Here are the real financial troubles of the municipality of Naples as the parties scramble to find candidates for mayors. The comment by Mario Seminerio, editor of the blog Phastidio.net Twist
: after a laboriously reached political agreement which had the hallmark of History with a capital letter, the Chosen and Pre-Elected turns around, noticing a giant elephant in the room : the debt. What are we talking about?
The attempt by the former Giallorossi national majority to obtain the mayor of Naples, winning the next municipal elections. As for the maxi debt, he had been there for some time but it seems he had managed to settle in the blind spot of the field of vision of politics.
After laborious consultations, Professor Gaetano Manfredi, former Minister of the University of the Conte 2 government, former rector of the Federico II University of Naples, former president of the Conference of Italian Rectors, seemed the chosen one for the appointment with history: govern Naples and finally put into action the pact between Pd and M5S, to replicate in the local context the experience of the Conte 2 government, which so many orphans and widows mysteriously left on the ground. THE PRE-ELECT AND THE PAIN
Professor Manfredi studied and re-studied, his heart was swollen with pride, feeling, joy and hope for this mission. But, suddenly, he came across Him, the Monster: “Flattered and grateful, as is my habit, I started studying. And I discovered the pain. The Municipality presents a dramatic economic and organizational situation. Liabilities well exceed five billion euros, including debts and bad debts. The investee companies are in full crisis and difficulties are expected in providing the services. The administrative machine is poor in personnel and indispensable skills. The current spending capacity is zeroed. We are, in fact, failing.
A disaster that must be declared either by the mayor Luigi de Magistris within a few days or by the new mayor at the end of the year. I would be delighted if you were proven wrong on these dramatic figures, but I fear they will be confirmed. The consequence is that, in these conditions of the city, the mayor becomes a liquidator ”.
So, let’s see: Professor Manfredi started studying and discovered the existence of a citizen debt of over 5 (five) billion euros. “Between debts and bad credits”. As we know from the well-known and unfortunate events of the Sicily Region, it is above all bad debts, recognized as such, the determinant of the disruptions. In addition to recurring chasms of income, because in the end the people should not be harassed. Bad debts, lost revenue
Years pass with balance sheets in apparent equilibrium, in whose assets there are often massive credits which, however, simply no longer exist, if they ever existed. Cleaning begins, the sign reading “work in progress” is removed and the chasm appears, in all its magnificence. Reality knocks on the door, more usual, those who have done classical studies would say.
In these cases, the local authority declares the failure and begins a painful but necessary path of multi-year rebalancing (if you are interested, here you will find the process). In short, you need more income and less expenses. Unbelievable, true.There
are alternatives
It depends: if you are local authorities with great political, economic and social importance, you can try to negotiate some agreement with the central government, in order to shift part of the restructuring burden on national taxpayers.
You can point out that the city “is a powder keg”, not without reason, or you can resort to a Masaniellar (or Masaniellesco
) approach, preferably from the Third World, denouncing the “hateful” nature of the citizen debt, which therefore makes it worthy of repudiation in the epic of the fight against the capitalist and Yankee exploitation of humanity. Which has nothing to do with it but is always needed, especially in certain environments.
If necessary, there are academics and intellectuals who denounce the colonialism of other regions of the country, according to a rather consolidated geolocation, which usually ends with phrases such as “ah, if the North did not have our consumption, it would starve!” , or equivalent. THE APPEARANCE OF THE DEBT
Because I remind you, in a very unpleasant way, of these situations and circumstances
. and discovers a monstrous and now unsustainable debt. Perhaps Professor Manfredi has had a lot to do in recent years, or with this decision he has tried to avoid drinking a very bitter glass.
Or, third hypothesis not separated from the previous ones, he wanted to express his disappointment at not having been fished out in the Draghi government on the recommendation of the entity conventionally called M5S, and which therefore has no interest in singing and carrying the cross of the one who is announces a council dripping with blood, sweat and tears.
So what to do
Manfredi is opposed to this suffering hypothesis for his fellow citizens, or in any case he is opposed to being the liquidator of the municipality, and here is the “suggestion”, my bold troublemakers: “The Neapolitans, legitimately, have very high expectations. They aspire to have efficient transport, sheltered and clean roads, kindergartens, centers for the elderly, sports facilities, public parks and conditions of daily life adapted to the best national and international standards. And this is just ordinary business. But they also ask for more, they want to evolve towards digital transformation, sustainable tourism, the circular economy, citizenship rights. They aspire to make Naples, while maintaining all its formidable characteristics, a fully-fledged European city as it has always been in its history “.PACT RICH, MI CI FICCO
Said in these terms, and before pronouncing the fatal (for the pockets of Italian taxpayers) formula of the “Pact to [insert name of a chapter of public expenditure at will]”, it seems a double precondition for acceptance of the designation: transfer of the debt to the “national solidarity”, to alleviate the guilt feelings of neoliberals and neocolonialists, and suggestion of the essential need to pilot robust shares of the next Recovery Fund in the city.
Which can certainly be there, if the objective of the Next Generation EU is also to bridge the most glaring gaps in growth and wealth at the regional level, in the frame of the now legendary environmental-digital revolution. So far, with the ordinary programming of European funds, we have been unlucky but we do not abandon the hope of change.
Whatever it is, Roman politics today has discovered that Naples is crushed by an unmanageable debt. Former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, pending the titanic legal clash between the entity conventionally called M5S and the Rousseau Association (soon also on Netflix), proclaims the need for an “assumption of responsibility by all political forces”. National, and the not too implied. Conte also speaks of the construction of a “broad front” of the forces of progress, using an expression that smells of South America.
While waiting for the Abogado del Pueblo to take the lead of the popular masses by pulling out a pink-yellow clutch bag, even the eternal candidate for the role of unlikely foreign pope of the left, Roberto Fico, has uttered words of great wisdom about the unexpected debt of the his city, of which it seemed he might be a candidate for mayor.
He is the wisdom that, needless to say, he converges towards the famous “Pact for Naples”, which later becomes the Pact for Italy, given that in the Peninsula there are 800 municipalities in incipient or overt failure. I’m not going to tell you what happens in the United States when a municipality goes bankrupt: that would be so terribly provincial for me. NATIONAL DISSEST, LOCAL DEFAULTS
I believe that local defaults are a consequence of the country’s more general failure, but I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. It is probably the fault of the euro, Germany, neoliberalism or the rogue pandemic.
Then, as I am notoriously ill-thought-out, I believe that this sudden release of the municipal debt from the blind spot of the political field of vision has been facilitated by the imminent arrival of the 210 billion “Europeans”. In addition to the well-known Italian inclination to treat the debt with another debt.
It would be absolutely heartless to inflict suffering on citizens with traumatic municipal defaults, just as we are preparing to leap into the environmental-digital future. We need to understand how, but some daring financial engineering construction (in debt) for desperate people can and must be found, in the name of Frente Amplio.
Among the idle questions, or more properly reactionary, there remains the one that should be made to the outgoing mayor of Naples, ten years after a great experience of a participatory community and its subsidiaries. Cynical and cheating debt.
