What do you think/know about Italy?

[Dan025]

about 20% of people own guns in the usa (finland is close to 60% but it's closer to 1or 2 guns per owner while americans tend to have many.). it is less than that who actually use them for a food supply but the fact remains that there is a percentage. that number i don't know but it is there. some hunt for sport even though they can buy food and that's cultural, many of the sport hunter do actually eat what they kill even if they don't need it. but many guns are in collections and are only used for show or sport. it is unfortunate there is so much gun crime but i don't know how more gun laws would go about stopping it.

i never realized how much space america really had untill i joined the military and thought i was from a smallish town, well i went to a high school of 1200 student and near 400 were in my graduating class. when i started to meet people that had graduating classes of 30 student or even less and they had 3 or more grades in one classroom because they had no teachers i got a bit of perspective i never had before. one guy i knew was from a town that was exactly 1 mile by 1 mile (1.6km long or 2.56km^2) with one road that went in and out. another came from a town that was just one road! one mile long. those were the towns, outside of that wasn't another town, just a long road through the mountain or desert for 10-20km before you got to another town or city.

we are not quite as rural as canada, austrailia, russia, or china but we do take up a pretty big portion of the map and a considerable amount of the population is concentrated in very large cities like New York and DC.

the difficult thing with gun control is it is so hard to do legally in this country because of our law system that our founders designed. even our liberal president will only suggest banning certain types of guns, and never all of them because he knows it's not practical.

 

[Dan025]

anyway i think it's best to go back to talking about italy. gun control is too controversial for this forum. i just want it to be realized that what ever side you take, it's not an easy thing to do here for reasons stemming from our law system to our culture, to the doubts many have that it will be effective.

 

[stubhead]

I'm afraid the current spate of "corruption", to me, seems based around a rather ridiculous economic model that has been exported largely from the U.S. Ronald Reagan and Margeret Thatcher managed to use television and rather empty pleasures to convince people that down is up, up is down, black is white and vice-versa.... The "trickle-down economy" has never worked that way, and the rich have been plundering unchecked for forty years now. Roads and buildings built by taxpayers have been sold to multinational corporations, and we are still asked to pay more and more.

The specific economic lie that underlies the latest scam is that endless, bottomless growth is possible, and even necessary, for an economy to be "good." Only people rich enough to own TV networks benefit from this, and we're running out of places to rob. For example, in America, most of the people who write for newspapers are fairly smart, but we had  a few idiot TV commentators who actually praised the recent, and ongoing, "Arab Spring." It proved George Bush was "right?" The specific problem there is that if the people of Saudi Arabia, who have been living atop the oil tank that fueled America's 20th century, look down and say "wait a minute. How come they're riding in air-conditioned cars and living in nice houses and we're living like peasants? It's OUR oil...." So "promoting democracy" in every place is HUGELY against our own national self-interest.

To get any understanding of the Mideast, you have to go back to the end of WWI and the blatant division of the Mideast's territory among that war's victors - US, UK, France, Holland... the map looks like a checkerboard! Nice, rectangular countries, laid out by map meridians with no care for who lived where, or what the people of the territory wanted. The US "won" an area that turned out to have huge oil reserves, we went in and found the most savage tribe of warlords - the Saud family - and told them "You can be kings! Princes! Solid gold toilets, house slaves, a yacht for every grandchild... just sell us the oil cheap." And it went pretty well for us, and pretty well for the Saud family. And the people of Said Arabia live in the worst dictatorship imaginable, there are no jails, no opposition press, no politics - one word, you disappear. And anyone asks, "Hey, where'd Uncle Abdul go?" - disappeared. And they work as slaves in the palaces, and hear of the prince who drops a billion dollars on craps one weekend at Monaco, and smolder.

And the "deals" the World Bank and the IMF make with the corrupt leaders of African nations, and the curious state of China, who seems perfectly willing to destroy their environment and populace for US-paid "growth", only we don't pay - we just owe? The rich people control the information, and that's key. Without resorting to any sort of conspiracy or anything, a relatively small number of people figured out that if they could get control of all the television programming, they could do whatever they want. And it's worked great, they set up these paper battles between "left" and "right" to make it appear as though it's something other than simple, sociopathic greed on the part of people who are already so rich they don't have any idea what to do except keep stealing.... so we have "The Tea Party" and "Occupy Wall Street" who are basically pissed off about the same thing, but they're both pointed towards "left" or "right" to keep them neutralized.

There are a few possible graces - one being that in 1969, US President Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard, to pay for his share of the Vietnam War. And ever since then, all the money figures have been imaginary - they're just numbers in computers. There's still food, and work, and clothing, and electricity. Like, I can't possibly imagine that the US is actually going to "pay" China 9 trillion dollars some day - out of what? The taxes collected off of kids working two minimum-wage crap jobs? The strength of the US was built off of a powerful and well=paid middle class, and the taxes from that, and a tax rate on the rich that stayed between 75% to 85% between 1933 and 1965. Now that's all blown... but we can grow food.

One advantage Europeans have, from my perspective, is that you have had historical periods of non-growth. And since "growth" as it's now envisioned simply refers to rich people stealing money from other's labor and goods, NON-GROWTH is the only way to live without some (fatal?) antagonisms.

The other grace may be, that everything that happens is really some expression of basic human nature, and in real terms, sensationalist news aside, there is less violence and crime in the world overall that in any previous period. Crime in the US is at a 55-year low... you wouldn't know it from the TV, but that just a tool to keep you agitated anyway. There is NOTHING on television designed to help you, or any public service benefit. The major "war" of the future may simply be of information, the rich keep designing political amusements, or - the rest of us began to demand accounting from the governments. Unfortunately, in the U.S. most people don't know who their own congresspeople are, what bills are up, even the congressmen just turn in bills written by the lobbyists. I guess like Italy, the Senate has become this club of rich guys. 

One basic necessity of social control is having troops willing to fire on your own citizens and in America we're nowhere near that - most of our troops are drawn from the same social classes they'd be shooting. Without that, the government has certain limits - in the 1930's some private armies lie "the Pinkertons" were used as strike-breakers, but it wouldn't work now. Basically, we're  just not near mad enough, or even uncomfortable. Yet. There's only so much more that can be stolen, though. When and if we finally figure ou the right thing to get mad about, it may be a good thing...

Gee, I need more coffee.... :laughing3:

 

[Don]

yes, the "american dream" that wanted everything to be cheap and good and everybody to be rockstars and managers is what screwed the world over in the first place.
You Americans though, even if you don't have a true history or a true ethnicity since your country was just created in a couple of years by a group of rebels that didn't want to pay taxes and then became a huge immigration cornucopia thanks to it's huge quantity of natural resurces, can fight better this consumerism bullshit. My grand father used to live in a house with no electricity and no running water. Just he, his eleven brothers, mum and pap. And a dozen of sheeps. And that was in the late fifties, mind you.
So when he heard that he could get a big juicy steak everyday if he had only sold his debt to some bank he was like "hey, why the hell not?" and so it went for everybody.
You instead are prepared to it, you invented it, it's yours. You know how to resist it, when you want to.

 

[stubhead]

Well, in theory the leaders of every country who bought the "all growth, no responsibilities" B.S. have to answer to their citizens, but it's the multinational corporations and their biggest owners who run stuff anyway. How could a fully-populated island country like Ireland buy into the notion of limitless growth?  :icon_scratch: As far as where it goes, like I said I think we really have no idea what is actually going on, only that rich people are living like pigs while everyone else is suddenly being preached to and "taught" the values of austerity. I can't imagine why China possibly wants to underwrite our debt - would YOU loan money to the United States? :laughing3:

It just looks like a shell game to me. I worked for some Mafia guys in Miami for about a year and-a-half, managing kitchens. At least, it was five Italian guys who were constantly buying and selling and remodeling restaurants (and they ALL had red Camaros or Corvettes, and an impossibly-gorgeous South American popsie on their arm... :laughing7 Three of them would sell a restaurant to the other two, two would go in together and buy a profitable business, close it and remodel it, sell something else - they always had like five or six restaurants and bars in Coconut Grove and Coral Gables and Miami Beach. I figured out, it was just about keeping large amounts of money moving all the time, I assume (hell I know) they were laundering profits, but from what I don't know. Most of us who worked for them just got the willies eventually and quit, it was easy managing a restaurant that didn't have to be profitable - but it got creepy. And now we run countries that way, just keep money moving so the rich can skim it off.

Even if the richest people in the world aren't necessarily extremely smart, they can afford to hire people far smarter than everyone else. And the leftists here have the pitiable notion that maybe if you could just talk to these people, they'd see what they're doing.... hell, they know exactly what they're doing, they're just stone-cold evil. At least in Italy, people are still afraid of both the far right and their far left - the left here are all "pacifists", following the instructions posted on their TV's. I'm just planning on dying of old age, one day before it turns just way too weird.

I can go on and on. In America being called a "socialist" or "communist" is the worst possible thing - "How to terrorize a Democrat 101" -  even though at any given point anywhere from 1945 to 1990, there was far more functional economic socialism here than in China or the Soviet Union. Mao Tse-Tung and Joesph Stalin behaved like fascist dictators through-and-through, they just lied about it. And while you can get most people to agree that leaders do, indeed. lie about stuff, if you start mentioning things like our socialist G.I. Bills that educated veterans and bought them homes, our tax-paid socialist interstate highways, our socialist army and police forces and fire departments and all, it's like you sprouted horns and started speaking Martian. Glorb fzxtrexc? Technically, there isn't even such a thing as a "communist government" - communism, capitalism, barter economies, these are all forms of economic systems. And governments are things like representative democracies, monarchies, dictatorships. But just follow instructions, and don't worry that movie stars make 1,000's of degrees of magnitude more in income than school teachers - how else are movie stars supposed to pay for stuff? :dontknow:. No point in teaching the children too much, they'll just be unhappy.

 

[Don]

There's no left neither right in Italy anymore. They're just all puppets, like those kings in the Middle Ages that were kept poisened stupid but not enough so they could live and act as a scapegoat for the peasants. The only difference is that while everybody knows that the right-wind politics are all corrupt and would sell their own mothers if they had a buyer (as they often say themselves more or less directly) the left winders act like they are all saints and philosofers, absolutely different from the right scum, but then wet shite hits the fan we discover that the biggest financial scandal in the Republic's history, 21 billion of euros, is Monte dei Paschi's fault, which is the Democrat Bank. What a surprise.
The mafias have a big role in moving capital, expecially when it comes to managing.
However as things are nowadays it's very difficult to tell the difference between how the mafias make business and how the banks and multinationals do business They are both too powerful to be controlled by the Law, given that we can still believe in such a Romantic idea...

 

[Dan025]

there is no difference between the criminals, politicians and buisness leaders. that's just how it is. they all enjoy sucess, work outside the law and rarely get caught and have no morals. i know for a fact that the american goverment has enlisted the italian mafia in war times for various purposes. as they enlisted all kinds of fascist groups and terrorist organizations.

a relative of mine was a powerful mafia "don" and fled back to italy in world war 2 to evade some charges. while there he befriended mussolini who wanted to eradicate the mafia who might undercut his power so he enlisted my relitive to help get rid of the gangs in italy who agreed because he clearly wanted to control all the gangs in italy and be the very thing mussolini was worried about. well when mussolini was killed and the war was ending the don acted as a translator and guide to american forces and returned to america as a diplomat and war hero! his charges were pardoned and he enjoyed more success as a criminal for some time untill a rival don set him up on drug charges becasue he was afraid of his ambitions to be the "boss of all bosses." so my relitive died in jail but still had enough influence to pay for my fathers surgery because my grandfather had no insurance. i'm not sure i still have any relitives in the mob because i believe it's passed down to the male children and it's on my grandmothers side who only has sisters. the "family" isn't controled by my relitives anymore so i would think having that name would be a mark against anyone in that world. i don't think my father advertises who he's related to because he was a union boss for a time and i'm sure there was a good deal of mafia influence around him.