Berlusconi avgår

Och enligt samtliga italienska opinionsundersökningar de senaste veckorna har han dessutom betydligt större folklig förankring än någon politiker i landet.

"---On October 24, 1922, Mussolini declared before 60,000 people at the Fascist Congress in Naples: "Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy."[1] Meanwhile, the Blackshirts, who had occupied the Po plain, took all strategic points of the country. On October 26, former prime minister Antonio Salandra warned current Prime Minister Luigi Facta that Mussolini was demanding his resignation and that he was preparing to march on Rome. However, Facta did not believe Salandra and thought that Mussolini would govern quietly at his side. To meet the threat posed by the bands of fascist troops now gathering outside Rome, Luigi Facta (who had resigned but continued to hold power) ordered a state of siege for Rome. However, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the military order.[2] On October 28, the King handed power to Mussolini, who was supported by the military, the business class, and the right-wing.

The march itself was composed of fewer than 30,000 men, but the king in part feared a civil war since the squadristi had already taken control of the Po plain and most of the country, while Fascism was no longer seen as a threat to the establishment. Mussolini was asked to form his cabinet on October 29, 1922, while some 25,000 Blackshirts were parading in Rome. Mussolini thus legally reached power, in accordance with the Statuto Albertino, the Italian Constitution. The March on Rome was not the conquest of power which Fascism later celebrated but rather the precipitating force behind a transfer of power within the framework of the constitution.---"

Hundratals studenter i Milano demonstrerade på torsdagen mot Italiens nyutnämnde premiärminister Mario Montis ”bankirregering”. Studenterna sköt fyrverkeripjäser mot polisen och kastade ägg mot det italienska bankförbundets byggnad.

För övrigt vågar jag påstå att minst 80% av italienarna har bättre kunskaper än Ezzelino inte om bara om italiensk politik utan också om europeisk politik. Så mycket för den "politiskt okunniga massan".

"---Political power in Europe has passed to a tiny elite of technocrats. Two days after the economist Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Prime Minister of Greece, another technocrat, Mario Monti, was asked to lead a new unity government in Italy.

Technocrat here is a euphemism for someone who has worked at or with the investment bank Goldman Sachs, nicknamed in financial circles "the vampire squid". Mr Monti was a member of Goldman's board of international advisers. Mario Draghi, the new president of the European Central Bank which controls eurozone monetary policy, is a Goldman man. So is Antonio Borges who, until Wednesday, was running the International Monetary Fund's European division. Mr Papademos is a former vice-president of that same European Central Bank; he is also the man who was running the Central Bank of Greece at the time when that country, like Italy, used complex derivatives to slim down the apparent size of its government debts in order to qualify to join the euro. The rules of the euro mandated that such debts shouldn't be above 60 per cent of the size of the economy. Who was behind that clever idea? The financial wizards of Goldman Sachs.

You don't have to smell conspiracy to be concerned here, merely a confluence of interests. Technocrats or politicians, they all sing from the same highly marketised hymn-sheet. Insanity, said Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.---"