You gotta fight, for your right...

[eppie]

DR

Italy is a microcosm of what is wrong with the EU. The south is a criminal run enterprise and feeds on the productive north, and has no reason to ever change.

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That is what the north Italians say. For a foreigner there is not much difference to see between south and north. True the north is where all the industry is but in terms of corruption it is all way below European standards for us to notice the slight difference between south and north.

The 'reason' nothing changes is that corruption and organized crime are interwoven with the government.....MPs are all rich people with very shady backgrounds (except for a few maybe). Berlusconi is the big example for italians that have to fight for themselves and see that it is good to steal, lie, and have mafia-contacts (but he is not the only one).
Europe (and especially the christian parties) don't want to criticize because of party political interests.

Only thing that can happen is a greece-like scenario where the Italian government is forced to take care of business.....sadly they will need to pull open a whole can of new politicians, because 95 % is incompetent.

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Here we go again, NOTA versus SOTA (North of the Alps versus South Of The Alps)

You might say this is Guelphs vs Ghibellines, chapter MCMCCLIII.

DR

But here we talk based on facts; the southern European countries spend to much and earn too little. Spain and Portugal need to be very careful with government spending....Greece already overstepped the line, and Italy might become next.
When discussing about expanding the EU, we (politicians and the people) have been focusing too much on e.g. Turkey's 'Islamishness', poor people in the former east block states etc., and too little on the countries that are already in there.
In Holland there is discussion about raising the age with which you can go with pension from 65 till 67 while in most southern countries people can go on full pension starting from 55 or so (depending on how many years they worked).

If we will not manage to control Greece's financial administration we will be heading for a severe financial crisis again.....might very well be a domino effect. So yes we need to put pressure on the countries below the alps.