"Trains, post offices, roads: things are getting worse for Italians" (Daniele Martini)

WORSENING OF PUBLIC SERVICES IN ITALY –

It took a journalist of class, like Daniele Martini, to dish out in a single text, the book entitled State robbery: how they stole our roads, railways, post office, and essential services. (Paper First editions), the tragic photograph of a country that not only has failed to modernise for decades, but in terms of public services has done nothing but regressOne step back after another.

To the point that Martini, provocatively, wonders if "it wasn't better when things were worse", that is, when trains, post offices and roads were firmly in the hands of the state boyars, the managers of public industry placed by the various parties at the top of state-owned companies, where there was no shortage of corruption and cronyism scandals.

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DETERIORATION OF SERVICES IN ITALY –

Where does the step backwards lie? In the false and rhetorical demagogy of the market that regulates and dictates the law, of the private sector which always and in any case does better than the public sectorDthe waste that is avoided when the State takes a step back, of services that improve when Italian-style privatizations make progress.

All companies involved in the State robbery they refer, in some way, to these clichés, behind which very specific interests often hide. The Post Office, for example, went public, but in the meantime, as we reported on the Non sprecare website, some services for citizens have worsened.Not to mention Ferrovie, which wants to be listed on the stock exchange by 2017: high-speed train customers certainly can't complain about the service, but the people of commuters (i.e., the majority of Italians) are subjected to all sorts of harassment. We've reported this too, even denouncing a genuine classism in Italian rail transport. And Anas? Whenever there's a chilling investigation into rigged tenders and corruption, Anas's name always crops up somehow. While roads and bridges continue to collapse, or lack the minimum maintenance to ensure safe mobility. Here, taking stock, as Martini manages to do in a book that also presents itself as a great fresco of waste from yesterday and today, it comes naturally to ask if this theft of services, to the detriment of citizens, has not, over time, become increasingly serious and increasingly widespread.

TO KNOW MORE: Without maintenance in Italy, 60 percent of old buildings are at high risk.