2023-08-04 23:41:17
The concept of accountability, expressed by the English word meaning “to take responsibility and account for the actions taken”, seems to have been lost in the context of Italian political life. Here is the interesting and clear article by Elena Basile published by Arianna Editrice:
author: Elena Basile – Title: “Piano Mattei, fake sovereigns and other jokes”
The English word accountability conveys well the meaning of what has been lost in Italian political life. It could be translated with a periphrasis: “take responsibility and account for one’s work”. It is clear to the citizen that politicians, institutions, even journalists and cultural operators are free from such a burden essential to liberal and democratic civilization.
Examples could be many. Journalists who predicted Russia’s economic collapse and a change of power in Moscow pontificate about Russia’s likely military defeat, not at all embarrassed by their earlier erroneous predictions. Novels awarded and pumped by the market sometimes do not meet any literary requirement, but the advertising machines, critics, publishing houses and friends continue undisturbed to destroy the culture.
The government of Meloni’s “sovereign” right implements a program in foreign policy and in Europe that could have been of the Democratic Party and the center-left. Voters remain loyal to the staggering belief that the president has no alternative if she is to stay in power.
Decisions are made elsewhere. Finance, large multinationals pull the strings of political puppets. Serious sociological investigations have illustrated how the president of the United States is elected thanks to the agreement of these strong powers.
There is nothing automatic and deterministic. Human action is full of unexpected events. But, as demonstrated by the absence of participation in politics except for sectoral interests and the very abstention from voting, the thread that linked civil society and institutions until the 1980s has broken.
Let’s take the Mediterranean policy. Diplomats and new penal traders are busy illustrating the so-called Mattei Plan. Shamelessly a mythical name is used. Enrico Mattei turns in his grave. The great entrepreneur, who paid with his life for the courage to pursue the national interest against that of the “seven sisters”, the political goal that believed in the common good of Mediterranean and African states, is snatched from the collective memory and exploited to today’s carnivals.
The prime minister (but Draghi or others of the centre-left would not have done otherwise) genuflects to US military and economic requests, renounces Italian commercial interests in relations with Beijing, gives alms without obtaining a different IMF policy towards Tunisia, and appoints without any shame Enrico Mattei to refer to the energy plan between Italy and Africa as an energy supplier. No journalist or economist takes the trouble to explain why decades of European Mediterranean policy (from the 1995 Barcelona process to the 2008 UPM) have failed despite the efforts of egalitarian partnership, codecision, holistic and non-sectoral approach.
Some brilliant colleagues even maintain that NATO, given the mention of the Southern Flank in the long-winded and illegible final communiqué in Vilnius, will open the doors to a different kind of cooperation with the North African countries. Mattei, starting in 1958, had stipulated energy agreements with the USSR in favor of Italian economic development against the oligopoly of the multinationals.
The Italian government exploits its name as it binds itself hand and foot to expensively sold US energy and fragmented sources of supply with volatile-tempered dictatorships.
The citizen, in reading some newspapers, feels a terrible sense of mockery.
Mieli makes good television programs, recently a historical reconstruction of the Cuban revolution. However, he feeds us articles in which he describes the end of the corn deal as a unilateral decision by the bad wolf. He forgets to list the conditions stipulated in the agreement and not fulfilled starting from the failure to lift sanctions on spare parts of Russian agricultural machinery to the refusal of the Russian agricultural bank to join the Swift payment system. He is silent on the percentages of wheat exported (80% to European countries, 3% to Africans) which according to Oxfam would not solve the problems of emerging countries, but would help limit food inflation in rich countries.
How many intellectuals and institutional representatives lend themselves to these games in bad faith with moralistic appeals in favor of emerging countries, losing the objective vision of what is happening on the international scene? The disconcerting feeling is that the elites in power in Europe and their ‘watchdogs’ have sold their souls and that politics like the economy and culture are only technique. We now live in an eternal Barbie, a film of sublime visuality devoid of content and with a demented script.
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So what happened here, Biden warned that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni posed a huge threat to democracy when she got elected but embraced her upon discovering she’s pro war in Ukraine?
— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) July 29, 2023
#reflection #Italian #accountability #politics