It would have been like trying to stop the rain or, precisely, the return of spring after an artificially prolonged and hardened economic winter.

The notorious “debt-currency” 1 had been the sneaky and deadly tool to enslave individuals, businesses and nations, in the north and south of the world. Only a few rebel nations, the so-called “Rogue States” 2, had opposed it, but they were brought back to the fold with “soft means” (economic sanctions and remote-controlled coups) or with “harder means” (bombing, invasion, exemplary hanging or lynching of the riotous leaders).

Such effective and pervasive global control seemed destined to consolidate more and more, instead it collapsed in a short time, due to the same mechanisms that had hitherto guaranteed it.

Everything got out of hand following the quasi-epidemic spread of a virus, Covid19, slightly more lethal than the common seasonal flu. The first epidemic outbreak occurred in China, and would have resulted in a “straw fire”, as had already happened in 2002 and 2012 with viruses from the same family. This time, however, the world-masters wanted to overdo it. They wanted to take this opportunity to punish the Asian giant who was claiming an increasingly prominent place in the global forum. So they unleashed their media and, in a precise interval of time (between the Western and Chinese New Years) that made the fortunes of astrologers in the following months, global fear and hatred were concentrated on China, knocking it out economically. For a few months.

But things don’t always turn out as planned: indeed that virus, and the media even more, behaved like a boomerang that came back and hit the hunter with an effect much more devastating than it had with the intended prey. The hunter/world-master was hit right on the nose (Italy): there was a modest bleeding that could be resolved with a simple swab. Instead, the fatal error was committed, imposed by the sadomasochism structurally inherent in that system of power. The hunter decided to redouble and punish his nose too, which he had always considered too long and too wide, graceless, impertinent to the point of wanting to compete with the French noses or with the perfect Teutonic nasal pyramids… To tell the truth, for at least fifty years the hunter had undergone a series of liposuction operations on his body, and in particular on that nose, but now the opportunity for a more radical intervention presented itself, and he proceeded without hesitation or ask doubts about possible contraindications. After all, why doubt? The decided “cryotherapy” had worked “very well” five years earlier on the chin (Greece) which had been “too bold”. Well, before the team started the actual intervention, it was enough to freeze that nose and the events proceeded autonomously, naturally, in a few minutes…

Now let’s close this metaphor and go back to real history: it was not a few minutes but a few weeks. Few, but enough to bring down the entire paper castle of the global financial-monetary system.

The Italian borders were sealed, all schools and meeting places closed; only essential production remained in operation. 60 million citizens were segregated at home, with permission to go out only to shop or for other mandatory needs.

Deciding on such measures had been difficult for the Italian leaders, but all in all it turned out to be easy to carry out and enforce, with lots of grunts but with few noteworthy incidents. Collective psychosis had been taken into account, indeed it was an integral part of the master plan: to get Western citizens increasingly scared, therefore increasingly docile. Moreover, in the European Union the undisputed principle prevailed: punish one to educate a hundred!

In short, everything seemed to proceed even better than planned, on the contrary the self-injury of all those maneuvers began to unfold when the Italian government was forced to issue every day, several times a day, urgent measures to stop the leaks that were gradually opening in the whole country-system, with an inexorable domino effect. Just to mention a few key stages: closing the schools spurred a surge in parental work-leave, due to the need to look after the children for all those hours, and also for most of the hours previously covered by babysitters, who were largely segregated at home too; suspending all social activities led to the paralysis of most of the tertiary sector; suspending or reducing non-essential production affected the secondary sector, and also in part the primary sector. I omit the intermediate steps and I immediately come to the conclusion:

The real economy slowed down dramatically, but spontaneously and promptly adapted to the new balances that were imposed by essential needs. Indeed, many authors reported important and lasting positive side effects: individual, social, and environmental.

The financial sector collapsed, and I am not referring to stock market prices, but to something far more fundamental.

– “But top executives of CONSOB3 were later tried and subjected to very severe sentences …”.

– “True, they had pocketed fabulous rewards from the largest multinational consortiums who bought half-price the Italian excellence. But even that was not the fundamental event: we know that money is more fundamental than finance”.

In fact, everything could be blocked or reduced, except for the payment of wages. And the collection of taxes and duties also had to be suspended for months. As these measures succeeded to calm down the protests in Italy, discontent grew in the rest of Europe, with increasing rebounds of reprimands, recriminations, accusations, threats, ultimatums, between Rome, Brussels, Paris, Berlin. The Visegràd cartel was screaming louder than all, while the Troika4 remained on the sidelines as much as it could. The mainstream media followed the classic strategy of shifting attention to marginal issues, debating about all except wages and taxes. Meanwhile in Italy wages continued to be paid, and taxes were not collected, in a European collective squint whereby the Italians were fully playing, by obligation, a role of cicadas that until then had been stereotypically reproached to them.

As a matter of fact the ECB was silent and paid. Scolded and paid. Launched ultimatums and paid …

Meanwhile, epidemic outbreaks multiplied in Europe and the USA, not enough to equal the mortality rates that the common influence claims each year, but more than enough to feed the war of all against all, in a kind of musical chairs game whereby yesterday’s accuser was becamig today’s infector: an apparently comic scenario, in essence a tragic one.

Then, after three months, that virosis died away, so much so that today it is mentioned only in ultra specialistic textbooks of medicine and biological sciences. But any secondary school student knows what “Spring 2020” is. Maybe he does not understand well when his parents talk about the times when they had to work hard to pay the rent or the mortgage and other strange taxes, however, if questioned, he promptly replies: “Spring 2020 marked the end of the dogma “Money is Scarce!”. Why? Because a third of Europeans found themselves forced to live as cicadas, not for three months like the Italians, but enough for everyone, cicadas and ants across Europe, to realize that wages, taxes, mortgages, bills were not paid with gold coins, a scarce metal for real: they were paid with the electrons of a computerized system. And everything can be said about electrons, except that they are scarce!

– “Yes, I confess that, at the time, me too I was rejecting my students if they were not reciting the refrain: “in the banking computerized system the electrons perform the same function as gold, so they must be scarce!”.

– “We were all like this: half narcotised and half blackmailed, otherwise you could never get the university chair! Today we call crazy anyone who mentions some old economic theory. Before 2020, we called crazy anyone who queried the dogma of monetary scarcity”.

That house of cards crumbled because the Europeans, thanks to that viral-media epidemic, made a series of concrete and collective experiences that categorically denied three centuries of monetary theories and practices. At first they found that the real economy, albeit temporarily halved, was proceeding smoothly. In fact, after the initial shock, around the proverbial “thousand bell towers”, a thousand local coins proliferated, based on the formidable precedent of Giacinto Auriti’s SIMEC5, and thanks to intercompany discount coupons. Meanwhile the average income, multiplied by the suspension of taxes and of many other payments, as well as by the drop in luxury and consumerism spending, allowed the citizens to put aside in a month as much as they could not save in the previous year. A further pleasant surprise came in the summer, when everyone could afford long and comfortable holidays, with family or friends, thanks to a fraction of the money set aside in the spring.

The Cassandra’s warnings were of no avail. With the ECB at the head, they anticipated disasters in the form of “a return to the times of double-digit inflation”. Indeed, the more the Cassandras raged in the media, the more workers raised barricades in defence of the benefits (re)achieved, and the less inflation showed signs of growing. In hindsight today, the “experts” of those days turn out to be either confused or reticent, however stubbornly clinging to the dogmas of “debt-currency”.

– “Clinging by hook or by crook, by the IMF diktats or by the NATO pistol at their temple! We must recognize that that virus was truly providential because it paralysed the USA in the following months, allowing us to free ourselves from the old yoke. Today the dollar is one of many currencies in the world basket, and the US citizens are happy with it, but then their “deep state” would have triggered a world war to defend the dollar monopoly”…

– “Yeah. So the IMF had to admit what is peaceful today: that inflation does not come from excess money but from scarcity of essential goods and services. And that the “essential” category includes everything that satisfies not only the physical, but also the psychic, social and aesthetic needs of people and organized groups”.

Today, with a 95% sustainable economy, there is no limit to the production of goods and services. The widespread robotization allows us to work a few hours, a few days a week, and only for passion, for pleasure, or in any case by choice. Once the bogeyman of inflation has fallen, each of us perceives the unconditional universal basic income, from the cradle to the grave, and the accusations of “playing cicada” no longer hold because those who want to be an ant, even just a little, get more than generous monetary incentives (money-credit, without interest).

– “And do you remember the taxes? Today we study them as an archaeological object… “.

– “In fact, the persistence, until the 21st century, of instruments so unfair on the social level, and so counterproductive on the economic level, challenges all historical understanding: it can only be explained by a stubborn design imposed and maintained to the bitter end by undemocratic elites. The more rational alternative, demurrage6, had already been successfully tested a century earlier, and with the advent of computers it could have been applied at least since the first day of 2000. It took some time, but today we have a fairer, more sustainable, and more peaceful world thanks to the New Monetary Order”7.

– – “Blessed Spring 2020! A virus that had little relevance in the history of medicine disrupted the classical economy, simply by revealing that the emperor was naked”.

Notes

1 Until 2020, every monetary issue was entailing a mathematically inextinguishable, inexorably growing, debt.

2 https://www.pressenza.com/it/2018/04/chi-chiama-canaglia-chi/

3 The Italian Financial Regulatory Agency

4 ECB, IMF, European Commission

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacinto_Auriti

6 Electronic money, just issued, begins to lose value at an intrinsic rate, like radioactive elements. That is: the tax is intrinsic in each monetary unit, rather than affecting productive activities.

7 http://www.monetabenecomune.it/2016/04/09/articoli-e-contributi-di-leopoldo-salmaso/

* MD, specialist in Infectious and Tropical Diseases, specialist in Public Health, Italy and Tanzania. Editor of Pressenza IPA, author of “The Latin Coup: Europe Saved from the Crisis by Mistake” (http://www.lulu.com/shop/leopoldo-salmaso/the-latin-coup/paperback/product-22597950.html)