Oristano, Sassuolo, Sorso, Bari, Valle di Cadore, Calalzo, Morazzone, San Donà di Piave, Zanica, Merate, Thiene, Ottana. What have these places got in common? They liberated themselves from the chains of Equitalia in advance. They have become free, humane and efficient.
From 01 January 2013, the law 201/2011 lays down that the towns must manage the task of gathering in taxes. Why wait? There is not a single good reason to entrust the task to Equitalia. The town of Oristano provides the proof of this. The direct handling of taxes has brought both a saving on costs amounting to 150,000 euro (the town council that gathers its own taxes does not have to pay the commission to Equitalia), as well as an increase of 650,000 euro in the amount collected. Lower costs, higher receipts. Not just that, they even have more liquidity in their coffers. “Resources immediately available, unlike what happened with management by Equitalia when the settlement of the sums due took place within two years from the time the register was issued.'', from a note written by the local authority of Oristano. In the light of these figures, the question to ask is “What use has Equitalia been in all these years? What has been the use of an intermediary that has placed itself between the citizens and the institutions? To increase interest rates? To grab back the houses? To provide administrative slowness? Oristano is an example, but it’s not the only one, of the uselessness of turning to Equitalia for the body that entrusts them with the task of collecting taxes. If citizens and towns are not getting any benefit from Equitalia why go on? And above all, whose was the brilliant idea to disintermediate the payments to a third party? What’s the point?
The Town authorities are not an impersonal entity, they are in the territory. They often know the person paying taxes and they know the difficulties he has. If there’s a family that is very poor, they can, if needed, suggest spreading out the payments or even cancelling them. That’s called humanity. The towns should speed up the exit from Equitalia now in 2012 and get themselves ready for January 2013. Equitalia is not responsible, it’s a target. The ones who are responsible are those that set it up.

The tertian fever that has struck Bersani who is rabbiting on about the “non victory” has also struck Azzuro Caltagirone, whose stage name is Casini. Back story: the MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} has in the past refused election expenses to a value of one million seven hundred thousand euro for the regional elections and it will renounce reimbursements for the next national elections, that could have a value of more than 100 million euro with the current voting predictions. Thus the M5S does not want the money. That’s difficult for the parties (that live on money) to understand. But it’s "Tutto Vero” {all true} like the headline in “La Gazzetta dello Sport” after the victory of the national team, that then went to Berlin. The move denominated “piercasinanda” (copyright Travaglio) is that of a truly accomplished politician. Just think about it: if the M5S doesn’t want the money it’s thus necessary to have an “ad hoc” law to prevent them from getting the money! The UDC has put forward an amendment that relates the payment of financing to the existence of a Statute, that all the parties have, as is obvious and thus it’s “ad hoc” for the M5S. The Lower House has given its enthusiastic approval with 342 in favour, 104 abstentions and 54 against. The MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} has a Statute of only 7 points that does not even mention the existence of a treasurer, nor does it even consider electoral financing. It’s called the “Non Statuto", but it is in fact a fully fledged Statute. I’m suggesting that the parties use it as a model and I’m not going to claim copyright. Instead of cutting the financing amounting to a billion euro going to their parties, they’re cutting the financing to the M5S that doesn’t want financing. Brilliant idea!
The UDC amendment even contained an appeal to democracy. The Statute (the one that makes it possible to take the money) must be “in accordance with democratic principles in the life of the party with particular attention to the choice of candidates, the respect of minorities and the rights of signed up members”. But this is an “own goal”, a move worthy of Tafazzi, of Casini’s IQ. The party candidates are in fact “appointed" by the party secretaries thanks to the "Porcellum” electoral law, quite the contrary of giving expression to democracy within the party, thus they will no longer be able to receive the expenses. Right? Right! Oh by the way, can someone lend me some money for my breakfast?

It’s getting more alienating to look at “cicciobombi” and “labbra turgide”, megaphones of the parties on national TV channels, on the TV News, and on the talk shows. They provoke a sense of small things that are in really bad taste. They call to mind the perfume of rotten flowers, the sharp stink of boxwood lining the avenues of the cemeteries. The shapes that jitter around behind the screen with the extreme vitality that at times precedes the final hours of life, remind you of the dodo, the extinct bird, or the last few Japanese that went on fighting after the end of the war in 1945 in some atoll in the Pacific.
Up until now, they have carried out their role as spokespersons and amphitryons, very well. They have transformed characters like Lupi, Formigoni, Alfano, Veltroni, Alemanno, and Fini into giants of the political scene. They have kept them alive. At times of difficulty, they have carefully rushed in, as attentive as Red Cross workers, to bring them the intravenous drip. The parties are now dying. They are falling like autumn leaves. The TV hosts are pet animals (parrots?) forgotten by their owners after moving house.
Their workspaces, where for decades they have manipulated public opinion, are bare and sad. The parties send them second rate characters to provide a presence. The TV hosts are obliged to interview each other and to share the opinions that are of no interest to anyone. Santoro interviews Lerner. Ms Annunziata interviews Santoro. Lilli Gruber interviews Mieli. They have invented closed circuit information.
The MoVimento 5 Stelle’s programme on news relates to them directly and offers them an escape route, the chance to get to grips with a real profession, it’s never too late. A few points relating to TV:
- no TV channel with national coverage can have majority ownership by a private entity. The shareholding must be broadly spread with no more than 10% in the hands of any single entity
- TV frequencies are to be assigned by a public auction every five years
- abolition of the law brought in by the D’Alema government that requires a one per cent contribution on the receipts of those to whom the TV frequencies are assigned
- sale of two public TV channels to a broad base of shareholders, with a maximum holding of 10%
- a single public TV channel that is independent of the parties, without advertising, providing information and cultural programmes
- abolition of the Gasparri law.
They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we. See you in Parliament.

The undead (*) (but almost dead) of a party that was never born. Bersani said that he “unwon” in Parma, Comacchio and Mira. He has explained this with incontrovertible words: “We have unwon because there they were governed by the Centre Right.” Clear? Is there perhaps any need for explanations? Call an ambulance for a spot of “involuntary treatment” The PDminusL’s affirmation “It's a victory with no ifs and buts.” Bersani however is overcome. He will no longer be able to construct the umpteenth incinerator in his beloved Emilia. In Parma there will not be a tumour-factory as in other cities governed by the PDminusL as with the ebetino {little idiot} in Florence. The chicken who believes himself to be an eagle has thus returned on his electoral war horses “We will not give in to the populisms and the qualunquisms” and to the political argumentation about the victory of the MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} in Parma due to “a right wing that in Parma dressed itself in new clothes by supporting the ‘grillino’ ”. The ‘grillino’ dressed itself in new clothes. Crikey, Bersani is beating Vendola in eloquence, 5 to 0! It doesn’t end here. For the undead (but almost) the crisis of the Right provokes “an air pocket”. Basically the fart into which the parties are dissolving. Bersani then explained to the journalists “Because if we are stopped we will not go far". No one, after this statement then accompanied the good man to the first park bench with a paper bag of bread crumbs for the pigeons, in fact the journalists that were present kept straight faces and even continued taking notes when he stated there’s an unanswered point with Grillo: work. We have a rate for the unemployed plus those who have lost interest and who are no longer looking for work, that reaches 20%. Who created unemployment? The 5 Star MoVement or the twenty years of mess ups with the PDL, of investment in Fiat’s old bangers and in the cementification of the country, instead of in innovation? Who else but D’Alema sold off Telecom in exchange for debts, condemning it to industrial dwarfism? Who blessed the law about “precarious workers” in the past and the "restructuring" of article 18 today? Who allowed our companies to shift production abroad, to China to Romania but allowing them to keep the label "Made in Italy” on the products? Who obliged a generation of young people to emigrate (second in Europe after Romania)? Before talking about work, Bersani should work. He should try it. In the future he’ll need to.
PS: In Parma, after the second ballot, they have brought in a new dish for the citizens: “Fried gnocchi”.

(*) The undead - also called the “not dead” or “walking dead”, is a monstrous creature generated by the resurrection of a corpse. The acceptation of the word “undead” can refer to various types of fantastical creatures, as for example zombies, vampires, mummies, or PDminusL-folk.

"We should not change the people who are in power and thus lame one in order to scare another. We should rather view power as a mechanism that moves forward thanks to those that wield it and that we should attack power itself and its inherent authority, not so much the individuals that are part of it, or are not part of it but are believed to be by others." Ascanio Celestini

Theatrical actor and writer Ascanio Celestini's Passaparola.

Far from an anarchic idea
Firstly I would like to greet all the regular visitors to Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Ascanio Celestini and I do theatre, I write and now they have asked me to comment on what has gone on in the past few days.
Let’s start by saying that, as usual, many things have gone on, indeed far more than would fit in a newspaper, a blog, a television programme, a TV news report or even in a full day of reading and research on the Web, in the newspapers, on TV or even down at the bar.
One thing that has struck me in the last few days has been the kneecapping of Adinolfi, and above all the claims of responsibility made by this Olga Unit of the FAI. It struck me for a number of reasons, the first being that it seems strange that this group would call itself the FAI since the FAI that we have known for the past decade or so is a totally different thing altogether, namely the “Federazione Anarchica Italiana” (literally the “Italian Anarchist Federation”), which was last armed during the Second World War, at the time of the battle for national liberation and the partisan war, after which this movement laid down its arms. This is the first thing that struck me in that there are so many other names they could have chosen: if a 16-year old starts a band he/she knows that there is some chance that they may choose a name that has been used previously, but there is no way they would ever call their band ”The Beatles” because everyone knows only too well that The Beatles already exist. This is the first thing that made me wonder: why would they step into someone else’s shoes, and that while that someone is still wearing and walking in those shoes?
The second thing is the very idea of an armed anarchist group, in the sense that anarchist action, or anarchist attacks if you will, somehow seems to be a part of the history of the last century and even two centuries ago. There is a somewhat believable article in the anarchist “A” magazine, which explains the position of the anarchists in this Country who somehow still honestly believe that, in this day and age, they can still arm themselves shoot at someone. This kind of action, inter alia mainly by individuals, may have been understandable in the historical, political and social times of Gaetano Bresci who, moreover, made a point of explaining that it was an individual act and that, therefore, he had no intention of representing anyone, whereas the thing that is so striking about these would-be anarchists of the Olga Unit is that it’s almost as if they are the vanguard of a population that is ready to take up arms and start a revolt or a revolution. This is not the manner of the anarchist, but more like the manner of the armed party, the Armed Communist Party. It is indeed much more like the armed party and the Red Brigades than an anarchist idea. The true anarchist does not take orders from anyone. As De André used to say, “I’m not saying that the State should not exist, but what I am saying is that it should keep well away from busting our chops”.

The problem of the prisons
So, the anarchist essentially sees life in this manner: they don’t believe in either giving or taking orders from anyone, or sometimes they even see themselves as the self-appointed representatives of an entire population or group of people.
Furthermore, they also have their own ideas about judging the behaviour of others and, therefore, the judgement becomes a kind of People’s Court or the Court of the few, or part of the people. This is very far removed from not only the anarchism of the nineteen hundreds, but also from the very idea of anarchism, namely that someone rises up and sets themselves in judgement over someone else. It was once again De André who, in a song written as a follow-on to the Spoon River Anthology, said something very simple but very profound with regard to what the anarchist believes a judge to be.
This said, obviously this violent act has led to a negative change in the way justice is viewed in this Country, even though this has never been a particularly humane Country in the sense that Italy is the worst country in Europe when it comes to not only our prisons system but particularly to our view of justice and our justice system. Believing that our prisons are the hell-holes that they currently are here in Italy purely as a result of administrative problems, lack of funding or some lousy laws introduced by some dodgy politician is tantamount to believing that Auschwitz was nothing more than a minor bump in the road. In fact, Auschwitz was the result of Nazism, the mental asylums were the result of the psyche in this Country and our prisons are the result of the view of justice that is rife in this Country. Therefore I would like to remind you that we currently have 144 inmates for every 100 available places in our prisons and that this is the second-worst figure in the whole of Europe, after Serbia, where the figure is only marginally higher at 150 inmates for every 100 available places. In Germany this figure stands at 92 and although even their prisons are not particularly civilised, the spread is quite considerable is it not? Whichever way you look at it, there’s quite a substantial difference between the 92/100 places in the German prisons and the 144/100 places in the Italian prisons. 44% of the detainees are immigrants while a further 30% are drug addicts and, as a matter of fact, the Italian prisons, and indeed the Italian justice system are using imprisonment as a sort of social State: seeing that we are unable to turn these people into 100% real citizens, we simply reclassify them as detainees. 40% of the detainees are immigrants because an 80% legal immigrant rate is unacceptable and, therefore, by law in this Country illegality is the norm for immigrants, so it is perfectly normal for them to land up in jail.
Very often in our prisons the drug addicts (the other 30%) don’t even have access to methadone, so many of them die or simply commit suicide just to get high because a drug addict is a drug addict every day and if they land up in jail things get even worse for them since in these hell-holes, to keep the guys in check, there is a major underground drugs trade. Here, as at the CIE (the former CPT), this solution was tried and tested in the mental asylums so it works equally well in the mental asylums’ sister institutions.

Illegality offers its services to legality
In this Country, Law No. 180 led to the closure of many of the mental asylums, however, we still have criminal asylums, which they call the PGs and there are still quite a few SPDCs (Psychiatric Diagnosis and Cure Service centres), which essentially work precisely like mental asylums, so much so in fact, that they are often colloquially referred to as “repartini”, as if they were little lunatic asylums because, while it is true that a person can be admitted for TSO (Trattamento Sanitario Obbligatorio – Compulsory Health Treatment) in an SPDC for a maximum period of a couple of weeks, in fact this often turns into a month and often the same individual lands up in there for two weeks in January, another two weeks in March and then one month in May, etc. So, to all intents and purposes, these places become like mental asylums, albeit with swing-doors, but little else changes because all too often, the people working in regional services and with individuals that have a history of psychological problems, make these places feel like mental asylums, with nurses dressed in mental asylum uniforms. In recent days the discussions in Parliament have once again turned, not to the actual re-commissioning of the mental asylums, but attempting to do what amounts to taking several steps backwards in terms of the provisions of Law No. 180. Half of the detainees are actually awaiting trial so, in effect, one out of every two detainees in this Country are in fact doing time without ever having been convicted of any crime. Unfortunately all this came about as a result of the collapse that began a few years ago, particularly after the “Mani Pulite” (literally Clean Hands) affair and, therefore, from a certain justicialist attitude, from a kind of revolt against power that has indeed done little or nothing and that, above all, did not and could not manage to find a way out from this institutional and justicialist phase. When all is said and done, the fact is that the problem of delinquency cannot be solved by means of incarceration.
In Italy – and not only in Italy but especially here - the full gamut of illegality has become not so much an area of total illegality but rather a kind of illegality that offers certain services to legality, starting from drugs and prostitution and going all the way through to politics, major tenders, etc. Therefore, as regards the claim made by this would-be anarchist group, first of all I have to ask myself how any group that assumes the right to represent a population or a part of a population and thus appoints itself as judge, jury and executioner can ever call itself anarchist. Then, and above all – and this lesson has been taught by two centuries of history that has included revolutions, insurrections and revolts – we should not change the people who are in power and thus lame one in order to scare another. We should rather view power as a mechanism that moves forward thanks to those that wield it and that we should attack power itself and its inherent authority, not so much the individuals that are part of it, or are not part of it but are believed to be by others.
If possible, spread the word!

The New York Times came to Garbagnate Milanese to follow the second ballot and it has dedicated a long article to the Five Star MoVement. Isn't that great news? (Right now the NYT prints a million copies and has a million unique visitors to its website.)

"Caustic Comedian Alters Italy’s Political Map"
GARBAGNATE MILANESE —
A rapt crowd gathered in this drab town in the Milanese hinterland one evening this week to hear the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo serve up his characteristically caustic take on Italian politics. And he did not disappoint them.
“Take away money from politics” he barked, as the crowd tittered. “Take away the careers. If someone wants to make money or steal, well, they should choose another job.” With no financial gain, he said, “politics becomes about passion.” Mr. Grillo pointed to the row of fresh-faced Italians — candidates with his Five Star Movement competing in run-off elections here this weekend — on the makeshift stage behind him. “These kids, they may be inexperienced, they still haven’t learned how to rig a budget, or give contracts to their friends …,”
What they were, he said, was the product of the “hyper-democracy” that he has been promoting through his blog and the plethora of Internet sites that have aggregated like-minded Italians bent on proselytizing political activism in a new form. And it’s through a deft mixture of mordant humor, righteous anger and grass-roots organization that Mr. Grillo’s movement is proving that it is no joke. Although it was founded only in October 2009, the Five Star Movement has quickly become a force to be contended with in Italy’s fractious political arena. In the first round of local elections on May 6 and 7, candidates from his movement ran in 101 of the 941 cities, and they captured nearly 200,000 votes — a national average of 9 percent — becoming the second- or third-ranked political force in various municipalities across Italy. The party won one mayoral race outright, in a small, but strategic, stronghold of the Northern League, the populist party whose leader, Umberto Bossi, was formally notified this week that he is under investigation for fraud.
“We’re at the beginning of something new that will change everything. The Web is sweeping everything away, toward a world most people don’t even know exists,” said Mr. Grillo, a popular comic for more than four decades, who has more than 550,000 followers on Twitter, and nearly 850,000 on Facebook. “It’s difficult to understand. Maybe we will in five or 10 years.”
Spawned from Mr. Grillo’s popular blog, which he started in 2005, and molded through various Internet incarnations, the Five Star Movement is rapidly becoming a vessel for Italians’ impatience with traditional political parties, which are seen as having lost touch with the needs of the people. Italians commonly refer to the political elite as “the caste.” Polls show that confidence in the nation’s political parties has plunged below 5 percent, and Mr. Grillo’s anti-politics message has found fertile ground. (Politicians do little to help themselves. A debate this week in the lower house of Parliament to discuss cutting public funds to political parties mustered the interest of just 20 of 630 lawmakers, newspapers reported.) Angelo Pellegrino, a plumber who had come to hear Mr. Grillo, said: “Politicians are thieves, clowns, buffoons, they live like kings. Although we are also to blame. We did after all vote for them.”
Political commentators have been tempted to dismiss Mr. Grillo’s movement as a national protest vote against entrenched interests, not unlike dissident movements elsewhere in Europe, from Germany’s Pirates to the far-right Golden Dawn in Greece. But the movement’s members reject the characterization and enthusiastically hawk their agenda — an environmentally friendly, anti-consumerist, pro-education platform, articulated with plenty of local variations. Community chapters decide which issues to emphasize for themselves and then elect a “spokesperson” to represent the ideas in electoral races. “The novelty is the use of the Web as a constituency, the idea of new democracy, with a direct relationship between the elected and the electors,” said Federico Fornaro, a historian who has written about the Five Star Movement, “a model of party in franchising,” he added.
The focus on local issues accounts in large part for its success so far. Of the three cities where Five Star Movement candidates made it to runoff elections, the most closely watched is Parma, a wealthy city in the agricultural heartland hobbled by a decade of scandals. Mr. Grillo describes the vote in Parma as “our Stalingrad,” a reference to the 1942-43 World War II battle between Soviet and German forces that marked a turning point in the war.
Federico Pizzarotti, who is representing the Five Star Movement this week in Parma said “It’s important to have open ears and listen to what people say.”
Mr. Grillo and his followers are also setting their sights on national elections next year, which will pose new challenges to the movement’s ability to organize and mobilize its leaderless membership. “The moment there’s a hierarchy, it all falls apart,” warned Gianluca Perilli, a Five Star member in Rome. “Political parties are the cancer of politics.”
Finding a common message to deliver to the electorate will also test the glue of this hyper-democratic movement that refuses to define itself through labels and elaborates its political positions through online sites “where everyone counts as one.” “So far, they’ve only won in small cities,” said Paolo Natale, a professor of political sociology at the University of Milan. “It will be interesting to see whether the utopian vision they now propose can be incarnated for the national elections.” The reliance of the movement’s followers on the Web as a point of contact is “both their strength, and their strong weakness,” he said. “They can be a bit naïve.” Mr. Fornaro described the movement’s shift to the national level as a “triple backward somersault with no net below,” he said. He added: “It’s one thing to raise a ruckus, another to govern.” None of that bothers Mr. Grillo, who is happy to admit that the movement is a work in progress and insists that he is not first among equals, and even less the “guru” that his critics have labeled him. Yet it is undeniable that the comic’s pronouncements — he is open, for example, to Italy leaving the euro — send regular shockwaves through the movement. He advocates, moreover, forcing Italian politicians to stand trial before a popular jury. “There is no forgiveness in a popular movement,” he said.
The Internet is also unforgiving, and has an inherent system of checks and balances, said Gianroberto Casaleggio, the Web consultant responsible for developing Mr. Grillo’s online presence. “If you’re credible and popular like Grillo then your message has wide diffusion on the Web,” he said. “It’s a Calvinist movement. If you lose your credibility, then your message has no future.”
Here in Garbagnate Milanese, Mr. Grillo wound down his speech. “Who knows where we’ll end up? I don’t know, this is direct democracy,” he said, his voice growing hoarse. “We’re not a political movement; this is a cultural revolution that’s going to change society.”

> Complete article in The New York Times