Christmas closed for Dpcm: there is no Covid emergency, there is a communist emergency in government
We have to thank @nonexpedit again for his tweet we borrowed to give this article a title, because, frankly, after nine months of seeing the same movie repeat itself, we're a little short on ideas. It is since last spring, when everyone still seemed stunned by the surge in cases and deaths, by the first use and abuse of the Dpcm to limit our personal freedoms, that Atlantico Quotidiano denounced the legal and democratic emergency in our country, far beyond the sanitary emergency.
With last night's show, yet another, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte began digging into the bottom he had already touched in recent weeks. It presents itself in prime time in front of the Italians to rattle off the restrictions designed ad hoc for the Christmas holidays and the end of the year: curfew from 10pm, so no dinners. Movements from region to region are prohibited from 21 December to 6 January, including to reach second homes, and even between different municipalities on 25, 26 December and 1 January.
Result: families divided, Christmas masses abolished. With paradoxical outcomes, for which parents, children, grandparents who live in two small neighboring municipalities, perhaps a thousand souls and a few kilometers away, cannot reunite, while the luckiest ones who live in Rome, Milan and Naples can cross the whole city.
Delusional measures, devoid of logic, reasonableness and proportionality, cardinal principles that must always guide the decisions of the legislator and the actions of the public administration, especially when they affect so deeply the fundamental freedoms protected by the Constitution.
Measures that confirm what we have emphasized from the first moment, and several times. The line of blame for the Italians does not change: the government is only capable of discharging the emergency on citizens and economic activities, that is, on the private sphere, first by attributing to them the increase in infections, then by placing obligations and prohibitions, while it continues to prove itself totally unable to make work of what it is responsible for: the public sphere.
The paradox, in fact, is that the Dpcm are very effective in keeping people at home and closing economic activities, but apparently not so much in accelerating the public response as necessary. The emergency is valid in one sense, towards the citizens, but not for the state bureaucratic machine.
At the end of October, announcing yet another close, the premier explained that the new measures were used to contain the infection so as to "spend the Christmas holidays with greater serenity". The goal, as you will remember, was "to save Christmas". Evidently they did not work as they should, if now it closes just for Christmas, but nobody will ask for an account.
The suspicion is therefore strengthened that the restrictions, increasingly Orwellian and haphazardly, now only serve as a cynical diversion: unloading everything on citizens, shifting attention from time to time to young people, nightlife, bars, restaurants, now also on seats at the table in family. Have you noticed? We have been talking about nothing else for weeks: what can we or won't we be able to do at Christmas? Everything, as long as the government's work almost disappears from the public debate with respect to the really decisive factor: organizing and strengthening the health front. Swabs, tracking, intensive care, public transport, schools, staff and facilities shortages, are hardly mentioned anymore.
But yesterday at least three circumstances did not play in favor of the premier's new show. In the last 24 hours a new death record: 993. The British government first approved the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine and will start the vaccination campaign next week. Brexit or not Brexit , where are our first doses, announced by Conte for December? Third, the premier once again ignored Parliament, choosing to announce the new measures in one of his TV proclamations rather than presenting them to the Houses. The opposition, as we will see, did not take it well.
President Conte, we have been in semi-lockdown for over a month, schools half closed, red and orange regions, and yesterday there were 993 deaths ( nine hundred and ninety-three! ). Who do we have to charge them with this time? To the nightlife? To restaurants that close at 6pm? At closed gyms? In fact, there is an “Italian model”: we have succeeded in the enterprise, among advanced countries, of maximizing the loss of human life and, at the same time, maximizing the economic damage. It wasn't easy, but with its Pandenomics , the deadly mix of unprepared healthcare system, closures and welfare, the Italian government has succeeded.
But no, President Conte in the press conference overlooked the 993 deaths in the last 24 hours (but not the "personal attacks", to which he wanted to respond). Not even a hint. And, far more serious, not even a question from the journalists-extras. A shame, Chinese media stuff. Yet, it didn't take a genius to formulate a simple question, the one that I believe is on everyone's lips: if the number of hospitalizations and intensive care continues to drop, how is it possible that we are still recording record after record of deaths?
This is one of the most squalid aspects, this yes a real looting: the accounting of daily deaths on which to leverage to feed the sense of guilt of the Italians and lead them to resign themselves without resistance to the loss of their fundamental freedoms: how can you think of celebrate Christmas while a thousand people die a day?
An accounting, among other things, very questionable if, as admitted in an interview with La Stampa , then retracted in others, by an authoritative exponent of the ISS, "while in Italy all those who die and test positive are classified as deaths due to Covid , this is not the case in other countries ".
And yesterday's numbers actually make us think. If in the last 24 hours 217 people have entered intensive care, but the daily balance is negative of 19, it means that 236 people have left the ICU. Even assuming that they all left because they died, very unlikely, 757 are missing to arrive at yesterday's total budget of 993 deceased. We know that unfortunately many elderly people die even before arriving in intensive care, but even in 80 percent of cases?
It so happened that while President Conte decided to announce the Christmas restrictions on live TV, and not in Parliament, the Chamber met for the final approval of the decree amending the Salvini decrees. In short, on the one hand, Italians are closed at home for Christmas, on the other, the ports are reopened to irregular immigrants and their ferrymen. And Parliament overtaken again. Understandable the anger of the opposition, which blocked the work.
Yet, they had just voted on the latest budget variance requested by the Conte government … And for all the reward, the premier goes on TV to announce the Christmas restrictions without going through Parliament, not even a phone call … What better demonstration of the mistake made ?
And do not say that these are two different games, because the "refreshments" of the categories affected by the closures are at stake. The point is political: no hand is extended to a government that has attributed itself "full powers" in the worst sense, which for nine months has had the fundamental freedoms of citizens for the Dpcm, tramples on the Constitution and the Parliament.
However, it is necessary to note the silence-assent of the Quirinale on a management not only of communication, but also of legislation in total disregard of the rule of law. Other than Hungary and Poland!
This is the most worrying aspect: the banks have been blown. The Covid emergency now seems to authorize in the abstract, not on the basis of evidence and scientific data, any limitation of rights which, like health, are protected by the Constitution. And moreover, with an administrative act, not having the force of law.
What is surprising and troubling in recent months is how extremely easy it has been to limit personal and business freedoms. The government does not even have to resort to law decrees, the Dpcm is enough. And it did not meet any resistance, neither from the institutions defending the Constitution, such as the Presidency of the Republic and the Constitutional Court, nor from the media system, which on the contrary accompanied the government measures by administering the necessary doses of terror in the population.
If one of the characteristics of the regimes is that a majority of citizens is convinced that the suspension of their fundamental freedoms is necessary, due to force majeure, well today this criterion is satisfied in Italy.
Once the precedent is created, the risk of the inclined plane is concrete: any excuse in the future could be good.
And so it's back to @nonexpedit's tweet:
“Once Covid is over , there will be something else: ecology, public health, inequalities, whatever you want. But they will enter your house and restrict your freedom of action and speech under the most varied pretexts. We don't have a Covid emergency, we have a Communist emergency ".
And yesterday evening, almost en passant , Prime Minister Conte approached a new limit, evoking the TSO (compulsory health treatment) to force citizens to get vaccinated: "If we are in a position to manage the contagion curve, it will not be it is necessary to impose a TSO of the vaccine on citizens ”.
The post- Christmas closed for Dpcm: there is no Covid emergency, there is a communist emergency in the government appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/natale-chiuso-per-dpcm-non-ce-unemergenza-covid-ce-unemergenza-comunisti-al-governo/ on Fri, 04 Dec 2020 05:04:53 +0000.