Milena Velba Back In Office

BERLUSCONI AL Potter Survive. WILL ITALY?

Silvio Berlusconi, that uniquely talented survival expert and corruptor of men, has once again succeeded in dragging Italy down to his own moral level. After many weeks of trying to “persuade” opposition politicians—in part by immoderate offers of government pork, and in part (if allegations in the Italian papers are to be believed) by straight-out bribes—he won yesterday morning’s confidence vote in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies by the narrowest of margins.

Over the course of the day, Italy descended deeper and deeper into chaos, violence, and self-destruction. The country’s rollercoaster ride toward the abyss is sure to continue today. If things go very badly, the whole continent may ultimately be dragged along.

Here is a brief play-by-play of Italy’s very recent, its present, and its future horrors.

EARLY YESTERDAY, thousands of students peacefully protested against a government that has been so obsessed with its own political and legal troubles that it is impossible to say whether its total neglect of Italy’s deep problems stems from incompetence or indifference. Meanwhile, a corrupt political class yet again delivered its ailing country into the hands of a self-serving buffoon.

Later in the day, extremists hijacked the student protests and wreaked havoc on the center of Rome. Their violence was stupid, immoral—and painfully counterproductive. But, hearing the protestors’ long-ignored chants, I find it impossible not to feel a little sympathy for their anger.

After all, their lack of prospects for the future is real. They have tried, in vain, to find a place for themselves in a country that has long since turned into a hedonistic playground for the rich and powerful. They realize and resent that nepotism and rent-seeking are the only realistic ways for them to get ahead. They are impotently railing against a country so devoid of meritocracy that raw talent, if it consists in good looks and big boobs, will get you invited to the prime minister’s bunga-bunga parties; but in which, if your talents consist in intelligence and moral scruples, you will get nowhere at all.

Meanwhile, on live TV, Berlusconi is sitting next to Bruno Vespa, the country’s most popular media personality. Vespa is enthusiastically congratulating his dear friend Silvio on yet another political triumph.

THIS MORNING, with yesterday’s violence having subsided, the government’s crisis drags on among fresh political intrigue. For, Italy being Italy, the parliament’s vote of confidence in Berlusconi has actually resolved nothing at all. That there is no majority against Berlusconi does not signify, in the country’s strange political arithmetic, that there is a stable majority for Berlusconi. Even less does it mean that the government has the votes to introduce the real reforms that are necessary to overcome Italy’s severe economic crisis.

Realizing this, the opposition will call Berlusconi’s bare survival a Pyrrhic victory. But this is just as wrong as the triumphalism of the Right. In a Pyrrhic victory, the forces of the victor are considerably weakened and those of his opponents emboldened. Berlusconi’s ability to bully and cajole Italy’s political caste into yet another round of submission to his every wish, however, demonstrates just how divided his enemies are.

In short, Berlusconi’s narrow victory may have exposed his underlying weakness. But it has harmed his two foremost opponents—the center-left opposition and Gianfranco Fini, Berlusconi’s former ally and current archenemy—even more severely.

The next months are thus difficult to predict. At one level, everything is completely up in the air. Berlusconi might try to persuade another party, like the Catholic Unione di Centro , temporarily to join his government. Alternatively, he might try to wait out the next no-confidence vote and survive it by means of yet another round of dirty deals. Or else, he might call new elections.

Two things, however, seem clear despite this uncertainty. First, the prospects for getting rid of Berlusconi are probably worse now than they have been at any time over the last year. Unbelievable as this might sound, even new elections probably wouldn’t produce a clear anti-Berlusconi majority at this point. Second, and no less worrying, Berlusconi, even though he will formally remain in power, seems less likely than ever to assemble a coalition with which he could actually govern .

ITALY’S NEXT year will, in all likelihood, turn out to be just one more painful confirmation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s prediction, in The Leopard , that everything can change even as things stay the way they are. However eventful 2011 may prove for Italian politics, in all the ways that really matter the country will probably remain paralyzed.

Yet there is also the risk, posed by globalized financial markets and therefore never considered by Lampedusa (who died in 1957), that when things stay the way they are for too long, everything might suddenly change—for the catastrophically worse.

Until today, the most realistic scenario for the demise of the euro was Spain defaulting. But while Spain’s economic data is in some ways worse than Italy’s, its government has proven able to respond with earnest efforts at political reform. Italy’s government, by contrast, has done little to avoid a looming confidence crisis over the last months, and may not be in a state to do much more in the coming months, either.

After today, it thus seems to me that Europeans worried about the stability of the euro should fearfully look at Italy, not Spain. Italy defaulting, while still unlikely, has just become a whole lot more plausible.

Berlusconi looks set to survive yet another political crisis. It is less certain, however, how well Italy, and indeed Europe, will survive Berlusconi’s ability to survive all political Crises. YASCHA MOUNK (http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=331)

Gallbladder Dill Pickles

3, THE CRIME FERPECT

of habit and inertia we talk about "right" even in Italy, although such a political force in the European sense of the word, we just do not exist. "Right" meant, by the end of the war to date, Churchill and De Gaulle, Thatcher and Chirac, and Germany, a tradition that goes from Adenauer to Kohl, and then Angela Merkel (the "center" does not exist). Is there any track of the values \u200b\u200band behavior of these personalities can be identified in Silvio Berlusconi and his nearly two decades of political activity? Even with a scanning electron microscope.

"Right" in Europe has meant and means liberal-conservative parties that insist on the almost obsessive sense of the state and institutions, the unity of the nation (always capitalized), the reaffirmation uncompromising and even punitive the law (what is more executioner of the policy is flaunting "law and order"?). On the economic positions are more varied, from free "hard and pure "Mrs Thatcher to full-bodied implants solidarism the CDU, to the real social and coté is often state-of Gaullism, but common hostility to the principle of private monopolies (abc obvious and intractable of all liberalism).

it becomes obvious that Berlusconi and Berlusconi have nothing to do with the right in the European sense of the word. The draft Berlusconi - from the outset - that of a system that removes the separation of powers, independence of the judiciary that humble obedience to political power, which establishes a dependency between plebiscite "the people" and leader, which reduces to a mere simulacrum of freedom of information, so that the Chapter and its cliques "to do" without more checks and balances of any kind. For this, for years, we argue that the substance of Berlusconi and Putin. For anyone who had "ears to hear" it was impossible not to notice, since the fateful day of "down the pitch."

Who chatter about a bet / promise of "liberal revolution" by Berlusconi, who later failed or forgotten / trade (sum of the genre specialists Galli della Loggia and the Ostellino), simply did not want to see what Berlusconi with his behavior, and with infinite "Voices from sen fled", spread from the very beginning of his adventure: a vocation to the irrepressible master scheme of institutions, public affairs and politics. Berlusconi on the "liberal" was not wrong, they were so brazen and exhibited its anti-Constitutional intentions. Assuming good faith in those who wanted to peddle a ridiculous legend for years, it would fall into the most virulent blame coryphaei cheerleader and incurable blindness, a mammoth stupidity.

The Gianfranco Fini, who now definitively breaks with Berlusconi is precisely the project of creating in Italy a European-style conservative right. His decision has matured over many years. Too many, of course. But Fini and the handful of leaders who followed him were from fascism, let us not forget, and a genuine conversion from "eia eia alal" to liberal democracy is not the case with the rapidity of a fall from a horse on the road to Damascus. Moreover, therein lies the explanation of the (many) years in which Fini did guardiaspalla shoulder prosthesis and the construction of the Putin regime Berlusconi. Fini, Berlusconi has a very rapid "clearance" (the Communist Party to get it partially, and although it was fully co-founder of the Italian Republic, had to suffer for some forty years after the de-Stalinization), its legitimacy was so (too) long sequestered (voluntary) safe in Arcore.

Fini can now do it? The right of coinage Europe has in mind can be successful? With Berlusconi every conflict is a zero-sum, this repeat it unnecessarily for years. The compromises are not possible, or he is sent home (in fact the right place would be the jail) or being crushed. The condition "sine qua non" for a European right is so full dismantling of Berlusconi, Italy's liberation of debris that is moral, cultural, social and institutional, in which Berlusconi and his cliques have reduced it. Berlusconi, against Fini, its not just a giant fire power corrupt, but also almost the entire past history of Italy. The lack of an autonomous civil society: a business "parasitic", a middle class that "brings the intrigue about and manifests a" primitive psychology, from pirates and slavers speculators "that produces" an era of corruption and decadence in morals, "as the liberal stigmatized Piero Gobetti, which is no coincidence that the" liberal revolution "(the real one) relied on the alliance with the workers' councils supported by Gramsci.

all the more difficult to build today, a right liberal in Italy, where the traditional European Right immunized by the sirens seem less and less-authoritarian populist and compromises with commercialism Kombinat of speculative finance junkie (and polluted by recycling) of soft racism (and sometimes hard), hostility to free journalism and "non olet" to the mafia. Since its collapse, however, Fini Berlusconi in which the country is plummeting, the levels of third-rate corrupt world of disinformation, the mass of inculturation, which have already triggered the economic decline. Too bad that in this clash is still missing the left. Paolo Flores d'Arcais

Can Chickenpox Cause Infertility To Women

PARENTOPOLI SU MARTE

Executioner who spring, he shouted at the young end of the eighties Gianni Alemanno, at the time head of the Youth Front and Pine Rauti loyalist leader wing movementists MSI and future father in law.

Twenty years later, no one can accuse him of inconsistency: Gianni, became mayor of Rome, did not give up anyone. Did not disappoint, did not leave the street the old comrades, even those jailed for armed gang and terrorist acts, even the most controversial characters in the galaxy far-right character of the years of lead. Indeed.

the year of grace 2010 Rome is increasingly black, by fascists and former fascists sprouting everywhere. In the city administration and key places in the entourage of the new small Dux, Capitoline and its subsidiaries in the assembly by the City, through regional bodies and ministries.

old friends have appeared also in parentopoli that hit the Atac, where they work - as written by Ernesto Menicucci "Corriere" - former White Nar Francis (formerly arrested and tried for robbery and murder with his brothers Fioravanti, was released from prison for running of time) and the former position of Third Gianluca Ponzio. Pontius is now head of the Industrial Relations Department of the City municipal, in the eighties was the protagonist of multiple arrests for robbery and possession of weapons.

The left has cried foul, but the two are just the tip of the iceberg of a group of power ever more entrenched in the city, cemented by the ideals and the old membership , interest (including economic) relations and friendship and family. The list includes former militants Third position and Nuclei armed revolutionary force of new men, close to the gang of skinheads Gennaro Mokbel, the historical leaders of National Vanguard, ultras fights and fighters of the seventies and eighties. Wrought surprise Francesco Rutelli, Italy disintegrated the powerful force (already been sorely tested during the regional government led by Francesco Storace) are now in the control booth, and very dark in the capital, commanding them. Emiliano Fittipaldi