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

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

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

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

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

Iraq Jihadists in the UK

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


It's always been obvious that the problem of "British" jihadists coming back from Syria - and now Iraq too - to become terrorists here is not going to go away. The UK government, with its phobia of "Islamophobia", cannot possibly solve it.

From "Iraq crisis: ISIS militants threaten UK, says Cameron":

David Cameron has warned of the threat to the UK if an "extreme Islamist regime" is created in central Iraq.

He said Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) fighters threatening the government in Baghdad were also plotting terror attacks on the UK.

And Britain could not ignore the security threat the UK now faced from jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

Britain may not ignore it, but it's not going to do very much about it.

A BBC reporter said Monday on the TV that this problem is the same all over the world. He should have added - but didn't - "wherever there are Muslims". Muslim-free countries don't experience this problem at all.

The BBC report was about what the government can and cannot do in order to protect British people from this threat, and in general to avoid the "radicalisation" of UK Muslims.

Despite the fact that 9 years have passed without another 7/7, the government measures to fight Muslim radicalisation in this country have been a failure, the journalist went on to say.

What a surprise! The only reason why there are not more terrorist attacks in the UK, I would say, is the constant surveillance of the "Muslim community" by police and intelligence services - with huge expenses for a gravely cash-strapped Britain -, which is now necessary to increase.

Nevertheless, former MI6 director Richard Barrett explained that the security services will not be able to monitor all the "British" jihadists who return to the UK after fighting in Syria.

The implications for UK security of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts due to the "Britons" fighting there is a topic dominating the national newspapers.

"Terror fallout from British jihadists fighting in Syria will be felt for years to come in Britain", headlines The Daily Mail.

This warning came from the top counter-terrorism expert Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner and head of specialist operations, who said that Britain will feel the repercussions of Syria and the rise of Islamic extremism within its own borders for "for many, many, many years to come".

She added that young "British" Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria might commit violence and terrorist acts when they return.

Possible links have been found between three Muslims based in Cardiff, Wales, Isis militants who were present in a propaganda video filmed by the group, and two other men from the same part of the city, who are in prison for having planned to blow up London's Stock Exchange.

Shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan warned that radicalisation in prisons was a big problem. Indeed, this corresponds to the dire predictions of Dr. Peter Hammond in his book Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) .

The book says that, when the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5% of a country, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from jails and among street gangs.

According to the the United Kingdom Census 2011, in that year Muslims were 2.7 million, 4.8% of the country's total population.

Hammond's book, which was first published in 2005 and then in a second edition in 2009, says that, when Muslims are above 5%, they exercise an influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. They will push for the introduction of halal food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims, and will increase pressure on supermarket chains to sell halal, with threats for failure to comply. They will also try to get the government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia law within their ghettos.

Rings a bell? This is the stage which Britain has already reached. The only prediction that hasn't materialised are Muslim threats to supermarkets, only because they are redundant as those companies are all too eager to oblige.

And now look at the next stage: when Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of protest, example of which are the car-burnings in Paris (and we can now add Sweden), and uprisings and threats for any action which offends Islam, namely any non-Muslim action. The greater the proportion of Muslim population the more frequent these tensions will be, until they become daily occurrences.

How can British people not have noticed that, over the years, their country's Muslims - whose number has steadily increased - have indeed become more vociferous, oppressive, demanding, aggressive and dangerous?

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

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.

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

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

Richborough Roman Port and Global Warming

I'm honoured that one of my websites has been quoted and linked to in a comment to an article in the famous website Watts Up With That?, considered the world's number one scientific site taking a critical approach to global warming and climate change.

The article in question is "Sea Levels are Never Still", and it explains something of which people, used to the alarmistic noise about rising sea levels due to "climate change", may not be aware:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

The fastest and most alarming sea changes to affect mankind occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Seas rose about 130m about 12,000 years ago, at times rising at five metres per century. Sea levels then fell as ice sheet and glaciers grew in the recent Little Ice Age – some Roman ports used during the Roman Warm Era are now far from the sea even though sea levels have recovered somewhat during the Modern Warm Era.

One such case of a Roman port now disappeared is that of Richborough, in Kent, which was the main port of Roman Britain, linking the British province to the rest of the Roman empire. My travel website Britain Gallery describes it in the article "Sandwich, Deal, Walmer, Richborough", and a comment to the Watts Up With That? post quotes from it:

Not far from Walmer are the remains of the Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, considered by English Heritage possibly the most symbolically important Roman site in Britain, “witnessing both the beginning and almost the end of Roman rule here”. Although it is now 2 miles from the sea because silted up, Richborough was in Roman times a major natural harbour providing a safe route from Europe to the Thames estuary.

Going back to the scaremongering tactics of the warmists, it's to be observed that from 15,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago sea level rose about 14mm a year, whereas it is currently rising at about 1mm a year, and this rate has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945.

There are many factors changing the sea level - melting of glaciers; warming and expansion in volume of the seas; extraction of groundwater ending up in the sea; sediments and debris washed into the sea by rivers, storms and glaciers; even tectonic forces -, and human emission of CO2 has hardly a role in them.

Figure by Robert A. Rohde made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mainstream Media Bordering on the Criminal

Yesterday I travelled on London buses from around noon to 5pm, in the Western part of town. During all that time I saw relatively few white faces, and the ones I did see were generally builders, so in all probability Poles.

On the bus I read a discarded copy of the London free paper Metro, carrying the irresponsible front-page headline "Student is murdered 'for being a Muslim'".

Irresponsible because, when I read the actual article, the alleged motive for the killing of Nahid Almenea in Colchester, Essex, on Tuesday morning was nothing more than a wild conjecture.

The only reason for thinking that the University of Essex female student from Saudi Arabia was murdered for being a Muslim is her dress:

Det Supt Tracy Hawkings said: ‘At the time she was wearing a dark navy blue full-length robe, called an abaya, and a patterned multi-coloured headscarf, known as a hijab.

‘We are conscious that the dress of the victim will have identified her as probably being a Muslim and this is one of the main lines of the investigation, but there is no firm evidence at this time that she was targeted because of her religion.’

In fact, there seems to be another, possibly more promising line of investigation:

Her murder is the second fatal stabbing in the town within three months, prompting police to issue a warning to residents not to walk on their own in isolated areas while they hunt for the killer...

Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Worron said there were "obvious similarities" with the murder of James Attfield, a vulnerable man with brain damage, who died after being stabbed more than 100 times in a park in Colchester in March...

“Both victims sustained frenzied knife wounds. Both were on secluded paths in parks used by members of the public."

Which is why the police have warned all residents of the area and not just Muslims wearing their traditional garb.

Nobody knows exactly the motive for the murder, therefore the headline on the front page of Metro was written either by a Muslim or by someone who likes to see "hate crime" everywhere and is not concerned about stirring up trouble.

Very telling is the way the Metro article ends, with a quote from Fiyaz Mughal, an old friend of my party Liberty GB, against a member of which he lost a lawsuit for racially aggravated harassment:

Fiyaz Mughal, of support group Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks, said: ‘Visibly Muslim women are the ones targeted at a street level for anti- Muslim comments and general abuse.’

How reliable Mughal's words are can be assessed by considering the careless way in which he treated the facts and figures relating to what he calls "anti-Muslim attacks" after the Lee Rigby murder in Woolwich on 22 May 2013.

Nevertheless, Metro considered this man's opinion worth of finding and publishing.

But that's not all. A paper read by millions, due to its free availability in a great city like London and its public transport system, should be more cautious about presenting hypotheses as facts, especially of this kind and especially on its front page, seen on bus and train seats by a multiple of the number of those who actually read the article:

Meanwhile, a British extremist fighting in Iraq appeared to use the murder to encourage followers in the UK to commit revenge attacks on non-Muslims.

The purported British member of Isis, the fanatical Islamic force leading an insurgency in Iraq, said Muslims should "take up a knife and kill as they did in Colchester".

A tweet under the name of Abu Rashash Britani, who has previously said he would bring Isis' brand of bloody attacks to Britain, said: "These kuffar [non-Muslims] getting out of hand, dare they touch a #Muslimah.

"I call upon any brother to take up a knife and kill as they did #colchester."

Comparing Ms Almanea’s death to the to murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Greenwich last year, the tweet added: "#colchester attack is cowardly act. At least when our noble brothers, killers of #leerigby did so they killed a soldier not a civilian.

"I pray a revenge attack takes place in #uk against those enemies of #Islam n #Muslims."

When you think of how the mainstream media are ready to condemn any justified and even necessary criticism of subjects like Islam or immigration as they claim that these incite to racist violence - another unfounded allegation -, the same media's gratuitously stirring up Muslim aggression against native Britons, in full knowledge of how volatile and easy to inflame Muslims can be, borders on the criminal.