Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Silvio Berlusconi's record: The man who screwed an entire country

Silvio Berlusconi's record: The man who screwed an entire country
The Berlusconi era will haunt Italy for years to come
Jun 9th 2011 | from the print edition
SILVIO BERLUSCONI has a lot to smile about. In his 74 years, he has
created a media empire that made him Italy’s richest man. He has
dominated politics since 1994 and is now Italy’s longest-serving prime
minister since Mussolini. He has survived countless forecasts of his
imminent departure. Yet despite his personal successes, he has been a
disaster as a national leader—in three ways.
Two of them are well known. The first is the lurid saga of his “Bunga
Bunga” sex parties, one of which has led to the unedifying spectacle
of a prime minister being put on trial in Milan on charges of paying
for sex with a minor. The Rubygate trial has besmirched not just Mr
Berlusconi, but also his country.
However shameful the sexual scandal has been, its impact on Mr
Berlusconi’s performance as a politician has been limited, so this
newspaper has largely ignored it. We have, however, long protested
about his second failing: his financial shenanigans. Over the years,
he has been tried more than a dozen times for fraud, false accounting
or bribery. His defenders claim that he has never been convicted, but
this is untrue. Several cases have seen convictions, only for them to
be set aside because the convoluted proceedings led to trials being
timed out by a statute of limitations—at least twice because Mr
Berlusconi himself changed the law. That was why this newspaper argued
in April 2001 that he was unfit to lead Italy.
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We have seen no reason to change that verdict. But it is now clear
that neither the dodgy sex nor the dubious business history should be
the main reason for Italians looking back on Mr Berlusconi as a
disastrous, even malign, failure. Worst by far has been a third
defect: his total disregard for the economic condition of his country.
Perhaps because of the distraction of his legal tangles, he has failed
in almost nine years as prime minister to remedy or even really to
acknowledge Italy’s grave economic weaknesses. As a result, he will
leave behind him a country in dire straits.
A chronic disease, not an acute one
That grim conclusion might surprise students of the euro crisis.
Thanks to the tight fiscal policy of Mr Berlusconi’s finance minister,
Giulio Tremonti, Italy has so far escaped the markets’ wrath. Ireland,
not Italy, is the I in the PIGS (with Portugal, Greece and Spain).
Italy avoided a housing bubble; its banks did not go bust. Employment
held up: the unemployment rate is 8%, compared with over 20% in Spain.
The budget deficit in 2011 will be 4% of GDP, against 6% in France.
Yet these reassuring numbers are deceptive. Italy’s economic illness
is not the acute sort, but a chronic disease that slowly gnaws away at
vitality. When Europe’s economies shrink, Italy’s shrinks more; when
they grow, it grows less. As our special report in this week’s issue
points out, only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in
the decade to 2010. In fact GDP per head in Italy actually fell. Lack
of growth means that, despite Mr Tremonti, the public debt is still
120% of GDP, the rich world’s third-biggest. This is all the more
worrying given the rapid ageing of Italy’s population.
Low average unemployment disguises some sharp variations. A quarter of
young people—far more in parts of the depressed south—are jobless. The
female-participation rate in the workforce is 46%, the lowest in
western Europe. A mix of low productivity and high wages is eroding
competitiveness: whereas productivity rose by a fifth in America and a
tenth in Britain in the decade to 2010, in Italy it fell by 5%. Italy
comes 80th in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” index, below Belarus
and Mongolia, and 48th in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness
rankings, behind Indonesia and Barbados.
The Bank of Italy’s outgoing governor, Mario Draghi, spelt things out
recently in a hard-hitting farewell speech (before taking the reins at
the European Central Bank). He insisted that the economy desperately
needs big structural reforms. He pinpointed stagnant productivity and
attacked government policies that “fail to encourage, and often
hamper, [Italy’s] development”, such as delays in the civil-justice
system, poor universities, a lack of competition in public and private
services, a two-tier labour market with protected insiders and exposed
outsiders, and too few big firms.
All these things are beginning to affect Italy’s justly acclaimed
quality of life. Infrastructure is getting shabbier. Public services
are stretched. The environment is suffering. Real incomes are at best
stagnant. Ambitious young Italians are quitting their country in
droves, leaving power in the hands of an elderly and out-of-touch
elite. Few Europeans despise their pampered politicians as much as
Italians do.
Eppur si muove
When this newspaper first denounced Mr Berlusconi, many Italian
businesspeople replied that only his roguish, entrepreneurial chutzpah
offered any chance to modernise the economy. Nobody claims that now.
Instead they offer the excuse that the fault is not his; it is their
unreformable country’s.
Yet the notion that change is impossible is not just defeatist but
also wrong. In the mid-1990s successive Italian governments, desperate
not to be left out of the euro, pushed through some impressive
reforms. Even Mr Berlusconi has occasionally managed to pass some
liberalising measures in between battling the courts: back in 2003 the
Biagi labour-market law cut red tape at the bottom, boosting
employment, and many economists have praised Italy’s pension reforms.
He might have done much more had he used his vast power and popularity
to do something other than protect his own interests. Entrepreneurial
Italy will pay dearly for his pleasures.
And if Mr Berlusconi’s successors are as negligent as he is? The euro
crisis is forcing Greece, Portugal and Spain to push through huge
reforms in the teeth of popular protest. In the short term, this will
hurt; in the long term, it should give the peripheral economies new
zip. Some are also likely to cut their debt burden by restructuring.
An unreformed and stagnant Italy, with a public debt stuck at over
120% of GDP, would then find itself exposed as the biggest backmarker
in the euro. The culprit? Mr Berlusconi, who will no doubt be smiling
still.
http://www.economist.com/node/18805327

Gli hanno riso in faccia!
ma con lui hanno riso in faccia alle torme di bischeri che lo hanno 
votato e a tutti noi che non riusciamo a staccarci quelal sanguisuga 
dalla gola!
 
COME FARE? S'è comprato 315 SECCHI DI MERDA e li ha portati in 
Parlamento....
 
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