You chose: corruption

  • Op-Eds

    Corruption and the Economy: From the Ill Winds, Some Good

    Judith Harris(June 30, 2015)
    As the daily outpouring showing the extent of corruption shows, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” In the case of Italy, that ill wind is the troubled economy. Without the lingering recession that began in 2008, much that is unacceptable might have remained under the carpet. If so, we can be grateful. But now what?
  • Op-Eds

    The Economics of Sleaze

    (March 19, 2015)
    Minister Maurizio Lupi bent to pressure and resigned. But in the cafés over cappuccino and corneto people here have been asking what this latest corruption scandal means. How did it come to pass that a shady businessman seeking government contracts could give a recent university graduate, whose father happens to be a cabinet minister, a $12,000 wristwatch? The cherry on the cake was the minister’s lame response: “Well, I would not have accepted it.”
  • Op-Eds

    Battling Corruption and its Costs

    Judith Harris(February 27, 2015)
    Forty-one years ago Indro Montanelli, that late lamented grand guru of Italian journalism, opined sardonically that what Italy needed was a “Ministry of Scandals” to regulate the “atavic” Italian sin of corruption. With the past six years of a severely weakened economy, corruption has grown, but also brought the problem into the open as rarely before.
  • Facts & Stories

    Gramsci Comes to The Bronx: Too Little and Too Late

    Jerry Krase(July 08, 2013)
    Whereas Jesus Christ stopped at Eboli on his way elsewhere and has yet to make a confirmed appearance anywhere in the bailiwick of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, I am happy to report that the ironically Christ-like radical Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, has finally made it to The Bronx; but only by way of Switzerland.
  • Op-Eds

    Food for Thought: Not All Popes Resign for the Same Reasons

    Ottorino Cappelli(February 12, 2013)
    In an interview with Professor Stanislao Pugliese we review an illustrious precedent to Pope Ratzinger’s resignantion—that of Celestine V, who resigned in 1294. Scorned as a “coward” by Dante Alighieri who actually accused him to have paved the way to the appointment of the infamously corrupt Boniface VIII, Celestine was rehabilitated by the renowned Italian writer Ignazio Silone in a famous novel published in 1968. To offer our readers some food for thought and help put today’s events in the Vatican in a broader perspective, Silone’s biographer prof. Pugliese tells us the story of Celestine V as reinterpreted by a great Italian writer whose motto was “Conscience is above obedience.”
  • Facts & Stories

    Dissecting Berlusconi’s Italy

    Alice BONVICINI(September 26, 2010)
    On September 20, journalist Marco Travaglio and Judge Piercamillo Davigo were invited to the School of Journalism of Columbia University to discuss the troubled present and past of Italy’s democracy under Berlusconi’s government. The debate was moderated by Alexander Stille, professor of International Journalism at Columbia and renowned expert on Italian politics