"Si seppellisce uno zio e poi si va a lavorare"

Gli americani, sul Wall Street Journal, spiegano la via italiana al protezionismo europeo con l'esempio di Taranto...
In pratica il modo anglosassone di dire qualcosa senza dire nulla. Cronaca acritica alla maniera del "così vanno le cose in Italia", buttandoci dentro un po' di dati e un po' di dichiarazioni ben bilanciate.
Poi la chiusura del pezzo ricalca il professionismo distaccato della giornalista: contenta di aver archiviato il suo lavoretto e pronta ad una nuova avventura, chiude "il pezzo" senza una visione.
Come nella celebre gag di Peppino de Filippo... "Ho detto tutto!"

 

A Chokehold Choice in Italy's South
In Time of Austerity, Steel Plant Blamed for Hundreds of Deaths Is Allowed to Stay Open; Burying an Uncle, Then Going Back to Work

By STACY MEICHTRY - Associated Press

     Vincenzo Vestita suspects furnaces of Ilva SpA's steel factory in the southern town of Taranto gave his uncle lung cancer. Yet, shortly after he buried his uncle last month, Mr. Vestita went back to his own job at the same plant.
    "I'm obviously leaving myself exposed," says Mr. Vestita, 35 years old, who maintains machinery at the plant, which belches fumes deemed so dangerous that livestock has been banned from grazing within 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, of it. Unless the plant gets cleaned up, "everyone will have to make a choice" between jobs and health, he says.
     Ilva says the plant is compliant with Italian and European Union rules on air pollution. Still, with the plant producing about a third of Italy's steel supply, the dilemma Mr. Vestita describes looms large over Italy's impoverished southern Mezzogiorno region, the government of Mario Monti and the wider economy of the euro zone's third-largest country.
    For months, officials in Rome and prosecutors in Taranto have been tussling over whether Ilva is safe enough to stay open. A Taranto court last month ordered the plant sealed, after medical experts commissioned by the court said the plant's fumes had caused 386 deaths from 1998 to 2010.
    But the government last week reversed the court order, allowing the plant to keep operating while it executes a €3 billion ($3.9 billion) safety revamp.
    The government's decree has drawn a wave of local criticism. "Come down here and visit our children who have been ravaged by cancer," Tonia Marsella of the Women for Taranto, a local advocacy group, said in an open letter to Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano.
    Workers rally in Taranto on Nov. 27 after a court ordered the plant closed. The order has been reversed to keep the plant open. Yet the state intervention is also a measure of the determination of the government—like many of its counterparts in Europe—to protect existing economic activity at a time when budget-squeezing austerity measures are choking growth. Closing the plant would leave not just its 12,000 workers out of a job, but also through ripple effects dry up half-a-percent of Italian GDP and threaten to kill the country's chances at economic revival.
    Environment Minister Corrado Clini summed up the dilemma faced by the government: "The economic impact of closing this plant would not only be costly; it would impoverish national industry."
    The Taranto plant is one of the many Italian formerly-state-owned companies that have become mired in controversy after being sold by the state. The factory was opened by the state during Italy's postwar boom with the aim of creating thousands of jobs and narrowing the economic gap between the country's rich industrialized north and its poorer agriculture-based south.

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