Comedian Beppe Grillo Make History in Italian Elections

Euro debt crisis looms again as Italians defy EU austerity demands

The eurozone’s debt crisis strategy was in chaos on Monday night after anti-austerity parties appeared on track to win a majority of seats in the Italian parliament, vastly complicating efforts to forge a government able to carry through EU-imposed reforms.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

5 Star comedian Grillo has embarrassed Italy’s corrupt political elite, and hoping to change Italy’s political landscape.

In an earthquake result, the Five Star protest movement of comedian Beppe Grillo looked likely to emerge as the biggest single party in the lower house.

The scourge of bankers and corrupt elites, Mr Grillo has campaigned for a return to the lira and a restructuring of Italy’s €1.9 trillion (£1.64 trillion) public debt.

The conservative bloc of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi looked poised to win the senate, coming back from the political grave with vows to rip up the EU’s austerity plans and push through tax cuts to pull Italy out of deep slump.

“The majority of Italians have clearly voted against the Brussels consensus. That is a damning indictment,” said Mats Persson from Open Europe.

A euphoric rally on European bond and stock markets early on Monday gave way to abrupt selling as it became clear that Italy would be left with a hung parliament and no consensus over fundamental policies, leaving the country almost ungovernable.

The yield spread of 10-year Italian bonds over German Bunds jumped 30 basis points to 290 in late trading. The MIB index of stocks in Milan saw a rollercoaster day, while the euro gave up its early gains against the dollar.

Plastic Politican: Corrupt multi-millionaire Silvio Berlusconi has had more plastic surgery than any other politician in history

The centre-Left Democrats of Pier Luigi Bersani won the most votes on the popular count with pledges to stay the course on EU crisis strategy, but fell short of seats under Italy’s complicated electoral system. He cannot pass legislation without the backing in both houses.

His economic spokesman, Stefano Fassina, said the result pointed to paralysis, and might force a second election. “The projections so far suggest there will be no stable government.”

It is unclear whether the European Central Bank (ECB) can continue to stand behind the Italian debt market under its Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) scheme if there is no party able to deliver on austerity cuts and reforms demanded by Berlin and Brussels.

“People have forgotten that the OMT cannot be triggered without a vote in the German Bundestag. This is going to be a huge problem, and we may be back to the political stand-off between the North and South of Europe,” said Mr Persson.

Giuseppe Ragusa, from Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, said there would be huge pressure to include outgoing premier Mario Monti in any new configuration to reassure markets and create a fig-leaf of continuity to keep the ECB on board, even though Mr Monti himself suffered a serious defeat.

His Civic List won just 9pc of the vote in what amounted to a popular rejection of his hair-shirt policies. “It is a disaster for Monti, calling into question every thing he has done. He must regret that he ever got drawn into politics,” said Gary Jenkins from Swordfish.

Mr Monti took power 15 months ago at the head of a technocrat team after Mr Berlusconi was forced from office in murky circumstances.

Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, alleges that he was the victim a “coup d’etat” orchestrated by EU officials and German political leaders, and has made no secret of his thirst for revenge.

“This election is close to being the worst-case scenario for the markets. If there is one wild card in the European pack willing to do anything, it is Silvio Berlusconi, and he is sitting on the biggest barrel of gunpowder in Europe,” said Mr Jenkins.

“Italy is big enough to blow up the whole eurozone. That means Italy’s leader can take a tough line in the pyschological game with Germany. The question is what markets will do. The Italian debt auction on Wednesday will be very interesting to watch.”

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Both Italy and Sweden Aiming to Be Cashless Societies

Patrick Henningsen 21st Century Wire Sept 11, 2012 Another 911, and the elites’ dream of a One World Order moves closer to reality. Enter the cashless society, likely to enter via the back door of our society much faster than people think… This latest report is eerily reminiscent of the recent IBM TV advert which is promoting the use of RFID chips in order to “make checkout lines easier”. Watch this creation from IBM, hoping the make the future into a sexy, paranoid dystopia…

Italy Plans to Ban Any Cash Transactions Over 50 Euros

Silver Doctors You won’t even be able to fill up your car without a credit or debit card in Italy beginning in 2013, as the Italian Council of Ministers has voted to increase the current capital controls banning the use of cash on transactions over €1,000, down to any transaction over €50! As we stated when Italy first announced capital controls and caps on cash transactions several months ago, expect bans on cash transactions to be coming to a neighborhood near you in the next 2-3 years. Courtesy Google Translate: Rome – The technical Rome government wants to limit cash transactions in Italy. From 2013, citizens may pay amounts in excess of 50 euros only by credit or debit card. That the Council of Ministers decided today. The measure is intended to reflect the money laundering and black money payments to clamp down. Since July, the government has banned cash transactions over 1,000 euros. Read more ….facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest

Decline of the West: Blood-lust in the streets of Libya suffices for justice

By Patrick Henningsen 21st Century Wire October 21, 2011 It appears that Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi may have been handed down his final verdict by NATO rebels, but it’s perhaps an even more bloody awful fate already suffered by a morally detached western civilization. The man who liberated his country from the tyrannical monarchy of King Idris back in 1969… was tried and sentenced by bullet today. Gaddafi modeled himself after Omar MukhtarThe Lion of the Desert, the only other man who has led a genuine, independent Libyan resistance, fighting against a brutal Italian colonization in 1927. Yet, our media tell us he’s just another dead tyrant. Unable to conceal her philistine nature, pathetic US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to crack a predictably disingenuous joke. When hearing the news of Gaddafi’s death she cackled as she told reporters, “We came, we saw, he died!”  News clip of Hillary Clinton’s cackle over the death of Libya’s Gaddafi This has become the new narrative in the US and western Europe now, where foreign leaders and other non-state actors with brown skin are given lengthy trials through press briefings by suited politicians in places like Washington, London and Paris, echoed by the corporate media until an antagonist is born for public consumption. Following the White House’s comical staged hoax of SEAL Team 6′s gallant raid on long-dead Osama bin Laden, and with no evidence to show it actually happened other than President Obama’s TV speeches- we get the next public assassination. After all, Obama’s far-fetched tale of the bin-Laden mission somehow vindicated all those innocent lives ruined by US incarceration and outright torture of thousands of young men since the War on Terror officially began in 2001. Al Jazeera will no doubt play the shaky cell phone video of the man being stripped and dragged through the streets of Sirte by the NATO rebel mob. Somehow they believe, Gaddafi’s brutal post-mortem will vindicate their careless efforts and somehow make right the thousands of innocents who have perished- so that Libya can finally become part of the globalist, debt-based, neoliberal economic IMF system. The west and its banking elite have nothing left to plunder other than middle class pension funds and incomes at home, so they are relying on plundering countries in the east and south in order to refill its sadly diminishing coffers. This is the only way to get their hands on any real liquidity or assets.

JUSTICE? Gaddafi could never be put on trial by the West, it's a stage they cannot afford to give him.

The same treatment was given to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Like Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden, he worked hand in hand with America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 in order to help western intelligence agencies achieve their operational goals, and thus the foreign policy objectives of the US, Great Britain and Israel. Grainy cell phone videos of Saddam’s circus execution somehow vindicated those in the west who liquidated so many innocent Iraqi lives since 1991, and arguably before. This is the new trend in dispensing due process, in a declining western civilization where blood-lust suffices for justice. After the protracted media trials of both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, globalist power-brokers will never allow their war criminals to stand trial and spill the beans on all their dirty little secrets. Over the last few decades, both Americans and western Europeans have become well-trained media consumers, and absorb their talking points much in the same way that grade school children dutifully repeat after their teachers and walk in single file. As adults, their teachers are CNN, FOX, the BBC, and the newest addition to the state information corps, US CENTCOM’s own Al Jazeera. None of them have any genuine moral or ethical perspective left in their editorial vision. The corporate networks will reserve any real humanitarian compassion for a handful of trapped miners, baby seals, missing Caucasian children and Amanda Knox. Our new teachers have taught the dutifully minded among us that when the mob labels a head of state or non-state actor as a tyrant, then regime change must take place, and that this man deserves to die. They have taught us that one dead US soldier is worth more in headlines than 100 dead brown-skinned Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, or Libyans- women and children included. That is the overwhelming power of the 21st century media. Will Libya have anything near the stability it enjoyed over the last 30 years? Will its people enjoy the mountain of state benefits available to them under the Gaddafi rein? Will Libyans be able to retain ownership of their country’s bounty of natural resources, and see the state reinvesting its profits back into their country for the benefit of future generations? History has taught us that the answer to each and every one of these questions is of course…no. History has written all over the sands of  the Maghreb of North Africa, and Libya in particular. It has always been under the thumb of one empire or another- from the Romans, the Spanish, the Vatican’s Knights of Malta, the Ottomans, and Mussolini’s Italy. Libya’s first brush with America came in the early 19th century, when war broke out between the United States and what was then  referred to as Tripolitania, in what came to be known as the Barbary Wars. Only this time around the Barbary pirates are on the other side of the fighting, and they are known the world over by the name of ‘NATO’. It’s only fitting that this latest chapter of history should be written as follows…
It was clear from day one that the Anglo-American empire, along with its clients like Qatar, were actively supporting and planning to bring destabilization to the country. From the very first days of the civil war in January 2011, before the shell casings had even hit the ground, western envoys and consultants worked with known al-Qaida fighters and criminals in Libya to form a new NTC government, a new central bank and a new state oil holding company. NATO were deployed to give brutal air support to these new gangs of rebel paramilitaries, and for nearly 10 months, both those groups killed, tortured, raped and looted everything in their path. Meanwhile, offshore transnational corporations from the US, Europe and Qatar carved up the country’s assets. Months followed years of instability, infighting and acts of internal retribution followed. The poor became poorer, the rich became richer, organized crime blossomed and thousands of middle class Libyans were allowed to immigrate to the UK, France and Italy. This would come to be known as Libya’s liberation.
What it means The UN issued the citation, and NATO came in with the tow truck. Make no mistake, in the real world, NATO is the USA and the USA is NATO. It’s a politically correct way of using military force without being seen to be acting alone as an imperial aggressor. But what about the NTC’s death squads, the theft, the rape, the torture and destruction of citizens’ property, business, and whole lives? To pass the buck a little further, NATO’s goals and end-game is handed over to Libya’s NTC, this way everyone’s asses are covered. Politicians in Washington, London and Paris should be proud. They got everything they wanted, and with no dirt under their nails. If no one in the US, UK, France, the UN or NATO’s technicians of death are held accountable for the sacking and looting of Libya- the crime of the 21st century, then expect that they will simply move forward, and do it again, and again. So who’s next? Syria? There is no more moral high ground, no more western values, no beliefs to use as a back-stop for western civilization. Was Gaddafi guilty? Is that it then, a bullet? He will never be afforded the same trial that anyone reading this article would expect as their god-given right. So what makes any among us believe that we deserve any of these so-called rights we think we enjoy in the west? Meanwhile, the US and UK corporate media can’t stop parading those barbaric pictures on the front page in exactly the same manner as Libya’s NATO rebels where parading corpses around town. And this is what 2000 years of civilization brought? Who are we kidding? -facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest