For a conventional accounting-kind of analysis, the reader is sent to this article: « Nadef, i conti del governo tornano. L’Europa sarà fondamentale per finanziare i bisogni dell’Italia », a cura di OSSERVATORIO CONTI PUBBLICI ITALIANI, 10 ottobre 2020 https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/10/10/news/nadef_cottarelli-270076530/
(This article also notices that the budget projection, which is supposed to be triennial, is spread up until 2026 and it hints at the possibility of a bigger government’s intervention in the economy than projected in the Nadef. The difference would come from cuts and savings in fiscal exonerations such as some ecological existing programs. It is true that the waste in fiscal revenues due to such exonerations and tax expenditures is gigantic in Italy as well as in other Western neoliberal monetarist States. This also tells us that such reorganisation will be marginal and will go in the general policy direction which is to pretend that the government is able to tendentially respect the EU Fiscal consolidation path, when the Nadef itself clearly states that such lofty goal is unattainable. (« Il criterio del debito non viene rispettato neanche nella configurazione corretta per il ciclo. » p 98 …) But this will provide legitimacy to the narrative used to push through the most regressive reforms still to be completed in order to dismantle the constitutionally enshrined Italian Social State. )
Added Oct 22, 2020. See also: « Half Of Europe’s Small Businesses Face Bankruptcy As Virus Cases Spike », by Tyler Durden ,Thu, 10/22/2020 – 10:15 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/half-europes-small-businesses-face-bankruptcy-virus-cases-spike (Note that this is much more than the 1/3 carnage expected until recently. The article continues: « Like the US, European SMEs account for two-thirds of the workforce and at least half of economic value-added. A further collapse of SMEs is a warning sign of an economic recovery that doesn’t resemble a “V-shaped” recovery. » )
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Table of content:
Foreword: Overview of the Next Generation EU – alias the Recovery Fund.
1 ) Introduction
2 ) This crisis is like no other crisis.
3 ) The Recovery Fund has morphed into a miserable RRF intended to provide a little more rope to hang EU and Italian workers and citizens.
4 ) The murderous management of the Covid-19 crisis.
5 ) The 2020 Italian NADEF or draft budget plan: the generalisation of poverty and of illegality.
5.1 ) GDP : Or how it will be better in 22 and 23 but still stay well under the 2007-2008 level.
5.2 ) Public debt. It is tentatively and fraudulently put at 158 % of GDP and then it is somehow supposed to come down in accord with the pre-Covid-19 Fiscal consolidation path.
5.3 ) The spread – carefully hushing any talk about a return to public credit.
5.4 ) Unemployment and active population: official statistics vs the real numbers.
5.5 ) Social security will deteriorate as much as education and public infrastructures.
5-6 ) Fiscal revenues and spending and more regressive fiscal policies.
6 ) The generalisation of illegality under the guise of bureaucratic simplification and reforms.
7 ) Conclusion. The Nadef is the worst illustration I ever ran across of a plainly inept belief in the meta-magic virtues of the invisible hand.
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Foreword: Overview of the Next Generation EU – alias Recovery Fund.
This stimulus EU plan will amount to 750 billion euros, 390 billion in grants and 360 billion in loans. It adds to the 1 074,3 billion of the European 2021-2027 European budget and to the ECB Covid-19 related interventions taken in the framework of the Zero lower bound policy. « The €1,350 billion pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) aims to lower borrowing costs and increase lending in the euro area. This in turn should help citizens, firms and governments get access to funds they may need to weather the crisis. This programme complements the asset purchase programmes we have had in place since 2014. » (a) The Asset Purchase Programmes amount to 20 billion euros a month plus other support measures, including purchase of corporate assets.
The Next Generation EU plan should be available early 2021 and is due to be reimbursed from 2028 to 2058. However, the only advantage of the Plan is that the amounts accruing to member States will not appear directly in the public debt and will thus contribute to mask the inanity of the Fiscal Compact and its Fiscal consolidation path. This is because this temporary program added to the normal multi-year EU budget will also have to be paid out by States’ contributions. There will be two marginal advantages for some countries with higher spreads since the money will be raised by the EU on the international financial market using its own excellent rating. However, today given the Zero bound framework, the gains will be very low even for the most indebted countries, the sole advantage being the resulting masking of the real public debt to GDP ratio. Furthermore, the EU no longer having its own resources, members States will have to provide some immediate guarantees. Hence: « In line with the conclusions of the European Council, a pre-financing of 10% of the financial contribution to each Member State should be paid. » ( b)
It should be underlined here that nothing is decided yet. Poland and Hungary are threatening to block the Plan if the EU insists in making it conditional to the Commission’s, at time peculiar, neoliberal monetarist definition of the State of law, something a shade different from Human Rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of 1948. Moreover, the coming second wave already makes it dramatically inadequate and captive to the logic of tragically failed speculative finance.
The Next Generation EU Plan come in 12 programs, the most important of which are the Recovery and Resilient Facility (RRF) and React-EU.
The RRF is the most important: « The Recovery and Resilience Facility will provide a total of € 672.5 billion to support investment and reforms. Grants worth a total of €312.5 billion will be provided to Member States under the Facility and the remaining € 360 billion will be provided in loans. » (a) It will come in exchange of the usual regressive reforms aimed at imposing a neoliberal monetarist European convergence in tune with the diktats of the « global private governance ». In this optic, other stings are attached. First, one third (1/3) of the funds will have to be spent in line with the speculative Green New Deal, not a good idea for a rational energetic upgrade aimed at real productivity increase instead of at a useless and costly reduction of CO2 – CO2 is beneficial to vegetation and culture whereas other green house gases not dealt with here are much more damaging to the environment, for instance methane gas. Second it « includes a minimum level of 20% of expenditure related to digital. This includes, for instance, investing in the deployment of 5G and Gigabit connectivity, developing digital skills through reforms of education systems and increasing the availability and efficiency of public services using new digital tools. » (Idem)
The REACT-EU – Recovery Assistance for Cohesion and the Territories of Europe (€ 50 billion in grants from ‘Next Generation EU’ and € 4.8 billion in grants from the amended 2020 annual EU budget)
The other programs are listed here « « The EU’s recovery fund proposals: crisis relief with massive redistribution », https://www.bruegel.org/2020/06/the-eus-recovery-fund-proposals-crisis-relief-with-massive-redistribution/
Here is Italy’s share, as far as we know it today: « The Next Generation EU mainly consists of two tools: the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and the React EU. The support to Italy is made up of grants, i.e. non-repayable sums of which it should receive about 65 billion through RRF and 10 from React EU, and loans (at subsidized interest), of which Italy should receive about 128 billion (all from the RRF). Grants do not increase deficit and debt, as they are non-repayable, while loans will be part of the mass of public debt.» (c)
Here is a table (c, idem) that sums up the use the 2020 Nadef intends to make of RRF and React-EU funds, without specifying much on the other lesser amounts:
Notes:
a ) https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/search/coronavirus/html/index.en.html
b ) Questions and answers: Commission presents next steps for €672.5 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility in 2021 Annual Sustainable Growth Strategy, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_1659
c ) For the original text in Italian see « Nadef, i conti del governo tornano. L’Europa sarà fondamentale per finanziare i bisogni dell’Italia », L’analisi dell’Osservatorio guidato da Carlo Cottarelli sulla Nota di aggiornamento al Def: traiettoria del Pil plausibile sulle proiezioni attuali. Il supporto all’economia (misurato con il livello di deficit) crescerà nei porssimi anni, anche in presenza di un miglioramento della ripresa. Bce e istituzioni Ue arriveranno a detenere il 28% del debito, a cura di OSSERVATORIO CONTI PUBBLICI ITALIANI, 10 ottobre 2020 https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/10/10/news/nadef_cottarelli-270076530/
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1 ) Introduction.
Structural crisis of a certain magnitude weaken the status quo and therefore present the opportunity to update macro-economic parameters in view of the future evolution of the Social Formation and of its revised insertion in the World Economy. Italy is doing the reverse. Its only goal seems to be to preserve the status quo at all price and to accelerate the very same regressive reforms which brought it to its current dismal predicament. The Covid-19 did not cause any of these socio-economic, cultural and ethico-political regressions; at most it only amplified them. The 2020 Nadef is a perfect example of how an opportunity is wasted and how costly EU aid – paid for by Italians themselves – will be cynically and incompetently squandered … slowly, year after year, until 2026, knowing that the funds will have to be paid back from 2028 to 2058.
The sole objective it to manage the Italian slide to third rank status with only the spread in mind. Fiscal revenues will remain low and tragically cut further by the recourse to the flat tax disastrous policy and there remain little room to cut in government spending. This explains why these incompetent government and Parliament have imagined to squander the EU Funds just to be able to present some kind of plausibly tendentially « balanced » budgets. But they carefully avoid to say that this will happen with a GDP that will be lower than the one prevailing at the beginning of 2019. And we all know that it was still some 10 % lower than that prevailing before 2007-2008. If one cares about the possible rise of the spread, one would do everything possible to sustain the real economy with a huge and planned stimulus plan aimed at retooling the Nation and at increasing full-time full-employment, if only because the workers pay the social contributions and the greatest share of direct and indirect taxes.
Furthermore, this sloppy draft budget plan has nothing to do with the last EU recommendations particularly as far as economic growth and social justice are concerned.
These are spelled out here : « EU COMMISSION STAFF WORKING DOCUMENT Country Report Italy 2020 – FEB 2020 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1584543810241&uri=CELEX:52020SC0511
« Facing a weak macroeconomic outlook and the challenge of ensuring sustainability, lifting productivity and potential growth is key to reducing Italy’s public debt ratio and unwinding its macroeconomic imbalances. Implementing ambitious structural reforms and prudent fiscal policies, and well-targeting investments would support Italy’s digital and environmental transformation, ensuring sustainable growth. As a matter of priority, a revived reform momentum should ensure sound public finances, more effective public administration and justice, a more efficient education system and labour market, a friendlier business environment and a more resilient banking sector »
2 ) This crisis is like no other crisis.
Neoliberal monetarism has dismantled the Social or Welfare State hence macro-economic competitiveness which is at the root of micro-economic productivity. Let alone the new theoreticians of technopoles, even A. Marshall, the father of Marginalist localisation policy, knew this. To prosper against competition, an enterprise does not need to resort to Schumpeterian « destructive creation » of which it often is the prey. Instead, it needs access to top-level infrastructures and services such as education and R&D, good unemployment and re-skilling policies, good public health-care and public pension systems as well as access to rapid and efficient governmental services and cheap, hence public or even cooperative credit i.e., the good old credit unions.
Today bailouts have eliminated competition at least for the banking and the non-banking enterprises deemed to be « too big to fail », although competition, with its recurrent purges of speculative excesses, was the only correcting cybernetic mechanism available to capitalism. The situation is made worse by the Zero Lower Bound theory as explained here : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/zero-bound-theory-the-last-neoliberal-monetarist-ineptitude-sept-13-2020/ .
Hegemonic speculative finance has weakened all spheres of public and private economic life. The dismantled Welfare State with its regressive fiscal policy is so indebted on the financial markets that it would be bankrupt without the massive liquidities injected by the Central Bank. The same goes for the business sectors now operating in mature global markets characterised by an increasing foreign competition. While smaller enterprises suffer from a chronic « credit crunch », many big and medium enterprises, cannibalised by speculation, have transformed into zombie companies. These are artificially kept alive by vulnerable banks that are afraid at the prospect of bankruptcies affecting their own balance sheets.
The Zero Lower Bound theory’s declared objective is to slowly eliminate the burden of public debt financing. But in so doing, low or even negative guiding rates of interest destroy the profitability of private and government bonds. This leaves the banks on a tight rope and paints the neoliberal monetarist Central Bank into a corner: Unable to impose a « reset » to the speculative markets, it now pumps liquidities simply because it is afraid of States going bankrupt in the midst of bursting bonds and shares bubbles. It is the end of the absurd neoliberal monetarist speculative cycle initiated in 1999 with the abrogation of the 1933 Glass Steagall Act and worsened by the additional financial deregulation imposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson as an answer to the 2007-2008 crisis caused by … financial deregulation. These reforms led to what I called then the epoch of « credit without collateral ». (1) Big private financial and non-financial enterprises could no longer go broke, thus cleaning up the speculative excesses, simply because they were now deemed to be « too big to fail ». With this evolution, the capitalist mode of production ushered into a world of absurdity in which competition can no longer play its corrective role.
Today we are no longer dealing with the usual cyclical or even structural crisis. We are not even dealing with what G. Bush Sr knowingly called « voodoo economics ». Instead we are faced with a pathological exclusivist version of it fathered by Ludwig Mises and disastrously elaborated upon by lunatics like Milton Friedman and Hayek and all the other Chicago Boys. Today, the spreading of this exclusivist debilitating disease is affecting almost all the mainstream economics servi in camera. The dominant Marginalist paradigm, a falsified narrative from birth, is quickly collapsing. For instance, no bourgeois economists, least of all monetarists and central bankers, know what inflation is. (2)
As explained already in 1985 at the very beginning of this self-destructive long-term economic cycle (3) and later in my books (4), the domestic and global objective is to build-up mass unemployment in order to open the road to the return of a new domesticity and of a new slavery. The ultimate proof is provided by the current management of the Covid-19-economic crisis: It is squarely based on the instrumentalisation of fear in order to impose even more disastrous neoliberal and monetarist cuts in Social and State spending. These linear cuts go hand-in- hand with the acceleration of the privatization of everything left to privatise, including public land and national patrimony.
The Italian draft budget plan is a perfect illustration of this exclusivist and criminal drive, in the strict sense that it runs frontally against all the 10 cardinal principles enshrined in our Constitution. Strictly speaking it amounts to a conscious anti-civilisation choice.
3 ) The Recovery Fund has morphed into a miserable RRF intended to provide a little more rope to hang Western workers and citizens.
We are leaving aside here the ECB disastrous QEs now inscribed into a suicidal Zero Lower Bound theory as well as stimulus programs such as Sure – to support labor policies – and as the MES, which for now proposes financial « aid » for health-care but with stringent conditionalities attached once the door will be open to its meddling in national economic affairs. To these is added the European Investment Bank – EIB – which peripheral countries like Italy do not even know how to use properly; Italy is further set to lose, at the end of the current year, some 45 billion euros from the European Funds allocated for 2014-2020! The same will certainly happen to the Italian share of 1 074,3 billion euros earmarked for the 2021-2027 European budget. As we know, despite the propaganda, the net gain from the RRF accruing to Italy will be at most around 30 billion euros! As for the European budget is as always been so far a net contributor.
The Recovery Fund had transformed into the Next Generation EU Fund that was meant as a EU stimulus plan of 750 euros, 390 billion in grants and 360 billion in loans. The greatest part of it has now morphed into a Recovery and Resilient Facility with only 672.5 billion at its disposal. For Italy, this means at most 203 or 205 billion mostly loans for 2021-26.
Of the 12 programs that fall under the Next Generation EU, the two most substantial that are considered in the 2020 Nadef are the RRF and the much smaller React-EU program. The formulas used to calculate the amounts are rather uncertain because they purport to take into account the specific economic hardship of the member States, as well as the decline of their GDP. While the funds should become available in 2021, nothing is decided yet. Furthermore Poland and Hungary are blocking the final decision because they object to these funds being subjected to the respect the State of law as defined by the current EU.
The RRF reintroduces the Fiscal Compact. The President of the France Insoumise, Mr. Jean-Luc Mélenchon had underlined at the time the crucial fact that the so-called Fiscal Compact had not been transcribed into EU law before the end of 2018 and consequently it had lost its legal status. Note also that this legal status had always been dubious because it never had the unanimity of all member States. Nevertheless, the corseting rules of the Fiscal Compact are coming back with the Recovery Fund, with the Sure and, in a potentially much aggravated form, with the new MES.
Italy has never been able to respect the Fiscal Compact before the current crisis. The 2020 Budget Plan lucidly states that it will not be able to comply soon with the rule according to which 1/20 of the public debt in excess of 60 % of GDP has to be eliminated year after year. (5) Hence the Italian government’s only hope is to count on the leniency of the EU to avoid penalties as long as the road to serfdom – beg your pardon, to reform – is carefully followed. At some point in time this will necessarily imply the recourse to the MES and hence to an European trusteeship for Italy. A trusteeship that will be much more stringent than that imposed to Greece because while Greece’s GDP was only 2 % of the GDP of the Eurozone, Italy’s is worse some 16 %. The systemic country risk being bigger and Italy being a servile country, instead of being a private bank « too big to fail », the conditionalities imposed on it will be that more severe.
The trick will be to talk opaquely about the path to fiscal consolidation using such phony concepts such as output gaps, exceptional conditions and the like.
But, of course, the reality is totally different. As we said above, the RRF will provide some extra budget room for the next three years with the hope that things will somehow get better – V or W hoped for recovery … In fact, this amounts to providing more rope to legitimise the reforms and make them sound economically plausible. Linear cuts and spending reviews, hence pauperisation and mass unemployment, will be the lot of the gentile Italian people. « Once again » ever since the philo-Semite Nietzschean Fascism of 1922-1943. As you know, the Partisans hanged Mussolini and the indifferent Ms Petacci by the feet because they knew that the US and the UK where preparing to put the Duce as well as Petain in France back in power, but they did have the Italian-Jewess Margaret Sarfatti, the financier, adviser and lover of the Italian dictator, under their control. Later, in a spirit of conciliation – « politica dei piccoli pesci » – Toglatti did not proceed to the due purge of Fascists followers and settled instead for the Article XII of Definitive and Transitory measures enshrined in the Constitution which outlawed the Fascist party in the Peninsula.
Meanwhile the funds provided by the RRF will mechanically lower the primary budget surplus hence the possibility to support real socio-economic stimulus and crucial R&D. But they will not directly appear into the public debt and therefore into the bogus public debt / GDP ratio used to fabricate all these mainstream phony equations, those linked to the Fiscal consolidation path as well as those linked to the socio-economic growth equations. Imagine this : the so-called Barro’s « Ricardian equivalence » is a puerile ineptitude to start with, but now one will have to deal with it and implement it in this new context!!! (6)
The mainstream economic narrative is bogus to start with but now its divorce from reality is such that an increasing recourse to State terrorism and repression is and will continue to unfold. « Once again » workers and citizens are seen and treated as « dangerous classes ». This is perfectly evidenced by the current management of the Covid-19 health-care crisis.
4 ) The murderous management of the Covid-19 crisis.
As we know – see my posts on this issue in this same site – the management of the Covid-19 sanitary crisis strangely follows a pattern that seems to coincide increasingly with Jacques Attali’s preferences voiced since 2009 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6JYoJomiAw at 3:52 – and again recently – see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zcf4qqWvGE&t=1070s especially at 15:30 – concerning the transfer of economic management to the US Army …(Poor Attali does not seem to have the least clue about the enormous wastes caused by the US Army military procurements, but then his reputation has always been overdone. I am certain that all US Generals and Admirals would be scared to high hell by such a ludicrous prospect and would rather prefer to keep their roles as well paid consultants and intermediaries in what President Eisenhower knowingly called the military-economic complex … )
In this warmongering optic the management of the pandemic, at least in the West, would closely follow the guidelines dictated by Bill Gates, by Big Pharma and by the current WHO heavily financed by Gates and totally and dangerously off the tracks as a UN Agency as far as the World-wide demonstrated benefits of using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are concerned.
We should note that no vaccine so far has worked for any corona viruses nor against HIV, and Prof. Montagnier and others have said that the Sars-CoV-2 does incorporate a non-random piece of HIV genetic code. The chances to develop an efficient and safe vaccine for Covid-19 is therefore scarce. Therefore, in the absence of a proven vaccine, with such a Sars-CoV-2 pandemic presenting a relatively high contamination rate, or Rt at 2-3.1, but far from reaching the level of other diseases like measles which scores at 12-18, see : https://www.rferl.org/a/how-contagious-is-covid-19-compared-to-other-diseases/30492988.html – one has two options: The Rt can be lowered and the Sars-CoV-2 either suffocated and eradicated or else one can chose to « live with it », counting the deaths.
1 ) In the first case total lockdown of the contaminated regions would be imposed with the proper logistics – massive CPR tests, adequate medical treatment calibrated to correspond to the three main and distinct phases of the illness, State support to quarantined people – and/or the targeted lockdowns going hand-in-hand with massive and rapid CPR testing. These will permit the use of prof. Raoult’s protocol demonstrably known to lower the viral load, hence the contagion rate. This would be done knowing that this early medical treatment does not interfere in any ways with other cures adapted to the other phases of the illness, meaning hospitalisation and often intensive care. At IHU of Marseille professor Raoult’s team is capable to provide a valid CPR result in a few hours. These CPR are around 30 cycles of amplifications or lower because over that level the false positives are so numerous as to invalidate or at least question the results. The price of CPR must also be considered – it is around 5 euros in Spain compared to around 75 in France; individual CPR in private institutions in Italy cost 80-90 euros or more … This is because partial unemployment, restrictions and lockdowns have drastically diminished the social dues thus seriously indebting the public Social Security system, especially its health-care branch, one that had already suffered huge neoliberal monetarist cuts. Public and rapid CPR can be organised at a minimal cost as demonstrated in Marseille.
It is estimated that 1 month of complete national lockdown would cost Italy around 48 billion euros. But, as the cases of China and Wuhan demonstrate, this is a false GDP-based calculus, at least if one adopts the right measures on the basis of available and evolving scientific knowledge. A month or a quarter plunge of the GDP is quickly cancelled because of the sheer inertia of the national accounts, at least if the pandemic is rigorously controlled. Otherwise, the crisis will linger with many picks and it will end up costing much more.
The only hope in Italy and in the entire Western World now resides in a quiet revolt of family doctors and first line health-care institutions. Using their Hippocratic Oath, they have to insure quick reliable CPR tests and immediate access to prof. Raoult’s protocol with the consent of patients. This will powerfully contribute to lower the viral load of detected patients and of their known contacts if they also turn out to be symptomatic.
2 ) The other option, the one disastrously chosen in Western countries, consist in « living with the virus » while taking half measures aimed at managing the rate of admission in the intensive care units and keep the economy open. This means accepting a higher level of death both in the hospital and outside it, especially in seniors’ home. This is because people with symptoms are now sent back home to wait until they get better or until they need to be rushed to the hospital. With all the complications this entails.
As one can expect, the lethality rate of both strategies are vastly different, see for instance : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/covid-19-aggiornamento-dei-dati-sui-contagiati-sul-tasso-letalita-al-30-agosto-2020-la-follia-della-proibizione-della-hydroxycholroquine-31-agosto-2020/ . Moreover the second strategy make things worse as is crystal clear when one compare China and other virtuous countries to the West.
In fact, the only thing that works to lower the viral load in a few days when prescribed at the earliest stages, prof. Raoult’s Protocol, is declared illegal or pushed aside. The management of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic consists in falsely pretending that « herd immunity » is the only remedy available while awaiting for – an unlikely – vaccine. (Added on Oct.2020: Recently the Lancet recognised that herd immunity is not a solution to strive for, see: « It is unclear how long protective immunity lasts, and, like other seasonal coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is capable of re-infecting people who have already had the disease, but the frequency of re-infection is unknown » in https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32153-X/fulltext)
Hence, the crisis is managed in a typical crisis management mode while scaring citizens a maximum and disorienting them with contradictory messages, faulty planning and ill-adapted measures aimed more at modifying personal and social behavior than at dealing with the crisis to save a maximum of lives. Personal Protective Equipments are neither rapidly available nor publicly paid for; masks are largely useless if they are not FFP3 or 2 and if they are not changed every 3/4 hours; the lack of adequate protective measures in seniors homes, in the workplaces, in over-crowded public transportation, in schools etc , etc seems to be the rule… It seems that the main concern is to interfere as little as possible with the economy as long as emergency hospital beds and intensive care units are not saturated, causing prime time TV concerns.
To achieve this lofty goal while still cutting spending to public hospitals and reducing available beds, you have to reorganise the whole system, favoring the private sector, and you have to deprogram other patients; and, if need be, as was done during the first pick, you have to impose triage for all those over 65 … . These victims are not seen on daily prime time news and only appear in the over mortality deaths statistics which are known to very few persons. Ex: The dirty current Italian leading classes and governments are increasingly frightened because the ratios between Covid-19 sick patients over the number of contaminated persons determined by manipulated CPR tests, reaches 5 % from the earlier threshold fixed at 3 %. That 3 % average was artificially achieved with a careful but monstrous lowering and rising of daily tests. Despite this statistical massage intended to misinform the population, the Rt – exponential effective contamination ratio – did rise and the situation slipped entirely from their hand, once again as in February. This is mainly due to the massaged hence erroneous statistics, a reality made worse by the high number of asymptomatic persons. Therefore one understands the present state of panic within this leading cast mainly chosen by profiling – which in Italy has become a hard science. That being said, can any good-faith statistician explain what this means, given that testing should be and is random and the potential Covid-19 Rt is less than 2 ?
The fact is that the current dirty Italian leadership have cynically used the crisis to scare people out and have massaged the statistics for disinformation purpose. As we pointed out, they systematically increased or decreased the daily tests so as to keep the number of affected persons more or less constant. And then they have quarantined them without treatment to wait until they either got better or became so sick as to be rushed to the hospital and, in fact, often directly to the intensive care units. Once there, their chances to survive are – still now despite more knowledge on oxygen and anti-coagulant and corticosteroids – very limited.
Meanwhile, ordinary people must go on with their life, but they are scared because they are disoriented and justifiably fear for their life. For instance, they have to take buses and public transportation that are always over-crowded while no real measure are taken to avoid contamination in working place and in schools. In all these situations, physical contact and particularly hand-contact, the main transmission mode of the Covid-19, cannot be avoided. The reality is that most citizens are now convinced that the transversal delinquent incompetence of our leaders, callously oblivious to citizens’ basic rights, will lead to a new pick, probably without lockdown in order to save the capitalist economy. The first pick – and Chinese and other countries’ experience – demonstrated that such an attitude ends up costing much more.
In this deleterious context, no one is surprised to see our leaders pushing for the use of control Apps. The Apps cannot guarantee any privacy simply because, ever since the introduction of campuses intra-net and of Internet, carnivore systems are able to pick up instantaneously all one keys in into her/his keyboard or with the mouse. Furthermore and even more importantly, the government does not guarantee that it will sue the private agencies like Cambridge Analytica on behalf of the citizens, in the eventuality private health data ever falls into their hands. Likewise, the EU governments should repatriate the civil status data – état civil – now sent without any citizen’s consent in Colorado, USA, and are open to the lunatic analysis of exclusivist geneticists and others.
Even more serious is the fact that the tracing Apps ignore the asymptomatic transmission which has turned out to be the major mean of transmission. I have already underlined elsewhere that the tracing Apps, at least when they are bureaucratically managed in a proper fashion, will not tell you anything about contact with the virus because, at most, it can trace the people one ran across at close distance. However, we know that touch is the main transmission form of the Sars-Cov-2 virus and that it can live for some time on surfaces. If one uses the Apps and is forced to take a bus or a subway or go to work or to school etc, the Apps will not tell you anything about the surfaces you touch, irrespective of the people with whom you are travelling or meeting at that specific time.
The truth is that such Apps are only meant for social control – awaiting the Big Pharma vaccine which will most likely never come. In fact, some candidates have already been stopped. Given the number of asymptomatic carriers of the SARS-CoV-2, in order to protect oneself, it seems better to adopt some social distancing in exposed areas and to wash one’s hands frequently . One would also be well-advised to inform oneself regularly and to check for early symptoms such as loss of smell and taste, cough and fever, fatigue etc. As for public transportation, we know that around 80 % of the vehicles are used during rush-hours; hence, if workplace and schools were to adopt different starting times, say 8:00 and 9:00 AM for different cohorts, the rush-hour problem would be considerably lowered. For schools, China uses detecting devices that control the temperature of students entering the premises, masks and gel for hand-washing are readily available, class-rooms are properly ventilated and, last but not least, bacteria and virus killing ultra-violet rays are used during the night to disinfect empty class-rooms.
All these concrete measures have nothing to do with phony chat on liberties propagandised in a vain attempt to return to a new Cold War mentality, without any Johnsonian Great Society social safety nets to compensate. Or, rather, in the optic of a really democratic distinction between the Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Liberty, China’s dealing with the pandemics proved to be the highest form of respect for the freedom and well-being of ALL citizens. And China’s attitude is to learn from past experience and to better what can still be bettered, as proven by the use made of past experiences in dealing with the SARS …
As we said the mask is mostly useless because the small virus goes through its fibers especially if it is not a FFP3 and, even then, it needs to be changed every 3/4 hours, an expansive proposal for most individuals and most families. Nevertheless, the mask signals social politeness to others in so far as it contains the spread of droplets. Gloves would perhaps be more useful because touching is the main vector of spreading Covid-19, although it seems that those who comment for the medias, in the Covid-19 media circus, are paid some 2000 Euros or more for less than 10 minutes plus VAT and know exactly why they are paid for … (see : https://quifinanza.it/soldi/quanto-guadagnano-virologi-tv-compensi-burioni-capua/382707/ ) This is worse than the usual conflict of interest which very few commentators reveal publicly, although it should be mandatory by law … – Clearly this is a totalitarian management of the health and economic crisis.
Remember the Nazi law doctor Carl Schmitt theorizing governance for the few as a function of the manipulation of fear and of the artificial creation of an an « enemy » ? Note the military semantic used by Western leaders when dealing with their « war » management of Covid-19, the latest ineptitude on this matter surely being the useless « curfew », a word and a measure immediately associated with war. What are they going to come up next? Instead of generalizing prof. Raoult’s Protocol, they will send the Army to patrol the streets with precise rules of engagement, namely if they ever see a virus taking a walk after curfew, to call the Israeli or US air force to bomb the hell out of it ?
Given the level of fear induced, the neo-Zionist Fascists leaders hope to use it in order to push forth their socio-economic agenda, even though all available data show that the neoliberal monetarist counter-reformation cycle initiated with Volcker-Reagan in 1979-1982, but tested a decade earlier by the Chicago Boys in Pinochet’s martyred Chile, has now reached its sorry end. The besieged Masada’s mentality will lead them along the usual path while attempting to push things as far as they can with typical chutzpah – in charlatanesque Freudian terms a recurrent « latent suicidal impulse ». (7) However, the most they can do now is to created two new warehouses for their New Economy in order to replace human production, consumption and recycling, as explained in my satire available here: « Pastiche sur la sortie de crise : on vous exploitera plus d’hier et moins que demain » in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/pastiche-sur-la-sortie-de-crise-vous-exploitera-plus-que-hier-et-moins-que-demain-comme-dit-la-romance-25-avril-2020/ ; the original is also available in Italian in the Categoria Economia )
Fortunately, one cannot hope to dehumanise the whole gentile society without expecting to pay the proverbial Pound of flesh. The History of exclusivism, on which I have elaborated upon after Thomas Paine’s essential Rights of Man and the Young Marx – the Marx of the Jewish question treated in The Holy family – demonstrates this dangerous and even recurrently deadly mechanism. See my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme.
To conclude this section, here is some not so curious crackpot talk we eared recently. How would a neoliberal monetarist Zionist government solve the problem of over-crowded buses and collective transportation in order to legitimize its murderous management of Covid-19 crisis? I would never have thought about it myself, but the answer is … simply by privatizing. But then it would have to ensure that rich people would not be penalised in so doing. As we know, the 10 and 20 % on top account for the majority of gains in the Stock Exchange and they also account for most of the forced crisis-induced savings. (8) At the same time, others are laid off or on partial unemployment. Solutions do exist as shown by the private management of highways with their paying booths or again with the Green ecological off-grid installations. In all these cases, you can deduct the extra cost if you are an enterprise or a salesperson. The preferred neoliberal monetarist solution is simply to resort to deduction from personal income taxes since lots of workers do earn too little to pay enough to deduct anything. Furthermore, it is occulted and therefore electorally painless. And if the budget always look precarious and bordering on the red because of these largesses, so much the better, because this will legitimize more sacrifices from the average trusting citizen … Thinking of it, this is exactly the rational for tax expenditures, the pain fiscal plank of the neoliberalist monetarist public policy.
5 ) The 2020 Italian NADEF or draft budget plan: the generalisation of poverty and of illegality. Aside from the torture and the violation of basic human rights routinely practiced against law-abiding citizens, see for instance the Open letters in the Homepage of this same site.
The plan here, to put it simply, is to gain time up until 2026 in order to push through the most regressive reforms still to be completed – current dirtied Italy is the real laboratory of neo-exclusivist regression in the whole EU and indeed in the whole capitalist philo-Zionist World. Hence, the RRF funds are not used to ensure a massive stimulus plan calculated to re-habilitate the constitutionally enshrined Social State with full-employment – attained through the Reduction of Working Time, be it lower pension age or the Work Week –, public works as well as the rehabilitation of the three components of the « global net revenue » of the households necessary to pay for Social Security – pensions, health-care and UI, etc . Would be added to these measures the rehabilitation of progressive fiscal policy to ensure massive public works and a R&D level at least close to the EU average. Italy’s R&D score was 1.43 % of GDP in 2019 whereas the EU target is set at 3 % of GDP.
Resorting to super and hyper-amortisation rates used to retool private enterprises, which the Nadef continues to use, does cost vast amounts of public money and is only feasible for the top 500 performing Italian enterprises. They do not help much the 90 % of small business with less than 10 employees. Above all, they provide no counter-parts for labor aside from increased precariousness and wage deflation . Other regressive income tax deductible measures like the 110 % so-called Superbonus deductible for a façade restoration programme (!) favors the rich as much as the earlier abolition of the tax on the residential home, except for big luxurious homes. It does not do nothing to better abandoned, decrepit and dirtied popular urban neighborhoods – not even in Rome as any traveller immediately notices when exiting the airports.
Similarly 30 % labor cost decontribution for the South goes to businesses with no strings attached especially in terms of employment. This is entrusted to the invisible hand. The same policy of favoring lower « labor cost » disastrously confused with « production cost » through Welfare killing lesser employers’ social contributions, is accelerated nationally. In any case, it will hardly materialise for the South given the current carnage the crisis is inflicting once again to the scarce industrial networks surviving in the Mezzogiorno after the devastating impact of the 2007-2008 crisis.
Add to this the fact that, in the South, big infrastructures are profusely talked about but never completed and, at times, never even initialised. The new Genova Bridge was rebuild quickly but Gioia Tauro, the biggest natural Sea port for huge containers in the Mediterranean Sea never gets the attention it deserves and is purposefully strangled by lack of adequate railroads connections to Mitteleuropa. Instead Trieste, now under foreign European control, is expensively refitted with more docks in a shy and servile implementation of the Silk Road Memorandum. After decades, the killing stretches of the Road 106 on Calabria Ionian Coast remains to be dealt with. The Corridor One Palermo-Hamburg is totally pushed aside.
In fact, any urgently needed big infrastructural project in the Mezzogiorno sees the artificial springing forth of ill-informed opponents who do not have the least comprehension of socio-economic development – nor even of the provenience of the EU and national funds involved, which therefore remain mostly unused and returned – and even less of environmental consultation processes and protection measures. Italy is afflicted by ecological groups mostly affiliated to international useless and like Greenpeace and the WWF. Curiously these pressure groups are even granted management responsibility for parks etc which should exclusively accrue to national, local and municipal governments with their democratic – not their shareholders’ or members’ – accountability. They are mostly the cause why we now waste so much money on alternative and private sources of energy. The price of electricity which is necessary for both industry and the consumers, has more than doubled since 2013, and is paid for by the citizens’ as consumers. This also explains why the less expensive public management of water distribution and waste disposal and recycling plants have been privatised in favor of vastly more costly private systems.
Many vocal nihilist militant groups do not even see that modern economic development is necessary to pay for the rehabilitation of the environmentally devastated Italian territories. To their credit one must note that the corrupt and inefficient state of affairs in Italy makes it safer to oppose corrupt development than to risk the community’s health in ill-conceived developments. But unless this logic is broken it feeds a vicious cycle of development of under-development and hence of ecological devastations. Some public infrastructures are urgent and vital and should instead become the battle ground for the democratic rebuilding of our country respectful of the precautionary criteria dictated by ecomarxism.
Aside from the TAV such nihilist militant groups are never heard about in the North. We did not hear a whisper against the huge – and in my view necessary – highway tunnel between Bologna and Florence. There is a national fund for the recuperation of plethoric white elephant buildings and for rehabilitation of heavily polluted terrains but it is kept minimal whereas it could advantageously served to employ thousands of unemployed, thus replenishing wages, differed salaries and fiscal revenues, while beautifying our cities, historical borghi and landscapes and making them safe again. Instead this sloppy Nadef criminally makes the legalisation of abuses much easier and almost automatic. The list could go on and on. Sadly, while the country is talking about 5G and making it illegal to oppose it at any government level (!), the South is not even properly connected yet to 4G. But then the Nadef pompously speaks about a 4.0 plan for the Italian enterprises …
Meanwhile financial and non-financial institutions squander lots of profits on buybacks to pay dividends to those shareholders most favored by the current regressive fiscal policy. As we hinted in the introduction above, the sanitary and economic crisis has impoverished an increasing number of citizens in absolute and in relative terms. This unfolds in parallel with the unprecedented rise of the Stock Exchange in these times of crisis. The same inequality is is verified for the household saving rate which favors the wealthier top two deciles simply because it follows the structure of revenues at a time when most workers are on partial unemployment … and are afraid of being laid off as soon as the interdiction to do so will be lifted by the government. Unless this is postponed again, the fateful date is set for December 31 …
The RRF Funds are spread over 6 years and thus dilapidated to maintain a semblance of a contained budget soon to be on track according to a slower but disciplined fiscal consolidation path. What could possibly explain such a choice when the Nadef itself rules out any chance to comply with the fiscal consolidation path even over the whole cycle, as we have already underlined ? – see Note 5 below. The goal is to pretend that the government is doing its best to comply with EU Six and Two Pack rules under difficult circumstances. With that legitimacy and accolade conferred by the EU, the OECD and other such agencies, the government aims at furthering its regressive fiscal policies in favor of business and to further cut and privatise while counting on the magic of the « invisible hand » to restore economic growth.
Instead of more fiscal gifts to business informed by the Flat tax philosophy, the sort of gifts which did not contribute in the least to prop up the economy as witness by the tendential degradation of the external accounts, including Target 2, the least one would have expected would have been a solidarity contribution levied on higher revenues and on accumulated wealth.
However, the philo-Zionist Nietzschean second rate current Italian leaders and their two controlling embassies seem to have come to the conclusion that the Italian workers and citizens are sufficiently stunned by the high real unemployment and poverty levels, and by the pervasive fear induced by the management of the Covid-19 crisis, to be ready to accept anything. Hence, they are pushing hard to implement the remaining regressive reforms as quickly as they can. It is plain and typical chutzpah, but with little hope to succeed even though the regression and repression might become even more anti-constitutional than these current reforms. The French speak of a « fuite en avant ». In any case, with such behaviour, the Italian PD and M5S government is laying the ground for a typical Procrustean bed.
The result of this plain betrayal of the 10 cardinal principles enshrined in the Constitution, born from the Resistance, is that Italians, who already earn the second lowest salaries and exhibit one of the most dramatic level of poverty in the EU, will become even poorer. Similarly the international rank of the country will further deteriorate. To make things worse, due to decade of socio-economic regression, there is precious little room left to cut social services and salaries. The most the Italian leaders can do at the present time is to implement so-called smart working and to uberise the Public Administration and the education system with some new SOPs and associated algorithms. In this way, they will shift the paper work to the citizens and thus be able to cut by half of the now old and inefficient Public Administration’s labor force … without having to let many young people in!!! This is not a cynical but a mainstream view: After all neoliberal monetarist public policy had ruled long time ago that the PA should not exceed a minimum threshold and that the current 16-17 % of GDP, including military and security public spending, was considered decidedly too high!
Why is this so? No one really knows as far as science is concerned given the higher economic Multiplier of public spending when carried out in public sectors. But then this brand of public policy, like Laffer’s « crowding out » theory – what about the current « credit crunch » from QE, would that qualify as « crowding out » of productive investments ? – and Barro’s Ricardian equivalence are not about science or even about the well-being of society. Instead it is all about an ideological vision of the World to be fully subjected to the unfettered play of the « invisible hand » of the market moved by the speculative « acquisitive mind » given as a perennial trait of Human Nature by bourgeois economics and not only by the crackpot Austrian school of Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, Mises, Schumpeter and all the rest …
The best illustration comes from the grand master of this lunatic philo-Semite Nietzschean thinking, that of the Jewish-Austrian Fascist Ludwig Mises who openly advocated, long after WW II, eugenic policies and the dismantlement of public health-care. In his view and that of his neoliberal followers, illness is created by the public health-care system and by public hospital, otherwise it would only be an holistic matter of Will – and I presumed of privileged access to private health-care. (9) As we know, public health-care spending was cut to the tune of 36 billion in Italy since 2011. This was done with the excuse of the rigor imposed by the new Maastricht treaty. Ironically, this is exactly the amount that would accrue to Italy, plus stringent conditionlities, if it were to use the MES.
The Covid-19 crisis illustrated the disastrous consequences of these policy choices. During the pick of the crisis in April and May 2020, hospitals were unable to cope and the intensive care units were submerged to the point that the Italian government needed to quickly inject 5 billion euros in the system through various emergency decrees. This is far from enough but then the Nadef proposes more reforms. In clear, this means that the rampant, though illegal, privatization of health-care institutions will continue and the number of beds available will remain way below the needed level. The established norm for bed ratio was 3.1/000 in 2018 for Italy and 8.0/000 for Germany – https://data.oecd.org/healtheqt/hospital-beds.htm . The Covid-19 demonstrated how crucial this ratio is.
The rule so far was than no more than 1/3 of health-institutions could be in private hands. In most regions and provinces, this ratio is not respected, no more than the constitutionally enshrined LEP, namely the national minimum level of care to be made available to any citizen anywhere in Italy. But if you are ready to accept, one could very well say « to induce », a greater rate of over-mortality and if you have chosen, as is again the case, to deprogram « normal » patients and to resort to triage in order to manage the possible saturation of intensive care units, then, of course, privatisation, going along with cuts in the public health-care system and greater subjection of drug prescription to Big Pharma, does indeed make sense. Anglo-Saxon blueprints and management systems are available and already widespread in our country. In such case, of course, there is no need to restore the public health-care system to the excellent level it had reached in the 1970s …
Typically in Milan today many people, proven utterly incompetent by the Covid-19 crisis, are now busy trying to imagine ways to use the coming second wave of Covid-19 to artificially turn the empty hospital recently build on the Expo’s ground into a profitable private machine … But Lombardy and other northern and southern Regions have seen worse as far as corruption is concerned in this sector which churns out lots of public money. (For the general issue, the reader is send back to my main essay on the issue entitled «Health-care between corruption and cuts » here: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/health-care-between-cuts-and-corruption-victim-of-choice-for-neoliberal-and-monetarist-fiscal-federalism-may-2016-translated-april-6-2020/ )
These trends and outcomes are undeniable but they are part the Nadef’s triennial vision. The RRF Funds will therefore be dilapidated slowly to keep budget appearances but also to cushion for the inevitable rise of the spread … In other words, these funds, which in the end are paid for by Italians, will be allocated and partly kept aside for a long period ending in 2026 … From 2028 to 2058, they will have to be reimbursed. Despite some hasty comments heard in various EU quarters which are always ready to confuse the Italian leaders incestuously chosen through profiling with the impoverished and disempowered working masses, Italians will have to learn to be even more « frugal »… Unless that miserable prospective forces them to effect a long overdue regime change …
5.1 ) GDP : Or how it will be better in 2022 and 2023 but still stay well behind the 2007-2008 level.
That is, after a big dip, GDP will recover mechanically by some amount but still stay well behind compared to 2007-2008. Remember that this level had never been recovered: even before the Covid-19 crisis, Italy was still around 7 % below that level, and in reality 10 % if one accounts for the artificial re-evaluation of GDP in October 2014 which included an evaluation of fiscal evasion, prostitution, drugs, some armaments and some digital property rights.
This time around such projections are just tentatively made to satisfy the rules of the European semester that span form October to April. The Nadef mentions five big unknowns like the global situation, the possible second wave, the spread, inflation and fluctuating oil price. The whole Nadef’s statistical apparatuses must be taken with a big grain of salt. Instead, on the basis of the current situation and of the expected evolutions one can infer from the measures proposed and adopted, one can realistically foresee the main tendencies and consequences that will unfold.
For instance, we know that the economy never fully recovers what it sheds away during such deep structural – and even at times, cyclical – crisis. This is because speculative excesses are eliminated as the competition forces the restructuration of the whole economic apparatus – fusions or centralisation and-concentration of capital. On average 5 % of the GDP that is « creatively destroyed » by a structural crisis disappears for good, including jobs. Some is recouped though the emergence of new sectors and of new intermediary sectors, but these are now all capital intensive and can no longer absorb the « freed » labor force. Of course, such obvious reality is not even conceivable within the Marginalist Paradigm (10) and its liquefied factors of production believed to automatically reach their « razor-hedged equilibrium », including on the flexible labor market. The winners are the countries exhibiting the best macro-economic competitiveness – public infrastructures and services – in support of the best micro-economic productivity. Italy’s Social State is now dismantled and its R&D is low at 1.43, hence … One just needs to look at the distribution of robots in various country to understand the extent of the un-going socio-economic reorganisation. Although Italy is doing better than France as far as the use of robots is concerned, it is still badly trailing the leaders of that pack. Moreover, it will not be able to catch up without causing a social rebellion of impoverished and increasingly unemployed masses. Dangerous classes? They are very quiet and subdued right now, but that might be deceptive.
5.2 ) Public debt. It is tentatively and fraudulently put at 158 % of GDP and then it is somehow supposed to come down in accord with the pre-Covid-19 fiscal consolidation path.
But this does not take into account many important variables. For instance, the 5 fluctuating variables acknowledged by the government, like the global situation, the possible second wave, the spread, inflation and fluctuating oil price. The reality of the matter is that one must add the 203 or 205 billion of the RRF – indeed the whole amount of the Recovey Fund – into the public debt. This is because, although it is not directly counted into the national public debt, the Recovery Funds will have to be reimbursed. Therefore not only do they weigh directly on the debt financing and on the primary budget surplus or deficit used to fine-tune the Fiscal consolidation path, but they also imply an unacceptable transfer of competence and of tax areas to the EU in a domain of exclusive power such as Social Affairs. This includes labor policy – SURE – and health-care – MES. Social Affairs are the main macro-economic lever still in the hands of sovereign member States.
Last but not least, as the Nadef recognises at the end of its presentation, the current crisis has induces billions in State’s guaranties. Some have estimated that around 80 to 90 % of these will never be paid back. This estimate is not far-fetched since close to some 1/3 of Italian small and medium existing businesses will likely disappear by next year. The government knows and it has extended its parasitic assistance programs to December 31of this year and will likely postpone the deadline after that, thus purposelessly squandering RRF funds as we explained above. Why do we say « parasitic » ? Simply because these programs are grounded in an inept belief in the meta-magic of the « invisible hand », instead of doing the structural things that should be done in order to reignite the economic machine within the constitutional parameters, namely those enshrining a mix public-private economy backed the State control of public credit, in primis to finance new public and para-public debt away from the diktats of the speculative market.
But there is more. On top of these billions wasted on direct guarantees to private enterprises without any say in their decision-making and on useless minimum assistance to the citizens, there will be around 600 billion euros in loans and in new lines of credit. (Nadef, p 113) The main benefits will not fall con the workers and the unemployed as they all know from experience due to their precautionary and limitless confinement …
The fact of the matter is that these measures are dictated by fear, hence by the necessity to keep the masses of citizens quiet, and by an ideological and irrational belief that things will get better without State intervention. Otherwise, we all agree that the government must provide for the citizens’ « livelihood » – to borrow an appropriate term from K. Polanyi – but this needs to be done in a constructive and planned fashion so as to respect the main economic circuits, first of all those which sustain the individual salary and the social contributions.
During the FDR’s New Deal, this is precisely what was done with Public Works absorbing unemployment – and maintaining skill in so doing – while simultaneously setting the macro-competitive basis for a new and higher micro-productive level. Many classical public infrastructures need to be rehabilitated and many vital new ones – eg. ecological, digital – need to be build if modern States wish to keep their rank among developed and prosperous countries. Obviously, this send us back to the appropriate way to deal with the Sars-CoV-2 crisis: many countries such as China, Vietnam, Cuba do demonstrate that this is possible in concrete practical terms. As least if one does not chose to confuse technical and ideological factors in their decision-making processes.
Therefore, the Nadef’s public debt projections are all bogus. Just an inept narrative bordering on the criminal disregard of the superior interests of the Nation and of its Constitution. I say this as a former professor and challenge any PhD in the discipline to prove me wrong in an open and public debate granting me the right to respond.
5.3 ) The spread – hushing any talk about a return to public credit.
Such a big issue is made out of the oscillations of the spread, in this context the differential in the interest rates of government bonds particularly the German Bunds. This is one just to occult the unavoidable recourse to public credit, unless one chooses « voluntary servitude » to the speculative markets and their enforcing agencies like the MES, the IMF and the lesser known IIF so active in the strangulation of Greece with the acquiescence of the pitre Tsipras and his Syriza’s band of losers. Recourse to public credit is the only way to solve the current public debt issue and to relaunch needed productive long-term investments.
In dirty contemporary Italy, too many people – precisely those who are paid, hence chosen through profiling, because they are ready to tow the line – shamelessly pretend that Mario Draghi, the servus in camera saved the country with his QE. Whereas he is the one who sold out the country on the Britannia and in other occasions, together with similar ilks like Ciampi, Padoa-Schioppa, Prodi, Padovan, and many other such incestuously and over-represented pitres. In reality, Draghi destroyed the EU as well as Italy. The proof is that no one knows any more how to « reset » from his delinquent pro-Zionist and pro-speculation QEs and form his neoliberal monetarist policies, not even Blanchard and Summers with their bogus and disastrous Zero lower bound asinine Talmudist remedy. The QEs only served the Goldman Sachs and associated private bankers masters of this typical Italian servile lackey. They gave them the opportunity to profitably take their stakes away from the vulnerable Italian banks and government bonds. Hence, the government used the budget margin gained through the QEs to pretend that the Fiscal consolidation path was working. This allowed it to push through more regressive reforms and linear cuts and wall-to-wall privatization. Meanwhile, a 500 billion euros new Target 2 debt was added on the back of the Italian tax payers. In Italy, many servile minds, even on the Left – most of these are infiltrated informers or worse plain imbeciles with poor academic training – do pretend that Target 2 is not important being only a « jeu d’écriture »!!!
This argument is also made by those who plead for an Italexit with a return to (Dini’s?) Italian Lire or an Euro-Mediterranean Union, small and peripheral enough for their ambitions. I was born in a country that had established itself as one of the Big World Powers after the WW II, soon to become one of the main three pillars of the Common Market and later of the EU. That being said non-colonial cultural relationships and mutually beneficial socio-economic cooperation should be furthered among all the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. For instance, like our late partigiano Calabro-piemontese President Scalfaro had done with Kaddafi’s Libya and Ethiopia before our new negotiated and mutually beneficial relationship, including an apology for colonial crimes, was shattered by neo-Zionist crusaders, some of them external to the area … Such is the dubious level of prospective thinking in my destroyed country …
Therefore one would be well advised to take into account the predictable failure of the Zero lower bound theory. Ms Lagarde already knows this because she is a realist, but she is totally cornered. Just like Powell, who needed to abandon his attempted « reset » when Trump’s fiscal regressive policy badly undercut any possible progress he might have made in that direction. Powell, and soon Lagarde after him, has recently freed himself from the irrational inflation Marginalist rhetoric in order to concentrate on the enormous problem now raised by the growing speculative bubbles.
The Nadef acknowledges that the spread is going to rise. But the only thing the government could come up with was to sacrifice the necessary and immediate big stimulus plan now urgently needed in order to put some RRF money aside until … 2026. Just to avoid eventual EU’s penalties. Penalties are low around 0,3 % of GDP a very little price to pay for recovered financial freedom. However, in so doing, the government will be in for a surprise. This is because some European powers will grow their economy again. Germany is now spending around 14 % of its GDP to do so, followed by Northern European nations like the Netherland. Meanwhile Italy will continue to self-destroy and to prepare its own subjection the new MES conditionalities.
This fatal issue is silently and inevitably programmed in the Nadef, together with the communicating cinematic strategy assigning specific roles to the PD and the M5S as well as to the more rightist parties. They all pretend that the EU stimulus plan – Recovery Fund, Sure and MES – is advantageous for the country. And while the M5S pretends to be against the MES, all of them agree to down play the conditions imposed, especially those imposed by the Fiscal consolidation path attached to the Recovery Funs, while the Nadef itself acknowledges that it will be impossible to comply with it other than tendentially for many years to come. (see Note 5 below ). The Right as well as the Lega’s comical and histrionic King Ubu, Salvini himelf, have quickly lowered their pants and Forza Italia – probably influenced by Berlusconi’s holdings in the Milan’s Stock Exchange, is probably still traumatised by Monti-Draghi-Trichet’s letter of August 5, 2011 – see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettera_Trichet-Draghi . Therefore, despite some fake Reality movie performances, they will all act as good Italian obedient neoliberal monetarist philo-Semite Nietzscheans and Spinellians. And they will tow the line. Unless, of course, these peoples are washed away quickly by the citizens, before it is too late. As a character says in Fellini’s Amarcord « Non faceva cosi buio sin dal 1922. »
The confirmation comes when one looks at the prediction for the primary surplus as compared to DGP growth. It is just insane. It bleeds out an already sluggish and depressed socio-economic formation.
QUADRO MACROECONOMICO TENDENZIALE SINTETICO – Ricomposto
……………………………………2019 2020 21 22 23
PIL 0,3 -9,0 5,1 3,0 1,8
PIL nominale 1,1 -8,0 5,8 4,2 2,8
Deflatore PIL 0,7 1,1 0,7 1,1 1,0
Deflatore consumi 0,5 0,0 0,6 1,1 1,0
Indebitamento netto -2,2 -1,6 -10,8 -7,0 -4,7
Saldo primario 1,5 1,8 -7,3 -3,7 -1,6
Interessi passivi 3,6 3,4 3,5 3,3 3,1
Debito pubblico
(lordo sostegni) 134,4 134,6 158,0 155,8 154,3
Tasso di disoccupazione 10,0 9,5 10,7 10,3 9,8
Bilancia partite correnti
(saldo in % PIL) 3,0 2,4 2,7 2,8 2,8
5.4 ) Unemployment and active population: official statistics vs the real numbers.
Bogus numbers are the rule here in Italy. Most other countries have understood the argument made in my Book III – see the Note ** – about the real unemployment numbers freed from the restrictive and anti-constitutional ILO statistics.The Constitution imposes the right to work and to decent pay and social services organised through a national solidarity system. It does not allow one hour in a gig or « shitty » job a week to count as employment capable to insure a dignified citizen’s life. Furthermore, the ILO stats do not take into account gig and other such precarious jobs supported by government’s programs and laws, such as the new cuts into so-called « labor cost » – cuneo fiscal – written in the Nadef which will add to existing multi-billionaire handouts and exonerations in favor of private businesses, including those that accompanied the implementation of the disastrous and failed Jobs Act. (11)
Incidentally we are faced here with the same paradox we denounced years ago when the Chicago Boys’s recipes were generalised to all EU member States at the same time. If all concentrate on exporting to repay the foreign-held public debt before anything else, not only public infrastructures and social services will be sacrificed, but they will all end up in more or less the same position relative to one another, any real difference coming from a greater national competitiveness. To win at that game one better rely on strong R&D rather than on already abused wage deflation. The same reasoning applies to the race to lower so-called « labor costs » at the expense of the vital reduction of « production costs » based on greater productivity sustained by stronger macro-economic policies. One only need to compare Germany with its pre-Covid-19 budget surplus with our own country or even with present day France.
Now the government knows this perfectly well. The Nadef even presents a graph on active population (p 5). Except that it does to mention the one hour precarious jobs that are counted as employment, nor does it seem to mind the fact that current statistics count hours not persons. Furthermore, although the pension age is now set at over 67 year of age, the official statistics only concern the cohorts 14-64!! Hence an active population hovering around 62 % – it was more likely less than 59 % before the current crisis – is just plain misinformation. Note en passant that the increasing pauperisation of workers and of the general citizenry is largely masked when one uses this peculiar gauge, namely the total number of hours worked. Dehumanisation did you say? True, years ago, and unfortunately still today, unions did use this same gauge without realizing that it does not make sense any longer because the full-time labor contract is no longer the rule.
Perhaps the measure which illustrates best the incompetent attitude of the government in facing a crisis it tries to manipulate without comprehending it and hence without being able to control it, is the REM or « Reddito di Emergenza Covid ». This key support measure of the Decreto rilancio is intended for a household for maximum of two months; it starts at 400 Euros a month plus increases according to a family scale, one which is however limited at less than 840 Euros and is carefully means tested on the basis of 10 000 Euros of family’s assets … https://www.inps.it/nuovoportaleinps/default.aspx?itemdir=53736 . In other words it is an additional measure to the already indecent Reddito di cittadinanza – RDC – which is a bad palliative to the lack of a decent universal social assistance program in Italy, a shameful exception among rich countries and among EU member States. The problem is that the Jobs act, the returning vouchers both planned as a function of wage deflation with the addition of these « Reddito support » gimmicks do not amount to even a half-adequate answer to the present health and structural economic crisis. The reader is send back to the categoria « Lavoro » for my early critique of the RDC and to this post on the impact on robotisation and IA: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/2298-2 . There is no solution without the generalised reduction of the working time backed by the new anti-dumping definition based on the three components of the « global net revenue » of the households.
5.5 ) Social security will deteriorate as much as education and public infrastructures.
For instance Italy has cut some 36 billion Euros from its public health-care system since 2011, precisely the same sum made available to Italy for health-care assistance but on the condition it would submit to the MES. You have already understood that this is precisely what will happen in due time with the help of the incompetent and P2esque PD and M5S, the same who are busily destroying parliamentary democracy. As a matter of fact, we all expect that the few millions « saved » from the recent reduction in the number of parliamentarians will soon go into new perks and salary and emolument hikes for the remaining deputies and senators. This at a time in which some people seriously propose to double the pay of what American medias called « useful idiots », namely obedient servants of the State, in order to buy their subservience, including M. Tridico who heads the public pension fund INPS.
Remember the in-house unionist Bonnani who invented 2 million pensioners to insure a victory in the referendum held a few years ago to impose neoliberal reforms to the public pension plan? This included postponing the retirement age and raising it automatically to adjust to the expected « average » increase in life expectancy, without the least regard for hard work or for the fact that workers die some 7 to 11 years on average before their managers? Well, it just happens that the Italian elites had already figured out how to domesticate unions in a country which had the biggest Communist Party in the West, that is up until it committed hara-kiri at the Bolognina Summit in 1992, a suicide already prepared in the1960 with election at the helm of the Party of the renegade philo-Semite Nietzschean Enrico Berlinguer. It was this Berlinguer who betrayed the metalmeccanici’s crucial strike and movement at the end of the 60s and early 70s and who is on record for having said, as a paid General Secretary, that he preferred Nato to the Warsaw Pact; which is even clearer than G. Lukacs’s attitude in Hungary … The Italian elites and their foreign mentors re-invented industrial relations and union democracy. They did so for instance by devising an anti-constitutional law by which such domesticated union leaders can change their salary a few months before they retire and calculate their pension on the last salaries. This Bonnani retired with more than 300 000 Euros in annual pension, in a country in which, thanks to his efforts, a majority of pensioners have pensions inferior to 1000 Euros, not bad, ain’t ? That logic prevails even today and informs the Nadef’s flat tax philosophy, if fiscal deduction from « labor cost » and its continuation of the suicidal salary deflation policies.
The Covid-19 had forced the government to react because everything being corrupt and bankrupt in the contemporary Italian health-care system, it had simply collapsed – despite the loyalty and heroic dedication of health-care personnel. It provided 5 billion this year. It is just a tantum effort made necessary by the Covid-19 crisis. But then we all know that, if they can avoid a second Covid-19 wave, they will go back to cutting and privatization. And we further know that they will not hesitate to de-program other patients and re-impose triage in intensive care units if, as is expected the numbers of seriously hill Covid-19 patients rise!!! Please read this sentence again slowly and be ready to check out the over mortality rate and the statistics on the general epidemiological degradation, when these numbers will be made available …
5-6 ) Fiscal revenues and spending and more regressive fiscal policies.
The Nadef provides a summary chart. One can again verify the delaying methodology implemented in the slow spending of the RRF calibrated to help pushing regressive reforms through. More fiscal largesses will be granted to our parasitic and mafia-like business class, knowing that only 500 enterprises are World competitive, the rest is just, say, … typical of peripheral nations … and poujadist in the extreme, meaning that they are police-mafia and judges-mafia managed and protected … in tune with the hand-in-hand working of mafias with the government and the guaranteeing institutions. Ever since Lucky Luciano. Racketing in Italy as well as wide-spread corruption is the norm: lately the Prefet of Calabria was accused of asking and receiving money for services. As we all know no one talks about the pizzo, the risk being that the power-that-be will always find a comandante of carabinieri, a doctor and many judges to delegitimize and even threaten the people who would complain … Just look at my Open letters in this same site … Even the Presidente del Consiglio, Mr. Conte, had been the object of such accusations, at one point.
The ultimate proof of this general degeneration is provided in the generalise state of illegality set up in the Nadef, a subject on which I will return.
Businesses will be destroyed together with full-time jobs at a time when the social security system is already collapsed – social contributions declined a situation aggravated by the exoneration of social contributions paid by employers who are always ready to enslave young or older persons with gig and other such precarious jobs … And what is more, the fiscal revenue needed to take the slack in the form of social assistance, is also quickly disappearing.
Hence, non only pensions, health-care, education public transportation and public infrastructures etc will be sacrificed at the national level. But a push will be made to regionalise further – after having carefully cut the number of parliamentarians and having thus illegally imposed a part of the Gutgeld-Renzi’s a-constitutional reform (12). The ultimate objective remains to transform the country into a trusteeship for Goldman Sachs and the EU Commission. This means that the Reaganian policy of shifting responsibilities – particularly for social and public infrastructures – to the regions and municipalities without the tax room necessary to provide national level of services, will be reinforced. Local governments corseted into a local budget law that outlaw their ability to run debts, will see their payment transfers reduced further. They will therefore be forced to cut services.
The problem is that, this time around, the main adjustment variable used by Italy since the Unification in 1860s, namely mass emigration, is no longer available. And this means that the Italian people must organise in order to take power into their own hands, otherwise the country will be transferred to institutionalised mafias and neo-Zionist Fascism, especially in the South, where poverty and mass unemployment are already rampant. In Calabria, the rate of occupation – not of unemployment – was around 40 % BEFORE the current crisis.
The only sectors that will be saved is the usual ones that are already accustomed to huge public bailouts. And to regressive fiscal policy. « Saved » is just a way of saying because – aside from business leaders who have been educated as good Fascists since their prime, or close to that – if the real business person was minimally thinking, s/he would lead the revolt in the name of the principles enshrined in the Constitution of the First Republic, including the right to decent work for all workers who also happen to be the great mass of consumers. And they would equally demand a quick and urgent return to public credit, offering mid and long term loans at a very low interest rate. A public bank – or even a old Cassa di risparmio – does not have to make any profit aside from what is necessary to cover administration cost and prudential provisioning. Like it or not, public credit is the only way to deal with the current and chronic « credit crunch »
6 ) The generalisation of illegality under the guise of bureaucratic simplification and reforms.
I am almost sure that the EU Commission will close its eyes on the matter but this will be the ultimate treason of the European integration process yet to be carried out by this exclusivist neoliberal monetarist and Spinellian putative leadership who has already sacrificed public reinforced economic cooperations to the altar of « global private governance » . But it will then pay the price because this choice will amount to the direct domination of the mafias in all the decision-making processes, as in evidently the case in my now dirtied country. Italy score 51/180 for corruption, see: https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/italy . Remember also that « The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 – 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion – $2 trillion in current US dollars. Though the margin between those figures is huge, even the lower estimate underlines the seriousness of the problem governments have pledged to address. » https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/globalization.html . Italy’s fiscal evasion calculated in term of the tax gap for 2015-2016 is estimated at around 23,28 % of GDP, in a historical context openly permissive to legal fiscal paradises and tax rulings, see: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evasione_fiscale#Tax_gap_2015-2016.
These amounts are enough to buy most politicians at least where democratic processes are not respected, most notably in Italy, a country in which mafia-carabinieri and dirty evil doctors and dirty and evil judges actively conspire to accuse decent law-abiding citizen like me to be « paranoid » when the whole Interpol knows perfectly well, since many years, that all my accusations are grounded into verifiable facts and that I have been targeted as a guinea pig specifically because of my law-abiding character and my scientific and Marxist dedication to truth, including on modern exclusivism. Illegal and intrusive targeting has now become a major problem in surveillance as well as in non-authorized gathering of data, on the Internet and elsewhere. The problem is that the low education and academic training of people involved as well as the pathological traits they developed given their sense of impunity, make one fell like in the Planet of the Apes. Surely, at some point common sense and legality must prevail. And victims be compensated.
The Nadef’s normalizing drive started with the rebuilding of the collapsed Genova bridge. Autostrade per l’Italia S.p.A., the private firm entrusted with the running of it, made around ½ billion profits and paid dividends accordingly the year the bridge collapsed; but it spent only around 35 000 euros in maintenance!!! Yet they are keeping their business with the dirty complicity of Piattaforma Rousseau, namely the opaque un-democratic body running the M5S. To build a new bridge quickly and to serve the economic interest of business without caring much about adequately compensating the families of the victims and of the others who lost their houses etc – the government passed a so-called SIMPLIFICATION decree. In clear parlance, this allowed them to overrule any other processes, including democratic consultations, environmental rules, public auction to allocate work, auditing etc.
The Nadef simply provide for this to be the general rule.
Similarly, the Nadef provides for abusive construction to le legalised after a waiting period of only 180 days thanks to a simple rule: if no one in local government etc objects, the abusive construction is automatically legalised. (p 114) Abusers will no longer have to wait years to get their proverbial « condone » which date back to the Roman empire.
We have already seen that 20 % of the Recovery Fund must go to digitalisation. Therefore no local government will be able to oppose of suspend the construction of 5G antenna in lands falling under their authority. (see p 115 on simplification for instance ) And no serious study of the impact will be done before the contracts will be auctioned. It clearly does not matter if 4G is still available on the entire territory. Personally, I am all in favor of the 5G and tend to believe that the environmental and health impact will not exceed that of the 4G network. However, it does not spoil anything to do all the necessary studies and to respect democratic processes beforehand.
As we know contemporary Italy is ordinarily corrupt and delinquent to the bone, and the mafia – with many judges’ and carabinieri’ complicity as demonstrated in my case – has overtly or covertly infiltrated most businesses, local governments and national public administrations and ministries. Commissar offices are devised without teeth so that they will substitute to corrupt elected politicians but keep in place the corrupt administrations often carefully placed outside their reach but their specific legal mandate… Hence, in such conditions, everything will be legalised. Including in Calabria, a destroyed although still beautiful region, once the cradle of Western civilisation, but which now wastes available lands at a rate 4 times higher than in Trento. This has become so bad that judge Gratteri – a lonely exception – is telling everyone who cares to listen that the « credit crunch », now made dramatically worse by the Covid-19 crisis and by forced inactivity and unemployment of many impoverished citizens does open the door to the ‘nadrangheta and other mafias. Remember that aside from industry, tourism was worth 13% to 14 % of GDP in my native country which hosts 1/3 of the World artistic and archeological World patrimony. The current government obviously thinks that this is an opportunity that should be lost.
As for public work auctions, instead of giving it directly to the mafia, the solution would be to entrust them to the Provinces. The Provinces have been transformed into empty clientelist shells, and the plan remain to shut them down even though they are necessary to deal with the diversity of our country with its mountainous regions and its varied local history and territories. It is not an easy project to carry out because Provinces are enshrined in the Constitution.
More constructively I had proposed to grant them the task of gathering all agencies concerned with a given project around the same table. This would create a working forum in which to discuss, and prepare the projects, do the democratic consultations before initiating them and then to proceed with it . Consulting populations after the fact is something that should never be done as is demonstrated by the disastrous but necessary TAV. The problem of long delays in Italy is real and serious and it hovers around 6 to 7 years. This is mainly due to wide-spread incompetence induced by the clientelist and corrupt selection processes. For instance, it seems that no one has read the public auction law aside from lawyers attached to big firms and then only to turn them in their bosses’ favor. But it is also due to the impossibility for the various agencies involved in a given project – eg., ecological, archeological etc – to speak to one another around the same table.
My solution would force everyone to sit together and proceed within three months or else the government would intervene. It would do so preferably through public ownership whenever it judges it necessary. But, of course, the elites prefer to give it directly to the mafias as the Nadef does when it enshrines the worst measures of the Simplification decree which we already denounced above.
Curiously, they all want the Recovery Fund, which Italy is paying for anyway – it will only receive a net amount around 27-30 billion – while, at the end of this year, they will lose around 45 billion Euros in European Funds for the period 2014-2020 because the decision processes necessary to devise and implement such projects are so bad an so slow. Note that these European structural funds are also paid for by Italy which was a net contributor to the EU budget up until now.
THE EU CANNOT IN ANY FORM OR SHAPE ACCEPT SUCH LEGALISED GENERALISED ILLEGALITY. It would then be better to suspend Italy from the Eurozone sine die.
7 ) Conclusion.
The 2020 Nadef is the worst illustration I have ever ran across of a plainly inept belief in the metamagic virtues of the « invisible hand ». Even from someone like the current Finance minster – not an economist, in any case – this is surprising. But it is the sad reality. After WW II, together with available public credit, the ability to plan rationally had transformed my country into one of the three Big Powers of the EU and into one of the Big 5 and later 7 globally. This capacity has now vanished at all levels. The leaders are incompetent, mafia- like and corrupt in their approach and are again « beyond good and evil ».
Italy is being destroyed from within. The big powers in Europe would be wrong to look at it as an opportunity to subject Italy to their own discipline in order to buy its remaining assets through privatisations and garage-sales, as was done in the case of Greece. If they do that, they will quickly pay a tremendous price in term of generalised corruption and mafia-like exclusivist practices in their own countries. And in terms of national – and not so populist – rebellions.
Paul De Marco, former professor of International relations – International Political Economy.
Links to RRF: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_20_1659
And to the 2020 Nadef : https://www.mef.gov.it/documenti-pubblicazioni/doc-finanza-pubblica/index.html#cont2
Notes:
1 ) « Credit without collateral » and « The Treasury and the FED » in https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/EPIFrame1Source1.htm#epi
2) On the faulty mainstream paradigm see: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-pseudo-economic-science-of-the-bourgeoisie-here-is-why-we-should-quickly-change-economic-paradigm/ ; on inflation, see: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-fed-finally-admits-it-does-not-know-what-inflation-is-sept-21-2017 /
3 ) See « The socio-economic consequences of MM Volcker, Reagan and Co », March 1985, in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/another-america-possible-feb-1-2017
4 ) See the Livres-Books section of my old Jurassic site www.la-commune-paraclet.com
5 ) « Il valore del rapporto debito/PIL per il 2019 non è stato sostanzialmente rivisto a seguito delle ultime comunicazioni dell’ISTAT69 e di Banca d’Italia passando da 134,8 a 134,6. Come già prefigurato nel DEF 2020, nel 2019 la regola sul debito non viene rispettata in nessuna delle tre configurazioni definite dal PSC.
Per l’anno in corso le previsioni del Governo segnalano un’ulteriore rilevante, ancorché inevitabile, salita del debito pubblico. (…)
Il criterio del debito non viene rispettato neanche nella configurazione corretta per il ciclo. » p 98, Nadef 2020, https://www.mef.gov.it/documenti-pubblicazioni/doc-finanza-pubblica/index.html#cont2
6 ) On these ineptitude of Marginalist GDP and Marginalist economic equations, especially during the epoch of hegemonic speculative capital, see: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/gdp-marginalist-narration-tool-against-the-welfare-of-peoples-and-the-prosperity-of-nation-states-may-24-2020/ . In short, not only does speculative capital cannibalises the real economy but, to add insult to injury, it accounts for a immoderate share of GDP. Of course, all economic equations based on such statistics are trivially false and dangerous most of it the asinine Ricardian equivalence. The Multiplier is totally different in a regulated economy compared to a speculative economy and this remains true for public as opposed to private sectors. See the argument here : https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/Book%20ReviewsFrame1Source1.htm#thebodyeconomic .
7 ) The first definitive scientific hence Marxist refutation of the fraudulent theories of the Jewish-Austrian Nietzschean S. Freud was presented in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilsme; a partial translation of Part II is available in English here : https://www.la-commune-paraclet.com/livresFrame1Source1.htm#livresbookmark
8 ) Concerning the forced saving rate see Les deux tiers de l’épargne accumulée depuis le confinement sont détenus par les 20 % des Français les plus aisés. Selon une étude du Conseil d’analyse économique, les 20 % des ménages les plus modestes non seulement n’ont pas réussi à épargner plus que d’habitude entre mars et août, mais ils se sont même globalement endettés. Par Audrey Tonnelier et Béatrice Madeline Publié aujourd’hui à 11h00, mis à jour à 11h52 , https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/10/12/les-deux-tiers-de-l-epargne-accumulee-depuis-le-confinement-est-detenue-par-les-20-des-francais-les-plus-aises_6055709_3234.html . The inequality here sends one back to the structure of revenues impacted by unemployment insurance and furlough in the sense of partial unemployment – namely all sorts of Gic ordinary, extraordinary see : https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassa_integrazione_guadagni. For the Stock Exchange gain during the first phase of Covid-19 see: « En parallèle, le maintien des versements aux actionnaires a alimenté une flambée du cours des actions. Les 100 premiers gagnants du marché boursier ont vu leur valeur boursière augmenter de plus de 3 000 milliards de dollars depuis le début de la pandémie. Par conséquent, les 25 milliardaires les plus riches de la planète ont vu leur richesse augmenter de manière colossale. Jeff Bezos pourrait payer de sa poche à chacune des 876 000 personnes employées par Amazon une prime individuelle de 105 000 dollars et demeurer aussi riche qu’il l’était au début de la pandémie. » https://www.oxfam.org/fr/communiques-presse/les-benefices-des-entreprises-explosent-les-plus-riches-empochent-des-milliards .
Meanwhile poverty grows, see « Donna, italiana e con due figli. È l’identikit della nuova povertà », File davanti alle mense Caritas, Rapporto Caritas 2020: “Così la pandemia ha messo in ginocchio i giovani e le famiglie senza più lavoro”. Boom di richieste, prese in carico oltre 450mila persone, una su due ha chiesto aiuto per la prima volta, di MARIA NOVELLA DE LUCA, https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/10/17/news/donna_italiana_e_con_due_figli_ecco_l_identikit_della_nuova_poverta_-270820208/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I270810399-C12-P2-S1.8-T1
9 ) On Ludwig Mises eugenic and many other lunacies, see the Note 11 of my essay on Health-care in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/health-care-between-cuts-and-corruption-victim-of-choice-for-neoliberal-and-monetarist-fiscal-federalism-may-2016-translated-april-6-2020/ . Note also that markets when they are not topological – K. Polanyi provided a typology – they are legal, hence class construct. The abrogation of the 1933 Glass Steagall Act in 1999 opening the road to hegemonic speculative finance is a case in point. The last and obscene instance is provided by this year pseudo-Nobel prize on the organisation of auctions, in particular for the communication specter, which was at one time and should be considered public good. In a natural monopole auction does not make sense.
On R&D and other performance indicators for 2008-2019, see the graph here : https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/economic-and-fiscal-policy-coordination/eu-economic-governance-monitoring-prevention-correction/european-semester/european-semester-your-country/italy/europe-2020-targets-statistics-and-indicators-italy_en
10 ) On the faulty and falsified Marginalist Paradimg see the synoptic essay here: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-pseudo-economic-science-of-the-bourgeoisie-here-is-why-we-should-quickly-change-economic-paradigm/
11) For the critique of the costly and failed Jobs Act see the pertinent essay in the Economia category of this same site, for instance: http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/statuto-dei-lavoratori-jobs-act-pieno-impiego-gerarchia-delle-norme-28-feb-2018/ . Note also that the « gauche plurielle » very successful RTT did only cost 23 billion a year money that came from the more efficient of existing funds wasted in useless assistance programs. For the general issue see : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/the-dismantling-of-the-social-state-or-of-the-anglo-saxon-welfare-state-and-monetarist-neoliberal-policies-seen-from-the-angle-of-the-labor-contract-october-4-2016-april-9-2020/
12 ) See the Categoria « Costituzione » in the same site. In particular : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/la-riforma-costituzionale-renzi-gutgeldiana-distruzione-del-paese-ad-opera-del-federalismo-competitivo/