EU Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:49:00 +0000

Это заставляет мужчину СХОДИТЬ С УМА от тебя (99% женщин этого НЕ знают)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 May 2025 23:48:00 +0000

Russia's new ally – why Luxembourg is perfectly positioned to form a special relationship with Russia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:24:00 +0000

Author: Simon Dinning

21 Jun 2013 | 00:00 |

Cyprus' special relationship with Russia has been rocked by its exposure to the eurozone crisis – and Luxembourg is perfectly positioned to step into the breach, says Simon Dinning

The financial crisis in Europe has been a constant in the news for longer than many of us would care to remember. The near financial collapse of Cyprus, developed primarily as a result of its exposure to Greece, is the latest highly publicised example of a wholly unstable economy and a country in political disarray.

Described by some members of the Cypriot parliament as the "enslavement deal", parliament in Cyprus has recently approved the country's international bailout after warnings that the alternative would indeed be financial collapse. MPs voted through the loan package by 29 votes to 27. The small eurozone state secured a loan package worth €10bn (£8.5bn) from its EU partners and the International Monetary Fund. In return it must raise €13bn (£11.1bn), largely through banking reform. This has created huge divisions in the country's representative house, where no one party has a majority.

The link between Russia and Cyprus has existed for many years and is one of convenience for the Russian market. While the double taxation arrangements between the countries are the main reason for Russian business flowing through Cyprus, there are many softer issues that have sustained the relationship. Proximity, "ease of doing business" and the ability of a number of service providers to speak the language has certainly assisted relations.

However, the depth of the crisis and the fact that it has shown not only extreme economic difficulties but also political division has left the financial services world concerned about whether the Cypriot offering is sustainable or secure. Certainly the idea of sending physical money through the Cypriot banking system seems unlikely in the medium (and perhaps longer) term but many are also questioning whether structuring through the jurisdiction is advisable. These factors, aligned with general concern over reputational issues in Cyprus have left them with a very challenging financial services model.

In the Russian market in particular, there are a range of views across the spectrum on this. Some believe that the double taxation agreement (DTA) will mean that Cypriot special purpose vehicles continue to be used. Some see Cypriot vehicles being used purely for tax structuring with no significant business or shareholder arrangements at the Cypriot level. Most suggest that they are actively looking for an alternative to Cyprus as a result of both political and economic instability and reputational risk.

So what are the alternatives? The answer depends to some extent on what role the vehicle needs to play in a structure. For pure holding companies or joint venture entities, both the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Jersey are widely used in the Russian market already.

It is common to see a chain with Russian assets, moving up to a Cypriot company and then a BVI entity on top. For some of the larger transactions, particularly where European money is invested, Jersey may take the place of the BVI.

The BVI and Jersey are both termed tax neutral jurisdictions. Neither has a DTA with Russia but these jurisdictions can ensure that there is no additional tax leakage. The flexibility of the corporate legislation in both domiciles makes them exceptionally attractive structuring options.

In looking for a tax favourable alternative to Cyprus, Luxembourg emerges as a leading contender.

Why Luxembourg?

A founder member of the European Union benefiting fully from free movement of capital and freedom of establishment within the EU, Luxembourg is also one of the largest global financial centres, with flexible and attractive legal, regulatory and tax regimes and a significant concentration of professional service providers to the financial services industry.

Luxembourg's sophisticated financial services infrastructure, global brand recognition, full EU single market access and extensive double tax treaty network has also lead to its development as a core jurisdiction for investment structures.

This has resulted in the domiciling of several tens of thousands of holding companies, many of which form part of globally recognised corporate groups, or hold the portfolio investments of leading international investment funds. Luxembourg'ssecuritisation vehicle forms a third principal pillar of its financial services sector.

As a leading global jurisdiction for the establishment and management of investment vehicles, Luxembourg has demonstrated one of the most solid track records for stability in relation to the challenges arising in global markets since 2008 with a triple A credit rating, low levels of sovereign debt and one of the highest per capita GDP globally. This economic and political stability, allied to the legal, regulatory and fiscal attributes of its financial services industry has resulted in Luxembourg's position as a premier-ranking global fund domicile.

It was interesting to read in the Russian newspaper Pravda in May of this year that "Luxembourg is a state that ranks third on the total volume of investment in the Russian economy. Luxembourg has invested €28bn (£23.8bn) in Russian projects, while Russia's investment in the economy of the Duchy makes up only €4.4bn (£3.7bn). Luxembourg enjoys great popularity among wealthy Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian businessmen." The links are clearly well established and there is a determination by Luxembourg to act as a platform for Russian capital.

On 21 November 2011, Russia and Luxembourg amended their double tax treaty of 28 June 1993 (the DTT) with the signature of a new protocol. The protocol was ratified by Russia on 2 January 2013. It will enter into force after Luxembourg has completed ratification procedures under its domestic law. This is anticipated to be in 2014.

The tax position, coupled with political stability, make Luxembourg a prime location for Russian companies to conduct international business across European markets. In particular, Russian entities seeking investment in the global marketplace will see investors easily able to get comfortable with the use of Luxembourg vehicles.

While Luxembourg cannot match Cyprus from a tax perspective at the current time, it is nevertheless more advantageous than a number of other jurisdictions and we are finding that many clients would prefer the certainty that comes with Luxembourg to the vagaries of Cyprus.

Recent Fitch analysis (May 2013) noted that while Luxembourg is a small European country with a large banking system, that is where its similarity to Cyprus ends. Fitch stated that not only has Luxembourg got healthier banks and a stronger sovereign than Cyprus, the structure of their financial sector means it is less vulnerable to a destabilising withdrawal of non-resident deposits and losses from foreign exposure.

In short, Luxembourg is not the next Cyprus – a key factor when considering other contending jurisdictions.

Simon Dinning is a partner at Ogier.

http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/analysis/2275388/russias-new-ally-why-luxembourg-is-perfectly-positioned-to-form-a-special-relationship-with-russia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 12:20:00 +0000

Russian business to turn to Luxembourg instead of Cyprus?

07.05.2013

The debt crisis in Europe has hit big business hard, and Russian business was no exception. Problems with Cypriot banks raised many questions about the appropriateness of keeping money in the Cypriot offshore. Some businessmen began to seriously consider Luxembourg as an economic partner.

Luxembourg will help Russian businesses

Luxembourg intends to serve as a platform for the Russian capital in Europe, Minister for Economy and Foreign Trade of Luxembourg, Etienne Schneider stated.

"To develop serious business contacts and create new joint projects, we need to look ahead and prepare professionals who are familiar with economic realities of our countries," said Schneider. Luxembourg offered Russian universities to conduct training of Russian students in the universities of the Grand Duchy. "The development of personal contacts between young people of our countries is the best way to create a framework for future partnership," he said. "We already have extensive business ties, but their potential is not fully realized," said Schneider. To expand business contacts, according to Schneider, Russia and Luxembourg must introduce direct flights.

It should be noted that Luxembourg is a state that ranks third on the total volume of investment in the Russian economy. Luxembourg has invested 28 billion euros in Russian projects, while Russia's investment in the economy of the Duchy makes up only 4.4 billion euros. Luxembourg enjoys great popularity among wealthy Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian businessmen. Many local businesses that register businesses opened departments that serve only clients from the countries of the former USSR.

Schneider's statement was voiced against the background of the crisis of the Cypriot banking sector, where Russian investors were holders of accounts. The Cypriot government was forced to accept the conditions of the EU and started to restructure the banking sector. This will enable them to obtain financial assistance from the EU to save the island nation. Under the terms of EU lenders, investors of Laiki Bank and the Bank of Cyprus will lose much of their funds. The Russian authorities expressed serious concerns about such measures, which affected Russian business. Entrepreneurs are forced to transfer their money to other offshore zones, such as Luxembourg.

Luxembourg is an offshore zone in the first place. The transition of financial activities of Russian companies under the jurisdiction of Luxembourg authorities will increase the risk for "the Cypriot script" to reoccur. In Luxembourg, the strongest link in the economy is the banking sector, and the maximum volume of Russian investments falls on the banking sector. But the banking crisis in Cyprus made Russian business think about the feasibility of using offshore zones. Businessmen do not want to lose their money again, so in the near future one should not expect large cash flows in the direction of Luxembourg. Russian business is being very precautious about offshore zones now.

Russian authorities want to return the money back into the country

The Russian government develops options to attract capital from offshore zones back to Russia. One of the options was the establishment of internal offshore zones in the Russian Federation. The zone may appear in the Far East, on the base of the International Investment Bank. Financial analysts say that big business is moving away from offshore companies and increases the transparency of its financial flows. Therefore, for Russian authorities it is now the main goal is the improvement of investment climate inside the country.

Some steps have already been made in this direction. In late April, Russian authorities proposed to consider the possibility of holding tax amnesty in the country that would allow businesses to return their capitals to Russia from abroad without any penalties or the need to explain the origin of money. The statement was made against the background of the economic crisis and the ongoing outflow of funds from the country. The proposal to hold tax amnesty in the country was announced by Gherman Gref, the chairman of Sberbank of Russia. The offer was about the funds that had been taken abroad and are currently kept in offshore zones.

Igor Shuvalov, First Deputy Prime Minister, backed the proposal. According to him, authorities are willing to discuss details of the amnesty if banks make such a proposal. He also said that such steps were made, but they returned no results. However, he added, many countries have held tax amnesties repeatedly and their efforts were eventually rewarded.

The format of tax amnesty was not specified. The term itself suggests that citizens will be able to declare their available money without explaining the source of its origin. As a rule, citizens are obliged to pay income tax on these funds, and the funds can then be legally used in economy. In Russia, tax amnesty was held in 2007, but the target was the funds kept inside the country. Back then, the amnesty was recognized unsuccessful, as small amounts of "amnestied" funds were collected.

During three months of the current year, there were 25 billion dollars wired from Russia. This amount accounted for almost one-third of last year's outflow of capital. In such circumstances, the Russian economy needs money. Russian authorities plan to conduct a large-scale program to return money to the country. It goes about measures to get rid of offshore factors in the domestic economy. The plan stipulates for the improvement of judicial system, the liberalization of corporate law, the strengthening of the rights for the protection of inheritance, tax measures and the prohibition to privatize state assets through foreign exchanges.

Experts doubt the efficiency of tax amnesty

Many officials and businessmen expressed doubts about the positive outcome of tax amnesty. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that he doubted the effectiveness of the financial amnesty in terms of the return of the funds to the country from the area of preferential tax jurisdictions.

Natalia Volchkova, a professor at the Russian School of Economics, believes that a certain amount of capital will return, but it will be quite an insignificant amount. Capital does not return from abroad due to the lack of projects that would ensure reasonable profit and non-interference of the state.

The absence of business climate in the country is a major reason why the money is flowing out rather than flowing in. In fact, the government must create conditions that would bring people profit from their investments in Russia. Experience in other countries shows that it is possible. For example, one needs to create an independent judicial system that would guarantee protection of deals. It is also necessary to revise the scope of responsibility of the Russian tax inspectorate, which, in addition to the collection of taxes, partly functions as a law enforcement agency. It does not allow private businesses to develop.

In general, the government should improve investment climate in the country, so that money would flow in Russia. Investing in European projects, Russian businessmen raise EU economies, to the detriment of the Russian economy. This is a serious problem that one needs to look into urgently.

Sergei Vasilenko

Pravda.Ru

Putin's use of chemical weapons in his hybrid war against Ukraine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 21:44:00 +0000

There is a lot of fuss in media about new military prowess of Russia and Russian “polite people”, succeeded in silent and bloodless occupation of the Crimea. There a lot of explanations how they managed to do this – from Russian TV propaganda, what is Russia' a psychological weapon, inducing in psychoses local population to cutting communications with Kiev and psychological unpreparedness of the Ukrainian military to kill the Russians. All of this make sense. But there is one more detail, which was not mentioned.

As the Russian video report ( made to celebrate Russia's new military prowess) demonstrates there is a reason to consider that the Russians used the non-lethal chemical weapons while seizing administrative buildings and Ukrainian military bases. Video shows that while capturing Ukrainian soldiers in their military barracks some of Russian gunmen were wearing respirators. What for? And why the Ukrainian military were so passive and easy to manage?

If this happened during their first operation this explains a psychological shock which was caused by this not only to the Ukrainian military, but to the Ukrainian authorities as well to prevent them from active measures. Also this should shape the public opinion at the beginning of intervention about Ukraine as a country, which did not oppose to the invasion of Crimea and to stifle the criticism of the West.

The video shows that when approaching the building the Russian spetznaz brought inside some heavy equipment. What kind of equipment this could be?

Another video from teh surveillance cameras at Council of Ministers building shows that before the capturing of the building the chemical substance was infused inside. The people on the video are absolutely passive without any sign of neither shock, nor fear - just apathy.

In such case is this a sign of prowess or just the use of the non-lethal chemical weapons for manipulating of people's minds to incapacitate the from performing their duties.

Putin's use of non-lethal chemical weapons

Putin has well-known record of using non-lethal chemical weapons during the Moscow theater hostage crisis for seizure of the crowded Dubrovka Theater on 23 October 2002:

On October 26, 2002, approximately 50 Chechen separatist guerrillas took over a Moscow theater, holding about 750 people hostage. The hostage-takers were well armed with automatic weapons and grenades, and the females were wired with high explosives. They demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and threatened to kill the hostages and themselves if their demand was not met. The Russian government refused to negotiate. On the 28th, Russian special forces troops stormed the theater, first releasing a potent narcotic (a derivative of the opiate anesthetic fentanyl) into the ventilation system. When the troops burst into the main hall, they found the hostages and hostage-takers in a coma. The unconscious Chechens were all shot dead at point blank range, and the hostages were rushed to hospitals. In the end, approximately 125 hostages died of overdose; the rest--more than 600--survived. A number of the survivors are likely to have permanent disability. Opiate overdose causes respiratory depression that can starve the brain of oxygen, causing permanent brain damage when prolonged.

Last year Russia was accused of supporting the Syrian ally Bashar Assad, who used imported earlier from Russia chemical weapons for the massive killing of his own people. This became damaging for Putin's reputation and he produced a U-turn by offering to convince Assad to scrap the chemical weapons. This rescued Assad from the US attack, promised by Obama for the chemical weapons use as a “red line” in his Syria politics and elevated Putin's reputation. Later for this move Putin was nominated (or rather orchestrated this nomination) for the Noble Prize.

But lately the theme of chemical weapons use in Syria arose again. This time this was about a non-lethal chemical weapons:

At the beginning of April, an Israeli security source confirmed that the Assad regime had used a non-lethal chemical weapon at the end of March on the outskirts of Damascus. The source said he could confirm claims made by Syrian rebels and doctors last month that a substance had been used on rebel fighters in Harasta, an outlying region of the Syrian capital, adding that the chemical “neutralizes [threats] but does not kill.”

Another coincidence – the same day when the theme of non-lethal chemical weapons in Syria arose Russia baned military and police from traveling abroad

The ban includes employees who have access to state secrets - parts of the military and the police, the Federal Drug Control Agency, the Federal Migration Service, Federal Penalty Service and certain employees of the Foreign Ministry. According to estimates, they are around 250 000 people.
The goal of the measure, according to LifeNews.ru is to prevent leaks of secret information to foreign intelligence agencies who could use it to penetrate Russia.
Exceptions would be made in “exceptional circumstances” and for “good reason”. The duration of the ban is yet unclear, which for the time being is for an indefinite period.

It seems that the use of the chemical weapons is the secret. which Russia would like to hide, especially after Putin's revelation at his press-conference at 17th of April that the silent “polite people”, who seized Crimea without any shooting in fact were Russian special forces. It looks like Putin was so proud for himself that he couldn't wait to identify those legendary “green men” as the Russian spetznaz.

This means that the same chemical weapons are used at the East of Ukraine – in Donetsk and other places, where the same Russian spetznaz has seized and continue to seize administrative buildings in the same “silent and polite” way.

“Doping of Hitler” for separatists

This is not the only use of psycho-chemicals in Putin's “hybrid warfare” against Ukraine. There is an information that inside Donetsk state administration building there is a laboratory, where a special substance - pervetin is produced every day and night. Later it is served to the rebels – many of whom are criminals and drug addicts. This substance is known as a “power drug”, which “reduces fatigue, heighten aggression, and diminish human warmth and empathy”.

As pervitin was used by Nazi's troops for making soldiers to fight longer and more fiercely it is styled the “doping of Hitler”. A pharmacologist from the German Doctors' Association explains :

"The blitzkrieg was fueled by Pervitin. The idea was to turn ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen into automatons capable of superhuman performance."

It seems Putin decided to actualize Hitler's secret weapon. It is not surprising that Hodorkovsky, visiting recently Ukraine, was not allowed to enter the Donetsk state administration building. As one of higher ups of the rebels informed him: “There are patriots there and they are attuned for everything”.

In February there was the information on the Russian spetsnaz, which lived in a resort near Kiev during the Maidan, was getting some special tea from their higher ups, not from resort as mentioned those, who worked there. Some observers consider that this was the same spetznaz, who killed Maidan activists later in February. One of captured in Donetsk separatists recognized that he was working in Kiev during the deadly shootings of Maidan.

Diplomatic dopings and incapacitants

Every result achieved in a war should be consolidated in diplomatic agreements. This is just another battlefield in Putin's hybrid war. One could notice that Sergey Lavrov does whatever he can to prolong the talks. And it seems at the end of the talks he is not exhausted like other participants, but an opposite – he looks even more refreshed than at the beginning. Journalists noticed that Lavrov often leaves the negotiations room for a smoke. - as often as some journalists suggested that it is damaging for the superpower status, for wh ich Russia aspires. This could be just a sign of extra-agitation. Otherwise nobody knows what Lavrov smokes. It is known the result: super diplomat always obtains what he wants, leaving the opponents confused.

Supposedly Lavrov is using a kind of power drug, designed or adjusted in the Kremlin's secret laboratories. Nanotechnologies have got a special boost in Russia lately, but without visible results. Also Moscow made its policy to invite the scientists, whose experiments are prohibited in their own countries or to use the results of their work.

The wearing-out strategy itself is enough to win over the exhausted partners during the talks. But after the latest diplomatic victories it seems that Lavrov could use not only a doping drug for himself, but a kind of sedative for his partners, what should make them more understanding. Just a capsule in his pocket is enough to achieve the result. The challenge here is to not overdo with the final result of the talks to remain credible.

The diplomatic practice shows that Putin himself used to utilize some special effects during the negotiations and doesn't have any psychological barriers to this. Moreover, such practice makes part of his basic skills as a former KGB agent. Putin not only doesn't downplay his FSB affiliation, but emphasizes how proud he is about it.

Hostages and enemies

The use of such psycho-chemicals can not only break a resistance, but make people more prone to manipulation. We could see that just a couple of days spent as a hostage in Sloveansk made mayor Shtepa to change her mind from accusing separatists to thanking them and Putin for annexing Crimea.

International military observers, captured lately by the Russian terrorists, also pointed out that they are not hostages, but guests of the“new Mayor of Slovensk”.

With the help of his straw men Putin can use any special substances against his opponents like the Ukrainian power, which behaves very strangely lately. It's behavior is far from rational, rather it could be rationalized later.

The sane technology can be used against the border patrols to access the country despite the introduced earlier ban etc.

It seems that this war advanced new and not experienced before challenges, which should be acknowledged and faced. If the world is to survive. This challenges demonstrate also how far Putin is prepared to go to achieve his goal for world domination.

Irina Severin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:11:00 +0000

Bernd Lucke, the head of Germany's euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, with his four children at an election party in Berlin.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 20:28:00 +0000

Bernd Lucke, the head of Germany's euroskeptic Alternative

for Germany (AfD) party, with his four children at an election party

in Berlin.

Despite falling short of the 5 percent hurdle required to enter parliament, the euroskeptic Alternative for Germany party performed surprisingly well in the German election. Experts say the party shouldn't be underestimated.

After a tumultuous night at party headquarters in Berlin, Bernd Lucke -- head of Germany's euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party -- was up bright and early on Monday morning, doing an interview on the ARD's "Morgenmagazin" breakfast show.

Lucke exuded an air of calm confidence. Though his anti-euro party -- which was only formed in February and calls for an "orderly dismantling of the euro zone" -- did not achieve the 8 percent vote share Lucke had optimistically predicted on Sunday, AfD did come within a hair's breadth of the 5 percent threshold required to take seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag.

"Objectively, a 4.7 percent vote share for a party founded so recently is a highly respectable result," he told the public broadcaster. "We continue to believe that it's important to have a political force that is willing to discuss the common currency and European bailout policies, and this force is the AfD," before adding, "The ball is in our court now and we are ready for it."

Many political commentators breathed a sigh of relief at the party's failure to make it into parliament. Still, even its most forceful critics -- among them some of the country's pollsters, whom Lucke has accused of underrepresenting his party's support -- concede that the election defeat may not be the end of the line for the AfD.

Photo Gallery

7 Photos

Photo Gallery: The German Election in Numbers

"It's crucial not to underestimate them or to assume that they will simply pass into irrelevance now that the election is over," says Manfred Güllner, head of German polling institute Forsa, who has sparred with Lucke about poll results. "They are not just a single-issue protest party, or else they wouldn't have made it this far. They are a socially acceptable organization with clear right-wing affiliations -- that is an extremely dangerous combination."

Beyond the Euro

The AfD seems to have learned its lesson from the failed Pro DM party -- a right-wing populist organization that emerged in 1990s with the sole intention of preventing the introduction of the euro currency. Pro DM achieved less than 1 percent at the 1998 general election and passed into irrelevance shortly thereafter, largely because of its status as a single-issue party.

Lucke's anti-euro party has made efforts to expand its election manfesto beyond the issue of the euro zone -- and the party has come to occupy a niche previously inhabited by the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP). Research conducted by polling institute Infratest Dimap shows that 330,000 of the anti-euro party's 1,160,000 votes on Sunday came from people previously affiliated with the FDP. "If the FDP had kept the promises it made four years ago, we wouldn't exist," Lucke said in an interview on Sunday.

But the party drew voters from across the political spectrum -- 230,000 AfD voters had previously supported Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democrats and 150,000 their center-left Social Democrat challengers. The fact that the right-wing populists have found resonance with such a broad spectrum of voters is likely to cause a stir among the country's more established players. It's also worth noting that 150,000 AfD voters hadn't voted in the previous elections.

"The spectacular success of the AfD increases the pressure on the mainstream parties to face up to questions [about the future of the European Union]," argued an online commentary in Germany's left-wingTageszeitung newspaper. "To dismiss them as a party that merely captures voters on the fringes of the political spectrum would not be smart."

Path to Brussels?

Though the anti-euro party's popularity is likely to make waves in the Bundestag, and may even prompt some political parties to rethink their approach to the euro zone, Güllner argues that Merkel's economic policies are unlikely to be affected by it. "The chancellor has such broad support, nothing can deter her from her European path," he says. "The support for the AfD is worrying for German democracy, but that is unlikely to influence Mrs. Merkel."

The AfD may, however, be able to build on its current momentum by launching a campaign to enter the European Parliament in 2014. In Brussels, only 3 percent of votes are required to enter parliament, which may work in Lucke's favor.

Unlike some of Germany's other fringe parties, the AfD will not have to worry about its finances -- it has several private benefactors who are likely to support its anti-euro agenda beyond September 22. "Lucke and his colleagues do have a chance at the European level," says Güllner. "Their financial house is in order and they've got some semi-credible leaders."

But Hajo Funke, political scientist at Berlin's Free University, has his doubts about whether the AfD will be able to establish itself as a credible player in Brussels. "What people seem to forget is that the AfD's approach to the euro is actually rather unsophisticated," he says. "Its economic policies have to be developed and fleshed out if it wants to compete on a European level."

U.K. Finds Its Beppe Grillo - Bloomberg

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 22:14:00 +0000

U.K. Finds Its Beppe Grillo - Bloomberg
U.K. Finds Its Beppe Grillo
By Marc Champion Mar 1, 2013 2:19 PM GMT+0200

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's tactic of pledging to claw back powers from the European Union and then hold a referendum on whether to leave or stay in the bloc has failed its first election test.

That was the general consensus in the U.K. news media this morning, after Cameron's Conservative Party was reduced to a humiliating third place in a by-election in the southern constituency of Eastleigh. The Tories were beaten not only by their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats (who held on to the seat), but also by the UK Independence Party.

The EU referendum pledge that Cameron made in January was designed precisely to stanch the flow of right-wing Conservatives to the UKIP. This week, it failed. Already this morning, conservative commentators in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph were saying the result proved that Cameron should hold a referendum on whether to stay in the EU immediately, rather than by 2017; crack down harder on immigration; and abandon recent policies such as legalizing gay marriage.

The result was widely interpreted, too, as a resounding victory for the Liberal Democrats who won with 32 percent of the vote, despite trailing badly in national opinion polls. The UKIP candidate got about 28 percent and the Conservative candidate 25 percent. Labour came in with less than 10 percent.

How you interpret the results depends on how you look at the numbers. One view is that midterm by-elections mean nothing -- the ruling party always does terribly because voters can send a message of protest with little consequence. That's usually and empirically ture, but as Beppe Grillo showed in Italy, politics are changing in Europe. Protest voters may really mean it this time.

More interesting than the raw figures is the change from the last results for Eastleigh, at the 2010 national election. The (pro-EU) Liberal Democrat share of the vote has fallen by 14.5 percentage points, about the same as the (euro-skeptic) Conservatives at minus 14 percentage points. This makes perfect sense to me: Both parties are running the government together and the economy is in terrible shape, so they did as badly as each other. Labour went nowhere, with an increase of 0.2 percentage point. That's a disaster for them, too, because as the main opposition party they need to be making large electoral gains if they hope to win power at the next national election.

The only clear victor was the UKIP, whose vote this week increased 24 percentage points, compared with 2010. I don't see this as a Europe issue, and if Cameron concludes that what he needs to do now is chase the UKIP's policies, he'll still lose at the next election.

That should come as no surprise. When the Ipsos Mori polling group does its monthly survey on what Britons consider the most important issue facing their country, the EU doesn't even make the top 10: In the latest, January poll only 6 percent of Britons ranked the EU as their top concern. The standout winner was the economy, at 52 percent, followed by unemployment, immigration, the National Health Service and crime.

What the by-election probably shows is that in UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the British have found their Beppe Grillo, the stand-up comedian turned politician who won a quarter of the vote in Italy's recent parliamentary election.

Farage was never a professional comedian like Grillo, but he is the nearest thing to it in the European Parliament, where he is a legislator. His party has nationalist roots that are quite different from Grillo's, but Farage seemed to understand that he drew votes from all parties and the cause of his success was the same as Grillo's: protest. He called his party's surge in Eastleigh a rejection of traditional parties and politics.

Cameron and the Tories will succeed only if voters believe the government is looking out for their interests and has found the right policies to restore prosperity to an economy that has yet to recover its size at the start of the financial crisis. The prime minister should spend all of his time worrying about whether he has the right growth and austerity policies; some time on improving immigration policies; and no time at all on showing how tough he's being on the EU -- a strategy that won't get him re-elected, but distracts from policies that might.

(Marc Champion is a member of Bloomberg View's editorial board. Follow him on Twitter.)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 May 2013 07:26:00 +0000

Stefano Pitrelli

Investigative journalist and scholar of comics

GET UPDATES FROM STEFANO PITRELLI

I like

Read Alan Moore to understand Beppe Grillo

Posted: 16/03/2013 05:00

Cultures , Video , Alan Moore , Beppe Grillo , Guy Fawkes , 5 Star Movement , Pier LuigiSpider , V For Vendetta , Fuck Day , Vday , News

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

139

"All the parasites drown, sex and crimes such as accumulated dirt will submerge them up to the waist ... And the whores and politicians will look up and shout," Save us. "And I whisper," No "."

Absence of irony aside, it sounds like a speech by Grillo. Indeed, this is exactly the standard answer of Beppe Grillo at every possible offer of alliance made to his parliamentary motion. But talking about here is Rorschach with his famous prose broken, that is the character of "Watchmen," Alan Moore comics, perhaps the most well-known author of comics in the world.

Its Elizabethan masks of Guy Fawkes - adopted by Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous, the Indignados, and other groups and protest movements International - do not mention that another of his creation, the anarchist "V" homonymous graphic novel "V for Vendetta. " And so far Moore has never hesitated to give them his blessing.

So I had already made an appointment for an interview with Alan Moore this week. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Beppe Grillo and his Movement. Moreover, the inspiration of the literature of Moore, the same Grillo has always manifested very clearly: the "V" of its founding political event, the Fuck Day - ie the same letter that stands out within the word MoVement capital - in logo electoral five stars is then enclosed in a circle, so that reassembles the character's trademark red blood mooreiano.

Not to mention, to want to be attentive to detail, that the number of its stars, five, in turn, form the Roman numeral V, a symbol in Chinese box that is very familiar to readers of Moore. Now, the analogy between the self-image projected by Grillo, and that of the English masked revolutionary who arouses England from the sleep of a media dictatorship, catches the eye.

Especially today that its representatives enter the Italian Parliament: "Parliament is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it ... are the men who give power to the symbols ... from only a symbol is meaningless, but with quite a number of people behind to blow up a building can change the world, "says V. Echoed by his pupil, Evey: "This country needs something more than a palace. It needs hope."

The proximity - symbolic - between the comic and the futuristic English anarchist, it is absolutely obvious. And 'less obvious what the story of "Watchmen" teaches us ethics policy according to Grillo. In contrast to "V for Vendetta", here the essence of militant grillismo as thought does not condense into a single character, but in the spirit of history itself. What then revolves around the death of a Comedy. In "Watchmen," the deepest convictions of each of the protagonists of the story break against that great cosmic joke that only the Comedian - a dark Captain America reactionary and unscrupulous, with a belated kidney shot in front of a bad top - seems able to understand.

But in the conflict, however, stands out a character, another anarchist this time more distinctly on the right: Rorshach is the Moore-ian version of "The Question", a creature of Steve Ditko (much more
famous for helping to devise Spider-Man) and summa of his devotee of Objectivism
Randiana school. No superpower, then, if not in its motivations. And here is what
that it is difficult to understand who judges usual superficiality stereotipizzata the comic
America.

What makes Batman - Superman, Spider-Man and all the others - the "superheroes" ... What, above all, makes it readable, compelling (and somehow immedesimabili) their narratives, it is the moral force of character, not physical strength. Not superomistica ethics, as is often tended to misunderstand, but superetica instead of superpowers. And the story works just as his characters are faced with difficult choices in extreme situations. A dilemmas of nature "iperamletica."

Alan Moore does not escape, on the contrary enhances knowingly superheroism this moral.Embrace the Manichaeism implicit in character, and pushes it to its logical extreme. And it does so answer Rorschach, the friend who asks him to shut up to save the world: "No. Not even in the presence of the Apocalypse. No compromise." Which is also what the Comedian Rorschach appreciated.

"They have no right. Nobody. Except the Comedian.'ve Known him since 1966. Strong personality. He does not care to please others. No compromises. Admirable. Among us is the one that has a better idea. On the world. On people. on society and on what happens. things that deep down we all know but are afraid to deal with. too polite to talk about it. He understands. understands how horrible it is humanity and does not hold back. sees the horror of the world and you do not never give up. When a man has seen, can no longer turn our backs pretending it does not exist. Even if someone orders it. do not do this because we allow it. We do this because we have to. Why we are compelled. "

Speaking with my friend and fellow Englishman, I heard him observe keenly, as the story of Italian politics - the election result to date - has been transformed into a medieval morality tale, Faustian, based on the soul of Cricket, and its unavailability to "sell it to the devil." If you succumb to the compromise would play the soul, but above all - in this case - his electorate.

That's why Grillo, Bersani and everyone else, can not and will not be able to continue to respond "spades". As is also true of Rorschach, who in the name of its integrity would leave - leave? - Burn the world. I started writing hinting at an interview canceled by Alan Moore. Now it is not difficult to imagine why. Moreover, the various Occupy movements that the author has supported so far have all stopped in front of the corridors of power.

Here in Italy, however, at the end there are entered. The superetico mooreiano man enters Parliament, and tries to change it (or down?) From the inside. And that even Moore had expected.And 'perhaps for this reason that at the last, the English writer has decided to decline, not knowing whether or not to support this political phenomenon. The rest is one thing to inspire a protest, another potentially inspire a party-in-government. Or maybe it's just the whole of Dr. Frankenstein, the creature who fears that he himself has created.

Stefano Pitrelli Follow on Twitter: www.twitter.com / StefanoPitrelli

Niall Ferguson on Europe’s New Fascists - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:57:00 +0000

Niall Ferguson on Europe’s New Fascists - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Niall Ferguson on Europe’s New Fascists

by Niall Ferguson Oct 8, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Populism takes an ominous turn.

It can be a mistake to laugh at fascists. Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler and Mussolini in The Great Dictator. P.G. Wodehouse had fun with his preposterous parody of Oswald Mosley, Roderick Spode. But Nazism turned out to be no joke. Today Chaplin’s film, for all his comic genius, is embarrassing to watch, while Wodehouse lived to regret his complacency about what was brewing in Berlin.

Members of Golden Dawn sing the Greek National anthem. (Sakis Mitrolidis / AFP-Getty Images)

So when a party called “Golden Dawn”—which has something that looks a lot like a swastika as its logo— starts denying aspects of the Holocaust and heaping opprobrium on immigrants, it’s best to keep a straight face. Sure, they’re Greeks, not Germans. Sure, their party leader, Nikolaos G. Michaloliakos, is about as -charismatic as a barrel of rotten olives. But if elections were held tomorrow, these guys could become the third-largest party in the Greek Parliament.

The Greeks are the extreme case. But maybe that’s only because economically they are the extreme case. This year the Greek economy is forecast to contract by 7 percent. Unemployment is at 23 percent and youth unemployment a mind-blowing 54 percent. Under these circumstances, it would be rather remarkable if people were patiently sticking to the mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right.

Populism is the standard political response to financial crisis. In America we have seen two different variants—the right-wing populism of the Tea Party and the left-wing populism of the Occupy movement. But European populism takes more toxic forms.

Nothing was easier to predict than this: that the crisis of the euro zone would spark a nationalist backlash. Golden Dawn is not just xenophobic; it’s also Europhobic. The same thing has happened in the Netherlands: there, Geert Wilders started out by attacking Muslim immigrants (and indeed Islam itself), but has more recently added Euro-bashing to his repertoire of his Freedom Party.

This strategy was pioneered in Finland by the “True Finns,” whose leader, Timo Soini, has succeeded in pushing his country’s government to take an increasingly tough line on bailouts for (you’ve guessed it) the Greeks. Populism in the North fuels—and feeds on—populism in the South.

As I said, there is much about this neo- or crypto--fascist wave that is hard to take seriously. Can 13 percent of Italians really want to substitute the unkempt comedian Beppe Grillo, leader of the anti-European Five Star Movement, for Mario Monti, the prime minister who has pulled their country back from the brink of moral as well as financial bankruptcy? Do the supporters of the Lega Nord (Northern League) really intend to dismantle Italy and create a new rump state of Padania—not so much a banana republic as a Bolognese republic? Is talk of Catalan independence just a Barcelona bluff?

Nearly one in five French voters backed Marine Le Pen’s French National Front in last spring’s election. Le Pen has described the European Union as “a structure that I consider totalitarian, it is the European Soviet Union ... a rootless ... impotent empire.” She also denounced last year’s fiscal compact, designed to slash European budget deficits, as “anti-democratic,” “anti-economic,” and adopted “by order of Germany.”

Credit where it’s due: a few wise men warned the Europeans that creating a monetary union without any kind of fiscal integration would lead not just to economic crisis but also to conflict. They were right. Last month, at a conference on the shores of Lake Como, I heard Prime Minister Monti declare: “I do not fear controversies between governments, but I do fear difference and hate between peoples.” That hate is growing.

Yet there is one crumb of comfort. Fascism is for young men. All that marching around, beating up opponents, and giving Roman salutes gets steadily harder once you pass the age of 30. And the good news is that Europe really has passed the age of 30. To be precise, nearly a quarter—23 percent—of the population of Greece are 65 or older. For the Italians it’s even higher: 25 percent. Any Spaniard over 50 remembers what fascism was really like.

Perhaps for this reason, the new right tends to do rather poorly when people actually vote, rather than just opine to pollsters. The Dutch Freedom Party lost around a third of its seats in last month’s elections. Earlier in the year, Timo Soini tried and failed to become the Finnish president. Marine Le Pen couldn’t even win a seat for herself in the French National Assembly.

Blackshirts were bad and brownshirts were worse. But who’s honestly afraid of grayshirts?

Fascism still isn’t funny. But the more it ages, the less it scares me.

How the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" Works | TechPresident

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:43:00 +0000

How the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" Works | TechPresident
BY David Meyer | Monday, May 7 2012

Photo: Bastian Greshake

Personal Democracy Media is thankful to the Omidyar Network for its generous support of techPresident's WeGov section.
In the midst of the political upheaval affecting Europe, a relatively new movement is making stunning progress, particularly in Germany. On Sunday, the Pirate Party entered its third German state parliament in eight months, demonstrating momentum that surprises even its core members. The party is now on track to pick up a double-digit percentage of the vote in next year's federal elections. And it's dealing with this explosive growth through the medium it knows best: technology.
Founded in Sweden in 2006 by Rick Falkvinge and known at first for its stance on reforming copyright to suit the digital age, the Pirate Party began to gain ground in Germany in 2009. That year, the country's family minister proposed blocking extensive lists of websites as a way of combating child pornography. The country's large hacker community cried censorship, and the then-tiny German Pirate Party again reaped the benefits.

"This protest against the idea of website blocking by political institutions helped to build the Pirate Party in the structure it has now," says political science professor Christophe Bieber, of the University of Duisburg-Essen. "They had 800-900 members at the start of 2009, and 10,000 afterwards."
In 2011, Pirates put up 15 candidates for the Berlin state elections. All of them won seats, putting the Pirates into a regional parliament for the first time. Then the Pirates entered the Saarland state parliament, before repeating the trick in Schleswig-Holstein last weekend. Membership is shooting up again, and is now nearing 30,000.
"That the Pirate Party is able to attract people to join a political party organization is quite a unique phenomenon, because the image of party politics is not very good," Bieber says.
But growth has led to growing pains. According to Simon Weiss, one of the Pirates who became a politician in the Berlin parliament, the party structures that existed in its early days don't work in the context of a much larger membership. "They were designed to fit fifty people, not thousands," he says.
The same core ideology that seems to have attracted all of those new members may also help the party deal with this growth. While the Pirate Party is still vocal on copyright issues, transparency has become so central to its platform that any party in German Parliament wanting Pirates as a coalition partner would have to live-stream negotiations online. No one is likely to take the Pirates up on the offer, and that suits them fine; they are seeking additional experience in parliament before making a play to become part of government.
And the Pirates' uniquely technological bent has come in handy. Members have tools at their disposal to discuss issues online in large-scale dialogue, then bring the conversation offline to reach official consensus at party conventions.
Tools of democracy
"What we've observed during the last months is that almost any decisions the Pirates took at their conventions were heavily discussed beforehand by a large number of people, many of whom did not attend the conventions," Bieber says. "[Absent members] will support the decisions being made there because they had the chance to input into the discussions beforehand. It's one reason for the stability the Pirate Party is showing."
The most widely-used online Pirate platform is PiratePad, a collaborative text editor. Adapted by party members from the commercial EtherPad software, which Google acquired and open-sourced in late 2009, Pirates use it alongside chatrooms, wikis and mailing lists to collaboratively work on policies.
But a few of the local Pirate chapters, notably the one in Berlin, are also experimenting with a platform called Liquid Feedback. Also open-source (and therefore available for implementation by anyone), Liquid Feedback is built around a concept called 'liquid democracy.' It's effectively a technology for hacking traditional politics.
If PiratePad is about collaboration and discussion, Liquid Feedback is about competition and decision-making. Any of the 6,000 members that use it can propose a policy. If the proposal picks up a 10 percent quorum within a set period, such as a week, it becomes the focus of an almost 'gamified' revision period. Any member can also set up an alternative proposal, and over the ensuing few weeks these rival versions battle it out, with members voting their favorites up or down.
"In the ideal case you have five or six people working on alternative initiatives, and everyone tries to be the better one so they can win the poll in the end," Berlin Pirate Party spokesman Ingo Bormuth explains. "We hope it's healthy competition, but we want people to compete against each other so they stay [involved] in the topic."
Each member has one vote, but most are not interested in marking up endless reams of policy papers. So the system allows every vote to be entrusted to another member – for everything, or for certain topics or specific proposals, or not at all. What's more, the person who has been delegated the votes of others can then re-delegate all those votes, plus their own, to someone else.
It's a trust-based approach and the nearest thing Liquid Feedback has to a reputation system. Members don't get points-based kudos for their involvement and expertise; they collect real votes. In theory, votes being passed up the chain like this could lead to a crony elite or even a dictator, but there is a failsafe mechanism. Every delegated vote can be reclaimed at any time, so no high-flying Pirate can operate without a continuous mandate. "We want effective people to be powerful and do their work, but we want [the grassroots] to be able to control them," Bormuth says.
This is liquid democracy: a sliding scale between direct democracy and representative democracy, where each member can decide where they sit in the spectrum at any given time.
"Just recently we had something regarding the EU Data Protection Directive," Weiss recounts. "The [winning] Liquid Feedback initiative said the Pirate faction in [the Berlin] parliament should bring those proposals forward. We discussed it in the faction and decided to bring it into parliament. It's not quite correct to say it was successful there, but an amended version was successful."
However, Weiss is wary of overstating the importance of Liquid Feedback relative to more frequently-used tools, and he is certainly sceptical of the idea that the platform is in itself a big draw for voters. "The average person knows we're a grassroots movement and they know we do things over the Internet, but they may not know about liquid democracy," he says. The politician also points out that, while Liquid Feedback does work for handling fundamental topics, it has limitations.
"For questions such as 'do we want to institute a basic income', there's more to it than decision on Liquid Feedback," Weiss says. "There's a decision at conference, and by an elected group of people. You can't have a system that maps the whole discourse that has to happen for this kind of democracy. But you can have quantified feedback that shows you where the majority lies on a given point."
Bieber reckons Liquid Feedback's interface may be seen as "nerdy or geeky" by many new recruits, especially when compared with the familiar mechanisms of wikis and collaborative text editors. It has an interface only a developer could love, although the Pirates have recently published APIs so people can build more attractive front-ends for smartphones and the web.
While other tools are open to all, Liquid Feedback can only be accessed by registered members. "With PiratePads, you don't need to be a member of the Pirate Party to join the discussion and edit the text," Bieber says. "To some this is the starting point for a critique of Liquid Feedback … that erecting areas of restricted access for members is against the grassroots attitude."
Security
As the party grows, some are asking Liquid Feedback to grow with it. Right now, it is not used to finalize position papers, just inform decisions at party conventions. Others want the party to take that extra step. Bieber, the political scientist, suggests that the scale of collaboration would create a Wikipedia-like environment where pranksters and outside political saboteurs would be quickly caught out in any attempt to game the system.
But the Pirate Party's growth may force its members to rethink its approach to identity. Liquid Feedback now allows the use of pseudonyms. At the national level, it's designed to verify that each user is really a Pirate Party member but keep no record of exactly which user account corresponds to which person. For now.
"There is a lot of talk in the party about changing that and forcing everybody to put their real name at least somewhere, maybe not publicly, but to make it clear who is who," Bormuth says. "In Berlin there are people talking about dropping pseudonymity altogether. The point is not so much about security, but now that we have politicians in parliament, they say they want to use the system a lot more. And they say, 'If I follow the system, I want to know that these are real people I'm talking to.'"
Bieber is cautious about making predictions, as data on the system's performance remains scarce, but he is intrigued by the idea of connecting liquid democracy with the parliamentary process.
"It can quickly give you an idea of what the base is thinking during a parliamentary discussion and maybe before a talk in parliament," he says. "Pirate politicians can then say, 'This is just in part my opinion; it's partly also the opinion of the base I'm related to.' This is some evidence of the sliding scale between direct and representative democracy."
Liquid Feedback has always been intended as a prototype for a future version of democracy, Weiss points out: "If you want to propose that as a way of organising things, you need to see if it actually works, and we're experimenting on ourselves. It's the same thing with transparency – if people say it doesn’t work, we can say we are trying it, and so far it has worked."
The Pirates may have been the first party to try implementing liquid democracy, but others are cautiously following suit. The center-left SPD is experimenting with a system based on Adhocracy (a more user-friendly alternative to Liquid Feedback) for its party thinktank. Even the federal parliament is using Adhocracy for a commission on digital policy. Whether or not the Pirates maintain the pace of their push, they have already proved to be, in Bieber's words, "a generator of innovation for the political process."

Italy: Beppe Grillo prepares to storm Europe | Presseurop.eu: European news, cartoons and press reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:04:00 +0000

Italy: Beppe Grillo prepares to storm Europe | Presseurop.eu: European news, cartoons and press reviews

Italy: Beppe Grillo prepares to storm Europe

20 March 2013
Il Fatto Quotidiano Rome

Pierre Kroll

The comedian's Five star movement was the revelation of last Italian election. Its anti-establishment views and "digital democracy" methods are shared by many political movements across the EU, and they could form a common front at the European elections in 2014.

Ferruccio Sansa | Emiliano Liuzzi

Beppe Grillo has a new objective: Europe. While Italian politics struggles to comprehend the political tsunami that has followed his election, from his home in Genoa the leader of the Five Star Movement's mind is already jetting across borders. His stated aim is to export his experience to other European countries where the key aspects of the political and economic crisis are very similar to the one in Italy. “We can't think that we've done it all and stay here in Rome. We need to push on and the target is Strasbourg in 2014, the European Parliament. Because there is a similiar need there, as in Italy and because if we find some support in Europe, the change will be far-reaching,” he tells his followers.

A man given to flights of fantasy or a visionary? The objective has become a lot more concrete in recent weeks when the debate at his meetings broke through into other countries and languages. Those behind the movement call it a “revolution”, “a kind of '68 that has the internet as its glue”.
“We've just started,” says Grillo, who, with his followers – as he has explained frequently to those who have been listening to him recently – already have contacts, especially with eastern European countries from Slovakia to Romania and Bulgaria. But then they're turning their attention to Greece, Spain and Portugal. “This is what I mean when I say that we've just started.”
The subjects particularly focus on environmental matters but also on de-growth. While the Indignados and the German green movement are closely watching developments, this is less pronounced among exremists from the left or right, such as The Greek Golden Dawn, Syriza or even the National Front in France. As in Italy, we're talking about the millions of citizens who are bound together by common battles rather than ideologies and the groups to which they belong. We're talking about Europeans who have not yet found – or no longer have – a political stable. We're talking about moderates too and young people, but not just young people, in Italy. “Of course the Five Star label won't be used but the programmes and mechanisms are exactly the same. In every country, they'll find their representatives.”

‘Blind cycle of manipulation’

The European press is divided when it comes to Grillo. Manuel Castells, in La Vanguardia, translated in Italy by Internazionale, writes how “the experimental nature of this traditional anti-politics project is clear,” adding: “But it has been supported by millions of people and by many young people who identify themselves with the desire to get out of the blind cycle of manipulation and non-transparency in the delegation of powers. The divide between civil society and political institutions is growing and is a phenomenon that is also widespread in Spain.”
Spain, of course, is one of the starting points in what was intended to be a movement sweeping across Europe. Back on October 15, 2011, the squares were filling up with young protestors who wanted a different kind of world. There were Spanish and French indignados and American Occupy Wall Street protesters. The streets were packed with thousands of people. In Italy there was looting and clashes with police, but then nothing.
What happened to those protests in the end? They ran out of steam in social networks as they waited for a new organisation to emerge. So it was that Italy, a country that gives its own twist to any political phenomenon, found itself without any indignados on its streets and instead a movement that wanted to make its way into the institutional set-up. And that was what happened.
Now the challenge is to communicate a common language that unites the movements within and outside Europe and that, as they say in the Five Star Movement, can be constructive – decisive in its messages but respectful of the institutions. “There's no room here for extremists and, worse still, racists,” says someone close to Grillo. Because the choruses of "Stuff you" and “Let's send them all packing” are of no use now that it's about going into parliament”. And they add: “It'll be an overhaul of the current political situation that will come about through a new enthusiasm for politics.”
There are different reactions from abroad. “Italy hasn't just let in the clowns,” says Jonathan Hopkin, professor of comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He takes a hard line in his response to The Economist, which saw in Grillo's progress and the umpteenth return of Berlusconi, another lamentable twist in the Italian political saga. “It isn't just a challenge to austerity but to the traditional party system itself. The economic crisis has helped, but the Grillo attack against corrupt and egoistic Italian politicians had already started before the beginning of the decline,” says Hopkins. “Throughout Europe, membership of political parties has reached the lowest level since the Second World War," he adds. Proof of this [frustration with politics] can be seen in the success of the UK Independence Party in Great Britain, the Pirate Party in Sweden, the anti-Islam party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, not to mention the populist parties such as the French National Front. He concludes: “Italy could pave the way for a change that will fascinate all of Europe”.

Pedro pleads for sacrifice

But for now, only one party openly against austerity has won elections in a European country since the onset of Europe's economic crisis. Rajoy's Spain and Portugal's Pedro Passos Coelho are among the countries where austerity continues to rule.
Just a week ago, the Portuguese prime minister wrote a long post on Facebook – which he signed off as "Pedro" – and in which he asked his people again to make sacrifices. He had more than 36,000 replies, with the most popular one being the reply that quoted Reagan: “Government is not a solution to our problem. Government is the problem."
There's a lot of weariness in European countries that have been asking people to tighten their belts for years now. A proposal from the Five Star Movement that could be tempting is the idea of creating a European Union that can explain itself to its citizens. “I have never said that I want to be in or out of the euro. What I want is accurate information. I want a plan B for survival for the next 10 years. And then, with a referendum, we can decide. First we need to be informed. We're trying to understand what the costs and benefits are. Just suggesting that, people say: you're a demagogue, you're crazy, you want to drag Italy into defaulting, you're irresponsible. Just because we talk about looking into this hypothesis”.
But this thinking brings together so many citizens, who see the European Union as something distant, scattered around in big meeting rooms in Brussels and Strasbourg. And this new attempt at Italian-style dialogue may please many people. While everyone is nervously looking at the Italian parliament today, there are those who are already thinking about the European elections in 2014.

Translated from the Italian by Julian Hale

Daniel W. Drezner | FOREIGN POLICY

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:48:00 +0000

Daniel W. Drezner | FOREIGN POLICY

How Margaret Thatcher affected international relations theory

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, April 8, 2013 - 1:11 PM

Margaret Thatcher has passed away. I could try to talk about Thatcher's place as a world historical figure, but let's face it, there's going to be an orgy of columns on that very point over the next week or so -- anything I write on the topic would be second rate at best. I could write about my own memories of living in London during the late Thatcher era, but to be honest, that's not terribly interesting -- it's a tale of fading political popularity and really strident left-wing art.
So, instead, consider the following two ways in which Thatcher has left a legacy in international relations theory:
1) Diversionary war. There's a large literature in international relations on the notion of using war against a foreign adversary as a way to distract domestic opposition and/or bolster domestic support for a leader (see Chiozza and Goemans for the latest iteration of this literature). It's a little-known fact, but International Studies Association rules prohibit any paper on this topic from being published without a Thatcher reference.
I kid, but only barely. The Falklands War represents the paradigmatic case of diversionary war theory for two reasons. First, almost every analysis of the conflicts attributes the Argentine junta's growing domestic unpopularity as a key cause of their decision to launch the conflict (though, of course, it's a bit more complicated than that). Second and more importantly, absent the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher would be remembered as a failed one-term prime minister. Victory over the Argentines in the South Atlantic enabled Thatcher to win re-election.
In truth, it's far from clear that diversionary war is all that common a practice (if it was, we'd be drowning in conflicts since 2008). The Falklands War, however, does provide the paradigmatic case.
2) The spread of ideas. It's fitting that the New York Times ran a story over the weekend about the boomlet in history about studying the growth of capitalism. Thatcher's role in advancing the spread of free-market ideas to other policymakers was crucial. To explain why free-market capitalism became the pre-eminent idea in economic policymaking over the past few decades, you have to look at Thatcher. She preceded Reagan, becoming the first leader in the developed world to try to change her country's variety of capitalism. Even after Reagan came to power, one could persuasively argue that Thatcher mattered more. As some international political economy scholars have noted, ideas and policies spread much faster when "supporter states" embrace them vigorously rather than reluctantly. Thatcher embraced capitalism with a near-religious fervor, acting as a vanguard for the rest of Europe on this front. For more on the role that Thatcher and her advisors played, see Yergin and Stanislaw's The Commanding Heights, or Jeffry Frieden's Global Capitalism.
OK, readers, in what other areas of international relations and comparative politics did Margaret Thatcher leave her mark?

SHARE:Share on digg Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on reddit More COMMENTS (15)

EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ECONOMIC HISTORY, EUROPE, IDEAS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

Five things that international relations scholars should shut the hell up about

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, April 5, 2013 - 4:12 PM

Your humble blogger has been knee-deep in chairing, discussing, and attending International Studies Association panels ~~all of which seem to have the word "diffusion" in the title and SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!!!~~
Now, naturally, with the global financial crisis and its aftermath there's been a lot of talk about debts and deficits. And with the defense sequester and what-not, there's been a lot of talk about rising levels of partisanship. And I've come to the reluctant conclusion that a lot of this talk need to stop, like, right now.
Here's the dirty truth about most international studies scholars: They know a fair amount about the high politics of international affairs and almost next to nothing about the rest of life. Of course, the rest of life does impinge on world politics, so there's some natural overlap. The problem starts when, in talking about non-IR stuff, we start to think that we have just as much expertise in these areas. Which we don't. At all.
Last night I tweeted a query about what areas IR scholars should be quiet about and got way too many answers to fit in a blog post. So, here are five things about which I'd really like 99 percent of international relations scholars to shut the hell up:
1) Macroeconomic policy. Should the United States cut its deficit further? Are budget cuts, tax cuts, or tax increases necessary? How can the eurozone escape its current macroeconomic malaise? Most of us have no friggin' clue what the correct answers are for the United States, and that goes double for the euro zone. So unless you're actually publishing scholarly work on global macroeconomic policy, shut up.
2) The role of money in American politics. Foreign policy scholars are far too often shocked -- shocked!! -- when they see interest group politics at work. The Citizens United decision has only amplified this lament. The reaction to this is to either bemoan the general health of the American polity or to start developing simple theories that argue that money or lobbies explain everything about politics. Now I might not be the biggest fan of the American politics subfield, but I'm pretty sure they know more about this topic than we do. So shut up and read what they have to say.
3) Partisanship in the United States. Did you know that it's getting worse? And that it's paralyzing the U.S. government? And that it's getting worse? One of the natural biases of foreign policy scholars is to think in terms of a national interest, and then act appalled when there are different partisan conceptions of that term. Basically, what applies to #2 applies to this point as well.
4) The Internet. As near as I can determine, when asked about this technology affects international politics, most scholars answer with some variation of "networks networks networks cyber cyber cyber." Some scholars do very good work on this subject. The rest of us should shut up for a spell and read them.
5) Diffusion. Never again. Ever.
What else, my dear readers, would you like to see less gabbing about from international affairs scholars?

BBC World Service - The New Europe: The far right: a nationalist International?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:55:00 +0000

BBC World Service - The New Europe: The far right: a nationalist International?

The far right: a nationalist International?

Listen to the programme

Joerg Schulze presents The far right - a nationalist International and David Ceserani gives his personal view in Comment.

Earlier this year at a rally of the Far Right NPD party in Germany supporters sung the national anthem. For obvious historical reasons any resurgence of the Far Right in Germany is watched with concern, both at home and abroad.
West Germany was able to establish firm democratic roots after the defeat of Hitler. But its reunification with Eastern Germany which had no real democratic foundation and was in a much poorer economic state, combined with the completely new phenomenon of mass and persistent unemployment provided the classic breeding ground for extremist politics.
Last month the threat from the right moved a bit closer when the German People´s Party won thirteen per cent of the vote in the elections in the eastern state of Saxony Anhalt.
But in the New Europe support for nationalist parties is not a problem unique to Germany. In the past decade their numbers have swelled across the continent. Despite their electoral gains, so far, no Far Right party in Europe has been able to break through the 15 per cent barrier with any consistency.
According to George Schopflin, of London University, that's a level of support which democracy can just about tolerate. "We can live with that. It can be very disagreeable, most unpleasant, but we can live with that. The danger arises when it starts to be significantly above ten to fifteen per cent because at that point you have the basis for a proper parliamentary, perhaps extra-parliamentary action - and that paralyses the rest of your parliament."
There is, however, a danger of complacency, especially with unemployment in Europe high and with the unsettling changes associated with EU enlargement and Economic and Monetary Union.
In France Jean-Marie Le Pen´s Front National has become an established part of the political landscape, gaining well over ten per cent in most elections. The National Front has one principal preoccupation - immigration. Jean-Marie Le Chavallier was re-elected mayor in March this year with over a third of the vote in the southern port town of Toulon . His slogan is "Your security and the French first". "France is made up of those born in France and those born elsewhere. What´s important is culture and a sense of belonging to the international family. In the last thirty years we've had ten million immigrants, and every year there are one hundred and sixty thousand more - usually from the third world. They have no financial means, no qualifications and there are too many of them. This is no longer immigration, it´s an invasion."
Earlier this month Le Chevallier's wife was defeated in the only seat held by the Front National in the National Assembly. Nonetheless, the views of the Le Chevalliers, with their often exaggerated claims on immigration numbers, can easily be heard echoed in the street. This, for example, from an old man who was shopping in the market in Vitrolles, another National Front stronghold. "It´s those who are born in France, those who lost parents, men during the war, those who worked in France and raised their children in France, who have unemployed children, for example. We have to give priority to them. Now I´m not saying we should put the others in camps, but we have to look after French people first."
Opposition to immigration is the battle cry of the extreme right across Europe, such as Austria's Freedom Party. Its supporters demand tougher restrictions on foreigners.
The Freedom Party´s leader Jöerg Haider is charismatic and youthful. His strategy has been to make his party respectable - electable to the middle class. That's why he rejects any comparison with other Far Right leaders such as Le Pen -- even though the Freedom Party´s manifesto mirrors that of the National Front´s and even though the National Front too has been aiming for respectability by making deals with moderate conservative parties. Joerg Haider -"When I came to the United States for the first time I had to explain - is the Freedom Party similar to Le Pen or something else? I explained it by an example in the United States and said: "Look to your south border in San Diego for instance where the border control has erected two metre high walls to prevent the Mexican people coming to California." It would not be imaginable to do it in Austria but we have to fight against the wave of immigration too."
Many of the Austrian immigrants have arrived from Central Europe. The collapse of communism opened the door for workers in the East to seek employment - legally or illegally, in the affluent West. But far right parties in former communist countries have found their own scapegoats - established minorities such as gypsies.
Unlike its counterparts in the West, the Republican Party in the Czech Republic has had to build up its support base and party structure from scratch. Jan Vik is an MP for the Republican Party. "We don´t like seeing the so-called waves of migration from various East European countries, Asia, Africa and so on - because even with the best will [in the world] we've got enough problems of our own, for example with our gypsies. And we don´t see why they should be reinforced fromRomania, Ukraine and I don´t know where else."
David Ceserani, director of the London based Wiener Library on the holocaust and fascism, leafs through the mountains of research tracking the far right. According to Professor Ceserani, it would be a mistake to see nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe as a new phenomenon. Instead, he says, it's merely been suspended in time. "In some cases, what we are seeing is a resurgence of ethnic and national conflicts that were frozen by communism. The position of minorities within certain central and Eastern European states, the Hungarians in what is now Slovakia for example, was simply not an issue while Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic were both members of the Eastern bloc and enjoyed fraternal co-operation. Now these are independent countries. And some ruthless, unscrupulous political leaders in both countries have used the minority situation."
Slovakia has not been invited to join NATO and has been put into the slow track of EU membership, in part because of the government's curtailment of the cultural and language rights of the Hungarian minority. The radical nationalist Slovak National Party was invited to join the ruling coalition in 1994, and has been there ever since. But Dusan Slobodnik, a Slovak National Party MP and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, maintains the Hungarian minority enjoy a privileged status. "The official policy never has been in Slovakia judged or evaluated as a nationalistic policy. We are patriots of our country but nationalism means not saying about the whole range of this term - it means suppression of some other nation or of some other group. And it doesn´t happen in Slovakia."
The anti-immigrant, anti-minority rights campaign, is not the only issue which unites the European extreme right. The Far Right is also virulently anti- Brussels. Jan Vik of the Czech Republican Party says the EU threatens a new imperialism. "The Czech Republic should finally be itself, not move away from the Eastern sphere around Moscow just to turn madly a hundred and eighty degrees and do everything they want in the West - be it in Bonn or Brussels."

All the Far Right parties in Europe oppose closer European integration. That, says the Czech born historian Jacques Rupnik, is potentially fertile political territory. "With the progress of European integration, with Maastricht, with now the common currency and of course with Schengen, with the idea that borders between European Union members are being abolished - well, that obviously is a whole new unchartered territory and naturally the right wing nationalists will try to use it and abuse it, and they are already doing so - not very effectively in most cases but I think on the immigration issue and on the issue of borders they will try to make some mileage out of the anti-European campaign."
For most Europeans, nationality remains one of the most important badges of identity. According to Professor Cesarani, the nationalism of the Far Right will eventually be weakened - not by a growing attachment to Brussels, but rather by a growing attachment to one's region. "The EU is a practical demonstration that the old nation-state has probably come to the end of its career but more positively it does stimulate and facilitate regional identities. In the case of the United Kingdom, for example membership of the European Union has made it possible for people of Scotland to press the case for autonomy within the UK and to make the case for independence much stronger because the EU provides a nest in which small nations and regions can function effectively. It has to some extent shifted the focus to cultural identities and away from political identities."
In Russia the extreme nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has been known to throw a glass of juice over his opponent in a heated television debate. A crude political style often accompanied by a crude anti-semitism. Zhirinovsky has tried to forge links with like-minded political leaders across Europe. On several occasions he's met representatives of nationalist Serb organisations, repeating his pledges of Russian support for the Serb cause. He also tried to enter Belgium and Germany -- but has been refused visas.
There are some signs of co-operation among parties of the European far right -- facilitated by modern communications such as the internet. But George Schöpflin from the University of London thinks that the spectre of far right networks has more to do with media hype than reality: "I can see far right skinheads from a variety of countries getting together and saying "let´s all be horrible together" and then the journalists will go "oh - magnificent story, look at them!" - and they will focus on two hundred shaven-headed thugs and say 'There´s the New Europe'. That's rubbish, it´s not true. But that´s the way that television especially likes to handle it. They might even be horrible to each other but they are a drop in the ocean."
Well maybe. But in parts of the New Europe, violence against minorities and immigrants has become endemic. In East Germany alone last year several were killed and over a 1000 injured by far right thugs. Nonetheless, Professor David Ceserani, believes the idea of a nationalist international, is a contradiction in terms. "There has always been talk of a "black international", there have been attempts to bring fascists throughout Europe together since the 1920s and they´ve always failed because there is a fundamental incompatibility between a nationalism, particularly in its far-right version, which accentuates national difference or racism and posits irresolvable differences between people and nations in the attempt to create transnational alliances. It´s possible for fascist groups to operate together at a pragmatic level. But when push comes to shove and when these chaps get drunk at their annual rallies they very soon start hurling racial and nationalistic epithets at each other and they find it impossible to co-operate, I regard the chances of a "black international" with a pinch of salt ."

O'Neil on Italy: Reform is not the Same Word as Austerity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

http://www.goldmansachs.com/gsam/advisors/education/viewpoints_from_chairman/viewpoints-pdfs/q1_2013/3_1_13.pdf

From: Jim O'Neill
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2013 9:17 AM
To: gs-jims-views
Subject: Reform is not the Same Word as Austerity
Reform is not the Same Word as Austerity.
So you thought you’d escaped my Viewpoints already? Sorry, not so soon, but after April that relief will
arrive! Anyhow, as you will read below, I returned early in the week from 10 days in Chile, including a couple
in Argentina, just in time for the results of the Italian elections and the latest chapter in the US fiscal debacle.
The Italian Election Results.
I will be attending a well-known financial forum on the shores of Lake Como late next week, and in that
sense, post the uncertain outcome delivered by the Italian electorate, it will be interesting to hear the debate
at the forum (although I will be fresh from much bigger excitement at Old Trafford earlier in the week). For
now, I have three observations about the Italian election outcome. Firstly, perhaps somewhat oddly, I find
the outcome quite exciting because it seems to me for a country who’s GDP has basically not changed since
EMU started in 1999, something big needs to change. Maybe this election outcome and the peculiar mass
appeal of the Five Star movement could signal the start of something new? Secondly, for the established
elite of Italy and, crucially, the other ‘power centres’ of Europe, in particular Berlin and Frankfurt, these
results are pretty close to a nightmare. Indeed, it questions many aspects of the status quo, including the
widespread view in such circles that debt reduction for the sake of debt reduction is not only a worthy cause,
but one that is necessary to attract policy support. If such a consensus were open to change, they should
question this belief but I suspect it won’t come quickly or easily. Thirdly and linked to this, in my view, Italy’s
real problem is the absence of economic growth, which has caused debt to rise, and not the same problems
as some other problematic Euro-zone countries. Italy’s cyclically-adjusted fiscal position is actually in modest
surplus (see table below), which is better than virtually all other developed countries. I believe that tightening
fiscal policy for the sake of it with a vague aim of debt reduction is not a smart strategy. Italy needs to reform
its product and labour markets, boost nationwide productivity and reform. They also need German and ECB
support in order to stay in the EMU, and especially now, to stop a potentially fresh escalation of unnecessary
increases in bond yields. In Italy, reform doesn’t equate to austerity as their voters have just shown.
Other Europe News.
Importantly, the big surprise from the Italian elections comes against the other, more modest, but important
surprise of the past couple of weeks, which was the unexpected fall in the ‘flash’ composite Euro-zone PMIs
for February. After some hopes since late last year of a bottoming in the economic decline, this news
suggests it may have been temporary. Friday’s final manufacturing PMI for the Euro-zone confirmed some of
this weakness, with a fresh decline in both Italy and Spain, and ongoing weakness in France. These
negative figures more than offset Germany’s strength. Both this release and the Italian election outcome
suggest a fresh policy approach is necessary, but I doubt that is coming quickly.
One piece of positive news against all of this was the confirmation that the official Spanish deficit has
improved considerably in 2012, declining to 6.7% of GDP, from 9.0% the year before. Although slightly less
improved than their target of 6.3%, this is quite impressive in view of their severe cyclical challenges. Whether this will mean an improvement in the perception of the cyclically-adjusted fiscal position (again, see
table below) remains to be seen, but it is quite decent news.
Broader European News.
A couple of other more inspiring items caught my eye. Firstly, German Chancellor Merkel made some fresh
statements about welcoming Turkish desires for EU membership. I have long believed that for the EU to
thrive in the future this would be a great thing, so I see this as a welcome development. Whether this was
just a statement to help prepare for a brief trip to Turkey or not is harder to tell. Secondly, and in some ways
oddly, Polish policymakers still continue to talk about plans to join the Euro, which has reminded me of my
experiences from travelling to Eastern European countries in 2012. Seen from their eyes, the future of the
Euro remains in little doubt, as does their long-term desire to join.
Ongoing Fun and Games in the UK.
German comments welcoming Turkey’s admission into the EU and Polish comments on their plans to join
the Euro, may be considered issues from another planet to UK policymakers who in the past week have had
their own problems to focus on rather than the European question.
The perhaps inevitable loss of AAA credit rating from Moody’s should surely be seen as a negative verdict
on the UK coalition government’s economic policies, and consistent with this Viewpoint theme, reform is not
the same as austerity. The coalition seems committed to deficit reduction, and at the same time, intense
regulation and ongoing deleveraging of the financial sector. I read two interesting pieces that relate to both
this week, one from Anthony Hilton in the London Evening Standard on 26 February on the excessive
‘strangling of the economy by regulation’, and Martin Wolf in the Financial Times on 26 February on the
inappropriateness of fiscal tightening (The sad record of fiscal austerity). I think on one level, it is obviously
beneficial for the UK to ultimately have less leverage in the financial sector and less government debt.
However, to persist with both at the same time, will at best make domestic recovery tricky, and perhaps,
extremely difficult.
Against this background, the continued strength of UK employment data is quite remarkable, if accurate.
Whilst I was away, I came across an interesting report about regional employment trends that showed
especially strong recent increases in employment in the North East and similarly strong declines in
unemployment in Yorkshire and the West Midlands. These are all areas that one might have thought would
struggle against a background of restrained government spending. Therefore, to some extent, the UK
cyclical mysteries continue, including questions about data accuracy. A further angle to this peculiar story
comes from an early February special FT magazine story, which I kept a note of. The story focussed on an
Amazon distribution centre in a Midlands town that may be indicative of the supposed employment ‘puzzle’
suggesting a structure of rather low paid, flexible employees with little signs of a support system. Perhaps
this is the current reality for many, as unappealing as it may be.
To top it all off, in the past couple of weeks, the recent GDP estimates for the UK included the inevitable
upward revisions to some past data, suggesting that the post-crisis recovery was not quite as dire as
originally reported. Against that, the complete 2012 data we now have, shows weaknesses in net exports.
Although I am sceptical, assuming one can believe the UK trade data, this is not a positive outlook to add to
fiscal restraint and persistent anti-financial sector strategy.
At the time of writing, the latest UK manufacturing PMI was also surprisingly weak, adding to a picture of a
pretty shaky couple of weeks.
The US Reform Does Not Equate With Austerity Either.
As we end yet another period of Washington DC discussions on fiscal policy, this time with the sequester
about to hit, one has to focus on the opposite dilemma to much of Europe. The US seems unable and
maybe, even reluctant to reduce their underlying fiscal deficit. Or could it be that US politicians believe that
although the longer term structural dilemmas are large, it is much more important to boost a weaker than
desired recovery than excessively focusing on deficit reduction. Whether this is due to some perceived
wisdom or the benefits of being the world’s reserve currency is impossible to know, although it strikes me as
a better position to be in currently than the Euro area or the UK. Interestingly, most ongoing economic data
in the US, especially in the housing sector, continues to somewhat positively surprise which would certainly
support a view that the economy can cope with some fiscal tightening so long as it is modest. I also noticed
fresh positive reports about both the scale of increases in domestic US oil production and the reducing role played by imports.
Since I last published a Viewpoint, there has been some fresh fun and games about market views on Fed
policy. For the second consecutive meeting, markets were temporarily surprised by the release of Federal
Open Markets Committee (FOMC) minutes. In both instances, the minutes suggested some dissention to the
Fed leadership’s dovish stance on policy. After this latest round of concern, it hasn’t taken long for the
markets to react, helped by some quite clear repetition of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s views. It is
beginning to emerge more and more clearly that the current Fed Chairman both encourages and tolerates
significant opposition to his own views, but his opinions on policy (probably supported by key allies, Dudley
and Yellen) tend to dominate what the Fed actually does.
The Yen and Currency Wars.
Since my last Viewpoint, Japanese policymakers have participated in a series of meetings. Following a G7
meeting and a G20 Finance Ministers meeting, the new Prime Minister, Abe, has survived a bilateral meeting
with US President Obama without having his policy criticised, as well as appointing key people to lead the
Bank of Japan with ex-Ministry of Finance stalwart, Kuroda, at the helm. During all of these events, the Yen
has oscillated, at times quite widely in the Y90-Y95 range, but not beyond. I am a bit torn about what may
happen next. On the one hand, the planned path of monetary policy seems now more clearly committed to a
true inflation ‘target’ as opposed to a vague ‘goal’ and this is essentially Yen bearish. Last November I
believed that this was likely, which is what persuaded me it was ‘the macro trade’ of Q1. It has been and
remains a big initiative and major shift. On the other hand, we now have all the new appointments in place
and they now have the rather ‘simple’ matter of delivery! Additionally, as a rather important Japanese
investor suggested to me this week, there is not much evidence of structural change to accompany those
planned monetary steps. This will perhaps continue to make domestic Japanese investors sceptical about
the longevity of the associated Yen weakness and the Nikkei strength.
China.
Not a good February for Chinese stocks after the stellar rally from November through to the end of January.
What is going on? Well, some key cyclical data has stopped accelerating, such as the PMI data, although at
this time of the year, it is harder than ever to interpret the Chinese data. If this were to be a true and fresh
deceleration, it would be cause for modest concern. However, it is probably a lot more to do with renewed
focus on possible policy steps about property prices, loose monetary conditions, and possibly higher
inflationary pressures. All of these strike me as modest concerns, and the very fact that Chinese
policymakers are so alert to containing fresh bubbles is, from a long-term perspective, probably a distinct
positive. It is difficult for me to believe that China has both genuine signs of fresh bubbles and inflation at the
same time as the economy slowing again. It might take until the March data releases for the evidence to be
clearer, which will not be published until April.
Chile, Argentina, Mexico and a Couple of Other Matters.
Except for my favourite topic, this leaves me with my impressions of Chile and Argentina and broader Latam.
This has been my debut in Chile, and I fell for it. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time to go far south or to
the desert, but we did experience Santiago, Valparaiso, the wine country and the spectacular lake and
volcano crossing of the Andes into Argentina. It was all lovely, and a sort of non Latin-American experience.
Many had advised us in advance that it would feel very European. While it did, it also felt quite a bit like New
York and LA, especially Santiago. As for Argentina, where I have been before, let’s just say it felt quite Latin,
unlike Chile. I left wanting to know the answers to the questions, “how does anywhere survive with 30%
inflation these days”, and “how come it is the only place I have visited in the planet in recent years where I
couldn’t get a roaming signal for my blackberry”, and “how come our bags got lost in transit”?
While in Santiago, I had a very interesting discussion about Chile and the rest of the continent with an
informed foreign observer, who was most bullish on Chile, as well as Colombia and Peru. He was not so
excited about elsewhere, with the exception of Mexico, and had a few highly sceptical observations to make
about Brazil.
Talking of Mexico, there was a very interesting FT interview with the head of Pemex on Thursday
highlighting the exciting potential reform of the domestic energy sector, which the new government is likely to
pursue. This is a key part of why so many people understandably are getting more and more excited about
Mexico (not forgetting Chicharito of course!). Coincidentally, I had a brief meeting with some Mexican policymakers on the same day, and amongst the many virtues they were extolling about the country, they
mentioned many anecdotes about accelerating Japanese auto and auto-parts plants moving there.
While I am on the topic of the FT, it was most interesting to read a “comment” article from a Deng Yuwen,
the Deputy Editor of the Study Times, which is the journal of the Chinese Central Party School. It suggested
that China should consider abandoning support for North Korea, and encourage unification. This is worth
watching because if this were reflective of a shift in official stance, this would be big, and positive news.
And lastly, India unveiled its latest budget on Thursday, with lots of tinkering and detail but nothing that
caught my eye. I was asked to be part of an Indian TV debate as it was unfolding. I suspect I upset them by
refusing, however, there was little in it that really captured my attention, and I believe India should start to be
much-bolder and include a more credible medium to long-term fiscal strategy, and as I have said on
numerous occasions, introduce a “proper” inflation target.
Football and Next Week.
Next Tuesday I will be in Manchester on “urgent business” for one of these ‘matches of the decade’. There
won’t be too much focus on austerity there, although for the loser, certainly reform!
Jim O’Neill
Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
>>
Cyclically Adjusted Budget
Balances Across Developed
Countries
Viewpoints are also available on our public website: www.gsam.com/jimoneill. Monthly Insights and Strategy Series are available on
www.goldman360.com. If you do not have access, please contact your Goldman Sachs relationship manager.
Jim O’Neill is the Chairman of GSAM, which is a separate operating division and not part of the Global Investment Research (GIR) Department.
The views expressed herein by Mr. O’Neill do not constitute research, investment advice or trade recommendations and may not represent the
views and/or opinions of GSAM’s portfolio management teams and/or the GIR Department. © 2013 Goldman Sachs. All rights reserved. Please
visit our website for additional disclosures.
This message may contain information that is confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please advise the sender
immediately and delete this message. See http://www.gs.com/disclaimer/email for further information on confidentiality and the risks inherent in
electronic communication
Opt-out Instructions: You may decline to receive further unsolicited emails from us at the address to which this message was sent. To stop
receiving such messages in the future, please visit our website to be removed from the mailing list. You may also "Unsubscribe" by contacting
us via postal service at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Institutional, 200 West Street, 37th Floor, NY, NY 10282-2198.

Why Ukip, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:05:00 +0000

Why Ukip, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

These populists are asking the right questions, but they don't have the answers. Mainstream parties must revitalise and respond
By Anthony Painter

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 24 March 2013 10.13 EDT
- Jump to comments (530)

Ukip supporters with 'Thank you' leaflets in Eastleigh, where the party came second in the recent byelection. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The rise of populism across western Europe and the US – especially in its radical right form – poses more fundamental questions for democrats than has been acknowledged. Whether we are talking about Ukip, Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement or the Tea Party, populists of all kinds are exposing old and hidden fault lines in democracy, and mainstream democrats need a greater alertness to the nature of the threat. Modern democracy, like a hot-air balloon untethered from the ground, is suddenly floating free and its destination is not yet known.

Populists pose a basic question: why is democracy not run as the true expression of a morally pure "will of the people" against a self-serving and corrupt political, bureaucratic, plutocratic or legal elite? This is a forceful question as old as democracy itself and it reveals what has become liberal democracy's unspoken compromise – democracy is bounded by institutions, laws and constitutional limits. It is democracy through pluralism and compromise; "minorities rule" as the American democratic theorist, Robert Dahl, described it. For populists, the problem with this notion is that they have their eyes on what they perceive as the majority (it usually isn't, in fact) against constitutional, legal or international constraints that have been placed on the "general will".
Mainstream democrats take their cue from American republican democracy with its checks and balances and self-restraint. This is an impediment to the true democracy for populists. They wish to sweep away any barrier to their desired ends – whether of the left or the right.
So the Tea Party proposes a radical reduction of the role of the federal government in the US political system. The FPÖ challenged the authority of Austrian courts with respect to upholding minority rights. Ukip demands a UK withdrawal from the EU. The Front National drives an anti-Islamic and anti-Gypsy agenda in France. Geert Wilders' PVV – following in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn – also confronts fears over the growth of Islam and its purported incompatibility with Dutch values. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez created a parallel state and augmented his own constitutional power. Viktor Orbán's Fidesz rewrote the Hungarian constitution to give the executive more authority over the courts and to safeguard "traditional family values".
The binding element to all of these movements and parties is that they are not simply seeking to compete for ideas, policies and power but want to change the rules of the democratic game in favour of executive, majority rule. They are democrats but majority rule is their guiding force rather than a legally enshrined pluralism with minority protection. As my new Policy Network report, Democratic Stress, the Populist Signal and Extremist Threat shows, the upshot is modern (liberal) democracy in a state of stress.
Underlying the growth of these populist movements is a series of stressors that come to bear on liberal democracy and its mainstream party systems. They are socioeconomic, cultural and political in nature.
As the economy has moved away from mass production and many have lost out, socioeconomic change has loosened the ties of parties. Austerity looms large but is one factor among many. The rise of a politics of plural cultural identities catalysed by modern technology, transport, communications and media has further loosened the grip of mainstream parties on a solid and predictable base. Finally, political changes such as the expansion of the EU's acquis communautaire and the increasing comfort of mainstream parties within the system has created an opening for political challenger brands. Those challenger brands are the populists – more so than the green movement and even nationalists.
Mainstream parties have to prove that republican, pluralistic democracy, despite its frustrations and complexities, can be navigated through the trade-offs that all societies face better than populism can. More often than not, populists have simplistic and, in the worst case, highly damaging policies which if ever enacted, could cause significant harm. The desire for a return to economic growth, a sustainable welfare state or reducing debts is just as great as controlling immigration more tightly or seizing significant powers back from the EU. Mainstream parties can cope with these trade-offs between these demands and needs better than populists can – as long as they craft a viable statecraft.
Just maybe there is some truth in the populist critique of political elites – in Brussels, Washington and right through western democracies – and the way they have embedded their own self-interest in the system. Mainstream parties have lost their edge. They have grown comfortable, closed and politically nepotistic – relying on voters having nowhere else to go. That works for a while but becomes progressively more difficult to sustain. Mainstream democracy needs to become a contact sport again – with greater openness and engagement between the people and those who seek to represent them. Parties need to open up to real change and diversity.
Populism doesn't have the answers – you don't need to be Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or even Edmund Burke to see that. In many ways, however, it is posing some of the right questions. New policy approaches are necessary but not sufficient. The political mainstream needs to ask more fundamental questions of itself and its ability to govern with real legitimacy. That is if they are not to continue to age as the societies around them age. People will be left with a choice between a tired political mainstream elite and populists with all of the answers but few solutions. It's not a choice many will savour.

Italy's Grillo exposed as tool of State Department, Goldman Sachs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:29:00 +0000

PressTV - Italy's Grillo exposed as tool of State Department, Goldman Sachs

Dr. Webster Griffin Tarple | More articles by Dr. Webster Griffin Tarple

Italian Five Star Movement political leader Beppe Grillo

Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:22AM GMT

249

By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley

It has been about a month since the Italian elections, and no new government has been formed to replace the hated IMF austerity regime of economics professor and Goldman Sachs consultant Mario Monti.

The power vacuum is largely the work of the right-wing demagogue Beppe Grillo and his band of enraged petty-bourgeois novices. During the current negotiations to form a government to replace Monti and his sociopathic technocrats, Grillo’s position has been the same as that of Hitler after the German election of July 1932, when the Nazi leader, citing the fact that he controlled the largest single political party (although not an absolute majority), refused to support anyone but himself to head the next government.

This is Grillo’s precise position today. And despite Grillo’s repeated boast that he is now the largest political force in Italy, the social democratic PD turns out to have more votes for both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate now that the votes of Italians living abroad have been counted.

The resulting log jam of un-governability plays into the hands of the Anglo-American financiers, among other things by preventing Italy from rolling back the destructive austerity measures decreed by Monti and his IMF technocrats.

In 1932, German President von Hindenburg refused to make Hitler the Chancellor even though he had 37% of the votes. Grillo, by contrast, has about 25% right now. It is assumed that neither the Bersani social democrats nor Berlusconi’s center-right group could accept serving in a cabinet under the mentally unstable narcissist Grillo, whose political style always places him on the cusp of a carpet-chewing apoplectic fit.

Grillo’s actions reveal him as a cynical and power-hungry manipulator much worse even than traditional figures like Bersani or Berlusconi. He is a purveyor of infantile rage, verbal violence, obscene slander, and the voices of the infantile id. Grillo’s megalomaniac strategy is plainly to provoke another round of elections in the late spring or summer, with the hope that he will emerge with an absolute majority or at least with enough parliamentary seats to demand the role of Prime Minister.

It is a calculation dictated by Grillo’s insatiable ambition, and not by the welfare of his hapless followers. Some 8 million Italians voted in desperation for Grillo in the hope of immediate relief from the crushing austerity enacted by Monti. They would be best served if Grillo immediately announced his willingness to support a government pledging to pass a short-term program of stopping all foreclosures on homes and factories, abolishing the onerous IMU property tax and other tax increases decreed by Monti, and guaranteeing an immediate minimum guaranteed income of €1,000 per month for pensioners, the disabled, and the unemployed, paid for by a more robust version of Italy’s new Euro ‘Tobin levy’ on financial trading. But Grillo wants more power for himself, not a concrete rollback of austerity for working people.

Instead, Grillo’s sinister amateur hour focuses on such trifling gestures as cutting the pay and perks of members of Parliament, eliminating provincial governments altogether, and demanding an end to the public financing of political parties - which would weaken the social democrats and make Italian politics into the playground for millionaires and billionaires, just like the United States after the Citizens United ruling. Needless to say, savings from such changes represent mere chicken feed, and would do nothing to alleviate the suffering and desperation of Italian families.

In the meantime, Grillo’s status as a US tool for the destabilization of Italy is now a matter of public record. When the new US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Rome, he told a small group of Italian political leaders that the United States was in no way hostile to Grillo. It was revealed that the previous US ambassador, Ronald Spogli, had informed the State Department that Grillo should be considered a credible partner.

US ambassador tells Italian students to support Grillo

On March 13, the current US ambassador David Thorne, Kerry’s Yale roommate and a fellow member of the infamous Skull and Bones freemasonic cult, told a group of high school students in Rome that Grillo and his neo-totalitarian Five Star Movement were the preferred alternative from Washington’s point of view. “You can take your country in hand and act, like the Five-Star Movement, for reform and change,” said Thorne to an assembly at the Liceo Visconti.

Thorne’s comment represented a crass and blatant interference in the internal affairs of Italy, and a deplorable diplomatic incident. A number of Italian politicians from the social democratic PD party demanded that the State Department repudiate Thorne’s remarks, but no such statement was forthcoming. Grillo, for his part, prominently displayed Thorne’s outrageous endorsement on his flagship blog, which is on the equivalent of the daily Pravda or V?lkischer Beobachter for his besotted legions.

Grillo’s movement represents a further step in the development of that basic Anglo-American destabilization tool, the color revolution. Growing out of CIA operations in Portugal in the 1970s, the Philippines in the 1980s, and later subversion in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, the standard color revolution has tended to follow a somewhat crude and mechanistic assembly-line approach: to target a country with a strong government, use the Madison Avenue branding techniques of a color and a slogan, plus a telegenic “reform” demagogue and a fake exit poll to mobilize swarms of naïve adolescents to undertake public demonstrations designed to portray the existing government as intolerably unpopular.

Then set up an IMF-NATO puppet regime and let the foreign banks asset-strip the country. This cookie cutter approach was perfected by Otpor of Belgrade, which transformed itself into a highly lucrative international consultancy in the service of Washington and London. The main failures of this standard model of subversion came in Lebanon, where the hollow “Cedars Revolution” did considerable damage but was defeated by the organized power of Hezbollah, and in Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government refused to be stampeded.

Italy, the seventh largest industrial power in the world, is a complex Western European society with the remains of a once powerful labor movement and labor-based political party, as well as Berlusconi’s bourgeois mass party. During 2011, US-UK intelligence attempted to mount a Purple Revolution against Berlusconi, but this feeble effort was unable to provide much camouflage for the coup d’état of November 2011 which ousted Berlusconi and replaced him with the incompetent Monti and his gaggle of austerity ghouls.

The persistence of at least two major political parties has forced the bankers to turn to Grillo, seen more as a short-term wrecking ball for the existing political system than as a long-term dictatorial solution. Once Grillo has further demolished the existing parliamentary democracy, Washington and London can pull out their next option, quite possibly the telegenic Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi, already celebrated by Time magazine as Italy’s white Obama, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge to the traditional hack leadership around Bersani in the PD primaries for prime minister. Wall Street and the City of London hope that, with a little bit of luck, Grillo might also be able to wreck the Euro and pitch continental Europe into the abyss of total economic breakdown.

Goldman Sachs welcomes Grillo as a Trojan horse for new speculative attacks on Italian bonds

The notorious Jim O’Neill, outgoing boss of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has joined Thorne in his enthusiastic support for Grillo and his myrmidons, the grillini. O’Neill is responsible for coining the insulting label of “PIIGS,” used as a catchphrase by cynical hedge fund hyenas and zombie bankers to organize the attack on the government bonds of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain starting in 2009 - all as a means of stabilizing the US dollar and the British pound by wrecking the euro while making enormous speculative profits in the process.

O’Neill welcomed the results of the late February Italian national elections, obviously because this chaotic situation weakens the Italian Republic and gives more power to predatory financiers like O’Neill himself and his colleagues at Goldman Sachs. According to Business Insider, O’Neill had the following to say about Grillo:

“Firstly, perhaps somewhat oddly, I find the outcome quite exciting because it seems to me for a country whose GDP has basically not changed since the EMU started in 1999, something big needs to change. Maybe this election outcome and the peculiar mass appeal of the Five-Star Movement could signal the start of something new? Secondly, for the establishment of Italy and, crucially, the other ‘power centers’ of old Europe, in particular Berlin and Frankfurt, these results are pretty close to a nightmare.” (“The Political Nightmare Unfolding in Italy Has Got Me Excited,” Business Insider, March 1, 2013)

But at the same time, O’Neill and Goldman Sachs were reported to be dumping any remaining holdings of Italian government bonds, even as they made a series of large-scale bets against Italian government debt with the aid of credit default swaps, the toxic derivatives which speculators use to increase the destructive power of the hot money they deploy against national economies.

On March 8, Fitch Ratings took advantage of the chaos and un-governability generated by the funnyman Grillo, lowering its Issuer Default Reading (IDR) for Italy from A- to BBB+, with a negative long-term outlook. Actions like this are at the heart of the Anglo American arsenal used to attack European government bonds as a means of damaging the euro. The Fitch downgrade was all the more outrageous because, as O’Neill has admitted, Italy’s cyclically adjusted fiscal position is actually in modest surplus, and is much better than that of the United States, Britain, and France, and slightly better than Germany.

Pro-fascist leads Grillo’s caucus in chamber of deputies

Like Mussolini and Ron Paul, Grillo has long claimed to represent the transcendence of the left-and right dichotomy. Grillo has used this sophistry to declare himself open to cooperation with the neofascist Casa Pound, a slimy operation named after the American fascist traitor, mental case, and poetaster Ezra Pound. In a dialogue with Casa Pound leaders, Grillo refused to describe himself as anti-fascist, and claimed instead to be “ecumenical” - meaning ready to work with the heirs of Mussolini. And of course, if Grillo wants to follow through on his plan to wipe out all labor unions while at the same time drastically cutting government pensions as part of his debt-reduction strategy, he may need all the help he can get from the fascist squadristi.

Grillo’s hand-picked chief enforcer for the Five Star caucus in the Italian chamber of deputies is Roberta Lombardi. The petty bourgeois Lombardi is nostalgic for the early years of the fascist movement, commenting: “Before it degenerated, fascism had a sense of national community (which it took directly from socialism), the highest respect for the state, and the will to protect the family.” With these words, Lombardi is endorsing the fascist movement which met in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan in 1919, made up of ex-socialists, war veterans, disillusioned trade unionists, and the self-styled creative intelligentsia. There are in fact many parallels between this primitive

Grillo trying to stop jailbreak among his parliamentarians

Ironically, Grillo’s calling card has long been a promise of total netroots democracy, with a referendum on every important decision. So far, Grillo and his guru Casaleggio have been making all the decisions on their own. The Five Star Movement has a structure which can only be called autistic. There are no clubs, locals, citywide or regional organizations. There are no party conventions or conferences on any level. There are simply the atomized, alienated, and isolated grillini at their computers, each relating solely to Il Duce and his decrees. Most of Grillo’s new members of Parliament had never met each other.

This would appear to be the Bilderberg/CIA/MI-6 answer to the question of how to create a mass anti-government political party while keeping all of its members in total passivity and isolation, lest they get any ideas about mounting a real challenge to the power of financier oligarchs. Because Grillo and Casaleggio were looking for doglike loyalty and not exceptional ability, many of the Five Star candidates are marginal people, unemployed or underemployed. They are now delighted to be getting the generous salaries paid to deputies and senators, and want very much to avoid the dissolution of Parliament for early elections. They fear the loss of their livelihood, either by getting the ax from Grillo for some petty infraction, or by defeat at the polls. This group is eminently susceptible to bribery, be it through cash-filled envelopes now, or through the promise of lucrative jobs on the other side of the revolving door.

The obvious alternative for the new parliamentary grillini is to ignore the raving directives issued by Grillo’s blog, and to vote in ways that will provide a minimum of institutional stability for Italy, along with a continuation of their own salaries. Grillo is acutely aware of the threat of a jailbreak among his minions. Soon after the elections, he exploded in rage against Article 67 of the Italian Constitution, which bans any so-called imperative mandate subordinating individual members of Parliament to their party organizations.

Article 67 was part of the backlash against the fascist one-party state of Mussolini. In practical terms, it means that according to Italian law every grillino deputy and senator is free to dump Grillo and stay in office as a member of the independent (or “mixed”) caucus of Chamber and Senate. Grillo, while claiming not to be a political party, wants instead a complete party dictatorship, as during Italy’s two decades of fascist rule. In response to these outbursts, Grillo’s blog - until then a theater of unanimous adulation for the unkempt leader - registered its first serious wave of criticism and dissent.

Grillo’s rage escalated on the Saturday after the Ides of March when about fifteen grillino senators (more than a quarter of his total strength of 53 in the upper house) broke ranks and voted for the social democratic judge Grasso over the Berlusconi candidate for the presidency of the Senate. Grillo, always seeking chaos, had ordered them to vote blank ballot so as to prevent anyone from being elected. In a psychotic outburst on his blog, Grillo demanded the resignation of all senators who had violated the party line. Part of the issue was Grillo’s unit rule, by which all grillini must vote together. The unit rule was of course a lockstep favored by southern segregationists at Democratic Party conventions through the 1960s.

In response to Grillo’s arrogant authoritarianism, the comment pages on his blog - filled up to now with fawning idolatry - exploded with anger and scorn for the new Duce. One of the most popular posts accused Grillo of an authoritarian turn aiming at political gains by wrecking the overall Italian situation as much as possible. Grillo was indicted for “deliriums of omnipotence,” and his hand-picked caucus chiefs scored as messianic acolytes. Many were the comments warning Grillo that he had lost their vote forever.

Up to this point, Grillo’s blog had been a one-way conveyor belt for top-down orders, with no feedback other than wild applause. But now Grillo and Casaleggio, faced with an overwhelmingly negative reaction, began to show their true dictatorial colors by censoring the comments they did not like. In the dead of night, they removed some 2,250 heretical posts, including some of the most popular ones.

Grillo has long been extremely paranoid about leading rank and file members of his Five Star Movement take part in Italy’s popular weeknight television talk shows. He obviously wanted to keep the attention focused on himself. To better browbeat these wretched senators and deputies, Grillo and Casaleggio now sent in two commissars, overseers, or enforcers - one for each house of parliament - to make their factions toe the line. Grillo decreed a policy of “press silence,” similar to wartime radio silence, to prevent nosy journalists from asking embarrassing questions. The press replied by reminding the grillini that press conferences without questions were a contradiction in terms, superfluous since a press release would get the job done. Grillo gives selected interviews to foreign reporters, but never to Italians. Grillo was thus working a true miracle: making the Italian press corps look good.

Grillo wages war against dissident ‘trolls’

In another apoplectic fit, Grillo lashed out on his blog against “hordes of trolls, freaks, and multinicks” hired by his political adversaries, who for several months had been guilty of lèse majesté against his greatness. With his usual obscene rhetoric, Grillo accused these “locusts” of creating “a filthy mess.” The most popular reply to this demanded that the Five Star Movement agree to vote a limited motion of confidence in a social democratic government based on a specific agenda of clean government process reforms like conflicts of interest, anticorruption, and a new election law. These symbolic petty bourgeois process reforms, needless to say, would do absolutely nothing for hard-pressed Italian working families. Even among Grillo’s internal opposition, mass traction material demands remain few and far between.

Grillo is obsessed that members of his caucus will vote for a social democratic government under Bersani. Bersani had announced soon after the elections that he was “scouting” for potential backers among the new grillini. Grillo’s witch-hunt will therefore continue. But there is one “ex-communist” that Grillo seems ready to support: the current President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano, who is one of the principal Anglo-American assets in Italian politics. It was Napolitano who carried out the November 2011 coup d’état which ousted Berlusconi and installed the brutal austerity regime of Goldman Sachs employee Monti. A Napolitano-Grillo government would therefore continue and escalate the savage austerity measures which are at the root of the Italian crisis. And this, of course, is what Grillo’s controllers want most.

If Italy is ever to get out of its current economic depression, a massive program of modern infrastructure will have to play a central role. The American New Deal, with agencies like the WPA, PWA, and TVA, makes this point absolutely clear. But not for Grillo and his myrmidons, who often sound like reactionary Republican Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey attempting to block the needed new tunnel under the Hudson River.

This past weekend, numerous grillini renewed their protest against the high speed rail link for freight and passengers now in the advanced stages of construction in the Val di Susa between Turin in northwest Italy and Lyon in France. This segment is part of the trans-European Corridor Five, which stretches from Lisbon, Portugal to Kiev, Ukraine. This is exactly the kind of infrastructure Europe as a whole requires to recover from the long deficit of the East-West rail links still left over from the decades of the Cold War.

The existing Fréjus-Modane railroad line was built between 1850 and 1870, and despite successive modernizations, it must now be considered hopelessly obsolete because of its winding path. Building the 57-kilometer tunnel at the heart of this project would enhance the worldwide reputation Italian civil engineering has enjoyed the Italians helped build the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Economic modernization and job creation make projects like this one indispensable if Italy is to have a future. Interestingly, Grillo’s hand-picked Senate faction leader who attended this protest was peppered by demands from militant workers about the Five Star Movement’s friendliness to neofascism.

Another way in which Grillo is already weakening Italy is by reviving the secessionist movement among the German-speaking population in the Alpine region of Alto Adige/South Tyrol. A leader of the South Tyrol separatists has now started a new campaign to get out of Italy using the specter of a Rome government dominated by Grillo.

Is Grillo a neofascist?

Across Europe, there is a growing awareness that Grillo represents a controlled opposition designed to ward off any serious attacks on the political dominance of the finance oligarchs. In articles published by the, British New Statesman, the leftist Wu Ming Foundation of Bologna argues that Grillo has been a shock absorber for the Italian bankers, since he directs the rage of the masses overwhelmingly at the “caste” of political flunkies, letting the bankers off relatively unscathed. Wu Ming laments that mass mobilization against the IMF austerity in Italy has been hindered by the Grillo, who is personally a multimillionaire and one of the 1%. His blog alone is thought to be worth €10 to €15 million per year.

London Guardian lumps Grillo together with the reactionary US Tea Party, the UK Independence Party, and similar demagogic movements. But Painter cannot grasp that only the killer austerity cuts imposed across southern Europe over the last several years by the IMF and the European Central Bank have made the success of Grillo and his ilk possible.

Der Spiegel of Hamburg has a better analysis, pointing to the obvious parallels between Grillo and Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who ruled the country from 1922 until 1943-45. Spiegel underlines the point with a cartoon portraying the Genoese comedian in a Mussolini uniform. The method of both is to focus mass rage on politicians in general and the parliament in particular, with bankers and economic issues getting far less attention.

As Spiegel notes, Grillo’s “anti-establishment rhetoric sounds appealing, [but] at heart it’s actually anti-democratic. And very similar to that of an infamous Italian from the past.” The German Social Democratic Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück is thus very wrong to lump Grillo and Berlusconi together under the heading of “clown.” Grillo also resembles Il Duce in his claim of overcoming the left-right dichotomy, and of not representing a political party in the traditional sense. (Spiegel, “Green Fascism: Beppe Grillo is the most dangerous man in Europe”) Grillo’s recent raving that, “We are young. We have no structure, hierarchy, leaders or secretaries. We take orders from no one,” and his slogan of “uno vale uno” - anybody is as good as anybody else - echo the clichés of the young Mussolini.

Washington Post sees Grillo as “thrilling example” of grassroots power

This growing awareness of Grillo’s fascistoid traits contrasts sharply with the whitewash of Grillo dished up by the Washington Post, house organ of the US Federal Reserve. Here Anthony Faiola offers a puff piece comparing the current Italian destabilization to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We read: “For 60 million Italians and political junkies of every stripe, the triumphs of a movement encompassing disenfranchised voters from both the left and the right - think of the tea party, if it included everyone from Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh - are a thrilling example of the power of the grassroots…. The rise of the Five-Star Movement, led by a former TV comedian, is the latest manifestation of a growing backlash in Europe to the crippling austerity and entrenched cronyism in the halls of power. It is nothing less than a social experiment underscoring what happens when voters decide to radically alter the status quo.”

There is nothing about Roberta Lombardi’s praise of fascism, nothing about Grillo’s flirtation with the fascists of Casa Pound, and of course nothing about the close connections between Grillo’s handlers at Casaleggio Associates and the Aspen Institute, the Bilderbergers, and the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy. (Anthony Faiola, “Newcomers Shake up Politics in Italy: Legislators from Grassroots Movement Promise Change as Leaderless Nation Grapples with Economic Crisis,” Washington Post, March 25, 2013)

Italian media veteran: Grillo is controlled opposition designed by Bilderberg

Grillo’s personal Svengali is the aging hippie ideologue and reputed freemason Giancarlo Casaleggio, whose apocalyptic predictions about imminent World War III with billions in deaths are available in his film Gaia, a movie festooned with freemasonic symbols. Italian media insider Carlo Freccero, the director of RAI-4, the fourth program of Italian state television, had earlier called attention to the indispensable role of the well-heeled Milan internet marketing, advertising, and political consulting firm Casaleggio Associates in the creation of the Grillo movement.

Freccero noted that Casaleggio’s film attributes most of the evil in the world to conspiratorial organizations such as the Bilderberg group, which dictate the policies of governments from behind the scenes. How then, Freccero asked, did Grillo and Casaleggio explain the presence as a partner in Casaleggio Associates of Enrico Sassoon, a member of the board of the Aspen Institute of Italy? Sassoon’s fellow Aspen board members are largely drawn from the Bilderberg group, for which the Aspen Institute functions as a kind of think tank and cadre school. Freccero was only underlining the obvious when he speculated that the Grillo movement is in fact a controlled opposition to the transatlantic financier oligarchy represented by Bilderberg. Sassoon resigned from Casaleggio Associates soon after Freccero made these remarks.

Has Grillo already peaked in the polls?

The most recent poll shows the Berlusconi forces reclaiming first place among the competing coalitions with 31.3%, with the Bersani coalition at 29.3% and Grillo in third place with 26.2%. The Monti forces are down to 7.1%. The SWG poll of a few days earlier shows Grillo at 26.9%, but falling a full 3.1% from the euphoria of his post-election uptick. Judging from internet postings, many Italians are coming to view Grillo as lots of smoke and not much roast beef, as the idiom goes. According to the Rome political website Dagospia, “the grillini risk becoming the biggest flop in the history of the Italian Republic” if they are unable to bring home for their voters “results that are concrete, tangible, and immediately beneficial.”

Is Dr. Benjamin Carson the American Grillo?

Anglo-American intelligence sees in Grillo a model for new generation of color revolutions and destabilizations that can be applied in Europe and North America. One possible candidate for the role of American Grillo is Dr. Benjamin Carson, a well-known black neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins University. Carson, who has been well known for decades as a reactionary ideologue operating under the spurious cover of evangelical Christianity, captured right wing accolades last months by spouting primitive anti-government platitudes at the National Prayer Breakfast, with Obama sitting nearby and forced to listen.

Immediately thereafter, the Wall Street Journal, the flagship organ of the financier oligarchy, began discussing Carson as a possible presidential candidate. According to the Style section of the March 25 Washington Post, Carson has been calling not just for cuts in the social safety net, but rather for its total abolition: “at the Conservative Political Action Conference… Carson suggested that government should rely on churches to provide a safety net for the poor and get out of the social welfare business. ‘Why is the government trying to duplicate what [churches] are supposed to be doing?’ he asked.” Time will tell if Carson can match Grillo’s success as a demagogue and mass manipulator.

EU Watch

Это заставляет мужчину СХОДИТЬ С УМА от тебя (99% женщин этого НЕ знают)

Russia's new ally – why Luxembourg is perfectly positioned to form a special relationship with Russia

Author: Simon Dinning

Russian business to turn to Luxembourg instead of Cyprus?

Putin's use of chemical weapons in his hybrid war against Ukraine

Another coincidence – the same day when the theme of non-lethal chemical weapons in Syria arose Russia baned military and police from traveling abroad

Bernd Lucke, the head of Germany's euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, with his four children at an election party in Berlin.

ANZEIGE

U.K. Finds Its Beppe Grillo - Bloomberg

Stefano Pitrelli

Read Alan Moore to understand Beppe Grillo

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Niall Ferguson on Europe’s New Fascists - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

How the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" Works | TechPresident

Italy: Beppe Grillo prepares to storm Europe | Presseurop.eu: European news, cartoons and press reviews

Italy: Beppe Grillo prepares to storm Europe

20 March 2013 Il Fatto Quotidiano Rome

‘Blind cycle of manipulation’

Pedro pleads for sacrifice

Daniel W. Drezner | FOREIGN POLICY

How Margaret Thatcher affected international relations theory

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, April 8, 2013 - 1:11 PM

Five things that international relations scholars should shut the hell up about

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, April 5, 2013 - 4:12 PM

BBC World Service - The New Europe: The far right: a nationalist International?

The far right: a nationalist International?

O'Neil on Italy: Reform is not the Same Word as Austerity

Why Ukip, the Tea Party and Beppe Grillo pose a threat to the mainstream

Italy's Grillo exposed as tool of State Department, Goldman Sachs

20 March 2013
Il Fatto Quotidiano Rome