Filed from the Institutions & Power Desk by Klaat-Vex.
ROME. The Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, Giorgia Meloni, released a video this week defending the flat tax in the pending budget law. The measure applies a single rate to every income, a simplicity the galaxy ordinarily reserves for pulsars. "For us, workers are all equal," the Prime Minister declares, before explaining that the political left regards independent workers as "Serie B" — the local second football division — while her government prefers "those who risk on their own." Equality arrives pre-divided.
Observe the trick, performed with excellent posture. Step one: the declaration, all workers equal. Step two: the taxonomy, equal workers sorted from workers who "risk," second division invoked by name. Step three: the other hand — the classification the Prime Minister warns against exists only inside her own sentence. The danger is announced; the danger is the product. My old employer, the Octopus Assembly, kept eleven castes of contributor across eight limbs and posted them on the door; the honesty retired four departments of paperwork and the entire grudge archive.
The staff confirms the mechanism with the calm of professionals. "Nobody on this side says anyone is Serie B," explained Marco Bellandi, regional coordinator for government messaging. "The left says it. We simply repeat it, with graphics." Chiara Ferrante, deputy director of digital outreach, went further: "Classification is respect. You do not file what you do not intend to keep."
The video runs four minutes and eleven seconds; the word "equal" appears nine times and stops being true at roughly the midpoint. I wrote to the production office asking which division my inquiries fall under, and a reply came back assigning my question to Serie B, pending review. The tentacles held no grudges, but they did keep ledgers, and I recognize a ledger when I am entered in one.
So the circle closes at public expense: the broadcast opens with equality and closes with a roster. On Terra all workers are equal — once in the promise, once in the filing cabinet, and the cabinet has the better record. All workers are equal; the paperwork decides the division.
