To have the cover of TIME magazine devoted to Monti is more than deserved. The spread is under control. The bund no longer causes fear. The public debt is still the same as before, but it already has a better appearance. It almost seems rejuvenated. The Great Public Works are not stopping. The most important American base in Europe at Vicenza is not under discussion. If there’s a war, we are the first target, but we are proud of that. Our troops are joyfully safeguarding Afghanistan ("In Afghanistan marciam, il perchè non lo sappiam” {in Afghanistan we’re marching, but we don’t know why}). Italy is participating in the embargo against Iran. What more do you want from a faithful ally? A few nuclear warheads to look after at Aviano and at Ghedi Torre? No problem. They’re already there. Nuclear is banned in Italy but the nuclear weapons of the stars and stripes are always welcome like the memorable American bombings on our cities in the Second World War.
CDSs are spurting out from all the pores of the American banks. “L'enfant du pays” Mario has gone back home to Goldman Sachs, where he has spent the best years of his life. The Americans must love us, otherwise why have they not gone away since pitching their tents in 1945?
Veni, Vidi, Monti. Better than Julius Caesar in Gaul. The defeated ones are the unemployed, the companies that close down, the young people who flee abroad in tens of thousands, the pensioners who will die in the work place, the employees without rights. We are just at the beginning. When we get to the magnificence experienced by Greece, with mass sackings, and widespread poverty, Monti will win the Oscar for the best protagonist stuntman, the Nobel in Stockholm for the Recession and the Order of the Golden Spur from the hands of Ratzinger. Monti is not “amerikano”, he’s just a bit tanned. Obama loves him. It’s a banking affection, the one that stands up to everything and lasts over time.

Every so often we need to play. Today’s game is to change Italy’s past. To go back in time and get a slaughter to fail, delay a meeting, prevent a murder, get a law approved - or not approved. Not just the important events, even situations that are apparently insignificant, but are such that they can cause a “butterfly effect” as discussed in Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder”. That idea that tiny changes in the past can produce great effects in our present. There is just so much choice.
On Sunday 19 July 1992 hiring a breakdown van in Palermo and shifting the car to via D’Amelio, in front of the building where Paolo Borsellino’s mother lived. Antonio Caponnetto said: “Twenty days before the attack, Paolo had asked the Questura to arrange for the removal of vehicles in the area in front of his mother’s home. But the request was not put into action. Even today I’m waiting to find out the name of the civil servant responsible for Paolo’s safety.” Perhaps Borsellino would have become the President of the Republic instead of Napolitano. A dream! On 16 March 1978 going through the Monte Mario neighbourhood in Rome, to the home of Aldo Moro and obliging his body guards to make a deviation to avoid via Fani. Italy would thus not have been handed over to Andreotti-the-guy-subject-to-the Statute-of-Limitations, companion of mafia-guys and protector of Sindona, who on that very day presented his new government to Parliament. If Craxi had not fled, there would not have been Berlusconi and twenty years of berlusconi-ism and anti berlusconi-ism, while the country was collapsing one day at a time. Between the two, the choice is complicated, like it is between a stroke and a heart attack, but Craxi has not been with us for years and his disciple is alive and kicking and will remain among us for who knows how much longer. It would be possible to try to see the effect it has. On 17 February 1992 stopping the entrepreneur Luca Magni at the entrance to the “Pio Albergo Trivulzio” in Milan while he was carrying the envelope to Mario Chiesa (who was caught red-handed while he was trying to get rid of the bank notes down the toilet). “Mani Pulite” {the criminal investigation whose code name translates to “Clean Hands”} would never have existed. Craxi or Berlusconi? This is the dilemma. In the Autumn of 1998, kidnapping Prodi and hiding him in a hole in the mountainous plateau of La Sila to prevent the entrance into the Euro. On 27 October 1962 in Catania obliging the pilot, di Mattei, to inspect the “Morane-Saulnier MS-760 Paris” aircraft that then exploded during flight because of a bomb. We would have kicked out the “Seven Sisters” for the “Dog with 6 legs” (logo of the Italian energy company - ENI} and perhaps the History of the Middle East would have been better.
What would you change as a time traveller?

Lusi has used the Fiscal Shield to bring back to Italy millions of euro in election expenses taken from the account of the Margherita {Daisy} party, in which account financing of the PDminusL also ended up and he could then use the money with complete serenity (*). The charlatans of democracy deny any responsibility, in fact they even get very angry. Rutelli “We’ve been betrayed. It’s theft!” Bersani in relation to a new law on the parties: “It’s urgent to proceed: let’s give ourselves a very short timeframe.” The election financing, abolished by a referendum, brought back as the reimbursement of election expenses, is equivalent to about a billion euro. How much of this money has been taken away and then brought back into our country thanks to the Fiscal Shield desired by the parties? The answer to this question could be given by the Finance Police by carrying out a check up (to be made public) on all the accounts held by the parties. The hurry and the bipartisan will to approve the Fiscal Shield in its time are at least suspicious. A law, that is a mark of infamy for the Republic is an insult to the honest tax payers that have seen total tax dodgers, scoundrels, perhaps criminals, make their booty clean with a 5% tax and after that able to compete in the market, while they were paying their taxes right down to the last cent, with companies that had the availability of capital that had been ”given back its virginity”, fraudulently taken from the State and from all the people.
Let’s take a step back to 2009 and let’s see who in the so-called Opposition, agreed to the Fiscal Shield. Thirty two deputies in the Lower House, with a “no confidence” vote could have avoided the return of the billions of the Great Tax Dodgers and the mafia capital removed from the tax authorities and they could have brought down the government. But they were not present in the Chamber. 20 votes would have been enough. The list: 24 PDminusL: Argentin, Binetti, Bucchino, Capodicasa, Carra, Codurelli, D'Antoni, Esposito, Farina, Fioroni, Gaione, Ginefra, Giovanelli, Grassi, La Forgia, Lanzillotta, Madia, Mastromauro, Melandri, Misiani, Pistelli, Pompili, Porta, Portas. 7 UDC: Bosi, Ciccanti, Drago, Libè, Pisacane, Ruggeri, Volontè. 1 IDV: Misiti.
“Thinking badly is a sin, but often it’s spot on” said the Black Box of the Republic, Giulio Andreotti. For an operation of transparency it’s necessary for the 32 people absent at the voting on the Fiscal Shield and at the “no confidence” vote relating to Berlusconi (they could have saved us two nightmare years ...), surely all without any shadow, should make public their fixed and liquid assets before and after their entry to Parliament. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we. See you in parliament unless they do an electoral law that prevents that.
PS: Given that NOT ONE newspaper or TV station has remembered, I’ll do it. The MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} is the only one to have refused the reimbursement of election expenses of one million seven hundred thousand.
(*) source: Corriere della Sera

The story of Rutelli Bread&Chicory is a novel of long long ago. Seduced, betrayed and robbed by its treasurer, the guilty one by virtue of antonomasia in every party worthy of respect. The treasurer has by now taken the place of the majordomo. He’s the first one under investigation for any missing cash. The names of the companies used by Luigi Lusi, the Margherita party’s treasurer and a PDminusL senator to remove 13 million in expense claims could have been taken from the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook: "TTTsrl", "Paradiso Immobilare", "Luigia Ltd" and "Giannone-Petricone" the architecture studio used to throw the investigators off the scent, in Toronto (Petricone is the surname of Luisi’s Canadian consort). The money was withdrawn from the Margherita party’s current account, into which money for the financing of the PDminusL landed up and it was destined for various types of spending including an apartment in the centre of Rome for a value of one million nine hundred thousand euro. Rutellone was also authorised to operate on the account, and he was unaware of everything. "Plis visit my bank account!". The transfers from the account took place over a period of three years with the explanation written as “payment of consultancy invoices”.
Rutelli with the "Maldive Style” tan, is disheartened: “I knew nothing about this”, “We are angry and saddened”, “The party intends to recover the money wrongly taken.”. The latter statement is to be framed. In effect, we are speaking of “money wrongly taken”, of the billion euro of public financing made out to be expenses even though the referendum had abolished expenses. More “money wrongly taken” than that! If the treasurer of a party steals the money that was wrongly taken from the citizens it is a double “wrongly taken”. After the Lega’sTanzania, we have the Canada of the Margherita party in the PDminusL. The next time, where will the expenses be exported? In Papua New Guinea?
I’m sure that Rutelli has nothing to do with it. Look at him. Does it seem to you that he is capable of managing a current account? Impossible. And a young old marmot/duck paid with public money in Parliament and in the city of Rome since 1983. It’s not by chance that Lusi has been the general secretary of the Italian Catholic Guide and Scout Association. Bersani thundered “I am unpleasantly surprised [as happened with Penati - editor] We are awaiting clarifications. If individual responsibilities were to emerge ... we have mechanisms able to decide on the appropriate measures.” Get money out of politics! They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we. See you in parliament unless they do an electoral law that prevents that.

I get cold shivers down my back. I look at Rigor Montis, Frignero, Passera and the wax faces of the various ministers and I see bookkeepers, tax collectors, bankruptcy adjusters, STRANGERS. Who invited them? Who voted for them? They remind me of the 1980s advertising campaign by Johnson with the dark mannered, serious and precise cleaner, signora Luisa who turns up at your door with the motto "Comincia presto, finisce presto e di solito non pulisce il water” {starts early, finishes early and usually doesn’t clean the WC} because she used the active foam of “Magic Water”. The Magic Monti government is doing the cleaning in our home without bothering about who is living in this house. It’s not bothered about the social classes. Pensioners, truck drivers, taxi drivers, laid off workers, small-time entrepreneurs - it’s as though they didn’t exist, as though they had never lived in Italy. The ministers are not part of the social fabric. They have not been elected. They don’t have to answer to anyone. They don’t have discussions with their counterparts. They carry out their mandate. They seem like disdainful aliens on an inspection visit. Indifferent to everything except the banks. Guests who have become masters, who after three months start to smell tremendously and who never clean the WC. What worries me is the total definitive loss of democracy and the acceptance of this loss by the Italians as though it were inevitable, obvious, taken for granted. As though democracy were an optional. In the 1970s “esproprio proletario” {proletariat expropriation} was fashionable. One went into a supermarket and did the shopping without paying. That was how it was. Today we are witnessing banking expropriation: a removal of the rights of the citizens, from article 18 to the fund for laid off workers, carried out in broad day light with bureaucratic rigidity by grey persons, in jacket and tie, to save the banks and the euro. I look at them and I don’t see humanity but the fixed and undecipherable look of sharks. The country is going up in flames, but for them it is just a task to be finished off as soon as possible. Magic Monti the activefoam that keeps the WC smelling nice.

The companies are dying. The Nation’s heart is coming to a standstill. The one that pumps blood and income to the country. The State owes the companies 70 billion euro. Money that means life or death to thousands of companies and families thrown into the street. The gravediggers Monti&Passera instead of cardiac massage, have prepared the lethal injection for them: the BOT treasury bonds. They will pay off the state’s debt using the public debt. It’s like paying the restaurant bill with “figurine Panini” (with all due respect to the glorious album), to exchange “a number two” for “poo”. In turn, the companies will be able to pay their employees with a small quantity of BOT and they will then be able to pay the rent, the petrol station, the gas and electricity bills with a few public bonds. They are taking us for a ride in such a big way that it seems to be a story taken from Mickey Mouse, but not for the journalists aligned with the “with-no-ifs-and-buts” System. Listen to this from today’s La Repubblica: “Among the very latest new ideas is even the possibility that the substantial public debt that the Public Authorities have with the companies - about 70 billion euro - is paid out in State shares - to give a breath of air to the companies strangled by the ‘credit crunch’.” I propose that as from now, the financing to the newspapers is paid in BOT, in that way they will stop writing bullshit. And not just that. Even the financing to the parties to be paid in BOT and also the salary of the parliamentarians, of the regional councillors and the Ministers, right up to Napolitano himself. Why stop here? All the annuities of the senators and deputies, starting with those of Amato and Veltroni passing by those for Scalfari, are to be honoured in BOT and every payment request from Equitalia is in the future to be paid out in BOT. Do I have a debt with you? I’ll give you another debt! Anyone who is in liquidity asphyxia and in exchange receives credit with the State can only sell, but the BOT are worth less than their nominal value, even 20-25%. Debt has substituted cash. We are transforming ourselves into a country of beggars. I’ll pay the electrician with the debt that I have with the plumber. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

Costa Concordia is the metaphor for Italy. A whale come to a standstill on the rocks. First the captain caused the problem, then he denied it and then he fled. Like “Piè Veloce Berlusconi” {fast-footed Berlusconi}. The captain insisted on giving instructions from the shore, while his feet were dry, while his lieutenants stayed on board (conversation). Exactly like the parties with the Monti government. The ship has an Italian name, but the owner is American ... like our country. The American owner is called Carnival, just like the management of our public finances. The crew was made up of those from outside Europe, crikey, just like those that are working in Italy. Carnival’s share price collapsed on the Stock Exchange, just like our public bonds To save the savable, the crew mutinied while the ship was keeled over on her side. Well, this has not yet happened here on solid ground. On the Concordia, the crew was able to rebel only because of the absence of security forces to beat them up on the orders of the captain, as in Val di Susa. The name Concordia refers to the unity between the nations of Europe. In fact, its thirteen decks have the names of European states, including Greece, Italy, Great Britain, Portugal, France, Germany, a reassurance while the euro is deflating and the Germans would rather cut off an arm rather than finance Italy and Greece. The alarm was raised late, once the ship had keeled over. Exactly the same as the Italian economic catastrophe, to Tremorti and the “crisis that has happened in the past” Help arrived from private vessels. There weren’t enough lifeboats. The life-jackets were fought over by the passengers and the decks in a state of chaos. It seems like an ordinary Italian day. The disaster didn’t happen because of natural causes but from inattention. A rule for Italy. Concordia went down because it came close to the island to "fare un omaggio” {send a greeting} with its horn blasting out to friends and authorities on Giglio unknown to them. Just like for Scajola and Malinconico! At its launch, the champagne bottle thrown against its side, bounced off. The disaster happened on Friday 13th. If we were superstitious we would be running away.

The undersecretary for publishing in the office of the President of the Council, professor Carlo Malinconico was a guest in a super deluxe hotel. Unknown to the person involved, the bill was paid by Francesco Piscicelli, the entrepreneur involved in the investigation into the contracts assigned after the earthquake in Abruzzo and who laughed after the catastrophe. Malinconico, formerly the president of the FIEG and general secretary of the office of the President of the Council with Romano Prodi, said that he has “never given favours to the people involved” and that he got to know “only now that Piscicelli had paid of his own initiative and for reasons unknown to me, some of my stays in the hotel complex”. The hotel "Pellicano" in Porto Ercole is one of the most beautiful in the area of Argentario. It’s not just beautiful, it’s fantastic! You arrive, you stay there and then the bill is paid by someone else, usually Piscicelli. Unwittingly, obviously. Try it out. The hotelier Roberto Sciò and the construction man Piscicelli, without telling Malinconico, had organised for him to stay, trusting that he would forget to pay. And that actually happened. In a telephone conversation, Sciò said to Piscicelli “You’ve really adopted the professor ...”
Malinconico resigned, to the applause for his “institutional sensibility” and declarations about the integrity of the person.
In nomen omen {the clue is in the name}: “Malinconia {melancholy} is a sort of fundamental sadness, at times unwitting, that leads a person to live passively, without taking initiatives, adapting to external happenings while convinced that they don’t relate to him.”
Malinconico is the same guy that called for a “Mini tax for those that surf, as a transtional measure to give a breath of oxygen to the publishing sector. It’ll cost as much as a cup of coffee a month.” A genius! Both him and the one that chose him.

The Italian is easy to govern. It’s enough to feed him a social category each day and his hunger is sated. It’s the strategy of non-attention . You shout out “Look at the flying donkey!” and he sticks his nose in the air. Monti has rightly said that it is the tax-dodgers who are putting their hands into the pockets of the Italians. However he hasn’t explained who has generated the public debt of 1,900 billion euro and what that money has been used for. Tell us Monti! Let him tell us who has put their hands into Italy’s wealth to maintain the party-ocracy and the lobbies and let him also explain where he has been in these long twenty years of silence. What’s needed is a public trial for this riff-raff that has ruined Italy. “Rigor Montis” has not considered it worthwhile to remember the 98 billion euro of presumed gap in tax payments from the slot machine concessionaries. And he hasn’t even mentioned why the taxpayers have been burdened with a billion euro given to the parties in spite of the referendum, and he hasn’t mentioned the total tax dogers given an amnesty with the Fiscal Shield of 5%. Who are these gentlemen? The honest taxpayers would like to know. They have the right to know. OUT WITH THEIR NAMES!
The great manoevres on the ski slopes and in Cortina’s bars are the flying donkey. As though for example it wouldn’t be enough to do a computer-matching of data about taxpayers with those who own a SUV without transforming the financiers into Yeti. But who do you want to take for a ride? The game is blatant. Place the social categories one against the other. The rich against the poor. The young against the pensioners. The unemployed against the state employees. And while the Italians are looking at the clouds, the entrepreneurs and the manual workers are committing suicide. What’s been the use of the money paid in to INPS? What’s happened to the contributions of the Italians that’ll never have a pension? Covering up Fiat’s losses through the fund for laid off workers? The Italian dupe has to forget the politicians, the parties, their thieving (I remember that the people with definitive criminal convictions are STILL in Parliament getting big salaries), the corruption, the mafia that is controlling half the country, the fish that smells starting from its head. And no one is talking about the banks. They are lilies of the field and do not have the responsibility for the collapse, for tens of thousands of investors who are ruined. It’s better to get your teeth into the hotel keeper or the bar tender. The concessionaries of public goods like Benetton for the motorways, are on the other hand, praised and fattened up with New Year increases to the detriment of those who work. The state concessions, all the concessions, have to go back to being managed by the State, to producing profits for Italian citizens who have paid over and above in decades of taxes. They shouldn’t be gifted to private companies. But like Alice, Monti doesn’t know this.
Ehi! “Look at the flying donkey”. Don’t disturb those doing manoevres. And keep the receipt when you leave the bar and the receipt for the car tax of ten years ago and be sure to keep your hands in your pockets!

Download and print out the flyer “VIETATO L'INGRESSO AI POLITICI” {No entry to politicians}

With no ifs and buts. The bipartisan political condemnation has no room for debate. There’s never any doubt or questioning. If Mussolini was ALWAYS right, the politicians are even more so. “With no ifs and buts” is a new verbal trench, the new battle front along the Piave river. Have a go at a discussion in the face of a statement by a Big Gun or a landowning guy decked out with a final “no ifs and buts”. Impossible. You are already guilty of armed insurrection with no ifs and buts. The thinking of the “no ifs and buts” people obviously makes no provision for any ifs and buts. It’s a single thought that gives of its best when it is accompanied by indignation. A solitary neuron that needs solace. The gasparization of politics has run its course. By now Gasparri seems to be the most intelligent one in the group.
“Italy is a great country and it will manage to get out of the crisis” (with no ifs and buts), “The Great Public Works are necessary” (with no ifs and buts), “We have to stay in Afghanistan” (with no ifs and buts), “The Italian Constitution is the best possible one” (with no ifs and buts). The “if” is a subversive and the “but” is a delinquent. The dogma is the only possible reasoning in that it accepts no reasoning at all, with no ifs and buts. The Inquisition is the inspiration of the “with no ifs and buts” people. Today Giordano Bruno would be given life imprisonment and he would commit suicide in prison. With no ifs and buts. The “with no ifs and buts” person can suddenly change his mind with no ifs and buts, and after the kick up the bum from the referendum, from a pro-nuclearist to an anti-nuclearist or, for the economic crisis, transform himself from one who protects the total tax-dodgers, with the Fiiscal Shield, into the Sherriff of Nottingham. You can recognise the “with no ifs and buts” person from the lack of backbone, and as he always crawls with no ifs and buts. As a child he took his cod liver oil without protesting. He always wrote the essay that was pleasing to his teacher and he wanted to become a politician.

Download and print out the flyer “VIETATO L'INGRESSO AI POLITICI” {No entry to politiicans}

If you have a go at saying “Politicians are thieving”, the response is “Not all of them”. If you point out that car drivers don’t respect pedestrian crossings (and someone kills a pedestrian), the response is “Not all of them”. If you explain that Napolitano signed Berlusconi’s shameful laws, from the Lodo Alfano to the Fiscal Shield, the response is “Not all of them”, in this case you make a big effort to remember what he did not sign, there must be one .... If you state that the jounalists financed with public money are on the payroll of the parties and the lobbies, the response is always “Not all of them”. If you say that you never see a local police officer when you need one, “Not all of them”. Anyone who replies “Not all of them”, never names names. They don’t tell you what the exceptions are. They give you a smile that explains and doesn’t explain and they look at you as though to say “You’re truly a shitty populist! One that tars everyone with the same brush!”. You stand there, bewildered, and you cannot find a word to say in return. But then you have another go and say “Those living near to incinerators are dying of cancer”, and you already know that the other wil respond “Not all of them” and you wish him the most lethal pathology that you can think of. You start again with “In Northern Italy the mafia has inflitrated the public bodies”, and you are certain they will say “Not all of them” citing Ms Moratti who was astonished about the existence of the 'ndrangheta (do they really exist?). The “not-all-of-them-ist” would even deny the existence of a metastasis that has spread to all the organs of the body by clinging on to the only healthy cell remaining. If you keep going on about “The socialists were stealing”, he’ll respond “Not all of them”. You are astounded, but you don’t give up and you spit out: “In Parliament there are mafia-guys - the Lega-people are turncoats - Italian local authorities have debts of billions of euro”. He, unrelenting, comes back with “Not all of them” Certainly not all of them, but certainly the majority of them. It’s impossible that all are. In fact, it’s a law of nature, if everyone were a thief, there’d no longer be any honest person to steal from. If everyone were a mafia-guy, who would they get the “pizzo” from? He who responds “Not all of them” is an old mole, a peeping tom, the lookaout during a robbery. The more they fuck him up, the happier he is.

Download and print out the flyer “VIETATO L'INGRESSO AI POLITICI” {No entry to politiicans}

Would you be willing to download this blog page to your 4G phone at, let’s say, twice the speed, if this meant a significant increase in the risk of getting cancer? I wouldn’t. But those who have set up the reduction of the electro-smog limits in last October’s development decree seem to see things differently. If you have an inkling that a new technology could cause damage, this needs to be considered as such, unless the opposite can be demonstrated. It’s the precautionary principle. And now go ahead and download with no problems.

Interview with Claudio Poggi, electronics engineer

Thousands of extra antennas
Greetings to the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. With the new year, surprises are coming. There’s one that we don’t know about. It’s called LTE, an acronym for “Long Term Evolution”. It’s an evolution of the telephone network.
In September of this year, the Italian Government made 4 billion from the sale of the telephone frequencies for LTE. But what is it?
It’s a technology that gives access to mobile broadband. That’s great news for those that don’t have the twisted pair telephone cabling, because at last they can get very fast Internet access without having to pay exorbitant installation charges. However, for others, including myself, it’s very bad news because in fact it means an increase in electromagnetic pollution.

...

”When there’s no more money for pensions, the dead will walk on the Earth". Beppe Grillo.

“MY MOTHER is a sprightly 87 year old lady in superb health ... or rather: SHE WAS. Until this morning, when we went to INPDAP to find out why she hadn’t been paid her teacher’s pension for a few months and a civil servant told her that according to them SHE DIED on 19 September 2011. Since I suspected something, I had taken with me not just the FORMERLY SPRIGHTLY OLD LADY, but also a certificate of EXISTENCE IN LIFE, without which, as the civil servant explained to me, we wouldn’t have been able to make any sort of claim. That is: it wasn’t enough to have the old MOTHER present on the spot with her valid identity card and health service entitlement card ... oh no! We even needed a CERTIFICATE!
OK ... Let’s go on. The pension that up until September had been paid to my mother ended up - and it’s not clear to whom it was paid, transformed into a PENSION PAID TO THE SURVIVING SPOUSE, paid out to a fiscal identity code IDENTICAL to hers but to a different bank account IBAN. At first the civil servant tried, as we say in Rome to "buttarla in caciara” {gloss over it} putting the whole thing down to “HUMAN ERROR” to laugh about, but when he saw my reaction, he calmed down. I pointed out to him that it’s not so easy to declare someone dead: you need at least a DEATH CERTIFICATE and the presence of a CLOSE RELATIVE armed with valid documents, as well as the documents of the dead person ... and if therefore a death certificate had been produced, it would have been FALSE and whoever had produced it was definitely a wrongdoer. Meanwhile the bank had not paid the utility bills because there was no more money in the account and my MOTHER, a sprightly old lady, had had a bad turn and so had to spend time in HOSPITAL. I have no alternative but to play the numbers of the “avoided death” on LOTTO ... and to go on with a great COURT CASE, hoping that the evil-doers, (meanwhile, by looking on the Internet, I’ve discovered they have done other similar actions), spend ALL THE MONEY STOLEN ON MEDICINES.” davide lak (davlak)

Perhaps a person from Veneto, more than other Italians, doesn’t accept the idea of going bust. His culture doesn’t envisage it. He considers it to be shameful. The closure of a company is an event that can NOT happen. It’s not conceivable. The employees are people that he works with every day in the office or in the factory. Veneto is the homeland of the small and really tiny enterprises, of the industrial neighbourhoods. To look into the eyes of your colleagues while they are being sacked is intolerable. For the family that’s even more so. The offspring that will end up with him in the middle of the street are the same ones that run up to meet him in the evening before dinner in the hope of getting a tiny present. This is true even in other places, but more so in Veneto. Bankruptcy is an unbearable burden that isolates you, that drives you to suicide. The myth of the entrepreneur that never has to ask anyone for anything, of the tiny American dream, is stronger here then elsewhere.
The long shadowy line of the suicided entrepreneurs, 40 since the start of the crisis, is something very deep, that cannot be explained in a rational way. Why is there this silent slaughter? In the last week another two small-scale entrepreneurs have killed themselves. One of them was called Giovanni Schiavon. He was the owner of Eurostrade 90 Snc at Peraga di Vigonza, in the province of Padua. He had two children. He was sitting at his desk in his office and he killed himself. For Christmas he would have had to lay off his employees, perhaps he wouldn’t have even managed to pay the wages and the “thirteenth month” {end of year payment}. Clients were delaying payment, it seems that the banks had asked for the repayment of loans and according to local sources "he claimed to have credit for more than 200 thousand euro with the public administration.“ For his wife, his action was due to the “System in which no one pays”. A text book situation. The honest small-scale entrepreneur in Italy is a hero. The State rewards him with the highest taxes in Europe, to be paid in advance. For reimbursements, however, there’s always time. And it’s almost impossible to get payment on the unpaid invoices.
Veneto has a dark evil, a tremendous one, if it obliges someone who has invested his life and his resources in this country to hang themselves in a garage or to shoot themselves in the empty office on a Saturday morning. Pensioners are important as are public employees, but without the enterprises they will end up in the middle of the street. Who is dealing with small-scale companies? They are cows to be milked. In Veneto there is a maximum concentration. The independence movements in Veneto are growing. They are not licking dogs like the Lega. Veneto will not let itself commit suicide in silence.

We’re so distracted by the economy that we no longer know what democracy is. In Italy there’s a government, a parliament, a President of the Republic, but there’s no democracy. Monti represents just himself. No one has elected him. His function is that if the liquidator who has to preserve “international credibility”, basically the value of State bonds purchased by France, Germany and Great Britain to avoid the default. Anyone sober and with a clean criminal record, coming after this party-cratic class, of which Berlusconi is the caricature, would have been welcomed as a saviour. And that has happened. The fear of losing everything on the side of the Italians, has worked the miracle. It has transformed an old professor into a father of the motherland. The previous governments were the triumph of the party-cracy. The party secretaries, thanks to an unconstitutional electoral law, did a desk job to elect all the senators and all the deputies. No party held back in screwing democracy. If commanding is better than screwing, the parties have joined both activities together. Without democracy, without the participation of the citizens in public life there’s no future for Italy. Instead of civil rights, there’s a discussion of spread, of bund and of growth. Whether a current account is more democratic than investment in shares.
For the succession to Monti, in 2013, there’s (being kept nicely warm), the banker Passera. Have we had the “Risorgimento” and the “Resistance” to put a banker as the head of the government? And he’s not the first to be a candidate for the throne. The PDminusL-guy Enrico Letta, the nephew of his uncle, had the gall to put forward Profumo as a candidate a couple of months ago. We’ll go back to the vote according to the census, as in the nineteenth century. You vote if you can afford it. The votes are paid for, not counted. The debate on rights and on duties, on the Constitution, on the motives for staying together and on the construction of a better future has disappeared from any agenda. We have become current account holders instead of citizens. The fiscal code has substituted citizenship. The word “democracy” is used like a stress ball. It’s useful to make us feel better while we talk and squeeze it. “We are a Great Democratic Country” in which the referendum is only to abrogate a law and anyway the parties don’t care about the results, where proposals for popular laws are ignored and where you cannot choose your candidate. What more do you want in life? This lot don’t give a toss about fascism.

The money you earn belongs to you, but only up to a certain point. An Amato who goes into your account at night can always be found. Money has become as well as a hidden microphone, also a subcutaneous chip. It has evolved from a financial instrument to an instrument of control. Anything but wiretapping. It’s used to track your actions, to connect you forever to a bank even though you hate banks, to bring into your bedroom a functionary of the Treasury to verify to whom you paid and why, 252 euro on the evening of the second Thursday of October three years ago at 9:15 pm. "Respond you wretch or I’ll call Equitalia". Every government follows its inclinations, its culture. The government of Bankers is no exception. Pensions and the salaries of public employees can be withdrawn in cash only up to 500 euro. The rest will have to be paid into the bank or into a Post Office account or with prepaid cards, perhaps with Tremorti’s social card. In the decree they haven’t yet included the “Gratta e Vinci” scratch cards or the “Il Milionario” cards or the waste paper of the BTP {government bonds}. But it’s just a matter of time, especially for the government bonds. All the transactions on your current account, even the withdrawals from a bank machine and the credit card payments, basically your life, will be made available to the Tax authorities from 01 January 2012. It’s set out in article 11 of the "Emersione di base imponibile" {emergence of the tax base}. For each transaction will you have to keep the receipt, the reason for the payment, and the address of the plumber to avoid penalties? And using cash then? Why not pay in cash and say you wasted it away on women and champagne? Wrong! In the future there’ll be an upper limit for withdrawing cash from the bank. The next arrangement from Rigor Montis will be the taxation of the bricks of your house used to hide the banknotes. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to tax “technically” with a 1.5% extra, the total tax dodgers, the ones that made use of the Fiscal Shield. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

In a Milan where the air is charged with poisons that are getting deposited like the plague on the parked cars and in the lungs of the people, there has been the celebration of the caravanserai of the first night at La Scala. An out of place show, out of time, a slap to the economic situation. In the theatre, there should have been, selected at random, common citizens. Pensioners, unemployed people, students.
The authorities found themselves in the royal box. Now the monarchy is no longer, the blessing-distributing partitocracy stepped into the top spot of opera, decked out with flowers. Amidst the golden stucco and the crimson drapes, with Napolitano and Monti there were, standing erect, the statesmen Pisapia and Formigoni, the latter wearing his “tails of ten years ago”, a sign of sobriety after the arrest of the vice president of the Lombardy Council, Franco Nicoli Cristiani. At the entrance, in a tunnel of crush barriers, the best of our youth paraded for the photographers. Present among the others, the nuclearist as well as incineratorist Veronesi, the former banker Passera with wife, Valeria Marini with a streetlight on her arm bandaged in dark blue, Marta Marzotto in white, Stefano Boeri, Bruno Vespa with wife and a prominent fluorescent gecko and an incredible couple: Cecchi Paone with Calderoli’s former wife. In their faces the happiness of being there.
Monti’s car was hit by an egg on his arrival, a waste at a time of crisis. A white limousine carrying members of CUB - Confederazione Unitaria di Base {United Grassroots Federation}, arrived right up to the entrance of the theatre. The workmen were immediately recognised by their clothes, costing abundantly less than 10,000 euro, and by their callused hands. They didn’t manage to reach the VIPs to demonstrate their affection for them. Superintendent Stephane Lissner said “From this spot Italy can get going again”, however he didn’t explain where it was going, perhaps because the Italians already know. In Piazza della Scala and in the nearby “Galleria” there were demonstrations of popular joy with placards of musicophiles "Cambia l'orchestra ma la musica è sempre la stessa" {The orchestra changes but the music is always the same} ignored by the new nobility, but not by the Police. Don Giovanni was a triumph; the new rich wore out their gloved hands. A long banner was left on the ground under the statue of Leonardo. It said “We will not pay for your crisis”. Perhaps in the future, but right now it is us who are paying for their crisis.

The politicians have been speedily buried and substituted by the exorcist Mario Monti. They were smelling because of the decomposition. The work of the gravedigger was urgent and necessary. Their stench was no longer bearable. The country has rejoiced in a way that hadn’t happened since 5 July 1982 after the 3 to 2 victory over Brazil at the World Championships in Spain. A few days have gone by and on the TV screens there’s the reappearance of Brunetta, Letta, Bindi, Alfano, and Fini who’ve returned from beyond the grave. The media representation of a Living Cemetery. The journalists in the usual role of mediums have brought Zombies in armchairs to explain to us how to get out of the crisis, the sacrifices awaiting us, a new vision of the economy. Them, the ones responsible for the disaster. No one who is asking for forgiveness and going back to the grave. Why evoke the dead and not invite the living? The dead should be honoured or forgotten. These can only be forgotten. Their apparition is in the best of cases, an insult to the intelligence of the Italians and in the worst case an incitement to violence. The “talk shows” are necrophilia in the pure state. You connect and out of the coffin comes Santanchè or just emerging from a trip round hell, La Russa appears for you. You get the instinct of the vampire hunter and you look for a ash stake within reach. Your temples are pulsating, your arteries are expanding, your stomach contracts. Your loved ones look at you with worried glances for your health. They don’t understand why you voluntarily undergo that torment instead of smashing up the TV. You know that it’s not for masochism. You want to see where they want to get to. To what point of exasperation they will manage to take the Italians. The Returners hope that the Bankers do the dirty work in place of them so that they can then resurrect at the next national elections. They put their trust in the poor memories of the Italians and in the genuflecting journalists. But their time is over. The living and the dead cannot share the same house. By definition, the dead have no future. At times it’s better to be dead than to face up to the judgement of the living.

We’re starting from the principle that the Italian is a frustrated person. He is fighting for survival in every moment of the day. He accumulates, suffers, swallows, all in silence. He doesn’t understand (or he understands too well) and he adapts for reasons of “force majeure” to a stepmother society. The children’s school, the mortgage, the job. He’s got few goals left and like a dazed horse, he trots after the carrots of the pension, the TFR {final lump sum payment}, the health service, a job whatever it is. For a long time he has been a “separato in casa” {separated but living in the same house} with democracy. Instead of him, the ones making decisions are the parties, the markets, the stock exchanges with which he has no relationship. Swap, derivative, hedge fund, spread, bund, and CDS are words of a new vocabulary. An incomprehensible neo-language that is frightening, a language of finance aliens who have come to destroy his world. It’s a straw dog that could catch fire at any moment. With his archaic animal instinct, the Italian senses the arrival of a tempest in which he will lose those few certainties that used to help him to bite the bullet. Without a pension, without a house, without a job. Even a field mouse if forced into a corner without an escape route, rises up and bites.
The dormant volcano is about to come back to life and that’s inevitable. What type of volcano will it be? Where will its lava flows go? Over the financial system? Over the parties? Over anything it meets? We need to ask these questions now, before exasperation becomes normal and we need to involve the citizens in the decisions, to give examples. Hoping that public order can be maintained with the security forces is utopian. The volcano is being fed continually from the lack of participation of the Italians in every decision relating to them. The referenda are ignored. Public financing to the parties and nuclear (the first time) thrown out by the will of the people, have been brought back, and now they are starting to discuss the privatisation of water. We are waiting for the oracular response from a gentleman that has a banker as his straight man and who will tell us on 5 December what sacrifices to make. It’s like the New Year Lottery but upside down. What have we got to do with all this? Did anyone consult us while the government was burning our future and getting the nation into debt? Has someone explained to us why we were outside the crisis in June and now we are in pre-default? And why are these incapable people still seated in parliament and so richly paid? And why will the parliamentary annuities only be abolished from the next legislature and not from this one? And why does the citizen never count at all? The volcano is erupting, erupting …

The text of the video declaration:

"First of all, ciao everyone. We haven’t seen each other for quite a bit. I’m devoting myself to agriculture. I’m getting ready for the future. I’ve got a piece made up of strips and a kitchen garden. I’m doing my kitchen garden: I’m beating with nature, with lettuce. I’ve found the water in a well that was there. I’ve chopped up the wood. I’m really getting myself ready for the future that will be that one then!
I can no longer put up with hearing these things about the debt. I’m complimenting myself because here I have this letter dated March 2008, printed off the blog. At that time I said what is happening now. Why did I say that? What is incredible about me that I can forecast these things? Absolutely nothing. I’m free to say things. Just like for Parmalat when I forecast what would happen two years beforehand. It was really simple to forecast where the debt was taking us and where it had taken the country, Europe, the world. Here there’s metaphysics. I’ll tell you what I wrote: “The state of siege proclaimed yesterday by the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano has exasperated the population weighed down by the serious crisis of the economy. During the night, people spilled out onto the streets and squares of the main cities of the country, ignoring the measures taken by the authorities and asking for the resignation of the Minister of the Economy Giulio Tremonti.” Tremonti has resigned and the Berlusconi government has fallen. I said this three years ago: “The debt will dominate us.” I said all these things, but it was me that said it! But Monti, these professors, the great professors with extraordinary degrees, where were they? Getting salaries in the universities. I exposed myself to risk. I was a comic and I was risking a section of my fan-base, I understand that because they see me talking about things that are perhaps not suitable for my profession, but I was risking a bit of my life. I have put myself on the line. And instead, these people, what do they do? Now they are in government and they are proposing sales tax from 21 to 23. When Berlusconi did it, it was 21 and straight away: “unjust measures for the less well off.” In fact the sales tax hits the poorest people. At 23 is everything OK? This lot think of doing economic budgets touching these bands and they are not giving anything?
I’ve read the first interview of this Minister that still calls himself “of the Environment”, I don’t know why. He said four things: “We can go back to nuclear as I’m convinced by the safe stuff, GMOs are really good, I taste them every day, it’s quite likely that water will once more become private because it’s logical that it becomes private because we cannot do without it, incinerators are OK, the TAV will surely be done and the bridge over the Straits is an exciting project." In 4 lines he has put himself against 30 million Italians. He is either stupid or he cannot think of governing, of being a Minister, without talking of civil society which is what has substituted politics today.
But he wrote these things and he has always written them. I ended up in Time, but I wrote to Time: “you are mad, take me out of this here magazine. I don’t belong to these assemblies of knowledge and of world culture, I am just a normal citizen who observes with a critical viewpoint.” But then who were these folk? Who are these people who have been holed up in the universities and have never even put themselves forward even a tiny bit, why have they not been shouting out about this stuff ? I was shouting about it three years ago in Piazza Navona at NoCav Day. I was on the telephone and I was shouting: “look it’s not this malevolent dwarf that’s the problem, the problem is the debt”. We had 500 thousand companies that were closing down. I was talking about these things. They wanted to interrupt the sound.

...

Out there, there are multiverses waiting for us. They will come into being all together, but for each one of us, luckily, we’ll only live in one of them. A new premier for every parallel dimension. The succession to the Cadaver of the Second Republic, for the theory of the public debt of quanta, will produce three different universes. The first is within a black hole that is the so called Schifani Universe. The mafia is decriminalised, Cuffaro, his good name restored, is appointed Minister for Development. A day is set aside as the “Giornata del Cannolo Nazionale” {Day of the festive pastries}. The South starts off again with the “Cassa del Mezzogiorno” {Fund for the South} and the “Ponte sullo Stretto” {Bridge over the Straits}. Sicily becomes the first European region to have zero unemployment thanks to the recruitment of 5 million people as employees in the public sector. Totò Riina and Provenzano are moved to house arrest and hold “lectio magistralis” on the mafia at the University of Palermo. A Government Committee chaired by Schifani himself deals with the rehabilitation of mafia people who were victims of the magistrates. The country’s top three industries, 'ndrangheta, mafia and camorra, receive the prestigious award "Imprenditore dell'anno" {entrepreneur of the year} brought in by the Confindustria for the underground economy.
The second universe has at its centre a double star. The Count Uncle, Gianni Letta, who rotates from Right to Right with the Right Nephew Enrico (the leftwing does not exist in this time-space dimension). Gelli is President of the Republic, elected by the “Loggia Massonica Parlamentare” {Parliamentary Masonic Lodge}. In the tribunals, the judges wear overalls instead of togas and the statue of Justice holds a compass in her hand. Freemasonry is taught in schools and the doctorate is replaced with the title of “Maestro”. To become head of the secret services, it’s necessary to have the title of “Gran Maestro”. The journalist Farina is elected Government spokesperson for his untiring “depistatoria” {wrong-track-creation} activity. The P2 is studied in the History books and the “Piano di Rinascita Democratica” {Plan of Democratic Rebirth} is learned by heart instead of the poem "La cavallina storna" by Pascoli. The words "stragi di Stato" {State slaughters}, "Ustica" and "servizi deviati" {deviant services} are considered to be defamation that can be punished with imprisonment. The first article of the Constitution: "l'Italia è una Repubblica democratica, fondata sul lavoro" { Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour} is changed to "l'Italia è una Repubblica creata dalla massoneria e su di essa fondata" {Italy is a Republic created by freemasonry on which it is founded}. After 150 years it is a belated recognition but richly deserved.
The third universe is immersed in a nebula with intermittent patrimonial stars, meteorites on the public employees and flaming comets on the current accounts. It’s the Monti Universe. Don’t ask what your bank can do for you, but what you can do for your bank. The crisis is overcome in a matter of hours with a patrimonial tax of 50% on the possessions of the Italians. What is yours belongs to the State and what is the State’s belongs to the banks. Profumo and Passera are the new twins of the euro and of the technical government. If taxes are really beautiful, Italians are now poor but extremely beautiful. They have that subtle fascination of the tramp under the bridges with a great past in days gone by, waiting for the flooding of Genoa. The country is restored to health once more, thanks also to the national banking pride. A collection of entrepreneurs from Veneto has bought back 500 billion of the public debt from France which in return will not send its Mirage bombers on Venice. You choose. Which will be your multiverse?

The default is gathering speed. Round about the time of All Saints, the bells are already tolling for Italy. The noise of the waterfall is becoming a roar and to assist the leap into the dark, our political class is rowing in the direction of the flow. If nothing changes, next year our medium and long term bonds worth 200 billion, will be unsold and the country will go up in the air. Tremorti knows this, as does Napolitano who dissuades, warns, invites but basically doesn’t lift a finger to change the situation. He just stays and watches like the stars do in Cronin's novel, waiting for the inevitable. Article 88 of the Constitution allows him to dissolve the Parliament. A threat that would allow him to give the responsibility to form a government to a ‘public health’ government with the only objective of saving what can be saved. No one believes that he will ever use article 88, not even with a gun at his head (the collapse of the Nation). Why? It’s a question that I cannot answer. What’s the use of a President of the Republic?
The spread, the difference between our bonds and the German bonds has reached 4.34%, the highest ever. It means that the BTP are worth even less and that to sell them it’s necessary to increase the interest rate, and that has now reached 6.2%. The point of no return when the bonds stay unsold, whatever the interest rate offered, is near. We are like Greece was two years ago without however having a Government and an Opposition and with the absence of the institutions. You don’t need a clairvoyant, the oracle of Delphi or Nostradamus to know what the end is that awaits us. It’s enough to have ‘mago Zurlì’, with all due respect to Cino Tortorella. The only response that the oligarchs in power know how to give, is to cut social spending, cut rights acquired by workers, and post mortem pensions. Their privileges and useless spending connected to the interests of the red and white cooperatives and the Confindustria are untouchable. Financing to the parties amounting to a billion euro, overturned by a referendum, the purchase of 131 bombers from the USA for 15 billion, the TAV in the Val di Susa for 22 billion, ‘la Gronda’ in Genoa for 6 - 7, the elimination of the Provinces for 3 - 4 billion of savings every year, the cancellation of Expo for 3 - 4 billion. 1+15 +22 + 6 +3 + 3 makes (about) 50 billion that can be saved. And that’s only a tiny part of the cuts that are at zero cost to the citizens. They continuously talk about sacrifices, but with what authority can an anticonstitutional parliament, (not elected by anyone, but nominated by some party secretaries) ask for sacrifices? How can you define someone who cuts pensions to poor devils and yet who pockets a parliamentary annuity? Who is ignoring a referendum against the public financing of the parties? Who is it that is against the provinces and yet has hundreds of provincial councillors? With this lot we will all die, but us before them.

A criminal uses ropes to tie the arms of a woman to the beam of an attic. She is defenceless before him. On her chest he uses a felt tip pen to draw the image of a target. Then with a mallet and chisel, he splits her sternum to extract her heart. A scene from a TV film on the national network after dinner. Horror has come into our homes. It’s an habitual guest that we have got used to, often awaited and welcomed. How many have had a shiver of pleasure in seeing the harrowing scene of Gaddafi’s body on TV?
In the street, people look at you menacingly, smiles are ever more rare. In reply to your greeting on the stairs the tenants go straight ahead without responding. The discussions, in the office, or at table with friends and relatives on Sunday, from “taking the mickey” and using irony, they have become clones of the talk shows. Between one course and another, like rabid dogs against rabid dogs of the TV studios instigated by the presenters. It’s the new way of conversing. While you’re driving your car in the morning, at each bend in the road, at every set of traffic lights, at the tiniest upset, you let out a cathartic “fuck off”. It helps you get your blood pressure down. Breathe in, breathe out, fuck off. We are immersed in the daily Styx, the infernal river of the Fifth Circle of the Divine Comedy. Irascible and unknowing. Our spaces are reduced to square metres. Overcrowded mice in cages.
Violence is a drug. Those who produce it know that. They sell it, they tout it, and they insert it into the media. Slowly, lightly, thought, cloud, caress, kiss, happiness, meadow, tree, bicycle, plane, smile, stream, friend, gentleness with words that are no longer pronounced, out of modesty. Is this overdose of violence the cause or the effect of a sick society? Why has violence become merchandise that is planned, exported, purchased? War has become good, it’s called the exportation of democracy. Missiles that hit civilians are friendly fire. Slaughters are thus democratic and take place in a spirit of friendship. It’s striking that this epidemic of submersed frenzy is not countered by anyone. In fact, that it is fed by the blood and horror that comes out of our TV screens while our children our playing on the carpet in the living room and you are desperately looking for the remote control to turn off the foul object that is the TV.

Sarkozy’s little smile is out of place. Not because of the subject towards whom the smile was directed, in relation to whom there would be to dislocate our jaws from laughing for days, but for the bitter French credits. Italy could quite soon bring ridicule on the grandeur of France. “Spezzeremo le reni” {We will smash the kidneys} of our cousins across the Alps, we’ll start with the Col di Tenda and we’ll end up in The Bay of Biscay without encountering obstacles. The force of our debt will smash the French banks. Anything but Mirage and “force de frappe”.
The French banks own 366 billion euro of our debt (*). And we are not alone. As well as our debt, the credit institutions have 53.9 billion in Greek debt, 18.3 billion in Portuguese debt, 17.3 billion in Irish debt and 118 billion in Spanish debt. The debtors are all countries at risk of default whose bonds have all been devalued on the markets by 15 to 50%., and in this way so has the value held by the banks. The overall total of debt of the Piigs in French banks is 573.5 billion (**). The lighted match of the European public debt is in Sarkozy’s hands and he doesn’t seem worried. He and the one close by remind me of the film "Lui è peggio di me!" {He is worse than me}. There’s no banking system that is exposed as much as the French one. It’s at risk due to a default in Greece, or in Italy and due to the reduction in value on the markets of Portuguese, Irish and Spanish bonds. If Greece goes bust, it’ll be an earthquake for the French banks, if Italy explodes, France’s destiny will follow. This is why Greece cannot and must not fail and neither must Italy: to avoid the collapse of the banking system, and especially the French one.
Why is it that France more than every other country has bought risky shares? The only response is the wish to obtain, by means of the public debt, a part of the popular sovereignty of other countries and to oblige it to make choices in the realm of economics, like Alitalia and Parmalat, in the energy sphere, the exportation of nuclear power stations, and in the military sphere, the involvement of Italian forces in the war in Libya. The problem is that the French investments in debt shares relates to all 5 of the PIIGS. Five losing horses for Sarkozy, the jockey. To be knocked off your horse with a smile on your lips takes a split second.

(*) The values given are calculated net of the French shares owned by the PIIGS.

(**) source: The New York Times

photo AFP/Borgia

Is there anyone of sane mind that believes that yesterday’s demo in Rome could have ended differently? It went off exactly as forecast, with the devastation, the urban warfare, the injured and the clashes with the Police. The result of demonising the movements by the parties of the Majority and of the Opposition succeeded perfectly well. Now everyone can add energy to the trumpets condemning the violence. “Indignados”, “Pirates” from various continents and why not, by osmosis even the 5 Star MoVement. If you want, call them the Black Bloc. But during the disorder where was the one who had blown on the flames for weeks? Yesterday with a massive and festive crowd he should in fact have been celebrating the fall of the government, of the tyrant, a Roman triumph, it was all prearranged. But last Friday the legal number was reached, the government did not fall and the frustrations of the participants got transformed into violence in the streets as it was logical to expect.
Once upon a time there were the Wicked Teachers like Toni Negri and Piperno. Today, much more modestly, there are the Wicked Ham-fisted ones who send things forward and instigate the young people to then badmouth them and hide away. Why did the newspaper directors and the party secretaries not go and get beaten up, placing themselves between the security forces and the violent ones? It’s best to stay behind your desks and inside your smart blue limousines after having shored up this government with countless absences and countless confidence votes or talking about Bunga Bunga or about the “pilu” of the latest “escort” to the point of exhaustion. Or also, as is by now the norm, gifting to the Government parliamentarians on parliamentarians, from Calearo to Scilipoti, in a continuous transhumance.
I’m sorry for the young men and women who were present yesterday in Rome. They were used, exploited. Treated like butcher’s meat by the parties and by some newspapers. I don’t believe in a second G8 with infiltrated agents (even though everything is possible), but rather in the anger of a generation with no longer any reference points used as bridgehead by newspapers and parties to get the government to fall.
Bersani condemned the violent people: “The provocateurs attack the heart of a movement that throughout the whole world, wants to freely express discomfort and criticism of the current world economic order. At this point it is indispensable to have a chorus of undoubted condemnation of every act of violence and a rigorous isolation of the movements from those who made themselves protagonists of these unacceptable actions. It’ll be necessary to understand how it’s possible that a band of a hundred delinquents was able to cause devastation, to attack, set on fire and keep control of the centre of Rome for hours.” Vendola spoke of “Minorities of thugs, of “black bloc” in action to take the stage away from the “indignant ones”, to take the word away from them, and they were talking about burning cars and smashing TV cameras.” Pontius Pilate had more dignity.

photo by artsyt

In the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers ” a small town is invaded by aliens who put themselves in place of the inhabitants while these are sleeping. Inside very large pods, perfect reproductions of the original humans are created and the humans are eliminated one by one. In the current Italian “pochade”, a comedy with love affairs, intrigue, "coups de théâtre" and journalistic crap, we are witnessing the “Invasion of the Ultracaste”. The extraterrestrials of the Ultracaste are replacing the half-wits of the Caste. It’s a slow and implacable operation in which Diego Della Valle, protector and mentor of Clemente Mastella, plays alongside the fictitious Zorro/Diego Della Vega, the one who rights wrongs. Ms Marcegaglia takes on the appearance of a Mattei with incinerators financed by our electricity bills. Fini, who for years, has changed the incontinence pads for all those in the current Majority, cleaning their backsides with dedication, has started to have suspicions about the “ad personam” laws. The topmost Ultrabody, De Benedetti the Swiss is dictating the rules for the future after having a rich past and a formidable present in the System. The number one card-holder of the PDminusL is now the “homo novus” with public financing to his newspapers. The limpid and cleaned Ultrabodies advance into our minds. Replicants that are needed to continue the game, to maintain ancient privileges. They are differently equal.
A particular type of Ultrabody is that of the Ultrabodies on the bench. The ones that have never looked to be in the limelight, but who have never raised a finger, for decades, they have enjoyed positions of prestige, always ready to warm up to come onto the field. People like Profumo, Monti and Montezemolo. Indifferent as a personal mission. Meanwhile, the parties are using gigantic pods in order to transform themselves. From on high, they are creating movements from below, going against the laws of physics. They launch useless referenda against laws that they have used up until yesterday, like “il Porcellum” and they attack “anti-politics”. The Ultrabodies, just like the Bodies that they are replacing feed off public lymph. The umbilical cord that keeps them alive is made up of our taxes. Financing to the parties of a billion euro, direct and indirect financing to the newspapers. A parliamentary Ultrabody will never renounce his pension. A terrifying effect of the Ultrabodies is that of corrupting anyone. If you happen to see yourself with the appearance of a not-completely-formed Ultrabody inside a pod, wake up! The next Ultrabody could be you, as was said by Dr Bennell at the end of Don Siegel’s film: “They are already here! You are next. You are next.”

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

Enough! Please, that’s enough with the presumed whores, the presumed schemers, the presumed favours, the alcoves, the photos with G-strings, tits and backsides. Do we want to get the former President of the Council out of our hair? It is right and fitting, but there’s no need to transform Italy into a hard version of the Decameron. Every day a new “red light” episode. To understand which Prosecutors Office is carrying out an investigation (Lecce, Bari, Rome?), and about which “escort”, and where is (but above all who is) Lavitola, it’s necessary to read the summary of the preceding episodes. Otherwise you can’t understand anything. The premier has persuaded a witness to lie, an under-age girl has been fucked, he had a shower after intercourse, he fucked eight in one go? Page after page of intercept records and lasses who have never been convicted in the courts, but who have become prostitutes by journalistic rights. If “not guilty” is the outcome, if there is no crime, will someone pay them compensation? Bagnasco has entered the field. “licentious behaviour, the air needs purifying”. He starts, as does the Church that has taken all possible economic benefits from this government, to keep silent on the world paedophilia scandal that is not written about only in this papist Italy. "Tarantini and free wives. For the Re-examination Tribunal the jurisdiction is Bari, not Rome." Can someone of sane mind tell me why this news is on the front page today? The economy is sinking. This would be enough to topple the government. There’s no longer any talk of the mafia, 'ndrangheta and camorra unless to say that their turnover is about 130 billion euro a year. “The money will be recovered” the politicians explain. But how can they even just say it if the political scene has often and willingly been in collusion with organised crime? This government has more skeletons in the cupboard than an ossuary, but no one is taking the risk to open this cupboard, because it contains tibias, skulls, malleoli, and ribs shared with the Opposition. It’s better to talk about arses and tits, to attack on a front on which the former President of the Council has an undoubted advantage ever since the time of the Fininvest showgirls. We know nothing about the criminal record of a deputy, but we are being informed as to whether he is homosexual or homophobic, whether he goes looking for transsexuals and in which area of Rome. The fantasy in power has been substituted with the arse in power. And the “Questions to il Cavaliere?”. Unmissable! Always 10, never one more, perhaps the journalists can only count using the fingers on their hands. Never an uncomfortable question, but just soft porn of the type you get in today’s La Repubblica: “Why do you hide your charitable actions, if they are really that, behind secret and mysterious agreements?" or “Why do you use the RAI and its directors to obtain favours from young women?” If tragedies often end up in farce, ours is ending in cows.

” Given that you can hear a bit of everything and so much incredible idle chatter, I would like to say: if someone instead of going round the houses were to think that I or someone in my party has done something less than legal, let him say so explicitly, and he will get a libel action. ” The words of Pierluigi Bersani talking about the Penati affair.
Do I think so or do I not think so? Right I think so. My lawyers will be happy. Right now I have only three libel cases and yet they have to do more work. I have decided that I think so, come what may. I think that Penati didn’t keep the money for himself and that he gave it to someone. It’s a hypothesis that is more than plausible that he took the money to someone in the party. Perhaps someone with whom he had a close relationship,, someone he trusted, who had helped him in his political career. It’s an hypothesis, oh dear, but how can I stop myself from thinking it? The Supervisory Committee chaired by "precog" (the one who has foreknowledge of crimes before they are committed) Luigi Berlinguer will find guilty anyone who thinks ill of Bersani. Minority Report for a Minority PDminusL. It’s the “precrime” applied to politics.
Bersani then underlined the need for double vision: “ In the PD there is no moral issue. What exists is the need to always have four eyes open. And that is even more relevant for us because luckily we have an electorate that is very demanding on this issue. ” The poor man must have serious eye problems. He’s practically blinded. Penati was his right hand man, but the lack of good vision has prevented him from seeing him at work in the episodes of corruption and complicity in the Falck area at Sesto San Giovanni and in the sale at three times its value of the package of shares in the Milano Serravalle motorway, belonging to the Province of Milan to Marcellino Gavio. For years, the former mayor of Milan, Albertini, had been calling attention to the Milano Serravalle motorway, even to the magistrates, but without being able to find anyone to listen. Is it not strange that no one has put forward a denunciation, and no one has investigated? Who was on the provincial council that approved the concession? Did anyone oppose the decision? What a lot of questions and what a lot of suspicions on the umpteenth mess-up at the expense of Italian tax-payers. Thinking is dangerous. Bersani knows that. That’s why he announced libel actions. Bersani the four-eyed precog will be the first politician to bring a class action against thinking citizens.
Anyone who even vaguely might think that Bersani or someone in his party has done something less than legal can write to Pierluigi Bersani and declare themselves guilty of bad thoughts. Send off your email.

What a strange country we have. A country in which an arrest warrant for Cosentino (PDL) and Tedesco (PDminusL) is rejected by Parliament and two young women with unblemished records end up in prison in Turin. Marianna, aged 20, and Nina, aged 35, are two pacifists who protested for the disgrace of the TAV in Val di Susa, a useless monster of 22 billion paid from our taxes. Marianna is studying medicine and Nina is a nurse and a volunteer with 118 and has three children. Why arrest them? Wasn’t it enough to impose house arrest? And is one not guilty only after a regular trial? What tremendous social danger do these two women represent? And in what Fxxxing State are we living anyway? Davide Bono, a regional councillor with M5S, met up with the two women in prison this morning. Soon we will publish his account.
I invite everyone to send a telegram of support to the two young women:

Here’s their address:
GARBERI ELENA / VALENTI MARIANNA
Casa circondariale
Lorusso Cotugno
Via Pianezza 300
10151 Torino ITALY

Interview with Simonetta Zandiri, a NO-TAV campaigner:

The parallel reality of the Val di Susa
My name is Simonetta Zandiri and I’m a NO-TAV campaigner. The NO-TAV battle involves us, given that there is an obvious emergency that everyone who lives locally has in front of our very eyes. Unfortunately, it is not so much in the eyes of those who are far away, because the media continue to perform censorship and to issue only a part of the information, a little or nothing at all of our reasoning and about what is truly happening in Val Susa. When you arrive at Chiomonte it seems that you are abandoning the borders of Italy and you are entering a parallel reality.

...

Rights trampled on for 22 years
Now they are being accused of complicity in aggression and aggression against a public official. The charges against them are in a way determined by the situation in which they were captured rather than individual actions and the accusations are very serious and we have the feeling that the case is more than anything else a political case, because of the presence of Caselli’s deputy (who is an important person) at the hearing to validate the arrest and then I have always been fighting

...

Two women in prison
Since Friday they haven’t yet been able to meet up with anyone apart from the lawyers obviously, and they have not yet even seen their parents. They haven’t been able to have anything, not even some clothing from home, something to change into. We know that this morning Ms Artesio, the regional councillor, has been to see them and we hope that others, who have the possibility, can go to show solidarity. For us, it’s a bit difficult because the procedures for admission

...

On September 10 2011, there’ll be the dish of peppered steamed mussels in Rome. At 3:00 pm the lay procession will leave piazza Navona. Each person holding a mussel. In Indian file. In good order on the pavement along via santa Giovanna D'Arco. The mussel will be deposited in a big basket in piazza Montecitorio. I will start first with my load of shells of fresh mussels delivered from Livorno. It’s important to be disciplined. Don’t jump the queue. Give the impression of a calm force that no power can intimidate. Don’t give the System any alibi.
The depositing of the mussel at Montecitorio is a cathartic, symbolic exercise. It will be useful for purifying the air, to breathe deeply and to look up towards the eternal blue sky. The mussels are forming a wall. A tangle of mussels-gone-bad attached to the same rock face. Politicians, bankers, journalists, concessionaires camouflaged as entrepreneurs. The economic disaster obliges them to support each other. If one gets detached from the Palace, they will all get detached. Politics from the bottom, the participation of the citizens makes them frightened. For them it’s a leap into the unknown, into the dark from which they come. A settlement of accounts that has been put off for decades. Here there’s the creation of the new Italy or the 150th anniversary of the Nation will be the first year of its disintegration. It is they who are the crisis. It is they that have created it. They cannot resolve it. The change cannot come from the bankers or from the magistrates. This has been seen in recent years. Corruption increased after” Mani Pulite” {Clean Hands}. The economy has been devastated even though Ciampi and the Bank of Italy’s Dini have been President of the Council. The Country can only be changed by politics but not by this lot of politicians. Italians have to be able to exercise their democratic rights, as they have done for the referendum for water and for nuclear. It’s like what they asked for with “Cleanup Parliament” a proposal ignored by all the parties for 4 years. The power has to return into the hands of its legitimate owners: the citizens. The party-ocracy is a different form of dictatorship, more insidious because you fool yourself that you are in a democracy. The parties have taken possession of the country. Parliament has been appointed by 5 party secretaries. Is this democracy?
In piazza Navona a few stands will be present starting in the morning. One for “Cleanup Parliament” and the others for the proposals of the 5 Star MoVement taken from the Programme.

For anyone who wants to taste a parliamentary dish of peppered steamed mussels, here’s the recipe:
Carefully wash the parliamentary mussels using public water. Repeat a few times.
Once they are clean, place in a large casserole with high sides to protect against “ad personam” laws, add a few spoons of extra virgin olive oil and two squashed cloves of garlic.
Cover the pan to prevent the escape of any Montecitorio mussels and turn on the lively democratic heat.
While cooking, mix the mussels around: take hold of the handles and shake with a movement from below.
You just need the time to get the mussels open and the dish of peppered mussels is ready, once you have dusted it with a lot of freshly ground black pepper right there and then.
Accompany this with slices of lemon and pieces of toasted bread.
At this point the Clean Parliament is served.

Make a date with the dish of peppered mussels tomorrow in Rome, piazza Navona at 3:00 pm. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

PS. Participate in real time in Mussel Day on Facebook and Twitter using the hash tag #cozzaday.

10 September is Mussel Day. The day of the unauthorised parliamentary mussels. “Parlamento Pulito" {Clean Up Parliament} is no longer enough. It’s not only the definitively convicted that have to go, but all of those who have dug themselves in inside the Palace. Like mussels they cling to their privileges, like a pension after one legislature, to election financing. There is not one single mussel in parliament that has renounced his pension and his “reimbursements” from the public purse. There’s no need for a law. It’s enough to write a cheque to the Treasury for the amount received. Compared to his successors, Craxi had more dignity. At least he didn’t take you for a ride. In Parliament he explained that if he was stealing then everyone was stealing and if someone didn’t agree then they should get on their feet. No one stood up. The hands of the parliamentarians were clinging to their seats. Behaviour like true mussels of the rocks.
Early in the afternoon of 10 September I will ask for an explanation in piazza Montecitorio for the silence on the “Clean Up Parliament” law, with the 350,000 signatures for a new election law locked up in the basement of the Senate since December 2007. The popular initiative law is an “anti-mussel law”. It wants to expel the convicted mussels, to get rid of the mussels after two terms of office from the chambers of parliament and to allow citizens to elect a candidate and not a mussel. The filthy Calderoli law was approved by the Berlusconi government in 2006. He was succeeded by Prodi who didn’t change it in two years, and he didn’t even try. No one protested. Now, instead of having a debate on the “Clean Up Parliament” law in the Senate, the same people that didn’t lift a finger when they were in government, are suggesting we have a referendum to overturn the law. Smoke in your eyes for a people with no memory. If the current law were to be repealed, the convicts could still stay in parliament together with the mussels that have served more than two terms of office. Whereas, the “Clean Up Parliament” law would send them all home starting with the Party Secretaries. This is why they are not putting it in the parliamentary timetable. Every parliamentarian is a mussel. They have to be reminded every day. When he’s walking around with his pack of newspapers under his arm, his back slightly bent and the expression of one who doesn’t need to ask, he is doing a perfect imitation of a mussel. He’s transformed into a mussel with tie.
For these people coins are an honour, a privilege that they don’t deserve. Better are the mussels taken out of their shells, molluscless, with the name of the parliamentarian written on it. They have a symbolic value. They are a sign of the times. They can be handed over to the deputy in the street, or left in front of the home that Scajola is unaware of, deposited in front of Montecitorio or Palazzo Madama as an invitation to get out.
The dish of peppered steamed mussels is ready. I repeat: The dish of peppered steamed mussels is ready.

This lot have got to go. They are attached to the rocks and to power like mussels. Smart aleck mussels. They are the problem, not the economic crisis. Any sacrifice can be acceptable, but not put forward by those who have destroyed the country and who are now explaining how to get out of it.
The smart aleck attacks the party-ocracy, but puts forward his own son as a candidate for the regional council.
The smart aleck explains to you that the Statute of Limitations for Penati is different and the party has never seen the money.
The smart aleck makes references to history, from Waterloo to Westphalia , to members of the public made up of smart alecks of the CL (Community and liberation) instead of asking for forgiveness after ten years of disastrous management of the country’s economy.
The smart aleck collects signatures to overturn the filthy laws after not having lifted a finger in two years of government , every reference to Prodi is not casual.
The smart aleck keeps a tight hold on his parliamentary pension, public financing worth a billion euro, but he asks for (necessary… ) sacrifices from the country.
The smart aleck criticises every measure introduced by the government and then votes for it.
The smart aleck would like to abolish the Fiscal Shield that became law with a contribution from his party.
The smart aleck is the one who wanted water in public hands, but only after the referendum got through.
The smart aleck wants to abolish the provinces while putting forward provincial councillors in the whole of Italy.
The smart aleck does not want EXPO 2015, but then has to do it so as to avoid making a bad impression.
The smart aleck pays the journalist smart alecks by means of financing to the publishing industry to be able to say smart-aleck-like-things from morning to night without a shred of questions.
The smart aleck prohibits civil unions and then goes whoring.
The smart aleck is only chitchat and badge, but that badge was given to him by no one. Parliament was elected with an unconstitutional law. Formigoni and Errani are illegitimate regional presidents because they have had more than two consecutive terms of office.
The smart aleck lives thanks to the absence of the Italian’s memory. He can say what he likes, sure in the knowledge that every word will be forgotten tomorrow. Only a people without memory and without dignity can be governed by smart alecks for a long time. We are that people.

I hate mass tourism,
the locusts that arrive with the charter flights
in places never seen before and that they will never see again.
I hate mass tourism that transforms agricultural workers into waiters,
shepherds into cleaners and the territory into a playground for children and adults.
I hate mass tourism that steals water from the wheat fields
for the swimming pools and the loos of the grand hotels and that, however,
leave instructions in every bedroom saying how not to destroy the planet.
I hate mass tourism that has no awareness of culture,
of the food, of the history of the places where they are visiting
frenetic and blind with in one hand an improbable guide book.
I hate mass tourism that transforms ancient marvellous places into a photocopy of the urban suburbs in which
they spend their miserable lives.
I hate the ecological eyesores, the villas at the seaside, harbours
transformed into an unending sequence of restaurants, pizzerias and bars.
I hate the cigarette ends that have taken the place of the shells on the beaches.
I hate the plastic bottles and the straws for the drinks that stick out of the sand,
instead of the chelae of the crabs and “ossi di seppia”.
I hate this fat, sweaty, ignorant tourism with little shows in the evenings and the buffet that is always available with food imported from who knows where.
I hate mass tourism, the supermarket in the summer with the shopping trolley full
of useless things to show off in the living room when you get back home.
I hate mass tourism that destroys villages, languages,
the ancient faces of the people, the politeness of those who have not yet been subject to globalisation.
I hate mass tourism that standardizes everything.

”Quota 97” is equivalent to an age of 62 years and 35 years of contributions in order to retire on a pension. No twenty, thirty or forty year old and even many fifty year olds who have lost a job in recent years will ever get there. The Everest of “quota 92” is, as everyone knows, temporary. It will be updated over time to avoid default. It will become “quota 100”, then 105. Getting ever higher, while what will get smaller are the number of years of possible contributions for the precarious workers, for those taken on to do a project for a limited number of months, or for the people who are currently unemployed. If all goes well, they will settle down with 18 to 20 years. To get to “quota 100” you will thus need to be 80 years old and have 20 years of contributions. This is an exceptional way of taking us for a ride.
The INPS contributions are TODAY being paid by workers who will NEVER retire with a pension. That money is being used to pay the “baby pensions”, the “super pensions”, the “double and triple pensions” and the pensions of the parliamentarians. Amato’s pension of 32,000 euro a month, the pensions of the regional councillors, Veltroni’s “annuity” of 9014 euro, the pensions of those who have been at home since retiring at the age of 40. Why pay the pensions of the others without retiring on a pension? It doesn’t make any sense. A maximum limit of 3,000 euro a month and the age of 65 seems reasonable to me. If the ceiling were to be applied, the State would save 7 billion euro a year and everyone could get access to a pension without having a “quota”. I see no reason at all why a young person has to pay pension contributions to INPS knowing that he will never himself get a pension. The obligatory payment to INPS has to be abolished. Let each person save how much they want so that they can use that for their old age. INPS is a ramshackle organization that has used the pension money to do everything. It’s a political institution not one that give guarantees to the tax payers. The money from INPS has been used, among other things, for laid off workers. When Fiat was losing money for decades, its employees were paid by INPS, that is, by us. Who knows whether Minchionne is aware of this?
We need to be clear about pensions. There has to be a minimum amount for the indigent (1,000 euro?) and a maximum ceiling for everyone else and no raising the age when you can get a pension. If it’s not going to work like that, it’b be better for INPS to close down and the young people and the generation of almost-young people should stop paying contributions for a pension that they will never receive.
There are 19 million pensioners in Italy and about the same number of workers who are paying them their pensions by making monthly contributions. Anyone who has not retired will work (if they have the good fortune to have good health and to have a job) right up until they die. This situation cannot go on. Even a child would understand that. And those who are paying contributions to INPS have already understood. The contributions have become a tax for the more fortunate old people. Pension reform has to be for everyone or for no one. For those who have already retired and for those who have the right to retire. Right now we cannot have rights that have already been acquired.

The crime of “vilipendio” {public insult} in relation to Italian taxpayers is not present in the criminal code, but it should be brought in as soon as possible. Those who have paid taxes in recent years have been carrying on their backs, the whole burden of a State that has created laws only for the crafty ones, with amnesties, the decriminalisation of false accounting, the Fiscal Shield and a hundred other vile laws.
The country is divided into two: the stupid and the crafty. The stupid feel that they are getting even more stupid and they are paying more and more taxes. The crafty, by now the majority, feel that they are represented by a bipartisan political class that can’t be arsed to make them pay taxes. The stupid who are paying for social spending for the crafty as well, ranging from health to education to security no longer even have the comfort of minimum services, in fact they have to pay even more to have less, from health to transport. The crafty ones are screwing the stupid ones twice over. The first time leaving them the whole burden of taxes, the second time by having free (or almost free) access to services provided for society thanks to the low income that they declare. The stupid on the other hand have to pay the full cost, starting with the school fees for their children.
The stupid know perfectly well that they are paying more taxes than other Europeans because millions of crafty ones don’t pay taxes. The stupid ones also know that the parliamentarians belong to the crafty and not to the stupid and that they do everything to favour the category to which they belong. It’s class solidarity that motivates them. The parliamentarian that gets entitled to a pension after one term of office, that often has two or three pensions and normally gets two or three salaries, the one as a parliamentarian and the one from their regular activity that they continue to carry out, is without doubt a crafty one. However, the stupid ones, in their small way, can get pissed off! Even more so now, as they can clearly understand that they will never see a pension and the continual increases in primary services like water, electricity, refuse collection, telephone, and public transport eat up any of their salaries that are left. There are two types of tax payers: the ones who pay right down to the last cent because they are obliged to do so and those who pay their taxes as a social duty. The former feel that they are in a prison that they are doing everything they can to get out of, as a means of survival, so that they can find an undocumented job. The latter are closing down their small or medium sized companies or they are going underground. Those who can, are moving abroad. The others are living off their life savings after having sold off everything or they no longer declare anything. The crafty ones are becoming the absolute majority, with a Bulgarian-style election. When they understand that without the stupid ones, everyone will be fucked up, it’ll be too late. Parasites die unless they have a healthy body to live off. The tax payer today is the only true value left in this completely and utterly chaotic country, but that situation will not last long and that’s even without the need for any type of taxpaying strike. The tax payer is in fact about to resign and enter the paradise of the world of the crafty.

P.S. During my presence in Rome for "Parlamento pulito" {Clean Up Parliament} on 10 September and the days after that, there’s no plan for any type of national meeting of the Movimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} to discuss basic ideas in its programme.

There are moments in the history of a country when everything becomes intolerable. The apex was reached with the speech delivered by Morpheus Napolitano in Rimini, applauded by the throng of those responsible for the Italian economic catastrophe. Morpheus, using his language of an nineteenth-century provincial bureaucrat, which is what he actually is, explained that “The seriousness of the crisis has been kept hidden.” Right, so from whom has this seriousness been kept hidden? From the bakers? From the petrol pump staff? From the doorman? The Quirinale, that costs the Italians a frightening amount, didn’t know anything about it? What was it busy doing? Busy signing every filthy law, including the Fiscal Shield to give an amnesty to the tax dodgers? Who was it that signed this law the first time round, without sending it back to the Houses of Parliament as he could have done and above all as he SHOULD have done? Perhaps it was him, the president who was appointed by Parliament that in turn was appointed by 5 party secretaries. That lanky gentleman who has never said a word about the public debt up until the moment that the bubble burst? The one who has never mentioned the 350,000 signatures collected for “Parlamento Pulito” {Clean Up Parliament}? Is it perhaps the guy who took the low cost flights to go to Brussels rather than Alitalia, the flagship airline? (video)
And behind this old man, who by now has served his time and who will be turfed into the cubbyholes of History, there are those who are taking refuge but are about to be swept away. All of them together, arse-lickingly. Cicchitto, a P2-ist of the first hour: “Napolitano has done a severe analysis …”. Enrico Letta (also called “Lecca” {Lick}) “We are putting our names to the Head of State’s appeal”. Moretti, the one of the railways that are being dismantled: “There’s a strong push to the pride in taking action”. Marchionne, the thermo-destructor of the Trades Union, who after thrilling results on the Stock Exchange and relating to sales, has not yet been put outside the door: “Napolitano is a man whom I hold in immense esteem, e reference point for the country”.
Morpheus said once more to the claque of bankers, members of the Confindustria, begging politicians and the papists present (unfortunately there was an absence of labourers, unemployed people, housewives, people laid off and Berlinguer-style communists) “It’s necessary to speak the language of truth as should be done by all those who have responsibility in the institutions.” This stupendous thought expressed by the one who has been at the top of the institutions for five years and who has never given any words on the foreseeable economic catastrophe, caused a round of applause from those present. From a distance even the voice of the former President of the Council was heard who judged Morpheus’ speech to be like "a spur". Behind the funeral stage set, there was the claque who were giving encouragement and applauding before the end: Passera (IntesaSanPaolo), Conti (Enel), Lucchini (Eni). Fantozzi’s daughter, otherwise known as Maurizio Lupi, was shouting excitedly just as she does when she has a private audience with Formigoni, the unauthorised Regional president, and a “uomo imagine” (sic) for the group “Comunione e Liberazione” or CL. The Dancing is Over. Will the last person to leave, please turn out the lights.

The Dancing is Over

There are moments in the history of a country when everything becomes intolerable. The apex was reached with the speech delivered by Morpheus Napolitano in Rimini, applauded by the throng of those responsible for the Italian economic catastrophe. Morpheus, using his language of an nineteenth-century provincial bureaucrat, which is what he actually is, explained that “The seriousness of the crisis has been kept hidden.” Right, so from whom has this seriousness been kept hidden? From the bakers? From the petrol pump staff? The Quirinale, that costs the Italians a frightening amount, didn’t know anything about it? What was it busy doing? Busy signing every filthy law, including the Fiscal Shield to give an amnesty to the tax dodgers? Who was it that signed this law the first time round, without sending it back to the Houses of Parliament as he could have done and above all as he SHOULD have done? Perhaps it was him, the president who was appointed by Parliament that in turn was appointed by 5 party secretaries. That lanky gentleman who has never said a word about the public debt up until the moment that the bubble burst? The one who has never mentioned the 350,000 signatures collected for “Parlamento Pulito” {Clean Up Parliament}? Is it perhaps the guy who took the low cost flights to go to Brussels rather than Alitalia, the flagship airline? (video)
And behind this old man, who by now has served his time and who will be turfed into the cubbyholes of History, there are those who are taking refuge but are about to be swept away. All of them together, arse-lickingly. Cicchitto, a P2-ist of the first hour: “Napolitano has done a severe analysis …”. Enrico Letta (also called “Lecca” {Lick}) “We are putting our names to the Head of State’s appeal”. Moretti, the one of the railways that are being dismantled: “There’s a strong push to the pride in taking action”. Marchionne, the thermo-destructor of the Trades Union, who after thrilling results on the Stock Exchange and relating to sales, has not yet been put outside the door: “Napolitano is a man whom I hold in immense esteem, e reference point for the country”.
Morpheus said once more to the claque of bankers, members of the Confindustria, begging politicians and the papists present (unfortunately there was an absence of labourers, unemployed people, housewives, people laid off and Berlinguer-style communists) “It’s necessary to speak the language of truth as should be done by all those who have responsibility in the institutions.” This stupendous thought expressed by the one who has been at the top of the institutions for five years and who has never given any words on the foreseeable economic catastrophe, caused a round of applause from those present. From a distance even the voice of the former President of the Council was heard who judged Morpheus’ speech to be like "a spur". Behind the funeral stage set, there was the claque who were giving encouragement and applauding before the end: Passera (IntesaSanPaolo), Conti (Enel), Lucchini (Eni). Fantozzi’s daughter, otherwise known as Maurizio Lupi, was shouting excitedly just as she does when she has a private audience with Formigoni, the unauthorised Regional president, and a “uomo imagine” (sic) for the group “Comunione e Liberazione” or CL. The Party's Over. Will the last person to leave, please turn out the lights.

photo by richard gillberg

First they came to get the precarious workers and everyone was happy. They were big babies that wanted a fixed job, holidays, paid overtime without accepting any entrepreneurial risk.
Then they came to get the private sector workers that cost too much, and were annoying for the Confindustria. The companies shifted into the countries without Trade Union rights, where they just thought about working. The workers became laid off or unemployed.
Then they came to get tens of thousands of teachers in the public sector, lazybones, paid to keep the teacher’s chair warm. No one was outraged. Basically, they’d been asking for it.
Then they came to get all the employees of the public authorities. There was a block on salary increases, the salary for the “thirteenth month” was chopped, as was the final salary lump sum and a lot were sacked. Nothing happened. The public employees stayed silent, feeling guilty about the public debt.
Then they came to get the future pensioners. The pension age was shifted upwards by a year, then two, then five then forever. No one reacted. Especially the parliamentarians with the pension (or annuity as Veltroni calls it) that they’re sure to get after one term of office and anyone already retired gets already. “Mors tua, pensione mea.”
For the politicians there’s starting to be a lack of human material for the social butchery. But they didn’t get downhearted. They still had the savers, the pensioners and the home owners. The people in the categories that have already been affected would not have appreciated being the only ones to pay for the crisis.
Then they came to get the people owning State bonds that were frozen for ten years. Then they came to get the people with savings by taking cash out of current accounts.
Then they came back to get the people with savings with the temporary closure of the banks.
Then they came to get the home owners with a new “ICI” tax and a patrimony tax on property.
Then they came to get the pensioners by taking their pensions away.
Then, given that no one protested, they declared the default of the State.
Then, precarious workers, people who were laid off and unemployed, teachers, public employees, people who have never had a pension, former pensioners, savers, home owners and in general, all the Italians reduced to poverty, came to get the politicians. No one protested.

(*) Freely adapted from “Then they came to get the gypsies” by Bertolt Brecht

Expressions by Sophie Caves

Those faces. I can’t stand them any longer. I can’t look at them anymore. They make me nauseous. They make me want to vomit, to throw up; the process of rejection. I can accept that Italy has gone bust. But these amateurs with their pig-like ferret-like smiles, I can’t stand them anymore. I would pay any tax; I would make any sacrifice to avoid those sneers of the piss-takers that appear every evening on TV, and every morning on 10 pages of the newspaper. “Good-for-nothings” that make themselves out to be statesmen.
Something has snapped inside me; perhaps in many of you. Something has changed. The country has understood that it is being led by people who are incapable and dishonest. Perhaps it already knew that, but it was thinking of a soft change of the guard, as happens in many collapses. The people responsible line up and reach the door, then are never seen again. And you understand and let them go. Tomorrow is another day and it’s possible to think of the reconstruction. Instead these traitors of the national economy that have got the country into debt and denied the catastrophe with such impertinence worthy of the maximum disdain. These oafs are not budging. They are not giving up even a centimetre of their power. I’m not violent. But I try to foresee events. History not only doesn’t stop but it repeats itself. When it meets a wall on its route, it knocks it down. That happened with the Berlin Wall, but even with Louis XVI’s head and the family of the Tsar. Events that, when you look back on them, were easily explainable. Craxi ran away. At that time it was possible to get thieves and find them guilty and induce them to flee. Today the convicted parliamentarians, even when the tribunals ask for them to be arrested, as happened for Cosentino and for Tedesco, they continue to have a seat in the Lower House and to pocket 20,000 euro a month in salary and benefits. But these would be trifles, bagatelles, if they didn’t continue to impose their presence on us.
They have to take themselves out of sight of the citizens, definitively. Let them go where they want, to Antigua, to Hammamet, to Vancouver. I’m looking at Enrico Letta, with that smile of one who has abandoned the priesthood, Calderoli with a face like one who has won a salami at the village tombola and Bossi, Maroni, Bersani, Veltroni, D'Alema, Brunetta with their faces of students who keep having to repeat the year of study with CEPU. They even lift my spirits. They have to go. There’s no need for the judgement of The Economist or of Nouriel Roubini to understand that the political class is the top problem for the country. It has run its course and it smells of mould, of rancid. They are the coprolites of the Second Republic. You see them and you stick your fingers down your throat so that you throw up. By now it’s an issue that transcends politics and the economy. It’s also ethics and morality. It’s an issue of pong. A disgusting stink that can no longer be put up with. And it’s also a matter of aesthetics. Certain faces are repugnant. Italy can collapse. It has happened on other occasions and it has got going again. But this political class has to go without turning back and without exceptions.

”Genoa. One evening my wife felt very ill. I bundled her into the car and rushed to the San Martino hospital. They told me to put her in the corridor. It was full of injured people from outside the European Union, perhaps injured in some sort of riot; there were transvestites, fools, and prostitutes. My wife was feeling even worse. I didn’t know what to do. It’s the first time it’s happened to me. I asked a nurse for help. He tells me to stay calm. “Try not to worry.” Calm? But if she hasn’t even been examined. I look around to find a doctor and find none. I’m afraid of leaving my wife on her own while I go off to find a doctor. Another nurse goes by. He tells me to leave my wife fully dressed. DO NOT take her shoes off. “Otherwise they’ll steal them…” But where the hell am I? Am I in a public hospital paid for with my taxes or in a souk frequented by thieves and whores? After a bit, the nurse comes back with a chain and padlock. “This is for your wife’s handbag.” he explains; “Chain it to the bed, otherwise after a bit she won’t find it anymore.” My wife, who had heard all this, looked at me like an injured fawn. I took her in my arms and I ran away. With the first taxi I went to a private hospital. I don’t have a lot of money, even because it all goes in taxes for these pigs. I got into debt for the operation that was urgent. Now my wife is feeling better. However, Italy is by now rotten. In the United States, you die unless you have private insurance. For us it’s no different. If you don’t have some money put aside, if you don’t take out your own insurance, after having paid the taxes for the public health service, you die anyway. However, it’s more democratic.“ Alessio T.

This morning I woke up with a furry mouth and a heavy head. Those are the symptoms of a day of disenchantment and pessimism. Your mood goes round like a ball on the roulette table and every so often it stops on a number that you haven’t bet on. Today is one of those days. It makes me think of a film of many years ago, Papillon, when Steve McQueen was an unachievable example for a young lad. Papillon dreams. He's walking in a desert. After hours of walking he comes across a tribunal, set up in the sand, equal in every aspect to one in a city. The judges look at him severely. They were waiting for him. The verdict is the maximum possible punishment. Papillon asks what crime he has been charged with. He doesn’t remember having done anything, nor of breaking any laws of the Republic. Impossible that he’s been judged guilty. A judge reads out to him the reasoning behind the verdict. The accusation is to have wasted his life. Then Papillon lowers his eyes, admits his guilt, he turns his back on the Judge’s bench and goes back where he came from. How many Italians would accept that they are guilty? Italy’s heart of darkness is this enchantment, this indifference that borders on cynicism that doesn’t manage to get shaken off. Too many times, I have seen those fixed staring eyes, that look through you when you cry out to them that we as a nation have failed and thus they have failed. How many are there of you for God's sake? What has happened to you? What do you dream about when night comes? What are your ambitions for the only life that you will ever have?
I’ll be better tomorrow. I need a few healthy moments of deep depression. It helps me bounce back. It gives me a boost. Yesterday the police stopped me. They asked for the recording of the show I did at Fermo. I told them that I had no recording. They were courteous. They mentioned a denunciation for a possible charge of “public defamation” of Napolitano and they bade me farewell. Napolitano … a parliamentarian in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. The symbol of a petrified Italy.
Perhaps one day there’ll be a bard, a new Pasolini, who will tell our descendents the story of the great sacking, about when the “Bel Paese” was plundered and reduced to a political and economic appendix of the world. He will explain how we were and how we could have been. He will do that with the landscapes disappeared, with the intelligences dispersed in a modern Diaspora, with industries that remain only in name, with a democracy betrayed. Perhaps he will venture out into the search for those responsible for that curse. But no one is responsible. The blame lies with a disease that poisoned the mind of one of the most brilliant people that ever existed and that no longer know who they are. That wanders around like a blind man in the night and if you take him by his arm to walk with him on the road, he pulls back and insults you. He’s not blind. He knows really well what he has to see. There are no cures for this illness apart from those that come from within.
This indolent body of the country that doesn’t budge, doesn’t get indignant, that gulps down any lie, frightens me. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself older, sometimes tired and disheartened, but serene. On 10 September, I’ll be in front of Montecitorio to ask for the “Parlamento Pulito” {Clean up Parliament} law , signed by 350,000 citizens, to be discussed by the Senate. I’ll stay there for as long as is necessary. Even if I’m alone. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

After my letter to Manganelli, the head of the Police and his response, the debate continues on the democratization of the security forces and on a different relationship with the citizens. Today we are publishing the important testimony of Vittorio Agnoletto.

Interview with Vittorio Agnoletto:

”My name is Vittorio Agnoletto. I’m a doctor. In July 2011 I was the spokesperson for the Genova Social Forum. 10 years later, I’ve got together with Lorenzo Guadagnucci, one of the victims of the night of terror at the Diaz School to write a book. It’s called “L’eclisse della democrazia, le verità nascoste sul G8 2001 a Genova” {The eclipse of Democracy, the hidden truth about the 2001 G8 in Genoa}. It’s a book that you will never hear mentioned on TV because of the inconvenient truth that it talks about.
I very carefully read the response that Manganelli , the head of the Police gave to Beppe Grillo and I would like to challenge a few points.

...

Reward those convicted
Manganelli said: the promotion of the people who have been convicted happens as a result of automatism. That’s not true. We are not talking about any old promotion, of a matter of people taking part in competitions for promotion. Let’s start by saying that from the first level upwards for promotions, there’s always an element of discretionality that depends directly on the head of the Police.

...

The identification of police officers
Manganelli moves to another point, he says he is willing to have a discussion, but with a lot of resistance, on the issue of the identification codes on the uniforms of the police officers. This is a request that even the Comitato Verità e Giustizia di Genova {Genoa Truth and Justice Commission} already suggested 10 years ago. We have found a brick wall, including the one put up by the police trades unions who are against the measure.

...

Justice and the Police
Manganelli says he is willing to have a public discussion about this with Beppe Grill, out in the streets, to talk about the role and the behaviour of the Police. I think that this would be very relevant. However, I would ask Manganelli to show his willingness with some concrete actions. When he was speaking to a national daily paper a short while ago, he said: “we are willing to answer for everything that the Police has done in the appropriate places.” My question is: why was this not done in the Tribunal? Which is the appropriate place. How is it that most of the directors of the Police made use of their right to remain silent so as not to respond to the questions of the magistrates?

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Proposals for a better Police force
I’m taking the opportunity to advise all of you to read this book, not just because it reconstructs the days at Genoa solely on the basis of documentary evidence, trial documents, witness statements, documents, wiretapping records, but above all because it reconstructs the 9 years of investigations carried out by the magistrates, magistrates who have been subjected to every form of pressure in an attempt to block their investigations. We are talking of pressure that is definitely not legal.
This book even concludes by putting forward some really precise proposals. I am absolutely convinced that there are many democratic forces within the security forces and that pressure from civil society has to allow these people to come out into the open, to express their ideas, and to put forward their claims.”

...

Filippo Penati has to pay back the 176 million euro to the inhabitants of the Province of Milan. The money that was in fact taken from public financing with the purchase of the shares for the Milano - Serravalle stretch of motorway from Marcello Gavio who died in 2009.
The value attributed to the shares by Penati, by the true friend of the jaguar (“don’t think that we are here to take the spots off the jaguar” is what Bersani would say) was 8.93 euro for a total of 238 million. Gavio had bought the shares for 2.9 euro a few months earlier. No one has ever seen a motorway tripling its value in such a short time. There was no reason to buy the motorway. The majority of the block of shares was already in public hands, with the province and the city of Milan. Here there are two possibilities: either Penati is a naive person who gives away taxpayers’ money in an unknowing way or he did someone a favour. Penati met Gavio in a Rome hotel, not in the offices of the Province, as he should have done, thanks to Bersani. Penati was Bersani’s right hand man, whereas the left hand man is Pronzato, an expert on the transport sector who ended up in prison. It’s possible to say anything about Bersani, but not that he is not a hard worker with two arms like that!
Now Bersani has announced a class action against the newspapers who defame the PDminusL. It’s truly an inside out world. It’s the citizens who should be bringing a class action against the PDminusL to have the booty returned to them. The province of Milan has 3,161,000 inhabitants. From each one of them, including the new born babies, 55 euro a head has been taken away to give to Gavio. What’s Bersani thinking of doing? Penati is a functionary in his party. If Penati does not have 176 million to give back to the people of Lombardy, the PDminusL will have to cough up the money. Bersani can start a “collection action” among those who are members of the PDminusL. Gavio, after the business deal of the century, invested 50 million in Banca Nazionale del Lavoro shares, while Consorte was staging a takeover bid. It’s a sin to think badly of anyone, but it is truly a strange coincidence. The PDminusL has pocketed a few hundred million in election financing under the guise of reimbursement of expenses. It would be a great gesture if they were to use a part for the province of Milan. We are waiting with hope.

photo by http://9gag.com/gag/14119/

On the Tarot card of The Hanged Man, there’s a man with his right ankle tied to a beam . His hands are crossed behind his back. In spite of the torment, his face is serene, almost ecstatic. Sometimes he’s surrounded by a halo. Italo Calvino in the book "Il Castello dei destini incrociati" {The Castle of Crossed Destinies}, has Orlando, the mad paladin finding himself upside down, saying: “Leave me like this. I’ve done the whole circle and I’ve understood. The world is to be read the other way round. Everything is clear.” The Great Book of the World of Madmen has to be read the other way round to be at peace with oneself. I’m not mad, I’ve finally understood this. I was just seeing the world from the wrong perspective.
When I go home, I have a chestnut beam ready for use. I get myself hung up by a foot and I laugh like a child. Anyone who loses his mind doesn’t know they have lost it, but that isn’t my situation. What do you say? Am I on a nasty slope? Ready for a white padded room in a clinic surrounded by a sea of grass? Like Orlando, I’ve done the whole circle and now I know that anyone who doesn’t adapt is lost. My eyes rove from the carpet to the tiles, towards the ground, like one who has to accept collapsing in order to survive. When they release me from the beam, ever more rarely, I go out of the house and I talk to the people I meet in the street. I have the feeling that I’m an alien. For a bit just recently, I’m getting convinced that it’s the others who are right. If the one who is not afraid of dying, dies only once, the one who is afraid of living never thinks about it and lives for a hundred years.
Who am I to judge my fellow citizens? I commit the sin of pride if I think that they are not well informed, able to discern the difference between good and evil, a delinquent from a Minister, a journalist from a mercenary liar. And when the doubt comes back again, my wooden beam gives me peace. I see Tremonti, the Minister of the Economy, and not Tremorti, the book-keeper of elusion. Napolitano appears to me and not Morpheus who is signing the warning. The TAV in Val di Susa is something that is right and fitting, and not a useless project costing 22 billion at the expense of the taxpayers. The 'ndrangheta does not exist, even Ms Moratti has said that, and Mangano is a true hero because he did not talk. Italy is the best of all possible worlds. Scalfari is a great journalist; De Benedetti is a virtuous man who has developed the national economy. Berlusconi the man of Destiny. A mantra when upside down. I feel better. To follow the crowd is a sign of wisdom, of tranquil strength, but it’s also true that when you follow the stream you always finish up in some sewer, whose stench is something you can cope with, a peg on your nose and Bob's your uncle! Straight away you imagine perfumes of lavender and cyclamen. The slight regurgitation of vomit was just an illusion. The world when you’re upside down is more beautiful, I didn’t believe it, but the Italians have made me change my mind.

Greek politicians are lucky. When they are seen out and about, (as little as possible) people throw yogurt at them. It’s the Greek type, among the best in the world … Whereas our politicians get arrested. They weep with nostalgia for the coins thrown at Craxi. If people were to throw 10 cent coins at them they would be happy. They move around with bodyguards, in dark blue cars with blackened windows, like sharks in the traffic, so as not to be recognised by people. They are afraid of them. The riot police should in reality be called the parliamentary anti-trawling force. They are the final barrier between the politicians and the citizens. Just think of the joy of a maxi-trawl done by the magistrates in Parliament. For the Italians, it would be like winning the football World Cup.
These individuals who are under investigation, convicted at the first, second or third level who no one has elected, judge themselves and absolve themselves all by themselves. They decide, for reasons that are mysterious to the people, who can be arrested, as happened for Papa of the PDL, and who can get away scot free like Tedesco of the PDminusL.
A lighted match is enough, a forgotten match and that can set off the social revolt. They know that. The country is in debt starting from the State right down to the tiniest town. The debt of each citizen is the sum of the debts of the town + province + region + State. A person from Parma, for example, as well as the 31,000 euro of State public debt , has on his shoulders 630 million in town debt, equivalent to 1,940 euro a head including the new born infants. Anyway, Parma is lucky when compared to Turin, the most indebted city in Italy. We are drowning in debt that someone has taken on in our place. More debt means fewer social services, unliveable cities, local transport collapsing. Before any other expenditure, in fact, you have to pay the interest on the debt so as not to go under.
Each day a new judicial bulletin. You go from the PDL ‘s multiply-arrested Prosperini for passing envelopes of cash to the PDminusL’s Filippo Penati, vice president of the regional council in Lombardy under investigation for misappropriation and corruption in an investigation about the area of the former Falck in Sesto San Giovanni. In a country where Alfonso Papa from Poggioreale declares himself to be “a political prisoner” like a member of the Red Brigades of times gone by and where the PDL contest the vote for Papa with the reason: “Enough electronics, go back to the balls”, it’s the balls of the citizens that are going round and round vortically. It is the judges who decide who has to go to prison, not the chums of the defendants and those who are accused of serious crimes have to resign. Meanwhile, Bersani of the Fiscal Shield, of the “no” to the provinces, of the management of private water, of the TAV, and with excellent defendants in his party, is asking for new elections. I agree. Before that however, the PDminusL must be dissolved. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

If the ECB had not intervened last Tuesday to buy our State waste paper that no one wanted, Italy would already be on the road to default. Anything but the miracle proclaimed by Napolitano who has found the time to receive Woody Allen in his shirt sleeves, together with his wardrobe-shaped wife.
What happened is “o' miracolo”. The blood of the Opposition became liquid (it’s not even as though it were the blood of Saint Gennaro).The Opposition that voted for the 80 billion euro package without even minimally denting the privileges of the politicians. The cost is 1,000 euro per family and zero euro for the parliamentarians. The deputies that voted out of a “sense of responsibility” and were praised by the Head of State, are the same ones that a few days ago absented themselves for the abolition of the Provinces, that receive a billion in public contributions for their parties and that happily qualify for a pension after one legislature. They should spit in their own faces when they look at themselves in the mirror. Instead they send out messages of solidarity like someone who has just escaped from a possible shipwreck. Nothing has been asked for in exchange for the blood of the Italians. People will retire at 68 years and two months (but those who are thirty years old will retire at 70).What’s the use of INPS? Where’s the money that we have contributed? This institution has to be abolished. From now on, let each person keep their own contributions, starting with what they have already paid in, and then decide when they want to stop working. They have brought in the payment for tests and visits to specialist doctors, basically everything.
“O' miracolo do o' Quirinale” and of the PDminusL. In exchange for the package, they should have asked for the immediate resignation of the government, a President of the Council appointed as a technical measure for a limited time to save the whole ship, the cut in the unbearable privileges of the politicians, a new election law, the elimination of public financing to newspapers and to the parties, the block on every Great Useless Public Work, from the Gronda to the TAV. Nothing has been asked for. Nothing has been done. The parties believe that they are safe. The Nation has been fucked one more time. For them it’s been a miracle, for the Italians, the umpteenth time we’ve been fucked around. The 80 billion is not enough to avoid the default, and not even 200 would be enough. Perhaps what’s waiting for us is the tax on patrimony, a sum of money taken from current accounts and the freezing of State bonds. It’ll be a new Italian-style miracle.

The band on the Titanic plays on while the iceberg gets closer. Tremorti, on trombone, reassures us: “We either go forward or we sink” (perhaps both …) and “As on the Titanic, those in first class do not get saved” It’s the umpteenth “tremortian” whopper. First class people are already saved. They have accumulated capital. They have taken their money abroad. First class people have got free tickets for the crossing, from the Government, with the Fiscal Shield with just 5% taxation on capital that has been kept hidden from the tax authorities. Together with the first class travellers, ones who will be saved are their cooks, valets, the serving staff of the newspapers, and the ship-owners of the banks and of the Confindustria. The citation of the Titanic is a good reassurance only for the poor people. Employees, precarious workers, unemployed people are already immersed in shit up to their necks. In the sinking of the Titanic, in first class 61.81% of the passengers were saved: 204 survivors out of 330. In second class 42.5%, 119 out of 280. In third class 26.85%, 105 out of 391. A first class ticket gave three times the guarantee of survival in relation to a third class ticket.
Tremorti after thirty years of political associating and economic tittle-tattle has woken up. He whispered, as though he were lying down on a bed waiting for the legal transfer: ”introduce into the Constitution a golden rule that ties us to the achievement of balancing the budget.” He’s saying that now, when everything is bursting its banks, falling over, overflowing and the debt is a mountain of ice close to 2,000 billion arriving in our faces.
”Tremortacci tua”, where have you and your peers been all this time? The MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement}, the populist one, the pioneer of anti-politics, the qualunquists, for years has inserted in its Programme a line that says: “Approval of each law subject to effective financial funding”. You cannot get the citizen into debt with his permission to do electoral financing, to buy fighter-bombers from the United States, to keep our troops in Afghanistan, for 22 billion euro’s worth of stupid things like the TAV, for a billion of public funding to the parties disguised as reimbursements. You cannot throw hundreds of millions of tax payers down the bog with bullshit like the one wanted by Maroni to decouple the referendum from the local elections or to keep the Provinces alive. Nor can you do the “Messina Bridge”, the “Gronda” and whatever you want for tens of billions of euro drawing on the public debt. The money belongs to us, the citizens. You have made it go up in smoke. You have gifted it to the State concessionaires, like Benetton for the motorways, like Marcegaglia and the oil barons with the Cip6, like our newspapers. The people of first class got rich thanks to the State. They should be the last to climb in to the lifeboats.

PS: tzetze.it, the portal of "Selected news Items on the Internet" reached 50,000 visits in a day just 48 hours after it was launched. Thank you to anyone who has appreciated it.

Roberto Cotachiño has taken courage. After a two year period of “mutism” he said: “Let Grillo not be seen again in Val di Susa instead of overheating the spirits and doing damage.” I consider that to be an invitation. I will act in such a way as to go frequently to this really beautiful valley. Cotachiño is never seen in Val di Susa. Let him go and hold a political rally, let him explain to the people of the Valley the reasons (non-existent) for the 22 billion TAV. I invite him to go to Chiomonte or to la Maddalena as soon as possible without body guards instead of hiding behind Maroni’s skirts. The Lega in Val di Susa is not the master or mistress in the house of others; the masters and mistresses are the people of the Val di Susa. The bluff of the Po Valley is deflating, like every other promise of the Lega in the last twenty years. The people of the North want secession, certainly they want that, but from the Lega people who give 90-degree support to the PDL that has Mangano as its hero.
Cotachiño should no longer let himself be seen in the Regional Council. He’s an illegal president. “Fora di bal e fora da Turin.” Cotachiño was elected thanks to Michele Giovine’s list called "Pensionati per Cota" {Pensioners for Cota}. The list collected 27,000 votes, but it should never have been admitted to the elections. The signatures of 17 out of 19 candidates were in fact false, as was verified in the criminal courts last week. A false list decided the elections in Piedmont. Cotachiño has to resign. The blog will follow the outcome of this electoral farce very closely. In November a verdict in the administrative field could (should!) invalidate the vote and call new elections and call Cota to return to the “fatal Novara”.
Meanwhile the Cabinet of Piedmont of the “Party of the Honest” (copyright held by Angelino Alfano) is losing its bits. Last May the councillor Caterina Ferrero was placed under house arrest for an invitation to tender for the distribution of 50 million euro of incontinence pads in the pharmacies rather than through the National Health Service. This weekend I’m inviting Cota to go on a family outing to Val di Susa. The air is great and the citizens are anxiously waiting for him. Let him take an incontinence pad with him, you never know.

Famiglia Cristiana, the dangerous magazine of the Catholic Black Bloc, has defined this political class as “the lowest of all time”. Italy is close to official default, the real one has already happened. We are at the bottom of the ranking for salaries, among the lowest for freedom of information, among the lowest for connectivity, even topped by Gaddafi’s Libya that we are bombing while the President of the Republic is sleeping soundly at night, among the lowest for investment in research and innovation, among the lowest for the employment of young people, thousands of companies are closing down every month. LAST. We will have to get used to this situation for years. It’ll need at least a generation to come out of it. The 47 billion of the Tremorti financial package is only just enough to pay for the sweeties. In a single month our public debt has increased by 22 billion. In 2012 the interest on the debt could get to 100 billion and perhaps go over that amount. In this screwed-up country every demonstration of moderation has been lost. The example is no longer a virtue. In Giuseppe Verdi’s house in Sant'Agata, among the memorabilia there’s a packet of train tickets that he left untouched. He was a Senator of the Kingdom. For this he received a salary, and he felt it was shameful to use them. He paid the train fare to Rome from his own pocket. Tremorti has suggested a cut in the salaries of the parliamentarians, but only for the forthcoming legislature. Sacrifices from the Italians, however, are required straight away. Why did Tremorti not put these off until 2013 as well? Why does he not abolish pensions for the parliamentarians retroactively? Why are double salaries possible? Why, why, why …. Yesterday saw the broadcasting of the umpteenth miserable episode about the cutting of the Provinces proposed by the IdV. The PDL voted against and the PDminusL abstained. Those who have the same interests adopt the same behaviour. “The number of provincial administrators is 4,000 people and there are 2,900 councillors, 50 people who are presidents or vice presidents, 100 who are presidents of the cabinets, and 900 cabinet members. The annual cost just in remuneration for this “army” is more than 50 million euro while the current spending of the more than 100 Italian provinces is about 10 billion euro a year.“ To be coherent anyone who asks for the abolition of the provinces should have abstained from presenting themselves at the latest provincial elections as the MoVimento 5 Stelle did. You don’t need a law to give an example. The trick of the election financing disguised as “expenses” brings to the coffers of the parties a billion euro. Has some party refused the money? The MoVimento 5 Stelle has. “You must be the change that you want to see in the world.” That’s what Gandhi said. In his place we have Bersani and Berlusconi. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

The guilty dog barks first. Ms Marcegaglia of the incinerators has invoked the arrival into the field of the “silent majority”. “The time has come for the silent majority of this country that wants the TAV, the infrastructure, to make themselves truly heard. Because otherwise only the noisy minority is heard and in bad faith.” The silent majority has already made its voice known with the referenda, the festival banquet, the table lavishly prepared with 6 or 7 nuclear power stations paid for by the tax payers for tens of billions and pocketed by the Confindustria, no longer exists. And not even the profitable handling of public water by the assisted industrialists. The bridge over the Straits has become a chimera. What remains are the Great Useless Public Works financed by the State, like the TAV and the Gronda in Liguria. Devastation of the territory and cement paid for by the tax payers. The Confindustria of the State Concessionaires, Benetton-style with the motorways, Marcegaglia-style with the incinerators paid for in the electricity bill with the CIP6, wants just one thing, public money. Without that it would be asphyxiated. In Italy, risk capital is put up by the State, the citizens who pay taxes, labourers, office workers, small business owners, it is they who are the “silent majority”. And Ms Marcegaglia is still asking for money from them. The Confindustria while passing round the plate has a loud voice. “What Grillo has said is really serious: “He said that those are heroes, whereas they are delinquents. The true heroes are the police officers.” That’s false and will find a response in the courts. My heroes are the citizens, like the people of the Val di Susa, who with the weapons of democracy are fighting this system that is rotten from its foundations. Ms Marcegaglia added “We entrepreneurs, the workers, the banks, have to say: that’s enough now, we are fed up. We have to swiftly decide one day when those who believe in the growth of this country, say – that’s enough!!” We all agree with this. We have to say “that’s enough!” to the ragged arsed entrepreneurs who plunder the resources of the country. Yesterday, just for a change, saw the conviction at the first level of judgement, of Sergio Cragnotti and Cesare Geronzi who are sentenced to nine and four years in prison for the collapse of Cirio to the value of 1,125 million euro. Who will give compensation to the savers? The Confindustria? They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

The Masque of the Red Death has already entered the castle where the parties are entrenched. They, however, are making out that nothing has happened. The happy brigade believes they have immunity against change, against the plague that will destroy them. It’s like a death that walks, but doesn’t know it. The surrounding walls constructed in so many years of the reign, that are apparently as solid as the ones in Constantinople, to keep the citizens out of every aspect of public affairs, are starting to collapse. Party-ocracy believes itself to be invulnerable and, up until now, it has had good reason to believe that. It has been living for decades between ease and privilege, it has been operating with edicts that cannot be discussed by those it treats as subjects. It has elected itself and it has propagated itself in every ganglion of the country, in every public and private structure, like a metastasis of democracy. In certain moments it felt itself to be lost, but it has never lost its spirit. It did a somersault as in 1992, it redid its make-up and it presented itself once more to the electorate. At that time it was the newspapers and the TV channels that transformed them into virgins from the old whores.
Now the game is up. The Internet shows up their wrinkles, their falseness, the buboes. The eternal arse-faces are drafting, are putting others off the scent, are confounding. They, like the old mafia guys, believe that the wind will blow over and that it will be enough to become like a reed blowing in the wind to then get up again when the weather is calm once more. After the referendum result they presented themselves before the Italians like old worn out brothel keepers to recite the old weary part, not realising that no one wants them screwing any more .They have transformed the victory of the Italians into their own victory. A vote for the future of the country for a political vote.

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Maurizio Gasparri was born in Rome in 1951. He had to redo the first year of elementary School five times and he has to update his date of birth to 1956 so as to be able to keep going at school. None of his companions suspects his real age. They just think that he’s a bit retarded, "grande e ciula". He immediately understands that his only possibility is to go into politics. If intelligence is not in abundance, the “phisique du role” however is not absent for Maurizio, this was even recognised by Oriana Fallaci herself years later: There’s another one who seems like the village idiot. He’s got such an unintelligent face, poor thing, a lip that hangs down like that, that it makes you want to pay for him to have plastic surgery". Fini saw in that lad the stuntman for Starace, the national secretary of the Fascist Party celebrated for twenty years on all the walls of Italy with the words: "Starace chi legge!"{Starace who can read} and he got him to play in the MSI’s football team. Gasparri thought he’d arrived at the summit of his career and yet, it was just the beginning. Having an easy capacity to fall in love he said of Di Pietro "He’s a myth, better than Mussolini" to then go on and disown him as “the worst Italian politician” when he entered the service of Berlusconi. He even became the Minister of Telecommunications and they named a law after him; a law that he never understood in depth even though Confalonieri spent whole nights explaining it to him so as to save Mediaset’s TV monopoly. According to Storace, his former party colleague: “That Gasparri law, not only did he not write it, but he hasn’t even read it”. It’s the first case of an unknowing Minister, only a few years later Scajola arrives. He’s the father of a well known monstrosity that is “digital terrestrial”, and in this he is respecting the motto "Qualis pater, talis filius". Someone who was badly informed involved him at the time of "Chiappe d'oro", a supposed politician that went looking for transvestites. He cleared things up immediately: “It’s all a misunderstanding. One day in 1996, I was in my car and I got lost in the neighbourhood of Acqua Acetosa in Rome. That’s an area swarming with transsexuals, and in this wandering about I was stopped by the Carabinieri and I asked for help in finding my way.” Fini immediately gave him a “Tom Tom” but Gasparri has never understood how to make it work, he has confused it with the “Bunga Bunga” but in spite of numerous attempts he has never achieved orgasm. As a former party journalist (he wrote in Il Secolo d'Italia), he considers the free journalists to be a true provocation. Santoro and Vauro are two vulgar jackals who vomit insults with their pockets full of the money of the citizens" and for Enzo Biagi he proposed martyrdom: "Biagi and Santoro are using all means to find media martyrdom. You’d really want to say: OK let’s give them what they want". A true democrat. He’s a sincere knight of the Antimafia and he knew Paolo Borsellino so well as to reveal to the “Movimento delle agende rosse” that "Salvatore Borsellino was disesteemed by his brother ". Anyway he’s a reference point for young people. In fact, if one like him has become a Minister, anyone has a hope in life.

In Trieste after the death of their father, two women were evicted from an apartment that their family had been renting for 42 years, all their lives, with all their things. They asked the institutions for help, but no one responded apart from the office of the President of the Republic and their father’s colleagues with a contribution. They have looked everywhere for work, even underpaid work, the type that Italians no longer want to do …. But no one has offered them any. They were evicted in accordance with the law even though they are daughters of a carabiniere who had dedicated all his life, 35 years of it to the State. Now they are living in the civilised Trieste inside a car. Compassion is dead and society is not in a great shape.

Interview with Cristina and Laura Di Sessa who are living in their car

A car as home
Cristina - We are Cristina and Laura Di Sessa, two sisters; I’m 41 years old and Laura is 45. Our story actually started with a letter to “Il Corriere della Sera”. Just over 8 months ago we were evicted from our home for default because we could no longer pay the rent and for 8 months we have been spending the night with Mauro and this lady who have allowed us to sleep here and in the day time we are in the car and we are looking for work.

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No work
Laura -So 4 months went by.
Cristina - However after that they gave us some money and even now after the broadcast of Balivo’s programme they once more invited us to get by now for a bit of time, but the big help came in fact from our letter to the President of the Republic, because when we were at the last moments in the house, in June I sent an email to the President of the Republic, explaining what had happened to us and what we were facing. I said that my father had been in the Carabinieri and had served there for 35 years.

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We smash the furniture!
Cristina - It was 1 October and we had to take the things away in a week. Big boxes with clothes, all the things that you can take away and that you can save and we brought them here. However for the furniture we needed help to move the items, and we also need a place to keep them. Thus 1 October arrived and we had one day to take the furniture away. It was 6 pm and do you know what I said? Laura rather than leave this here, it’s our stuff and now it will be broken up and thrown away, so we broke it up and threw it away!
Laura - Those things were the sacrifices of our parents!

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Closed Doors
Cristina - It’s not only a matter of the walls, but really what’s inside!
Laura - We have lived our birthdays, Christmases, Easters. We were with our parents inside there. Our parents died there!
Thus they didn’t have a crumb of compassion for us and I was not going to leave them our things.
Cristina - Even because less than a year earlier when the eviction proceedings had started in the apartment below, an elderly lady had to go away because she didn’t manage to pay the rent, even she didn’t with her pension and she didn’t have time to take anything away, because after the time to go away in May, straight away in June they had let it.

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P.S. Anyone who wants to give a hand to Laura and Cristina Di Sessa can do so by sending a postal order to Cristina Di Sessa, V.le D' Annunzio n. 39 - 34138 Trieste –Thank you.

In the 2010/2011 hunting season there were 100 victims, 25 dead and 75 injured. Mostly in Tuscany, Sardinia, Lombardy and Veneto. Overall it went well, considering that for months Italy is transformed into a shooting range. A wood is more dangerous than the war zones of Afghanistan. During an Autumn walk, the sound of birds singing is replaced by the roar of rifles. If you don’t run, you become the wild boar, the hare or the deer. And not even within the walls of your own home are you safe. “Our house is in a zone frequented by hunters in Ceglie. At times you happen to hear gun fire even when it’s the closed season for hunting. It happens that the hunters are shooting at a distance of 10-15 metres from my house. One morning in January, at the first light of dawn, while we were asleep, we were woken with a start by a loud sound of glass shattering. A blast of lead shot had hit the window of the bedroom where my sons (aged 15.11 and 5) sleep, shattering the glass” (12/9/2010)
“A lady from Bellaguarda di Viadana (Mantova) was hit by pellets issuing form a hunter who was aiming at a hare while she was taking her children (aged 8 and 13) to school. The two children were unhurt while the woman was slightly hurt on her thigh. There was a lot of fear given that a mass of pellets was lodged in the door of the house, just missing them.” (22/9/2010)
”It was 12:30 when a shot ruined the Sunday for a family living in Roana (photo). The bullet made a hole in the front door of the two storey villa and it lodged in the opposite wall just above the table on the first floor where the daughter of the couple was having lunch.” (13/10/2010)



“A young lass was grazed on her face by rifle shot from a hunter at Rocchetta Palafea in the langa astigiana. When it happened, the twelve year old was playing in the yard at home.” (11/10/2010)

You also put your life at risk on the roads and the motorways, in the car or on a bicycle.
”On the A5 motorway between Quincinetto and Ivrea a car travelling towards Turin was hit by a bullet shot by a group of hunters looking for wild boar. The bullet damaged the car’s rear window and in the car was a 31 year old man from Verrès and his son. The bullet lodged in the boot at the back of the car...." (20/12/2010)
”They were pedalling along on their bicycles, when they were injured by pellets exploded by a hunter whose identity is still a mystery. This happened in the hamlet called Jano di Scandiano, in the province of Reggio Emilia to two amateur cyclists aged 58 and 54, mistaken for wild animals during a peaceful Sunday outing. One was hit in the buttocks, while the other was hit in the lobe of his right ear: they were immediately taken to the hospital at Scandiano.” (27/9/2010) (*)

If it’s not possible (for now) to prohibit hunting, shootings can be limited near homes and roads. To do that, article 842 of the Civil Code needs revising. It was brought in, in fascist times to allow hunting on private land. (**) An unconstitutional article that represents a violation of the principle of equality of citizens before the law (article 3) and they have to revise the right to have property (article 42). My lawyers are checking up how to proceed.

(*) The information is from the website: http://www.vittimedellacaccia.org/
(**) Hunters cannot have access to land only if it is fenced for the whole perimeter with fencing of a height equal to or higher than 1.20 metres.

Even the Nazis, before they were hanged, were put on trial in Nuremberg. Bin Laden was not assassinated, killed, shot, butchered, struck down. No. Bin Laden was “terminated” to cite Obama’s words. An elegant metaphor that reduces a man to an insect. The members of Goering’s family were not condemned to death, however one of Bin Laden’s sons has been “terminated”. He was there at the scene of the crime. It’s his fault. Bin Laden, a former friend of the CIA, and of the United States, educated in the best universities of the western world, is innocent or guilty for what happened on 09/11? It should have been established by a tribunal on the basis of evidence, of debate. The world would have observed and perhaps understood. The Americans have intervened in the home of others, as usual, cowboys of the Earth. Pakistan is an independent State. According to International law, the United States should have asked the government of Pakistan to capture Osama. Why didn’t they do that? According to United States sources Bin Laden’s corpse has been thrown into the sea after an Islamic funeral (?) on an aircraft carrier. They transported it from Islamabad for hundreds of kilometres so as to feed the fish. Who can demonstrate he has died?
Bin Laden is useful to Obama to win elections. Perhaps however, he’ll lose the war. This death is in fact a vendetta and blood calls for blood. Islamic fanaticism can explode once more and get more extensive. The scenes of jubilation in the streets of American cities after the news of the disappearance of Osama remind me of the same scenes in Arab countries after the collapse of the Twin Towers. There’s something sick about celebrating the death of a person, even a criminal, just as at that time it was revolting to celebrate a massacre.
Bin Laden was living in a three storey building in Abbottabad, a tourist locality in the mountains not far from Islamabad. Abbottabad is where there is the Headquarters of a military academy and numerous barracks. The Pakistani government couldn’t not have known, just as at that time, the Italian government couldn’t not have known that Totò Riina was living with his family in the centre of Palermo. Bin Laden was sacrificed, given that he hadn’t already died some time ago. “Terminated” as they say in America for those who dare to stand up to it. Inhumanity is among us. Let’s "stay human", in accordance with Vittorio Arrigoni’s message.

A clandestine is for ever. He never leaves Italy and he is never sorted out. Stateless for life. The clandestine is useful; the social fear that accompanies him is an old racist legacy. It’s not difficult to demonstrate that. He’s useful to the companies that pay him half an Italian and it keeps down the wages. Italian construction work would have fallen over without the clandestines; the new import slaves. It’s possible to live on 500 euro a month. I spent three days in London to check up that everything was organised for the wedding of William and Kate (oh – and by the way, they didn’t invite me). It seemed that I was in Rome or Turin. There were more Italians than English people. We have substituted the Pakistanis. Everyone’s abroad to do the work that we no longer want to do in Italy so as not to die of hunger: cooks, shop assistants, bar staff, waiters. Young people with a degree and a good knowledge of the English language. They wouldn’t go back to Italy even with a pistol pointed at their head. Ungrateful! If D'Alema and the former minister Ferrero had known, they would have taken their passports away.
The clandestine is politically useful. On the Right he justifies the vote to the PDL and to the Lega for fear of invasion, but also on the Left, the vote to the PDminusL for his welcome without ifs and buts. The clandestine is no longer a person; he’s an electoral weapon.
The clandestine is useful to organised crime. Where would the mafias find such a large number of desperate people willing to peddle drugs or sell counterfeit merchandise? Thousands of young women forced to be prostitutes? Children reduced to slavery?
In Italy, 20,000 Tunisians have come in. We no longer know anything about most of them. What has happened to them? A few managed to arrive in France. They roam around throughout the peninsular without knowing a word of Italian. In no State in the world is this allowed with such serenity of spirit; with us, it is. The reason is simple. They are useful for the profits of the companies, to the parties, to the mafias. The clandestine is multi-purpose like a Swiss army knife. To receive someone in your home, you must have the resources available to do so. Otherwise you have to ask yourself whether you are playing with dynamite and the future of your nation.

PS. At 5:30 pm Live Streaming from Novara on http://www.ustream.tv #m5sTour

Let’s start with a fact. The MoVimento 5 Stelle {5 Star MoVement} reckons that the 110 provinces are a colossal waste of public money, a cost of 16 and a half billion euro a year (there are provinces that are the size of a neighbourhood in Rome or Milan, like Isernia (88,799 inhabitants) and Ogliastra (58,000 inhabitants)). Consequently, the MoVimento 5 Stelle has not participated and will not participate in the provincial elections. If you’re against rape, don’t commit rape! An elementary principle.
Many parties are against the provinces in theory and even with heated parliamentary questions from the benches of the Opposition or mocking the voting citizen in the same programme as the current government. However, all the parties dunk their doughnut and offer candidates for the provincial councils for the positions of President and the thousands of councillors and cabinet members. Furthermore, the Province is a consensus machine; it provides work to hundreds of companies. In public the parties long for chastity, in private they fxxk the citizens like hedgehogs. “Among the Pharisees there was the admission of a dogmatic and juridical development: intransigent on the substance of faith and law. They were flexible in the application” (source: translated from the Italian page on Wikipedia). The New Pharisees want water in public hands like the PDminusL and Sel, but they are handing it over to private companies. They preach morality and put forward Giusi la Ganga for the city of Turin. They want “generational renewal” and the top brass of the parties, from Casini to Fini to D'Alema, have been in Parliament for decades. Now they are all in favour of solar and wind, yesterday it was nuclear. New versions of bifronted Janus, with their buttocks in place of their faces. In the voting for the bringing together of the local elections with the referendum, 10 PDminusL and 2 IdV (that put forward the proposal) deputies were missing. The proposal failed by one vote. And the pensions of the parliamentarians? One legislature and the right to a pension is triggered. How many people have publicly refused the pension or have passed it on to an NGO? Not one. (If anyone has done so, please write to me.) “I’m indignant but I’ll take the cash.” is the motto of the new Pharisee.

People die in Italian prisons. Above all it’s the young people that have committed crimes that die. Carlo Saturno was one of the many. He was 23 years old. In the past he had a suffered detached retina because of a punch that he received in prison. He was found hanged. “Found” … The “worst youth” of Italy die like that: “found hanged”. Every year about 180 people die in our prisons. However many errors youngsters like Carlo can do, their death redeems them. But who will redeem this State that allows young people to die in prisons where it should be guaranteeing their safety?

Interview with Fabio, cousin of Carlo Saturno
My name is Fabio, Carlo Saturno’s cousin. Carlo is the prisoner who according to the declarations hanged himself in his cell in the Bari prison after a scuffle with prison guards. He arrived in the intensive care unit on 30 March at 7:30 pm and he stayed there for 8 days, until 7 April, when he died at 1:15 pm.

Carlo – a life in prison
Now everything is in the hands of the Magistracy. We know the facts from the moment he was taken to the intensive care unit, and the autopsy right up to the time when we dressed him and finally we had the funeral.
We have made a denunciation against “unknown” people. Now they also want to bring a libel action against us. However we have made a denunciation for culpable homicide and for inciting suicide. There are denunciations against “unknown” people delivered to the Public Prosecutor.

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Bari, the prison of suicide attempts
He was hanging for 20 minutes then for 30 minutes he was in the prison infirmary, then he was taken to the intensive care unit by calling 118. This is in the declaration given by the Trades Union to the newspaper. However for us it seems that he was picked up from the cell where he was hanged and not from the infirmary.

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An eye for the prison
Carlo’s scuffle happened because the second section was to be closed for refurbishing and they had to be moved to the third section. He didn’t want to change cell and he argued with a guard who landed up in hospital.
In the young offenders institution he was subject to a detached retina in his left eye because of a punch received. We have the name of the person who hit him, but we cannot reveal the name. Carlo couldn’t see any more from that eye. He was completely blind in his left eye.

”Take some kittens, tiny little cats and put them in a box” said the surgeon at Gaza’s main hospital called Al Shifa, while the nurse placed a couple of big boxes on the floor right in front of us, covered in splashes of blood. “Seal up the box, then with all your might jump on top of it until you hear the little bones crunching, and the last suffocated “meow”. I’m astounded and I stare at the boxes. The doctor goes on “Now try to imagine what would happen straight after the broadcast of a scene like that, the justifiably indignant reaction of the world-wide public, the denunciations of the organisations protecting animals …” The doctor goes on with his account and I can’t take my eyes off those boxes placed by my feet. “Israel has enclosed hundreds of civilians in a school as though in a box, dozens of children, and then it squashed it with all its might using its bombs. And what were the reactions of the world? Almost nothing. You may as well be born an animal as a Palestinian. We would have been given more protection.”
At this point the doctor leans towards the box and takes the lid off in front of my eyes. Inside there are mutilated limbs, arms, legs, from the knee down or whole femurs, amputated from the people injured inside the Al Fakhura United Nations school in Jabalia. Up until now there are more than 50 victims. I pretend I have an urgent telephone call, I tell Jamal I have to go, and in reality I make for the toilet, I bend over and vomit.

Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza, 8 January 2009
(Thanks to Alina F. for drawing this to my attention)

Sacred cows do not exist. And not even the Constitution is one, the Constitution that has been mocked in Parliament by the PDL and by the Lega and recited by the psalmodizing Pharisees of the PDminusL as an attestation of their re-virginisation. How can a handful of unauthorised occupants of the State discuss the Constitution unless it is in function of their own interests? All of them, without distinction, should be dismissed from Montecitorio and from Palazzo Madama with a kick up the backside.
The Constitution sets out that the elected are chosen by the electorate. Calderoli’s “legge porcata” {filthy law} has betrayed it and has allowed the secretaries to “appoint” their vote gatherers, their handmaidens, their brothers-in-law and their wives. The electoral law is unconstitutional, but that is no interest to anyone.
These characters, from D'Alema to Bersani, from Alfano to Ms Carfagna, are illegitimate. They represent the parties, not the citizens. Even the Presidency of the Republic and the Constitutional Court have not noticed. Article one specifies: sovereignty belongs to the people. Article 48 has two parts: the vote is personal and equal, free and secret; the right to vote cannot be limited.
There are two possibilities: either the Constitution is a sieve and anyone can wreck it, or a “coup d’état” has happened and no one noticed. If you run through its articles, few are respected and many are interpreted. Article 11 says: “Italy rejects war as an instrument of aggression against the freedom of other peoples and as a means for the settlement of international disputes.” whereas we have been at war for a lifetime, ranging from Serbia, to Iraq, to Afghanistan. Article 5: “The Republic is one and indivisible” with three secessionist Ministers in the government. Article 7: “The State and the Catholic Church are independent and sovereign, each within its own sphere” with continual interference in the life of the Republic from the Vatican, ranging from “PACS” to private schools. The list is infinite. There is however, in the Italian Constitution an Ariadne's thread that in the end is the reason for this usucaption of the State by the parties. A text written by the parties themselves and in particular by the three major bodies represented in the Constituent Assembly: the Christian Democrats, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
The Constitution is armour-plated. It’s almost impossible to change it, and this is to the benefit of the parties that can thus act without being under the control of the citizens thanks to a series of measures to maintain legislative control, from the lack of a quorum in the referenda, to the impossibility of proposing a positive referendum and to the de facto foundering of every proposal of a popular law. The citizen can only put a cross on the symbol of a party. This is also thanks to the Constitution. Perhaps it’s the moment to remove its “sacredness”, to restore the voice to the citizen and to remove it from the parties.

P.S. Even this year there’s Chernobyl day in Europe on 26 April to say “no” to nuclear. In Italy, the main event is in Cagliari. With pleasure, I have accepted the invitation to talk at this event, but as soon as it was known that I’m to participate at the event, the Regional body for the Right to University Study in Cagliari has decided not to give permission to use the venue as had been agreed. The organisers have confirmed with me that the event will go on all the same even in a different venue. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

“Yes – I know!” How many times have they answered you like that? The irresistible response is the usual one. The desperate search for a baseball bat to continue the conversation. You say: “There are two million precarious workers” or “It’s not possible to understand why we are present in Afghanistan” or “Our public debt is taking us towards default” and the unfailing, standard response is “Yes – I know!” Are the politicians stealing? “Yes – I know!” Federico Aldrovandi was killed by the Police and whoever killed him is still serving in the Police after a conviction at the first level? “Yes – I know!” In these cases, the response is also accompanied by a “They can allow themselves that!”
The “yesiknow”s can be divided into a number of categories. The first is the category of the slothful. Their task is to block the discussion as soon as it starts so that they are not compromised. And if there words were to be reported? If someone happened to be listening? A quick“Yes – I know!” and they no longer have to think about it. The second category is that of those who commiserate and for them reality is unchangeable and anyone who goes against that, who tries to change the world has to be one you feel sorry for. Live and let them steal is their motto. The third category are the contemplatives for whom there’s never a single solution, the issue is always complex and only the intellectuals to which class they feel they belong as a right, can interpret the issue. They live for problems and for the analysis of problems. Their “Yes – I know!” is used to move to a subordinate position anyone who deludes themselves that they can understand reality and even put forward solutions. Stay in your place! The last category is that of those who collude. In this case “Yes – I know!” is pertinent. They have a good grasp of what you are talking about. Their objective is to extinguish the discussion. They transform a denunciation into a self-evident reality, in front of everyone. So obvious that it’s not worth talking about it anymore. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone knows about it. And so for example, why launch a ferocious attack on Veronesi or on Dell’Utri?
The “yesiknow”s of all categories hate names. If a banker publically remembers Geronzi’s trials, he starts to stammer and he tries to get to the door fast. In fact, to the affirmation that some guy is a mafioso or a corruptor, the response “Yes – I know!” can lead to serious consequences The most irritating “yesiknow”s are those that draw out the “e”. They say “Yeeeeeees – I know!” to make it understood that know so much about it. If only they could talk … They can’t but if only they could ….. If only they could go and fxxk off.

photo: Reuters

Russell Harding, deputy commander of NATO’s Unified Protector mission in Libya, declared that he is not apologising for the Libyans killed by “friendly fire”. To call an assassination “friendly fire” is like defining a rapist as a seducer. “Looking down from above we cannot identify the nature of the vehicles” added Harding. Thus it’s the business of whoever is underneath when the liberators arrive. If they die it’ll be for a just cause, that of the United States and the allies, for not wanting to risk having their men on the battle ground.
Bombing is in the DNA of the Americans. It’s a way of maximising the results and reducing the losses. The civilians die and your soldiers are saved. A winning tactic, from Italy in 1943/45 when the people killed by the allies’ bombs numbered tens of thousands, with Dresden transformed into a blaze in which 25,000 Germans were burned alive, most of whom women and children. Right up to the triumph of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were launched as a demonstration project in August 1945 when the war had practically finished with Hitler and Mussolini having died months earlier. The bombs kept going in Vietnam and Laos right up to Iraq of Bush senior, to the Iraq and Afghanistan of Bush junior and the Libya of Obama, the Nobel Peace prize winner, perhaps unknowingly.
NATO is putting pressure on Italy to take part in the bombing. I have a response for the NATO top brass: “Bomb your own balls!” NATO has become an instrument of aggression, but originally, its mission, never denied, was a defensive one. It’s enough to have a UN resolution and then in 24 hours to bomb Libya and Ivory Coast.
It’s well known that in wars, the number of civilian victims goes up all the time and it goes way beyond military victims. Cities have become the battle front. The anti-aircraft guns are placed near to hospitals as a deterrent, but it’s a useless exercise. Bombing should be prohibited. We’d need an international moratorium. You launch a bomb from the fuselage or a Tomahawk missile from a ship and whatever happens happens. The word “end” needs to be put on bombing. Any bombing is a potential assassination of innocent people. Let anyone who wants to do war, like Russell Harding, let them go onto the battle field and risk their life. Let Italy be out of any war, starting with Afghanistan and when people write about bombing, let them use the exact terminology: “Assassination!”

Boatloads of desperate people are turning up every day on the Egyptian coast. They are dreaming of going to Israel and from there to the United States to join up with the millions of their fellow nationals who have emigrated. They are coming from every part of Italy. A nation destroyed by the economic default and by the radiation coming from the new-born nuclear reactor at Caorso. They are disembarking on the beaches of Alessandria and Damietta exhausted by the journey with “la Gazzetta dello Sport” of three days earlier. They got on the boats by paying thousands of euro to the merchants of humans at Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Cagliari, and even Stromboli where the volcano has become active again.
The Egyptian government has set up wire netting camps in a semi-desert area where, by now there are tens of thousands of clandestines crammed together. Some of them, under the terrified eyes of the Egyptians, climbed over the fencing and have fled towards freedom. The police chased them on camels. Protests of the peasants of Tanta because of Italians climbing up the date trees and starting to eat the fruit. The same happened in Helwan in a banana plantation. Local groups have started to “hunt the clandestines”.
The Egyptian Prime Minister has gone to Alessandria to reassure the inhabitants and he bought a villa on the coast as a demonstration of his good faith. The Minister of the Interior has flown to Rome to ask the Pope, the only person of authority left in Italy, to take charge of the Catholics that have invaded Egypt. The Pope replied that he will pray for them. Thousands of Italians are to be found in the Gulf of Aqaba, after swimming across the Red Sea, on the way to Tel Aviv. Israel is not willing to welcome them and it has officially protested to the Arab League. The Egyptian Minister for Reforms has proposed to naturalise the Italians as Palestinians and to move them to the Gaza Strip. After long negotiations with Veltroni, who has been self-elected head of the “differently refugees”, the proposal was turned down for fear of friendly bombing, a frequent phenomenon in that area. The Egyptian Minister for Reforms has not accepted defeat and has issued a decree for the circumcision of all the infidel clandestines on Egyptian territory.
Many of the displaced people have got busy as black market slaves for the reconstruction of the Pyramid of Cheops. When interviewed by CNN they declared that they never want to go back to Italy again. In Egypt they are better paid, they don’t run the risk of dying at work and the air is better. A poster captured by the TV camera proclaimed “Better to be a slave in Egypt than a precarious worker in Italy”.

Ps. Today, 6 April at 9:00 pm, the Blog will broadcast in direct streaming "Le fiamme e la ragione {flames and reason}", the assassination of Giordano Bruno by being sentenced to a fire, as told by Corrado Augias.

Immigration is a taboo. What is a taboo? A fact about which you cannot talk or about which you always have to give the same interpretation. The taboo demands that it is perpetuated with meaningless phrases that have, as their only objective, the strengthening of the taboo itself. To Infringe the taboo is considered repugnant and worthy of censure from the community. A taboo is nourished by noble pronouncements like: “Let’s remember when it was us who crossed the seas, often in really difficult conditions and let’s put a brake on the excesses of reaction in relation to those people who are coming to seek a future in Italy.” pronounced in a way that is “differently responsible” by Giorgio Napolitano. The United States, the land of immigration for Italians above all after the annexation of the South and of the Veneto region by the Savoys, was an immense unpopulated space, with incredible natural wealth and to go there you first had to ask permission. If you got off the boat without authorisation at Boston or Miami they shot at you. The world has changed. Making comparisons with the past serves only to keep a taboo alive. Today’s Italy is over-populated. It’s one of the most densely populated states in the world. France has double the land area, with few mountainous areas and about the same number of inhabitants. Maine, one of the tiniest States in America, has the dimensions of the North of Italy with only 1,230,000 inhabitants.
The Italy of the spieler Berlusconi who promised houses and work for immigrants on Tunisian TV, has 20% unemployment and at least 100,000 unemployed people from outside the European Community and that number will double after the widely forecast collapse of the property market. Where will we put them? With which resources will we manage them? Will we give them a home and a job? Will D'Alema make them welcome on his yacht Ikarus or will they be rubbing shoulders with our “vulnerable”, the pensioners and unemployed people of the suburbs? We don’t manage to do anything for the people of L’Aquila and we are deluding ourselves that we are feeding the planet?
The immigration taboo has undesirable effects and desirable ones too. The undesirable ones are in front of everyone’s eyes, with thousands of poor wretches left to their own resources and to the mafias. The desirable ones are the provision of low cost labour, often on the black market, often destined to die on the job for the profit of their little boss and that of the Confindustria. The triumph of the globalisation of slaves. Political refugees must always find a welcome. Those who come from war zones must always find a welcome. The others are welcome only if there are the conditions to receive them, a home and a job, otherwise there’s electoral demagogy to the benefit not of our goody-goody and good-for-nothing left wingers, but to the benefit of the Lega. An invasion, because it’s a matter of invasion, will give the Lega absolute control of the North of Italy. In recent years the Lega has fed on immigration. Every immigrant without proper credentials means an extra vote. The destabilisation of the States has always happened even thanks to the immigration factor. The Lega is the party with the most interest in keeping alive the taboo of the unresourced welcome, justified by the myth of the Italian with a cardboard suitcase. The problem of the Lega and of immigration that feeds it is not just an Italian issue, but European. Fascism was not just an Italian issue, and neither will the Lega be. But Europe is having a blessed sleep and as we have seen in Libya, in reality it doesn’t exist. Which union of States can continue to exist without a foreign policy and a common army? And which State can allow itself to have the immigration taboo without disintegrating?

Image: “Il babau” by Dino Buzzati

The nuclear cloud forecast to be passing over Italy tonight or the early hours of tomorrow morning, Thursday 24 March 2011, is good. Fazio, the Minister of Health, said so “Italy is at zero risk. There is no danger for health and the contamination of food.” The cloud is kept under control by a capillary network formed by ARPA, by the network of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by the network of the Ministry of the Environment and by various monitoring networks stretching from the Alps to Capo Passero. Ms Prestigiacomo and Maroni are giving the guarantee.
It’ll be a tranquil radioactivity, that goes by and leaves no trace. The cloud that is worrying all Italian mothers: “Shall I take him to school tomorrow or not?” is described with a type of language between the courtly and the encomiastic: “According to the French agency for nuclear safety some masses of air weakly contaminated with radioactive material released at Fukushima is due to pass over France today and go on to Italy, that should be passed over between today and tomorrow. The ASN makes clear that the level of radiation could even be lower than the limits recorded on the instrumentation.” In a single agency message there’s the attribution of the news item to a third party (the French agency) so if something happens it’s their fault …. two expressions of minimisation: "some masses of air" “weakly contaminated”, three conditionals ("dovrebbero", "dovrebbe", "potrebbe essere" {literally translated in English as should, should and could}) and a badly hidden satisfaction for a “level of radiation could even be lower than the limits recorded on the instrumentation”. Thus, we are already more radioactive than the Japanese. Basically the cloud does not do good, but almost. There’d be the need for more clouds that are so polite, well-mannered, basically Japanese, in transit in our skies.
Giancarlo Torri, the head of the Radiometric Measuring Service at ISPRA’s Nuclear Department declared: “Any exposure would be very rapid.” He’s an optimist. In a single sentence he used just one hypothesis and a conditional. Giorgio Mattassi, the technical-scientific director of ARPA in Friuli Venezia Giulia is reassuring: "No risk to health. I’m not expecting any consequence that could be compared to that caused by Chernobyl, where there was nuclear fusion. First of all, the cloud is mixed with other air that is not contaminated. Then we need to see whether it rains and where that happens. Anyway, that rain will not have a Japanese origin.”
Crikey, I feel like Attilio Regolo in a barrel of contaminated iron. It’s not Chernobyl (what luck!) and the rain is not Japanese, perhaps it is really from Alto Adige. Really high air, really pure and only a little radioactive … “Less dangerous than a CAT scan” according to Giuseppe Remuzzi head of the unit for nephrology and dialysis at the United Hospitals of Bergamo. I can’t wait for the arrival of the next cloud so I can create an aerosol for myself.

”Dear Beppe,
This evening in my city, as in many other cities, there’s the beginning of the festivities for 150 years. But of what? I have refused to attach a flag to the balcony because I don’t believe that Italy truly exists. Formally yes, but not as a people. We are a bunch of individualists who see ourselves as a people only when the national team is playing. We no longer get indignant about what our ruling class is doing and saying; the important thing is to have a full shopping trolley and a great TV with a Sky subscription. I am feeling bitter because after graduating I was working for a number of years as a freelance professional combining work and family and I have given this world a reasonable number of offspring. After a very controversial separation, I went back to work issuing an invoice for every euro that I was paid (and also for those that some clients have never paid). I have never stopped looking after my children and fighting with a state school system that is very patchy with teachers that don’t know how to speak Italian and that made me have to do extra work in the evenings to help them with their studies so as to be sure that they learn how to express themselves in the national language. With all that, I have always paid the same taxes as a colleague with no children and who perhaps is living with their own parents … And the result was: for the last few months I’ve changed my job: I have an appointment system for receiving men. Basically I’m a prostitute. I couldn’t do anything differently. I was about to go mad. I was fed up of getting to some weekends with the children at home, the fridge empty and twenty euro in my wallet. I have tried everything but in the end I have thrown myself into this work that definitely allows me to earn well and to have free time to dedicate to my children. And to pay off the debts that have unavoidably mounted up over the years. It’s not easy but at least I feel the pride in being able to guarantee there’s the minimum indispensable for my children. However, I leave it to the others to fly the ‘tricolore’”. Maria

‘Mortizia Moratti’ has been warning us for some time. About herself and her son, going about in disguise at night in the infamous neighbourhoods of Milan. Exploring the area between Quarto Oggiaro and via Padova. Stan Laurel and Charles Bronson. “There are aspects about me that people can’t imagine. Do you know how many times I have put on a disguise, and with my son Gabriele, also in disguise, we have gone around the risky streets of Milan, where there’s drugs, prostitution, delinquency, to really understand what’s going on so that we can then take steps? She was sincere. The adoration for her handsome Gabriele and her mother’s heart have betrayed her. After the tip-off, it hasn’t taken much to discover the secret identity of ‘Mortizia’ and her son: they are Batman and Robin. He is Batman, she is Robin. After the nocturnal excursions the wonder-duo have taken refuge in the Bat Cavern in via Ajraghi 30. A location that is beyond suspicion, apparently innocuous industrial laboratories. A perfect hidey-hole to escape from the nocturnal approaches that are so frequent in relation to transvestites on behalf of the people of Milan who are looking for adventure. Gabriele, nicknamed Bebe, has been inspired by the latest Batman film: "The Dark Knight" to design the area measuring 447 square metres. A basement constructed using special reinforced concrete with motorised trapdoor, a boxing ring, a shooting range, a salt water swimming pool with a drawbridge, a jacuzzi and a Turkish bath. For resting after the nocturnal activities, immense bedrooms and a super-accessorised kitchen.
Bebe is tough. He’s famous for his bust up with Eddie Irvine in the disco called Hollywood for which a trial has started because of serious injuries sustained by both parties. He loves wearing clothes carrying the German iron cross of the "One per cent" bikers. The Bat Cavern has been constructed amidst the silence of the general public. He doesn’t care whether it’s Palermo or Milan. However the law looks no one in the face. Not even Batman whose name has been entered in the register of those under investigation with the accusation of presumed violation of building regulations. His mother however is always his mother, and better still if she is the mayor and if she has given approval to the new Plan of the Territory. “When the Plan of the Management of the Territory comes into effect, in neighbourhoods like that of via Ajraghi, defined as ‘Zones of urban renewal’, many constraints will fall. It’ll be enough to put forward a simple application to the Town Hall … but still paying the necessary dues and demonstrating that the necessary improvements have been done”, words and music by Carlo Masseroli, Milan Cabinet member for the Development of the Territory.
To silence any possible malice, 'Mortizia' said: “I do not manage my son.”

The streets are full of armed men. They are among us. There are lots of them. I leave my house. In front of the supermarket there’s a security guard, pistol, bullet-proof vest. On the corner, at the bank, an armed man, blue beret, he observes first to the right, then left, suspicious. I speed up and move towards the metro. First there’s the ambassador of a far off country, near the entrance an army truck with the engine kept ticking over. A soldier has his machine gun well in sight, pointed down. Is it loaded? And if a volley of shots goes off?
I’m off the metro. Escalators, a glimpse of the sky up there. Straight away, in the square, one Police car and two cars of the Carabinieri all lined up side by side. Four police officers and ten carabinieri all fully armed. One is smoking a cigarette. A siren, a car with a light flashing with more armed men of the Security Forces on their way to a probable disturbance. I go straight ahead, along the street, past the shops and I come across two armed municipal guards talking to each other and an urban police officer with a white truncheon and a pistol in its holster. I cross the road at the crossroads, another two banks, another two armed guards on duty, loaded down with weapons. Waiting at the traffic lights, a patrol car of carabinieri, they set off as the green light appears. It wasn’t for me. Three grey uniforms of the Finance Police appear among the customers of a shop. In other places, the Finance Police are not armed, but they are in Italy.
Apart from the stretch on the metro I’ve covered not more than 600 metres and I’ve seen more armed men than in an action film. I’m counting up in my mind. Three armed guards, two military personnel, eight carabinieri, six police officers, three Finance Police, one urban police officer, two municipal guards making a total of 24. A pistol or a machine gun every 25 metres. And that’s on normal days. On the exceptional days, however, that are coming with ever greater frequency, by now one a week, together with the demonstrations and the events, hundreds of men are milling around with helmets, truncheons and guns in the various squares. On those luminous days of democracy, with the State lined up to protect us, the percentage of arms is at least one per square metre.

”I had stolen two jumpers from Oviesse and they caught me. I don’t know why I did it. My life is a disaster. No money, no work and a little girl to bring up.” That’s how the account given by the young mother starts, the mother who denounced the group rape in the barracks of the Carabinieri. This young woman was urgently imprisoned for having tried to steal a couple of fucking jumpers. How much were those jumpers worth? 20 euro? 30 euro? And they throw someone into prison for a theft like that? Was it not possible to charge her and leave her at home? Put her under house arrest? And the director of the Supermarket, once he had got back the stolen goods (what a great recovery… ), could he not have withdrawn the charge? No! Ruthless with the starving hungry, with the most vulnerable, with the full force of the law, whereas for Nicola Cosentino permission for authorisation to bring criminal proceedings against him for external collaboration in associating with the Camorra was refused by the special committee of the Lower House of Parliament. Camorra, not two stupid jumpers. You take refuge in Parliament and you are safe, like Alberto Tedesco sent for trial relating to the health system in Apulia.
There are the drowned and the saved in this infernal whirlpool called Italy, in line with Primo Levi’s metaphor. There are grey areas of power where everything can happen, but only to the most vulnerable like a woman without a family but with a daughter to bring up. What will she tell her daughter after the arrest and the rape? Every day, really serious crimes are committed under our very eyes and those who commit them will never serve a day in prison, protected by their money, by lawyers, by the caste to which they belong, whether it is a political, economic or criminal one. We stand by and we are indignant then we go on to have a cup of coffee. Meanwhile, the drowned, the chicken thieves, the most wretched, land up in prison, some die in prison and there are those who commit suicide from shame. Others are raped. And this is justice? And this is the law? “Summum ius, summa iniuria.” Justice is blind, but only in one eye. For the poor folk she sees very well.

We are waiting but we don’t know what for. We have to wait until the end of the night, but no one knows how long and black the night is and in the end, it doesn’t matter. From our fortress, our ruined outpost, our apartment in the suburbs or in the city centre, we observe the horizon by means of the enchantment of the TV. Familiar voices of perfect strangers keep us company every evening. They play out the happenings at our frontiers and even the dangers, and together with those even the solutions. We, obviously, no longer believe in the dangers, nor in the solutions. The dangers are much more threatening, already inside our borders, and the solutions are conjuring tricks from those who can do nothing other than to perpetuate their own power, and anyway they have no choice. The falsities with which we surround ourselves are too obvious and prolonged, but that future that is so threatening cannot be faced now, with these wretched weapons, without a strategy, without an ounce, or even a single gramme of courage. The fortress is welcoming. We lack for nothing apart from liberty and knowledge. The wait consumes us like candles, but the heat is enough to banish even the tiniest examination of conscience.
From the desert that stretches out interminably from the edge of the boundary wall, inside which we are enclosed by virtue of our wickedness or by choice, no one will come, no formidable and ruthless enemies, no friends coming to help us with the weapons of democracy and liberty, two words that we believe we understand the meaning of, but that we have mutated, more or less unconsciously, into dictatorship and servility. The wait must last forever. To resist (against whom?) is our only true objective. The waiting time has lasted for generations, one after the other cancelled out like stars with the light of the morning sun. In the fortress there’s still enough food, but the youngest ones often go off to foreign lands without ever coming back. By now there are millions of them.
The fortress gets old together with its inhabitants and its outer walls are starting to crumble. It’s said that that happens for all fortresses, that no fortress is eternal, that no wait is forever. The Berlin Wall fell came down, and now the fortresses of the Maghreb, one after the other. But the wait is sweet, even with the rumble of the first collapses. That enemy that will never appear from unknown lands, is in reality, ourselves, but it’s so reassuring to think of it as being different, far away.

To me it doesn’t seem like a great idea to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Unity of Italy on the 17th. It means looking for trouble. There are people who don’t take decisions on that day, don’t purchase anything, don’t even leave the house, don’t get married, and don’t go off on a journey. In some buildings, they go from the 16th floor to the 18th. What’s missing is just the black cat in the middle of the “tricolore” {national flag}. The day of 17 March is a day to be taken with pincers.
180: Commodus became Emperor of Rome. His reign was such a success that on his death, the Senate and the people wanted his dead body to be dragged through the streets with a hook and turfed into the Tiber.
642: Muhammad’s first victory at Badr preceding the spread of Islam in the whole of the Mediterranean and in Spain
1942: The first Nazi concentration camp came into operation at Bergen-Belsen, others followed with millions of deaths
1959: Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama had to flee from Tibet
1981: Licio Gelli’s list of P2 members was found
1989: In Pavia, the city’s Tower collapsed after 800 years. There were 4 deaths and 15 people injured.

People will say that it’s not possible to do otherwise because it was on 17 March that Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy was proclaimed King of Italy in Turin. Perhaps it would have been better to change the date to a more worthy one, 2 June 1946, the birth of the Italian Republic, for example. On 17 March 1861, they celebrated the annexation of a part of Italy to the Kingdom of Sardinia. That didn’t include Rome and a part of ‘Triveneto’. They celebrated the loss of Nice and Savoy, certainly more Italian than the Austrian ‘South Tyrol’ that we then occupied after that. They celebrated the massacre that took on the proportions of genocide, of the populations of the South. So basically what is there to celebrate? In 1861 they didn’t celebrate the birth of the State, but the extension of the dominion of the Savoys over the rest of Italy. The article approved by the Parliament in Turin in fact stated: “Victor Emmanuel II will take on for himself and for his successors, the title of King of Italy.” In Piedmont they didn’t speak Italian, but French. A world apart in relation to the rest of the peninsular.
Italy reaches its 150 years exhausted, worn-out with corruption and mafias, divided on everything, with a secessionist party in the government, with Parliament reduced to a ‘souq’, and a President of the Council who is unpresentable. The present is the son of our past, it’s got very little glory, has never been under discussion together with its so-called Fathers of the Fatherland.
On the 17th, let’s celebrate if we want to. In the end it’s the beginning of a long Spring weekend, a “super ponte” lasting 4 days. But straight after that, we need to observe one minute’s silence.

P.S. Everything happens on the 17th. I’d forgotten that 17 February was the “Day of Libyan Rage”, indicated by ‘mavalà’. Tell us about all the 17ths that you know about.

Wonder is a gift of the Italians. Surprise in the face of the unthinkable, but only because no one had wanted to think about it, is a national characteristic. Down with Gaddafi, the bloody Bedouin dictator, the one who has committed genocide against his people, the slaughterer of thousands of innocent Libyans. Yes, OK, but no one has ever said anything to Scaroni’s ENI, to Agnelli’s Juventus, to Romiti’s Impregilo, to Finmeccanica or to Unicredit belonging to whoknowswhosepapi? Did Mother not inform them before they got married to Gaddafi? Italian companies with enormous interests in Libya and with shares held directly by the Country responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. Lockerbie, the town in Scotland where 259 people from the Pan Am flight died together with 11 people from the town. The bloodiest act of terrorism before the Twin Towers? In the forty years, has anyone raised a finger against the one who stripped of all their assets and booted out like dogs, from one day to the next, the Italians who had been living in Libya for decades? In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. Gaddafi has been protected, revered, and welcomed as the guarantor of Italy’s mythical Fourth Shore. It’s no secret that his military air force was trained in Italy and that our Secret Services have on more than one occasion given them warnings of threats and bombings. It is said that he escaped death during the bombing ordered by Reagan thanks to Italian informers. Gaddafi is one of us, whether we want it or not, whether we accept it or not. That Berlusconi kissed his hands is just the latest episode, the most blatant and undignified for the Italians, of a relationship that has lasted decades. Gaddafi saved Fiat with his capital in the 1970s. No one was outraged. We have bartered oil with arms and military assistance, energy with the lost of modesty of our democracy. And now, rightly we are outraged. The wonder belongs to the children and to the hypocrites. Italy is the land of Wonder and of Hypocrisy. Gaddafi has declared that he will stay until he dies. Italy loses one of its faithful allies that it has already renounced. Gaddafi? Who knows him?

P.S. Meetings for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists have been organised in the following towns:

Abano Terme, Arezzo, Arzergrande, Este, Modugno, Montignoso, Montefiascone, Ospedaletto Euganeo, Rocca Priora,
Suggest a meeting in your own town.

A sheriff without a pistol and without a badge. He has no big belt and no legitimacy to ensure the law is respected. Armed solely with his indignation. He is the citizen that each day and each night sees or suffers a small or large abuse of power. His anger is fuelled by the evidence, by the impudence of the crime, by the uncivilised behaviour happening in broad daylight, with the silent assent of those who should be insisting on the application of the law, from the local health service, to the town police to the cabinet members of the town council, to the Presidents of the Region. Between the indifference of a big chunk of Italians who are scrupulously minding their own business, true amoebas of democracy, the gristle of a body in the process of decomposition.
The polluted river of the company that you know the address of and their sales tax identification code, the cars, often belonging to the so-called authorities who stop to get a coffee while parking on the ramps for those with disabilities, under-age people who offer themselves as prostitutes on the city streets at all hours, drugs on sale outside the schools, hunters shooting at a few metres from houses, the destruction of the territory, that in your case is the meadow in front of your window, with an unauthorised shed, the slender youngsters who don’t stand up to offer a seat to an old lady on the public transport, respiratory illnesses due to air pollution because of the local authorities, the protection money taken from shopkeepers. It’s an ordinary injection of bile that relates to all that surrounds us. The citizen sheriff that can no longer hold it in, reacts, raises his voice, denounces, gets angry, does the job that he pays four million public employees to do. He risks everything. It’s he who is the pain in the arse, not the others. Isolated, insulted, sometimes beaten up, denounced, taken to court for libel. If he has something to object to in relation to the ordinary daily shit that is poured over him, he can turn to the authorities … But eight million eyes that he pays for, with his work, should they not see themselves in his position, intervene instead of him, get the civil code and the criminal code applied instead of him, and if necessary with weapons in their hands? And so?
The sheriff is not in the city nor are the other authorities. The citizen sheriff, like Gary Cooper in “High Noon” is alone. Anyone who should be in his place has closed themselves in their houses for fear of retaliation or just for a quiet life. The improvised sheriff is considered with annoyance by the family and friends. That’s what Cooper’s wife said to the person who criticised her for wanting to leave her husband: “But what type of woman are you? How can you leave him like that? Is the sound of gunshot so frightening for you?“ “No, I’m used to it. My dad and my brother were killed in a shoot out. They were in the right, but that’s no use when they start shooting.”

P.S. Meetings for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists have been organised in the following towns:
Abano Terme, Anzio, Arezzo, Arquata Scrivia, Arzergrande, Chivasso, Crotone, Este, Montignoso, Montefiascone, Nettuno, Ospedaletto Euganeo, Rocca Priora, Sennori, Vasto, Vimercate
Suggest a meeting in your own town.

Some people compare Berlusconi with Al Capone. The former on his way out because of stories involving prostitutes, the latter imprisoned for tax dodging. But the comparison doesn’t stand up for two reasons. The first is that Al Capone was the boss of Chicago, but not the President of the United States. He was a private citizen, not the First Citizen. The second reason is that he did not have available to him information about the big tax dodgers of America, whereas the psycho-dwarf certainly has a cupboard full of dossiers on all those who have been gravely sinning, and not just sexually, whether they are in Parliament or in the institutions. How many are there and who are they? Before leaving the stage he will bring them down. He will use his media like cannons. In 1993 it was said that politics could not be substituted by the magistracy. The collapse of the 5-party set up has gifted us with the worst twenty year period of the Republic and the restoration of the Craxi-ists and the P2-ists. Who remembers Tina Alselmi? In 2011 we are still at the starting point, like a never-ending ‘Game of The Goose’. Then the bribe money, today the showgirls. In this legislature the Oppositions (?) have had a number of opportunities to bring down the government. It would have been a worthwhile action. It didn’t happen. And politics has been substituted by Ruby. Politics cannot abdicate its role. Bersani, Fini, Casini, D'Alema, Veltroni and other courageous ones are using a young girl as their shield for the end game. A game that should have and could have ended a decade ago. Berlusconi has been a lame duck for some time. He is the past. But, in politics, there’s a variety of ways to bury the dead. The risk is that even the Italian Republic might get buried. After the fall of Benito Mussolini, there was chaos, September 8, the fleeing of the king. Berlusconi is the one who is the guarantee of very precarious equilibria. The economy is close to collapse, whatever ‘Tremorti’ says. If there were elections, with PDL in disorder, the Lega could get a majority in the North and start off the secession with the consensus in the Veneto region and in Lombardy. The psycho-dwarf in his own way has been the glue of a Nation that is in decay, his alibi and his mirror. This evening in the streets of the cities of Italy, hundreds of underage girls will be offering themselves as prostitutes to the general indifference of the public and today multitudes of Italians will take off in flight, true modern ogres, to rape children in the world. Is anybody interested? We can expect a period of private shit in the fan; I believe that almost no one will be immune. Get ready and fasten your seat belts.

P.S. Meetings for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists have been organised in the following towns:

Abano Terme, Anzio, Arezzo, Arquata Scrivia,Arzergrande,Chivasso,Codogno,Crotone, Este, Figline Valdarno, Montignoso, Montefiascone, Nettuno, Ospedaletto Euganeo, Rocca Priora, Sennori, Vasto, Vimercate

Suggest a meeting in your own town .

When I read "La pena di morte italiana" {The Italian death penalty} by Samanta Di Persio, I just felt horrified.

Preface by Beppe Grillo
”As everyone knows, the death penalty doesn’t exist in Italy. It’s true, there’s still the freedom to torture, in that our penal code does not mention it and some people take advantage, as they did during the Genoa’s G8 at Bolzaneto and at the Diaz school. But since 01 January 1948, the death penalty no longer exists, as stated in the Italian Constitution. That’s the reason why capital sentences are executed with discretion in the prisons, without being too visible. The beating up is called a heart attack or a cerebral haemorrhage. Strangling is always a suicide, often with the laces of their shoes that even a cricket wouldn’t be able to use to hang itself. You can die in your cell and during your death throes, that can last for hours, as they did for Aldo Bianzino or for Stefano Cucchi, no one is present. The prison orderly is constantly somewhere else. The duty doctor late. When he arrives, reassuring, with his bag, he never notices the signs of the hitting, the bruises, and the injuries. The death is natural. The doctors’ photocopy diagnoses state that the injuries were self inflicted. They always hurt themselves. The detainee was depressed, he couldn’t cope. The signs of the dark badness that the dead prisoners inflicted on themselves are the witness letters sent to the relatives, and especially their mothers, shortly before their death.
They are announcements of death, from lads who are shouting out in an uncertain handwriting, desperate, lads who are about to be killed dead. The mothers ask for an interview, a transfer, but however, right up to the death, that is denied, as in the case of Niki Aprile Gatti. Prison, the place that by definition is the safest and the most looked after in the world, is an arm of death that extends right down the peninsula from Genoa, to Florence, to Rovereto. Each year, about 180 detainees die in prison.
A third are suicides. The ones that take their own life are usually the lads being imprisoned for the first time. In 2009, there were sixty nine suicides, a record as never before, a suicide rate that is twenty one times the rate for the Italian population not in prison. It’s possible to think that it’s normal that that happens, in Italy like elsewhere. However, Canada has a rate that is four times lower than the Italian rate and the Polish Minister of Justice had to resign because of a suicide. In prison, the ones who survive and don’t commit suicide or get themselves suicided becomes habitual criminals, a danger to society when they return to freedom. The option of being on probation in the care of the social services has in fact been eliminated. Probation is a measure for re-education to protect the safety of the citizens. The prisoners on probation with the social services, in fact, almost never commit other crimes and go back inside: only three out of ten. Those who serve their whole sentence in prison continue to commit crime: a good seven out of ten.
This book is a painful chorus of voices that tell us the story of infernal to-ing and fro-ing in which the death penalty is inflicted without a verdict, without guilt, without witnesses, and above all without anyone being guilty. The prison, like the uniform, is not put on trial, and anyone ending up behind bars is just a number with no longer any rights. The death penalty has never been abolished, it has evolved. Anyone, to general surprise, found dead in his cell, with a swollen face, his organs in a state of devastation, is just one who is “differently suicided”. Beppe Grillo

Italian politics has moved from Parliament to the ‘Manifestazione’ {Demonstration}. The opposite of the word ‘Manifestazione’ is ‘occultamento’ (concealing), disappearance. In physics, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The democracy that has disappeared finds other routes when the institutional ones are blocked off for it and it suddenly reappears like a karst river. The squares of Cairo and of Tunis are the Galilean demonstration, but also those recent ones in London with the protest of the university students and Charles’ car tossed around like at the dodgem cars in the funfair.
If the demonstration abroad has its beginning and its end (there’s a demonstration to get something that will be conceded at least partially), in Italy the demonstration has a beginning and that’s it. The aim of the demonstration is to demonstrate. If abroad a demonstration is an important fact, often momentous, and thus rare, in Italy there are more demonstrations than there are days in the year. The calendar of a demonstrator is so full that he faces incredible difficulties. On a Saturday, in order to participate in two demos, both vital for democracy, he even has to do 200 or 300 kilometres.
The parties participate in the demos with conviction, and usually they take them over when they haven’t managed to organise them directly. And you often see their banners waving in the sunlight and the stalls with the symbols and the obligatory fliers. They are the temporary outpourings from Parliament. They protest in the streets at the weekend against themselves, but without getting too much in the public eye, in political jargon, they are the so-called arse-protectors. The parliamentarians who are divorced, who frequent the ‘trannies’ and the prostitutes protest against the ones in civil partnerships. The Opposition, for decades accomplices of Berlusconi with no “ifs and buts’, PDminusL folk and thereabouts are demonstrating against the psycho dwarf three times a week. The Trades Unions and the key parliamentarians who have witnessed the destruction of Fiat and of Olivetti are marching united for employment.
When they don’t manage to steer the demonstrations for their own electoral pool, the politicians get together at the last moment. They even climb onto the roofs to bring their hairy solidarity to the students for whom Ms Gelmini has even chopped their desks, they who pocket a billion euro in public financing. Close-knit demonstrations for public ownership of water that they cannot give a toss about while they are creating contracts for water management to private companies. They are marching against the Finance Bill, they ask for the abolition of the Provinces and the reduction of the costs of politics and meanwhile, their provincial councillors are getting fat and the key newspapers, the ones acting as the megaphones of the demonstrations are raking in 330 million euro. The Demonstration that is a battle and of the government is by now a known fact. I demonstrate ‘ergo sum’.

The ship of fools continues its journey towards the unknown. There’s a certain happiness in the air, effervescent, like that of mad people and those who no longer have anything to lose and want to see how things end up, and see the effect it has. The Parliament of the non-elected and the information about the bunga bunga have by now done an ‘about-turn’ towards the stratosphere of nothingness like an immense fart that takes off towards space to look for a black hole. Politicians and journalists of the hole are travelling towards their origins.
Federalism is the reform of the reforms that has been discussed for 20 years with the same furore engendered to search for photos of the presumed hookers. The citizen eats bread and prostitutes from morning to night, and he knows all the measurements of Ms Minetti (100, 60, 90), but nothing about a federalism that could split the country or perhaps not, or perhaps it could. Who knows? It’s easier to explain Einstein’s theory of special relativity than Calderoli’s proposal. And within those pages there can be everything and the contrary of everything, from a sweet Bosnia, to being taken for a ride with names of barbaric invasions like ‘IMU’, the ‘Cedolare Secca’ and the ‘Autonomia Impositiva’. The Lega without federalism is like an empty box, an unloaded pistol. To get it, it has been threatening for years to bring down the government, the government that has never been so stable as when it is threatened by Boss(ol)I. The parties are all federalists, the problem is how much and how. Each one has his own federalism. And it’s the comparison on methods, timeframes, contents that has become an elitist discussion, behind closed doors. From Putin’s big bed to the 'Bicamerale’ {Parliamentary commission set up by the two Houses of Parliament} is a short step. In practice a big bed with space for two where a group of self-appointed people has debated our future without having any authority from us to do so. What will they have said? And what is the Bicamerale? A club for the initiated? It finished in a draw. Technically the perfect result as Gianni Brera would have said. Neither of the two teams on the playing field has won, but no one has lost. The January acquisition campaign was not sufficient to reinforce the two teams. Today in the newspapers, the Bicamerale is defined as the "bicameralina", {little Bicamerale} a bit less than a Bicamerale, an under-age Bicamerale. The government has explained that the result was just a consultative opinion and the draw was an authorisation to proceed. A legal decree in the night and federalism is born, even though no one knows who the father is. It was born from a dust-up of spermatozoa from all the parties. The baptism will take place in parliament, federalism with be taken to the palace of the President where it will be blessed, not without a few doubts, but with great confidence in democracy.

P.S. Meetings for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists have been organised in the following towns:
Abano Terme, Alatri, Anzio, Arezzo, Arquata Scrivia, Bardonecchia, Chioggia-Sottomarina, Chivasso, Codogno, Este, Figline Valdarno, Modugno, Nardò, Nerviano, Nettuno, Policoro, Rocca Priora, Salsomaggiore, Vigonovo
Suggest a meeting in your own town.

(4:57)
Casini said to Santoro, in front of millions of Italians, that he would “Accept the political responsibility” of putting forward Cuffaro as a candidate “before the country” if it should happen that Vasavasa {Cuffaro} is convicted. And he added “I would be in the condition of asking for forgiveness”. Sicily is an important reserve of votes for the UDC. Cuffaro as President of the Region was a guarantee for the elections. Casini has raked in the election result. This is the story in its simplicity. Now that Cuffaro is in prison, Azzurro Caltagirone should have the dignity to resign. Obviously he’s not even considering it.
A citizen went up to him in the street: “Three years ago I asked you why you were putting forward Cuffaro as a candidate and you defended him ferociously. Today would you make a declaration asking for forgiveness from your voters and the Italian people?” The response is worthy of one of Forlani’s pupils (do you remember? the one with the bib in the tribunal?): “I believe that Cuffaro is giving a lesson of enormous dignity. He has not even waited for the Senate to establish sending him to prison (remember that we are talking about a prison sentence of seven years for aggravated aiding and abetting of Cosa Nostra). He presented himself thus showing he had confidence in the magistracy (?). I believe that he has demonstrated that with a sentence of this type there is a style and a respect for the institutions. We have to acknowledge that.”
Summarising the Casini-thought: Cuffaro has dignity because he didn’t run away. He has confidence in the judges who have absolutely no confidence in him and who have convicted him at all three levels of justice. He has style and respect for the institutions that he is number one in sullying by his behaviour. But above all, Casini is glued to the armchair. He doesn’t reckon he has any political responsibility. What’s he got to do with it? He’s not called Salvatore. He hangs on to the votes and the other guy hangs on to prison. Let’s give Pierferdinando the benefit of the doubt. But also in this case they shouldn’t even have trusted him with Mubarak’s presumed-niece. Who will put forward Pierferdinando the next time? The man who while he was the President of the Lower House, in 2004 provided his support and his expression of esteem for Marcello Dell'Utri on the eve of his conviction at the first level for external collaboration in mafia association issued by the Palermo tribunal? It is said that Follini has been charged with scouting in the Tribunals of the Republic to promote new faces for politics. One or at maximum, two levels of judgement, respect for the institutions, unending dignity and an electoral college to bring with you as a dowry. A legislature for sale, negotiations reserved. When I listen to Casini I always ask myself the same question. Which came first his arse or his face?

Bersani, that old guy that watches you from a park bench with his sleeves rolled up in the hope of squeezing a vote out of you, has gathered up his courage. To boot out Berlusconi from Palazzo Chigi he has decided to bring him 10 million signatures that he will gather in a month using ten thousand gazebos. It’s the “February campaign”. A half way house between the storming of the Winter Palace by Lenin and the eight million bayonets of Mussolini who said with prophetic lucidity: “Thus it is a great olive branch that I am raising up …. Watch out, this olive branch has come from a massive forest: it’s the forest of eight million bayonets that are sharp and in the hands of young people who are intrepid and strong.” From eight million bayonets to ten million signatures with the blessing of the olive is only a short step.
Bersani thundered with his lisped ‘s’: “He is thinking of talking about the magistracy and not answering the questions he should answer.” D'Alema was a bit upset. He thought allusions were maybe being made. Still digging up the story with Ms Forleo and the interview about the magistracy on ‘Canale 5’. Implacable, Bersani remarked: “I am clearly opposed to elections. But let’s not delude ourselves. If there is voting with this law and he wins, then he will do everything he can to get to the Quirinale {official residence of the President of the Italian Republic} and he will have the numbers required to do that.” The electoral law, Calderoli’s ‘legge porcata’ {filthy law}, was never discussed by the PDminusL in the two years of the Prodi government. This law is the offspring of every party present in Parliament, welcomed warmly by all of them. Bersani also got sad at the thought of the psycho-dwarf: “He’s there and will stay there as long as he’s allowed to.” Exactly. Who has allowed him to? The government would have fallen a long time ago if the PDminusL had been present in the Chamber when there was the confidence vote on the Fiscal Shield. Berlusconi wouldn’t even be in Parliament if the Opposition had brought in the law on the conflict of interests. Berlusconi would not have control of the TV stations if D'Alema hadn’t made him a made-to-measure-law in 1999 (anything but “Bottino Craxi”).
Bersani anyway has a dream. To listen to 'Topo Gigio Veltroni' tomorrow in his second speech at Lingotto, 22 January. He’s expecting “a contribution to political culture”. ‘Walterloo’ brought Berlusconi back to life, Berlusconi who in the Autumn of 2007 was reduced to giving out pasta to old folks in the outskirts of Milan and he even managed not to mention him throughout the whole of his election campaign. As a true opponent, but also ally, he shook his hand in the Lower House after his opening speech. At the thought of his new political contribution, every Italian makes an intimate gesture to bring good luck. Bersani concluded: “It’s obvious that Berlusconi takes us all for fools”. And this is being naughty. Not everyone. He doesn’t consider the top brass of the PDminusL to be fools, but business partners. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

“Il se..ss..sso” {sex} the one with four “s”s, a bit breathy, like they speak in Emila, a bit like the slut (sòcmel!), is using its red light mantle to cover everything. We have transformed ourselves into a people of peeping-toms. A perverse daily pleasure, a continual erotic stimulus to be satisfied. Anyone who doesn’t fuck is lost. As is whoever fucks too much. I have not yet found an old man who would not go on foot from Rome to Trieste to do “bunga bunga” with Ruby, minor or non-minor, prison or no prison. In the bars, they are not engaging in political commentary and about the economy even less than a little bit. They are talking about the tits or arse of one of the girls of the day. Of the prostitutes‘ market transformed into the Football players’ market, “I don’t think that’s worth two thousand … For that one I’d pay three times the rent if I had the money … A mini for a blowjob is an exaggerated price …. – however … “. They are giving an analysis with professional precision, in the middle of a brioche and a cappuccino, in the midst of a Campari and a Pernod, the day’s sadomasochism described explicitly by top journalists transformed into gynaecologists and experts on the colon. Those practices that they never managed to get accepted by their own lifetime partner. Anyway it’s still the same one. In the country, there’s a feeling of individual envy in relation to an old man who has had a prostrate operation, with no hair left on his head, who in any Western country would be seated on a park bench feeding birdseed to the pigeons or behind bars. “Il Corriere” and “la Repubblica” seem like the Italian version of Playboy. Sex has become the yardstick for everything. The goddess Circe transformed men into pigs by deception, today there would be a queue to be allowed to root about in the manure with an “escort”. The booting out of a philanderer for excessive doses of whores is a paradox, an Italian record. It’s the equivalent to the deposition of Mussolini for an excess of fascism or the imprisoning of Rockefeller for an excess of capitalism. We have gone from the pages discussing judicial proceedings to the pages discussing sex. The scene of crazy satyrs bunged full of Viagra and with the papaverine injections on the apex of the penis is the authentic representation of this country. Of an Italy that for decades has stood and watched the disappearance of democracy. Passive and not Active in its every way of relating with Power, of an Opposition transformed into the Madame of the Arcore brothel. How many prostitutes are writing in the newspapers or are voting in Parliament? They have not sold their bodies but the dignity of a country that has gone whoring.

I need air. I have a legitimate impediment like a breaking of balls. A “Lodo Alfano”, a Pecorella law, some kind of law that they will think up tomorrow. A farce dressed with an Italian sauce that has been going on for too long. Should Berlusconi have himself put on trial or not? After 15 years of being put in charge by the President of the Republic, the Opposition has licked his arse, the newspapers have done investigations on Bunga Bunga and on D'Addario’s backside rather than on the death of Borsellino, they still want to put Berlusconi on trial with headlines and articles on the front page? A guy that has already been judged and found guilty a thousand times by the Italians? We’ll have to organise campaign groups for self-defence from these swamps, from his daily miasmas. We risk being asphyxiated.
In every other democratic state, Berlusconi would be in prison or anyway not in Parliament. In Italy no. The problem is thus the State, not Berlusconi. With what cheek has Napolitano allowed Berlusconi to become the President of the Council? Pertini would have had him thrown down the stairs. Remember Veltroni who shook hands with Berlusconi after his appointment to the Lower House (and even before that …)? And D'Alema who gifted him the TV frequencies with a special law in 1999? And the Fiscal Shield and the Great Pardon approved thanks to the Opposition? And coming to today, to the new bastion of antiberlusconi-ism, to the incinerators, to Vendola’s business dealings with Don Verzè in Apulia? Berlusconi has bought up Italy, at least whatever is for sale, and in Parliament nearly everyone is, not just the former DiPietro-ists Razzi and Scilipoti.
Now the decision of the Constitutional Court is being celebrated as a victory for democracy. A decision that in reality leaves everything as before. The judge will decide whether the President of the Council’s justification to not turn up in court is legitimate. The judge? How can a judge decide whether a meeting with Putin or Merkel, or participation at a meeting of the UN or the G8 is or is not legitimate? We are not at Aunt Maria’s nursery with the note of justification from our parents. Let’s be serious. He will never turn up and his presumed crimes will get timed out due to the Statute of Limitations. I’ll bet my old Prussian blue jumper (it’s very valuable … as a keepsake). The whole country has delegated its politics, its future to some gentlemen who are as respectable as you like, to the eighty-year-old judges of the Constitutional Court, but whose job is not to create a revolution for third parties. But still today, just for a change, the topic of a nation that no longer has a helmsman, that is close to economic collapse, dominated by the mafias, the topic is whether or not Berlusconi has fucked a minor.
P.S. Meetings for the creation of 5 Star Civic Lists have been organised in the following towns:
Canino, Capoterra, Carmagnola, Cassino, Cavarzere, Chioggia, Ciriè, Civitavecchia, Corigliano Scalo, Crotone, Desio, Fuscaldo, Grottaglie, Isola Della Scala, Marino, Nogara, Noventa Padovana, Pessano con Bornago, Pioltello, Rocca di Papa, Roseto degli Abruzzi, Siena, Sennori, Terracina, Viadana
Suggest a meeting in your town.

I was with some young people. And among other things I said, “ … Pisciotta’s coffee”. Question marks in their faces. Then I went on: … yes – like the cyanide-laced coffee that Sindona drank …” Muteness and blank faces. Given that no one has recently been assassinated in prison with a coffee and that both Provenzano and Riina are in good health, I haven’t found other examples. During the 1960s, the TV broadcast “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky in the early evening slot. Today it’s been replaced by “Big Brother” and by "I Cesaroni". Masi, director of the RAI, having survived Anno Zero, would be sacked on the spot if he were to propose a novel by Gogol or Chekhov at a peak viewing time.
Ignorance of the past, that gives rise to our present and everything that we are, is there but no one worries about it. New knowledge is limited in terms of time and depth. A fact, even an important one, is here today and tomorrow it has dissolved, the son of Nothing, the “throwaway” reality. The vocabulary of the Italian language has got smaller, not more than a thousand words are used and when it’s possible we are shortening the terms in order to be able to communicate faster by imitating Twitter and Facebook. The next step will be the language of gestures.
Knowledge and language are shared by people even less. By now what exist are many social islands that are separate from each other and the river that separates them gets stronger as time goes by. The result is an overflowing of daily life of the “conversations in the pub”. A hyper-simplification that relates to everything. It makes it banal and it makes it understandable at the same time. Easily-exchanged merchandise, even though it is completely obscure, and meaningless. Free territory where it’s possible to socialise, say everything without saying anything. An upside down Tower of Babel, where everyone speaks the same language so as to not communicate, that has occupied the TV channels, the newspapers and the living rooms of our homes. The insane talk shows are the most popular programmes because they are “understandable”. At lunch-time on Sunday, with relatives and friends, the conformity of shared ignorance is a taboo that cannot be violated. Anyone who delves deeper between the maccheroni and a dish of salad is a person who is “different” and a trouble-maker who doesn’t know how to share food at the table.

It was Piercamillo Davigo who said it years ago. In Italy a prohibition always needs to be reinforced to be taken seriously. The simple, “smoking is forbidden” is ignored, it’s almost a kind invitation. What’s needed is the intimidatory adverb: “it’s absolutely forbidden to smoke” to attract attention. The utility bills that come into our homes have become threats the violent language of which, even a hardened criminal would take care not to use: “To be paid undelayably before …” “Forced execution … “. In the Equitalia letter the intimidation is even shown clearly, and explicitly: @This notification has the value of an INTIMIDATION to fulfil the obligation ….”.
Threats are followed by actions that have the objective of crushing every resistance by the person who does not fulfil the obligations. If you don’t pay the water bill or the electricity? They confiscate the house from you! You don’t want to pay the last penny of the unpaid licence fee for Minzolini’s TV and feel that you are cuckolded over and over again? You will have your car taken from you. The framework is the same as the “pizzo” {mafia extortion}. If you don’t pay everything straight away, they slash your tyres. The intimidatory language accompanied by disproportionate sanctions is the only possible relationship between the State and the citizens. The more a State is weak, the louder you have to shout. The mafia, in as much as it is credible, does not make threats, but simple requests. At least it safeguards the niceties.
The Italian however is accustomed to everything. He would even survive a nuclear holocaust accompanied by a tsunami and the simultaneous eruption of Vesuvius, Etna and Stromboli. Thus he does not let himself be intimidated. If he has to, he pays, but only if he has his back to the wall. Otherwise he throws it in the bin. Not even a letter with a sequence of outrageous adverbs like undelayably, anastatically, obligatorily, contentiously and cannibalescally, would alarm him. He is used to it and he doesn’t care.
The Italian is naturally symmetrical. The more the prohibition is intimidatory, the more he does the opposite. A sign saying “Absolute prohibition on tipping” placed in a meadow is the best way of creating a tip out of nothing. A sign saying “It is forbidden for anyone to collect porcini mushrooms on this property” will set off a mass of mushroom collectors never seen at your house. The symmetry of the Italian can however be exploited with the contrary intimidation. Signs saying “Smoking is obligatory in this room” or “It’s obligatory to make your dogs shit on the pavement” would produce the opposite effect: no one would ever smoke again and the dogs would all become constipated.

Christmas is the saddest festival in the year. Anyone who is alone feels even more alone. Anyone who is poor becomes a beggar. Relatives that you would never even dream of meeting up with, and some of whom you had even forgotten about their existence, turn up at your door. People that you bump into only on two occasions: 25 December and funerals, smile at you and keep on kissing you. Why? Houses turn into rubbish tips after the opening of the presents whose packaging costs more than the actual contents. There’s always the presence of an aunt or a granny who gets transformed into the domestic cleanliness person with loads of rubbish bags, one for plastic stuff, one for glass, one for paper and cardboard. We are all better. Beggars, by now delivering a strong presence in the cities, are difficult to distinguish from the normal passersby. Yesterday I gave 20 cents to a bank clerk who was rummaging through the rubbish bin and he was even affected by it. The beauty of Christmas is that it covers everything, like snow, like Berlusconi. You forget that you are a precarious worker, or unemployed, or laid off, and Marchionne seems like one of the Three Kings with the Swiss myrrh. “Made in China” is overwhelming. It’s the triumph of "Merry China Christmas", every object under the Christmas tree comes from the far off Far East, but however it’s produced by Italian companies. We export capital to import toys. It’s the globalisation of Baby Jesus. Immense pine trees are raised up in Milan’s “piazza del Duomo” and in the Vatican City, cut off at the roots, sacrificed, decorated with streamers and fairy lights for unsustainable festivities. However Christmas is still Christmas and to some more than others I want to send my best wishes this year: to the fathers. To those fathers who are afraid they will not be able to give a dignified life to their children, who they see with eyes glued to the window of a toy shop and they feel like non-entities because they cannot afford a present. To the fathers who are alone, because they are separated, whose Christmas is contained in a telephone call: “Hi Dad! – I’ve got to go now…..” To those who never give up for their children and accept any job, whatever the humiliation they have to suffer. How many are there of these modern heroes who are working but underpaid, who are accepting risky work and who sometimes die so that they can bring home a wage? The ones that put their heads down and give up on every type of pride? It is they who are the true Father Christmases even though sometimes their sack is empty. The light they have in their eyes when they look at you, and I’m also thinking of my dad, is a gift that you won’t find again if you lose it.” Happy Christmas from Beppe Grillo

In the post office you find the bank. At the station, you find the shopping centres. You cannot yet send a parcel from the counter at the bank, but it’s just a matter of time. It’s the triumph of universality. The politician spends his time on TV but not in Parliament, he’s an actor, he doesn’t make laws. Anyone who is elected, in all senses, it’s as though he has been given employment by the public broadcasting company, the RAI. There’s a growing repulsion in relation to one’s own job that pushes one to do something else. For Moretti, it’s less important to have the trains running to time than having the supermarkets in the Big Stations. In theory, Benetton makes jumpers, in practice it manages motorways, an activity of which it has no experience but that allows it to rake in billions of euro in tolls. Colaninno, ex Telecom, ex Olivetti, ex everything, goes by Vespa and he’s dealing with Alitalia though he knows not a jot about air transport. It’s the apotheosis of incompetence.
The escorts become Ministers, the judges are deputies and many deputies would like to be judges, the government issues laws instead of governing, and the Opposition, as well as opposing, finds time to collaborate. The oncologist Veronesi improvises as a nuclear expert. Doing something else is useful to fight the boredom of one’s own job. It’s better to be an amateur every day, than to be a professional for the whole of your life. Only the one who tackles his activity with the spirit of a pure amateur can carry it out without distractions, with the thoughtlessness of improvisation. For example, Bertolaso of the catastrophes, or Gasparri when he was an unknowing Minister of Telecommunications.
Obviously, doing something else doesn’t mean renouncing the salary that one is paid to do something else. In fact, "altrismo" {other-ism} mustn’t be confused with altruism, even though it sounds similar. If the crime doesn’t pay, exactly as for Tremorti, being a Mayor and a Senator, theatre actor and a deputy, lawyer and parliamentarian, pays double and even triple. "Altrismo" develops unthinkable synergies together with the wallet. The important thing is to participate (in getting the money). To find a Minister who does the job of a Minister, a euro-deputy who does the job of a euro-deputy, a whore who does the job of a whore, is a forlorn task. There’s even the one who improvises as leader while he’s President of the Lower House, and there’s the one who participates in the drafting of laws like the President of the Republic.
The neighbour’s activity is always greener. Father Christmas will also be the “Befana” {the witch who comes for the Epiphany} and the three Kings together with St Joseph. “Trasformismo”, an old sickness of the country that relentlessly strikes the Italians, from Giolitti to Scilipoti (with all due respect) has transformed itself into social schizophrenia. Each one is also other. The important thing, as always, is not to work, and above all, not to accept one’s own responsibilities.

The blog has come into possession of the contents of a (true or presumed) spiritualist séance held by the medium Marcello Dell'Utri in which the spirit of Benito Mussolini was evoked.
”What is this new fascism that the old and new enemies are all clamouring against, and I would say rightly so? Let me who proudly launched it into the world, be allowed to respond to this question. Let’s speak clearly: my fascism has the same relation with this nothingness, as an original has with its caricature. My government had Gentile and this one has Gelmini, Bottai and this the ephebe and woolly Bondi, more a larva than a man, a worm who would never have faced up to a circle of fire. Balbo was a magnificent Minister of Aviation at the age of thirty three, and he achieved the first flight across the Atlantic with an air squadron. They named a street in New York after him. Today he would be a “precarious” worker or a sales assistant in a department store. The black shirts who died cannot defend themselves from Fini, named in fascist language "er caghetta" {the shit} for the pugnacious spirit that he has always shown, nor from the filthy and charlatan-esque representation of one called La Russa. My errors do not justify this mockery. Fascism was better and worse than all this. Fascism with its mistakes and its horrors, died with me. I was hung up in a square in Milan, not far from the hall in Piazza San Sepolcro where the basis of my ideal construction started. Leave me in peace. Anyone representing me right now is a traitor, a braggart, a mafia person, a freemason. Prefect Mori shot at mafia people who now have seats in Parliament with Berlusconi. What’s the difference between an obvious dictatorship, the fascist dictatorship and a hidden one, but only for those who do not want to see, the “plutomafiomassonica” one in which you are living? Not even one coin fell from my pockets while I was upside down in piazzale Loreto together with Claretta Petacci, who was my favourite one, but because of this she never became a Minister. The richest man in Italy has become your master. I was a socialist before being a fascist and I shared prison with the socialist Pietro Nenni before becoming “il Duce” and ordering the death of Matteotti. If I were alive now, I would buy up every socialist, and all at a good price. Instead of Matteotti I would have to face up to Gianni De Michelis and Claudio Martelli. The race laws were my gift to Hitler, the ideological basis for an infamous alliance. The xenophobia of the green shirts has substituted with the racism of the black shirts. History repeats itself. It was destiny that says that Italy, after the tragedy of my time, should live through the farce of your time.”

The Lower House is closed. The justification given by the leader of the PDL, the vintage P2-ist Cicchitto (membership number 2232), was: “It’s better not to tackle these delicate issues in the House.” The closure will last until 13 December, the feast of Saint Lucy, when the psycho-dwarf will give his funeral speech. The day after that there’ll be a vote of confidence in the government. Thus it won’t be possible to discuss the motion against “TremeBondi” while Pompei continues to collapse. The deputies will be able to take advantage of a super-long-weekend-break. The snow is looking good in all the main tourist spots. The return to Rome will be made merrier by the thought of the upcoming Christmas festivities. The Lower House has been closed to avoid a debate, but if there’s no debate, what’s the point of the Lower House? Like dirty clothes, it’s better to wash “delicate issues” at home. The country would be disturbed. The ease with which they close down one part of Parliament to check up on the strength of the Government behind closed doors, is incredible. First the citizens were denied the choice of candidate and now they are even denied Parliament itself. Once upon a time there was the Aventine Secession with the Socialists that chose to abandon the House as a protest against the Fascist Regime. Today there’s no longer even the satisfaction to walk out of the Chamber. Fede and Minzolini are beavering away writing the psycho-dwarf’s speech. The blog is able to give a glimpse in advance.

“When I think of those gentlemen (the Opposition – editor), I’m reminded of strategists …. while we were eating all over the country, they were doing a strategy with little election pins on the map. But then, when it was a matter of concrete cases, in the command seat and in the position of responsibility you see things in another light and in a different way. And yet there was no lack of occasion for me to demonstrate my energy. I have not yet been inferior to events. In a few hours I terminated a student revolt. In a few days I got rid of the rubbish in Naples, in forty eight hours I bought a dozen parliamentarians. These gestures of energy and the latter one, that even shocked the Undersecretary of State of a friendly nation (Hilary Clinton, editor), are a demonstration that it is not energy that is the defect in my spirit. I have said: “I want there to be peace for the Italian people”; and I wanted to establish normality in political life. But what response has there been to my concept? First of all, with Fini’s secession, an anti-constitutional secession, completely revolutionary. Then with a journalistic campaign that has lasted months, a dirty and miserable campaign that has done us dishonour for months. The most fantastic, the most chilling, the most macabre lies have been widely affirmed in all the newspapers! There were inquisitions, there was invention, people were knowingly lying, but they lied. All the same, I am continuing in my effort to normalisation and to bring normality. I repress illegalism. To all this, what response is there? There’s a response with an accentuation of the campaign. They say: Berlusconi-ism is a horde of thieves camped out in the nation; it is a band of bandits and predators! They stage the moral issue, and we know the sad story of the moral issue in Italy.

...

- January: The Berlusconi government falls. Consultations between the Quirinale, the parties and the social organisations. The first exploratory mandate entrusted to Berlusconi fails. Crowd in front of Montecitorio {seat of Lower House of Parliament}. Egg throwing at Palazzo Grazioli {Rome residence of Silvio Berlusconi}. Public Debt rises above 1900 billion. The EU asks Italy for an additional measure amounting to 30 billion, on top of the Finance Act.

- February: Second mandate entrusted to Draghi. Unemployment figures rise thanks to the end of the fund for laid off workers involving tens of thousands of workers. The Confindustria declares that growth in 2011 could be zero. This evaluation is confirmed by the IMF and the EU. Spontaneous strikes in the public administration. Draghi, in his first speech in Parliament as President of the Council, having obtained a bipartisan vote of confidence announces that sacrifices are inevitable and that Italy is on the brink of economic collapse.

- March: Fall in tax receipts and a new sharp rise in the Public Debt to 1,940 billion euro. The Debt/GDP ratio rises above the threshold of 120%. Interest given by the Treasury on Italian State bonds reaches that of Spain. There’s the hypothesis of a bridging loan to Italy from the EU and the IMF amounting to 200 billion with non-negotiable conditions in relation to the reduction of the Debt, of pensions and of the number of people employed in the public administration.

- April: Social unrest throughout Italy. Berlusconi fails to return from a trip to Antigua. On live TV, Draghi announces the 5-year block of State bonds for Italian bondholders, to whom interest is still to be paid. The period for freezing any increases in the public sector is extended for a further two years. There’s a decision on the abolition of the provinces and the integration of personnel into the regions as well as about the reintroduction of ICI {Local property tax} on the first house.

- May: Income from taxes drops by 6%. Zero growth of GDP could become negative. Broadcasting across all TV channels, Napolitano exhorts the nation to have social cohesion and national solidarity. Tension resulting from the failure to sell some State bonds.

- June: Speculation regarding Italy’s imminent exit from the Euro. Draghi sets in train exceptional measures to restore the health of public finances. Withdrawal of ten per thousand from current accounts, maximum value for pensions set at 2500 euro and raising of the pension age by two years.

- July: Italian banks are beset by the property bubble. Collapse of bank shares and the shares of real estate companies quoted on the Stock Exchange. Collapse of some of the companies in the sector. Occupation of unrented buildings in many Italian cities. Emergence of unsuspected connections between organised crime, politicians and entrepreneurs in the real estate market sector. Draghi promulgates a law to discourage the outsourcing of Italian companies abroad.

- August: Flight of capital from Italy and increase in unemployment especially in the South. Spontaneous uprising for lack of basic necessities in Campania and in Sicily. Dell'Utri found guilty even by the Court of Cassation and is imprisoned. The PDL dissolves spontaneously. A new electoral law starts to work its way through Parliament. Beppe Grillo presents to the Senate the popular initiative law “Clean up Parliament”

- September: The Public Debt goes over 2,000 billion. Plan to cut a third of the Public Administration employees in 5 years. Reduction in consumption. For now, Italy avoids leaving the Euro. Increase in the gap between the return on Italian and German bonds.

- October: General Strike paralyses the country for two days. Trades Unions are contested. Schifani resigns as President of the Senate for personal reasons. The new President of the Senate belongs to the PD so as to reinforce the united national technical government. The hypothesis of elections in 2012 seems unlikely given the fear of default.

- November: Italy is on its last legs, resulting from unemployment and the increase in inflation. Draghi sets up a massive programme to recover taxes that have been evaded, amounting to 50 billion a year based on actual ownership. Public financing to parties is cut by 50% and to newspapers by 100%.

- December: A wealth tax and an increase in the tax rate on deposits and on current accounts are the final action of the government in 2011. Italy ends the year with a forecast of 1% growth in GDP in 2012 and an increase of 22% in unemployment. Berlusconi never returned from Antigua where among others, he has been joined by Bondi, Cicchitto, Fede, Gasparri and Letta for reasons of personal safety.

Students and research workers protesting on the roofs are receiving visits from politicians. Gentlemen around 60 years old are climbing up ladders with the youthful self-confidence and the smile of Italians on an outing. The protest of the young people has become a catwalk for them. The moderate newspaper highlights Bersani’s lopsided cigar, whereas the progressive newspaper highlights Vendola’s ear-ring. There’s already a queue at the bottom of the ladder, Veltroni is getting in some training, he can’t wait, but even Casini, Bindi, and incredibly, Fini want to take a stab at the solemn activity of climbing. It’s an elegant way of getting to know the roofs from where the helicopters will lift off, the helicopters that will take them away to safety the next time there’s a default. A general rehearsal.
The research workers are a bit lost, they have been taken by surprise. “The ladder-climbers that are expressing their solidarity – are they not the same ones who have been living off politics for thirty years, right at the time that the public education system has been destroyed?" Assassins and politicians always go back to the scene of the crime. If I were in the shoes of the research workers on the roofs, I would ask a question of the current politician: "Why is it that your “cazzo” party, together with the other ones that get a billion euro in public financing under the guise of election expenses has not destined that money for Research?” The response, since the time of Craxi and the Christian Democrats, going through to Castelli and D'Alema has always been “politics has a cost”. If that’s so, let them be the ones to pay.
The 5 Star MoVement has refused one million seven hundred thousand in financing. Let the parties do the same and let them hand over the billion euro in the State coffers that is available to “Tremorti” for public education. The well informed research worker could ask other questions, perhaps uncomfortable ones: “How many people in your party have earned their pension in two and a half years? Public financing of newspapers (*) amounting to 330 million euro – who voted for that a few days ago? The Fiscal Shield that has rewarded tax dodgers – why did it get passed thanks to the votes of the government benches and the absence of the Opposition?" A blush could appear on Bersani’s face or perhaps not. Anyone who has a face like their bum has an incorporated sun-shield against shame.

Right now, there are demonstrations all over - from Venice to Milan to Pisa, where they have established the occupation of the Tower.

I invite the security forces NOT to beat up the students. Citizens are not to be hit. It’s the delinquents that need to be sought out.

(*)apart from il Fatto Quotidiano

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have a Ghandian spirit. I am a little lamb in amongst wolves. But sometimes even little lambs get angry. In these days of floods in the Veneto region, that seem like a new disaster like the one that happened in Polesine with the only difference being that no one is saying that, and of toxic waste and poisonous truncheon blows in Campania, I have been to Milan. In Piazza del Duomo a gigantic screen told the passers-by: “Whatever kind of work you do it’s your right to go home to your loved ones. And the culture of safety is the best preventative measure against accidents. Follow the rules that protect the most important thing for you and your loved ones: your life.” There were images of husbands getting back home in the evening (they’ve managed to do it again today!) with the yellow helmet nicely visible and the wives anxiously rushing up to embrace them. It’s not a subliminal message, it’s a clear direct message, a rubbish message: “Worker, if you die it’s just your business.” You are like Ambrosoli for Andreotti: "You had it coming!” It’s the campaign for safety at work by the Ministry of Work and Social Policies. The advertising that costs 9 million euro produced by a government that has halved the penalties for employers and for the responsible directors and in some cases it has swapped arrest with a fine by means of the Decree Dlgs 106/09. More than 1,000 people die a year because of accidents at work. A massacre. Anna Di Vitale is one of the thousands of widows of a mass assassination. They kill you, they make laws against and to finish up they take you for a ride with the advertisements. What is worse than killing the father of a family for profit, to save on safety measures? The campaign slogan says "La sicurezza sul lavoro la pretende chi si vuole bene" {To look after yourself, you must insist on safety}. But shouldn’t it be the State that insists on the safety measures?

"My name is Anna Di Vitale. I was married to Giovanni Di Lorenzo, such a gentle lad aged 31, who was always ready to help everyone. It was 26 July in the middle of the summer. My husband left home before 7:00 am, he gave me two kisses that morning, an extra one because it was the feast of my name day. We were planning to meet up at lunch-time. Then he called me at about 10:00 am saying that he wasn’t coming back for lunch as he was having a sandwich there with his colleagues. He explained to me more or less where he was working, but he didn’t tell me that he was driving an excavator. My husband was a lorry driver. Around midday my dad called me and told me that he had received a telephone call whose message was vague and talking about an accident; the first thing I did was to telephone my husband, but no luck it was switched off. I jumped into the car and straight away I feared the worst. After a quarter of an hour I arrived at the place (Baiano-in the province of Avellino). It was a mountain road. I saw the upturned excavator and loads of carabinieri. No one would let me get past. I wanted to see Giovanni, but they said I couldn’t and shouldn’t. At that moment I thought of Carmen our two year old daughter, of his dreams and I just saw nothingness around us.
Three years have gone by. Up until a short while ago, I didn’t want to talk to anyone, the pain was so fierce and it still is. Now I want to talk so that stories like this don’t happen again. I want that a father of a family after a hard day’s work is able to go home to his family. We can no longer let these deaths slide on top of us as though they were simple accidents, They are not “white deaths”, they are “red deaths”, as red as the blood I saw the following day, where my husband died. Three years later there are four people under investigation for culpable homicide, and I don’t understand why it’s necessary to wait so long to have a bit of justice, and why I have to hear the lawyer say to me that I mustn’t expect them to pay by being put in prison. He said to me: "Signora here in Italy they kill people and don’t spend even a day in prison.” I am really getting discouraged even because the hearings are always getting postponed, and meanwhile that company continues working and it’s horrible bumping into them in the street. It’s really horrible for me to know that they are the guilty ones and I cannot do anything.” Anna Vitale Di Lorenzo

Once upon a time, the old people lived and died in the family, when families still existed. They were listened to and when they became completely senile, they were tolerated like tiny children who are a bit annoying. Today the value of an old person is his pension. It is used to pay the rent and the utility bills of the unemployed grandchildren. He’s an old time-limited fixed rate Treasury Bond. It’s not too rare that he gets frozen in the freezer at death so that the demise is not declared and the income can continue to flow in. The useless old person ends up in a home or in hospital while waiting for his funeral.
Nick il Nero, a friend of the blog, has ended up in a clinic in the geriatrics ward. Here’s what he has to say.

“Dear Beppe, diabetes has taken hold of me, the paunch has betrayed me. I’m back in hospital after a week there. The first three days went by marked by the most serious foolishness. I had a really terrifying painful arm and the news about diabetes disturbed me a bit. In my head I was thinking that the tons of food I’ve eaten over the last few years would not have given me big problems, and then …. BANG!!! The machine has broken down. I find I have a disease that will probably be with me forever. Never mind, what’s done is done. (Oh – an omelette - oh gorgeous…) I have to go on a diet that keeps the glycemic values balanced. I have to take three tiny pills a day. Basically I will lose 30 kilo in a few months and you will call me ‘Nik lo Smilzo’ {Nik the skinny}
The hospital is still a sad and dark place where people complain for too many reasons. The nurses are angels who run all over to look after the needs of the patients. There are really only a few of them to look after the needs of the whole of the general medical ward. The Health system in this country is not working of course because of the usual political money flows, too much money spent badly.
In my room, there were companions in my adventure. There was Mario, the oldest, aged 96 he still had a few moments to live, who knows who he was, he didn’t talk, he grumbled, a terrifying wheeze that seemed like the sound of an injured dinosaur. There was Mario whom they took away the other morning, a skeleton who could no longer be helped because he had no veins that could be accessed for treatment. Then there was Adolfo, lung cancer, serious respiratory difficulties, an ATC driver for 30 years, he was the most desperate and every day he was asking to die, he suffered terribly and he didn’t breathe even with the oxygen. Every morning, he asked me to keep him company for a bit and he told me the story of his life. Another old man, aged 83 was in the bed near the window, I don’t know his name, an oxygen mask, a competition-style incontinence pad and he was so hungry he could have eaten his own mother, he came out of the hospital today with me. As soon as the doctor told him he was being discharged, he took everything off and he got completely dressed with the tubes of the drip coming out of his shirt, in the time that the doctor was still finishing off his rounds in the ward. Spectacular!! In the centre of the room, a guy from Pakistan who reminded me of the Buddha, he slept while he was seated, two legs and two arms as thin as grissini and a stomach of biblical proportions, diabetic like myself, but with world-record-breaking values, with dialysis every other day. The last of my companions was an old man aged 79, as thin as Ghandi and with a heart of gold. He was ashamed because the nurses gave him a wash every morning. He couldn’t get out of bed because he was too thin and weak. Last night, a young man who spent the night with Adolfo, cut his hair and his beard. And he asked me what I thought. I gave him a kiss on his forehead and i told him he looked fantastic.
Wonderful old men who are living out the final moments of their existence with the wish to go away and not stay there, men who have lived through who knows what stories, but still they are protagonists of a generation that is on its way out too often in the midst of complete indifference.
I have the luck to have the most numerous family in Italy, my friends. They have come in droves to visit me. I have understood that I am very lucky to know so many people, the messages of solidarity on Facebook, the SMS messages, the emails, have filled my heart with happiness. THANK YOU to everyone for always being there through thick and thin.“ Hugs , NIK

Political language has lost content, but in return it has acquired a new fabulous incomprehensible form of its own. If you don’t understand, it’s you who feels ignorant, not the one who has just uttered the supercazzola {nonsense words}. But what is a supercazzola? How do you recognise it?
The definition of supercazzola: “A word made up of two elements in the Italian language: the prefix ‘super’ and the noun ‘cazzo’ {prick}. The fundamental linguistic structure on which it is based is that of the ‘fruit-salad’ word, in which there is a combination of different terms or parts of different terms with the creation of a semantic confusion.”
For example: famous supercazzola from Tognazzi/Mascetti in "My Friends":
Man: “Excuse me, are you …. ?”
Mascetti: “Antani, as though there were Antani, even for the director,’ la supercazzola con scappellamento’ [the nonsense with revelation].”
The supercazzola has to be pronounced with a solemn face and with the words well articulated, In that way it gains value. It’s possible to say it anywhere: on a stage, in a conference, on TV, in the newspapers. However it has to be interpreted for common citizens and in fact the journalists have the task of raising it up as a parable, the peak of thought. Basically, to lick arse.
Some of the supercazzola of the day:
Dario Franceschini: “The home that is owned … no longer objective value because it presumes the non-mobility” ”I would like 50 thousand young people from the North to move each year to the South and vice versa”
Ignazio La Russa:
”It makes me sad that a house that in the wish of the person who left it as an inheritance and had to be destined for the cause, is then lived in by a person that has nothing to do with that cause”
Nicola Vendola:
”I’m inviting Grillo not to mistake the anxiety of change with the aesthetics of blasphemy”
“The wise contemplation of the capacity to lose well (by the Left, - editor)”
”We have to work in the territory and be cosmopolitan.”
Umberto Veronesi:
”If today the nuclear option is frightening, it’s a political error. Fermi invented the battery, not an atomic bomb … war can happen, the government of the USA created the bomb and it was the head of the American army, in total autonomy (?) who decided to unleash it on an unarmed city.”
Uolter Veltroni:
”This country is dominated by the past, that is clutching our legs, and it is stopping u