An American Crisis
Shaken Eagle
Guilt-ridden explanations about why sites are not regularly refreshed with new content are boring and we’re not going to offer any of them. Suffice it to say that while you are sitting around in your underwear reading stuff on the Net, someone is off fighting your battles – though of course not necessarily on your side…
At any rate, the news of the day is of course the upcoming End of the World as We Know It – the global financial crisis. It is a subject about which Italy is on the whole very poorly informed. Most Italians still suspect that it is largely a problem for the US – due to the usual kinds of kicks; pet rocks, CB radio. healing crystals, lo-carb diets and sub-prime mortgages; that Americans are liable to get involved in.
There are a number of reasons for this. One is that all significant Italian media are owned either by industrial groups (the dailies) or, in one way or the other, by politicians (television). None of these entities has an interest in stirring up anxiety. In the offices of news organizations, playing down the global financial crisis is referred to as “behaving responsibly”. Beyond that, very, very, few Italian journalists would know a credit swap if it bit them on the ass. This is in no way an easy crisis to explain and the Italians are – to their credit it would now seem – conservative in their investment habits, so they are hardly equipped to grasp what has happened even if there was a commentator around prepared to tell them.
This of course does not mean that no one is speaking. Political figures and house economist are deeply engaged in being “reassuring”, often with amusing results. For instance, it is quite normal to hear, not only from the same commentator or politico, but in the same paragraph, that this crisis is: A) “unlike any other” (code for, “please don’t worry, this is not the Depression all over again”) and that B) “this is a wonderful time to make investments because after this kind of thing prices always bounce back” (...).
As ever, the very loose mouth of the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been much at work. Last week he advised the Italians (shortly after informing them that he and George W. Bush had decided to close the world’s stock markets for an indefinite period; something, it turned out, that he had, ah “heard”) that, because Enel and ENI – respectively the “privatized” State electrical and oil monopolies – appeared to be crashing on the markets, they were a wonderful investment opportunity, bound to bring in “big profits in a year or two” as their share prices return to normal.
Leaving aside the fact that it is odd to hear a prime minister touting the stock of two companies that are supposed to be privately held, the Italians – who, as we mentioned, are conservative investors – couldn’t quite see the logic of buying into something that was nosediving.
Failing in that, Mr. Berlusconi tried again a few days later by announcing that he “understood” that swarms of sovereign investment funds owned by Arab governments were getting ready to come and rape Italian women and children; er, that is, run hostile takeovers on Italian companies, which of course would drive prices up terribly; but that he, personally, would see that they did not…
He succeeded so well in protecting Italian firms from “predatory” takeovers that no-one bit at all and the Italian Foreign Minister has now been sent on a sales trip to a number of Middle Eastern capitals to attempt to drum up interest. In the meantime, the Libyan central bank has acquired not quite five percent of Italy’s Unicredit Banca, the country’s largest and wobbliest financial institution. The damned rag-heads – not quite a direct quote, but close – are even insisting on having a seat on the Board. This however was not predatory – even though the Government seems to have been told about it only at the last instant – because, should the Libyans suddenly announce they were joking, take their marbles and go home, the whole Italian banking system would presumably be in an extremely embarrassing fix.
The point being that Mr. Berlusconi, who hasn’t personally the least clue about what is going on, tends to view his role as that of the nation’s cheerleader, keeping up morale rather than anything else. It is probably fortunate that he does not in fact enjoy any very significant powers of intervention. Still, he has given his word that no Italian bank will be allowed to fail. This could easily be a problem – it certainly was for Ireland, which did something similar, though more credibly – but fortunately no-one of any importance (that is, with any money) took the Prime Minister seriously. It isn’t up to him anyway.
But this is just politics and Berlusconi is just a politician. And we are just us, with no more clue as to how the credit worm is going to turn than anyone else. So, rather than go on macro-economizing, we are going to stop for the moment.
22.10.08
Political Dialogue
Political dialogue
The yellow box in the web site pictured above – that of Ryan Air, an extremely successful Irish low-cost airline that flies into Italy – shows a Minister in the present Italian Government making a unpleasant gesture with his middle finger and is headlined: “Minister Bossi to Italian passengers.” The body copy then points out that: “The Government supports Alitalia’s high fares, supports Alitalia’s frequent strikes and doesn’t give a damn about Italian passengers.”
On the whole, these things appear to be perfectly true, but that is of course not the issue. The issue, at least formally, is that the image of a Minister of the Republic of Italy is being used without his permission for commercial promotion. The Government has formally asked the country’s civil aviation authority, called “ENAC,” to find a way to make life difficult for the Irish even though, embarassingly, it does not appear they have actually committed any crime.
The snap itself is a recent and widely available news photo – a “photo opportunity” if you will, covered by every agency – which does not actually appear to belong to anyone and for its news value and for the nature of the “public personage” – a Minister – is presumably in the Italian equivalent of the public domain.
The other difficulty is that the politician in question, Mr. Umberto Bossi, the leader of the country’s mildly xenophobic “Northern League – see (here) and (here) – was at the moment the shot was taken giving the finger to the Italian National Anthem rather than to Alitalia’s long-suffering passengers. He does things like that periodically – usually when he is about to sell out the principles of his followers in some way – so that he can appear as an opposition politician even when he is instead in office.
Though the gesture did not excite as much comment in Italy as it would have in most other Western countries, it still makes the photograph difficult to talk about politically.
As for Ryan Air, aside from the considerable free publicity – and of a kind that strikes a chord with many Italian travelers – the company is very likely trying to dare the Government into even stupider behavior regarding the lengths it will go to to keep the cadaver of its national airline stumbling along by causing as many regulatory problems as possible for its competitors.
The Irish, as things stand, have little to lose and are already well-placed to take their case/cases to the European Court of Justice in Brussels. So why the hell not?
We’ve written about the sad tale of Alitalia’s place among the living dead so often by now that we really don’t want to bother giving you all the links. This one will probably do: (here). If you are genuinely excited by the carrier’s saga, you could also use the search box to find much more.
Maybe we should point out before you look at that note that it was written a year and a half ago and things have only gotten worse since.
27.07.08
Play gypsy, play!
Imaginary good old days
Italy has a gypsy problem. That is nothing new for most European nations, but for this country it is, and the Italians have no idea what to do about it.
If gypsies are thin on the ground wherever you live, in the US or Japan say, you may enjoy a romantic vision of a colorful nomadic population of tinkers, fiddlers and fortune tellers. Possibly a little inclined to knife fights and perhaps charmingly light-fingered, but fundamentally harmless.
That is of course one way of looking – or not looking – at the phenomenon.
Italy is not good at immigration (as opposed to ‘outward’ emigration) anyway. There never were too many immigrants here. The country was always a net exporter of the huddled poor and has only in fairly recent decades become wealthy enough to attract its own, mostly from North Africa and the Balkans. Beyond that, Italian society is highly stable and so, tendentially xenophobic.
It has been unlucky too. Two different gypsy-based trends collided and brought the Rom pouring in. The first of these was the series of Balkan wars that finally drifted to some kind of conclusion – for now – in the first years of this Century. Much of the Balkan trouble had to do with Christians and Moslems not getting along – but both hate the gypsies, of whom the former Yugoslavia harbored many, making it seem to these last like a very good idea to someplace else, and Italy was close.
The second and even more massive source of incoming gypsies is Romania. This not very nice country was brought into the European Union – largely by the French, for their own complex policy reasons – even though it was perhaps not quite completely ready to take its place among the, ah, “Western democracies”.
Once fully into the club, Romania went back to its bad old ways with a vengeance. One of the things that it proceeded to do was sort out a difficulty left unresolved by the old dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, by forcing as large a part as possible of its massive and intensely unpopular Rom minority into leaving the country.
Many headed for Italy, attracted by the considerable similarities between the Romanian and the Italian languages as well as by the relatively forgiving nature of Italy’s cops – particularly as compared to the Germans, since that country would have been the obvious alternative.
Unfortunately, these “new” gypsies then revealed a positive genius for high-profile crime and social disorder. In Naples – and the Neapolitans, out of historical necessity, could probably assimilate Martians without any great difficulty – an enraged mob recently attacked and burned two gypsy encampments.
Things are not much better in other parts of Italy and the Government, eager to find cheap ways of showing it is doing something about all this, has recently launched a highly dubious plan for fingerprinting Rom children so they can at least be arrested when they come of age. As it stands now, in practice they simply declare that they are thirteen years old and must be released, whatever the crime and however often it has been committed – and however old they are, since there is no real way to know.
All this has raised a huge political correctness problem, and that’s really the point of today’s note. The Italians are very nice people and truly dislike having to admit they are having, well, “racist” thoughts. They always thought that was something Americans or Germans did. On the other hand, those gypsy bastards are making life a hell, don’t seem to know how to get along with decent people and should probably be shot…
That’s why “Upper Italy” was so taken by a recent decision of the Italian Supreme Court in relation to the case of the Mayor of Verona, Mr. Fabio Tosi. His Honor had been convicted by a lower court of “inciting discriminatory sentiments” by declaring in a political meeting that the gypsies should be sent away – to where he didn’t specify – since “whenever they appear a spate of thefts is sure to follow.”
After due and careful consideration, the high court has now determined that a legitimate distinction can be made between the behavior of a minority and other characteristics relating to the group. Specifically, the court said Tosi’s was not discrimination because this by nature, ”...must be based on some particular quality of the subject group and not on aspects of its behavior. Discrimination because others are ‘different’ is not the same as discriminating on the basis of their criminality.”
In other words, Mr. Tosi was not basing his remarks on the ethnic affiliation of the gypsies, but simply on the fact that the whole damned lot of them are a bunch of thieves – and that’s OK…
The Supreme Court’s finding barely made the papers and attracted no particular comment that we are aware of. The determination has been transmitted to the Court of Appeals of Verona, which emitted the original verdict, with instructions to retry the case bearing in mind that it “not consider to be a crime political initiatives that have as an objective the illegal behavior of those belonging to an ethnic minority rather than the minority in itself.”