The Dangers of Over-riding Democratic Voting Outcomes in Europe

Many of the countries of continental Europe suffer from a disgraceful 20th century political history and a default political position which is authoritarian:  either communist collectivist or fascist corporatist.  In this they are unlike the United Kingdom, whose default political position is representative parliamentary democracy expounding conservative,  liberal, or social democratic  views through its political parties;  the installation of a dictatorship in the UK is neither likely nor facilitated by its mind set, constitutional form or institutions.

Italy provides a specific case of this broad-brush assessment.  Italy's governance was dominated overtly by fascist corporatism between 1922 and 1943, and it has been branded ever since by a self-righteous and self-justifying communist collectivism from 1943 to the present day.  Anti-communism has been made up of externally applied encouragement, a subterranean fascism under various other names, and governmental co-operation with organised criminality that derives from even before the 20th century and which,  as a cultural rather than political phenomenon, is ineradicable.   The collectivism wing of authoritarianism has flourished too with the considerable regional independence enjoyed within the Peninsula's weak central state and, in the second half of the 20th and in this century, with  total commitment to a 'progressivist' European Union.

As a topping to this authoritarian mish-mash there is false history and consciousness actively reinforced by laws, schooling, media, and acceptable expression of opinion that fascist corporatism is 'bad' and communist collectivism is 'good' (though kept from national power by shadowy 'right-wing' forces).  That both are disreputable and murderous destroyers of life chances and living standards and on a par with one another is a stance unacceptable to both.   When the last elections returned as the largest parliamentary group  a direct democracy,  participatory movement,  the rampage through the institutions and through the Italian Constitution by the collectivist, corporatist and criminal factions was visceral and immediate.  Led by the outgoing head of state, a noted, historical collectivist-authoritarian, power was guided into  the  hands of a progressivist, European Union-acceptable leader.

Unfortunately today's reality (so often referred to by Rajoy of Spain) requires that Italy's economic depression be alleviated immediately. Not next year, not in the medium term, not with the expansion of employment 'opportunities' for the 'young', not by a continued credit denial to the SME, backbone of Italian industry,  not by declarations from the European Central Bank about whatever it takes to defend the destructive disciplines of internal devaluation.  And the default governance option in Italy as a continental European state is not voting Conservative instead of Liberal or Labour.   The default option is Popular, its demise regretted by many more than are permitted by political correctness-speak to say so,  demonstrably effective in instigating economic growth and, more worryingly, in arousing loyalty; its voters and its leaders are already in situ, as are its policies and its targets. The default option is fascism. 

At the recent local elections half of those eligible to vote did not.  This is not a stable-state in Italian political behaviour  (and the assumption by the collectivist authoritarians that they have recouped their voters lost at the last general elections, and that the 50% absentee count is made up entirely of others,   is as dishonest as it is silly.  We didn't vote because the Five Stars didn't meet - or more accurately  was prevented from meeting -  our policy requirements and political demands.  We had already deserted a communist-led Democratic party. ) The collapse of the PD vote was confirmed, not reversed.   

Those missing actors in the democratic process have had their democratic faith savagely destroyed as the democratic process itself has been destroyed.  There will now be a short intermission (to borrow a phrase) but the profound political instability in Italy, coupled with wilfully induced economic depression  threatens the EU and Eurozone elites more now than  before our election of a direct democracy movement instigated a collectivist  coup.

Germany Protests to Italy Over Granting Refugee Status and 500 euros to Sub-Saharans Provided They Head for Hamburg

Granting refugee statuses and rights to remain to non-EU citizens by individual EU member states  but applicable across the European Union  is causing growing tensions within the Schengen area now, but will affect non-Schengen member states too.

Italy was flooded with refugees from the war in Libya, many of them sub-saharan Africans who worked in North Africa until the war.  They fled, particularly the West Africans, not back to their own countries,  but across the Mediterranean where they were landed (or were picked out of the water by the Italians) by the people traffickers,  and went into reception centres.  Many absconded (mostly the North Africans) making their way via Ventimiglia and across the French border to communities of fellow countrymen in France, and other European countries.  Some 13,000 Sub-Saharans remain in the reception centres and Germany has now officially complained that Italy is granting a three-month leave to remain in the EU and sending them on their way to Hamburg with a ticket and 500 euros.  The German Interior ministry notes that these migrants have no claim to settle in Germany, nor  access to any welfare provision or occupation.  Their countries - Nigeria, Ghana, Togo are democratic and at peace.

Well, say the Italians, you can send them back when the the 3-month leave to remain is up.  We are in the front line for receiving African migrants because we're nearest to Africa but the whole of Europe must be involved in responding to African migration.

The appointment of a minister in the Letta government whose principal aim is the immediate introduction of the right to Italian (and thus EU) citizenship conferred simply by being born in Italy compounds the complexity.  At the moment Italian migration controls are internal - without citizenship access to the social state is severely limited, even for education, health and what social housing there is; so while it's relatively easy to get into Italy it's very hard, attractive as Italy is,  to live here or even stay here on support.  Accordingly most migrants move on immediately to other states,  if they come here at all.  If the Democratic party (which has just benefitted enormously from migrants'   votes in local elections) does alter the citizenship laws  so that descent is no longer the main criterion for citizenship, the other constitutionally-imposed rights and duties of an Italian citizen will kick-in  (mostly concerned with inter-generational claims to support and residence).  Although Italy will remain a relatively unattractive stopping-place for migrants, however.  Its  Italian-by-descent citizens receive little in direct welfare payments, social housing, or payments to the unemployed in comparison with northern European EU member-states.  And it is in the deepest recession since 1945 with high and stable unemployment rates.

The migrants to Germany are clustering at Hamburg - it is the state of Hamburg which is making the immediate representations  demanding that encouraging the transfer of migrants by Italy should stop and, not least, that Italy should stop issuing right to remain permits to people from peaceful democratic countries; as well, the German Federal Government has issued a confidential circular to all German states warning  that Italy is exporting migrants who cannot qualify as refugees.

Refugee status, leave to remain, let alone citizenship of an EU member state are very valuable and, for welfare providers, very costly entities.  Perhaps they should not be left within the grasp of political parties manoeuvering for votes in single states of the EU.


UPDATE

We haven't done anything! -  the Italians are denying breaking any rules.  The Germans point to the website of the Italian ministry of the Interior which states that 5,700  extra-communitari  have now left the reception centres with their 500 euros,  permissions to remain in the Schengen area, and tickets (where-to not stated).  Hamburg says 300 migrants are living on the streets in Hamburg right now.

  

Crisis of Democracy in Italy Worsens

The imposed government of Italy now states openly its intention of any democratic vote being ignored.

"Whatever is the result of  local elections the government must go forward as if nothing has happened."*

The prime minister from the Democratic party and the deputy prime minister from Berlusconi's People of Liberty party have a signed agreement to circumvent from the centre any effects of their respective parties loss of influence locally after the elections.  The vote is to be ignored.   Voting closes today for the elections for the mayor of Rome and for the mayor of Siena (to name the most significant - Rome because it is the capital and its mayor has extensive power and political importance,  Siena because it is the heartland, and was the financial, banking-driven power house, of the Democratic party after funding ceased from the USSR in 1992 until the scandals engulfing the Monti dei Paschi and  its Foundation this year and ongoing).

Voters are deserting the elections en masse.  In Rome there is a 20% fall in votes cast on the first day of the ballot, which closes at 3pm today.  Across the country double-digit falls in voter numbers are being recorded.  Presumably most of the deserting electorate are former Democratic party supporters who have been betrayed  by their elected representatives both in the elections to the presidency of the Republic with the refusal to support either Romano Prodi or Stefano Rodota' for the presidency and the reimposition of Napolitano,  and in the acceptance of a regime then imposed by Napolitano and sustained in office by deals between extra-parliamentary as well as parliamentary minorities to maintain an EU-sanctioned status quo.

Meanwhile we are now back to standards of living last seen 40 years ago as a direct result of  obsessional adherence to European Union  agendas and priorities.

UPDATE

Only 1 out of 2 voted in Rome.

In this photograph packages of unused ballots wait to be returned to the electoral returning officer for Pisa where the same unheard-of turnout was registered.


* "Qualunque sia il risultato delle amministrative, il governo dovrà andare avanti come se nulla fosse".

Motherhood and Gay Marriage

In most societies, in most of time,  the status of women is defined by their unique ability to bear children.  That ability extends beyond conception and childbirth.  Bearing children doesn't begin to be encompassed wholly in those two acts; socially, and probably biologically,  motherhood rests with us for life.  And our children's lives too will embody our motherhood, whatever form it has taken.  Including our absence.

Men who choose life partners in marriage who are men choose also relationships with the mother for any children born into such marriages.  There are cultures where the inability to bear children (including those where no female is available in the correct marriage kinship category) is met with various solutions, concubinage being the most common and, once, widely accepted.   Now even concubinage is displaced by an outright denial of any special natural link between mother and child in surrogacy.  Surrogacy does not have the minimal social elaborations and protections afforded to concubinage.

Gay marriage strips away the socially-constructed but naturally-generated statuses that motherhood confers on women.  Usually, and in all current same-sex marriage institutional arrangements,  surrogate-birth women are denied any social role engendered by natural requirements.  If surrogate-birth women do have any social statuses proffered to them these are entirely within the gift of the gay spouses.  Payment extinguishes any rights in motherhood for both mother and child in gay marriage even if, occasionally and entirely one-sidedly, other arrangements are set up.

The proponents of gay marriage are not demanding equal status with marriage.   They are seeking the cancellation of what many would see as the  purpose of marriage: the procreation of children and the social affirmation of the status of women as equal partners in their creation and upbringing.  

Pressure to Re-think the European Union Still Coming from Italy's Largest Single Parliamentary Gouping

"The European Union should be re-thought.  We are planning an  information year [on the current European Union] and then instigating a referendum on Yes or No to the Euro and Yes or No to the European Union.  The English are teaching us democracy.  No party may arrogate the right to decide for 60 million people."*

The Five Star Movement has taken up again its central electoral campaign policy of  putting the destruction of Italy's economy and democracy by the European Union's elites to direct democratic vote.  This, of course, is the cause of the savage exclusion - at any constitutional and  ethical cost - of the largest, single, elected group in the Italian Parliament from power.

Expect the amputation of the ability to impose a binding referendum by the submission of half a million peoples' signatures;  either by  the extra-Parliamentary committee of appointed  constitutional 'experts' acting through the Constitutional Court, or a declaratory law from the presidentially-imposed Executive, in the near future.


*L’Europa va ripensata. Noi consideriamo di fare un anno di informazione e poi di indire un referendum per dire sì o no all’Euro e sì o no all’Europa».     «Sull’Euro e sull’Europa gli inglesi ci insegnano la democrazia. Nessun partito può arrogarsi il diritto di decidere per 60 milioni di persone». 

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.