flipper:

On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 03:10:45 +0100, "F. Bertolazzi"
wrote:

Exactly. That's because the briber wanted to (I cannot be very precise,
because, at the time, I was living there) have a... VAT exemption (not
exactly, there is also a 10% VAT, he wanted his wares to be classified in a
lower "bracket") for basic chemicals and incentives for grain alcohol. He
later committed suicide with a revolver whose hammer was allegedly still in
firing position.

I'm just surprised 'everyone' went along.

Sorry, can you rephrase the above? I can't understand what you mean.

Blair won elections three times in the UK with his "third way".
I don't think anybody still knows what that means.

The 'third way' goes back to the collapse of the Eastern Block and
Soviet Union with some socialist elements concluding that managed
economies don't work. So the 'third way' is meant to employ
'entrepreneurship' and the 'free market' as tools in implementing
socialist policy.

Well, here nobody dared to say it that plainly. There are no more
Communists in Italy. Well, you may say that there are, but they're lying.
The sad truth is that Europe is already so socialist that a commie may look
as a mildly progressive bloke.

This is not entirely new. Fascism was also touted as a 'third way' and
favored 'private enterprise', subject to the good of the state, vs
communism which extols state ownership.

It's not a case that Mussolini, before being expelled from the socialist
party, was a "maximalist socialist", as opposed to "reformist socialist".
The two factions split in, if I remember well, 1924, forming the communist
and the socialist party.

After all Catholicism is not too different from fascism: you are allowed to
own your home and personal belongings, provided tey're nott too much.

Fascism, however, directly controlled private enterprise when the need
arose

Or if the enterprise was sufficiently powerful. The IRI (lauded by, guess
who, Keynes) was made for that.

The only difference between fascism and communism is the respect for small
property. Communism deletes also that.


An example would be "cap and trade" where the government sets up caps,

Yea, "crap and trade the manure".

Some argue this is akin to a mugger claiming you 'voluntarily' handed
over your wallet and the gun poked in your chest was merely an
'incentive' for you to decide on the proper behavior.

LOL

2000. The 21st century began in 2001. ;-)

Now I understand where the folly of the "millennium bug" originated.

No, that was software and had to do with various methods 'old'
software used for year calculations like, as one example, using only
the last 2 digits.

Yes, at the time I was still a "softwarist" and made good money in doing
rather useless maintenance. I mean, a single line would have sufficed, i.e.
if(dateend-datebegin) 0 then result = result + 100
while everybody insisted to bring the year field to four digits, so the
solution will be perfect for the next 8k years to came.

He was right: with his accomplice Greenspan he abridged one recession and
consequent layoffs, as Bush, freshly elected, did again. How?
By printing money and lowering interest rates until they become negative
(lower than inflation). If you sabotage the basic tenet of capitalism, i.e.
that when you borrow money you must return a bigger sum, everything can
happen. And it did.

That sounds good but upon inspection it doesn't explain the crisis.

It does: if you skip the "bad" effects of three crises, you end up with a
triple crisis.

Government, however, is not a 'profit enterprise'.

Even if it was, at least as far as the enterprises and people under its
jurisdiction, it would be an unbeatable competitor, because your money is
its money, the more you make, the more it taxes you.

Clinton, btw, is a 'third wayer'.

Right, pals also with mr. D'alema, the former senior member of PCI, that
bombed Serbia without even consulting the Parliament.

When Berlusconi sent some troops *after* the war in Iraq was won (you can't
imagine the deluded faces of almost half of the italian population whe you
won in about a month), his party voted against it and continues to claim
that that's an illegal war initiative, even if, this time, the Parliament
voted on it.

But, paraphasing you, Berlusconi wears horrible socks. ;-)

Depends on how you measure it. Conservatives love to point to
Kennedy's tax cuts.

A good start.

Probably the most famous, both here and abroad, aspect of his
presidency was the Cuban missile crisis, a crisis he induced by the,
so called, "missile gap" he campaigned on. Once in office he
discovered the falsehood of it but decided to begin a buildup anyway,
which panicked the Soviet Union into retaliating with missiles in
Cuba.

Well, it's also true that you had missiles in Turkey, which is in a similar
geographical position relative to Russia, and probably Iran.

But no, here he is maily the young progressive president killed by an
obscure conservative plot just before the US briefly become a really free
country (hippies, flower power and all that crap).

Only my mother once told me of the 1963(?) scare. Once every while there is
a documentary about it, but it's not a commonly known fact. That's the
magic of leftist propaganta: the benevolent USSR would have never dared to
menace the US. Only the fascist yankees do that.

But in most towns there is a big street or a place named after him. Maybe
because, at the time, we were in our "chinese era" (Italy was the first to
repay the Marshall loan) and we were building the country.

I know there can be 'behind the scenes' issues and unobvious
historical context but that wasn't the case in the things I saw.

It often happens.