I have pointed out that the present fear fad in Italy is only a matter of perceiving it as such, exploited to the hilt by the rightwing press. There is no security problem in Italy beyond organized crime. Petty criminality has gone down over the long term. Were we to compare the Italian situation to Germany we would expect Merkel to set up a totalitarian state for the higher crime levels there.

What the law seeks to do is to further Berlusconi's anti-illuminist, ancien régime project of a two-tiered judiciary system in which the modern "royalty" (assorted white collar mafia, starlets, economic criminality, corrupt politicians) are judged by their social position rather than their actions. The hoi polloi are now obliged to undergo summary trials with rights to appeal curtailed.

While the annual budget law drastically reduces resources for the police forces over the next three years, a big vaudeville hullaballoo is made over using 3000 military to police the cities presumably against perceived bogeymen (the usual black, brown, beady-eyed clandestine immigrant).

With this new law it is a crime to be clandestine. All crimes committed by a clandestine will be punished by harsher sentences than if they were committed by a person with papers in order. It is precisely these sort of laws that fill prisons with illegal immigrants giving grist to the argument that illegal immigrants are the major cause of crime. If one subtracts crimes related to a person's political status, the incidence of crime as compared between the general population and clandestines is on par. Actually, legal immigrants have a lower crime incidence than Italian nationals.

Detention camps will no longer be called "Centers of Temporary Detention" but "Centers for Identification and Expulsion."