Bella Ciao: The misappropriation of an old Italian folk song used as a song of liberation.

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

National Public Radio/NPR's 'Sunday Morning Weekend Edition' had a piece today on the use of the old Italian folk song that is often associated with protest and liberaion.

How the Italian anthem 'Bella Ciao' is connected to Charlie Kirk's killing

BELLA CIAO

by

Victor Volpe

Popular Italian poetry, that is poetry of the people, has always made its way into the musica popolare, that is folk music.  Bella Ciao is an excellent example of this.  It comes from a genre of poetry called fior di tomba, or grave flower.

Fior di tomba poetry usually depicts unrequited love, alla Romeo and Juliet; and, the flower on the grave comes to symbolize the love lost.  Sometimes different flowers are used to portray the type of relationship; e.g., the sweet scent and pretty bloom of a rose plant is contrasted with the thorns.  This duality is a common analogy used to represent conflicts inherent in life itself, as depicted in another folk song, Barbara Allen, also having many versions.

Fior di tomba poetry was popular all over Italy; but, the Veneto region has long been a very rich source for many of these poems.  The poems, with their analogy, are also depicted in the folk song.  Bella Ciao has evolved from this rich heritage.

Bella Ciao comes from the Po River delta in the Veneto region; but, it is a protest song.   How did this poem with a fior di tomba theme get transformed into protest?  During the Risorgimento (the Italian  independence movement of the 1800's) the theme transforms from a flower representing a  personal love lost to the fower representing a greater cause, e.g., land reform, protest working conditions,  the struggle of the people, etc.  The popularity of the catchy verse and the ease of changing the words to fit the cause to be protested have given the tune a life into this century.  With many things to protest in Italy during the early part of this century, many versions of the tune sprung up.

It was during World War II that one version of Bella Ciao shifted the theme from political protest to a fight for liberty.  The version came out of the resistance of the Italian under-ground, which was over 100,000 strong, and so is often called the partigiano version.   Since many in the resistance were members of the Italian Communist Political Party, the song is identified by some as being a communist song.  Since folk music serves very handedly to portray popular protest, the Communists used folk music for their own political ambitions during the post-war years and especially during the 1960's and 1970's.

We Americans can see the strength of the partigiano version as portraying the fight for freedom and we remove the political baggage which has accompanied the song.  The popularity of Bella Ciao in Italy has found its way in many other countries for the same reasons.  There are American variants of the song (in English) which are used to express protest  -  for Women's rights, justice for workers, etc.

The song was recorded at the Spoleto Festival in 1964, during a presentation of folk music produced by Roberto Leydi and Filippo Crivelli.  The record album has been available since under several foreign labels and for the past ten years has been available under Harmonia Mundi

(CD number HMA 195734, Bella

Ciao: Chansons du people en Italie).  It's a wonderful recording with many old tunes.

I hope you enjoy the tune.  If you are in a performing group, try the tune out.  It goes over very well for sing-a-long, for all ages, especially for young children.  The "O Bella Ciao" chant in each verse (accompanied with hand clapping on the ciao) is quite easy to pick up regardless of your ability in Italian or musical talents.

BELLA CIAO [GOODBYE BEAUTIFUL]

(FIOR DI TOMBA) 

[GRAVE FLOWER]

Una mattina, mi son svegliato.

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

Una mattina, mi son svegliato,

E ho trovato 1'invasor.

0 partigiano, portami via.

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

0 partigiano, portami via.

Che mi sento di morir.

E se muoio da partigiano.

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

E se muoio da partigiano.

Tu mi devi seppellir.

Mi seppellirai lassu in montagna.

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

Mi seppellirai lassu in montagna.

Sotto 1'ombra di un bel fior.

E Ie genti che passeranno,

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

E Ie genti che passeranno,

Mi diranno che bel fior.

E questo e il fiore del partigiano,

0 bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao, ciao, ciao.

E questo e il fiore del partigiano,

Morto per la liberta.

One morning I woke up.

A beautiful awakening, a beautiful awakening,

a beautiful awakening, hello, hello, hello.

One morning I woke up,

And I found the invader,

Oh partisan, take me away.

A beautiful awakening, etc.

Oh partisan, take me away.

I feel that I am dying.

And if I die as a partisan.

Then goodbye beautiful, etc.

And if I die as a partisan.

You must bury me.

Bury me high, up on the mountain.

Goodbye beautiful, etc.

Bury me high, up on the mountain.

Beneath the shade of a pretty flower.

And the people that pass by,

Goodbye beautiful, etc.

And the people that pass by,

They will say to me, "What a lovely flower;"

"And, this is the flower of the partisan,"

A beautiful awakening, etc.

"And, this is the flower of the partisan,"

"That gave their life for liberty.

 

Bella Ciao - Chansons du Peuple en Italie 

(Italian folk songs). "Padano di Piadena"

Another example of a fior di tomba, or grave flower, folk tune; 'Barbara Allen', which can be traced back to the British Isles, maybe Scotland, in the 17th century.

'Barbara Allen', sung by Joan Baez

And a more modern fior di tomba, or grave flower, folk tune, from the 1970s, written by Jim Ringer and Barbara Keith, 'The Bramble And The Rose'.

'The Bramble And The Rose' by Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin

A New Global Order, or the Same Old, Same Old???

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

This is a post from the government's trade rep, as it appeared as an op ed in the NY Times.

U.S. Trade Ambassador Jamieson Greer: Why We Remade the Global Order

I agree with the criticism of how the "Old Order" trade system worked against the U.S., but I disagree with using tariffs to re-align the broken system. The Trump Administration agrument is always about what foreingers -- our allies -- have done to us. My argument would be what we did to ourselves, by not fighting back and using fiscal measures of stimulus/incentives to protect specific industries affected by the unfair trade practices we faced or by using specific disincentives against the specific industries of specific countries.

With respect to the argument that our trading partners and adversaries took advantage of us, which is the argument that you most often hear from Trump and his officials, I would offer this; just because a nation, and take China as an example, builds and subsidizes factories for exporting, and especially for the U.S. market, doesn’t mean the U.S. is forced to then make itself the importer of such goods. We made a decision ourselves to be the importer of these so-called cheap goods. All you have to do is go back and listen to economists like Milton Friedman make this argument. It was criticized then, just like today; and that opinion was ignored. We could have enacted specific policies to punish specific nations who engaged in this type of trade practice, but chose not to.

The problem with Trump's tariffs is that they are going to affect a broad base of Americans as consumers, and that should be inflationary in nature. That inflationary pressure can be offset if we raised our productivity (output per hour; not just GDP) substantially; but I don't see this administration inacting enough broadbased incentives to do that. That effort is being left up to our private sector to shift for themselves; so maybe it will work, maybe it won't. In time we will see, you cannot hide the affect of tariffs.

And just to note: When I say (in the first paragraph) that we did it to ourselves I am saying this is a result of economic policies we put into effect which worked against our industrial base. This started under President Reagan and continued under President Clinton during the implementation of globalization policies. [You can look below for the graph of the change in our Balance of Trade.]

I think the Black Friday stock market crash in 1987 – the worst percentage drop in the market in our history – resulted from some of these policy changes. Changes that affected our currency value and the U.S. position as the dominant currency internationally.

These policy changes, in my view, reflected the battle between the economic forces in our society. And especially during the Clinton Administration, reflected what is called the financialization of our economy – where our financial sector will have a more prominent influence in the political power struggle between different sectors of our economy. And I think the Financial Crisis of 2008 really highlighted just how influential the financial sector was in the manner they were bailed out – because that sector, so we have been told repeatedly, represented a systemic risk to the whole economy/society – while the rest of our society had to shift for themselves.

This battle of economic forces is reflected in the growing inequality in our society that manifests itself in how wealth is generated. In the 1960s, when we had the best peacetime performing economy in our history, with a shrinking gap for income and wealth inequality, basically an industrial economy where the different sectors benefited from each other’s improvements, not without issues that resulted in social conflicts, wealth – the value of your assets – and income – derived from the performance of the economy – were closely linked. But by the 1980s, and especially by the 1990s, that linkage was showing signs of deterioration, and the gap in both wealth and income inequality were also spreading apart.

With globalization, the wealthy elite had sources of wealth and income increasingly tied to financial transactions that did not always have a benefit to the broader good of the society. And that was what was revealed during the Financial Crisis of 2008, when a $600 trillion derivatives market (by notional value of the underlying assets) with maybe $60 trillion of that in play and directly related to the mortgage housing market in the United States – and really just a few states, like California, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Georgia where the mortgage underwriting was speculative – where the total mortgages outstanding were no more than $10 trillion, so that a slight movement in price on the derivative contract could result in wild swings of profit, or in the case of 2008, great losses. The Crisis showed you did not need a derivative market that large to support the funding of mortgages, and thus a “casino analogy” was applied to this type of economic activity that only the wealthy could play; and had to be bailed out to prevent the whole international financial system from collapsing when the casino crashed and the financial liquidity needed for all financial transactions to flourish was internationally frozen.

So it depends on if you see a problem with the way wealth – the value of assets – is generated in relation to income; with wealth increasing at a greater rate than the economic growth rate which reflects people’s income and not their asset holdings. And as I have said in previous posts, our annual economic growth rates for the past twenty-five years – since 2001 – have been well under 30% of our historic average. And that has a cumulative effect because the growth rates are compounded growth rates, each succeeding year builds on the previous year. Where our present GDP is around $30 trillion, it could have been between $40 trillion and $50 trillion if we had just average growth rates, they wouldn’t have even had to be better than average.

The globalization policies implemented in the 1990s opened up the international economies to the free flow of capital; and at that time the United States was experienceing an international wealthy elite who could take advantage of these new circumstances. And our Wall Street firms were consolidating, and as financial intermediaries they have no real counterparties, so they were in a unique and competitive position to take advantage of the "New Order" shaping the international community. And they have been exerting their political influence to push their economic and business agenda.

And the Trump Administration -- their policies -- are not fixing any of this. Ambassador Jamieson Greer mentions the agreements they have already worked out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investments coming into the United States; but the total foreign investment in the United States is over $60 trillion. We have never had a problem in attracting foreign investors. And you don’t know if this figure he is floating around is new investments that never would have been made otherwise, or if the foreign countries are just outwitting the administration with investments they intended to make anyway.

And President Trump, who rode into the White House on a populist backlash, is oblivious to this. None of this – the use of tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.; the use of tariffs to increase revenues and reduce the national debt burden; the use of tariffs as a bargaining weapon to bludgeon your opposition – is reflected in the remaking of the “Global Order”.

This is the Net International Position: Total U.S. Assets ($269 trillion) minus Total Liabilities equal a Net Position of almost -$124 trillion. The graph is the quarterly results.

Trump’s reckless rhetoric and meandering modus operandi

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

We are a very big continental nation where our economic output is determined 75% by our private sector – what businesses and people decide to do in spending their money – and only 25% by our federal government.  But that difference by the federal government can be a stimulant or roadblock to what the private sector does.  And Trump’s reckless rhetoric and meandering modus operandi of on again/off again policies creates enough uncertainty that leaves business decisions and people’s choices in a state of frozen action that interferes with the nation’s forward progress.

Tariffs: Inflationary, or Not Inflationary?

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

Several Federal Reserve officials, including Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman and Governor Christopher Waller, both appointed by President Trump, have suggested that the inflationary effects of tariffs are likely to be a one-time price level shift rather than a persistent inflation problem.

I disagree with that. A one-time hit on prices is like the sales tax you pay when you go shopping. The tariff is like a value-added tax; it is imposed on our importers at the time it hits our shores, and then it is passed along the supply chain.

The difference between the two is the sales tax comes at the end of the transaction stream; whereas the tariffs come at an intermediary point in the transaction stream, where the system is more dynamic as these transactions become more repetitive. Because it is at the intermediary level you have many different activities involved -- shipping, transportation, warehousing, and even service activities like firms who finance transactions and payrolls with accounts receivables -- with each one taking their cut, passing it along or absorbing the cost. So as these tariffs continue to get imposed over and over again as shipments are repeated, you are never sure how the different intermediaries are going to react to the extra charge each time and how that either gets absorbed into their operational costs or gets passed along as a cost to the next party.

The chart shows that prices at the wholesale level are more volatile than at the consumer/retail level. In other words, the prices in the supply chain at the intermediary level do not always result in getting passed to consumers -- sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Trump''s World View: Replacing The Old Order

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, the Singapore Minister for Foreign Affairs delivered his Committee of Supply speech in Parliament on 3 Mar 2025. In his speech, he spoke about how Singapore should navigate a more uncertain and volatile world, characterised by rising geopolitical rivalries, protectionism, and weakened international norms that have reshaped the global landscape.

[Note the speech was given one month before President Trump's "Liberation Day".]

So what are the purposes of Trump's tariffs? Do you want to waste time talking about the economics of it? It should be very apparent that the tariffs become one more tool for his transactional way of viewing business.

What's wrong with that since it seems to be working? Well, it's a pure power play. The rules of the game have been thrown out.

So it is like what the foreign minister of Singapore said, when the big powers exercise their might, the smaller players have to stay on the sidelines and wait for things to settle out. The American system of international commerce after WWII differed from previous systems whereby trade was conducted for mutual benefit and not just with the colonizing attitudes that preceded it under the British system. But this system of commerce exercised by the United States also reinforced our national security strategy that was being pursued against communist expansion, by forming alliances based on common interests in commerce. But that was the old system.

We have always conducted our commerce and national security strategies with “carrots and sticks”; “carrots” being incentives to encourage the behavior we desired, and “sticks” being the disincentives, or punishment by exercising our power. Where under the old system it relied mostly on “carrots”, Trump is more inclined to use “sticks”. Trump thinks that we have conducted our policies with too much reliance on using incentives, and this has created "free riders" as allies who would not take full responsibilities in a shared leadership position.

Trump has continually violated our old alliances. The way he exercises “America First” is a beggar thy neighbor attitude; and, that has weakened our alliances. It is weakening our alliances at a time when the world is more unstable – the Middle East, still important for crude oil; the Southeast Asia arena, which has become since the late 1990s, a hub for low cost manufacturing which is less suited for the more advanced economies in the North American bloc as well as the European Union. The Southeast Asia manufacturing hub has been integrated into the more advanced economies. But Trump thinks these smaller nations, and China, are taking advantage of us... us being the Super Power???

This is what Trump’s “America First” strategy is disrupting. It not only disrupts commerce, but also affects the way we have conducted our national security strategy. And he really hasn’t left us – or our former allies or adversaries – with any clear vision of where he is going because of his inconsistent manner of handling affairs in a transactional manner.

So last week he was threatening India. Today we find him threatening Canada with tariffs because they may recognize a Palestinian state. Tomorrow it will be somebody else.

The problem in his power play, like the foreign minister of Singapore said, is that there is another power, China. Trump in being transactional has left voids when he retreats from a former American presence in the international community. And when you leave a power void, somebody will fill it.

And this is related to the economic growth argument I make: that we have a GDP that is $30 trillion but should be $40 to $50 trillion hadwe had our normal historic growth rates, where we have been at least 30% below that over the past 25 years. That "starve the beast" mentality that contributes to our failure to have government policies that address the growing needs of our society -- that constrain investment -- has resulted in the GDP we have today. And that doesn't raise the revenues the government needs to finance our national security strategy of the past, which was an involvement all over the world; one that we financed with our good growth. And we not only lose the government revenues when we have a GDP of $30 trillion instead of $40 or $50 trillion, but we lose the extra $10 to $20 trillion of economic activity in our private sector that addresses the wants and needs our people have, not to mention the jobs that go vacant.

 

Lessons Learned

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

In my opinion, the reason we had such a successful clandestine nighttime strike on Iran, which we learned this morning involved a multitude of resources, stems from the lessons learned from an unsuccessful clandestine nighttime strike on Iran in 1980 to free American hostages.

The 1980 strike was a bold move; but, it failed.  It failed for a variety of reasons.  Our military went back and studied the failure.  And over the years practiced and prepared themselves for special operations that would be successful.  Many of these operations were small in scale, but our military learned as they went along.  The initial attacks in Afghanistan after 9-11 and even in Iraq in 2003 demonstrated coordinated action among some of the small units.  The Desert Storm attack on Iraq in 1990-1991 demonstrated the coordination of much larger forces.

The real success of our special forces operation in a small strike was probably demonstrated with the capture of Osama bin Laden.  It is a demonstration of the resilience and adaptability of our military establishment and the professional leadership and people who are part of that.  It shows a willingness to change, that you have to be open to change to meet new contingencies.

Well, the same is true of the American people.  Like our military, we are innovative and have shown through the years our ability to adapt to  change to meet new opportunities.  Afterall, in our democratic governance, our military personnel come from “The People”.  For quite some time we have been mired in a status quo that has resisted the change that is needed.  We have become deeply divided politically which has hampered our governing ability to function effectively.  We can overcome this.  If our military can change, so can we.  And when we change, new leadership will come out of that.

Which is more disconcerting, the possibility of a Mid-East War, or President Trump?

 

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

You would think with the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran and the possibility of a Middle East War, the center for much of the world’s crude oil production, that the international stock markets, the overnight American stock markets, the price of crude oil, would all be reacting extremely volatile. Actually there is very little movement in the action. Crude oil is only slightly higher. Some of the overnight markets are actually positive; and the one’s that are negative are by no more than 0.5%. The value of the dollar, the world's reserve currency which has been slipping since Trump took office, and the value of gold, which is supposed to be a safe haven in times of trouble, are little changed. The bond market has little reaction.

Now remember when Trump announced “Liberation Day”? All the markets – in Asia, Europe, the overnight American markets, and the daytime markets – plunged, about 4%. The value of the dollar dropped precipitously. The bond market became unsteady. And gold rose in value as investors fled to safety.

Now you know what worries international investors.