How to Make Immigration Look Good

They've done it again. Here's the umpteenth attempt to portray immigration as economically useful for Britain, if undertaken by selecting only a particular group of immigrants for a carefully chosen period of time.

The media report that a new study by University College London (UCL) claims that immigrants to the UK from the 10 newest EU countries (those that joined the EU in 2004) have benefited the British economy. In the years to 2011, it says, they added £4.96 billion more in taxes than they took out in public services.

It turns out that this is not so much a new study as a revision of a previous one whose faults had been rightly criticised.

The original University College London’s study (conducted by Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, CReAM for short), published in November 2013, was the most far-reaching study ever carried out on the impact of migration on taxpayers, covering 16 years from 1995 to 2011, based on official and government figures.

It concluded that immigrants from the EEA (European Economic Area) contribute 4% more in taxes than they take out in benefits. Non-Europeans immigrants, on the other hand, are a financial burden: they take in benefits and services £100 billion (or 14%) more than they put back.

CReAM also found that British-born people pay into the Exchequer 7% less than they receive from the state.

So, because that study includes both European and non-European immigrations, it calculated an overall net benefit of £25 billion to the UK from recent migrants, which it described as "a very sizeable fiscal contribution".

But, if you analyse further, you see that, as explained above, non-European immigration, far from contributing positively, is a huge economic burden for Britain. So there is no rational motive to support that type of immigration on financial grounds.

But there’s more. A more in-depth assessment of the fiscal effects of immigration to the UK published in March 2014 analyses the CReAM research. This study, by Migration Watch UK, found some serious faults in the CReAM paper.

Migration Watch experts found, for example, that its authors themselves, even using their over-optimistic calculations, had found a cost to the UK from migrants of £95 billion between 1995 and 2011, but they had buried the figure, which could only be found at the end of their paper but was not mentioned in their text.

Migration Watch also makes clear that the the CReAM study's authors, Dustmann and Frattini, have overstated revenues and understated expenditures for the migrants arriving after 2000. Among the extremely unrealistic assumptions made by CReAM is that even the most recent arrivals contribute as much as long-term migrants and the UK-born, whereas both their younger age and lower incomes make this highly unlikely.

When these over- and under-estimations are adjusted, the result is – assuming that Dustmann and Frattini were otherwise correct - an overall fiscal cost of migration to the UK of £148 billion (more than £22 million a day) during the 1995-2011 period.

Interestingly, the two academics did not reply to these criticisms but only made vague remarks about "derogatory language seemingly attempting to undermine our reputation".

This was the preamble, the story so far.

Now CReAM has published a revised version of its November 2013 original study discussed above. The authors claim they have made "robustness checks", taking into account some points raised by Migration Watch.

This new paper only concerns itself with immigrants from the so-called A10 (Accession Ten) countries, namely those that joined the EU in 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. They have been making a postive contribution of almost £5 billion between 1995 and 2011.

The problem, according to Migration Watch chairman Sir Andrew Green, is cherry-picking. The overall effect of immigration resulting from this study – although not publicised in headlines - is now a fiscal cost of £114 billion as a best-case scenario and £159 billion at worst, therefore higher than the previous CReAM paper's calculation of £95 billion.

He said to the BBC:

If you take all EU migration including those who arrived before 2001 what you find is this - you find by the end of the period they are making a negative contribution and increasingly so.

And the reason is that if you take a group of people while they're young, fit and healthy they're not going to be very expensive, but if you take them over a longer period they will be.

Anthony Reuben, head of statistics for BBC News, added:

If we are only interested in tax and benefits, the perfect person for the economy would arrive the day after they finish education, work for 40 years, not have children and then leave the day after they retire.

It is no surprise, then, that the relatively young, already educated migrants from EU accession countries are closer to that model than people who have arrived in Britain longer ago, or indeed the population in general.

The big question that this research does not address is what happens to those migrants in the future; in particular, will they stay in the country after they retire?

And also, what effect if any have they had on the amount of in-work benefits and out-of-work benefits paid to the rest of the population?

Sir Andrew Green also said:

This report confirms that immigration as a whole has cost up to £150 billion in the last 17 years. As for recent European migrants, even on their own figures - which we dispute - their contribution to the exchequer amounts to less than £1 a week per head of our population.

And, if even the BBC admits that "over the longer term, immigrants to the UK had been a burden on the state", it must mean that as far as immigration is concerned we'got to the end of the road.

Italy Is One of the EU Largest Net Contributors

Net receipts from the EU budget, based on 2009 budget data (negative amounts show net contributions)

Member state	Per capita (in euros)	Percentage (of national GDP)	Total amount (in million euros)
Austria	−59.7	−0.18	−499
Belgium	90.0	0.29	968
Bulgaria	77.4	1.76	589
Cyprus	−34.0	−0.18	−27
Czech Republic	150.4	1.11	1,575
Germany	−107.3	−0.37	−8,797
Denmark	−211.0	−0.53	−1,163
Estonia	416.2	4.02	558
Finland	−113.8	−0.36	−606
France	−100.4	−0.34	−6,461
Greece	267.2	1.30	3,009
Hungary	265.1	2.68	2,660
Ireland	−35.0	−0.09	−156
Italy	−100.7	−0.41	−6,046
Lithuania	438.2	5.33	1,468
Luxembourg	2364.5	3.05	1,167
Latvia	218.8	2.62	495
Malta	17.4	0.13	7
Netherlands	−90.2	−0.26	−1,488
Poland	160.5	1.66	6,119
Portugal	196.4	1.25	2,087
Romania	74.8	1.24	1,609
Spain	9.7	0.04	444
Sweden	−43.6	−0.13	−404
Slovenia	92.8	0.55	189
Slovakia	88.8	0.78	481
United Kingdom	−62.7	−0.24	−3,865

One William Gruff left this comment to my post The Looting of Italy:

Italy is not and has never been a nett contributor to the EU. Not a nett contributor means not a contributor at all in precisely the way that being a public sector worker means not a tax payer. In the same way, Scotland makes no contribution to the 'U'K, despite partisan claims to the contrary.

This sums up the kind of widespread ignorance and prejudice about Italy, largely due to media distortions, that my Italian journalist friend Alessandra Nucci laments in her article, "The Looting of Italy", that attracted that comment.

The comment requires a documented reply.

Above is a table for the year 2009 reproduced from Wikipedia, based on research by Deutsche Bank Research. The net contributors are shown in blue.

Wikipedia says:

The four largest net contributors in absolute terms are Germany, France, Italy, UK.
The four largest net contributors in per capita terms are Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy.
The four largest net contributors as a proportion of GDP are Denmark, Italy, Germany, Finland.

Only Italy and Germany are among the four largest net contributors in all categories. It's also easy to see from the table that in absolute terms Italy contributes almost double the net receipts from the UK, the country from which our commenter friend William Gruff hails.

As you can see, in total amount Italy is third, little behind France, which Italy, though, overtakes in terms of per capita contributions. As a proportion of GDP Italy comes before both Germany and France, and is second only to Denmark, an economic lightweight compared to Italy.

Also observe how Italy is usually placed by the international media together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, which are among the largest net recipients - along with Luxembourg and some Eastern-European countries -, therefore at the other end of the spectrum.

A table showing member states' net contributions to the EU’s annual budget for the period from 2000 to 2011, compiled by the European Commission, can be found here. Again, somewhat counterintuitively, if the figure is negative it means that the country has received fewer payments from the EU than it should and is therefore a net contributor to the EU’s budget.

This table shows again that, except in 2000, Italy has been a large net contributor all these years.

Even the German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote at the end of 2012, accompanying the article with a clear graph:

Italy is the country that most contributes to the European budget...

Compared to the 2011 Gross Domestic Product, no other country has contribuited so much to the European budget as Italy...

...but, despite its strong debt, [Italy] has not yet received a cent from the various European "parachutes".

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

This is the fourth and final part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first three parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy


Also read Italy Invented Banks by Enza Ferreri

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The Attack Begins In Earnest

2011 is when they began in earnest to train their guns on us, with the military aggression that started with the Nato attack on Libya culminating in half-truths calculated to stampede investors away from Italy in the direction of presumably safe bonds. And what bonds can be safer than Germany’s?

After the attack on Libya pulverized the country’s infrastructure, mainly built by Italy, as well as the many giant Italian industries that lined the coast, the banksters sprang into action. In July, Germany’s heavily-leveraged Deutsche Bank - which a month later was revealed to be one of the prime recipients of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tremendous secret bailout, to the tune of $354 billion - dumped over 7 billion euros’ worth of Italian bonds onto the market in one swoop, loudly trumpeting this fact to the press and then just as dramatically buying up unnecessary swap options that bet on Italy’s going bust.

This of course signalled to all investors to follow suit, lest they remain saddled with bonds that might never be paid back! After which the panic inevitably spread to the shareholders’ market, driving the price of wealthy banks and huge joint-stock companies down to levels of craziness where one could buy a mega-multinational concern at the cost of maybe a single one of its properties.

Der Spiegel may have let the cat out of the bag when it wrote that documents in its possession showed that the reason Angela Merkel was holding out against the Euro-bonds - which would guarantee the debt of all the euro-zone countries - was that in exchange for relenting she planned to demand privileges for foreign buyers of choice property in Southern Europe.

This may or may not be. What is certain is that they have had this on their minds for a long time. In one sole day, in July 2011, Germany’s Deutsche Bank dumped billions of euros’ worth of perfectly good Italian sovereign bonds onto the market, trumpeting the move as the markets were still open – something that is NEVER done – and then dramatically buying swaps that would make a profit if Italy went bankrupt. By stampeding investors away from Italy they managed not only to distract the press from their own banks’ toxic assets, which they were busy dumping onto other countries’ debit accounts, but also to attract the money thereby freed up to – where else? Germany of course.

This kind of situation is a problem even in normal free markets. But in the euro-zone, where the spigot of money creation has been clamped off in the name of thrift (“austerity” they call it) - and, thanks to Maastricht and other assorted treaties, cannot be turned back on except by fiat of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt - it becomes a matter of mors tua vita mea. It’s like when you tilt a glass of water letting it all flow to one side, leaving the rest high and dry. If there is a fixed amount of money and it is all made to flow to one corner of the continent, the rest is left high and dry, with no way for people to exchange the fruits of their respective labour to procure the rest of the things they need to live. Money has no value in itself. The value lies in goods and manpower. But barter became impossible a long long time ago. Even in the bronze age there were products of human invention that needed some instrument to fraction their worth with respect to whatever needed interchange. Can a piano manufacturer barter his goods in exchange for his daily bread? Or must he grow his own produce if he wants to eat? Without money, markets are not free but paralyzed. Such is the situation of the captive countries of the euro-zone.

Hence, from July 2011 on, Germany’s vested interest in the collapse of other countries, and particularly of Italy’s rival economy, has been obvious to all who cared to see. Nevertheless, no-one could possibly have imagined that two months later, and a fortnight before the financial putsch in Italy, the Deutsche Bank would go so far as to secretly request the Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund] to impose a “massive and profound decommissioning of the system of social welfare and of services to the public, to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, for France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland” (the so-called “PIIGS” countries, plus France), according to a report which we only discovered the following year.

Unsurprisingly, the insultingly-named “PIIGS” countries are all non-Protestant. As attested in several editorials, since the euro no longer evokes wealth and stability but unemployment, poverty and decline, there has been a return of anti-Catholic prejudice in Northern Europe, where many consider the “PIIGS” countries to be doing badly because of Catholic sin. The whore of Babylon all over again.


Mario Monti's Government of Technocrats

Enter Mario Monti, the unelected Prime Minister, self-proclaimed Catholic and supposed conservative economics professor who went to visit the Pope eight times in little over a year while impoverishing the country and instigating the suicide of dozens of industrialists.

Under his watch billions were siphoned out of the economy, while the vast majority of Parliament remained inert, the conservatives mostly looking on in passive and silent dejection and the leftists simply waiting for election time to reinstall them in power. All of them, left and right, were as if traumatized at the display of power in what amounted to a coup d’etat by President Napolitano, and even more frightened at witnessing each other's silence. One MP, an ex-socialist friend of mine who had joined Berlusconi's centrist party Forza Italia, wrote a piece early on which ended saying that we were in the midst of a tragedy which risked changing forever the face of the country. When I called to compliment him for his perspicacity, he cut me short replying “Yes but nobody else is speaking up.” In a matter of weeks he had eaten his words and climbed aboard Mario Monti’s brand-new political party.

I think that a sequence of events of this kind – plus the court actions which have devastated and closed down one major industry after another on charges usually involving either environmental disaster, health hazards or corruption, increasing unemployment by the thousands - are probably what is routinely done to countries when there is a leftist takeover. I hold that they could purposely be using the power to legislate money away, isolate the country from investors so as to tear the system down for good and render the people powerless to recreate it. This is the only explanation I can find to the inexplicable way the technocrats have been sending money abroad as if there were no need for it at home: 5 million to Albania to buy equipment for doctors’ offices, 3 million to Bolivia to help protect its biodiversity, 1.3 billion to help Ethiopians guard against a new drought, 400,000 for a school for tour operators in Mozambique... it goes on and on.

Is it any wonder that Monti’s supposedly un-political, technocratic administration was actually made up of 99 % left-wing ministers? Why else would our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano - whom The NYT enthused about dubbing him “King Giorgio” - install Monti in the Premier’s office the minute the stock markets’ plunge finally managed to dislodge the entrenched incumbent, overriding all constitution-mandated Parliamentary prerogative? The international press immediately recorded this unprecedented power grab as the virtual coup d’etat it was, but this soon became an embarrassing detail that it is impolite to even mention any more.

Because Italy's politics was purposely programmed by our post-war Constitution - largely dictated by the powerful Communist Party - to be unmanageable and incomprehensible, hardly anyone in the international press bothers to delve into anything that regards Italy. Journalists have us conveniently shelved under the categories of fashion, pizza, the mafia, the Leaning Tower and the Pope. Investors care only about what the herd will do next in order to follow suit and try and turn a profit on the stock exchange. As a result, no-one ever writes about Italy except if there is a sex scandal, a mafia crime, or talk of corruption. Or, today, if the press says that Italy is being bailed out.

All of the good things, the 95 percent of hard-working, honest Italians, who are not corrupt but actually the first victims of corruption, the mafia, etc, are invariably ignored.

Ironically, despite the country's having had as Prime Minister a media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, whose supposed expertise in manipulating media coverage might have served Italy in good stead, the international spotlight has remained firmly projected onto the unfavourable clichés and the sole unfavourable numbers of Italy’s external debt. Our erstwhile Premier’s ludicrous private lechery deservedly made him the butt of worldwide ridicule, and dragged Italy down with him. However, I can’t help remembering that Bill Clinton was President of the United States when his sex-capades in the White House were made public. Has this ever made a laughing stock of the entire American populace for having elected him? Hardly.

I believe that in this globalized world, relying solely on the mainstream media for news about other countries is a mistake that can prevent a needed comprehension of what is going on. Because, the globalist players being a tight-knit clique, the blueprint they follow can eventually come round to harass other countries in their turn.

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

This is the third part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first two parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

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A Never-ending Flow of Illegal Immigrants Overburdens Italian Welfare

Very little is ever said about the immigration load, which together with bureaucracy is largely responsible for the burgeoning debt. It is routinely downplayed, while Italy gets lectured to for supposedly not living up to impossible standards that are provably not expected of any other country. The Italian Coastguard and Carabinieri have saved countless lives and generous Italian welfare, including old-age pensions, is doled out not only to illegal immigrants but, incredibly, to their relatives back home. Nonetheless Amnesty International feels free to scold us on the subject, and periodically issues press releases condemning the heartlessness of Italy alone, never anyone else, even though Spain has been known to shoot against boats approaching its shores and Malta routinely turns away boats heading in its direction, instructing them to come to Italy and France, and literally closed its borders after having prompted the renewed stowaway immigration by instigating the attack on Libya.

In order to de-industrialize an economy as big as Italy’s, money has to be pried away from millions of hard-working Italians. Which explains the sudden deluge of illegal immigrants which has been literally tossed onto our shores by the shiploads, starting in 1993.

That first time, Italy flew them right back from where they came from, like any other sovereign country would. But in 1997 they were back, with Romano Prodi, the leader of leftist Catholics, as Prime Minister. He hedged and hawed and eventually ...refused to send them back.

The flooding continued, to the self-righteous glee of Italy’s powerful leftists, until it was stopped by a costly “friendship” treaty with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (who was not friends with Italy alone. His friendly relationships with the leaders of France and Britain, as well as with Nelson Mandela, are well documented on the Internet, and it is rumoured that he financed the election campaign of Sarkozy, his prime assailer of 2011, in which case Sarkozy would have had good reasons for preferring him dead rather than imprisoned and eventually allowed to talk; same goes for his sons).

Which leads us to when the West suddenly discovered the pressing need to get rid of Gaddafi, and Sarkozy led the way in Nato’s …humanitarian bombing.

It has been proven that the attack on Libya was based on a flagrant lie. There were no mass graves and Gaddafi was demonstrably not killing his own people. (Just like with Syria’s Assad today).

But the testimony of the Archbishop of Tripoli and other witnesses went unheeded, the forgery of the mass grave pictures was brushed aside, and the “humanitarian” bombing began. (Again, just like with Assad.)

The no-fly zone, which immediately turned into a viciously destructive bombing (like Nato’s intervention in Kosovo, which went on even after Serbia had surrendered), was not just about Gaddafi. It was all about Italy; it was a frontal attack on

1) Italy’s major companies, which all had legitimate business with Libya and costly infrastructure built up through years of work on the Libyan coast,

2) the treaty that had put a stop to the wholesale invasion of Italy by impoverished immigrants, who happened to come prevalently from Muslim countries.


Consequences of the Libyan War for Italy

Both of these were enormous blows to Italy, but the second one was made particularly odious by the double standards that were flagrantly applied: with Italy being required to take in any and all who come by boat to our shores, or are dumped almost anywhere in the Mediterranean between here and Libya, while France - whose raids had started it all - literally closed its borders. When refugees from Tunisia (a former French colony) showed up expecting to get into France, they were shoved back into Italy! This incredible behaviour revealed to public scrutiny for the first time the existence of a Treaty signed in Dublin and dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, by which all illegal immigrants to the EU are to be registered and dealt with by the country where they first set foot. Italy being a stone’s throw away from Africa means that the boat people obviously come here as their first “choice”, and the Treaty makes sure they go no further than here.

This incredible burden notwithstanding, our rulers in Brussels, perhaps savouring the day in the not-too-distant future when the Vatican (considered the Book of Revelation’s “whore of Babylon” ) will inevitably be surrounded by a predominantly Muslim population - armed and financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and incited by Quran precepts to conquer the world for Allah and his prophet - ignored our legitimate pleas for help. Not only that: there were dark intimations here and there in the press about Italy needing to face up to its responsibilities. Whoever googled "Italy+colonialism" would come up with a lengthy Wikipedia list of Italian colonies, which actually correspond to the ancient Roman empire, plus charts of what amounts to dictator Mussolini’s 1930s colonial …wish list!

Now, the illegal immigration forced on Italy is a large part of what has caused our huge national debt. Yet, whenever Italy is concerned, the EU applies a sort of right of anyone in the world to come and live here, with his family, and be supported by us as well. In early 2012 the European Court of Human Rights even fined Italy for repatriating 24 illegal immigrants from Eritrea and Somalia, who had tried to enter the country three years earlier, 2009, on board a boat that was setting sail from Libya. These people were not harmed in any way, they were merely prevented from setting sail.

This was in accordance with the Treaty between Italy and the then-existent Libya, which allowed the Italian Coastguard to halt the massive illegal immigration that had been bringing immigrants to our shores in uncounted multitudes. Many drowned in the attempt.

Today, particularly after Pope Francis - in the aftermath of the October 2013 shipwreck of a shipload of 300+ Africans - amazingly went to Lampedusa to lament a generically wretched treatment of migrants, the situation is that Italy’s Navy is perennially fishing unlimited numbers out of the sea, ferrying them and towing their boats into Italian ports by the thousands. Daily. From the beginning of 2014 to Easter, over 20,000 were saved and brought into Italy, after Easter the rate of intake has been on average over a thousand a day, with no end in sight. Secretary of State Angelino Alfano has made it known that an estimated 800,000 people are assembled in Northern Africa, waiting their turn to be ferried into Italy. He has said that Italy cannot shoulder this burden by itself. But the Italian government dares take no action to stop them, knowing full well that the newscasts and daily press would immediately be filled with statements of moral outrage.

In sum: Italy has one of the highest population densities in the world, an economy saddled with the notorious public debt, yet we are high-handedly expected to take in unlimited masses of people who come here with their families, empty handed, expecting to be supported for the rest of their lives. In 2013 Australia, a continent with the lowest population density of the world, let it be known that boat people demanding asylum by landing on Christmas island – their Lampedusa – were denied entry and immediately deported to detention centers in Papua New Guinea or the island of Naum instead. Where was the international outcry?


Read the fourth and final part of the article:

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

This is the second part of the article "The Looting of Italy" by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci.

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How the Looting Works

I will venture to suggest that there must be a blue-print out there on how to manage a country after a revolutionary takeover, such as what has been done to Italy (and to Venezuela? Cuba? China? Russia?)

I would say that basically, after A) overwhelming the system (the Cloward-Piven strategy), the revolutionary leader will aim at B) impoverishing the middle class in order to prevent its every chance of rebelling. This can be done in various ways, which should include: 1) continuous price hikes in utilities, 2) a credit crunch, 3) tax-tax-tax, 4) media influence used to a) scare investors away b) deflect attention from what is really going on and c) create an iron-clad reputation for the revolutionary “good guys”, 5) sale of the nation’s property at bargain prices.

This sequence is coming full circle in Italy.

A. Overwhelming the system. In the years prior to 2011 the hard-working Italian people had been saddled with a bloated bureaucracy and progressively swelling taxes, due to the unquenchable demands imposed on our welfare system by competing leftist and populist parties, goaded on by trade unions with a finger in every pie. I think that the most telling examples of legislation foisted on the people were a law that was passed by another technocratic administration in 1992 (also unelected but at least concerted by the elected political parties) whereby immigrants over 65 were entitled to old-age pensions (whether or not they had paid into the pension funds), and a law of 2007, passed by ex-EU-Commission President Romano Prodi, whereby the old-age pensions were extended to the relatives of immigrants who joined them in Italy. In 2009 the Conservative government managed to limit this provision to relatives who could prove they had at least lived in Italy for ten years, but the burden on Italy’s budget remains enormous and climbing. It is estimated that in 2015 Italy's old-age pensioners coming from outside the EU will cost over €1.5 billion yearly.

All this preceded Prime Minister Mario Monti [unelected, invited by President Giorgio Napolitano to form a new technocratic government in 2011], who was called in precisely to put a stop to it, lower the debt and put Italy back on course. But what he did was the exact opposite, in other words:

B. Adding taxes upon taxes, wiping out liquidity, scaring investors away, protecting certain privileges and playing the media with expertise. Very creative.

He then proceeded to the bargain sale of the family jewels.

It goes like this.

Italians, who are notoriously very attached to their offspring and grandchildren, were used to judiciously setting aside their savings, usually investing them in real estate. This was highly prized collateral that should have avoided all the pernicious alarmism about the national debt.

But the alarms were contrived (See this video where Monti states that crises are good events). Having set inordinately high property taxes, Monti crippled their prices, thereby reducing at the wave of the magic wand the value of Italy’s financial collateral.

Then Monti announces that Italy is all set to sell off huge amounts of prestigious state-owned real estate.

Funny, the Bank of Italy announced the very same thing more or less at the same time. Which means glutting the housing market with fine property from one moment to the next. The technocrats know that the glut will make the tax-depressed prices collapse even lower, but it will appear as if it were no one’s fault, apart from the usual culprit: the free market. This way they can sell off the family jewels at bargain prices to their foreign friends (the rest of us in Italy not having the liquidity left, as explained above).

This is a tragic déjà vu.

For the modern-day looting of Italy began back in June 1992, with the now notorious, but then super-secretive, meeting on the HMS Britannia, anchored off the shores of Latium, the region of Rome. The British royal family yacht had been lent for the occasion to a group of Anglo-American financiers. Among the guests was today’s President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi.

What did these invisible financiers want from Italy? Well, just as they do today, they wanted to get their hands on Italian banks and telephone and energy companies: the “family jewels”. Their main target is probably ENI [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Italian large multinational] – but more about that later.

To go about this they had to speed up the changing of paradigm, making politics subordinate to the economy, and making the economy in turn to hinge on volatile finance.

In 1992, Italy’s IRI (Institute for the Reconstruction of Italy), the world’s largest state-run holding company, began to sell off its assets, at bargain prices, thereby starting the rush that has led to an avalanche of private industries to follow suit and seek a foreign buyer for their “Made in Italy” products in order to escape the combined stranglehold of bureaucracy and taxes. In the intervening 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands, of famous Italian brand names have been sold off to foreign companies.


The Attack in the Press

Reputation is everything, in a globalized market where traders encounter no restrictions to gambling with their own or other people’s money and are therefore in a position to cripple banks, currencies and entire countries. Demolishing investor confidence in a country can cost it millions, in the higher interest rates needed to attract buyers of its bonds. Disparagement by competitors is also a good way to increase investor interest in alternative bonds. In practice, as a piece in the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore put it, “the worse the reputations of Italy and Spain, the lower the interest rates on German bunds”.

Normally ignored in the general press, except to confirm uninformed clichés about things like the mafia and corruption, Italy started being described in the financial press as a basket case, hovering on the verge of disaster due to the size of its public debt, at the beginning of 2011. Despite its (then still) humming industries, mostly healthy banks and debt-free, educated, well-to-do population – conditions that are more than enough to guarantee secure payment of a country’s sovereign bonds - the press portrayed Italy’s condition as being desperate and placed the blame on the shoulders of the nation as a whole.

In actual fact, the situation was only desperate because of an uninformed international press pretending it is informed while choosing its sources only from among the “progressive” liberal press that mirrors their own biases. And the blame should actually be laid where it belongs, for example at the door of the decades-long unreasonable demands and manipulations of domineering communist parties and trade unions with a finger in every pie: a tale of warning that bears out the Cloward-Piven strategy of instigating the downfall of a capitalist society by overwhelming the system with massive demands. It could be a useful read for the U.S. before it finds itself winding up in the same spot.


Some Technical Notes, by Way of Explanation

Up until the single euro currency was invented, Germany was the “sick man of Europe”, mainly due to the fact that Western Germany had absorbed impoverished and backward Eastern Germany (Prussia) in one swallow, sharing with it the strong Deutschmark as its currency, with no adjustment. The Germans are still having to pay a tax for the support of ex-East Germany, but the common currency has enabled them to spread the burden onto all of the other members of the EU as well.

Since the introduction of the euro in 2001 German exports have soared, and every year there has been a surplus in Germany's accounts and a consequential mirror-image deficit in the accounts of the rest of the euro-zone countries.

There are many little details that have favored the image of Germany presented to the world as the most prosperous, honest, solid, upright and reliable country in the EU, or maybe the world. Things like the liabilities from the Kreditanstaltfurwiederaufbau which they don't include in the official accounts, so that they don’t come to bear on the total debt. Or the covert bailout they received when, as revealed by Bloomberg, Germany was allowed to spread its exposure to Greece onto all of the other EU countries. Most outrageous of all: the arms deals foisted on Greece, which in order to gain Germany’s assent to the bailouts was bullied into handing over a sizeable amount of said bailouts back to Germany itself, settling its debts for a purchase of submarines!


So Who Is Bailing Out Whom?

Bailouts are carried out in order to help a country’s creditors as much as the country itself. This is particularly obvious in the case of Greece, which Germany and France cynically compelled to use a considerable part of its bailout money (borrowed from the EU, at interest) to pay off previous purchases of German submarines and French helicopters. Percentage-wise, with respect to its exposure to Greek debt, Italy has contributed more than any other country to Greece’s bailout. But while the Greek government was forced to pay for German submarines (at least one of which doesn’t even stand up straight), as well as for French helicopters, it neatly rescinded its contract for Italian fighter planes, with no penalty attached .

Of the total €340 billion granted to Greece in official loans, only about 15 billion came directly from Germany, which corresponds to only 68.6% of Germany’s exposure in terms of the Greek bonds held by its banks. France, also imperilled by a possible Greek default, has contributed an even smaller proportion: 21% of its exposure. Conversely, Italy which, having relatively few Greek bonds, was one of the countries least at risk, has forked out 214.6% or more than double its exposure. According to some accounts, it was Berlusconi’s attempt to refuse this apportionment, balking at the Italian tradition of meekly accepting unfair conditions, that unleashed German fury against Italy, an account confirmed by ex-Spanish Premier Jose Zapatero who in his memoirs tells of the irritation against Italy's Prime Minister and the Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti at the G-20 meeting in Cannes, in September 2011, a little over a month and a half before their ouster.

Most unfair of all is the fact that, despite being lumped into the “PIIGS” [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] group, Italy, which has never received a penny of the 285 billion lent out to the other troubled countries, actually contributed a hefty 55 billion to bail-out Greece, Spain and Portugal. This is:

- money we must borrow at some 6% while getting a 3% interest in return.

- money that contributes to increasing not only the recipient countries’ debt, but also our own debt, for which we are fined by Brussels and reported on as profligate spenders!!


The Press: Conniving or Incompetent?

So which country do you think is being trumpeted by the international press as being the one and only magnanimous and put-upon benefactor of all things European? Italy, which is shouldering a share of the bailout which is wildly disproportionate to its exposure? Of course not. As always these days, when something is being meted out to enhance reputation and/or the economy, Germany is on the receiving end.

Here are some other examples of pernicious press incompetence.

On August 7th 2011 Fox News’s Shepard Smith suddenly came out with "A couple of weeks ago there was a run on the banks in Italy"... which was totally made up. Italy has had to cope with lots of problems but so far never any runs on banks! Who fed Fox News that lie?

When the “humanitarian” bombing of Libya was being carried out and the papers were dwelling on the situation in Northern Africa, The Washington Times wrote that Italy was "the former colonial power in Tunisia". Of course, Tunisia was a French colony, as were Algeria and Morocco. Of all the territories in North Africa, the only one that was a colony of Italy's was Libya, which it accrued in 1911, as the Ottoman Empire was starting to disintegrate, and held only until World War II. With all the North African autocrats suddenly being presented in their worst colors, singling out Italy, the least of the colonial powers, as the colonial power par excellence is particularly unfair.

Whether out of ignorance or interest, The Daily Telegraph wrote in a front-page headline in 2012 that “Spain and Italy are to be bailed out”, while it was Spain that was to be bailed out, with Italy shouldering 20% of the cost.

At the end of June 2012 an opening headline piece in The New York Times informed the public that our unelected, then Prime Minister Mario Monti had been doing wondrous things, and would do even better if it were not for those petulant little nuisances, the political parties, who are reluctant to let him take the tough decisions he would like.

Actually, things are the other way round! Monti enjoyed the unmitigated praise and support of an unprecedented majority of Parliament from both sides of the aisles. He was able to do whatever he pleased and they ratified, very few questions asked.

And unfortunately, what he did amounted to grinding the Italian economy to a halt, ruthlessly imposing punitive taxes on everyone and everything, giving our money away as if it were everyone else’s due, and pretending slow-motion to do something to help companies that were struggling not out of lack of business or readiness to work hard, but for want of liquidity. Not that the state coffers are empty, they’re not. Italy has the wherewithal to settle these overdue accounts, but can’t do it because of treaties such as the European Stability Pact which requires us to keep the money on hand. Businessmen have been committing suicide by the dozens, and one of the reasons was and is that they await payment for services rendered to the state, yet are required nonetheless to cough up income taxes immediately to that same inflexible state.

All this, and more, notwithstanding, The NYT certified that Monti was unquestionably competent and did more in his first six weeks in power than the entire political class had done in the preceding ten years!

In actual fact the Monti government did pitifully little, apart from eliminating some remaining early-retirement loopholes. Now Italians must stay at work (if they have it) until they are 67, while Germans retire earlier and the French only recently raised their retirement age from 60 to 62.



Read the two final parts of the article:

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

The Looting of Italy

This is an article that was written and sent to me by Alessandra Nucci, an Italian journalist and friend. It describes what the European Union has done to Italy. Since it's a very long article, I've broken it down in 4 parts. Here is the first part.

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How would you feel if for years you had been picking up shipwrecked penniless migrants from Africa, dumped by criminal agents all over the Mediterranean, ferrying them to your shores and taking them in by the thousands, only to see yourself made the butt of sarcasm, reproaches and even pecuniary fines for not doing enough?

How would you feel if the EU, to which you have contributed and continue to contribute billions, were to ignore your pleas for help, and yours alone?

How would you feel if you were to help debtors out to the tune of billions of euros, then were to find yourself painted in the media as being a spendthrift recipient of bailouts?

How would you feel if in order to bail other countries out, you had to borrow money yourself, at double the interest, ruining your own credit rating while praise is heaped on the borrower countries for their newly shining performance?

These are just a few examples of what has been happening in the last several years to Italy.

At the end of June 2012, and then again at the beginning of July, the headlines in the international press carried news of the “bailout of Spain and Italy”, placing the two on the same level. Yet it was Spain that was being bailed out while Italy is the third most generous contributor to the funding.

This is just the latest blow to the reputation of the euro-zone’s third-largest economy (and the world’s eighth largest), dealt like all the others in a seemingly innocent manner by an international press which is either superficial or conniving in what amounts to the looting of Italy.

By looting I mean the process of cheapening the country, its name and its worth by means of discredit nonchalantly but relentlessly sown in every possible way and direction, from within and without, to drive the value of its assets down and make them more … affordable. This has quietly been going on since 1992, but was stepped up with a double-barrelled aggression, on a military and financial level, in 2011.


The Philosophical Divide

The world, and the stock markets, are being told today that the countries insultingly referred to with the acronym "PIIGS" are a bunch of lazy, irresponsible spendthrifts who, after piling debt upon debt, are now squandering other people's hard-earned money. Therefore they deserve whatever degree of impoverishment they may get. Well, the truth is mostly the exact opposite. The financial élite gathered around the EU buildings in Brussels have been quietly at work undermining the economies of Southern Europe, out of the need to save their own.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the “PIIGS” countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) all have a historically Catholic or Christian Orthodox background, which the common assumptions underlying the culture have maintained as a basic frame of reference, even if the number of liturgically-practicing faithful is at a minimum. On the other hand, the countries that are aggressively posing as having been economically wise and virtuous (Germany, France, Belgium) are leaders on the road to the predominance of a secular culture.

In Italy’s case, we are clearly a big disappointment to the EU secularists. Once the showcase land of successful inroads against Catholic norms (our 1978 law provides abortion free of charge to all, within the first three months of pregnancy, for whatever reasons of health, including the prospective mother’s psychological duress), Italy now identifies with a firm and widespread resistance against the pressure of gay lobbies and pro-euthanasia activism (described in my piece “The Struggle For Italy’s Soul”).

The last straw, to the pagans in Brussels, was probably the march in Rome organized by the Forum of Families in 2007, which mobilized over a million people in defence of heterosexual marriage. Oh, yes, and also the sensational defence of the Crucifix upheld by Italians of all stripes, including agnostics and even a few atheists, against a decision by the Court in Strasbourg in 2006 to prohibit its being exhibited on classroom and courtroom walls. Italy appealed the decision and won, but the occult powers that inhabit the EU-governing bodies have dug in their heels and clearly intend to make us pay for it. Their objective? Nothing less than physically taking over the country, thereby finishing the job that had been started in the mid-nineteenth century.

The irony of this all is that Italian citizens find themselves being told they must look up to those who have cleverly installed themselves in power, and be grateful to those who are actually ruining the economy under the guise of fixing it. Like the Masonic élite who took power in the nineteenth century, they are impoverishing us while declaring themselves Catholic, and then coming, like the elders to Job, to lecture and teach us our lessons.


Before Prime Minister Mario Monti

Until ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help, Italy was doing better than all of the other EU countries, bar only Germany. We had a higher surplus than France, a higher surplus than the UK, and only a slightly lower surplus than Germany. Our banks had almost none of the toxic assets that glutted the banks of France and above all of Germany. Our unemployment was manageable. Our companies and trade marks were and still are so successful that they are constantly being bought up by foreign companies.

All this was despite the vast amounts of money that Italy shelled out to line the coffers of the European Union. According to the official data released by the EU Commission, the balance of payments from Italy surpass incoming funds by 25 billion. By Italian official accounts the real amount is 40 billion.

Yes, we did have a huge public debt, but the private debt was almost non-existent, which, together with the solid economy, guaranteed that the bonds would be paid back. In other words, our debt, like Japan’s even bigger one, was manageable.

Some figures? Italy’s GDP in 2010 was $2.1 trillion. We were the 8th exporters in the world ($448 billion foreign exports), and the 6th preferred nation for investors (source: World Bank). Unemployment was at a manageable 8.3%, which was lower than the euro-zone average of 10.2% and also lower than the US's 9.1 % - and that is despite our very high population density.

Without the interest on our national debt, we would have been way past France and Germany. The prospects for 2012 were that France would have a deficit of 2.4% of its GDP while Italy was predicted to have a 2% surplus, which was to be even greater than Germany's, forecast at 1.4%.

The debt was bringing us down, of course, but the real debt parade, which must include private debts, has the United Kingdom in n.1 position. The international media, however, take care not to point that out, as they considerately avoided making a fuss when then Prime Minister Gordon Brown turned the UK into the first European country to nationalize a bank (Northern Rock) to prevent it from failing, in 2008.

So, well, Italy had it fairly good. Russia guaranteed the flow of oil from the North, and Libya guaranteed it from south of the Mediterranean. Most importantly, a costly treaty with Libya had finally put a stop to the flow of illegal immigration that had been overwhelming the country, weighing down on the economy (and the debt) and almost literally crowding out Italians themselves, thanks to Leftist quotas discriminating against Italians.

Why am I writing all this in the past tense? Because this was the situation before Nato’s 2010 attack on Libya, pretending Gaddafi was killing his own people, and before 2011 when ex EU commissioner Mario Monti was sent in to help. Mr Monti’s CV reads like a page out of a book on conspiracy theories. He is a past official advisor to Goldman Sachs and to Moody’s, president of the Trilateral Commission for Europe and a member of the Bilderberger clique. Since his sudden appearance on the scene in mid-November 2011, not elected but appointed single-mindedly by our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano to head the Italian government, Italy’s sole negative economic index, the public debt, rather than diminishing has soared. At the end of 2011 it was 1897.9 billion euros, four months later it was 1948.5 billion: a 50 billion increase in a matter of 120 days. And we are now officially in a recession, whose beginning is vaguely being retro-dated to precede November’s unacknowledged coup d’état.


Read the second, third and fourth parts of "The Looting of Italy":

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy