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This afternoon I have taken part in a meeting at the European Union in Strasbourg. at the invitation of Giulietto Chiesa, together with Marco Travaglio and Luigi De Magistris. At this meeting there was discussion of European funding. I’m giving a summary below. In the next few days I’ll publish my video and the video of De Magistris and Travaglio.

“I’ve come here to Strasbourg to ask you for help. To beg the European Community not to provide any more funding to Italy. The money that is arriving from Europe is increasing the metastasis that is devouring our country.
In 2006, Italy got illicit funding from the European Union, then it swindled it for 318,104,000 euro with 1,221 cases denounced. In a single year it has improved its performance by 90 million euro.
We are the top in Europe. First in football. First in fraud. Italy is fraudulent with agricultural funding. It is fraudulent with structural funds for the development of areas that are getting left behind. And I’m just referring to fraud that has been proved.
Billions of Euro arrive every year from the European Community to Italy. Where do they end up? Italian citizens don’t know. To get information they can only turn to the judges. But the judges, when they take action, are always blocked by the Government, by the Parties. So we are always kept in the dark about everything.
The financing from the European Community is our money at the end of the day. Italy participates with other countries to create the common fund that is then redistributed. Money that goes out and that then comes back. A bit like uncontrolled laundering of dirty money. Our taxes are financing the European funding whose use the Italian citizens know nothing about. If it is useful, if it is not useful, what benefits it brings, when it ends.
The Vice President of the Community, Frattini and the Minister of Community Policies, Bonino are very private people. They did not tell Prodi that Barroso had put up 275 million Euro for the integration of the Roma community. Italy didn’t ask for anything, Spain got 52 million and Poland got 8.5 million. Poland? Have the Roma people gone to Poland as well? I thought they were all in Italy. For once when we could have used the funding for a good reason we haven’t asked for it.
And it’s strange. Because even our Regions have opened luxurious community offices in Brussels, that we pay for, to get to the funding. They have more office workers than all the other States.
The billions of Euro that come into Italy are intended for useless work: roundabouts, theme supermarkets, like the TAV tunnel in Val di Susa and Mediapolis in Piedmont. They have financed projects that never arrived at a conclusion, purifiers, alternative energy. They ended up in the pockets of that grey zone that connects the parties to the companies to criminal groupings.
It is better if Italy no longer gives contributions to the common European Fund and in exchange that it has no funding. This money can be used by our government in other ways. To reduce our Public Debt, the biggest in Europe, one of the most impressive in the world.
A Debt that risks taking us under. The money could be used to reduce taxes. To give incentives to companies to invest in Italy instead of encouraging Italian companies to transfer abroad. Or even to reduce the poverty that exists in Italy or increase the starvation pensions of our old folk.
The money laundering of our cash through Brussels is no good for us. It is only useful to fatten up the mafia, to grow criminality in our country.
Also present here is the judge Luigi De Magistris. What has been taken out of the hands of De Magistris is an investigation that involved the top people of the Region of Calabria and of the Italian Government: Mastella, Minister of Justice and Prodi, President of the Council.
The investigation was removed from him by his superiors without a reason. The documents of the investigation have been taken from the strong boxes of the Catanzaro Prosecutors Office without warning him and they have been sent to Rome. The investigation is called Why Not and it also deals with the use of Community funding. In Calabria, they are waiting for five billion euro in European funding. Where will it end up?
The magistracy has been halted by the politicians. Once, in 1992, with Falcone and Borsellino, they used TNT. Now it’s the Minister of Justice who intervenes directly.
European funding is of no use to Italy. It’s useful to the political parties and organised crime. We don’t want it. Please hang onto it. Do this for a better Italy.”

Beppe Grillo

As someone said, the mafia is a human factor and as such, it has a beginning and an end. With the arrest of Lo Piccolo there is still a lot to do to kill the Sicilian mafia. But every step is important and I am very happy with those in Italy who fight this virus.

The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet wrote a big article today about the Sicilian life and the new movement Addio Pizzo. 

"The Italian Youth defy the Mafia hold on Sicily"

Thank you Christian Ferrera and SVD for telling about it. Italians really need our solidarity. I would love if Christian and his colleagues would deepen their knowledge about the Italian situation, reading among others "La Casta", "La Gomorra" and "La Casta dei Giornali".

What is going on today and what Italian politicians and journalists seems to hide or even deny, was said even 1983 by an Italian journalist, Giuseppe Fava.

On Guardian Unlimited you could read this about the italian mafia:

“Italy’s mafias earn more than the country’s biggest corporation, according to a report by the national retailers’ association.

According to the latest Fortune 500 list of the world’s biggest corporations, Italy’s largest company by sales is the oil and gas giant ENI. In the first half of this year, it had a turnover equivalent to €83bn. The retailers’ federation Confesercenti put the earnings of organised crime in Italy at €90bn (£63bn).”

Look what Giuseppe Fava told us 1983: 

“And so here you are with the banks, this proliferation of new banks. General Dalla Chiesa understood. This was his great intuition, that led to his death. You need to look hard inside the banks: there there are tens of billions covered with blood that come out cleansed by the banks to arrive at public works. It is said that many churches have been constructed with the bloody money of the mafia… I have seen many State funerals. Now I’ll say something that only I myself am convinced of, so it could be not true: but very often the assassins were on the stage of the authorities… My opinion is that everything starts with the absence of the State and the failure of the Italian political society. Perhaps we need to create a second Republic in Italy, that has laws, democratic structures that eliminate the danger that the politician can become under the domination of himself, of his greed, of the ferociousness of the others, of the fear or that he can just become a professional of politics. Everything starts from there. From the collapse of the politicians and of politics.”

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The intuition of Giuseppe Fava and among others, his antimafia fight in “Giornale di Sicilia” and “I Siciliani”, led him to his death 5th January 1984, killed by the mafia.

Today several Italians are fighting against corrupted  and investigated politicians like e.g. the Minister of Justice, Clemente Mastella. But the Italian mafia seems to control the Italian Parliament. Italians seems to be in need of a second Republic…

The whole interview translated into English is to be found on www.beppegrillo.it.

Italy's leaders barely understand word processors, let alone the web. Now they've turned against the country's bloggers

By G8 standards, Italy is a strange country. Put simply, it is a nation of octogenarian lawmakers elected by 70-year-old pensioners. Everyone else is inconsequential.

Romano Prodi, the Prime Minister, is a spry 68, knocking off 71-year-old Silvio Berlusconi in last year’s election. President Giorgio Napolitano, 82, has six more years left on his term; his predecessor was 86 when he called it quits. In the unlikely event that Italy declares war, the decision will come from a head of state who was a month shy of 20 when the Germans surrendered at the end of the Second World War.

This creaky perspective is a necessary introduction to any discussion about Italian politics with outsiders, I find. If the Italian Government seems unable to adapt to the modern world, the explanation is quite simple. Your country would operate like this too if your grandparents were in charge.

Recently, Italian lawmakers (My comment: mainly Ricardo Franco Levi, born 1949, see photo) once again took aim at modern life, introducing an incredibly broad law that would effectively require all bloggers, and even users of social networks, to register with the state. Even a harmless blog about a favourite football squad or a teenager grousing about life’s unfairness would be subject to government oversight, and even taxation – even if it’s not a commercial website. (Read more on Times Online)

• More about this on www.beppegrillo.it 
• Read an italian article on La Repubblica)

The energetic old Levi isn’t giving up. He has in fact modified article 7: ”Excluded from the obligation to register with ROC are those who use the Internet or who operate on the Internet in forms and with products, like personal websites or websites for collective use that are not for an entrepreneurial work organisation.” www.beppegrillo.it

• Read an article on La Stampa