Football's 'We Are the World' Moment

The refugee crisis is a major stepping-up moment for the world's most popular, and profitable, sport. Here is my take...

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/refugees-welcome-soccer-has-its-we-are-world-moment/40778

The War on Immigrants

The riot police in full metal gear kept pushing the crowd back trying to get them to disperse. But every time the crowd dispersed only to reform again and attack the immigrant dormitory with stones and bats. Inside social workers barricaded themselves all night, manning barred doors and first floor windows, while refugees, many of them unaccompanied minors, huddled in fear in their rooms.

A scene from a movie? Children of Men? Or a dystopian novel on like Ink? No. This scene was all too real and happened last week at a refugee relocation center, a "welcome" center in Italian, on the outskirts of Rome. Tor Sapienza, the neighborhood is called, Tower of Knowledge.

Abandoned and decaying buildings dot the periphery of Rome.

The battle raged for three nights, and was followed by a major demonstration in which locals pelted the mayor of Rome with insults and demanded the closing of the center. Authorities decided to move the children to another facility, in another blighted neighborhood, Infernetto, or Little Hell, for their own protection. But this prompted a similar violent outburst in that neighborhood as well, and the frightened kids were bused back to Tor Sapienza.

At first, the Italian press depicted the violence as a spasm of racism. And, there is plenty of racism to go around -- from the demonstrators' descriptions, to the press, of black people as animals; to the targeting of all brown and black people for abuse and retaliation; to the chanting of the racist mantra that Italy is for the Italians, meaning whites only.

A Rom (Gypsy) camp in the outskirts of Rome.

But soon, the public discussion took a different turn, that of analyzing the incident as a war of poor against poor. A second set of neighborhood voices tried to tone down the racialist tones and emphasize that Italy, and the Italian State, has failed them. The pointed to rising crime in the neighborhood, the lack of public transport, the decaying infrastructure, the garbage that never gets picked up by the city... Locals complained that, in addition to the refugee dormitory, there was a Rom (ie Gypsy) camp nearby, which adds to the density of displaced, jobless, men floating through the area.

After three days of riots, and a couple of headlines noting his absence, the Mayor of Rome, Mayor Clown people are calling him,  finally visited the neighborhood to met with the angry locals. He immediately caved to demands to close the center to all except women and children. Prompting anger from both pro-immigration groups who want the center's work to be validated and protected and locals who want it shut completely.

Mayor Clown blamed the Government, that is, the Ministry of Justice which runs immigration policy. The Minister of Justice called Mayor Clown a ... well, clown, and also blamed the European Union for its inflexible immigration and refugee policies.

The right has doubled down on it's National Front-like strategy of riding the anti-immigrant wave to votes in the next election. The Left is torn between defending the migrants and rending their garments over the loss of working class (white) support.

But, in my opinion, to dismiss this violent spasm as a poor person's movement ("war between poor and poor") or a protest against the failure of the Italian State, or a popular rejection of immigration ("the illegal invasion" the right calls it), is to miss it's essence.  This is, I believe, a fundamental battle over the shape of Italian society and it's future. And I will spend the next few blog posts, teasing my ideas out.

Europe Will Be Asked to Pay for Italian Politician's Sins

The legitimacy crisis of Italy's political class is so deep and so broad that it takes your breath away. I used to think that the image of Nero playing the violin while Rome burned was poetic exaggeration. Now I see it was politics as usual.

Over the past week, the country has been wracked by intermittent, and intermittently violent, protest. The protestors are collectively known as the "Pitchfork" movement, but they are not an organized or coherent group. They are a motley collection, united only by anger. Farmers blocked roads and bridges with tractors to protest food imports bearing misleading "Made in Italy" labels; Truckers slowed their rigs down to a crawl, tangling traffic on highways; artisans and small biz owners spoke against taxes and the government in town squares; Students protested cuts in education; Xenophobes and neo-Fascist groups marched against immigration and Europe.  In Turin, the country's hard-hit manufacturing capital, the riot police removed their helmets in show of solidarity and sympathy.

Living under a bridge: As more Italians fall into poverty,
the welfare system has proven woefully inadequate. 

Meanwhile, the response of Italy's political elite has been either to freak out or to freakily try to play the anger to their own ends. The Interior Minister [from the Center-Right] ordered the cops to keep their helmets on and come down hard on "Troublemakers." The Left started talking about how the protests have been infiltrated and hijacked by Fascist groups, a line made easier to believe by a number of video clips showing a small group of protestors giving the Roman salute and showing off tattoos of Mussolini.  Berlusconi, who believes himself to be a bit of a pitch-fork wielding, barn-burner himself [even if the pitchfork is by Versace and is actually wielded by a hired hand] scheduled a meeting with pitch-forkers, only to cancel out when he realized that some of the anger might be directed at him. [Some in the angry mob, it seems, are under the impression that his having been in power 20 of the last 24 years, might have something to do with the dismal state of things.] Beppe Grillo, the leader of the 5 Star protest movement has been cheering the Pitchforks on with his usual subtle message which can be summarized as: Burn, Baby, Burn.

The most freaked-out was Giorgio Napolitano, the 87 year-old President of Italy, who warned Parliament that, if they did not take action to reform the country, a social explosion wasn't out of the question.

Cheering the Pitch-forks: Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi have looked
to turning the anger to their own political ends. 

Napolitano is a good example of how the Italian political elite rules without having to submit to elections or popular consent. This year he was elected to a second 7 year term as President of the country by the Parliament [and a few other political actors] despite his age  -he will turn 94 before leaving office- and against his stated wishes. The parties in parliament simply could not agree on anyone else and begged him to stay. He has never been voted for directly by the people he represents.

Napolitano was critical in brining the current coalition government into being after no party got enough votes to govern alone. The Left had run on the promise that they would never, never pact with Berlusconi. But, under Napolitano's prodding, they did. Berlusconi agreed to the coalition government and then changed his mind. But when he tried to pull his party out of the government, half of his deputies refused to go. So, in a sense, on both Left and Right, this is a government that no one voted for, no one wanted.

Added to the profound electoral disconnect is a profound immobilism and an unseemly refusal to cut back on the perks of power. For the past year, this circular reasoning has governed: No laws can be passed because on party has a majority; to call a new election and get a new majority, you first need to reform the electoral law; but no reform can be made for want of a majority.  The same logic applies to bills the parliamentarians don't like but which are hugely popular with voters, like cutting politician's salaries and pensions.

The there is also corruption. Despite multiple promises that the parties would run so-called clean slates that excluded anyone under indictment for a crime, this has not fully happened. Dozens of deputies have been elected -in Italy you vote for a parliamentary list rather than for a single candidate- with the impunity from prosecution that comes with it.

The notion that the political 'caste,' as Italians call it, is impervious to public opinion and corrupt to the core is part of the reason abstentionism has risen to higher than US levels. It has also fueled a whole gaggle of angry movements, from Grillo's 5 Stars to the Pitchfork crowd.

There is a sense that the political structure of this country resembles a termite infested house. It is impossible to know how much of the strength of the structure has been hollowed out and whether it could give at any moment. This fear might be fueling Napolitano's urgency; that and the fact he's too old to outrun the pitchforks.

So, what happens if the unthinkable happens? What if the political structure of Italy collapses under its own weight? The good news is that there is an insurance policy in place: Europe. The European Union would pick up the pieces. But, there is also bad news. After years of European enforced economic austerity, Europe has never been this unpopular. It has gone from being the parent who insists that you eat your vegetables, to being accused of, by the xenophobic and racist Lega Nord party of perpetrating a "crime against humanity," that would be accepting Italy into the Euro zone, and requiring that Italy adhere to European regulations on thing like recycling its trash and solving prison overcrowding. Oh yes...and pay its debts. The gall! The gall!

And these demagogues are just getting warmed up. Stay tuned.

"The Mediterranean is a graveyard."

Ruined watchtowers dot the easternmost point of mainland Italy. 

A crippled ship weighed down with over 500 refugees caught fire and sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. A hundred or so were rescued alive, thanks to the unstinting bravery of Lampedusa's fishermen. But divers have filmed horrifying underwater images of the sunken ship, still packed with dead bodies, above and below deck, perhaps over 300.

The tragedy has set off a needed debate on how Italy, and Europe, treat the thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa and the Middle East. In Lampedusa, which is 70 miles off the Tunisian Coast and which has the largest refugee relocation center in Italy, the people held a moving candlelight vigil in remembrance and solidarity. The refugee relocation camp on the island has space for 250 people. It currently houses 1,200. The majority of refugees, including unaccompanied minors, sleep on the open ground for want of space. Other refugee centers in Italy are also overcrowded, and are reluctant accept more. Asylum requests can take years to process.

Sunrise over San Giovanni in Laterano, the Pope's Basilica.

Pope Francis, who has been a strong voice in favor of making immigration policy more humane, is offering the use of monasteries to house the refugees. The xenophobic right is calling for the use of the military to intercept and prevent refugees from approaching Italian shores. (The European Union already has a military border interception force --but it is housed in Warsaw, far from the Mediterranean.) 

But the tremendous scale of this tragedy has forced the Italian government to take action. They are ordering other refugee centers in the country to take more of the load. And they are calling on the European Union to change some of its more dysfunctional policies.

By European regulations, asylum seekers must remain in the first European point where they apply for asylum. This is to prevent migrants from moving about Europe, but the consequence is to put a tremendous strain on a few countries: Italy, Greece, and Malta, in particular.

Italy is calling on other European countries to accept to receive their fair share refugees. Currently three European countries receive a disproportionate amount of resettled migrants: UK, France and Germany. The smaller countries accept almost zero.

The tragedy has also opened debate over Italy's own highly restrictive immigration laws. (A magistrate has already announced that the survivors of the tragedy will face prosecution under the harsh Bossi-Fini immigration law in the books.) The law makes legal immigration to the country almost impossible, thereby exacerbating the use of desperate and dangerous illegal routes. Italy's immigration levels are higher than those of the small, exclusionary countries of Europe, but very low compared to the big three.

The vast majority of those who died this week were from Eritrea and Somalia -- the former a poor one-party state, and the latter a famously failed one. Both were once Italian colonies. Eritrea officially became an Italian colony in 1890, after Italy invaded and occupied Ethiopia. Somalia followed later. In 1936, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland were declared provinces of Italian East Africa. In 1941, when the British expelled the Italians from the Horn of Africa, almost 10% of the population of Eritrea was Italian.