bout time you did some travelin', stuck in the same country all the time

My favorite part:

[....] no client was more important to Emílio than Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former union leader who won Brazil’s presidency in 2002. Da Silva, known to everyone simply as Lula, was a socialist elected on promises to eradicate poverty and revive the sinking economy. He was a gold mine for Odebrecht. He initiated a torrent of spending on public works, the shipbuilding industry, and Petrobras, and Odebrecht got a huge share of the contracts, rising to become the biggest builder in Latin America. In Brazil, the company was part of a cartel of engineering companies that paid bribes and kickbacks in exchange for being allowed to rig the bidding for contracts, especially at Petrobras. (This was the original focus of the Car Wash investigation.) And as Lula made his push to boost Brazil’s influence in the developing world, Odebrecht funneled cash to his allies across the region. (Lula, via statements published on his website, denies any involvement in wrongdoing by Odebrecht or its executives. “The former president never authorized anyone to ask for any kind of donation in exchange for any government actions of any kind,” says the website, which acts as Lula’s spokesperson.)

The scale and complexity of the corporate graft machine eventually overwhelmed Marcelo. The company’s operations had grown sharply as Lula jacked up spending on roads, ports, shipyards, and oil production and refining and opened markets outside Brazil. All of it required kickbacks and bribes, and Marcelo couldn’t keep up with the details and the pace. So in late 2006 he offered Silva a new job. Silva had been at Odebrecht since the 1970s, mostly in finance [....]

This is the kind of stuff I've been reading for 30 years or more, this is why I am cynical. That said, I'd say lefty leaders (around the world) are often not complicit. More often naive and clueless about what's happening with the big money they are spreading around until there's a huge intrenched machine on the ladder below them that they can no longer handle.

It's actually amazing that more graft didn't happen during the FDR years in the U.S.