The Resurgence

(WARNING: This is post contains personal political beliefs.)


Not only has the Berlusconi era thrashed the last bit of dignity of this country, most tragically it has exterminated its hope, will power and, ultimately, brains.

You know that a country has really sunk beyond revival when its people are imposed a government of barons, bankers and bigots and they genuinely cheer about it... because they have been told that it's the solution to a crisis caused by barons, bankers and bigots.

Don't get me wrong, I am ecstatic about Mr B's long due departure. I am not happy at all about how it happened. We needed Revolution, we got Restoration.

We are back to the roots now, back to the old-line liberal conservative politics of 150 years ago, as Norma Rangeri wrote on il manifesto today. We are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Italy, we are really celebrating the 1st... Let's see how it goes this time.

The bankers of God

Monti's supposedly technical, non-political government.

The week that changed Italy - a minimal press gallery

Letting technocrats run Europe is bad politics and bad economics 

It's a mistake to put unelected officials in charge of Italy and Greece (ADITYA CHAKRABROTTY - The Guardian)

Government of the technocrats, by the technocrats, for the technocrats

Democracy must not be regarded as merely an optional extra when solving economic problems. (DAVID SKELTON - NewStatesman)

Banker's Choice

Imagine letting Goldman Sachs and Bank of America select our president — 

that's just what's happened in Italy and Greece. 

(HAROLD MEYERSON - The American Prospect)

How Europe propped up the buffoon Berlusconi

Italian politics was a joke. But, within the security blanket of the eurozone, most people simply shrugged their shoulders (JACKIE ASHLEY - The Guardian)

Berlusconi's exit – what does it mean for Italy? Seventeen years of Berlusconi has meant rising poverty, rampant price-fixing, strengthened organised crime, a burgeoning black market and a shocking brain drain. So what next for troubled Italy? (TOBIAS JONES - The Guardian)

Occupy the world - Meanwhile in Italy

Sorry about the interruption... we were trying to occupy everything.

Dismayed by how things turned out for the worst in Rome, this blog has avoided commenting on the October 15th worldwide protest.
There we go again, we thought, we always stand out for the worst: the worst government, the worst police, the worst little violent proto-fascist few.
Following the news about the "Rome riot" we felt exactly what the mainstream media wanted us to feel: shame or scorn.
Some of us were ashamed because Italy was ruining the party for the whole movement. The other half was looking with contempt, having confirmed that the pinkos out there are dangerous.

So while the whole world was making a difference, we were plunged back in the same usual pit of petty politics, recrimination and whining.
In the Italian press you won't find news about what an incredible day the 15th of October was on planet Earth, but you can profusely read the comments and reactions of pretty much any obscure public figure, you can be lectured about the deep roots of violence in this country, you can find improbable interviews to mysterious black bloc members.

Once again we are the 99%. Once again only the other 1% counts.

Millions of people in 82 countries, 951 cities across the world, participated to the Day of Rage, peacefully. [pictures] 500,000 people in Madrid listened together to Beethoven's 9th symphony, massive demonstrations of the indignados all over Spain (350,000 in Barcelona, 100,000 in Valencia, 40,000 in Zaragoza). There were amazing scenes of cooperation in New York where 10,000 protesters 'took their message from the outpost of Zuccotti Park into the heart of the city, thronging into Times Square' (the Guardian). And then London, Berlin and Tokyo, Athens, Chicago, Copenhagen, Frankfurt am Main, Santiago del Chile, Toronto, Zagreb, Sydney, Lisbon, Brussels, Cairo...
...and yes, Rome with 200,000 marching and a few idiots smashing, with the compliance of the police and the government.

As Repubblica journalist Vittorio Zucconi commented:
A government that is unable to grant order and security during an authorized and peaceful protest, a government that is unable to foresee what we all feared, a government that allows a few hundreds smashing professionals to easily join the flow of the march, wearing uniforms and gas-masks [...], should resign rather than exploit the actions of these hooligans. All the more, if the same day in no other world capital, where similar demonstrations were taking place, anything like this happened.

Now the Italian government will be discussing special laws to increase the police power and put a stop to
"Preparatory acts to commit violence".
Acts such as surrounding a square of mostly peaceful protesters, obstructing all ways of escape? Driving a police van at full speed in a square full of people? Or raiding a school in the middle of the night, beating people and planting evidence(*)?

Oh wait a minute, the last two are not preparatory acts to commit violence, they are just plain acts of violence, so sorry about the misunderstanding.

Condemning young people to unemployment and precarious work
Cuts to the health system and to education
TVnews and politicians daily fomenting hatred against immigrants
Taxing the poor and letting the rich prosper
...
ARE all preparatory acts to commit violence.

The occupation goes on, spread the word, join the protest, occupy everywhere, "crush the hatred play your ukulele naked".

Ex-patriates

«I'm leaving this shitty country of which I'm sickened!»

It was not an unemployed researcher joining the stream of Italian fleeing brains, who said this.
It was not a lesbian woman or a gay man, who got married in Amsterdam or New York and who does not have any recognition and spouse rights in Italy, who said this.
It was not a factory worker, who after twenty years on the job watches the production being displaced to more profitable countries, who said this.
It was not an immigrant, arrived with immense strain, who hoped for a better life and found exploitation, injustice, discrimination, who said this.
It was not a pinko, an "indignado", a dissenter, a communist, who just couldn't take it any more after 17 years of Berlusconi, who said this.

It was Berlusconi, who said this.

"One of them things you say late at night!"

Yeah, he said that too. After all what Prime Minister hasn't...
"late at night, with half a smile on your face, paradoxically, as something that does not exist".

No worries, he reassured he is not going anywhere, he's staying right here "to change the country", to solve the big, ominous problem of Italy...

phone tapping!

For once Berlusconi and I have something in common: rampant unpatriotism. Though if he really wishes to leave this fraudulent dump, I might as well stay.

ITALY, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

don't miss the new movie by Gustav Hofer e Luca Ragazzi, award winning authors of Suddenly last winter

They may not have a future, but they got smart phones - the UK riots according to the Right-wing press

The London riots are all over the Italian press, as well as all over the media in every corner of the world. The conservative papers choose the virus metaphor and they seem to revolve around the question "are we going to get infected too"?
Hardly surprising.

But while the international copy-cat panic creeps through the front pages, another copy-cat phenomenon meets the eye.

The Berlusconi family newspaper il Giornale embraces the interpretations and the visions of its British ideological twin, the Daily Mail and offers its readers an enlightened and profound explanation of what is going on in the streets of London and the streets of Birmingham.

One leading commentator of the paper writes:

Sbandati e vigliacchi senza passato né futuro In Inghilterra va in scena la guerra della feccia

which sounds something like

Morally-wrecked and cowards without a past or a future

England stages the war of scum

The fact that they have no past and, especially, no future, does not seem to insinuate any doubt in il Giornale (or in the Daily Mail) about the causes. 

There does not seem to be much interest in understanding WHY this is happening. The Daily Mail this week alternatively blamed twitter, the liberal intelligentsia, moral decline, phone hacking hysteria. and so on.

The media hum-drum repeatedly let us know that these looters have blackberries and i-phones, that it isn't as if they were starving or something, sure they have no future, but hey one cannot have it all.

Il Giornale's writer (Tony Damascelli) tells us it's really about greed: "they are hungry for luxury and never satisfied". And don't forget, it's obviously about drugs: "this is to make money, to by drugs, to go back to their holes and refuse education, refuse jobs". Slackers and junkies, that's it and of course... they are black!

The writer goes on saying that unfortunately David Cameron is not Margaret Thatcher, that there is "no rigor and no vigor", that the government is fragile, the police is fragile and it's because of the chaos created by the phone hacking scandal (where have I already hear this one?).

So far we have learned that Tony Damascelli is a Daily Mail reader. But it gets better and better. In the following paragraph he assimilates the looters to Adolph Hitler, for no particular reason, but the fact that it is a right wing commentator's habit to nazify the "other" (remember Glenn Beck?).

The article then concludes explaining that there is no class war going on, it's just pointless violence and crime, they are nothing but rats, let's sanitize: "The rats' faces are on the front pages of every newspaper. They can't get away from the island".

Since there is no socio-economic cause but nihilistic greed, there is no need for any socio-economic solution, punishment is all we need. Conservatives and right wingers of the world unite.

But wanting to understand what is going on in the UK does not mean endorsing or even justifying crime and violence, it means looking at a picture that is bigger than one's own spectacles and trying to solve a problem that goes beyond the cuts in the UK, goes beyond the contingent financial crisis and is rooted much more deeply into our society.

So far most commentators, in the UK and abroad have failed to see that, the right-wing press blames it on the "scum" of society, the left-wing one on right wing governments. Replace hoodies with immigrants and Cameron with Berlusconi and the recipe works for every national palate.

However

The looting was, on one level, pure nihilism; on another, it was a crude attempt by rioters to mimic the conspicuous consumption exercised by the affluent and credit-rich. It was an expression of the values of a society in which we have been taught that, in the words of the former Labour minister Alan Milburn, to lead a good life is to "earn and to own". (theNewStatesman 10.08.11)

in the map of shame

Meet the markets

Yesterday Italian journalists spent the day telling the Italian public that we were all nervously waiting for Berlusconi's crisis (or anti-crisis) speech at the Parliament. Many also told us that while we still had to wait in trepidation we shouldn't expect anything new or useful.
Nothing new or useful was said after all and all newspapers opened this morning with big dull titles about same old same old. The media hasn't found the morbid crime of the summer yet.
If you want to hear what a failure the prime minister's speech was, the foreign press is eager to tell you: the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Irish times, the Australian, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, you name it...

But what I'd like to discuss is something that may sound even more un-newsworthy and obvious, that is the way we are used to talk about markets. The way we are taught to think about the markets.
The radio was quacking in the background all day and I kept hearing "the markets ... the markets ... the markets ...." and after a while I felt for them, the markets, poor chaps, poor family, poor rock band... But WHO are these markets anyway?

In Italian, as well as in English, there seems to be a massive tendency to anthropomorphize the markets. Just reading through the articles mentioned before we find plenty of examples, there are "stunned markets", "nervous" markets, the Deutsche Welle titles "Berlusconi seeks to soothe market nerves".
So it's normal, that's how one conventionally speaks about the markets, the economy and lots of other inanimate things, we make them human, it a bit like seeing a smiley face in the moon (we do that all the time, it's called pareidolia) it's the way our brain works, we just can't help it, can we?

I did a very informal analysis of how the markets are represented in the Italian media, looking at the past month's news on a variety of outlets (moderate, left wing and right wing dailies, financial papers, catholic press, weeklies) and the picture that emerged was very much homogeneous. The markets are people, just like you and me.


They have cognitive processes:
the markets judge, the markets have understood, the markets don't give much weight to the declarations,  the markets think, the markets obviously doubt about it, the markets are skeptical, the markets will start to make conjectures, the markets believe, the markets are ever more convinced, the markets know, the markets are not stupid ...


Emotional ones:
the markets remained indifferent, depressed the markets, calmed the markets, worried the markets, shocked the markets, scared the markets, the markets' nervousness, the markets' mood, the markets' euphoria, the markets' fear, the markets' relief, the markets might loose confidence, the markets are worried, the markets wish, the markets are taken by surprise, nervous session for the markets ...


They are involved in communicative interactions:
convince the markets, give a signal to the markets, the markets demand, make the markets understand, his first interlocutors will be the markets, that's what the markets ask, the markets reply, the markets are telling us, the markets can't give an adequate answer, and the markets said "...", listen to the markets ...


They have senses, in particular sight:
the markets look with apprehension, is seen by the markets, the markets foresee, the markets look attentively, the perception of the markets, right or wrong the markets perceive, the markets like, the markets don't like ...


They do very human things:
the markets wait  (they appear to do a lot of waiting), the markets cheer, the markets hunt, the markets menace, the markets will punish, the markets attack, the markets go on the rollercoaster, the markets bite Italy ...
and as for biting one needs teeth, the markets seem to have many more human body parts:
arms the markets wave
legs the markets stagger
shoulders the markets leave behind their backs
lungs the markets are gaping, the markets exhale with relief
hearts the markets are in fibrillation
they suffer and they keep on suffering, they have serious health problems


There is the markets' revolt and the markets' dictatorship. Still WHO these markets are we don't know, human in every respect, but with no faces.

Berlusconi's speech will be forgotten tomorrow, the global accumulation of patterns humanizing inanimate and abstract things in our language stays and strengthens every day. The more obvious, the more NORMAL it gets, the more problematic. We are to talk to, listen to, respond to, blame ... the markets but we can't. The markets have no name, no picture, no criminal record, no job to loose, shoes to buy, rent to pay, pets to feed, kids to see through school, relatives to bury... The markets are not accountable, people are.

In the meantime "Silvio challenges the markets" and off on holiday he goes (yesterday's was last session for the Italian parliament) ... the markets of course don't sunbathe and don't 'bunga bunga' party, do they?