I live in Italy, unfortunately -I wish to add.
For many years I felt this country like a suffocating weight I had to carry, a cage of rules and laws that made even breathing difficult and sometimes I wonder how do we keep our sanity, ah yes, we don’t so much lately, we have people committing suicides at an unprecedented rate, an austerity that doesn’t allow many to get to the end of the month, a church that says its duty is not to care for the poor but to evangelize and give sacraments BUT we have the freedom of porn, cheap high street fashion and soccer. Yeahy to that.
It makes for a grim picture for the future of our young ones, especially when the eldest insist that ‘at their times, because they tried harder, they would always find a job. Bullocks.
Those were other times, another world, other opportunities.
We have 1000 small enterprises closing each day, actually those were the number in 2013, now some say it’s 1600, which is commendable on a 69.000.000 inhabitants figure.
Last night I watched a political show that talked about how difficult it is to have a company in Italy, to be an entrepreneur, which is odd if you think that entrepreneurship in a country suffocated by unemployment should be encouraged in any possible ways, instead we keep legislating, we keep creating laws, commas, addendums, restrictions to the movement of our unparalleled ingenuity born out of sheer survival.
This can explain why Italians do so well abroad, anything we face abroad is EASY compared to what we have to face at home, you lift the weight and we float effortlessly.
In this talk-show a woman said that she moved to Cambridge to follow her daughter and she discovered that the employment office actually works! She was helped to write a CV and to find a job, which she did in no time, it is in the interest of any community to have employed people in a world where our living is tied into working, is it not?
Instead in Italy we are firing people from Government positions by the truckload, citing this system-created austerity on steroids, now people who go on strike are fired on the spot, we are witnessing the removal of the basic working class rights to state that we do not agree with exploitation, the new rule is either you accept to be exploited or you are jobless – and jobless in Italy means going to the church for warm meals and a shelter, which is granted on a first come first served basis.
The woman who moved to Cambridge said she will die there and wants to be buried there because Italy gave her nothing, never, not even when her spouse died and she was hunted down for her debts that she asked to put on hold until she got back on her feet. She said she must have been born in Italy by mistake, so have I, I thought many times.
The point that really left me flabbergasted watching this talk show was when they moved on to the proven relationships between Laws and Corruption – and found out that the higher the number of Laws in a country the higher the corruption, the lack of transparency, the dysfunction.
The comparison made was again between England and Italy, we rank 69 in the Corruption Perception Chart and jolly come in after Rwanda, Namibia and Ghana, England ranks 14.
A professor at Cambridge, an Italian who had lived there for 25 years, said that it is now proven that the more a Government acts in distrust of their citizens, the more it is reciprocated in kind, so, as the government burdens us with useless laws, rules and regulation that it’s impossible to carry out and live – we cheat, evade taxes and lie, we are just playing out the script written for us by those that don’t even trust themselves (and ain’t them right about it?).
The English Parliament issues 500 new laws a year that make sense, we issue 2000 that don’t, in the UK there are 3000 laws to abide by, in Italy 150.000, to open a hairdresser shop in Italy – 84 bureaucratic steps are required, our taxation equals the one in Denmark but we have no benefits for obliging, so what is the recipe I am describing here? The recipe to create criminals and corruption.
We have more lawyers than the USA, because our laws are cryptic and they have to be interpreted on a case by case basis, they are in fact ad personam laws, where the idea that the law is Equal for everybody is not even contemplated, it would just be too funny to even teach it to children, our justice system is lagging behind a good 10 years at least with commercial proceedings and we are guilty until we can prove that we are not- what kind of citizens can such terrain cultivate?
Liars, cheaters, tax evaders and ultimately criminals (and proud to be) mostly because we can’t even understand what we are supposed to do, many young ones that have managed to secure an European grant for a project left Italy and took their project elsewhere because they became exhausted with the never-ending idiotic bureaucratic requests, such as providing documents dated 2 centuries ago that no longer exist to prove the original structure of an old property, or other oddities of the kind.
The Law has been created for the purpose of protecting private interests and in Italy we have expanded this definition from private properties to the private interests of Notaries, solicitors, barristers, public employees, politicians, many wheels that need oiling to move the machine to make things happen and that oiling translates in Money and hence into Corruption and into Injustice because if you don’t have the Money to move the wheel, you are stuck, your ideas, your potential contribution to a better society is worthless without the bribe required to make it real.
The more mazes of laws to unravel, the more opportunities for corruption.
So, to sort out our corruption we need lean, just Legal systems whose laws are clearly understood and applied to all indiscriminately, we need a social contract, we need to create a state that trusts that the members of an Equal society do their best to comply, if they make it possible, because we all agree that social interactions need to be regulated for a functional society, look at what Chavez did by printing the Constitution on packets of flours and rice, he involved the population in their rights and not only in their duties, we need to build a new state of mind that creates a new State of Being that works for all and not just for the elected that manage the system to the detriment of everyone else.
We could revert the legal system to just 1 Law: Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you – imagine this, the simplicity of it, anyone standing for something that doesn’t support the Life of All, the life of another like his own – will have to take a leave from public office, which at the moment would leave the Italian Parliament empty but that is not a dire alternative to what we are living at the moment, if that happened we could restructure the system putting the wellbeing of everyone on the same line – if a wage cut is applied indiscriminately to all, there will be no wage cuts, if healthcare coverage is given to all or taken away from the privileged one, we’ll have national health coverage.
Unfortunately, by design, we don’t have TIME to rethink this world and this is another reason why we need a Living Income Guaranteed, many are purposefully enslaved from 9 to 5 if not longer, on a daily basis to earn a Living that should be granted to All, many don’t have the time, the strength, the clarity to ponder about the state of our world and the things that really need to be sorted out, we need TIME, a living income guarantee is FREE Time, a free Life with no strings attached in exchange for active participation, it will give us that buffer to take a breath, to come out of the mud in which we have been buried and buried ourselves to look around and decide – is this the world I want to live in?
Because if it’s not, we can stand together and change it, we are the majority, the users of the system that never thought they are already the Administrators through the choices they make on a daily basis, the market force, what gives value to the money system, we are IT, if we get this we can change the way things are working now and start administering the wealth of the world differently, better, including all parts and all needs equally, a Living Income Guaranteed is our chance to better ourselves, to become the people we thought we could be when we were young and idealists, it’s not too late, it just requires for us to come together and agree on the changes that will have to be implemented to change the world and make it an honorable, Life supporting place, For All.
Some pettiness will have to be given up in the process, some honesty is required to see how we have carelessly -but equally- participated so far, our MEMEME mentality will have to make space to move little ME into a big WE, this could start with a Life Giving Proposal that includes all -as equally worthy of it.
Living Income Guaranteed – not a dream, not a hype, it’s a Plan – check it out.
Money Matters 