WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria 2023 June: Disasters. Growth, profit, destruction, poverty... Disasters create wealth - Angelo Barberi (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 GDP is alive and well and is always among us. The gross domestic product, the

elusive measure of economic growth and consequently of a nation's wealth,
continues to be the oracle around which rulers, institutions, bankers, , lovers
of statistics. The great fetish thus proves to have emerged unscathed from the
criticisms it was subjected to a few years ago, so much so that even the Ministry
of Education during the 2016 state exam invited students to discuss its limits by
proposing Robert Kennedy's famous speech March 1968: "Too insistently and for too
long, we seem to have given up personal excellence and community values, in favor
of the mere accumulation of worldly goods. Our GDP has exceeded $800 billion a
year, but that GDP - if we judge the US by it - also includes air pollution,
advertising for cigarettes and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. of
the weekends". Etc. etc.

So let Latouche and the supporters of degrowth, more or less happy, rest in
peace: growing up is beautiful, it is invigorating; growing up is the masculine
virtue of any self-respecting government (just to imitate the fashionable lexicon
among our rulers).

No wonder then that governments rejoice when the data show a plus next to the GDP
box, even when it is a mere 0.001 percent. The post-pandemic Italian governments
- Draghi, Meloni - were able to enjoy a positive result of the GDP which already
in 2022 had recovered what was lost during the almost two critical years of the
spread of the covid. Even more the latest data reiterated on 31 May last, which
accredit a growth of 0.6% compared to the last quarter of 2022 and a better
performance of the Italian economy than the United States, Germany and France,
have authorized the government to declare that their choices are going in the
right direction. If the data on employment and unemployment are added to this
result, which in the latest available survey relating to the first quarter of
2023 certify a growth in employment and a decrease in unemployment of 7.8%, the
government believes it can sail with a certain tranquility in the ever-stirring
sea of the global economy.

But was it true glory? We do not intend here to enter into the merits of a
precise examination of the data which, moreover, governments and aligned
information use more for their propaganda and symbolic value than for real. We
therefore also assume that the Italian economy is going through a positive phase
and that national wealth has increased. At this point, a first question should be
how such wealth was distributed. Just take a cursory look at the Oxfam 2023
report to get a clear answer. The richest 5% have more wealth than the bottom
80%. The super rich, 0.134% of the population, have increased their wealth by
almost 13 billion dollars (8.8%) compared to the pre-pandemic period and possess
a wealth equal to that of the poorest 60% of Italians. Meanwhile more than two
million households are in abject poverty and the wages of more than six million
private sector employees have fallen by 6.6% in real terms. But these two data,
GDP and national income distribution, are never compared, in fact for the
neoliberal vulgate wealth is the result of entrepreneurial intelligence and
poverty instead is the fault of the unemployed who do not want to make
sacrifices. Propaganda works so well that no political party in Italy has in its
program the only tool that could mitigate inequalities: progressive taxation that
effectively affects profits and incomes. Indeed, whenever someone has dared to
support a one-off taxation for the super rich, there has been the emergence of
those who accuse that in this way the State wants to get its hands into the
pockets of Italians, i.e. that 0.134% of the population or, to stay wide, by 5%.
This confirms that instrumental and ideological vision of the State so much in
vogue whereby the field can be left free to entrepreneurs and services removed
from the majority.

For those who instead want to have a rather precise idea of what is happening in
the current economic situation, beyond the propaganda, they can read and reflect
on what Joseph Halevi writes in the Fatto Quotidiano of 29 May. Among other
things, this passage: "It is therefore crucial to understand the causes of
today's inflation.

[...]Since nominal wages have not increased, this gap (i.e. the fact that only
one third of inflation is caused by the increase in energy prices, editor's note)
can only be explained by an increase in profit margins: in a context of highly
variable prices such as the one that began at the end of 2021, in various sectors
companies have not only passed on all the increase in production costs to
consumers, but have had a good time increasing prices more than proportionally,
increasing profit margins . We are therefore faced with inflation driven by
profits, not by wages".

But let's go back to Bob Kennedy's speech on GDP. It is precisely the numerous
disasters that regularly hit Italy, the latest being the flood in Emilia Romagna,
that contribute to the growth of the GDP. The war in the Ukraine also makes a
modest contribution. If this is the case, it could even be argued that the famous
thirty glorious years of the world economy from 1945 to 1975 are in part the
consequence of the most destructive war ever: the Second World War. We now live
not only in that paradox denounced by Latouche of a growth society without (true)
growth, but also of a growth, albeit modest, which basically produces
destruction, which contributes to moving us inexorably towards those mass
extinctions predicted by scientists. Producing, growing, innovating is the new
undemonstrable and unassailable trinity, on which the elites and the masters of
the world feed, even in this little Italy, and it will not be enough to fly over
the places of catastrophes in a helicopter and promise a prompt reconstruction,
which, moreover, reproduces the same mechanism from which calamities arose, to
avoid the worst. There is method and madness in the way in which we continue to
persevere in the elusive development that is not at all sustainable, in spite of
all the green with which they try to paint every wickedness and every provision,
from weapons, to mega infrastructures, from the production of energy to that of
food. It's time to start interrupting such a spiral that is sinking us more and
more and it certainly won't be for any government or any small or large
entrepreneur if we manage to avoid ruin.

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca