From the morning news dispatch:
The Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a young and handsome politician who saw himself as a kind of Clinton/Blair of Italy, lost a referendum for constitutional reforms (some of which wanted to make Italy more "competitive") and resigned yesterday. What is now uncertain is Italy's future in the EU, an association that's neoliberal to the core because it is above all a monetary union. (Neoliberalism is a political system that can tolerate civil rights but doesn't tolerate a law or practice that places the market in any place but first in our lives.) In 2010, the euro hit the rocks hard. There was panic in the markets. Something needed to be done fast. Berlin, Europe's center, decided to bail out the banks and impose austerity on the public. This has suffocated the economies in the south. Italy's recession has been long and severe, and it has an aging population. Neoliberalism was able to block all leftist solutions to this crisis to protect banks and their bad bets, and so we are now seeing there and other places a surge in other political options. Those options are populist and xenophobic.
