On Returning to Italy and Leaving Democratic Civilisation

It's barely worth writing about the installation of dictatorship in Italy; all the usual suspects from the highest to the lowest, all the ususal excuses about emergency and temporary and experts and technicians and Europe.  So take it as read that Italy is a representative democracy only in name, as were the countries of the East, and the countries of the past under Fascism and Communism.

Never and then never will direct popular democracy be permitted to operate the levers of power, no matter how large our group in Parliament nor how formally constitutionally guaranteed.  The sensation of wanting to vomit reading and listening to the usual suspects' mellifluous self- righteousness  or peremptory condemnation of populism and non-party movements is longstanding and widespread.  "You haven't understood" charming and capable Italians of various backgrounds and sophisticated skills and statuses would tell me as I enthused over formally democratic rights and obligations.  I have now.

Just as an example in a multitude of repressive measures being introduced, no political grouping not formally composed into a political party conforming to hierarchical organisational structures  and with a juridical personality will be permitted to stand for Parliament; nor will such a grouping be able to access  any state political funding for propaganda or for election expenses (it is a source of distaste that any grouping, party or no, should have access to tax-payer funding, but let that pass, as the scandal of the intertwined banks and parties must be allowed to pass).

The internet is now policed and condemnation of people and policies is defined as insult: criticism is permitted,  the definition of which is left open to the complainant or the authorities.  Behaviour during the 20th century is not to be  considered relevant - re-opening old wounds not being conducive to the imposition of the national peace.

Unemployment is described as youth unemployment though what is youthful about being 40 and without work?  Never worked?  This is infantilisation and policy-driven removal of basic economic and social activities.  Of a piece with the destruction of political and civic claims and deriving from the same source - European policies and governance structures.

Any threat to these last will be met with a response that breaks any rule, denies any choices, permits any authoritarian outrage.  The images of demonstrators from the Milan social centres being beaten with truncheons are up there with the squadristi.

The response of civilised Italians is as it has ever been: the rientro nel privato  - the withdrawal into private worlds mediated by networks of friendship and kinship - of the established, the carefully orchestrated emigration of the younger generation to education and work in the rest of the world until return is needed by this private world.

"We told you," say those from the prestigious English and American universities,  from international institutions, from well-to-do lifestyles of unblemished propriety, from firms and industries insulated from the economic disaster by a kind of economic version of this self-defence against pillaging elites.

After three weeks in London the engulfing criminality and pseudo-justification of democratic perversion on coming back here makes England's equivocating with a continued membership of the European Union look irresponsible.  There is nothing  for England in membership of the European Union.  There is no reform, no return of powers, nothing to be renegotiated.  The kind of renegotiation outlined by David Cameron denies the foundation and purpose of the European Union.

Leave.  Leave while your sins and failures are still, just, your own.  You don't want what we've got.

Blogger Persecution Underway in Italy

22 commenters on Beppo Grillo's blog have been charged with “Offesa all’onore e al prestigio del Presidente della Repubblica".   The comments, which are described as extremely damaging to the honour and prestige of Giorgio Napolitano, were posted a year ago and have been the object of investigation by the Polizia Postale* and involve bloggers throughout Italy as well as those using servers abroad. 

The minister of Justice in the Letta/Berlusconi/Napolitano administration  (formerly minister of the Interior in the Monti/Napolitano administration)  gave the go-ahead for the charges reports Il Fatto Quotidiano.  Prosecutors  in an evenly spread net across Italy will now be taking forward the proceedings, doubtless aided by their postal collaborators.


*Postal Police?  How many kinds of police does Italy have?  They must have the ten o'clock police and even the eleven o'clock police who come and get you if you're still in your jamas.

Democracy Denied in Major European Union States

That the European Union has no further historic purpose is an understanding whose time has come.  Germany is reunited - which was the primary objective of the immediate post-War original institutions - and, more importantly, no Europeans are going to permit the use of their terrain as battle fields again.

The European Projecteers are engaged in a wholly different and now collapsing plan.  Where 'plan' is the operative word - they want a centrally planned federal state, redistributive and 'fair' with  all the disastrous incompetencies that brought down the last attempt, under realised socialism, to be resolved by informational and technological innovation.  None of which  has anything to do with the unification of Germany except insofar as unification brought a definitive end to the failed attempt in the East.

When Nigel Lawson acknowledges that whatever European unity might have been it is now utterly inappropriate for the United Kingdom to subject itself to  its present and future intentions he does not even bring into the argument the sheer unpleasantness of some of its  Member States.  Current and developing unpleasantness, that is, never mind their pasts. 

Italy's new status as a presidential dictatorship is a malignant sore on the face of a  democratic Europe.  Its democratic political system has collapsed under the assault of an authoritarian statist egomaniac who still believes; whose  age and acculturation,  coupled with obdurate persistence in ideological and ethical wrongdoing has brought corruption of the soul.  The United Kingdom cannot continue in any kind of political association with a Europe accepting Member-States like Italy. 

Roses and Young Girls

The European Central Bank, under Mario Draghi, is  looking  like the Italian Constitution under  Giorgio Napolitano - malleable.  Germany swapped the Deutschmark for the euro in return for German reunification and the setting-up of a European central bank modelled on the Bundesbank; indeed the ECB was to be the Bundesbank writ large.  What was not to like in the founding pillar of the West German state becoming the founding pillar of a united Germany, and of the European Union as a whole? 

No, the Germans said,  the ECB would not be answerable to Ecofin.   "the single currency, under the authority of the Central Bank would complete monetary union, while economic union would merely consist of national policies, coordinated by the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers. "   The Delors Report would not be implemented. 

Well, it's looking as if the Italians are going to have a sly try.  Not the whole thing, of course, out of the question.  But this 'austerity is not enough, Europe needs fiscal measures and debt-sharing and common economic policies and  growth, and so say all of us except you Germans and your selfish northern goody-goodies'  mantra is  accompanied by the ECB's Mario Draghi pushing the mandate of the ECB as out of shape as his country's poor Constitution.  European Central Bank independence is becoming a double-edged sword.  Germany et al.,  needs to assert not just independence but the religious observance by the ECB of its mandate under the treaties; which brings us to Charles de Gaulle's  assessment of treaties - they last while they last.

Napolitano (88) Swears-In His Puppet Administration in Rome

Germany Has Outgrown the Project as Italy Scrambles to Get the European Central Bank Up and Running with OMT

It is crucial for the European Project to get an Italian administration in place, an interlocutor for the European Central Bank, before the Bundesbank puts the boot into Mario Draghi.  The ins and outs of democratic impropriety being explored by the Italian nomenklatura are of interest  only to the nerds of political imposition and its means, idiosyncratic to each state system, and no longer matter anyway

As the Italian administration members are announced 2.3 trillion euros of Italian sovereign debt  remains, as it always has  been,  the reef for the euro, and for the European Union that has tried to fix its own particular form for ever, via a common currency.   All the other eurozone states in sovereign debt crisis  are a nuisance but not a systemic threat to the single currency and thus to the European Project - the 'tying-down-Germany-into-the-Europe-that-suits-us-the-victors'  Europe.  Of course, Italy has always been a problem for Germany: it has a long, long tail of criminal, pre-modern governance attached to the continental north by nationalist concerns and, perhaps as importantly, it has a deep-rooted refusal to confront its 20th century history and confess, as Germany has done.   So it's quite a cheek for Italy to be still attempting a holier than thou attitude to Germany (it was an outrage during the last century) and try to use the Project to shove its debt onto German (and other member-states') taxpayers.  This administration is probably too late to activate OMT.

On balance Italy does not bring enough to a German-dominated European Union which is bound together by a common currency that is acceptable to modern Germany.  Indeed Italy and the aging Project is a constant threat to Germany's complex relations to the East and the Balkans and a threat, via its debt, to the central pillar and the political consensus  of the German state.  

Germany has sloughed-off the Project and is now building another Europe. Hence the closing-down of German acceptance of the European Central Bank and its variously-clothed attempts to saddle Germany with the debt, and all the corruption that debt represents, of others;  particularly Italian others (most of whom have no claim to ethical or political superiority over the Germany of either the last century or this.  It's no good Italy going about singing Bella Ciao at the tops of their voices, they were all at it, and many of them still are - 88 indeed).

So  while Italy's current (and in some cases erstwhile) elites are in part trying to justify their  present behaviour by a long out-dated need to cage a long-ago Germany, modern Germany is going to cut them and their Central Bank Italian off at the knees.  Frankly, Germany has bigger fish to fry and other roles to play.  Italy has allowed its  elites from the past, and its myths and self justifications of the past  to dominate its present and its people.  It's looking as if we're going to be left to stew in our own debt.  And the euro, its zone, and it's outdated Project are only for peripheral people.

Giorgio Napolitano hasn't noticed, but he's out of time, imposed administration or no.

One Last Heave for Napolitano

As the Italian collaborators stitch-up an administration they are, also and inevitably, creating the Opposition.  And the Opposition in Italy has constitutional roles (not that constitutional guarantees exist any more, of course, but they do have to go through the motions to obliterate them and that does take time).  Among those roles is the chair of the state broadcasting company, the RAI, and the chair of the state security commission, COPASIR.

If the Opposition is made up of more than one party then the chair is elected by a simple majority of the Opposition MPs.  The Five Stars have an enormous, absolute majority in the Opposition.  It doesn't matter that minor parties of the collaborationists are declaring themselves as part of the Opposition - Five Stars has 163 MPs.  It has been obvious since the election last February that if the Democratic Party could not split Five Stars and assimilate a large enough part of the Stellar Movement into an administration-supporting role then there was a huge threat to not just the Italian political elites. 

Accessing the files (and horrors) of COPASIR state intelligence by a political Movement based on internet and local association, entirely without party structures to act as gate-keepers to  political information and power,  would pale Wikileaks and the publication of the secret intelligence files of the German Democratic Republic into insignificance (and the GDR has been abolished, unlike Italy and its local, European, and gobal elites). 

Imagine - the state intelligence authority and the state broadcasting authority in Five Stars' irreverent hands.  Come on Giorgio Napolitano!  You're the vecchio, glorioso comunista - Italy and the world needs the smack of firm, authoritarian governance in this above all else.

Not Going to Prison is Not Enough

Silvio Berlusconi wants his conviction, and his possible conviction overturned and stopped.  Then he wants a constitutional revolution in which the Head of State is directly elected to be the political leader of the country, as in the  French Fifth Republic.  And he wants it now because convicted criminals are excluded from political office, and because he's old, though not as old as our current Head of State (who he plans to succeed and who could fall off the twig anytime.)

In the recent ructions  he's managed, as part of their settling down, to have the hearing confirming his conviction and four-year prison sentence halted while earlier parts of the conduct of the case are reviewed and, he hopes, a ruling sets aside the  conviction, after which  the statute of limitations will once more ride to his rescue as any fresh trial is cut off mid stride.  As for Bunga-Bunga and under-age prostitution, well that's already halted as he's too important and busy a politician to be disturbed by having to go to court while he's fixing up his future (there's some high falutin' legal language for this but effectively it's 'not going to court because too busy').

So,  he gets what he wants now and, to keep us all quiet we  get our property taxes back and are promised never again - or he pulls the plug on Wormtongue and we all vote on the beaches - when the offer of our property taxes back and a promise never to do it again will beckon (even now the polls are very much in favour).

It's either Berlusca is let off the hook and given a presidency to stand for or the Stability and Growth Pact.