You know it’s bad when Berlusconi is the voice of Reason

Mad Silvio says, "Why be sane?" He has a point.












[Credit: forzaitalianfootball.com]

Italy is now looking less cooperative with the worship of the Austerity God mandated by chief Walkyrie Angela Merkel, and lo and behold it’s none other than Silvio Berlusconi who is causing the banker oligarchs to get nervous.

Italy has had a non-elected ‘caretaker’ prime minister for over a year now after the country’s most important (and entirely surreal) right-wing politician got squeezed out. But now he’s back after having re-made nice with his erstwhile partners of the Northern Alliance and threatens to upset the applecart of continued grinding misery for all of Europe except the financial elite. Europe’s most famous sybarite has been saying for a while that Austerity is not the medicine it’s cracked up to be--this is, of course, Heresy.

It’s not immediately clear why anyone would hold a vote in Italy or any European country these days given that the governing program is all laid out in advance for whichever party poobah takes superficial ‘control’: cut spending, cut pensions, cut benefits, cut services, sell off state-owned assets and hope that some day in 2022 things will turn around once all those useless old people are dead and the excess working-age population has emigrated to Australia. Or Latvia!

Berlusconi is shameless, but his presence in the race is interesting because he’s just shameless enough not to do what he’s told. One expects the center-left Democrats to make all kinds of proper noises about protecting the working and middle classes and then do the exact opposite after winning—kind of like Joe Biden. Berlusconi might too, but he’s enough of a maverick and wacko to figure out a way to tell the banker cabal to go stuff itself, if for no other reason than the fact that they forced him out of office just when he was having fun.