Tag Archives: government

A Thought on Nationhood

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Germany has one, and it centers on immigrants assimilating into German culture rather than holding themselves apart while taking advantage of the German benefits that drew the immigrants in the first place.  It’s articulated by Joachim Gauck, President of Germany from 2012-2017.  He told Bild

“I find it unacceptable that people who have been living in Germany for decades cannot hold a conversation in German, do not attend parent-teacher conferences or keep their children from going to classes or sports.”

He said people should not shy away from standing up for German values out of fear of being seen as a racist or xenophobe and that there should be “something like binding rules for living together and not several societies alongside one another.”

Absolutely.  A nation’s culture, its ability to rule itself, its very existence are at risk when immigrants as large groups don’t assimilate, and the receiving nation allows that to occur.  The nation ceases to be; it devolves into a collection of disparate groupings who happen to occupy a geographic area.

Most of What They Wanted

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Recall that, in a breathtaking attack on Italy’s democracy, the nation’s President Sergio Mattarella vetoed formation of the coalition government that hard-Left 5Star Movement and hard-Right League, as the two winners of Italy’s elections, had formed because Mattarella didn’t like the coalition’s choice for Economics Minister, Paolo Savona.  Mattarella held Savona personally unacceptable over the latter’s disdain for the euro and for the European Union.

5Star and League have formed a new coalition, and it seems that Mattarella has approved the new coalition.  The coalition’s Econ Minister will be Giovanni Tria, an economist from the Tor Vergata University.  Tria has “criticized the eurozone, saying it had failed to achieve the convergence of the different economies;” he doesn’t seem that far from Savona’s position or from the coalition’s, just perhaps a bit more politic in expressing it.

Also, far from being banished to the sticks, Savona also will get a position in the new government: Minister for European Affairs.  The position has no formal portfolio, but he’ll still be in a position of influence and in the venue for which he was found ill-suited by Matterella.

Maybe Mattarella is figuring out that he’s President of Italy, not a mucky-muck of the EU.

An Argument

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…for leaving the European Union altogether.

By openly invoking the role of investors, financial markets and the defense of the eurozone in his speech on Sunday, the president [Italian President Sergio Mattarella] lends credence to the populist argument that Italy has become the battleground in a war between the international establishment and national democracies. Even if populists win the elections, their supporters believe, they will never be allowed to hold power for fear that they would oppose the dogma that dominates the eurozone.

That speech was his rationalization for his decision to block the coalition of the two parties who one the last national elections from forming a government.  With that speech, he demonstrated the fact of the Italian peoples’ belief.

And this from European Commissioner for Budget and Human Resources Günther Oettinger:

…markets will teach Italians how to vote….

And German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s

comparison between Italy and Greece is an unveiled threat: Italians had better toe the line, or they will not be spared what the Greeks have been going through.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have this one right.

[W]hat is happening in Rome is not only about the future of the euro. It has also to do with the state of democracy, in Italy and in Europe. Discussing and questioning the governance of the eurozone, as the Italian right-left populist coalition wished to do, should not be a taboo in mature democracies.

But national sovereignty be damned, and to hell with democracy and what petty voters want.  That’s the elitist EU attitude.  The worthies of EU governance Know Better.

This is what the Italian people need to think very seriously about in the coming national elections.

A Concept of Privacy

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Personal privacy and protections against warrantless searches got a boost from the Supreme Court earlier this week.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that police need a warrant to search vehicles parked at private homes, the second time this month the justices rejected government arguments for expanding the “automobile exception” to Fourth Amendment rules against unreasonable searches.

The case at hand involved a stolen motorcycle parked in the driveway of a private residence and protected from the elements (and perhaps (even probably) from being seen by police) by a tarp.  A police officer recognized from Facebook postings the residence, saw the fact of a motorcycle under the tarp, entered the property, lifted the tarp, and looked over the motorcycle—all without a warrant.

Writing for the Court in an 8-1 decision, Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote

Just like the front porch, side garden or area “outside the front window,” the driveway enclosure where Officer [David] Rhodes searched the motorcycle constitutes [the area where] activity of home life extends….

And

Given the centrality of the Fourth Amendment interest in the home and its curtilage and the disconnect between that interest and the justifications behind the automobile exception, we decline Virginia’s invitation to extend the automobile exception to permit a warrantless intrusion on a home or its curtilage[.]

Justice Samuel Alito was the lone dissenter.

…the officer should have been permitted to search the motorcycle visible in the driveway, just as he could have were it parked in a public street. “Officer Rhodes’s brief walk up the driveway impaired no real privacy interests,” he wrote.

Surprising out of Alito; it seems he doesn’t completely understand curtilage or of privacy.  Notwithstanding, I’d further curtail the motor vehicle exception* allowing warrantless searches to bar such from motor vehicles parked on the street in front of the vehicle owner’s residence (or beside it in the case of a corner lot) or parked in an apartment complex’s parking lot near the vehicle owner’s apartment or in the apartment renter’s designated parking slot.

 

*The motor vehicle exception to the requirement for search warrants allows warrantless searches based on a prohibition era ruling that motor vehicles were too mobile and could be moved before a warrant could be obtained.  That ruling was itself erroneous IMNSHO because it assumed that the police were incapable of keeping a motor vehicle under surveillance until the warrant arrived.

Europe’s Italian Crisis

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Europe is a-roil over Italy’s inability to form a government at any time since the nation’s elections some months ago.  And so is the old guard in Italy.

Italy’s woes rippled across the eurozone, driven by investor worries that an exit by the bloc’s third-largest economy could force others out.

Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco said this with a straight face:

We must never forget that we are only ever a few short steps away from the very serious risk of losing the irreplaceable asset of trust[.]

They’re risking losing that trust, anyway, on the political front—from which flows all economic trust.  The Italian Old Guard is in the way here.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella blocked the formation of a euroskeptic coalition government formed of the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement and the League parties, raising the prospect of new elections.

He perpetrated the decidedly anti-democratic move of refusing to allow a coalition of the two parties who won the election to form a government because he personally didn’t like their finance minister nominee.  I would have thought Italy would have had done with fascism.  And so, sub rosa, would many in Europe, it seems.

And there’s this, based in no small part on those erstwhile coalition parties’ shared lack of enthusiasm for eurozone membership:

Italy hurtled toward a political crisis that is reigniting debate over Europe’s future, including whether the eurozone’s third-largest economy should remain in the currency union.

They’re worried that an Italian exit—if it actually were to happen—would spell the end of the currency union altogether.

Which brings me back to that matter of trust.  Having blocked the formation of a government, Matarella has virtually guaranteed new elections soon—there are no other possible combinations of Italian parties capable of forming a governing coalition.  And those new elections, given who won the last round, will surely be less an election of a new government and more a national referendum on whether Italy should remain in the eurozone.

Of course, Italy should not; they’re a terrible match for that currency union.  Italy, along with Portugal, Greece, and Spain—the original PIGS—should form their own currency union.  Those four nations’ philosophies concerning the purpose of money and of government’s role in society are much closer to each other’s than they are to the rest of Europe’s.