In praise of Robert Kennedy [629298]

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In praise of Robert Kennedy
(Brookline, 20.11.1935 – L.A. , 6.6.1968 )

The Spre ad: The mythological unicorn of toxic finance

Abstract
The economy is a moral and social science not a positive or rational science : this is the
great mistake of the financial culture ; we can’t measure the human society only whit
the numbers because we forget its spirit which is fundamental in human decision s . The
evidence of the facts , every day , and the complete asymmetry between the fictitious
value of finance and social values is clearly and in controvertibly highlighted showing
the profound anomaly of an indicator that is only functional to manipulat ing reality for
the realization of higher interests that have nothing to do with the common good. The
fundamental cultural shift is to attribute to finance a value of sacred truth that is non –
existent, but still attentive to interests that can determine and create this illusory truth
thanks to the Academy that has dressed that truth with a sacred mantle to award prizes
to the cultural and fictitious scientific narcissism with too many Nobel prizes awarded
to finance because economics is no longer studied. This in total contradiction to Alfred
Nobel's wishes that are all too clear in his holographic will with regard to creating a
common good. In this way Robert ( Bob ) Kennedy wrote : “ . It does not include the
beauty of our poetry or the strength of our m arriages, the intelligence of our public debate
or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither
our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it
measures everything in sh ort, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us
everything about America except why we are pro ud that we are Americans. If this is true
here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world“ ( Robert Kennedy,1968 ).
The begin ning
It was March 18, 1968 when Robert Kennedy spoke at the University of Kansas on the
inadequacy of the GDP as an indicator of the well -being of economically developed
nations:
“Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the
poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too
long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the
mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800
billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of
America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette
advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for
our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the

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redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and
counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It
counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify
violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the g ross national product does not allow
for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does
not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of
our public debate or the integ rity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor
our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our
devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life
worthwhile. And it can tel l us everything about America except why we are pro ud that we
are Americans. If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world“( Robert
Kennedy,1968 ).
This exact same speech could be presented today .Indeed, the context has severely
worse nedcomp ared to when he tried to warn the country of the illusion of an indicator
that had not hing to do with the common good .As he then stated, “The first sign of
tyranny is government's complicity in priva tizing commons for private gain”. This is
exactly the case in a country that despite that the GDP has grown ,as we are falsely told ,
is currently in second place in the world for inequality and where a person with such
ideas was too dangerous for the interests at play . Three months later , he was killed
during his election campaign that would probably have led him to become President of
the United States of America . History , as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, is full of surprises
for those who do not know how to read it.He would probably have won against the
challenger Richard Nixon , who had been defeated by his brother JFK, andstepped down
following the Watergate scandal . Nixon would not have been a bad president , albeit
with the limit ation of wanting to be independent of strong powers and he too paid the
price of his choice. Not even Robert Kennedy could have imagine d the future that would
emerge and form after him, and how his considerations and expectations were
grounded in the facts, his idea of equality betrayed in honour of a GDP that today hasn o
scientific foundation, and even more sothan at the time , does not measure anything ,
since its value is based on a currency that has been separated from the real good to
which it had been anchored since 1971 .
Money without a real counterpart becomes infinite, unme asur able , and takes on a
conj ectur e of mythological illusion and because it is infinite , cannot be a measure of the
real finite and the incontrovertible evidence . Yet from that moment on, the infinite and
unreal currency would be falsely used to measure a finite system , as isthe case in the
reality in which we live and work. Money has become a form of mythology created by a
sovereign state power that thanks to a GDP that similar ly tothe verity of the
mythological unicorn decides the fate of ex -sovereign countries. We find ourselves
discussing the growth or not of an indicator of n othingness , half a point or less of GDP ,
exactly as you would measur e the growth of one cm or half a cm of the alicorn of a
mythological and non -existent creature.It all began in that terrible year of 1968 and
America would from then on have to face the drama of greed, selfishness, and

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damnation resulting from the loss of the sense of society that with difficulty was
constructed after the war. The following graphs clearly show the correlation between
social capital and economic capital, and the trend demonstrates that the instability of
the human soul is its eternal damnation:

In these graphs show ing the correlation between capital stock and economic capital , the
turnaround is evident from a positive to a negative trend from the early seventies after
the end of the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. Since 1971, with the end of the
currency’s con vertibility into a real good – the gold exchange standard – economics
falsely turned into an exact science, with infinite and totally deregulated financ e that
dragged us towards today’ s global chaos. Currency , illusory debt, systematic market
manipulation, and social disquiet exploded, as can be seen in the following graphs:

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The destructive shareholder value creation mantra led to the desolating delocalization,
destroying manufacturing that was the true foundation of the “American Dream”.
Unemployment, inequality, widespread poverty, the pulverization of society brought the
country to the brink of collapse and fratricidal wars such as those we are witnessing.
The following graphs depict the end of the dream of equality and democracy that
occurred in the same period as the end of the gold exchange standard:

“Chinese manufacturing became the world's factory thanks to this ‘creating shareholder
value’ mantra at the end of the 1980s when delocalisation became the shortest path to
achieving maximum profit and the resulting liquidity. The path was opened to a
metaphysical monetarism culture by depriving the country of manufacturing on which it
had rebuilt its rebirth after the 1929 crisis. But as always, history has its own tempo that
we have unlearned to watch and link, and the fire prepared in the sixties exploded in 1968
and changed the destiny of the hopes of the young. At the end of those years, faced with a
revolutionary thrust by individuals such as the Kennedys and Martin L uther King, society
became afraid of change that was too close to a socialist model. Both King and Robert
Kennedy were assassinated only a few months apart, the former in April and the latter in
June. On 30 January 1968, the violent Tet Offensive was launched that put an end to the
illusory dreams of an easy war as it had been passed off, especially by General
Westmoreland who had not understood or did not feel that he needed to understand who
he was fa cing at the time, thereafter disqualified from command. The clash in Vietnam
after Korea and the US defeats represent the lack of historical culture in the country that
entrusted everything to technical power, defeated on the social and political front. No one
had seriously considered the story of General NguyênGiáp who defeated the French at Dien
Bien Phu in 1954, simulating the same strategy in the Tet Offense to mislead the USA
command and the Japanese in 1945 in Hanoi. The supposition, the lack of histo rical and
political vision, the absence of true internal creative inspiration are critical elements of the
USA, as the last 20 years of foreign policy demonstrate, linked only to the supposition of
the technical domain that detaches man from his soul and r enders sentiments sterile and
aseptic. From there, in the face of student protests, libertarian movements, protests
against racism and war, the country turned the page, and those dreams of equal rights for

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all and equality for minorities, now majorities, s wiftly turned towards the oligarchy and
the dominion of the monetary and financial econo my in social and political life (Once
upon a time in America, Socialomics Journal 2017, FabrizioPezzani).
The materialistic sociocultural model became the absolute trut h and economic s
change d its DNA ,unnaturally tuning into a positive and exact science against history and
the evidence of human nature . Man would be come economized, a consumable object ,
and GDP w ould be the measure of f alse democracy . In other words , the GD P became the
ends and society the means, in this way totally cha nging the spirit of human nature . As
Kennedy said , GDP does not measure anything , or rather, only the dominant interests ,
but their greed is infinite and un measurable.
The history of the GDP presents the great deception of a false culture founded on
infinite finance totally detached from the real and finite world , but functional to
supra national interests w ith great and unjustifiable power .
If starting from the general definition , GDP (Gross Domestic Product ) measures the
market value of all goods and all services produced within the borders of a country in a
given period of time. The notion of product refer s to the goods and services that have a
value in a monetary exchange and non -barter ing process .The term ‘value ’
thereforeimplies "monetary" value that is expressed and determined by the value
attributed to the currency in a given time period. The concept of product does not mean
that the product is necessarily sold , but is simply the final o r intermediate out put of a
given production process.
It is rather evident that the concept of monetary value is ba sed on the false idea, as we
have seen, that currency has a value in itself and relative stability for a spatial and
temporal comparison between profoundly different countries and geographical areas
due to their history, culture, religion, and type of production activities. These diversities,
as we will see, are evident especially between the US – where the market culture
prevails – and Europe – where thew elfare culture prevails. In the first case, the pursuit of
profit maximization has led to the financialization of the economy by distorting t he
composition of GDP with the delocalisation of manufactur ing reduced to the minimum
and now actually determined by services, while in Europe the culture of the real
economy has maintained a high level of manufacturing activity , the only type that
generates real wealth , because merely printing infinite money creates only illusions. A
comparison with the same unit of measure of profoundly different realities is a serious
scientific and cultural error.
Theterm ‘domestic ’indicates that this variable includes the economic activities with in a
country . Therefore, the goods and services produced by businesses, workers , and other
domesti c operators abroad are excluded, w hile the products made by foreign operators
in the country are included. Excluded from GDP are free of charge services or self –
consumption. It should also be pointed out that the "monetary value" attributed to
production does not account for the ways in which the production processes have

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generated that value or even its effects in the redistribution of income , and therefore
does not take into account the social effects of compensation distortions and damage
caused by the absent respect of environmental constraints. In other words, an illusion
of growth in GDP in the presence of environmental degradation, increased inequality,
concentration of wealth without activit ies to support social spending, fraudulent
behaviour s, and so forth . In this sense, Robert Kennedy emphasized that GDP does not
measure what human life might be worth , but in this way the uncritical deification of
this instrument altered the ends with the means by which its pursuit justifies the global
social and moral degradation that is considered “collateral damage” .
Finally, the term ‘gross ’ indicates that the value of produ ction is gross of amortization or
the natural depreciation of the stock of physical capital during the period .This means
thatto not reduce the capital available to the system, part of the product must be
destined for its r eintegration. Deducting depreciation from GDP leads to obtaining the
NDP (Net Domestic Product ).
The evidence of the facts and the complete asymmetry between the fictitious value of
finance and social values is clearly and incontrovertibly highlighted by the following
charts showing the profound anomaly of an indicator that is only functional to
manipulat ing reality for the realiz ation of higher interests that have nothing to do with
the common good. The fundamental cultural shift is to attribute to finance a value of
sacr ed truth that is non -existent , but still attentive to interests that can determine and
create this illusory truth thanks to the Academy that has dressed that truth with a
sacred mantle to award prize s to the cultural and fictitious s cientific narcissism with too
many Nobel prizes awarded to finance because econom ics is no longer studied .This in
total contradiction to Alfred Nobel's wishes that are all too clear in his holographic will
with regard to creati ng a common good.
The eviden ce of the fact : the GDP is a mythological Unicorn
of toxic game of finance

Let us consider the most obvious distortions:

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GDP in its current measurement highlights the growth of BRIC countries with respect to
the US and the G7 S tates .While US GDP would seem to be growing , in reality it is not ,
since having delocalis ed manufacturing abroad there is no real growth but only
injections of liquidity through quantitative easing that makes it grow , but GDP is left at a
standstill also due to the di fferent composition of GDP and increasing the debt and GDP
ratio . These explosive dynamics manifested after 1971 at the end of the gold exchange
standard:

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As is evident , the activities that contribute to the formation of GDP have changed
profoundly .While in the US , the financialization of the real economy reduced the
contribution of the real economy to GDP , in other countries this contribution has
remained high. The culture of finance enshrined in the maximization of profit logic has
led to individual accumulation that has made inequality and social ills explode. The
affirmation of the ‘everything now’ found in finance reasons in a short -term liquidity
logic ,the mos t suitable instrument to satisfy the ends rather than the real economy that
operates in the long term. Finance in this sense becomes amoral, because those deciding
do not in the least consider the consequences of the decisions in terms of social effects,
which only become collateral damage for the personal ends pursued, even normalizing
illicit behaviours, as we have amply and dramatically seen.
The US , from the GDP/debt ratio point of view is bankrupt with a debt that is four times
GDP. Simplifying, one co uld compare this to a company with debt that exceeds revenue s
four -fold and with a production system that is unable to change the asymmetry of the
economic instability . There are therefore only two options: either redefining the debt
structure because it is not sustainable over the long term or chang ing the revenue
composition . In other words, redefin ing the composition of GDP , but also here this is not
possible in the short term. I f it were a private company, the bankruptcy procedure
would already be underway and the books would have been in the courts for some time.
Thus ,the separation of GDP measurement from the social implications renders it totally
useless to understand the state of happ iness or well -being brought about by the
production processes and redistribution of wealth for the stability and resilience of a
society. To recall is that in the millennial history of man, societies have always collapsed
either for war or class, and it is quite obvious that a measurement such as the present
GDP leads to forms of social exasperation that result in revolt.
The consequences of the myopia of current GDP are seen in the degeneration of social
systems and the consequent pathologies both in terms of inequality and social
degradation, and the resultant loss of employment, growth of poverty, and violent
reactions, with acts of death and weapons loaded with the hate of poverty and
abandonment :

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The US that has a high GDP, but which in reality is at a standstill, as a consequence of
fiscal policies has increased the inequality that is tempered in other countries by social
transfers while in the US these are at a minimum. Social spending would reduce the
disruptive process of a cultural model that has reached the end of the line and should be
stopped before it explodes uncontrollably in social revolts. The most obvious social
pathologies are the following expressed by the social discomfort and the use of
psychiatric drugs, suicide, the incarcerated and the rate of homicides, and finally,
increasing private debt with absent income :

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The r eality is quite obvious and in front of our eyes with a n extreme degree of danger,
but no one wants to see and those who theoretically should have free judgment are
enslaved to higher interests , so that both the Academy and the “media ” have become
mereservile masters that recite from memory and dictation . We are playin g with fire
andnobody seems to want to understand .
In reality ,under the thrust of the evidence of the facts, French President Sarkozy called on
Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Fitoussi to create a commission to propose alternatives to the
measurement of the degree of socio -economic development based only on GDP. But the
dominant interests were still too strong, and thus the “Beyond the GDP” commission
vanished in the same way as the justified motivations . However, none of the m has since
addressed the matter e ven on their own , and toxic finances have continued to procure
victims.

Conclusion s : “. The elite must, in various respects, respond to
the court of history for the damage done to man's future.”
Perhaps it is time to ask, before it is too late, to what extent a “capitalist finance” model
and its manipulated instruments such as GDP, as has been stated over the years, is
responsible for the damages that have led to the world’s fate and to what extent the
collective responsibilities have not worked by letting themselves be led towards the
disorder of unregulated markets. When a cultural model is affirmed and legitimized at
the global level by both the Academy and politics, by force and against the scientific
evidence demonstrating its unfoundedness, and leading to social dramas that expunge
the declarations of universal human rights, we must ask ourselves what has gone
wrong. When faced with the declared need to affirm the inalienable rights to be
recognized as dignity in terms of freedom, equality, the right to work, healthcare,
education, a life that can be lived with pride, a socio -cultural model that has found in
finance a dangerous destructive weapon that affirms the right of the few to the
detriment of the many , and we find ourselves in front of a h uman drama. The elite must,
in various respects, respond to the court of history for the damage done to man's future.
An international community, as the United Nations should be, must justify its own

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existence, awareness of even transversal responsibilitie s that have enabled the
affirmation of a socio -cultural model that has shown in the facts that its founding
principles are against civil coexistence and respect for the rules. Is this cultural model,
according to the prescriptions applied to the various di ctators, not to be considered a
crime against humanity? The control role of the various financial market regulators has
been discarded without any reaction or opposition at least in principle. Quite evident is
man’s inability to govern himself and to bring under his control a power that is likely to
overwhelm him if not regulated and oriented towards the common good.
Globalization and the period of a cultural model that has detached man from his own
intimacy shows that the apparatuses and higher -order insti tutions, without exceptions,
push man towards losing his organic bonds and form a man who, without roots, lives by
the day with principles of absolute arbitrariness in his choices. In this way, man
becomes a victim of a power that is becoming increasingly subtle and insinuated in
everyday life, becoming a hostage without even realizing it.
It may be an ungovernable power in nature that responds to superior mechanics, but
there cannot be an irresponsible power of man and in this sense the role of power
exerc ised by finance cannot be dissociated from the responsibility of how it is used and
by those who determined its purpose. Are those we have in charge of public affairs
aware of the responsibilities that have been vested in them? Is this accountability
towar ds society reflected in exercising their functions or is totally disregarded? Do
those that make vital decisions for the survival of man as a person have the knowledge
needed to carry out this activity and the humility to understand the difficulties that
being morally irreprehensible imposes? Are our young people educated in this logic or
abandoned to the nothingness of a daily life where it seems they cannot identify
themselves in behaviours to imitate?
All these questions that Romano Guardini put in various ways in his splendid work “The
end of the modern world. Power and Responsibility” published in 1956 are always
present to demonstrate that thought, which goes deeper and not just a quick glance at
the waves, never belies those who read history in t he long times that constitute it. “ The
greater a man's power, the stronger the temptation to take the shortcut of force ” (as we
see every day, author’s note). “The temptation to nullify the individual and his freedom, to
ignore both his creative originality and his personal truth; to achieve the desired end
simply by force, dismissing what cannot be forced as not wo rthy of consideration in other
words, the temptation to erect a culture on rational and technical foundations alone. To
this end, man himself mus t be considered something "marketable" ("the labor market")
something that can be "managed", "laid off or on," "conditioned" from the start to certain
ends. Even spiritually man is malleable, once dialectics and mass -suggestion, propaganda
and Weltanschauu ng or historical perspective, even legal testimony are undertaken not
with respect for truth, but to support predetermined ends (in turn , subjugated to power,
editor’s note) ”wrote Guardini.

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In the end, if our time is the expression of this global drama liv ed independently of the
territories, the beliefs, the different cultures, are we still faced with crimes against
human rights for a just existence? It is time to ask ourselves these questions before the
final account of history brings to an end the human a dventure in this world. If western
society is unable to find the right way to respond to the many problems that are
strangling it, then from a creative point of view, it has nothing more to say .
We can close this reflection as it began with reference to Bob Kennedy's speech at the
University of Kansas that ended with the following words, “ George Bernard Shaw once
wrote, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were
and say, why not?" So I come here to Kansas to ask for y our help. In the difficult five
months ahead, before the convention in Chicago, I ask for your help and for your
assistance. If you believe that the United States can do better. If you believe that we
shou ld change our course of action. If you believe t hat the United States stands for
something here internally as well as elsewhere around the globe, I ask for your help and
your assistance and your hand over the period of the next five months. And when we win in
November, and when we win in November, and w e begin a new period of time for the
United States of America – I want the next generation of Americans to look back upon this
period and say as they said of Plato: "Joy was in those days, but to live." Thank you very
much ".
A dream of freedom, equality, solidarity, a sense of common good for all that after a few
days would dissolve ,as Bob Dylan sang:“ The answer , my friend , is blowin ’ in the wind ”.
Bye – Bye , Bob !

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