an interesting and completely depressing column about italy and why it's almost ensured its political and economic doom.

If anyone belongs to Italy's tight group of power brokers -- in Italian, the salotto buono -- it is Carlo DeBenedetti. He briefly ran the Fiat industrial conglomerate before a falling-out with the controlling Agnelli family, whose members he knew from childhood. As the head of Olivetti, he made a bold if unsuccessful run at IBM in Europe but used the remnants of the company to make a fortune during the heady days of telecom privatization. Today, his "group" includes a media empire of newspapers and radio stations, a giant auto-parts company and an energy division.

But sitting in his small, unmarked headquarters on a narrow side street here in Italy's capital of finance and fashion, the 70-year-old DeBenedetti speaks of a "perverse and unwritten alliance" among politicians, financiers and company owners. This alliance, he says, is slowly destroying Italy, enriching its members while undermining the nation's economy through excessive debt, protectionism, serial devaluations and shortsighted "concessions" to unions -- concessions that Italian workers are paying for in the form of meager take-home pay, high unemployment and deteriorating public infrastructure.

"There have been 52 postwar governments, but in truth they have all been the same," said DeBenedetti of the oligarchy's enduring power.