Archive for January, 2010

We read or hear a lot about the rise of worldwide unemployment, while not so much on the different social reactions to the loss of jobs or incomes across the world. Most of the little we know is vague or impressionistic- that Americans are rather tolerant about the ambushes of capitalism; that the French cherish their revolutionary heritage and still practice rebellion occasionally; that Germans dislike striking; that Spanish anarchists have quieted down; and so on and so forth. Stereotypes are misleading, although they often describe realities or are ultimately vindicated by facts.

Recently, employees of a number of French companies detained or even kidnapped their managers to prevent them from terminating jobs or transferring operations elsewhere. In France and Italy, industrial workers, miners and combative farmers tend to blockade highways, airports and railroad stations in order to forcibly affirm their claims. They also climb on roofs, cranes and other tall structures, install themselves there for days and nights in the cold, so reporters and cameras can rush to report on their daredevil protests. Things like these seem to be uncommon, say, in Scandinavia.

Some situations, while understandable from a human perspective, challenge common sense. For years, Fiat in Italy and Renault in France have been moving production to countries where labor and/or other costs are lower. Naturally, employees resist moves that destroy their jobs. But in specific cases, their demands border on the absurd. It’s common knowledge that the world automotive industry expanded too much, and that overcapacity became huge. Consequently, output had to be reduced. In the case of the Fiat plant in Termini Imerese, Sicily, the company has insisted that the costs of making cars there are so exorbitant that paying salaries and taxes without making cars would lower the losses of said plant. The result? The Termini Imerese operation will be terminated in a year or so. The management will now strive to determine a line of production that is not focused on automobile production. This is for the additional reason that many urban administrations everywhere are discouraging or even forbidding car traffic in city centers as to limit pollution. In the meantime, Fiat shut all her plants in Italy for two weeks.

The Termini Imerese unions simply said no- the plant must continue to produce cars that don’t sell, or that sell at a heavy loss. They argue that for a whole century, Fiat received giant subsidies from the government, so in the current crisis the company must return what received. Also, that the automotive orientation of the local factory must remain, even if alternatives are offered. Eventually unionized workers risk losing everything, should any prospective buyer of the plant conclude that said workforce is unreasonably combative.

At Pomigliano, in Southern Italy, at the site of another Fiat plant, a number of workers even threatened to set themselves on fire, should their jobs disappear.  Suicide is such a tragedy that no facetious remark is permissible. However, it’s evident that they would not accept working in nearby farms and plantations (where black laborers toil, but are increasingly discriminated), even if government subsidies would significantly add to farm wages. Picking oranges is heavy work, pressing keys on car-making robots is not.

Suicidal threats are something that one would expect in India (where some persons are said to kill themselves so that remorse will punish their enemies), or in Japan, where stoic, heroic sacrifices are a national tradition, rather than in sunny Pomigliano, not far from Naples. Manufacturing activities have spread so much worldwide that situations like Pomigliano, Termini Imerese and the kidnapping of French managers may happen everywhere. Whether behavior to defend jobs and incomes are going to stay different or become similar is a question that can only get vague and tentative answers.

There’s a story that should be told on every website of the world, suggests La Gazzetta dello Sport’s journalist Mario Canfora. And that’s true. But there’s no happy ending. And neither beginning to be honest. Nuova Sebastiani (NS) Martos Napoli’s story promised all but good things also back in September when Lance Allred and JR Reynolds left the club. Not even movie mogul and Napoli soccer president Aurelio De Laurentiis could imagine such a drama.

While NBA fans are quite used to see their teams shift from one city to another in search for more wealth and fans (like Seattle Supersonics did migrating to Oklahoma City), this is not to be considered the norm in Italy, especially at the non-metropolitan level. Normally, teams coming from small towns are actually more supported than those from, say, Rome or Milan. They tend to have a harder core of supporters and the percentage of season ticket holders in comparison to the number of citizens is always very high. That was almost the same case for Nuova Sebastiani Basket in Rieti, almost a hundred kilometers from Rome. After surviving the fight for relegation, their volcanic president Gaetano Papalia decided to do the unthinkable and move the whole team to Naples, almost 300 km south.

Basketball in Naples before Nuova Sebastiani and Papalia
S.S.Napoli Basket won the Italian Cup in 2006 and joined Euroleague basketball a season later, before failing to register to the Italian League for debts insolvency in 2008. Thus, last season Italian Serie A jumped off without them and Capo d’Orlando and the league was reduced to just 16 teams.

The worst team in Europe
Papalia decided to give new life to basketball in Naples and searched for some help from local institutions at the beginning. The team responded very badly on the pitch losing every game, conceding 80 points average to the opposition and also saw 8 points deducted (for debts insolvency again) from their total amount, that is zero. NS is the worst team in Europe, if not the world at the moment. There’s no other team in the European major leagues that has not won a single game so far. But when that small amount of Neapolitan fans (who will be given back the money spent on a season ticket next week) thought to have seen it all, they did not consider that Damon Jones, Robert Traylor and Travis Best would not come back from the US after Christmas holidays, so that coach Federico Pasquini (who just heads to Naples in the weekends – this resulting in him having just recently learnt his players’ names) had to field Under-19 players (who descend to Naples every weekend from Rieti) in the match against Biella. That game was lost 54-124 and Nuova Sebastiani then shifted from conceding 80 to 100 points on average to the opposition in the following games.

Here’s their recent streak:
Biella at Naples 124-54
Naples at Rome 37-138
Naples at Pesaro 64-126
Cantù at Naples 128-37
Siena at Naples 143-49

That’s just ridiculous
The game played against Italian Champions Siena was the worst really: Siena had just defeated Maccabi Tel Aviv last week for the first time in their history at the tenth attempt in the Euroleague and are aiming to a Final Four spot in Paris in May. They’ve been the best team in Italy for the last three seasons at least and they are amongst the elite in Europe. Everybody was expecting them to win with a very wide margin. They made it indeed but the thing is, they made it fielding just one of the regulars (Nikos Zisis) plus six Under-17s and one Under 19! Even so, they managed to score a record in Serie A, breaking 1971 Simmenthal Milano (vs Udine) and 2010 Lottomatica Roma’s (vs Naples) 138-points records.

Montepaschi Siena pretended not to have their best players available for this game (officially McIntyre, Hawkins, Sato, Domercant, Stonerook, Lavrinovic and Eze were all sidelined with injuries) in order to prevent themselves from a potential referral from the FIP (Italian Basketball Federation). Every team involved in a match against Nuova Sebastiani now could risk a serious referral or could have at least some problems with FIP legally wise. As Gazzetta dello Sport journalist Luca Chiabotti said, that’s just ridiculous.

Basically coach Simone Pianigiani (who’s also the National team coach) decided to rest the best before the difficult trip to Istanbul that awaits Siena in the Euroleague next Wednesday. Fair enough.

Something must be done
One of the hypotheses would be to adopt an extraordinary measure just for this case. The best thing to do would probably be to let Naples slip to Lega Due (the lower division). But just today (Sunday January 31st) President Papalia announced that the team will be soon backed from a group of Neapolitans investors. Is it really true? Or is it just another wolf cry? Only time will tell. But the whole situation is going fast from joke to drama.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s accelerator pedal problem isn’t likely to have much of an impact on its bottom line this year, but the damage to its image will undermine it in the long term, analysts said Thursday.

“The impact on Toyota’s business performance will be limited,” an auto analyst at a Japanese securities house said on condition of anonymity. “But Toyota’s image of safe and high quality is damaged.”

The world’s top automaker said Thursday it will recall an additional 1.09 million vehicles in the United States to rectify potential problems with gas pedals and floor mats.

The announcement came a day after Toyota said it would suspend U.S. sales of eight models — including the top-selling Camry — because the accelerator pedals could get stuck.

Analysts were forecasting a rebound in earnings for the business year to March 2011 because the failure of U.S. rivals General Motors Co. and Chrysler Corp. were expected to boost Toyota’s sales in the North American market.

That scenario is no longer likely, they said.

In 2008, Toyota became the world’s biggest automaker in production terms after going all-out to chase GM for the title. But that achievement, signaling GM’s first fall from the top in 77 years, may have come at a dear price.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Toyota extends car recall to Europe (thestar.com)
• Toyota extends car recall to Europe (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Toyota supplier ramps up output of new pedal (financialpost.com)

A South African community is to challenge German homeopathic giant Schwabe Pharmaceuticals in court in Munich next week over a traditional medicine the company is seeking to patent.

The case could set a precedent in cases in which multinationals use the plants and indigenous knowledge of developing countries, where laws may not protect communities’ intellectual property rights.

Schwabe wants to patent a method for producing extracts from the roots of Pelargonium sidoides and Pelargonium reniforme to make cough and cold syrups. The company has also hit problems in India over alleged bioprospecting.

The community, in Alice in the Eastern Cape, said the extraction method has been used for generations by traditional healers and Schwabe has no right to patent it.

Community member Nomthunzi Sizani said she grew up with the plant and it was trusted in her community as a flu and cough remedy.

“The community wants to stop [companies] from saying they were the first to know that this medicine is important, because we grew up knowing that. They are like thieves, stealing the indigenous knowledge,” she said.

The plant is endemic to Southern Africa, especially the Eastern Cape and Lesotho. The Zulu, Basotho, Xhosa and Mfengu peoples have used it for centuries to treat respiratory complaints, and the compound it contains, cumerin, is now a key ingredient in remedies.

The Alice community is supported by the Africa Centre for Biosafety and the Swiss biopiracy watchdog, the Berne Declaration.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Major Victory Against Neo-colonial Patents (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)

Businessman Porfirio Lobo on Wednesday was sworn in as the president of Honduras and issued a call for national and international reconciliation to overcome the crisis besetting his country since last June’s removal of Manuel Zelaya.

With the presence of just two regional heads of state — Panama’s Ricardo Martinelli and Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic — but a multitude of other vice presidents and representatives from countries as far away as Taiwan, Lobo opted to treat the crisis as a situation that has practically been surmounted and thanked the international community for its efforts to help reestablish normality in the country.

“We have just come out of the worst political crisis in our democratic history, but … we have managed to avoid all the great dangers that confronted our nation,” Lobo, 62, said at a ceremony lasting about six hours.

“We’re ready and willing to confront the future united,” emphasized Lobo, the winner of the November 29 election, which many of the world’s nations refused to recognize as legitimate because the balloting took place under a government they regarded as installed by a coup.

Zelaya supporters, backed by human rights organizations and most foreign governments such as Venezuela and Bolivia, said a free and fair vote was impossible in Honduras given the repression imposed by Roberto Micheletti’s government.

Before barely a score of foreign delegations and diplomats, the new president gave assurances that he wants “a necessary and indispensable reconciliation with the international community.”

His first act as president was to sanction the decree approved Tuesday night by the National Congress granting political amnesty to the officials and others involved in the crisis caused by the June 28 deposement of Zelaya.

Lobo interrupted his speech to ask congressional speaker Juan Orlando Hernandez to bring him the decree and he signed the document saying that the amnesty for political crimes was in keeping with the “principle of reconciliation.”

Amid boos, the new president thanked Costa Rican President Oscar Arias “for being interested from the beginning in a fair and peaceful solution” to the crisis, and Fernandez for signing the accord to facilitate the trip into foreign exile by Zelaya, who had been holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa for four months after sneaking back into the country.

Read more here.

North Korea appears to be employing a two-track strategy after it fired artillery shells into the West Sea border for the second consecutive day Thursday, while proceeding with inter-Korean talks on joint projects.

Pyongyang also proposed talks with the United Nations Command (UNC) on the same day to discuss the resumption of operations to excavate the remains of U.S. soldiers who fought alongside South Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War.

The secretive state resumed an “artillery exercise” by firing shells toward the South’s Yeonpyeong Island from 8:15 a.m., a South Korean defense official said.

The official added that the shells landed in waters north of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto border drawn up by the U.S.-led UNC at the end of the Korean War, which the North refuses to recognize.

A day earlier, Pyongyang fired some 100 rounds in the same area on three separate occasions. No casualties or damage occurred.

A leading North Korea watcher said that this dual-track approach is aimed at pressing the United States to hold negotiations over security issues, particularly the signing of a peace treaty.

The two Koreas remain technically at war since the Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• North Korea fires near sea border (news.bbc.co.uk)
• North And South Korea In Sea Border Clash (news.sky.com)
• Report: North, South Korea exchange fire (cnn.com)

British troops in Iraq Image via Wikipedia

If you sit in the public seats at the Chilcot inquiry, one of the first things you notice is that the witnesses have their backs to you. There is a large television screen on one side of the surprisingly small, cold room, showing their testimony live; but you can watch that from home on the official website, so at first it feels a little disappointing to attend one of the long sessions and be presented, in the flesh, with only a rear view of the invaders of Iraq. From behind, one important man in a suit can seem much like another.

And yet, as the air conditioning hums and the politicians and civil servants and soldiers lay out their elaborate defences, it becomes clear that this perspective does have its compensations. Each witness sits at the same bare desk, only a few feet away, in an exposing black chair like a Mastermind contestant. And each gives off their own little physical signals, deliberately or not.

A seemingly smooth senior official from the Ministry of Defence describes the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq as “orderly, efficient and entirely peaceful”, while jogging his feet furiously under the desk. Lieutenant General Barney White-Spunner, bulky and uniformed, commander of those forces during some of the fiercest fighting, answers questions respectfully enough; but his fingers drum impatiently on an armrest.

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and Iraq confidant, sits with theatrical ease, lanky legs and feet splayed; yet he rocks his ankles from side to side when challenged. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s even closer Iraq confidant, casually half-stifles a yawn as he begins his testimony – but also kneads the side of a finger with a tense thumb. Tomorrow, when Blair himself appears as a witness, he might be best advised to sit very still.

Beyond the witnesses, facing the public, sit the five members of the ­inquiry panel. Since the inquiry was announced last June – the fifth official British investigation in less than seven years into the 2003 Iraq war – it has often seemed that these inquisitors are being judged as much as the witnesses. The inquiry is much more ambitious than its predecessors: covering the hugely controversial build-up to the war, the conduct of the conflict itself, and the often chaotic aftermath – a total period of more than eight years, during which 179 British military personnel and an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.

Read more here.

Mustafa AKYOL for the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review

Dear friends,

I hope all is well in the Holy Land. Things are not too bad here in Turkey. Yet one thing that certainly does not look great is relations between our countries, which hit an ugly low this week.

In fact, since the beginning of your government’s “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza, which happened a year ago, a continual war of words has been going on between your leaders and ours.

But no war of words has ever helped anybody. So, as a humble commentator on Turkish affairs who would be happy to see better Israeli-Turkish relations, let me offer a few honest thoughts.

The New Turkish Republic

First, we all should see something: The Turkish Republic of today is more democratic and more Muslim-minded than it ever used to be. And these two things are not contradictory at all. In the last decade, the power of the democratically elected government has steadily increased vis-à-vis the secularist bureaucratic elite that had dominated the country since the late ’20s. As a result, the cultural sensibilities of the majority of Turkish society, in which Muslimhood plays a great role, have become more influential in policymaking.

The practical result of this is that Turkey is ruled by people such as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has a greater emotional connection with the Muslim Palestinians, and not by the ultra-secular generals who look at the Islamic world with distaste. (I know that some of you think Turkey was doing much better under those generals, but I strongly suggest consulting with our liberals or Kurds, who tasted torture in military prisons or who saw their friends assassinated by the gendarme.)

This is not to say that everything that comes out of this more democratic Turkey is sensible – no, not at all. Some of the harsh rhetoric against Israel that we see in our media is indeed fueled by anti-Semitism, which exists within various political camps. The recent TV series that depicted the Israeli military as a bunch of sadists were indeed childish and silly. Turks are a highly emotional people and their anger against the carnage in Gaza, which I share, can easily lead to the vilification of Israel, which I criticize.

However, what I or you would prefer to see does not matter much here. What matters is that this New Turkish Republic, as political analyst Graham Fuller wisely calls it, is here to stay.

Read the rest here

Hanoi Vietnam.

2 flights and 20 plus hours of traveling.

I’m a long way from New York City but it’s a warm late December morning in North Vietnam, and I’m just fine with that. I’m a little confused about the time change… Can it really be that I haven’t eaten for 2 days??!  Not sure, but I am hungry and that’s not up for debate.

This is not a travel piece, and I am not a travel writer. I am a culinary student and I’m in Vietnam. And I packed light. All I brought was my camera and my appetite.

This was my first meal in Vietnam. Cha ca fish. I was starving and would have eaten just about anything at this point, except cottage cheese – can’t stand the stuff. That said I enjoyed meal but little did I know that I would find this fish just around about any corner in Vietnam.

The ubiquitous Cha ca fish- part catfish, part bass. It’s a firm, round white-fleshed fish, that tastes just a little bit tough and fishy. The consensus at the end of the meal was that fresh herbs, greens and toasted peanuts were the winners.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found the same fresh herbs (basil, thai basil and coriander) accompanying my next meal (which was about an hour later).

Bun Cha (above) is my personal favorite.

It’s something I could eat at any meal of the day or, for that matter, every meal of the day. Bun Cha is a luke warm fish broth with cold rice noodles served with fat bits of meat (either pork or beef or other) or sometimes fried egg rolls, garnished with fresh herbs, soy beans, toasted peanuts and finished with chili sauce. If you are particularly fortunate, your Bun Cha will be served with a cold local beer called Bia Hoi and prepared by the lady seen above.

Bun Cha is an anomaly. A hearty, savory dish that is both unctuous and refreshing. Maybe this is because it is a fish soup served neither hot nor chilled, but at room temperature. One would think: Its definitely a fish soup, isn’t it? But the trick is, while it has a fish broth and fish sauce, the floating bits of protein in the broth are beef.

A better way to think about Bun Cha may be as a wet salad as opposed to a tepid soup. The raw greens, cold noodles, and cold meat are reminiscent of an Asian beef salad, something about as common as a rat in the subway, and in my opinion not much more appealing. But don’t get me wrong, Bun Cha – I’m a big fan of yours. The difference is the fish sauce. Vietnamese fish sauce come in two versions: non-fermented and fermented. Both are sweet and tangy but the latter has a smell similar to a men’s locker room.

After 48 hours in Hanoi, I hit Halong Bay. It’s beautiful. It should be one of the 7 wonders of the world. But it’s not, so there is a huge promotional campaign to have it included in the “next” 7 wonders of the world. I hope it works out.

Halong Bay has over 2000 limestone hills that seemingly just pop out of the water. It’s incredible. If you want to hear more about it, see pictures in a Lonely Planet guide or something…

Within these 2000 or so islands there are fully functioning communities, complete with their own stores, markets, even bars.

I decided to stop by one of these villages to pick-up some food for a simple lunch of fresh local fish. Who am I kidding? That was never going to happen. Things got out of hand pretty quickly and I had a full-on shellfish orgy on my hands.,

Here are a couple “before” pictures from lunch- a big-ass octopus and crayfish-looking shrimp straight from the bay.

Lunch wasn’t bad. The shrimp were steamed in vinegar and green onions and the octopus was steamed as well but in beer and red chillies. Both were served with fish sauce, but fortunately it was of the non-fermented variety. Otherwise lunch would have smelled like a wet gym-sock.

On the left is the octopus steamed in beer and chillies accompanied by the fish sauce. On the right are 2 different types of crabs that were pulled out of the bay less then an hour before they ended up on this plate and then in my belly.

On the left: the fish-monger called it a carp. But I knew better, once again the ubiquitous cha ca fish, this time fried and stuffed with tomatoes, peppers, and onions. As for the photo on the right, like I said: I enjoyed myself. Let’s leave it at that.

From Halong Bay it was time to head south and hit Saigon, the largest city in the country for a day visit.

Saigon is a big city with lots of motorbikes. About 4 million of them, so the air quality was not great, but the city more than made up for that with its gastronomic offerings. While in Saigon I ate everywhere from the gnarly (and I mean it in both the good and the bad ways) stalls in the markets (below [fish stand, roast pork, and random parts] yum) to a classic French restaurant where I was able to enjoy a traditional 5 course lunch of smoked salmon, foie gras, truffles, maigret de canard, and venison. The chef was from Nice and didn’t speak any English or Vietnamese. I may have been in Vietnam but in his house it was France, France and more France.

I enjoyed my classic French meal rich with the flavor of nostalgia, for what now feels like an ancient colonialism. The lesson I took away from this meal was that imperialism, like most other things French, tastes better in France.

During my brief stay in Vietnam I also had the chance to try some of what the hotel concierge called the “new Vietnamese haute cuisine.” It was good; I enjoyed it. But it was basically just better quality versions of the staples such as spring rolls, seafood pancakes, and the like. I really enjoyed this meal and I am going to choose not to be critical. Why? South Vietnam as we know it today is basically a completely new country. It was entirely destroyed less then 50 years ago and has only been open to trade with the United States since the mid-1990s.

I say give it time. With the quality of produce that is available in Vietnam and the ever-increasing influx of western cultural influences, there is a bright future for high-end Vietnamese cuisine.

That said the most memorable thing I ate in Saigon was Pho (below).

Pho is a large noodle soup served hot with beef or pork, and clear rice noodles, in a broth of unknown or secret origin. Like Bun Cha (and Cao La in some parts) the Pho is also topped with fresh herbs and served with fish sauce and chili sauce.

My final thoughts on Vietnam; I came in with high expectations and was a little disappointed to find that the cuisine did not vary regionally as much as I had anticipated.

But I arrived hungry and left full so the food couldn’t have been that bad.

The African uprising in Rosarno, in Southern Italy, attracted a lot of reporters, and they duly uttered their indignation at the treatment of the illegal African laborers- very low pay, barbarous lodgings and so on and so forth. Unquestionably, somewhat better accommodations should have been provided, somewhat higher wages paid. However, said reporters were not credible judges of a very complex issue at the heart of the problem.

The facts are widely known: tangerines and oranges are the crops to be harvested in Calabria from mid-November until the end of winter. In recent years, up to 2000 African laborers came to pick fruits. In the previous 15 years, the influx of foreigners was smaller and did not result in disturbances. This year, however, was different. Criminal (if not homicidal) shooting by one or two local thugs, possibly mafiosi, wounded a few immigrants and a violent tumult erupted in which African rioters seriously damaged property, assailed locals and policemen. The white counter-violence was so forceful that the Africans then risked a modern-day lynching. Once the waters calmed, they had to be transferred to distant districts.

The evidence of racism is scant. The Calabrian mafia, known as the ‘ndrangheta, is a serious evil, but its activities aren’t specifically aimed against immigrants or Africans. The truth is. local growers demand low-cost seasonal laborers as market conditions hardly permit them to offer significantly better wages.  Their produce is sold by bulk at 5 to 6 eurocents per kilo. If farmers were to pay laborers much more than 25 euros a day, it would not be worth gathering the crops in the first place. “A large part of the crop will rot on the trees,” a leading grower stated a few days ago. An additional incentive not to harvest is that the European subsidies to growers are related to the acreage of a farmer’s lands, not to the quantities he harvests.

Market laws never obey philanthropic instincts. Do all California farmers pay good wages to illegal laborers from Mexico?

Of course, politicians and the church are both exerting pressure in favor of a more charitable treatment of immigrants. But the effect of said pressure will be weak. Nobody can be forced to harvest crops at a loss.

Rosarno’s growers have made other serious mistakes in addition to failing to provide decent shelter for their migrant laborers. They made a major error in thinking that they could afford to shun manual labor with the delusion that their operations could be expanded simply relying on ‘imported’ cheap hands, and that their exertion would be limited to supervising the toil their workers from their cars. Of course, social mobility in Italy is such that the children of peasants go to college and consequently detest picking fruit.

Perhaps intensive farming has expanded too much; it may have to shrink. If this happens, less manual laborers will be needed and the immigrant condition will further deteriorate. To add to Rosarno’s problems, are the imports of citrus fruit from abroad. Retail prices in Northern markets are so low that harvest costs must be low. If ever Italian (or Spanish, French, Greek etc.) intensive farmers will be forced to raise wages, the increases will be miniscule and very little private money will go to build decent shelters for immigrants.

While in Rosarno illegal immigrants were some 2000, the whole of Southern Italy does not have less than 150,000. Any (unlikely) plan to give substantial help to laborers would be thwarted by the current law, which theoretically punishes illegal immigration. Does America build homes for its illegals ?

The problem is much larger, almost planetary. In Italy, probably one million out of the 5 million immigrants lack acceptable living conditions. In fact, throughout Europe many million homes are required for those immigrants who live in squalor. But while only a small fraction of the immigrants could pay market rate rents, taxpayer money would have to build or subsidize these shelters.

It’s almost guaranteed that taxpayers will say ‘no’. But should they say ‘yes’, building millions of almost free homes will be the wrong choice. More immigrants will come and integration will become more chimerical.  African countries will remain poor, having lost their most enterprising young. A better solution would be to prioritize investments to fight poverty in Africa and elsewhere. To do this, we shall have to import less cheap laborers, less farm hands, and less maids.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Racial Rows In Reggio Calabria (plastic.com)
• Shooting at immigrants: an Italian tragedy (liberalconspiracy.org)
• Looking Past the Facade of Italian City After Riots (starting-points.blogspot.com)
• Pope call to Italy over migrants (news.bbc.co.uk)