Feeding on Depression

As his own Minister of Corporations, omnipresent Benito Mussolini has a thumb in Italy's big industrial pies, a finger in her little ones. Last week he sharply curbed the few Italian capitalists who have figured out ways to beat Depression and are still making fairly fat profits. Through the docile Chamber and Senate, // Duce pushed a law barring private capitalists from enlarging their plants or building new ones without express permission from the State.

"Although a crisis halts new initiatives and investments," said the Premier, explaining this distinctly novel law--antithesis of the U. S. 14th Amendment-- "nevertheless in the midst of Depression there is always some industry which does not voluntarily slow down but actually feeds on the crisis." Briskly he declared that a newly appointed commission will decide what "exuberant branches of industry" need to have their branches trimmed "to facilitate the process of gradually scaling down production."

Observers, remembering that Mussolini has created and continues to create a series of State-controlled super-trusts (such as his Italia Line, formed by merging the nation's three largest transatlantic carriers), assumed that he hopes to draw Italian capital into these huge, permanent units by preventing its dispersal into tempting ''exuberant industries" which seem to offer a quick profit.

Italian capitalists, faced by such checks last week, were scarcely pleased to learn that Italian public works will be pushed through the winter as a most "exuberant industry." Less an economist than a politician, 77 Duce has decreed the building of $130,000,000 worth of bridges, aqueducts, public buildings and roads on which he expects to employ 300,000 men or nearly one-third of all Italians now unemployed. All over Italy last week so-called Fascist "spaghetti clubs" were open again. Here, as last winter, indigent Italians may eat of the Dictator's steaming bounty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.