Tag Archives: Italy

The Sport of Speculation, by VF

Posted on March 17, 2020 | 5 comments

Is the coronavirus panic a replay of the 9/11 panic, and for the same purpose? From VF at thechicagoeconomist.com:

I’m beginning to believe the current “pandemic” is perhaps just the latest contrived “enemy of the state”. An opportunity taken by western governments that have, over the past 20 or 30 years, gotten bolder in their willingness to fabricate fear to secure a political end. Political ends are always about greater control, corruption, and ultimately, cover ups.

In the age where air has become second to digital noise in terms of ubiquity, and hyperbole has replaced truth as the journalistic objective, governments’ ability to leverage misinformation (i.e. propaganda) has become a precision tool. Like it or not, society has become confused by the amount of information thrown at us and that makes us susceptible.

But if this is contrived political hysteria, what is the objective?

I’ve heard people on either side of the aisle suggest it is to help or hurt Trump. And perhaps, it is that simple. However, given equally good points on both sides of that argument I am skeptical. So then what? Well, I think back to 9/11 and whether you believe it was an act of terrorism by our own government or some other group, the end result was the same – The Patriot Act, and a truckload of knock-on legislation that quietly edged out our individual rights and freedoms. All in the name of keeping us safe from harm.

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Posted in Banking, Civil Liberties, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

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Italy: Salvini Facing Show Trial for “Kidnapping” Migrants, by Soeren Kern

Posted on February 16, 2020 | Leave a comment

You might see some similarities between what’s happening to Matteo Salvini in Italy and what has happened to Donald Trump in the US. From Soeren Kern at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • In September, Sicilian prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro said that the kidnapping accusations against Salvini were “groundless” and recommended that he be acquitted of all charges. The Court of Ministers, however, overruled Zuccaro, who is now, paradoxically, required to proceed with prosecuting Salvini, even though he has already found him to be innocent.
  • The charges against Salvini appear to be part of a political vendetta against him as well as his opposition to mass migration. Case in point: Although the decision to prevent those onboard the Gregoretti from disembarking in July 2019 was made by Salvini in close coordination with senior members of the Italian government, only Salvini is facing prosecution.
  • “No contrary position was taken by the Prime Minister Conte…. This makes the hypothesis of individual action by Minister Salvini completely improbable.” — Senator Erika Stefani, Lega Party, presenting documents showing that other ministers were deeply involved in discussions over the Gregoretti.
  • “If I have to go to court, I will explain to the judges that defending the borders of my country and protecting citizens was my duty and, serenely, I will go to that courtroom to represent millions of Italians, because I simply did what they asked me to do: to control who enters and who leaves Italy.” — Former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in a tweet, February 12, 2020.
  • Like Trump, Salvini’s legal troubles are fuelling his approval ratings…. Surveys indicate that if Italy held elections now, Lega would win a majority together with its conservative allies.
The Italian Senate has voted to strip former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of parliamentary immunity so that he can face kidnapping charges for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a ship at a port in Sicily. This is in spite of Sicilian prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro saying in September that the kidnapping accusations against Salvini were “groundless” and recommended that he be acquitted of all charges. Pictured: Salvini (center) at a rally in Policoro, on August 10, 2019. (Photo by Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images)

The Italian Senate has voted to strip former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of parliamentary immunity so that he can face kidnapping charges for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a ship at a port in Sicily.

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Italy Slouches Towards New Elections, by Tom Luongo

Posted on January 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

Italian politics are generally incomprehensible, even to Italians, but one trend is clear: a growing number of Italians no longer want to be under the EU’s thumb. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Italy is always good political theater. I remember years ago when I cared more about poetry than politics, a friend of mine saying, “Tom, seriously, you’re missing out, Italian parliament is better than cable.” And in the early days of reality TV he was probably right.

That grand tradition of Italian government being closer to performance art rather than public policy continues today. I’m being somewhat facetious, certainly, since this game is deadly serious. Italy is a lynch pin to the grand dreams of The Davos Crowd for global social and economic dominance, so what happens there politically is vitally important to the world.

And given that the annual convocation of those would-be world rulers is happening right now in Davos, it is only fitting that changes are occurring in Italy’s ever fluid political landscape.

Since the collapse of the populist government in August when Lega’s Matteo Salvini tried to force a new election that he would win in a walk, the situation in Rome has been tense, to say the least.

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Brexit Is a Symptom, Not the Problem, by Tom Luongo

Posted on October 30, 2019 | 1 comment

The peasants are revolting in myriad ways against the plans for globalization and control their betters have for them. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:

Since the moment the votes were totaled in the June 2016 Brexit referendum there has been nothing but handwringing about what it implied. The Brexit vote showed, quite clearly, that growing political unions were unsustainable.

It was the first in a series of electoral losses where the people finally said enough to an expanding EU.

Four months later the US voted Donald Trump, of all people, into the White House, again throwing into the air another ‘two fingers up’ to the Western political establishment that wanted to break down borders and blur the lines between nation states.

Trump’s first moves were to nullify the Paris Accord on Climate Change and both the TTIP and TPP. These are all globalist, transnational treaties designed to usurp national governments and put control of the world economy into the hands of corporations with little recourse to the courts for those harmed.

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Italy: Mass Legalization of Migrants is Suicidal, by Giulio Meiotti

Posted on October 29, 2019 | 2 comments

Displacement of a native population by an immigrant population is no longer just a theoretical prospect; it’s happening in Italy right now. From Giulio Meiotti at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • “In my son’s kindergarten there is a serious integration problem, I have to take him away”…. At the time of enrollment, Mohamed explained, they had seen drawings with flags of all nationalities in the school, but, “when we arrived at school the first day, we found ourselves in a class with all foreign children. The teachers are even struggling to pronounce the children’s names.
  • The migrant reception center on the island of Lampedusa, the front line of Italy’s migration crisis, is now in a state of “collapse” due to the rapidly rising numbers of arrivals.
  • “The lifestyle of the migrants will be ours”. — Laura Boldrini, former president of Italy’s Parliament; Il Giornale, 2015.
  • Will Italians integrate into the new culture of the migrants?
  • With a native population already shrinking, if Italy is open to the mass legalization of migrants, we should be aware that it will be culturally suicidal.

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Posted in Collapse, demographics, Economy, Governments, Immigration, Politics

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Italy: Salvini Out, Migrants In, by Soeren Kern

Posted on September 28, 2019 | 1 comment

The new government in Italian is throwing open the gates for immigrants. From Soeren Kern at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • During just the past several weeks, the number of migrant arrivals to Italy has increased incrementally…. Many of the new arrivals are reaching Italy by using new people-smuggling routes that originate in Turkey.
  • The interior ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Malta met on September 23 in the Maltese capital, Valletta, where they agreed to a tentative proposal for shipwrecked migrants to be “voluntarily redistributed” throughout the European Union…. Similar proposals have failed in the past and there is no reason to believe this one will be different, largely because the concept of European solidarity is a myth. So far only six EU states have agreed to migrant redistribution: France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain.
  • NGOs such as Open Arms claim to be playing an invaluable humanitarian role in saving the lives of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war and oppression in their home countries. Statistics show something else entirely.

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Italy and Salvini Face Real Crisis Now, by Tom Luongo

Posted on August 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

Italian politics would be a tempest in a teapot except Italy is a significant part of the EU, it has a lot of debt, and its banking system is a mess. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

With the resignation of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte the future of Italy is now up in the air. There are many things that come into play with Conte resigning before the No-Confidence vote tabled by Lega Leader Matteo Salvini could take place.

The euro popped 40 pips, back above support at $1.11 on the news. The forex markets realize this was a Brussels-friendly move.

Conte didn’t want to chance getting voted out of office. That makes it difficult for President Sergei Mattarella to call for a new government without snap elections. The Italian Senate would have formally rebuked Mattarella’s compromise pick for Prime Minister, Conte.

Conte was there to effectively keep the children in line – Euroskeptics Lega and Five Star Movement (M5S). So, Conte used his time to take the bully pulpit and excoriate Salvini for twenty minutes. This gives the U.S. and European media plenty of chum to make their case against Salvini.

You will hear a lot about how non-partisan Conte did this for the sake of Italy to stop the mad, selfish and unprofessional Salvini from taking power.

It’s good political theater but it’s as disingenuous as the day is long and very much the truth. No one in power in Brussels wants what Salvini is selling. Not many in Rome do either.

Because had he not resigned Mattarella could have faced impeachment for not going to elections. He only relented to let M5S and Lega take power under that threat last year.

So Conte has set the stage for Mattarella to take charge again. They will put the veneer of legitimacy on this process to protect Italy from Salvini. In reality, the only people they are protecting are in Brussels.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Debt, Economy, Geopolitics, Governments

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Can Salvini Beat the Italian Troika? by Tom Luongo

Posted on August 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

What happens in Italy is important because the country has a lot of debt and a tottering banking system. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:

Italian leader Matteo Salvini is in the headlines again, now openly threatening divorce with his coalition partner, Five Star Movement (M5S).

Salvini unleashed another round of rhetorical bombs at M5S to get on them board with his part of the agenda. But that seems to have failed and he is now prepared to go to Parliament and withdraw his party, Lega, from the coalition government which will lead to new elections.

He had put off any kind of talk of new elections in the past because the opinion polling wasn’t strong enough to grant Lega the kind of majority it needed to govern without strings.

The coalition is dead but it may not matter.

The biggest problem Salvini faced, however, wasn’t M5S’s internal strife and contradictions. His biggest obstacle lies in the Troika of Technocrats that hold all the real power in Italy as it pertains to the European Union.

That Troika is President Sergei Mattarella, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Finance Minister Giovanni Tria and they are the problem, as I wrote back in June.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti and Economy Minister Giovanni Tria are in open revolt against the coalition leaders over the upcoming budget fight with the EU.

Reuters is reporting this morning that these two are working together to undermine the internal reforms Salvini is proposing to spur economic growth from the ground up by instituting a flat tax and spending a whopping $3 billion more than Brussels wants them to on rebuilding crumbling Italian infrastructure.

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Who Killed Oscar and Valeria: The Inconvenient History of the Refugee Crisis, by Ramzy Baroud

Posted on July 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

Western nations complain refugees flows from countries they’ve bombed, made war in, and otherwise screwed up. From Ramzy Baroud at antiwar.com:

History never truly retires. Every event of the past, however inconsequential, reverberates throughout and, to an extent, shapes our present, and our future as well

The haunting image of the bodies of Salvadoran father, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria, who were washed ashore at a riverbank on the Mexico-US border cannot be understood separately from El Salvador’s painful past.

Valeria’s arms were still wrapped around her father’s neck, even as both lay, face down, dead on the Mexican side of the river, ushering the end of their desperate and, ultimately, failed attempt at reaching the US. The little girl was only 23-months-old.

Following the release of the photo, media and political debates in the US focused partly on Donald Trump’s administration’s inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants. For Democrats, it was a chance at scoring points against Trump, prior to the start of presidential election campaigning. Republicans, naturally, went on the defensive.

Aside from a few alternative media sources, little has been said about the US role in Oscar and Valeria’s deaths, starting with its funding of El Salvador’s “dirty war” in the 1980s. The outcome of that war continues to shape the present, thus the future of that poor South American nation.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Immigration, Imperialism

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Italy’s Mini-BOT Trojan Horse Could Blow Up the Eurozone, by Mike “Mish” Shedlock

Posted on June 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

Italy shows no sign of folding like the Greeks did a few years back when they took on the EU. From Mike “Mish” Shedlock at money-maven.io:

Italy threatens to create a parallel currency dubbed the Mini-BOT. If launched, it could lead to a Eurozone breakup.

Italy’s is on a collision course with the EU in two different ways. The first regards Italy’s budget.

Outgoing European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warns Italy faces an “Excessive Deficit Procedure” and may be fined billions of euros. No country has ever been fined. This is the first time a country has faced such a ruling.

France regularly breaks the deficit rules but “France is France” as Juncker once stated.

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