Newsgroup: it.politica.polo
Titolo: The Guardian: Berlusconi? An enemy of democracy

An enemy of democracy
Berlusconi has learned that it's more profitable to manipulate the
parliamentary system than to overthrow it
Paul Foot
Guardian
Tuesday October 2, 2001
What did the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, mean when he said he
was "confident of the superiority of our civilisation" over the Muslim
world?
A Guardian leader last week listed the three central features of
Berlusconi's Italy that justify his confidence and his pride: fascists and
racists in government, hideous corruption in business, monstrous media
monopolies. To which I add: disgusting police brutality at Genoa, and crude
official cover-up of that brutality.
All these, it seems to me, can be grouped under a single heading - the
determination of rich and powerful people to manipulate the democratic
process. This was once the central aim of P2, perhaps the most influential
secret society ever established in postwar Europe.
P2 was ostensibly a harmless branch of the freemasons but there was nothing
harmless about it. Its members included top bankers, business tycoons, media
moguls, generals, judges and intelligence agents. They met in secret and
plotted the gradual erosion of the hated system of democracy that from time
to time threatened to exert some marginal control over Italian society.
One of P2's most influential members was Roberto Calvi, boss of the doomed
Ambrosiano bank. In June 1982, Calvi's corpse was found hanging from
scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge. The City of London police concluded
that the banker had committed suicide, though others were struck by the
coincidences between the scene of his lurid death and certain well-known
masonic symbols - a bridge, a ladder, some stones in the dead man's pocket,
not to mention the frati neri (black friars), an ancient secret society from
which P2 allegedly originated. At any rate, despite occasional successes, P2
never came near to overthrowing democracy, and not long after the death of
Calvi, dissolved and vanished.
One of its most prominent members - no 1168 - was Silvio Berlusconi, who was
so rich and owned so many television stations that he was able to form an
entirely new legal political alliance, unattached to the parties of the old
Italian democracy, and, with the help of former fascists and racists, to get
the alliance elected to government.
Ever since, the Italian parliament has been absorbed with complicated
financial legislation, much of which will make it much more difficult, if
not impossible, to convict Silvio Berlusconi of corruption charges launched
against him. The new legislation sailed through parliament until recently
when proposed changes in the laws about foreign bank accounts were deemed to
conflict with other laws necessary to counter terrorism and were, narrowly,
defeated.
All this goes to show, however, that if you are very rich and want to change
the law to your advantage it is really much easier to work within the
parliamentary system than to subvert it from outside. In a half-hearted
apology to the Italian senate, Mr Berlusconi called on Italian citizens to
"hang me". Curiously, no one took him up on the offer.
. I was intrigued by an item last week on BBC Radio 4's excellent business
programme Money Box. The programme has been flooded with emails from
customers of Lloyds/TSB bank. They complained that they couldn't contact the
branch of their bank. Their calls to their branch were automatically put
through to call centres, most of whose harassed staff couldn't begin to cope
with their queries.
I recommend any customer of Lloyds/TSB who wants to know how their bank came
to this sorry state to read John Plender's A Stake in the Future. He recalls
the history of the old Trustee Savings Bank, which prided itself on having
branches in every major high street and close personal contact with its
customers. As a result, the TSB became more popular and more successful by
any measure than its competitors.
To the Tory government of the day and their many supporters in the
boardrooms of the big privately owned banks, this was quite intolerable. The
Trustee Savings Bank was owned by its depositors. There were no shareholders
to make money from someone else's efforts. The obvious answer was
privatisation. But there again, the bank was owned by its depositors, so
ostensibly there was nothing to privatise.
This ticklish problem was subjected to a long and expensive legal action
which ended, triumphantly for the directors and for the then Tory
chancellor, Nigel Lawson (later a banker), with a bizarre House of Lords
ruling that the bank was owned by the state, and could therefore be
privatised.
So it was, with the usual results. The bank was flogged off to shareholders
of Lloyds, juicy high-street premises were flogged off at a profit, some
directors stayed on at grotesque salaries, others left with even more
grotesque payoffs, and the net result is that customers who were once
lionised can't even phone their branch and speak to the manager.
--
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
Mailing Address: RAWA, P.O.Box 374, Quetta, Pakistan
Mobile: 0092-300-8551638
Fax: 001-760-2819855
E-mails: 
ra...@rawa.org
, 
ra...@iname.com
Mirror site: 
http://my.rawa.org
Home Page: 
http://www.rawa.org

 ha scritto nel
messaggio news:Uojv7.27904$0Y2.2...@news.infostrada.it...


 Sarà propaganda del KGB....
Quella puo' essere propaganda di chi vuoi tu, ma il tuo post e' uno
splendido (si fa per dire) esempio di propaganda contro la netiquette
ed il corretto uso del quoting.
Andrea
salo...@mediacomm.it