Author: Jacques René Zammit

Categories
Politics

The politics of serenity

I don’t know whether Carm Mifsud Bonnici has his own facebook account – though I know that he does blog on a regular basis. If he does have a facebook account – or if he did – it would be fitting if his current status read “serene”. He told reporters that felt serene both before and after the vote of confidence and this because he was prepared for every eventuality. Kudos to Carm Mifsud Bonnici who has opted to put on a brave display of cool, calm and a very Christian (democrat) form of zen. It is no coincidence that the emotional and physical behaviour of Mifsud Bonnici provide a stark contrast to the picture of a power hungry, angry and revengeful Franco Debono.

Joseph Muscat may have stressed the fact that this government (read the parliamentary group) remains divided and that no amount of confidence motions survived with the speaker’s vote or that of a recalcitrant Debono will improve the situation but the leader of the progressive movement may be missing the wood for the trees. The lack of political acumen in Labour is ever so glaringly obvious when they persist in error. The very rift that caused glee among labourite supporters and among those nationalists who are dying to spite GonziPN by seeing the end of it is the very foundation upon which the nationalist party’s potential revival is built upon.

How I hear you ask? Well to begin with the issue of the CMB motion was an eye opener of itself. Politics as it should be was nowhere to be seen. You may get the sweeping statements about the “unjust justice system” and you may have an opposition spokesman turning a list of grievances about the courts, the police and the laws into a show of unhappiness. What we did have in actual terms however was a bloodthirsty attack at the throat of an ex-Minister – for by the time the motion was presented (and amended into a call for resignation) that was what CMB had become.

If the subject of the motion had been the supposedly disastrous state of affairs in the justice ministry then the only resignation that should have been demanded – and a symbolic one at that – should have been of the Minister currently in charge of the portfolio. That would be Minister Chris Said. So many lessons of ministerial responsibility, collective responsibility, governmental responsibility had been given in press conferences and long-winded speeches that one would have expected this motion to be directed at the right person. But no.

And it is evident why not. Because politics and responsibility had nothing to do with this motion. Whether or not you agree with the ills that befell our justice and security systems in the past few years, your cause, your petita was not considered one bit. Instead – as has been widely documented – this was a vendetta. It was personal.

J’accuse has elsewhere complained about the use of certain terminology in politics. The martyr complex, the excessive descriptions of “suffering” and “hurt”. A large part of our voting masses reason in these terms. It is no crude calculation on the basis of policies but rather a complex build up of emotions where a partisan DNA struggles with feeling of entitlement, chips on the shoulder and some weird collective illusion that politicians suffer whenever they “serve” the people.

Carm Mifsud Bonnici’s serene acceptance of the inevitable outcome of the vendetta plot is no cup of hemlock. It is a rallying call. Strategically the moment of serenity is a necessary stroke of genius. Given that the political battle on a national level seems to have taken the direction of being fought out on the emotional rather than the factual fields then might as well take the cue early in this pre-election run. Mifsud Bonnici’s serenity comes out stronger when contrasted to the actions of his self-appointed nemesis Debono and that of the braying power-or-nothing pitchfork gang on the benches of the opposition.

We would have thought that exposing the absolute vacuum that is Labour’s sum total of projects and preparedness for its time in government would have been enough for PN to have a field day. On second thoughts and having seen the latest events unfold we cannot but applaud the emotional counter-moves that have begun to surface. If anything it will distract attention from the embarassing gaffes being committed in the social marketing field – better known as the mychoice.pn campaign.

Categories
Mediawatch Politics

Malta Post-Franco (Reprise)

Discussing the Franco Debono situation over lunch yesterday, we joked that his statement of “I will not vote with Labour” (as reported by MaltaToday) meant just that. Admittedly our considerations were more in jest than anything else but we considered the possibility that Franco was using his very literal form of reasoning in the sense that “not voting with Labour” does not necessarily mean voting otherwise.

I must admit that given the information earlier that morning I too was surprised by the outcome of the final vote. Surprised to a certain extent though. While I had not seen Franco’s vote coming I was fully aware of the consequences of this vote in the sense that there would be no great collapsing of government, no tumbling down of the temples of power and that the only “victim” of this latest fit would be Carm Mifsud Bonnici.

Incidentally we had also joked that since the motion of confidence had concerned a portfolio that was no longer in CMB’s remit then technically there was nothing to resign from once the vote passed. I know, it’s no laughing matter but the way things were going laughter did seem to be the best medicine. The whole body politic has been in the thrall of Franco Debono’s voting antics for quite some time now. As we pointed out in an earlier series of posts (Malta Post Franco I-IV), Franco is doomed to be a temporal blip in political history.

Sure a record might be broken here and there – such as the forcing of a resignation of a minister (within living memory) but the long-term impact of Franco on the Maltese political landscape was always intrinsically linked with the one-seat majority that the nationalist party enjoys (ah, the cruelty of language) in parliament. The content of Franco’s agenda (or whatever screen he has put up to disguise any personal ambitions and compensation for suffering) is all watered down when seen from a long-term perspective.

In two matters Franco has been unintentionally and unwittingly useful. Firstly his protracted theatricals have served to exposed one major weakness of our representative democracy. The obsession with guaranteeing a bi-partisan approach and discarding all other models (such as one that encourages proportional representation) has meant for some time now that the JPO’s and Debonos of this world expose the stark reality of “election or bust” oriented parties without a backbone. This is a weakness that no “premio maggioranza” would solve , rather, it would only serve to entrench the two parties further in their twisted machinations.

The second useful matter concerns the Labour party. Franco’s bluff and no bluff has actually uncovered the Labour party’s brash “power or nothing” approach that discards any conventional value-driven approach while grafting the ugliest versions of the nationalist party to what it believes to be its own benefit. Valueless politics giving way to full blown marketing was already bad enough. Now we have Labour with it’s catastrophic approach. Muscat’s Labour has shot itself in the foot so many times it probably lacks any limbs.

There is a third, important conclusion that one should add. It is the ugly reflection about the “general public”. A large swathe of it – or the particularly active part of it – have proven to be ridiculously hopeful of the promises that Franco seems to have bandied about. His pet subjects were manna to the ears of the disgruntled – particularly conspiracy theories peppered with mantras about arrogance, cliques and friends of friends. His tales of hurt and suffering – culminating in the infamously comic “broken chair in Court” episode could only strike home if the audience were (how can I put it) less informed.

To conclude, the merry go round that risks being extended once Franco misses out on the latest redistribution of power has exposed huge fault lines in our appreciation of how a basic democracy should function. Separation of powers,  judicial authority, parliamentary privileges, public security and rights were all melded together in one big bouillabaisse of political convenience.

Franco’s minutes in the political playing field are now counted. We should have moved on from gazing at Franco months ago, yet we (and the press have much to blame for this) are still at the mercy of his idea of a guessing game. The real politics that will affect out lives for the coming five to ten years lie far away from Franco’s hand. Sadly, nobody seems to be bothered to find out what what those politics and policies really are or will be.

…

from Malta Post-Franco (II)

To get at Austin Gatt, Joe Saliba, Carm Mifsud Bonnici, Richard Cachia Caruana and others Franco Debono decided that the best option was to threaten to topple government. He had had enough waiting in the sidelines for his opinions and ideas to be heard and for a place in the decision making clique that counts. So he refused to play.

Categories
Politics

PM.pn – auctioning off the prime minister

I’m afraid that I may be a little late on this one since I was still lounging by the pool when this “initiative” made the headlines. To be quite honest when I first heard of it I thought it was a joke – a funny “tickle me under the arms” affair that goes by the name of satire these days. Could it be that the lads at Bis-Serjetà pulled off another “The Onion” inspired headline?  Sadly my first hunch was wrong and the Partit Nazzjonalista was really offering its followers a chance to “become PM for a day” (and win an iPad 3 to boot).  Here is how the Independent reported the possible winnings (PN launches “Be PM for a day”):

The winner of this contest will be handed the opportunity to propose one particular idea or project, as well as naming his or her own members of Cabinet and members of parliament from their acquaintances. The winner will spend a whole day with the Prime Minister on Tuesday, 19 June during which he or she will get to meet the press, tour the corridors of Castille, and discuss policy ideas with Dr Gonzi.

Now this idea of “reaching out” to the public by one of our two political parties smacks of “wrong” in so many ways that I risk missing out on some of them if I do not turn them into a “list”. In these days when marketing and snazzy websites might trump content many people might think that this move is actually “good”, we beg to differ and here is why:

1. PN (a party) – PM (a head of government)

The first and most obvious objection to this crass exercise of X Factor meets Castille is the fact that a party initiative, kicking off from a party website is auctioning off the role of a government position. Not just any government position but THE BIG KAHUNA. It’s the PM seat for chrissakes and they are not even playing make believe. For it would be one thing if the winner would “fake” being Prime Minister and play along in a sort of re-enactment with his friends and the press… you know a sort of King Carnival but for politics. But it’s another thing when our Prime Minister is actually part and parcel of the prize. Which brings me to point two…

2. Does not PM Gonzi have better things to do?

After all what with all these ridiculous motions by the opposition, an economy to hold steady and a government with that perilous one seat majority you would expect a Prime Minister to spend his time in better ways than prancing around with a make believe duplicate addressing press releases about fancy projects from the citizen. What does he expect them to come up with? Something fantastical? A tunnel to Gozo perhaps?

3. The Miseducation of Joe Citizen

Once we’re on this play acting business, even if we were prepared to play along with the party game then there is the not too irrelevant business of education. If we really are trying to get something out of this exercise how about not drumming home the idea that the PM is such a powerful man that he names “his or her own members of Cabinet and members of parliament from their acquaintances”. I mean for crying out loud do they not even stop and read what they propose? A PM choosing members of parliament? From their acquaintances? What shall we call it? “Il-parlament tal-ħbieb (tal=ħbieb) tal-Prim Ministru”? A prime minister does not choose members of parliament – the people do. That’s lesson number one in basic democratic skills innit?

4. Tour the corridors of Castille and discuss policy

Seriously. I was under the impression that Castille had its open days during the nuits blanches that are thrown every now and then. Anybody could get to walk into Castille and shake Dr Gonzi’s hand. As for policy – this is running a bit thin isn’t it? I mean is this the best “listening” the PN can do?

The “Be a PM for a day” is an exercise that would be more fitting in Azerbaijan than in Malta. Yet it is happening and the danger is that it is actually being taken seriously by the fourth estate and the voters who are meant to be more demanding on our politicians and their parties. What next? Shall we bring Simon Cowell in to evaluate the contestants? After all guys like Christian Peregin might have a conflict of interest selecting the winner while also interviewing them on the day they got to play PM.

Strength and resilience. Lord knows that we’re going to need much of those till election time.

 

Categories
Politics

The Cantankerous Voter

The leader in this week’s Economist advocates a form of financial federalism as a sort of Plan B to combat the economic crisis. Europe has moved far from the “deepening vs widening” debates of the mid-nineties. After Maastricht the questions being asked were mainly with regard to the various geometries that the next step of integration would take and how far would states go in relinquishing sovereignty to a higher order. Then came the euro.

The launching of the single currency was meant to be a grand step in the wider project of integration. A european construct that had been built on the foundations of economic incentives and integration could not but rejoice in having its own single currency. One interesting remark in the Economist appreciation of the causes behind the euro crisis was with regard to this very moment of crystallisation – when Europe got its own coin.

In fact the euro came around a good sixty years into the roller-coaster ride that was gradual european unification. For most of that sixty years Europe had been built on the safe assumption that the project was one very good way to avoid the return to the bad habits of internecine warfare that had plagued the old continent from time immemorial. More importantly the constitutive demos of this project could be sold a series of integrative steps without having too much of a say in it.

The post-war generation did not need reminding that having the Germans and French sitting at a table discussing mutual improvement was much much more preferable than Blitzkrieg and the travails of la resistance. Up until the early nineties this meant an institutional construct that had glaringly obvious deficiencies in its democratic structures. The symbiosis between Council, Commission and Parliament together with the occasional wink from the court in Luxembourg delivered results – top among which was the huge relief that this was an ever growing club of nations NOT GOING TO WAR WITH EACH OTHER.

By the time the euro was launched the face of the demos had changed radically. Old threats and bogeys had either been long forgotten or been dropped along the way. 1989 and the disappearance of the big menace behind the Iron Curtain were also factors that distanced the link between the benefits of mutual cooperation on the one hand and the benefits of cooperation on the other.

The euro was born on the brink of world economic meltdown. A post 9/11 US was also reeling from its failed financial bets and the European crisis followed suit in the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Europe’s baby was not exactly a crowd pleaser. The demos could only associate the euro with trouble – trouble of the worst kind that takes money out of pockets, destroys jobs and voraciously devours any dreams of prosperity,

The challenge of the European union and its leaders is to continue to sell the project for its benefits beyond the facile association with euro tinged misery. From Greece to France to Malta whether the demos will be able to relatch to a promise and a new european dream will depend on how the plan for the future is revealed and sold.

More importantly it depends on whether there is a plan that involves the kind of cooperation and integration that made the first half-century of European union such an outstanding success…. in spite of the feelings of doom that are all-pervading right now.

Categories
iTech

Facebook, Privacy and Deactivation (a list)

I chose midnight last Sunday as the time and day to deactivate my Facebook account. My personal Facebook account that is, if anything such as a personal Facebook account really exists. I’ve been asked “Why?” and been warned “Don’t” as though the issue of whether or not to have a FB account is a matter of life and death. Meanwhile the bliss of deleting the FB app from both my iPhone and the iPad was followed by a tiny semblance of withdrawal symptoms – would I be suddenly “out of the loop”?

Deactivation is not deletion. I still have the option to reactivate and log back in as though nothing ever happened. “We were on a break”. But why deactivate? I don’t have one reason. I have a series of unordered thoughts that have been running through my head for a while and here they are in no particular order (that’s the unordered bit).

1. The Not So Social Network

When Mr Mark Zuckerberg decided that Facebook should go public he added a letter to the IPO (initial public offering) application that he filed. In that letter he spoke in glowing terms of Facebook’s mission. Facebook is not a company he said. Facebook has a social mission, he said. The mission, he said, was to make the world more open and connected.  Connections, change, networking. The long, long letter is full of this kind of vision. It was Google’s “Do no Evil” with an added bout of logorrhea. You would not be investing in a company but in a social mission. Zuckerberg did not tell us why Caritas, AA, the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontières – to mention a few – haven’t yet listed their social missions on some stock exchange.

But hey. This is the internet. The internet is now linked to financial bubbles and at 38 dollars a share buying a part of facebook just meant going along with the trend/myth of dot com investments. Kudos to Mr Zuckerberg for managing to sell his “social mission”. In one week facebook shares have plummeted and “16 million dollars have been shed in market capitalisation”. I don’t know if that is good or bad. I don’t care. I just find the idea that Facebook has any kind of social mission in mind very very risible.

The first thing I don’t like about Facebook is the way it is about anything other than your ability to control the spread of information about yourself. Sure, you choose what to put on Facebook but then again – do you? There is a huge gap between the promise of freedom of networking and the constant impulse of FB to get you to share, share, share.

The first thing I don’t like about Facebook is that it is sharing via force feeding.

2. The Sheep’R’Us

When you first registered on Facebook it was to be connected. Then we added and added friends. Then, at a time when Google Circles were still a pie in the sky we had no way to distinguish between your College Alumni, your Sport Friends and the freaks who post weird stuff on walls late at night. For a while it got interesting. Campaigns went viral on facebook, the like button provided instant gratification that had not been seen on the internet since the early days of Yahoo Categories and we just posted and posted. Faster internet meant more possibilities of “sharing” video, photo, apps. And the games? Do you remember the first time you opened Farmville, spent five minutes trying to grow some shit then wondering “what the fuck?”. Some people still use farmville.

Do you remember the pokes? They too seem to have fucked off to a worse dimension. We were left with walls, posts, and “threads” of absolute bull. Because whether five idiots meet on the street or whether they meet virtually their collective contribution to humanity is just about equal. It’s not like every chat on facebook has to be a Zizek-Hitchens debate but you could sense a collective dumbing down suddenly beginning to take shape. It was not even the “good morning I’m having toast” crowd that finally did it. It was the general feeling that having an opinion suddenly meant that once was right. And facebook reinforced that. Photos, opinions, videos merged into one miasma of a collective skip.

And you got lost in the crowd. The second thing I did not like about Facebook was that anything goes.

3. The Expression Lie

If I do reconnect to Facebook it will be to reconnect a blog to an audience. Unfortunately almost 80% of J’accuse traffic was sourced from Facebook. The worst part of that deal was that readers stopped commenting on the blog. They preferred the comment on Facebook. You tried to integrate the two but it never was the same. Once again you could sense the attention span of readers going berserk – like that of a pack of flies suddenly discovering the morning pile of dogs’ droppings on a suburban pavement. Facebook had created the skim reader. Twitter’s metre of 160 words had become the generally accepted limit for an attention span.

Does Facebook empower with information? Maybe. What we definitely do is form our input channels into a constant monotone dreg. We tend to network with like minds, like ideas and similar opinions. Collectively these little facebook packs will look for information they approve of and enjoy. Before long they will have moulded their own virtual world of inputs where all the news and all the opinion they read stops challenging them, stops provoking them. Their cerebrum has become an added appendix to the senses without any feedback. Colours, sounds and (if it could) tastes. Without the appreciation born of provocation.

Facebook the champion of expression. Fuck that. One big massive unlike.

4. Time

I found it much easier to quit smoking than to quit facebook. Because facebook had become that distracted timefiller. An iphone app that vomits post after post of nonsense skipping from the 1,000 likes to save the orphan in Brobdingag to the viral video of the pope on a loo to the latest breaking news from parliament. Worse still it gave you a reality check. The ugliest quirks that people had managed to keep away from their social interaction were suddenly and inexplicably hung there for all to see. You suddenly had intimate photos – not of breasts or testicles – but of bedrooms and studies. What was previously one’s own sancta sanctorum was suddenly posted and bared for all to see. The weakest of individuals who were unable to master even the most basic rules of social interaction felt “empowered” when they shared their framed certificates in the bedroom, their corny poses by the sea and in some cases they even fought out their personal fights like some UFC Championship battle.

And for every “empowered” citizen struggling to grasp the concepts of basic PR there would be some ruthless, uninhibited facebook voyeur/stalker who would scour the walls for information to snigger at and make fun of. Bitchery too became an art. The packs of supposedly educated wolves were unleashed on the beginners and found it oh so easy to point out to the crude reality of their inexperience with real social interaction. It’s not like it was difficult, and I am guilty of having engaged in the ruthless behaviour myself. Stalkers unleashed on the unknowing victims were like foxes released in a chicken pen. There is no great intelligence required to pull a photo off the wall of some unsuspecting facebook user and to blog about the social shortcomings that have been so unabashedly and unwittingly put on display.

Insofar as politicians and their daily tomfoolery with the medium is concerned there would be no amount of wolves that would suffice to tear the arrogant peacocks to bits. For you’d expect a politician to be able to handle the dos and donts of simple social networking. Still. The time that facebook stole from us can never be recovered with 1,000 other initial public offerings. The fourth thing I do not like about facebook is the amount of time wasted on it before discovering that it is another cynical mirror of our society.

7. Not the full list

There’s more to this list. Much more. But there’s a limit to how long a post can be. I’ll be stopping here for now. Will elaborate later. Do not be surprised if my personal account is reactivated soon. In the meantime J’accuse still has a facebook page where you will find most updates.

I’d like to hear what you think about facebook, privacy and more. I doubt anyone will comment though. You’re probably all busy catching up on facebook.

 

 

Categories
Mediawatch

Swedes for Europe

Reading the Times of Malta nowadays is as much a guessing game as it is informative. More often than not it is more a case of the former than the latter. Take this article that was uploaded at a quarter to eight in the evening on Sunday:

Alleanza Liberali to field Swedish candidate for 2014 EP elections

Alleanza Liberali this evening announced that it will be fielding Swedish Peter Lowe as one of its candidates for the 2014 European Parliament elections. On twitter, Mr Lowe describes himself as an urban European fighting for human rights and a better, stronger and larger EU.

The article was accompanied by a photo of a beaming man who presumably is the Swede (not the Swedish) Peter Lowe. Whoever filed this article must have been on a trip and so must any person who proof read or approved it for immediate uploading. Why? Do we need to explain?

First of all there is a glaring lack of facts. What is the Alleanza Liberali? Who spoke for it? Where? Did the heavens above the Times part and did a voice suddenly “announce” that Alleanza were fielding a candidate? It is not like Alleanza Liberali are in the news everyday – I for one thought that whatever Liberal formation existed in Malta had long disbanded. Was it a press conference? Was it a press release issued on Sunday afternoon – as an afterthought following a Sunday lunch that was heavy on the grappa?

Then there is “Swedish Peter Lowe”. It’s either Swedish national or Swede Peter Lowe (with the unfortunate consequences of associations to cousins of turnips). The second (and final) sentence of this enigmatic appendage on the timesonline pages is actually part of Peter Lowe’s twitter blurb about himself. Lazy journalism? You bet.

GIGO proceeds: What the root vegetable is an “urban European” who “fights for human rights”? Why did the Times print this bullshit?

Well ok, the Alleanza Liberali exists and it is a band of nutjobs. So far so good. Only a band of nutjobs would announce their candidate for an election two years in advance (woosh – see that? there goes the element of surprise). As for the Times lazily copying a press release into their paper… well trashofmalta anyone?

A quick internet search led me to ProKredit a property financing firm in Germany. Peter Lowe is the CEO of this firm that, among other things, translates the German “Menschen” to “Human Beings” in the English version of their website.