RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/italy-again-the-euro-again/

“Revenge,” it is said, “is a dish best served cold”. The creation of the euro, it is said, was the triumph of politics over economics. The eurozone crisis a decade or so later, it is said, was the revenge of economics.

Well, economics has returned for another helping.

Accepting Italy as one of the eurozone’s founding members was a decision only made possible by ignoring common sense, by twisting statistics, and by making a mockery of the rules. But it was a Pyrrhic victory: Italy was allowed to trick its way onto a voyage that damned it. The euro simply did not fit the realities of Italy’s economy or its politics. By dramatically cutting the country’s financing costs (borrowing lire would have carried a significantly higher nominal cost) adopting the single currency allowed Rome to avoid tackling the country’s high debt load, a debt load that was made all the more dangerous now that it was all denominated in a ‘foreign’ currency. Italy could no longer print lire to pay off its creditors.

When the eurozone crisis hit, Italy was one of the victims, and so, in some respects was its democracy. In something that came uncomfortably close to a coup, the eurozone leadership essentially used Italy’s financial fragility as a lever to secure the replacement in 2011 of Prime Minister Berlusconi by a Brussels man, Mario Monti, a pliable, unelected proconsul. Next time you hear Brussels lecturing Eastern Europeans on democracy remember that.

Italy weathered the crisis in a ‘just a flesh wound’ sort of way. Its problems became chronic, rather than acute, if that’s the correct adjective to describe the consequences of staying stuck in the euro’s deflationary trap: High rates of unemployment and anemic economic growth.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/italian-elections-endless-appeal-easy-money/

The two political champions of ‘moderate’ Italy — Berlusconi and Renzi — have both fallen, rejected resoundingly by voters very much imbued with the spirit of Brexit and Trump’s deplorables. ‘Populism’ has been the ready explanation, but there is much more to it than that.

On March 5, Italy looked like France without Emmanuel Macron. The national elections, held the day before, were hailed as a triumph for the so-called populists. Added together, the political parties that could be so labelled gained 58 per cent of the votes. “Moderates” of the Left and the Right, namely the Democratic Party and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, performed badly.

This seems to be another tile falling down in a domino effect. Since Brexit (June 2016) and the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States (November 2016), observers have looked for a pattern in political shocks. Some analysts have suggested that middle- and lower-middle-class voters are protesting, all over Western democracies, against globalisation, as they feel its costs (businesses moving to emerging economies) and fail to see its benefits (lower prices, more innovation, better international division of labour). Others have pointed to a sense of frustration people are developing with international organisations, beginning with the EU, that are perceived as an attempt to shield political decision-making from democratic accountability. Almost everybody believes social media has changed the rules of the game, making “mainstream media” less and less relevant and perhaps transforming the world of news into a series of “echo chambers”, where like-minded people listen exclusively to other like-minded people.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/05/amnesty-morally-corrupted/

When Amnesty International concerned itself with campaigning on behalf of individual and identifiable political prisoners of regimes of whatever political colour it did some real good.

However, it now appears to have become an expensive exercise in wholesale and futile virtue-signalling, with some highly dubious choices of targets. If it is still campaigning for individual prisoners, one doesn’t hear much of this.

Kate Allen, UK Director of Amnesty International (the world’s third-biggest Amnesty Organisation), would-be Labour politician and long-time former mistress of extreme leftist and anti-Israel activist Ken Livingstone, appears to have had much to do with radical changes in Amnesty’s policies and political colour in Britain. Acccording to Wikipedia, ‘Allen undertook a major restructure.’

She was quoted in the International Express of May 7 on planned demonstrations at President Trump’s proposed British visit: ‘We and thousands of our supporters will very definitely be making our voices heard. In the 15 months of his presidency we’ve seen a deeply disturbing human rights rollback.’

Huh? I do not believe there is one single instance of ‘human rights rollback’ that can be blamed on Trump. His attempted crackdown on illegal immigration has nothing whatever to do with human rights, but with stopping the law of a democratic nation being flouted and damage being done with impunity to its polity, economy and identity. The accusation is not only false but will achieve nothing good. Amnesty, in Britain at least, appears to have gone from being a respected and effective defender of persecuted individuals to being just another bunch of virtue-signalling creeps.

The difference [between what Tommy Robinson did and any reporter] is that the BBC and other mainstream media are determined to give as little coverage as possible to the mass Muslim rape of infidel girls.

These same cops arrested Tommy Robinson on Friday not because he did anything wrong, but because he was drawing attention to Muslim crimes that they would rather see ignored – and drawing attention, too, by extension, to their own genuinely criminal failure to defend innocent children from what was essentially jihadist torture.

Within hours, according to some sources, Robinson was tried and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Even in Islam-appeasing Britain, this seems inconceivable. It sounds like Soviet or Nazi “justice,” not like British jurisprudence.

However Tommy Robinson may have strayed from the straight and narrow over the years, he is a champion of those victimized children, a voice for freedom, and a living rebuke to the cowardice of the British media, police, social workers, and other officials and public figures who knew what was going on in flats in Rotherham, Newcastle, and elsewhere, but stayed silent.

All right, the competition is over. Britain wins.

SEOUL, May 27 (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his commitment to “complete” denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and to a planned meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Sunday.

Moon and Kim agreed at a surprise second meeting on Saturday that a possible North Korea-U.S. summit, currently planned for June 12 in Singapore, must be held successfully, Moon told a news conference in Seoul.Moon, who returned to Seoul on Thursday morning after meeting Trump in Washington in a bid to keep the high-stakes U.S.-North Korea summit on track, said he delivered Trump’s “firm will” to end the hostile relationship with North Korea and pursue bilateral economic cooperation. (Reporting by Soyoung Kim and Hyonhee Shin in SEOUL Editing by Paul Tait)