A state on wheels: if in an emergency the bureaucracy triumphs more than ever

3 January 20222 years ago babelfish

There are circumstances in life in which it is necessary to pause for a moment to reflect and ask oneself if what we are doing in civil society (assuming there is still one) is still useful for us and for our fellow men. In a historical moment like this, characterized by an extreme uncertainty of the future as well as by the bitter realization that many of the fixed points of our work have turned out to be much less fixed than was legitimate to expect, it would be logical to witness a profound renewal in the world of work and in the way of approaching new evidence. On the contrary, the exact opposite happens. We witness, helpless and bewildered, the perpetuation of Byzantine rites of conservation of the positions acquired, which do not even take into account what has happened to us between head and neck for a couple of years now. One of the most evident and sad proofs of what I affirm is the lack of consideration of how certain elements external to the world of work should have pushed the social partners and all the protagonists of the production area of the country to change register, to consider ineffective, if not harmful. , many practices consolidated in the times of the pre-pandemic.

In vain we have hoped for new schemes that better suit the real needs of these interminable days of the state emergency. Where we could legitimately have expected an extreme simplification of the petty bureaucracy (the one that complicates and slows down every administrative practice) we see instead an enormous increase in the silly and incomprehensible forms for most to obtain yet another certification, the authorization, the pass of ancient memory. Even the inscrutable and unconstitutional "control rooms" and the national technical committees are multiplying, where until a few months ago the Ministries with their undersecretariats, the Regions with their numerous departments, the Provinces (never completely abolished) and the mayors were enough to complicate our life. But even before Covid we could have blamed ministers, regional presidents and mayors (still elected, which never hurts), now we don't even know who is in the control room of the moment.

As I write this, the audio of a local television on not far from my workplace is making me aware that in order to better apply the infamous PNRR (which, I think, means National Recovery and Resilience Plan), the " direction "public and private that should help us to go about something and (perhaps) to be real earners of some very vulgar sum of money that, in the end, should give us a hand in order not to close one's business in constant loss. Because, dear friends of the PNRR and of the control rooms, in the end, for many Italians who have to work for a living, this is what it is: receiving concrete help in order not to close the shack, very often leaving other workers without work. With the control booths we do not pay our Enel or gas bills and those, after a short time and without hearing reason, close the meter for us.

It seems that the solons who are turning the PNRR in their hands, as if it were a Rubik's cube to find the way, do not care about the countless closures of the meters for arrears. If the company closes, if the retiree stays in the cold, if those who could still give their work contribution have an administrative stop on the only car they would need to work, the solons of the control rooms don't give a damn. Public money is spent to advertise on how delightful it is to be holders of the SPID code, which should avoid queues at public counters, without in the least understanding that over half of those who have tried to undertake the bureaucratic process to obtain it have given up and has given up, not to mention the ISEE certification (whose exact meaning does not interest me in the least and I don't even waste time looking for it on the web), an indispensable prerequisite for obtaining any State aid, which, according to what the experts tell me , it is so cumbersome and tiring as to induce many people not to benefit from such aids (except the Citizenship Income which would seem to be very easy to obtain even for those who do not even know how to read and write in the Italian language, but this is another matter …).

Prove the opposite to me: bureaucracy triumphs more than ever even in emergencies and the recent incomprehensible diversifications of the so-called “ green pass” amply demonstrate that our rulers are increasingly treating us as idiots. Imbeciles who need at least three different passes to leave the house, work, visit elderly parents, pick up their children from school. Fools who can't even trust official documents because the content written on those documents lasts less than a month. It's a state of emergency, baby! I fear that it would be more appropriate to speak of a state of emergency, that is, of a state now based on a last minute decision, of a state based on wheels (perhaps recovered from ridiculous school desks now out of bounds), of a state that is not and that maybe it was something that could cost us dearly in the future, once we got used to suspending certain irrepressible rights of Italians with ease and without the necessary parliamentary passage. I say "of the Italians" because abroad, on these matters, they are much more cautious.

We daily witness certain paradoxes that those who do not confront each day do not even imagine. In full state (or state) of emergency, failure to affix a duty stamp stops any urgent practice and even exposes it to punctually sanctioned consequences and if, poor and uninformed subjects, you show up in the Municipality to renew your pass identity but, you fools who are nothing else, you have provided yourself with proletarian passport-size photographs, they send you back: you need a photograph in passport format. That the phantasmagoric identity card with a flashy chip still does not allow electronic identification operations, just as the health card only allows you to buy cigarettes at the vending machine is yet another matter: they ask us to adapt to the latest imaginative rule in less than 24 hours, but the State (and the emergency one does not differ from the constitutional one), after having squandered billions in the construction of infrastructures to read electronic documents, still does not seem capable of making them work as they should. The principle, alas, remains that of the Marquis del Grillo: "I know I and you are not a …" .

The post A state on wheels: if bureaucracy triumphs more than ever in an emergency appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/uno-stato-a-rotelle-se-in-emergenza-la-burocrazia-trionfa-piu-che-mai/ on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 03:46:00 +0000.