July 13, 2007 (LPAC)---One month after Lyndon LaRouche's visit to Rome, where he won bipartisan support for his Eurasian Land-Bridge policy, Italy's Minister for Infrastructure has proposed a bipartisan institution to guarantee that key infrastructure projects, are pushed through, independent of party politics. The projects include rail and tunnel links to Berlin, Kiev and the port of Rotterdam.
Minister Antonio Di Pietro made his proposal in a conference in Rome yesterday, gaining support from Prime Minister Romano Prodi, representatives of industry and of the opposition, including Lombardy governor Roberto Formigoni and Milan mayor Letizia Moratti. Di Pietro has thus reacted to Green party sabotage in various parliamentary committees, where Green representatives, although being part of the government coalition, have voted against the infrastructure chapter contained in the current government budget plan.
On July 18, Di Pietro will file a request at the European Union for co-financing four major infrastructural projects which are part of the Trans-European Corridors plan, involving four major tunnels through the Alps:
* the 63-kilometer Brenner Tunnel (Corridor 1, Berlin-Palermo);
* the 52 kilometer Tunnel in Val di Susa (the Lyon-Turin, Corridor 5 high-speed rail connection);
* the Giovi Tunnel in the Genoa-Milan high-speed connection (Corridor 24 Rotterdam-Genua), and;
* a tunnel for the Trieste-Dvaca (Slovenia) connection (also Corridor 5, to be extended to Kiev).
Green spokesmen in the Parliament Public Works Committee have described such plans as an "environmental disaster" and voted against them. The Green opposition threatens to sabotage Italian government compliance with deadlines for receiving EU funds, as for instance in the Lyon-Turin project, for which a detailed plan has to be filed before July 19 at the EU Commission. Di Pietro's move yesterday, calling for a bipartisan council, outflanks the Greens, and follows in the footsteps of LaRouche's intervention.
Of course, the issue of productive credit has to be addressed. Due to the limitations on government spending imposed by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union, the government has budgeted only 3.3 billion Euros per year, which is insufficient even to cover the 32 billion Euros calculated for these four Trans-European connections.
