Fire!

Everything beyond the crest of the hills surrounding the ecohouse has burned. Woods of cypress trees interspersed with Mediterranean pines, and oak, underbrush of juniper, cistus, wild orchids, roses - all blackened ash.  The animals that made it out look at us from our woodland, seeking water and resting places.  And we were lucky.  The wind drove the fire away from our woods to devour hectares and hectares of classic Tuscan landscape the other side of the hills.  We can't even see the devastation just over our skyline - but we can smell it.

All day long the firefighters, the Canadair, the helicopters, gouged fire breaks through  secolare landscapes, emptied every site with standing water (the Arno is dry from bank to bank) every swimming pool, as the spotter planes circled, looked for fresh outbreaks.  People were being evacuated from settlements and farms, and we were checking that we had everything important and the Landie keys on the shelf by the door ready to take the back route to the village through the olive groves on the  rough white  roads, so painstakingly restored over the last decade.

The sky was black with smoke and underlit by the flames, with a shimmering in the air from the heat.  What we didn't realise was the sky was black too from  an enormous thunder cloud that burst over the whole nightmare of burning effort and lives, of men and animals.  It hadn't rained since last June but water sluiced down so hard and so cold it hurt to be under it.  Which we weren't as soon as the lightning started landing in what felt like the garden.  So the fires were doused, the roads turned to river beds and we couldn't have got out then because of the mud. 

Where that rain came from with such force is unexplained to non-meteorological mortals (and Angels).  The blasting heat is back and the woods have dried again to tinder-boxes.  The fire was set deliberately, as are most.  Someone knows who did that and, I am told, their family will be made to pay - not by the magistrates and other authorities but by a threatening (and so  threatened) community.  I'm unsure which is the more scary: the burning of the countryside or the burning of the whole extended family of the fire-setter.

Angels are Hooligans Too

'That the Pussy Riot members and the Syrian revolutionaries are both being described with a Soviet term of opprobrium drawn from British anti-Irish racist stereotypes points to the staid, conventional banality of evil that lurks in Vladimir Putin’s notion of order.'

Juan Cole provides a video of Pussy Riot's 'hooligan' performance that so riled the religious Russians as well.  The emergence of Russian religious and their hanger's-on - the fat, over-painted women, the fat, though unpainted priests, is noted by anyone who has been at those shindigs thrown by oligarchs and wannabes in Russia itself and various global holiday resorts.

Severe Self-love

Absolutely.

'Nietzsche loathed capitalism and capitalists (and the cultural and aesthetic vulgarity he saw as their legacy) and also despised what he called "the selfishness of the sick" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and the "self-interested cattle and mob" (Will to Power).  What he admired was "severe self-love," the kind "most profoundly necessary for growth" (Ecce Homo).  "Virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality"--all the things "for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth" (Beyond Good and Evil)--all demand such severe self-love, and for this reason, and this reason only, Nietzsche wanted to disabuse those capable of such excellences of their false consciousness about the morality of altruism.'

Not Angels' writing.  Angels' syntax isn't transparent enough, prose clear or simple enough.  It's here:
the usual suspect.

Luther not Weimar

This is such a clear-eyed, competent view of what really guides the  falsely-named 'austerity' route to economic recovery I thought I would add Steven Ozment's

 “The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation.”

to my deckchair bookshelf for the rest of the summer.

Dancing Indians

The Prime Minister says too many schools were fulfilling the school sport target with activities like 'Indian dancing'.

So?  It looks very athletic and the music is miles better than the Olympic cacophony.

Winning the Olympics

As the medals are totted up it is worth noting that the Member States of the European Union are way out in front for medals.  Even excluding the United Kingdom* - whose people undoubtedly and with impeccable reasoning wish to leave the Union asap - Europe is still tens of golds ahead of China, the United States and Russia.

It might be argued that Europe is not competing as one nation.  True.  But the evident popular desire to remain together as Europe is a powerful argument that a majority of Europeans can be pleased that not only their individual countries but their continent  provides a sporting environment that leads the world.

Adding the medals score of the United Kingdom to the European Union medals' numbers takes Europe's achievement out of the reach of any other part of the world.  Sometimes, in the concerns over the renewal and development of the European political settlement that is generating so much financial unease, we forget that our continent is a better place than most others.

* If we count the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (including South Africa, even though) they are nearly catching the EU medal count without (most properly) the UK.

What Happened between 1997 and 2007 at the Treasury?

New Labour came to power in 1997.  One of the very earliest of its initiatives was to remove financial and regulatory control from the Governor of the Bank of England (under the guise of making the Bank 'independent') and vesting that control in the Chancellor of the Exchequer -  the Financial Services Authority was merely a circuit-breaker for the Chancellor and his Treasury.  I write 'his' Treasury because the Treasury rapidly became a personal power base and fiefdom buttressed by a narrative (however false) of  'deals' to divide Executive power between Prime Minister and Chancellor and, much worse, an embedded alternative government to the one we had elected.

Boasts of 'light-touch regulation' yielding the 'end of boom and bust' were a yearly budgetary feature in Parliament, and other public forums, throughout the years subsequent to this profound alteration in the UK power structures until the elected Prime Minister was driven from office by what was effectively a colpo di stato,  in 2007.

That deregulating the financial system did not end but positively rocket-fuelled boom and bust is our current sad understanding.  The unfolding experience and history of sub-prime lending and its subsequent  repackaged onwards-sale,  the pillaging of savings and pensions, the outrageous leverage levels undertaken by provincial building societies acting like financial tyros, and the corruption of banking and financial institutional behaviour generally may, or may not, be on the legal side of iffy.

Fixing Libor, money-laundering for international criminal organisations, and for outlawed sovereign states is, however,  beyond the Pale.  London was used as a centre for what could not be done elsewhere - either because other, off-shore centres were too small or insufficiently developed and trusted, or because  appropriate but more severely regulated financial centres wanted to use a cess pit for subprime, and the laundering of gun- and people- running, drugs, and rogue-state and rogue individuals transactions and profits.

Laundering for the State of Iran is the last straw.  The Telegraph reports that:

'Standard Chartered denies the allegation made by the New York state regulator that it carried out sanctions-busting transactions on behalf of Iranian clients totalling $250 billion over a decade.'

"Standard Chartered thinks the regulator [emphasis added, ed.] got it wrong by enforcing a view of the rules that was “incorrect as a matter of law”. 'In effect, Standard Chartered is saying ‘yes, we carried out these transactions, but we think they were within the regulations’.

The bank’s statement (again quoted by the Telegraph) emphasises too:

“Standard Chartered ceased all new business with Iranian customers in any currency over five years ago.” [emphasis added, ed.]


So, for ten years they sanctions-busted for  Iran -  content their behaviour was permissible under the rules extant in London -  to the tune of $250 billion.  Over 5 years takes us back to before August 2007.   In June 2007 a new Chancellor of the Exchequer took office and a horribly old and familiar 'new' prime minister moved into No 10.   The ten previous years then take us to 1997.   In 1997 that same 'new' Prime Minister had moved into the Treasury, nursing the strong but inappropriate belief that he should be the prime minister.

The kinds of services that have been provided by the City of London  - the UK's major industry -  do not come cheap.   So where are the returns?  Ill-gotten returns, certainly, but if we agreed, and we did, to lift the regulation, at least let's see the money.  Except what we see is PFI off-balance sheet debt: the hospitals'n'schools, the wilful expansion of state sector employment on inappropriately high wages and benefits, the whole  client state,  has not even been bought outright.  We are in grotesque levels of debt for all of that.

There really does need to be an Inquiry into the conduct of economic and financial and regulatory policy between 1997 and 2007.  This is not a banker scandal.  It is a political scandal whose ramifications are being uncovered by the regulatory authorities of foreign powers.  Apart from querying whether we have we no sense of shame or regret we need to clean up this ten-year disgrace ourselves because otherwise others will do it for us, and with interests as wholly foreign as are their powers.

Richard-Ginori Closes. No-one Wants These Kind of Cuts

The Ginori porcelain factory just outside Florence has closed after more than 250 years of producing infinitely desirable china of every kind.  Unfortunately it is also dauntingly expensive but sometimes I wish.....those creamy, wholly undecorated plates, thin as thin can be and very flat -   we might have  managed those. 

Or perhaps these

Too late now: the 350 skilled members of the workforce left the factory for the last time yesterday evening.

Manners Makyth Man

“believe me, it will be enough”. History will hold you to it, Signore. 

Twice I have taken lessons in international manners.   Once, at an international conference of sneering ultra liberals when a venomous American (so unusual, Americans are 'the essence of politeness' as my mother would have it) referred to,  'Mr Marx':

 "Dr Marx", said  the Chairperson.  Pause: "Philosophy -  Democritus and Epicurus", he added severely.

The second time was when that same person, this time being the speaker not the Chair, was referred to as,  'Herr Dr Professor Professor,' by a commenter: I glanced, and was met with an absolute stillness of expression, an acknowledgment of German courtesy I was on the verge of not offering myself. 

It is not enough to excuse rudeness, in form of address, that a user does not speak the language or have any familiarity with the culture of the addressee.  Titles - inherited, awarded or earned - matter.  The civilised form, in doubt, is to use the surname unadorned or, as do the Quakers, the full name.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard does himself no honour  in using a term of address that implies that the President of the European Central Bank is an under-qualified  office-holder with an Italian axe to grind.

Fighting On

Silver for the sabre today; and bronze for the judo.

Defending the Castle

Gold, silver and bronze to the women's fencing team: gold to the archers;  silver to the pistol shooter.

Italy keeping up with its martial arts at the Olympics yesterday. 

Full Text of Mario Draghi's Speech at the Global Investment Conference Yesterday

Mario Draghi's speech at the Global Investment Conference, London, 26 July 2012. [this is how I received it. I leave it unedited. Ed.]

Drawing a Veil

In getting himself made a United nations envoy our former unelected Prime Minister has  obtained an enviable  level  of immunity from just about everything: self, wife, laissez- passer, papers,  records, communications, use of codes,  possessions of all and every kind, tax privileges,  you think of it - he's obtained it.  Now and for ever after; none of this falls away when ceasing to act, for whatever reason, for the UN.

Of course it's supposed to apply to whatever 'international work' (his term for traipsing about from freebie to freebie in holiday locations with others of his ilk) he's managed to finagle this for - education, the BBC says, always one for photos down with the school kids, our Gordon - but in truth it applies all the time.  Handy, that, when the financial shenanigans and regulatory fiascoes from 1997-2010 currently  under investigation and practised on his watch as Chancellor and Prime Minister are unfolding.

Of course Dominique Strauss-Kahn failed in his attempt to assert his immunities but only because the appropriate body refused to assert itself on his behalf.  As long as the UN Secretary General doesn't  actively lift immunity, for Gordon it's there for good.

Remember Them

Paolo Borsellino, Italian magistrate: born 19 January 1940, Palermo  -  assassinated 19 July 1992, Palermo.

 

    together with all five of his police escort.

Italian Film Heritage Uploaded to You Tube

The Istituto Luce - cinecitta' has uploaded its entire film archive to You Tube.

There will now be a short intermission while Angels has a look.

Investigate Wider Involvement in the Libor Rate-fixing

A commenter, JJ Forest,  in today's Telegraph, cannot be bettered for summing up the minimizing slant that is being attempted in the media over the Libor scandal.

'It's amazing to me to read this article which implicates the BOE and Whitehall in a Libor scandal that existed at least a year prior to the Barclays Libor rate-fixing and see that for whatever reason most commenters still draw the conclusion that the scandal revolves around Bob Diamond. It does not....  BD was only a small part of this. It seems to pass over most of the media heads that it is obvious the nationalized banks were rigging libor in Sept 2007 as it was impossible for them to have libor rates lower than Barclays at that time and yet they did. At least with this article it is finally becoming recognized in the mainstream.
When will the full scale firings and political massacres begin in earnest throughout the financial industry in the UK? Enough of the scapegoating of one particular individual at one bank. Bob Diamond is gone. Now lets get on with the real investigation.'

Angels would add:

If it wasn't the Chancellor or the Treasury under Darling, if it wasn't Vadera, if it wasn't Balls - and all downright deny that it was - who in government had the authority and the contacts to suggest, indeed call for, the Libor rate fixing? Diamond says it was senior figures, ie more than one.

Anticyclones

"I don't like these names," remarked the laundry lady, accepting a bag of shirts in the already 32 degree morning.

"First we had Caronte, now we've got Minosse; mark my words - it'll be Lucifero next."

Hats off to  Italian mass state education ; it may have been instituted as late as the 1950s; it may have had a school-leaving age of 11 as late as the 1970s; but it  has never held out on the children.  What there was to be taught was taught to all until  time ran out on the years of obligatory schooling; there was no dumbing-down, no intellectual condescension; no time to waste.

The Wheel Turns

The ruota degli esposti, the revolving crib that graced the walls of hospitals centuries ago, where desperate women could leave their newborn infants, was used last night in Milan.

In the 21st century once again women are reduced to this.

The boy was well cared-for, dressed in a thin white shift and wrapped in a light cover.  Beside him were three freshly laundered baby-grows and a feeding-bottle of  mother's milk.  He is a week old.

It would make Angels weep.  It does.

Two Inquiries and Not a Blade of Long Grass in Sight

So there is to be a Parliamentary inquiry and a Serious Fraud Office inquiry (the Chancellor of the  Exchequer is ensuring that there is a funding boost to the Serious Fraud Office for this, the FT reports) into the fixing of the LIBOR.

This is much more satisfactory than a judicial inquiry, their usual  purpose being to make nasty, embarrassing, even criminal stuff slip out of sight and as far into the future as possible while everybody says they can't say anything as its all in the judicial inquiry maw.

Now who might be required to come and tell Parliament and/or the SFO all about it?  Imagine prepping some likely candidates before their appearances.

The damage to the City is already done but the damage to the Labour party has barely begun; and the more the Labour party and those in the Labour administration during the first decade of this century are made to face up to the damage that they did -  which cannot be made good for years to come - the more the City will cease to be blamed for the political  purblindness and economic puerility of policy-makers seeking to join international political elites.  They hadn't the stature, they wouldn't have been Labour politicians if they had.  There is not a single Labour politician who has ever been of anything but local importance, not one.

Whodunnit?

Boggling doesn't begin to describe the systemic effects of 'managing' the interbank rate in what is supposed to be an advanced capitalist market economy.  The redistributive effects are unquantifiable and unlimited in every market.  Contracts geared to LIBOR?  Globally?  Expectations in financial transactions falsely based?

An 'independent' central bank that seems to have been making calls co-ordinating rates?  Under pressure from Whitehall 'figures' (read politicians, not civil servants).  A point blank, full denial from the then Chancellor of the Exchequer that this pressure was coming from him or from the Treasury; not just 'not me not us' but the use of the word 'unthinkable'. 

A Cabinet Office 'figure' (political appointee) who circulates a paper on the desirability of a lower LIBOR and whose spokesperson uses merely 'does not recall' in reference to actions in all this?  The central bank that refuses any comment at all?  

The media reports that LIBOR had been manipulated in two phases: 2005-2007 upwards (that would give more private profits) and 2008 onwards downwards (that would help the economy in its awful place).  So first it's practised for private profit without intervention by regulatory authorities - this is what they meant by 'lightly regulated?,  and then it's required by the Executive in office with the active intervention of the 'independent' central bank. 

While it is perfectly acceptable, indeed the responsibility of a central bank to set the bank rate, and use any other available instruments to influence market rates, these instruments do not include direct orders.  We might as well have been in a communist centrally-planned economy - in Poland before The Fall is a good model;  (even there the Polish central bank had been made genuinely independent in 1987.)

Now who was senior, not in the Treasury after 2007, running an alternative finance ministry within Whitehall after being thwarted in choice of Chancellor, believed in the managed (right down to the micro-managed) economy,  boasted of light regulation when he was in the Treasury including 2005-7, and would have been blinded by Executive authoritarian  attitudes to the ramifications and consequences of using central planning practices in the London financial sector?

 

Merkel and Monti Minuet

The instant response was a chorus of 'Bravi tutti.'  But now the 500 billion euros of the ESM are looking not just very little but inaccessible.

The German Constitutional court had already called in the legislation on the ESM that was accepted with large (more than two thirds) majorities in the German parliament last Friday, requiring that the President of Germany should not sign it into law until the Court had ruled on its constitutionality.

The arrangements are supposed to have become effective in early July but are now held, awaiting the Court ruling (pace Finland and its claims to have vetoed the agreement, they are irrelevant as they contribute too little to be in a position to be vetoing anything, not even with the Netherlands in tow) before any of last Friday's performance got under way.

This may not be of front rank interest to the UK (any more than was the other event involving Italy and Germany last Friday evening) but it illustrates vividly what is the matter with the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. When Heath paid so excessively to join, it was under the pretence of accessing the common market;  yet not only was the British Constitution not restructured to meet the UK's wholly altered but vastly under-acknowledged constitutional status, there is no intention of ever providing the safeguards and redress systems to contested EU behaviour  that is driving the demands to leave the European Union by democratic forces in the UK.

Germany, and most other EU member-states, has functioning safeguards for its citizens against pan-European elites and pan-European policies.  It would be naive to imagine that the German Chancellor and the Italian Prime Minister are unaware of the capacity for national constitutional challenge.

They were relying on it.  Germany has gone first but Italy, and France, are fully equipped with the means to block the actual use of ESM funds - so grossly inadequate for their purposes.  Further, if any of such (relatively) small funds are called upon we can all take away (unless we are in an English primary school in which case lots of us can't.)

It was beautifully done, as was the Italian play in the semifinals but, in the end, they will dance the fandango

The Most Beautiful of Cars

A Maserati was always beyond reach.   And if ever offered the choice this would be the darling of my heart.

Sergio Pininfarina, born  in Turin,  September 1926 -  died, July 2012.

Bugs and Bunnies

The icy, deep snow Winter, followed by the steady downpour for the whole of Spring and now temperatures in the high thirties under a brazen sun is hatching things not seen since dinosaurs walked.  They must have been sitting in their crysallises  for ever until they thought they were in with only one more chance when the heat came.

They are so variously horrible but all are large - as big as the palm of a man's hand or bigger, with hooks, or  eyes on stalks, or digger truck attachments to the jaw  big enough to shift rocks.  They come armour-plated, some segmented, some writhing, others going like the clappers across polished floors (a particularly nasty effect) and some whose feet click as they crawl along very slowly.  Worst of all, some of them have wings and fly towards the lights at night.

In the beginning I would get one of the men and a boot would come down so fast they didn't stand a chance but left a nasty mess and the sound lingered in the ears.  So I got out the wasp nest spray but couldn't do it  when what I was pretty sure must be a giant scorpion was followed by two little ones.  It is worrying as well that they must be quite rare, these different creatures, even if I have no idea what they are.  The answer for now is strategically placed, long-handled dustpans and brush and flinging them (the creatures,  though the dustpans have been flung more than once) over the edge of the garden; but my courage is going to give out soon.

Why do they inspire such atavistic fear?  This morning at first light I saw two hares playing in the meadow on the edge of the woods.  I thought them utterly beautiful and stood still as still until they saw me and lolloped off towards the fountain and the glades above it.   They are much bigger than even the largest, most fantastical  creatures, yet looking at them I was enchanted.

All Out and How to Achieve It

Two days ago the FIOM (the metal bashers section of the Italian trade union confederation) called a strike at the FIAT joint venture plant in the Abruzzo.  Under 3% of workers in each shift at the commercial vehicle producer answered the call and stopped work.  So FIOM has called another strike, again to protest the newly passed laws reforming the labour market.

This time it's from 18.15 to 22.15 this evening.

Bringing Work Home

Last night the Italian parliament broke the stranglehold that trades union special interest groups had upon the politics of labour.  The vote showed too that the Prime Minister maintains his commanding majority in the House.

The conditions under which those with jobs work was not much altered: what changed was the mind set accepted as normal, and the opening to debate and reset of what had been set in stone - literally constitutional stone - on the determining of relations between employer and employee.

'Italy is a democratic republic based on labour.'

states Article 1 of the Constitution.  Article 4 persists:

'The republic recognizes the right of all citizens to work and promotes conditions to fulfill this right.  According to capability and choice, every citizen has the duty to undertake an activity or a function that will contribute to the material and moral progress of society. '

Unexceptionable, positively praiseworthy; except that the political parties of the Left, some wholly undemocratic such as the Communist Party, and the Socialist Party (yes, of course they're still there, factions within the Democratic Party) together with their trade union offshoots, had set themselves up as arbiters of how those Articles would be fulfilled, and as sole representatives of the people when it came to work and working conditions.  Steadily they entrenched into law demands wholly destructive of work but highly advantageous to those who achieved a job - 'il posto'.  Increasingly recourse against work offered that was not compliant with their policies (and they had established a very large say indeed over labour policy)  was to the courts, a much less difficult and doubtful route to their objectives than industrial action from a reluctant workforce so unhappy with the undemocratic nature of the political caste and the pressure groups and lobbyists that 'represented' their 'interests'.

Now, perhaps, firms in Italy that need to grow above 15 employees (and there are many, Italian entrepreneurship is notably family-based and grows from the success of such small companies) will stop either deliberately limiting growth to avoid falling under regulation  inappropriate even to 20th century industrial production, and even to public sector employment -  or relocating their companies in Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and other parts of the Italian diaspora. In those places work is work, there are government incentives through taxes and resource allocations, a well-educated, skilled workforce, and  long-established connections with Italy.  

Across the Adriatic is not abroad; nor is it home though.  The first blow for people to find work at home and speak for themselves on terms and conditions has been enacted.   It is further deregulation that will end increasing de-localisation  of activity and and deliberate restriction on growth. 

Text of the Van Rompuy-Draghi-Barroso-Juncker Report

Should readers like to look at the document from Barroso, Draghi, Juncker, and van Rompuy prepared for the European summit meeting tomorrow (or a draft, at least) here is a link.

There is discussion of various points in the Italian press but it is always interesting to look at the text rather than just extracts  picked for journalistic purposes.  The bit that caught Angels' eye was the statement that Article 126 of the Treaty, which deals with the powers conferred on the European Central Bank for the supervision of banks in the Eurozone, must be fully considered and exploited. 

Stretching Children is Cruel

The dog's breakfast that is the English schools examination system could quite readily be cleared up.  A system of public examination centres where examinations at any pre-university level could be taken by candidates of any age or status, set by a public body and marked and adjudicated under the surveillance of a public body should do the trick;  on the lines of the examinations of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.  An Associated Board of the Universities of England, so to speak.

These examinations would qualify a candidate for matriculation.  There need be no rows about the abolition of GCSEs and the creation of two-tiered systems.  Current school-based examinations of the GCSE kind with course work and resits etc., could continue to run, providing a school-based assessment system which was equally accessible to  all school learners but didn't necessarily lead to university study, although the universities could also set the standards needed to matriculate by the GCSE route.

As a matter of fact, at the moment, any examination candidate not falling within the parameters drawn by a school-based system suffers discrimination.  A dual system of which one route was outside the schools would be more open and fairer to everyone, regardless of age or the manner of their education.  The subjects on offer would be drawn from a wider knowledge base than available to  schools, too.  We have an Open University: why not an Open School using the modern resources available for learning now? 

I think I might have a stab at classical Greek; sadly, time's up for the violin.

Italy is Not What It Used to Be

The constant referral to Italy's 'technical' government is damaging understanding of  the European Union crisis.  One of the prerequisites for acceptance of the President's invitation to form an administration was that a Monti administration would be  fully political and extend into all fields of government.  Its mandate would confirm just that; it would not be  limited to an economic and financial turn-round.

In truth, an economic and financial turn-round was not the problem, as Ambrose Evans- Pritchard  now acknowledges:

'The country is clearly not a basket case on any measure.  It will have a primary budget surplus of 3.6pc of GDP this year, and 4.9pc next year, the best in the G7 bloc.  Combined public and private debt is 260pc of GDP, similar to Germany and much lower than France, Spain, or the UK. With private wealth of €8.6 trillion, Italians are richer per capita than Germans.  Italy scores top on the IMF's long-term debt sustainability indicator at 4.1, ahead of Germany 4.6, France 7.9, the UK 13.3, Japan 14.3, and the US 17.'

The Prime Minister is coping with a double-headed monster: the bloated, corrupt political elites so intricately entwined with the geo-political gangster criminality over which the state itself can barely retain control; and, what the core nations fear most, 'the creation of an uncapped transfer union without surrender of national sovereignty to the supranational European level' as   Willem Buiter so felicitously encapsulates the European-level core nations dilemma.

 It is not by chance that it is in Rome that the core nations meet today.  Italy must call on Europe's strength to defeat its own monsters  - the creation by an unholy alliance of the trade union-based 'left',  the populist gangsterista 'right,' and a naive anarchist protest vote of a pretext to pull down the administration before the end of the Legislature as Monti threatens their fiefdoms and their privileges. The European Union needs to call upon Italy's strength as a highly advanced, innovative, entrepreneurial economy; but this must be voiced through growth and financial measures that preserve and enhance it.

To do what Monti is doing demands high-level intellectual and professional skills,  a clear grasp of political strengths and political forces operating here and in Europe, an ethical stance that sets his aims against those of powerful national (and international) corruption; and considerable physical bravery.  To daub him (and the constitutional authority from which he derives his power) as 'technical' and "unelected'  denies him, and all his policies the validity which they  deserve.  Worse, it warps perception of Italy's  real 21st century status and, in so doing, damages the European Union in its entirety.

All Greek....

Half a million school leavers sat down to the First Test yesterday - Italian.  The examination, taken by all, had a number of essay titles from which the examinees choose one and then write for the whole day (the invitation to write on the labyrinth, with excerpts from Ariosto, Calvino, Borges and Eco, plus paintings by Picasso, Pollock and Escher, was particularly fine).

Today they separate into their specialist schools, writing on specific material.  For the Classical Lyceum, this year, the Unseen is  Greek (it alternates with Latin annually).

Aristotle – De partibus animalium I, (A), 5, 645 a 


is   offering all its complexity and imagery to their best efforts even as we take our elevenses.  They have been at it since 8.30 this morning.  The papers are now providing translations, interpretations, profound thoughts (everyone is re-living their own trial by fire, as the whole country does, obsessively, every year in June) while they continue, locked away in the examination halls, but this is a very tricky passage and Aristotle - always and rightly feared -  hasn't turned up in the Unseen since 1978.

Here is an interpretation from Merton (Oxford still does Greek), which refutes, among others, Heidegger's effort.

 'Heraclitus can be seen in the anecdote as inviting his visitors to join him in the kitchen by appealing to their common archaic heritage, and the way he does that provides a delightful illustration for the point Aristotle wants to make about the study of animals. Just as Heraclitus encouraged the visitors to waive their conventional scruples and join him in the kitchen by suggesting that the ordinary fire in the oven is as divine and hospitable as the consecrated fire of the hearth, Aristotle encourages his audience to over- come their puerile revulsion towards the examination of the humbler animals by saying that there is something wonderful in them as well as in other things of nature, including the better respected animals and, ultimately, the stars which are appreciated as divine and well worthy of study. The wonderful thing is, of course, the purposefulness which pervades the whole natural world and which is the counterpart of the beautiful (tÚ kalÒn)in things of art. And because of that, Aristotle exhorts his audience to forget their distaste for certain kinds of animals and to open their minds to the systematic treatment of animals which he is about to supply.'

England v Italy

Are you ready England?

And these are just the Florentines

Back to the Future Once More

              

'concrete steps towards a more integrated financial architecture'  Los Cabos Growth and Jobs Action Plan - circa 1932.

Through to the Quarters

l'Italia s'è desta,

dell'elmo di Scipio

s'è cinta la testa.

Dov'è la Vittoria?

Le porga la chioma....

If I Want to Speak to Europe Who Do I Call?

The restricted meeting between  Obama and Merkel, Monti, Hollande,  Barroso, and  Van Rompuy didn't happen.  The White House said this was because it was decided to extend the working dinner at which all the G20 heads of government and state were present (though not heads of international organisations) .

The German version is that everything that was going to be said between Obama and the European leaders had been said; it was the Chancellor of Germany who cancelled the meeting after talks between her and the US President (talks that lasted 45 minutes, held before the G20 dinner began) exhausted any exchange of views.

It begins to look as if Kissinger's Question has been answered.

Lippis et Tonsoribus

A supply side economist:

believes that the level of income and employment is determined by the level and structure of productive capacity and economic agents' choices.

does not believe that national income and employment are determined by keynesian aggregate demand.

believes that the economy must be deregulated in order to mobilise entrepreneurship and to grow.

Francois Hollande is not a supply side economist, as has been claimed by  Professor Philippe Aghion, a self-declared major economic advisor:  Francois Hollande is a motherhood and apple pie economist.

Boom Boom

Returning from a Florence glowing 40C from every stone, I carried a cake from Robiglio wrapped in waxed paper and tied with golden ribbons and bows (pan di spagna soaked in liqueur, covered with freshly-made pasta di mandorle, decorated with mint and violet sugared flowers and leaves, as you ask).

"Today,' I announced, "There will be proper tea."

"Can't have that," replied Mr HG. 

Me, snippy in the heat, "Why ever not, just for once?"

"As we all know: proper tea is theft."

A General Election Where the People Really Will Speak

Italy must hold a general election in a little over 10 months.  Until now Senator Monti has been having a difficult time forcing the various embedded powers of political parties, trade unions, professional bodies, and open gangsters to accept that spending must fall.  Everyone is clear that the others should accept reduced state spending - but not themselves.  They're all as bad as one another;  it isn't as if there's an outstanding villain, though the political elites - the elected and their hangers-on - are not just acting for themselves but being obstructive in the legislature on behalf of the others, who are both their clients and, to some degree, their paymasters  (tax-payers are contributing forcibly too.)

After a brief interlude of relief that Berlusconi had finally lost his majority in a welter of accusations and trials, some still on-going, the Prime Minister began to lose the upper hand.  Trade unions defended their outrageous closed shop that over-rewards the employed but excludes the young from entering employment; professions dug in their heels over their exclusionary practices; gangsters returned to corrupting and shooting their way forward as usual.  But now the politicians are in a bit of a difficulty.

Yes, they have refused to take any cuts beyond derisory gestures that can be made up elsewhere on their palette of access to other people's money.  But with the  summer recess and a mass decamping to the seaside and the mountains, their hold over the Prime Minister falls away.  In the Autumn there can be no more threats of precipitating early elections or forcing the President to ask someone else to try and form a government.   The use of  legislative decrees will come into its own.

The decreto legge is proposed by the Prime Minister of the day and his cabinet, and signed off by the President of the Republic;  for 90 days it is the law and, before the end of that period, must be ratified by both Houses.  Or not.  Monti has done much, under this system, but has been hamstrung by the threat of legislative refusal  on every matter of substance to any of the entrenched interest groups.  The people are becoming resigned, a lot of talk, they say, but nothing gettting done.

However, the talk has served: battle lines have been drawn, strengths tested, alliances split, public attitudes evinced.  Monti and his ministers have got through what they could, and learned much of what the people want but the vested interests want to prevent.  In the Autumn they can put the really necessary changes into place,  but they do not have to push any of them through an implacable legislature.

By the time the 90 days is up it will be too late to refuse ratification.   Italy will be in full electoral mode; and the people are very angry indeed with their political representatives.  They will be even angrier if the rejection of necessary reforms is the platform on which the political elites and the special interest groups go to the country.

Neither  the Prime Minister* nor the President of Italy are  standing for re-election next Spring.  They'll really have the bit between their teeth.


*It is a misrepresentation to say that Mario Monti is unelected.  He was nominated by the President and given an overwhelming vote of confidence by both elected Houses of Parliament.

The Grandest of Coalitions

As President Hollande receives the leaders of the German SPD  Sigmar Gabriel, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Peer Steinbrück at the Elysee palace today to discuss a fiscal pact and growth in the Eurozone we see the shadow of the grand coalitions that have ruled Germany for so many of the recent decades beginning to shape itself as an intra-state force in the heart of Europe.

Le Monde describes the meeting as “unheard of”,  as an attempt by the French president to pressure  the German Chancellor to shift emphasis from 'austerity' to growth  ahead of the EU summit;   certainly the growth agenda needs to be addressed more urgently, as the third 'voice' of a shadow EU troika, Mario Monti, has constantly emphasized.

It should be borne in mind, though, that the SPD is in negotiations with the CDU/CSU on the fiscal pact  (ratification of the pact requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag.)   Mrs Merkel is highly skilled at conducting a grand coalition in a German-only political environment; indeed a very good case can be made for such a political coalition arrangement to be infinitely preferable to the current centre-right coalition with the FDP in Germany.  Some have said she would 'give her right arm' to be in the former grand coalition with the SDP.   At the same time President Hollande is as  unimpressed by the parties to his left as Chancellor Merkel by the parties to her right.

The Chancellor and the President have not yet gained confidence in one another but there are obvious political stability advantages from interchanges like this one.  The European Union does not suffer so much from 'state desertion' as from  failure to construct the state at all in a timely and modern fashion during the years of plenty.

Hollande's determination to emphasize growth,  not austerity,  now is  admirable  and, many would argue, correct; this meeting is justified in those terms although the Chancellor's office has asked that there be no common press conference afterwards

Events in the unfolding eurodrama are perhaps clearer if seen as European events,  not as nation state-bounded events.  To look, as it were, from the possible future; this constant harking back by media commentators to the 1930s is so unhelpful and without explanatory power; for the politicians and institutions of the 1930s the long run has arrived.  They are all dead.  The economic analyses of what is the matter with the eurozone are done and dusted but the political analyses are crying out for fresh thought and approaches.

UPDATE

A report on the meeting at the Elysee palace is here.

Bach 1 - British Border Guards 0

This is what the Gatwick border guards might have succeeded in  preventing.

Ending the Music

There are reports that the opening concert of this year’s Spitalfields Festival almost had to be cancelled  because of Border Agency officials.

The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra were due to play at Christchurch Spitalfields, the festival’s principal venue;  but when they arrived at Gatwick on Friday afternoon three of the orchestra’s members were arrested, held in detention for five hours, and then sent back to Amsterdam. The multi-national orchestra’s founder and conductor, the harpsichordist and organist Ton Koopman said:

 “They kept them in detention like criminals and they weren’t even allowed to give us their music – because they were criminals, of course. It was a disgraceful way to behave, and I had to leave them there in order to be in time for the concert.”

The three musicians, violinists and a viola player, who  had come from Spain via Amsterdam, where their passports were said not to have been stamped properly, are Japanese.

This is a seriously nasty piece of behaviour, yet another piece of officious jobsworthyness on the way to  England becoming A State of Denmark.

Giving Notice

The United Kingdom is promised a referendum on any further handing over of powers to the European Union.  The Lisbon Treaty requires that should a member state wish to renegotiate its relationship with the European Union it must leave first and give two years' notice of that intention.  (Not unreasonably; first you leave and then you apply to rejoin on fresh terms.  There is a clear procedure for application for membership and there is no such procedure, or body that can accept on behalf of all member states any renegotiated terms of membership.)

According to Der Spiegel Mario Draghi, José Manuel Barroso, Herman Van Rompuy and Jean-Claude Juncker are preparing a fully-fledged euro area fiscal union.   This would deny its members the right to take on new debt independently;  a member state government would be able to  dispose independently of only self-generated revenues.  Any additional  debt-funded expenditures would  be financed by Eurobonds issued on the agreement of  Euro finance ministers     Joint  liability would be for newly issued debt after  the introduction of the fiscal union. The plans envisage a full time chairman of the euro finance ministers who could eventually become the euro area finance minister.  National parliaments would be represented on a new body controlling the finance ministers.

The United Kingdom is already outside the loop of the recasting of the European Union.  Changes of the order proposed above will certainly involve the ceding of powers by all member states whether inside or outside the eurozone; indeed relations with states such as Norway, who are not member states of the EU, will be affected.

If the Coalition Government is to meet its undertakings to the UK electorate it needs to give notice now that it intends to leave,  and renegotiate its relationship with the European Union, or it will find it has been issued with a fait accompli.

UPDATE

If preferred, an English version of all this has now been published by Der Spiegel  with a bit more padding, and joining-up of other proposals that have been mooted by Monti (among others).

It's Not a Very Big Re-capitalisation

Spain, according to a report freshly issued (it was due on Monday) by the IMF, needs to find $46 billion for its banks, reports the New York Times.  That's all its banks, not just the one.  $46 billion is £30billion. 

Mervyn King famously regarded £30 billion as a great deal of money in those dear, dead days when New Labour's bank, Northern Rock, inflicted the indignity of a retail bank run on the United Kingdom and its benighted Chancellor of the Exchequer.  But he was constrained to accept £30 billion and then some as Northern Rock swallowed down more and more of taxpayers' money only to look quite abstemious as Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, and their sundry, formerly solvent victims quantitively eased their way into the public purse.  It turned out that £30 billion isn't much after all.  And as for the 29 trillion dollars President Obama rarely mentions.....

Obama is banging on and on about Spain, the IMF in Washington is rushing out reports, the English language media is sucking its breath in between its teeth as if Spain had been caught in flagrante delicto.

All this for just one kiss?

  (Quante storie per un bacio: Sandro Chia, 1979)

 

When Push Comes to Shove

That the basis of growth must be the reduction of public debt accompanied by the privatisation of economic activity inappropriately conducted in the state sector and the liberalisation of labour and trade relations is not accepted by the left, or by their current fellow travellers, the progressive authoritarians of the third way.

Their intellectual shock troops, armed as economists but acting as propagandists (a highly questionable ethical stance -  permitting a connexion between their undoubted technical status and their debatable political beliefs) call up the experiences of almost a century ago and the remedies to that Depression worked out with such care in subsequent decades, as if old-fashioned economics applied in toto to the present day.  And, guilty of this error, in true propagandistic fashion, they accuse the supporters of a more modern economic solution to the current crisis of secret subscription to an even older, Schumpeterian belief in the beneficial effects of the experience of Depression, and call them vindictive and even mad: guilty  of punitive assault upon the well-being of their fellow men. 

The 'New Dealers' of this millennium have failed to consider (or at least failed to acknowledge) that last century's over-use of deficit financing and state acquisition of economic controls has brought us here.  (Never mind the political refusal to recognise the popular overthrow of the regimes of eastern Europe where their economic theories, and their political beliefs and the necessary structures that in the end accompany them,  failed even to feed, house and clothe the people beyond the most basic level).

In thrall to the economics of the past  United States' debt stands now at 100% of a year's GDP.  European debt, on average,  is 88% of annual GDP.  The US has a higher current deficit and a higher balance of payments deficit on current account.  And they assault the Eurozone for rejecting the retro-economics that has produced this disaster?

There aren't really laws in economics, except in the sense of a few verifiable empirical regularities, but it's as true in there as anywhere else that 'to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.',  and all this pushing and shoving of the Eurozone has indeed produced  an equally powerful response which will put in place rapidly the long-planned and prepared machinery of a core United Europe.

Of Wolves and Lambs: the Cheek of American Political Elites

'As a Wolf was lapping at the Head of a Fountain, he spy'd a Lamb paddling at the same time a good way off down the Stream. The Wolf had no sooner the Prey in his eye, but away he runs open-mouth to't.

"Villain (says he) how dare you lie muddling the Water that I'm a drinking? 
Indeed, says the poor Lamb, I did not think that my drinking here below could have foul'd your Water so far above.
Nay, says t'other, you'll never leave your chopping of Logick, till your Skin's turn'd over your Ears, as your Father's was, a matter of six months ago, for prating at this saucy rate; you remember it full well, Sirrah.
If you'll believe me, Sir, (quoth the innocent Lamb, with fear and trembling) I was not come into the World then.
Why thou Impudence, cries the Wolf, hast thou neither Shame nor Conscience? But it runs in the Blood of your whole Race, Sirrah, to hate our Family; and therefore since Fortune has brought us together so conveniently, you shall e'en pay some of your Forefathers Scores before you and I part."

And so without any more ado, he leap'd at the Throat of the miserable helpless Lamb, and tore him immediately to pieces.'

MORAL  'Tis an easy Matter to find a Staff to beat a Dog. Innocence is no Protection against the arbitrary Cruelty of a tyrannical Power; But Reason and Conscience are yet so sacred, that the greatest Villanies are still countenanc'd under that Cloke and Colour. (Aesop)

Europe is not responsible for the economic woes of the United States, as their equally woeful President now claims.  We have it from the the mouth of the Savior of the World, the man who abolished boom and bust:

"It all started in America."

 

Ravenna Earthquake

Ravenna was shaken by an earthquake at 4.5 on the Richter at 6.08 this morning.  A World Heritage Site, the city has not been damaged at a first inspection.  The Mayor of Ravenna meets the council this afternoon to hear further reports on the situation  and make an assessment.

The strength of the earthquake was such as to be felt in the whole of the Marche.  There are no reports on damage elsewhere yet.  The epicentre of the earthquake was just off the coast.

Muscle and Grace

'...virtually no original German planes remained from either World War I or World War II.'  Der Spiegel explains.   They were all destroyed in 'de-militarisation' programmes after the second War.  Why?  Germany was hardly going to rise from the ruins and start flying them about, now was it?

Anyway, the Military History museum in Berlin is raising a Stuka from the Baltic seabed.  'The Junkers Ju 87 "Sturzkampfbomber," ....   with its trademark siren, known as "Jericho trumpets," blaring as the aircraft hurtled down to its target.'

They look extraordinarily modern for 1940; just look at those sophisticated wings.

This is Italo Balbo's Savoia-Marchetti SM.55X flying boat , also looking good, from the same period.

Yes, one is a warplane and the other an aircraft of the Italian Formation Flight, but somehow they capture the different design mindsets  of two great  engineering traditions.

Balbo's Flying Chandelier

This video of the recovery of the antique murano glass chandelier from the town hall at Sant'Agostino, presented by Italo Balbo, shows the skill and determination with which what can be saved will be saved.

The town hall is so damaged no-one may enter.  So they did it by remote control.  Imagine giving the order to cut the support chain!

A Proper State Broadcasting Service

Dividing the BBC would end the kind of disgraceful performance by the state broadcasting service that occurred yesterday.  A First Division BBC could  provide official announcements, coverage of state events, an unvarnished news service both in the UK and abroad,  party political broadcasts, election results, and the various kinds of public information best diffused nationally.

A Second Division BBC could provide entertainment of whatever quality or level.   It could also cover everything dealt with by the First Division BBC if it liked, in any manner it chose.

Neither Division would be funded by licence fee.  The First Division BBC would be funded out of general taxation and from a levy on the Second Division, and any other commercial channels.  The Second Division BBC would be  paid for in the same way as all the others, by subscription and advertisements.

The arts are already amply funded by various government bodies like the Arts Council and there are many charitable sources of funding available to be tapped.  As for the rest of it, the chat shows, the light entertainment (I'm unsure where to put the quotation marks round those last two words), the drama, the Proms, they'll just have to fight their corner.

What we can end is broadcasting drivel and the politically incorrect warping of events in the world all  given status by being under the same roof and brand name.  The BBC does have a brand and a status and its theft by unrepresentative warriors in the culture wars  is overwhelmingly  portrayed as unacceptable in today's media.  

The BBC  have announced that they are proud of yesterday's coverage of events on the Thames.

The BBC Are the Real PIGS

'A Venetian Gondola from City Barge Rowing Club. The Querini's 
Disdatona  is  commanded  and  crewed  by  highly  skilled  and 
experienced  Venetians  to  whom  boats  and  boat  handling  are 
second  nature.  Venice  has  strong  historical  trading  links  with 
England.  For  King  Charles  II  wedding  procession  two  gondoli 
closely escorted the Royal Barge. ' ( see this for a description of many of the boats)

The BBC remark?  "Nice to see the Venetian gondoliers resting on their oars.  They've actually made it  all the way. Bit different from what they're used to."

The Pageant was absolutely unwatchable on the BBC.  That man in a too-tight grey suit stretched over his little belly, the woman in a dress inappropriate for sitting down and inappropriate too for a person of her age.  The refusal to show us the boats;  the inanity, vulgarity, patronising ignorance, grotesque self regard.  Who were those people?

Colpo di Grazia for Novi's Tower

An earthquake at 5.1 on the Richter scale has struck again between Modena and Mantova,   followed by after-shocks throughout the night above 3. The settecentesco clock tower which had symbolized the earthquake-stricken north of Italy's determination to rebuild was brought down at 9.21 last evening.  The earthquake shook the country from Firenze to Bolsano and from Milano to Venezia; seismic events continue to be recorded in the entire north.

 

All schools are now closed in the Provinces of Modena and Mantova and the scholastic year has been cut short for 2012 as the checks on their buildings, which had just been completed, are begun again.  The shops, bars and supermarkets that had begun to reopen in the zones worst affected have closed once more and the civil defence teams are extending the temporary accommodation, field hospitals and  canteens to cope with the further influx of people who, up to now, had been camping in the public parks and gardens within towns and cities in their own tents.

Today is a day of mourning for the death and destruction with flags at half mast and minutes of silence in all comunes in Italy.  The damage to towns and cities, to infrastructure, though not the industrial damage, is estimated at 5 billion euros and rising.   The damage to the glories of the courts of the Gonzaga and the Rinascimento?  Still being assessed.

A Quieter Night for Northern Italy

Thirty further tremors in the North last night were all below 3 on the Richter.  Tremors were felt throughout the Veneto but no obvious damage was reported - just a good shake to Palladio's villas: Vicenza is another World Heritage Site.

What this shock has taught is that all of Italy is an earthquake zone.  Of course this was recognized at a technical level - always has been - but implementing measures and requirements flowing from this has been uneven.  The collapse of the industrial sites, where much is of this century's construction, is the object of the magistrates' enquiries.  It shouldn't have happened and it seems that the anti-seismic regulations themselves, to which many of the fallen buildings conformed, were inadequate.  Most of the people who have been killed died in the factories.  (It is noteworthy that the factories were working three shifts, seven days a week, and many in the advanced manufacturing sectors; the factories around Mirandola supplied the biomedical needs of Italy's and a considerable proportion of  Europes's health services).

The plant of firms like Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini were undamaged although they did close partly because just in time supply was interrupted from smaller manufacturers and mostly to allow workers to support family and community in these days.  Some of the oldest buildings resisted.  The inadequacy of modern  minimum anti-earthquake standards must have some role in all this; the engineering standards of those that withstood the shocks must become the norm.

The civil response to the emergency has been impressive.  Water, gas, electricity, transport systems have been checked and kept running when there might reasonably have been an expectation that the Peninsula would be cut in two by all this.  The people who have lost their homes and even their entire villages and towns have been sheltered and fed in temporary conditions and are now being settled in more permanent housing from surrounding comunes.  Most importantly communities have been kept together.

 The emotional blow has been awful: people are, quite literally, spaesato,  disoriented, their paese both physical and cultural, gone.  The Church, which might have been expected to have much to offer in this, is notably absent.  It is the civil powers that have responded.  It may be that the Church's efforts are not being reported but that would be surprising; the Church, apart from remarks of almost formal regret from Pope Ratzinger , is silent. 

The response of the central government, banks and local financial institutions and foundations, and of the professionals - the doctors, surveyors, architects, engineers - has been generous and efficient.  Tax collection has been delayed, loans have been made available, mortgage payments lifted for a year... and the services of those best qualified to restore the built environment made freely available through their professional organisations (Florence and its region, for instance, has already sent dozens of professionals to help with assessing the damage and determining the remedies).

The Prime Minister has suspended the Growth and Stability Pact for local authorities in the North.  Leaving the factories in ruins, the towns and cities unsurveyed, the anti-seismic measures not raised to meet geophysical conditions would be economic barbarism. 

Here is a perfect example of the uses of deficit financing for investment.  Not windmills, not funding welfare benefits for voter clients, not deficit financing after decades of deficit financing wasted on political rather than economic ends.  (The difference between now and the depression of the 1930s is that then there wasn't the previous abuse of economic good sense and deficit financing wasn't applied quickly enough.  Now, in 2012, we  must recognise that deficit financing was used improperly for decades, culminating in folly of the New Labour years.)

Deficit financing for investment is a specialised economic tool not a generalised condition of economic life.  Mario Monti has correctly  instigated its use in investment oriented circumstances.  It still has no place in fuelling house price booms and buying votes.

Bologna's Towers

       The towers of Bologna, Asinelli and Garisenda,

are moving with every tremor.  Almost a thousand years' old they display their age, leaning together, shifting slightly in response to temperature, environmenal change; but now they are being shaken over and over again and their movement has become cause for grave concern.

Staff from the Istituto nazionale di geofisica e vulcanologia  are  camped in the piazza Ravegnana monitoring the structures, joined by many of the citizenry.  They say that after the first shock the towers changed but the alterations are still being analysed; the second quake and waves of after shocks, which continued with more than 30 tremors last night, have produced further alterations in the towers.

Dawn in Northern Italy

Seventy further shocks around 3.5 Richter have shaken northern Italy all night long.  The repeated effects of these on the fabric of ancient buildings is profound.

The damage to the industrial base is in the billions of euros.

Here is a police video from one of their helicopters. 

If You Pray, Pray Now

In 1565 the organ in the Basilica Ducale di Santa Barbara was commissioned from Graziadio Antegnati by the Gonzaga. 
The instrument was used by Claudio Monteverdi, Luca Marenzio,  Gastoldi....

Universally renowned for the perfection of his instruments, the beauty of their sound, only one other complete instrument, in the church of San Giuseppe at Brescia, built in 1581, had survived.

The earthquake at 1pm today has brought down the cupola of Santa Barbara in the palazzo Ducale in Mantova.  There is no news yet of the fate of the organ.

The Earthquakes Continue

La Repubblica has a constantly updated report of the horrifying effects of the earthquakes rolling through northern Italy.  There are now 10 dead after the major earthquake at 9.01 this morning.  The cathedral of Mirandola has collapsed.  Citta' d'arte from Pisa to Venice and everything in between are being shaken and damaged.  The quakes are being felt from Florence to Austria.

Schools, hospitals, government buildings, are being evacuated across the country - Pisa, Genova, Bologna, Padova, Modena,  Ferrara, Rovigo, Venice .....  Appeals to lift password protection from internet connections are being met by the population so that communications can be improved.

The great plain of the river Po and its tributaries rests upon the ranges of the Apennines that continue towards the Alps submerged by the silt of the river systems.  These buried mountain ranges are moving, pressured towards the Alps.  Water is being suddenly squeezed out of the acquifers and forced upwards causing great cracks of 'boiling' mud and sand to open up on the surface as well.

Industrial centres across the North - the economic heart of Italy -  are suffering extensive damage.

The rapid and sophisticated response to this onslaught has been impressive and notably humane in coping with the destruction and threat to so much but the geologists fear that these kinds of geological events are not just a sharp adjustment but a longdrawn out shifting in a region that has been stable since the 1500s.

Social Aggression is not a Party

Jean Sandler, 42, a UK Uncut supporter, is reported by the Telegraph to have  said: "Nick Clegg is one of the architects of austerity; he's a millionaire and lives in a million pound home.
"The cuts are a political choice of this Government and the Cabinet of out of touch millionaires, they are not necessary....
 
"These cruel cuts are designed to destroy our public services, the NHS, the welfare state and our future.
  [emphasis added.]

Has it ever dawned on Jean Sandler that many of us view the English Health Service, the unreformed welfare state, and public so-called 'services' like the state education system  as partially destructive of our future and of our present - designedly so and with every intention of embedding socialist objectives and their authoritarian means into our lives?

At least we don't take our views and actions onto the street and frighten the horses - or the small children of the neighbourhood.  That this action was aggressively intended is underlined by her further remarks:

"The cuts are getting personal and so are our protests ."

Greece is Boring and Democratically Irrresponsible

These data, presented in Der Spiegel, say it all.  The sky isn't falling and core Europe - which includes  large and successful parts of nation states considered inappropriately together with their under-developed problem regions, is doing brilliantly despite, or quite possibly because of, its marked political and institutional diversity.

"You've all been reading some very old books," Bernard Crick remarked in a political science class at the School.  We are doing it again, and some very old economics books too, in informing our understanding of inter and intra-state relations, practices, goals, in core Europe.

Green Misunderstandings

Door bell rings. Put head out of window (can't be bothered to go all the way to the citofono) and look down at a man and a woman surrounded by brown plastic bins.  They have come to change my life and save the planet.

All the community wheeled rubbish bins in which we can pop stuff at any time but  are emptied every morning before 7am are to be removed.  Instead we are to place our rubbish, properly separated into sacks of organic, sacks of paper, and sacks of whatever else is left, on the doorstep  every day.

"There's only one bin" I remark. 
"Each kind of rubbish has a different day.  You need only one bin.  Just remember which rubbish goes out on which day. Organic has three days and the other two a day each.  Before 8am."

I can hear the light tap of claws in festa as the rats and other vermin celebrate the leaving of dinner every night outside  doors throughout the village.  But they celebrate too soon.  No bin is to be out before 6am.  Gulp.  It's all right in the summer and I suppose if I get it ready every night before bedtime it's just a matter of taking it down the stairs first thing, unbarring the doors, and putting it outside -but  in the main street opposite the town hall?  Or I could choose the turning into the piazza della Chiesa, or put it all out in the back lane and hope the men don't miss it.

"Who lives here?" they asked. "Why are there three of you? And in different streets?"
"Think of it as a block of flats with lots of HGs inside and hand over the bins!"  (With three bins I can manage this separation stuff much better.)
"No. We're taking these two to the piazza Chiesa and the via del F..." they  decide.  "Where is the piazza della Chiesa?" Where are these people from?  I'm not good at local accents and these two are from far away.  "There," I point, "That piazza with the large church in it, at the corner." "And the via del F...?" 
"Backdoor.   Go down to the other end, turn left and first left and there you are.  There's a Landrover parked outside.  Can't miss it.  I'll race you from inside the building. Uno, due, tre -  via ."

They handed over the three bins where we stood at the main door.   "Is your husband in?" the man asked hopefully.  I could see it written all over their faces:  English - they're very strange, the English.

In May

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau  died on Friday at his home in Bavaria. He was 86.

Sob

It Takes a Village

The verbal noun 'parenting' repels instantly.  The small HGs were not 'parented' but brought up.  As were their parents. And their grandparents before them.  They were involved in  kinship constellations  engaged in myriad exchanges, large and small, that provided the background against which their formal instruction in school was set - and judged, and adjusted or refuted, as well as accepted.

The notion 'parenting' deliberately confounds the meeting of immediate physical needs with the provision of an upbringing.  A hundred pounds the state is offering to reduce (or traduce) a child's birthright into advice on how to change a nappy.

Even Hilary Clinton knows that to bring up a child it takes a village.

Debt Kills Growth

The massive overhang of public and private debt in advanced capitalist countries (public debt to GDP levels exceeds the critical 90% threshold while "private debt is showing a marked upward trend and remains near pre-crisis levels") and its damaging effect on growth are analysed in this paper by Reinhart and Rogoff   (referenced in the Irish Economy blog).

The impairment of growth by debt overhang is both marked and long-term.  It is  made clear too that causality does not run from  growth to debt "the multi-decade long duration of past public debt overhang episodes suggests that at very least the association is not due to recessions at business cycle frequencies."

Unnervingly, even continued ability to access  capital markets at relatively low interest rates by debtor countries does not ameliorate the growth-killing capacities of large debt overhangs.   Consoling thoughts that at least the UK took a Euro-use opt out are ill-founded insofar as  "growth-reducing effects of high public debt are apparently not transmitted exclusively through high real interest rates."

The Wrong Men for the Job

London was there for the taking by Labour.  That's twice Labour has thrown away power by allowing tightly-knit groups of politically motivated men to manipulate the choice of Labour champions in crucially important contests for social democracy in England.

 First they couldn't summon the will to rid themselves of Brown as an inappropriate Leader (inappropriate Chancellor of the Exchequer did the more damage to us all but that's another matter) and he lost them the UK election.  Now they've failed to gain London (Livingstone's previous term in office was not a Labour term but a last fling for other left forces) because another inappropriate candidate imposed himself.  The comrades in Europe must be aghast (social democracy being what it is, the ultimate internationalist movement).  All their hopes for re-taking widespread positions of authority and influence in a post modern political elitey way  now rest on Hollande,  and future co-operation and reinforcing support is compromised.

Of the two losses -  the UK and London -  it is London that is the greater.  Power, like culture, goes where the money is.  London ( devolved in the same manner as were Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  but with many of the powers suppressed by the Blair administration when Livingstone took it in 2000)  could recover those powers over some forms of  taxation, health, education, infrastructural investment,  relations  with other devolved regions both within and outside the UK.

New Labour - the UK's local  social democratic elites  - intended devolution to be the permanent denial of power to the centre right ( the Conservatives here); they must  bitterly regret the regionalisation and other mechanisms  they put in place to safeguard themselves against democracy that have now fallen to the centre right.  Pity they failed to safeguard themselves against putting up wrong'uns and throwing away the loyalty, conviction and hard work of social democracy's supporters.

Welwyn Hatfield Council Results in Affirmation of Aspiration

Election Results - 3 May 2012

The Conservatives retained their control with a [slightly] decreased majority.
The political composition of the council is now:

• Conservative 34 seats
• Labour 11 seats
• Liberal Democrat 2 seats
• Independent 1 seat

There was Labour gains [So? So? Sometimes our grammar slips but aspirational doesn't mean perfect. It means there's no stopping us because we'll get it right next time.  Ed.] in Haldens and Hatfield West wards, and an Independent gain in Welwyn West ward.

Hollande vs Sarkozy

So did you watch the great debate?  And what did you think?  Has Sarkozy adopted the right tone to pull in the le Pen votes?  Is Hollande a deceitful liar?

Why should the hardworking of Europe fund eurobonds for the corrupt, the special interest lobbies, and the workshy?

Can a France  be taken seriously as an ally if led by Hollande, who wants to pull out of Afghanistan unilaterally when French troops are there as part of a NATO command?

What kind of to-be-taken-seriously energy policy could end France's commitment to nuclear power or is Hollande dog-whistling the Greenies?

Should there be a muslim commuity in France or a muslim community of France?

Is the presidency of France not in the least a 'normal' undertaking or is it just an apparatchik's job?

Should the President be stripped of legal invulnerabilities or is that a politically childish refusal to recognize the vulnerabilities of the exercise of power and that  the real, and proper,  containment of presidential power is undertaken by the Constitution?

Is former official contact with Berlusconi as a fellow European leader ethically equivalent to being Strauss Kahn's Party's substitute candidate after he was found out?

I thought Hollande was like Harold Wilson but without the political and high office experience, skills or charm.  He also shares with Wilson the need for an answer to the "Are you, or have you ever been..." question.

I thought Sarkozy was violent at times and contemptuous throughout, which didn't appeal to the English behavioural norms in me but might appeal to the voters he's after.

Come and Join Us!

There are lots of Americans permanently resident in Europe.  After all, it's the best place on Earth to live.  But their exodus is so irritating to the United States that our fellow European residents have started handing in their United States passports and renouncing their citizenship.

They're queueing up in various countries.  Bloomberg's report suggests the reasons are principally for tax evasion and avoidance but numerous readers' comments make it clear that what is objectionable au fond is the attitude of their fellow-Americans to those who prefer elsewhere: that they are tax cheats; that they are rich and disloyal; that they need to be made to pay.....

Idly, I looked up how to renounce UK citizenship.  No bullet-proof booth (shades of the confessional), interviews with embassy officials, long-term left-over tax liabilities,  huge fees, or other general big brother nastiness.  You just do it online.  And if you want to take up being a UK citizen again you can do that online as well - once certainly and, at the Home Secretary's discretion, repeatedly.

Hollande's Party is as Bad as Berlusconi's

Dominique Strauss Kahn is not alone in facing accusations and investigations about his sexual affairs and attitudes.  Silvio Berlusconi's trial is advancing steadily in Milan and is reported daily in the media. 

For those with their Devoto-Oli to hand the recordings and transcripts of telephone conversations between 'Papi' (Berlusconi, not the Libyan Papi, he's dead) and the Olgettine, and among the Olgettine themselves (the collective noun refers to the block of flats in Milan in which the papi-girls were housed) can be wondered at here (from La Repubblica).

The wonder exists, too, in the way in which  while Berlusconi's Party fell with him on the growing public awareness of his sexual mores,  Hollande's Party has pretended that the sexual mores of their disgraced champion were unknown to Party apparatchiks, to political elites and insiders, to knowledgeable observers in the media. And there is no moral or ethical fault admitted among the Left in France for permitting such people to lead them.  But DSK was their leader, their hero, their man. 

And they knew.  And they pretend they didn't. 

At least the Italians have put  Berlusconi's Party  out of office and out for the count.  In France there is the unedifying spectacle of the entire centre left in denial about who and what they were willing to have stand for them until they couldn't hide it from the electorate.  Then they ditched the man. But his Party remains as disgraced as ever for their association with,  their acceptance, their lionising, of him.

No voter in France should accept any claim by Hollande's Party to hold high office - not even holding their noses. 

Certainly no woman should be voting for their own betrayal, their own degradation. 

Turkey May not be European but Europe is not a State

All the fuss about the European Union dragging proud nation states of Europe into its maw looks somewhat exaggerated as the two European Union presidents wait hopefully for their invitation to the Chicago NATO summit at the end of the month.

The Secretary General of NATO Rasmussen has done his round of European and other NATO capitals for preliminary discussions, views have been taken and exchanged, but Turkey has objected to any European Union presence.  Not a NATO country, the Turks argue; shouldn't be invited.

Turkey 1: 'Baroness' Ashton scores her standard 0.