Racism and Obama's Visit to Rome

U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Italy has stirred up a number of embarrassingly racist reactions. This front page, for example, from the Left-wing  daily  newspaper Il Manifesto, is so blatant and cringeworthy, one has to ask, was it done intentionally or just the result of colossal incompetence?

More ominous,perhaps, is the bizarre show of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin by a motley crew of European white supremacy groups and right-wing political parties. Even former Italian Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and radical comedian turned political firebrand Beppe Grillo got into the act. 

Berlusconi is Putin's old buddy. And Grillo likes throwing gasoline on fires, but how much of the rest is motivated by simple racism?

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.

Is the Sun Setting on the Italian Lifestyle?

Seen from the outside, there is something inspiringly right about how Italians live.  They close up shop to eat a home cooked lunch every day. They buy their food fresh; personally know their butchers and bakers and candlestick makers; spend a month (or two) on the beach in the summer and a week (or two) on the ski slope in winter.  And they own houses, often in stunningly beautiful locations. Italy has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, and few kids and shrinking families mean that properties are often inherited from both sets of grandparents as well as parents. City apartments are rented out. Country homes are used, if for nothing else, for olive trees, from which they press, their own oil.

A declining industrial power, Italy is finding that
it can no longer afford to live Italian style. 

Seen from the inside, Italian families are trapped inside a compression chamber. They work long hours, the lunch break is offset by working late, often six days a week. Wages are low. Promotions are out of the question. And yet, those with a job, no matter how grinding, are grateful, because most people under 40 have given up on getting staff positions. They subsist on short term freelance contracts. No bennies. No security. No niente. To lose a job in Italy is a form of economic death.

And the home cooked meals? They have to be cooked by someone. Italy has the lowest percentage of women in workplace in old Europe (after Greece). Italian women cook and keep house (Italian men know how to make coffee), do the daily food shopping, keep house, and care for the children and elderly parents (the state neither provides daycare nor elderly care). Grown children, often unemployed, live at home into their forties.  

And the houses? Those rented are used to supplement the meager family income, and as a trust fund for unemployed offspring. Landlords live in terror of the deadbeat tenant. It can take decades to evict someone. Those houses not rented, decay. Families age and shrink. Less space is needed, maintained. Italy is house poor, falling into ruin.

Fresh food means constant shopping.

Falling slowly but surely into economic destitution, most Italians use tricks to survive. They cheat on taxes. They skimp on maintenance of their properties. They stop paying rent, buying medicines, eat less.  But this cannot last. 

Is there a way out? Perhaps, but it runs against all the  conservative Italian instincts: 

To create more jobs, make it easier to fire workers. The fact that no one can be fired from a job functions as a curse on the poor, because new jobs are not created or filled. Those who have job, even ones they hate or are under-qualified for, hang on to their jobs with a white knuckled death grip. No one takes a chance on something new. Greater job insecurity, ironically, would increase the turnover and vitality of the job market. 

To get money flowing in the economy, tax property. Real estate is to Italy what the stock market is to the US and savings accounts are for Germany. That is were the wealth is stashed. But real estate is not a productive investment, a house, unlike a business or an investment, does not create jobs. By taxing home ownership, and using the revenue to reducing taxes on labor,  Italians would be forced to sell and spend the gain on something more productive for the economy. But this is hard for Italians, barely making ends meet, but inheritors of a long tradition of valuing home ownership, to swallow. Berlusconi made much hay campaigning against this in the last election. 

Falling surely into destitution,
most Italians use economic tricks to survive. 

To get the population off the death spiral, it is time for welcoming immigrants, and their new ideas and habits and demands, instead of fighting them every step of the way. Italy needs growth and investment, and that requires loosening all the state regulations that keep the economy and society an insiders-only game. Let the sunshine in. 

So, to create more jobs, Italians need to give up job security, lose their second homes, and let go control of what their country looks like (and sounds like). In essence, to gamble on an uncertain future, while relinquishing some of the social gains that made the past more stable and secure.

In other words, to save the Italy, Italians may need to relinquish what, from the outside at least, is seen as the Italian lifestyle --slow, sweet, unchanging.

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.

Empty Nationalism, Enlightened Soccer Fans

Italy is a country that has surrendered most of its national sovereignty.  At least traditionally, when one thinks of an independent country, one thinks of the ability to write your own laws, manage your own economic policies, and have an independent foreign policy. Italy does none of these.

The country's laws are subject to European Union regulations, and are routinely changed to conform. In foreign policy, Italy follows the EU lead even, as in the attack on Libya, when it is against Italian strategic and economic interests. Italy does not set it's own monetary policy, has no real central bank, and it's government budget must be approved (or not) by Brussels.

Yet, despite having given away many of the tools of the modern nation state, the Italian political elite can still work up a heady froth of nationalist rhetoric, especially over issues that might impinge on a politician's ability to place a cousin in a good job.

Two recent cases have set off this empty nationalist tick. Italy's national airline, Alitalia, is going bankrupt. It has an aging fleet, high labor costs, and lots of debt. It also has been regularly feathered by politicians with people who need to be placed, routes that lose money, and facilities it does not need. Needles to say, it cannot compete with low cost airlines. It certainly cannot compete with the modern Middle Eastern airlines without a ton of new soldi (money).

The Italian state is one of the most indebted in the world, and yet, to save the airline, it is tapping into the money of the postal system to keep Alitalia flying for a little longer. Even then, the very ideal of selling the airline to a foreign rival -in this case, Air France- fills Italy's political leadership with dread. What if they highjack weathy Chinese tourists on their way to Rome and force them to see Paris? The fiends! 

The idea that a country that already receives more tourism than any other in the world needs a national airline, is highly suspect. When the country itself is almost bankrupt, then throwing the pension fund money from the postal system into a money-burning biz like an airline is a crime.   

The second nationalist tiff is over the Italia Telecom -- the phone company. Like all landline, legacy telecoms, this is buried in debt, is losing customers to wireless, and needs megabucks to lay down a broadband network, something the country genuinely needs. In this sad state, a bid came in from Spain's Telefonica. Suddenly Italian politicians were spouting nonsense about the need to guarantee the security of Italian phone and online connections by keeping the company Italian. Absurd to anyone who understands modern technology.  Even more absurd if you see how much investment is required to wire Italy (a land where ay hole in the ground stands a reasonable chance of striking an archeological find).

But, I guess, if you can't control it, better not to do it.  

Except when it really matters, when there is something truly important at stake. Take soccer. One of Italy's grand old soccer clubs, Internazionale of Milano, was just sold to an Indonesian billionaire. This provoked a very positive reaction from a football crowd not normally associated with enlightened, cosmopolitan reactions. But the fans know that for Inter to compete with their hated rivals, AC Milan, owned by Berlusconi, and Juventus, owned by the family that founded Fiat, the team needs more money. So, play ball!

As for Alitalia and Telecom, both Air France and Telefonica have since backed-off their offers. 

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. 

Birdstorm Season in Rome (and in Italian Politics)

Fall brings thousands of small migratory birds to Tiber alluvial plain. They flock in dense clouds that cross the sky in eerie beautiful formations. They fill the branches of the trees along the river, and dust the streets along the river with …  well, you know.  The Italian word for it translates as: birdstorm. Tourists and squeegee men love them (unless caught underneath); car owners and terrazzo lovers, not so much.  (There is a video at the bottom of this post.)

 Another birdstorm of sorts is playing out with the Italian government. The governing coalition has just presented a budget –which caused a flurry of condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum. Both center right and center left -ie the governing parties, though they don’t act like it- denounced the budget for what it does not do, namely increase spending or cut taxes. Even the namby-pamby center, which usually thinks that any government that avoid being kicked out of Europe is doing fine, had a few unkind words. The unions called for street demonstrations and a general strike. The business association, for the umpteenth time, declared that it despairs for the future of Italian industry…

Sadly, they are all right, of course. The budget will neither generate new jobs nor put the country on a more solid financial footing. It is neither fish nor fowl, neither stimulus nor austerity. Even more sadly, Italians are going to have to get used to such budgets. The country’s debt amounts to over 130% of its gdp and interest rates are at all time lows. I can’t see the country getting out from under this mountain of debt in the next 10 years. Most sadly of all, politicians are not being clear with the Italian public about what realistically can be expected.

If they did... that would really generate a ****storm no little birds could match.