The week of Ferragosto that we are living takes away the memories and the Olympic laurels, and leaves our country in its marginal debates, while all around us important things are happening. Which concern us and will define our destinies, but on which – more and more often – we seem destined to reap the consequences of other people’s decisions – suffering the effects, or benefiting from them – rather than having a decisive role in the processes that form the wills that count. This is naturally true, regardless of the color and strength of a country, in an interconnected world in which specific and relative weights are established above all by historical and geographical factors. And yet, the contingency of the time we live in has its importance. As does the public debate in which politicians and the media are both creators and recipients of the country’s moods.

The risk of recession

A look at international and national newspapers explains well what I mean. For days and days now, starting from the stock market crash in early August, the world has been wondering about the risk of recession that scares the United States of America and, by definition, the entire world. The data of the real American economy indicate a tendency towards a slowdown, which could also become something longer, more lasting and painful than an episode. The markets fear that the Federal Reserve is proceeding with great – in their opinion: too much – caution and slowness in the process of lowering interest rates. As long as money continues to cost a lot, however, consumption will remain low, and this accentuates the risk of recession. The weakness of the labor market seems to confirm the validity of these concerns. However, in the United States inflation continues to be high, higher than in the euro area, and this would explain the reason for production in easing the monetary tightening, rapid and harsh, that the central banks had decided in the last two years. This is what the international media are talking about, and ours too, and an important part of the near future of the globe is at stake on these issues. It is obviously one of the issues that are at the center of the electoral debate for the American presidential elections, and should occupy that of all the ruling classes of the world: especially those who lead countries with a high public debt, and an economy geographically very heterogeneous in its fundamentals.

The eternal question of the beach resorts

In our country, beyond the analyses of editorialists and economists, the issue has not really reached the lips of the politicians that matter, neither in government nor in opposition. It will be said that if politicians speak, we criticize them for not acting, and if they are silent we scold them for not speaking. It is also true. However, the feeling is that this omission is more the result of indifference and cunning, which exploits the heat and popular distractions that in August are more efficient than ever, than the consequence of a silent industriousness of those who govern or of those who aspire to do so. Also because, on other dossiers, evidently and incredibly considered more relevant for the electoral and political constituency of the government, verbal and legislative activism is not lacking, indeed. Let’s think of the case of the beach workers, who with their two-hour mini-strike, a few days ago, have gained rivers of ink and attracted a lot of political attention. Why does a small strike by a small corporation attract so much attention, our Martian who watches the world from afar might ask? Because closing beach umbrellas in the middle of August can scare the consensus of the elected officials. And because that small corporation, composed of a few tens of thousands of voters, is very close to some members of the government majority, and has a certain power of blackmail. So strong that, to tell the truth, it has always obtained extensions to concessions and softening of European diktats, even when the left has governed – during these thirty years of discussion. From the newspapers we have learned, in any case, of a government in fibrillation.

Small lobbies out of time

Compared to many other problems, it is certainly a small thing, in economic terms: perhaps a few hundred million euros a year between tax evasion and missed collections of renewals. There are much more serious things, it is said, rightly. And yet, in addition to the fair consideration that many issues of little importance, put together, create a large public debt, there is another, more serious and important: the political issue of beach concessions, more than anything else, is a perfect metaphor for an Italian politics prey to small anachronistic lobbies. Which every summer, and with every change of European government, returns to manifest itself in these terms, for what it is. Like the fever of a country that thinks of itself and is thought of, by those who lead it, as an infinite sum of small particular interests, very often in conflict with a common interest and good. Like a myriad of legacies of privileges that come from the past and do not allow us to think about the future in an organic way, to propose an idea of ​​society that goes beyond what each small group thinks is fundamental for itself. After all, while the world is ending the Olympics, the universal event par excellence, and thinking about the recession, the global tragedy par excellence, we have been dealing with a few tens of thousands of business owners who, in defiance of a supranational law in force for about thirty years, remain clinging to their buckets full of sand. The same sand that, with regularity, empties the hourglass of opportunities of a country that does not seem to realize how its future is over, without ever having even begun.

TAGS: