Coronavirus, Meningitis Tell Us Without Borders We Die

By Enza Ferreri


This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


While all the attention is on Coronavirus, there is another illness that has been on the increase in Italy: meningitis, a disease of generally infectious origin.

Meningitis Risk from African Migration to Italy

Italian doctor Alessandro Meluzzi, while speaking on the topic of coronavirus, also said:

I want to remind everyone present of something that nobody remembers: the very strong growth of meningitis in Italy, especially in Tuscany, is related to the fact that the type C meningococcus [meningococcal type C bacterium], which almost did not exist in Italy, comes from the meningococcus belt. That is the Sahel, from which 90% of African migration to Italy originates.

He concluded by saying: “Let's try to tell that to the President of the Tuscany region. What I mean is that boundaries, like cell membranes, serve to survive.

"It is not a question of racism, this is not the problem, but that of stopping viruses and bacteria, otherwise we are delirious.

"Without borders we die. As cells need membranes and the immune system needs antibodies, borders are necessary for survival."

Meningitis Belt, in Africa

Like Other Parts of the Natural World, We Are Not Interchangeable

Doctor Meluzzi is right.

The idea of a globalised, borderless world is a dystopian view, totally unrealistic and, if tried to put into practice - as many forces are trying at the moment, against people's will - it will lead to chaos and highly destructive consequences.

There is a reason why the various peoples, nations, ethnic groups have spontaneously formed and united themselves into separate societies.

Smaller polities are always easier to manage. This is why larger states are divided into federal states, then counties, provinces, regions and so on.

This is the way men naturally organise themselves, it is an organic process, not one dictated from above like the "one world" idea.

Nature doesn't exist just outside of us. It exists inside of us too.

We worry not to break the balance of non-human nature, what is generally known as the environment or the ecosystem.

But then, paradoxically or at least unreasonably, our culture's dominant ideology (although not shared by most people) holds that human beings are flexible and pliable to a fantastic point, for example holds that a person's sex can be chosen or changed.

Similarly, this powerful ideology maintains that the naturally-developed, organic human societies that have grown out of family and blood ties, together with a shared history, culture and, more importantly, religion, are not necessary and can be replaced by a global society with a world government.

In this view, humans are seen as pawns in a game of draughts or chess, which, being all the same, can move or be moved from one part of the world to another without any serious consequence.

A hypothesis that we are now experimenting on ourselves with disastrous effects.

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SOURCE
Meluzzi: I confini servono a sopravvivere
PHOTO CREDIT
Streets of Italy Deserted

Italy: How a Coronavirus Crisis Became a Disaster

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Italy early in the coronavirus crisis was the first country in the world for number of Covid-19 cases, with its number of confirmed infections increasing very rapidly day by day, and the whole country was placed under lockdown, as is well known. It is important to understand what happened to provoke this exceptional crisis.

In a previous article we saw that, for fear of labels of racism, by not having quarantined all people coming from China, a measure recommended by the World Health Organisation and followed by many nations, the Centre-Left Italian government has opened the door to the epidemic.

Then we saw that the uncontrolled immigration that for a long time has particularly hit and shaken Italy among the countries of Europe, in addition to bringing security and crime risks posed by undocumented migrants' free circulation, has now turned into another possible dynamite waiting to explode: due to China-Africa close trade ties and the vast presence of Chinese in the continent, Africa can become an incubation venue and transmission channel for coronavirus, which means that lots of African immigrants to Italy may be carrying Coronavirus.

The migrants arriving in Italian ports may have the coronavirus without their knowledge - and without ours. And still without their knowledge they could contribute to spread it throughout Europe.

The consequences, in that case, would be potentially lethal given the absence of sanitary bulwarks in almost all African states.

The infection might spread to Europe through Africa perhaps via Italy.

African Countries at Risk

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very clear when he said that the "biggest concern", in addition to the epidemic itself, is that the virus may reach "countries with weaker health systems" least able to contain it, and the whole of Africa undoubtedly falls into that category.

Although, when news of the epidemic from China first started spreading, there were no confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Africa, there are now, and escalating fairly quickly.

Doctor Giovanni Rezza, specialised in hygiene and in infectious diseases, senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' (ISS) in Rome, and Director of the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases, has confirmed that Africa could represent a problem: it is a very populous continent, he said, and has fragile and weak points in the health chain:

African states do not have the same network as European laboratories. And the various types of fever that people can get could be confused with other infections and not be recognised as Coronavirus. This is why international organisations should be on the alert.

Africa, except for a few specialised centres, does not even have the means to recognize this new virus.

Health authorities and researchers fear that the Coronavirus could circulate undetected in Africa, where less advanced health systems could quickly be overwhelmed by a local outbreak.

It's therefore necessary to close the Italian ports to migration.

PHOTO CREDIT
La Gazzetta di Reggio

Coronavirus Exposes Open Ports to Africa Danger

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas and is our second post on the subject, here's the first on Coronavirus and Italy.

Italian physician and psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi rightly described as paradoxical Italy's current policy of "closed schools and open ports", letting in migrants at such a time of emergency for Coronavirus (whose official name, which initially and temporarily was 2019-nCoV, has from early February become Sars-CoV-2, also adopted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), while the disease it causes is called COVID-19).

If we don't close our borders others close theirs, Dr Meluzzi added.

This happened, in fact, and China itself was among the countries isolating Italy.

Dr Meluzzi was making correct predictions as early as 31 January, when he said in an interview:

"My feeling is that the Italian situation is already totally out of control".

He added that he considered with great concern the hypothesis of the spread of Coronavirus on the African continent:

"When the virus arrives in Africa, where countries do not have adequate health coverage to deal with the epidemic, this could spread in a potentially catastrophic way".

He referred to the great number of Chinese workers and companies in Africa, "which create a large flow of trade with China, especially with the industrial area from which the epidemic originated", concluding: "I dare not imagine what could happen in Africa."

From China to Europe via Africa

The African "bomb" became a later alarm about Coronavirus and its further spread in the world.

There are two factors that greatly elevate the potential risk of contagion: one is the thriving trade relations between China and Africa, the other is the uncontrolled immigration that from Africa regularly arrives in European countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, particularly Italy.

Let's be frank: when we say "uncontrolled", it is very literal. We know nothing of many, indeed probably the great majority, of people landing on our shores from smugglers' boats and NGO ships, since they have no documents or false documents. In a very high number of cases we don't even know their name, let alone their past history, criminal record and health status. The newspaper Il Giornale wrote:

Italy hosts immigrants at its own expense without having the slightest idea who they are. To know their stories, we rely on the stories given by them in front of the various commissions.

For their personal identities, we are satisfied with having them put their name and surname in writing the moment they disembark...

In Italy, in fact, thousands of people arrive who can carry with them cell phones but never a shred of an identification document.

Hardly Any of the Arrivals Are Refugees

There have been cases of fake refugees who disclosed to the media that they paid thousands of euros to obtain ways to claim asylum status.

For a long time Italy has been literally overwhelmed by would-be asylum seekers and migrants. A Nigerian interpreter and "cultural mediator", calling himself Uchenna, has explained how it works:

To judge asylum seekers there should be 4 people for each commission [called 'territorial commission'], who include representatives for the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), Italian police and local authorities. Now, there are only 1 or 2 left to follow the interview because there are several organisational problems... so many requests arrive that if they were all present at each interview, it would never end. The system is practically collapsing.

This means that in some cases the waiting times for obtaining the opinion of the commission can be extremely long. Meanwhile, Italy hosts many immigrants at its own expense, who will then never obtain refugee status. And they are a very high number. Says Uchenna: "The majority of those who are arriving on the Italian coast from Nigeria certainly do not run away from dangers: they are looking for money and success to be able to return home one day and strut the wealth achieved".

He explained that to do this, therefore, many times they invent stories of suffering and persecutions that they have never undergone: "I often hear the same identical story told by different immigrants".

Asked why everyone coming to Italy on the migrants' boats is undocumented, the interpreter answered: "Those who land in Italy say they never had a document or lost it in Libya. In Nigeria, falsifying documents and changing identity several times is normal. They do the same during recognition in Lampedusa".

But in Italy, he says, the 'poor thing' rule applies, explaining: "In the commissions we hear them say of every tale: 'Oh, what a poor man'. Yet these people often only tell lies."

Migrants, particularly those who seek asylum under false pretence, are also known for cutting, abrading and burning their fingertips to prevent identification.

Anna Bono, former University of Turin researcher in Africa's History and Institutions, who has long lived in Africa and has worked with the Italian Foreign Ministry, sums up the situation:

We now know with certainty that 95% of the foreigners who land in Italy are not refugees: they are not people exhausted from extreme poverty, they are not people who have escaped death threats, torture, deprivation of human rights.

They come from southern Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast ... they are illegal immigrants. In 2016, 181,045 arrived, 123,482 of whom applied for asylum. The territorial commissions examined 90,473 requests, accepting 4,940 of them, namely 5.4% of the applications examined, 3.9% of those submitted and 2.7% of the total landings.

Prof Bono says that the vast majority of asylum seekers do not get asylum because they are not persecuted at home, nor are they fleeing wars.

However, not all applicants rejected over the years have left Italy. Many of both fake asylum seekers and illegal immigrants remained in Italy, escaping the control of the authorities and often disappearing. With the "residence permit for humanitarian reasons" many have been allowed to live in Italy in hiding, doing illegal jobs or illegal activities.

Therefore it's not surprising to know that 1 in 3 inmates in Italian prisons is foreign. This gives some indication of a serious problem of security in the country, a danger that has been in existence for a long time.

Yet again, it should come as no surprise that people with no official identity, no ties with the larger community that hosts them, generally no family (they are mostly young men of military age) and few opportunities for legal jobs should be enormously overrepresented in crime statistics.

Incidentally, this statistic is similar in other European countries. In Germany, for example, as reported by Free West Media: "In a sample of the 3930 prison population of Berlin 31 March 2018, 51 percent had no German citizenship. Of the individuals in pre-trial detention facilities, 75 percent had foreign nationality, the Berliner Morgenpost reported."

The epidemic of the new virus simply adds to this grave risk, and, paradoxically, it seems almost to offer an opportunity to examine it.

It's terrible, though: it shouldn't have been necessary to face a dangerous epidemic to be allowed to more openly discuss it.

We must also mention a well-known illegal trafficking of identity documents among immigrants across various European countries, including Italy, Germany, Greece, involving even people who have been recognised as refugees.

This Migration Phenomenon Is Not Good for African Countries Either

As we've described in this previous article “Young People, Don’t Emigrate” Say African Bishops, Italy, with 1 in 3 youths unemployed, has nothing to offer to migrants. African Cardinals and Bishops themselves have repeatedly and constantly exhorted their flocks to stay at home and help their countries.

Those who emigrate are usually the best equipped and qualified to help their own economies. They are richer, otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the expensive people smugglers, younger, stronger, more skilled, with more initiative than the rest of their population that they leave behind.

And no-one in his right mind can seriously think that Africa's poverty problems - which have nevertheless diminished over the last few decades - can be solved by transferring the 1.2 billion Africans (rapidly increasing as we are counting) to the continent of Europe, the world's smallest.

And why don't we ever hear the same people who, for self-declared humanitarian reasons, worry so much about illegal immigrants equally condemn the most atrocious persecution of Christians all over the world? Why don't they beat their chest, similarly, for those Italians who commit suicide because their business failed and they can't support their families? While Italy is paying to host and keep thousands and thousands of fake refugees and illegal immigrants, what about the Italians who also need help?

The series of articles on Italy and Coronavirus continues.

SOURCES
Stop Censura
Researchgate: Fingerprint Alteration
Il Giornale: Gli immigrati raccontano bugie
Dei profughi non sappiamo nulla
La NuovaBQ: Io, falsa rifugiata
Un detenuto su tre e' straniero
Free West Media
Traffico di identita'

PHOTO CREDIT
Il Primato Nazionale

Italy: Racism Fear Stops Coronavirus Vital Quarantine

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas

Italy has been one of the world's most affected countries for the number of infections caused by the novel coronavirus.

Walter Ricciardi, Italy's representative at the World Health Organization and Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome, very clearly stated: "We [Italy] pay the consequences of not having immediately quarantined people who landed from China. We banned direct flights, a decision that has no scientific basis, and which did not allow us to trace the arrivals, because people were able to stop over and arrive from other places."

Professor Ricciardi was referring to the possibility left open to travellers of, for example, taking a flight from Beijing to Dubai, changing tickets and then heading to Rome or Milan.

Another authority on the subject, famous virologist Roberto Burioni, as early as 7 February was writing:

"The virus in China might be out of control, but it is not here yet. The only chance we have for not letting it in is only, and I repeat only, the quarantine of those who return. All, without distinction. It is not racism, but a simple and elementary measure of self-protection, which costs a little discomfort to the people who are isolated and provides us with infinite security, while avoiding hateful and unnecessary discrimination."

Dr Burioni later declared in an interview to Il Corriere della Sera:

Oh, I know, they called me an alarmist, even a fascist leghista [supporter of the centre-right Lega party], because from the beginning I claimed that isolating people from China was the only effective way to avoid the spread of the virus. I stress: people, not Chinese.

As you may have already noticed, the political climate in Italy has over time become excessively, paranoidly fixated against any supposed "fascism" or "racism", even when there is none, to the point of neglecting basic considerations of, as in this case, health and self-preservation.

Something similar happened in many other Western countries: see the example of the street distribution in Canada of bottles of hand sanitiser bearing the message 'Stop the Spread', referring not to Coronavirus but to xenophobia and intolerance. However, such attitudes of "the stigma is worse than the virus" in Italy have had more devastating consequences, due to the actions of the current government, which has been described as "the most unfit in the history of the Italian Republic".

On 31 January, the day after two Chinese tourists who had arrived from Wuhan to Milan Malpensa Airport were discovered as Italy's first two cases of the virus, the leader of the Lega party himself, Matteo Salvini, wrote on Twitter:

"Let me understand … The first two cases of Coronavirus in Italy apparently have quietly landed at Malpensa on 23 January and, without any control, travelled for days across half of Italy, until checking into a hotel in the centre of Rome.

"Is this how the government protects the health and safety of Italians? The Lega for days has been calling for quarantines, checks, blocks and information, but for Leftist politicians and journalists we were 'speculators' and jackals. Let us pray to God that there will be no disaster, but whoever has done wrong must pay."

He also tweeted: “Check every single entry. By sea, by air, by land. While other countries took immediate action, in Italy there was the impression that someone has been wasting time. And you can't play with the health of citizens."

Salvini's words, like Dr Burioni's, were welcomed by insults as well as totally ignored by the government.

Instead, a much more reasonable response came from a Chinese in self-isolation, married and mother-of-three Xia Weihong, 48: the Lega is right, she said to the Libero newspaper.

Italy's Centre-Left government was busy in fighting not an all-too-real virus but an imaginary risk of anti-Chinese racism, as if the highly-justified fear of contagion had been a symptom of dangerous xenophobia.

So we saw the President of the Republic Mattarella visiting a Rome's school attended by Chinese children to show his solidarity; initiatives like "embrace a Chinese" launched by Florence mayor Nardella; politicians and media people eating spring rolls in Chinese restaurants.

Except that, when a few cases of the virus were found in some parts of northern Italy, none of these personages went to embrace inhabitants of the Italian affected area.

Other posts on the subject will follow.



SOURCES
La Stampa
Medical Facts of Dr Roberto Burioni
Il Corriere della Sera
Malpensa 24
Matteo Salvini tweets
Libero
Canadian Hand Sanitiser

Racist Black Looters in South Africa

Black rioting and looting are not caused by any conflicts between US cops and black criminals, although these can be used as a pretext. Events in South Africa show that it is in fact a far more widespread, global phenomenon.

And in this case blacks form the country's majority, targeting a powerless minority: so, who's racist and xenophobic now?

For a week, at the end of January, a mob in South Africa lynched Ethiopians, Somalis and immigrants of other nationalities living in Nelson Mandela's country, and raided and looted their stores.

At least 4 people were killed and over 160 were arrested in Soweto, during a wave of anti-immigrant protests and violence.

The Daily Mail reported:

The 19-year-old mother of an infant who died after being trampled by a mob during the looting said she was accidentally caught in the street chaos. Some witnesses, however, said the mother was herself pillaging when she was knocked down with her baby strapped to her chest...

In a separate incident, a truck carrying livestock overturned on a highway in the Johannesburg area last week, and people carrying knives and buckets descended on the injured cattle and slaughtered nearly three-dozen for their meat, according to Eyewitness News, a South African media outlet. The driver alleged that people on a bridge threw objects at his vehicle, causing it to crash.

These are savages, who don't care about human and non-human lives alike.

That the violence began in Soweto - the same district of Johannesburg that became the symbol of anti-apartheid protests - is particularly ironic.

The recent unrest, one of the worst in Soweto since the apartheid era, started on 19 January when a Somali national allegedly shot and killed a 14-year-boy who was among a group of people attempting to break into his shop.

That was the signal which started the crowd's rioting and targeting of immigrant-owned shops, in a repetition of what happened in the country during the episodes of xenophobic violence in 2008 that killed more than 60 people. Anti-immigrant attacks seem to occur periodically in South Africa.

The media, as usual, try to exculpate the criminals with references to "the frustration of the poor":

Such episodes reflect the predicament of South Africa, a regional hub with gleaming infrastructure projects where many people nevertheless feel marginalized by high unemployment, a lack of opportunity and a gap between rich and poor that is starkly visible in leafy, spacious suburbs, on the one hand, and the shacks and so-called "matchbox" homes of the townships where blacks were confined under apartheid.

Soweto came under the world's gaze in 1976 when it erupted in student-led protests. Parts of it are relatively affluent today, as malls, gyms and new homes attest. But poverty is still widespread.

But it's evident that these attempts to find excuses are due to the mob's skin colour, and to a lack of will to admit that black proneness to violence is not the fault of whites, with their "evil racism" and apartheid, after all.

Witness Phindile Shabangu said that the mother of Nqobile Majozi, the baby boy killed by the crowd, "was caught in a stampede after emerging from the shop with eggs and drinks, and that the mother didn't even notice her baby's dire state while she was trying to pick up fallen items."

Video footage showed rioters looting shops sometimes in view of police, and one clip showed an officer apparently participating in the free-for-all.

The Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, a group representing immigrants, urged the government to approve hate crimes legislation that it said would curb a culture of "impunity."

Didn't they say that, with the end of apartheid, racism would be eradicated from South Africa?

Norway Says Enough, Deports Record Numbers of Immigrants to Reduce Crime

The Norwegian paper The Local reported in September that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants (euphemistically called "persons living in Norway without papers") are over-represented in the country's crime statistics:

Asylum seekers and visa-less immigrants in Norway are charged with twice as many crimes per head of population as Norwegians, but still account for a very small proportion of overall criminality, a new report has said. [Emphasis added]

The authors of the report from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), in the typical, apologetic style of officialdom, felt compelled to add: "This is so little that it has minimal significance to the big picture of crime in Norway." This reservation echoes the way in which in Britain figures are twisted and contorted to portray immigration, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as economically beneficial to the UK.

But on this occasion there has been a sort of social experiment carried out in Norway in the last couple of years, that empirically disproves the "minimal significance to the big picture of crime" fabrication.

Norwegians have progressively become aware of the link between crime and immigration. A November 2013 survey revealed that over half of the capital Oslo's residents feared street crime due to the rise in muggings. It got so bad that even the new Prime Minister, Conservative Erna Solberg, declared that immigrant parents should control their mugger kids.

Oslo saw 120 robberies in October [2013], more than any other city in Scandinavia. There were just 78 robberies recorded in Copenhagen and only 63 in Stockholm.

That something has started to change in Europe is obvious from the response from Norway's immigrant politicians, who agreed that young gang members are mostly foreigners and their parents could do more.

"I think actually Erna's hit the nail on the head here," said Abid Raja from the Liberal Party. "It's time to get past worries over making immigrant parents feel stigmatized. It is mainly young people from immigrant community who commit these robberies."

Action followed words. Last year the brand new government elected in Autumn - a minority coalition of Conservatives with the right-wing, anti-immigration, populist Progress Party, that has replaced a Labour government - started cracking down on immigration.

Progress, created 40 years ago, is in government for the first time.

Among the tougher measures implemented was that deported foreign criminals who return to Norway now face 2 years’ jail, a 10-fold increase in the penalty from 35 days, a measure that had the unanimous support from all parties.

But the most important policy introduced has been the vast increase in number of deportations.

In 2013, a record number of 5,198 foreign citizens were expelled from the country, an increase of 31% from 2012, when 3,958 people were deported.

Frode Forfang, head of the UDI, put it simply: "We believe that one reason for the increase is that the police have become more conscious of using deportation as a tool to fight crime.”

The number of deportations increases from one year to the next and one month to the other.

In October 2014, 824 people were forced out, which is the highest number of people deported in a month in the history of Norway’s National Police Immigration Service (PU).

This has established a new record, beating the previous record set in the month before, September 2014, with 763 deportations.

The National Police Immigration Service (Politiets Utlendingsenhet) has released latest figures showing in the last six months [from the article's date, 3 July 2014] an average of 18 illegal immigrants per day were deported from Norway. This figure is up from 13 deportations for the same period last year.

The main reasons for deportations are people not having valid residence visas or being involved in crime. During the first half year this year, 3,167 people were forced out of Norway, 1,237 of whom had criminal convictions, newspaper Dagbladet reports.

Kristin Ottesen Kvigne, head of the police immigration service, told the newspaper: "We are at our highest number of illegal immigrants ever and deportation is a policy the government wants".

The service has a target of 7,100 people to be deported by the end of 2014.

What has the result been?

PU head Kristin Kvigne, in an interview with the Dagsavisen newspaper, said that the increased deportations save Norwegian society much money. It costs money to try people in the courts and to jail them.

She explained that people have been deported because their asylum applications have been rejected in terms of the Dublin Agreement, the international agreement which governs asylum seeker applications.

If the current trend continues, the PU will “reach its target” of deporting at least 7,100 people this year, meaning that at least 20 per day are being sent home.

Of the 5876 people deported this year so far, the majority have already been found guilty of criminal acts, Kvigne said. She said it was thus “important to view the high number of deportations made by PU in the context of falling crime rates across the country.”

She said that Norway has a voluntary repatriation program, where “asylum seekers” are paid to return to their home countries, but few take up the offer and most have to be forcibly deported.

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.

Labour's Immigration Plan Is Unravelling

This article is by our guest writer Cassandra.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Did you notice the shift in British 'Left-wing' orthodoxy? You might have missed it if you weren't paying attention since our 'progressive' overlords changed tact without acknowledging what they had tried to do, and what they had in fact succeeded in doing, to British society since circa 1997.

It is now apparently acceptable to criticise the open-door policy to immigration that this country has had over the last decade and more. A policy which, for the most part, it still has today. Even the leadership of the Labour party has come out of the 'bigot' closet to admit that perhaps, just maybe, the level of immigration into Britain has been a tad high. They've even gone as far as to admit responsibility for the dramatic demographic changes that many cities have undergone and, what's more, to reluctantly admit that the 'pace' of immigration has been a little too fast for some people's liking.

What the intelligentsia more broadly (not just the Labour party and their clique) has not admitted responsibility for, however, is its attempt to indoctrinate and cower people into allowing it to continue its grand project unopposed by condemning those who opposed it as 'racists', 'bigots', 'xenophobes' etc. What project is that, you ask? Why, the project, as revealed by Labour speech-writer Andrew Neather, of opening up 'the UK to mass immigration' thereby transforming the make-up of British society in order to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'. Opposition to that project was quelled through the dogma that opposing it automatically made one a 'racist', a 'bigot' and a 'xenophobe' – all very bad things. So bad, in fact, that there was nothing worse than to be labelled as such.

That dogma was not something that the party attempted to impose by itself. Its law-making power and control of the education system was not enough. The media were roped in to help to impose a fog of fear and silence upon society. Comedians were used to poke fun at anyone who dared to step out of line.

These tools worked together so effectively that average people came to police themselves. They came to learn, by indoctrination, what the right things to think and say about immigration were. Moreover, they imbibed all the buzz words ('racist', 'bigot' etc.) to be used against those who did not conform in order to pressure them into conforming. It didn't matter that, if pressed, most of the people using those words couldn't actually provide a clear and precise definition of their meaning, as long as they understood when to apply them - i.e. when somebody is critical of immigration -, and understood that, in applying them, they proved to themselves and their overlords that they belonged to the 'right' group. They learnt from our 'progressive' rulers that language is a weapon to be used with extreme prejudice against the enemy in order to inoculate yourself from the very same treatment that you yourself give others - thereby perpetuating the system.

So what happened? Why the change? What made the 'progressives' who sought to bully an entire society into conforming to their ideology abandon their dogma to such an extent that they now talk in the same vein as the very 'racists' and 'bigots' they once condemned?

Part of the truth is that their success, such as it has been, has been a superficial one. It was never really more than skin-deep. Of course they succeeded in creating an atmosphere wherein people felt that they had to keep their true feelings about immigration unvoiced, but they did not succeed in actually forcing people to abandon those views. There remained a silent majority who was waiting for its opportunity to express its true feelings, and that opportunity came in the form of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

That party refused to be cowered although it was demonised (and continues to be demonised) for criticising immigration. Seeing this, the silent majority used UKIP to express its own views through the ballot box, so that the party came to speak for that silent majority. The people came to see the demonisation of themselves and their views in the demonisation of the party, and reacted accordingly by supporting it.

It is the success that UKIP has had most notably during the 2014 European elections, and more recently at the Clacton by-election, that has caused the Labour Party to begin to scurry around trying to find some way to show that it 'understands people's feelings' about immigration. It has made Labour aware not only of the failure of its grand project, but also the flimsiness of the tools with which it, and the intelligentsia that it represents, used (and continue to use) to impose its orthodoxy upon British society.

What happens when the threat of being condemned as a 'racist' and a 'bigot' is no longer an effective means of scaring people into conformity and into voting the way that you want them to? What happens when pillorying them as uncouth and absurd no longer works to turn them into passive, malleable group-thinkers? What happens is that our 'liberal' rulers get an inkling into their own weakness. They are floating in dinghy upon a sea of opinion that is diametrically opposed to their own. They are trying to keep the waves from swallowing them up, and they realise that their only weapon is flimsy. Their only weapon is words.

What happens when 'sexist' and 'homophobe' no longer calm the waves? What happens when 'islamophobe' falls on deaf ears? You may soon find out, comrades!

Italy: 100,000 in Anti-Immigration Demo

An estimated 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union at a rally organised by the Lega Nord (Northern League) in front of Milan's Cathedral, the heart of the city.

The crowd was so enormous that it took two hours for everybody to get to the vast square.

Demonstrators were holding banners saying "No to mosques", "Fewer illegals = fewer diseases", "Less money to refugees", and "If I catch Ebola I'll infect Alfano". Angelino Alfano is Italy's Minister of the Interior, responsible, among other things, for internal security and immigration.

The main message was similar to that of my party Liberty GB in the UK: in social priorities Italians must come first, otherwise it is reverse racism.

This was the first major event organised by the Northern League under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, followed with interest in Central and Southern Italy as well.

"Stop the invasion" was the demonstration's slogan, with the objective of stopping the Mare Nostrum operation, Italy's mission of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean - called "Mare Nostrum" (our sea) by the Romans, but ironically not ours even around our coasts any more.

Said Salvini in his speech at the rally: "Like other countries, we have to use Navy ships to defend our borders and not to help the people smugglers." The Italian term for a person who ferries illegal immigrants to Italy by boat for a high fee is "scafista".

A few days later, in Strasbourg, the Northern League's leader discussed these issues with his party's French ally in the European Parliament, Front National's Marine Le Pen. Together they'll call for the suspension of the Schengen Treaty and for border control. The League identifies mass immigration as a source of unfair competition against the unemployed Italian workers.

As in Britain with the EDL, a counter-demonstration was held a few hundred yards away by the "anti-fascist" radical Left. And, like in here, the massive deployment of security forces ensured that there was no contact between the two camps.

Wearing a T-shirt, Salvini led the march to the Piazza del Duomo suggesting slogans through a megaphone, and when it got in front of Palazzo Marino, home to Milan City Council, he stopped the march to shout at Mayor Giuliano Pisapia: "We do not want the new mosque in Milan."

The Northern League has gone from strength to strength and is now a force to reckon with, in Italy. But, unlike a party like the UKIP in Britain, it has a firm anti-Islam position. I cannot imagine Farage yelling against mosque building.

Illegals with Scabies Disinfected, Italy Chastised



The tragedy of the "boat people" in the Mediterranean is now in the news more than ever.

130 migrants were presumed dead after two boats capsized on 2 October.

This date is so close to the anniversary of the first tragedy of that kind. Just a year before,

On October 3, 2013, the 368 [in fact, 366] bodies laid out on the wharf at Lampedusa marked a watershed in the history of immigration — in the Mediterranean and perhaps even the world.

The latest events have led to a rethinking of immigration policies. First by Italy:

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano called for the Mare Nostrum surveillance-and-rescue operation to shut down in favor of ''European action able to show that Europe takes charge of its own border'', during a visit to Tunis on Friday, the first anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck in which 366 immigrants died.

The debate was then extended to Europe.

The UK government is being chastised by the Left - and not only - for its refusal to support migrant rescues in the Mediterranean:

Foreign office minister says that providing comprehensive rescue cover in the Mediterranean is encouraging more migrants to make the dangerous journey and risk their lives.

Even The Telegraph joins the condemnation, with this ridiculous headline:

Drown an immigrant to save an immigrant: why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?

This is where the death spiral into a political bidding war on immigration leads us.

And yet, generosity is like everything else: you can have too much of a good thing.

This furore reminds me of another case, in which it was Italy that received international scorn for doing the right thing.

After the Ebola outbreak, it's useful to revisist that episode from last December, when Italy was severely criticised in the most absurd way just for trying to prevent contagion and an epidemic by spraying with a disinfectant the guests of a reception centre on the island of Lampedusa, the destination of thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa.

This is how the BBC reported the story, to which the above video refers:

Footage filmed secretly on a mobile phone appears to show detainees being forced to strip naked in mixed company while a worker hoses them down.

The man who took the video - an unnamed Syrian refugee - says the migrants are being treated like "animals".

The camp houses people from Africa and the Middle East who make the dangerous crossing to Italy by boat...

The images, which were broadcast on state television, show migrants queuing up in a crowded, open-air courtyard.

One after another, in cold, winter conditions, they have to strip completely naked.

The man who filmed the scene says this is apparently an effort to combat the skin condition, scabies, and that both men and women have to go through it every few days.

The illegal immigrants were disinfected by means of a hose spraying a substance protecting them from scabies.

This, nothing more than a mass shower, prompted a national inquiry, with Italian politicians and media condemning such a treatment that made the centre look like a "concentration camp".

How can a country which had received more than 40,000 illegals in just a few months wash them one by one? As an Italian blogger put it:

If you import Africa, your country will look more and more like Africa.

The press melodramatically and hyperbolically described the shower as "dehumanising" as well as freezing, but people's comments to those articles were overwhelmingly of a different opinion. Just a sample:

Don't be ridiculous. Being freezing cold in Lampedusa, that's big news! They have scabies and who knows what else. Disinfecting them is the least. First of all, no-one has invited them; second, if they want to keep scabies, lice etc. they can stay in their own countries...

15 degrees is not a freezing temperature, they can always go back and keep their scabies and whatever else they have. In case you didn't know, there have been 7 cases of scabies in an elementary school in Parma. Who knows how it got there, and what other filth they are bringing here...

If 15 degrees is cold for them, how can the illegals migrate to Sweden or Germany, as they say they will, and survive?...

Maybe the shower rooms have been destroyed like everything else [a reference to previous episodes of rioting and vandalism by illegals attacking the reception centre]...

Shame on you Lefties, it's all your fault, you wanted the immigrants to appear humanitarian; and now you're paying the consequences!...

If they had remained in their own countries they would still have scabies......

The real shocking images are not these, they are those of the victims of the increasing number of crimes committed by illegals.

Frontex, the European Union Agency for border management, has released data according to which, in the first four months of 2014, landings of immigrants in Italy have increased by 823% compared to the same period last year. And from early May things have got even worse.

Not only the immigrant reception system is collapsing under the weight of these figures. Another consequence of this invasion is the impossibility to control who is coming, with the probability of health emergencies increasing all the time.

The migrants are from countries with serious health problems and travel in poor hygienic conditions, therefore can be carriers of infectious diseases.

Diseases like polio and tuberculosis, disappeared from our countries, are coming back to Europe, carried by immigrants. The city of Syracuse, in Sicily, has a tuberculosis incidence not unlike that of a Third World city, because of the many illegal landings.

There have already been cases of immigrants with scabies amidst the general Italian population.

Scabies is a serious and extremely contagious disease, and can only be eliminated by the method used in Lampedusa. It is in the interest of both Italians - in case anybody still cares about them - and illegals that the latter are sprayed with disinfectant, as many of them are contracting the illness in the asylum centre itself from other guests.

Italians Are Getting Tired of Muslim Invasion

A small but significant story comes from Italy.

Adel Smith, born in Alexandria, Egypt, son of an Italian father and Egyptian mother and living in Ofena, a little town in the central Italian region of Abruzzi, has just died at 54 from a serious illness.

The reason why he is remembered is his constant attacks against Christianity, which this Muslim man probably believed to be an easy target in the current secularist climate.

In 2003, his intolerance for Christian objects in public buildings prompted him to request the removal of all Christian symbols, including crosses, from the primary school in Ofena attended by his children, request granted by L'Aquila Court judge Mario Montanaro.

In 2005, Smith succeded in his request to have even Christmas plays and Nativity scenes banned from the same school.

But eventually he met his comeuppance in 2006, when he was sentenced to 8 months in jail for contempt for religion for his gesture of 3 years before: at the height of his anti-Christian delirium, he had hurled a crucifix out of the window of the hospital where his mother was a patient.

There is only so much that Italians can take.

I found this story on the Facebook page of the aptly-named group "Italians are not racist, they're just tired of this invasion".

Ebola and Immigration, a Deadly Combination



The Ebola virus epidemic reminds us that global travel and international communications are not always a good thing.

Furthermore, since epidemics of this kind often originate in the same Third World countries that routinely send us thousands of people - call this phenomenon "immigration" or more appropriately "invasion" -, the infectious diseases emigrate to richer nations with their carriers.

Last year, for example, a report by the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, said:

The majority of UK cases are likely as a result from the reactivation of latent TB infection in people who were born in high incidence areas outside the UK.

While cases of tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, are increasing in the world and - according to The Lancet - "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV, in developed countries like the UK immigration is the first culprit of the rise in incidence.

The above-mentioned study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group reported that TB rates increased in only three of the 21 countries under investigation: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all of them, about three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a very high TB incidence.

In the USA, last month Fox News disclosed that tuberculosis had spread and become a dangerous issue at both its southern border and the refugee centres housing thousands of illegal immigrants:

Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University's Langone Medical Center and a Fox News A Team medical contributor, said tuberculosis appears to be spreading through several counties in southern Texas. He told me that some counties are reporting twice the usual average number of cases.

"Some of the tuberculosis that comes from Central America is drug resistant," he told me. "It's not easier to spread but it is harder to treat. I'm concerned about that."

And while TB is not that easy to spread, he warned that all those children living in close quarters could be a ticking time bomb.

"It is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for -- something that is not possible under the current circumstances," Siegel said.

An earlier article had given a similar warning.

In the video above this article, a map of the United States showing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine stations is compared with another map of the country showing the places to which the illegal immigrants have been sent. They are almost completely identical.

It's not conclusive evidence, of course, but it provides a good working hypothesis to research on.

Now, the Ebola virus is spreading in West Africa. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are among the most afflicted countries of what the World Health Organisation has called the worst outbreak of Ebola virus in history, with 932 deaths so far.

To put that into context, in the biggest previous outbreak of the disease 224 died out of 425 cases, and all previous outbreaks resulted in just 2,300 deaths. This epidemic, increasing since January, concerns the deadliest form of the Ebola virus, Zaire ebolavirus.

This means that one third of all the fatalities caused by Ebola since it was recognised as a disease 40 years ago have taken place in the current outbreak. And the number is increasing.

Some nations try to confine the population, but the countries in that region, as nearly all African states, have porous borders with large uncontrolled tracts - which explains why Boko Haram terrorists can cross the border with Cameroon, where they have created several bases, and return home for new attacks. After Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the first case of death due to Ebola was identified in Nigeria, a country located 2,000 km from the epicentre of the epidemic.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Ebola virus disease causes high fever, diarrhea, bleeding, vomiting, chills, muscle aches, headache, joint pain, damage to the nervous system and other symptoms. The disease is transmitted through contact with the bodily fluid of an infected person directly or indirectly - e.g. by touching needles which have come into contact with infected bodily fluid.

The CDC has moved its operations to Level 1, with increased deployment of staff and resources. This is the first time the agency has invoked its highest level alert since 2009, then over a lethal influenza epidemic.

Christian doctors and missionaries treating Ebola patients for Christian charities - not many atheist charities involved in such task, as Dawkins' "rationality" doesn't seem to work in these cases - have died. But then we know that many of today's medical facilities were originally founded by Christians who acted out of a humanitarian impulse inspired by Jesus Christ.

In the UK, according to a union leader, border, customs and immigration staff feel unprepared to deal with people coming to the country with possible cases of the Ebola virus.

If you think that the USA is off the hook due to the provenance of its immigrants from Mexico and Central America, think again:

What’s more alarming, however, are reports confirmed by the National Border Patrol Council, or NBPC, and United Nations that some of the detainees apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally are from Africa – where the Ebola outbreak is thriving...

In 2012, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released a report confirming, “Central Americans are not the only ones being smuggled through Mexico to the United States. Irregular migrants from the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia), as well as South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India), China, and other African and Asian states are being smuggled through Central America.”

“Border Patrol agents in our sector have in the past apprehended aliens from Iraq, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel and from many other nations,” Spratte continued. “People think this is just about Mexico and Central America, but it isn’t. People from all over the world are trying to sneak into the United States.

What is happening in Africa due to the Ebola is terrible. But what is there to gain from importing the virus to our countries?

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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