In the 1949 film “The Third Man,” set in post-war Vienna, the Austrian capital is a bombed-out city where Orson Welles’ character, Harry Lime, makes a killing on the black market for medical supplies. Lime steals military stocks of penicillin, dilutes the antibiotic and sells it to unsuspecting patients who die from the watered-down drug.

Profiting in desperate times is immoral and unjustifiable.

It is also common.

While most people are conscientious, showing strangers compassion, love and selflessness, craven examples abound of certain individuals profiting from the COVID-19 crisis, and others, by hoarding, price gouging or simply leveraging market forces. The $138 bottle of hand sanitizer is the poster child product of this lockdown moment.

Money motivates the unscrupulous and greedy. Power is the other potent aphrodisiac. In its pursuit, power hungry leaders fan the flames of popular fears and exploit nativist anger.

Money and power are a killer combo.

Across the world, from Ankara to Beijing, Caracas to Moscow, powerful (and newly rich) leaders see the current crisis as a way to build themselves an unassailable permanent political role. Case in point? Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán now rules by decree. READ MORE

Film director Spike Lee’s most recent film about a black cop joining the Ku Klux Klan is a caustic reminder of America’s “original sin” of slavery and our raw, homegrown racism. The KKK is truly an American original, but it has not remained within U.S borders. No wall of ideas has corralled this toxic concept from jumping the Atlantic and infecting Europe, where the KKK has found a new home.

KKK promoters do not regularly crow about their network or membership numbers. The European Klan plays a coy game, often masking its illegal affiliations and private intentions while publicly sugar-coating its rancid message. But their goals are clear. As German investigative journalist Frederick Obermaier told Deutsche Welle, “The German groups admire the American Klan, and they hope to be as big as the KKK in the U.S.” Blood and soil is their refrain. READ MORE

In Hungary, coronavirus crisis is the perfect time to throw democracy under the bus

Unfortunately, the American KKK’s brand of hate travels well