By Conn Hallinan - July 13, 2011
Paestum, Italy
Walls tell you a lot about a country’s history. Since their
purpose is to keep people out who want to get in, they generally mean trouble.
In the case of this stunning ruin of a city southeast of Naples, back in the 6th century BC the Greeks were trying to keep out the Etruscans who didn’t cotton
to a colony plunked down in their midst.
Italy has lots of walls, particularly in the north and center
where towns and cities cluster on the high ground. The Italians did not build
on mountain tops for the view. What is picturesque now was safe haven from the
barbarians back then.
Except, the barbarians are back, only this time they are not
tribes with scary names like Goths, Huns and Lombards. Today the brutes have
bland sounding labels like the International Monetary Fund IMF), the European
Union (EU) and Moody’s. And some of the worst are homegrown: Silvio Berlusconi
and Giullo Tremonti.
Italy is in deep trouble, though it is hardly alone. While
the headlines go to Greece, Portugal and Spain, Italy has the second highest
rate of debt in Europe and one of the lowest growth rates. On July 8, Italian
bond yields jumped to a nine-year high, and the country’s stock market tanked.
Given that Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone, if it is in
trouble, so is the Euro. And, unlike Portugal, Greece or Ireland, Italy is far
too big for a bail out (not that the thuggish austerity programs being forced
on all three of those countries have anything in common with “bail outs.” They
are simply taxpayers covering ruinous speculation binges by French, German and
Dutch banks).
There are signs that the Italian economy is running off the
rails, but the signs are subtle. Lots of locked houses and long grass, for
instance.
The locked houses are in Pompeii, where the government no
longer has the money to shore up the walls of the 2,000 year-old city. From the
Pompeii of glorious mosaics and stunning frescos it has become a ghost town
that one views from roads and sidewalks.
The immense Doric temples at Paestum are wonderfully
preserved, but grass has reclaimed much of the rest of the site. It is charming
to wander through the ruins, finding lovely mosaic floors, peristyle gardens or
swimming pools, but the Italian authorities did not let the grass grow in order
to stimulate the curiosity of tourists; they don’t have the money to cut it.
There is a sense in this country that people are holding
their breath. The current center-right government is pushing through a $68
billion austerity package that will increase the retirement age, cut medical
benefits, and lay off state workers, but many of the cuts will not take effect
until 2013 and 2014. Hoping to avoid the wrath of voters, the current finance
minister, Giullo Tremonti, has back loaded the cuts so they won’t take effect
until after next spring’s elections.
As in ancient Rome, there are graffiti everywhere. There are
hammers and sickles painted on the walls in Naples, as well as scrawls
threatening “death to the Communists.” The left took power here in the last elections
and is currently locked in a battle with the local Mafia over corruption. A
cursory glance at this teeming, energetic, and most Italian of cities suggests
the left is holding its own: the Mafia’s tactic of flooding the place with
garbage is not working. The streets are chaotic, loud, and anarchic, but clean.
Sometimes it is hard to decide if Italians are holding their
breath or their noses. For instance, Tremonti’s political advisor, Marco
Milanese, a member of parliament, was arrested last week as part of a
corruption investigation, forcing Tremonti to give up using Milanese’s luxury
flat in Rome. In the meantime, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi secretly tried
to slip a clause into the budget bill that would delay paying a huge $1.5
billion fine against his flagship media company, Fininvest.
Compared to social unrest in Greece, Spain, Britain and
Portugal, Italy has been relatively tranquil. While the Greeks are in open
rebellion against the austerity packages of the IMF and the EU, Italian demonstrations
have been big but generally quiet. Tremonti told the Financial Times that Italians are different than Greeks and would
accept austerity, because “The Italian people understand,” he said, “their
demand is to be serious and rigorous. People are strongly in favor of this
discipline.”
Tremonti is whistling past the graveyard, his words an eerie
echo of Greek Prime Minister George Papandrerou’s comment that Greeks were
“unified” behind the government program.” Outside the parliament Athens seeths
with rage, and hundreds of thousands of Greeks battle tear gas and police
batons to demonstrate quite the opposite. A recent poll found that 80 percent
of the Greeks oppose the austerity plan.
There is nothing to indicate that Italians won’t follow the
Greeks into the streets once the cuts hit home here. A stencil on a wall in
Citta de Castello shows two stick figures, one firing a gun at the head of the
other. Underneath the picture is one word: “capitalism.”
Europe (and much of the world) is currently in the throes of
a counterrevolution led by a combination of local capitalists and international
finance. Using the crisis sparked by bank speculation, its goals are to weaken
trade unions, roll back social services and pensions, and privatize as much as
possible. Wages have fallen across the continent, and temporary jobs with
sketchy or non-existent benefits have grown at the expense of regular employment.
The “crisis” is a one-way street. As a Financial Times analysis pointed out last month, “Millionaires
across the world are richer they were before the financial crisis, the latest
sign that the wealthy have weathered the downturn far better than other
groups.”
The number of millionaires in North America went from 2.7 to
3.4 million from 2008 to 2010 and, in Europe, from 2.6 to 3.1 million during
the same time period. Italy was the only EU country that saw a slight drop in
the number of millionaires: 179 to 170. The countries with the largest number
of millionaires are, in decreasing order, the U.S., Japan, Germany, China and
Britain.
Capital is playing hardball in this counterrevolution.
On one level, governments like in Greece have unleashed
their police in an effort to drive the hundreds of thousands of young people,
teachers, government workers and trade unionists off the streets.
On another level, rating agencies like Moody’s, Standard
& Poor’s, and Fitch deliberately downgrade bonds in order to protect
private investors. When investors are asked to absorb some of the losses that
their speculation generated, the rating agencies step in and make an offer no
country can refuse: drop efforts to make private speculators pay or we tank
your bonds and drive up the cost of borrowing money. “The credit rating agencies are playing politics not
economics. The timing of the downgrades are not a coincidence,” one “senior EU
official” told the Financial Times.
The “bailout” will not stop Greece from defaulting on its
debt (with Ireland, Portugal and Spain likely to follow). Nor is there any way
for a country like Greece to climb back out of the debt pit as long as its
currency policies are dictated by Germany and France.
Italy has some experience with this business of crisis and
currency, although its current leaders choose to ignore it. Back in the early
19th century, Naples was the largest city in Italy, and the south
had a diverse and dynamic economy. It was the first region in Italy to build
railroads, but the madness of the Catholic Church derailed the effort by
blocking passage through the Papal States. Pope Gregory XVI called rails “roads
to hell.”
According to Sir Martin Jacomb, former Chancellor of the
University of Buckingham, the sabotage of railway development marks the
beginning of the south’s decline. But it wasn’t until the lira was made the
national currency in 1861 that “ it [the south] lost its ability to correct its
uncompetitive position. Able and enterprising people moved to the north or emigrated,
and the situation became permanent, as it remains today. The tragedy endures.”
Southern Italy has been locked into poverty for close to 200
years, a fate that is almost certain to befall other periphery members of the
EU. Generations of poverty and emigration will be the price tag for protecting
the investments of the very people who brought the current economic crisis on.
The Citta di Castello stencil was, if anything, an understatement.
So far Italy is quiet, but everyone is aware that the coup
of capital is being contested in the streets of Greece, Spain, Portugal and
Britain, as it will eventually be in Rome, Naples, and Milan.
In the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre in 1819, where the
British government sent cavalry to scatter a massive demonstration demanding
political reform, an enraged Percy Bysshe Shelly penned “The Mask of Anarchy,”
which ended in words that today’s powerful would do well to consider:
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”
Conn Hallinan can be read at
dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com