And suddenly, the mainstream media seems to have woken up and finally realized that the European Commission, headed by Ursula von der Leyen, when it refers to the European “values”, is actually talking about the values it benevolently attributes to European billionaire families. The Guardian says that its “investigation” has revealed that 17 billionaires, listed by Forbes, are listed as the final beneficiaries of projects worth 3.3 billion euros.
It’s a mystery why it’s taken so long for The Guardian to see a reality that has been repeated uninterruptedly for dozens of years. A reality that is unfolding at the same time as homelessness, the housing, health and education crisis, war and social instability are on the increase. But even more inexplicable is the confinement of this “investigation” to the agricultural sector and projects linked to the Policy for European Agriculture. After all, while it’s bad, given that small farmers are going through an unprecedented crisis, we’re still talking about money to produce food. However, there are far more damaging and obvious cases to which, as we shall see, The Guardian and the mainstream media turn a blind eye.
In fact, the large corporations that own the mainstream media, social networks and financial resources, financing the electoral campaigns that follow one another within the framework of an absolutely fallacious democratic process, of which the upcoming elections in the U.S. are the latest paradigm, not only manage to get governments, which are always domesticated, to lower their taxes, but they also manage to obtain more tax breaks, tax exemptions and access to public funds for investment. A kind of “socialism of the rich”, in which the state socializes the costs and risks and privatizes the profits.
The European Investment Bank, in its latest “Investment Survey 2004”, shows how an important part of this transfer is taking place. Between the 1st quarter of 2020 and the 1st quarter of 2024, corporate investment only grew positively in one quarter (the 3rd quarter of 2023); in all the other quarters, there was only positive growth in the quarters in which investment by the state and households increased. Despite the hundreds of billions of euros that the EU allocates to private company projects, in the 1st quarter of 2024, corporate investment evolved negatively. In other words, the money we “invest” in these privileged beings is not leveraging investment, but rather accumulation.
And if you look at the accumulation side, you’ll find many of the answers, namely the way in which a foreign country sucks up many of the resources we produce. The war in Ukraine plays an absolutely fundamental role here, as a catalyst for the growth of public investment and the transfer of income to large corporations and, through them, to the richest families. That’s why the Western oligarchic elites feel a brutal desperation in the need to maintain the conflict in Ukraine. Even the U.S., as we see, will take their share, even in the case of the investment is supported by the EU.