Beppe Grillo – The Man Who Knew Too Much
Beppe shares some wisdom - this is from 1998 but is relevant today.......
http://www.businessinsider.com/anger-builds-in-italy-as-old-guard-plots-fresh-technocrat-take-over-2013-3
Italy’s president Giorgio Napolitano is exploring the creation of a second technocrat government to break the political log-jam and calm markets after key parties failed to reach an accord, risking a serious popular backlash.
Italian officials say the Bank of Italy’s governor Ignazio Visco is front-runner to take over as premier despite warnings that this will be seen as an elitist ploy. It is far from clear whether the Democrats (Pd) in charge of the lower house will back the idea.
The plans amount to a near replica of the outgoing team of Mario Monti, though one greatly weakened by the earthquake upset in the elections a week ago . Almost 57pc of the vote went to groups that vowed to tear up the EU-imposed austerity agenda.
Stefano Fassina, the Pd economics chief, said his party is vehemently opposed to “any form of technocrat government, new or old”, insisting that the election result must be respected. Mr Fassina said 90pc of the country had rejected the Monti agenda and warned that it would be a grave error to try to force through the same reviled plans a second time.
Comedian Beppe Grillo repeated his vow to “bring down the old system” and dismissed the latest talks as cattle market trading by a depraved political class trying to circumvent the will of the people. “I repeat for the umpteenth time, the Five Star Movement will not back any government. It will vote law by law in keeping with its platform,” he said.
“We’re not a political party, we’re a civic revolution. This country is in ruins with two trillion in debts and we have to rebuild it from scratch,” he told a scrum of journalists. In a rhetorical play on the slogans of 1789 and 1917 he exhorted “all citizens” to descend on parliament.
Mr Grillo repeated his call for an “online referendum” on the euro and vowed to buy back €600bn of Italian bonds held by foreigners if his movement gains power, a de facto default and withdrawal from the EMU system. He has in the past called for Argentine-style “haircuts” for bondholders. “Within a year we won’t have enough money left to pay the pensions and public sector wages,” he told told Bild am Sonntag.
His newly-elected army of senators and deputies - fresh-faced idealists in their 20s or early-30s with no experience in public life - met for a “conclave” to thrash out the party line. Most of the 163 “grillini” have never met their leader, or each other.
They crowded into a room at the Hotel Saint John, many sitting on the floor with their napsacks as if it was opening day at university. Their first action was to create a “Google group” to handle logistics.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the Italian Republic. We are seeing a true crisis of the regime,” said Professor Luca Ricolfi from Turin University.
Investors have discounted Mr Grillo’s wild rhetoric as comic chatter, but his relish for shattering taboos in putting unthinkable ideas into play. “People in Brussels can handle old-style politicians like Silvio Berlusconi but Grillo really worries them because this is a protest against the entire system, and they are afraid it is spreading to other countries,” said Giles Merritt from Friends of Europe.
The EU policy elites are increasingly alert to the danger of losing popular consent for the EU Project. European Central Bank governor Benoit Coeure said Europe must pay more attention to the “social contract” if it is to avoid feeding “nationalist temptations”.
Mr Coeure warned that record unemployment across much of Europe - reaching 59pc for Greek youth -- was eroding the job skills of a generation and doing lasting damage to future growth,
While the tone is changing, there is no sign yet of a retreat from fiscal belt-tightening. “Given that average debt exceeds 90pc of GDP in the EU, I don’t think there’s any room for manoeuvre to leave the path of budgetary consolidation,” said EU economics chief Olli Rehn.
“We won’t solve our growth problems by piling new debt on top of our old debt,” he said. Defying his critics, Mr Rehn said John Maynard Keynes himself would not be a Keynesian today’s circumstances.
Yet Mr Rehn also warned Germany politicians that it would be courting fate to push Cyprus into default and exit from the eurozone in the belief that the island is too small to pose a contagion risk. “Even if you come from a big EU country, you should be aware that every member of the euro zone is systemically relevant,” he told Der Spiegel.
Separately, it emerged that the eurozone bail-out fund (ESM) may not be used after all to recapitalise banks, even once the banking super-regulator is in place. Klaus Regling, the fund's chief, said opposition from the creditor states may kill the idea altogether.
If so, this will breaches a summit accord in June by EU leaders to deploy the ESM directly to break the “vicious circle” between banks and sovereign states.
Failure to implement the deal would be a blow for Ireland and Italy, leaving them shouldering the full burden left from a bank crisis that was partly caused by northern creditors. The International Monetary Fund said it is imperative that the EU upholds the specific pledge made to Ireland in the summit text.
Germany, Austria, Finland, and Holland have all all said they would not let the ESM cover "legacy assets" left from the bubble. They now seem to be resiling from the accord altogether.
and.....
http://www.businessinsider.com/beppe-grillo-supports-euro-referendum-2013-3
And Now Beppe Grillo Wants Italians To Vote On Leaving The Euro
Beppe Grillo, the leader of Italy's nascent Five-Star Movement catapulted into power by last week's Italian elections, is causing a bit of a stir this weekend.
Yesterday, Grillo told German weekly news magazine Focus that given the dire straits Italy's economy is in, if things didn't change, Italians would want to leave the euro.
Today, in an interview with Bild – Germany's biggest newspaper – Grillo said he supports a referendum on euro membership.
Referenda on euro membership in the euro area periphery, which is suffering the pain of record levels of youth unemployment and, in Italy's case, a deepening recession, are the types of things that tend to spook investors.
Reuters correspondent Steve Scherer has the details:
"I am a strong advocate of Europe. I am in favor of an online referendum on the euro," Beppe Grillo told Bild am Sonntag.
Such a vote would not be legally binding in Italy, where referendums can only be used to repeal laws or parts of laws, but would carry political weight. Grillo has said in the past that membership of the euro should be up to the Italian people.
Italian financial journalist Fabrizio Goria just tweeted a great chart from a December Morgan Stanley report showing how Italians feel about staying in the euro:
Not exactly reassuring.
In a recent note, referring to Grillo's party's rise to power, Citi political analyst Tina Fordham wrote, "The outcome [of the elections] also reflects the collision between two macro trends we have long warned of: the rise of anti-establishment sentiment and the increased skepticism towards European obligations in the midst of a slow-growth or no-growth economic situation."
Grillo's comments today introduce the sort of headline risk that the Italian elections have brought back to the forefront of the euro crisis storyline.
The Five-Star leader has pledged not to form a coalition with Pier Luigi Bersani's center-left party, which means now Bersani has to forge a coalition with Silvio Berlusconi's center-right party in order for Italy to form a government. The problem with that is that Berlusconi and Bersani don't really agree on much and neither is really incentivized to compromise with the other.
However, Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Emsden notes that there may be a loophole allowing Bersani to duck the problem if Grillo so chooses:
[Grillo's] insistence that he won't form a coalition doesn't mean Mr. Bersani won't be able to form a government with Mr. Grillo's indirect support, however.
Analysts noted that an obscure Senate rule would allow the Five-Star Movement lawmakers to stay out of the room during a confidence vote allowing a government to be installed. Mr. Grillo has said he is interested in supporting legislative proposals on a case-by-case basis, so there would be room for convergence on some points.
In other words, if Grillo chooses to abstain from actively obfuscating the process, there may be a workaround.
BofA Merrill Lynch economists Raffaella Tenconi and Laurence Boone have pointed out that the two parties (Grillo's and Bersani's) could actually agree on a lot of things.
Here are a few items they highlight in a recent note to clients:
- Services liberalisation
- New energy strategy, with the aim to reduce costs in the medium term
- Strengthening the spending review process to cut non-social services costs to finance tax reforms. Reducing the housing tax on lower income families
- Constitutional reforms to streamline the legislative process. Bolder measures to fight corruption
- Reshaping of the labour market: higher unemployment benefits, greater protection for part time contracts and stronger productivity incentives.
- Greater investment in education and infrastructure to support women’s labour participation
- Stronger corporate governance rules
In any event, Grillo's words today indicate that he's clearly intent on one thing: further agitating. Whatever outcome results from the negotiations set to take place in the coming weeks as Italy tries to form a government, the process is sure to be dramatic.
http://www.businessinsider.com/beppe-grillo-warns-on-italy-euro-exit-2013-3
( Does Beppe have control of his 5 Star Movement ? )
Beppe Grillo Warns About Italy Leaving The Euro
Italy plunged deeper into political chaos this weekend after Beppe Grillo, the quixotic former comedian who holds the balance of power in parliament, suggested that the country may have to abandon the euro and return to the lire.
The rebel comic's warning came amid a growing rebellion among grass-roots supporters of his Five Star Movement, with 150,000 signing a petition calling for him to open up dialogue with the centre-Left Democratic Party, the biggest force in parliament.
With the country in political paralysis, there were also questions over his eccentric behaviour, after the surreal public appearance of a man, either Mr Grillo or one of his supporters, with his face obscured by a zipped up puffer jacket and a pair of ski goggles.
The bizarre figure, resembling a human fly, waved at photographers from the deck of Mr Grillo's beach house at Marina di Bibbona on the coast of Tuscany.
In an interview with a German magazine, Mr Grillo warned that "if conditions do not change" Italy "will want" to leave the euro and return to the lire. The 64-year-old comic-turned-political activist also said Italy needs to renegotiate its €2 trillion debt.
At 127 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), it is the highest in the euro zone after Greece. "Right now we are being crushed, not by the euro, but by our debt," he told Focus, a weekly news magazine. "When the interest payments reach €100 billion a year, we're dead. There's no alternative."
He said Italy was in such dire economic straits that "in six months, we will no longer be able to pay pensions and the wages of public employees".
The comments will further hamper efforts to resolve the crisis caused by Italy's general election last week, in which Mr Grillo's web-based, anti-establishment movement won more than a quarter of the vote .
He is refusing to contemplate any sort of power-sharing deal with the centre-Left Democratic Party, which has shaky control of the upper and lower houses of parliament but lacks a big enough majority to form a government.
In the Focus interview, he said that an accord with the big parties would in theory be possible if they acceded to key parts of his movement's agenda, including limiting MPs' parliamentary service to two terms, an overhaul of the election system and the slashing of the lavish perks enjoyed by politicians. "But they will never do that," he said. "They are trying to make us believe that they will, just to gain time."
Mr Grillo, renowned for his blistering attacks on Italy's established political caste, last week called Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party "a dead man talking".
In the interview published yesterday he predicted the annihilation of both the centre-Left and the centre-Right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, the 76-year-old playboy who has been prime minister three times. They would be around for another "six months" but then they would be "finished", he said.
He also insisted that his party would not take part in any "horse-trading", describing the overtures from the Left as "the usual whorish way of doing politics."
But he faces a growing clamour among his grass-roots supporters, however, to open up dialogue with the Democratic Party in order to break the log jam and form some sort of credible government.
An online petition begun on Wednesday by Viola Tesi, a 24-year-old member of the Five Star Movement from Florence, had by yesterday gathered nearly 150,000 signatures.
Miss Tesi wrote an open letter to Mr Grillo on the website, www.change.org, appealing to him not to "waste" her vote but to give a confidence vote to the Democratic Party so that a reforming government can be formed.
Grillo supporters should harness their unexpected triumph at the polls to compel the centre-Left to adopt the policies that would make Italy a better country, she said. "We should embrace the challenge and start changing Italy straight away, for the benefit of all," she wrote in the letter.
But with Mr Grillo apparently ignoring those appeals, the three-way deadlock has raised fears about Italy's ability to maintain desperately needed economic reforms initiated by Mario Monti, the former technocrat prime minister.
The comedian has said that his movement will remain outside any government, voting on individual bills in parliament on a case-by-case basis.
Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that Mr Grillo refuses to talk to Italian journalists or to appear on current affairs television talk shows.
Italian reporters who have telephoned him and asked to speak to the general secretary of the party claim he has told them: "Hang on, I'll just pass you to my 12 year old son."
The new parliament has to meet by March 15 at the latest, after which formal talks with Giorgio Napolitano, the octogenarian Italian president, are scheduled to begin on the formation of a new government.
In the space of just three years, Mr Grillo's movement has come from nowhere to place him in the role of kingmaker. During the election campaign he travelled Italy in a camper van in what he dubbed his "Tsunami Tour", filling piazzas with cheering supporters as he railed against entrenched political and business interests.
AP
One prominent supporter is Dario Fo, the 86-year-old playwright and satirist, whose best known works include Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Can't Pay, We Won't Pay – an apposite title given Mr Grillo's threats regarding Italy's debt.
Mr Fo said yesterday: "Satire can uncover big ideas and bring about huge upheavals. Beppe Grillo is a man of satire, that's where he came from, and that is his strength."
Mr Grillo's success means his party is poised to send more than 160 members into parliament's two chambers. Many are in their twenties and thirties and very few have any political experience, raising fears of legislative chaos if a government is eventually formed.
The "Grillini", as they are known, include nurses, teachers, students, lawyers, engineers, molecular biologists, bank clerks, and architects.
Some are unemployed. All are under 50 – a novelty in a country in which many politicians are well into their seventies.
Critics say they will be clueless in parliament and that their reliance on internet-based democracy to determine policies will be a recipe for disaster. Mr Grillo says their lack of political experience means they are untainted by corruption and cynicism.
One new MP, Ivan Catalano, 26, who works at a metal machining factory north of Milan, told The Sunday Telegraph: "I am a normal citizen like any, who thanks to this new way of doing politics, will enter into parliament.
"The message is that change is possible. We don't have to put up with the same old methods, and the same old people."
He acknowledged there were differences of opinion within the movement but denied it was an open schism. "It is a healthy dialogue," he said.
The movement's policies include tax cuts, a big increase in health spending and investment in the "green economy", but it has struggled to explain how this will be paid given Italy's mountain of debt.
Mr Grillo also wants deep cuts in defence spending and the scrapping of a high-speed rail link to France beneath the Alps.
The movement's newly-elected MPs and senators will meet one other for the first time in Rome on Monday to discuss whether to ignore their leader and support some sort of coalition.
Italians are divided as to whether the movement promises fresh blood for an anaemic, corrupt system, or political and economic disaster for a country already mired in recession.
"Beppe Grillo is a pistol pointed against Italy's head," was the front cover headline in last week's edition of Panorama, a conservative news magazine. Another news weekly, Oggi, ran a photograph of Mr Grillo with the words "Now what?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/02/italy-general-election-grillo-turmoil
Italy election: Welcome to Italy, where nobody knows what will happen next
Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement has triumphed. But now comes the big debate
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Beppe Grillo at a meeting in Rome. Photograph: Eric Vandeville/Gamma
Last Monday, for the first time in my memory, nobody celebrated after a general election. No celebration from the Democrats, who were the projected winners but came out sore losers. Nor from the seven million voters (down from 13 million in 2008) who still chose Silvio Berlusconi and then became invisible – almost no one admits to having voted for the disgraced former prime minister.
There was not even any celebration from the real winners, the militants and voters of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Stars? How did Italy end up with a populist party whose name sounds like a luxury hotel chain?). Without securing a parliamentary majority, it is now the leading party in the Camera dei Deputati, and the second in the senate.
But, contrary to national tradition, the movement's supporters did not meet in piazzas, they did not take to the streets honking their car horns, they did not gather outside the party's headquarters opening bottles of sparkling wine. Beppe Grillo's movement voters are recession-stricken and don't find a great deal to celebrate. Also, nobody knows, or much cares, where the party headquarters are actually based.
Out of a sort of desperation, a few militants and many more reporters stood outside the former comedian's villa on the outskirts of Genoa, while at the Bar del Fico, in central Rome, about 100 Grillini ate pizza and drank house wine. In truth, many supporters, as well as shell-shocked citizens, remained online, posting comments on Grillo's blog, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
In short, the quasi-winners did not seem too enthusiastic or hopeful; the losers were puzzled; and the path to a new government remains an enigma. Many Grillo voters already disagree with him and want him to support a minority cabinet with a short-term reform agenda led by a leader from the Democrats. Many former Grillo-haters show sudden admiration for his stamina and his success. However, our economy is not getting any better; but, along with a post-election Grillo hangover, we are at least now having an interesting – if scary – national conversation. No, we're not Greece. We're much bigger, and weirder.
In Rome, we are without a prime minister (and pope); and with a president (the very worried Giorgio Napolitano) and a mayor (the much-criticized Gianni Alemanno) in the last weeks of their mandate. There are scarce hopes of political stability in the near future. Everybody saw the Grillo tsunami coming; everybody knew about people of all sorts – mostly impoverished, out of work, underemployed; but also over-educated, experienced and close to the ruling class – who were coming out in support for him. But many kept believing in the pollsters who erroneously predicted a clear if narrow victory of the centre-left coalition.
Grillo has been attacked for his right-leaning outpourings about immigrants, women and trade unions. But among the 162 newly-elected 5 Stelle MPs there are 62 women; and the Grillini are, for the most part, young former left-wingers, environmentalists and local activists who had been ignored by the self-important and self-deceiving Democratic party leadership.
Democrats are traumatised, but it looks like they are once more failing to learn their lesson. They're openly fighting each other. Some support a suicidal coalition with Berlusconi's Popolo delle Libertà. Some are desperately trying to start a dialogue with the 5 Stelle, which means exclusively with Grillo and his advisor-consultant-guru Gianroberto Casaleggio, who keeps humiliating them. Some want President Napolitano to appoint Grillo as prime minister. And some keep commuting around Rome in chauffeur-driven luxury cars, fuelling the resentment against the Casta, the often corrupt and always overpaid political caste. The other caste – CEOs, industrialists, wealthy professionals, and pundits who abhorred Grillo until the end of last week, are now praising him. He has been declared "a Shakespearean fool, the only one who can say what others can't" and "an antidote to the proliferation of neo-Nazi movements which took hold of Hungary and Greece". Leonardo Del Vecchio, the founder of Luxottica, a global eyewear company, even backed a Grillo cabinet: "I don't think he's more stupid than the prime ministers we had in the past." Some endorsement!
As the novelist and playwright Ennio Flaiano used to say: "Italians tend to rush to help the winner." Some have decided to bet on him after suffering several other political delusions. Others have just decided to go with the pro-Grillo flow. Others are perplexed when they hear the new Grillini MPs telling reporters that they have no idea how the president is elected and they don't know where the senate is located. Nobody can predict how long all this will last, and what will happen next. Some real Grillo voters appear even less convinced than Del Vecchio. More than 100,000 of them signed an online petition launched by Viola Tesi, a PhD student, waitress and 5 Stelle supporter from Florence, to ask Grillo to negotiate with the Democrats. And many more agree. Others, the holier-than-thou Grillini, insist on fighting online, abusing dissenters. Italian-speakers might enjoyLibernazione.it, a website that has an automatic generator of Grillini insults, mostly about banks, subservient media, freemasons and corrupt politicians.
The newly elected Grillini will be trained by a former MP who is under investigation – the picturesque Francesco Barbato. Grillo likes him and has called him "a warrior". Barbato's apprentices are expected to share apartments, give back most of their parliamentary salary, and follow the rules posted on Grillo's blog, apparently written by someone fond of1984's Orwellian Newspeak: "The members of Parliament are obliged to conform to the Statute, which will be named the Non-Statute."
Alongside the Non-Statute, most Italians are expecting a Non-Government: a phase of turmoil that will end up, not with a revolution but – in a best-case scenario – with some resignations, a few reforms and new elections. The average Grillo voter is as pessimistic as any other depressed European. She generally says: "I'm not a big Grillo fan. I voted for him because I support some of his proposals, but mostly because I wanted to send home our bankrupt political class."
As I write, the only resignation has come from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. On Thursday, he took off from St Peter's Square in a helicopter, "flying over a crazy Rome", wrote Francesco Merlo on the daily newspaper La Repubblica. It will probably get even crazier soon, and somewhat less stylish.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/02/beppe-grillo-dario-fo-italy
Beppe Grillo is a wise clown saving Italy with satire, says Dario Fo
The playwright tells Tom Kington in Rome that the comedian, who finds himself kingmaker of the Italian government, is taking his cues from medieval comics who bedevilled the powerful
Dario Fo and Beppe Grillo at their campaign rally on 19 February 2013.
What makes Beppe Grillo tick? After a quarter of Italians voted for his brand of populist insurgency in last week's general election, it is a question preoccupying the country's political class and much of the eurozone. According to Italy's most distinguished playwright and prominent Grillo supporter, the answer is simple.
"Grillo is like a character in one of my plays," says Dario Fo, whose satires on medieval and modern life have seen him handed a Nobel prize and hounded off Italian stages in a career that has covered 50 years. "He is from that school of medieval minstrels who played with paradox and the absurd," adds Fo.
Fo, 86, is best known for his play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, inspired by the death of a man in police custody in 1969, and has long been a leftwing hero in Italy. He publicly backed Grillo this year, co-writing a book on the comedian's fledgling political movement and giving him a ringing endorsement at a packed rally in Milan's Piazza Duomo days before the election.
In return, Grillo, 64, suggested that Fo be nominated as the next president of Italy, an offer that the playwright turned down.
The high-profile backing contributed to a campaign that achieved an astonishing momentum. As a result of the 8.7 million votes Grillo received, his movement is now the biggest single party in the chamber of deputies, which makes him a kingmaker in a hung parliament.
After building a cult following through his blog, which denounced the austerity drive of the former prime minister, Mario Monti, and dubbed ex-president Silvio Berlusconi "a saliva salesman" and "the psycho-dwarf", Grillo's breakthrough before the election came when middle-class professionals started to see him as the best way to express their alienation from Italy's self-perpetuating political class.
Experts and analysts have been drumming up ideas about new political paradigms in Italy ever since. Journalists mobbed Grillo all last week for clues as to what comes next. His only response so far has been to refuse an offer from Italy's centre-left Democratic party to work together in parliament, using characteristically earthy language to describe the party's leader Pier Luigi Bersani as an "arse face". On Saturday he said he would accept a centre-left alliance with Berlusconi, only to add "they will never do it."
For Fo, the key to understanding Grillo is not in 21st-century Italy but in the 13th century, when storytellers – giullari – roamed Italy, entertaining crowds in piazzas with lewd tales interwoven with satirical attacks on local potentates. "In English the equivalent word is 'juggler', but in Italy they juggled with words, irony and sarcasm," says Fo, who has attended Grillo's shows for years.
Grillo rose to fame mixing comedy routines with references to political scandals in the towns he was playing in, a straight lift from his medieval peers. "He is from the tradition of the wise storyteller, one who knows how to use surreal fantasy, who can turn situations around, who has the right word for the right moment, who can transfix people when he speaks, even in the rain and the snow," explains Fo.
At one rain-soaked pre-election rally in Viterbo, in Lazio, central Italy, Grillo yelled: "Put down your umbrellas, I want to look you in the face." The crowd duly obeyed the comedian's demand.
Even the internet-based forums where Grillo's followers argue over policy have their roots in the Middle Ages, argues Fo. He says: "We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns."
Grillo's focus on the web followed his ejection from Italian state TV in the 1980s after he made fun of corrupt Italian Socialist politicians, a few years before many of them were rounded up during Italy's Clean Hands probe.
His TV ban was part of a proud tradition, says Fo. "Nothing has changed since the Emperor Frederick II issued a decree in the 13th century against giullari who criticised power."
Fo himself was thrown off state TV in 1951 after he adapted biblical tales as political satire, the start of a series of run-ins with Italy's fascists, communists and the Vatican as his radical theatre group challenged taboos.
By 2004, Fo was being sued by an associate of Berlusconi after he staged a satire that poked fun at Berlusconi's small stature. "Every time you touch those who have power over the media, they seek to stop you," he says.
As a young man in Milan during the second world war, Fo helped his father – a resistance fighter – smuggle escaped British prisoners of war into Switzerland and his memories flooded back when he was invited on stage by Grillo at the Milan rally.
"The end of the war was the last time I saw that piazza filled with the same joy, with people changing their way of thinking about politics," he says.
Fo draws a parallel between Grillo's Five Star Movement's attack on Italy's privileged political class and the activists he worked with in the late 1960s. "Back then, people were also realising the importance of culture, of schools, and a generation of Italian singer-songwriters were giving voice to that."
The difference is that those artists never held the balance of power in Italy as Grillo does, with 162 deputies and senators under his movement's control in parliament. Now, after his election triumph, Grillo faces the challenges of real politics.
The first came last week when thousands of supporters urged him to form a functioning government with the centre-left leader, Bersani, who needs his backing in the senate to reach a majority.
"It is not easy, the Democratic party treated Grillo with disrespect, called him a fascist, a buffoon, but now they are offering their hand," says Fo, who is actively encouraging Grillo to negotiate, meaning that a playwright and a comic were making Italy's political headlines at the end of the week.
In Sicily, where the Democratic party runs the regional council but Grillo's movement is the biggest party, the two have formed a cagey alliance. "This is the model, it is working," explains Fo.
The real trap for Grillo, warns Fo, is being beguiled by flattery. Turning again to history, he cites Cola Di Rienzo, the charismatic son of a tavern owner in the 14th century who wooed Romans with his oratory and became the city's leader, setting his sights high and ousting corrupt noble families, only to see his support slip away before he was murdered by a mob as he sought to flee in disguise. "I have seen the glowing press for Grillo and he must be careful not to fall for the adulation, it's a honey-like trap."
After Italy's new parliament assembles on 15 March, President Giorgio Napolitano is likely to ask the centre-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, right – who has a majority only in the lower house – to form a government that can win a confidence vote. Everything has to be wrapped up by 15 April when parliament must elect a new president.
The most likely scenarios are:
■ Bersani gets Grillo to back a centre-left government with a strictly limited programme, including an anti-corruption law. But at the moment Grillo is refusing to back Bersani in a confidence vote.
■The centre-left forms an alliance with Berlusconi – unlikely since the centre-left has already ruled it out.
■ A new technical government is appointed that will reform Italy's messy electoral law, attend to urgent business and prepare for June elections.
And the pushback from the Establishment ( The Economist is just one example ) continues - note the retort by Charles Gave ......
The Economist vs Italy's "Clowns"
A few days ago Bloomberg mag did all it could to alienate virtually all racial minorities residing in the US (which in three decades will be the majority) by insinuating that Bernanke's second housing bubble is the sole source of riches for those not of the Caucasian persuasion. Now it is The Economist's turn to provoke well over half of Italy, by alleging that in not voting for technocratic, Goldman-appointed oligarchs who promote solely the banker backer interests, Italy has made a horrible mistake and has ushered in the circus...
And while it is clear what The Economist's agenda is - the fact that the magazine is owned by the FT, Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, and Agnelli is becoming more transparent with every passing day - a far better take on the implications of the Italian election, and the opposite to that of the Economist, was presented here yesterday by Charles Gave.
We repost it in its entirety.
Italian electors’ rejection of Brussels-imposed economic diktat is an extraordinarily important moment in the history of modern Europe - perhaps the best political news since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given the power of unelected technocrats, it is easy to forget that sovereignty in Europe still resides with the nation state as expressed through elections. The problem for those unelected officials who conspired to capture the political system - think Jacques Delors, Jean Claude Trichet or Mario Monti - is the obvious failure of their great project. For the first time a majority of electors has decisively voted against the euro and rejected policies imposed by technocrats.
As usual, the proponents of technocracy claim that the Italian vote changes nothing substantively and soon it will be business as usual. This is the standard response whenever European electors express disagreement (think of referendums in Ireland, France, and Holland..) and upset this freedom-killing project. Since more than half of Italian voters chose parties with an overt anti-euro stance, I would beg to differ.
The euro project is a financial Frankenstein which could not and has not worked; this Italian vote may mark the beginning of the system’s ultimate demise. Italy is different from other European problem economies since it runs a primary budget surplus, a current account surplus and finances most of its debt internally. Hence, Italy can leave the euro tomorrow and be much better off. Italians have led the way and soon the Spaniards, French and the Portuguese will reject this slavery in order to achieve "reforms" whose only purpose is to make a dysfunctional system work.
But let us stop and consider what these technocratic elites mean by “reform”—an end which is apparently worth so much suffering. To translate their bureaucratese into a commonly understood language let’s first define the different groups which compete for resources and influence in the modern European context:
- The fellows who want to take care of themselves and be left alone - i.e., the entrepreneurs and those working in the private sector. These guys and only these guys create economic growth.
- Those who want someone else to look after them. These fellows tend to work in the public sector or be retired and can be called the “new rentiers.” These guys want to lead a stable and uneventful life.
- The fellows who want to lead their inferiors to a better future because they are smarter and know what is best. Borrowing from Thomas Sowell, I will call them the "anointed" since they very often have a very special relationship with their God, a kind of idol which they call by a strange name: the State.These guys have one and only one objective: the growth of their own political power.
Europe’s anointed decided a long time ago that we had too many little gods in Europe (The French State, the Italian State, the German State, etc.) and we needed to move to monotheism, thereby creating a European State or an altar where everybody could properly worship. Previously, each little individual god had its own "money,” with the peseta, drachma, French franc, etc., used by the local citizens to pay their dues to the local god. But as the French free market economist Jacques Rueff said, "a currency is a sewer in which unearned income is collected." In other words, if compensation is awarded even when nothing of value is produced, such “unearned income” will in time drag down the value of the currency.
The stuff that gets distributed through the sewage system varies greatly from one country to the next. Take the example of Italy, a strange country (which I love dearly) if there ever was one. The north has a large community of entrepreneurs, and the south a majority of “new rentiers”. Up until 2000, Italy had a simple way of solving this problem. Massive transfers were made from the north to the south in the local currency, while the fellows in the north were effectively paid in deutschmarks. From time to time, the lira was devalued which guaranteed that the fellows in the north remained competitive against their German competitors. Similarly, the "new rentiers" received their retirement income in the local currency, which minimized transfers taking place between generations.
Balance was maintained since private sector salaries tended to be indexed (with a lag) to the DM, while retirement benefits and public sector salaries were paid in lira. The same thing happened in France, where an abnormally large part of the population (much higher than in Germany) wanted to be "rentiers” i.e. civil servants.
Because the French and Italian currency sewage systems had more waste to recycle than their German equivalent, the exchange rates adjusted accordingly and harmoniously downwards. As 19th century philosopher Ernest Renan noted a nation is defined by "a willingness to live together" - and every nation in Europe, for most of the post WW2 period, found a way to uphold its local social contract.
To cut a long story short, it is the constitutional right of every country to be badly managed if the survival of the social contract binding the population is at stake. Finding a way to live together is much more important than being well managed.
Unfortunately, this common sense formulation was never understood by the European zealots, who were intent on destroying the old gods to replace them with their new and unique god - a new Roman Empire. In this sense, the similarity with the USSR project is striking (see our discussion of a Christian Europe vs the new Roman Empire in Was The Demise Of The Soviet Union A Negative Event?).
The euro was created as a first step towards a new Roman Empire and the result was that Italians had to effectively transfer deutschmarks to the south. France was also forced to pay its innumerable civil servants in DM. Retirement benefits across the eurozone were effectively set in DM, which savaged the younger generations. The result was that local entrepreneurs lost competitiveness and peripheral eurozone economies started to go bankrupt. The euro has thus caused the probability of recurrent devaluations to be replaced by the certainty of national bankruptcy. This fate can only be avoided by a total surrender of national sovereignty to so called creditor nations, which is a remarkable achievement.
It is against this dreadful backdrop that the Italians have just voted.
However, the fact that the euro is a disaster has absolutely no impact on our "anointed." They are not interested in the well being of the local citizens, but are in fact missionaries for a faith. Since they are appointed from upon high, they are able to preach to the sinners and demand their repentance, i.e., that they should "reform". Monti, for example, was very big on preaching the "reform" sermon.
By “reform”, our proselytizing elite mean the dismantlement of "national contracts” which had managed to unify each European polity. In their place, we have been granted a new social contract whereby the Germans pay for the Sicilian and French civil servants (read a “Federal Europe”).
The Germans are not exactly keen on this idea, so in order to placate their own virtuous fellows, Berlin has offered to organize a world of ever falling salaries in southern Europe—to teach the sinners a lesson. For the lapsed southern Europeans, such collapses in their standard of living is the only way to stay competitive so long as the fixed exchange rate stricture remains. Compliance also implies dismantlement of all the social protections that the rentiers of southern Europe have over many years managed to secure.
As a Frenchman, as a European, I want a diverse Europe in which each nation is managed by its own elected people. If the nation chooses to be poorly managed—so be it, this is what democracy is all about. I am not interested in a Europe where the standard of living falls precipitously for a large part of the population, nor am I interested in humiliating what were once proud countries in the hope that they desert their old deities and accept a new god.
And neither do I want to be administered by unelected technocrats delegated by the northern Europeans on the flimsy pretext that my own politicians are useless; they may be hopeless, but I am entitled to have them that way.
What the eurocrats offer under the banner of "reform" is nothing of the sort but just an increase in their power and the destruction of the incredible diversity which made Europe an endlessly fascinating place.
It is time to return to market prices and democracy and to accept that technocracy cannot work. I love Italy more and more. Indeed, for the first time in years, I can envisage a situation in which I feel bullish on Europe.
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