Alberto Bradanini – Corona Crisis: A Not-To-Be-Missed Great Opportunity (not only for Italy)

In these times of EU chaos, we keep hearing voices of reason, as in this article by Alberto Bradanini. Unfortunately they are drowned out by the German hegemon and its European quislings, as well as mainstream media.

Alberto Bradanini is a former Italian diplomat. Among many positions, he was Ambassador of Italy to Tehran (2008-2012) and to Beijing (2013-2015). He is currently President of the Research Center on Contemporary China.

Original Italian version here

The system we live in has suddenly found itself to be more vulnerable than it would have ever imagined due to a calamity that has brought health systems, freedom, citizens’ security and economies to its knees, while political institutions are lost between uncertainty and confusion.

The President of the European Commission, Von der Layen, grotesquely trying to copy the 1963 Berliner John Kennedy, said last Friday: Dear Italians, today in Europe we are all Italians. I don’t know how many believed it. Many others for sure, especially speculators, did believe the words of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, who shortly before with a few words had sank stocks across the planet. Moreover, in spite of the subsequent denial, those words did not altered the German-Lagardian obtuseness: in a blatant underestimation of the degree of the crisis we are confronted with. The ECB will limit itself to ensuring liquidity to eurozone banks – instead of tearing down the wall and providing EU governments with resources to be invested on infrastructure and jobs creation. The ECB keeps focusing on containing the non-existent ghost of inflation, instead of using J.M. Keynes’ teachings, a giant never revered enough, before whom the current doormen of the Berlin / Frankfurt / Brussels condominium stand out only for their blindness and greed. Once the emergency that would have blown their assumptions to smithereens has passed, we will return to the immoral and incongruous Maastricht parameters.

However, Lagarde is only the symptom. The disease is in the system of economics and social relations that the European treaties have drawn up prioritising profit and the commodification of human life (a highly competitive market economy, according to the Euroomaniac scriptures). This pathology is accompanied by a heavy deficit of democracy since EU institutions value European citizens only as consumers or precarious workers. The European technostructure consist of a group of officials with fairytale remuneration, at the service of multinationals, who feed a handful of other officials (the unelected European Commission) that prepare laws which, after a brief passage to the European Parliament (that has no power of legislative initiative), are then approved of by the Council (the 27 governments can decide by majority, de facto only if the Germans agree). All European peoples and peripheral governments are therefore legally enslaved to a structure that obeys to the German-centric financial monarchy which in turn controls Commission and ECB. Even Draghi, though far better than Lagarde, was only a supporter of a decrepit and unreformable European House.

After devolving monetary sovereignty (which has nothing to do with nationalism) to European technopathology, Italy delivered its currency to an extra-national entity that does not respond to any democratic government, let alone a democratic Parliament, but only to markets (profit) and dominant elites (Germany and its satellites). In a tragic hour like the present one, the EU so-called partners even dropped their masks, shattering every fragment of solidarity that fills the EU treaties, worse yet, without any real wave of indignation across Europe.

In this tragic situation, therefore, Italy finds itself alone and abandoned in front of a mountain of problems. The faithful of the European cult will once again explain the reasons for this abandonment, but now an increasing number of citizens are acquiring consciousness, and sooner or later they will be the majority.

On the other hand, if the darkest moment of night is just before dawn, Italy is offered a precious opportunity, which will not appear again for many years to come (except perhaps with another virus). The European leviathan is now vulnerable, and it is therefore possible to strike a decisive blow, with the aim of rebuilding a state that has undergone constant dismantling since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and whose restoration is today invoked by most of Italians.

There would be a long list of things to be done: creating stable jobs, strengthening social and public systems, building infrastructures in the Italian South and so on, whose list would fill this website. Only the unique thought of mainstream economists engulfed in there is not alternative ideology, (although Tina is denied by theory and historic evidence) echoes incessantly that the huge public debt is the hindrance. But public debt is not an impediment in a country with a sovereign currency and a large workforce like Italy. And after all, it is not even necessary to consider Italexit (from eurozone), a hypothesis – they tell us – that would shake the world markets, but actually North European elites. Something could be done, anyway, or indeed many things. What cannot be done is Nothing!. A number of scholars have already explored some options: for instance, issuing CCF (tax credit certificates), minibonds or legal state banknotes, along the lines of Aldo Moro’s 500 lire in the 60s-70s (all schemes respectful of European treaties). The technicalities for a correct management of these steps have already been studied by excellent economists of various schools and nationalities. The obstacles are indeed others, and all in the head of the Italian ruling class. The first concern is related to possible EU reactions, since Italy might be suspected of surreptitiously moving towards exiting the eurozone; the second is the Italian bureaucratic structure at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, mysteriously aligned with the German-European mantra; the third and most important is of psychological nature, to recognise that the hopes placed by most politicians, economists, intellectuals, and academics in the euro and in the mythical creature called European Union, have been misplaced. Humans make mistakes and we are humans. Only the wise have the moral energy to acknowledge their mistakes. Future historians will place those who today will have the courage to act among the giants of history, even if contemporaries should persecute them.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, one of the greatest revolutionaries of all time, said that three ingredients are needed to achieve any goal, including revolutions: leadership, resources, and a strategy. Here, somehow, and now is the time to find them.