"We shall triumph over all this evil that wants to debase our humanity or obstruct our progress as a nation," he vowed.
Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament, condemned Mr Berlusconi's comments as words which "debase the presidency of the [EU] council and offend Europe".
He is accused of seeking to "encourage corrupt music" and of giving credence to people who want to do such things as remove God from the school curriculum, break traditional family bonds, remove all restrictions on sex, encourage bestiality and orgies and debase all art.
By denying Japan's venal politicians the opportunity to debase the yen, the Bank of Japan may think it is acting in the right spirit.
It was important to them to say 'I know what authentic is, and this isn't authentic.'" It is easy to defend good barbecue from those who would debase it, but how do you protect a living practice from those who would, in its defence, smother it?
Even worse, the wrong sort of bail-out could debase the euro, as happened to the mark in the 1920s.
T.S. Eliot, a 20th-century poet and critic, argued that choosing people on the basis of their talents would "disorganise society and debase education".
The fear is that governments might inflate away their enormous debts: whereas medieval kings adulterated their coins with base metal, today's rulers may debase their money simply by creating more of it.On the supply side (chart 2, bottom panel), the main source of new gold what is dug out of the world's goldmines has been flat or declining.
No country has tried harder to debase its currency.In theory, such debts would not be tolerated for long by investors, since the easy way out for central banks is to "monetise" them with inflation.
And that could debase what the agencies see as their greatest asset, that is, "reputation capital .Rating agencies are hardly strangers to conflicts of interest.
One, says Mr Egan, is that, sooner or later, the established credit-rating agencies will not tolerate the way in which such secured issues in effect debase the firm's unsecured debt.
