A-Infos (en) Italy, Umanita Nova #23/25 - Taranto: ILVA and more (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Taranto, a "laboratory city," where environmental disasters, military 
occupation, and health care-in short, "power"-has succeeded in its 
greatest aspirations: dividing a people, starving them, and sowing death 
in the name of profit. It might be said that all this happens almost 
everywhere; it's well known that dividing a people has always served to 
perpetuate its rule without any popular resistance. But here, it's 
different: power has managed to go further. Through a multi-pronged 
operation, it has managed to impact the conscience of our people, 
causing disappointment, disaffection, habituation, and the abandonment 
of any form of struggle, building and fostering prevailing individualism.

Struggles usually create collective consciousness, love for one's 
territory, organization, and collective memory, even when they aren't 
victorious.

The State, in its "City State," has managed to go further: it has 
succeeded in spectacularizing dissent.

Since the largest popular uprising in 2012, in which a multitude raised 
the issue of health and employment in an angry and joyful struggle, the 
state has prepared, as it has in the past, to laboratory-build devices 
that will fascinate the people (individuals willing to sell their charm 
in order to satisfy state logic and personal interests) and to amplify 
the hypertrophy of the egos of doctors, chemists, artists, lawyers, 
professors, fixers, and new professional politicians unwilling to admit 
the betrayals of their political parties.

To the people and for the people, incomprehensible words that generate 
confusion: AIA (Integrated Environmental Authorization), PIC (Capital 
Investment Plan), VIS (Health Impact Assessment), Article 15, program 
agreement, regasification ship, decarbonization, pre-reduced, electric 
furnaces, compensation, motivated dissent that will perhaps turn into 
unmotivated assent. But the people have already condemned them; they 
know about them, they just didn't vote! And while acknowledging the 
validity of scientific data produced in the past, the public is no 
longer willing to pursue ILVA on legal grounds, which only serves to 
prolong the process and stoke anger, allowing the company to continue 
producing deaths for the people of Taranto, debts we will all have to 
pay, and profits for the owners.

The city community no longer needs to know the peaks of each substance 
emitted. Suffice it to recall that in 2012, the Taranto Public 
Prosecutor's Office estimated more than 11,000 deaths in seven years 
linked to ILVA emissions and a lung cancer incidence rate of more than 
50% above the regional average in the working-class Tamburi 
neighborhood, near the ILVA plant. Arsenic, lead, and dioxin were 
detected in soil and homes at up to 20 times the legal limits: in 50 
years, red dust has covered streets, schools, and even gravestones in 
the cemetery. The people of Taranto know that every family has been 
affected by a loss, by an illness caused by pollution; the fishermen 
know that the sea is no longer the same; the doctors know-without 
needing INAIL data, perhaps even a conservative estimate, given that 
INAIL is the state and not the local workers' representative-that 
illnesses are on the rise and are causing death, and that treatment has 
become a privilege for the few; the lawyers know that reimbursements, 
even if they were granted, will not help to ease the pain of an entire 
community.

And now, even the people know that self-pity is no longer helpful.

Those who should have done so have refused to face the health-work 
blackmail for all these years because they were complicit in a culture 
of subservience to the military and political hierarchies of this country.

With the Puglia region increasingly playing a leading role in the 
rearmament and militarization process sponsored by the Meloni 
government, ILVA could also play its part and receive funds earmarked 
for rearmament, as it is considered a strategic military asset.

In the same Taranto area, a few kilometers from ILVA, another 
contaminating company operates, with equally polluting emissions and an 
equally active role in the militarization process: ENI. Indeed, ENI 
itself is present in Palestinian territory for gas exploitation and 
maintains economic relations with Israel, responsible for the Gaza genocide.

In the same process, government funds are earmarked for the expansion of 
the military bases in Taranto and Brindisi to allow large Italian and 
European aircraft carriers to reach the docks of the city's historic 
centers.

ILVA will therefore continue to operate as long as it suits military 
interests (e.g., NATO) and "state capitalism."

And the people of Taranto are no longer satisfied with the buck-passing 
between the national government, the regional government, and the 
municipality, which only serves to generate confusion, but has a 
specific objective, desired and shared by all: Keeping the ILVA machine 
afloat, prolonging the process to continue sowing pollution and death.

An initial attempt to neutralize the struggle was made with the 
appointment as Environment Councilor of an environmental activist from 
the Europa Verde list (on the Alleanza Verdi Sinistra list, to be clear, 
the same list as President Vendola, who was intercepted in the 2016 
"Ambiente Svenduto" investigation into the environmental disaster caused 
by the ILVA steelworks in Taranto). This was soon challenged by citizens 
protesting against the planned landfill in Taranto's working-class Paolo 
VI neighborhood.

The small talk promised in opaque press conferences-far removed from the 
citizens' needs-and the farcical resignation of the newly elected Mayor 
due to "political unfitness," which he withdrew shortly thereafter, seem 
intended to transform the legitimate popular protest into a public order 
problem and advance the militarization of a territory in the name of 
security.

The same idea of security is constantly used to expel the population 
from the historic city center, aiming to make it merely an attractive 
showcase for developers and new adventurers.

Transforming non-voting into anger, building a collective path to 
reconstitute the class, beyond the old logic of self-celebration and 
personalism: this is the task of those who have always resisted, of 
those who love the people, of those who continue to live in this land 
and in their community.

Therefore, launching a tenacious and continuous self-organized and 
antimilitarist struggle, aiming in the near future for a social strike 
with a blockade of the city and the factory, will serve to defend our 
lives and the freedom of all.

Cosimo Cassetta

https://umanitanova.org/taranto-ilva-e-non-solo/
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