The hamster wheel
(15:00)

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.

The Pitchforks are once again moving northwards through Italy - Pino Aprile
(12:00)

Author and journalist Pino Aprile’s Passaparola.

Producing without any guarantees
Hello there to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s Blog. My name is Pino Aprile and I am a journalist and author. I deal mainly with what is happening to Southern Italy and why the South currently seems to be harbouring a lot of resentment and indeed, let’s go as far as using certain words that may sound somewhat exaggerated, inexplicable anger. One example of this is the Pitchfork Movement. There is this instant revolt, involving tens of thousands of people down in Sicily, that has effectively blocked Sicily, is busy spreading to the other southern regions of the continent and we don’t know that it will stop there. Our immediate reaction has been to ask “But who are the politicians or the movements that are behind these people? Surely the Mafia is busy making its move, infiltrating, etc.”, which is a somewhat consolatory and reassuring way of explaining what is going on. I met a number of the Pitchfork Movement’s leaders about a year and a half ago and I was so taken aback at what they told me about their situation that I decided there and then to include it as a chapter in my last book, entitled “Giù al Sud” (Literally Down in the South) . But what exactly did they tell me? What is happening down in the South involves many different groups, types and classes of people, indeed all sorts of people, although the ones I was talking to at the time were produce and livestock farmers. What happened was that these farmers had modernised their businesses by investing more money and thereby keeping people employed and ensuring that produce and livestock would be produced, quite rightly so, in accordance with the Central Government and Regional Administrations’ health and tax regulations, but what happened then? They were producing with all those wonderful guarantees, but when their products got to market, with all those additional costs, they still had to compete and obviously they could not compete against similar products produced in areas where there are no such Regional and Government regulations.
For example, the “ciliegino” (Cherry tomatoes) that are produced down in Sicily subject to three-thousand different guarantees are marketed at the same price as the Cherry tomatoes grown in Egypt where a farmer’s daily labour cost is around two Euro. Quite clearly, under such circumstances our producers are dead in the water because their revenues don’t even cover their production costs. As a result, they have accumulated a huge amount of debt, particularly with the Receiver of Revenue, the Department of Welfare and Pensions and with the State. Instead of addressing the problem and resolving it in conjunction with the producers, the Government simply presented the producers with a bill to be paid. However, the producers did not have the wherewithal to pay these bills, so the Department of Welfare and Pensions simply sold the debt on to debt collection agencies for around 10% of the actual value of the outstanding debt and so the producers, in other words the debtors, said “If you had told us that you would accept a mere 10% of what we owed you, then perhaps we would also have found some way to pay you”. At that point the new debt holders simply declared the companies in default and so they were put up for auction and sold off to the highest bidder. They were telling me that over the past three years, some 50-thousand of the 200-thousand companies in Sicily landed up like this, and then we are surprised when their anger explodes in this way?

The education system reform that conveniently forgot about Quasimodo
Having gathered various views from all sorts of people around me, although I cannot draft an entire encyclopaedia I can at least try to tell you about some very different ones amongst them. There is an awful lot of dissatisfaction regarding our schools at the moment, but particularly regarding the schools down in the South. What never made the news headlines at the time was that the then inauspicious Minister of Public Education, Minister Gelmini cut around half a billion Euro from the budget destined for the upliftment of the poorer schools of the South and then proceeded to share the money out throughout the Country and then, as if that weren’t enough, Gelmini also proceeded to make a number of extremely disparaging statements about the students and the teachers in the South. According to her, all the teachers in the South were in dire need of supplementary training courses, each and every last one of them. That’s rich, coming from a woman who took an extra three years to complete her degree! But then, for example, the Ministry that she managed issued an edict, the subject guidelines for Italian literature courses for secondary schools, in other words, how the literature of the 1900’s is to be taught, which listed the names of the approved Italian authors, poets and writers. All good and well, however, not a single one of these approved authors, poets and writers were southerners, in other words, according to the Ministry of Public Education, throughout the 20th Century, a very prolific Century at that, there was not a single poet or writer from the South who was worthy of being read by Italian students, not even a Nobel Prize winner such as Quasimodo, now that’s total madness! Now I don’t mean to sound racist in any way but what I am about to say is purely meant as an example. Just imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed and a Minister of Public Education from Palermo, a Sicilian in other words, in providing guidelines for how the literature of the 1900’s should be taught, were to eliminate all the names of writers from the North from the list of approved writers, so no more Saba, no more Ungaretti and no more Pasolini, now that would equally be total madness! The best thing to do would be to call in the men with the white coats and ask them to “Please go and pick up the minister and take him/her somewhere where he/she can rest in peace!”.
Now, changing the topic completely, In Messina they told me that there are still two ongoing legal disputes regarding property confiscated from survivors of the 1908 earthquake, Italy really is a truly strange Country indeed! At that point I decided that I really wanted to find out what the hell happened after the Messina earthquake. The people of Messina know what happened and although they don’t speak about it very much, inside it’s eating away at them as they would say in Bolzano, but why? Well, in 1908 there was an earthquake. The town was destroyed, 2/3 of the town’s population was killed and what do you think was the first thing that the Italian Government did at the time? They tabled a proposal, which was subsequently voted on in Parliament, that the town of Messina be bombed, this is no joke! Never mind the fact that there were still survivors buried under the rubble at the time, they were seriously proposing to bomb the town of Messina right off the face of the earth, forever, and thus split the Palermo and Catania Provinces. Giolitti, who was hoping to stand for election in Messina, foiled their plans. Fortunately the proposal was subsequently defeated and 10-thousand “Bersaglieri” troops arrived in Messina with orders to shoot any looters and suspected looters, so they began to shoot the survivors.
Meanwhile, the very ones who were supposed to ensure law and order, in other words the soldiers, managed to get a post office put up right on the pier, reserved exclusively for them and prohibited to the survivors. So, while there was no way for any of the survivors to contact say an uncle in Florence to ask that blankets be sent down to them, only the soldiers could use that post office to send between 80 and 100 parcels a day to family members back home, containing jewellery and money stolen from the dead and the survivors. There are documents relating to this racism that are enough to make one’s hair stand on end! Added to this growing resentment the Lega’s insults depicting Neapolitans as “rats to be exterminated”, Romans as “pigs” and southerners in general as “Mediterranean scum” that are being resuscitated, so now all the ill-feeling is once again resurfacing and adding up. So, on the one hand there are the protests of the produce farmers and livestock farmers and on the other hand the fuse-lighting flame, all that tinder that has lit the fires, which are now spreading. That’s what’s happening down in the South. No one is listening to the people of the South. They have tried in every way they know how to make themselves heard and understood, but to no avail!

Italians, get to know each other and stand united
Whenever Italy’s cheese producers are facing a crisis, the Government invariably uses the money destined for the South to bail out the parmesan producers and when there is no money left to bail out the Sardinian Pecorino producers because the available money was spent where it wasn’t needed, they then proceed to have the Sardinian Pecorino producers truncheoned and the Sardinians heads beaten in, and you see this difference everywhere.
When more Cipe funds become available, they proceed to introduce a totally unnecessary new high-speed railway link between Genoa and Milan while at the same time cancelling all the direct South-North train connections. Here in Italy these days, in 2012, it takes longer to travel up from the South than it did back in 1900 and there are 1000 kilometres of railway line less than what there were around 70 years ago. Shall we sit down and discuss this calmly and rationally? Otherwise what happens? What happens is that I carry on hearing that by writing about these things I am stirring things up, but since when? A book is like a finger pointing at the moon, so watch the moon and not the finger. I was born in February and my father was not a carpenter. I am merely a journalist who is trying to point out to the least attentive part of the Country that we are making a whole horde of mistakes. If these mistakes keep on building up, the people won’t be able to take it anymore and something very bad is going to happen, something very bad indeed, and it is going to be bad for everyone. No one should think that they are going to be able to save themselves somehow, or simply because they have somehow managed to clamber out onto the rocks and are now kicking those who are still in the sea.
In the words of Don Milani, politics is all about "Sortirne insieme", in other words getting out of trouble together, otherwise no one gets out of it. The time has come for Italy ….. after having promised the South 20 million rifles, after having promised the South that the rats would be exterminated and all that other garbage, thereby allowing the government ministers to say these things and still remain in their posts, after having allowed the then Minister of Finance to take the funds destined for underutilised areas and spend them elsewhere. The l’Aquila earthquake cost the Country 4.5 billion and that 4.5 billion was taken entirely from the South. To be precise, 85% of those funds should, by law, have been used in the South and the remaining 15% in the North. Well, those funds used for the l’Aquila earthquake were taken away from the poorest 1/3 of Italy while only 15% was taken from the wealthiest 2/3 of Italy. This notwithstanding, Borgezio had the gall to insult the people of l’Aquila as if they were the football at the tip of the boot of Italy, as if he had personally contributed even a single Euro.
The title of this editorial is “passate parola” or spread the word and I think that there is no better way than word of mouth to inform people every time we notice some sort of discrimination, irrespective of whom is being discriminated against because, in any event, someone who discriminates always starts out by discriminating against someone in particular and then, bit by bit, he/she invariably moves on to others and in this way they end up making the Country ungovernable and set one Italian against another. If the truth be told, the Italians are far more united than what it may seem, although they know little or nothing about other Italians. Just ask a Sicilian what he knows about the Venetians. Venice was the longest lived republic in the history of man, yet all we find in the school history books are about ten lines between Marco Polo and the white flag flapping on the bridge. Equally, how much do the Venetians know about the Sicilians?

The landing strip
(10:30)

Alessandro Bergonzoni's
passaparola

The first revolution is a revelation
Hello to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. I am pleased and honoured to be amongst you.
You may be an actor, an author or an artist, but when you have finished your shows, your books, your exhibitions and your performances, what’s next? We have to start in the schools, although it is already way too late to start in the schools, it’s too late to start in the secondary schools and it’s far too late to start in the universities. We have to go to the primary schools, but it is already too late to start in the primary schools so we must start in the crèches, although even in the crèches it is already too late, so we have to start at conception, saying: listen, in order to be able to tell a “tale”, a story rather than a dogma because no dogma is preferable. At this historical or anti-historical moment, as the case may be, it is no longer possible to be happy merely doing one’s job and we now have to start doing other people’s jobs. We have to go to places where we are not wanted and not expected although I haven’t invented anything and there are others here who did it all before me and did it far better than me. We have to start going into the prisons and the hospitals, not only into the streets, and I must add that this is what interests me more than anything else. Since it’s not sufficient to do one’s own job, we have to start taking to the inner streets. I know that perhaps this audience at least partly agrees with what I’m saying, but the first revolution is indeed a revelation, namely to see how much I’m changing and then I take to the streets and start a revolution. However, first you have to figure out how responsible you are for an inner change, which I will call the gross internal change or gross internal product. We have very short landing strips and concepts such as economics, death, life, illness and racism are jumbo-concepts since Jumbos are extremely large aircraft that contain large numbers of passengers-ideas. In order to land, these concepts require huge landing strips. In order to land, a Jumbo needs numerous kilometres, but we have short landing strips, indeed extremely short landing strips for vertical landings only. We have to begin with an expansion that will then enable us to go out and revolutionise, and this devolution has already begun. You know more about this than I do since you are here listening and watching this blog. The artists narrate, they don’t compel nor educate, even though the idea of being able to tell a story in the background should be even stronger and more energetic. I would very much like to see the beginnings of a change, that every day and every minute of every day we start saying ….. because we are in fact voting every second and every minute of every day, when we look at a handicapped person, when we use water, when we waste stuff, when we curse something or someone, when we say “Poor bugger” to someone who has a tumour, we are voting, we are in the polling booth, so it is a continuous referendum all day long. I believe that inside ourselves, whether it be artistically, anthropologically or philosophically, we should not be afraid of these words.

Living deceased personalities
Inside of me I have my own internal Parliament, an internal government that has to create a culture every day and not leave this entirely to those who represent me, in other words some or other politician. Politics come later and it is very important indeed. Society also comes later, as does community spirit, and absurdly even ethics come later. First comes an internal revolution, a major change. Inside of you you have to have a mass of organs that vote, that choose an executive, the ones that then lead to growth, a kind of expansion, and that is what growth is all about, namely, no longer accepting being small, being short or being limited, no longer being happy with merely imitating, or parodying. I’m even telling the artist: "You must start changing your codes, changing your terminology and your rules, but internally. You have to start writing differently, you have to start looking elsewhere without forgetting "… This does not mean fleeing, not by any means, indeed it is like exploring a cave because it comes from within. The mafia problem is indeed a political problem, by all means, but as I have said before and now repeat without presumption, the mafia problem is also a problem of soul. When I talk of soul, I don’t mean religion, I mean an internal condition that, unless it changes, you cannot expect anything. So, go to the crèches and tell them how we can have a new kind of politician 30 years from now, a new kind of magistrate 30 years from now, a new kind of patient 30 years from now, a new kind of doctor 30 years from now or a new kind of teacher 30 years from now, that’s where you have to start working right now!
It is a form of mental prevention, a concept of hard work and great investment. The future generations get very little so that’s where you have to get to work to instil a different outlook. We’re lacking poets. Let me make a rhetorical statement. What I’m talking about is something poetic. In addition to a sense of justice and honesty, a managing director must also have a sense of poetry. If you are a well-rounded man, you will know instinctively what is right, what is wrong and what is illegal, and this knowledge comes from an internal mechanism that is not only the result of culture and anthropology, but also of additional growth. It is no longer possible to go on certain programmes and talk about ethics. We have realised this since they began stealing our savings, since they began robbing us and stealing our neurons. Intelligence and conscience is something else that has been stolen. This is another partly internal concept and it is from here that everything begins. Then, when we have changed, then we can take to the streets. I think it was Gandhi, whom I would like to greet right now because I believe he too is listening to us now, who said that there are live people who are already dead and dead people who are still alive.
It was important to mention these things in the wrong places, but what are these wrong places? All of them, after all, where can you do so? Where can you do so within the family? Where can you do so within the schools? In the hospitals. You shouldn’t only talk about illness when it affects you, you shouldn’t only talk about the abuse of women if you yourself are a woman or if you have a daughter and you shouldn’t only talk about road safety or Saturday night vehicle accident deaths if you have young children, although you must in any event. I’m tired of people only talking about cases of medical malpractice because they have experienced it first-hand. I should personally be doing something to address the problem. That’s what internalisation is all about. I should be identifying with the problem, participating and getting into it. These are not just words because words that are not backed by actions are merely like the points o fan iceberg so there must be revelation and then revolution, not acceptance!

Act internally
We want to forget the slogans. Young people need to dream more. Young people don’t dream, they merely desire things, want things, it foolish ambition. What I’m talking about are needs and necessities laced with some lack of reality. It may seem to be a lack of reality but in fact it is not, it is merely a case of knowing and expecting more of reality. I can no longer appear on a programme with the same old routines and use the same old words, the same old ways of interpreting things and thus addressing the issues satirically or parodistically, I simply have to change. We have to recreate re-creation, we have to create, invent something new and that’s what I expert of a student or a child in the crèche who starts examining a body, perhaps even a body without arms, who starts looking at the skin, the colours, the habits and the person’s way of being, starting with a judgement of that individual, and who begins to realise that there is not only one type of religion, one type of medicine, one type of body, one type of woman, but that he/she needs to expand their view. These are huge landing strips and huge concepts and that’s why I say that, given the prison scandals and the healthcare scandals, I cannot continue to think only about what is happening to me and when it is happening. I have already been affected by each and every one of the healthcare scandals and each and every one of the prison scandals even though I may not have personally borne the brunt of those scandals. By now we have realised that if a tree falls in the Amazon, we will soon feel the effects here. Metaphorically speaking, someone might say “But are there really trees that are that tall?" That has nothing to do with it. It’s a concept that states that energy is transferred and even though you may be sitting far away, you are nevertheless very close to whatever is going on so you mustn’t only talk about the news because the germ of Kronac is the real killer, so let me say it again and again, ad nauseum, to the point that I’m sick of saying it. The fact is that we constantly talk about communication, but the real issue is knowledge, not the manner in which we communicate. I don’t care how we speak in public or whether we use more or fewer conjunctives, what I want to see is some sort of meaning in what is being said, some sort of idea, some sort of depth, some meat on the bone, a kind of anti-vegetarian thought process!
At this point this is not a hope because I have no hope whatsoever. They say that hope is the last to die, but I couldn’t be bothered about who or what is the last to die. What I want to know is who will be the first to be re-born. Every day I see the last one to die. The television set must remain off. You can watch it but don’t ever turn it on! I’ve said it millions of times. At this point we have to follow a different path. The problem lies in the small things, the things that seem innocuous and simple, but the little things are not innocuous, they are very serious indeed, and also criminal, so one must first act internally. This is not a waste of time. Reveal, tell and talk about it and thanks for your landing strip, which from here looks plenty long enough anyway!

The new racism
(11:00)

Historian and author David Bidussa’s passaparola,

Racism, a way of life
First of all I would like to say hello to all the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. My name is David Bidussa and I am a student of the History of ideas, which may seem to be a rather strange discipline. In the old days it would have been called the History of political doctrines, but now it is known as the social history of ideas. Certain people were quick to shout racism when just last December certain things happened that were certainly bloody, violent, undoubtedly discriminatory and that displayed some decidedly racist undertones. Many people spoke of racism while others took offence at the use of this term. Certain other people claimed that our legislation makes no provision for any form of ethnic, religious or cultural division and that it is therefore improper to speak of racism since during the last century racism was merely an episode or a passing phenomenon in the history of Europe and even in the history of this somewhat tainted Country of ours.
There are two ways of remembering things: an event sticks in my mind, I memorise it and should the same thing with the very same features occur again, it means that it is the same thing. Otherwise, I pick up some pieces, I think about them and reflect on them because not all phenomena are precisely the same. I tend to go for the latter option, the one that picks up a number of pieces and attempts to put them together somehow so as to make some sense of them. However, in order to put the pieces together, we have to have some sort of memory and not allow ourselves to be afraid that, if we use certain words, then those words immediately relate to certain images that are fixed in our minds. The word “racism” should not necessarily immediately evoke memories of extermination camps, voyages and forced transportation of people. It should not necessarily imply images of people being uprooted from certain places. Racism can mean many things. It was an ideology and in some cases a way of life, long before it became a political theory. I will try to list some factors that created a cultural condition of racist conviction, rather than a racist ideology in a certain European Country many years ago. A country that had high levels of unemployment, where there was a strong feeling that the country’s economic crisis had caused it to become second-rate, that there was no future for the younger generations and that the middle class was being totally penalised as regards its social and political relevance and, above all, where it was felt that the legislation penalised the middle class with regard to economic and political decision making. A Country in which regional independence was extremely strong, movements were strictly controller, there was little internal op position and the concept of community was based on blood bonds. A Country in which, at that time of economic crisis, many members of the extreme left crossed the floor to the extreme right and the thoughts of many members of the extreme right turned to violence.
A Country in which the feeling was that there was no other way but to forcibly take back the Country that seemed to be at the service of immigrants who were deemed to be foreigners and invaders and where the locals had become second-class citizens. Now let’s try to work out what country that was. It wasn’t Nazi Germany, nor was it fascist Italy. It was a Country with a free Parliament, political parties that battled each other in Parliament, where there was the right to strike and freedom of the press: this was France back in the 1930s. A Country that had its own literature, theatre and a great history of art, literature and culture. Racism does not necessarily occur because it is legislated or because there is a particular ideology. Racism is born when there is extreme hardship that is simply ignored, where politics doesn’t intervene and just lets things run their course, where public anger is somehow exploited and, above all, when a downward spiral begins and no one bothers to stop and reflect and everything seems to just happen automatically. Well, in some ways I believe that this is a snapshot of the situation in our Country today. The question is “How did it end in France in the 30s?”. It ended with a military collapse preceded by a cultural and social collapse. A belief that there was no future, and this is an issue that is very close to home here in Italy today. We are not obliged to follow the same route as that taken 70 years ago, but we should be aware that racist is not merely a product of ideology. It is not a conviction that comes about by reading books or the widespread distribution of newspapers. It is a feeling of having been excluded from History and knowing that we were part of that History once upon a time, that we were somebody and that we once had a role to play in that History!

A Country seeking protection
When we read in the newspapers that, suddenly, certain people are coming out of their houses and getting the feeling that there is no room for them either in the present or the future, and a feeling that they have to take back something they have lost, then we have to believe that we are not living in a Country that has entirely lost its senses but rather one that is at risk, indeed seriously at risk, one that can and will pick itself up again if it can somehow experience not only an economic recovery but also a recovery of pride rather than a mere material recovery. The France of the 1930s was living with its eyes looking back. There was a feeling that its past was glorious, that its present was uncertain and its future was terrible and, above all, there was a belief that there would be no tomorrow! Today we stand a chance if we are able to reflect on the way we are and avoid dismissing it as some sort of deviance, of madness, of wickedness, lack of control or uncontrolled emotions. Each and every one of us sometimes does something rash, often a generous act, not because we expect to get something in return, but simply because it is part of our human nature. We can either obviously be totally intolerant of someone’s presence or we can be welcoming, of course … it depends on many factors and on whether we are able to analyse a situation without always having to be right, but asking ourselves why we are in the situation we are, why we have failed economically, why we don’t have a cultural, scientific and technical status in keeping with the Country’s status, like 50 years ago, why we don’t have an education system that works, why we no longer have a healthcare system that works and why our society has declined, well ..... it’s not only a question of resources. Often it’s a question of being there, of knowing that that thing that you are part of affects you and you are responsible for building it. For a long time we have shied away from this. We have had the feeling that it had nothing to do with us, something that we never thought about in our daily lives, something that was given to us once and was no longer an issue. Now it has once again become an issue and it has led us to ask ourselves why and wherefore we continue to stay together!
Let’s try to draw up a list of factors that differentiate a Country in crisis from one that is growing. A Country in crisis is one where unemployment levels are high, young people see no future for themselves, the Country remembers its past success and now instead faces the problem of slow growth. A Country whose political class is not working for the Country but rather for its own benefit rather than that of the citizens is a Country that no longer feels the need to live communally within a single territory but rather to need to get away because it does not feel protected, because it feels more protected by a neighbour than by a vision of nationhood. A Country that is experiencing a crisis of values, in which the distinction or difference between the left wing and the right wing are very far apart and technicians are viewed as aliens working towards a purpose that we don’t understand and that is not, in any event, at my service. A Country that, when it experiences all these conditions at the same time, becomes afraid, discouraged, in search of someone to provide comfort, so it is not an adult, it is a child Country, a Country that is seeking protection.
This is a factor that usually doesn’t lead to development and an increase in the level of political democracy, but rather to a search for an authoritarian control system because this will provide a certain level of certainty and safety so that people don’t have to worry about what is going to happen! Perhaps all these issues are affecting us. At some time in the History of Europe they affected another Country that is very close to us. They never had any racist legislation in the beginning, but they did later. They never had nor practiced discrimination in the beginning, indeed they had a large number of foreign residents and immigrants who were tolerated somewhat grudgingly. This was France, a Country that we have always held up as the epitome of liberty and that was never racist or bloodthirsty. In our minds it was other European Countries that were racist! This is something that we should really think about! So, spread the word!

Passaparola - The meaning of life
(18:00)

Your videos on: "Passaparola - The meaning of ..." (4)

Send in your video

Moni Ovadia's Passaparola
My name is Moni Ovadia and this is my first time on Beppe Grillo’s glorious blog. I must admit that I’m very honoured and excited about being here. All of us Italians owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to Beppe Grillo and his associates for everything that they have done for all of us. Apart from getting us more committed to a particular idea and a particular view, what Beppe Grillo’s MoVement, and he personally have done for us is a truly great service for this Country because he has had the necessary strength, courage and perseverance to reveal and unmask many unspeakable shameful issues. Without him and without the MoVement that initially blossomed around him as individual but that now has its own identity and independence, in many cases we would never have found out about those issues, nor would we ever have had the weapon that this MoVement and what it represents for us in terms of not allowing, or indeed even preventing the politicians from hiding their misdeeds.

Inside an asphyxiating economistic cage
In the great hubbub and the rumour mongering of the media, hidden in amongst the myriad of speeches being made with the excuse of the emergency, and I believe that the emergency is just another excuse for the powers that be to justify certain things that would otherwise be unjustifiable, but since there is indeed an emergency, we have to justify our actions, so they keep talking about the emergency, they quote figures, data, employment, unemployment, etc and, as if they ever did so in earlier times, they have tended to avoid talking about the real underlying issues, the issues that are important to the people. No one seems to ask themselves any common sense questions any more. I believe that one of the biggest failures of our society has been the destruction of common sense. We have been left to float in a pool of meanings without any visible horizon. Everything is asphyxiating, everything simply floats by and I think that the real issue is “what does living life really mean? What is the meaning of a human life or the meaning of a society on this Earth? Why are we here? How can we continue to be here?”
We have become progressively more confined to an asphyxiating economistic cage where all that matters are the economic figures and the first thing we are always told is how the markets are doing and how the markets are reacting. At least in theory, we live in democratic systems in which we actively participate in a ritual that is becoming increasingly senseless, specifically the elections, in the belief that we are appointing individuals to govern us on the basis of a programme. More often than not, we have no idea what their real programme is, but merely what they say on the television. In reality, the majority of the citizen voters don’t have the cultural background or even any of the basic tools required to read a programme and to be able to differentiate between what is the real programme and what is mere propaganda. What we hear is election propaganda, not genuine election programmes. Then we go and take part in this meaningless ritual that is the election, only to subsequently realise that, after all is said and done, our destiny will not actually be decided in total or even in part by the individuals that we put there to govern us, but that there is a conglomeration of economic powers known as “the markets”, which dictate the economic future of a country, since everything these days is all about economics, and even though we did not elect the markets, we are nevertheless subject to them. This in itself already proves that we are not living in a true democracy but rather in a very formal and essentially fictitious democracy, particularly here in Italy. Berlusconian Italy has become the cloaca of Europe’s pseudo-democratic systems, the sewerage drain, or indeed the cesspit of the most ridiculous and ill-conceived democracies, however, this is a general problem. Now that the sun appears to be setting on the Berlusconi era in this Country, we still don’t know why it has somehow managed to catalyse ancient failings in the Italian people and Italian politics. Berlusconism is merely a symptom, but the problem is actually something totally different. It is a conglomeration of ailments that combine to form an illness that includes conformism, servility, opportunism and a “You have to understand that I have a family to support” attitude that initially led Italy to dabble with fascism and now, 40 years later, with Berlusconism. So that’s where we actually need to look. But to find a deep-seated illness in a society, we have to address the issue of common sense, What is a society actually? I discovered that one of our founding fathers, Giuseppe Mazzini, whom I didn’t think much of and whom I viewed as a somewhat unseemly political leader during the “Risorgimento” era, which was supposedly a nationalist revolutionary era, wrote all about duties rather than rights, both in his book and his manifesto. He talked about duties to a population made up largely of farmers and manual labourers worn down by a succession of brutal, arbitrary, aristocratic and oppressive rulers to whom they were mere subjects.

The centrality of the human being
That’s why I never bothered to delve any more deeply into the history of Mazzini the man. Then, purely by accident, especially since no one ever taught me any of this at school, I discovered that Mazzini actually had some pretty disturbing things to say about the whole idea of nationalism and homeland. Mazzini said that a homeland and a nation are not defined by their borders but rather by a social fabric in which there are no privileges and one in which all men are equal before the law. A homeland, therefore, is a place where there is dignity in hard work and where every human being is given the opportunity to utilise his/her abilities to build him/herself a life that is equal to that of other people by right. This is common sense, otherwise what is a country anyway? For example, what does a country like Italy mean for a man such as Berlusconi? His culture? What is Berlusconi’s Italy actually? A bunch of companies that want to be free to carry on their business as they see fit, even if that means embezzling, breaking the law and evading tax! How on earth did such an Italy manage to come about under the very noses of the Italian people? Well, because the concept of belonging to a Country, to a social fabric, in the sense that was built into our Republic’s Constitution, has been totally lost on a very large section of the Italian citizens who are so in such bad shape as regards the kind of citizenship that guarantees you social and political dignity that they don’t even know what Article 1 of our Constitution says, namely “Our foundation will be that Italy is a democratic Republic based on work” because we can only talk of democracy if there is work and there is a certain dignity in work, common sense. However, this has been totally destroyed in favour of flexibility, sub-contracting, temporary work, the raising of the retirement age and the bosses’ interests.
So Italy is a democratic Republic founded on the principle of work, common sense, but the article in question doesn’t stop there. In fact, it goes on to state that “The sovereignty belongs to the people, who shall exercise it in the manner and within the limits specified by the Constitution”. How many Italians are actually aware that it is not the people who reign supreme, but the Constitution, precisely in order to avoid any populist tendencies that could turn this Country back to a dictatorship. Silvio Berlusconi and his courtiers and thugs have done nothing other than repeatedly talk about the sovereignty of the people without even realising precisely what they were saying, or perhaps they did but certainly the people that voted for them actually believed them, but why? Well, because they don’t understand the deeper meaning of that on which our democracy was founded.
Our democracy harks back to something even further back in time, indeed back to the origins of monotheism when the idolatry of power was defeated by storytelling. All human beings are equal because they have only one father and one mother. Given that God is both father and mother, this becomes a weighty concept indeed, a long walk of faith that destroys the non sense of power, namely oppression. It is a concept that governs man as an individual and replaces it with the centrality of man and of life, and the dignity, sacredness, sanctity, equality and independence of every human being, rather than power.
But this concept is something we never talk about unless it’s at some religious or literature Festival, but we never hear anyone discussing this on television. When we hear people talking about work, this concept should lead us to talk about the worker, the human being behind the work. All we ever hear about are the burden on the pension system, the temporary lay-off fund and obviously the pros and cons of Article 18, but what about the people? We never talk about man, or what life is all about? Shouldn’t work be a time and place where a human being fulfils a plan for himself, for his family and for society? Not any more it isn’t! All we talk about these days are numbers, not people. We have been sitting back and watching the priapic machinations of a tiny little man for the past 17 years, but we have done absolutely nothing for the people of this Country and of our European Union. Does this mean that we are not interested in human life? That we’re not interested in the life of the planet? Do we become subversives if we dare to demand that human life, life on this planet, animal life, plant life, our habitat and building our future be put at the top of the agenda? We are not even able to continue to plant new trees for the future. Our farmers used to plant trees even though neither they nor their children would ever get to pick the fruit, but only their grandchildren. We no longer seem to be able to do this, but why? Well, simply because we have altered the very meaning of life.

The lack of culture
Steve Jobs was a man with a true depth of vision. Whatever anybody says about him, he once said that death is a natural part of life because death brings new life. Death makes room for new life and the fact is that new life evolves in order to complete its own cycle and to have its own meaning.
So if this happens, this must be the meaning of life. Young people make their own way, but when undignified elderly people pump themselves full, like balloons and try to have the sexual prowess o fan eighteen year old, or rather they merely claim to have it because in actual fact they don’t, clearly this spells disaster for any form of inter-generation alliance, which should be a form of handover of the banner if you will, a collaboration in which each individual fulfils his specific role. It’s not a case of “Make way for the youth”. It’s merely a case of restoring the alliance between the generations because that is common sense and that is what gives some sort of meaning to life.
We have got to a point where our sense of existence has been totally short-circuited so that certain apparently virtuous social, political and economic phenomena can occur, but now the time has come to let common sense prevail, to talk about what makes sense and set the common sense horizon where we want it to be, because otherwise we will once again fall into the same old traps. The problem is not the berlusconism here in Italy because Berlusconi is 75 years old and, although he may still get to 85 or 90 years of age, he is bound to go sooner or later. The problem is that Berlusconi was able to do what he did, and the even more real problem is the up and coming politicians. Do you really think they are going to immediately introduce a new law to control conflicts of interest? Will they bring in a new Information law? Will they put cultural issues at the very top of their political agenda? I ask this because the real issues are all about culture, not politics. Berlusconism was first and foremost a cultural issue. Berlusconi imposed his own television subculture, the boobs and bums culture and all that kind of thing on the Italians. After that, winning the elections was an absolute cinch! And the opposition was totally unprepared to oppose this type of culture because issue of culture is nowhere to be seen on their agenda. The cultural issue is the mother of all issues because there is clearly a problem with the political culture and the economic culture and not only with the “court” culture.
I always say: “Take Dante, the melodrama, the beautiful monuments, the Renaissance, etc away from Italy, take away our cinema and Fellini and sell them to the Japanese so that they are no longer ours, and what will be left of Italy then? With all due respect to our industries? What is the metal bar of Brescia? Is this what Italy is made of? We have gotten to the point where a Minister of the Republic had the gall to say that you can’t put Dante on a sandwich and, worst of all, there was no public outcry whatsoever. If a French Minister of the Republic were to say that you can’t put Rassin or Proust on a sandwich, he would no longer have been able to show his face in public.
So, it is the common sense and the culture issues that allow us to provide the Italian people with the critical tools that will enable them to make informed choices because, clearly, there is a huge section of the population that currently doesn’t have the critical tools with which to assess what is happening, and that therefore vote on the basis of the candidates’ smiles or the horrendous crap that they speak, simply because they have the television channels at their disposal. I always jokingly say, and it really is only jokingly, that if I had had Berlsuconi’s means at my disposal, within a mere two or three years I would have had the communist flag flapping in the breeze over the Vatican, and with the Pope’s blessing at that. Now obviously that was a wisecrack and a joke, but why has all of this been allowed to happen? Well, because the political classes lacked the cultural and the critical assessment tools to understand what the most critical issue of all the critical issues really was, and still today we talk about the berluconism festival, but nothing is said about a law to counteract conflict of interests, which is something that should be under discussion. But that’s not all, what about a Media law that would prevent one individual from having so much power over the media, and why? Well, because we are still relying on improvisation and emergencies and we simply don’t have that common sense horizon that enables one to think about the laws that one has to introduce in order to build a horizon of dignity and respect for the equality of all citizens before the law.
I thank you for your hospitality and I sincerely hope that this will not be my last time here with you.

Passaparola - The people of the Val di Susa simply cannot lose
(20:00)

Property tax, Municipal property tax on first homes, a rise in retirement age and a reduction in the number of public servants, these are the most likely measures that will be introduced by the incoming Monti government. The 22 billion of the TAV high-speed train project, together with the further billions to be wasted on useless works like the Genoa CANAL and the Milan Expo all add up to the 35-odd billion Euro budget that we will be hit with. So why not start by canning all these costs that are burdening the population? The Country’s citizens cannot be squeezed like lemons simply in order to fatten up the political parties and the lobbies. We have to export the Val di Susa model, in other words information and recognition of human rights, throughout the whole of Italy, from Genoa through to Milan. Mr. Revelli is here to give us some good news today, namely that the TAV high-speed railway will never get through!

Interview with Marco Revelli, Italian sociologist and historian.

Forecast cost increase of 600%
Warm greetings to all the friends of Passaparola. Today we’re going to talk about the TAV, and the article is masculine because the acronym stands for “Treno ad Alta Velocità” (literally “High Speed Train”), Which I’m sure you all know about by now. The TAV is an exercise in futility from a transportation point of view, harmful from an environmental point of view and totally unsustainable from an economic and financial point of view.
All the figures have already been quoted, re-quoted and repeated and are now public knowledge and available to anyone who may care to go to the website of Alp-Info, this Country’s most important agency that monitors the flow of passengers and, more importantly, the flow of goods across the Alps. According to those who originally came up with this folly, in the early nineties that now infamous Turin – Lyon railway line carried a few million tons of goods across the border. Supposedly, the number of trains that carried those few million tons of freight at that time was set to increase so much during the first two decades of the new century that they would overwhelm the old railway line, supposedly shooting up to more than 20 million tons per year. This would therefore make this major enterprise absolutely essential, namely cutting a 53 or 56Km-long hole through the mountain and then go through yet more tunnels, another twenty or maybe thirty kilometres of tunnels, in order to enable at least 30 or 40 million tons of freight to be moved. However, those calculations were unfounded because they were based on a peak numbers rather than the trend. They used the peak flows of freight, but not only has the flow of freight not increased at all since then, but has indeed declined significantly. At the moment, the line is in fact currently only carrying some 2.5 million tons. It could be said that the current economic crisis is at least partly to blame for this state of affairs, so let’s say that without the current crisis, the existing line would perhaps be carrying 3 or 3.5 million tons of freight, yet this would still only amount to about 1/6th of the existing railway line’s carrying capacity, the one that would cost little or nothing to update a little. Road transportation of freight has also declined somewhat, but why? Well, because there has been a structural decline in the East – West traffic flow, in other words between France and Italy. The major traffic flows these days are North - South, connecting Italy to the centre, the locomotive of Europe. The French and Italian economies are highly stable, mature economies and there is thus a structural decline in the flow of heavy goods. We are able to provide services because we have now entered the era of intangible assets, but while materials goods will continue to be shipped, the quantities will continue to decline.
The TAV project is sheer folly, born in a different century, in a different context and in a different economy, yet they nevertheless continue to push the idea. It is also a very destructive project from an environmental point of view, but I don’t want to belabour this point because anyone who goes onto the No TAV website will find an abundance of documentary evidence. Millions and millions of tons of material are being removed in order to create that crazy 53km-long tunnel that cuts right through a mountain that nobody knows what it may contain. In the Val di Susa there is an abundance of uranium mines, as well as a large number of materials that are distinctly hazardous to human health, although I also don’t wish to belabour this point, so let’s just consider these millions of tons of spoil, which is the technical term, spoil that will allegedly be used as landfill in the valley, thereby changing the valley’s profile, creating dust and truly hazardous conditions.
Finally, the project is economically unsustainable. The overall cost has been estimated to be in the order of some 30 billion Euro, a small portion of which will be provided by the European Union. The rest of the money, however, will have to come directly from the Countries involved, namely France and Italy. The cost and the interest to service the necessary loans will put an additional burden on the State coffers and in the coming decades our children and grandchildren are going to be paying the price for this useless and hazardous project, which will cost around 16 to 20 billion Euro, assuming that the costs don’t escalate. However, the costs of the Turin – Milan high speed railway escalated by some 600% during its construction, and please note that this line was built on relatively level ground, with no tunnels and all it involved were a couple of river crossings and a couple of bridges. That was a very simple route indeed, yet the costs skyrocketed by 600%, so we can only imagine what the cost overruns are likely to be on a project that starts off by drilling a 53 kilometre tunnel through a mountain? This is something that is public, something that anyone with a modicum of interest can work out for themselves, yet our politicians and public administrators, backed by a large section of the press have insisted on demonising those opposed to the TAV project. If we read the newspapers we see that the anti-TAV movement has to be the most persecuted and hounded by a hidden yet extremely fierce Court of Inquisition working away behind the scenes.

The tangled web of politics and business
Any dissent is immediately punished, just think back to that little comment that Luca Mercalli made on the “Che Tempo che fa” television programme, and the agitated reaction that the comment elicited from the major dailies like La Stampa, La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera. The No TAV Movement is regularly and openly portrayed as the enemy, but why? Why this dogged determination to proceed at all costs with a project that is so patently useless, hazardous and unsustainable in any event? I think that what is happening in the Val di Susa is a general sign of the times, of what is driving the relationship between economics, politics and the media at this moment in time, and not only here in Italy either. It is a sign of what is happening throughout Europe and it can be broken down into three points: firstly, the existence of a dogma that is communicated in ideological terms, a libertarian, nay ultra-libertarian dogma communicated in ideological terms in the central halls of power and that then goes on to dictate policy in a purely mechanical manner. This dogma says that we have to do the kind of things that make large amounts of money go round, even if they are detrimental to society and social ties. The most important thing of all is profit and the biggest enemy of all are the people’s rights. In some ways, this is the logic by which the European Technocracy decided to create the major shipping channels by merely drawing lines on a map, but it is also the very same logic that that has led not only the financial institutions, but also the political and European institutions to destroy Greece. This same logic, applied in a purely mechanical manner to other Mediterranean Countries is what has resulted in Italy’s financial agony and it is also this same logic that demands that the salaries, the rights and the income of a huge part of the population be reduced just when the economic crisis has already resulted in the weakening of the job market, weakening the position of huge numbers of workers and reducing the purchasing power of a significant section of the population. It is a folly, but it’s a kind of folly that is pursued on the basis of a dogma that is deemed to be unquestionable, the same kind of dogma that, notwithstanding everything and notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, nevertheless dictates that our Country must go ahead at all costs with this bottomless pit that is the Turin – Lyon high-speed railway line.
The second part of the paradigm is the very tangled web that exists between politics and business, namely the concept of business as the only basis of politics and decision making and the role of politics being little more than to support business practices. Any decision that does not fit in with business interests becomes irrelevant and is simply dropped from the agenda. Whenever business logic comes into the picture, then everyone is in agreement, including the politicians because politics and money have now become synonymous and inseparable due to the prevalence of the belief that without money there will be no politics, and the fact that every political party now has its own business arm too. This arm can be direct, as in the case of Berlusconism and its immediate conflict of interests, or it can be indirect. Business interests can be complementary, for example the major shareholders of the political parties. I think of the relationship between the Democratic Party and the co-operatives. In the case of the TAV, this relationship was clearly highlighted from the word go with the close and direct co-operation between certain family-owned firms, certain Ministers in the Berlusconi Government and the CMC, namely the builders and carpenters co-operative of Ravenna, whose members commenced the TAV works and are continuing with the works to this day. The relay team that is getting ready in the little fort of Chiomonte just in case the works should commence include a number of companies from the Valley, companies that have faced some legal battles in the past few decades, even rather demanding ones, as well as the Ravenna CMC..
This tangled web has is now even bipartisan and across the board and has become an established driving force of this Country’s politics, irrespective of whether this project goes ahead or not, since there is money to be made in any event through feasibility studies, planning fees, surveys, etc. and this feeds the relationships between the public service decision makers and their backers. This is a pathological issue that is unfortunately becoming physiological.

90-Thousand Euro per day just to guard a hole in the ground
Finally, the crisis of representation is beginning to take its toll and there is a distinct breakdown in the relationship between the representatives and the represented, between the governors and the governed. In the Val di Susa, this relationship has broken down dramatically without any of the parties involved being concerned about it in the least because, in reality, they are worrying less and less about this kind of issue, even in a situation as dramatic as the one in Val di Susa, this growing detachment, this increasing gap between the decision makers’ logic, which is becoming increasingly transversal, and the interests, the needs and the feelings of a people who are being deprived of a relationship with their own representatives. This explains the persistence in this folly, this doggedness that is costing around 90-thousand Euro per day just to pay for the security services, that army that the people of the Val di Susa see as an occupying force. Will the TAV high speed train ever become a reality? I’m sure that it won’t because the money will run out long before it is completed, because we simply can’t afford it and because the people of the Val di Susa will win out in the end. Their victory is inevitable, but why? Why am I sticking my neck out like this? Generally speaking, in politics people tend to say “most likely”, “possibly” or “hopefully”. I say that I am certain that the planned TAV will definitely never be completed in the Val di Susa” because the one thing that the politicians have not yet realised, and that is going to cost them very dearly indeed, is that the opposition to the TAV is not coming from a movement in the truest sense of the word. The No TAV movement is in fact much, much more. It is a population that is banding together, a groundswell that goes far beyond mere political affiliation. A wide ranging group of people who are rooted in the area, a number of different generations, including grandchildren, mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers, all taking part in the demonstrations that are perfect because, in some ways they are controlled by the people that organise them. Let’s just take the last one as an example, the one at Chiomonte, which set off some serious alarm bells in the Val di Susa. This was the one where, I think for the first time ever, we witnessed a huge group of people walking along the mountain tracks without anyone getting injured, not even a twisted ankle, notwithstanding the fact that there were thousands upon thousands of people there. No fireworks were even set off even though, just the week before, there had been that demonstration in Rome that turned into a total slaughter!
So why so much control, you ask? Well, because in this case it was a territory that was demonstrating, not a political or political party gathering. It was merely a bunch of residents that is showing its opposition to the project on a daily basis. No one can win the battle against this type of resistance, just as it would be impossible to win a battle against an anti-colonial revolt or a battle to occupy some other country. Sooner or later they will have to retreat because they simply cannot continue to use the Alpini Corps’ Lynxes returning from Afghanistan to guard an area against invasion by the local residents for the next 20 years. I don’t think that the politicians have realised this yet, but they will certainly have to pay the price in terms of violent delegitimisation, but also because, looking at the Val di Susa and looking at what is happening there under a microscope, anyone can perfectly understand what is happening in the world of politics and the level of degradation that the political hierarchy is reaching. From that, we can see just how rotten the core really is. For that reason, friends of Passaparola, keep an eye on the Val di Susa and keep watching that as yet nonexistent tunnel that will never, ever be completed and, of course, continue to spread the word!

Passaparola - Italy can take off again - Tito Boeri
(16:00)

Reducing public expenditure
The major concerns are linked to the fact that a strong commitment would be required from Europe in order to reverse the markets’ very negative expectations regarding Italy. What we would need, above all, is some authority capable of standing as a lender of last resort to governments that are in trouble and the banks. The BCE would have all the hallmarks to act as just such an authority, but as long as the voters in the countries that are better-off in terms of public spending, for example the Germans, are afraid that every bit of help given to countries in crisis, like Italy and Greece, is like throwing money into a bottomless pit and those countries are simply using the aid to postpone having to make the choices that they should be making in any event. Until the people hold this belief, it will be extremely difficult to reach agreement at the European level to allow the BCE to fulfil this role. What Italy has to do is to set a good example, to prove that we are doing our best to sort out our public finances and that, therefore, the help we receive from the European Union will be extremely useful because Italy’s problem is a temporary cash flow problem in terms of financing our public debt but that, in the final analysis, Italy’s finances are in relatively good shape and we don’t have any solvency problem. That has to be the message that is sent out.
It is essential for us to work hard at doing those sorts of things that will sort out the public finances. The main thing is to confront the problem that lies at the root of it all, in other words our Country’s low level of growth. Italy is the only OCSE member Country in which per capita income has not increased at all over the past 12 years and remains precisely the same as it was back in 1999. Why has this happened? Well, it has happened because we have had a number of years of very low growth, indeed 0% growth, while other countries were growing at a much faster pace than us. We have kept on falling further and further behind, and here we’re not talking about India and China, but almost 25 percentage points behind major European Countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France. A negative difference of almost 25 percentage points, or almost ¼ of GDP, it’s as if Italy had experienced three major recessions more than these other countries.
The reasons why we have stood still has nothing to do with the fact that we perhaps experienced stronger negative shocks than these other countries. On the contrary, Italy has not experienced any major crisis, or the failure of major banks, as happened for example in the United Kingdom and in Germany. Nor have we seen any major collapse in the property market as happened in Spain, Ireland and a number of other countries. The problem is that here in Italy there are certain impediments, certain structural hindrances that prevent our economy from taking off. We have been complaining about this for years, but unfortunately no one has listened. If we truly want to address the issue of public debt, then firstly we have to work out how we can once again grow at the same rate as the other economies are growing, because this is truly the only thing that will be able to drag us out of the public debt crisis. At the same time we have to cut public spending because, if we don’t, we will never be able to reduce taxes. What the current government has done, instead, has been to invent all sorts of new taxes and increase the existing taxes.
Are you aware that the tax burden has jumped two GDP points to 44.5%. The effect of State revenues, in other words the higher taxes, fees, levies, etc on the income produced in Italy has gone up to 50%. Of every two Euro generated in the country, one lands up in the State’s coffers. There is no other country in Europe where the tax burden is this high, except for the northern European countries such as Sweden and Finland, countries that provide extremely high levels of welfare services to help the needy. Here in Italy, we now find ourselves with Swedish tax rates but Italian public services. In order to change, we have to address the issue of costs and make some pretty substantial cost cuts. A number of proposals that have been discussed on your website are pretty valid and, indeed, we have even mentioned them in our book. Here I’m referring particularly to all the proposals that involve cost cutting. Cutting the cost of our politics is essential because it is a step in the right direction. Inter alia, these cuts would have the additional advantage that by cutting, it would improve the selection of politicians because, if we have fewer politicians, we could make better choices since not all politicians are equally good and especially here in Italy we certainly have some terrible examples. I believe that we could get to the point where we have reduced the number of parliamentarians by 1/3, which would bring our ratio of politicians to voters into line with the ratio in many of the established democracies. We then need to push for the smaller municipalities to be merged since we have a number of municipalities with as few as 33 inhabitants and there are certain costs involved in this, not only in terms of what the mayors are paid, but also the costs of the municipal buildings and the representatives and these are costs that could comfortably be reduced.
The same thing goes for the Provincial Administrations. The Provincial Administrations could be abolished immediately, without even having to amend our Constitution. All we would need to do is to replace the Provincial Administrations with a Council of Mayors of the various zones, with the Chairman of the Council being the Mayor of the largest capital city of the area. This would lead to significant reductions in the cost of our politics and would also improve the co-ordination between the various municipal districts. This type of proposal that you are suggesting are widely acceptable and we have therefore picked up on them in our book. They have the advantage of cutting costs while at the same time improving the selection of our politicians, since that is one thing we desperately need, namely a better political class. How many times have we brought up this issue and how many times have I been insulted? I even appeared on television, where I said “Please note that Italy is not growing. There is a very definite problem of low growth rate”, but there were certain people who believed that the figures I was using were gathered by Mickey Mouse. The current politicians have continued to ignore our problems, which is why we are now facing such a serious situation, simply because our politicians have proven that they are totally incapable of addressing the Country’s problems. The proposals that you have put forward but that I cannot agree with are those that involve either more spending or tax reductions.

No-cost reforms for the State
The situation regarding our public accounts has now become so serious that we simply cannot afford to implement any major spending programmes and I must say that quite a few of the proposals you guys put forward on your website somehow seem to lean towards either greater spending or tax reductions. If we want to implement such things, we would obviously have to find some way of funding them. There are, however, any number of things that could be done but that would not cost the State coffers anything. All that would be needed is for the regulations to be changed. For example, let’s just consider the move from school into the labour market. We have a large number of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 who are unemployed and are not currently studying further. Indeed, there has even been a drop in the number of university enrolments. There are many institutions spread throughout the country, too many in fact, that are unable to provide quality education and that also cannot achieve the critical mass required in order to be able to conduct any research. However, these universities could very easily enter into agreements with various companies. We also have many small enterprises. Using our current resources, we could easily set up training courses that combine simultaneous study and some sort of applicable practical work experience. The enrolled students would thereby spend half their time working within the companies and the other half of their time at the university, thereby earning the kind of intermediate technical qualifications that the companies really need.
This should go hand in hand with a review of the entry level employment mechanisms. A progressive protection consolidated employment contract would ensure that individuals enter the labour market via the front door of permanent employment contracts rather than via the existing jungle of temporary contracts in which many youngsters find themselves hopelessly trapped. The worst thing about temporary employment is that there is no in-company training. Employers simply don’t train these youngsters. Under normal circumstances, the employer would invest in training his young employees because his payback over the employee’s working life would be increased productivity, better skills and the ability to make a greater contribution towards improving the company’s performance. However, since these youngsters are being employed on a temporary basis, employers view them as little more that relief valves to be used during hard times, so the employers don’t invest in training these youngsters. I see that you are proposing a series of interventions that are somehow aimed at supplementing taxes, there is talk of some sort of tax on assets and, amongst your proposals, I also see a proposal to nationalise the banks. I believe that here in Italy we should be taxing assets more and taxing labour less because it is really bad that labour is so heavily taxed here in Italy. Labour should be taxed less because we need to work more and also encourage our women to go out and work. Here in Italy, we pay our women to stay at home, that’s what the standard tax deduction for married men is all about, whereas we should be providing incentives instead and give some extra money to women who go out to work, albeit at a low salary. This should be done along the lines of the labour reforms implemented in the United Kingdom, like the “working family tax credit”, which worked very well and offered a kind of support to families and improved the woman’s contractual power within the family.

The devil is in the detail
While it may be right to tax assets more, this has to be done on a standard basis. The extraordinary asset tax, which would take money out of the Italians’ pockets merely in order to confront the current crisis, is the usual kind of Italian logic of “one-off” interventions. We will continue to have problems at infinitum until such time as we change the way in which we tax assets. We have to tax assets more and labour less, but we have to do this every year, not once every now and then. We must absolutely avoid implementing any mandatory levies on bank deposits. What we have to do is to place a higher tax on mobile assets, in other words on financial investments made, which should be taxed in precisely the same manner as other forms of income. It is hard to understand precisely why financial returns are taxed at a fixed rate while income tax is levied on a progressive scale. The wealthier individual should pay more and that’s that, even on any investment earnings.
The same should be done as regards fixed property assets because it is really wrong when property owners whose main residence is a high-value property pay no tax on that residence. I find this absurd because the people that land up footing the bill are the normal workers and if we make normal workers pay so much we will continue to see a decline in the number of normal workers in our country.
You propose that the banks be rationalised, but here I have some very serious doubts. Do you remember the “Bins” (the national interest banks)? Prior to the privatisation of the Italian banks, we used to have those disastrous banking institutions with their lengthy queues at the counters, employees that were never there and terrible service quality and I really don’t think that we would want to go back to that. Furthermore, there were also a number of politicians who lived off those banks! You had special meetings of Ministers specifically held in order to appoint the Presidents of the various banks. It really is something that doesn’t evoke any sense of nostalgia whatsoever. Let’s keep politics as far as possible away from the banks. In fact, we should reform the banking foundations that are indeed a powerful vehicle for getting politics involved in the banks. In my opinion, we should separate the banking foundations from the political ones as much as possible and push them not to participate … There are certain banking foundations, like the Monte dei Paschi, that have gotten themselves into debt in order to be able to participate in share capital increases. We absolutely have to keep politics away from the banks. I fully agree with the concept of reducing and simplifying our laws, in other words, a kind of re-organisation if you will. For example, we have to review our immigration laws because, in this regard too, we are currently shooting ourselves in the foot by turning away the best and most highly skilled people, like forcing doctorate students that come here to Italy. We give them study bursaries and then we make their life unbearable because of our anachronistic immigration restrictions that force these people to continuously have to renew their residence permits and while they are awaiting the renewal, they are prohibited from travelling anywhere and cannot even go and present the results of their research abroad. All around the world various countries are competing to attract valuable talent because talent is a truly important thing. These are the people that come up with new ideas, create new jobs and help economies to grow. We, however, are doing our very best to chase them away! This regulatory re-organisation and change is extremely important.
Each chapter in the book is dedicated to a specific proposal … let’s try to dig into the detail. The English say that the devil is in the detail and this is very true indeed. We need to examine these problems in depth and then come up with comprehensive and feasible proposals because that is the only way in which we will be able to nail down our politicians, those who come up with any number of excuses for not doing what they should be doing in order to save our country. Let’s put forward some concrete, specific and comprehensive proposals, point by point and let’s not resort to using mere slogans. At that point our politicians will find themselves cornered and they will then have to find some way of addressing these problems. Let’s force them to address some concrete proposals and, in this regard, the work you guys are doing via the lavoce.info website is extremely important. In our own little way, with the lavoce.info website and this book entitled “Le riforme a costo zero”, we have tried to make our own small contribution and the important thing now is for us to join forces because that is how we will be able to nail down our politicians and make them face their responsibilities. So please, I urge you to spread the word!

Interview with Silvia Seno Truccolo, President of A.GE.RA.N.V.I.:

Don’t be afraid of finding out
My name is Silvia Seno Truccolo and I represent the ‘Milan Association for Parents and Youngsters with no vision and low vision’ that operates throughout the whole country in collaboration with other organisations.
Our story started 30 years ago with the closure of the special schools. A group of parents tried to give a response to the gaps in provision at that time, at the end of the 1970s in relation to schools, society and the local authorities that were not responding to the families’ questions.
We welcome families from the moment of birth of the child, right up until that youngster is 25 years old. Our main objectives are to support the family, to create a social group, to support each other, to listen, to help. This means offering to collaborate and help in an atmosphere that is as serene as possible. We ourselves live this situation and we well know the dark shadows, the everyday difficulties, the day to day issues, having to tackle the trauma that came unexpectedly into our lives and the mutual support that comes about is very important for us.
I believe that each parent is aiming to give their children a future in which they can live a life that can be called a life, to have a good quality of life. This can be done by means of experiences of autonomy right from the time they are tiny. It’s already possible to work on the prerequisites, the very first activities that can stimulate the resources of each child to the best advantage. Thus each individual, as they are growing, can use this to face up to everyday life, in a school environment at first and then in a work environment.

...

A good future
It would be really useful and very important for the health services, the doctors, the pediatricians, the people that come into contact with families, with children that have sight problems, to help the families straight away so that they can find the right path so that they are not continually starting with the wrong set up. It often happens that families come to us and take time to find the right solutions for their own situations and according to us, this should no longer be happening.

...

Faide { Feuds} - by Biagio Simonetta L'impero della 'ndrangheta. {The empire of the ’ndrangheta} Buy your copy today

Interview with Biagio Simonetta author of Faide:

’Ndrangheta is emigration
Hi to all the friends of Grillo’s blog. I am Biagio Simonetta, a 30 year old writer from Calabria. This is my book. It’s called “Faide, l’impero della ’ndrangheta”. {Feuds, the empire of the ’ndrangheta}. Why have a book about the 'ndrangheta? Because the phenomenon of organised crime that has devastated and continues to devastate the earth where I grew up, too often does not find space in the journalism and thus literature can be an alternative.

...

Innocent victims
I think that an important aspect is that of considering the 'ndrangheta as an international phenomenon and no longer one pertaining to Calabria. The number of recent investigations in Lombardy is incredible. In Lombardy there are 16 “locali” {cells} of the 'ndrangheta when I glanced through the warrant for the “Infinito” trial, I realised that there’s not really that much difference between my land and Lombardy where I live now.

...

Faide { Feuds} - by Biagio Simonetta L'impero della 'ndrangheta. {The empire of the ’ndrangheta} Buy your copy today

Passaparola - Why they killed Gaddafi - Massimo Fini
(13:36)

Gaddafi was barbarically murdered because the Western powers could not allow a trial to reveal their joint responsibilities. The Libyan leader was not the only dictator. His supporters in the Country held off the NATO attack forces for eight months in a very unevenly matched armed conflict.

Interview with Massimo Fini

Why did they kill Gaddafi?
Massimo Fini: Well, I believe there are two reasons. The first was the brutal ferocity of those Libyan pseudo-revolutionaries and the second was that there was no way that the West could afford to allow Gaddafi to be brought to trial because such a trial would have revealed a whole series of joint responsibilities, particularly over the past ten years.

Blog: But why was Libya attacked?
Massimo Fini: Well, to most mere mortals, that seemed somewhat strange at the time because, until just two or three months earlier, Gaddafi was being received with full pomp and ceremony, not only by Berlusconi in his obviously grotesque manner mind you, but also by Sarkozy, etc. The most obvious reason for this was that they were all trying to get their hands on his crude oil and turn Libya into a protectorate, at which point they would have walked away with the bulk of the spoils and left nothing but a few crumbs for the Libyan people.
Surely there can be no other logical explanation as to why the same dictator who, as we said, was being received with full pomp and ceremony and with whom all sorts of deals were being made, now suddenly being portrayed as a monster. Just in passing, this war actually showed that indeed Gaddafi was not the only dictator and that he must have had a pretty solid support base, otherwise how could such an unevenly balanced war have gone on for eight months, a war with NATO using its bomber planes and the other side without any remaining planes or anti-aircraft weapons. Furthermore, the war took on even more grotesque undertones because it began as the policing of a “No-fly Zone” so that Gaddafi would not have aerial superiority over his enemies and that then became a complete turnaround where Gaddafi no longer had any warplanes of his own, whereas the other guys did. It was all a farce anyway because in an operation that was ostensibly begun to protect civilians, NATO killed off many more civilians in its collateral bombing raids. Then there’s the matter of the last bombing raid. Precisely what kind of threat did this desperately fleeing convoy of 15 or 20 pick-up trucks or suchlike pose anyway? They were obviously not posing any threat to anyone but were merely trying to escape. So all this was the usual arrogance of the West, combined with ever increasing western hypocrisy. In this sense we have taken a backward step. Once upon a time there were certain powers that, if they wanted something, they simply sent in their battleships and took it without hiding behind any kind of false moral indignation. Intellectually speaking, at least what they did was more honest and forthright. These days, however, the powers are doing the very same thing, and indeed worse, except that they pretend that they are doing so due to certain principles or for moral or ethical reasons. In my opinion this is particularly hideous because the politics of power have always been part of life, however, this is like some sort of global Holy Inquisition. During the Holy Inquisition, they used to beat the soles of their victims’ feet and force them to drink pints and pints of water, which wasn’t such a great thing, but they used to pretend that what they were doing was for the victim’s own good and that’s precisely what we westerners are doing today!

Blog: Are you saying that the Libyan people could become the victims of the West?
Massimo Fini: They are exchanging one type of serfdom for another, the only difference being that their former lords were Libyans whereas the new lords will be westerners. They didn’t fight for their freedom on their own. They wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, but they managed to liberate themselves thanks to the NATO bombers. Whenever this kind of thing happens, there are always consequences, after all, that’s precisely what happened here in Italy where we certainly didn’t free ourselves from fascism thank to our own efforts or on our own merits. The Resistance was a kind of moral ransom paid for by tens of thousands of courageous men and women who offered the resistance. But we convinced ourselves that we won a war that we indeed lost in the most shameful manner possible. These kinds of misinterpretations inevitably have certain consequences over time. Just cast your mind back to the terrorism that modelled itself on the Resistance. Our Country became an American Protectorate and NATO became the tool by which the Americans achieved political, military, economic and eventually also cultural nomination over Italy and the rest of Europe, but Italy more so than the other Countries.

So who are these new would-be revolutionary Libyan representatives?
Massimo Fini: They are all former Gaddafians who changed sides when the time was right. This makes me wonder whether there was perhaps already an agreement in place prior to the attack, in which case these guys would have known that NATO would intervene. Otherwise, it is difficult to understand how this Minister of Justice suddenly received a revelation on the way to Damascus and decided to become a rebel fighter, almost as if, looking a little further back in history, Galeazzo Ciano had succeeded Mussolini.

Blog: With the downfall of Arab leaders culturally aligned to the West, is there a risk of some sort of pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism gaining the upper hand in terms of relations with the West?
Massimo Fini: Most certainly! In reality, virtually the whole history of the past twenty years, and that of the United States in particular, is made up of actions that have suddenly backfired. I think, for example, of the attack on Saddam Hussein, which mainly favoured the Shiites in Iraq, so now the Iranian Ayatollahs are the ones that are really in charge in Iraq, the very people that America has been fighting against in various ways since 1985. So yes, I honestly think that this would be more or less the right type of punishment, or at the very least serve as a warning not to make use of such violence, arrogance and an attitude that says that we are the good guys and we know who the bad guys are, which is precisely the kind of totalitarian attitude of the West.

Blog: Do you see any potential danger from pan-Islamism?
Massimo Fini: If we continue to bust their chops, then yes because, in the end, this entire propaganda campaign that the west is throwing at Islam, namely that Islam should be more moderate, that Islamic women should become more like Western women, etc, results in even the most moderate Muslims fighting back and claiming back their own identity. I remember something that happened a few years ago in Egypt, where three female Egyptian Television presenters who wouldn’t normally have dreamed of covering their heads with veils under normal circumstances suddenly appeared on television wearing veils, precisely to establish their own identity and as a sign of rejection of the anything but innocent cultural colonialism being practiced by the West. However, if you remove the woman’s role in Islam, then you destroy Islam far more effectively than dropping a nuclear bomb on it! That’s why they keep fighting this thing. It reminds me of the story of that Iranian woman by the name of Sakineh who was sentenced to death by stoning. Now, obviously death by stoning is a something disgraceful, however, here in Italy we immediately began seeing banners proclaiming “Free Sakineh now”. The fact of the matter is that this woman killed her husband, so it’s a bit like saying “Free Mrs. Franzoni now”.
So there is a kind of twisting of the facts, a kind of ongoing and consistent “disinformation” regarding the Muslim Arab world and Iran, which is yet another matter, and this can only benefit radicalism in the long run. I think that if I were a Muslim, I regret to say that I would probably also be radical.

Blog: Now that the domino effect is reaching Syria and perhaps even Yemen as well, is it possible that NATO and the USA, or perhaps even the allied forces, have their eye on Iran?
Massimo Fini: It is very possible indeed because Iran has already been in the spot light for a number of years. Just think of the whole Iranian nuclear issue. After all, Iran signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and when they opened up their nuclear sites, they granted the UN inspectors access to go and inspect these sites. Even today there are inspectors in Vienna that are getting ready to leave. It has been verified that their uranium enrichment is at the 20% level, but you need 90% in order to be able to manufacture a bomb. This notwithstanding, sanctions have been introduced against Iran and there have been further ongoing threats, as if, for some unknown reason, these guys were not entitled to utilise nuclear energy for civilian electricity generation or medical purposes. It’s as if we wanted to re-open the decommissioned Caorso nuclear power station, which we are not about to do, but let’s say Italy wanted to re-open Caorso and we were told: “no, because in theory you could be developing a nuclear bomb”. This attitude towards Iran is extremely aggressive, so that could well become their next objective, although it would be a difficult objective for them to achieve in that if they were to do so, fifty atomic bombs would fall on them and destroy the Country. We really do have some very twisted perceptions about that Country, after all, Iran is a major cultural centre. I remember when I visited the Country, the previous bourgeoisie not only knew all about our greats, by that I mean greats such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, but at that time they were also reading the works of Calvino and Moravia, whereas, at best, we have heard of Omar Khayyam. We always have this attitude that believes that other cultures are inferior. The concept of cultural superiority has become a new form of racism that can thankfully no longer exist after Hitler, but it is precisely the same sort of thing.

Blog: It would appear that the UN threw its weight behind NATO in this attack. Was this real support or was it all merely for show? What role is the UN now playing in these matters?
Massimo Fini: Please excuse the rather crass expression, but the UN goes up and down like a foreskin. When they need backup, somehow they get it, but when they don’t have the support, as in the case of the attacks against Serbia or attacks on Iran, then it doesn’t really matter and they carry on regardless. Therefore, in my opinion, the UN doesn’t matter in the least, after all, all it takes is for the five countries that have the veto right, to agree. They are the world’s most powerful countries anyway and they have therefore rewritten the book of International law to suit themselves. What has happened in Libya, and in Serbia before this, is a prime example of what I was saying. There is in fact, what is to my mind a sound principle that must be adhered to, namely that no one should ever intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another sovereign Country.

It would appear that China and Russia are watching all of this from the sidelines. What could we realistically expect in the future?
Massimo Fini: What I believe is that, even if it means swallowing the bitter pill of the Chechen genocide perpetrated initially by the Soviets and then by the Russians, we should far rather move closer to Russia than to America. Perhaps that these Arabian revolutions and all that goes with them may also, at some point, eventually spread to this infamous regime that we currently have here in Italy. I’m thinking of a proper uprising like the one that has taken place in Tunisia, which has proven to be the cleanest of all the Arab revolts. It was a violent but unarmed revolt that led to the ousting of that Country’s leader in just two days. In my mind, this would be possible right here in Italy if only we were to put our mind to it, even though the average age of the Tunisian population is 32 years while that of the Italian population is 44.5 years. In fact, what we’re lacking is the will, in addition to the fact that there are certain groups that oppose this course of action and are simply doing their job, like your movement (the MoVimento 5 Stelle, ed.) and other smaller and less well known groupings. However, this is mainly an issue of culture and it is going to take some time, perhaps too much time, for us to get to that point.

Blog: But is there not some risk of foreign intervention in the event of such a radical change taking place here in Italy?
Massimo Fini: Well, there could be some attempts at foreign intervention but I very much doubt that anyone would resort to this kind of action if such a revolution should occur here in Italy because our history is somewhat different. I don’t believe that we would accept protectorates in this case, but first of all we have to get rid of these guys, then we’ll think about it! By “these guys”, I mean the entire Italian political class, which also includes some good guys and, in this regard, I could certainly mention a few names, but the bulk of them is what we see, both left wing and right wing, with the latter being slightly worse than the former, although they are actually much of a muchness.

Sinking the Internet
(23:00)

Interview with Claudio Messora:
Someone once said that the Internet has been the greatest invention since Gutenberg’s invention more than 500 years ago. The reality is that, above all else, the Internet has had an impact on our world maps. It has made the Earth flat. It has brought peoples and towns closer together. It has succeeded in building countless bridges that can be crossed at the speed of light. For this reason, the Internet can be equated with the discovery and marketing of electric power, which also, at the time, sparked off new thoughts and ideas by lengthening working hours thanks to the advent of electric light, enabling the construction of exceptionally tall skyscrapers thanks to the development of powerful and tireless elevators, driving the electric motors that speeded up the production rates of industries and powering things like radio and television. The Internet is not a thing or a place. It is a multiplication factor. It is pure thought, fixed in time like a rocky landscape painting and transported instantly at the speed of light. The Internet is like the addition of telepathy to the human senses, the tele-transportation of intelligence, a construction site where everyone adds and continuously shuffles around their own little brick and then leaves it there at everyone else’s disposal.

What use is the Internet?
While this would be sufficient in itself to convince us to invest in the Internet, there’s still more. The business world and, therefore, the world of work is the greatest single beneficiary of the development of the Internet. In the McKinsey Global Institute study entitled “Internet matters: the net’s sweeping impact on growth, jobs and prosperity”, it is estimated that there are currently some 2 billion Internet users worldwide and that each user generates twenty Euro per month of added value. In the case of 13 Countries analysed, the Internet accounts for some 3.4 points of GDP, a percentage that is greater than that generated by both the agricultural and the energy sectors and, for example, in the case of the so-called “mature” economies (Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the USA, South Korea, Canada, Italy and Japan) the Internet accounts for as much as 21% of the total GDP growth in the past five years. In the interests of clarity, the Internet’s contribution to growth in the GDP amounts to some 6.3% in Sweden, 5.4% in the United Kingdom, 4.6% in South Korea, del 4% in Japan, 3.8% in the United States and so on, down to 1.7% in Italy, 1.5% in Brazil and 0.8% in Russia. On a global scale, instead, it is estimated that the Internet’s contribution to GDP is at least 2.9%, or equivalent to 1672 billion Dollars. The global consumption and production generated by the Web in 2009, for example, was greater than Canada’s or Spain’s entire GDP, and grew at a faster rate than that of Brazil. For every job that it has contributed to eliminating, the Internet has created 2.6 new jobs, however, it is interesting to note that the primary beneficiary of more than 75% of all the added value created by the Web has been the world of traditional industry, mainly thanks to increases in productivity. Furthermore, the Internet generates a 10% increase in productivity for small to medium-size enterprises. Those enterprises that make extensive use of Web technology are growing and exporting at twice the rate of the other enterprises. Perhaps that is why, in its Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations Organisation has highlighted Internet penetration as a key factor in the ongoing battle to reduce poverty and encourage sustainable development.
Over and above the key role that the Web plays in global democratisation, these figures alone should be sufficient to pressure governments to want to optimise their participation in the Web ecosystem. However, encouraging the use of the Internet is merely the first step towards halting public spending. We need to train our human resources, allocate our financial resources, build infrastructure and prepare the ground so that the business world can grab the opportunities presented by innovation. How are things here in Italy in this regard?

The current Internet situation in Italy
In its report entitled “The Global Information Technology Report 2010 – 2011”, the World Economic Forum defines competitiveness as a combination of policies, institutions and factors that determine a Country’s productivity. Just think that, in 2015 alone, just the opportunities offered by the development of digital superhighways will be worth something like 1900 billion Dollars yet, out of 138 economies examined in the study, in response to the question “Are you ready for the Web?”, Italy scored a mere 4.0 points, placing it in 51st place. Things get even worse when you look at the utilisation of the Web by companies in the various Countries, where we are in 71st place. And where do we stand with regard to our ability to create new business models and new products and services by exploiting the potential of the Web? All the way down in 88th place, that’s where! We drop even further when you do a comparison of each economy’s ability to utilise information technology to create new organisational models, in fact we drop down to ninetieth place!
In order to pressure individual Countries that are lagging behind in the digital stakes, the European Commission has drafted the “ Digital Agenda for Europe”, with the aim of maximising the economic and social impact of the Internet, which is considered to be an essential tool for business and social enterprises and the world of business, employment and communications. In its main report, the EU points out that (as further confirmed by the Caio Report) 12% of the Italian population still has no form of physical connectivity to the Internet. Here we’re talking about some 7.5 million citizens! Furthermore, it appears that no less than 36% of the population has never browsed on the Web at any stage in their lives! 55 Out of every 100 families have Internet access, only two of which by means of a UMTS Internet Access Key (3G), however, we are fourth to last when it comes to regular Internet users, where we currently stand at 40%, only slightly ahead of Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania, although all three of the aforesaid Countries, namely Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania are showing a higher growth trend than Italy in this regard. Bulgaria is currently achieving 17% growth in Internet use per year, compared to our meagre 4%.
According to data gathered in January 2010, the rate of broadband penetration is greatest in Denmark, with 37.8% of internet connections. Could this be why they have just elected a young government, with a Minister of Finance who is only 26 years of age? The average in greater Europe, where there are some 123,738,940 broadband lines, a number that is increasing by 28,199 each day, currently stands at 24.8%. We are currently in seventeenth place with 18.7%. According to the Eurostat data (2009), in Iceland 87 out of every 100 families have a broadband connection. Could this be the reason why the newly revised Icelandic Constitution was born precisely on the Web? At the global level, only Korea has been able to keep up with the Icelanders, with 81 families out of every hundred having a broadband connection. Then comes Sweden with 79 families out of every hundred, Norway with 78 and then, in 28th place, along comes Italy, where only 38 families out of every hundred have access to a broadband connection.
But how is this broadband market actually growing? The penetration rate between January 2009 and January 2010, calculated on the basis of countries where the markets are still deemed to be immature, shows Cyprus in first place at 4%. Slovakia and Greece have a low penetration rate that is below the current average but, on the other hand, they are showing an extremely high rate of growth. Austria, Spain, Rumania, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and – of course – Italy have shown a growth rate of between 1 and 2 percentage points, having failed to match the European average and even managing to fall back. Surprisingly, we are told by the European Commission that there are several economies with some of the biggest drops in GDP as a direct result of the crisis, drops worse than that of the European average, where the landline broadband markets have grown at a higher rate than the European average (for example, Slovenia, Greece, Hungary, The Czech Republic and Germany), while in Countries such as Belgium, Spain, Austria, Poland and Italy, which have shown a slower decline in GDP, the rate of growth in the landline broadband markets has been much lower. The growth in the fibre-optic cable market in Japan and Korea has been exceptionally high, while the lowest rate of growth in this very same market has been registered right here in Europe. In June 2010, broadband in Europe consisted mainly of DSL lines, with 81% of all connections, fibre-optic with 2% and other technologies with 19%, but what about here in Italy? Here in Italy DSL rules the roost almost unopposed with 98% of all so-called broadband connections. I say “So-called” because although the average nominal speed of Italian broadband is sitting at around 20% below 2 Mbps, 70% between 2 Mbps and 10 Mbps and about 9% above 10 Mbps, the reality is that in no less than 120-thousand tests conducted by “Between”, have revealed that the actual performance of Italian broadband run at no more than 55% of the contractual speed claimed by the service providers, who always quote the maximum speed without fail. Thanks to Wikileaks, we were able to view a confidential document drafted by Italian Internet technology consultant Francesco Caio, which revealed that the much vaunted high-speed ADSL connections were nothing more than fraudulent advertising and statements to the effect that the Italian Network is very outdated and rather unstable. Perhaps that is why the Broadband Quality Score study conducted in 2009 by the Oxford University, and the Oviedo one based on more than 24 million actual measurements done by SpeedTest.net and regarding the key factors like upload speed, download speed and latency, placed Italy in a lowly thirty-eighth place. That is lower (indeed much lower) than Countries such as Qatar, Cyprus, Bahrain, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Malta and so forth. Also based on similar measurements, netindex.comshows that for the past 30 days we have been sitting in 70th place as regards real download speeds, which is even lower than China! Furthermore, Italy is in 109th place as regards upload speeds, in other words the speed at which we are able to upload our content onto the Web.
Perhaps that’s why Italians seem to use the Web mainly to find information relating to health and for healthcare related services. Then perhaps to find work, then to access news and only then to download games, pictures, films, and music. Almost 90% of internet users use one of the Internet’s main functions, namely sending and receiving e-mails. As regards e-commerce, we are only in 22nd place, in other words sixth to last, above the usual culprits like Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Rumania. The same goes for companies that use e-commerce for more than 1% of their sales or purchases: here we are third to last, marginally ahead of Bulgaria and Rumania! Even as regards the growing trend in e-government, Italy is nowhere to be found on the list of the Top 20 Countries.
Yet, on page 43 of its study entitled “Economic Impact of Broadband”, even the World Bank acknowledges that each 10% additional increase in the diffusion of broadband generates a further 1.21% increase in GDP. In the report entitled "Network developments in support of innovation and user needs", drafted by the OECD in 2009, and confirmed by Confindustria’s “Progetto Italia Digitale 2010” it is stated that the savings associated with the creation of a good digital infrastructure would amount to some 40 billion Euro per year, made up as follows: 2 billion due to people working online from home, 1 billion 400 million due to e-learning, 16 billion due to e-government and digital company trading, 8 billion 600 million due to digital healthcare, half a billion due to digital justice and security and another 9 and a half billion due to intelligent energy management. This data has been confirmed by a study undertaken jointly by the “Boston Consulting Group” and Google, called the “Fattore Internet 2011”, according to which even a 13% to 18% broadband growth rate would equate to real economy growth of between 59 and 77 billion Euro (a GDP increase of somewhere between 3.3% and 4.3%). And all of this, according to a recent study conducted by Alcatel-Lucent, at a total cost of no more than 10.4 billion Euro, even if we were to lay fibre-optic cable throughout the whole of Italy, including the islands, made up as follows: 2 billion 200 million Euro to take fibre-optic cable services to the 5 and a half million citizens living in urban areas, 7 billion 200 million Euro to take fibre-optic cable services to the 14 million people living in suburban areas and finally one billion Euro for the people living in rural areas. So why on earth has the Italian Government not yet jumped on the band wagon and invested in the Web, especially at a time like this when the traditional economy is in such a deep crisis?

The Internet and Italian politics
Basically it all began with the Prodi Government. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa’s 2008 budget allocated some 800 million Euro of funding for the establishment of broadband infrastructure. Then the government fell and nothing was done about it, although the al location remained intact. Then along came Paolo Romani, the then Deputy Development Minister responsible for Communications who, in June 2009, announced a plan that bore his name, the so-called “Romani Plan”. The plan involved taking broadband services with a minimum speed of 20 Mbps to 96% of the population , as well as a connection with a minimum speed of 2 Mbps to the remaining population. So, on 9 June 2009, Deputy Minister Romani said the following: “Eliminating the digital divide in Italy is going to cost us 1.471 billion Euro. By the end of 2012, every Italian will be able to connect to the Internet at a speed of between 2 and 20 Megabits per second. This will be mainly by means of fibre-optic cable”. The one and a half billion would be made up of 210 million of private investment plus one billion 160 million of public funding, which would include the famous 800 million previously allocated by Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, as well as another some other money obtained from the FAS funds, namely the European funding for depressed areas.
Art.1 of Law No. 69 of 18 June 2009 states that: “The Government hereby identifies and grants the Interministerial Financial Planning Committee (the CIPE) the necessary resources approved for this purpose and to supplement the public, private and EU funding. We hereby allocate the sum of 800 million Euro for the period 2007-2013 to be added to the resources of the fund to benefit underutilised areas”.
On 19 October Renato Brunetta stated that the broadband plan was ready and that “all it needs is the final push". By around October or November we should get the go-ahead from the CIPE. I’m counting on providing everyone with 2 Mega of broadband with effect from 2010 because an efficient Internet service is the only way to send certified documents and bring about change in our current bureaucracy”.
Less than two weeks later, on 4 November 2009, the incumbent Undersecretary to the Prime Minister, Gianni Letta, announced that the plan and the funding would remain with the CIPE but had been frozen due to the economic crisis and the fact that broadband services were not a priority.
On 17 September 2010 came the announcement of a definite reduction of those allocated funds from the original 800 million down to a mere 100 million, of which half would be national government funding and half Regional Administration funding. Officially, it was rumoured that this investment was an expense that should rather be avoided rather than a development opportunity. In all probability, the small change that remains will be diverted to connect 73 industrial districts by means of fibre-optic cable, once again leaving Italian families out in the cold and notwithstanding Brussels’ recommendations regarding new-generation networks (or so-called “NGN”s).
On 9 February 2011, immediately upon leaving a Council of Ministers meeting, Paolo Romani was in the mood for announcements. He stated that: “Today we begin on the path towards broadband. Together with Minister Tremonti, we have decided to allocate 100 million Euro to the FAS funds in order to totally eliminate the digital divide by the middle of next year”.
Yet only one week later, digging through the Consolidation Decree, we read that “An amount of 30 million Euro has been approved for the 2011 financial year to re-finance the fund aimed at moving towards the terrestrial digital service. These funds are being allocated as part of the resources set aside for broadband services by Law No. 69 of 18 June 2009, within the overall amount resolved by the CIPE on 11 January 2011". So the funding for broadband services, already heavily plundered and reduced from 800 to 70 million has now been taken away from the Internet and given over to television broadcasting, but why? Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that both Silvio Berlusconi and Paolo Romani are television magnates and that the Web could potentially water down their advertising revenues and could also prove to be a dangerous competitor working against their pluralistic plan for guiding public opinion?
The fact remains that while Italy remains on the starting line, condemned to continue dropping down in the International ratings in terms of Internet penetration and the quality of the Country’s Internet connections (which has already relegated us to second last place as regards work from home, just above Portugal in fact), between 2006 and 2011 successive colluding governments have succeeded in tabling no less than twelve anti-Internet laws.
In 2005 there was the Pisanu Decree, which condemned our Country to digital marginalisation as regards Wi-Fi connections. Then in 2007 came the Franco Levi Law, which expected anyone who wanted to post anything on the Web to register with the Communications Operators Register (the ROC). Then the 2007 Gentiloni Decree, which established and funded the so-called CNCPO within AGCOM (the Italian broadcasting oversight body) with the aim of eliminating online child pornography. The CNCPO was to force Internet Service Providers to censor any content that they deemed to be unsuitable for publication, this without going via the Magistrature. In September 2009, Pecorella wanted to add another clause to article 1 of the Press Law (1984), to extend the applicability of that same regulation to websites of an editorial nature. In January 2009, Luca Barbareschi also added his bit by trying to apply iron fisted rules to protect author’s rights on the Internet and also to make the Sarkozy doctrine, which provided for the forced disconnection of citizens from the Internet, applicable here in Italy too. The guy we’re talking about here is the very same Barbareschi who was won’t to use Spinoza.it cracks on his LA7 programme. Then, in February 2009 Udc Senator Giampiero D’Alia wanted to prevent any form of apologetic or instigation activity from being conducted online. To this end, he wanted to grant extraordinary powers to the Ministry of Internal Affairs so that they could issue immediately executable circulars forcing internet service providers to black out any website arbitrarily deemed to be dangerous for Italian laws. Then along came the Carlucci Law, which wanted every single bit of data that crossed the Web to have its own ID document. In December 2009, that very same Paolo Romani who promised us a broadband service that never materialised, mangled a European Union Directive so as to equate anyone who simply uploaded a video clip or did any audio or video live streaming on the Web, even if it was merely a chat with the girlfriend, with the major television editors, with all of the consequent obligations. Still in December 2009, Maroni drafted a Code, the infamous Maroni Code, which was a government decree to stop violence on the Web. The decree never materialised, but what did happen was that Maroni had meetings behind closed doors with the administrators of the most widely used social networks, to discuss heaven alone knows what, because we don’t! Shortly thereafter, a high ranking Postal Police Officer let slip that a number of his people had been to Palo Alto, California to pick up the keys to some 20 million Italian Facebook accounts, thus enabling them to carry out an infinite number of checks, supposedly also to protect the honour of people in the public eye, or so-called VIPs. In December 2009 came Lauro’s proposal that the Internet be viewed as an aggravating factor in cases where individuals are charged with encouraging violence and raising the potential maximum penalty to 12 years if the crime is committed via computer. Since 2008, the infamous clause 29, carefully hidden inside the Wiretapping Decree has been terrorising the Web because it essentially applies the same retraction obligations that were spawned some 70 years ago specifically for the press on all websites, carrying the threat of fines of up to 12,500 Euro. The issue of the AGCOM’s author’s rights regulations, which aim to give anyone the right to have any Web content that they deem to be unacceptable removed from the Web, without even having to go via the Magistrature to confirm the validity of the complaint, is still pending..
Meanwhile, in Finland, access to broadband has become a constitutional right, just like access to water and access to electric power. Everyone is entitled to have a 100 Mbps connection by no later than 2015. In Germany, 75% of homes will have the same by 2014 and France is busy investing 10 billion Euro to service 4 million households by 2012. And while the Indian institutions view the e-tablet as a useful tool for education purposes and are therefore handing out thousands of these units to students, free of charge, and are counting on having handed out a million units soon, here in Italy the most innovative plan they have come up with is the plan funded by no less than 17 newspapers and 34 banking foundations, namely to provide youngsters at school with printed newspapers. Don’t you think that perhaps they could be doing just a tad more?

PS. Remember my dates for the regional elections in Molise:
- Thursday 13 at 17:00 piazza principale at Isernia
- Thursday 13 at 20:00 piazza principale at Termoli

Calendar of Lay Saints 2012 A hero every day. Buy your copy today.

PS. Remember my dates for the regional elections in Molise:
- Wednesday 12 at 19.30 piazza Prefettura at Campobasso
- Thursday 13 at 17:00 piazza principale at Isernia
- Thursday 13 at 20:00 piazza principale at Termoli

Calendar of Lay Saints 2012 A hero every day. Buy your copy today.

PS. Remember my dates for the regional elections in Molise:
- Wednesday 12 at 19.30 piazza Prefettura at Campobasso
- Thursday 13 at 17:00 piazza principale at Isernia
- Thursday 13 at 20:00 piazza principale at Termoli

Mani bucate {Hands with holes} - by Marco Cobianchi I soldi perduti dei contribuenti italiani. {Italian taxpayers’ lost money} Buy your copy today.

Present to the very end
(05:20)

Today’s edition of Passaparola is dedicated to Dario Fo, my favourite minister of Culture.

Dario Fo:
"We really are in a very bad way indeed. There is a kind of crisis that is taking shape in dramatic ways. Besides what has happened down in the South in recent days, namely the four women squashed in a falling building, with the owner’s daughter on top of it, women that we now find out were working for peanuts, there is also the current situation regarding the government, a government that seems to be going distinctly downhill day by day. Then there are those, like all the agencies, politicians, foreigners and even the Bishop, the Cardinal and the Pope, who are warning us saying “please note that we’re not getting anywhere."
It immediately reminds me of a Buster Keaton film that I saw a long time ago, one of the few films at the time that had a sound track. There were shouts, sounds, explosions and music. It all took place in a building, in a huge hall, with a bunch of clowns. It was clear from the movements and the pantomime that the film was about some or other government, a government in which everyone was fighting. They were playing tricks, hurling insults and slapping each other – obviously acting as clowns – and slap bang in the middle stood a statue. The statue indicated the extraordinary presence of the incumbent State President at that time. They were hurling insults at each other and, above all, there was a lot of noise. At a certain point, they realised that the statue was tottering, so everyone stopped fighting amongst themselves and rushed over to help keep the statue up. They climbed on to each others’ shoulders to get to the ladders and then they climbed up to hold the statue. The head was busy falling off, so they put it back in place and screwed it back on before climbing back down very, very slowly, sitting down once again and trying to make as little noise as possible, having realised that the noise, the shouts, the arguments and the swearing was causing the statue to move and totter. They spoke quietly, but then they forgot about the danger of collapse of this statue, which was a symbol of power. Above all there was a feeling that if the statue were to collapse, then everyone would go down with it. At a certain point they once again began shouting, but then they quietened down because the statue had once again begun to move, and indeed to shake, to the point where everyone immediately shushed one man who happened to sneeze. Another man starts coughing and yet another man who is afraid that the statue will fall over starts shouting “Stop it!”. They stopped the sneeze, they knocked him down and then they surrounded the statue and the statue remained standing. Let’s go, slowly, slowly. Slowly, slowly they leave the building, but as they exit, “CRACK!”, the statue moves once again. Someone tries to keep it standing, but nothing doing, down, down comes the statue. As they all hurriedly rush out of the building, the building itself begins to collapse. They only just make it out by a whisker, “CRASH!” goes the entire building with the statue still inside it. The ones who had just managed to save themselves began to cry inconsolably, saying "what’s happening? Was that us?" Then there is a great peal of laughter. They look at each other and then look around and see a huge crowd of people clapping their hands and shouting “Oh boy, finally! It was about time that it fell, about time indeed!”
We too are waiting for that “about time”, but I don’t think it’s enough for us to stand at the window and wait for something to happen, but each of us has to play our part and do our duty. In this case, our duty is to inform, to be present, to participate and not to wait for someone else to fix the problems or to tell us to go ahead. Above all, we have to not keep quiet or wait for some sort of encouragement from certain politicians, but rather realise that only an active presence has the ability to resolve a problem. So we must be present to the very end, that is our duty!"

The 5-Star Movement, two years on
(10:30)

Use your own heads
Then there are those journalists who have invented certain movements born of the Web, like the “Purple public”, which I’m sorry to say, especially for those who fell for it, are merely a projection of, and a way of funding certain boorish parties, or perhaps German and Italian pirates, is just an attempt to upstage our movement. I must tell you, we are really making major inroads. Clearly, if with this referendum Vendola and Di Pietro move into the Democratic Party and choose to opt for the so-called “Mattarellum” law, then we will be somewhat left out or cut down to size. This is just another load of bullshit because why have they said nothing about that law of the 350-thousand signatures? Well, because they were all well looked after. For two legislatures, with retroactive effects, it has brought home the bacon for all these guys, all the party secretaries, these people whose faces you see on the television, these intolerable people with faces like shit. They are not all the same, but they are all more or less disgusting, one worse than the other. It may be indifference or populism, I don’t quite know what it is, but all I’m trying to do is to interpret what I hear and what I see, which is that they are fucking scared and that’s why they are trying to merge seamlessly into this minestrone soup to bring in bipartisanship, to introduce thresholds and to exclude the direct democracies that are starting to emerge. So what I’m suggesting is that you use your own eyes and take a good look around you and use your intelligence to filter what you see and hear. Look at what is happening to you and what is going on around you because it is truly unbelievable, from the pension system that will have to be addressed immediately because it currently makes up 40% of public spending, through to the removal of our primary assets and services, sacrificing us for whose benefit? For the benefit of these 4 lost souls? Enough is enough! Be ready! Trust your own instincts and what your eyes and ears are telling you. Stop basing you thoughts on what you see in the newspapers and on television because they are totally useless. Right now, in the Molise region, they are holding some truly fantastic elections in which the left wing candidate is a former right winger and the right wing candidate is a former left winger. There is simply no competition. This truly is science-fiction!
I promise you that, if we stand for election in 2013, barring any unforeseen or incredible circumstances, we will get 20 or 30 young guys into Parliament, and if 30 of our guys get in, with the Web and with the means provided by the Internet, with the Web filming what is going on and thus providing transparency, we will introduce plans and we’ll really bust their chops, so I want to embrace all of you, one by one and I’m sure that Saint Francis will bring us good luck for another two years.
For 4 years I have been shouting: “Hey guys, be careful because we’re busy going down the tubes because of our public debt!”, and where have we landed up now? While I was busy shouting this warning, this Government was trying to reassure everyone. Tremonti, the dwarf, and the rest of the Government were going on TV, saying: “No, the truth is that we have to increase consumption”, do you remember that? They were all on the same path, the path of infrastructure and all sorts of other things that have brought us to the brink of total disaster. We cannot even afford to fail because, if we do, we will drag France and Germany down with us and the bubble will burst because the days of unrestrained capitalism have come to an end, even a child can see that, so what will happen to us? Do we emigrate? Do we leave this Country? Where do we go? The world, or at least the western world is much of a muchness, so what can we do? I don’t know what to suggest to you because we are already at the point where people can no longer get to the end of the month on their salaries thanks to the increasing cost of our monthly shopping, healthcare and public transport, which is killing people, and for what? These guys must be sent home, so I think that we have to start over and look inside of ourselves because, if we don’t, then our end is in sight … We have to start risking something personal and you will all have to risk something of your own. Now undoubtedly you will all say “I have a family to worry about” or “I have a mortgage to pay” and I know it’s difficult, but the truth is that we no longer have anything to lose, we have become citizens wearing helmets. I can promise you that if some thirty of us, or rather thirty of you youngsters, truly determined and well-informed citizens get into Parliament then all those other guys are goners and we will feast on their brains!
Goodbye to all of you and “Three cheers for the green house effect”!

Mafia and government alliance - Marco Travaglio
(46.22)

The Minister on trial

Initially the Palermo Public Prosecutors Office asked that the case be archived, having proven his dealings with known mafia members beyond any shadow of doubt but having also decided that this was insufficient to ensure a conviction for that crime that was specifically written for mafia politicians, namely external collusion with the mafia, which is just an interpretation of the crime of mafia collusion and that only comes into play when active dealing between the politician and the mafia members can be proven, rather than merely that there is a relationship between mafia members and the politician.
What they have to prove is what the politician said to the mafia members that could have been useful in terms of strengthening the entire mafia organisation, and what the mafia member may have given the politician to strengthen his political career. The same thing is obviously true for all those who are not official mafia members, in other words, from the outside, they use their profession to further the aims of the mafia on a regular basis, because if it is only on an occasional basis, that would merely be aiding and abetting, while if they consistently place the powers conferred on them by their public or private posts at the mafia’s disposal, then that is classified as internal association. If the truth be told, the mafia would not exist if it weren’t for the help they receive from politicians, from the forces of law and order, from within the Magistrature , from the world of finance, the public tender market, from within the Church and from many other sources like the professionals within the hospital services, etc.
So anyone like an architect, priest, policeman, Carabiniere, Magistrate, politician, banker, financial police officer, secret service spy, etc who places the influence of his post or his role in society to the Cosa Nostra, he7she is guilty of external association with the mafia, that is, of course, if someone is able to show what he gave that may have strengthened the mafia and what he may have obtained in exchange. If we are unable to prove what he gave and what he received in return, then there is essentially no crime, even if there is perhaps some proof, perhaps some photographs or some wiretapped telephone conversations that show that the mafia member and the outsider do indeed meet, go to dinner, hug each other, do deals, are on very friendly terms, act as best man at the other person’s wedding, act as godfather to the other person’s child, etc.
So the Palermo Public Prosecutors Office felt that Francesco Saverio Romano was indeed a friend of a known mafia member, but that there was insufficient evidence to prove that there was any pact between them, or any exchange of favours, or any quid pro quo, so the Prosecutors Office asked that the case be archived, but what does that mean? Does that mean that the suspect is innocent? No, not at all. Archiving means that the investigation and what it has uncovered is unlikely to be sufficient to prove the prosecution’s case in court, and for trial purposes, if the evidence submitted is insufficient to prove the prosecution’s allegations, then it will end in acquittal, which is final. When an individual is acquitted of certain charges, he cannot subsequently be put on trial again on the same charges, that shows the legal system works and the principle is called the “ne bis in idem” rule, meaning not twice for the same thing. Therefore, when an investigation is deemed to be incomplete and that it is likely to uncover additional facts and evidence, it is far better to have the case archived until such time as new documents, new information, new leads, new testimony or new confessions come to light, at which point the case can be re-opened. So archiving is like putting the case in the freezer, to be thawed out at a more opportune moment.
Instead, if you submit inadequate or shaky evidence at a trial and the accused is then acquitted, you can never again put him on trial for the same crime or crimes, not even if more damning evidence has since been uncovered.
An infamous case in point is the Piazza Fontana massacre. Those who committed the Piazza Fontana massacre were acquitted in the trial that had been moved from Milan to Catanzaro at that time due to legitimate suspicion and the end result was that Messrs. Freda, Ventura, Giannetini, etc were all acquitted.
A few years ago, in the Court of Cassation, a new trial revealed that the very same Messrs. Freda and Ventura had indeed been involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre, however, they could not be convicted for their part in that crime because they had previously been acquitted. That’s why the Palermo Prosecutors, knowing the Palermo Courts reticence whenever a case involves politicians and powers that be, obviously said to themselves: we have some evidence that Saverio Romano is friendly with a number of mafia members, but perhaps we are not yet in a position to ensure that he would definitely be convicted of external association if we take the case to trial at this stage, so let’s rather have the case archived and then wait until we manage to uncover some more evidence.
The Preliminary Investigations Judge decided otherwise, however, and said: no, in my opinion there is sufficient evidence, and he then ordered that a series of additional investigations be conducted now, after which the Prosecutors once again said: we are not so sure that we have sufficient evidence to convince the Court to convict not just anyone, but a parliamentarian of external association, so let’s archive the case. However, once again the Preliminary Investigations Judge said no. Now, when it happens that the Preliminary Investigations Judge disagrees with the Prosecutors’ request to archive the case for a second time, he essentially forces the Prosecutors to proceed with the trial, but what does this mean? He basically orders the Prosecutors to request that the suspect be remanded for trial, a trial in which the individual will either be convicted, no longer by the Preliminary Investigations Judge who was in charge of the investigations, but by a Preliminary Hearing Judge, in other words by a different Judge, and this is precisely what happened. The Prosecution formulated the charges, in other words they asked this new judge to remand Francesco Saverio Romano for trial and, on 25 October, the Preliminary Hearing Judge is due to hand down his ruling. So, on 25 October, we will find out whether Romano, who is already accused from the moment that the Prosecutors request his remand for trial, thereby setting the wheels of justice in motion, will have to appear in Court or whether he will be acquitted instead.
If he is acquitted of the offence for which he was under investigation then they cannot be tried again o the same charges, not even if new evidence emerges later. That is the legal situation. Later we will take a look at the charges against Romano because, after the Prosecutors had twice asked that the case be archived and the Preliminary Investigations Judge had rejected both their requests, some new evidence has already emerged. Fortunately there are a couple of turncoats amongst Provenzano’s guys who have fingered a number of politicians, including Saverio Romano and, mark my words, there will be yet more new turncoats coming forward. I know nothing because the new turncoats certainly don’t come to me, but I believe that the current political climate certainly favours the emergence of new state witnesses. State witnesses are normal human beings, criminals and mafia members who, every day when they wake up, assess whether it would be better for them to spill the beans in order to get themselves a lighter sentence and more humane treatment in jail, or whether it would be better for them to continue to shut up. At this time, what with the politics being absolutely rock-bottom in terms of prestige and influence in society, fingering a politician who is hand in glove with the mafia is far less dangerous than doing so at the time when the politicians were really ruling the roost, so it is quite likely that the current political situation may spawn a new batch of state witnesses. In the meantime, we know that there are already two new ones that are busy fingering Romano, as well as three earlier state witnesses, as we will see in a moment.
The political aspect of this entire affair is that Romano became a Minister this past spring. He was appointed as Minister of Agricultural Resources, replacing Ronchi. Ronchi was appointed Minister … I messed it all up … in place of Galan, who was transferred to the Ministry of Cultural Assets in place of Bondi who had resigned. The Ministry of Agriculture is obviously a great place for making deals because, for example, it is responsible for the whole issue of European Union milk quotas and for farming subsidies, both of which are very important issues in a Region like Sicily. Cuffaro was Regional Councillor for agriculture prior to becoming Governor of Sicily, then parliamentarian and now currently sitting in jail, so the Ministry of Agriculture is obviously a very important Ministry indeed, and that’s precisely where Romano ended up. I’m sure you remember the pantomime played out by our Head of State who, on the one hand appointed Romano – and we must never forget that it is the Head of State that appoints our Ministers who are nominated by the Prime Minister, but it is the Head of State who finally decides whether or not the nominees will be officially appointed. As a matter of fact, after having appointed Romano and having sworn him into office on our Constitution, while Romano was leaving the Quirinale, the Head of State issued a press statement stating that he had asked for information regarding the mafia activity investigation involving Romano, At that time, there was a request from the Prosecutors to archive the case, a request that was rejected soon after. He had asked for information because he was about to appoint a man who was under investigation as Minister of Agriculture. Never before in this Country’s history had such a thing ever happened, notwithstanding our unenviable record, namely that a person who was under investigation for Mafia association got appointed as Minister of Agriculture, never! Usually it was the opposite, in other words, first they were appointed as Minister, then they were placed under investigation for Mafia association, or they were placed under investigation only after they had already left the government and politics as a whole (see Andreotti). So what happened? What happened is that things just went ahead and so, after Napolitano heard that the Prosecutors had submitted a request for the matter to be archived, he would have read the newspapers and discovered that the archiving request had been rejected, and that, following the second request, they had been ordered to proceed with Romano’s prosecution and therefore the Prosecutors had requested that the Minister that he (Napolitano) had just sworn into office, namely Romano, be remanded for trial on charges of associating with the Mafia, yet we have heard absolutely nothing from Napolitano since then. He had asked for information and was obviously satisfied at the time because he went ahead and appointed the man as Minister at the very time when the man was only under investigation and furthermore there had been a request submitted to archive the matter. All good and well, however, now that the newly appointed Minister has been charged and a request has been submitted for him to be remanded for trial, why has our State President has not issued any other press statement or at least distanced himself from this affair? He is the one that appointed the man as Minister. Tomorrow, in Parliament, in the Chamber of Deputies to be precise, a vote will be held, a secret ballot you understand, on a personal no-confidence motion against Minister Romano, as tabled by the op position parties. This means that if a majority vote is achieved on that motion in Parliament, it will constitute a direct challenge, not to the incumbent government as a whole, but to the Minister of Agricultural Resources, who should then resign from the post immediately thereafter. Rumours were doing the rounds that Berlusconi wanted to force Romano to resign just before the vote, but why? Well, because with a secret ballot one never knows which way things are likely to go. As we saw, thanks to the secret ballot, the Hon. Papa landed up in jail, “betrayed” by his own majority, whereas Marco Milanese managed to avoid arrest by just a handful of votes, I think it was 6 votes in all. In this case, they will not be voting for or against an arrest, or for or against authorising the Magistrates to proceed, but rather on a political matter, namely whether or not this gentleman should be allowed to continue as Minister. So they’re not voting to restrict his freedom, or to wiretap his phones or to place him in handcuffs. They will simply be voting on whether or not a man who is under investigation for Mafia association can continue to be Minister of Agricultural Resources.

Maroni and the battle against the Mafia, with a Minister accused of Mafia association

Maroni, our Minister of Internal Affairs, the one who always boasts about the number of mobsters he has had arrested, Maroni and the Maroni-ists are the ones that sank Papa and sent him to jail. They have already stated that they will be voting against the no-confidence motion, which means that just to keep Romano in their government, the very one who claims to be battling the Mafia will have a Minister accused of mafia association as a parliamentary colleague. Not to mention Bossi! Bossi even went so far as to rescue Milanese in order to safeguard his own cushy posts, above all those of his family members. It has got to the point where Bossi would even rescue Al Capone if someone were to ask him to.
We are all too painfully aware of what the Pdl has become. Romano has already thrown down the gauntlet with his threat of “If I go down then I will take everyone else down with me because I am a party leader”. Yeah, right, he is the leader of the party managers, just like Scilipoti and others who were originally voted in under one of the opposition party banners. Romano went into Parliament as part of the op position, as a member of the Udc but then, at a certain point, he switched camps and, together with Cuffaro, he sided with the Berlusconi Government when he voted against the no-confidence motion table last December, thereby getting himself dragged in during the last re-shuffle and then being rewarded with a Ministry. So here we have one of the Sicilian management leaders stating openly that the majority is dependent on these managers for its survival and that, unless the majority wants to become a minority, all they need to do is to vote against the no-confidence motion. Romano knows that if he were to land up in jail, all the other party managers would bring down this government.
Si it is very likely that the no-confidence motion will be squashed tomorrow, even by those who claim to have it in for the Mafia and those who claim to have it in for the criminal south and, from the Lega members whose vote will be decisive in terms of saving these fine specimens. The last thing that we have to ask ourselves is: are we absolutely sure that someone should resign as Minister just because he happens to have a remand for trial application hanging over his head? What if he is eventually acquitted? What if the Prosecutors’ application for remand for trial is rejected? Who is then going to compensate him for the loss of his cushy post? How many times have we heard this being said: who is going to compensate him, etc., etc. …. I think that even if he is eventually acquitted, Romano should nevertheless not be a Minister, nor a Parliamentarian for that matter, or even a District Councillor or high-school janitor because of the people he frequents, not because of any crimes that he may or may not have committed. The judges will have to judge whether or not he has committed any crimes, however, when it come to acquaintances, we can judge those if we have all the facts.
But do you know what the real tragedy is? The tragedy is that tomorrow Parliament will vote for or against Romano, and that in a Country in which no one except for a few of his closest friends have any idea who this Romano fellow is. Just as last week they voted for or against Milanese in a Country where no one, except perhaps Tremonti a handful of others actually know who this Milanese fellow actually is. When Papa landed up in jail, no one knew who Papa was, not even the centre-right voters seeing that he had been brought into Parliament via the back door thanks to our current electoral law – just by the bye, you still have a few days to go and sign the call for a referendum. So, if we knew who this Romano fellow actually is and if the people of Padania knew who this Romano fellow really is, never mind his alleged crimes on which the Magistrature has to decide, but because of his associations and his history, I think that the Lega would be obliged by its voters to vote in favour of the no-confidence motion, which is far less difficult than authorising someone’s arrest. All they are doing is telling this gentleman to “go back to Palermo as a common citizen and give up the idea of being a Minister, at least until your legal issues have been sorted out”. But the fact remains that although we are only marginally concerned about the outcome of the legal matter and we only really want to know who did what, I think that however the trial may end, Romano should not be allowed to continue as Minister in any event.
But who is Romano? Let’s look at a brief biography of the man in order to understand what is at stake tomorrow in the Chamber of Deputies’ no-confidence motion vote. Romano was born in Palermo on 24 December 1964, so he is now 47 years of age. He has a law degree and is an attorney. He was Undersecretary for Welfare under Maroni when he was a Minister in the Berlusconi 2 Government from 2001 to 2006. He was also Regional Undersecretary for the Udc in Sicily and has been in Parliament since 2001, in other words for the past 10 years, so this is his third legislature.
On 17 December 2002 he publicly came out against the regulation that entrenched Article 41 bis, in other words the article that prescribed hard labour for incarcerated mafia bosses, and when that law was approved, he abstained from voting. The SISDE listed him as one of the 6 southern attorneys that the Cosa Nostra wanted to eliminate in order to send a message to those who didn’t meet certain commitments and certain agreements with the Mafia. He, like most of his colleagues who were deemed to be at risk for not having stuck to certain agreements or because their party had failed to stick to agreements, was offered protection, but refused it. He was investigated for mafia activities for the first time with Totò Cuffaro, who was his mentor, his Siamese twin or his Dioscuri, but why? Well, because he was being accused of having accompanied Cuffaro to a meeting with a number of members of the Cosa Nostra. That was the Guttadauro inquiry, which led to Cuffaro’s final conviction for aiding and abetting the Mafia, for which he is currently serving time. Romano, instead, was arrested but then his case was archived and I have already explained to you what that means, namely that the case file was put in the deep freezer because the evidence that had been uncovered at the time was not sufficient to guarantee a conviction.
However, in 2006 he was once again placed under investigation for external mafia association following the revelations made by turncoat Francesco Campanella regarding alleged summits held with other known mafia members.
So, what did Campanella have to say? We are only finding out now and so now we understand why they are conducting this investigation, why there is this request for remand for trial, why a Preliminary Investigations Judge has ordered that the Prosecutors must proceed with Romano’s prosecution and why all good people would hope that the no-confidence motion is adopted. There are 5 State witnesses that have made accusations against Romano. The first of these is Nino Giuffrè, who was one of Bernardo Provenzano’s main henchmen and Boss of the Madonie clan and who said that Romano was often spoken about in Provenzano’s circles already when he was President of Irca (the Regional Co-operative Credit Institute) and therefore managed public funds. So he was very much talked about in Provenzano’s circle, or so we are told, so let’s leave it at that.
Then there is Angelo Siino, former head of the Sicilian tender round table and the man that Riina had personally placed at the head of the public tender round table as long ago as the early 90s. He was nicknamed “Bronson” because he looks a lot like Charles Bronson. He loves cars and beautiful women and even worked as chauffeur to Pope Wojtyla, who obviously had no idea of what was going on during his trip to Sicily. Then there is also Angelo Siino, Totò Riina’s Minister of Public Works, who states that in 1991, Francesco Saverio Romano brought Toto Cuffaro to his home when he (Cuffaro) was standing for election to the Sicilian Regional Administration, not as President but merely as Regional Councillor, that was very early in his career, 20 years back. Romano was only 26 years old at the time, yet he brought Totò Cuffaro to Siina’s home to introduce this chubby young candidate who was just beginning his career in the shadow of Calogero Mannino, who was Cuffaro’s father, but also in the shadow of Totò Cardinale and Romano himself.
The third turncoat ... so it’s a fact that Siino, whom everyone in Sicily knows, met with the young Cuffaro at his house, accompanied by Francesco Saverio Romano.
The third turncoat is Salvatore Insalaco, another Boss of the mafia tender group who tells of another episode, stating that: Operating together, Romano and Cuffaro arranged public funding for various businessmen in exchange for bribes.
The fourth turncoat is Francesco Campanella, but who is this guy anyway? Well, he was the “enfant prodige” of the Christian Democrat Party who, following the death of the Christian Democrat Party, immediately rushed to join the Udeur party, where he went on to become national coordinator of the Young Mastellians, because it seems that there really are some young Mastellians, I think his sons, or suchlike. So the Young Mastellians, the Udeur youth in other words, were co-ordinated by Campanella who continued to climb up the ranks and eventually became President of the Villabate Municipal Council, a Municipality situated right alongside Palermo with a high proportion of Mafia members, where the Mandalà family ruled the roost. As a matter of fact, Campanella was the Manadalà Boss’ right hand man so half of his days were spent working for Mandalà and the rest of his day was spent working for the Villabate Municipality. This was the Municipal Council that was dissolved twice because of its mafia links, as much due to Campanella’s presence as that of a Mayor who was directly related to Boss Mandalà. The interesting thing here is that Renato Schifani was a town planning consultant in that very same Junta.
Villabate is well known to Schifani and Schifani is well known in Villabate. At a certain point, Campanella even dedicated himself to protecting Bernardo Provenzano hiding place and he (Provenzano) was even provided with false documents for a trip to Marseilles, where Provenzano went to have a prostate operation using a false name and fake identity documents. Campanella tells of a couple of events that he remembered at various times: 1) the very well-known story about a certain lunch that was held at the “Campo dei Fiori”, where Romano pointed to Campanella who was also there, and said that: Francesco will vote for me because we are members of the same family, and Campanella says that the family that Romano was obviously referring to was the Villa family, headed up by Nino Mandalà. Campanella explained that it was Mandalà himself who wanted Giuseppe Acanto to stand in the Regional elections back in 2001, under the banner of the “Bianco Fiore”, which Romano himself had founded. Romano knew this and accepted it, and therefore the Prosecutors believe that Romano not only worked to get himself elected, but also another politician that was well-liked by the Mafia, namely this Acanto fellow, on a nomination list that he had personally drawn up and was a nomination list for the “Bianco Fiore”.
The last of the turncoats is Stefano Loverso. But who is this guy? Well, for two years he worked as Bernardo Provenzano’s chauffeur and he too hosted the man at his home and took care of Provenzano for part of the time that he was in hiding from the Police prior to his arrest in 2006. Loverso says that: Nicola Mandalà - (Nino Mandalà’s son), another convicted mafia member later sentenced to life in jail – we have our hands on one of my godfather Ciccio Pastoia’s countrymen (Pastoia was one of Provenzano’s men who committed suicide in prison not long after being arrested), Saverio Romano. My Godfather knows all about it and he agrees. In other words, Ciccio Pastoia, a mafia member from Belmonte Mezzagno, which just happens to also be the hometown of Francesco Saverio Romano, and one of Provenzano loyal followers was also Godfather to Saverio Romano and looked after him, according to Loverso.

The turncoats start spilling the beans again (about Saverio Romano)

Another revelation made by Campanella, the fourth most recent turncoat, is that: In 2001, Romano called me to his home and told me that he intended to stand for election and was hoping to be a point of reference for the families of Villabate and Belmonte Mezzagno, in other words the town controlled by the Mandalàs and the one controlled by the Pastoias, both of whom were Provenzano’s men and he then pointed out that he knew I was close to the Villa Family. So, knowing that Campanella was Mandalà’s man, Romano called him to come to his home and said: look, I’m going to stand for election to Parliament. The first time he was elected, it was to the Chamber of Deputies as point of reference for the families of Villabate and Belmonte Mezzagno. Campanella also opened his wedding photograph album. I think he got married in 1999, if I’m not mistaken, and who do you think stood out in those photographs? Well, two individuals whom we already know, namely Cuffaro and Mastella, both of whom attended the wedding of Campanella, a mafia member from the Villa Family. Cuffaro and Mastella, no less. But Saverio Romano was also there, what a surprise! Caught on camera, standing behind the wedding couple at the altar while Campanella and his little bride were being married, Romano at the back and Cuffaro and Mastella on either side.
What a wonderful little group! Now some may say: oh well, these are merely the accusations of turncoats, but no, the wedding photograph shows that when Campanella talks about Romano, he is talking about someone that he knows very well, someone who attended his wedding and this really is a major find! But hang on, there is also certain evidence against Romano that is not just the word of a turncoat or that of a mere fitness, it is documentary evidence.
Not only the photographs, but also the wiretapped telephone conversations between Massimo Ciancimino and Accountant Gianni Lapis, who acted as proxy for old man Ciancimino, the man who looked after Don Vito Ciancimino’s treasure, especially Ciancimino’s investments in Enel’s gas business. At a certain point Ciancimino senior passed away and this Lapis fellow and Ciancimino’s son spoke about living these shares back to certain politicians, as if they were concealed shareholdings, so these politicians must have been silent partners of Ciancimino senior, so much so that they were given some shares. This is what emerged from the wiretapped telephone conversations, the documents and the money that this Lapis fellow gave certain Sicilian politicians, with the full agreement of Massimo Ciancimino, namely to Cuffaro and another couple of Sicilian Parliamentarians that I won’t bother to mention here because that would really lead us astray. But also to Francesco Saverio Romano, who is in fact under investigation for corruption, together with Lapis. Then there’s Vizzini and a deceased parliamentarian, as well as Cuffaro and Romano, all of whom, according to the prosecution, received certain sums that were a kind of return of company shares that they held jointly with Ciancimino.
In order to find out whether Romano will eventually be prosecuted, we will have to wait for the Chamber to either authorise or refuse to authorise the Palermo Prosecutors to proceed and to use those recorded telephone conversations, but why? Well, because they indirectly involve a parliamentarian who was talking to Lapis.
The third fact and not just hearsay from a turncoat is another wiretapped telephone conversation that everyone had overlooked at the time of the 2003 investigation. The conversation in question is the one picked up by hidden bugs in the lounge of Brancaccio Boss and mafia doctor Giuseppe Guttadauro’s home. He was Graviano’s man who received doctors, killers and protection racketeers, all in that same lounge. He manipulated the healthcare system and the protection rackets as well as dealing with the nomination of candidates for election. Up to now it seemed that another of Cuffaro’s pupils, Mimmo Miceli, who suggested to Guttadauro that he meet with Romano back in 2001 when Romano was elected to Parliament and, therefore, it appeared that it was all this Micelli fellow’s idea. However, from a wiretapped telephone conversation that the Preliminary Investigations Judge uncovered while re-reading all of the documentation of the Cuffaro trial, it turns out that it was Romano himself who let Guttadauro know, via an intermediary, that he wanted to meet with him, so it wasn’t all Miceli’s idea to put Guttadauro and Romano in contact with each other, but it was Romano who was proposing to meet a man who was indisputably a mafia boss because Guttadauro had already been convicted, served his sentence, been released and had already returned home and started doing business again, so everyone was well aware that he was a mafia boss!
So now you understand that this changes things, but why? Well, because if you want to meet with a known mafia boss and you send in an unnamed intermediary to represent you, clearly this is not just some chance meeting at a bar or at the sports club, and that’s why the Prosecution writes that Romano made himself available to the Mafia in his professional capacity in order to assist the mafia in its criminal endeavours, in return for some consideration, and that’s the next fact. A quid pro quo, as La Repubblica revealed last week. When the Mafia Boss of Agrigento, Alberto Provenzano, namesake and colleague of Bernardo Provenzano was arrested in 2002, in other words nine years ago, in his wallet he had some tickets, or IOU’s, one of which. For example, was from business card for “pronto pizza”, the pizza home delivery service. On the back of the card there were two handwritten telephone numbers, one for a landline and the other for a mobile phone, both of which belonged to Romano. When Romano was questioned about this, he said: Well, I met him at university back in 1984 but I have not seen him since then. We studied together – but please note, this is an incumbent Minister and head of the anti-mafia prosecution unit! I suppose it could be a mere coincidence that they studied together back in 1984 and now, in 2002 the mafia boss has his telephone numbers at hand. But hang on a minute, there were no mobile phones around in 1984, so obviously he must have got that mobile phone number far more recently and how could this be if it is true, as Romano claims, that he had not heard from Provenzano since they were at university? Someone else must have given Provenzano Romano’s number, but what did he need those numbers for back in 2002? At a time when Romano was no longer a university student but rather a parliamentarian in the Italian Parliament, working alongside Cuffaro?
So you can understand that this jigsaw puzzle undoubtedly made some waves, also because the turncoat by the name of Loverso, whom I mentioned earlier, also added another little detail, namely that whenever there were any bureaucratic problems with the Villabate Town Council, he would go and talk to Nicola Mandalà, the Boss’ son, who promised – according to Loverso at least – that he would sort it out. Then he went further and began to talk about political matters and assured me that there were no problems, not even at the Regional and National levels and that we had no problems whatsoever, not even with the centrist parties, in other words the Udc, because we have Saverio Romano and Totò Cuffaro on our side.
Then Loverso added that Michele Aiello, the king of private clinics and roadwork tenders that has also already been convicted for his mafia activities, albeit not finally convicted, but certainly on appeal, had made it known that he also knew that Romano was pushing to nominate Mandalà’s man, namely the Piero Acanto that we mentioned earlier, on the Bianco Fiore nomination list, as well as another of Provenzano’s men, Vincenzo Paparopoli and talking about Campanella’s statements, he said that it was all true that these were the kind of deals that were being done between the mafia men, and that the contacts between the Villabate family and the Hon. Romano were arranged via Nino Bruno, whose name appears in the Cuffaro investigation. That’s why on the charge sheet against Romano, the one that is currently being scrutinised by the Preliminary Investigations Judge, it is written that Agriculture Minister Romano knowingly and consciously furthered the aims of the Cosa Nostra mafia group by making himself available in his professional capacity, thereby contributing to the execution of the organisation’s criminal plans, which were aimed at getting their hands on the power and influence needed to influence the work of political and administrative bodies.

So, if the Lega should decide to rescue this man, you should know that it is not only to save the current government, but also precisely because Romano is indeed the Minister of Agriculture and we all know that Bossi continues to fight on behalf of a few hundred cattle breeders who have fiddled the milk quotas, thereby cheating the thousands of honest cattle breeders of northern Italy that have always stuck to their quotas, eventually paying fines for those violations. Now Romano is persecuting an upstanding Lega member like Dario Fruscio, President of the Agency for the al location of European Union Funding, who is trying to get the guilty parties to pay those fines and to get those who are flouting the European Union rules to comply. Romano has placed this agency that was cutting costs and helping the Inland Revenue Department to recover this misspent money, under administration, so Romano has become Bossi’s accomplice in this operation that rewards illegality at the expense of those who operate legally. So, Romano has probably done enough to gain the political backing of the Lega. I want to point this out to all the people of Padania that look to thieving Rome without noticing that the real thieves are right in their back yard. Spread the word!

A mussel is not forever - Marco Travaglio
(39.39)

How to cut the bonds of the mussels
The problem, therefore, is not how to loosen the grip of the mussels one by one, but rather how to cut the bonds and destroy the rocks that they cling to. It seems to me that the weapons of traditional politics are no longer able to break those bonds that the politicians themselves have contributed to establishing and we therefore obviously need something from outside the political system, perhaps from below, but something that is in any event independent of the political system.
In order to fulfil the hopes and wishes of his voters and his senior colleagues, yesterday Fini should have stood down as President of the Chamber in order to throw down a challenge to the right wing and to prevent the votes that Pdl and the Lega are losing at a dizzy rate of knots because of their total failure from simply adding to the discontent, abstentionism or the fence-sitting that they like to call anti-politics but that is, in fact the new politics. Instead, Fini was unable to pluck up the courage to do so, so he will continue to sit in Parliament like a stuffed trophy, as President of the Chamber, and will probably give up the chance to be a real catalyst for the many centre-right voters who would never vote for the left but who, at the same time, will never again vote for Berlusconi or for Bossi since they have been so beautifully taken for a ride by these guys. On the left, we see a total impotence amongst the major players of the centre-left, and here I’m talking about the Democratic Party, which, on the one hand has been seriously check-mated by the Penati affair, and the rot continues to spread day by day, and on the other hand appears to be unable to do anything other than meekly mumble while the government, and unfortunately also our Country, continues to fall apart. I think that, given the indecency of a government such as ours, even the most idiotic opposition in the world would somehow be able to launch initiatives that are far stronger and more visible than the mumbling and dawdling that we are currently seeing from the Democratic Party, not even to mention Vendola’s so-called radical left, which has gone totally extinct and become totally deflated in recent weeks because they appear to be obviously unable to find the right words to describe what they want to do, assuming, of course, that they are allowed to do anything.
So, fortunately, this past weekend, on the one hand we had the Movimento Cinque Stelle and Beppe Grillo beating the drum, and on the other hand, thanks to press patriotism, we had thousands of people who came to join in Il Fatto Quotidiano’s festival, which, unlike the usual, semi-deserted political party festivals, was not all about ballroom dancing, entertainment, fritters and roast suckling pig, but a festival based on culture, politics and economics. Yesterday afternoon I participated in a marvellous meeting with Magistrates Davigo and Greco and former Magistrate Tinti. The meeting was chaired by Antonella Mascali and Marco Lillo and we talked about the real root of the problem, namely financial crime and tax evasion, which Public Prosecutor Greco defined as the real reason behind the zero growth-rate in our Country. If you care to go and take a look at the film clips of Davigo, Greco and Tinti, you will discover that a number of solutions were proposed although, unfortunately, the problem is no longer how to find solutions because the right solutions are disarmingly simple and elementary and have already been written. They are natural solutions and obvious in a Country such as ours, so, what do we have to do in order to defeat tax evasion? Well, we must increase the number of audits, increase the penalties, extend the statute barring deadlines for these kinds of crimes, we have to go after the people who hide their money in tax havens and we have to fight against the tax havens themselves, but how do we do this since we can’t exactly bomb them out of existence? Well, Greco proposes that we impose a 100% tax surcharge on financial transactions involving the Countries on the Tax Haven Black-list, everywhere from Monte Carlo to the Cayman Islands and everything in-between, rather than rewarding such transactions. Then we must also impose harsh penalties, perhaps in the form of additional levies, on banks and Italian companies that have questionable shell-subsidiaries registered in Monte Carlo, in Lichtenstein, in Ireland and in other Countries that have tax structures that are totally different from ours, all of which are far more advantageous and with no transparency, which is precisely what makes them tax havens. That is what we should do, but why? Well, because, as Tinti showed by quoting some calculations done by the Ministry of Finance, official calculations in other words, Italy has some 41 million taxpayers. Of these, around 35 million are company employees who contribute some 92% of the total tax revenues and who cannot evade tax because their taxi s deducted at the source, in other words directly from their pay-packets by their employers. So these people are not the tax evaders. The tax evaders are the remaining 5 or 6% of taxpayers who only contribute around 8% of this Country’s total tax revenues but who are also, on average, the wealthier echelons, namely the independent professionals, those with VAT registration numbers. It’s a sad fact. I must hasten to add that not everyone with a VAT registration number is automatically a tax evader, however, it is safe to say that all tax evaders are holders of a VAT registration number, but why? Well, simply because there is no way that they can be company employees or pensioners and that’s why Public Prosecutor Greco stated that “Both here in Italy and worldwide, but above all here in Italy, the trend is for the poor to support the wealthy. The tax evaders govern while the honest taxpayers pay”. Now I’m no expert but I do believe the Assistant Public Prosecutor of Milan. Go and take a look at the film clip of the debate. These are not merely the words of some or other self-professed expert or populist or terrorist or self-serving subversive, they are the words of a Magistrate who has spent the past 30 years dealing with financial crimes and financial criminals and who is now saying, quite rightly, that the main problem is the money that the tax evaders and bribers are hiding from the public. While we’re on the subject of bribers, and just to prove to you how simple the solutions really are if only there were any politicians who could afford the luxury of adopting them, Davigo reminded everyone that in other countries, in order to nab those individuals involved in bribery and corruption, they make extensive use of sting operatives who are charged with setting traps to test the honesty of public servants, but what precisely do these operatives do? Well, just a few months after an individual has been elected to public office, an individual suddenly appears, pretending to be a businessman who is interested in a particular tender contract and who then proceeds to offer the public servant a bribe. If the public servant kicks him out or lodges a complaint against him, then it means that we are in good hands and that the public servant in question is honest whereas, if the public servant accepts the bribe that is being offered, he will land up in jail because it means that he is potentially open to bribery and corruption. That’s how you go about fighting corruption, with extreme means and extreme remedies. These sting operatives are the magic bullet. Let’s go and find out whether or not the people we elect to public office are inherently honest. There are other solutions too. When Rudolph Giuliani became Mayor of New York, the city was in total chaos as a result of gang warfare. So he came up with the concept of “Zero tolerance”. Every broken shop window leads to another broken shop window and if we replace the broken window, people will think twice about breaking another window, but why? Well, because the people will realise that we are living in a context of law and order, which obviously goes hand in hand with repression and zero tolerance against the crimes committed by the dregs of society. Simultaneously, Mayor Giuliani declared war on corrupt public servants. For example, as tends to happen worldwide, taking backhanders was common practice in the higher echelons of the parastatal refuse collection company. Can you imagine the financial muscle and the power wielded by those responsible for refuse removal in a city like New York, one of the largest cities in the world? Okay, so what did Mayor Giuliani do? He stipulated that anyone hoping to be appointed by the Municipality to work in New York’s refuse removal company would have to sign a declaration in which they accepted that their telephone conversations and their mail could be monitored at any time and for the entire duration of their mandates. Individuals were obliged to sign this declaration if they wanted the job and anyone who refused to sign would not be appointed to the job. In other words, if you want to become a member of my club, I get to set the rules and you will have to live by my rules. If one of the rules of my club is that you must wear a collar and tie, either you wear collar and tie or you simply won’t be allowed in. I made the rule and that’s that and no one is forcing you to come to my club if you don’t like my rules!
Similarly, if you want to become a public servant, you first have to agree to the fact that your calls and your mail will be monitored, but why? Well, because certain of your predecessors stole public funds and because of their theft I am no longer able to remove the refuse from the streets, so either you agree to being monitored or you won’t be appointed to public office and you will have to find some other job in the private sector. That’s how you apply extreme measures. The solutions are very simple, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that a Parliamentary majority is required in order to adopt these solutions and in order to get such a majority, we would need to have a majority of honest people in Parliament, elected by honest voters who are well informed regarding the honesty or otherwise of the candidates and using a voting mechanism that would enable the voters to select their own representatives rather than allowing the political parties to simply appoint their own chosen candidates who may or may not be entirely honest. So what we need is information and a democratic electoral law, not the one we have at the moment, as well as honest, smart voters. Even a thief should realise that it’s not a good thing to be governed by other thieves because, at some point, there would be so many thieves that they will even steal from him. We, instead, have a serious problem, namely the millions of tax evaders and construction fraudsters, in other words mass criminality and you can imagine what this means at election time. That explains why no illegally constructed buildings, or rather very few of the millions and millions of them have been knocked down in recent years, why the politicians so often defend the culprits by preventing the demolition of their buildings, and why, for the past 20, 30 or 40 years the politicians have made a point of demolishing the repressive legislation that landed the tax evaders in jails. That’s why there are 0 tax evaders currently in jail. Go and take a look at the film clips of yesterday’s discussion, which reveals how both the left wing and the right wing have protected the tax evaders for the past 20 years, but why? Well, because these are their voters, that’s why!

Time for a trim? The Electoral Law
Most of them vote for the right wing because the right wing even grants regular amnesties, but some even vote for the left wing where even the most rabid trade unionists have always been very protective of tax evaders thanks to some very generous pension top-ups handed out to the INPS as a form of social welfare, which helps to keep the people quiet, instead of merely a payback of actual contributions that individuals have paid in over the years. And so this contribution evasion has created the current INPS pension deficit, a contribution evasion that has unfortunately been tolerated for many years, as has absenteeism within the companies and the public service and even by the trade union movement. But then that’s what happens when many of your voters are just simply lazy, tax evaders, contribution evaders, milk quota evaders – and here just think about how the Lega protects those who evade milk production quotas -, as well as corrupt tax evaders and mafia members, what is clear is that these criminal lobby groups, especially the mafia ones have an impact on the evasion policies, but why? Well, because while the mafia members may only number in the tens of thousands, they also happen to control some hundreds of thousands of local votes in certain areas, and not only down in the South, but also in Milan, the suburbs of Milan, as well as Turin, the Valle di Susa and even part of the Aosta Valley and a large chunk of Emilia Romagna, the Lazio coast, etc. Does anyone actually know exactly how many votes the Mafia controls? Perhaps a few hundred thousand. How many votes do the tax evaders control? Millions, simply because there are millions of tax evaders, after all, it would be impossible to get to a figure of some say 120 and others say 160 million Euro unless millions of people were evading taxes.
All of these are amongst the ranks of the independent workers and professionals, all amongst those that have VAT registration numbers. This is the real problem. Clearly there is a problem and, as in the case of the mussels clinging to the proverbial rope dangling in the sea and that are virtually impossible to extricate, what we need is a pair of scissors, which can only be provided by those outside the system. At this moment in time, this can only come in one of three ways: 1) a referendum against the so-called “porcellum” electoral law, which is not ideal since it would only reinstate the earlier so-called “mattarellum” electoral law that was based on proportional representation but was still preferable to what we have now, what are the alternatives? None at the moment. For the next elections, either we must use the Calderoli abortion that allows 5 party secretaries to appoint all their buddies, their lovers or their sugar-daddies, those who blackmail them, as well as their whores, servants and protégés to Parliament, or we can use the so-called “mattarellum” electoral law, which, while it doesn’t allow us a great deal of choice, at least it allows us to choose from amongst two or three potential candidates within the constituency. Certainly we didn’t choose these people, unless the parties hold primary elections, and that’s why I’m in favour of the dual-round system where, in the first round, each of the parties nominates their own candidate and the voters can then choose their preferred candidate, these are known as the primaries, where the voters get to decide whether they prefer the candidate put up by the smaller party because he may be better or more prestigious or more honest than the candidate put up by the larger party. Thereafter, during the second round, the candidates with the highest number of votes battle it out amongst themselves and you, the voter, will probably land up no longer voting for the candidate whose ideas are necessarily closest to your own, but for the one whose ideas are least distant from your own, or you may choose not to vote if you don’t like either of the candidates. However, with the so-called “mattarellum” system, at least the candidates have been chosen in some way rather than simply being appointed and you get the chance to write your preferred candidate’s name on your ballot paper or put a cross next to his name and this has to be better than the current system. So, in order to bring back the earlier system we have to go down to one of the stands and sign. There were stands at Il Fatto Quotidiano’s festival too, where the Democratic Party was obliged to set up a stall notwithstanding the Democratic Party establishment’s hostility to the idea of stalls. There were stalls at the Italia dei Valori party festival and even at the Futuro e Libertà’s do held at Mirabello, against the wishes of Casini and Rutelli’s Third Pole, who didn’t want to know about allowing the voters to express their wishes, since when?
Anyway, since Casini himself pushed for and voted in favour of this so-called “porcellum“ electoral law, it would seem rather strange for him to now call for a referendum aimed at revoking a law that he originally voted in favour of. In any event, there are stalls all over the place where you can go and sign the call for the referendum. I signed yesterday and I believe it is the right thing to do, but why? Well, because if at the next election we vote to send those gentlemen that the parties have already chosen and nominated de facto to Parliament, it like not going to vote at all, just like the last few times. This is the first thing to do in order to sever that rope full of mussels and make the mussels fall off.
The second thing to do is to support the existing and potential future movements that will grow in stature, such as Beppe Grillo’s “Movimento Cinque Stelle”, which is already gaining ground and, according to various polls, supposedly enjoy around 5, 4,or 6% support, even thug the polls don’t place much emphasis on the movements because they never seem to be able to accurately gauge exactly how many people will actually go and vote. There are still a few months to go to the elections so the results of the polls are neither here nor there, but if they are already showing some 5% potential support for a brand new movement that has never stood in any election before now, and this one and a half years prior to the next elections, it means that this is definitely another tool originating outside of the current political system that could somehow break that hegemony between right wing and left wing that has become outdated, withered, mouldy and rotten to the core.
The third and final tool that I can see at the moment for cutting that rope and freeing us from that disaster that is majoritarianism and the equally disastrous opposition is a new kind of information, information that comes from below and that begins on the Web. That is why I am particularly pleased that Santoro was shown the door by RAI and had the door slammed in his face by “La 7”, which would have been more of the same. Obviously Mediaset has become little more than an impenetrable fortress for the common man, so I’m pleased that Santoro has taken the advice that Beppe has been giving him for some time now and has opted to go on the Web. Please note that what Santoro announced yesterday and that the newspapers have labelled as something that will be going on Sky and that is paid for by Murdock is utterly false. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. It is a television channel that is totally separate from the television service as we know it, but works via online streaming, precisely like the Passaparola programme that you’re busy watching right now, but obviously with more television appeal because you can’t screen a prime time television programme that consists entirely of a person sitting behind a desk, but via direct streaming, with the added possibility of viewing a recording just moments later on YouTube. But this is not produced by someone who controls what is screened. It is produced by an independent party, such as Il Fatto Quotidiano, which doesn’t need to get prior permission from any bank, any FIAT, any Ligresti, any Caltagirone, any Berlusconi, any Bersani or indeed anyone else! In the same way, this television programme will open a direct channel, which could be followed by other free programmes and any of the existing television channels are free to pick it up and run with it as is. They can air it but without having any right to control the programme content or the choices, which are made exclusively by the journalists, writers, cameramen, directors and the editors that produce the programme, all those in front of the cameras and those behind the scenes, those whose job it is to inform.
This truly is a Copernican devolution. Whereas before one had to beg and editor for permission to come in because he was the boss of both the medium and the programme and, therefore, of his employees too, here we have something totally different. Independent professionals working for themselves, funded by pure publishers, people who do nothing other than publish, like Il Fatto Quotidiano, local television channels like Telelombardia, Telenorba and all the other local television channels that will come together to form this network to cover the entire country on the terrestrial digital system. Then, if Sky should choose to screen the programme even on only one of its channels, which would undoubtedly be beneficial for Murdoch, as well as for all those who subscribe to Sky and who, in addition to the various films, sports events and documentaries, will also be able to watch Santoro’s programme. If they don’t want Santoro’s programme, it will be available in any event, on the Web and on terrestrial digital TV, but why? Well, because the programme exists, notwithstanding the television bosses and, in fact, you’re going to see two things happening now: first of all, undoubtedly there will be a veritable defamation and denigration campaign unleashed against those who produce and those who support the programme; 2) there is bound to be some sort of legal attempt to muzzle the programme, passed off as some sort of regulation to control Web TV because obviously, it’s one thing if I, as a novice, sit behind my desk and talk on Web TV, but it’s a totally different matter when the person sitting behind the desk talking is Santoro who, when he was on the traditional TV, had 8 million viewers tuning in to listen to him for 3 hours in prime time and who, when he presented events such as “Tutti in piedi” with Fiom, or with RAI and, as occurred on one evening last year, in Bologna, where he had no less than five million people who struggled to find the transmission on live streaming or on the local TV stations or on the “Current” channel when it was still up and running before they shut it down in June this year, then clearly, when the No.1 show host leaves the traditional TV broadcasters and video bosses to go out on his own, then these guys get very nervous indeed, but why? Well, because those that stay behind will suddenly be seen for what they are, namely people who are happy to kowtow to the bosses’ diktats, which those that work with Santoro are no longer obliged to do.
In order to reveal the things that Berlusconi has done, it will no longer be necessary to invite his attorneys into the studio to shout insults and interrupt you in an attempt to prevent you from speaking. It won’t be necessary to invite Bersani in order to be able to discuss the scandals afflicting the centre-left. You can invite him along if you wish to put some questions to him, that is if he agrees to come along of course, but you don’t have to invite him because the journalists are responsible for informing people, not the politicians, so finally Santoro’s programme will no longer be obliged to pay the kind of tolls he was forced to pay in recent years, a heavy toll too I might add, namely having to invite along the usual gaggle of politicians, which represented a tax to be paid in return for being able to conduct inquiries and discuss what those politicians and their buddies had done. As you know, the minute that Milena Gabanelli, who didn’t even do any political debates between politicians in the studio, dared to speak ill of Tremonti in one of her programmes, she was immediately attacked by the Agcom (the Italian television oversight committee), that ridiculous committee stuffed with loudmouths and political has-beens appointed to the committee by the various political parties, and was forced to do another episode of “Report” where everyone only spoke well of Tremonti, but why, you ask? Well, apparently there was no one in the studio on the first occasion that could support Tremonti! But hang on a minute, where is it written that if you speak badly of a politician then you have to later speak well of him in the interests of fairness?

Truly free information in order to tell the story of a Country
A journalist must only speak well of a politician if that politician deserves praise whereas, if a politician deserves to be spoken badly of, then we have to speak badly of him, that’s what freedom of information and freedom to criticise is all about. The right to criticise was hard-won through a series of liberal revolutions that gave us freedom of the press and the right to disagree, the right to criticise. The right to praise is granted even in dictatorships because there is no need for any freedom to applaud those in power. The difference between dictatorships and democracy is that, in the case of dictatorships, there is only the right to applaud whereas, in any democracy there is also the right to criticise and to blow raspberries. In recent years we have witnessed the progressive erosion of our right to criticise and, if someone dared to criticise, then they also had to praise, or if someone was criticising, then there had to be someone next to him who would praise the individual, otherwise it was an infringement of the equal opportunity rule. This is no longer applicable once an individual becomes an independent on Web TV where, if someone has something to say, he/she simply says it. In these past few years I have been able to present hundreds of episodes of Passaparola and I have been free to criticise whomever I wished, without anyone coming up to me and saying “next time you have to speak well of him, okay”, why is that? Well, the answer is very simple. It is because while Agcom has jurisdiction as the Boards of Directors of RAI, like a bunch of Sanhedrins put there by the parties under various pretences to control the content of televised information, they have no jurisdiction over the Web or over this programme, which will be called “Comizi d’amore” (literally “A meeting of love”) and will be predominantly screened online. Then, if someone should choose to broadcast it, and I think that a number of local television channels will undoubtedly want to broadcast it for business reasons, and we’ll whether or not Sky is truly independent, in other words whether or not they will also want to broadcast it, but why? Well, because when the free market operates properly it is absolutely relentless and if someone has a loyal viewership who watches his/her programme, those viewers will also see any advertising that is included in that programme, so the advertisers will be attracted, but you will remain free because you don’t need the advertising revenue anyway. If the advertisers, or their bosses for that matter don’t like something that you say in your programme, then it’s their hard luck, not yours, if they choose not to advertise on your programme.
Il Fatto Quotidiano has very little advertising yet we continue to do very well for ourselves, precisely because when any advertiser try to blackmail us by saying that they will only advertise with us if we speak well of them, then we say “Okay, then don’t place your advertising with us”. At the end of the day, the clever ones continue to place their advertising with us because they realise that this is a free and prestigious newspaper and when you advertise in a free and prestigious newspaper, some of that prestige rubs off on your advertising since everyone is patently aware that anyone advertising there gets nothing more in return for that advertising. The same thing occurs when a programme is free and independent, so between the contributions of public shareholders, the 10 Euro minimum contribution that Santoro asks, the contributions from any television channels that may want to broadcast the programme, and any revenues arising from the advertising that may interrupt the programme from time to time, that is what creates television content that is beyond the normal television content and the normal television circles. That is the third tool that will help us to sever that mussel-encrusted rope that currently appears to be inextricable, because that’s how democracy works.
We will go and vote knowing who we are voting for. If I know that one of the candidates is a delinquent, then I simply won’t vote for him, unless I am either equally delinquent or totally stupid because even delinquents like to have a monopoly and doing other delinquents a favour is not always a good thing. I know who the candidates are. I vote in a free and informed manner, so a better class of politician gets elected to Parliament, a class of politician that adopts good laws that, as I explained earlier, don’t need to be written by rocket-scientists but laws that are, perhaps paradoxically, very simple, rather than adopting the kind of crap laws that have been adopted over the past 20 years, and that’s all we need: a political class, intelligently elected by well-informed people, which can afford the luxury of making laws against corruption, against the Mafia and against tax evasion and thereby reel in those billions of Euro that will be needed in the coming years in order to balance the budget and avoid being kicked out of the European Union.
But what about Columbus’ egg? I sit a pipe dream? I don’t know, but in any event we currently have an opportunity that we cannot afford to miss and we have to do everything in our power to turn those opportunities into reality, namely free programmes via the Web, free newspapers – and we’ve so far managed to have at least one -, an electoral law that is at least less indecent that the current one and that at least enables us to make our mark, and the movements that put pressure from below because only that kind of pressure is capable of forcing this regime to backtrack and allow some freedom.
I would like to end by reminding you what was said on 8 September a few years ago when the very first V-Day event was held in Bologna, and once again on the subsequent 25th April at the second V-Day event, but what was that, you ask? Well, we said “Away with the convicted criminals in Parliament”, “Away with the Gasparri Law that condoned monopolies and the conflicts of interest”, “Away with public funding for the political parties”, “Away with this obnoxious electoral law”, “a maximum of two terms in Parliament” and then a number of other very simple things, such as the referendum that we voted for: equality for all before the law, no special privileges for the caste, no more “ad personam” laws, water resources to be a public asset, no to nuclear power and yes to alternative energy sources, that’s it. I remember when Grillo spoke about these issues at the first V-Day event. The next day he was lambasted, and you can go on the Internet to see what he said, by the likes of Messrs. Scalfari and Panza who likened him to Mussolini. They said that fascism was making a comeback and that this was the start of a new march on the gates of Rome by a bunch of ruffians, they were just youngsters! Youngsters who, upon hearing these simple, common sense ideas, went straight out and immediately signed the call for a referendum and the popular law initiative. Now these very same topics are the order of the day for the politicians and even the politicians themselves are mooting the idea of limiting the maximum number of terms for parliamentarians, some mentioning three terms and others two terms, but they are nevertheless talking about it, as they are about freeing television broadcasting in order to change things, changing the electoral law and the public funding of the political parties, not that they are wanting to cut it, you understand, they’re not about to cut the funding but merely talking about cutting it, but why? Well, because they know that this is something that their voters want and since they cannot do it, at least they’re talking about it, meaning that the pressure is building from below and it is starting to produce results, but why? Well, because it has brought this issue from the ghetto in which Grillo was hiding to the attention of millions of Italians, a veritable horde of people who are now demanding the very things that only Grillo and the youngsters gathered before the podium were asking for at the V-Day event. Now there are millions of people, including left wingers, right wingers and supporters of the Lega, the Pdl, the Fli and the Udc, all of whom are demanding these things, so much so that everyone is verbally at least wanting changes to the electoral law, cuts to the cost of politics, separation of legitimate election reimbursements from illegal and thinly disguised public funding for the political parties. So the mere fact that the seed was planted and nurtured is extremely important in itself and, had it not been for that battle, no one would even be talking about these issues, so we have to carry on.

So, with this three-pronged shear made up of movements that are gaining ground, a referendum that could truly eliminate this “Porcellum” electoral law, and independent information such as that provided by Il Fatto Quotidiano on the newsstands and “Comizi d’amore” on television, it may not be enough, but at least they provide new avenues that raise our hopes of being able to do something positive. Whether or not we will succeed remains to be seen, but it is certainly worth a bash so that in the future each one of us can honestly say “at least we tried”. Spread the word!

The Pied Piper - Marco Travaglio
(31:27)

The second class citizens of the V-Day event
Today, in Il Corriere, Gian Antonio Stella reminded us about the fact that now, four years later, the Senate continues to keep those signatures locked up in some or other desk drawer and has steadfastly refused to even examine them. It’s not like they have rejected those signatures for some reason, no, they have simply refused to even examine them. Obviously those 350-thousand citizens, including yours truly and many of you out there listening to me, are deemed to be second class citizens, not even worthy of having these guys consider our popular initiative laws, something that is certainly contemplated in our Constitution and something that Parliament should at least discuss and take a vote on. They are not obliged to approve any such popular initiative laws, but they are required to at least discuss any such bills that are proposed, however, they don’t even do that, simply because the proposals have not come from within the caste and would indeed make some serious cuts to the caste itself.
If you notice, these have become some very popular topics of discussion since that first V-Day event was held, that V-Day event that stirred up great controversy because certain major right wing and left wing newspapers claimed that a new kind of authoritarianism was being born and that Grillo had become a kind of Italian-style Bin Laden, perhaps even a fascist emulator who perhaps even wanted to march on Rome and perhaps wanted to bring back the Black-shirts. The truth is that the issue of a new Bin Laden are equally valid today if we care to listen to public opinion, because if there had been a natural turnover of our politicians and we were allowed to select our preferred candidates and to kick out all the convicts, at least when they are guilty of any wrongdoing, as well as all the lifers and all the appointees, by now our Parliament would probably not be such a joke. Furthermore, if our Parliament were not such a joke and if it wasn’t made up of all these jokers, then it would probably get around to examining proposals submitted by the public, especially when they are backed by 350-thousand signatures. But why am I bringing up that proposal, or rather those 3 proposed popular initiative bills now? Well, because the referendum for which they are now gathering signatures is headed in the same direction and you’ll struggle to find any political party that is voluntarily helping to gather signatures. The same thing is happening now as happened with the referendums on legitimate impediment, on privatisation of water resources and on nuclear energy, which only the public and Di Pietro originally wanted and was later supported by part of the extra-parliamentary left wing, but was sabotaged by the Democratic Party and obviously also the centre-right. However, once the signatures had been gathered and the referendum was won last June, then the Democratic Party, who are a bunch of idiots, played down the victory and instead of exploiting it and trying to catch the wave set up by the referendums, the Party is also sabotaging the electoral referendum proposed at the time by some of its own senior party members, like Veltroni. Even Prodi signed the call, as did thousands and thousands of other people, including a number of Democratic Party voters. Obviously however, the elected representatives even hate even their own voters. Indeed they want to punish them and so they are sabotaging the signature gathering process, which has to be completed by no later than 30 September. If you happen to pass one of the stalls, please stop by and add your signature. This referendum aims to put a stop to the “porcellum”, the Calderoli Law that allows the parties to appoint their own Parliamentarians, and to bring back the previous electoral Law, the so-called “mattarellum”. The “mattarellum” is the one that stipulated that, apart from the one quarter proportional representation quotas, the remainder is what turned our Parliament into something elected by the voters who elect a single candidate in their own constituency. Now, we can say what we like about such a single candidate system but at least it allowed each constituency’s voters to elect choose between various candidates. Usually there were only two potential candidates, or perhaps three if there was a third pole, but there was always a chance for a prestigious outsider to enter the fray and, if he/she was a respectable candidate, they could beat the traditional right wing or left wing candidates and so, while it was indeed possible for the choice to rest on a candidate nominated by one of the traditional parties, no one could prevent the birth of a new political grouping who could then put forward their own candidates. We were the ones that decided where to put our cross on the ballot sheet and so, as debatable and unsatisfactory as it may be, a return to the “mattarellum” would be a return to freedom of choice and therefore, if you should get the opportunity to sign, you should know that you can do so until 30 September. You should also be aware that all the major political parties, from the Democratic Party through to the Pdl, the Lega and the Udc are busy trying to sabotage this referendum, whereas many right wing and left wing voters are supporting the referendum because the “porcellum” is one of the most unpopular and most shameful laws introduced in re