Tagged with Italy

Italy: Renzi’s pre-election coup

Matteo RenziPut more money in ordinary people’s pockets to boost household spending while taxing banks and axing military and other wasteful spending: sounds like a political coup and it was one Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi pulled off consummately  on Friday.

Renzi’s cabinet passed a decree to reduce taxes for those earning between 8,000 and 26,000 euros a year by about €80 per month, starting next month. The decree “for competitiveness and social justice”, which goes into effect immediately but must be confirmed by parliament within 60 days, means almost €7 billion in tax cuts this year and €10billion in the following years. Continue reading →

How PM Matteo Renzi’s ‘Jobs Act’ will sink Italy

Matteo RenziItaly’s new PM, Matteo Renzi, has pledged to slash the country’s record unemployment with his American-branded ‘Jobs Act’. But his labour reforms, which will see short term job contracts extended for up to 3 years, are more of the same medicine applied since the turn of the 1990s that have been such bad news for the Italian economy and workers, argues Paolo Pini.

Renzi has pledged to enact reforms that tackle Italy’s growth and productivity crisis. But his ‘flexible’  labour reforms – which will allow employers to fire workers on the payroll for three years without justification –   will do nothing to reverse the backwardness of Italy’s economy. Continue reading →

Europe’s debt – a con-trick binding the people to banks

The broken Euro symbolThis article was translated by Tom Gill based on the original in Italian at  Il Fatto Quotidiano  by Loretta Napoleoni.

From this year Italians have a 45 billion-euro–a-year bill to pay under the EU Fiscal Compact, a budgetary straightjacket binding Rome to 20 years of economically and socially lethal spending cuts and tax rises. It’s time to end this vicious cycle of impoverishment, designed for the sole benefit of private banks, and cancel the debt, says Loretta Napoleoni.

In 2014 the fiscal compact will become operational. For those who want to refresh your memory here is the definition that Wikipedia gives : Continue reading →

Is it all over for Silvio?

Berlusconi says farewell1Is it all over for Silvio? This question has been asked repeatedly over the past twenty years since the billionaire media magnate entered Italian politics. Today the answer has never looked more like a Yes.

On Wednesday the former prime minister was forced into a humiliating u-turn as plans to topple the government by withdrawing his party’s support backfired very badly.

Silvio Berlusconi’s actions prompted a confidence vote but Italian Premier Enrico Letta, from the Democratic Party that since the Spring has been in a ‘grand coalition’ with Berlusconi’s PDL party, won it. The Senate voted 235 to 70 in favour. Continue reading →

Italy’s centre-left is dead, long live the Italian Left!

The ‘grand coalition’ between the Democratic Party and Berlusconi’s right-wing People of Liberty party means it’s time to say goodbye to the ‘centre-left’ and hello to a new Italian Left, says Marco Sferini.

For the first time after the death of the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party , the bourgeois forces find themselves politically united in an executive that brings together supporters of the centre-right, the entrepreneurial class, the middle class and even the common people who voted, to no avail, for the Democratic Party having been mislead that their’s was a “useful vote” that would help the Democratic Party beat Silvio Berlusconi and his People of Liberty party. Continue reading →