Sicily is on the verge of being without water. A state of emergency has been declared in Messina. 259,000 people are without running water. In Gela, they just get water once a week. In Agrigento the provision of water has been suspended because of the presence of bacteria.
Water in Sicily is managed (if you can say it’s managed at all) by a private firm (Siciliacque, 59.6% of which is owned by the French firm, Veolia) to whom Cuffaro gave the job of managing it for 40 years. The wishes of the citizens expressed in a referendum on the management of water, were completely ignored. There was a similar situation in Campania, where nine towns were without water yesterday. We have to return to the public management of water. The leaking network needs to be brought back to a good state with investment from the public purse and the risk of hydrological disturbances has to be eliminated as these disturbances are destroying the reservoirs. This is what Italy needs, but instead we are now being taken for a ride with the umpteenth announcement from someone who seems less like a statesman and more like the comic character lngegner Cane from the Gialappas, talking about the construction of the bridge over the Straits of Messina.
VIDEO How the government will construct the bridge over the Straits of Messina explained by ing. Cane
A mammoth task that will never see the light of day. It has already cost the tax payer about 600 million euro and 3 years ago the Monto government allocated 300 million for the payment of penalties if the project is NOT completed. According to the economic plan approved by the Board of Directors of the company called Stretto di Messina Spa on 29 July 2011, the overall cost of the project was to be 8.5 billion euro, which is half what’s needed for the Citizens’ Income with which the M5S will save 10 million Italians from hunger and unemployment. Up until now, a bridge measuring 3,000 metres with an aerodynamic profile has never been built. There’s no certainty that it will stay standing and especially in a zone that has a high seismic risk (do you remember the Messina earthquake?) and really strong currents. The news about the construction of the bridge is just a way of taking us for a ride. It’s useful to the PD to have something to talk about on a talk show and to cover up its every day failures. It’s useful to the mafia to open up construction sites that will never get closed down and that will cost a further hundreds of millions to the citizens who are now experiencing thirst.
Posted on November 12, 2015 at 9:15 AM in | Post a comment | Listen
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Passaparola with Gianluigi Nuzzi, journalist, TV presenter and writer, talking about the latest Vatileaks scandal, revealed in his latest book "Via Crucis", coming after the best sellers: Vaticano SPA {Vatican company} and Sua Santità {His Holiness}.
“Greetings to the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog and let’s keep this in mind: it’s always better to have a book than handcuffs.
We need to remember that there are two views of the Church, that of Pope Francis, and that of someone who says that you can't run the Church on Hail Marys and that someone was Monsignor Paul Marcinkus who created disasters in the Vatican Bank even bringing in money from the Cosa Nostra mafia.
The Pope wants to change the Church, but more than anything, he wants to change the Vatican Curia.
My book talks about all of this. It talks about bad deeds and thus it has created a lot of upset.
Peter’s Pence
I’m talking about the money collected for “Peter’s Pence” that is then destined to be given to those in need in accordance with the indications given by the Holy Father. Peter’s Pence is collected in churches all over the world, and it totals about 60 million Euro. Well, in the last few years, sixty per cent ended up covering the debts of the Curia, those gentlemen that are living in apartments measuring 500 square metres, Cardinals, just twenty per cent ended up not for worthy causes, but in a deposit account with the Vatican Bank or with the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA). Just think, that’s almost 400 million euro that’s sitting there and only 20 per cent ends up in the Pope’s account to do good works. I believe that this is in fundamental contradiction to what Pope Francis wants and is promising.
Who’s in control of APSA and the Vatican Bank?
In the Vatican Bank there are many hidden people with murky and unseeable interests. They have told us that they had closed all the accounts of lay people, that they had cleaned things up. Just about a month ago, I received a detailed report and I discovered that there are still accounts of lay people who have nothing to do with the Vatican! This is the bank that’s meant to do good works, to do missionary work, and yet there are lay people with accounts worth millions of Euro and these accounts should not exist. It’s a lie to say there are no longer accounts held by lay people.
APSA is the same. We have to acknowledge that Francis has done more to clean it up. However it still has the same , man in charge: a Cardinal who was selected by the former Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, with whom I’d not be willing to have a coffee. I’d not even have a drink of water with him!
Bank accounts of dead Popes
Then there’s another mystery. There are bank accounts in the name of Popes who died many, many years ago. When I discovered these I asked around among my information sources in the Vatican, but it’s still a mystery. It’s not known who manages them. The amounts are not enormous but we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of Euro. Why are they not closed down? As Giampaolo Pansa has written “in Italy and also in the Vatican, the sewage system gets everywhere”, you just have to lift up the right manhole cover and take the right drain and you can find yourself in another part completely.
This has nothing to do with faith. It has nothing to do with the Church and the fact that it is the heritage belonging to each of us personally. You may or may not have faith. The Church of the volunteers, of the Sunday schools, of the regular schools, all that is the heritage of our country through history, it’s our everyday story.
Vatican staff
Here I’m talking of the power centres that distribute privileges, that look after jobs. There are 14 HR departments in the Vatican and that is ridiculous compared to the number of employees. But each HR office has its own web of employees. On 3 July 2013, the Pope said that there’d been an increase of 30% in expenditure on employees in the previous few years and it wasn’t known why that was. It’s easy to understand: each employee that you recruit is a “trusted man” that you can depend on. And this is the web, the system of power that the Pope wants to pull down. In the 1990s all the reforms of the Curia failed. There were 5 or 6 attempts. In my opinion, this is the time for it to happen. Anyway, if it doesn’t happen now, it won’t happen.
The Committee of Enquiry into Vatican affairs
Then thre’s something else that’s surprising. In March 2014, there was a Committee of Enquiry into Vatican accounts and finances. It was trying to get to the bottom of things. One night some thieves (- or at least some people presumed to be thieves, or people dressed up as thieves), used a blow torch to break into safes and heavily protected cabinets belonging to this Committee of Enquiry.
VIDEO Thieves in the Vatican
It’s as though, here in Italy, someone got into the office of the Prosecutor, and opened the safes to take away the documents of the current investigations. Why did this happen? It seems to me that they did this to find out what had been discovered by this Committee of Enquiry set up by the Pope.
Sindona’s letters
Then a really worrying and extraordinary thing happened. A few weeks later, before the beatification of John Paul II and of John XXIII, a number of these documents turn up in a plain envelope in the same office where they were stolen. On examining these documents it was discovered that these are letters written by Michele Sindona, (so we’re talking about many years ago, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s) in which he encouraged his Italo-American mafia friends to do business with Caldi and with Marcinkus’s Vatican Bank. These are letters that this gentleman, this banker, sent to the top people in the Church hierarchy at that time. In my opinion, this is a message of intimidation.
Ratzinger and Bergoglio: similarities and differences
There’s a fundamental difference. Bertone was Ratzinger’s right hand man. Ratzinger was the sovereign of the Vatican’s monarchy. He delegated the administration of the State, matters of business, of money, of finances. He was thus a sovereign who did not govern.
VIDEO Pope Francis is not like Ratzinger
Pope Francis was not like that. He said: “I want to govern as well. I want to do politics. I want to look at the accounts. These unauthorised accounts must not pay out to companies of friends, of chums, of lovers. How come this library has increased in cost from 100 to 200? Who has stolen that money? Be careful about the investments. - These are all things that you can find in the book. - We have invested 95 million euro in UBS and Goldman Sachs.“ In my view, I’d say that if the Curia is investing in UBS and Goldman Sachs, it seems more like a finance company than a theocracy.
So he’s saying: “Be careful about the investments.“ So, you see, he’s even looking at the invoices from the shops, the invoices relating to tenders. That is he wants to do the managing because in order for it to be credible, the Church has to be poor.
The Pope’s struggle: reforms are in danger
I believe that this is a possibility. His reforms are in danger. This is certainly the same thing, because the leadership of a Pope is represented by what he does. There are those that want to oppose him. This is actually happening. People are saying he is ill, that he has a brain tumour and thus that he is not believable. Strange thefts happening in the Vatican.
VIDEO Throwing mud at the Pope
It’s all a big swamp but perhaps it’s smaller than we imagine, but it is insidious. These are incrustations. This Pope wants to change the mindset, the laws and the men. The problem is that it takes time. The problem is that many mindsets don’t want to be changed.
The right to report news and information
To say that I’m a fan of Pope Francis is not correct. I have written this book and it is not for or against anyone. It tells the facts. In my view, these facts are what make it possible to understand what is happening. If you then ask me on a personal level, as a Christian man, what I think of the Pope, I’d say that he’s a great Pope who is driving forward change. Like his predecessor, now watch out, perhaps not everyone is in agreement with this, like his predecessor, he is revolutionising the Church. There’s nothing more revolutionary than what was done by Ratzinger, that is a step backwards, a Pope who didn’t feel able to hold the tiller of St Peter’s boat, who took a step backwards, until the arrival of a Pope who for the first time, took the name of Francis. These are personal reflections. The book is something else: the book is the work of a journalist who wanted to tell the story of facts that were not known. However, at times, there are those who prefer to arrest people who are providing information, or who are believed to have given information. Perhaps there are more than a few paedophile priests. If we do some calculations in the Vatican, in the last 3 years they’ve arrested one paedophile priest and three people who gave information to the press. I’m not very happy about this.
Spread the word.” Gianluigi Nuzzi
Posted on November 11, 2015 at 7:10 PM in | Post a comment | Listen
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“Without what Article 9 of the constitution calls the natural landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation, Italy would not be what it is today.“ Salvatore Settis, archeologist and historian specialising in Italian art history. He’s a former director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
“I believe that there should be public museums and private museums. There are private museums in Italy just as there are in other places. For example I could mention the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome - one of the greatest private museums in the world. It’s always been a really important museum belonging to the Doria Pamphilj princes. I would leave those private museums as they are.
No to the privatisation of public museums
But, on the other hand, there are some really ancient museums, the Capitoline Museums, the Uffizi Gallery, and others, that have to stay in public hands and we have to bear in mind that the cost to the State of these public resources is not simply a cost without any benefits. Without these museums, and without these monuments, and without our landscape, without what Article 9 of the constitution calls the natural landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation, Italy would not be what it is. In order to have the identity we have, for us to be happy to be Italians, we have to show that we are able to look after this landscape and this historic artistic heritage.
Culture is food - words of a Nobel prizewinner
Not only must we look after our artistic heritage, we have to improve it!
Among the particularly great economists, there’s for example, the Nobel prizewinner, Amartya Sen. He has put forward some great arguments in relation to his nation, India, saying that in order to develop economically and improve the economic satisfaction of the citizens, the pride in their origins, the pride in belonging to a certain culture, there’s a factor that is absolutely necessary, absolutely essential: a multiplier of inventiveness of productivity and of creativity.
This has been Italy’s history for thousands of years. If we don’t want it to end, we have to protect and take care of our historical and artistic heritage with more public expenditure and recover what’s missing. Not continuing to just say the same old words, the rosary, the litany of the different episodes of crisis, but recovery of what’s missing from the terrible abyss of tax evasion that distinguishes ltaly and makes it the third country in the world after Mexico and Turkey. This isn’t a record that we should be pleased with.
The social role of the museums
These days, people talk about museums and they say loads of stuff that in the main is not true or not entirely true, however, very rarely do we remember that the museum is a very recent cultural institution. The concept of a museum that we think of nowadays, basically came into being in the 18th century, and I said then, that if it’s got a date of creation, it can also have an expiry date. Let’s keep that in mind. Do we want to close them down? OK. And yet we should continue to constantly ask ourselves what their role is. The connection with the school is incredibly important, and it’s important to remember with all this rhetoric about beauty that is produced in Italy ad nauseam, that many people indulge in (whether they are the President of the Council, a mayor or a former mayor) with all this rhetoric about beauty, we forget that beauty is nothing unless it’s history.
We are all guardians of our artistic heritage
Beauty is History, the fact that with the latest education reforms, there’s a tendency to abolish the history of art, reducing the space and perhaps talking about art education as though everyone has to be presented with a blank sheet, all of a sudden they become Rembrandt or Picasso or Michelangelo, this is a really serious mistake, because - in the words of a great art historian, Gombrich: “Unless all Italians are the guardians of their heritage, then our heritage, the heritage that belongs to everyone, will die.” Salvatore Settis
Posted on October 27, 2015 at 7:53 PM in | Post a comment | Listen
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“When all’s said and done, in Italy, the Statute of Limitations is the safety net for the delinquents and it’s also one of the main causes of the courts being clogged up. Today, a delinquent who has blatantly been caught “red-handed” does everything possible to draw out the trial procedures to arrive at the desired objective: for the trial to collapse due to the Statute of Limitations. In fact, the Statute of Limitations should avoid the State being able to “wake up” at any time and go after a citizen for a crime committed, thirty years earlier, for example. Obviously, when the State starts to take action or when it sends someone for trial, (which means that it has been given the go-ahead by a prosecuting magistrate or a Judge for the Preliminary investigation) then it’s obvious that the Statute of Limitations must be suspended.
That’s what happens in nearly all of the rest of Europe, where, with different mechanisms, the Statute of Limitations is obviously suspended or interrupted for the duration of the trial. In France and Germany, it is interrupted by the investigation activities, for example, simply by a preliminary interview with a suspect. In the United Kingdom, the Statute of Limitations does not even exist. As soon as it gained saeats in Parliament, the M5S proposed the interruption of the Statute of Limitations as soon as someone is sent for trial - for as long as that trial is ongoing. It’s a simple and effective measure that would avoid many many injustices. When a crime runs out of time because of the Statute of Limitations, the State fails twice: once because it wasn’t able to discover the truth; and once more because all the effort of the judges, the lawyers, the court officials, the investigators and so on - is just thrown away - with an atrocious waste of public money.
From 2003 to 2013, about one and a half million trials disappeared into thin air because of the Statute of Limitations.
Among the numerous people that have taken advantage of the Statute of Limitations in various ways are business people and politicians (and these are just examples): De Benedetti, Moggi, Tanzi, Geronzi, Ricucci, Fazio, Caltagirone, Gelli, Berlusconi, Andreotti, Calderoli, D’Alema, Penati, Scajola).
Today, Wednesday, in Lucca, the families of the victims of Viareggio are going to court where a really efficient team of judges is racing against time to get to the truth. Unfortunately, it’s practically impossible that three levels of judgement can be concluded before the crimes fall out of time, due to the Statute of Limitations.
You can study thousands of pages of law, but there’s not even one that makes it possible to explain to Marco Piagentini who lost his wife (aged 40) and two children (aged 2 and 4) in the tragedy, that some crimes are about to “run out of time”. The time has come to stop this. On 29 August 2014, the premier announced the reform of the Statute of Limitations; on 20 November 2014, after the shameful Eternit case, once more the premier said: “The Statute of Limitations has to change. Justice has to be done. I am struck by the interviews with the families of the victims and they make me shiver. The families are so dignified, they beliee in the justice system, even more than some public servants do. It’s not posible to console a person for the death of someone they love. There’s no verdict that can do that. However, the idea of clutching at the justice system is for me somethig that involves endless suffering and beauty.“ Did he mean what he was saying, or was he just talking to get media coverage? Almost a year has gone by: the Statute of Limitations has not changed. The PD continues to say “no” to the M5S proposal! The Statute of Limitations must be interrupted at the moment someone is sent for trial: we are asking the government to keep to its commitments!”
Alfonso Bonafede, M5S Lower House
Posted on October 27, 2015 at 3:50 PM in | Post a comment | Listen
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Passaparola by Serge Latouche, French economist and philosopher. Serge Latouche is one of the regular contributors to the journal Revue du MAUSS, he’s president of the association “La ligne d’horizon”, he’s emeritus professor of economics at the University of Paris-Sud and at the The Institute of Economic and Social Development studies (IEDES) in Paris.
“We’ve reached a point that means we can no longer go on as we are doing!
Everyone’s talking about crisis and it’s slightly paradoxical because I’ve always been hearing about a crisis ever since 1968 when there was a cultural crisis, then in 1972, with the publication of the work by The Club of Rome, there was talk of an ecological crisis, then there was the neoliberal counter-revolution and the social crisis with Margaret Thatcher and Reagan, and now there’s the financial crisis and the economic crisis after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers.
Finally, all these crises are getting mixed up and we’re seeing a crisis of civilisation, an anthropological crisis. At this point, the system can no longer be reformed - we have to exit from this paradigm - and what is it? It’s the paradigm of a growth society Our society has been slowly absorbed by an economy based on growth, not growth to satisfy needs - and that would be a good thing - but growth for the sake of growth and this naturally leads to the destruction of the planet because infinite growth is incompatible with a finite planet.
We need a real reflection when we talk about an anthropological crisis. We need to take this seriously because we need a decolonisation of the imagination. Our imagination has been colonised by the economy. Everything has become economics. This is specific to the West and it’s fairly new in our history. It was in the seventeenth century when there was a great ethical switch with the theory expounded by Bernard Mandeville. Before, people said that altruism was good and then: "no, we have to be egoists, we have to make as much profit as possible; greed is good“. Yes - to destroy our "oikos“ (our home) more quickly. And we have actually got to that point.
We can see this with Climate Change, with the loss of biodiversity, with the pollution of our air, water, and soil. We’ve reached a point that means we can no longer go on as we are doing! We either change direction, or it will be the end of humanity.
So the project is to exit from the growth society, exit from the consumer society, exit from the economy and find once more the social or better still, the societal. This revolution is primarily a cultural revolution, but it’s not a quick fix, it’s a long process that takes time.
When I started organising conferences on degrowth, I thought it was necessary to change direction before the collapse, but now I’m getting more of a pessimist. I think that we won’t avoid the collapse. We need to make preparations for the time after the collapse.. And let’s hope it’s not a total collapse and that there is a possibility for humanity to have a future, to invent a new future.” Serge Latouche
Posted on October 21, 2015 at 12:40 PM in | Post a comment | Listen
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The number of poor people in Italy is increasing. According to the July figures published by the official statistics agency, ISTAT, there are 10 million poor people. According to the report published this week by the study group Unimpresa, just last year, there’s been an increase of 30,000 - that’s as though a whole town has fallen into poverty. There’s just no sign that this epidemic is going to calm down.
The working poor
The ones affected are not only those without a job, who represent about a third. Most of the people who are poor, are working! They go into the office. They’ve got a boss. They’ve got responsibility. They pay taxes. However, they don’t manage to have a dignified life. They can’t pay for medical treatment. They do without going away on holiday. They eat low cost rubbish food that makes them ill. They suffer because they cannot guarantee a future for their offspring and because they have to queue up at the Caritas soup kitchen when they’ve finished work. They are not free people. They are slaves. According to the Unimpresa results, some are employed part time (740 people), some full time (1.66 million people), some are freelancers working part time (802 thousand), some are contractors (349 thousand) and some have long term part time contracts (2.5 million). In total there are 6.1 million such workers living in poverty - with fragile job prospects and low income. They are thus slaves. The triumphalist announcements of the government’s propaganda have no meaning and show that there’s an underlying intention of taking us for a ride: more people in work and more people in poverty. The government doesn't want to eliminate poverty. It just wants to normalise it with the “Jobs Act”.
VIDEO “There’s nothing to celebrate”. The truth about the GDP and unemployment
The government’s propaganda lies
The unemployment figures are meaningless and everyone knows that. The nespapers and the government spout off about three figure numbers. They talk about more than 300 thousand more fixed contracts than there were in the first 8 months of 2014. Of these 300 thousand, almost 230 thousand are simply already existing contracts that have bene converted and counted as new contracts. There are in fact only slightly more than 10 thousand new worker-slaves a month because the "increasing-protection-contract" allows the employer complete freedom to fire the employee in the first 3 years. Workers will all be fired shortly before the end of their three year limit and then they will either be taken on again or replaced by new slaves. According to ISTAT, those who are trainees, the workers with the least amount of security, are counted as officially employed. How much does a trainee earn? In certain cases, a pat on the back and at the end of their training, a kick up the backside. There’ve been 30,772 new trainees taken on in 8 months just in Sicily, 11,912 in Lazio, 9,021 in Emilia Romagna and 4,843 in Veneto. If you think about all 20 regions, you can understand the trick.
The Citizens’ Income is the only way out
Jobs are no longer being created and poverty is increasing. What the government is doing is propaganda and they are just finding ways of publishing figures that keep the "market“ calm. The GDP is increasing thanks to drugs, prostitution, and contraband, thanks to favourable international conditions, and thanks to more people with jobs - people that are still poor. For an Italian person, nothing has changed. The M5S Citizens’ Income that lifts out of poverty someone who hasn’t got a job (and helps them find one) , as well as someone who has a job, but is still poor, - the M5S Citizens’ Income is the only way to save Italy.
VIDEO Shock admission from PD person talking live: THEY ARE KEEPING UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH ON PURPOSE!
Posted on October 21, 2015 at 10:07 AM in | Post a comment | Listen
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