Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Un nemico della democrazia!

Un ritratto imperdibile, quello offerto da The Guardian a proposito
del mafioso di Arcore:
"An enemy of democracy"
"Berlusconi has learned that it's more profitable to manipulate the
parliamentary system than to overthrow it"
Paul Foot
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 membersincluded 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 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 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
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.

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