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Tag: community service
Ex-Prime Minister Berlusconi Sentenced To Community Service

Ex-Prime Minister Berlusconi Sentenced To Community Service

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

ROME — Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ordered Tuesday to spend a year performing community service among the elderly as his sentence for committing tax fraud at his media conglomerate.

The decision by a Milan judge spares Berlusconi, 77, a sentence of house arrest. But the former premier, who has dominated Italy’s political scene for two decades, will see his movements restricted just as his center-right party gears up for elections to the European Parliament next month.

The billionaire media tycoon was convicted last year in a complex case involving overpayments at his Mediaset television company. In November, he was expelled from the Italian Senate because of his legal problems, despite a vigorous campaign to persuade fellow senators to let him remain.

He was handed a four-year prison sentence for the fraud conviction, which was reduced to one year as part of Italy’s efforts to relieve overcrowding in its jails. Partly in light of Berlusconi’s age, confinement to his home or community service were put forward as alternatives to spending the time behind bars.

Both the prosecution and defense reportedly urged the court to order Berlusconi to perform community service, either among the disabled or the elderly. He must now spend four hours a week working at a center for the elderly, among men and women who are essentially his peers.

He must also spend the majority of his time in Lombardy, in northern Italy, where he lives in a lavish residence. But he is allowed to spend between Tuesday and Thursday of each week in Rome, which could be key to his continuing political ambitions.

Although his conviction bars him from holding office, Berlusconi remains a significant force in Italian public life as the head of his center-right Forza Italia party. The party has fallen out with other conservative groups with which it once formed a coalition, but Berlusconi has been hoping for a strong showing at the polls for the European Parliament at the end of May.

How much campaigning he will be able to accomplish with the constraints imposed upon him remains to be seen. His reputation as a wily operator skilled at going around the rules is legendary here.

Berlusconi, who served as prime minister three times, has consistently maintained his innocence of the many charges that have been laid against him at various trials throughout the years. He insists that his legal woes are the work of left-wing judges determined to bring him down, and has compared the “persecution” he faces to that experienced by Jesus.

Besides his fraud conviction, he has also been found guilty of paying a teenage girl for sex and using the power of his office to try to cover it up. He has appealed that conviction.

afp.com / Alberto Pizzoli

A Program Conservatives Should Love

A Program Conservatives Should Love

WASHINGTON — We are at a point where we will soon have vicious ideological debates over motherhood and apple pie.

Don’t laugh. If we can agree on anything across our philosophical divides, surely we can support efforts to promote voluntary service by our fellow citizens and to strengthen our nation’s extraordinary network of civic and religious charities.

This shared set of commitments led to one of the few bipartisan initiatives of President Obama’s time in office. On April 21, it will be five years since the president signed the Serve America Act, the final product of one of Congress’ most creative odd couples. Over and over, Republican senator Orrin Hatch and Democratic senator Edward Kennedy found ways to legislate together. The law aimed at authorizing 250,000 service slots by 2017 was the unlikely duo’s capstone project before Kennedy’s death.

At a very modest cost to government — those who serve essentially get living expenses and some scholarship assistance later — AmeriCorps gives mostly young Americans a chance to spend a year helping communities and those in need while also nurturing thousands of organizations across the country. Senior Corps provides Americans over 55 a chance to serve, too.

AmeriCorps sent out its first volunteers 20 years ago this fall. Since then, over 800,000 Americans have participated in the program. By giving life to this great venture in generosity, our government did something that taxpayers, regardless of party, can be proud of.

One politician who speaks often about the importance of civil society groups is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan rightly talks about the “vast middle ground between government and the individual,” and of empowering “community organizations to improve people’s lives.”

Yet Ryan’s new budget comes out against apple pie. It zeroes out AmeriCorps. Poof. Gone.

Rather than denouncing Ryan for this, I would urge him instead to take a second look on the basis of his own principles and realize the opportunity he has. The best move for someone who loves the activities of the nonprofits as much as Ryan says he does is to try to trump the president.

Obama’s budget proposes $1.05 billion to finance 114,000 AmeriCorps positions, a net increase of more than 30,000. It’s good that Obama and Senate Democrats have worked to keep the program funded in the face of House Republican resistance. But even the number Obama proposes amounts to just over half of the 200,000 spots for 2014 that Hatch and Kennedy envisioned in their original bill.

It’s not as if young people don’t want to serve. AmeriCorps had 580,000 applications for 80,000 openings; Teach for America, 55,000 applications for 6,000 slots. Alan Khazei, co-chair of the Franklin Project at the Aspen Institute that promotes national service, points to the 16 percent unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds. Service, he argues, is a gateway. It can lead to “employment opportunities and help young Americans develop important job skills for their future careers.”

If Ryan isn’t convinced yet, he should talk to Wendy Spencer, the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. He’d have a lot in common politically with Spencer, a Republican. She worked in the private sector, for a local Chamber of Commerce and a United Way, and held positions in Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration in Florida. She headed the state’s Commission on Volunteerism for the last three Republican governors.

Spencer has been inventive at a time of tough budgets. At the end of March, she announced a partnership with Citi Foundation and the Points of Light Institute involving $10 million in private financing to engage 25,000 low-income young Americans to lead volunteer service projects even as they get mentoring and training from Citi employees.

Encouraged by Obama, federal agencies are using AmeriCorps volunteers in new ways. FEMA Corps, for example, can deploy 1,600 volunteers in disaster relief emergencies while the School Turnaround corps has used hundreds of volunteers in repairing troubled schools.

Spencer views the federal service programs as a “trifecta.” The organizations receiving AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members see their capacity enhanced as full-time volunteers leverage the work of thousands more. And, of course, the participants themselves benefit, as do the people they serve.

If you wish, Mr. Ryan, you can let the president get all the credit for saving this worthy endeavor and for fostering innovation. Or you can go him one better by expanding it. You could use AmeriCorps as a model for a practical, locally oriented, conservative approach to government. Because that’s exactly what it is.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: St. Bernard Project via Flickr