Newsgroup: it.politica.polo
Titolo: [Fwd: Pacitti portrays Romano Prodi (President European Commission)]

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ROMANO PRODI, BRUSSELS GODFATHER
Paper: Parliament Magazine (Brussels) Date: 17/05/1999
Title: Italy's numismatic Mr Prodi - guru or godfather?
Author: Domenico Pacitti
POLITICS, universities and the Roman Catholic Church are often held to
be Italy's three greatest scourges, respectively responsible for the
promotion of a Machiavellian mentality, insensitivity to truth and merit
as values and the repression of an independent social and moral
conscience. Together they have helped maintain a long-standing system,
rooted in the Counter- Reformation and reaching back perhaps even as far
back as the late Roman Empire, in which corruption continues to be not
only socially acceptable but also virtually indispensable for survival.
Like all Italian institutions, including the judiciary and the police
force, they are viewed by many as quite literally mafias, sharing
identical ground rules with the notorious and more dramatic Sicilian
variety, the main difference being that while the latter eliminates its
victims physically, the former tends to do so psychologically and
spiritually. Common to both are the principle of exchange of favours,
gross over-concern with power and money, a cynical disrespect of the
law, strict observance of the code of silence and the complete disregard
of all social and moral criteria.
History shows that a peculiarly Italian corporative spirit has always
automatically transformed any collective undertaking into mafia,
rendering it impossible for even the most passive participants to avoid
complicity in corruption. The popular saying "In Italian tutto è mafia"
(In Italy everything is mafia) warns that any resistance to the system
would be about as futile as trying to stem the tide.
Viewed in this light, it is both ironical and perplexing that an Italian
professor-politician (over 40% of Italy's politicians are university
lecturers) with a permissive Christian Democratic background, should
have been unanimously approved on a "soul for Europe" ticket to take
over from an outgoing Commission accused of fraud, nepotism and
mismanagement - activities in which Italians have traditionally been
past masters and of which Mr Prodi himself has certainly had first-hand
experience.
It was the Church which, through the customary channels of
"raccomandazione" (recommendation on the basis of criteria other than
merit), obtained for Mr Prodi his first major government appointment as
industry minister in the later 70s under the premiership and spiritual
guidance of Giulio Andreotti. Mr Andreotti, who has been Christian
Democrat prime minister a record seven times, is currently standing
trial for his alleged involvement with the Sicilian mafia in the 1979
murder of a journalist who made him the subject of a damning article.
That an elusive Mr Prodi may have managed to escape Mr Andreotti's
questionable influence is supported by the fact that a number of letters
addressed to Mr Prodi at his own ministry are reported to have been
returned "addressee unknown".
Mr Prodi began to make his presence felt in 1982 when the Christian
Democrat leader, Ciriaco De Mita, another former prime minister who
later faced allegations of corruption, placed him at the head of Italy's
mammoth state holding company, IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction
Institute). When it was decided that he had failed to fulfil his brief
of reducing patronage, inefficiency and waste, Mr Prodi was sacked but
reinstated again for one year in 1993. During his premiership in 1996, a
public prosecutor who accused him of abuse of office and criminal
offences in connection with exploiting the privatisation of public
companies for personal gain while chairman of IRI was suddenly
transferred without explanation.
The chief private company involved was an economic research centre,
appropriately named Nomisma (numismatics, or coin-collecting), which Mr
Prodi founded in his home town of Bologna and ran together with some one
hundred shareholders. Mr Prodi's company, which the centre-right
national daily newspaper Il Giornale called "a sort of mafia cosca
clan", secured numerous contracts from the Emilia regional council in
record time to produce study reports on topics such as public holidays
(£86,000), the state of research and innovation (£70,000) and the
economic impact of the Italian army (£48,000). Although these and
similar studies are said to have been either plagiarised or simply
thrown together, several were readily purchased by the Bologna
provincial council, which just happened to be chaired by Vittorio Prodi,
Mr Prodi's brother, who in turn commissioned a Church history of Bologna
(£80,000) from another of Mr Prodi's brothers, Paolo Prodi, a university
professor. Another of Nomisma's clients, the Tobacco Documentation and
Information Centre, had previously been created at the behest of the
Philip Morris company, which subsequently signed lucrative contracts
with the Italian Finance Ministry for the production and sales of
cigarettes in Italy. Mr Prodi's wife too, Flavia Franzoni, is reported
to have performed remunerative part-time work providing study reports
for public institutions (£140,000). She is also said to have benefited
from a deal which privatised a former school for social assistants.
But Nomisma's biggest single killing was a piece of research on high
speed carried out for the national railways. Netting a cool £4 and
working out at over £2 per word, it carried such gems as "The advantage
of high speed is speed", "Speed is greatly appreciated because it saves
time", "Preference for the train is inversely proportionate to distance
from the station: those who live closest to the station use the train
more readily" and "The market value of a flat whose view across a bay is
blocked by an eight-lane flyover inevitably falls".
A recently published book which courageously names names - always a
perilous practice in Italy - places Mr Prodi's Bologna mafia high among
the country's major power groups. Should a new law be approved, says its
author, Bologna will as European capital of culture for the year 2000
receive £33 million - £9 million in the first three years and £24
million over the next twenty years - in order to encourage restoration
work, which would leave the Prodi family laughing all the way to the
bank.
It is an open secret that Mr Prodi obtained his professorship at the
University of Bologna, again, through Church recommendations, thus
forcing a potentially more deserving candidate to wait up to ten years
under the present system for another opportunity, change career or
attempt entry through the usual corrupt means depending on his or her
level of moral integrity. It is sadly indicative though hardly
surprising that in the course of his 25 years of teaching economics and
industrial policy at Bologna, Mr Prodi never once spoke out against
Italy's universities, one of the country's most criticised mafias,
sometimes said to merit the title of universities only by courtesy and
arguably the most grotesquely corrupt in the civilised world.
Pending the improbable event of his being brought to trial and convicted
of corruption, Mr Prodi seems likely to continue enjoying his foreign
reputation as Italy's honest politician, rendered more plausible by an
ingratiating priestly manner, an affable nature and an engaging
down-to-earth human approach. But the average Italian remains convinced
that Mr Prodi has as much chance of being morally upright and free of
corruption as he has of being fully immersed in the nearby River Po and
stepping out bone dry.
Within this context Tony Blair's words, "I have always made it clear
that Romano Prodi has all the qualities to be an excellent president of
the Commission", seem decidedly over-generous and Mr Prodi's robust
backing by European Socialists for a full five-and-a-half year mandate
perhaps ill-considered. Just last month the Socialists argued that Mr
Prodi's candidacy for European elections was morally unacceptable - a
fine point under the circumstances.
Doubtless Mr Blair's judgement is at least partly based on Italy's
successful entry into the European Monetary Union under Mr Prodi's
premiership last year. But as Italy's greatest living historian and
social observer Indro Montanelli has pointed out, whatever the official
records may have shown, there was no  legitimate way that Italy could
have brought herself into line with the entry conditions in such a short
term. Only time will tell whether the Bank of Italy is the one Italian
institution miraculously exempt from a mafia mentality. The real miracle
was that Mr Prodi's 55th post-war government somehow managed to survive
for as long as 28 months. This, as it turned out, had little to do with
Mr Prodi himself and much to do with the widespread Italian fear that
failure to enter the EMU would have had disastrous consequences for
Italy, a fear shared also by the Communist Refoundation party and trade
unions which lent Mr Prodi their backing.
As Italy continues to look to Europe for political, economic and moral
salvation, Mr Prodi has had a dream, which he has set down in the form
of a new book published just last month, An Idea of Europe. "The search
for a European soul", he writes, "is beginning to appear as the dominant
problem for the future of our continent. It is certainly a sign of
weakness to think in terms of a possible future path for Europe's
institutions (the strengthening of Parliament, the resolution for the
right of veto in exceptional cases and the reorganisation of the
European Commission and its powers) while no one is able to dictate to
us the path for the reconstruction of a European soul." But in the
course of a chapter entitled "A Soul for Europe", which makes copious
reference to the Roman Catholic Church, it emerges fairly clearly that
Mr Prodi himself intends to dictate such a path while at the same time
stressing the prior need for a "great moral revolution".
One might be excused for hoping that in calling for a "specific mandate
by EU leaders for reform", Mr Blair intends to leave as little
initiative as possible for Mr Prodi's creative capabilities and that he
also understands that Italians can be made to work efficiently and even
honestly provided they are kept under close surveillance.
To many bemused Italians, stunned by Mr Prodi's windfall appointment but
already planning to cash in on it, entrusting Mr Prodi with the
presidency of the European Commission is tantamount to entrusting the
running of a brewery to a chronic alcoholic, the operation of a casino
to an inveterate gambler or the governorship of the Bank of England to
the Sicilian mafia. Fortunately, Italy is also an unpredictable country
of exceptions, where the only thing that is certain is that nothing is
certain. Given the right conditions, Mr Prodi might even succeed. Should
he fail, he can always confess his sins.
NOTE: Parliament Magazine is an English-language quality weekly
published in 30,000 copies and densely circulated in Brussels,
Strasbourg and Luxembourg. It is read mainly by members of the European
Parliament, the European Commission, the Court of Human Rights and the
European Court of Justice.

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 Che tu devi vergognarti, come uomo e come italiano.
ma come fai????
un attimo prima ti vanti delle cazzate della regina elisabetta che parla
male del malefico berluskoni, poi di chirak che gli da del ladrone da fonti
fantomatiche o meno..
passano 3 secondi e dici che chi parla male di prodi č uno che si deve
vergognare perchč diffama il paese...
mi spieghi, per favore, come fai ad essere cosě idiota???
ce ne vuole..
e pure l'inglese sai??
non ci posso credere! pensavo che uno come te potesse conoscere solo il
dialetto..
ciao
Lupo