Italy’s Populist Parties Win Approval to Form Government
Okay, what’s next? And how will it affect the European Union?
Italy’s Populist Parties Win Approval to Form Government
By Jason Horowitz
May 31, 2018After a seesaw week that spooked financial markets, Italy’s president on Thursday gave a green light to a government of populist parties that would put Europe’s fourth largest economy into the hands of leaders deeply antagonistic to the European Union, its currency and illegal migrants.
Only days ago, President Sergio Mattarella of Italy rejected a populist government over concerns about a key minister who had suggested he wants to withdraw Italy from the group of countries that use the euro, Europe’s single currency. The chaotic consequences of such a move — even if remote — alarmed many investors and resurrected fears about a possible fracturing of the European Union.
On Thursday evening, the party leaders presented the president with a reshuffled cabinet that would make it difficult for Mr. Mattarella to reject them a second time. The new government still needs to win a confidence vote in Parliament, but at this stage was a formality.
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The League and Five Star both want to renegotiate treaties on budgets, migration and a range of other issues with the European Union. They also want to lift sanctions against Russia and for Italy to move closer to its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who once said he didn’t need to meddle in the Italian elections because it was all going his way.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/world/europe/italy-government-popu...
So, what’s next? We’re watching a realignment of European countries form being firmly in the NATO league to wanting to rethink the official western stance against everything Russian.
I’m a simple creature with a simple mind and I put this down to (basically) western avarice. When European economies crashed due to banker greed and malfeasance that was the beginning of the end for the EU. Being forced to pay off the gambling debts of Americam and European bankers and constantly being slapped with increasingly horrific ‘austerity’ programs to pay for it all, gave the European people an up front and very personal view of what life under capitalism really means. They figured out that it is a parasitic form of government and the hosts it feeds on are the plebs. They are angry and unhappy. And they are going to do something about it.
I don’t know if what they do will help them in the end. I don’t know if these populist parties are the answer. I don’t know if things will be better or worse. But something had to change. Capitalism made whole nations hostages to the policies of a system that only benefits those that have more than they need.
At least people have started to fight back. How it will all end is anybody’s guess.
Comments
A good day for Europe
No joy for Rajoy:
Couldn't happen to a nicer fascist.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
So, is Carles Puigdemont going to be
able to go back home? Or is he still a wanted man?
Just something I’m curious about.
EDIT: sorry folks still can’t see a thing. The typos aren’t clear until after I post.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
A good and heartening essay! Nailed it, and thanks !
Except that, personally, I'd say that this is a global web of various self-interested groups, enacting incrementally implemented plans in possibly varying degrees of collaboration. (Which might, in my estimation and speaking as One Who Knows Nothing And Merely Speculates, be at least in part why Hillary was so leaky with US national security, so The Right People in various countries could keep being updated more quickly and easily.)
Great freaking phrasing/statement; we need that on T-shirts and walls.
In answer to your/our wonderings about how this will in end, another indication of hope:
https://www.rt.com/news/428424-spain-pm-stepped-down/
The EU, being effectively run by international financial interests rather than human beings, has repeatedly revealed itself as a pathological destructive force, blatantly enforcing outright and entirely avoidable cruelty and devastation to worsen debt to international financial interests in order to weaken countries and enable unrestrained profiteering in their dismantling of publicly owned systems, property and national heritage.
Eventually, the propaganda bubble is burst by the sheer overload of what it has to cover and people start opening their eyes to the fascism which they wanted so badly to deny was nonetheless evidently all around them. And once they finally see, they likely react. And the reaction spreads by example, despite - and awakened by - brutal crack-downs to repress this, once even the more propaganda-blinded/pathologized people finally realize that fascism/psychopathic government, under any label, harms themselves, not just those carefully 'othered' others - and that they need to start fighting free, even if only for their own human rights and lives.
What can be done to one, can be done to any, and ultimately will. Even enlightened self-interest dictates that injustice can never be permitted to prevail.
People and countries could, in actuality, join in mutually beneficial defensive and trade unions, but any union is only as good as its leadership, platform and intent.
Allow self-interests/the psychopathic into any area of any system, and efforts to corrupt the system will begin; psychopaths tend to be drawn to positions of power, where they can exert it over and against others.
A country is essentially an arbitrarily defined area, consisting of its ecology, people and their (real) economy; destroy these in the personal pursuit of maximized and totalitarian power and wealth, and there's nothing. Yet that is what the psychopaths currently in power are so eagerly doing, all over the world...
A democratic government must not only be formed by those within the country and aware of local issues, but of, by and for the people, to protect and maintain the public good. If they fail to do so, they have revealed themselves as not forming any legitimate/sustainable government at all.
A true democracy has no 'rulers', merely having sensibly enforced rules to protect all - and especially the most vulnerable - against abuse and predation and to assure the welfare of the country and people to the best of the ability achievable with the public funds collected according to ability to pay, in order that the country, essentially consisting of its people and the ecology and economy which sustains them, may prosper in health and happiness in the manner which best suits them without causing undue harm to others, all being equal under law.
But only The People, united and vigilant, can make - and keep - it so.
If we do not learn from history now, there will be no future. It seems that lessons are finally, and increasingly, being put into practice, at this last and desperate moment.
...
Edit: lol, hadn't looked down the thread; should have guess that I and my headache would spend all day on this trying to make some degree of what I hope is sense, to have been ninja'd in the first post.
Brain hurts too much to work well, (cold again today and the windows are closed elsewhere through the house, storing up accumulating chemicals, drat it,) but if I recall correctly, your glasses were broken? Are you able to get a new pair soon?
This must be fouling your life up 9 ways from Sunday, although - speaking as The Typo Queen - I haven't noticed a problem with typos in your stuff. And I'm very grateful that you still are able to manage essays, despite this!
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.