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.

Italian Politics Take a "Game of Thrones" Turn

Italy gained a new government this past weekend, and did so with all the intrigue and drama of "Game of Thrones" (minus the bloodshed and the chain mail armor, but not the sex).

Matteo Renzi has used is position as Mayor of Florence
to showcase a problem-solving, ideology-lite approach.

The new Prime Minister is Matteo Renzi, the ambitious 37 year-old mayor of Florence, who has made a career by running against the leadership of his own center-left political party, the PD. In this, Renzi has been absolutely brilliant. He recognized, much like Berlusconi before him, that the old guard that ruled the PD were not only out of touch with Italian voters, but also unrepentant, even proud, of that fact. He pushed for internal party primaries to determine it's leadership and, though he lost, did well enough to go from relative nobody to political star. And when the old guard's candidate ran a disastrous campaign, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime sized lead to cross the wire essentially tied with a discredited Berlusconi and comedian-turned-political-gadfly Beppe Grillo, Renzi was the only figure left standing in the wreck of the left.

Well, not the only one. One of the princes of the PD, Enrico Letta, was able to put together a deal with Berlusconi to form a coalition government, one that joined center-left and center-right, representing two-thirds of the electorate. In theory, this would give Letta a broad mandate to govern; in practice, all the government's energy was spent, it seemed, holding itself together. It's biggest achievement was to survive an attempt by Berlusconi to tumble the house of cards and call for an early vote. Stability was Letta's byword. Not change. Not reform. Stability.

This might have worked, if Italy were not going through the biggest economic crisis in its history. And, if Matteo Renzi were less ambitious. While Letta fiddled, Renzi took control of the shattered PD. He handily beat the candidate of the old left, to become party president and, soon after, started turning up the pressure on Letta to do something.  But, of course, as all could plainly see, Letta had no space to maneuver. Like a junkyard car, his awkward coalition of enemies could only hold together at rest, in the absence of sudden moves.

Renzi had always vowed that he would not become Prime Minister without winning a national election. (This is why enemies within in his own party have blocked an electoral law from passing, so there can be no new elections to win.) He also promised to "help" his "friend" Letta but, as Letta slowly sank in public opinion, with European elections looming, Renzi, perhaps sensing that he was caught in a trap, engineered a palace coup, replacing Letta's unelected government with his own posse.

Mired in a deep legitimacy crisis, Italy's
political class fear that the bells toll for them.

Renzi'a new cabinet is young, most of the ministers are under 40. A full half of the ministers are women. Both are revolutionary developments in a country heretofore dominated by old men. The media, both left and right, responded with horror and sexism and disdain. Talking heads commented and criticized the clothes the new women ministers wore to be sworn in...too bright, too tight, too too...  None of the ministers was a heavyweight, pundits sniffed.  And Renzi's inaugural speech to congress, left pundits and pols aghast. It was actually directed at the Italian people and not at the parliamentarians and journalists, the horror, the horror.

The Italian political elite's rejection of Renzi, and this includes the big left and right newspapers, has much to do with their mistrust of popularity and elections.  For the Left, elections are what they lose because the Italian voters are befuddled by too much TV and too much soccer.  Each of the major figures of the PD, each a grey party apparatchik with no aptitude or respect for modern electoral politics, has been defeated by Berlusconi in an election. Each of them, instead of retiring to the Italian equivalent of Kansas (Emila Romagna?), has hung-on to their political retainers and chunk of political turf. And they spin webs and scheme their return while ostensibly selecting the next center-left champion to serve as Berlusconi fodder. That is, until all this primary nonsense spoiled the party.

One the right, there is the fear that there are no conservative voters in Italy, only Berlusconi voters. The former premier looms over everything, consuming all the oxygen in the room. Because he is a convicted felon, guilty of tax fraud, and also of paying for sex with a minor, and perhaps soon of bribing a Senator, Berlusconi cannot run for office. But he seem determined to not let anyone else run in his stead. The center-right is his soccer ball, as it were, and no one else is allowed to score.

So, Renzi makes everyone nervous. He is too ambitious, moves too fast, is too young and too popular. He represents a threat to the usual game of thrones. Or he did, at least, before he assumed power. Now that he is Prime Minister, he has to do what Letta could not: Act.

Much like bayonets, one can do anything with power except sit on it.

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.

Is Europe's Media Making Racism Worse?

Europe is living through a particularly ugly spasm of racism. This time the targets are the gypsies, and the catalyst for the outburst comes from Greece, where police took a blonde 4 year-old from her (dark) gypsy parents on suspicion of child theft.

Unemployed and homeless in Rome.

The picture of the “stolen” blonde girl in dirt-caked tresses was printed and broadcast across Europe, stirring up an old specter: gypsies steal children to exploit and sell. Greek headlines were explicit: “Roma Steal Children” and “Amber Alert: Roma Circuit Snatch Babies.” In the media frenzy following the Greek case, in Ireland, authorities in different parts of the country took a fair-haired 7 year-old girl and a blond 2 year-old boy from traveler parents, the cases are unrelated, except in racism, only to return them both after dna tests showed –unlike in the Greek case-that they were indeed their gypsy parents’ biological offspring.

Living on the water's edge in Rome.

Europe’s fear and loathing of gypsies –known variously across Europe as Rom or Roma or Sinti, or Travelers– is very old and very bitter. It is part of a broader resentment and mistrust of immigrants and outsiders, a rejection that has begun to boil over with the economic crisis and that has been stoked by xenophobic politicians. Immigrant groups across Europe, are profiled by police, discriminated against in housing, and denied social services and benefits. But none, perhaps, are targeted as consistently and shamefacedly as the gypsies. Swedish police keep a file on all gypsies that enter the country. Hungary and the Czech Republic have been found guilty, in the European court of Justice, of denying low-income housing to gypsies and segregating their children in school.  Greek police routinely conduct sweeps of gypsy camps to find what they can find. It was in one of these that the blonde girl was discovered.

But this particular outbreak of racist hysteria has undoubtedly been fed and exacerbated by incompetent reporting and the bad habits of Europe’s media.

Living under a bridge in Rome.

First, there is very little, if any, fact checking of stories. Articles are self-checked with very little editorial assistance or support. Second, there is a pernicious reliance on single sources for stories, with little effort to include a second view or version of events. This is particularly evident when dealing with government authorities. In the Greek girl’s case, the police put out a press bulletin, which was repeated by the press, with speculative elaboration, but without questioning the police interpretation or incorporating other voices. Third, there is a preference in European journalism, including crime reporting, for full narratives, where the blanks of what we don’t know are backfilled by “informed” speculation to provide a more complete and compelling story. Combined with an almost total lack of attribution or sourcing for information, this “fly-on-the-wall” reporting makes for a good read but abysmal journalism. Again, in the Greek girl case, none of the deeply flawed assumptions (that gypsies could not have fair children, that therefore the child was stolen, and that this formed part of a shadowy criminal conspiracy) were questioned by the media. Instead, they were reiterated, and elaborated, and magnified.

In the end, the international attention did serve to identify the biological mother of the Greek girl. She was a gypsy living in Bulgaria. She voluntarily gave the child to the couple arrested in Greece, she said, because she could not provide for her 10 children.