It's the money, stupid

Clemente Mastella, ex-minister of justice and the man who brought down Prodi's government, isn't just a consummately self-regarding politician. He's also a newspaper editor. Like all Italian parties, UDEUR, Mastella's gang of hangers-on, cronies and relatives, has the right to its own state-financed newspaper, to ensure that the information available reflects all points on the political spectrum (yes, right). It's called Il Campanile (The Belltower) and it costs the Italian taxpayer the tidy sum of €1,331,000 each year. Of the 5,000 copies printed each day, 3,500 never leave the printers while the others are binned by news kiosks. A newsagent near the House of Deputies claims never to have sold a single copy.

But the money has to be spent somehow. Let's see how: among the employees of Clemente Mastella, editor, is Clemente Mastella, journalist. Cost: €40,000 a year. Then there are travel expenses, because a newspaper needs to keep its finger on the local pulse. Annual cost (2005): €98,000. Most frequent beneficiaries: Sandra Lonardo Mastella (wife, and under investigation for collusion), followed by Elio and Pellegrino Mastella (sons). You can't fly everywhere, of course, so Pellegrino needs to fuel his Porsche Cayenne. He does it at the family's local petrol station. Cost (charged to Il Campanile): €2,000 every month. That's nothing compared to the money spent on public relations: €141,000 a year, plus €22,000 on gifts like chocolate and nougat from a small town in Clemente's home territory, Summonte, the birthplace of Mastella's sister-in-law and her husband, UDEUR deputy Pasquale Giuditta.

The main offices of Il Campanile are in Rome, in a rented building that used to belong to the state. Its new owners? Pellegrino and Elio Mastella.

At the last elections, UDEUR won 1.4% of the vote.

(My thanks to Susanna for passing this information onto me, and to Mauro Montanari of Corriere d'Italia/news ITALIA PRESS, who put it all together.)

They know no shame

As you may already know, Berlusconi brought down the Prodi government a couple of years ago by purchasing the support, if not affection (i.e. they fucked but refused to kiss), of several senators. One of the first to slide his bum across the polished benches of the senate was a human blowfish of no discernible talent called Sergio De Gregorio, who received a tidy sum almost immediately. The last, and most clamorous, example of ideology bowing to the siren call of cash was the defection of minister of justice Clemente Mastella (you can see what I thought about all this at the time by clicking here). His name was mud for a few months, but he received his reward at the last European elections and now represents the Great One's party in Brussels, where he's recently had the indecency to complain about the crap expenses budget. No moats for Mastella, apparently - hard for a man who's lined his nest and his extended family's various nests with government lolly for the past thirty years.

Still, yesterday was a good day, in a schadenfreudery sort of way, because both De Gregorio and Mastella found themselves, bluntly, in the shit. De Gregorio was threatened with arrest for a small matter of money-laundering. Mastella, and his wife, popularly known as Lady Mastella and the president of the region of Campania, on the other hand, are under investigation for fraud, tender-fixing, distributing favours in return for votes, creaming off the customary percentages, corruption. There's a subtle whiff of Mafia about the whole affair, so it's all pretty much run of the mill. Lord and Lady Mastella, needless to say, deny everything. Well, they would, wouldn't they? as a call-girl in a more gallant age once told a judge. The cherry on the cake is that Lady Mastella has actually been denied the right to reside in Campania and six bordering provinces, including, I'm delighted to say, my own. Her world, she says, has collapsed about her. Oh good.

Bananas

As predicted in my last post, Clemente Mastella has withdrawn his three (yes, that's right, three) senators from the Italian senate, depriving the Prodi government of its majority of two (yes, that's right, two). The government's been looking like a house of cards in a gentle but insistent breeze for some time and this will probably be the final puff, though there is a slight chance of a 'technical' (as in, non-elected) government being cobbled together to vote through some sort of electoral reform. The only good that might come from such a solution would be an electoral law that prevented self-serving ingrates like Mastella from holding the whip hand with their fistfuls of bought or bartered votes.

It was clear from the beginning of this legislature that the greatest threat to its survival came not from the left, responsible for bringing down Prodi's first government, but from the centre, a haemorrhoid-like cluster of mini-parties, most of whose leaders are, or have been, investigated for corruption, favouritism or collusion (Mastella, Dini, Di Pietro). The left has had to grit its teeth and vote for any number of unpalatable provisions simply to keep Prodi in power. It's seen parts of the electoral manifesto - such as support for civil unions - scrapped. It's even toed the line over foreign policy decisions that would have brought Prodi 1 down in two shakes of a snake's tail, alienating substantial chunks of its own electorate in the process. To its credit, it's understood that real politik is based on compromise, rather than unbending principle.

Not that the centre's obstructionism and wheeler-dealing has had anything to do with principle. The way Mastella and his merry gang have behaved over the last two years, as though the Italian parliament were part of their personal fiefdom, is simply cringe-making to watch. There is nothing such men wouldn't do to be able to continue to dispense largesse and rake in the profits from it, which, as often as not, have as much to do with the exhilarating buzz of power as they do with cash. (Not that they're short of that.) There are rumours already that Mastella and Berlusconi are brokering some squalid little deal which will ensure the former's political survival. To counter this, and to show the extent to whoch Italian politics is contingent on private interests, there is talk that some of the teeny-weenier parties of the right might, just might, be tempted to cross over to the centre-left and keep it alive for another month or so. Naturally, they'd be rewarded.

The cherry on the cake is that the head of the Italian Episcopal Council, Bagnasco, has informed the electorate (Italy's electorate, naturally - the Vatican's subjects don't get to vote) that the church will not tolerate civil unions, etc. etc. Nobody asked him, he just thought he'd remind us. Oh yes, the church will also oppose any attempt to introduce the notion of gender into Italian law; apparently it remains entirely Christian to insult and disscriminate against gay men and women with impunity. How far the Vatican is from Fred Phelps and his God Hates Fags gang is a moot point. Richard Dawkins would say they're the same thing and, until I hear an awful lot of dissent from grassroots catholics - something that's signally absent at the moment - I'd tend to agree with him.

Today is the first birthday of my blog. I was going to celebrate but I'm sick to the stomach about all this. I've never been less in love with Italy than I am today. I don't even want to begin to talk about the toxic rubbish in Naples. I'd be unable to resist a metaphor that's better left implicit. I'll just post a picture and you can do the creative business yourselves.

A normal country

The problem with talking about events in Italy, particularly political events, is that, as they move forward, often at a great rate and with considerable fluster, they nonetheless drag their significance behind them, fanning out into an endless murk, so far behind them and in such confusion that what we are faced by is nothing, a bagatelle, a minor scandal, and so we don't know where to start, which thread to begin to unpick, which rumour to substantiate or set aside, which name to name, which reputation to save or besmirch. In other words, they're rather like the previous sentence, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were tempted to give up and wonder why I hadn't just posted a photograph of my dog again. So thank you for getting this far.

The event that triggered this post is the news that Clemente Mastella, Italy's minister of justice, is being investigated for a series of crimes, including the abuse of his office and membership of secret associations (read: masonic lodges), in connection with an inquiry into the activities of one of his chums, a certain Antonio Saladino, a powerful entrepreneur, connected to the world of politics, the church and, it's said, organised crime, as well as being ex-owner of a temping agency called Why Not. Why not indeed?

In a normal country a minister of justice who found himself under investigation would, at the very least, remove himself until the investigation was concluded. But Italy isn't a normal country. Mastella's first reaction was to attempt to remove not himself, but the investigating magistrate, Luigi De Magistris. In a normal country, De Magistris would have sought redress within the structure, and probably found it. In Italy, he went on prime-time television to defend his position. In a normal country, this would have been seen as inappropriate. In Italy, it's absorbed into political discussions of a Byzantine complexity as to how long the Prodi government can survive. Because, of course, if Mastella goes, or is forced to go, he'll take his 1.4% (yes, that's right - 1.4%) with him and the government will fall. At this point, his innocence or guilt is irrelevant. In a normal country, a man whose party contrives to win 1.4% of the popular vote and whose attitude towards the morality of the state and its representatives is notoriously elastic, would not be minister of justice in the first place.

In Italy, he is. In the meantime, De Magistris has been taken off the case.

Hate (crimes)

The Italian government is in one of its periodic kerfuffles about gay rights and the lack of them. A clause introduced into the long-suffering security bill currently passing through parliament aims to impose sentences for acts of violence or discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation. Analogous to the kind of hate crime legislation that's disturbing sensitive family-loving souls in the States, it's based on the Treaty of Amsterdam and is as bland as semi-skimmed milk.

But you wouldn't think so from the way self-mortifying catholic Paola Binetti (see illustration) sprang into action, refusing to vote with the government, rambling on about natural law, etc. She was followed by the usual suspects, not least the ever-present justice minister, Clemente Mastella, a man for whom nepotism and corruption are essential components of the air he breathes, who doesn't appear to see that justice is only justice when applied to all. Giulio Andreotti, man of honour and best buddy to the Vatican, also piped up with a moral qualm or two.

Now it turns out the clause refers to the wrong part of the Treaty, so doesn't exist. This may be a way of solving the problem (in the sense of burying the whole business beneath a ton or two of sand) or of prolonging it. I suspect the latter. But the real problem isn't this scrap of legislation, which any normal country would have voted through unblinkingly. It's the presence of people like Binetti in the newly-formed Partito Democratico. There may be a place for religious bigotry in the government (though I doubt it), but that place shouldn't be a centre-left grouping that has absorbed a sizeable chunk of what's left of the Italian Communist Party.

If she wants to preach her poisonous nonsense in parliament wouldn't it be fairer to herself and everyone else if she joined one of the parties for whom prejudice and discrimination are daily bread? Ex-bovver boy Francesco Storace has just set up a little party for himself and a few chums called, in a moment of exceptional candour, La Destra (The Right) - presumably because there's no money involved. Wouldn't that dark but cosy enclave provide a more congenial home for the wearisome bigot and and her bible-thumping family-values-loving friends? And wouldn't it be refreshing if the newly-appointed leader of the PD, Walter Veltroni, interrupted his ongoing tête-a-tête with Silvio B. to suggest that she take her criminal hatred elsewhere because no democratic party worthy of the name was prepared to tolerate it?

Tengo famiglia

Three short updates on Italy. (Spot the link.)

1. Salvatore Ferranti, jailed for presumed association with the Mafia, has been granted house arrest because he's just too fat for his cell. The bed won't take his weight, the door's too narrow for his 210 kilos (that's 452 lbs), he's had to be helped, day and night, by a guard assigned to assist with his physiological needs (don't even think about it). According to the judges who made this decision, none of the local jails was able to guarantee the prisoner a level of treatment that would protect and respect his human dignity. It isn't clear how much human dignity a grossly obese Mafioso actually has, but, as the Pope would say, these things aren't quantifiable. The divine flame burns in everyone, including Ferranti, though clearly not regularly enough to consume a few thousand calories.
2. Eight years after being sentenced to spells of 24 years in jail, two Mafia bosses have been released. Why? Because the judge presiding at the trial hasn't found time to write the motivation of the sentences, without which they become invalid. Edi Pinatto, the judge responsible, says he's been very busy. In the meantime, the Mafiosi walk the streets of Gela, Sicily, where it's business as usual.
   
3. Clemente Mastella, the man who shopped the Prodi government for a promised role in the new government, has been dumped by pretty much everyone. Berlusconi isn't answering his calls, his party 'colleagues' are scattering like hungry rats from the wreck of the UDEUR to seek refuge with anyone who'll offer them a place in the next parliament, his brother-in-law is calling him names. Basically, the trough in which he's been happily guzzling for the past few decades has blown up in his face. All is not lost, of course; he'll still get millions of euros simply for participating in the elections. Plus, if he's lucky, one of those cushy EU jobs too often used to reward the faithful and console the faithless. Still, in a country and political culture in which impunity is the general rule, it's nice to see someone suffer as a direct result of his acts.
   

What's civil about this?

The government is still arguing about exactly what to do with all these people who just don't want to get married and breed. And not only the government. The Italian president, ex-communist Giorgio Napolitano, threw in his tuppenny-hapenny worth a couple of days ago, announcing that the Vatican's views on PACS, or civil unions, should be taken into account. If this was a conciliatory gesture, it backfired. The episcopal council yesterday said that no compromise was possible, the traditional role of the family was sacred, marriage was an absolute value, etc. The usual position, in other words, and why not? Isn't grunting what pigs do best, even exclusively?

With 56% of Italians now in favour of civil unions, the opinion of God's ferret and his merry gang of sex-obsessed septuagenarians is daily less significant. The problem's within the government itself. Mastella, Minister of Justice, refuses to endorse the bill as a matter, apparently, of conscience after a career based on the most shameless political expediency. An anti-abortionist called Paola Binetti whines on about family, family, family, as though marriages will crumble at the merest whiff of visiting rights in hospital. (Hey! Why go to all the fuss of getting married? I can watch you die without it!)

Meanwhile, the two women responsible for drawing up the bill, because of course it's women's work, are arguing about how long a civil union should last before one can inherit the pension of the other. They're doing a Sugar and Spice routine, like police interrogators. Sugar says five years is long enough. Spice says fifteen, but may come down to ten. Will this be applied retroactively? I don't think so. Great news to couples in their fifties or sixties, who may have been together for decades, like my friend Dan and his partner.

And how long do widows/widowers (I'm talking the real thing here, obviously, the genuinely ex-married) have to be together to qualify? Not one fucking day.

Sei una merda

It doesn't take that much Italian to understand what this nameless Italian senator (National Alliance, i.e. post-fascist) is shouting at another senator, a certain Dottor Cusumano who has just voted for the coalition to which his party belonged until, let's see, 63 hours before. And was subsequently expelled from that same party. By its capo supremo, Clemente Mastella (see below).

But, just in case your Italian doesn't run to insults, let me help. Sei = You are. Una merda = A shit. You are a shit. Thank god we have the Senate to show us how to behave. Cusumano was also spat at by one of his ex-colleagues and called a queer (frocio) and dirty faggot (checca squallida). How patrician.

And that's the end of Prodi, for now at least. (Though, in Italy, one never knows.) There may be sadder ways for a relatively decent government to come to a close, though it's hard to think of one that doesn't involve bloodshed.

Hate (crimes) postscript

Come on, you don't need me to translate this for you. Make an effort. Sweat a little. After all, you never know how useful these very words might be on your next trip to Italy. You might bump into a cardinal and want to introduce yourself. You might glance up from the deck of your yacht to see Mastella sunning himself with a bevy (as I believe they're called) of topless lovelies. You might be shopping for souvenirs at the SM counter of a sexy shop (yes, that's what they're called) and see Binetti hanging round the harness section. You might be on the receiving end of a homophobic gang attack and have nothing but words to defend yourself with. Because there won't be any law there to help you.

No corruption? No party!

Italian politicians certainly know how to celebrate. Totò Cuffaro, centre right, president of the region of Sicily (see left: modelling a coppola, traditional Sicilian headgear, in a probably mistaken photo-op), was convicted a couple of days ago of having favoured individual Mafia bosses and sentenced to five years in jail. What did he do? Apologise? Resign? Take off his coppola and hang his head in shame? Did he buggery. He waved his fat grasping hands in the air with joy, said he had no intention of leaving his position, then treated his chums and colleagues - and no, you can't see the join - to champagne and cannoli siciliani (see right: the missing cannolo? Don't ask). He had every right to be happy, as far as he was concerned. He'd been acquitted, for insufficient evidence, of the far more serious charge of association with the Mafia. Let's face it. What's a little favouritism?

If you want to know the answer to that question, ask Clemente Mastella, centre-left Minister of Justice until three days ago. Having been told that both he and his wife were under investigation for big-time favouritism, he actually did the decent thing and resigned. The gloss of this good action is slightly tarnished by three considerations.

First, he's been itching to do it for months and can now position himself for the next government, increasingly likely as a result of his resignation. Second, he said that neither he nor his wife (president of Campania regional council) had done anything wrong, as in: hey, everyone does it. He can't see why it's wrong to use his power to fill important positions with his friends and hangers-on. He just doesn't get it. Third, he made a speech in parliament in which he declared his own innocence, obviously, and accused the investigating magistrate of, to say the least, malicious incompetence. This, from the (ex-)Minister of Justice.

In any normal parliament, his speech would have been met with embarrassment, scattered boos, a general drift towards the bar. Here, it was greeted with wild cross-party applause. The man's a hero.

God help us. Pass the party hats.

DICO day: impressions

The day after, there's the usual war of numbers: 20,000 according to the police, 80,000 for the organisers; La Repubblica's settled on 50,000. Whoever may be right (and I'd go with La Repubblica), Piazza Farnese was jammed with adults, children, dogs taking part in the protest in favour of civil unions, currently under attack from the centre-right, the Vatican and elements within the cnetre-left government, notably the Minister of Justice, Clemente Mastella (whose party polled 1.4% of votes in the last election), and Opus Dei member Paola Binetti, centre-left senator and, god help us, psychiatrist, who recently announced that homosexuality was deviant behaviour (and who is also known as a self-flagellant). The mood was contained, static, even dull; certainly not festive, despite the presence of a score or so of rainbow banners. A stall was selling the usual T-shirts, with Che Guevara, surely no homophile, prominent among them. Most of the flags belonged to political factions within the governing coalition (the Rose in the Fist, Rifondazione Comunista, the Greens), although several handwritten banners showed a camper, less party aligned spirit.

We were there to tell the government that civil unions are still on the agenda, whatever the Vatican and Andreotti might think, and three government ministers were there to tell us how right we were, although the promised presence of some centre-right representatives remained unfulfilled. It's obviously a cross-party issue, though, and it will be interesting to see how people vote when a bill of some sort reaches parliament. Cecchi Paone, television presenter and Forza Italia MP, apparently had a hissy fit and left the stage, but this was set so low only a privileged few could see it. There were very few police and some of those present were parked as usual outside the home of Cesare Previti, corrupter of judges and Berlusconi sidekick; the scaffolding against his building had the largest banner of the day, announcing Io DICO Zapatero! The Spanish PM was definitely the event's patron saint, and placards to his sanctity were scattered throughout the crowd.

There were none of the usual leather chaps framing bare bums, disco bunnies and male-on-male snogging that, for better or worse, tend to characterise gay protests, though I did see one couple of youngish men share a fairly chaste kiss. This was only fitting. After all, the law--if it ever exists--won't only protect gay couples, as civil partnerships do in the UK, but any two people bound by 'affective ties'. Even the highly-publicised wake-up alarm, which went off at six with the help of clocks, mobiles, etc, felt angry rather than shrill.

The only sour note occurred later, as Peppe and I walked through the centre of Rome. We were just past the Pantheon when we heard a waiter announce to no one in particular that Rome was full of queers. And today, there's news of the arrest of the latest Rumanian rentboy-cum-murderer, obliged to kill a man forty years older than he is to protect his honour. Business as usual in the shadow of the Vatican.