The ESM and the WHO

a parliamentarian could not be denied secrecy!

The fact that I didn't know this was quite serious: evidently I hadn't studied enough. Whether Rivera didn't know it, however, was a bit difficult, or maybe not, considering the many "successes" he collected in his career as a civil servant .

But that's the past.

A law not supported by sanctions other than those of a political and reputational nature is not, in fact, a law (the excellent Prof. Moavero Milanesi is not sorry): practically all relationships between our Parliament and the European Parliament take place in violation or disapplication of that law, without knowing where to turn (to the Constitutional Court?… Never mind…), and therefore we can say that practice reigns supreme (and that's okay). There was the political sanction for this abominable incorrectness: the vote on 21 December against ratification. This matters, and we leave the rest to our memories.

The fact is that I had missed the television broadcast of 3 December 2019, which also followed a parliamentary broadcast in which Claudio, again consulting with me, had asked me (on 29 November) to mention the episode, and this gave me the opportunity to review and secure a few things.

For example, the chat where that Whatsapp had been spread.

This is one of the 64 groups in common with Claudio, to which must be added at least another 37 in which Claudio does not participate (like he will have in which I do not participate), all created for the coordination of parliamentary activities at various levels (with members of the Government, without members of the Government, with allies, without allies, limited or not limited to the offices of the Presidency, limited or not limited to a branch of Parliament, joint with several Commissions, dedicated to a particular measure – for example the budget law – or to a particular thematic area, etc.). And here I am obviously talking about the previous legislature, from which not all the groups were inherited (some were redone taking into account the new roles and the new composition of the groups, others fell into disuse, etc.). To say, and to make it clear what an "economics department head" does, of the 64 groups in common with Claudio, 35 were set up by me, 3 by him, and 26 were set up by around twenty other various subjects (eight were created by government members, four by collaborators, others by parliamentary colleagues…). When someone points out that there is a lot of work that cannot be seen, they are right! And the most thankless but essential part of the job is coordinating the work of others, which is done mainly by message: the most practical way of keeping everyone aligned, of commenting on the press review, of sharing draft documents, of making quick appointments in clippings of classroom time, etc. It's the three hours a day that I spend on Whatsapp on average, "playing" with my phone (according to the statistics fascists), often to raise the balls that others crush: the machine man lives in the shadows, and that's okay. This, moreover, is one of the many reasons why the rhetoric of "pure proportional" with which "erbobolobuonogiustoesando" would elect "erijorerepresentanteviscinoarderidorio" does not particularly convince me. Such a mechanism creates a system of incentives that pushes us to make useless mess (to have visibility on the "ridicule"), not useful work.

But we will talk about this on other occasions.

I thus retraced the history of that very small group (the one that ended up on the Omnibus screen):

discovering something that I had forgotten: that group, which is still the most active today, had been created on the afternoon of 12 June 2019 in response to an emergency condition: we knew that Conte was about to approve a reform of which we did not know the contents and we had to manage this unfortunate situation. I remember the anguish of those days, the anger with which we experienced the impossibility of directing "our" Government, of ensuring Conte's loyalty in the European offices (a difficulty widely exemplified by this episode ), the embarrassment of the officials, the effort to maintain coolness in the face of a dangerous dissembler…

Here, in thinking of those moments, of the meetings in Chigi's yellow living room, of the whispers exchanged in the antechamber, of the bewilderment of the allies, of so many excited emotions, of the fact that on that matter, five years ago, we had made Conte fall (because what the idiots call the Papeete had actually been the speech in Pescara, and behind that speech there was also this episode, which had finally convinced me and Claudio too, good last men, that we should go through with the "spinners", which were the vast majority, and I would say the totality of the members of the Government…), in thinking about all this I felt like making some reflections on time, on the fruits it bears, and on the wear and tear it causes.

Start from here.

When, on 21 December last year, I spoke in the chamber :

giving back to many little Ephialtes what I owed them, when I crushed the serpent's head by pressing the red button, I did not feel that joy, that feeling of liberation, which five years earlier, if I had been able to imagine that moment, I would have thought I would feel. The sensation was the one known to those who read Proust:

But then again, one hour after I am revealed, the woman of the hairdresser's instructions so that she knows her hair doesn't get out of hand, she thinks about it, the revit, as the previous ones felt before him, I feel sorry for her 'Odette, the trop maigres joues, the drawn traits, the yeux battus, tout ce que – au cours des successive tendresses here avaient made of son lasting love for Odette a long oubli de l'image première qu'il avait reçue d'elle – the avait ceased to remarquer once the first times of your liaison dans lesquels sans doubt, pendant qu'il sleeping, sa mémoire en avait été chercher la sensation exacte. And with this intermittent mufflery here repaired that he is the one who is no longer ill-tempered and who has given up on the same level of morality, he says to himself: « Say that I have seen the years of my life come, that I want to die, that I have the greatest love, for a woman who doesn't please me, who doesn't like me! »

Yes, okay, I had, we had won, but then? So many passions, so many efforts, to what end?

In the 1653 days that have passed since that 12 June 2019 we had left many friends on the street who would have wanted to witness that moment: from Antonio to Emanuele (and Marco narrowly made it), but in addition to these justified absentees we had lost along the way many… I don't know how to define them: grillini? Imbeciles? Cowards? Surely many weak people (of intellect and temperament) incapable of understanding that to push that button on December 21st, they had to get there on December 21st, and that many choices they didn't understand had only one logic: that of resisting, of holding the position.

Yes, to crush the ESM (and Draghi) Draghi had to be taken care of: there was no other path, and if those who didn't understand it ex ante were justified, because ex ante we too had many doubts and hesitations, who doesn't want to understand it ex post it's just a despicable helminth. And the sadness, in this case, is not so much in having lost such slimy ballast along the way, but in not having realized that we had loaded it on board, in having deluded ourselves into having joined, speaking with rationality and sincerity since I had everything to lose in doing so, equally rational and sincere people. It was not like this. The insults of fools had caused a certain wear and tear. It was, more than anything, the disappointment of not being able to share the achievement of an objective even with those who had apparently shared it, but had not managed, with their own mind, to share the means to achieve it. We didn't choose these means! With a 40% League, things would have gone differently, obviously. You had largely chosen these means, and there was something unfair, and even exhausting, in the fact that you came to hold them against us. Just to be clear, if we had left the Ursula majority free to operate in Italy, the reform of the ESM would also have passed immediately.

Wear and tear, therefore, and the inability to enjoy, even for a moment, on an emotional level, the objective achieved.

Certain.

But in the meantime the objective had been achieved, and this told us that 1653 days later we were not in the same condition as 1653 days before: we had brought home, by choosing the only path that history had made practicable for us, an objective that you had given us asked to take home. We showed you that voting, and waiting, is useful. Also because, to be honest, that story did not begin on June 12, 2019, but much earlier. The story of the ESM reform for us began with this exchange of messages in another coordination chat with Brussels:

(obviously put together by the usual known person), but our attention went back a long way, it dated back to that phone call from 2012 ("Professòòòòòòre!"), and in short, you can find some of the work done here .

Twelve years of work for a victory which I have not been able to rejoice in as much as I would have imagined, but which still indicates progress, which, between us, makes it incomprehensible to me the attitude of many who want to deny that victories have been achieved, and who abandon themselves to despair and defeatism.

I also had another thought to make.

Claudio's famous tweet on the MES , published on 28 June 2023, had received one million views on 19 July, i.e. 21 days later. The tweet about the WHO , published on February 11 this year, is still at one million today, that is, 56 days later ( on World Health Day, by the way ). In short, the WHO issue travels at half the speed. Yet, looking out into the black sewer, for a while it seemed that you cared about nothing more than defending yourselves from the WHO and its management of global health!

From here too, in my opinion, there are a couple of lessons to be learned, and they are conflicting.

The first is that we shouldn't listen to you: the shouters are a minority, mostly in the vast majority of cases animated by the sole desire to steal votes from us, not to solve problems, and therefore it's better not to care about them and not give them trouble. After all, if the numbers aren't there, then they can't be seen: exactly as they aren't being seen under the WHO tweet (for goodness sake, a million is a million, but if you have many followers and keep a post pinned, sooner or later there will be Arrivals:

The point is how long it takes to get there: if there are numbers you'll get there quickly, as in the case of the ESM, if instead the numbers seem to be there, but they aren't there, because the ones making the noise are the usual four cats who are also enemies , don't get there quickly).

The second is that you have to listen to it, you have to dedicate time to it. The ESM reform concerns your wallet, and it is quite an esoteric thing ( single limb CACS , qualified majorities, subscribed and paid-up capital, SRF backstop : are you sure you all know what we are talking about?). The WHO concerns your skin and it is quite explicit: "the next time you sneeze we will lock you in the house and throw away the key" (I'm trivialising, but in short we understand each other: lockdown is a more intelligible word than backstop ). We have often wondered why the ESM reform attracted so much attention. We haven't asked ourselves yet, perhaps we will do so tomorrow after reading this post, why the WHO, which is ultimately a more serious but also more containable danger (given that it does not find the unanimity at a global level that the ESM had found in European level) fails to mobilize as much attention, moreover in a public that should be galvanized by the fact of having just achieved an important victory, that on the ESM (but galvanized it is not: this is demonstrated by the numbers of the #midterm and those of the tweet WHO). I believe the answer is, precisely, that we need to listen to you, that we need to dedicate time to it. Behind the tweet on the ESM there were over ten years of work, done in particular here, in many discussions, then in all the meetings organized by a/simmetrie , in countless public meetings of ours around Italy. The WHO theme was born on Twitter, there is no healthcare Goofynomics (there are many good guys, but…), the underlying work in popular terms is therefore relatively inferior, beyond the clamor of a few Erinyes often shouting about nothing … on nothing and from nothing comes nothing, or at least little. And this is perhaps another explanation of why certain themes are more exciting than others: because they have longer roots.

But perhaps there is yet another: what brought us together here was the awareness of how dangerous, as well as odious, the European institutions were, and the ESM belongs to their unfortunate group. It was not easy, unfortunately, perhaps because little was invested in it (I wrote a book and some posts , but evidently the core business was another) to convey the awareness that the problem is a little broader, that the institutions that exercise an invasive power over our lives, all the more difficult to contain the more indirect and subtle, are all those of globalization, and therefore the WHO, but also the OECD (which has so much to say and advise for example on our children or on our pensions ), the IEA (which has so much to say about the left's new fetish, the climate ), etc.

To return to being arbiters of our destiny it is as necessary to free ourselves from the European noose as from the network of this soft power . Definitely a vast programme , I won't argue with that. But if we managed to get rid of the ESM, we could also get rid of the WHO. There are two conditions: believe it, and be present.

For this reason, those who have not yet done so should go and support Claudio's tweet, and remember that there is still room in the # midterms : it is up to you to give the signal, and the first mistake not to make is to think that " another will give it anyway."