It's easy to rap about Berlusconi, because his name rhymes with a large percentage of the Italian language

I have a bunch of Italian rap cassettes from the mid 90s in which the (not yet then) Prime Minister's name gets dropped a lot. He's been dominating Italian politics for a very long time.

He's also a criminal and a joke, and Italy will be well rid of him, maybe soon:

Reporting from Rome— Italy's beleaguered prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has survived more than 50 no-confidence votes and multiple accusations of criminal and sexual impropriety, including charges he paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl. But the 75-year-old billionaire may have finally met his match in the bond market. 

With dwindling confidence in Berlusconi's ability to manage Italy's affairs — and the Eurozone's debt crisis hanging in the balance — investors Monday pushed up Italian bond yields to a euro-era high of 6.63%. That means higher borrowing costs, and takes the yield ever closer to a point that tipped Greece, Ireland and Portugal over the edge and seeking financial rescue.

… Indeed, the reaction from financial markets adds to "strong pressure for Berlusconi to resign," said Sergio Fabbrini, political science professor at the LUISS Guido Carli university in Rome.

In once sense, this the ultimate referendum on his performance. The bond rates represent the utter failure of the country to right itself.

On the other hand, as much as I would like to see Berlusconi out, there's something unseemly about the bond market* having this much power over a sovereign, democratic country. It reminds me of the rating agencies trying to dictate the size of our own budget cuts during the summer.

Capitalism should be a tool in service of democracy, not the other way around.

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* The bond market is people, my friend. 

Progress

iPhone now available for business users. Naturally, it costs more for a business to get the same product, but that's AT&T for you.

Tangentally, here in Michigan the Comcast cable network has been waging a propaganda war against the Big Ten around the issue of whether the Big Ten Network will be included in basic cable packages. The whole affair is sick with bizarrely bad judgement from Comcast, which is filling its own airwaves with anti-Big Ten attack ads. To make the resemblance to a political campaign complete, the latest Comcast ad is accusing the Big Ten of imposing a tax on Comcast customers.

Since the major effect of attack ads in politics is to suppress turnout, you have to wonder what Comcast thinks it's going to accomplish here. Then ask yourself, who is the median television sports viewer going to side with? My guess is that the cable company which customers already dislike is going to lose out to the incredibly popular major sports conference.

But let me bring this back to AT&T. I was thinking the other day about the companies that I hate but purchase services from anyway. They are, without exception, providers of various kinds of utilities. I hate Comcast, I hate AT&T, and once I get them to send me a bill I'm pretty sure that I'm going to hate DTE. If I were a right winger I might have something to say about the way that utilitity providers have a kind of quasi-governmental way of doing business, but I'm not and I think that the explanation here is a little deeper than 'government is bad.' As to what that explanation is...are there any sociologists in the house?