WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, UCADI #185 - What's new - 15 Politics and business (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Judicial news reports on the activity of the Public Prosecutor's Office,

which is increasingly interested in investigating the relationships
between politicians and business and the buying and selling of votes
during the various electoral deadlines. The object of investigation are
the relationships that many local lists establish with the majorities
that are determined from time to time, offering to support with their
support uncertain and shaky councils, ready to ask to be rewarded for
having allowed the stability of local governments. There is one for
everyone: it ranges from Sicily, to Piedmont, to Puglia and, lastly, to
Liguria which certainly constitutes the most striking case among all of
these. The house arrest for the President of the Region and for other
political and business leaders have in fact created the temporary
paralysis of local institutions, focusing attention on the affairs that
revolve around the management of the port of Genoa, the state
concessions of public areas , the penetration of large-scale private
distribution in the Region (read Esselunga), the management of
landfills, while the activities and businesses that revolve around the
regional management of healthcare could not be missing.

I'm not doing it for my own pleasure...

The politicians would have pocketed, by declaring them, sums intended to
subsidize their political activities and aimed at making up for the lack
of public financing of politics. But the fact is that the mechanism
created favors some, the corruptors, and disadvantages others, who
either did not want to or did not want to was able to take part in the
appropriative division of public activities and goods. This large
availability of money, which would have been illicitly perceived, is
however aimed at obtaining consensus and not only through propaganda
activities, but also through the direct purchase of it, paying for each
single vote a sum ranging from 20 to 50 EUR, or by promising a change of
job or other perks.
We have no intention of being the ones to condemn or acquit those under
investigation, nor do we have the tools to ascertain the truthfulness of
the specific facts contested, but when this is happening it constitutes,
in our opinion, an opportunity to ask ourselves what it is today that
makes it possible, cronyism and the selling and buying of consensus are
becoming easier and more frequent.
Vote buying is certainly not a fact, neither new nor original, but it
characterizes all regimes and political systems in which people vote,
starting from ancient Athens, where vote trading took place even in the
agora.
What makes the phenomenon more widespread and worrying today is the
progressive reduction in the number of voters.
In other words, fewer and fewer votes are needed to win and govern; by
applying the laws relating to supply and demand, the value of the vote
becomes more attractive, inevitably rises, and the vote becomes a
precious opportunity for an exchange of favors, especially as the
growing distrust in politics makes various competitors
substantially equivalent alternatives. In other words, aware of the ever
decreasing importance of the vote, the voters, reduced to the gas barrel
by their living conditions or disgusted by the general climate of
dishonesty in politics, find nothing better than to make the sale of the
vote an opportunity to at least gain a utility material from an
irrelevant tool to see their choices affirmed. Lack of participation and
abstentionism therefore support each other and the degeneration of the
political class, of the elected representatives, serves as a
justification for the illicit behavior of the voters and at the same
time justifies their behavior.
We are convinced that the remedy for this situation is not to vote for
honest politicians, also because there is no doubt that it is the
opportunity that makes a man a thief, it is the material, structural and
legal conditions that determine behavior. Therefore we only see in the
modification of mandate democracy the possible guarantees for greater
and effective participation of all in the management of public interests
and activities.
We therefore believe that a clear and irrevocable mandate, subjected to
repeated and periodic verification mechanisms, is the only guarantee for
effective management of the institutions, in accordance with the
interests of the populations.
The proclaimed absence today of intermediate bodies, such as parties,
bearers of programs and ideas is a further element that impoverishes
politics which is essentially based on business committees that arise
and melt like snow in the sun, in the face of opportunities electoral
and which have the sole purpose of obtaining positions of control and
management of public interests in order to be able to distribute favors
and benefits.

In such a context, how surprising is what happens.

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/05/22/noi-siamo-ancora-qua/
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