Corruption

The following article has been adapted from an article which was published in Gympie Life on 30 Sep 08.

Secret State Land Deal

The Queensland State Govt. is preparing to gift $100 million worth of public beach land to private developer.

Is the public purse now underwriting land developer risk in Queensland?

Recently released Freedom of Information (FOI) files reveal that senior State Government Departments are working behind the scenes to give hundreds of hectares of prime ocean-front public lands to a Rainbow Beach developer.

Additionally, the FOI documents — copies of internal State Government reports — indicate that some Departments support transferring the land 'pre-approved' for development. This means the local Council and local community would not only miss out on the value of the land, they would also have no say in what is developed on it.

Public land north of Rainbow Beach along Inskip Peninsula has very high recreational and economic value. The deal underway would give large areas of this precious public asset to Rainbow Shores Pty Ltd in return for the private corporation's leasehold interest in the low-lying, 200 hectare Rainbow Shores Stage 2 development lease.

The lessee has an active Development Application (DA) seeking approval for a 6,500 population suburban subdivision upon this lease. This DA appears highly unlikely to be approved due to rapidly changing social and environmental factors, including climate change and rapidly accelerating beach erosion.

Informed Rainbow Beach residents say this lack of eligibility for development makes the Stage 2 lease commercially worthless.

However, FOI documents clearly show Government agencies have managed to calculate Stage 2 land value at $100m. They have assumed the lessee's DA is already approved (which it isn't and most likely won't be); they have then totalled the net retail value of the thousands of urban allotments proposed in the DA, which do not exist and aren't approved.

This flawed calculation means the Government is now inclined to give away one hundred million dollars' worth of developable public land in exchange for land that cannot be developed.

The FOI papers call this transfer a 'like for like' exchange. Very clearly it isn't.

The error stems directly from Departmental assumptions about the Stage 2 lease entitlements that are either grossly mistaken or collusive with the developer. The lease clearly places the onus on the lessee to acquire all necessary approvals and permits. These are not acquirable under current policy and knowledge. This is the developer's problem, not the State's.

However State Agency involved in the deal are dumbly parroting the lessee's claims the lease was originally granted in recompense for surrender of mineral sand leases, and thus entails an obligation from the State. This is historical nonsense. The mineral leases were rendered unprofitable by the Fraser Government's cancellation of mineral sand export licenses. The Bjelke Petersen regime consequently granted Development Leases to the affected mining companies. This was more a corrupt act of favouritism to party supporters than it was compensation for anything of real value.

This aberration of fact and logic is only able to continue due to the covert and absolutely unaccountable nature of the process now underway. If it results in a land transfer of the type and scale indicated in the FOI documents it will be a terrible loss.

The list of areas drafted for possible 'swap' is extensive and includes allotments which residents say are vitally important to the balanced development of the seaside town into the future. This surrender would deliver nearly all future Rainbow Beach development potential to one private interest. This would lead to development forms that destroy the last seaside village remaining in SE Queensland, removing a unique social and environmental recreation option from all SE Queensland. residents.

Local residents ask: Why does the Government process exclude the concerns and knowledge of the local Rainbow Beach community? Why are the poor calculations being kept from public scrutiny?

Why does the Government pander to the lessee's claims but ignore the public interest?

(Original source: http://problemsoftheworld.com/archives/tag/painted-girls/; uploaded by bgn59)

Wall Street money talks while the Lips of Barrack Obama and Jack Layton move in sync.

It all makes sense now. Why a socialist. Oh, I’m sorry. Why a “social democrat” from the frozen north, Canada, would come down to the Denver convention of US Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama to roll over on his stomach and bark at his feet. They both stand for the same things. But not quite in the way Canada’s Jack Layton, leader of the leftist NDP, says they do.

He said, “Democrats here are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada.” Layton’s correct there. Democrats are talking about turning a blind eye to runaway population generated by both illegal and legal immigration. He continued, “Whether it’s real action on climate change, forging trade policies that work for working families or standing up for jobs and better health care, there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table head of the board room table.”

That must be news to Wall Street, Jack. They bought and paid for Obama, and now this socialist from the north has come down to Colorado and told everybody that their nominee is concerned about ordinary people. But, hey wait. Democrats have been doing that for decades. They talk like Robespierre and govern like Louis XIV.

In assessing a politician it is best to cast rhetoric aside and look at who is bank-rolling his campaign. Follow the money trail. The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by referring to The Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP). http://www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s comrade Democrats are their clear favourites as the figures will show. Let’s cite some examples of the more prominent corporate contributors.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to Jack’s friends, the Democrats.

The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.

This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence-peddling.

This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million in political contributions to the two-faced Democrats.

Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its 8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton is a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as “the Military Industrial Complex” once more. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.

Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million from private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By the August 28/08 Barrack Obama had raised $389,423,102. Friends, that money most assuredly did not come from cab drivers, hairdressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks, gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary, down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama. And City Group who gave him $389,989. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375.

Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate IT benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and congress for even $1 billion in campaign contributions would be bargain for the IT industry.

Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a progressive party of the downtrodden, the Democratic Party of the United States of America has done pretty well for itself, as did Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act.

I just loved their spiel too. “Please Mister, could you spare me a million, when I am elected I’ll open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another five million middle class jobs, expand the visa programs, displace jobs, depress wages, replace Canada as the country with highest population growth rate in the G8 and accelerate green house gas emissions, ruin the environment. Please Mister. Please. I won’t let you down sir..’

Now, it’s true. Organized labour has deployed 91% of its donations toward the Democrats and this has offset the corporate influence. But the scale is so pitifully small as to be compared to a peashooter firing back at a cannon. But then, if Big Labour did have the same financial clout, how would they wield it? The answer is not encouraging.

Until 1993 it was understood by trade union leaders that a tight labour market was a workers best friend. As the Democratic Socialist leader of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.’

Obviously Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S.

Woodsworth, the founder of the CCF, the precursor to Mr. Layton’s New Democratic Party, since Woodsworth favoured restrictive immigration policies during his tenure as leader before the war. Layton is intent upon “jacking” up Canada’s immigration intake another 70-80,000 people immediately to achieve his arbitary goal of an annual quota equivalent to one percent of whatever of the country’s population level is. He maintains a steadfast ignorance of any study that undermines his rationale for growth. Studies like the C.D. Howe report that revealed that pensions could not be indefinitely supported by increasing immigration unless immigration was multiplied 28 times its existing level. Is Mr. Layton prepared to process over 7 million immigrants a year just to support pensioners? It would be interesting how his “Green Agenda” held up after a population hike like that after five years. Not to mention his plans to cut GHG emissions. And then there is that inconvenient Statistics Canada report of May 2007. The one that showed that immigration has depressed Canadian wages. That’s good news for the people who sit at the board room table. Bad news for the people who sit at the kitchen table that Jack claims to speak for.

In America, the voice of organized labour, the AFL-CIO, is singing in harmony with Obama’s Democrats. But the song is not “Solidarity forever”, its “Money, Money, Money”. In 1993 the AFL-CIO made a shocking break with its past by attacking the critics of illegal immigration. Three years later it joined a coalition of business, agribusiness and Christian conservatives to kill provisions of bill to limit refugee admissions and verify social security numbers of newly-hired workers to discourage illegal workers. But the landmark moment came in February of 2000 when it was announced that the AFL-CIO would “support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration law and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups.” Translation: The AFL-CIO was abandoning American workers to champion legal and illegal immigrant workers in their greed to recruit and harvest a larger dues-paying base.

Organized labour in Canada, as represented by the CLC, and its parliamentary wing, Jack Layton’s NDP, has precisely the same attitude. Xenophiliacs who love strangers within our gates more than the workers born right here. Some would call this a Christian attitude. Perhaps they should refer to 1st Timothy 5:8. There are many translations. But essentially, charity begins at home, and if you don’t begin at home, you aren’t practicing Christianity. I would prefer to call it an attitude of selfish condescension, one easy to accommodate if you are a trade union bureaucrat with a degree in Labour studies or economics sitting in an office insulated from layoffs and passing judgment upon “ignorant” blue collar workers who are obviously guilty of “false conciousness” because they don’t see the world as you do. Tougher though if you are on the front lines of competition, mopping a hospital floor for a subsistence wage and you’re in danger of losing your job because it might be contracted out to a cut-throat company that uses illegal immigrant workers. The ones the CLC says enrich our culture.

The reality is that although Jack Layton and Barack Obama may be talking about the same things, the populist script they are reading from is carefully crafted to decoy our notice from their corporate obligations. We may hear their rousing speeches, but it is money that is doing the talking, and it has an agenda. Its agenda is not American or Canadian. It is globalist. And it will do anything to have its way. It plays dirty. It doesn’t care about equality, but if it needs to, it will play the race card. It doesn’t care about migrant workers, but if it needs to, it will pretend to care. It doesn’t care about cultural diversity, but if needs to build up a constituency among Hispanics to gain support for amnesty and a bigger labour pool, it will. And it doesn’t care about the environment, but when there was a danger that the Sierra Club was going to return to its former policy of favouring restrictive immigration policies to stabilize the country’s runaway growth, a billionaire stepped in with $100 million to ensure that it didn’t happen.

Wall Street money talks. And if it keeps talking, in four decades, thanks to corporate mandated manic immigration, one half billion North Americans may be alive, or dying, to hear, the sound of a silent spring and a dead continent.

Thanks, Jack, for your role in making it happen.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
August 29/08

The Business Council of Australia says that the current design of the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will force closure of at least three major business, cause four to "fundamentally review their operations", and force others to find ways to cut expenses. It claims to have surveyed 14 businesses over sectors including minerals processing, manufacturing, oil refining, coal mining and sugar milling.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it. The fact is that the kinds of industries and clients that the BCA and similar groups represent cannot expect to survive in their current form. Neither can the tertiary industries that rely on them, such as expensive law firms, frenzied global stock-exchanges, advertising corporations, high-flying consultants and millionaire-salary CEOs.

"Propaganda about a ‘dematerialised economy’ makes it hard to establish the reality that material industrial productivity is not actually less reliant on burning fossil fuels than it was in the 1970s, and that drawdown on fossil fuels has in fact been multiplied by the needs of much greater populations. Similarly the obvious still needs to be pointed out that increasing productivity means burning more fuel and outputting more pollution, accelerating petroleum depletion and adding more greenhouse gases."[1]

We have to face reality. Business and economic structure and expectations have to change.

The Business Council of Australia writes in its recent news release of "The ‘truly dreadful
problem’ of the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries." It says, "Professor Ross Garnaut, in his review of emissions trading, accurately describes what he calls the ‘truly dreadful problem’ of EITE industries: so-called ‘carbon leakage’. If we price emissions fully in Australia, emissions-intensive activity might simply relocate overseas. Rather than eliminating emissions, Australia’s regime would move the source of the emissions offshore, most likely to jurisdictions with less stringent environmental standards. Thus a well-intentioned Australian regime could produce the truly perverse effect of actually increasing the level of global emissions."

It is all very well threatening to go overseas, but this will be a very temporary measure; as these industries try to continue to process and sell massive amounts of industrial product, they are going to run into the long-anticipated problem of not having any customers left in the industrialised 'richworld' to sell to, since the people in those 'first world countries', unburdened of corporate accelerated profit-making, will simply slow down and relocalise their activities. Big business will finish up mired in the poverty which it has sought to exploit in its offshore victims.

It adds that, "This problem affects a substantial slice of Australian economic life. The EITE industries contribute 16 per cent of Australian business investment, 51 per cent of exports, 15 per cent of gross value add and employ nearly one in 10 working Australians."

What to do about mass unemployment with the decline of mass production?

Val Yule often says, that it isn't that there isn't any work. It is that the work that needs to be done isn't done because of all the work we do that doesn't need to be done in paid employment which uses up our time and energy.

If we stop working to feed the profit machines, which only expend most of the profits we make for them on more growth, creating more needs for more growth, and less time for everyone, we could, instead, work according to our needs and desires, rather than the hypertrophied needs and desires of a small sector of global power-freaks.

Political commentator and climate activist, Clive Hamilton, writes in Growth Fetish,[1]

Reduction in working hours is the core demand for the transition to post-growth society. Overwork not only propels overconsumption but is the cause of severe social dysfunction, with ramifications for physical and psychological health as well as family and community life. The natural solution to this is the redistribution of work, a process that could benefit both the unemployed and the overworked.

He remarks that

“Moves to limit overwork … directly confront the obsession with growth at all costs,” and talks about the liberation of workers “from the compulsion to earn more than they need.”

Because growth is sustained by a constant ‘barrage of marketing and advertising’ Hamilton wants advertising taxed and removed from the public domain, and television broadcast hours limited so as to

“allow people to cultivate their relationships, especially with children.”

The era of big profits, big business and big government is in terminal decline

The problem is that, with rising fuel costs, the margins for profit are declining. Add this to costs for carbon emissions, and you are looking at a profound challenge for the growthist economy of profit.

We industrialised humans have to change the way we do business and the pace of business.
We are facing global climate change; futures of very unpredictable wind-speeds, temperatures, crop productivity and water availability. We are facing continuous declines in agribusiness productivity because of the decline in availability of fossil fuels. Permaculture will be better able to provide than agribusiness as fossil fuels decline and it will provide better socially as well. See Antony Boy's delightful "Photo essay of a rural Japanese city," for an excellent and entertaining discussion of the problems and solutions.

It is normal for the Business Council and for the Government to be worried, because the necessary changes threaten their systemic hegemony and the whole notion of profit.

If we attempt to go on as we are, Australia faces monolithic power production and government systems, in the effort of the current elite to retain a profit-oriented society, from which the elite themselves are the overwhelming social and financial beneficiaries, at the cost of the greater population. There will be continuous attempts to find finance for huge nuclear power plants to keep up ever less viable industries and giant cities.

The Nuclear route (...) implies total electrification, synthesising, using complex technology, the pattern of settlement and transport which arose from exploitation of the natural endowment of petroleum. It requires massive investment, and in Australia’s case, the investment sought is likely to be private. This implies ongoing loss by citizens of control over the country’s energy systems and all that flows from that – the future of work, the state of the environment, natural amenity. It implies the reshaping of Australian society by corporations with profit alone in mind, for the benefit of a small dominant asset-rich class, with the electorate a mere captive market.[2]

This is a truly unsustainable battle; it will just bring us into feudalism and a much deeper economic depression than a relocalising of all our systems will.

Not only do we not need all the goods we produce for consumption at home or abroad, we do not need the income they bring, and their acquisition is a poor compensation for lives given to industry. Wonderful jobs are few and far between. No-one wants to give those up. Some people also derive much of their social life from work but they would derive similar benefits, and perhaps more status and satisfaction, from other community activities. And plenty of people reach a stage of maturity where childlike obedience to workplace regimes in the cause of producing more and more widgets in different colours, or processing more and more customers a day, with unflinching subservience, challenges every natural instinct.

Instead of those complicated international agreements about percentile reductions in emissions over the years to come, which are hardly enforceable or even measurable, remaining mostly in the control of the corporate emitters, the solution lies much closer at hand, and could ultimately be controlled at grass-roots levels by the masses themselves. Relocalisation is obviously the best way to develop the solidarity and self-sufficiency to reorganize work.

It should be obvious that the slower we work, the more fuel will remain, the less greenhouse gas will be emitted. If the populations which have ballooned to unimaginable proportions since the 1950s were allowed to return (through natural attrition) to more natural sizes by 2050, and the economy permitted to slow, it would take the heat off the planet and us as well. With so much less effort we could make such a positive difference to the planet and to our personal effectiveness.

ENDNOTES

[1] Hamilton, Clive, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2003 and Pluto Press UK, 2005, last chapter, especially, pp.218-220

This article contains extracts from :"101 Views from Hubbert's Peak" in Sheila Newman (Ed.) and from "France and Australia after oil," in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, Second Edition Pluto Press, UK, 2008 (Available in Australia in late August)

Low birth rate, its dangers and remedies

My last article didn’t even attempt to expand on this: it was just a satirical gibe on a serious subject. And it mentioned immigration only as one of the solutions envisaged by demographers and urged by economists, to remedy the European reluctance to produce more babies. Meanwhile couples are cajoled and enticed with prizes, bonuses, Christmas boxes, allowances, trinkets, anything, that could lure them to do their duty for their Country.

Italians are doomed to extinction, indicated by the low rate of birth (1,34 babies in 2007)? The Maternity and Fertility Centre Studies confirmed that we are behind the European optimum ideal of 2,1 children per woman, (suggested by a Lisbon document of 2000) in order to avoid the Old Continent disappearing in this century. In this demographic Olympic race Italy is sadly behind every other European nation, of which the Champions are France, with Great Britain and Finland close behind. So, the country of “Amore e Bambini” is being paradoxically defeated by countries with a higher rate of divorce, contraception use, and women at work.

At the moment ,an oppressive pro-natalist propaganda sweeps Italy, fuelled by demographers and the fear of economic stagnation.

Take the well-known Massimo Livi Bacci, who is a robust and insistent pusher for economic incentives for newborns.
Livi Bacci began by defining migrations as the most important means to combat poverty, based on studies that forecast a 20% decline in the labor force in rich countries and a 60% increase in the poor countries by the year 2025.

On examining the consequences of Italian low fertility rate, he admits that:
“In a few years the new entries in the labour market will be substantially fewer than they are today …with very beneficial effects on the high unemployment of the young; the fewer entries, if more productive (as they must be), will also earn more. …”

Well? This is a philosophical issue as to what should be the basis for society decisions as to the type of future we prefer.
Livi Bacci , the demographer, is only worried because the current fertility rate implies the halving of the Italian population every forty years.

The issue of promoting an increase in natality has become the leit-motif of every Italian electoral programme, and, under the last Prodi government, was one of the most important objectives of his government.

Illegal Immigration and Criminality, twin issues

But Prodi may have disregarded the real preoccupation of the electorate, which was understood by Berlusconi, his successor, whose recent third ascent to power, by an overwhelming majority, was due to his recognition that the “people” wanted Security (Sicurezza). According to the figures of ISTAT, criminality is the major source of preoccupation ( 58,7 % ) especially in Puglia, Campanla and Sicily, and is often connected with massive waves of illegal immigration that regularly sweeps the Southern coasts facing North Africa.

TV and newspaper propose the same menu day after day:

Tons of rubbish left to rot in the streets of Naples, road pirates that kill pedestrians and run away, Roma or Roms (gypsies) that force their children to steal, honest citizens revolting against the numerous nomad camps, citizen’s patrols against mounting crime, illegal immigrants, more immigrants for whom, let’s face it, we don’t have jobs.

Here we have contrasting points of view, someone is telling lies and it is not clear why:
“Unemployment rises!( Corriere della Sera, June 2008). No joke, so why do we need more workingwomen + more babies and what are we going to do with the immigrants who reach our chores almost daily?

Why, one should ask, have Italian governments, of every shade, closed their eyes for years when faced with such ever-growing disorder?

It is not a mystery that criminality is more diffuse today in our world than when I was a child. England, for example, has the deplorable record of teenage gang’s and knife-related murder. Sociologists, historians, psychologists have been studying for years the reasons why. No consensus has prevailed.

Italy boasts an endemic ancient type of criminality that is family- and clan- related.: the Mafia and the Camorra. There is of course a relation between this home-grown criminality and an international business base that exploits vulnerable people by a heinous illegal traffic across the Mediterranean Sea.

Our frontiers have become porous

Thousands of “carrette del mare” ( sea-carts), hopelessly overloaded with immigrants are continually leaving Libya for Italy. Many of them end up on the bottom of the sea, tombs for lives and hopes. Reports of clandestine immigrants that reach the island of Lampedusa (a favourite spot for such adventurous passage from North Africa) are so common that it needs a shipwreck or some other tragedy to overcome the lethargy of a public overfed by the media. In the jargon borrowed from the unfortunate destiny of whales and dolphins, these cargoes are called “ beached”. According to figures released by the local Welcome Centre, more than 5,900 clandestine immigrants have reached Lampedusa this year alone.

In the national newspaper coloured ads declare: “LAMPEDUSA, the Pearl of the Mediterranean, From 490 €. Children gratis.”

The island is a tourist destination and in summer a vagrant crowd repeats the transhumance ritual.

With the high decibel of clubs, nobody seems to notice the presence of the new hungry arrivals. We think of them as wretched, they think of themselves lucky. Points of view change as the view from the shores points south or north.

What is the answer to these massive movements of people to this southern Italian outpost? Being Italians, can only be a… Work of Art! Which means: Escapism. You won’t believe this: to commemorate the deaths of thousands of victims at sea due to an ignoble trade with the connivance of General Gheddafi of Libya, the local Major commissioned a monument by a certain Mimmo Paladino, an artist in need of exposure with a politically correct cause. It is a door, which looks out to the sea and should symbolize “ a secular sanctuary”. It will be called “Door of Lampedusa, Door to Europe”.

EU closes the stable doors after the horse has bolted, but…

The wishful thinking by a foolish administrator clashes with the Parliament of the European Union’s decision to harmonize throughout the EU the rules of return to their homeland of these sans papiers (undocumented people). The new stricter law has became necessary- and came far too late – because the sages of the EU have suddenly realized that illegal immigration was choking their welfare system and feeding an already florid criminality.

But nothing is simple in Italy,the land of contradictions, where the old divisions between Right and Left, Secularism and Catholicism, dominate every aspect of life. The European religious bodies are up in arms: the Conference of European Churches, Caritas Europe, and the Commission for Migrants protest against the idea of forced return. “To migrate is not a crime, the real crime is an economic-financial system which allows 11% of world population to consume 88% of resources while the rest live in poverty.”

There you are: the social mission of the Church meets Communist internationalism, both denying the idea of borders.

But the Church’s criticism has a point, although we cannot force poor Italians (they exist) to pay for an unjust economic-financial system of which they too are victims.

We are at a stage where we cannot ignore the “other” “inconvenient truth”: the unmentionable reason of this irrepressible migration: overpopulation.

The flow of migrants comes mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa, which includes the 40 poorest countries in the world. To migrate is a necessity. The median age of population varies from 15 (Niger) and 19 (Gambia) and the demographic growth is the highest in the world. The Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mauritania and Nigeria registered a rate of growth greater than 3% per year, which means a doubling of the population every 23 years. Fertility is high and every woman gives birth to 5,5 children, against 3 per woman in other developing countries. The record belongs to Niger (7,9), Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Liberia (6), greater than the birth-rates of European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries.

According to previsions by the UN , the entire region will grow from 309 million to 730 million in 2050, resulting in a scarcity of resources and need for cultivable land which the very density of a young population will not be able to satisfy and will lead to an enormous migration pressure. (Source: Neodemos, Dove emigrare è una necessità, by Letizia Mencarini)

This is the obvious sign that Europe should - before anything else- for the good of the poor and its own good, encourage birth control in these wretched countries by every appropriate means: education, economic incentives, media propaganda, but especially the diffusion of family planning clinics.

Failing this, the future scenario will be more famine, more wars, more suffering, more expensive but ineffectual Western aid. We will not halt the biblical invasion. Italy, its demographers and economists point out, needs young blood to do the jobs that the new generation doesn’t want to do . Or is there something else at work?

Who profits?

What is the role of the Mafia or the Camorra, the two main criminal organizations ? And what is the Berlusconi government prepared to do ?

All Italian society is indirectly involved in the consequences of human traffic, not just criminal organizations.

Take the “caporalato”, a new term to indicate the ringleader of a pool of immigrants, who supplies the industry large and small scale, with labourers at knockdown prices. These pools are formed as cooperatives that have an inbuilt existential volatility: they are born, prosper, die and then spring up again with a different identity. Some of them are manned by immigrants themselves and, for every worker they find, they will receive a financial cut. The immigrants who are victims and accomplices of such illegal transactions do not complain, even if the salary is so low that it doesn’t permit them to rent a habitable accommodation, but forces them to live heaped up sub-human misery.

Most of the illegal labour is used by:

1)the construction industry;
2) agriculture.

We shouldn’t build too many houses. Once the sans papiers get their papiers – which they will finally get – they finally can occupy the very houses that they have built, this time at subsidised rent. A friend of mine who works for the Assisi City Council, providing accommodation for poor families, explains that the more children in a family, the more likely they are to jump the queue for subsidised housing. Italian families, which have one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, do not have right to accommodation, even considering that the statistical reality (1,35 child per woman) is a numerical fiction, as families have more than one child. Moreover, the median dimension of a family nucleus is 2,5 persons per family, including other, often elderly, relatives.

But what will happen, when, according to last international news, the housing bust reaches us, as it already has in Spain and Denmark, where the construction industry has over-built ? "What will happen when the construction industry realizes that a shrinking and aging population won't need new houses?" asks Joseph Chamie director of the UN Population Division. Yes, what will happen ? What will we do with the excessive uneducated workforce of immigrants ?

The South of Italy is full of illegal immigrants from Morocco and other parts of Africa, who never heard of a contract and if they see one, they wouldn’t be able to read it. Some of the most celebrated Sicilian wines are the fruit of their labour. The tomatoes, the olive oil and wines that we eat and drink, and that are exported to markets in far away countries like Canada or England, are grown by seasonal and illegal immigrants, who have been paid next to nothing to enrich some producers and middle-men, of whom even Scrooge would be ashamed.

But the ones who work full time, even in horrible conditions, are the lucky ones: a substantial number roams from town to town, sleeping in stations, parks, a “via crucis” of day jobs, sometimes not paid by a landowner who acts more like a criminal himself. ( Source “Una stagione all’inferno” by Medecin sans frontiers, www.terrelibere.org/?x=completa&riga=260 )

Sometimes hope but more often shame impedes these young men from returning home, where prospects are not much better anyway.

The Mafia has a role in this human trafficking. Its formidable power is embedded in the territory where it has social acceptance and cooperation. It is a compound of families and “cosche” or clans, which operate as legal enterprises, with above-ground businesses that hide more sinister underworld activities.

Ultimately the Mafia has diversified by forming pacts with various criminal groups from East Europe and North Africa, which handle the most profitable, meanest tasks, such as drug trafficking, prostitution and illegal immigration. The foreign Mafia controls 50% of the prostitutes in Sicily while cocaine and marijuana are in the hands of Albanian clans. Immigrants sell their lives to the Mafia to pay for the trip to Italy.

One hears every single day of scandals involving either inhuman treatment of immigrants by Italian criminals, or crimes committed by immigrants, especially Roms, who have become the latest Italian obsession:

Another unresolved problem: nomads

The Roms are one of the manifold tribes of nomads who came originally from India and have taken up mobile residence in the heart of Europe, always refusing integration and assimilation. Once silversmiths, bear-trainers. fortune tellers, horse traders and other itinerant casual labour, they cannot cope with the changes of a modern world that has no need of their skills. However, their shabby settlements have all the modern tokens of consumption: mainly satellite TV cables, Nike shoes, Mercedes and other luxury cars. Italians fear the vicinity of their 700 camps, scattered among the peripheries of Italian cities. Famous for instructing their children in Dickensian-style pick pocketing, their mores are more brutal than anything old Fagin ever dreamed of. Wire tapping from the police has revealed their cruel lives: parents threaten small children with sexual abuse and beatings if they didn’t follow the orders given through a cellular phone, to rob apartments. Popular reaction was swift and unusually violent:

In May 2008 Roma camps around Naples were attacked and set on fire by local residents.

Journalists were accused of fomenting the xenophobic ire of the Italian populace, by daring to report the criminal acts committed by “foreigners”…So much for freedom of the press.

The Berlusconi government responded immediately by threatening controversial measures. They wanted to fingerprint all the Roma children, to protect them from mistreatment and a life of delinquency and lack of education. In Italy, there are about 35,000 Roma children between 6 and 14 years of age, but only 1,200 are actually enrolled in school.

The Lega Nord (Northern League), a party that represents the richer more industrious North and lobbies for fiscal independence applauded. The left claimed, “discrimination!” The Catholic hierarchy bled for the little children....

But a recent survey has established that 67% of Italians approve the idea of fingerprinting, as nobody has offered an alternative way to avoid the children’s scandalous exploitation by their own parents. The proposed measures have been criticised as racist by foreign observers. On the other hand, apparently, in France, children from 13 years onwards are registered by the police even in the absence of any punishable offence, but thought to be a nuisance for public order…

Is Italian society disintegrating ?

Journalistic ethos and the polite fiction of hopeful environmentalism require that, after describing disturbing scenarios, one should end with a note of optimism.

Unfortunately, I cannot see things getting better. The hopes which Berlusconi has aroused, the changes that his Cabinet of mediocre and inexperienced ministers have been instructed to carry out, are not going to produce a revolutionary reversal of national decline.

Italy is now more than ever divided by the forces of single-issue pressure groups. The leftist mantra is multiculturalism; the right is sticking to nationalism. Italians won’t suddenly metamorphose into law-abiding citizens. National character doesn’t change in a day. The proposed laws to stop illegal immigration are half-hearted attempts to satisfy a momentary anger, but the reality is that the country as a whole uses immigrants to carry out the growth that law-makers and citizens aspire to. Everybody lives on the back of immigrants, legal or illegal. Antonio Golini, professor of demography at the University La Sapienza in Rome, said that immigration is necessary, especially for countries like Italy, to meet the exigencies of the labour market. "But it cannot be massive," he said, "because of the presence in Europe of old minorities."

An aura of hypocrisy permeates the whole thing.

Through a recent survey we find out that 73% of the participants declared that migratory phenomena is dangerous for public order, while at the same time they employed illegal immigrants themselves, as black-market labour.

In the moral vacuum that is the hallmark of our decadent Western societies, the only voice that has any position on social and ethical issues is unfortunately the Catholic Church. And its position is, as to be expected, the defence of the meek, the poor and the slave. In its universalism, it has no voice to defend the national interest. Because it believes that man is made in image of God, it neglects and sometimes despises nature, if nature doesn’t serve unknown “higher” interest of mankind.

In a funny way, the Churchmen have become the defenders of an old vision of economic interests, and their language is laced with market jargon. Thus, the all-out defence of immigration, to replenish the empty pension trunks of the State and be called upon to fill the empty cradles. “Replacement Migration” (Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Population?“ a subtitle title of a 2000 draft report by the UN Population Division) has been called a buzzword for Italian growth economy.

In a report by the Catholic Foundation, Migrantes (http://www.migrantes.com), with the theme of “Young Migrants: a resource and a provocation,” we may glimpse a Catholic vision of our future as a nation. The schools of tomorrow, let’s say by 2050, will have more foreign students than Italians. They will be sons and daughters of immigrants, and obviously the teaching profession welcomes this possibility, otherwise what will we do with all our teachers ?

According to a priest, the outcome will be positive, because Italian education has already chosen an intercultural approach, where differences are an enriching element.

Pupils from 192 nations are already present with a multiplicity of languages, customs and even traditions, including food, in the Italian schools. According to the Report, the school MUST recognise this reality and renounce the selfishness of mono culturalism.

Some teachers, swamped by the extra work included in an colossal influx of children in big cities, without the minimum knowledge of the Italian language, are starting to rebel, led by a determined group of parents. No need to wait till 2050: In Milano’s suburbs there are nursery classes with only one Italian bambino! The audacious proposal is to institute a maximum limit to the admission of children of other ethnic groups, let’s say, no more than three per class.

We know that the deterioration of Italian civilisation is not just the fault of immigration. But illegal immigration has added to the existent chaos and to the aggravated population pressures. It is suffered passively with a mixture of incompetence and resignation.

The Sicilian author Lampedusa in his book “The Leopard” expounds this revealing political truth: “ We will make changes so that nothing will change.”

Is this the destiny of our democracies?

Some Italian political commentators have risked their reputation by affirming that Italy is governed by thieves, by self-important idiots, by wind-bags or by ineffectual turn-coats. It may be that most political power attracts the wrong sort of personality. The difference lies in an incurable, seemingly invisible sickness, afflicting Italian society. This sickness manifests in the impossibility of indicting and calling to account whoever is responsible for unlawfulness or foul play. An impenetrable smoke screen covers the truth and offers impunity. Whoever knows something, won’t divulge it, or the accused ping-pong the responsibility to each other. Nobody ever can know the truth. Omertà is an Italian word for the conspiracy of silence concerning crimes, usually practised by Mafia members.

And so it goes: thefts, abuses, embezzlement, fraud, negligence of duty, go unpunished and the malpractice lasts forever and ever.

The battle so far seems lost.

We can no longer preserve our neglected cultural heritage, and alas, our quickly fading natural beauty, which, who has grown in this much-loved country, should appreciate and defend. But the greed of the few is spoiling and transforming our age-old landscape. Who will inherit all this ?