Jamie Rubin:
And you think the average Italian doesn't know this.
Alexander Stille:
They know that he has a lot of influence and he knows some unseemly things were done. But I think they think, "Well, this has always happened. Everybody throws their weight around." But I think that if they really knew the exact specifics of that, they in many cases would be shocked. In other trials, for instance, it's been proven that Berlusconi's company bribed tax inspectors who then didn't look at books which would have revealed an enormous network of offshore accounts and under-the-table payments, which are really a central part of the company's way of doing business. The other thing is that one of the cases in which the docket is still open is a case involving the bribing of judges. And while the paying off of tax inspectors is a common thing in Italy, the bribing of judges is a really, really serious thing. It takes it to another level. And there actually are documented evidence that show hundreds of thousands of dollars going from Berlusconi company accounts into the accounts of the offshore accounts of Berlusconi's lawyer and into the account of a prominent sitting Rome judge. That simply shouldn't happen and it was shown that it did.
Jamie Rubin:
And that's not being reported?
Alexander Stille:
It is reported. But it's, for example, never explained on TV. So that what you'll get on TV is Berlusconi or one of his lawyers saying, "This is outrageous. They've invented an entire case and it's based on no evidence." And then a journalist doesn't intervene and say, "Actually, the evidence is this and there are two ways of looking at this case." You only get he's been accused of bribing a judge, a contradiction of that charge by saying it's invented, and no independent analysis of what the facts are.
Jamie Rubin:
You've written that Italy has become almost a company town. What do you mean by that?
Alexander Stille:
What I mean by that is the fact that one individual owns or controls an enormous amount of society. I, for example, am a Berlusconi man in the sense that my Italian publisher is owned by Berlusconi. When I first signed up with that publisher a number of years ago, they were an independent publisher. He took it over and, in fact, there's a lot of evidence that bribery, the bribing of the judges, won a favorable court decision that allowed him to gain control of the biggest book publisher and magazine publisher in the country.
Jamie Rubin:
So you're a Berlusconi man.
Alexander Stille:
Well, my next book might not be with their company. But I'm in the fortunate position that I live overseas and I have other sources of income. But you can imagine if you live in a country where someone controls that much, it really does affect your career possibilities. It affects your ability to earn a living. And if you consider that the numbers of Parliament in Italy for his coalition, so many of them either owe their salaries to his saying yes or no to their being on the party list or they have consulting contracts with Berlusconi --
Jamie Rubin:
Huge bonuses.
Alexander Stille:
Huge bonuses. They have a column in one of his magazines, a consultantship with one of his TV networks that greatly add to their salary. You know, the Italians have a saying, which is, "You don't spit on the plate off of which you eat," and there are a lot of Italians that are eating off of that plate and not to be underestimated as a form of control.
Jamie Rubin:
You've also written how Italy over the 20th century has been almost a laboratory of bad ideas. Do you really think that this Berlusconi-run government is an idea that translates into other Western societies?
Alexander Stille:
Well, I do think you see signs of that in our own society. If Bill Gates, for example, were to decide to be a major political force, does anyone really doubt that he could have a huge effect on our political life? You look at the recent decision of Arnold Schwarzenegger to enter the race for governorship. The fact that he is a celebrity, a TV personality, movie personality with an enormous amount of money makes him a player from one day to the next. We live in a world in which celebrity recognition, media access, and power translate very quickly into political power and indeed economic power. And I think you see those forces at work here. The Forbes phenomenon, the Perot phenomenon, are other examples where you have a weakening of political parties in our system.
Individuals deciding to dispense with political parties and to speak directly to the public through TV. We're living in a different world. I don't think people have fully processed how deeply television has changed the political process in our own world. Political parties have become vestiges of what they were and individuals with large amounts of money can leapfrog over that process, which can have a positive mediating effect. And so I think there are things to worry about. The fact that no political candidate in this country can mount a serious campaign without raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars means that they're already beholden to interests that then will make themselves known after the election. A lot of Americans feel that that's happening and are dropping out of the political process. It's very interesting that, for instance, both in Italy and in this country in the era of television, political participation is going down significantly. People, rightly or wrongly, feel that their votes don't count.
Jamie Rubin:
But right now in Congress, they're rejecting attempts to allow large media figures to expand their power base by buying more and more property. So aren't our laws more protecting against a rise of a Berlusconi in America?
Alexander Stille:
I think that's a very positive development. I think it's also a positive development that both Republicans and Democrats have recognized the dangers of that. But it's also important to realize that we've already slid a long way in the last 25 years in that direction. A lot of the public interest requirements of commercial TV have fallen by the wayside. The Fairness Doctrine was effectively eliminated. Someone like Rupert Murdoch was allowed to both own newspapers and create a national TV chain. So we have much of our media concentration in this country than we did 30 years ago. And I think it's healthy that people in Congress have recognized that we've gone too far.
Jamie Rubin:
But if one of these media barons tried to enter politics, we've developed a system, really, for how to deal with it. Namely, the divesting of their private ownership by handing over power to someone else or putting it in a blind trust. Why hasn't Berlusconi just dealt with this big, big issue by putting the power of his private company into other hands or some blind trust or a commission of some kind?
Alexander Stille:
Well, that's clearly what should have happened. And I think the reasons why it didn't happen are many. One of them is that there is not a culture of antitrust laws, a culture of professional ethics in Italy. So that, for example, there were not insider trading laws in Italy until recently. It was simply a way of doing business. I have good information I'm going to use and I'll make a killing on the market. Those sort of things didn't exist in Italy, and so there wasn't an enormous amount of public pressure to force him to divest. And therefore, he didn't.
The political left, in my opinion, made a colossal mistake by not making this a major issue. The President of the Republic, in my opinion, should have said, "Look, I'm the referee of the political system. I'm above the political parties. But the competition has to be fair. Therefore, you must choose. Either you are the richest man in the country ..."
Jamie Rubin:
Or the leader.
Alexander Stille:
"... or the leader, but you have to divest yourself." I think a blind trust is not [the answer] -- that was discussed in Italy, but how blind can a trust be if everyone knows who the owner of the stations actually is?
Jamie Rubin:
But they didn't even do a blind trust.
Alexander Stille:
They didn't even do a blind trust, but he, for example, says, "Well, I don't have anything to do with the affairs of my company. Other people run it. I don't go to the office every day and participate in meetings and decide who's going to run this or that program. So why should I be criticized for that?" The fact is that everybody knows that you don't criticize Berlusconi either on public TV or on his own private networks.
Jamie Rubin:
Why wasn't he forced to sell them?
Alexander Stille:
Selling them would be obvious. Well, I think it's again because there wasn't public pressure to do it. There wasn't a strong political opposition to do it. I think that the center left really underestimated the importance of the issue and didn't force it while they were, in fact, in power.
Between 1996 and 2001, they had an opportunity, particularly early on, to make that happen. And I think they should have done it in a way that would have been acceptable to the right as well as the left. They should have, for example, tried to depoliticize the public networks much more. Unfortunately, everyone in Italy when given the opportunity tries to influence the media as much as they can. And the left is as guilty of that as the right. They just don't own all the private networks.
Jamie Rubin:
Berlusconi has a curious explanation for why he doesn't sell his companies. What is that?
Alexander Stille:
Well, he's told various people that he doesn't sell his company because his children won't let him. They've taken over the business, they love it, and they want to continue it.
Jamie Rubin:
He's just a family man.
Alexander Stille:
He's just a family man. And it seems laughable to us, but it does appeal to this very sort of family oriented, family business oriented nature of Italian life. But the fact is if you think about it, it gives you a real measure of Berlusconi the statesman that he would prefer to have the country paralyzed by a massive conflict of interest problem than displease his son and daughter. I don't think, by the way, that's why he's refusing to sell his stations.
Jamie Rubin:
Finally, the issue of a sitting leader being prosecuted for corruption or bribery or such crime occurred in this country and many people believed that the idea of delaying a trial until after a leader is out of office is a wise thing so it doesn't interfere with his duties. Is that a reasonable argument?
Alexander Stille:
I think there are arguments to be made for that. Even in France, for example, there were charges of corruption regarding Chirac, the President of France, and they were put on hold. He was basically given a kind of immunity from prosecution. I think the difference in Berlusconi's case is that I think you can make a very strong case for the fact that Berlusconi entered politics in order to avoid prosecution. These investigations that were taking place in the "90s had reached the company door by the time Berlusconi decided to enter politics. He told people privately, "If I don't enter politics, they're going to tear me to pieces." And he's used the political process to avoid prosecution and then immediately was able to turn around and say, "You see? It's a political prosecution. They are after me because I represent the right."
Jamie Rubin:
So politics was his ultimate criminal defense strategy.
Alexander Stille:
Yes. And I think that many people would regard that as an unhealthy phenomenon. And moreover, there are many charges that stem from acts committed during [his term] in office. For example, he met with one of his company officials who apparently bribed tax officials. He actually went to the prime minister's office to visit with him shortly before calling these tax inspectors. That's the kind of thing that's an abuse of power, misuse of public power, that should be of interest to people. There also were other alternatives other than criminal trials; for example, a parliamentary commission. It could have very well been done that someone decided to set up a bipartisan commission to say, "Okay. What are these charges? Let's examine them with serenity and sort out slander from fact and get to the bottom of it."
There have been parliamentary commissions when people were in office, as we know: Watergate, Whitewater, and Iran-Contra. They certainly made governing more complicated, but they didn't stop our country from functioning. That didn't take place. I, for example, all the way back in 1994 went to the person who was the head of a commission, who was a Berlusconi appointee. And I said, "Look, here is a series of facts that we know about contacts between organized crime and Berlusconi company officials. Wouldn't it be better for you as a person beyond all suspicion to investigate these charges so that we can satisfy ourselves that there may be nothing to them or learn that they, in fact, are true and we can put this issue to rest?" She said, "Oh, yes. That's a great idea, but it's not my job to do that. Let someone else do it." That didn't happen and that should have happened as part of, I think, a healthy, functioning democracy.
Jamie Rubin:
What is the biggest threat that Silvio Berlusconi poses to Italy today?
Alexander Stille:
I think the biggest threat is a kind of erosion of democratic norms that should exist in a well-functioning democracy. I think it's getting people used to an excessive concentration of power, the blurring of lines between public and private power, and the retarding of the maturation of democracy. Italy has been a troubled democracy for much of its history, and I think there was a possibility of there being a kind of normal alternation between left and right, the establishment of certain rules of the game. And those rules of the game have, I think, been weakened dramatically under Berlusconi, and I think that's a real problem for Italy, but also for Europe.
Jamie Rubin:
Do you think that Italy today under Silvio Berlusconi has freedom of the press?
Alexander Stille:
I think it has a partial freedom of the press. I think you can see, for example, in the print media, you can find almost any opinion and the opposite of almost any opinion. There's a wide array of newspapers across the ideological spectrum. On television, however, you see an incredible uniformity and an enormous amount of political control. And the reality of modern life is that the great majority of Italians, like the great majority of Americans, get their news almost exclusively from TV.
The fact, for instance, that there's not been on Italian television any serious examination of the charges against Berlusconi tells you that you don't have freedom of the press there if one thinks about the amount of air time given to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky's relationship and the almost absence of any serious inquiry into charges of a much more serious nature against Berlusconi and his closest associates. It tells you that something's not working and the press is not free truly.
Jamie Rubin:
Alexander Stille, thank you for joining us.
Alexander Stille:
Thanks for having me.
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