""
Italy
Wed, 2013-11-27 16:53
#1
Italy
Wed, 2013-11-27 16:55
#2
Finally & good riddance!
Now put him in jail where he belongs.
Berlusconi expelled from Italian parliament over tax fraud
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/berlusconi-faces-expulsion-parliament-tax-fraud...
Wed, 2013-11-27 18:04
#3
I believe ole' Silvio is past the maximum age for incarceration.
Wed, 2013-11-27 19:43
#4
Is there really such a thing in Italy lagatta? That would really be a shame! 
Wed, 2013-11-27 20:52
#5
A shame, yes and no. It stems from humanitarian ideas, and the fact that most very elderly prisoners, say your ordinary thieves or murderers, are pretty harmless in their dotage. There is a similar provision in Argentina, and as a result Videla, one of the leaders of the junta, was under house arrest. Problem is, he continued with fascist utterances and threats, so he is in some kind of secure facility now.
I wonder if Italy has any similar provisions for elderly mafiosi, who are good at running things, even if they can barely move.
Thu, 2013-11-28 14:29
#6
This story is up there with the Rob Ford stuff. Silvio Berlusconi's 28-year-old girlfriend is appealing for Pope Francis to help clear Silvio's name:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/silvio-berlusconi-pope-fran...
Mon, 2018-03-05 08:20
#7
A majority of Italian voters have supported Eurosceptic candidates in the national election, preliminary results showed, after decades in which Italy has steadfastly championed the European project.
Early results released by the interior ministry on Monday morning, as ballots continued to be counted, pointed to a hung parliament, though there was still a possibility that the centre-right coalition, with about 37% of the vote, could secure a majority once parliamentary seats are allocated.
Mon, 2018-03-05 09:09
#8
Another example of a PR country that proponents don't use.
Mon, 2018-03-05 16:17
#9
Pondering, is PR about giving the people control of their government, or about manipulating results?
Is PR bad because it allows a populace to elect right wing governments if they so choose?
Would a system that doesn't reflect the will of the people be better, if it protects them from the right?
Mon, 2018-03-05 17:41
#10
Pondering, is PR about giving the people control of their government, or about manipulating results?
I'm not answering for Pondering here, but I'd say "giving the people the control of their government".
But her question isn't unreasonable, either. Why NOT use Italy as an example of the awesomeness of PR? The people wanted a right wing government and they got it, yes? How is that not a win for PR?
Is PR bad because it allows a populace to elect right wing governments if they so choose?
Not at all. Which is why PR supporters can feel free to use Italy as an example.
Thu, 2018-05-10 11:55
#11
Italian Bonds, Stocks Slide As Populist Parties On Verge Of Forming Euroskeptic Government
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/10/2018 - 09:30
29
Chaos has returned to Italy and, appropriately, it has once again started with the bad boy of Italian politics, Silvio Berlusconi, the same flamboyant playboy-cum-former prime minister who back in 2011 nearly withdrew Italy from the Eurozone and only a flagrant political intervention by the ECB prevented the collapse of the European experiment.
As we reported yesterday, in a statement published late on Wednesday night in Italy, Berlusconi changed his long-standing position, and said he'd be open to an agreement between the League and the Five-Star Movement (otherwise known as M5S) to form a ruling coalition that wouldn't include his center-right party, Forza Italia. And so, with his blessing, on Thursday the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League were on the verge of forming a Eurosceptic government in which Europe's third largest economy would be the latest to succumb to the populist wave unleashed by a decade of central bank errors and record income and wealth disparity.
The two leaders wasted no time, and Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star leader, and Matteo Salvini, the League leader, promptly met to try to iron out details of a potential agreement, including who become next prime minister. Key cabinet positions, including the finance ministry and foreign ministry, were also being discussed according to the FT.
Sat, 2018-05-12 11:52
#12
EU's Worst Nightmare
The Express describes the EU's Worst Nightmare as Eurosceptics Join Forces.
One of the first things the two parties are likely to agree on will be to scrap a 2011 pension reform which raised the retirement age and required further hikes over time. Economists say repealing the law would cost 20 billion euros ($24 billion) a year, but opponents say it is unfair on ordinary Italians.
Both parties also want to renegotiate the EU's fiscal rules to allow Italy to spend more. 5-Star has rowed back on a pledge to hold a referendum on Italy's membership of the eurozone, but the League still calls the euro a "flawed currency" and wants to exit it as soon as is politically feasible.
Setting up a possible institutional clash in Italy, President Mattarella made clear on Thursday that he did not want to see any confrontation with Brussels.
"To think that one can go-it-alone in Europe is knowingly deceptive in front of public opinion," Mattarella said in a pointedly pro-European speech at a conference on the state of the European Union in the central town of Fiesole.
...an interesting mix of so called right and left policies...but sovereignty is definitely on the table....Italy, Hungary, Catalunya, Brexit come to mind.....where is Canada?
Where are our movements to build alternatives to neoliberalism?
Sat, 2018-05-12 13:48
#13
They’re there. But they are hampered by those on the “left” who still believe in things like the EU and so-called free trade agreements.
Sat, 2018-05-12 15:43
#14
They’re there. But they are hampered by those on the “left” who still believe in things like the EU and so-called free trade agreements.
You're right about neoliberalism. The issue with the EU and the Left, however, is that a lot of the Left, or at least the center-left in the UK and Europe see the EU as the only institution that can offer protections against racism/sexism/homophobia-transphobia/Islamophobia/xenophobia in Europe-that if the EU ended, if the European Court of Human Rights were abolished(which I assume would have to happen if the EU was wound up), no meaningful protections would exist for any historically oppressed and currently vulnerable communities in the UK and Europe. Is ANYBODY on the anti-EU Left addressing the problem how how to fight all of that once the protections against it the EU offers are removed? And what would you to those who'd argue, based on many events in European history, that it may not be possible to fight against those forms of repression working solely within the bounds of the nation-state? This matters because if the EU vanished, for a very long time afterwords the nation-state would be the only political unit within the UK and the other EU countries. At the moment, it seems very hard to believe that a Europe without the EU could ever be a place where hatred and bigotry could be put in check, let alone defeated, it looks as though there would be no way to even come close to stopping Poland and Hungary from going full on fascist, for example.
Are we seeing any of the anti-EU Left in Europe mobilizing to protect the people who'd be put at risk by...well I guess the word would be... "Endit"? Are any anti-EU Left groups even proposing strategies to deal with that series of problems?
Address that, and I think you'd end virtually all Left or even center-left support for the EU.
Sat, 2018-05-12 16:20
#15
Not familiar enough to comment. But countries are capable of passing their own human rights legislation. And this is one of the tactics of the neo-liberal power structure. They don’t care about social issues. They use these issues as a way to suck in social progressives as a means of accomplishing what they really do care about, namely, market rule.
Sat, 2018-05-12 19:44
#16
They don’t care about social issues. They use these issues as a way to suck in social progressives as a means of accomplishing what they really do care about, namely, market rule....
whew...thank you for this!
Yes it is crucial that left progressives engage in building alternatives to globalization!
Sun, 2018-05-13 22:22
#17
They don’t care about social issues. They use these issues as a way to suck in social progressives as a means of accomplishing what they really do care about, namely, market rule....
whew...thank you for this!
Yes it is crucial that left progressives engage in building alternatives to globalization!
Agreed. I was just saying that addressing the issues I mentioned there is PART of building those alternatives. Somebody's going to have to figure out, for example, how it will ever be possible to stop Poland and Hungary from completing their continuing transition to fascism in a disunited Europe.