Avanti Grillo

The Italian euro-elite is plotting against the Italian people and their right to self-determination again:

Italian officials say the Bank of Italy’s governor Ignazio Visco is front-runner to take over as premier despite warnings that this will be seen as an elitist ploy. It is far from clear whether the Democrats (Pd) in charge of the lower house will back the idea.  The plans amount to a near replica of the outgoing team of Mario Monti, though one greatly weakened by the earthquake upset in the elections a week ago. Almost 57pc of the vote went to groups that vowed to tear up the EU-imposed austerity agenda.

Stefano Fassina, the Pd economics chief, said his party is vehemently opposed to “any form of technocrat government, new or old”, insisting that the election result must be respected. Mr Fassina said 90pc of the country had rejected the Monti agenda and warned that it would be a grave error to try to force through the same reviled plans a second time.

Comedian Beppe Grillo repeated his vow to “bring down the old system” and dismissed the latest talks as cattle market trading by a depraved political class trying to circumvent the will of the people. “I repeat for the umpteenth time, the Five Star Movement will not back any government. It will vote law by law in keeping with its platform,” he said.

“We’re not a political party, we’re a civic revolution. This country is in ruins with two trillion in debts and we have to rebuild it from scratch,” he told a scrum of journalists. In a rhetorical play on the slogans of 1789 and 1917 he exhorted “all citizens” to descend on parliament.  Mr Grillo repeated his call for an “online referendum” on the euro and vowed to buy back €600bn of Italian bonds held by foreigners if his movement gains power, a de facto default and withdrawal from the EMU system. 

The “comedian” is terrifying the bankers and the politicians because he’s made it clear that he will not be co-opted by alliances and payoffs.  Naturally, this refusal to join them means those who are observably anti-democratic fascists are attempting to smear him as a fascist.  They are frightened, quite reasonably, that Grillo will lead Italy out of the Euro and possibly the European Union as well.  As, one hopes, he will.

To put it into American terms, this is as if Ron Paul had run third party for president, no one won, and it was declared that Ben Bernanke would be appointing himself president.  Needless to say, the 90 percent of Italians who voted against Monti, the Italian equivalent of Alan Greenspan, who for the last year has been acting as prime minister despite never being elected to anything, are not at all pleased about this.

Meanwhile, in the land of the free, Americans sit complacently on their $53 trillion in debt and continue to support the very Republicans and Democrats whose policies created it.