The parliamentary body that oversees state security and the state security services COPASIR has called upon Silvio Berlusconi to appear before it. Presided over by Massimo d'Alema, it can lift state secrecy measures, require sight of all and any judicial or banking papers, and require the presence of those it wishes to question. It will come as no surprise that Berlusconi is refusing to do so despite the draconian powers the Committee enjoys and his duty as the prime minister to respond to concerns for the security of the state. Taken together with his refusal to appear before the Milan magistrates his performance on tonight's video was a virtuoso performance in denial.
'Shan't' 'Didn't' 'Can't make me' 'Don't care' 'Haven't done anything.', just about sums it up.
The entire nearly 400pp of the Milan magistrates' case has now been published. The abuse alleged is horrific, sustained, indefensible. It is impossible to believe that such a catalogue of offensiveness and offences could possibly have been concocted by the Milan magistracy as a media assault upon the Prime Minister for political ends, as Berlusconi sustains.
The irrelevance of his accusations of subversion of the Constitution, followed by assertions that the magistrates do not have jurisdiction, escape him. To watch the Prime Minister arguing like a barrack-room lawyer about by whom and where his behaviour can be judged is to be in a modern Inferno.
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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
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Blog Archive
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2011
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January
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- What Was Shouted At Aaron Porter?
- G'Day!
- Watching the Past Make the Present
- What Should the United Kingdom Contribute to the D...
- Berlusconi Sorting Things Out
- More Than Ten Are the Best Ever
- Best Composers
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- For Pig and Poppy (and Lilith)
- Banks and Whose Army?
- Berlusconi's Political Life Now in the Hands of a ...
- The Irrelevance of the United Nations
- Queueing. Pity it Came Too Late for Christmas
- Who's a Naughty Boy Then?
- Time for Italy's European Friends to Intervene
- Revulsion
- Dining Out. Pass the Oil
- The Vipers Strike or Il Contrappasso
- Lordy, lordy
- The Vipers of Milan
- Better Than Mauve
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- Defending Rotten Boroughs are a Rotten Group of Li...
- Not Old and Sad
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- The Social Market Wobbles
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- Why Social Democracy is Dying
- Kaldor not Keynes: Time for an Expenditure Tax
- Miliband With the Wrong Attitude Again
- The Cuts
- It Takes a Custodial Sentence Before Labour 'Exclu...
- Really Measuring the Economy
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- An Angels' Hero Speaks
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January
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Fallen Angels
- David Cameron (for risking the disorderly dissolution of the Euro)
- Giorgio Napolitano (for stance on Budapest 1956: Prague 1968: Italy 2013)
- Mervyn King (for bailing-out Northern Rock)
- Nicholas Kaldor (for inventing VAT)
5 comments:
Is the end finally coming?
Is it really over for him?
Will he climb into the back of garbage truck like the beleaguered "Bailey" in once upon a time in America?
There are twin governments. One is the competent, economically and fiscally effective, technical government that keeps Italy on the reasonably straight and narrow of Tremonti, Draghi, the diplomatic service, and reasonably well-conducted more local levels of government (though that is infected too); the other is the politico/criminal government that straddles the interface between such government and the immense, submerged criminal hinterland of this geopolitical area which is not, of course, just the Italian peninsula.
Which makes it a very different kind of democracy from ours. Berlusconi is personally caught by being under investigation for so much of the criminopolitical activity that he cannot give up. But he is kept in power only by the Northern Leagues who want to make profound changes in the other governmental mode - in the very nature of the Italian state and its fiscal and other institutional structures.
Also Berlusconi displays a mindset that cannot be accepted any more; he abuses people, personally and horribly, but thinks he's just acting in a way most men would if they could, which is profoundly insulting to us all.
He used to 'amuse' himself by allowing this cruel, criminal mindset to show when acting in the first governmental world - tweaking what he regarded as the self-importance and pomposity of what is really propriety and normal behaviour with acts of considerable vulgarity. But now the price of his self-preservation seems to be the unity of Italy. The worlds have collided.
To answer your question, Mr Q, (finally, sorry to go on) Yes, the end is coming for him.
It's interesting to note that the impact of all this in the UK MSM is precisely zero. Not a story to be seen. Nothing.
Makes me think the old rogue still has some friends in high places.
Friends he may have, Yacht, but it is the size and importance of the Italian economy, and the ditto geopolitical position that is often overlooked.
Oil and gas, both production and supply in and to the Mediterranean are dominated (or at least must take cognizance of) Italy, just for starters.
Here's a story about more important corruption in Italy than the tawdry trivialities that engage the media:
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/an-ecological-bomb-in-the-mediterranean/
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