Youthful CVA Leads To Cerebrovascular Accident

CVA is a euphonious acronym which, in the witty slang of my younger days, was used to say: And me, How's It Going for me? (in Spanish, ¿Cómo Voy Ahí?).

The year was 2017. France's 500 largest fortunes owned 20% of the national wealth. Don't cry, it's not that bad: in this country that's enough for more than one bottle, even two or three, without even bothering to return the empties.

2017 was the year in which a sharp drop in standards, in stature and in decency allowed Emmanuel Macron to be elected. A real record-breaker, this Macron, you'll see.

The downhill road had hit a steep slope back in 2007, when Nicolas Sarkozy arrived at the Élysée: a former president now convicted of corruption, a crime, well... a peccadillo that in Chile they modestly call "irregularities" or, failing that, "ideologically false bollocks".

Sarkozy was succeeded by the social democrat Hollande, who in turn incubated an incubus (Macron) who screwed us (there's no other word for it) as if we were a collective succubus of 70 million arses, gathered and available...

So the 500 oligarchs I was telling you about, seven years later, in 2023, owned 45% of the national wealth. That's growth, my darling, tu m'as fait tourner la tête, as Edith Piaf used to sing.

Free market, they call it: liberalism, private initiative, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit or else growth (aptly named), more than 32% a year, beat that. Here in Gaul it's grab and go, they're giving it away, help yourself, it couldn't be easier, last one in's a sissy, and all that sort of thing, but in French.

While this accumulation was taking place, dividend payouts were breaking records: 63 billion euros last year, well above the European and world average, surpassing even the USA.

At the same time, public debt rose from 64.5% of GDP in 2007 to 110.6% in 2023.

Perhaps the "aid" to private enterprise has something to do with it: Eric Coquerel, chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, states that every year the State transfers 211 billion euros to the "long-suffering business owners".

If you were to think that private wealth grows scandalously while the whole nation sinks into debt, in other words that the poverty of the many makes the wealth of the few, you wouldn't be far from the truth.

It won't escape your sharp mind that if a handful of oligarchs increase their slice of the cake by such a vast proportion, millions of poor sods simultaneously see theirs shrink at a bloody alarming rate.

That is what justifies the title of this rant: "The CVA". CVA is a euphonious acronym which, in the witty slang of my younger days, was used to say: And me, How's It Going for me? How much am I going to get my hands on? What's my share? A legitimate concern which, according to the fathers of the invention, lies at the very foundations of economic science, just you see.

Last 9 August, Jean-Hervé Lorenzi and Alain Villemeur, economists before the Almighty, went out on a limb with a piece published in Le Monde (Paris) in which they announced they had found the philosopher's stone: how to divide the product of labour between the workers and capital so that we all live happily ever after. Their tale, worthy of Scheherazade, begins like this:

I am inclined to think that the way the cake has been cut for centuries is what led Albert Camus to open his book The Myth of Sisyphus with the brief, caustic sentence you know:

If Lorenzi and Villemeur had discovered how to carve up the pie so as to leave everyone happy, we'd have heard about it.

Their pesky theory would be religiously taught at the Business School of Adolfo Ibáñez University, whose curriculum is inspired by the one Reinhard Höhn invented after the war, thereby contributing mightily to the training of the hundreds of thousands of Vorarbeiter, Aufseher, Werkmeister or Rottenführer who worked the German miracle.

Reinhard Höhn was a German jurist and historian, a member of the Nazi party and an SS general. During the 1930s he worked closely with Reinhard Heydrich in the Sicherheitsdienst, a sort of DINA (Pinochet's secret police), but for real. Very much for real. Very SS.

At the end of the war, Höhn made himself invisible and reappeared as director of the business school he founded in 1956 in Bad Harzburg. He became a professor of personnel management at the Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft, which trained 600,000 managers from 2,600 German companies. His success was such that the army of the Federal Republic and the regional governments (Länder) sent their officials to learn the private-sector management methods known as "management by delegation of responsibility".

Back then, business schools barely existed. From Reinhard Höhn onwards it has been nothing but shouting and money to this very day. All over the world.

The workforce management methods developed by Höhn made the fortunes of Yankee and European employers, as well as his own.

Among the lessons Höhn lavished on the workforce were the capacity to be free to obey (sic), submission, frugality and the ability not to be a pain in the arse.

France, like every country of the Free World, followed the path of progress, modernity and efficiency. SS General Reinhard Höhn (Gott schütze ihn) generously bequeathed us his unsurpassable science.

Thanks to this, as I was telling you, France's top 500 oligarchs seized 45% of all the national wealth, while public debt reached 110.6% and the annual budget deficit hit the solid figure of 5.6%.

The same thing is happening from "Noo Yawk" to Berlin, from Buenos Aires to Brussels and from Santiago to Jakarta. And then the know-it-alls wonder why the far right and fascism are gaining ground everywhere.

Given that the right and social democracy govern for the filthy rich, what do you expect?

All of which is why yours truly keeps fretting about his damned CVA...