The interested and deceitful tale of the Italian political ‘corruption’, as Western exception
The politics costs, in Italy, according to Teodori
The media-academic deception on the ‘heroic’ magistrates-executioners
The world police-judicial space as Anglophone new domination tool
The 1989 Anglophone transition to the attempted direct [police-judicial] world domination
Echelon: complement of the Anglophone world hegemony
‘Criminality’ as pretext for a police-judicial world web
Also German and French political leaderships as criminal questions
The 1999/2000 German politics criminalisation
And Italian-style assault
The Schröder’s judiciary option to political power consolidation
The attempted reduction of French politics to criminal question
The ideological covers of the Anglophone espionage: the ‘transparency’ campaigners
The myth of the casual investigations, from a magistracy fully inside the powers networks
5. 1990s’ defamation as one of the domination techniques
The interested and deceitful tale of the Italian political ‘corruption’, as Western exception
The Italian political system and its Constitutional frame were created after WW2 in conditions of allied occupation and under the hegemony of DC and PCI. Suddenly, in 1992, some judicial networks, of different political and powers’ colours, discovered that only the Craxi-PSI, the Andreotti-Forlani DC, the non-pro-PCI fractions of the PDSI, PLI and PRI were corrupted, while everyone else was absolutely pristine. In addition the evils were corrupted (but rarely in court, having been the wide majority never sentenced for any crime) in the measure the PCI/PDS did not decide to save, as it did in some cases, the stricken politicians. And overall they were corrupted in the measure they showed fidelity to national independence and resisted to renounce to their political engagement. Intellectual networks submitted to various national interests suddenly united enthusiastically to the chorus born from these abrupt discovers of some Italian magistrates. So also internationally it was claimed that in Italy there was finally, from 1992, the definite collapse of a political class needing lots of money for party financing, and the triumph of the goodness side, which, in spite of its gigantic bureaucratic machines and other very expensive activities, was fed by the militants’ pure enthusiasm. As usual in State and powers propaganda, who/which promoted because liked became liked because ‘honest’, alias ‘honest’ because liked and promoted. It was exactly as the usual games on ‘human rights’, where States founded on genocide, slavery, racial discrimination[1] and the consociative dictatorship of a couple of similar political parties permanently monopolising power, became world judges and executioners.
The methodological approach was the usual tautological one. Adversaries of foreign and internal powers were not bad because enemies but enemies because evil. Powers were always good. Their enemies were always evil. Only for that the latter were enemies of the former. Interest could not be an interpretative frame because goodness, in spite of their always obsessively claimed national interests, was absolutely disinterested. Andreotti, blessed from the Pope, and Craxi praised on certain (not the Francophone one) Latin press were the evil the dominant international and certain internal powers couldn’t not to perceive and their enemies, overall after 1989, and also more from 1992, the time of the Maastricht Treaty. Around these tautologies reciprocally fed and sustaining, claims, more than documented and positively tested theories, were built from academic networks about the 1990s’ Italian events.
Exactly as in all case, in history, of political persecutions, the regime intellectuals supporting the political purge assumed political magistracy as truth source, what anyway magistracy can never be, being its function different. Actually even this intellectual operation was too arduous because the sentences against the ‘guilty’ politicians there were not. Political magistracy defamed by press but generally without prosecuting and sentencing. Guilty were not judicially guilty. Consequently even the judicial evidence that in the arbitrary evaluation of magistracy stricken politicians were guilty, there were not. There were only the regime intellectuals unfounded supposition of guiltiness. No alternative coherent interpretative and testing frame was ever suggested, apart from the tautology that the purged political class should be certainly guilty, since no Western or Central power had ever posed any problem of human right and threatened and actuated bombing campaigns. Alias, who was defamed as guilty from political magistracy and foreign powers, was claimed as guilty from regime intellectuals. Intellectuals are always very cleaver in letting to understand something without stating it. In fact, in the academic literature on 1990s’ Italy, evidence is always let to understand, or even invented, never showed and tested in a reasonably coherent frame. So the GWs, the notices that the citizen was under investigation, and the relative abusively militant Prosecutors-promoted media-defamation were assumed as sure evidence of guiltiness of the cleansed part of the political system. This, despite the absence, for the wide majority of the accused politicians, of any prosecution and/or later condemnation. The actually very ephemeral result, the realised purge, was sold as the proof that the purged were criminals should be purged.
Naturally, since ideology must always cover interests, there was a kind of unexpressed, but not in Italy, moral justification to the discrimination between Italian good and evil. As summarised from a rightist journalist well connected with the powers supporting the PDS and Lefts in office, Montanelli, to ‘steal’ for paying the one’s and current political activity was corruption. While to ‘steal’ for the party, as, for Montanelli, it was the case of the PCI/PDS, was claimed as moral superiority.[2] As to tell that between two MPs equally avoiding all personal interest in politics, but one having paid his electoral campaign collecting directly financing and the other one having had it paid from the PCI/PDS, the former was a corrupted and the second was morally superior. Nevertheless Montanelli, not really a very analytic mind, never explained why a DC-Lefts politicians even if not morally superior, according to his own frame, were equally saved from militant magistracy. More direct was the Craxi- and also Andreotti- and Berlusconi-phobic La Repubblica party. For the 4 July 1999 La Repubblica Berlinguer, the denouncer of the moral question who actually did nothing for moralising his party, the PCI, had moral tension because he avoided alliances with Craxi, while D’Alema was without it because he dealt with Berlusconi.[3] The concrete characters of different defended wallets determine always differences in the concrete analytic approaches but inside a basically identical methodology.
Italy was a country where the PCI had been even bribed from central government, from 1987, by an entire State-TV-group, RAI3, become its de facto monopoly but paid from State. And macro- and micro-clientelist, category- as territorially-focused, laws always saw Parliament unanimous. Also the benefited citizens and economic groups never refused, on the contrary they always pretended, such kind of relations State-citizens and of governance. In a particratic regime, and specifically in the Italian one, where everything depends on politics the first kind of corruption is the people’s one. Useless places of works are created, useless people is hired, useless enterprises are build and their losses financed, to relatively young people pensions and subsides are given. Funds are distributed in the most odd and unimaginable ways for pure consensus reasons. In addition the entire business flows between Italy and socialist countries included fixed percentages passed to the PCI/PDS, and also other entities, as illegal financing. Also direct Soviet-block funds arrived to the PCI/PDS and other entities, as Western-block ones had arrived to anti-Soviet parties and organisations. Inside Italy from the State industry, the private one, the State bureaucracies, the illegal financing to all parties and TUs was generalised, since the normative inadequacy, nearly the impossibility, of legal financing. When investigations touched Lefts local government as the Turin commune one in the 1980s, no difference from the practices of the DC hegemonised administrations was found in the practices of clientelism, illegal financing, bribes[4]. All interest block had wanted to use against concurrent parties, party-fractions, TUs, economic and bureaucratic interests the card of the illegal financing, bribes corruption, and also eventually of the high betrayal, had not the problem of the crimes. Laws create crimes, and the Italian laws had created the inevitability of the crime of political and TUs illegal financing, and other crimes, and also of high betrayal in certain cases, for all political and TUs organisations. Only problem was to dispose of a judicial network adequately internally and internationally[5] supported for realising political and/or other purge.
Being essential in a political purge and country-weakening operation to assure the continuity of the stricken system, it is not astonishing that the TUs real position had not attracted specific attention in the presentation of the 1990s Italy and its developing political dynamics. In the Italy’s weakened continuity, TUs were more essential than the same Lefts parties, because their power position was electoral irresponsible, and consequently independent from their real consensus. In the soviet structure characterised the post 1968/1969 Italy, overall the three main regime TUs participated to thousands of State and local institutes administrations, committees and sub-committee in a capillary network of State and society co-management. According to 1998 revealed data, TUs got from the Italian Social Security (INPS), about 800 billion liras every year. A little more than 300 were direct INPS financing to the TUs Assistance Offices (AOs)[6]. The remaining sum was collected from INPS on behalf of the TUs. In fact when the INPS customers used these AOs not only this use was INPS financed, but TUs use it as occasion for getting delegations for detracting fees, for their benefit, from the insured pensions. These contributions received from the TUs should be compared with the State financing to political parties, which was of 180 billion liras per year.[7] In addition the TUs got functionaries de facto paid from State structures and from private enterprises, and all this not for favouring workers integration, but, on the contrary, their militancy against all even shy modernising measure, and all attempt to weaken the genetically corrupted nature of the bureaucratic machine. The regime three main TUs, CGIL-CISL-UIL (defined from radical-liberals as the three-dead[8], actually very deadly alive), as all the TUs wide galaxy, was carefully let untouched from all claimed as anti-‘corruption’ investigations.
Even if the image of an Italian politics where political parties were only preoccupied to capture relevant flows of funds has been suggested, it would be arduous an unfavourable-to-Italy comparison with other countries. That politics was inexpensive abroad was not supposable, also where the political system was less competitive and reduced to a mere couple, or triplet, of relatively similar parties, as in the Anglophone countries. The Presidential candidate Bush junior collected, in 1999, for his 2000 electoral campaign 70 million dollars.[9] Similarly did Al Gore. The exclusion or not, of candidates, from the Presidential pre-race, was determined from their capacity to collect funds, alias from the private interests to have them on their budgets. Nobody claimed for the USA par condicio among candidates, neither prohibitions of TV political advertising. As nobody denounced as corruption to be paid from private interests, which will inevitably condition the elected candidate. The US politics was currently financed both from internal Mafias and from foreign ones. That verified indifferently for Democratic and Republican political personnel. It was obviously legal in the USA, but claimed as illegal and criminal when it was supposed to have verified relatively to foreign States and politicians the USA considered their enemies. Who denounced black funds and corruption, electoral frauds and corruption neither was denounced and tried as a slanderer, nor his/her denunciations translated in judiciary actions. For example the whole costs of the electoral campaigns for the 2000 Presidential elections and ‘general’ (always partial in the USA) elections were estimated 3 billion dollars.[10] For Sartori, the total cost of the 2000 Presidential elections was of the order of 1 billion dollars[11]. Also vote is always a form of reciprocal conditioning (in fact in Italy purged candidates were accused of the crime of exchange vote), in one wants to use this kind of reasoning frame. Following judicialist Italian frames all form of lobbying was corruption, apart from that exercised from and/or for profit of judicialist components. In fact, not differently from the case of the party financing where norms were made for being immediately violated and everybody accepted explicitly their violation, lobbing was without any rule in Italy. There was only an equivocal law on the exchange vote, made a bit before the start of the judicialist waves and widely used for charging and defaming politicians, usually without finally condemning them for it. If one looks at the USA, for example, Clinton gave judicial pardons and guaranteed the non-prosecution of people responsible of fiscal and other frauds and crimes only because they had considerably financed the Democratic Party and had assured relevant quantity of votes to his wife when she was successfully candidate as New York Senator in the year 2000. In addition he assured relevant benefits to himself at Federal State charge.[12] Nobody prosecuted Clinton for that, or developed long and insistent international campaigns on these practises.
Also in Japan, when systemic forces wanted to strike strong political leaders, as it was the case of Tanaka Kakuei, a self-made-man, and more generally more attempt of politics’ autonomisation from bureaucracy, a wide claim about ‘structural’ corruption and bribe was built and used, in the 1970s’ and later. In the Japanese case what was in danger was the bureaucracy’s power monopoly. The legal indeterminacy was function in that country of the bureaucratic developmental leadership. Also, thanks to the media and magistracy control from the system’s leading forces, it was possible, each time politics tried to interfere with real government, to oblige to the retreat political leaders, reaffirming the submission of the political system. Already between 1983 and 1986 the experiment of the creation of a kind of external fraction of a LDP object of media and judiciary attack for supposed corruption had been realised, creating the New Liberal Club (NLC). More organically and decisively, in the 1990s’, the LDP long monopoly power from the half of the 1950s’ was broken, since bureaucracy initiative, with the creation of the New Frontier Party (NFP) at the end of 1994. It was a party with an electoral weight of the order of 30% votes[13] founded in a contest of continued media and judicial quarrelling against the LDP ‘corruption’ and illegal financing.[14] If in a country governed since 1868 by forces outside formal politics and also more after WW2 from a bureaucracy’s dictatorship, there was political ‘corruption’ evidently bureaucracy wanted it, as control tool. Apart from the different nature of the two State formations and countries, one, Japan, strongly developmental, the other one subordinate inside the international order, there were common political patterns. The situation of indeterminacy of politics and its financing reflected the necessity to keep it subordinate and blackmailable. In the case of Japan the subordination was essentially internal. ‘Corruption’ was, for its ethical contents, the brand under which to justify attacks to the political system.
Partridge writes: “Tangentopoli[15] is the name commonly given to the series of corruption scandals first emerging from the northern city of Milan, previously thought of as the model to the corruption-ridden bureaucracies of Rome. The exposures were set in train through the energetic and sustained work of a group of Milanese magistrates, a prominent member of which, Antonio Di Pietro, soon become something of a national hero.”[16] The news of “447 old-guard politicians, including five former Prime Ministers, had been investigated on various corruption-related charges”[17] by March 1994, was complemented with the most linear of the explanations. In Italy “the intensity of the inter-party competition drove extraordinary numbers of politicians over the boundaries of legality in the search for party funds and this, combined with the unleashing of the judiciary’s potential independence, made the corruption scandals exceptional among Western democracies.”[18] It was a very weak and question-avoiding logic. A ‘scandal’ is evidence of nothing and it is even impossible to define rigorously what it is, being totally subjective to remain scandalised. Partridge arrives even to define a comparison between Italy and supposed “Western democracies”, funded on an entity, “corruption scandals” cannot be defined, but even if defined and synthesised in data would be data on a stated and incomparable feeling.