[ExI] The Manifesto of Italian Transhumanists

[Amara Graps]

Mirco Romanato painlord2k at yahoo.it :
>I would vote for Mr. Berlusconi, because he is the last best chance for
>Italy to recover economically. Now he is not saddled with the UDC party
>(Mr. Casini and other demochristians), so he has no excuse to fail.

Unfortunately, Berlusconi is running for office instead of serving time
in jail, but perhaps the majority of Italian citizens want it that way.
You probably didn't see much of this information because of his tight
control over much of the Italian media.

I'll just pick a couple of areas that I have ready-to-go detailed data.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Criminal offenses
-----------------

Here I've collected the most relevant articles about his fitness as a
prime minister; the last 25 pages of this 50 page compendium concern his
last 9 criminal indictments as investigated by The Economist.

http://www.amara.com/article.pdf

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Science and Technology
----------------------

If you are interested to see Berlusconi's effect on science and
technology during the last ~five years, just search at Tommaso Dorigo's
blog :

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/page/1/?s=berlusconi&searchbutton=go%21
(there are six pages of various references to Berlusconi from an Italian
high energy researcher living in Venezia)

With such an effect on one aspect of 'health' in a country, it is easy to
make a comparison with other countries who are making a sustained
investment in the technological fields:

Comparing the 'health' of Italy and Spain-

The growth of science and technology is one way to gauge a culture's
ability to adapt to a changing world, and modernize, so let us look at
how the two governments are investing.

The Ramon y Cajal program is one of the Spanish government's (Ministry
of Science and Education) primary investments in its future. Every year,
250 scholarships covering all of the sciences are awarded; each
scholarship is 5 years with a salary of 32KEuros per year, and after the
five years, you're ready to be awarded a permanent position. Spain has
been offering the Ramon y Cayal for the last 8 years. Nothing like that
exists in Italy, and the typical Italian salary for that same type of
work is about 1/2 of what one earns with the Ramon Y Cajal. Living
expenses are cheaper on average, as well. When Prodi was interviewed by
Le Scienze, and asked what he would do if he was elected, he said that
he would like to begin a program like the Ramon y Cayal.

http://www.perlulivo.it/2006-elezioni/2006_04_02_lescienze_intervistaRP.html

If it ever happens, (it hasn't so far, you know) then Spain will have
say, a ten year head start on Italy, consistently investing in the
country's technical future. I believe that the Spanish government's
investment in research is about 1.2% GDP/year,  while Italy's has
dropped below 1% in the last years.

It is true that Italian scientists presently earn more citations per
year of their published papers than Spain, but it is not by very much,
and it indicates to me how far and how fast Spain has risen, from what
it used to be, a few years ago. If you plot per year the citations,
Italy's number of citations per year is flat, while Spain's
number of citations is increasing rapidly per year.

http://in-cites.com/research/2006/april_17_2006-1.html

Current (2007)
Citations per paper: Spain: 8.32, Italy: 9.68
http://in-cites.com/countries/2007allfields.html

Ten year ranking  Citations per paper
http://in-cites.com/countries/italy_6-05.html   8.42 (2005)
http://in-cites.com/countries/spain_2005.html   7.20 (2005)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

>If and when the economy will recover, people will have more money and so
>will have more options in and outside Italy.

I think it is appropriate at this time to paste what the Economist wrote
about Mr. Berlusconi just two years ago.

Italy's election
Basta, Berlusconi

Apr 6th 2006
 From The Economist print edition
Italians have a rotten choice to make, but it is time to sack Silvio Berlusconi
Corbis

FIVE years ago, this newspaper declared that Silvio Berlusconi was unfit
to lead Italy. Mr Berlusconi was (as he still is) the head of Forza
Italia, a political party that he had created only seven years earlier,
and as such he was the centre-right's candidate to become prime
minister. Despite our declaration, Italians voted his coalition into
power in May 2001-and Mr Berlusconi has been Italy's prime minister ever
since. Now, in the election on April 9th and 10th, he is seeking a fresh
term of office. He does not deserve one.

Our verdict against Mr Berlusconi in 2001 rested on two broad
considerations. The first was the glaring conflict of interest created
by his ownership, via his biggest company, Mediaset, of the three main
private television stations in Italy. The second was the morass of legal
cases and investigations against him and his associates for a wide
variety of alleged offences, ranging from money-laundering and dealing
with the Mafia to false accounting and the bribing of judges. We
concluded that no businessman with such a background was fit to lead one
of the world's richest democracies.

That view stands: we continue to think that Mr Berlusconi is unfit to be
prime minister, both because of the conflict of interest arising from
his media assets and because of his continuing legal travails (he may
shortly go on trial yet again for alleged bribery, this time of a
British witness, David Mills, who happens to be married to a minister in
Tony Blair's cabinet, Tessa Jowell). But five years on we have a new and
even more devastating reason to call for Mr Berlusconi's removal from
office: his record in power.

As we predicted in 2001, his premiership has been disfigured by repeated
attempts, including an avalanche of new laws, to help him avoid
conviction in legal trials. He has devoted much time not only to
changing the law to benefit himself and his friends, but also to
besmirching Italy's prosecutors and judges, undermining the credibility
of the country's entire judicial system. It is not surprising that tax
evasion, illegal building and corruption all seem to have increased over
the past five years. And, again as we predicted, he has done little to
resolve his conflicts of interest: instead, he has shamelessly exploited
the government's control of the state-owned RAI television network.
Directly or indirectly, Mr Berlusconi now wields influence over some 90%
of Italy's broadcast media, a situation that no serious democracy should
tolerate.

The failed reformer

Italian voters knew most of this in 2001, of course. Yet they still
chose to give Mr Berlusconi their backing, for quite another reason.
They hoped that he would deploy the business skills that had helped to
make him so rich to reform their weak economy, making all Italians
richer as well.

On this count, however, Mr Berlusconi's government must be judged an
abject failure (see article and article). Italy now has the
slowest-growing large economy in Europe. With wages still rising even
though productivity is not, and with currency devaluation no longer
possible now that Italy is in the euro, Italian business is fast losing
competitiveness. Many of the country's traditional producers in such
industries as textiles, shoes and white goods are under devastating
attack from lower-cost Chinese competitors. The Berlusconi government
has also undone much of the improvement to the public finances made by
its predecessor: the budget deficit and the public debt, the world's
third-biggest, are both rising once more.

It would be unfair to assert that Italy's economic difficulties are all
Mr Berlusconi's fault. In truth, its problems are similar to most of
Europe's, although they seem worse in Italy than anywhere else. As in
France and Germany, their roots stretch back for decades, not years. To
cure them will require the adoption of many tough reforms; and, as
France has just demonstrated so graphically, implementing such changes
is politically challenging, to say the least. But where the Berlusconi
government has really let Italy down is in failing even to begin the
process. Apart from a few sensible labour-market and pension reforms, it
has done too little to press ahead with market liberalisation, with more
privatisation and with the promotion of competition in what is one of
Europe's most overregulated economies. The conclusion from these five
years is that Mr Berlusconi is not and never will be a bold economic
reformer of the kind that Italy desperately needs. Prodi's test

Unfortunately there are reasons to doubt whether his centre-left
opponent, Romano Prodi, would be a lot better. The former economics
professor grasps the need for change in Italy more clearly than Mr
Berlusconi, who has spent much of the campaign denying that the country
has any economic problems at all. Moreover, Mr Prodi made a fair stab at
initiating reforms when he was prime minister in 1996-98-and he also
succeeded in getting the country into the euro. But neither then nor in
his later stint as president of the European Commission did he show
himself to be a forceful leader, still less an unwavering advocate of
economic liberalism. Most worrying of all, if Mr Prodi wins the election
he seems certain to be dependent on the support of coalition partners
who are actively hostile to reform, particularly the unreformed
Communists who are led by Fausto Bertinotti.

In foreign policy, too, some of Mr Prodi's instincts may be unwelcome.
He is a faithful believer in a European federal superstate; Mr
Berlusconi's more sceptical approach to Brussels is one of his better
points. Mr Prodi's plans to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq are no
longer controversial-indeed, there is little difference between him and
Mr Berlusconi on this issue-but he is likely in general to adopt a
rather less friendly attitude to America than his rival.

It is the economy that will remain the critical test. Sadly, most
Italian people do not yet recognise how sick their economy has become.
For that reason they may not be ready for the pain of reform. Mr
Berlusconi is certainly not going to push them-and he remains unfit for
the office in any event. Italians should accordingly vote for Mr Prodi,
not il Cavaliere.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado