Letter from Lhasa, number 245. Usual Junk Bonds’ Unreliable Italic Predatory State
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
The very recent new pseudo-austerity measures are just propaganda. In fact, they have been apparently implemented by a decree. However, it is decree will be radically changed from Parliament, as already implicitly and explicitly announced from the formal government.
That means that, very likely, some limited apparent cuts will be suppressed, while taxation will be increased more than previously planned. Now at 53% GNP, it will jump over the 55% GNP.
No real cut of the Italic Predatory State is possible under the comprador Quirinale dictatorship, with unaccountable formal governments and parliaments. Not casually the bureaucratic-oligarchic comprador-predatory block always has ferociously opposed whatever radical Constitutional change for creating accountable governments and parliaments.
The same apparent head of the formal government, Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, has immediately and repeatedly dissociated himself from the same measures he and his government had just approved.
Mr. Berlusconi has declared that he is not the taxation man. That means that not only the Italian Parliament will suppress some cost cuts to local councils but that it will suppress some limited increase of direct taxation, increasing instead indirect taxation, the VAT, which in Italy is at 20%, while in Germany is at 21%. Very likely, it will be increased to 21%.
So that Mr. Berlusconi’s “I am not the taxation man” will mean that the limited direct taxation increases will be suppressed while less visible taxes will be increased as usual. Nothing else.
It is not very original, in Italy, the guerrilla/propaganda legislation destined to be changed or nullified from Parliament. It is not a novelty that the Predatory State be untouchable even in circumstances as the present ones, while increased taxation (which depresses finance and economy) be the only real pseudo-solution.
The demagogy about the “cost of politics” does not reduce the heavy burden the Italic Predatory State represents.
Only immediately cutting 75% of the current expenditure and 75% of the public employees could dissolve the Predatory State and relaunched a sunken system.
They will not do it. They think they are very cunning, even more cunning than the Greeks, and that they can deceive the markets and the ECB. ...Improbable!!!
