I remember an old advert that said that a hair product, despite its appearance, packaging and smell, was not medicine. It seemed like it, but it wasn’t.
This memory came when reading a report on the public consultation on the Rouanet law, which seeks – once again – to correct all of the distortions that have accompanied it since its creation, more than three decades ago.
This new movement for change by Rouanet – carried out through a sub-legal norm, of low hierarchy and controlled in a monocratic manner –, repeated periodically, led me to some fundamental reflections. The main one is that Rouanet, although having a number, a menu and all the formal elements of a law, no longer functions as such. This sounds like a law, but in practice it is no longer the case.
Its main normative force has been sucked up by each of the governments that have managed it, always with the ambiguous strategy of defaming it, but accompanied by the promise of correcting it.
The call for public consultation regarding a new normative instruction for Rouanet presents some refinements likely to make Machiavelli proud, had it been proposed by his disciples. The first is to give a new face to the “law”, something that, if successful, allows a single executive power to replace an activity that should be carried out by the National Congress, which constitutes precisely a substantial change in the norm.
Another very powerful filigree is that, under the heady and always effective argument of correcting the injustices of the rules, avoiding the execution of truly necessary and still pending tasks.
In fact, these salvationist modifications generally relate to only one of Rouanet’s three promotion mechanisms: patronage, always with the aim of canceling its marketing dimension; and without, however, resolving the problems of the National Culture Fund (FNC) and the Cultural and Artistic Investment Fund (Ficarat), which would have the potential to balance this development system.
As for the FNC, the main problem is certainly that the composition of its resources has never been at a minimum satisfactory level, because most of the legally planned sources have never been implemented and, with regard to budgetary contributions, they have always occurred in such a timid dimension that they prevent the public power from using it as a corrective instrument of the so-called distortions of clientelism.
Concerning Ficart, the abandonment is so pronounced that it can even be considered negligent, since they have not even been tried. It follows that the demands which should have been addressed to them were redirected, in the Brazilian manner, towards the other legal mechanisms mentioned here. The fact that they have not been repealed, coupled with similar experience with audiovisual legislation, suggests that they could be very viable, if there was the political will to do so.
We conclude that this recurrence of modifications of the Rouanet law according to lower standards, without real results, is not only unconstitutional and devastating for a development system, but it is something that makes us reflect on the immediate and rhetorical acts, which do not deserve the name of cultural policies, but on the irony that they seem to be, but are not.
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