Gian Antonio Stella and Sergio Rizzo were very good. In 2007 they invented the Caste, that is, as good reporters, they were able to put together and tell all the privileges enjoyed by our politicians and above all they stripped all the tricks that the political class uses to extort money from the state coffers . Now the two Corriere della Sera journalists, just at a time when sacrifices must be imposed on all citizens to save Italy from bankruptcy, have published an instant book, "Licenziare i padreterni", where they show that while all the Italians are called to do their part, it is precisely the members of the caste who, with various subterfuges, avoid any sacrifice and continue to enjoy their privileges, from annuities to gold liquidations, from blue cars to reimbursement of undocumented expenses. Even if the news is mostly known and published by Corriere itself or by other newspapers, it must be admitted that it is impressive to see them listed in an agile volume of 173 pages side by side.
And surely the list of privileges will not even be complete! And it is not just a question of the expenses of the constitutional bodies, which grew by almost 2001% between 2010 and 50, gaining absolute primacy with respect to what all the other Western states spend to make their democratic bodies function, but of all the scams implemented by parliamentarians, regional presidents, mayors and councilors to frustrate the laws that prohibit double offices and to combine public tasks with a lucrative private activity, or those of the high bureaucracy that continues to accumulate pensions and benefits, hindering any attempt to reduce expenses and moralisation of the sector. And if this is the example that comes from those who govern us, it seems difficult to impose the discipline of rigor on citizens who have been used to getting by for a long time.
In the end, however, if you focus only on the high salaries of parliamentarians or on their excellent restaurant at the prices of suburban bars, however, you risk missing the real knot that is slowly but surely strangling this country. And indeed there is the risk that a somewhat trivial and somewhat demagogic reading of certain privileges could lead not to a reasoned change of course, but to a feeling of generic contempt for politics which in the end risks hindering the search for a rational way out of the cul de sac we've driven ourselves into. We must ask ourselves why, despite the privileges of caste and its bad administration have been known for many years, the Italians, until three years ago, continued to vote for the same parties and often for the same politicians already talked about and even indicted.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that many Italian citizens are colluded with this political system because they hope, sooner or later, to have a public job too, a pension, some privilege that can let them enter, if not exactly in the caste, at least in the clientele benefiting from the caste. But our fellow citizens do not behave this way because they are genetically inclined to cheat others or because they are culturally anchored to that "amoral familism" identified forty years ago by the Englishman Percy Allum as the worm that made Italians structurally incapable of building a modern society and state.
They do it for a precise rational calculation. In fact, in a country where public spending reaches 50% of GDP and if we also consider companies controlled by the state or by local authorities, perhaps it exceeds 70%, it is evident that it is the politicians who can find a job, who allow you to make a career in hospitals, as in municipal companies. And even among professionals and private entrepreneurs, there are certainly not a few who work with public procurement and therefore must have well-oiled relationships with politicians. On the other hand, one cannot think that we have accumulated a debt of over 1.900 billion euros just because of the high salaries of deputies or too many blue cars.
In reality, politicians of every color have given baby pensions or disability pensions to hundreds of thousands of citizens, they have hired millions of useless public employees, they have handed out subsidies to various associations without even asking for a statement of expenditure, they have bought on the market goods or services at a high price, they have made useless public works, perhaps neglecting those that are useful because they are more controllable by public opinion, they have hired many people in Rai only on the basis of the criterion of belonging and not that of professionalism.
Stella and Rizzo also address these problems by describing, for example, the case of Sicily (but there are equally scandalous examples in the North too) where the at least nonchalant management of governor Lombardo did not change when he unloaded the centre-right with which he was elected, to make a junta supported by the diessina left. As the prosecutor general of the Court of Auditors in Sicily says, politics scatters huge amounts of money in thousands of patronage drops. Every drop is just a drop. “But ultimately the sea is made up of many drops of water”.
The problem then is that of cuts in public spending, privatizations not only to create more markets and more competition, but above all to deprive politicians of the possibility of managing most of the Italian economy and therefore determining people's destinies. Today, according to the latest polls, almost 50% of Italians declare that they will not vote in the next elections or will vote blank because no party is considered worthy of trust. “Politicians are all the same” is the phrase that we hear more and more often.
But we must be careful because this wave of indifference paradoxically risks facilitating the perpetuation of the power of the caste which, by gathering its clientele, can more easily obtain sufficient votes to continue managing power as it has done so far. Berlusconi had promised a more liberal society with less state. This is where it failed. And it is this that needs to be discussed, not just the "bunga bunga" scandals or judicial investigations.
