Living in the Past

"The BBC is considering broadcasting a clip of the 1939 song and having a reporter explain why it is in the top spot. “Many 16 to 24-year-olds are too young to remember when Lady Thatcher was in office,” a source said.",  reports the Telegraph this morning.

It's a scary thought that  some  16 to 24-year-olds  are not too young to remember Margaret Thatcher's years in office - time-lords perhaps.  In Italy we have some 16 to 24-year-old partigiani, indeed many such partisan time-lords are even into their seventies, and they have songs from the 1930s too,  with vivid, life-informing experience of fighting for freedom from the Fascists, despite losing their enemy in 1943.  Unfortunately these experiences do not inform or engage  them in fighting current forms of statist authoritarianism, or even in fighting the eurozone Germans  - that's the trouble with being a  time-lord, you get stuck in a past irrelevant  to an understanding of today's society.

I blame it on their parents.  

Morality and the President of Italy

The President of Italy,  lips thrust forward in 'considered' statement, hands in preachyness, is the outward expression of his inward grace.  He has chosen to condemn those 'moral fanatics' who 'ruin politics'.

That'll be us.  Our insistence that politics should not be funded from taxes, that no parliamentarian should bear other office, that those condemned by the courts should not be eligible for election, that 'expenses' should be backed by paid receipts, that the Legislature, in Parliament should function forthwith regardless of inter-party struggle over the Executive, that Monti has no further mandate, that it is the primary task of the Head of State to nominate prime ministers until someone commands a majority in both Houses, that we do not condone last-gasp pardons for definitively convicted Americans who practice Rendition in the streets of Milan - thus undermining the Judiciary by ultra vires Executive act, our requirement that those who cannot fulfil the role of head of State should resign to make way for someone who can, that at the very least an end could come to mouthing falsity and lies in the interests of dead objectives from half a century ago; our insistence that the Head of State should not subject the interests of Italy and its people to the interests of the European Union's elites - that'll be us, the electorate and our so inconvenient morality ruining the 'politics' of  an ill-spent political life.

Italy's Colonels

                                 Monti       Bersani         Berlusconi

1976 Is a Very Long Time Ago Mr President

The dictatorship under Napolitano continues.  The Head of State has still not made the slightest effort to appoint a prime minister to face Parliament.  The Monti 'administration' continues to issue decrees without authority to do so under this Parliament and goes as far as Brussels to receive the European Union blessing for his extra-constitutional efforts.  The group of  unconstitutional advisors continues to fulfil, as they recognise, their true function of simply wasting time.

Napolitano has just been on television exhorting us to display the 'spirit of 1976' - what spirit?  He was eulogising the 20th anniversary of the death of some old communist I'd never heard of who must have somehow distinguished himself (in doubtless particularly repellent fashion).  If it wasn't so pathetic it might be unnerving.  Immediately after his appearance Margaret Thatcher appeared on the screen in a brief resume of her political life.  What a contrast between a major politician and this  87 year old president who is unfortunately still with us.

Tomorrow Parliament is to be occupied by its MPs in a further attempt  to initiate parliamentary democratic governance.   Currently the Speaker of the Lower House is in accord with setting going the Parliamentary Committees needed to activate parliamentary process.  The former communist who is the Speaker of the Senate won't hear of it.  Perhaps the reading of the Constitution might stir his brains into recognising the position he's getting himself into.  

Bersani and Berlusconi Unite to Prevent the Functioning of the Italian Parliament

The pretence that the Democratic Party will not act politically with the Berlusconi's centre right coalition to form a government is wholly undermined by the reality that the two parties are acting together to prevent the Parliament from working.  Ever since  MPs were declared elected (which took long enough) even now the two coalitions of Left and Right refuse to allow what the largest single party - the 5 Stars Movement - is seeking: the putting into operation of the various Parliamentary Commissions from which legislation is generated.   Parliamentary rules require that each Commission have a chair and vice chair.  Without a government, say Bersani and Berlusconi (tacitly recognising that the Monti left-over is no government) those offices cannot be filled.  Actually they can; in precisely the kind of hiatus we have now there is provision for the most senior Commission member to act as chair  (and since when has anybody been paying the slightest regard to the rules in this fiasco of ad hoc governance?).

There is a grand coalition alright, or rather a common front - keep the 5 Stars Movement away from the levers of power is its bedrock, secret negotiation and agreements its means.  Just as Beppe Grillo said it would be.  Except that the strain of the exclusion imperative, of freezing out our Movement, is tearing the coalitions apart, particularly Bersani's coalition.  Matteo Renzi's  MPs are calling for central parts of the 5 Stars programme to be enacted, particularly the removal of all public funding from political parties; the far Left rainbows SEL are joining with the 5 Stars for the immediate  initiation of the Commissions' work, indeed it is SEL that has pointed to the means for them to start work immediately.

Napolitano, Berlusconi, and Bersani are horrified at the obvious capacity of the Parliament to work without the control of an Executive.  Their problem now is to 'wrap' their alliance sufficiently well to keep their electorates without losing face - and votes - when we go back to the polls.

Heads of State: Their Failings and Their Splendours

As what looks remarkably like a works' council from Togliattigrad attempts to run Italy the country is without any form of constitutionally sanctioned government. When Elizabeth II asked David Cameron to form a government she didn't do so after five weeks of bad-tempered disbelief at what we had voted for, she didn't appoint a couple of Royal Commissions to set out answers to politico-institutional and socio-economic  problems facing the the United Kingdom and add another who knows how long to the wait for a government, she didn't whine that 'the parties have left me isolated'. She didn't hesitate:

Mr Cameron to face Parliament, Mr Brown to vacate Downing Street (and get a move on).

Nor did she visit Italy last month.  Didn't feel too well.  You wouldn't, would you?

Mario Monti Should Insist That His Administration Is At An End

Whatever can Mario Monti be thinking of?  Why is he lending himself to this anti-democratic farce in Italy?  It is one thing to handle matters of everyday administration until the designated majority politician faces the House for a vote of confidence.  It is quite another to continue to govern the country when he has not just lost the last elections, he couldn't find the last elections again if he searched for them with both hands.  And it is no excuse for apologists to argue that the Constitution places no limits on what is meant by 'everyday administration'.  Mario Monti knows perfectly well that he is acting well beyond any commonsense interpretation of those parameters, let alone previous practice which contributes just as much to Italy's written constitution as the words themselves (of necessity, though codified versus non-codified is not the argument of this post).

The Leader of the Democratic Party should face the Parliament.  He has the mandate, he has the MPs.  If he wins a confidence vote then he's it;  if he doesn't then it should be Bersani running a caretaker administration, while new alliances are hurriedly shunted together to have their try, not Mario Monti.  If the President of the Republic has not noticed that there is a new Parliament whose confidence Monti does not enjoy, we have.  And most certainly Monti has.   Monti needs to get up the hill to Napolitano and tell him that's it, the Monti administration is over, tomorrow morning, first thing.  Otherwise he's as responsible for what is going on as Napolitano.

Time to Ignore the President of Italy and Assert the Sovereignty of Parliament

'In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.'  Angels hold no brief for the Italian Democratic Party or its erstwhile candidate premier. Nonetheless, Pierluigi Bersani has been most seriously wronged, as has the Democratic Party and its voters.  It was not for President Napolitano  to act as he has.  Bersani should meet Parliament and see of he can muster a vote of confidence in both Houses, not have Parliament second-guessed by Napolitano.  Italy is not the France of the Fifth Republic (yet).

Bersani has an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies (the Lower House).  He can table and carry a motion of no confidence in the Monti administration as soon as he likes.  At that point Napolitano will be forced to get out of the way, together with his ten Dead White Men, and Bersani will face the Parliament, to be accepted or rejected by the proper body.  Bersani has not returned to Napolitano (to Napolitano's reported extreme irritation) the mandate he has held since the President's earlier consultations.  With Monti voted out he is freed and, almost certainly, would be able to find the dozen votes he needs in the Senate.

So why doesn't Bersani act?  Yes his party is split but for this power-taking operation it might well reunite.  Yes a great wound would open in Italian institutions of governance between the Parliament and the Presidency but, frankly, Napolitano has asked for it by putting himself into such a position, and will be gone within weeks anyway.  Parliamentary sovereignty should not have been encroached  like this.  The real reason Bersani won't do it is because he hasn't got the guts Napolitano has, and he's backed down.  If Bersani wants office he's got the mandate and the votes but he has to take it.

Ten DWMs

Dead White Males, ten of them have been put in place, personally (as he remarked) by President Napolitano to 'find a solution' to our irresponsible voting at the general election now over a month ago.  Actually some of them might not be quite dead but who can tell amongst such an undistinguished cluster of state beneficiaries and eurocrats.  No industrialists, no workers, no musicians, no painters, no poets, no sailors, no soldiers, no young, no women - an all-Italian crony-group of an 87 year old man at the end of his powers.

Here they are.  Angels can't be bothered to give their individual names.  The nomenklatura.

Anti-democratic Constitutional Garbage

The President of Italy has just got off the telly.  He says that the Monti government is remaining because it has never been subject to a vote of no confidence.  Monti has offered his resignation but he, Napolitano, has not accepted it.  Monti therefore retains the confidence of Parliament and can remain conducting the business of the Italian state.

Unfortunately the Parliament that voted confidence in Senator Monti no longer exists.  On 25 February 2013 we elected a new Parliament.   Senator Monti does not enjoy the confidence either of this Parliament or of the electorate (who voted him down in droves, he got less than 10% of the vote).

Napolitano is not just off the telly - there are other things he's off as well.

Italian Democratic Party May Split in Two and Its Coalition Group Collapse

It was always an uneasy amassing of the Italian Communist Party, the remnants of the Italian Socialist Party, the liberals of the Christian Democrats and various odds and sods left over from debacles in the Italian politics of the last century.  Romano Prodi (Christian Democrat) could hold it all together by offering external goals, European agendas that were acceptable to the motley crew.  He could attract, too, the votes of the real Centre, the gente perbene of the middle classes repelled by Berlusconi and his behaviours.

Not Bersani:  nor could such a grouping be held together by imposition of Communist party discipline, although it could be usurped by Communist party political action and activists - and it has been.  The Partito Democratico has never won an election other than under Prodi's leadership and, on Prodi's departure, has lost every time to Berlusconi.  Only a minority of Italians are Communist voters.  The Communist-faction led PD has lost again this time.  This time they kept out the leader who could have given Italy a government over a month ago with their rigged primaries last November.   Bersani has argued falsely that only he can keep the PD together.  The truth is that only by keeping the PD under its organisational, democratic-centralist thumb can the old Communist Party of Italy survive at all.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has had to fund itself via 'foundations' controlling regional banks - notably the Monte dei Paschi, itself now under blanket investigation by the magistrates.  Any government installed in Italy other than a Bersani government means the end for the PCI, few followers, no money.

They should be extruded from any party calling itself democratic.  They should, together with their  'social forces' - the communist-dominated unions,  the third sector, swathes of regional and local government and administration -  be finally extinguished as any part of the Left. They put themselves and their survival before country, party, national and local need.  They are disloyal to all of these.

Bersani has just said:
"Whoever may come after me.....must first of all win the votes of 480 MPs  of our coalition. [because the PD-SEL (far left eco/rainbow party) coalition got 0.4 of the vote more than the Right coalition they received the majority premium in the Lower House, ed.] votes that I have now.  So don't come and propose grand coalition government, even disguised behind another name because my "No" is a given already.  Half the PD will not vote ever for a sort of new version of the Monti government and does not want to split with the SEL,   because SEL will not agree to follow such a path..." [Secretary Bersani often slips into Communist Party-school speech  it would be quite funny if it wasn't so vile, ed., emphasis added]

So the other half of the PD will vote how, exactly?  For a grand coalition?  And how will the SEL then vote once there is nothing to be gained from alliance with the CP rump?   By his own admission Bersni can no more hold together Prodi's Democratic Party than fly.

Bersani Told to Go Home But He Still Doesn't Understand He Lost the Election

Comrade Bersani has been told by the Head of State that as his proposals for government are not able to command a majority in the Parliament, even on paper, he can't be prime minister.  The prime minister remains Mario Monti and the Monti administration remains in office.  The President of Italy has stated that he will personally begin consultations to put together a post-Monti administration.  Neither the Bersani faction of the Democratic Party nor Bersani himself will accept this  and have declared that the Leader will continue in his negotiations for a majority in both Houses of the Italian Parliament.

Bersani doesn't seem to have a proper grasp on how to put together a coalition.  It is not done by barking orders at the largest single Party represented in the Lower House, and holding the vital votes in the Upper House, to get back in line or we'll have to have another election.  We are quite willing to have another election  - after the new President has been elected; the Bersani Democratic faction's attempts to portray the 5 Star Movement as disaffected lefties has just been time-wasting but as the new elections cannot be until June at the earliest  (what with one thing and another) it doesn't really matter.  Now they understand,  5 Stars is not just an outbreak of indiscipline from the Democrat Party line.  Nor is it made up of political innocents or fools.  We have an agenda, oh yes.

We were told in a press conference an hour ago that to form a coalition Bersani 'would have had to accept proposals and conditions unacceptable to him.'  Poor lamb;  he told us what we had to agree to, perfectly plainly.  He even wrote it all down for us in eight points but we kept changing them,  and requiring so much more - like not financing his party out of tax-payers' money (that was one of the unacceptable conditions).  He's demanding to meet Parliament, so clearly he's failed to grasp as well that Italy actually  has got a government (admittedly not very popular but wholly efficient) and the President hasn't accepted Monti's resignation (even though he's had it since January) so there isn't a vacancy.

Berlusca's condition for support was himself as the next president of Italy or, if that were thought a touch risque' then his principal political advisor, Gianni Letta, would do it.  The Northern Leagues want all taxes raised in northern Italy spent in northern Italy and an autonomous North.  You can see that Napolitano had a point, telling Bersani to go home;  and it took over an hour to get Bersani out of the Quirinale.

Poor Cyprus

Cyprus, being unable to assert its claims to the gas fields around it, has been taken apart.  Any state wishing to exploit its natural resources had better have the defence resources to do so,  international law and treaties being always a cover story for powerful states, not a  guarantee for weak ones.  This is true as well for claims by EU bureaucrats that Cyprus is a template for dealing with  member states' sovereign debt  rule-breaking.  Small or weak states will be brought to euro-heel, the others will reshape the euro-structures.  Those determined that the euro should succeed  must hope for confidence in its flexibility to respond to political change within and between powerful member-states.

Even Spain is too poor, too under-resourced, too under-developed to exert Euro-reformatting.  The people there can riot in the streets for all the effect it will have on changing the euro structures or enabling the Spanish government  to alter their relationship with the eurozone.   In contrast, the United Kingdom, although formally equally bound by euro rules,  is big enough and rich enough to ignore them when it chooses.  And does. This independence of action is usually attributed to retaining a national currency -  undoubtedly a help - but the real source of capacity for self-assertion is the usual: too big and complex an economy and a state too powerful to push around.  No EU Projecteers are going to tell France and Germany what to do either.  The euro structures will certainly respond to their requirements.

Which leaves Italy.  The idea that the treatment of Cyprus could be used as a template for Italy is far-fetched, unless such a template is self-administered.  While there can be no Troikerenes flying into Rome to lay down the law, the pitched political battle here is precisely over whether Monti's imposition of the current shape of euro requirements continues, or euro-structures flex to  Italian politico-economic  pressures.   Monti is still prime minister; Napolitano is determined to push the constitution into any shape it takes to keep the current administration - under another name,  whatever name  -   to do from within what weaker states have had forced upon them from without.  There is, at the moment, a kind of shadow template that has been introduced by the Monti government.  We can all do as we please but every move we make will be reported by various bodies and institutions and subsequently attract investigation that amounts to little more than fiscal and financial harrassment.   The President of the Republic and the Prime Minster (who was so humiliatingly rejected at the general election last February) are still trying to leave the current euro-structures alone and warp Italy.

The electorate, disinclined to be impoverished at every level and their economy reduced to, at best, stasis have voted for the re-structuring of the euro and the Union.  What happens here should be of much greater interest to the citizens of large,  powerful European states than anywhere that has been in the sovereign-debt news so far.  

No-one Blinking in Berlin, Moscow or Nicosia

The established Russian financial base in Cyprus is under very serious threat from Berlin masked as the EU and from the US masked as the IMF.   It is not credible that the Russian government regards the Russian resources in Cyprus as illegal or borderline legal - their size and the entities involved are part of Russian policy even if there are some Russian and non-Russian money laundering advantage-takers in the mix.

The European Central Bank continues to provide liquidity to Cyprus banks.   EU rules require it to provide such liquidity only to solvent banks;  Cyprus banks are being kept solvent only by the funding that requires their solvency for such funding to be extended.  Obviously the ECB is holding the banks in suspension while the political stand-off is resolved (in itself a highly politicised act from an ostensibly 'technical' institution, but then it has its own axe to grind about eurozone member states departing the zone).

Cyprus government (which includes the whole political and cultural spectrum, as do other  Mediterranean states, it's the constitutional model used in this part of the world) is entertaining the Troika  while its minister of  Finance  is in Moscow and, he says, intends to stay there  until discussions are satisfactorily completed, though what form finalisation will take is under consideration.  Meanwhile in Cyprus the parliamentary draftsmen are blamed for no legislation being available for bank resolution and a parliamentary session to debate this is cancelled.  The chances of this being true are challenged by Cyprus having perfectly well drafted (by the English) bank resolution legislation, have had since long ago.

The RAF has had to fly out a plane load of euro bank notes because the eurozone seems unable to perform even that most basic of monetary operations, run a retail cash banking system.

Every, perfectly reasonable, alternative to mulcting the Russians out of their deposits and out of such a geo-politically important piece of real estate is met with vetos from the Troikerenes in Nicosia.  Pips are going to be made to squeak, right down to the last euro to teach all of us Southern wastrels to mind ourselves as well.

The Archbishop of Cyprus, who owns the third largest bank there, and large pieces of the island,  has been seen kissing the new Jesuit Pope in Rome, (Dearest brother) which is giving a decided Umberto Eco-ish twist to these events.  The Italian President, occupying Rome's magnificent former papal palace, is failing meanwhile  to put together a democratic pro-European administration while the largest single party in the Italian Parliament calls for  re-negotiating the euro and, indeed the entire European Project.

Greece Considers Re-Opening Close Contacts With Putin

A map of the Mediterranean to hand is useful when reading the news on the Cyprus stand-off.  Now it is reported in the Fatto Quotidiano that the Cypriot Finance minister is no longer talking just to his Russian counterpart, and  that talks which were originally about extending the Russian loan and reducing its interest rate have now moved to another venue and onto "other matters'.  What these might be can be readily guessed and their importance and generality intuited  if the further suggestion that Mr Putin has asked the President of Cyprus to come to Moscow is correct.

Meanwhile the Church has intervened to offer its full support to the Cyprus government and  points out that it is the largest land owner on the island and wholly disposed to making land available to the state.  It suggests also development bonds for the land that would be subscribed down to parish level throughout the island.

Greece too is now wondering if it should seek renewed close contacts with Mr Putin via former Conservative prime minister Costas Karamanlis, whose vision of Greece as an energy hub dovetails with Russian gas delivery via South Stream into Europe and particularly to Italy.

Northern European Union moral hazard nerds are uniting a Southern European community of interest  they do not seem  to have fully grasped.

Italian Democratic Party Splits in the Lower House

The Italian President finally opens negotiations for the next administration today, a month after the general election.  Unfortunately for the self-seeking Bersani, the Democratic Party has split. In the voting for the Party leadership in the Lower House  (the equivalent in the UK would be, more or less, the chief whip) Bersani attempted to foist a candidate onto the assembled Democrat MPs by demanding his candidate be elected 'by acclamation'.  As the candidate is a full time, full working life, Bersani faction, Party creep this attempt to close ranks round Bersani himself was met with silence, followed by a request for a secret ballot.  Trade union MPs then tried to insist on no ballot.  MPs insisted right back.  The vote split the Party with a third denying support; as there was only one candidate (nice, democratic, Bersani-ites) ballot papers had to be left blank.

So we now have a third of the Lower House majority Party voting en bloc against the imposed leadership.   The comrades tried to explain this unfortunate and very public demonstration of their smaller than they pretend support by claiming the bloc to be supporters of Matteo Renzi but the evidence is that those 87 votes against the leadership came from across the Party political spectrum, united only by their antipathy to the organised proto-communist and trade union faction.

The Head of State is today to be presented by Bersani with 'a unanimously agreed Party programme' and a claim on the premiership.  The Democratic Party has no majority in the Upper House and, as has just been shown, no control over all its own members in the Lower.    

How Are We Defining Wealth?

The widely accepted  heist on savings over a hundred thousand euros - it's the heist on sums lower than that which mostly  is causing the outrage - is unnerving.  Wealth taxes should be on wealth not bog standard savings.

Everyone would have their threshold for 'wealth',   but  a hundred thousand euros? You couldn't buy a studio flat in South Hatfield for a £100,000 (never mind euros.)

Whatever It Takes?

Italy is an existential threat to the Euro and to the Union.  Just for starters between 71 and 79 billion euros is owed by the Italian state, at national and local levels, to small, medium and even larger businesses.  Obviously there will be, and there is, a cascade effect and, as  during the Transition of the eastern bloc (with the complicity of the IMF)  we have the beginning of the de-monetisation of the Italian economy.

Last week the Prime Minister went to Brussels to obtain authorisation for unblocking  at least this disaster, whose cause is not principally lack of funds: regional and  local authorities are forbidden to release the funds they have because they are bound by the rules of the Stability and Growth pact.  Italy needs to live under fiscal sovereignty.   It is also the third largest economy in the EU.  Something has got to give.  Simply demonising Italians as ne'er-do-well, sun-tanned, ice-cream eaters is beyond good and evil (as the saying goes here). 

We tried.  We voted.  The moment we - finally - got our hands on a ballot (which event was so improperly delayed for 15 months by a President claiming dictatorial powers under constitutional guise)  we voted for a re-negotiation, or out of the Euro.  Since winning a month ago, no government at all has been  installed;  the Monti administration is  forcibly (though again under constitutional guise) kept in office.  Even Mario Monti himself is protesting against his slaving to European Union imperatives.  His use of Garibaldi's "Obbedisco"  is  hardly a full-hearted expression of consent, or of agreement with the Head of State's  understanding of our situation,  and  his objectives for Italy.  Napolitano had to swallow Monti's scathing consent because Monti's government is the only possible Italian counter-party for any international bailing - in or out - and there is no possibility of stable democratic governance (for instance, Comrade Bersani has just accused us all of being Leninists, which is a remarkable exposition of his mindset.  Angels are not at all sure what a Leninist is, but it must be better than being a Bersani Stalinist. Whatever - it gives an idea of where they are coming from).

Now the Cyprus experiment has made plain the full content of Mario Draghi's  'Do whatever it takes' euro speech.  What the euro-zealots intend to take is a sitting duck in the nation's bank accounts.  Well, it's a sitting duck  at the moment but it's getting under cover fast, despite 15 months of Monti trying to close down escape routes (which attempts,  both Monti's and our defensive manoeuvres, of themselves have had adverse effects for investment in a time of broken monetary transmission mechanisms.   How pathetic to have driven the country's savers into gold.)

Meanwhile in another part of the forest Silvio Berlusconi, whose coalition received only 100,000 fewer votes than the dominant Bersani-ite Democratic Party, has said plainly that any further constitutional warping of the higher offices of the state will be met with obdurate opposition in Parliament and Piazza (constitutionally Italian government rests upon continuous and cross-party consent much more than the oppositional model of, say, the UK).   The Five Stars, who definitely hold 25%  (but even 30% according to Italy's latest iffy political polls) of the electorate, are joined at least in the requirement for fresh elections, with Berlusconi.  The pro-European elites publish dream teams of 'civic', imposed governance in their media.  The Northern Leagues want an end not just to the EU in its present form but to Italy in its present form as well; and these anti-Europe anti- united Italy separatists are the chosen target coalition group Bersani hopes to use to shoe-horn himself into power.

In its current figuration and future goals Europe cannot afford Italy.  Indeed Angels are unsure whether Europe can even afford itself.  Italy can afford Italy, but we can't afford Europe; not the awful Austrians again, or the Germans either (the Dutch and the Finns are just gloomy coat-tailers from soggy seasides, and frozen wastes at the edge of Russia).  If 'Whatever It Takes' means the destruction of Italian manufacturing industry,  bankruptcy, the mass unemployment of the young, the denial of the concept of property, and the dismemberment of Italy, this is not for Mario Draghi or President Napolitano to offer.  Not for their idea of Europe.

Cyprus Achieves Full Communism

In the good old Soviet days goods' prices were held down artificially but the goods were not there.  The population accumulated useless cash unwillingly.   The government tried to capture these involuntary savings by making obligatory the purchase of government bonds.  Those were not savings but a form of taxation.  However the Soviet government never got round to actually confiscating excess cash except a couple of times in the 1950s by enforcing a currency conversion at progressively more punitive rates for prices, bank accounts, and cash.   As they used to say,  under full Communism there would still be money  for some but not for others. 

The European Union has succeeded in reconstructing Soviet-type confiscation of hard-earned savings because  setting limits to cash withdrawals  have turned part of household savings into forced involuntary savings.  In Cyprus, by then skimming depositors' accounts at a very high rate, they have been recognised by Medvedev (not unnaturally) for what they are. There is no difference between Soviet practice then and European Union practice today. 

Gold Rush

Just running down to the bank - irrational not to, as Mervyn King remarked.  It opens at 8.30 but it might be best to get a head start on the rest of the village.  Fortunately the bank at the bottom of the hill sells gold bars.  It's supposed to be for the local factories but mostly they'll be selling to most of us today.