Yesterday's comments on the on-going restructuring of the Italian banking industry would have been greatly enriched by reference to material in il Manifesto, which underlined the notable, indeed exceptional, nature of the take-over bid of the Banca Nazionale di Lavoro by the Stefano Ricucci's Unipol group.

As mentioned Unipol acted in concert with a group of real estate magnates headed by the Caltagirone group, but what is more remarkable is that the latter sold its shares in BNL directly to the Unipol team. The money for those shares came from "red" insurance companies, i.e. insurance companies with ties to the florid world of Italian cooperatives. This transfer from leftist cooperatives to center-rightist real estate magnates was allegedly celebrated at the close of the decisive meeting with the phrase "Better Bologna than Madrid", i.e. it's better that decisions be made in the (red) Italian city of Bologna than in Madrid (although, of course, an intimate embrace with the world of cooperatives is not standard behavior for laissez faire capitalists).

Needless to say there is a good bit of doctrinaire dismay from the "orthodox" left for this huge payment (on the order of 1,000,000,000 Euro) to traditional adversaries, although Piero Fassino, leader of the major leftist party DS, is very much "on board".

In Italy such leftist "shame" is decidedly retro, the cooperatives having long since adapted to free-market techniques and attitudes. Indeed, for an erstwhile Yank accustomed to the well-meaning but usually rather inept practices of American cooperatives as seen around university towns, the cooperatives of Italy's Red Belt are quite another cup of tea. I vividly recall a brief conversation with a representative of an Emilian co-op in the early 80's in which we discussed relations between the Italian cooperative and its Polish counterparts, then in serious difficulty for lack of "valuta". The agent's comment was, "You know when you are in the presence of someone who is drowning, the best thing you can do is give them a kick in the teeth", a sentiment which would certainly have found agreement in the heart of J.D. Rockefeller. Proletarian solidarity is by now not even a distant memory.