love this bit of nonsense about Lost Causes.

The common thread is that aphorism or saying: “He who fights is not dead.” If you set aside mythology and literature in the magical-realism vein, whoever has kicked the bucket does not struggle, does not make trouble, does not fight with anybody.

Unfortunately, that is also true of many of the living – and I say the living taking advantage of the polysemy of the word (in Spanish, vivo means both “alive” and “sharp operator”), referring to those who still breathe and are content with that, and to the others, those who seek to profit and take advantage of the former.

The History of Humanity has gone through fortunate periods as regards the social struggles that sought to place the human being at the center of their endeavors and their most sublime purposes.

Which has not been an obstacle to living through times like those we live in today, in which a hotbed of crazy bastards triumphs, running from Trump to Milei, by way of Kast and the European mediocracy, whose main task consists in screwing the people over, stripping them of everything they had won in centuries of class struggle, and sending them back to the condition of slaves that prevailed in some phase of the development of the primary markets.

So as not to make a mess of it with an interminable, boring, ball-busting text, I will explain myself briefly using a few headlines from the press, which is closely tied to the interests of the hotbed of crazy bastards, and whose content and message, thanks to their concision and clarity, get through even to the dumbest of economists – and God knows there are plenty.

The first headline came, precisely, from one of them: Jorge Quiroz

The only big thing Quiroz dreams of is his homegrown Nasdaq. Otherwise, his specialty is cuts, trifles, pettiness and shrinkage, to the point that one wonders why he did not dedicate himself to homeopathy instead.

The second headline is intimately linked to the first and explains it:

Given that SQM is the product of a plunder carried out with premeditation and treachery, on a sure thing and in the middle of nowhere, against public property, there is no starting capital against which to calculate the return.

To add insult to injury, Boric very amicably handed the lithium over to the company that resulted from the dispossession of the State, so it is possible to estimate that the profits tend arithmetically to infinity…

As they told me at school, any number divided by a number that tends to zero yields a result that tends to infinity.

Which does not even motivate the Teutons (whose history is full of episodes of crimes against Humanity) to launch actions aimed at fighting white-collar crime, which is the predominant kind. They are only interested in the lousy petty thieves who – having no other choice – steal from the poor what is left to them after having been stripped bare by the system.

Aware that this economic policy portends a bleak social outlook, ergo potential popular disorder, the Obersturmführer of La Moneda (the presidential palace) wised up and submitted a freedom-killing bill that would make him the modern version of ancient Rome.

He looked in the mirror and saw himself as Julius Caesar, who had himself named Dictator in the year 44 Before the Common Era.

It went badly for him… some senators, fearing the destruction of the Republic, assassinated him. If you ever went to compulsory, public, secular and free school, you must remember what the History teacher told us (in my case the Choro Silva, in San Fernando): Julius Caesar, on seeing that among the senators who carried out the assassination was his favorite, exclaimed: “Tu quoque, Brute, fili mi.”

While standing in front of the mirror, the Obersturmführer also evoked Athenian democracy. He is a Nazi lout – but an educated Nazi lout!

Democracy in Athens reserved power for a very small minority of the population, the free men. Only adult men (from 18 or 20 years old) took part in decisions. Better still, they had to have a certain family origin. Citizens represented barely 10 to 15 percent of the inhabitants of the cité.

Among the groups excluded from citizenship were slaves (the property of a master) with neither political nor legal rights, metics (foreigners), and women – rich or poor – who enjoyed no political rights and were under the tutelage of a man (father or husband).

Not only does the Obersturmführer like Athenian democracy: from 1990 on, all Chilean politicians adored Pericles, who invented the misthos. Was ist das? It was a daily allowance paid to citizens who held public office. The misthos allowed them to be politicians without living in poverty.

Since then – which is why the Age of Pericles is so famous – one of the quickest and most effective ways out of poverty is to go into politics. With the advantage that nobody asks for your high-school diploma or any other degree. If you don’t believe me, ask Escalona.

The consensus of the (bad) chilensis political class regarding these two principles – impunity for the plunder of everything that is or was in the public interest, and the legality of institutional theft from the State, both founded on the dictatorship’s Constitution – ensures the cohesion of the system.

What was once political debate now serves as a screen, a partition and a facade for the suckers – that is, for those of us who live in subjection.

Every tenant of La Moneda invents jokes to entertain the people and swears he is a hero of the Fatherland. The current Obersturmführer, neither more nor less of an asshole than those who preceded him from Aylwin to Boric, rejects an accusation nobody made and hides the ball. Heil Kast claims he is not “illiberal” (??) when in fact (in my case) we have only called him a neo-Nazi.

The national reaction to all these vicissitudes makes me think that ours are lost causes. The bad guys won.

Ponce Lerou will keep on stealing with or without Boric’s help, and the economy will allow records to be broken like the one Forbes reminds us of – an influential magazine and global media company specializing in the world of business, finance, investment and entrepreneurship, based in New York:

Even so, we are far from the feats of an Elon Musk who, on June 12 of this year, sold shares of his company SpaceX that until then, and even today, had not produced so much as a fart. In less time than it takes me to tell it, he raised a little over US$86 billion contributed by asset managers such as the AFPs (Chile’s private pension fund managers) and others, not forgetting the dupes who hope to live off the interest (?) and put in their little savings.

The same magazine, Forbes, explains:

That represents a reduction of around US$620 billion in SpaceX’s market value from its high on Tuesday, taking it from US$2.99 trillion to US$2.37 trillion, when SpaceX was the fourth-largest company in the world (without producing so much as a fart…) ahead of Amazon and Microsoft (it now ranks seventh, behind sixth-placed TSMC at US$2.38 trillion).

It is hardly His Smallness Jorge Quiroz who will get us onto such important rankings.

As I said: ours are lost causes. The bad guys won.