Author Simone Perotti's Passaparola:

Thinking, examining and making changes.
Good day to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Simone Perotti. I’m an author who worked in a company for 19 years before deciding to spend all of my time writing and sailing. I became a sailor in order to survive before my books began to become successful and to this day I continue to be a sailor, a skipper if you will, as well as a sailing instructor. I also clean boats and I do anything else that is related to the sea. Everything we do in life we normally do for one of two reasons, either for love or because we are forced to, in which case, any downsizing will no longer be the result of a personal choice as it has been for many people in recent years, in fact more so than what we may think, but rather the result of necessity since the great promise made by the System, namely that we would all leave the countryside and eventually even the factories to live in the city, and we would all have a collar and tie, a desk, a motorcar, a house and a middle class life will never materialise and is never going to happen. The system is no longer in a position to drain all the working resources to which it once had easy access, so it cannot provide what it promised and it can no longer provide wellbeing as promised so, in other words, it was either just one big lie or at least a serious error of judgement. The most serious and most unpleasant thing about the way things stand at the moment is the fact that the main role players in this system, the ones that actually conceived it and developed it are not doing any soul-searching whatsoever. I would perhaps still be prepared to accept the errors that were made and accept that it was all done in good faith … but now, unfortunately, things have become all too clear and what we need to hear is someone saying “We made a mistake!” We cannot accept a system such as this capitalist system that promises wellbeing for all and is then unable to deliver what has been promised, so our current capitalist system needs to be reviewed, and that’s something that people like Berlinguer, Pasolini and many others were already talking about back in 1977.
But no one listened to them. The time has come to do some serious soul-searching, yet neither Monti nor anyone else is doing any soul-searching and this is not a good thing. People cannot simply be expected to accept a change of direction without the leader admitting that mistakes were made in the first place.
There is no question that this downsizing has to take place and it is going to involve taking 1, 2, 3, 4 or perhaps 10 steps backward, which is obviously not going to be a painless process. When something is done for love, the motivation is strong and there is a certain amount of conviction involved. However, something that is done through necessity is different. These things have to be done without delay, immediately, even though these steps backward are going to be difficult for everyone that hasn’t been able to plan for them. Those people who have been living in a more sustainable manner for some time already, trying to consume less and spending less time at work because the extra income was not actually essential for living, in other words, those who have thought about the problem of consuming less, being more free and not having to work quite as hard, but doing just what is necessary in order to live, are now going to be far better off. The system needs to be changed because it is unsustainable and because there is another way that has to be looked at. It seems to me that our intellectuals and our economists have not made any attempt to come up with a new, workable system. We went from being a monarchy to being a Republic by first developing the political theory of Republicanism, a move away from feudalism and other earlier systems, by developing a new concept of organisation, but this is the first time in history that we will be changing from one system to another without anyone having sat down and theorised first, except perhaps for a few marginalised and vilified downsizing theorists who have given this some thought.
In any event, we have to change, even in the absence of any sort of guidelines, and this places the onus squarely on the shoulders of individuals who, as individuals, have to think it through, examine the options and then bring about change.

Getting back in touch with reality
Downsizing does not mean sitting on the couch and doing nothing all day, or not working simply for the satisfaction of being a lazy slob. Downsizing is a new model for development, not a plan for involution or non participation in the daily liturgy of an economy that is condemned to either grow or collapse. It doesn’t mean not having anything else to do and indeed not wishing to do anything at all. What it means is doing just enough and no more, consuming only what is actually necessary and no more, envisaging a kind of development of our Country that is based on different things since our Country has no energy resources or mineral wealth, and based on other things that are far more important, such as our landscapes and our many abandoned villages that need to be recovered. New construction is not possible because we don’t have the room, so we have to recover our earlier and even ancient buildings that are just sitting there waiting to be renovated, inter alia also in order to protect the land from the landslides and ground collapses that are increasingly becoming regular events. What we need to do is to clean up this Country so as to turn it into a garden and to clean up our seas. Simply cleaning up our coastline and our seas will keep tens of thousands of people busy for a good long time, while turning this Country into a veritable mecca for tourism and the hotel trade. We need to produce electricity in a different manner because things simply have to be powered by energy other than that obtained by burning hydrocarbons. There are many things that need to be done, but the problem is that no one is currently developing any plans without any philosophical flights of fantasy.
For me the choice was very simple. I worked for 19 years and I even had a pretty good career. I began as a temporary worker and in the end I landed up as a manager. I was very fortunate. I worked very hard and I believed everything that I was told, namely that if I worked hard and gave my all I would reap the benefits of the widespread growth. At a certain point, however, one day I simply realised that this was not so. I was working extremely hard, as a matter of fact all I was doing was working and I no longer had any time left to do the things that are important to me. The money that all my hard work brought in was needed to purchase useless things and indeed, more often than not, I was driven to spend money that I didn’t even have, using credit facilities to purchase things that I had to have in order to impress heaven alone knows who. This system was not bringing me any wellbeing at all, so at that point one has to do one’s sums and ask oneself “Is what I am doing making me feel good? Am I happy?”. I believe that life is like a recipe and a good recipe does not consist of only one ingredient, it needs many ingredients that are well mixed and well balanced and although this is merely my personal opinion, that was no longer my situation. I’m standing here wearing 4 or 5 jerseys, one on top of the other, because my house is ice-cold since I don’t have any central heating. All I can do is burn wood in the fireplace and that’s how I keep warm, standing a metre and a half away from the fireplace. As I move away from the fire, the house is ice-cold, but this has no effect whatsoever on my happiness or unhappiness, it’s simply a choice that I have made.
Every time I need to buy something, I tie myself to a cost that involves me becoming a slave and since these are not the things that make me truly happy, I would rather live with the problem of feeling cold in winter or having to resort to putting in a major effort to chop wood in order to warm myself up. I have realised that this kind of hard work is not something that is to be avoided at all costs, but rather something that is to be welcomed because all that lack of hard work that I perceive as being a comfortable office in Milan, or a hyper-heated home that swallows up tons of crude oil on a daily basis, that way of life, that lack of effort is not an indispensable resource and, if anything, everyone needs to do a good bit of hard work in life because that is what keeps us in touch with reality.
It was possible to change lifestyle. It would have been enough to spend less, reduce your personal consumption and it would have been enough to live in a place where homes cost 300 Euro per square metre and not 6-thousand Euro like in the big towns and where, just in passing, it costs you far less to do the shopping and where you are not obliged to eat out in restaurants 4 times a week and spend 6 or 7-Thousand Euro a year but you can cook at home instead. Here in La Spezia I eat fish morning, noon and night because that is one of the things that costs less and it is absolutely doable. My electricity bill for two months amounts to 15 or 18 Euro, I produce a good part of what I eat and yet I can still do far more, especially since I have just begun. This is just the beginning of a whole new life. I’m finding it hard, by all means, and over time I will learn to do other things even better, but it is by no means impossible. The only life that is impossible is the one that they tell us we should live, life in a big town doing jobs that we certainly would not have chosen if we had followed our true passion, earning money and seeking certainty. But how on earth can you seek certainty in a life in which the only real certainty is that we will die by the time we get to 90 years of age? Am I going to die any earlier just because I changed job? I too will die at 90, but at least in the meantime I will have tried my best to live because the other option would be death. These are our fears, fed by the advertising and disinformation, which would have us believe that if you leave your job, you’re screwed and if you opt out of the System you will never be able to go back.

Taking back our time
The rarest commodity around is time. Time, however, has one particularity, namely that while it is said that even money comes and goes, time goes and that’s it. Seneca knew this only too well two thousand years ago already, as did the pre-Socratics, the philosophy that has attempted to steer mankind in certain directions over time, and universal culture. We are the only ones that don’t appear to have realised this yet so, as if we had all the time in the world, we seem to continue to waste time from morning to evening throughout our life, doing things that don’t matter, in an attempt to live our lives in the most original and authentic manner possible, as if we have so much time to blow anyway and the time will come to do the things that really count. But the truth is that the perfect time will never come because that time is now. From now until then, assuming of course that that time will indeed come, we will have wasted time and this simple concept is reason enough for us to seek to change our own way of life. Since I stopped going to the office every day and began living on very little, I have tried to make the best possible use of my time. I live in a very different way and I feel a lot better for it because I now have lots of plans and lots of dreams to fulfil. The time at my disposal is now spent entirely on fulfilling those dreams, it is all for me and for the people that I love, who I can now finally go and visit. How sad are those telephone conversations, often with our best friend rather than a mere acquaintance, as and when we contact each other and the half of our conversation goes something like this: “Hi, how are you? It’s been too long, but you know how it goes…we really should get together again one of these evenings and spend some time together”, knowing full well that it’s not going to happen because we spend all of our time in the company of people that we never chose in the first place, more often than not with work colleagues that have been imposed on us and that we would dearly love to strangle with our bare hands but don’t, thank the Lord.
All that time is a treasure that we have wasted and that should make us lie awake at night, just thinking about how guilty we are of wasting so much time. One of the most urgent things that we have to do, crisis or no crisis, is precisely to take back control over our time and to try to live what we have left of our short time on Earth to the fullest because the truth is that we may not live to be 90, we could just as well die tomorrow due to illness or some other perfectly normal cause, something that actually happens to many. Furthermore, there are certain people walking around who are extremely superstitious and refuse to talk about such things. Now I don’t know where these people come from, perhaps from the Middle Ages, but those of us who, I trust, are modern people, can calmly discuss the fact that we could realistically die at any moment and we know not when that moment will be. The Gospel warns us to “Stay alert for ye know not when nor whence…”. Now I’m not Catholic, in fact I’m anticlerical, but I must admit that that is great book that we should somehow listen to.
Goodbye all and spread the word!

Mafia-style federalism
(11:00)

Financial journalist and writer Filippo Astone's Passaparola

The Cosa Nostra and globalization
Good day to you all. My name is Filippo Astone, financial journalist and author of investigative books and I spend my time dealing with business, finance and Italian Capitalism. Italian financial journalism tends to either hustle, sanctifying business and capitalism, or immediately write them off as a dead loss. I, however, have always tried to point out their complexity and I think that the same counts for my latest offering, entitled “Senza Padrini: Resistere alle Mafie Fa Guadagnare” (literally “Without Godfathers: Resisting the Mafia pays dividends”). I took a look at this movement of Sicilian businessmen who are standing up against the Mafia, not for reasons of ethics, principles or heroism, but simply because the Mafia groups are hampering economic development and are therefore harming their respective companies. I have intertwined this story with the destructive economic impact that the Mafia groups have had on Italy. Currently everyone is talking about the financial crisis, yet they conveniently forget that one of the main causes of our decline and our impoverishment has been the so-called Mafia economy. Following the massacres, the Cosa Nostra is in decline and today the Calabrian ‘Ndragheta is the most important of all the Mafia groups. After the 1993 massacres and the Falcone and Borsellino murders, the authorities applied some pretty major investigative and repressive pressure and, at the same time, the international drug traders dropped the Cosa Nostra and began hooking up with ‘Ndragheta instead. The Columbians no longer did business with the Sicilians but turned instead to the Calabrians. If the truth be told, this kind of entrepreneurship that is independent of the protection rackets and free of the Mafia has always existed. Few people know, for example, that there is a small mechanical engineering hub in Caltanissetta that even manages to export its products. The one who began this revolution, together with Ivan Lo Bello, is Antonello Montante, who runs a company called MSA (Mediterranean Shock Absorbers), a company that manufactures special shock absorbers and exports some 70% of what it produces. The shock absorbers used on the “Freccia Rossa” (literally Red Arrow) trains are manufactured by MSA and they therefore don’t need any favours from the politicians or reliance on territorial connections. The new climate created by the decline of the Cosa Nostra and the greater opportunities provided by globalization have benefited these kinds of businesses, which would otherwise have had to remain in the shadows. To this we must add the characters of the individuals who finally realised that it was possible for them to rebel, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was the fact that a mafia boss who had concentrated the bulk of his power in the Sicilian branch of Confindustria is now sitting in jail. That individual goes by the name of Pietro Di Vincenzo and he was a major Sicilian construction mogul, as well as being the President of the Caltanissetta branch of Confindustria and President of the Sicilian Construction Federation. The rebellion against the Mafia began in Caltanissetta as a rebellion against Di Vincenzo himself, instigated by a group of young businessmen who wanted one of their members at the head of the local branch of Confindustria but were being hampered by the Mafia. Then, at the same time, there was also the petrochemical hub at Gela, which also happens to be one of ENI’s biggest plants and which had pretty much become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the mafia-run businesses. We mustn’t forget that Gela was one of the biggest Mafia hot-spots in the entire universe. It is no longer so after this rebellion because, in 2007, Engineer Rispoli, the son of a magistrate, came in as the new head of the Gela petrochemical hub whose turnover amounted to quite a few billion Euro. The latter decided to no longer give the business to the Mafia companies, to introduce certain controls on suppliers and to ensure that everything became legal. In the Province of Caltanissetta, of which Gela is a part, Eni controls some 40% of the votes. They introduced a legalisation policy which required all ENI supplier companies to comply with certain rules and so all the crooked and Cosa Nostra suppliers were weeded out, also thanks to the fact that Gela’s legendary Mayor at that time was Rosario Crocetta, who backed these changes because Di Vincenzo was not only a Mafia boss and a construction mogul, but as a construction entrepreneur he also controlled the Sicilian desalination plants. What was happening was that Gela did not have enough water notwithstanding the fact that the town had invested millions of Euro in desalination plants, money that had been paid over to Di Vincenzo and so, for this reason Crocetta decided to oppose Di Vincenzo.

The entrepreneurs take to the Web to save themselves
Montante, Lo Bello, Venturi and Catanzaro were living under constant escort at the time but, as expected, there was obviously a reaction so these entrepreneurs adopted a strategy to take to the Web. Libero Grassi was killed because he was isolated and therefore, by hitting him, the problem would be solved. There are so many of them that even if one of them were to be killed, the network would carry on. Then, in any event, there is the additional benefit of the repressive pressure being applied, which has become extremely heavy indeed. Currently Sicily has a heavy concentration of the best magistrates and the best law and order officers and now, whenever a particularly talented policeman is identified, he is invariably sent down to Sicily. On the one hand this is a good thing, however, on the other hand it could also be a bad thing since perhaps it implies that the less well-trained and less talented people are being left up in the North so, given that the Mafia groups are busy invading the North (for example Asti Province) they are finding it easier to get established there. Up North, people find it culturally more difficult to admit the pervasiveness of the Mafia economy, so much so, in fact, that the directive issued by Confindustria Mezzogiorno (literally the Southern Chapter of Confindustria), chaired by Cristiana Coppola, which makes it obligatory to expel or suspend anyone found to be colluding with the Mafia and was made compulsory for all the southern branches of Confindustria, was instead made voluntary for the northern branches of Confindustria and, to date, only the Assolombarda and Imperia branches have complied. The Veneto and Piedmont branches of Confindustria have no intention whatsoever of complying with a provision that would be relatively simple to comply with if the truth be told. The reason for this is totally cultural in that there is a total refusal to admit that this problem is indeed occurring. This refusal to admit to uncomfortable or negative realities due to factors such as strength of character or morals is the root of many ills. For example, the companies... the Mafia groups (above all the ‘Ndragheta) somehow manage to worm their way into struggling companies because they simply take them over, initially by lending them money. However, any businessman who accepts these loans actually refuses to face reality, namely that he should rather be taking the company books to Court and, instead, he chooses to resort to accepting this so-called help that will inevitably lead to his own demise. There are even some dramatic cases where businessmen have initially let these mafia guys in so that they could borrow money from them in order to keep their struggling businesses afloat, only to later find that their companies have been taken away from them and they were then obliged to act as Mafia agents, quiet little northern businessmen who have now let their companies go and have become mere bookkeepers, accountants and proxies for the Mafia. Mafia terminals, now that’s the right term.

The Mafia chooses local politics
The crisis is extremely beneficial to the criminals because, as it is, these Mafia businesses distort the markets and ensure that the market rewards the worst performers since the Mafia business has the competitive advantage represented by privileged relations with the politicians, the threat of physical force and easy access to money. In an economy that is in crisis, the worst performer with these advantages has a much better chance of weathering the crisis. Not only that, but as the number of companies in difficulty or with a lack of access to capital increases, so the Mafia groups have more companies to which they can offer easy credit. Companies that are apparently healthy but are in fact controller by the Mafia have more cash available than other companies that are perhaps being sold off by the banks that have shut off their lifelines, so the Mafia-controlled companies find it easier to weather the storms.
At this moment in time, besides National politics where they are also active because of their need to influence the major investment decisions and judicial policies, the Mafia groups are even more interested in gaining power at the local level. The Mafia groups’ core business depends strongly on local politics. The movement on the ground, which is where their main strength lies, really needs local politics. They need the construction contracts, and now there is a new line of business in which the Mafia groups are very strong, namely wind power, which requires permits from politicians and is really becoming big business. The minute any piece of farming land is equipped with wind power generators or solar panels, it’s value suddenly increases tremendously, hence the need for these political contacts. The risk is that this federalism that is being vaunted as the solution to all our problems may indeed become a reality as a kind of Mafia-style federalism.
I would like to mention the names of a number of these entrepreneurs who are members of this network that is so tightly meshed that it is impossible to break the bonds. In addition to Antonello Montante and Ivan Lo Bello, there are also Ivo Blandin in Messina, Davide Durante in Trapani, who has had the courage to make 30 suspensions in an area where Matteo Messina Denaro, Giuseppe Albanese in Palermo, Domenico Bonaccorsi in Catania, Rosario Marù, who is Montante’s deputy in Gela, and Giuseppe Catanzaro, who is President of Confindustria in Agrigento and state witness in one of the more dangerous legal inquests against a Mafia boss who was threatening him. As entrepreneur and President of the Agrigento businessmen, Catanzaro headed up the turnaround and engineered some 37 suspensions and expulsions. Pippo Callipo, the man behind the Calippo Tuna brand and special commissioner for Confindustria in Reggio Calabria, has managed to make more than 30 suspensions and expulsions and then there is Alberto Meomartini who, as head of the only large Confindustria branch in the North, insisted on complying with the protocol that includes the expulsion of anyone found to be colluding with the Mafia.