May 17th: Stop austerity! Stop privatizations!

Water, land, income, house, jobs, commons, social rights and democracy in Italy and Europe

Call for the construction of a nationalwide demonstration
in Rome (Italy) on May 17th

A new era in privatization of the commons, in attacks against our social rights and democracy is beginning.

The extraordinary victory achieved at 2011 water referendum shows that consent to a “private is better” ideology has ended and the multitude of open conflicts dealing with the defence of commons and local territories suggests the possibility and the urgency of a new social model. But crisis, built on the trap of public debt, is proposing again the ideology of “private is compulsory and indispensable” in a strong and fierce way.

The aim is clear: allow the enormous amount of money hoarded by financial markets to take possession of our country’s and Europe’s social wealthness, dictating a corrupt productive model, commodifying commons and alienating basic rights.

And the consequences are also clear: the dramatic depletion of wide population sectors, subdued to losing their jobs, income, access to services, to environmental damages and the resulting impacts on health, with alarming signs of social and individual desperation.

Renzi’s government, supported by the impressive mass media system and fully in continuity with his predecessors, is speeding up neo-liberal policies: the decree proposed by Welfare minister Poletti and the “Jobs Act” will make precariousness in jobs and in people lives irreversible; the pressure on local communities democratic spaces will force them to be subjected to environmental devastation, to big infrastructural projects, to “major events” and to financial and estate speculation; the public expense cuts will put at risk the right to health, to school and university and the preservation of environment and natural resources.

Looking at this project, it is democracy in itself to be questioned, by a neo- authoritarian pressure that is depriving legislative institutions from their representative value (in particular, with the new Electoral Law “Italicum”), is increasing the power of Executive and Prime Minister himself, and it is attacking the social and public function of local governments.

All those actions are taken in subjection of the political and financial élites governing the European Union, trying to destroy every kind of Welfare and to impose the commodification of commons, by using austerity policies, the imposition of financial bonds by the ECB, the Stability pact, the Fiscal compact and the imminent free trade agreement USA-EU (TTIP).

The complete Call for a nationalwide demonstration on May 17th

The Call in italian