FROM MONTI TO MILEI: THEY CHANGE THE ADVERTS BUT ALWAYS SELL US AUSTERITY
+ Food for thought: Money is not a value!
Today I am providing my English translation of 2 articles, both originally in Italian. (All emphasis and footnotes mine in both).
The first one is an article published on Comidad.org on Thursday 26th December 2024.
FROM MONTI TO MILEI: THEY CHANGE THE ADVERTS BUT ALWAYS SELL US AUSTERITY
The tendency to label as conspiracy theory any misgiving expressed about the official versions is not the effect of superficiality or casual misunderstandings, but rather represents the need to defend to the bitter end the myth that the apparatuses of the so-called state could only deviate from legality through pre-emptive as well as complex conspiracies. In reality, the very notion of the state itself is very blurred and uncertain, since in practice power overrides legal distinctions and is transversal between the public and the private, and above all between legality and illegality. The mystification is so structural to the system that there is nothing necessarily planned in the fact that a power in difficulty speciously resorts to emergencies in general and the terrorism emergency in particular, since the latter is the easiest to implement and manage. Terrorism is so healthy for power in each of its degrees and articulations, that attacks can be the result of initiatives by individual officials, so everything can proceed by fait accompli and successive adaptations of the apparatuses to a familiar and reassuring emergency mechanism.
At the end of this 2024, the German government had to officially admit that the economy is in recession, and for a country like Germany this has traumatic effects on domestic and international prestige. It was better to avoid talking about industrial failure and instead give the government other topics on which to create pathos. Perhaps an Islamic bombing was too banal and obvious, so someone came up with the gimmick of an anti-Islamic bombing. The alleged bomber is said to be a psychiatrist doctor, an immigrant of Saudi origin, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and AFD sympathiser, or so his website says. But the AFD denies any contact. This is the Teutonic discipline: neo-Nazis and anti-immigrants take to the streets to protest against the blocking and rejection of immigration; progressive democrats may take to the streets to protest against the Islamophobia of the AFD sympathiser; moderates may call on the government to handle the mess; the dominion will see its protective and rescuing role reinforced. The important thing is that a power discredited by the collapse of industrial production has been able to regain a role by taking on the mission of restoring the violated order.
Ten years ago there was talk of a “Fourth Reich”, of a Germany colonising the Eurozone by imposing its austere budgetary rules. Instead, today we have a “Little Germany” with a little government led by a quack like Scholz, who could not even be taken seriously by his usher. At this point, it is a little difficult to keep up the act of a spendthrift Italy that would be forced, against its will, to tighten its belt by austere Germany. Some ill-disposed people might raise the doubt that all these years our [Italian] oligarchy has been hiding behind Germany in order to implement an austerity that inevitably favours the concentration of wealth.
Contrary to popular belief, austerity has hardly ever entailed a decrease in public spending, but has mainly resulted in a fiscal squeeze, particularly on indirect taxes. From 1996 to 2021, excise duties on petrol [in Italy] were increased six times by centre-right governments (anti-tax governments?!), twice by centre-left governments, and three times by the [Mario] Monti1 government, i.e. the one considered “austere” par excellence. The moralistic term “austerity” translates precisely into higher indirect taxes, i.e. higher taxation on poor taxpayers. Excise taxes on fuels are a clear case of tax squeezing of the poorest, who are also taxed in order to be able to move to their jobs, and also deprived of purchasing power, which has the effect of decreasing demand.
Like all “liberalists”, in Argentina [Javier] Milei became president on the promise of lower taxes and the slogan that taxes are theft. However, like all “liberalists”, he has done exactly the opposite, i.e. he has increased taxes by shifting the highest tax burden to indirect taxes and in particular fuel taxes. The same austerity policy that we have seen implemented by Monti [in Italy] is being implemented today by Xavier Milei in Argentina, so much so that he has become the darling of the International Monetary Fund [IMF], i.e. the major globalist finance lobby. If you make people so poor that they cannot buy anything, of course inflation will fall. Those who lose their jobs and wages due to the economic recession can do nothing about falling inflation, while it benefits the banks and investment funds, who avoid having their loans written down.
The oddity is that ten years ago, the right-wingers were posing as sovereigntists and bad-mouthing Monti, who was their black beast, while “left-wing” newspapers like “Repubblica” liked him. On the other hand, now at Atreju2 the right-wingers are doting on Milei and pretending to take seriously his slogan that taxes are theft. According to the usual play of the parts, now the “left” is posing to turn up its nose and maybe someone will even say that taxes are nice and should be paid with joy, so the comedy is complete. The media only consider those on the “left” to be “leftists” who do not realise that the mythical “liberalism” is just a slogan to hide tax increases for the poor. To understand the extent of the mystification, it would be enough to compare the enormous space the media give to empty catchphrases like the one about tax-hijacking, compared to the paltry space they give to factual news about indirect tax increases. With a new advertising operation, changing testimonials (from Monti's sober loden to Milei's lowlife sideburns), they manage to sell the exact same IMF-branded product: austerity, i.e. increased taxation on the poorest.
Milei's victory is often attributed to the particular situation in Argentina, where there is a segment of public opinion that is ideologically hostile to Peronism, considered populist and wasteful, and willing to embrace anyone to get rid of it. Of course, Peronist mythology is one thing while reality is another, since Peronist president Carlos Menem did the exact same thing as Milei is doing. But it is also true that ideological aversions exist on a purely symbolic basis, totally disregarding factual data; in Italy we have seen Matteo Renzi3 in his early days win consensus by badmouthing [Fausto] Bertinotti4 and [Massimo] D'Alema5, characters to whom the right wing attributes a symbolic hostile value despite their harmlessness. In Milei's case, however, it is clear that the character has been packaged specifically in an advertising key for an international audience. The character Milei falls into the category of Mr. Clean, and in fact he too is equipped with his good phallic symbol (the chainsaw).
The second article that follows was published on Movisol.org yesterday, Saturday 28th December 2024.
Food for thought: Money is not a value!
At the beginning of the first session of the Schiller Institute's online conference on 7-8 December [2024], an excerpt of a webcast given by Lyndon LaRouche on 7th December 2012 was screened. The theme of the webcast was how to stop the economic collapse from hyperinflation by restoring bank separation (Glass-Steagall6) as an aspect of a sustainable credit system.
Incompetent people, LaRouche said, “assume that money deposited in a bank, or attributed to a bank, represents value. It does not. Money as such is a very complicated thing, because it has no intrinsic means of defending itself against hyperinflation or other kinds of similar problems. So only a certain credit system is the key to this process…
“What do we mean by a credit system? That the federal government organises a system whereby credit is issued, the characteristic of which is the time factor, namely the anticipation that if we assign a certain value to something as credit, we must assume that by the time that credit is collected, or paid off, there will be a growth in the value of the product and a growth in the value of the credit itself”.
This may mean that products become cheaper, and so there is a gain, for example through productivity. “But for the rest there is no other source of value in terms of money as such, in simple circulation, as is happening now with this ongoing hyperinflationary process that is about to destroy the United States. This cannot be tolerated.
“So, in what does value consist? In the physical values per capita. Now, that includes increasing the value of labour, the value of production. Because as we become more efficient, we tend to adopt more advanced, more productive technologies. And therefore, there is a difference between the time when the credit is issued and the time when it has matured, when it has to be repaid”.
The difference, LaRouche explained, can come from a combination of increased productivity and a decrease in the relative cost of the same good. “But the key to the whole system is that you have to realise that there has to be an increase in the physical productive powers of labour, expressed in terms of net output. This has to happen and this is the basis of the credit system. This is where the question of value determination arises.
“In other words, if you want a stable system, there must be growth, physical growth or an improvement in the efficiency of physical growth. Therefore, by granting credit, as if lending money, this money must increase in value. In reality, the money does not increase in value: what happens is that the cost of the product decreases in value, in terms of relative value. And this is the basis of credit.
“Credit is not about letting money stay in the bank; it has to do something. It has to change its character; it has to be more efficient, or it has to get richer. It means technological progress, it means more energy flow, which is an essential part of this process. People are more skilled; they do more skilled work; they produce more value with the same amount of nominal labour. That is the system. Growth must be generated. We need to increase the productive power of labour. We need to advance technology, absolutely. We need to increase the density of the energy flow through the whole system”.
Italian economist and academic who served as Prime Minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a technocratic government in the wake of the Italian debt crisis.
Political festival in Italy, founded in 1998, that serves as a gathering for the country's right-wing parties and activists. It is named after a character from Michael Ende's novel "The Never-ending Story," symbolizing courage and the fight against destructive forces.
Italian politician who served as Prime Minister from 2014 to 2016
Italian politician who led Partito di Rifondazione Comunista (literally: Communist Refoundation Party) from 1994 to 2006.
Italian politician who started his long career as a member of Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party). He was Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000
The Glass-Steagall Act, enacted in US in 1933, was a law that separated commercial banking from investment banking to protect depositors and reduce the risk of financial speculation.
Yep, I listened to Milei's pitch and early on decided he was a fraud.