Death of a Godfather

For many Italians, Giulio Andreotti, who died yesterday aged 94, was simply “Mr Italy”. His political power and influence stretched from the immediate postwar period until the day of his death.

Along with his mentor, Alcide De Gaspari, he resurrected the Christian Democratic Party which had been destroyed by Fascism. He became prime minister seven times, despite (or perhaps because of) his involvement with some of the darkest forces in Italian politics.

He was known in his country as “Giulio il Divo” (the divine Julius after Julius Caesar) and even Beelzebub the devil. In Godfather III, a character modelled on him whispers a famous quote from the man: “Power wears out those who don’t have it”.

A cartoon joke summed him up. Asked to attend the funeral of the assassinated anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, a friend pleads: “The state must give an answer to the Mafia and you are one of the top authorities in it!” Andreotti’s bemused response is: “Which one do you mean?”

A devout Roman Catholic with close links to the Vatican, he enabled Italy’s ruling classes to cling on to power.

Andreotti early on revealed an uncanny ability to straddle opposing political forces, being involved with both fascist and anti-fascist newspapers during World War II. He became Christian Democratic party secretary in 1948, holding key ministerial posts. His “strategy of the two ovens”, allowed him to wheeler-deal between the right and left wings of the party, accepting “loaves” from each side.

During the 1960s, as defence minister, he was notoriously associated with the secret Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due, at the time when neo-fascists in the army leadership were planning a coup.

But it was during the 1970s and 1980s that his ability to exploit the craven opportunism of Italy’s Communist Party (PCI) came into its own. In the 1976 elections the PCI won 12.6 million votes to the Christian Democrats’ 14.2, far out-pacing the remaining parties. When PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer proposed a “historic compromise” Andreotti won the distinction of being the first Italian prime minister prepared to find accommodation to the PCI.

The PCI promptly repaid for its distant glimpse of power by helping Andreotti railroad through anti-working class austerity measures against the opposition of the 2-million strong party’s rank and file.

In the midst of this tense political situation, fellow Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades terrorist group. Andreotti refused to negotiate and Moro was killed in May 1978.

Andreotti had no qualms about serving in Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi’s Cabinet during the period of political corruption and cronyism known as Tangentopoli.

In 1992 anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone was assassinated in a massive car bombing in Sicily. Charges of Mafia links now multiplied, including that Andreotti had conspired in the murder of investigative journalist, Carmine Pecorelli. Finally stripped of his parliamentary immunity in 1993 (but not before being appointed Senator for life by Christian Democrat crony Francesco Cossiga), he was brought to trial in Palermo and Perugia.

After a three-year trial, he was acquitted by the Perugia court in 1999, but in Palermo only escaped conviction on grounds of insufficient evidence. Italy's highest court established he had ties until 1980 with mafia gangsters, which were covered by the statute of limitations.

Andreotti’s connivance with media magnate Silvio Berlusconi further divided the Christian Democrats during the early 1990s. By 1994, the party had disappeared and Andreotti joined first the Italian People’s Party and then La Margherita. If the Andreotti epoch was a tragedy in Italian politics, that of Berlusconi, the second Mr Teflon, has most certainly been a cruel and ugly farce.

The corrupt Italian state is kept in power today by an unholy alliance between ancient Stalinists like president Giorgio Napolitano and Democratic Party leader (and Berlusconi relative) Enrico Letta, overseen by IMF-EU-ECB enforcer Mario Monti. 

The recent electoral success of the Grillo 5-Star movement illustrates the contempt which millions have for the undemocratic and unrepresentative political system. The Divo is dead, but his political legacy remains to be overturned.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Pesky voters ignore markets, vote against austerity

When an anti-austerity, anti-establishment internet-based political movement with few policies and led by a comedian, gets 25% of the vote in a general election, you know for sure that the political system is travelling on a one-way ticket to disintegration.

Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement (M5S) won 54 seats and cashed in on Italians’ hatred for a corrupt, incompetent state that has cut their pensions, living standards and left record numbers of young people out of work.

Deadlock is what the markets didn’t want. That’s why Mario Monti was appointed by the European Central Bank to head a caretaker government 15 months ago as Italy’s debt mountain threatened to overwhelm the euro. But given half a chance, the electorate rejected his policies.

The ex-Goldman Sachs banker only got 10% of the vote when he put his austerity programme to the electorate. And with Silvio Berlusconi also raging against Brussels and promising everyone a tax cut, many voters backed a man who has somehow evaded prison.

As a result there is no immediate prospect of a stable government to manage Europe’s third largest economy. And the markets don’t like the stalemate at all. After initial polls showed the centre-left alliance winning, the markets rallied.

Then when the electoral deadlock was confirmed, black turned to red on trading screens around the world. Italian bonds were sold off, trading in the major banks was suspended, the stock markets plunged and the euro crisis returned with a vengeance.

“This looks like a recipe for total gridlock,” commented Nicholas Spiro, a sovereign debt analyst. “On current projections, financial markets are facing the worst of both worlds in Italy: a full-blown political crisis in the eurozone’s third largest economy and a severe setback for the liberal economic agenda championed by Mr Monti.”

Pesky voters!

Enrico Letta, deputy leader of the Democrat party, concluded that the “absolute majority of Italians have voted against austerity measures, the euro and Europe,”.  This, he claimed, sent a “a very clear signal to Brussels and Frankfurt”.

But is anyone listening at the headquarters respectively of the European Union and the European Central Bank? No they’re not. The EU and the ECB is desperately to prop up a weak currency and austerity, austerity and yet more austerity is the mantra. No matter that it doesn’t work. They have no alternative.

Spending your way out of the crisis is no good because it’s a global economic recession that is already dependent on large-scale printing of money to prevent a full-blown depression. It’s not just the political system that’s broken.

Grillo’s Five Star Movement is hostile to Brussels and the indecently corrupt Italian establishment. It wants to reform parliament by halving its size and a new electoral law based on proportional representation. Other than that, it has little to say.

Grillo – called everything from “sans-culotte satirist” to “populist, extremist and very dangerous” –  hands it back with interest. His nickname for Berlusconi is “the psycho-dwarf”, while he refers to the technocrat Monti as “rigor Montis”.

Grillo told the Financial Times last year: “We are occupying a void, which in other places like Greece has been filled by Nazis and extremists. We are a response to government ‘parasitism’, corruption, a system of political diarrhoea.” Recent scandals include arrests at the top of state-controlled Finmeccanica to corruption probes into the Eni and Italy’s third-largest bank.

Grillo does not appear on television or take part in debates. His movement – it’s definitely not a party – is driven by the use of social media. He runs Italy’s most-read blog and the M5S organises on two levels – internet and local grassroots.

He used the social network “meetup”, which was already active in Italy, to set up local support groups across the country. There are now more than 700 such meetup groups, with more than 100,000 members.

In Britain too, the establishment and the state is also mired in a variety of scandals. The old politics is dying right across Europe and further afield as the recession coincides with  a crisis at the top.

A new politics, a democratic transformation of political systems, is not only possible – it’s absolutely necessary.

Paul Feldman

Communications

Italy bosses call for 'shock therapy' as recession takes its toll

The south of Europe is fast becoming engulfed in political turmoil as the economic contraction deepens. After protests against soaring electricity prices, austerity and corruption turned violent Bulgaria’s government has collapsed. "I will not participate in a government under which police are beating people," says prime minister Boiko Borisov.

In Greece, Bulgaria’s southern neighbour, workers are once again taking to the streets in the first general strike against austerity for 2013, joining farmers who have been blocking roads for nearly a month, protesting at high production costs and fuel prices.

Despite more than 20 general strikes, economic conditions continue to deteriorate. Claims by the government of Antonis Samaras that the country has now turned the corner would be considered laughable if the situation wasn’t so serious.

Two-thirds of employees in the private sector no longer receive regular pay. Unemployment has passed 27% and is predicted to reach 30% this year. More than 60% of young people are without a job. Benefits run out after one year, so now only 225,000 jobless Greeks are currently receiving monthly state assistance.

Last summer, all but the lowest-paid employees were hit with an emergency bill in additional taxes, often for several thousand euros. Further charges were levied on electricity bills, with households that failed to pay disconnected from the power grid. And another round of tax increases took effect this year, the price of further bailout funds secured in December.

Savas Robolis, professor of economics and public policy at Panteion University in Athens, and the head of research at the General Confederation of Greek Workers says: "The standard of living of the average Greek worker between 2009 and 2012, in a span of 36 months, has declined by at least 50 percent."

GDP is expected to contract by a further 4.1% this year, and Robolis warns that that country is fast approaching a tipping point in which “Greek workers and unemployed people may soon not have enough money left to pay taxes while covering their basic needs. If that happens, it would be the worst possible outcome for the Greek economy and Greek society."

Figures show a sharp fall in the country’s trade deficit, but the published figures so far don’t tell us whether the fall in imports is due to a reduction in capital imports which would signal yet a further sharp contraction.

An election in Italy this weekend is set to replace the appointed technocratic government of Mario Monti. The new government which, amazingly, could see the return of Silvio Berlusconi, due back in court to face sex charges after the election, will take charge of what many call the sickest economy in Europe.

Italy, the eurozone's third-biggest economy, has been in recession since the second half of 2011. After 14 years of near-zero growth it is now smaller than in 2001 and shrank most out of the rich G7 countries last year, its GDP contracting by a bigger than expected 2.7%. 

But as the latest snapshots from the OECD club of rich countries show, a return to growth in Italy or anywhere else is ruled out as the global capitalist recession deepens. Economic output across the OECD's 34 member states fell by 0.2% in the three months to the end of December, representing the first contraction since early 2009. The OECD said that the contraction was "particularly marked" in the European Union, where GDP fell by 0.5%  in the fourth quarter.

Marcella Panucci, director-general of Italy’s big employers’ federation, Confindustria, is pushing for a stable government, that she hopes will pursue “shock therapy” policies to restore growth. This open call to destroy living standards is a real sign of a deepening political and social crisis not just in Italy, but throughout Europe.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Bond dealers put a price on democracy

The financial markets that have forced out the Greek government and are on the verge of bringing down Italy’s, now instinctively prefer to sideline what is left of the democratic process if it means they have a better chance of getting their money back.

Not only that, they would rather have a non-government of so-called technocrats in place of politicians in some cobbled together coalition. So whatever you think of Berlusconi or Papandreou's wretched politics, their impending demise is a sinister development with echoes of past European history.

Politics, even of the bourgeois variety, increasingly stands in the way of capital’s interests because it is a time-consuming process. Putting together governments of national unity, agreeing a strategy for spending cuts, holding referenda – all this takes too long when time is not on capitalism’s side.

So Papandreou’s call for a general election in Greece is off the agenda. It would only result in more uncertainty, the markets declared. France and Germany’s leaders agreed and so that was that. A national government without a mandate will take over in Greece.

In Italy, Reuters, the financial sector’s news agency, writes that Berlusconi's departure would offer "no speedy solution to a debt crisis threatening the whole euro zone”.

A “worst-case scenario” could see weeks or months of instability and continued “reform inertia”. The answer? “Markets want an unelected technocrat government appointed to pass unpopular reforms needed to improve growth potential in one the world's most chronically sluggish economies.”

So that’s alright then. If the markets want it – and today they were charging an unsustainable 6.73% to lend to Italy – who are ordinary people to deny them their wish? Elections in January? Far too long to wait. And what would they resolve? Nothing!

In one sense, of course, the markets are right. Elections can’t solve the crisis. Debt reduction requires so much pain through spending cuts, unemployment, lower living standards and rising prices that it can’t be achieved with popular consent.

Which means, logically, that some kind of authoritarian rule, a 21st century European dictatorship, is necessary. Dispensing with politicians, even if they are as obnoxious as Papandreou and Berlusconi, is the first step on a slippery road.

Even the right-wing press is getting the frighteners. Janet Daley, the former left-winger turned commentator for the Daily Telegraph, has noted: “Last week, the European Union effectively undermined the democratically elected government of one member state and put another one [Italy’s] on notice.”

In line with Tory anti-EU sentiment, she blames the “Eurocracy” led by Germany and France for denying Greece a referendum and telling Berlusconi that his time is up, adding:

“All those quaint assumptions about the legitimacy of government coming from the consent of the governed must be cashed in for the ‘economic stability’ that the rules of euro membership will provide.”

Interestingly she contrasts the achievements of the Arab Spring with the decline of democracy in the West, “the wilful dismantling of its political inheritance” with the loss of the “right to choose who governs you”.

While her target in the shape of the EU bureaucracy rather than financial markets and capitalism, smacks of small-time nationalism, Daley is perceptive enough to acknowledge that an historical turning point has arrived.

Capitalism and democracy are not natural bedfellows but in conflict with one another. At times of emergency – and that’s what we are in now – the niceties of elections, parliaments etc come under strain. The next step, to outright dictatorship, is a massive one to take. But don’t for one moment think that the ruling elites are not capable of going down that road.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The point of no return

The anti-government demonstrations sweeping Libya mark a stunning turn of events in the revolutionary upsurge sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. With diplomats defecting and the army split, Muammar Gaddafi’s regime is rocking.

A bizarre appearance by Saif Gaddafi on state television last night only adds to the sense that Libya’s leaders will soon suffer the fate of those in Egypt and Tunisia.

Gaddafi’s eldest son, while saying that “untrained” soldiers had made mistakes, claimed the “seditious” demonstrators were under the influence of foreign powers or even drugs and claimed that only a few people had died. He warned of civil war and a fight to the finish.

But with an estimated 200 plus deaths and many more wounded, events in the Libya – and the Arab world as a whole - have reached a point of no return. Those who are being gunned down in the streets of Libya’s second city Benghazi share the grievances affecting all of the Arab states from the largest (Egypt) to the smallest (Bahrain) – the lack of democratic rights, growing inequality and economic want.

The crackdown by the Libyan regime has been particularly brutal, much of it hidden as internet services are closed down and foreign reporters banned. One CNN report said that helicopter gunships have been used to fire at protesters.

The turning of the Gaddafi regime against its own people in this way is a turning point in the fortunes of the Arab people. Libya, despite its small population of 6.5 million, has played a special role on the world stage. After taking power in September 1970 in a military coup that overthrew the monarchy, Gaddafi fought hard to implement the ideals of Pan-Arabism championed by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.

With his concept of jamahiriya – “state of the masses” or “republic of the masses”, he sought to foster a direct democracy in which the people would rule through local councils and communes. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Libya became a anti-imperialist force which supported liberation movements throughout the world, especially the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Libya became subject to US oil and export sanctions from 1982. The UN trade embargo was to last until 2004.

Not only did Libya face punishment by the major imperialist powers. Gaddafi’s campaign for Arab unity was undermined and betrayed by Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s and Hafez al-Hassad in Syria. He was denounced by his neighbour, Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba. He was punished further for opposing the Iraqi invasion of Iran during the genocidal Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s.

In April 1986, the US ir force bombed the Libyan capital Tripoli in revenge for a bombing at a Berlin discotheque frequented by US troops and Gaddafi’s family was targeted, with his daughter being killed. Political and economic pressure on Libya increased after the downing of the Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie in December 1988 for which Libya was framed.

Libya’s political and economic isolation produced a reactionary political turn. The 1990s saw increased inequalities and loss of political freedom for ordinary Libyans. A nepotistic dynastic elite grew up in which the rich enjoying freedoms denied to ordinary Libyans. Rights for opponents became non-existent, with political prisoners being shot down at the Abu Salim jail in 1996.

The sight of Gaddafi making deals over oil and immigration with oil-hungry authoritarians like Blair and Italian leader Berlusconi has been particularly shocking. The possible collapse of his regime is sending shock waves down those in the British establishment and corporate world, who have been supplying many of the weapons used against the demonstrators

Events in Libya sound not only the death-knell of liberation leaders turned autocrats. It also creates a crisis for those who conspired against them while they were revolutionaries but embraced them when they turned against their own people. With both eyes on Libya’s oil, the major capitalist powers do not give a damn for democratic rights, which is why their remarks are not worth listening to.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Italy's political crisis raises old fears

As Italian trade unions prepare for a general strike later this month against public spending cuts, political tensions are once again rising within the unstable edifice that is the Italian state.

The background is the slow-motion collapse of the right-wing government led by Silvio Berlusconi, and the ruling classes’ desperate requirement for a stable regime that can carry through austerity measures.

Berlusconi is increasingly at odds with his coalition partners. Gianfranco Fini, the speaker of the Lower House and co-founder with Berlusconi of the ruling Party of Liberty, has formed a faction called Generation Italy and is manoeuvring for power.

The head of Italy's Northern League, a key ally of Berlusconi, has predicted the government will fall. Umberto Bossi, whose anti-immigrant party made strong gains in March regional elections, backed Berlusconi in his battle with Fini.

Meanwhile, public figures are taking the opportunity to remind the public of the plots aimed at destabilising the state during the 1990s and a clampdown on media freedom by the corrupt Berlusconi government has provoked a furious reaction.

Under Berlusconi, telephone eavesdropping reached some of the highest levels in Europe. But now Berlusconi has decided that enough was enough after journalists published leaks that caught him and his cronies out.

Guido Bertolasi, the head of the Civil Protection Service, and Angelo Balducci, senior officials in the country’s public works department, have both been implicated in scandals as a result of leaked phone taps. Balducci was recorded arranging a date with a young Vatican choir singer.

A new gagging law is being driven through the Italian parliament which, far from offering protection from intrusive state snooping, will benefit corrupt politicians and Mafiosi. The “legge bavaglio” (gagging law) will restrict magistrates from using phone taps. But not only will the courts be affected. Journalists who publish material from leaks will risk heavy fines.

Parliamentarians, newspaper editors, journalists and 220,000 individuals have registered their opposition through the Aavaz website. A post-it note campaign by the Repubblica newspaper has drawn widespread support. The editor of the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, Ferruccio de Bortoli, believes that “there’s no other reason [for the new law] beside fear of further investigations that could involve members of the government.”

Press freedom website, Reporters Without Borders, points out: “The jail sentence and the size of the fines that can be imposed is out of all proportion and has to be considered as a real censorship. How many news organisations would dare to carry out this kind of investigative reporting if they knew they were risking this kind of financial bombshell?”

With political anxiety on the rise, national anti-Mafia attorney Piero Grasso and ex-presidents Carlo Ciampi and Oscar Scalfaro took the opportunity last week to speak of their fears of a coup d’état during the early 1990s and the existence of elements within the state itself working with the Mafia to undermine the government.

Scalfaro, who was president of the Italian republic from 1992-1999, said there had been “a political vacuum… which is the greatest weakness of a democratic state. It would be difficult for any state to rule under these conditions.”

Social tensions are rising as the recession takes its toll. Youth unemployment has reached a record 30% nationally. Attacks on immigrants and gays have been on the rise in recent months, especially in the capital.

The election of pro-fascist Gianni Alemanno as mayor of Rome in 2008 was taken by the far right as a signal to launch their attacks. "These thugs don't get any support from the town hall, but they feel justified and encouraged by the political climate," said Flavia Servadei, who runs the gays Coming Out bar.

Berlusconi, 73, who is notorious for his efforts to appear young, has just invested £40 million in a biotech company researching how to prevent ageing. He took advantage of the disarray in the state to return to power in 2008. But despite Berlusconi’s efforts to live forever, there are even darker forces waiting in the wings.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Italy's sinister power struggle

The political crisis in Italy is deepening by the day, with Silvio Berlusconi arrogantly rejecting a damning verdict of the Constitutional Court and sinister forces around Gianfranco Fini waiting in the wings to take over should the government collapse.

Last week, the seemingly Teflon-immune Berlusconi appeared to suffer a major legal setback. The 15 judges of Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled by a nine to six majority that legislation forced through last year was in breach of the constitution. The law granted immunity to the top four officers of the state, including of course the prime minister himself.

His lawyer notoriously claimed that the prime minister should be “first above equals”. The reason? Berlusconi was on trial at the time – accused of bribing his former UK lawyer, David Mills (estranged husband of New Labour Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell) to lie in court to the tune of £376,000.

A second charge of corruption was for tax fraud and false accounting to acquire rights for Mediaset, his television company. Mediaset controls four Italian channels and has a majority stake in Spain’s Telecinco. It is valued at £5.1bn. Another court in Milan has also just ruled that Fininvest, Berlusconi’s media empire, must pay £690m in damages for bribing a judge to allow it to take over the Mondadori publishing house, currently valued at £871m.

Berlusconi, who has dominated Italian politics for 15 years, and is presently worth £6bn – the 70th richest man in the world, has struck back by accusing the Constitutional Court of being left wing. He presented himself as the underdog, persecuted by the left, and that to defend himself against wicked judges he has been forced to lash out £192m on “consultants and judges” – whoops, he meant to say lawyers, not judges.

This is a man who is rightly seen by many Italians and others as a “caudillo” or authoritarian strongman in the style of Mussolini and Franco. Eugenio Scalfari, editor of Repubblica newspaper, one of the few not under Berlusconi’s control, has described Berlusconi’s “super-ordained power of leader” as the stuff of dictatorship.

Although Berlusconi’s popularity has dropped dramatically in recent months, he remains buoyed by his majority in parliament, and above all the parlous nature of the centre-left opposition. Berlusconi’s government remains warmly supported by European Union leaders like Nicholas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and above all by former PM Tony Blair who holidayed with Berlusconi on two occasions, not to mention Russian ex-president Vladimir Putin.

But whatever the fate of Berlusconi, the real danger in Italy is likely to come from within his recently formed People of Freedom (Popolo della Liberta) party, especially from its co-founder Gianfranco Fini. He may well take advantage of the crisis to stage an internal coup inside Berlusconi’s alliance, by forming a grand coalition or an emergency government, involving businessmen and “elements of the left”.

Fini is a son of fascist parents, who was chosen to be the national secretary of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the direct successor to Mussolini’s party. He has stated that Mussolini was “the greatest leader of the 20th century”. Although Fini now poses as a new-born liberal and Berlusconi critic, the notion that he is a “former” fascist is nonsensical. For example, the Bossi-Fini law of 2002 which removed asylum rights and set the scene for some of the worst attacks on immigrants, gypsies and ethnic minorities in present-day western Europe.

Italy is presently in severe economic downturn. It has suffered a 6.3 per cent fall in gross domestic product , the second largest amongst the G7 industrialised nations, trailing only Japan. This combined with a constitutional crisis has serious political implications. A myopic obsession with the empty shell of parliamentarism could allow the really dangerous forces hiding behind Berlusconi to take the initiative.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

How to fight job losses

The reinstatement of the sacked 647 Lindsey oil refinery (LOR) workers, with offers of work for the 51 whose redundancies sparked the walk-out at dozen of energy plants around Britain, is a triumph of rank-and-file solidarity over trade union bureaucrats, who have allowed mass unemployment to develop virtually unopposed.

Not far from the LOR plant in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire, are the Corus steelworks in Scunthorpe, Sheffield and Rotherham. Last week, the company announced the loss of another 2,000 jobs on top of the 2,500 made earlier in the year. All that the steel union Community could say was that workers were “devastated” by the news. Of any plan to resist the redundancies, which will destroy communities if they take place, there was not a word. And there won’t be.

As for the position of the union leaders in general, their craven position was summed up by a press release from the Trades Union Congress, which declared “Barber to tell Berlusconi to put jobs first in run up to G8 summit”.
This was a reference to a meeting involving TUC general secretary Barber and the deeply reactionary Italian prime minister, urging the forthcoming G8 summit chair to build “on the positive proposals in the London G20 summit declaration”. Not a spoof press release, simply shocking but true.

The outcome of the LOR strike itself only guarantees work for the 51 who were made redundant for just four weeks on the extension of the refinery owned by the oil corporation. Other details of the deal struck by union officials are not clear. There were reports during the strike that Total and its sub-contractors had broken an agreement made during the winter strikes that there would be no redundancies while Italian and Portuguese workers remained on site.

What is unambiguous, however, is that 25% of workers normally involved in oil refinery construction are out of work and that the dole queue is lengthening hour by hour throughout the country. Warnings that the British economy is lurching towards a deeper crash as the banking crisis intensifies, will lead to even more rapid job losses, short-time working and demands for pay cuts and, as at British Airways, working for nothing at all.

The LOR strike showed that workers will fight back, given half a chance, and that anti-union laws that ban solidarity actions are no deterrence to the rank-and-file, even if they remain sacrosanct as far as the union leaders are concerned (who declined to make the walk-outs official for fear of being taken to court).

Ultimately, however, the cards remain stacked in favour of corporations like Total because they will still decide who works and who doesn’t, based on considerations of profit and nothing else.

Answering that, and to fight unemployment in a serious way, means challenging the ownership and control of the means to work. It requires a plan to transfer economic power into the hands of ordinary people, mobilising those in and outside the trade unions. Then a strategy could be developed to reorganise the economy in such a way that unemployment is eradicated, something that is not possible under capitalism generally and even more so at a time of global slump.

At the centre of this perspective has to be a campaign to remove the discredited and reactionary New Labour government from office now, rather than waiting for a general election and the seemingly inevitable return of the Tories. That would open up important issues about political power itself. Building a movement along these lines would build on the success of the LOR strike rather than waiting for the employers to strike back.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Dangerous days in Italy

It’s been an odd week for the “Il Cavaliere”, as Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, is known. In a single day, a key group of top judges attacked his government whilst Italy’s highest court approved racist measures against Roma gypsies.

On Tuesday, Italy’s Superior Council of Magistrates voted 21-2 to denounce legislation which, if passed, would give Berlusconi immunity from prosecution. Berlusconi’s cabinet has approved the legislation and it could be agreed by the Italian parliament by the end of this month.

Antonio Di Pietro, the most respected former anti-corruption magistrate and leader of the opposition Italy of Values party, accused the government of seeking to "destroy the trial system to save only one person” and insisted that Berlusconi should stand trial. Berlusconi has retaliated with a denunciation of what he termed "left-wing" magistrates, calling them a "cancerous growth" in Italian democracy. He is trying to evade prosecution for allegedly arranging a £300,000 bribe to David Mills, estranged husband of New Labour’s Olympics minister Tessa Mills, in return for misleading evidence in earlier corruption trials in the 1990s.

While magistrates in Rome denounced the prime minister’s attempts to evade prosecution, the country’s highest appeal court, the Court of Cassation, ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against the Roma on the grounds that they were thieves. The ruling follows an announcement by interior minister Roberto Maroni, that all Roma – many of whom are Italian citizens - including children, were to be finger printed.

Leaders of Italy’s Jewish community, among others, have protested at this blatant racism, with its echoes of the past. They pointedly referred to Mussolini’s fascist regime which in its last days helped organise the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. Berlusconi, of course, works closely with the Mussolini’s political heirs. The neo-Fascist National Alliance Party leader, Gianfranco Fini, president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, admires Mussolini as “the greatest Italian statesman of the 20th century”. The National Alliance party is Berlusconi’s main ally in Italy’s ruling People of Freedom coalition. The Northern League, another partner in the government, is also from the ultra-right.

In reality Berlusconi, despite his third election victory, is not even control of his own football club, let alone the southern half of Italy and the island of Sicily. Milan football club fans, the Tifosi, are plotting to overthrow Berlusconi’s ownership of their club. And there is the still-unresolved rubbish crisis in Naples and its surrounding area, Campania. This has raged since December, when dumps overflowed and residents banded together to prevent dangerous incineration near their homes. According to the Italian environmental group Legambiente, illegal dumping in the south of Italy would form a mountain weighing 14 million tonnes if it were collected in one place.

Berlusconi claimed this week the problem will be resolved by the end of July. But the heaps of rotting rubbish are a potent symbol of his inability to tackle any major problem facing the country. And, the rubbish crisis in Campania is much more than municipal mismanagement. It is the visible sign of a secret Italy which neither Berlusconi nor any politician in Rome or Milan controls. The Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra, according to journalist Robert Saviano, became European leaders in waste disposal in the late 1990s.

In his book, Gomorrah, Italy’s other Mafia, Saviano documents how powerful Camorra clans have seamlessly merged with capitalist globalisation. The Camorra controls contraband goods and pirated goods passing through the port of Naples, in particular shoes, handbags and clothing from China, not to mention drugs and money lending and laundering. Its tentacles reach as far as US, Canada, Brazil, the Canary Islands and Australia.

Last Sunday’s Observer remarked that Berlusconi’s re-election showed the “paradox of democracy” – that “nations get the leaders they deserve”. But surely Italy’s predicament shows more sharply than most that the empty parliamentary charades are the foam on the surface, indicating a deep crisis and instability within the heart of the state as a whole.

As the political shenanigans continue, the Italian economy is plunging into recession, brutally exposed by the global credit crunch and there is nothing Berlusconi’s government can do about it. The state-organised attacks on the Roma are a sinister indication that as the parliamentary system fails to get a grip, the iron fist of Italy’s fascist past is rearing its ugly head once more .

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

The Blairs (and others) cash in

Years ago, when Harold Wilson was the Labour Prime Minister, the satirical magazine Private Eye used to run an amusing column called Mrs Wilson’s Diary. The PM’s life was described through the eyes of his wife Mary Wilson, a middle-class woman with few pretensions who lived modestly and wrote poetry. She led a fairly humble life-style symbolised by her husband’s raincoats and the couple’s holidays in the Scilly Isles.

How much things have changed since then! These days, ex-Prime Minister Blair’s wife Cherie has depicted her years in Downing Street in a biography called “Speaking for Myself”. It manages to combine self-aggrandisement and self-pity, political trivia with salacious details about her personal life while saying nothing worthwhile about political events. Mrs Blair’s detailing of her me-first attitude to life makes Mary Wilson seem almost saintly.

Not satisfied with her massive income as a leading barrister and part-time judge, Mrs Blair has long been notorious for her ability to make a fast buck out of being the Prime Minister’s wife, running from lucrative lecture tours in the US (where she was paid £30,000 for one talk) and £100,000 for a speaking tour in Australia. And don’t forget numerous freebie holidays, including two at the invitation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who presently presides over one of the most racist right-wing regimes in Europe.

There may be those who say, well, Blair can’t be held responsible for the greedy antics of his wife, but he himself is thought to have made more money out of public office than anyone since Britain’s first-ever Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He has made millions from after-dinner speeches since leaving office. The Blairs have just acquired a £4 million country house in Buckinghamshire, which makes them the proud owners of no less than seven homes, including their £3.5 million house in London’s posh Connaught Square, augmented in 2007 by the addition of a £1 million mews house next door. And they have just bought a £500,000 flat for their son Euan.

Mrs Blair’s latest venture into print has not won her any plaudits, literary, personal or political. Only the crassest opportunists and gold-diggers could possibly find anything to admire in her frenzied consumerism and self-seeking wheeler-dealer approach to life. Last week saw not only the publication of Blair’s book but that of two other New Labour luminaries, millionaire Lord Levy and ex deputy-PM John Prescott. They also fail to offer a single political insight into recent political history and are full of tittle-tattle.

What we do get in close-up detail is the true tawdriness of New Labour in the shape of Mrs Blair and Prescott who were paid, either directly or indirectly out of public money to live in grand public houses and (in Prescott’s case) to help run the country. Levy of course is a millionaire with ample means of his own. But nonetheless, like the other two, it is through his connection with Downing Street that he stakes his claim to authorial fame. Between the three of them, they stand to make around a £1 million for serialisation rights. Their paymasters? The Times and Sun newspapers, both of them owned by trade-union busting, media-mogul Rupert Murdoch.

These three gruesome publications – you could hardly call them memoirs – sum up New Labour’s persona and helps explain why the electorate is queuing up to give them a massive caning at the polls. Blair, Brown and the rest of them smashed up Old Labour and created a gaudy, tacky, money-grabbing party and government in its place where self-advancement comes first, second and last.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Italy at the crossroads

The election of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy for the third time brings together an extreme right-wing coalition at a time of severe economic problems for the country, even before the global credit crunch hits home. These conditions are certain to create a nationalist-racist, authoritarian regime and, at the same time, deepen the crisis of a decrepit and corrupt Italian parliamentary state.

Berlusconi’s government is made up of his own sinisterly named People of Freedom Party, which last year absorbed Gianfranco Fini’s extreme right National Alliance. Fini himself was once a leader in the fascist MSI movement but now proclaims himself a “post-fascist”. Joining them in government is the separatist, anti-immigrant Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, which was the big winner in electoral terms. Bossi wants the richer north to abandon the poorer south and for the Italian navy to shell people trying to enter the country by boat. Bossi’s party won 8.7% of the 47% cast for Berlusconi’s coalition. His movement runs neighbourhood patrols aimed at intimidating immigrant communities.

Italy's morale has been battered by the struggle to find a buyer for loss-making airline Alitalia, a rubbish crisis in Naples, a health scare over mozzarella cheese and gloomy economic news. The International Monetary Fund forecasts barely any growth this year for Italy, which has the third highest public debt in the world in absolute terms. The Mafia is said by Confesercenti, an association of small businesses, to control 7% of Italy's annual output, while the Spanish economy last year overtook Italy’s. A former British ambassador to Italy says: “It is no wonder that, during a recent visit to the US, I heard doubt being expressed in more than one quarter as to whether Italy still deserves its place at the G7, the capitalist top table.”

Berlusconi himself is, of course, Italy’s richest man by far and owns most of commercial TV, a massive publishing empire and will dictate to state television when he takes office. In 2001, the Economist magazine conducted a long investigation into his finances and declared him “unfit to govern Italy”. Berlusconi has evaded court action only by using his 2001-2006 government to change the statute of limitations and abolish the charge of false accounting with which he was faced. During this campaign, Berlusconi proposed that all prosecutors and judges should be given sanity tests in a verification of his total disdain for the rule of law.

For the first time since 1946 there are no socialist or former communist representatives in parliament. The only opposition to Berlusconi comes from Walter Veltroni’s Democratic Party, which won 38% of the vote and whose policies are hard to distinguish from those of the actual victors. One would-be voter on Sunday channelled his frustration by tearing up and eating his ballot before being led away from a polling station in the southern town of Sorrento by police. "What future are we preparing for our children? Who should I have voted for? Something has to change," said 41-year-old Ciro D'Esposito.

For some time, the Italian left has focused its efforts solely on trying to win control of parliament in the illusory hope that they could bring about change in this way. Following the dissolution of the once powerful Italian Communist Party in 1991, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) embarked on a project for the building of a "new left". Their failure once in government to make any headway, most recently within Romano Prodi’s administration, has seemingly ended this particular Italian road to nowhere.

Italy’s 1948 constitution is now under impossible strain. The absence of any left opponents in parliament will add to the endemic resentment towards the Italian state, which will abandon what’s left of its democratic credentials as it seeks to impose Berlusconi’s corporate agenda. The social and political struggle in Italy must now assume an increasingly extra-parliamentary dimension, in which the remaking of the constitution to break the power of the country’s economic and political elites is on the agenda.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor