Bilderberg.org

[marektysis]

Meet the Global Ruling Class

by STEVEN COLATRELLA


Padua, Italy.

Making economics and politics appear separate is one of the chief characteristics of capitalism as a system of class rule, as Ellen Mieksins Wood has pointed out in many of her writings. But it is how politics is manifested AS economics and economics AS politics that should concern us especially right now.

Today a general strike is paralyzing Portugal, as workers there protest the loss of job security through legal changes, and the wage cuts (through elimination of 13th and 14th months of pay, which are standard in many European countries where monthly wages are not that high) that are essential parts of the austerity program approved last week to please the Troika (IMF, European Central Bank and EU Commission). Fitch announced this afternoon that is downgrading Portugal’s bonds to junk status.

In the streets of Cairo clashes have taken place over six days, and hundreds of thousands have gathered for several days in a row demanding that the military junta cede power to civilian rule so that the process of democratization supposedly won in the February Revolution can go forward again. Standard and Poor just cut Egypt’s sovereign bond ratings “deeper into junk status”.

The message is: bond ratings are a reflection of how well a local government successfully suppresses working class and popular revolt. That is lesson 1.

Lesson 2: The downgraded bond rating is also intended to back that government up in suppressing such opposition, by limiting options, requiring even stricter and more painful austerity. This has been very much the point of externally-imposed austerity programs for more than 30 years, in the form of structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank, and more recently across Europe and the US. Further, the organized, collective purchase or non-purchase of a country’s sovereign debt is a primary means by which the capitalist class, especially its best organized sector finance, controls and limits the policy options available to any government. Hence the famous exchange recorded in Bob Woodward’s “The Choice” in which newly elected Bill Clinton rants about how the bond market is controlling his presidency.

Lesson 3: “market” is an abstraction. What is abstracts is a set of identifiable players, fewer than it might seem at first, since the concerted, coordinated or simply coincidental actions of a few very large banks and investors can make a huge difference on a given day when concentrated on a single country. This leads to Lesson 4: There is an increasingly united, increasingly global ruling class, who act collectively through a set of institutions that I call, using that classes’ own phrase for it “global governance”. Global governance includes four different kinds of organizations:
Most obviously, the specifically global governance organizations themselves, that is institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU Commission, UN Security Council and a plethora of less central agencies involved with energy, environment, management of the seas and so forth.
Informal gatherings, some official, some not, ranging from the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland to the right wing’s favorite conspiratorial suspect the Bilderberg Group, to the Trilateral Commission to the G20 summits, to the European Council summits. The importance of these in shaping and enforcing, through peer pressure, or what one scholar called “elite socialization” should not be underestimated. Nelson Mandela describes how it was at Davos in the 1990s, when he was the world’s most famous and esteemed leader, that he was convinced by the consensus of other world leaders to abandon the promises of his own ANC’s Freedom Charter with its call to make the wealth and resources of South Africa property of the whole people and instead to work for free markets, foreign investment and trade. Any process more convincing than a lifetime as leader of a revolutionary movement and 27 years of suffering in prison for it should be taken seriously.
Central Banks. These are now Fifth Columns in every democratic republic. Their “independence” – of elected officials, constitutional niceties and control by the people – is a requirement by capital worldwide as a precondition for even dealing with countries, as it was for creating the European Union and the Euro. These act as political leadership for the banking and investment industries as a whole, guiding financial movements, setting initial conditions, such as money supply and interest rates, so that the options available to other actors are restricted. While these are national in general the ECB is of course above and outside of any national government’s control, which was the whole point of it, indeed is the whole point of central banks in general today. That the ECB’s new head, Mario Draghi was able to oust elected (if execrable) prime minister Silvio Berlusconi by not buying Italian state bonds for a few days a couple of weeks ago makes clear my point. Investors followed Draghi’s lead and the result was that the whole Euro zone was nearly capsized as it took time for Draghi’s adjustment in buying Italian bonds to turn the ship around again once it was clear that finance has won and their direct rule, in the form of the unelected government of new PM Mario Monti, former head of the Italian central bank and ex-Goldman Sachs executive, was guaranteed.
A number of private but collective actors such as banks, investors and especially ratings agencies – the big three Standard and Poor, Fitch and Moody’s to whom anti-trust rules apparently do not apply, since if they did any country that applied them would be subject to a downgrade similar to the one that S and P carried out on the US rating this past year to put pressure on for more austerity during the Debt Ceiling crisis there. That no such downgrade of say, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns or any of the other disasters on Wall St. took place has not been the subject of an investigation, let alone of any arrests and charges, or to be really absurd the cancelling of the ratings agencies’ charters and their being closed down for good in favor of a governmental or inter-governmental, non-profit and neutral body to rate companies and public credit worthiness should not surprise us. Do anything of the sort and your credit will be downgraded, costing you a fortune in higher interest rates to sell your bonds, or even a shriveling of credit resulting from your meddling in ruling class matters.

These actors, though distinct, not always in perfect agreement and coming from different points of view at times, are nevertheless part of the same overall division of labor (no pun intended, but irony yes) for capital: they constitute, in their ensemble as global governance a political force, a political party of sorts if you like, able to act in concert, and whose general perspective will be similar as a result of the elite socialization process that serves to unite the private and public sector, the national and global organization actors into a single class. How else to explain why Obama, Mandela and his successors, Lula and others so easily end up carrying out the same essential policies? How better to understand why everyone at the G20 agreed that Greek Prime Minister Papandreos’ call for a national referendum so the Greek people could decide their own fate, and judge whether the wrecking of their national economy and social fabric was too high a price to pay for membership in the Euro was an act of insanity and in bad taste besides?

So Lesson 5, summing up what we have learned: whenever you see economics, especially when it seems to be neutral, professional, technocratic, as in the new governments in Greece and Italy, you are watching politics happen, class politics. And it is not happening either as a result of impersonal, diffuse market forces, but because there are organized class forces making it happen.

My wife recently came to this conclusion independently as she learned watching the news here in Italy where we live, that Italy will now be required (passive tense, already a literary preference for style in the Italian language is very well suited to the process of global governance, since in governance, unlike in government, no one appears to be governing – all the better for those that are) to change its constitution to require municipalities and the national state to balance their budget. Such a legal change is appalling for several reasons, among which are that the Italian constitution is the result of the Resistance movement that liberated the country from the Nazis and Fascists, and changing it because of outside pressure is shocking to many. Second, because any such requirement of a balanced budget essentially outlaws Keynesian economics and most social democratic and leftist politics by definition. Whether one likes or does not like such policies, banning one side in a political debate from enacting its own policies and requiring only one set of opposed policies is to thoroughly supplant exactly what a democratic debate and elections are meant to decide.

But my wife Silvia cut straight to the chase, to the heart of the matter one split-second after hearing the news: “That is the same thing the right wanted in the US when they were debating the Debt Ceiling” she told me. “This is a precisely-formulated program!” That is, she had exactly identified the main point in world politics today: who the main actors are. C.Wright Mills would not have put it better – a few whose ability to shape history far outweighs that of most of the rest of us put together. He called the ones he studied the Power Elite, I call the ones we face today a global ruling class and the institutional framework through which they act Global Governance. They’ve evolved since Mills’ time in other words.

But there is one more lesson: Politics, OUR politics, is also represented as economics. This is hard for activists to see since it sometimes requires both reading hieroglyphics such as market quotations, or interest rates, that at first sight appear to be unrelated to strikes, struggles, occupations and protests, even elections, and even boring to those of us who have avoided working in banking or Wall St. because this stuff did not seem the stuff of dreams to us. Also because it requires understanding that the results of our struggles sometimes leap up several levels of mediation.

Thus, on October 22, during the waning days of Jean-Claude Trichet’s tenure at head of the ECB, it was announced by Trichet, Sarkozy and Merkel that the banks would have to take a 50% haircut on their loans to Greece to save the Eurozone. This came just a couple of days after the largest, most disruptive strikes and protests to that time in Athens during the entire year and half of agony that has attended Greece’s debt crisis/class war, which is saying something, and after 100,000 had marched in Rome with much of the city involving clashes with police, on the eve of the already in the works Italian crisis. The ruling class had taken a step back from the abyss, writing down the Greek debts, as a revolution in Greece, the country’s withdrawal from the Euro and the Euro’s collapse were not the results desired, since the whole point was to use the Euro to force Greece to transfer wealth from its working population to global finance, not to have the whole debt cancelled and the measure of wealth in European banks reduced to paper.

Similarly, yesterday’s (Nov. 23) fiasco of German bonds, and the news that a Eurobond of some kind now appears inevitable are highly mediated but unmistakable results of the struggle as well. It has proven impossible to defend German finance while waging the class war on so many fronts in Southern Europe and while the students in Italy whose occupations as the “draghi ribelli” (rebel dragons but a play on the surname of the ECB head) and Greek and Portugese strikers and protesters will undoubtedly be made to pay later with more downgrades, more austerity proposals and the rest, they should be aware that their struggles in the streets, plazas and piazzas are not without effect.

For in the end, the real lesson is the one Marx gave us: that economic minutia measure class struggle, and our struggle therefore has an impact on the system as a whole, its profitability, its flows of investment, its institutional stability. This is the trump card of political struggle, from Tahrir Square to the occupations across the US, to the strikes coming up in the UK, Greece and elsewhere in the next week or so, we can rest assured that the cracks in their seemingly technocratic edifice, in their stock quotations, bond ratings and profit rates are determined by our movements in the final analysis.

STEVEN COLATRELLA lives in Padua, Italy.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/24/meet-the-global-ruling-class-2/

[marektysis]

The latest drop from the interminably repetitive and rather innocuous Nixon Tapes has caused the customary outburst of confected indignation against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as anti-Semites, and, in the case of Kissinger, as effectively a self-hating Jew. This is the final spluttering of the Nixon demonology movement and its subcommittee for the smearing of Kissinger. Nearly 40 years after Watergate, it is long past time that the Nixon presidency be seen as the imaginative and generally successful administration that it was.

Throughout that time, the myth has been imposed that Nixon was a deranged and morally depraved man who inexplicably outwitted the presidential screening process and was exposed only when Bob Woodward pulled back the president’s White House shower curtain and discovered a cloven foot. For good measure, the Left has gone to unheard-of lengths to debunk Kissinger, one of the country’s greatest secretaries of state.

When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, America had 550,000 draftees at the end of the earth in an inadequately explained war; 200 to 400 body bags a week were coming back from Vietnam; there were constant anti-war and race riots; the country was in shock from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the skyjackings were beginning; and there were no relations with China or the major Arab powers, nor any talks under way with the USSR to de-escalate any aspect of the Cold War.

Richard Nixon was the first president since General Zachary Taylor in 1848 to be elected to office without his party being in control of either house of the Congress. Despite the fact that the Democrats had plunged the country into Vietnam without any proper authorization, mismanaged the war, and lost control of domestic opinion, they, with the eager complicity of the national media, abandoned their former leaders and became anti-war agitators, and the entire Democratic establishment except Scoop Jackson set out to inflict defeat on the U.S. while Nixon and Kissinger worked with great skill and often courage to extract America from the war while salvaging a non-Communist government in South Vietnam, in obvious conformity with the wishes of most of the people of South Vietnam.

The Democrats failed to prevent Nixon and Kissinger from negotiating out of the Democrats’ war after South Vietnam successfully repulsed the Communists on the ground on their own in April and May 1972. They did this with no American ground support, though with heavy American air support, and after Nixon and Kissinger, with surpassing diplomatic agility, had recruited China and Russia to help pressure North Vietnam into a settlement.

After having thus failed to prosecute the war they started, or to force an outright surrender from the succeeding Republican administration, the Democrats and their partisans in the national media approved the administration’s Vietnam peace treaty in the Senate (which was a formality Nixon did not have to seek), in which treaty it was implicit that anticipated North Vietnamese violations would be replied to with U.S. air power as they had been in 1972.

When the North Vietnamese assault came, the Democrats prevented the Nixon and Ford administrations from providing the South Vietnamese any assistance, dooming the mission for which 57,000 Americans had died. This outright betrayal of the South Vietnamese anti-Communists, which condemned millions to gruesome fates in the Cambodian killing fields and among the Boat People on the high seas, and to the insatiable execution squads of the Viet Cong, was covered by, in Napoleon’s phrase, the “lies agreed upon” that Nixon and Kissinger had known all along that a non-Communist Vietnam had no chance of survival and had deliberately sacrificed tens of thousands of American servicemen in order to masquerade as patriots and true-grit Cold Warriors. This was not just a shameful traduction; it was an egregious act of partisan transvestism.

In his one full presidential term, in addition to extracting America undefeated from Vietnam and opening relations with China, Richard Nixon negotiated and signed the greatest arms-control agreement in the history of the world with the Soviet Union, started the peace process in the Middle East, abolished the draft that had so vexed the hordes of supposedly conscientious anti-war demonstrators, ended school segregation while avoiding the court-ordered lunacy of compulsory busing of children all around metropolitan areas in pursuit of “racial balance,” and founded the Environmental Protection Agency.

For all of these reasons, Nixon was reelected in 1972 by the greatest majority of the states (49) since James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, and by the greatest plurality in history (18 million). (He had defeated Hubert Humphrey four years before by only 500,000 votes.) The reason for this immense victory was that his one full term was, next to Lincoln’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first and third terms, the most successful in the country’s history, which has remained, these nearly 40 years, one of the most assiduously ignored facts of American history.

Subsequent Democratic leaders — McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — have all been unrepentant old boys of the anti-war myth-makers’ brotherhood, and the current president, because of his comparative youth, is an alumnus of the red-diaper anti-Vietnam children’s auxiliary. The Democrats evaded the responsibility for getting into Vietnam by magnifying the Watergate nonsense into the destruction of the Nixon presidency, and then the responsibility for defeat there behind Ronald Reagan’s bloodless, bone-crushing victory in the Cold War (against every important tactical ingredient of which, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Democrats had ear-splittingly railed; Reagan redeemed the efforts of earlier Democratic leaders of firmer mettle, such as Roosevelt, Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson).

To be sure, Watergate was, and was symptomatic of, a tawdry and debased political ethos. There was something seriously amiss in Nixon’s order (fortunately unheeded) to break into the Brookings Institution, and in his assertion in his memoirs that he might not have stopped the break-in at the office of the psychotherapist of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, if he had known of it in advance. But Brookings was not broken into and Nixon knew nothing of the Ellsberg affair, any more than he had had advance knowledge of the Watergate intrusion.

The only part of the so-called cover-up that is legally questionable is whether money paid to the defendants for their legal and personal expenses was conditional on altered testimony, which has never been clear and would be a close call in a real and fair trial, if one could be had. The so-called smoking gun was in fact a refusal to urge the CIA to tamper with the investigation. Nixon facilitated the work of his enemies by his uncharacteristically bungled handling of the Watergate controversy, but the murderous and even now unrelenting assault on him is pretextual.

Yet this abominable Manichaean fable creeps on, from decade to decade, fueled now only by the gaseous vapors from late-released Watergate tapes. It is scandalous that any market of credence remains for it. Nixon’s political ethics were not inferior to Roosevelt’s, Kennedy’s, or Johnson’s. The latest published comments by Kissinger criticizing the agitators who wanted to tie any de-escalation of the Cold War to increased emigration of Jews from the USSR is surely the last malodorous driblet from this lemon of pseudo-historical defamation.

Except for Harry Truman (who uttered a good deal more vile and frequent anti-Semitic slurs than Nixon did), no American president has done so much for Israel as Nixon, including airlifting it a transfusion of warplanes and other vital materiel during the Yom Kippur War (and in the midst of the greatest crisis of his life) in 1973.

And no secretary of state has been as helpful to Israel as Henry Kissinger. Between them, Nixon and Kissinger increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union from about a thousand in 1970 to scores of thousands, and their refusal to mortgage the entire superpower relationship to the public humiliation of the Kremlin over the issue, as the Israeli lobbyists demanded, was quite defensible. Nixon’s impatience with American Jews who ignored his service to Israel and did nothing but complain about all other aspects of his policy is not to be wondered at.

Kissinger’s exasperation with the Israeli lobby, especially when, as he thought, he was speaking in confidence in the president’s office, is also quite understandable. He never forgot he was a fugitive from the Nazi pogroms. These endless defamations designed in part to whitewash the conduct of those who destroyed the Nixon presidency must no longer be indulged. It is a mark of mature societies to assimilate their historical controversies, and in these matters, the United States has yet to do that. Richard Nixon, and especially Henry Kissinger, who had nothing to do with the less salubrious aspects of the administration’s record, deserve that at least. They rendered immense service to America and the West.

This dispatch first appeared in the National Review.
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/nixon-and-kissinger-emerge-in-ever-better-light/87579/

I wonder if the former magnate sacked by the bilderbergers following some domestic acts of thievery in the magnific group he was robbing is not taking some revenge against his former associates.
He should be careful because a life is not weighting a lot for them.
(See the poor Maxwell who was also a fallen magnate)
'When two men know a secret, one of them is too much'(sicilian proverb)
Marek

[marektysis]

http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/dirty-thirty/all/lloyd-blankfein

[marektysis]

One of the longest running conspiracy theories in the global mindset is that the banking cartels would like nothing more than to control the economic and social domains of nations through a centralized authority, which would then be run by a select few.

On November 24th, this theory may have finally come out of the darkness and into the light as an executive member of the European Central Bank (ECB) called for nations in the Euro Zone to be willing to give up economic sovereignty to the EMU over fiscal, structural, and economic polices.

…from the just delivered speech by ECB executive board member José Manuel González-Páramo is the following: "We cannot completely delegate governance to financial markets. The euro area is the world’s second largest monetary area. It cannot depend solely on the opinions of ratings agencies and markets. It needs economic governance arrangements that are preventive and linear. This underscores my central point that a much more comprehensive approach to economic governance is now the priority for the euro area. And this means more economic and financial integration for the euro area, with a significant transfer of sovereignty to the EMU level over fiscal, structural and financial policies." - Zerohedge

Continue reading on Examiner.com Conspiracy theory confirmed: bankers do want to rule the world - National Finance Examiner | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/finance-examiner-in-national/conspiracy-theory-confirmed-bankers-do-want-to-rule-the-world#ixzz1enVp2s65
WHO CAN NOW DENY THE BRAVE BANKERS TAKEN WITH THE HANDS IN THE HONEYPOT?

Marek

[marektysis]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/25/jon-corzine-mfglobal-financial-services-committee?newsfeed=true

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Goldman-Sachs-Has-Taken-Ov-by-paul-craig-roberts-111125-820.html

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/huang-says-signs-of-china-selective-easing-everywhere/2011/11/25/gIQAZncMxN_video.html

[marektysis]

Policy-Making Billionaires

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: November 26, 2011


OVER the past 30 years, as the gap between wealthy and poor grew ever wider, total philanthropic giving almost tripled, according to annual estimates published by the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. In an age of widening partisanship and plummeting trust in government, this outpouring of philanthropy has produced a distinct breed of philanthropist: The policy-making billionaire.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, has invested more than $13 billion in public health initiatives around the world through his foundation. William E. Conway Jr., a founder of the Carlyle Group investment company, is planning to give away $1 billion of his personal fortune, and is said to be considering how his money can aid in financing major infrastructure projects.

“What’s going on at a broader level is a sense of, ‘Hey, we can be much more effective and efficient than government in doing things,’ ” said Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of philanthropic studies and public affairs at Indiana. “And it’s become more pervasive in recent years.”

In keeping with the anti-government spirit of the times, the new philanthropists — some with roots in the loosely libertarian milieu of Silicon Valley or Wall Street — share a disdain for established politics and an impatience with the slow churn of old-fashioned policy making. Last month, the Starbucks executive Howard Schultz, whose net worth approaches $750 million, proposed using Starbucks’ corporate foundation and customer donations to create an economic development and job training program for the unemployed, one that he hopes can generate tens of millions of dollars in loans to small business.

“As corporate citizens of the world, it is our responsibility — our duty — to serve the communities where we do business,” Mr. Schultz wrote, “by helping to improve, for example, the quality of citizens’ education, employment, health care, safety, and overall daily life, plus future prospects.”

But the very loftiness of such ambitions raises a significant question: Can even the very wealthiest philanthropists finance public services on the scale necessary to achieve social change — that is, on the scale of government itself?

One way to make that happen: Instead of seeking to supplant what government does, philanthropists can finance advocacy to change it. When philanthropic dollars are applied to lobbying for programs, they can have an enormous leveraging effect on public dollars.

A coming study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which advocates giving that aids the poor, looked at 100 social welfare organizations in 13 states. The groups spent about $230 million on advocacy and organizing for minimum wage laws, expanding tax credits for the working poor, and other programs. Those efforts, the study found, produced more than $26 billion in direct and indirect benefits to individuals, a “return on investment” of about 115 to one.

“I get it — there’s frustration when there’s gridlock, and sometimes people want to give money where government won’t,” said Aaron Dorfman, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. “But most philanthropists realize that good philanthropy can never be a substitute for government spending.”

A version of this thinking has long guided conservative political philanthropists, whose distaste for government has not blinded them to the value of influencing it, and whose money helped create an entire infrastructure of research organizations in Washington in the 1980s and ’90s dedicated to shrinking government. In the last decade or so, it has also become received wisdom on the political left, as some major liberal donors began to shift money out of traditional charity and into political advocacy.

followed on next page
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/sunday-review/policy-making-billionaires.html?_r=1


As Bill gates says it ' philantropy where we do business"
to say, philantropy as a strategy of investment.more to say about that is the personal interests these firms have in medecine fields and the value of poisonous vaccins that are given to local populations without any defense.
Such a philantropic activity is purely to be ranked as criminal acts.

[marektysis]

http://www.monarchie.be/fr/actuel/discours/archives/discours-du-prince-philippe-club-rome-european-chapter

[marektysis]

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=11&dd=26&nav_id=77505 Mr Bild is a boutefeu in Europe; provoking the Russians in georgia, Kossovo, wherever where it is possible.Last time he was in trip in Ukrenia where he wanted mrs Timochenko Ioulia to be freed, the most sign she was guity of the motives of her condamnation. Mr Bildt has to remind the destiny of last agent of CIA (former Olof Palme who was also an engaged swedish FM) who was slaughtered in Stockholm.Even the belonging to Bilderberg will not save him of his turpitudes. The people in Europe doesn't want a war with Russia even if NATO and America perhaps wants it. Europe has to define a self policy not depending of Wahington iF she want to get money from Pekin and Moscow to save her derilection in the actual financial crisis. Marek Tysis

[marektysis]

http://community.cengage.com/GECResource/blogs/gec_blog/archive/2011/11/21/what-peter-thiel-looks-for-in-startups.aspx

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcLZpO1pJ-Q

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x637241

SUPERCOMEDY ON THE SINKING TITANIC ?
MAREK

[marektysis]

http://eulaw.wordpress.com/

May be have you ideas about this theme...?

Marek

[marektysis]

PROFILE-Italy Prime Minister Mario Monti; ECB's Visco
Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:19am EST

Position: Italian Prime Minister, Italian finance minister Incumbent: Mario Monti Born: Mar. 19, 1943 Term: Nov. 2011, next election due 2013 Key Facts:

- Mario Monti was appointed by President Giorgio Napolitano to lead a technocrat government, replacing Silvio Berlusconi who lost his parliamentary majority as the euro debt crisis threatened to push Italy's borrowing costs out of control. Monti also holds the finance and economy portfolio. He has said he intends to remain in office until the next scheduled elections in 2013.

- Monti, a distinguished economist, served as a European Commissioner between 1995 and 2005, first as internal markets commissioner and later as competition commissioner, where he made his name in high profile battles against corporate giants Microsoft and General Electric. He was President of Milan's Bocconi University before being named Life Senator by Napolitano and asked to form a government after Berlusconi's resignation.

- Sober and reserved, in sharp contrast to his flamboyant predecessor, Monti is known as a tough negotiator. He has close connections to European policy makers from his time in Brussels and is a former adviser to Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola and a member of the Bilderberg group of business leaders and other influential figures.

- Monti has pledged to restore confidence in Italy's public finances through budget rigour, economic growth and social fairness. Priorities include pension, tax and labour market reform as well as education and getting more women into the workforce. He has maintained Italy's target of achieving a balanced budget by 2013 and has argued for greater economic and fiscal integration between European Union member states.

Position: Bank of Italy Governor Incumbent: Ignazio Visco Born: Nov. 21, 1949 Key facts:

- Visco, formerly number three at the Bank of Italy, was appointed to the top position in October as Mario Draghi left to become President of the European Central Bank.

- A distinguished academic and former chief economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Visco was previously the Bank of Italy's sherpa for G7 and G20 meetings and has wide international experience.

- He had good relations with former centre-right Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti but was also well regarded by the centre-left opposition, which welcomed his appointment.

- Considered open-minded and pragmatic, he is not ranked among the hawks on the ECB's governing council.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/27/idUSLEADERIT20111127