The Greasiest Palms in the World

Photo courtesy of Ansa In Italy, a country on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s downright fucking silly how easy it is to secure a lifelong pension from parliament. All you need to do is participate in a single legislative session—even for just one day—and you’re guaranteed a payout of somewhere between $2,500 and $13,500 per month after “retirement.” Last year, Italians spent more than $275 million ensuring that former members of the Camera and Senato—the country’s legislative houses—were beyond comfortable in their dotage. A law passed in 1997 forbade MPs from collecting these pensions until the age of 65, but it wasn’t instated retroactively. So “legislators” like Angelo Pezzana, Pietro Graveri, Luca Boneschi, and Renè Andreani—each of whom physically spent only one day’s service in parliament—are now set for life. Disgusted as usual with the absurdity of Italian politics, I turned to Gian Antonio Stella, investigative reporter and best-selling author of La Casta (The Caste, a 2007 expose about the rampant corruption in Italian government) to try and wrap my head around just how bad things have become. VICE: Parliament’s pension scandal is just one in a series of astonishing abuses of power by Italian politicians. How much does something like this affect their already terrible reputation in the eyes of the average Italian citizen?
Gian Antonio Stella: Very much. The thing is, you can’t carry out reform if you don’t cut political costs. I would lose money if they changed the public pensions system, but I do believe it is a vital operation. The only way it can be pursued without people taking to the streets is to reform parliamentarians’ retirement pensions from the inside. It’s not justifiable to lower the pensions of average workers if you don’t first change the one received by members of parliament. Last year, the famously disgraced Italian politician [Piero] Marrazzo started earning a public pension at the age of 51. It’s ridiculous! What about the rule adopted in 1997? At least new MPs who weren’t grandfathered in to the pension system can’t exploit it, right?
There are lots of exceptions to the rule. The 1997 law is a fake reform. It only applies to members of parliament who are appointed post-2011. What kind of change is that? So what needs to change in order to ensure this doesn’t continue to happen?
Until right-wing voters demand more regulations, nothing is going to change. The problem is that today’s right-wing voters are too easy to satisfy. It seems like blowing up Palazzo Montecitorio [a palace in Rome housing the lower chamber of parliament] would be much easier. There’s nothing else that can be done on the ground level?
You can be sure that if voters get pissed, things are going to change. But as long as right-wing voters keep forgiving [recently resigned] Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is capable of taking a state-owned helicopter to a massage appointment, things are not going to change. And I’m talking about a helicopter belonging to the Italian police, just to be clear.