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.

Staying Close to Your Oil and Gas Supplies

The Prime Minister has been in talks with the Secretary General of NATO Rasmussen, who is in Rome for a number of meetings prior to the NATO summit in Chicago in late May.  Senator Monti noted:

"Italy assures a financial and manpower undertaking committed to the training of Afghan forces...until now taken on by Italy in helping the security of that country...in accordance with the agreement signed by me with President Karzai on 26 January last."

It is no surprise that the Italian forces in Afghanistan are centred on Herat.  Where else?  The lovely city, the best carpets...

 
What is surprising (or perhaps more interesting than surprising) is their determination to stay after 2014.

It must be the proximity to all that  oil and gas.
 

Still On the Rocks

The Costa Concordia, now almost wholly submerged and lying on her side off the island of Giglio, is to be removed by a firm from Ravenna.  Tuscany is outraged. 

Not only has the removal contract gone to Emilia-Romagna but the port where repairs will be made after the gash in her side has been closed, the water removed  and  the ship made towable in situ, will not be Livorno but Civitavecchia.  There she will be refloated and will then be taken to Sicily where Fincantieri will sort her out  - probably by dismantling her - in the Palermo shipyards.

Chances are the numbers of  holidaymakers in Giglio will  rise.  There's so much advice to be offered to the salvage workers from the serried ranks of watchers on the quay, so much to discuss about how not to hit a large island with a large boat on a moonlit night with calm seas - Elba must be wondering what attractions it can offer to compete.

Rules of the Game

Rome. Half past five in the morning.  Two jewellers get into their car with the new collection they are taking to Munich for a jewellery fair.  These are the entrepreneurs, the kind of Italian family firm that makes up so much of the Italian economy through thick and thin.  The brothers are armed - as they should be carrying 75 million euros-worth of preziosi.

They note a white van as they drive up the ramp from the garage and are ready when it is rammed into the side of their car.  Before the pistol-waving robbers can wrench open the car doors the brother in the passenger seat has shot two of them - one dead and  another wounded. 

That  jewellers and gold couriers go armed is widely known and wholly accepted; the brothers have not been detained or charged.   The third robber is being hunted by Carabinieri throughout the neighbourhood -  they are even using helicopters over nearby open countryside.  There has merely been an official announcement that the dead robber was a Roman and had a long criminal record.

"Speak as you eat." is the Roman saying.  So they did.

End the Public Funding of Political Parties

Morphing into full vamp-face is as  nothing in effect when compared with the visceral distaste induced by watching Italian political parties justifying their continued drawing upon tax-payer funding.  The last tranche of the more than 2 billion euro payout for this legislature is due.

Without it the Partito Democratico - centre-left, ie. left-over communists and socialists, mixed with triangulating centre opportunists,  will become insolvent.  They seem to have spent their share of our money on travel, hotels, conferences in various more desirable parts of Italy and the world; a steady stream of petty upgradings of their politicians' and apparatchiks' living standards.  The Northern Leagues went for gold ingots, diamonds, villas, central city appartments and supporting the Bossi family and friends with handouts, business start-ups, and jobs all round.  The Partito della Liberta' have a more bunga bunga approach to spending our money.

The Prime Minister now stands accused of running not a 'technical' government backed by a grand coalition in Parliament to straighten out the economy and deal with welfare debt, but a full blown political administration that is taking on the real problems of  the country: an enormous submerged black and grey economy; organised criminality embracing the judiciary and local governance (towns and cities are having their administrations suspended from Ventimiglia to Palermo for mafia involvement); what looks like an entire programme of arrests for clan and family heads of organised criminality - they're hauled up into the daylight from their underground hidey holes at least once a week on the Eight O'Clock News with Carabinieri officers wearing 'at last' expressions and toting submachine guns; bemused-looking diners, shoppers, yacht owners, Ferrari drivers looking for their receipts under the gaze of Financial police (with golden wings on their hats!); and night after night enraged trade union special interest groups join various professional  -well, guilds, I suppose - spitting various kinds of moral high ground venom and demands that their particular interest group's ends and means should continue to deny the rest of the potential workforce a chance of a reasonable job, pension, health service, business start-up.

The population is cheering him on.  He's committed to no more austerity and the use of all his Executive power - which is considerable - to lower taxes once the evaders' revenues are in the kitty, lose the regulations designed to keep economic activity for the privileged and connected, bring Italy's highly-skilled, and largely maintained in functioning groups during the recession, workforce into  productive contact with the European economy (indeed the international economy, given the high propensity to export to the rest of the world).

The trouble is he's determined not to continue past this year.  The disgraced political parties have been warned to clean themselves up and sort out their relationship with the institutions of the state - you know, Parliament, the Judiciary,  the Constitution, the Law, the People - and stop  setting themselves up as all those things if not more.

So now we can see them as they really are, fighting for their kind of Italy; our country that they nearly bankrupted in their incompetence and corruption; their incorrigible, self-seeking pursuit of personal gain.  By next May there will be elections for the new Legislature  and for the new Head of State.  Both the Prime Minister and the President have stated they are not available again.  And we, the people, will not put up with political parties as they were (and still are trying to remain).

It took four months for the present Prime Minister to pull the economy and public finances into some semblance of order, to get the rules of the game sorted out, to vanquish the vicious vested interests.  But the minute the politicians saw a little room for themselves they are rushing to fill it with their usual poison.  In the end their funding must be cut off.  It's the only way to kill them so we can have parties that depend upon public support and answer to our political choices.

The Colonial Archives and the Art of Concealment

The dismantling of empire is never a pretty sight.  Today the Foreign Office has begun to release some of the files held secretly in Buckinghamshire (where else but Le Carre country?) and the Guardian is up in arms.  So it should be.  Much of what is extant from the files that were held in former colonies is as disgraceful as might be expected.  And much that is worse has been destroyed.

Except that these seem to be just the files from the colonies - those not destroyed in situ.  Savingrams poured into London day after day recounting, analysing, warning, seeking decisions, recording, panicking even; diplomatic bags and deliveries of copies of material arrived by slower routes.  Allies, most particularly the United States, and other decolonising European states, were fully embedded in matters of interest to them.   The destroyed data were not unique documents - merely those copies kept in local archives and offices.

Yet we are led to believe that they are lost, evidence of colonial wrongdoing gone forever.  They are not.  They are merely in another place (another part of Bucks?) and all the more secure because of the misleading emphasis on local destruction.

And if you ever wondered where the arrogance and enormity of the British secret state derived, start by looking at these damaged, partial, redacted archives that have been wrung from your ruling classes.

Lenin's Question Again

Generalised austerity is producing recession; and structural reforms alone are not going to make it better.  Not least because some structural reforms are not necessarily for the better.  Furthermore they are effective over the long term - ten to twenty years.  In the meantime the absolute requirement for fiscal consolidation reinforces lack of demand.  Which is made worse by taxation levels that render the financially competent poor.

Europeans are suffering from social and political parasitism.  Certainly today's economic environment  is competitive, but parasitism as a concept  can be borrowed from Lenin.  Indeed, for our economies too, much can be learned from the experiences of state planning and the centrally planned economy that failed the moment its objectives were not the creation of basic development but the creation of a modern consumer-driven economy.

For our capitalist societies to fail because of income inequality and mal-distribution of wealth is as miserable an end for us as the destruction of the dream of realised socialism.    However, even though the failures of state planning are well-known and well-documented,  the failures of market capitalism are, unfortunately,  in part the result of the economically naive and unaware attempting to use the failed techniques and ideologies of  realised socialism through an antidemocratic take-over of the state, and its enlargement beyond any local, democratic control.

Yet the hyper-liberal response to the ills of market capitalism is creating the gross increases in inequality that are at the root of our recession.  What is to be done?

Happy Easter!

We've made it once more.

Lenin Makes it Through Siberian Winter Cold

The tortoise is eating flowers in the garden.  There were great fears for survival after the February temperatures and deep snow.

When is a Dove Not a Dove?

Imagine calling an Airbus 319 a dove.  No matter what colour you paint it, it's an ugly Airbus. 
(And artists are supposed to have some sense of beauty.  And history.  Aren't they?)

This is a Dove.  From de Havilland.

The UK Needs More Than 'Privacy From State Snooping'

Fresh legislation on surveillance of individual's communications is a red herring when considering what needs to be done or undone or not done to end the United Kingdom's democratic deficit.  This deficit is nothing to do with the UK's membership of the European Union although the EU democratic deficit interacts malignantly with that of the United Kingdom to produce a peculiarly authoritarian and surveillance-ridden European state in the UK.

First to be reformed must be the institution of an hereditary head of state. The feudal governance structures carried in the train of an hereditary monarchy have no rightful place in an advanced capitalist European democratic state.  Crown prerogative and Crown privilege (or Public interest immunity these days) are democratically uncontrolled and their distribution between the Executive, Judiciary, and the Head of State in person are unsettled and shifting to the advantage of secrecy and the manipulation of those parts of the state that are accessible by democratic means.

Which leads to the lack of a codified constitution.  The UK has no constitution.  A constitution that is capable of taking on almost any form under guise of being 'unwritten' but to be found in many sources accessed by specialist knowledge and interpretation, and whose content is undefined and without criteria for inclusion and which, further, can be wholly altered by legislative or Executive act, is no constitution at all.

There is no readily accessible route to any resolution of conflict between the individual and this monstrously over-powered and ill-defined state.  Without a constitutional court, defined as such and sitting as such any party to a conflict finds themselves without straightforward redress, lost in a fog of interpretation and application of unclear rules and precedents.  Which is precisely how sovereign, Executive and Judiciary want it.

Redress, for UK subjects, sought through the Court of Human Rights is grossly inadequate and it is here that some of the the worst aspects of the malign inter-relationship of European structures and UK structures occur.  If domestic remedies must be exhausted first and there are none or are defective UK subjects are further disadvantaged by the nebulousness of hard to realise possibilities dressed as real opportunities or even rights.  Other European states' citizens know precisely where they stand and how to get from there to somewhere else (so to speak).

It is long past the time that this pernicious, mutually reinforcing State in the UK was reformed to make all of it,  not just parts of legislature and parts of local government, open to democratic vote, scrutiny and  control.  If all the other member-states of the European Union can produce forms of democracy enabled through institutions and constitutions open to democratic control, so can the United Kingdom. 

The UK needs:  an elected head of state; an elected second chamber of Parliament; a codified constitution; a constitutional court; and local level tribunals readily accessible to the population  for early resolution of abuses of power by state officials.

Perhaps then the Union itself will no longer be so noxious to the United Kingdom through the over-zealous and selective application of its practices and policies, which are held in check in other member-states by the proper functioning of their democracies.