Failed State Latvia?

Latvia: A drab, grey nation in midwinter

2012-01-11T18:12:00.000+02:00

I am writing these recent impressions of Latvia while visiting the US East Coast (the Boston area). While life is no picnic here at all, there are “shiny happy people” around instead of what I saw just before departing. I will be going back to the drab, gray nation on Friday.

One of the things I have been doing as a hobby is to walk around Riga and photograph people, buildings, street scenes and the like. A place I have gone a couple of times with my camera is the Riga Central Market, with its former Zeppelin hangar halls and open-air area. To get there, one way is to go through the Central Station, which has partly been turned into a multi-level shopping center with clothing stores, electronics shops, restaurants, newsstands and a supermarket.

To go from this modern 20^th or even 21^st century environment (shops selling iPads etc.) into the Central Market is a remarkable and depressing transition in terms of the people one encounters. It is a socio-economic leap to another world of mostly old, haggard, grey, apathetic and resigned faces and bodies. Listless, old, greyish-pale expressionless or ravaged faces abound, almost like a contingent of people shuffling away from some disaster just around the corner or over the horizon, too burned out to move very fast. Is this the Third World, the photos of Somali or Ethiopian war victim and refugee faces, only white and better nourished?

The impression one gets is of a society from which the life-spark has vanished, or more precisely, emigrated. There is only a scattering of young people in the otherwise old and worn masses shuffling about the market with tattered plastic bags (almost like the Soviet era, except that then plastic bags were a sign of privilege, net bags and cloth abounded). The young are tourists or shoppers seeking fresh, organically grown vegetables and other foods from the countryside. The sellers, too, for the most part are babushka type country women, with a bit higher energy level than their often morose shoppers.

I fear this somehow illustrates the state and fate of the Latvian nation (including non-Latvians, too). Drab, haggard, impoverished, drained of any hope for the future and of an age when, given the overall demographics and state of health care, there probably is little time left for many of the individuals one encounters. All this just a few hundred meters from the modern center of Riga, where tourists and somewhat better looking locals gather, as well as the significant but visibly dwindling young, who are often livelier and happier.

What is going on? As a colleague working for a foreign news agency said, it appears that the local Latvian media don't really care. Poverty and long-term unemployment statistics are big news in many other countries. A shift in the number of poor generates considerable media attention, analyses, searches for root causes and the like. Not in Latvia. Even the annual Human Development report seems to focus on issues of identity and emigration/immigration (to be honest, I have only skimmed parts of the document).

It would be facile to say that the root of all this is the transition to a capitalist market economy. There were similar scenes in the Central Market of huddled, grey masses of socialist citizens waiting in huge lines (sometimes crowds bordering on mobs) for a piece of gray frozen meat to be hacked off a huge block with an axe. One of the roots of the seeming exhaustion and demoralization of Latvia's people is fifty years of occupation and a totalitarian, centrally planned economy that did provide a dull, monotonous subsistence for most people living under the system. It was the era of stagnation, shortages and little apparent hope that anything would change, though with a certain reliability that rents would be low, electricity cheap, bread, fish, potatoes and other basic foods generally available and the occasional sausage or fruit waiting at the end of a long queue if you were lucky. Being a victim was nothing new to Latvians leaving socialism and entering the new system of the 1990s.

The problem was that the new “system” in the 1990s consisted of most of the ex-Communist elite of an entire country trying to imitate the behavior and lifestyle of characters on the American TV show Dallas, since this best approximated what they had been taught about capitalism. The idea was to immediately spend money – the more, the better – on huge houses and big cars. Dishonesty and cheating – whether on wives or business partners – was part of the deal.

To be sure, stuff like that happened in the real world, so that the picture of how things were in non-socialist economies as presented by Dallas was selective, but not entirely inaccurate. There was no show made called Central Committee, which could have shown the depravity (now documented) of the Communist elite running a state-owned, planned socialist economy and succeeding poorly, sometimes pointlessly and often sloppily at providing what are still the promises of socialist movements everywhere – free healthcare, free education, and full employment.

It is obvious that a grab-whatever-you-can economy will generate inequality, or rather, exaggerate existing inequalities among a population that had been indoctrinated that complete equality was possible and that, indeed, a semblance of it existed in the low, but barely adequate standard of living shared by most of the population. Among the old and hopeless, memories of this have turned to nostalgia for “better times” under the old system.

Why is Latvia turning into a society with a significant, even dominant population of the aging, passive and helpless poor? Some would say that the cause of poverty is the failure to equally distribute wealth, bringing us back to the socialist argument that all one needs is a centralized system for equally distributing resources in a planned way. This works, more or less, in organizations that are smaller and somewhat less complex than society as a whole. The best example, in rough and general terms, is the military. All soldiers have more or less the same uniforms, weapons, food and medical support and can be relied upon, as a whole, to carry out centrally issued orders and instructions. The military is, looked at this way, an organization that produces the outcomes for its members that are promised by socialism – equality in the fulfillment of all basic needs by central planning and allocation.

However, it can also be argued that the root cause of poverty is low productivity. Here the military analogy breaks down, because functionally “socialist” armies do not produce what they consume. They are not, strictly speaking, “economies”, and it is economic systems that create wealth, multiply and refine resources. Latvia's poverty stems in part from a failure to form an economic system that increases its own productivity and, thereby, the wealth available for “redistribution”, should anyone choose to do so.

Productive and evolving economic systems also need strong institutions that ensure the rule of law, the enforcement of contract and the orderly elimination of non-productive economic entities in favor of those that are innovative and more productive. With all their imperfections and failings, Western European countries have created such economic systems based largely on private ownership and market relations among economic actors.

Since the early 1990s, Latvia has had a long parade of advice and instruction on how to reform and transition society from a failing socialist economy to a modern market system, including the necessary institutions to underpin such an economic system. To be sure, a lot of the advice given to Latvia over the past 20+ years has been condescending, oversimplified, overoptimistic, and presented with little understanding of how the presumed audience – homo (post)sovieticus saw the world. But at the end of the day, or rather, the two decades, Latvia was given almost all of the basic and much of the sophisticated knowledge on reforming its society that was needed to build a socio-economic system that would increase productivity and increase the total wealth of society.

So it can be said that much of the poverty in Latvia, exacerbated by the emigration of productive and potentially productive individuals, was caused by a failure of politicians and institutions and, to some extent, society as a whole, to learn the lessons repeatedly given to them since 1991. They can be summed up as – don't bribe, don't steal, deal honestly, pay fairly, invest for the mid-to-long term, educate your workforce, streamline government, make bureaucracy small, smart and efficient, make the benefits of tax-paying visible and obvious, keeping taxes moderate, etc. etc.

Too little of this has been done. Instead, the political elite has discredited itself to an extent unheard of since modern polling methods have been used. The collapse of trust in institutions in Latvia is very likely irreversible and has already mutated into a kind of social paranoia as witnessed by the run on Swedbank. The end result is that we have a society that, at least by street-level observation, is ravaged by poverty and has failed to implement the practices that would have significantly reduced that poverty. It is too late to retrain the older part of the population to do the work, say, of five Chinese while getting paid three times Chinese wages (probably a bad comparison), and the young are making decisions every day to leave a country they perceive as failing and futureless. The drab, gray, haggard, exhausted, aged population that one sees behind the socio-economic divide of the Riga Central Station (and probably in many rural areas) is the result of a series of choices over the past 20 years that, whether intentional or simply clueless, have resulted in an act of “futuricide” agains the Latvian nation.

Banking with Chicken Little in Latvia

2011-12-12T08:11:00.000+02:00

There are reasons for concern everywhere about the financial system, especially in light of the Eurozone debt crisis, the postponed, but still possible collapse of the euro and other things based on facts, figure, events and rational analysis. But that is not the biggest immediate risk for bank customers in Latvia. The biggest risk is proving to be the customers themselves.

Whatever else banks are, they are institutions based on trust at the customer level. That is, the bank is kept solvent by the fact that depositors a) believe the bank will be there the next day, which depends on b) most of the other depositors being there the next day. If that doesn't happen, whatever else the bank is doing with the money entrusted to it by customers doesn't matter, because, basically, the customers cannot be trusted to stay with the bank and can, for whatever reason, seriously damage it or pull it down.

This is what is starting to happen in Latvia with the initially groundless panic surrounding Swedbank and, to a far lesser extent, SEB. Both parent banks in Sweden are stable, solvent, and there are no signals from any of the many third parties watching the banks (auditors, analysts, shareholders) that anything is wrong (or, for that matter, that the official authorities, which there may be some reason to mistrust, are hiding anything). But now in Latvia, the mass hysteria of bank depositors is itself becoming at least a low intensity threat to Swedbank and the other banks. It at least suggests there is some truth, but little reason behind the saying that in bank panics and runs, the cool and rational will fare the worst, remaining as the “last man not taking everything out of the bank”.

There may be an explanation, but not a justification of public behavior in Latvia in connection with the recent closing of Latvijas Krājbanka. However, that was a relatively small bank in terms of assets (but broad-based in terms of numbers of customers) and its demise was the result of alleged criminal behavior by the owner of its parent Snoras Bank, the Russian millionaire Vladimir Antonov. Also, thousands of customers were compensated to the extent of their deposit insurance coverage very quickly, with some LVL 200 million paid out within days of the collapse.

The fundamental problem is that people in Latvia now have a largely irrational distrust of banking system as a whole, with Swedbank singled out as the market leader, and a far less irrational mistrust of government authority based on inept initial statements (Krājbanka is OK) by the Financial and Capital Markets Commission (FCMC) in connection with the collapse of Snoras in Lithuania. This mistrust is showing signs of turning into a kind of mind-set of the Middle Ages. What I mean by that is that people see their surroundings as governed by incomprehensible, mainly malevolent and arbitrary forces beyond their control or understanding. Wars, plagues, famines were frequent occurances and to the average illiterate peasant, they simply happened or were acts of God or other mystical forces. It now seems that many Latvians view the financial system and their environment as a whole as a malevolent force to which one can only react in the short term, based on the basic emotions fear and suspicion, putting reason and the checking of emotions against facts on the back burner. It is the kind of mindset that led to numerous panics, delusions, witch-burnings, children's crusades and other acts of mass hysteria in one form or another. This is shocking and baffling to the more rational societies of Europe, in particular, the Swedes.

Another way to put it is that these recent and still ongoing events show that the greatest risk to any Latvian customer of a stable, well capitalized and profitable Swedish-owned bank is the fact the many of his or her fellow customers are like Chicken Little, ready to run about madly shouting that “the sky is falling”. It would almost be reason enough to move one's assets, if possible, to Swedbank in Sweden, where the cohort of bank customers is less excitable and irrational.

Weaponizing the Russian language in Latvia again

2011-12-03T19:34:00.001+02:00

When I wrote about the successful signature campaign by Latvian citizens to make Russian the second state language, I got some comments on Twitter and elsewhere that “a language is just a language” and it was somehow wrong to associate demands for Russian as a state language with the Soviet policy of Russification.

This is surprising, except when it comes from the generation that doesn't fully remember what the Soviet Union was like. To be honest, I didn't live in Latvia then, but I participated in many emigre Latvian activities, including demonstrations against the Soviet russification policy, which consisted both of imposing the Russian language on the Baltic populations and massively importing Russian-speaking labor (at least to Estonia and Latvia). The latter means of russification ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The actions of Balts abroad were based on personal experience (visiting the Baltic States), anecdotal stories and academic research (including a book by the Latvian political scientist and present-day Saeima deputy Rasma Kārkliņa) that characterized policies regarding the use of Russian in non-Russian Soviet republics as part of the policy of russification. It is probably beyond reasonable dispute that the Russian language, during the Soviet era, but also with precedents in Czarist Russia as far as the Baltic were concerned, was used as a weapon of state policy aimed at subjugating and, eventually, assimilating the Baltic nations to some greater, Russian-dominated ethnos.

The Soviets made it clear-- the future belonged to a Russian-speaking new Soviet people that would have erased all traces of the diverse national identities that had been (in some cases forcibly) incorporated into the USSR. Those policies were terminated with the collapse of the USSR, but it is reasonable to say that the widespread post-Soviet knowledge of Russian, whatever merits one can ascribe to it otherwise, could also be described as one of the badges of occupation. In other words, on a “but for” basis, many Latvians would not speak Russian but for the occupation of Latvia for 50 years, a period of time when they were compelled to learn Russian. Above and beyond Russian as a compulsory subject in school, there were also campaigns (proclaimed in the Latvian-language Soviet press) exhorting people to improve their Russian and emphasizing the role of Russian as the basis for the new Soviet nation of the future.

As a language learned by compulsion during the totalitarian occupation of Latvia, Russian can be seen as a weapon that has left its impact on most Latvians (and non-Russians in Latvia, such as Armenians, Poles, Georgians, etc.), even if that impact has entirely benign consquences today (buying a beer at a Moscow bar, watching Russian movies, whatever). However, those consquences are benign only because the regime of Russian domination and compulsory teaching of Russian has ended. If it had not, “Russianspeakingness” would continue to be a sympton of russification and a badge of occupation and dominance by a foreign power.

The successful signature campaign to restore Russian as a state language in an independent Latvian state, reviving, at least formally, the status it had in the Soviet Union, is an effort to make Russian a weaponized language again. Since there is little or no evidence that ethnic Russians in Latvia cannot conduct most of their daily lives speaking Russian, there is no logical need to make Russian a second state language except to make it a weapon again.

To be sure, it is a weak and irrational weapon if, as some suggest, it is aimed at expressing some kind of protest by the “Russian-speaking” (read ethnic Russian) citizenry for not getting a share of political power after the recent election. Unfortunately, their poster-boy, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, ran mostly as a populist social democrat, attracting some ethnic Latvian votes. His Harmony Center party (Saskaņas centrs/SC) was acting like a party of Russians, not a Russian party pushing for specific issues relating to Russians as a significant minority in Latvian. As a “Russian” party, SC should have agitated for more adult education in Latvian as a foreign language to make more citzens functionally bi-lingual as well as for home language instruction to keep Russian children form losing their native language (something the USSR never did for minorities living outside their borders). Most non-Russian Latvian citizens would have no issues with that. But those Latvians, who don't see Russian as “just another language”, should object against having a weapon pointed at them again.

Russian as an official language = re-Sovietization

2011-12-02T00:49:00.001+02:00

Riga is a heavily Russian city, always has been since I personally knew it, which is from my first visit in 1980 or so. There appear to be no problems getting by in Russian here, just this morning, as I was buying my copy of the magazine Ir at a Narvesen shop, the clerk smoothly went from telling another customer something in Russian to asking me for my LVL 0,95 in Latvian. As an interesting aside, the girl behind the counter looked to be of Roma (gypsy) ethnicity, a people who, in Latvia, mainly have Latvian as their mother tongue going back for centuries.

There is no lack of Russian culture and media here. There are placards for all sorts of Russian singers and entertainers coming to Riga. The Russian Theater in the Old Town on Līvu Square has been spectacularly renovated and attracts an audience made up of anyone who understands Russian. Contemporary Russian TV series as well as old Soviet films are shown on Latvian TV channels with subtitles, something which (except on some channels) is never done for English language material, where a Latvian voice-over (murmulis) is the standard procedure. Some commercial signeage is both in Latvian and Russian, and Russian foods and canned goods are sold in their Russian-language packaging with small, Latvian-translated labels (in micro-typeface) pasted on.

In short, Riga is a very comfortable town to be Russian in. You can make it through your whole day speaking Russian, because most of the population does, and in a commercial situation, the customer's language is what matters (for making the sale and building the relationship). Even in some hard-line, state-language only institutions, a translator will eventually be called if thats what it takes to get important business done, so that the Russian-speaker will still remain in his/her language sphere.

Given all that, enough ethnic Russian Latvian citizens (so we can forget that other issue that gets brought up whenever “the Russians” are discussed) signed a petition to have a referendum on making Russian a second official state language. To me, that sounds like bringing back the Soviet Union – the bi-lingual signs everywhere that weren't really based on language equality, but rather, we will have your Latvian jazik around until we absorb you, make all the other non-Russian Soviet “nations” part of the “we are Russkie-Borg”. It was prelude to a “soft” destruction of national identity (as opposed to the Siberian alternative), Chapter Two of the Russification policy of Czarist Empire.

The petition campaign, was, or will be, at the end of the day, part of a campaign to resovietize Latvia at an official, day-to-day level. It will be back to when, if a few Russians were present, everyone spoke Russian. In the Soviet era, it was because of fear of political repercussions, but if the second official language is passed, it will be because of the laws and regulations of the independent, democratic Republic of Latvia.

Perversely enough, the whole process may have started with a failed initiative by Latvian nationalists to petition for a referendum to make all state-financed education in Latvian only. But was that enough to trigger the successful counter-petition by the pro-Russians, or was it merely a lucky excuse? It almost didn't get off the ground because two different Russian nationalist groups were at each other's throats for a while as to who would start the signature gathering. Then there was the extraordinary Saeima election and the bizarre attempts by Valdis Zatlers and his Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP) to get the pro-Russian Harmony Center (SC) into government at all costs.

The ZRP's efforts were a spectacle, against all political logic on both sides of the attempted coalition. The political programs of the ZRP and SC didn't match – center right parties and self-proclaimed populist social democrats cannot have too many common policies in government. Moreover, the SC, by dropping most of its populist positions in order to get into a government with the ZRP at all costs, proved nothing but that it was a chameleon willing to betray the electorate that believed its own slogans.

The SC apparently took great offense at not being let into government as a “Russian” party that got a few more votes that anyone else (as if “Russian” and not liberal, conservative, social-democratic, centrist was an actual political ideology). Then one of the SC leaders and Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs publically signed the petition, apparently triggering a wave of copy-cat signings by other SC members. This all was in the interests of “national bolshevik” Vladimir Linderman, who was the de-facto leader of the petition signing movement, and “rapped for Russian” in a video along with the semi-monolingual Valerijs Kravcovs, an ex-Saeima deputy, ringing a huge motherfucker of a bell (you were wondering when I would let slip some obscenity, weren't you? :) ). Ušakovs said he was merely asserting his self-esteem (strange, for one of Latvia's most photogenic young politicians), but Linderman and his droogs were dead serious – they want to impose Russian as a second language and will do their best to see that it is enforced.

The unintentional consequences of Nils' wounded self-esteem and his self-proclaimed respect for Latvian as the sole national language (go figure on that one) will be that Latvian will end up back where it was in the Soviet Union, as the language you speak at home, on the street, or in official situations when there are no Russians around to demand that their language be spoken,

I won't go so far as to say that Russian as a second language will be the end of the Latvian nation and all that (even if that is one possible scenario), but it will end up at least as a significant nuisance (if properly resisted). One example is French in Canada, which means that even the Inuit who have never been near Quebec have to pour their milk/lait on their morning cereal. Or the Finns, who have to learn Swedish (to some extent) in school out of respect for a few villages where the ethnic Swedes still speak it (on the island of Åland, the Swedes on this Finnish possession speak English when dealing with the mainland. Then there is Ireland, where the Irish, who all speak English, with the exception of some Leprachaun-infested villages, where some people actually speak Irish, but everyone has to learn and forget Irish in school in any case.

I moved to Latvia in 1995, not Russia, and, while I have visited Russia a couple of times, I have no desire to live there. Being in a virtual Russia was not part of the deal of what I now see (for a number of non-language related reasons) as a dubious choice to live in Latvia (the economy is a wreck, the future bleak). Frankly, I don't want my son (16) to grow up in a Russified country, where the role of Russian goes well beyond the present-day “modus operandi” (described at the start of this post) that seems to work, while presenting a lesser, but nonetheless non-trivial threat to Latvian identity.

Don't get me wrong. I am a pretty multicultural person and can get along/have gotten along elsewhere – Sweden, the US, where I grew up, Germany, where I have worked and know the language. But for me, Russian as a second official language would be a defeat of all that Latvian independence meant, a re-sovietization of conditions in this country. Count me out on that...

How badly did “FukTuk” Fuck Up? If at all?

2011-11-28T22:49:00.001+02:00

I just had to use that title. “FukTuk” (with the fuk like some Brits say, well, you know...) is how Latvians often pronounce the acronym for the Financial and Capital Markets Commission, Finanšu un kapitāla tirgus komisija or FKTK, the financial markets supervision and regulatory commission. The agency has been getting a lot of criticism recently after the looting of Latvijas Krājbanka, the Latvian Savings Bank, and its parent bank, Lithuania's Snoras, by their main shareholder, Vladimir Antonov and his lackeys.

On the one hand, it would seem that by offering to resign, the head of FKTK (FCMC is the English acronym) Irēna Krūmane, has admitted that – here we go again – FKTK fucked up. But this is actually a wrong and ignorant interpretation of events, even if mistakes were made. The mistakes didn't concern the direct regulatory and supervisory functions of FKTK. It was more of a public relations problem (Krūmane, who was out of town, may have sent the wrong people with inadequate briefing on what to say, to explain the Krājbanka fiasco) and the problem of having to face down ignorant media and the public, screaming for someone's, anyone's blood.

Strictly speaking, Krūmane's resignation is like a head of the national police resigning because the crime rate isn't zero. Well, almost. To have a crime rate of zero, you would have to have one cop following, say, every one or two citizens (an impossibility) and also have absolutely no corrupt or fallible cops who could be persuaded to join, rather than fight criminals (after all there is a lot of money and excitement in crime).

That is not how the system of criminal justice and law works. It works mostly by self-regulation and a number of other individual and social mechanisms. Most people, for one reason or another, stay within sight of the boundaries set by The Ten Commandments, or at least those, that apply to transitive actions (those affecting the rights of others). That may exclude idolatry – the having of other gods, etc, and another “ultry” reserved for – adults – that goes with the coveting your neighbors' wife and all that. But it certainly covers stealing, slaying, and, to a large extent, bearing false witness. That is because you have to be pretty much of a sorry-ass, evil fucker to do any of that, and most people are not like that, or evolution would have reduced us thousands of years ago to a small, about to be extinct pack of upright apes snarling and fighting with each other for the last bananas in some remote jungle. That's not how things are.

Peer pressure and the need to have the respect of others are also powerful restraints on the urge to do any kind of batshit stuff, whether it harms anyone or not. Driving up to a cloister, blowing your horn in the middle of the night, waking the nuns and then mooning them standing on the roof of your car really doesn't hurt anyone and would make a great and gross teenage movie scene, but it is not what you want on the front page of the newpaper. Nor do you want to make the evening TV news for being shitfaced at the wheel of your car as the cameras show up and then go into a racist rant about Uigurs or some other obscure nationality as the police take you away. Nobody, well, almost nobody, wants that kind of shit.

It is more or less the same with the financial system. Like the police, Krūmane could reasonably go to sleep at night on the assumption that most of those she rides herd on would not simply up and break every rule for the hell of it. In fact, with two layers of checking and regulation provided by the internal controls and risk management of any financial organization, combined with regular checks by independent auditors, there is enough of a self-running system to keep things on the straight and level. Finally, there are the regulators, seeing to it that the others are at least equipped, set up and ready to do their jobs. This means credit committees, risk managers and a lot of double checking and signing off on stuff before any other people's money is utilized. That is what banks are – other people's and enterprises' money entrusted to the bank or other financial actor. One shouldn't fuck with that, nor go unpunished for doing so.

What happened at Krājbanka is that, despite most of the necessary checks, balances and scarecrows (the idea of being jailed in disgrace keeps fingers off the cash like a scarecrow spooks the crows)being in place, the bank's managing board chairman Ivars Priedītis did go batshit and pledge some LVL 100 million in assets as collateral for loans made to Vlad the dude with a sportcar jones and his various projects. Priedītis had been a pretty straight and honest guy before that, but the mo-fo simply went or was pushed over the edge into crime when he agree to sign off on the deals on an adventure of his own. Apparently, the rest of the bank management knew fuck-all about it, or maybe merely suspected something. They certainly didn't suspect Vlad, assuming that several national intelligence agencies could have the dude's past in Russia all wrong. So maybe he found the cash needed to start his bank in paper bag in a Moscow back alley. Hey, those were the days in the Wild, Wild East.

So what failed was not really Krūmane and the system under her. The system is based largely on trust (most information is not submitted by liars). What failed was one guy, perhaps a few more people going rogue. Some financial institutions with some of the best monitoring and internal controls have had traders cut loose and create enormous losses, if not bring the whole motherfucker down if they were unlucky enough. Taking the wrong side of some financial derivative instruments can cause losses big enough to warp spacetime around them, dwarfing anything that Priedītis pulled off. Lucky that that didn't happen in Latvia, which is not to say that it couldn't be done. Just most people in the business won't try it.

You can do all the checks and cross checks you want, but no system is God, and most run themselves adequately, thank you. It is foolish to think anything can or should be designed to be everywhere all at once. Don't blame the overseers for failing to do or be that.

By offering to resign, Krūmane has actually thrown herself on her sword as a PR stunt to restore some trust in the FKTK. The blogger and political scientist Iveta Kažoka made this point about trust in the financial system being undermined by Krūmane's communication style. Her appeal for Krūmane to resign was borderline strident. But for Krūmane it was probably a tactically right move to keep the dogs from tearing apart the institution by thowing herself to them (sword, now dogs is only a sign that it is late and I am tired from pulling all sorts of shit for my employer over the weekend in Stockholm to in order get and do an important interview). When it is all over, whoever takes her place should remember that sitting in that chair, no one will excuse you because sometimes things just happen (“honest Ivars” at Krājbanka went wacko), and they will crucify you for not being god even if you said you couldn't be.

Russian investment in the Baltics -- by "whitelist" only

2011-11-25T00:40:00.001+02:00

It's beginning to look like 1995 all over again. That was the year that Banka Baltija, Latvia's largest bank at the time, was destroyed by economic crime. In fact, looking back, the whole bank was the economic crime. It was probably never intended to be anything else. The case with Latvijas Krājbanka or the The Latvian Savings Bank, is not identical. For one thing, Krājbanka has historically been around since 1924. During the Soviet era, it was one of the few institutions where private persons could keep their money on deposit. After Latvian independence, it was privatized in 2003 and in 2005 Krājbanka was acquired by Lithuania's Snoras Bank. Snoras Bank, in turn, was owned by Vladimir Antonov, a Russian “investor” now suspected of looting both Snoras and Krājbanka, who also attempted to buy Sweden's Saab.

Like Banka Baltija, Krājbanka's customers were mostly private persons. On its home page, the bank says it is (was now) one of the largest providers of financial services to private persons. When Banka Baltija crashed, tens of thousands of Latvians lost their often meager savings, which they had been criminally lured into depositing with the bank. Krājbanka's customers entrusted their money in good faith to a bank that had, in fact, worked as some kind of functioning bank for over 80 years. In short, the bank did what it promised its customers, up to some as yet indeterminate point at which Antonov started influencing the operations of Snoras and Krājbanka with criminal intent.

Whatever the sequence of events, the effects of deliberate looting and deception are being felt – thousands of customers have had their savings thrust into limbo (theoretically, they are covered up to EUR 100 000, but the payout will take time) and hundreds of businesses and government and municipal institutions. The total cost to society will be in hundreds of millons of LVL, including businesses ruined by the crash, small municipalities losing most of their funds and further unemployment triggered by all of this.

In some cases, the losses have been staggering. The Latvian State Radio and Television Center had more than LVL 24 million on deposit at Krājbanka, having chosen the bank as offering the best and safest terms for holding this amount of money. This is now lost, especially as Krājbanka is likely to be liquidated. The famous Latvian composer and musician Raimonds Pauls has lost most of his savings of some LVL 700 000 on deposit with Krājbanka. It also looks like significant funds – something like LVL 70 000 may have been put on deposit by the Latvian Filmmaker's Union.

Recriminations are already starting, just as they did when Banka Baltija fell apart. The Financial and Capital Markets Commission, Latvia's banking watchdog, is being blamed for missing the signs (or looking the other way) when it should have seen the shady deal in August that plundered Krājbanka of funds, diverted, it is said, to Antonov's private projects, including his attempts to buy Saab.

All things considered, though, it is impossible for any regulator or watchdog, no matter what resources it commands (such as the Securities Exchange Commission/SEC in the US) to double check on everyone, especially when criminals ar lying. Banka Baltija founder Aleksandrs Lavents and his managers lied systematically to auditors, who had neither the duty nor the capability to test every number and assertion offered by the bank with a lie detector. The Krājbanka case was different, but at some point, most likely due to the actions of Antonov, the bank turned into a fraud against its customer.

Moreover, Antonov's behavior seems to fit into a pattern of criminality and fraud by Russian so-called investors, who have either earned their money by some form of crime at home, investing the spoils of plundering and corrupting Russia into relatively benign Western businesses, or who are simply taking the worst of so-called Russian business practices into the West, like a gang of Wild West bandits riding into town on money bags rather than horses.

Antonov seems to fit into the latter pattern, making destructive “investments” in Lithuania and Latvia, attempting to get a foot in the door at Saab (hindered, at least, by the Swedish authorities who were aware of his possible organized crime connection). Antonov's father Alexander survived a shooting, an incident that casts light on what his lines of business were and possibly still are.

At the end of the day, the impact of the Krājbanka collapse will probably be less dramatic than Banka Baltija and far less than Parex Bank's collapse in 2008, which cost the government around LVL 1 billion in bailout spending and almost made the country an international basket case (when the basket says IMF on it, it is just a temporary resting place until your limbs grow back). Parex Bank's collapse also has elements of criminal sleaze, but it was done by locals and perhaps with a bit more sophistication. There is a difference between getting rich owning a bank that earns money serving shady characters and doing for them (as well as its other customers) what it promises to do, rather than breaching its trust to depositors and customers and simply stealing or squandering their money. In any case, the full story of Parex and various criminal and semi-criminal activities may yet emerge.

What all this suggest that with the Baltic countries being of particular interest to Russian based criminal “investors” such as Antonov, it is time to take targetted action. To be sure, there are examples of Western fraudsters and financial criminals, from the people running Enron to Bernie Madoff. But these guys eventually go to jail in the US and other Western countries, they do not move to London and buy football (soccer) clubs when rival gangs in Russia star breathing down their neck, or when their gang falls out of favor with the Russian political elite and the secret services.

I would suggest that Russian investment in the Baltic countries be allowed on a “whitelist only” basis – that is, to put you money into any project in these countries (and why not the US as a whole), any person whose investment capital was accumulated in Russia (meaning any wealthy Russian citizen) shall be barred from significant investment in any enterprise except if he or she is on a “white list” of investors who have been thoroughly background checked and vetted to be as clean as possible of any criminal or Russian secret service ties.

Whitelisting would be fair to Russians who want to put largely honestly earned funds into legitimate businesses in the Baltics, but it would create a presumption borne out by events, that the Russian post-Soviet super-rich are not to be trusted and probably, by conscious intent or instinct, engage in barbarous business practices. It may be the only way to prevent a Banka Baltija 3.0, now that Krājbanka may prove to be a Banka Baltija 2.0 (Not So ) Lite.

Graffiti, junkies and multi-drug addled mutts as signs of social decay

2011-10-24T00:07:00.000+03:00

The center (even officially known as "Centrs") of Riga, where I live and work, is showing signs of profound social decay. If you accept the "broken window that doesn't get fixed" theory of areas spiraling downward into becoming crime ridden slums, then the signs are all over the place in central Riga. It is not broken windows, but spray-painted, artless, incoherent graffiti everywhere. I discovered this by going around on walks and taking photographs, mainly of what I think is "street art" type graffiti and noticing that there was much, much more of the incoherent, quickly daubed squiggles and tags type of stuff. It seems to increase from week-to-week.
Also noticeable is the number of people on the street nodding on heroin or intoxicated on substances other than alcohol (not stoned, but on something that, unlike grass, affects motor functions in a different way than the drunken stagger of alcohol). You see these characters even in the morning, along with drunks, the typical signs of urban social degeneration. As things look, the mutts* are getting the upper hand.
*From the Urban Dictionary:

A Mutt is a person who is a real lowlife, degenerate piece of shit who just never does anything right... The common Mutt can be found in OTB and the local bagel store buying lotto tickets every day of their lives and losing every dollar they have... Another type of Mutt will be high or drunk 247 and try to operate and have a normal life but wind up doing "Mutt" things.

Here are some examples

Basically, just "tags" and scrawls, propagating day to day.
For the record, on addicts: Heroin should be decriminalized and made available to registered addicts along with clean needles. There should be no "accidental death penalty" for being a fuckwit who gets addicted, nor should we be robbed by addicts who need to pay for drugs whose prices are determined by their illegality, not their cost of production.

Latvia: Cobbling together a "kludge" of a government

2011-10-23T09:30:00.000+03:00

It looks like Latvia may have managed to cobble together a fragile coalition of Unity/Vienotība (V), the tatters of the Zatlers Reform Party (ZRP), six ZRP defectors and the National Alliance (NA). By now it should be obvious that the bright sun of change some Latvians have expected since the founding of New Era (Jaunais Laiks/JL) almost ten years ago, and that they expected, yet again, with the V alliance in 2010, and yet again with the dismissal of the Saeima and the new elections, has slipped back below the horizon. Another false dawn.

So what can we expect? Valdis Dombrovskis will continue at the helm of a listing ship with six loose cannons on deck (perhaps more, one can't say that the disintegration of the ZRP has ended with the mere loss of 27% of its parliamentary strength). There is already talk that oligarch influenced Green/Farmers Union (Zaļo Zemnieku Savienība/ ZZS, which neither particularly green nor agrarian) could be called out of its political leper colony to boost the coalition should all else fail.

That, of course, would be a symbolic death blow to the ZRP, which was built, overnight in political movement forming terms, on the idea of opposing the “oligarchs” and the practice of state capture. The six loose cannons have indicated this could be fine with them, providing that no direct representatives of Ventspils mayor Aivars Lembergs (from his Ventspils based “sub-party”) are involved. Dombrovskis, too smart not to be aware of the kind of crew he is sailing with, has also hinted that the ZZS might be let in the back door. After all, they are weaker than in the last Saeima, when they did everything to disrupt V's attempts to govern coherently. But then coherent governance has never been and is unlikely to be a Latvian priority in the foreseeable future.

The Harmony Center (Saskaņas Centrs/SC) has forecast – motivated by some bitterness – that the coalition will be lucky to last until next spring. They may be right. They have also indicated that as a harsh and firm opposition, the SC will continue to advocate social democratic policies. When it was offered a chance to govern together with the center-right, the SC quickly abandoned the social democratic populism that got it elected. More evidence that the SC are chameleons, never mind inexperienced (maybe a virtue where “experience” is being part of two decades of misrule) at national government.

After the “Sunday morning surprise” popped on everyone by the chief loose cannoneer Klāvs Olšteins (who burned through two political parties this year so far), it is safe to say that anything can still happen by the time the Saeima has to vote on the new government on October 25. But it seems likely that the present kludge (to use IT slang) of a government will get approved. Then the whole company of 100 merry pranksters will have to pass yet another austerity budget for 2012. How much more will have to be cut, and will the cuts keep up with the deterioration of the tax base due to emigration and the drift of the population into the gray economy is an issue that no one has talked about yet in and depth. Everyone has been watching the political circus or balagāns of the past five weeks. The real horror show may start with the budget.

Act one of the "balagāns" ends

2011-10-11T00:59:00.000+03:00

Act One of the balagāns seems to have ended. At square one, namely, the coalition that most people thought they were voting for – a center-right government consisting of Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP), Unity (Vienotība/V) and the breath-taking (if you try to say the whole thing in one breath) All for Latvia/Fatherland & Freedom/Latvian National Independent Movement or simply the National Alliance (NA). It took just three weeks of acrimony, betrayal, reconciliation, adultery and the political equivalent of make-up sex to get back to where everyone started – at least everyone who could a) count the Saeima seats won after the September 17 election and b) compare and contrast the party programs of those elected to the Saeima.

Looking at things that way, one can say – good for you, Harmony Center (Saskaņas centrs/SC),you added two seats and became the single largest party in the Saeima! However, your program – at least up until the chameleon hopped up in front of a picture (symbolically speaking) of Valdis Zatlers and Valdis Dombrovskis and started to try to match its background – was completely mismatched with these guys. The ZRP and V are not populist social democrats. Nor is V “pro-Russian” in the same sense that SC appeals to its Russian electorate. Neither is it anti-Russian and much of what it says could appeal to middle-class ethnic Russian voters.

The same goes for the ZRP, which has proposed and may still get ethnic Russian economist Vjačeslavs Dombrovskis appointed to a ministerial position. He would be, technically speaking, at least the third ethnic Russian minister after Vladimirs Makarovs of the nationalist Fatherland & Freedom and Vasilijs Meļņiks (finance minister for five days in 1997). However, the ZRP has, for three weeks, clung to the idea of having the SC as a coalition partner almost like one of those attack dogs whose jaws, once they bite, cannot be opened without cutting off the beast's head. The news that the ZRP has agreed to what was obvious three weeks ago came the night of October 10, so there is still time for surprises before the new Saeima meets.

As for SC, their “exclusion” from government is not a “Russian vs Latvian” thing, at least not in rational terms. The ideology of SC and the other potential coalition partners didn't match. You cannot match shape-shifting “social democrats” who voted to protect an oligarch (Ainārs Šlesers) from the law with centrists, much less with nationalists. The ZRP was crazy trying to do so and persisting in its obsession for three weeks, discrediting (if that is at all possible) the Latvian political system even further.

The potentially loose cannon in the upcoming coalition is the NA, who know that they probably can test how far they roll around on the heaving decks of the coalition without any serious consequences. Unlikely that they will be dumped in favor of the SC, after all, but perhaps they should not tempt fate. On some points of logic, the NA does make sense. No one should accept the facile phrase that Latvia was occupied, but there are no occupiers. To say this, even in 2011, is like going back in time to 1965 (20 years after the war) in Germany and saying : “There was a Holocaust, but there isn't anyone around who shot or gassed Jews.” Of course there were such folks around, and they were found and put on trial.

The expression “there was an occupation, but there are no occupiers” is an illogical way of saying that most, perhaps the vast majority of non-Latvians who arrived during the occupation did not do so with the intent of actively enforcing the totalitarian regime. Clearly, those who were members of the security service (the KGB) and the military (the Soviet army wasn't just visiting Latvia for 50 years for vacation). Soviet army veterans have essentially been blanket pardoned for, technically, being “occupiers” under the treaty that ensured the removal of ex-Soviet Russian troops. There has not been a concerted effort to find and punish ex-KGB, a number have even become businessmen and politicians (such as social democrat Juris Bojārs).

What one really means by saying “there are no occupiers” is that one isn't going to make a big deal of it unless there is a clear case of someone being a “ripper of fingernails” (nagu maucējs in Latvian). Also, there is no point in going after second-generation “occupiers” or those who simply came along for the ride thinking that the “known world” for them was the Soviet Union. The country has already lost some 300 000 people of all ethnicities to emigration, and trying to get even more to leave simply because they are Russian is not going to help things, especially the economy.

Keeping the NA from going off the deep end on these issues is going to be a major concern for the new coalition (if it hasn't already fallen apart as I write this). The other concern is what Zatlers, who has proven himself somewhat of a whackbat (amalgam of wacko and batshit) may do if offended by the NA and tempted to seek solace with his “first love” the SC. Which is not to say that the center-right coalition that has apparently been stapled together couldn't get the support of the SC on some issues. That would almost be like normal European politics. Nice thought. But this is Latvia...

Admitting a wasted vote in a failed state lite

2011-10-08T20:32:00.000+03:00

I voted for Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP) in the September 17 out of a sense of duty to vote for an “electable” political party, also to express my dissatisfaction with Unity (Vienotība/V) for letting their coalition partner, the Green and Farmers' Union (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība/ZZS) walk all over them. I decided that voting for the party I most sympathized with, the semi-anarchist Last Party (Pēdējā partija) would be a waste of my vote.

It now turns out that voting for the ZRP, even though they came in “second” with 22 seats in the Saeima, was also a waste of my vote. Others may be happy with their choice, I am not. It not seems that the only goal of the ZRP is to bring the Harmony Center (Saskaņas centrs/SC) into government, no matter what other disruptive effects this may have. These may include tearing apart the other parties it is trying to bring into the coalition, including itself.

The idea of making the SC one of the building blocks of a future government with its 31 Saeima seats has freaked out Latvian society in many ways at at many levels. It has also been reflected in the foreign media in distorted and nonsensical ways. For instance, saying that the SC gaining two Saeima seats for itself is a “social-democratic” victory is simply wrong. The SC is not a classic social democratic party, its populism sounds social democratic at first glance. It has voted with the oligarchs, it did not act to let anti-corruption police search the homes of Saeima deputy Ainārs Šleser, suspected of corruption. One of SC's candidates for prime minister, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, partnered with Šlesers in running the city until the politician was elected to the Saeima in 2010.

For me, these are reasons enough to be skeptical of bringing the SC into government. I would also be worried about the somewhat chameleonic nature of the SC. Within days of the election, they were ready to abandon their pre-election promises concerning the indexing (raising of pensions)and to soften their skeptical stand on joining the euro (considering what is happening with the European sovereign debt crisis, there was some merit to this view) as well as on attempting to re-negotiate and extend Latvia's arrangements with the IMF and other international lenders (a crackpot idea, IMHO).

Also, the SC is actually an alliance of two parties – the SC and the Socialist Party, which is an unreformed, hard-line Communist organization that justifies the deportations of Latvian citizens under Soviet occupation in 1941 and 1949, and calls the 1991 restoration of Latvian independence as a “ reactionary coup”. In a sudden move after the election and as coalition talks started, the SC said it would disassociate from the Socialists. What were they thinking earlier?

Meanwhile, the other parties in the talks were also showing rifts. Valdis Liepins, a Canadian-Latvian who “defected” from V to enthusiastically join the ZRP has been circulating e-mails expressing his opposition to any deal with the SC. He is a potential defector from his new party, which could bring the SC/ZRP majority to 52 (should both parties try to go it together).

V, meanwhile, has been deciding on-again-off-again that it won't/might go into coalition with the SC or maybe with everyone (except the ZZS, a party consigned to a kind of political leper colony). Except that “everyone” doesn't get along with “everyone” else, and the country is not at war or in any other extreme situation requiring a government of national unity. The National Alliance (NA) has declared it will never join a coalition with SC in it, nor is the SC ready to sit in the same government with the nationalists. V is also showing little unity in that some of its components (the former Citizens' Union) are also threatening to split off if there is a coalition with the SC.

Which means there are really “one and a half” possible combinations – the ZRP, V and the NA in a center-right coalition with programmatic similarities and a ZRP/SC coalition of two inexperienced and programmatically mismatched parties that would satisfy former president Valdis Zatlers' ambition to finally bring some ethnic Russians into government (at all costs, if need be).

As for the “Russian” issue, that has been raised yet again in all of its paranoid glory, with at least some parts of society sincerely believing that the SC will move rapidly toward moving Latvia into Russia's sphere of influence and making Russian an official language. Dampening these views has not been helped by Janis Urbanovics, a ethnic Latvian SC leader and its second candidate for prime minister, hinting that Russians would use “extra-parliamentary” means of protest if the SC was kept out of government.

In short, with President Andris Bērziņš setting a deadline for some kind of resolution of matters this Monday (October 10), there is some pressure for the parties to get their act together. But since this is Latvia, that may not happen. The continued bickering, bumbling, “betrayal” and shape-shifting will only confirm the totally cynical attitude the vast majority of the population has toward politics and politicians in general. While Urbanovics may not succeed in getting people into the streets, the continued failure of Latvian politics will lead to more external and “internal emigration”, in the form of passive resistance to taxes and any dealings with a system of governance much of the population sees as corrupt, incompetent and hostile to their interests.

Ground control to the majors Valdis...

2011-10-04T01:28:00.000+03:00

The political balagāns in Latvia has lifted off into new regions of outer space. Major Valdis Zatlers of the spaceship ZRP (Zatlers' Reform Party) has said it will take Imperial Star Cruisers (main battle tanks in Earth terms) to get him to undock from the Starship Harmony Center (SC). Now the other space major Valdis (Dombrovskis) has joined the orbital circus by proposing that all the spaceships dock and form a nice orbiting “ rainbow” with the Starship Unity (V), the Nationalist Falcon (NA) and even the almost launched into the Phantom Zone interplanetary garbage scow The Green Farmer (ZZS).

Ground control to the majors Valdis – this ain't gonna work, not in orbit, not on Earth.

The whole process of putting together some kind of workable coalition has gone far down the road to a total FUBAR (fucked up beyond all repair, in case you didn't know). It was probably heading there from the very start. Major “Big Wally” as I call him was determined from the start to link up with SC. Nothing was going to stop him, not even a deal with the other, “Little Wally” and V, to form the “core” of any coalition. Core meltdown. Bad in space, worse on earth.

So where does that leave things? The smart thing to do, to keep everything from de-orbiting and burning up, would be to let Major Big Wally remain docked and in orbit with SC. Everyone else stays on the ground, in gentle opposition and sees how many orbits the tandem can do by themselves.

This may be the only way out. Despite the fact that, programmatically, ZRP, V and the NA fit together, actually putting them together into a coalition has proven to be about as easy as the worst case scenario for assembling a piece of IKEA furniture. All the parts are there, just no one can fit them together and all attempts just fail.

ADDING THE LATEST

Well, maybe not. Now it is on again, yes, again, between V and the ZRP, who have, according to the latest news, both agreed to call for a kind of government of national unity minus the Green Farmer spacecraft, to be left in decaying oppositional orbit. That means that both the SC and the National Alliance will agree to sit in the same government. Yeah, right... Where is that cryptic IKEA diagram. Wait, these are parts from a different chair.

It is night, there will be real daybreak some hours from now, but this whole Saeima dismissal process, the referendum, now the latest elections, all point to yet another false dawn. The already totally cynical electorate will give whatever new government is cludged together a single digit rating even before it is formed.

Oh yes, then there is the little matter of the 2012 budget, with more spending cuts and the need to pour resources into what one can neither confirm nor deny is a rathole in the skyways – air Baltic. There, also, some kind of deal has been cobbled together and it will cost the state LVL 57 million in a first installment. Berthold Flick, who may well have been running the company against a merry mare's nest of revenue-suctioning parasite companies under his half-owned Baltijas aviacijas sistēmas (BAS), at least, is out of the picture. Whether he will sell his shares in BAS remains to be seen. In any case, it is starting to look like the biggest minority owner of air Baltic may be from the Russian sleazocracy.

Somehow I don't see the broad rattletrap coalition now being proposed as capable of getting much of anything, never mind the budget, done. Leaving the linked spacecraft of SC and ZRP to do it alone would be the test to quickly see whether they have the stomach (especially SC) to cut at least another LVL 100 million, if that is really the true figure. Just wondering, as 14 000 taxpayers, a record number, rising fast, have left the country this year to work and pay taxes where it actually counts and pays off. So I don't see tax revenues narrowing the budget deficit. Instead, the tax base will shrink by the combination of emigration and increasing tax resistance and evasion.

Let us see what marvels of outer space the next few days bring...

The “nicotine drill”, urban cattle update and a whiff of heroin

2011-10-02T13:25:00.000+03:00

I go to work past some kind of vocational high school in Riga, and almost every morning, I see something that reminds me of my high school days in the US-- almost everyone has left the building and is standing around in small to medium-sized groups. Back at Newton North High, this kind of a scene meant there was a fire drill, and this occurred a couple of times during any semester. At the Latvian school, the teenagers are out, standing in clumps, every weekday. And 99% of them are smoking. It is, in other words, a daily “nicotine drill”.

Don't get me wrong. Smoking is an individual choice. I have smoked for periods in my life, but never to the point of addiction (“needing” a cigarette at all costs, feeling “withdrawal” symptoms). If someone wants to smoke, let them do it (with respect for others and non-smokers, a commodity in short supply in Latvia). But the shocking number of smoking teenagers every morning indicates a number of things badly wrong. First, apparently these kids are either not educated about smoking, or whatever they are told falls on deaf ears. Compare this to the relatively low teen smoking rates in Sweden and other European countries. The other thing is that these smokers are the public health problems of the future in a country were there is practically no public health – by the time they are 20 years older, there may well be no tax-funded health care in Latvia (or many of them may be net consumers of health service in countries they have emigrated to).

In other words, the “nicotine drill” is yet another “street level” observation of the failure of societal mechanisms in Latvia and the continued degeneration of everyday life. I can only note that the proportion of the strange, addled and desperate-looking on the streets continues to increase. It is, perhaps, distorted by the fact that I work near the Riga central train station, and train stations are magnets for social outcasts.

Just a few examples – the pathetic, stereotype-boosting hustle by Roma/Gypsies by the train station, involving a few women peddling some kind of cosmetics, supervised by a number of men. It happens every day, with little apparent success by the “salesladies”. Where the goods come from can also be open to question. Certainly, one of the marketing mistakes by this team of street peddlers is that most Latvians automatically think – “Roma=stolen goods”. This may or may not be true. Perhaps they are peddling counterfeit goods. In any case, this activity, day-to-day, propagates the image of Roma as folks who engage in what can charitably be called cheap-ass, sleazy commerce.

A few meters away (one standing with a crutch, one sitting in his wheelchair) are two disabled beggars, who routinely engage in verbal and, sometimes, physical bum fights. The stand right by the pedestrian cross toward the train station (also the Origo shopping center) said to be the busiest in northern Europe. Here we see the phenomenon I have called urban cattle in full flower. Urban cattle are people who simply wander about mindlessly, ignorant of distinctions between sidewalks and road traffic, as well as anyone else engaged in locomotion (on foot, by motor vehicle or bike) around then. Urban cattle operate alone or in small herds. These herds, as a rule, fan out when one approaches and tries to overtake and pass them while walking somewhere in a purposeful manner (the cattle saunter and pause, doing “stop and stares” at nothing in particular).

It has now become routine at the Origo crossing, where pedestrian lights are indicated by digital times, for the urban cattle to jump the gun in considerable numbers at around 10 seconds before the lights actually change. I see this every time I cross there. First the urban cattle, some as early as minus 15, without even breaking stride from whatever hallucinatory or somnambulant hike they are one, then the rest of us

This seems especially dangerous, as the cattle end up in the path of drivers racing past the crossing on yellow. So far, I have not seen anyone hit, which seems almost miraculous. Then one day I noticed a few heavy-eyed cattle walking in a noddy-plodding manner not typical of alcohol drunks, who usually stagger and sometimes are self-aware (with the exception of the glassy-eyed robodrunks marching in their own oblivion).

Which brings us to the next observation. Mr H is definitely here in Riga. Harry the Horse is riding high. People are fucked up on heroin in Riga, not in great numbers, but increasingly noticeable. I have worked or lived in places with junkies on the streets before (New York, Frankfurt) and the eyes half-shrouded by lids, knees bending slowly, then popping back out of the nod thing is pretty obvious. Maybe other recreational chemicals do the same. I don't remember seeing folks on quaaludes back in the day, but those made people who took them into giggly-gumbies (like the stop-motion clay creature Gumby of 1950s and 1960s TV), or so it is said.

Anyway, I run across a few obvious junkies on the street every week, and this should have alerted the media that something is going on. But the Latvian media do not have the time or resources to deal with this issue, or maybe I don't read the right papers. However, it is become clear that heroin use among the underclass (and not only) is an emerging problem in this country.

My solution – decriminalize heroin, set up needle exchanges, clean shooting galleries and offer detox programs (unrealistic in Latvia except with charitable financing) to those who need it. This would reduce the danger of overdoses, get the heroin trade out of the hands of criminals (shifting it to pharmacies for registered addicts), prevent the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, as well as drastically reduce crime related to drug addiction (theft and robberies) as well as emptying the prisons of those “guilty” of victimless crime.

A new, bizarre act in Latvia's political "balagāns"

2011-10-01T19:08:00.000+03:00

The political balagāns (carnival) continues with a wee-hours-of-the night coup by the Zatlers Reform Party (ZRP) to bring Harmony Center (Saskaņas Centrs/SC) into government and offer the post of prime minister to Valdis Dombrovskis of Unity (Vienotība/V). Somehow I don't think this was coordinated between ZRP and V, in accordance with an agreement between both parties forming the “core” of any next coalition that exactly this kind of thing would be done by mutual agreement. For a number of reasons, the ZRP simply decided to screw its potential coalition partner, set off a bombshell in the middle of the night and get the whole country (or that part of it writing comments on internet portals) up in arms.

One reason former president Valdis Zatlers himself mentioned (and this was hinted at when he was forming his barely three-months old party) was to bridge the ethnic gap in Latvia between Latvians and Russians. At least one political scientist, Iveta Kažoka, called this “historic” and a good thing, sorta... In purely logical terms, it makes considerable sense. Latvians and Russians face the same economic challenges – despite some GDP growth, the country is still way below where it was in 2007 or 2008 and will not clamber back until the middle or latter part of the decade. Unemployment hits Latvians and Russians equally hard. Even emigration is an issue if we talk about ethnic Russian voters, which means they have citizenship, a passport and are free to go look for a better life in the rest of the European Union. Ethnic issues are largely historical and it is the future – will Latvia have one or not – that matters. Or so it would seem.

In reality, ethnicity overrides any and all common causes, except in fleeting, temporary situations, like hockey championships, where Russians and Latvians unite behind their (heavily Russian) national team. The issue of occupation and who or what was responsible for it (between 1940 and 1991, twenty years ago) is still emotionally pivotal and the main reason the National Alliance (All for Latvia/Fatherland&Freedom/Latvian National Independence Movement –NA) will see cows flying in formation before it joins any government with the SC in it.

It is not clear what would happen if the SC electorate were all to agree, not only that there was an occupation, but that they all, whether born here or not, are occupiers, including minor children, housepets and lawn statues of dwarfs. The NA, I am sure, would then urge them all to go back to Russia, acting out its deoccupation fantasies. That might have worked in 1991 -1992, but not anymore. Besides, Russia is an increasingly authoritarian bardak of corruption and cronyism that even puts Latvia to “shame”. However, a virtual deoccupation has already occurred in economic and demographic terms – at least 300 000 people, most of them economically active, have left the country, probably never to return (in any permanent sense). Trouble is, only some of them are Russian.

The other reason that Zatlers wants to have a three-party ZRP, SC and V coalition is that it would have more than a two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to change the constitution and allow popular elections for president, as well as granting the new, popularly elected presidency broader powers. Presently, the Latvian president is largely a figurehead. Cynics say the only reason Zatlers dismissed the parliament was in order to run for the new, more powerful office of president a few years down the road. This is probably not true, there was good reason to dismiss the Saeima with 94% of the electorate approving Zatlers' move in July.

As far as V and the coalition offer from the Zatlerites goes, it looks like the party will fulfill a cynical name I gave it back during the summer – izjuceklis or something that will tear itself apart. The former Citizens' Union (Pilsoniskā Savienība) has declared its opposition to forming a government with SC and there is talk of some V members of parliament quitting the party. This would leave ZRP with the other option of forming a bare-majority government with the SC, resting on 53 votes in the Saeima. It would also leave two inexperienced parties running the country, at least one of which has a dubious record on being law-abiding (voting against a search of the oligarch and Saeima deputy Ainars Slesers' residences) and of keeping promises to its own voters and internal partners (Nils Ušakovs has said he will boot the crackpot neo-Communist Latvian Socialist Party out of the SC if that is what it takes to get into the coalition).

So the balagāns is far from over and Latvia probably faces more years of acrimonious, bumbling government for the next few years, perhaps followed by a possible nationalist backlash in the regular Saeima elections in 2014.

One "balagāns" is over, the next one starts

2011-09-21T07:52:00.001+03:00

And so the big balagāns (slighty tawdry carnival) of the extraordinary Saeima elections is over and the outcome is much as could be expected. The only thing that did not happen is that Harmony Center (SC) didn't get the big gain in seats that some pollsters predicted, and that would have allowed it to make a coalition wih the severely depleted Green and Farmers' Union (ZZS) of the “oligarch” Aivars Lembergs. The SC, which has been called both “ pro-Russian” and “social democratic”, gained only two seats for a total of 31. The ZZS was cut down to 13 seats in the Saeima, but with the SC failing to make the gains that some had predicted for it, there is no way that the two of them together can make the populist, corruption-tolerant coalition that would have been possible if the list led by Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs had gained at least 38 seats (for a bare majority together with ZZS).

What is possible now is a number of unstable coalitions. One is to put together 51 seats with prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis' Unity (V) and SC, which would need a good reason for excluding the Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP). It would also put the strongest member, SC, in a technically dominant role against the more politically experienced, but “defeated” V. A strong coalition in terms of numbers would put the top three winners together and gather 73 seats, making it possible to pass almost any “reforms”, including changes to the constitution (Satversme).

In such a coalition, the two centrist-liberal parties with 42 votes among them would be dominant, though perhaps as a two-headed alpha dog. If one “discounts” the SC, then the ZRP has good reason to consider itself the real “winner” of the election, having come from nothing to 22 seats in the Saeima, ahead of V with its depleted 20 seats. Vienotība, itself an amalgam of three parties, can still consider itself most experienced at government (which ZRP is not), and besides, ZRP is just an accidental clone of itself, isn't it? Seeing things that way, the real winner is the center-liberal block, the unintentional seeming twins V and ZRP, with 42 votes, just a few short of a majority.

That is where the Nationalist Alliance (NA) with is long title of All for Latvia!-For Fatherland & Freedom/Latvian National Independence Movement could fit very nicely to make a government backed by 56 votes in the Saeima. There is just one problem – the NA knows they are the keystone that holds together the edifice of a “non-Russian” and nominally non-leftist (the NA actually supports protectionism and state ownership, but nevermind...). This gives the nationalists undue leverage, which would be problematic enough if the NA could keep some of its loose cannon from rolling around the deck and firing at the wrong time.

For a while it looked like one of the cannon, a young lawyer named Jānis Iesalnieks, had been lashed down after stating in social media that multiculturalism in Norway was really to blame for the bombing and massacre staged in July by Anders Breivik. Iesalnieks agreed not to run for the Saeima on the NA ticket, something he and All for Latvia (VL) had intended. But just after the election, Iesalnieks resurfaced and engaged SC's candidate for prime minister, Riga mayor Nils Ušakovs, in a duel on Twitter, saying that most of the people who voted for SC (as Latvian citizens) were really an illegitimate colonial population. Ušakovs wrote to VL's leader Raivis Dzintars, who was elected to the new Saeima, demanding an explanation. Dzintars responded that Iesalnieks arguments, based on the Geneva Convention articles about settlers in occupied territories were sound, but that VL and the NA did not support acrimony between the Latvians and Russians on an everyday level. This was a position that could effectively exclude the NA from any coalition with V and the ZRP, especially as the latter has said one of its purposes was to bridge the ethnic rift in Latvian society.

While the NA is unyielding in its hard-line position, the SC has apparently show readiness to retreat from its contrarian, populist or as some politely called it – social democratic policies. In order to join a possible grand coalition, the SC has indicated it will go along with a 2012 budget deficit that will get Latvia into the eurozone under the Maastricht criteria in 2014. It also has, by implication, backed off from suggesting that it wants to extend repayment (by refinancing on the market) of Latvia's loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other lenders. Ušakovs also made a low-key concession over the weekend, telling a conference that he considered Latvia to have been an occupied country during the Soviet era, but that no one today should be considered an occupier (Latvians use the term okupants or “occupant” – the biggest single addressee for junk mail in the US until /not-so/ sophisticated computer mailing systems personalized each letter). If you ask me, you will see cows dancing ballet on their hind legs by the Freedom Monument in Riga before Nils Ušakovs statement on “occupation” gets the NA to join any government with the SC in it. The reason for this was more likely to make a gesture toward the ZRP and V, who are also sensitive to anyone treating 50 years of totalitarian rule as some kind of mistake in international affairs or an “annexation” agreed to by a government in 1940 terrified by thousands of Soviet tanks and soldiers at (and to a great deal, within) its borders.

Having said that, the quick retreat from apparent “principles” (pasted to the backs of half of the busses in Riga) does not bode well for the SC as a reliable partner to the ZRP and V. Shapeshifters never are. As one former Riga hand said recently over a beer while visiting town, it's all about getting into power for the SC, never about any principles. That makes it a very much “Latvian” and old-style party, much like the sordidly defeated ZZS.

Oh yes – Vienotība and the ZRP are already kicking each other under the table while still trying to smile, because ZRP apparently went to a meeting with the SC without taking its slightly smaller twin along. And already during election eve, a carrot-topped iron lady from V was ranting that Zatlers was a liar because he had extended feelers to the SC even as the ballot boxes were being being sealed and taken away to be counted and exit polls were hitting the newswires showing who would be boss.

A merry few weeks are ahead for all. Book your Ryanair seats now for the opening of parliament (air Baltic may well have gone to the dogs by then, the government may just dump it on the mysterious minority shareholders rather than put up to LVL 60 million, maybe more, into a rathole in the skies).

Latvia Heading for a populruppted or corruplistic government?

2011-09-11T20:55:00.000+03:00

The Latvian affiliate of the German-based market research and polling company GfK has published a poll indicating that the Harmony Center (Saskaņas centrs/SC) will get 41 seats in the extraordinary Saeima elections to be held in less than a week. In the last elections to the 10^th Saeim,, GfK accurately predicted that SC would get 29 seats, which gives considerable credibility to their latest forecast.

The poll also sees the Green and Farmers Union (Zaļu un zemnieku savienība/ZZS) getting 13 seats down from 22, Unity (Vienotiba/V) would get 21 seats (down from 33), Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP) would get 18 seats (as a new party, no prior presence), and the nationalist National Alliance (Visu Latvija-Tēvzeme un Brīviba-LNNK /NA) -seven seats.

The only combination that “works” from these forecast results is a coalition of SC and ZZS, easily getting 53 votes (or more, if support for the ZZS is stronger than anticipated). The resulting government will be populist – with the SC advocating more spending for pensions and social programs (even at the risk of expanding the budget deficit) and “corruption-tolerant” with the ZZS still holding out hopes that its backer and “eminence grise”, Ventspils mayor Aivars Lembergs, who face criminal charges for economic crimes, will someday be prime minister. Hence the idea that the government will be populruppted or corruplistic, combining the words populist and corrupted.

The SC and Lembergs have both entertained the idea of renegotiating Latvia's deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the vain hope of extending Latvia's very favorable credit terms (never mind that the IMF has not given any new loans at the same low rates) rather than re-financing the loans and going back to the market. Even if it worked, it would mean continued austerity, something at odds with the SC's attempts to be social-democratic.

The ZZS, a party ready to go in bed with almost anyone in order to stay in government, will continue to shield state-capture and corruption, though perhaps with less vigor since the SC will want to keep a relatively “clean” image. Indeed, one of the reasons people will probably vote for this party and forget the battles over “acknowledging the occupation” is that the SC has not, so far, been involved in any major corruption scandals (probably because it has been kept away from the trough by the bigger pigs).

Interestingly, Latvia will probably be praised for getting a government with its first ethnic Russian PM, Nils Ušakovs, a kind of Latvian version of Arnold Schwartzenegger – a politician of national scale who spoke the official language with a slight accent. There will also be well-grounded fears that an EU member state has been drawn further into Russia's sphere of influence, although the same could have been said about Germany and its pro-Russian policies some years back, for instance, regarding the Nordstream gas pipeline.

So, if the GfK poll and forecast are right, Latvia is heading for a change, putting the present government party in opposition, a different party and possibly an ethnic Russian prime minister in charge, and, after some years of slight progress in breaking away from corruption and free-spending, pedal-to-the metal government, a partial back-to-the future with populist spending and tolerance of, to put it mildly, politico-economic hanky-panky.

On violence..and futility

2011-08-23T00:22:00.000+03:00

I am reviving something I was writing in Latvian for a closed reading list. It started with looking at the government and ruling elite as an unknown creature from which we try to elicit some kind of response. First we make sounds at the creature. Nothing happens. Then we flash colored lights at the creature (this is getting to be like the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Finally, (and this is not to be tried lightly with a real alien or unknown beastie), we poke the thing (a minor act of violence) and it finally responds.

It seems to have been the same with the Latvian government. Peaceful public protests were dismissed as “yapping” by angry little dogs by the government of Aigars Kalvītis. The protests involved both audible (chanted slogans) and visual (signs and placards) cues. There was no response. On January 13, 2009, a mob “poked” the creature of government by stoning the parliament (Saeima) and other buildings, trashing some storefronts, fighting the police and overturning some of their vehicles.

Boy did that get a response! Ivars Godmanis, prime minister at the time, appeared on national television the next morning, stone-faced and speaking in a voice almost from beyond the grave. “We have awoken in another Latvia”, he intoned. Well, good fucking morning, as if this shit hadn't happened in other countries, in some, like Greece, just weeks before!. Right after that, then president Valdis Zatlers also gave the Saeima an ultimatum – to pass amendments to the Latvian constitution allowing popular initiatives to dismiss the Saeima, to change the election laws to prevent powerful candidates or “locomotives” from running in more than one electoral district as well as other measures by March 31 of the year. Some of what Zatlers requested actually got done and he never acted on that ultimatum.

The quick and simple, maybe oversimplified conclusion is – a bit of violence is the only communication that elicits a response from the ruling elite in Latvia. Paving stones and smashed glass are “heard”, words and protests, ignored.

But that is about the end of it. There was needless and senseless collateral damage from January 13, such as the stoning of a library building near the Saeima, the ransacking of a liquor store and serious injuries to a teenager hit in the eye by a rubber bullet. It also became clear that the “political” stone throwers were joined by a rabble out for the thrill of destruction and looting.

Even the political stone throwers represented no one beyond themselves and their personal anger with politics and politicians. Even their violence was “senseless” because it had no agenda and no organizational back-up in society. In other words, these guys were not the vanguard or fighting unit of a well-organized and defined revolutionary movement.

I started writing this before the rioting in the UK, which puts a different angle on things. Those events gave an entirely new meaning to the idea of politically (and economically)senseless violence. One may be able to better examine things once data are collected on the more than 1600 persons arrested in the wake of the UK disorders, but it now looks like what happened was an outbreak of theft, violence and destruction by the British equivalent of what are called urlas in Latvia. These are uneducated, unemployed (though not always) purposeless, substance-abusing, petty criminal rabble. They are apolitical except to the extent that some commentators on events try to interpret the formation of the UK lumpenproletariat in political terms. It is likely that the Brit-urlas have no political agenda and little or no political consciousness.

Before anyone starts drawing conclusions from what I have written so far, I am not building up to advocating terrorism in Latvia. Suffice it to say that in earlier times, somewhat better organized Latvians did turn to anarchism and/or revolutionary violence, such as in the uprising in 1905. Terrorism is merely the other side of extremely poor and often oppressive governance, it is a reaction to the action or inaction of the state – at least in simple terms, discounting the terrorist movements based on shared misperceptions of reality and bizarre ideologies.

One can safely say that there is little basis for domestic terrorism in Latvia, mainly because those dissatisfied with the state of affairs have taken the much easier step of emigrating and see no sense in staying behind to fight a political battle. Latvia's citizens have seen all to often that when “political battles” (elections) are won, the spoils are divided among some of the winners at the expense of taxpayers, or, at best, literally despoiled and wasted in attempts at governance by incompetent fools. Electing a few “good people” merely thickens the brake linings on some wheels of a what has been a runaway train of corruption, incompetence, cluelessness and folly that has characterized much of Latvian politics over the past 20 years. That is what the reform movements of recent years have accomplished, thickened the brake linings without stopping and just slightly slowing the train. I refer to the Jaunais Laiks (New Era) experiment, the re-try of the same formula with Vienotība, the work of “good people” (no irony intended) such as Valdis Dombrovskis, the “new kids in the Saeima” or the former exile Latvians and some of their allies.

Tax resistance?

Maybe I am misinterpreting some socio-economic phenomena too optimistically or politically, but some parts of the population have reacted to this pattern of failure of governance by simply withdrawing from economic engagement with the state. That is another way of saying – not paying taxes. Again, at the risk of overpoliticizing what is happening and projecting a consciousness into this behavior that isn't there, I would argue that this form of effective “secession from the state” is, at least, a minimally effective form of resistance.

Undeniably, the lack of tax revenues is (and we have heard this song before) deprives pensioners, the health system, the police, the schools, the roads etc. of funding that would have made these government services better. But it also says, from the de-facto tax-refusers' point of view – that I am also depriving one of the world's most expensive bridges of my money. I am not paying for borderline-poor medical services so that characters like Mr. Golden Hands (New Era's first Minister of Health Āris Auders), the surgeon, can take my money that was earmarked for his treatment of patients, and then hit these patients again for a hefty envelope payment.

In what may be an idealistic fantasy, I think that at least a few Latvian businesses are paying in envelopes not to enrich the boss at the expense of depriving the state of tax revenues, but simply because envelope payments instead of withholding social tax are actually a form of direct-action social welfare. An example I often use is that if a small business has monthly labor costs of say, LVL 10 000, the owner takes some LVL 3000 or whatever the social tax rate is, and pays it to the state. Month after month, those LVL 3000 have no visible impact on the miserable looking pensioners, the beggars (at least those who are not professionals), the local hospital about to close with its “fat-years” MRI unit that gets used twice a month, etc. etc.

Now take those LVL 3000 and pad the envelopes of employees that one knows personally – Jānis, who looks after his infirm mother, Anna, who is paying for her daughter's university, Sergejs, who can now afford a private day-care center for his son and needs elective surgery himself. The extra money, taken away from the rathole of paying the state with a negative return on taxation now becomes a tangible, here and now (or in the foreseeable future) benefit for a small circle of people who need it and use it wisely.

It is, of course, pure political science fiction to imagine that, having experienced a degree of state failure for 20 years (minus the attributes of real failed states, gunmen in the streets, three hours of electricity, the whole Somalia scene), Latvian society would self-organize into communities of resistance as it did, to some extent, when forming the Peoples' Front (Tautas Fronte) in the late 1980s. Having exhausted the possibilities of getting a response from the present political system, such communities of resistance could at least improvise local solutions to problems the state is unable to solve.

Electronic civil disobedience?

For example – shutting down a hospital to cut costs (after deranged, shambolic spending on health during the “fat years”)? The community simply occupies it, organizes that some work is done voluntarily in exchange for care, local business puts in some funds to benefit the town's citizens, the MRI units services are offered, on the internet, to patients across the country (or even from abroad).

Elsewhere, people can take non-violent, disciplined direct action against the state –occupying ministries or government buildings, at least for a short, symbolic period, or organizing electronic political actions, including the limited “hacking” (a note on a home page – this agency is run by thieving or wastrel fools). Such actions would involve technically illegal behavior and would require backing by legal defense and public relations teams, to do everything to hinder (by legal means) the prosecution of persons involved in resistance activities, and to explain to society and the media (with social media, everyone is media) the reason that activists were being made, in effect, political prisoners.

Back to Gewalt gegen Sachen?

At some point, there would have to be symbolic violence against the state, targeted trashing of state property, but if this was done against the background of a mass civil resistance and direct-action movement, it would be a small price to pay for finally breaking the grip of a political ruling elite that has, by the “experiment” described above, shown that violence is the only language that it hears.

Having said that, I have to emphasize that this is an impossible scenario and there are no signs that anyone is trying to execute it. The human capital needed for something like that has been dispersed abroad by the consequences of 20 years of the political elite's behavior. Those who remain are too disorganized, drawn to crackpot ideologies, übermother political movements or simply given up on the whole mess, often based on a rational assessment of the situation. I think I can count myself among the latter.

We will have yet another election, triggered by good intentions to throw the bastards out, but I suspect the result, at best will be another deceptively bright false dawn, and, more likely, a typically Latvian political bardaks where the sleazy but untainted-by-being-in-government Harmony Center (Saskaņas Centrs/SC) will be the biggest winner. Then, no one among the “good guys” will want to play with them. So they may end up with a “worser” if not worst case scenario of SC aligning with the Green and Farmers' Union (Zaļo un Zemnieku Savienībā/ZZS) to put one of the oligarchs (and a popular one among the large ignorant and populist-manipulated part of the electorate), Aivars Lembergs, in de-facto control of the state.

More nothing special..

So the coming election battle, triggered by the drama of dismissing the Saeima and the subsequent referendum, may yet again amount to nothing – nothing special. The referendum showed that almost 95% of the electorate rejecting the present political elite and the antics of the parliament up to now. One could almost say it was a reflexive vote against two decades of state underperformance, if not what I call state failure light. But that is it. There will be no second Awakening/Atmoda. There will be no powerful popular movement of resistance and direct action, no one is there to lead it, and the very few, probably too few good people able to change much of anything, are running again for what I call the Big Monkey House (disrespectful? Check those referendum results again).

Maybe, just maybe, the 2020s may be a time when the last hard-core homo postsovieticus retires from political life or dies off, and then the 1,6 or 1,8 million left in a marginal, stagnant little European country may, at last perk up and find that they can at least adequately govern themselves. But is there any point for someone like me, of advanced youth but with a few good years left (working and writing)to linger here and wait to see where the chips fall in ten or fifteen years?

20 years of freedom – and?

2011-08-20T23:56:00.000+03:00

OK, I will join the great chorus in saying how great it is that Latvia regained its independence in 1991 and nothing could have been worse that continuing to stagnate under the Soviets. The Soviet occupation was a truly horrible time, especially the beginning of it all, with deportations, war, deportations again and repression and fear that only eased very gradually toward the end of the 1980s. Add to that the bizarre economic deprivation, queues, shoddy products, blat-level corruption, dismal everyday life with little or nothing changed, no freedom to travel, etc. etc.

The occupation left indelible marks on the Latvian nation, and those are the reason that, at the end of the day, we are happy to have our freedom, we say we cherish our freedom (and we probably do), and we should never, never lose that freedom again. Of course!

But what have we made of that freedom? What did those of us who lived outside Latvia expect? We grew up as “refugee/emigres” wherever we were, a status that kept important, vital parts of our lives focussed on Latvia and on the impossible dream of Latvian independence. The dream came true, but we who grew up in freedom knew that freedom was the most important kind of opportunity, often the first step. Freedom is to be used, filled out with a vision, a path chosen together with other free citizens.

Yes, Latvia used its freedom. The country made its way into the European Union and NATO, two visions that it automatically adopted once free. But after that? There is no realistic, coherent vision for the future.

To be frank, Latvia achieved freedom from the Soviet Union, but is still far from free from being a nation of far too many homo post-sovieticus. It has lost up to 300 000 inhabitants to emigration, a good part of them, perhaps, for largely economic reasons, but also because what the political and economic elite of this country has done and failed to do has broken any trust they had in the government and any faith in the future.

I put myself among those who have lost this trust and faith – for reasons that I have argued many times over in this blog. Latvia could have done a lot better with its freedom over the last 20 years by making many choices not made. Many of these choice not taken involved actions and changes of behavior that would have cost very little money. It is not case of failing to do as old rich countries did with their wealth, but failing, with few exceptions, to behave as old rich countries did in order to become both rich and reasonably civilized.

Much of this I have described in earlier posts. There is really nothing new to say on the 20^th anniversary of the Soviet coup and independence. I don't regret spending much of my life growing up in the US, living and working in Germany and Sweden, while always trying to “be Latvian” and do things for “the Latvian cause”, even as a journalist. I can say, too, that I have also “served my time” here in Latvia, for better or for worse. We have what we have. Been there, done that, yet again. But I've had enough, too, in one sense. I want to be somewhere else and do something else next, before going even further into “advanced youth” where my options will shrink.

The deeper roots of Latvia as a failed state lite

2011-07-31T18:14:00.000+03:00

What are the historical and socioeconomic roots of the failure of governance and, to some extent, the failure of society that make me say that Latvia is a failed state lite? Why are the crisis in politics and the stagnation of the economy most likely intractable?

The deepest roots go far back in Latvian history. Maybe “600 years of serfdom” is a myth. The truth is that Latvian society was largely untouched by even a theoretical understanding of democracy and nationhood well into the 19th century. Subjugation and the serf mentality it created left a profound effect on national character and mentality.

At the start of the 20th century, Latvia was fortunate, despite being part of the Russian Empire, it had developed somewhat of an educated elite, sufficiently in tune with the movements and forces that had already changed or were changing Western Europe. These were classic liberalism, nationalism, scientific rationalism, to some extent Marxism, socialism and social democracy.

To be sure, the majority of society were still subjects, not citizens, trading loyalty or favors for the good will of the German manor lord, the Czarist bureaucrat or Father Czar (caratētiņš). Patronage and corruption, such as it was, had not reached depraved proportions, though I may be wrong and am ready to stand corrected on historical issues from this period.

Multi (25+) party democracy?

When Latvia gained its independence, the liberal democracy foreseen by its constitution, the Satversme, was the product of the nation’s small elite, which today we would call “Westernized”. The constitution had to be implemented in a society with an underdeveloped and fragmented political culture. How else does one explain 25+ political parties? The country’s already diverse population found expression in having, in the Saeima at one time or another, Zionist parties who differed only on whether they split a certain religious or political hair vertically or horizontally, Old Believers (Russians with ZZ Top beards), the Fishmongers and Breeders of Dwarf Swine etc. Some of these are made-up parties, but if you check the Saiema rosters from back in the 1920s and early 1930s, I don’t think my creative guesses are far from the truth.

As for corruption, etc., I assume that the film Ceplis (Soviet-era made), showing the antics of the business and political elite of the interwar period, was not an extreme exaggeration. Certainly, the culture of horizontal patronage among members of student fraternities (korporācijas) thrived, with some jobs or career advancements open only if you were a member of Ļurbalonia (sorry to insult all decent student organizations by avoiding naming any one in particular and making up this name)

After the bloodless military coup of 1934, it was back to being subjects again, this time of the Leader and Good Farm Manager (best try on labais saimnieks) Kārlis Ulmanis. Being a subject or follower of the good Vadonis (leader) also created, to my mind, a perverse version of that which is utterly lacking today in society’s attitude toward its institutions of governance -- trust.

The few remaining Latvians who experienced the Ulmanis era as young adults or teenagers often speak of those times with adulation. What shines through is that all these people, back then, trusted the Leader. They trusted him not because he had their electoral mandate based on informed choices, or based on a record of rarely or never breaking previous trust, they experienced as trust being relieved of the need to make choice and follow up, critically and skeptically, the actions of those chosen. Whatever the Leader does must be good, because we all, or most of us, trust him in this sense.

And so it was: I stay my place, you stay your place (to make a somewhat bizarre translation of what Leader Ulmanis said when the Soviet army rolled, unopposed, into Latvia in June, 1940). It quickly turned out that for Ulmanis “my place” was an unknown grave somewhere in the USSR, while “your place” (for the leader’s subjects) was a lot of places, many of them horrifying (Siberian labor camps, the Riga Ghetto, Waffen-SS fighting hopeless battles in some Russian swamp, Red Army on the other side of the swamp, fishing boats to Sweden, semi-slave labor under Allied bombs in Germany, and a whole range of merry adventures). In other words, almost everything had been fine on the Leader’s watch, but he just happened to lose the country.

Depradations of totalitarianism

And so, for the next 50 years, Latvian society was the largely unwilling subject of totalitarian foreign powers. The German occupation was relatively short, 1941-45, a different flavor of terror and terror with different targets than that of the Soviets in their first 1940-41 and subsequent 1945-91 occupations.

The Soviet deportations of 1941 and 1949, the losses of population due to battle casualties on both sides (Latvian citizens conscripted by the Germans and the Soviets), the Holocaust killing of the Jewish population, and the flight of some 200 000 Latvians to the West as the World War II ended, had a devastating impact on the social structure of Latvia. A large part of the nation’s educated elite were lost as refugees, war casualties or victims of political repression.

Economically, the already damaged agrarian base of the country was practically destroyed by collectivization and political repression. The most capable and productive farmers, in addition to losing their property, were imprisoned or deported as kulaks. The message of the early years of Soviet rule in Latvia was that any skills or behavior that would have been considered as entrepreneurial before the war or today were best hidden from the authorities.

With Stalin’s death in 1953, there was significantly less reason for day-to-day personal fear of the government authorities, but people were still largely subjects of a regime beyond their control. Moreover, the Communist regime was obviously mendacious (or put simply, a liar) about its economic and social achievements. For most people in Latvia, the imposition of a centrally planned, command economy meant a decline in living standards and the quality of life, while Soviet official propaganda portrayed it as progress and advancement.

Latvians, who prided themselves as a nation of farmers, were shocked when collective farms or kolhozes, sometimes turned to buying bread at artificially cheap prices and feeding it to pigs because proper animal fodder was not available (delayed, misdirected or embezzled). The destruction of the market economy and the absence of competent management (as well as the intractable problems of managing a command economy) degraded labor productivity in almost all fields. Salary incentives often had little impact because there were few goods or services to be bought with higher income.

By the time Soviet planners, desperate about the failure of the centrally planned economy to deliver what Communist slogans had been promising for decades, started experimenting with various incentives (aside from exhortations and bonuses in “wooden rubles” ) the “animal spirits” of enterprising Latvians and others across the USSR had created a dark, distorted “market economy” of favor and influence trading, bribes, stolen production and the “misuse” of socialist state property.

Summing up the effects of Soviet totalitarianism, the late Latvian historian and political commentator Uldis Ģērmanis described the society created by Soviet rule as an “anti-civilization” (anticivilizācija) -- a tragic, at “best” black humor parody of what “civilization” is generally understood to mean. It was a fragmented, atomized, demoralized society under a false banner of internationalist unity and socialist construction that, in fact, engaged in industrial activities that have been described as “value destructive” rather than “value-adding”.

Informal communities of trust

With a lingering fear of the KGB and its informers or stukači, society fragmented into small communities of tenuous trust (family, close friends, school or university classmates) that also provided “safe areas” for officially unsanctioned or forbidden activities -- a cousin to sell sausages from the meat of a kolkhoz pig that never was put on the books (piglets die, nobody double-checks), a classmate to bring Levis jeans from a sailor in return for some other favor. This, too, was part of the anticivilizācija, since in normal, open societies, people at least had some trust of public institutions and could be open about other communities of trust they belonged to -- churches, clubs, circles of friends and the like. In the Soviet anticivilization, these communities, instead, formed an ad hoc underground of, if not deliberate, then defacto resistance to most, if not all of what the state represented.

Theft, embezzlement and double-dealing were the safest and most powerful weapons of resistance to the state, which was seen as a dangerous, hostile menace. Few people would risk the penalties for raising the pre-war Latvian flag on the factory flagpole or of distributing “anti-Soviet” leaflets. But when it came to skimming the monthly production quota of some “deficit” goods, even the local Communist officials could be offered a cut and keep quiet about this offense to good plan execution. Often they were at the top of and even started whole “food chains” of pilferage and off-the books production (there were reports of informal “night shifts” at Soviet factories that produced for the benefit of the managers, while the “day shift” muddled about pretending to work).

This form of resistance also brought practical benefits in a society of chronic shortage and disfunctional official channels for getting anything done. Raise the red-white-red flag and get away with it-- so what? Nothing changed. Steal several rolls of good fabric and you are owed many favors by your elementary school classmate, now a seamstress, including making you a jacket from part of what you stole. Or arranging to see her sister, a dentist who is not a butcher.

As the malaise of the centrally planned but nearly unmanageable Soviet economy spread to more and more institutions, bizarre relationships developed. Even as Latvians, enjoying perestroika and glasnost freedoms, shouted at public rallies for the Soviet Army to leave Latvia, Latvian kolkhozes unofficially traded food (meat, eggs, fresh produce) to nearby Soviet army bases in return for motor fuel. Soviet army conscripts were living on poor rations, sometimes the kolkhoz care packages filtered down to them, more often, the officers would send Latvian sausages, smoke meats and cheese back home to Russia for consumption or sale through one of their informal and hidden communities of trust (Uncle Leonid in Krasnoyarsk and his black market boys). Meanwhile, had there been a major military alert, many tanks and armored personnel carriers would not have made it far past the army base gate, because their fuel tanks had been siphoned to pay for inventory for Uncle Leonid’s basement meat emporium.

Society as a thieves’ market

This society, a thieves market of fragmented, mutually suspicious informal little groups, all deliberately or unconsciously undermining the enemy state and its official economy, was what stepped into complete political and economic independence, somewhat unexpectedly, in August, 1991. The flags on the flagpoles changed, little else did, though much was expected, far much more than from the Communist slogans of the last time the order of things had changed back in 1945.

The Latvian leadership of the early 1990s were basically well meaning, inexperienced (at running free countries) and baffled Soviet people trying to be “ post-Soviet” (when “post” amounted to days or weeks). They inevitably failed. Bumbling mistakes were made, temptations “to grab a little” abounded. Society -- a rag quilt of these little groups of tentative trust -- took a few looks and concluded -- it is all the same. The state is still a hostile and incompetent force, failing to deliver the milk and honey that implicitly stood behind all the slogans and songs of national pride and independence. So fuck ‘em.

Oh, but there was milk and honey and five-star cognac in abundance, because the market economy kicked off in Latvia and the rest of the former USSR as one of history’s biggest yard sales. Millions of tons of inventory -- metal, chemicals, scrap, caviar, furs, you name it -- were there in the ownerless warehouses of ownerless all-Union enterprises. So people got to it, and were literally rolling in hard currency.

This was not entrepreneurial capitalism, but it sure looked like “ wow, I’m a millionaire”. What role models did anyone have for this? Certainly not the discreet charm of US or British “old money” where wealth was “flaunted” by funding a university library, opera house or scholarship fund. Try Dallas instead.

By the mid-90s (around the time of the so-called G-24 loan fiasco, when millions in foreign aid loans were wasted and shamelessly embezzled) the first Western and European Union (EU) advisors started arriving in Latvia under the Phare and other programs. Sometimes stridently, sometimes unintentionally condescendingly, the advisors and consultants repeatedly told their “clients” that graft and stealing were bad, that bureaucracy had to be eliminated or made efficient, that government operations and finances had to be open and transparent, plus a whole shopping list of things that had to be done if Latvia wanted to join the “civilized” world and eventually, the EU. Much of this fell on ears that were open in the classrooms and seminars, but often deaf when it came to putting the lessons into everyday practice.

In the 90s (and still, almost 20 years later), it was often argued that Latvia could not be like developed Western countries because it was poor. Certainly, it could not afford to build massive new infrastructure, tear up its railway net overnight and adjust it to European gauge and many other things, but that was not the issue. Latvia didn’t do the simple things that were recommended over and over by the Western consultants and that cost little or nothing -- like stop embezzling, taking bribes, being harsh and unkind to people seeking public services, treating employees as equals, not servile subordinates, etc.

What happened during the late 90s and what continues up to now is that the remnants of the anticivilizācija simply shrugged off all well-meaning outside influences and went about their business. This showed up not only in the activities of significant parts of the political and economic elite, but also in everyday behavior by ordinary people. It has probably been underestimated to what extent much of the population is psychologically twisted, undereducated, and made passive-aggressive by both the Soviet legacy and the experience of the past 20 years. I have described these behaviors in other posts.

Opening the floodgates

2004 and EU accession opened the floodgates for people who wanted to get away from all this and move to where they were, first of all, better paid, and second, better governed both by the states where they moved and, often, in their new workplaces. The end result is that Latvia has lost some 300 000 inhabitants, in non-violent and, for those directly involved, even subjectively pleasant ways (I disagree with those who compare the population loss to a war, economic migrants are not refugees from conflict nor are they war casualties). TV shows on emigration often feature people saying that they are living dignified lives for the first time after moving to Ireland or England.

However, the emigration also took away a very significant part of the population that, had it been confined to Latvia by difficult immigration rules in other countries (no EU membership), might have formed a powerful political opposition to what has happened. A potentially revolutionary opposition was simply vented off like steam, thanks to Latvia joining the EU and many people choosing a relatively quick way to get away from, though hardly solve, Latvia’s intractable problems. It could even be said that many of the country’s best and brightest have been lost, simply because it matters to be good and bright elsewhere, but not very much in Latvia.

While we may not yet be scraping the bottom of the social and demographic barrel, we certainly are in the lower layers, and it even seems that it can be seen on the street level - the increasing numbers of worn-out, strange, haggard, desperate and sometimes criminal looking people on the streets. It also seems, looking at some remaining young people, that the generation of fetal alcohol syndrome babies from the 1980s has started growing up. Yet another sign that the effects of anticivilizācija lingering 20 years after the USSR collapsed.

Anticivilizācija has left more than a physical condition. It has also hit at what I would call the “social DNA” of the nation, the processes by which social behavior patterns, rather than physical characteristics, are transferred from generation to generation. Compare this, if you wish, to the operating system of a computer, the program that determines how all other things are done by the machine. Real DNA is like hardware, and there is nothing particular about the Latvians -- same as everyone’s and same as it ever was.

Warped “social DNA”

The social DNA of Latvia, however, is badly warped. It predisposes people to a strangely post-Soviet paranoid inferiority complex. Being told that, or determining one’s self that one lacks something is not in and of itself enough to develop an inferiority complex. A rational individual will look for ways of remedying one’s faults and failings. Add to that a paranoia fed by complex, overlapping and overlaid conspiracy theories and being told that there is something wrong is equal to trying to make things wrong or worse. No need to listen to these voices!

Moreover, the paranoia exaggerates the inferiority complex to its opposite -- not only are we victimized, but we, as victims, play a special role on the world stage with major figures such as George Soros and the better part of the Russian intelligence services (and most of the Russian population of Latvia) out to keep use down and make things worse. This paranoid inferiority complex -- sometimes mild, sometimes intense --blurs the view of or blinds the remaining population to seeking a way out of their lingering misery. Instead, with fewer and fewer educated and thinking individuals as part of the mix, society continues to chase phantom solutions and explanations for its problems -- a return to mythical autarky, a strong leader (appearing from where?), more wacko conspiracy theories, many of them fed by crackpot Russian websites and publications, since people able to critically read other languages have moved to the countries where they are spoken -- England, Germany, Sweden, etc.

So where does that leave things? Unfortunately, it looks like Latvia has slipped past some kind of tipping point, and what we will see for the many years is stagnation and slow decline. People who expect a great repatriation of the 300 000 immigrants are deluding themselves. What is there to come back to, to permanently come back? For those who emigrated to Western Europe, frequent visits are not a problem. Keeping up the language and culture -- ditto, if anyone wants to. An emigre middle class can afford its ethnicity and most of the trappings as a hobby -- the post-war refugees proved this. Latvian churches and centers everywhere. The new emigrants are duplicating this to some extent. They are saying that their presence in Ireland, England, wherever, is (semi) permanent. The only benefit they will bring to those remaining in Latvia is a steady flow of repatriated funds (remittances) and money spent when visiting “home” from their real and socio-economically better homes.

I have seen the future, and it may not be there.

Sacking politics, witch doctors and the Ubermother

2011-07-26T07:57:00.000+03:00

Overshadowed by the terrorist attack in Norway, almost 700 000 voters in Latvia voted by almost 95% to sack their parliament, the Saeima, on Saturday. Not that the event would have gotten all that much attention without Norway. When these domestic political dramas occur, Latvians think the whole world (or Europe, at least) is terribly interested and even take mild offense when little or nothing is reported in the foreign media.
By contrast, when foreign analysts, advisors, educators or whatever show up and sometimes mildly, sometimes frankly suggest to Latvians that they have let their country become a corrupt, incompetent or "best of both" socially and economically disintegrating soon-to-be "Osteuropa" (in the bad sense) backwater -- then of course, shut up, we know best, you didn't live here for those 50 years, who are you and basically we are a planet of our own.
So now we have one end result of that defensive arrogance bred by a simmering inferiority complex. As Arnis Kaktiņš, an astute political analyst and opinion pollster said, the near-95% vote could also be considered a total rejection of the political system and most, if not all that has happened in Latvia over the past 20 years. Pretty impressive. But what next, what then?
As many as 300 000 Latvians have already made a choice and moved to other countries that are better able to govern themselves. Not perfectly, by far, but producing far better results, basically by doing for years and, in some cases, decades or even a century or two, that which all those foreign know-it-alls were talking about for those same 20 years, when the outside world was giving Latvia its share of aid and advice.
Some of the advice was about matters that cost nothing -- like not stealing and wasting taxpayer money. Like not running the institutions of governance like a cross between "lets have a nostalgia for Soviet-style bureaucracy day five days a week" and the game of "who is the biggest cretin?". Like not making both petty and awesome scale bribe-taking pretty much standard procedure.
So we are left with a largely failed state, society and economy. too poor to pay for decent police or education or medical care, but merrily building a nearly-billion dollar bridge where small change like LVL 80 million (USD 160 million) can't be accounted for, just like change that fell out of your pocket on the bus. Who wouldn't vote against all that?
But what next? As usual, Latvians are largely at a loss. The country made it into NATO and the European Union (EU), though perhaps it didn't deserve the latter, but then Brussels was convinced that once in the door, the post-communist shambolistans would get their acts together, which they didn't. So once those goals were reached, and we could send soldiers into purposeless battle against a near-Stone Age Muslim society, while the folks back home went batshit all the way to the bank, pushed the pedal to the floor as politicians told them to do, and contributed to the worst economic crisis the nation has faced since the 1930s Depression. Or worse, since Latvia claims to have sailed rather well through that one, if you believe that an autarkic, authoritarian system was an effective remedy.
It is not like nothing is happening, to be sure. Former president Valdis Zatlers, who successfully dismissed the Saeima (once the popular vote was in), started his own party, the Reform Party or Zatlers's Reform Party, symbolized by a logo of a Red Cross (yes, the medical symbol and the one for the folks who show up after typhoons and earthquakes) with an arrow-thing sticking into it. Whatever that means.
Basically, the ZRP (Zerp?) as it is abbreviated is yet another clone of a we will do it better centrist reform, clean government and nice smart people party. It sound a bit like New Era (Jaunais Laiks) or, for that matter, Vienotība, the chimera being patched together from Jaunais Laiks (the original reformers party founded by mildly(?) wacko Einārs Repše), the Citizens Union ( a kind of nationalists lite) and the Societ for a Different Politics ( a kind of social democracy lite).
Well, good luck to them. So far, reforms have been nothing but false dawns, and the electorate seems to know and have expressed that truth.
The day after Zatlers founded his party at a place appropriately named "The Dream Factory" (Sapņu fabrika), it was back to normal in Latvian politics as a witch doctor (healer) calling herself Virsmāte or the Ubermother founded her own political party dedicated, also, to healing the country and bringing on better days for everyone. Just like Zatlers. In fact, there are probably as many witch doctors in Latvia as there are bright, Western educated 30-somethings ready to step up and join the ex-president's team. So, with just about six weeks left until the extraordinary elections (a system dismissed by 95% of the population, according to Kaktiņš), the merry band of pranksters -- the ex Pres and his boys and girls, the badly battered Vienotība, the ever-faithful to the accused criminal Aivars Lembergs Green and Farmers' Union, and, of course, the witch doctors-- can set off on yet another race for the discredited halls of power in a failing state. As always, it will be sad fun to watch and very hard to cast a vote and still take oneself seriously.

Urban Cattle II - more observations

2011-07-26T00:37:00.000+03:00

“Urban cattle”. the phrase I coined, was accepted by the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com). I submitted it because it amused a friend from back in the day, now safely living in California, but never been to Latvia, nor even Latvian. Is the dictionary listing the reason they seem to be propagating, increasing in numbers here in Riga?

They were out in force on the weekend, along a major thoroughfare, Brīvības, which is a very wide boulevard for most of its length. Probably, therefore, a great place for urban cattle to wander out, stand on the white center line, oblivious to traffic or to meander across perhaps 50 meters from a legitimate pedestrian crossing.

At real pedestrian crossings, such as the one by the Riga Central Station, said to be the busiest in the Baltic area, the urban cattle mingle with the ordinary pedestrians, who watch and wait for a countdown indicator. For this subspecies of nimble urban cattle, any number below minus 10 is a signal to jump the curb. With red-light running a very commonplace event, never mind racing on yellow, it is a wonder that I haven’t seen any urban cattle taken out.

The nimble ones, I have noticed, are young and usually look spaced on some cocktail of addictive substances. With a loping gait and eyes watching some chemical cartoon version of the reality around them, they set off, oblivious to blaring horns as cars swerve around them. I mean, Lonja the urla or his Latvian counterpart (can’t tell cause the cattle don’t speak very much) are on the move, the deck is rolling and it is another day of solvent sniffarama or whatever they are into.

Then there is old Zonko the geezer, who crosses and wades into a line of cars, so that he is hidden from the next lane, where folks aiming to do a right turn only can’t see him. Surprise!

Further out of town, we see Dancin’ Dan, who is traipsing, fucked up on rotgut, along the center line, waving at some cars, shit eating grin on his face. I still wait for the return of Meatface the mobile phone man, but maybe he has been taken out, though hitting him with a vehicle would do as much damage as whacking a real, and not so small cow. Not recommended.

Somewhere closer to the Alfa shopping mall, the airhead teeny boppers start appearing, also traipsing or teetering on the white center line, but unlike Dan, sober and stupid as a fencepost as Latvians would say. Favorite meandering area for these urban cattle is also within sight of an elevated walkway where you can cross the street any time you want.

Then there are the tourist cattle, more often than not Swedish, lumbering along the sidewalk or crossing the street with technical correctness, but unaware that this is not fucking Stockholm, folks. They don’t stop -- the cars. Maybe they swerve, they may honk and if old sheep-brained Sven and his wife notice, they will live another day with no casts, no crutches.

Back on the sidewalk, the bikes are out in numbers, to them, pedestrians are just slalom poles to be weaved around at high speed. To the bikies, we are all urban cattle.

Able-bodied beggars, urban cattle and the assless anorexic

2011-07-15T00:47:00.002+03:00

Every day, I keep seeing strange and stranger stuff here in Riga at the ill-defined but somehow "street level" of observation. Most of it points to this society continuing to slither into further disintegration and degeneracy.
Let's start with the beggars. They have been around for a while, they are a symptom of both socio-economic and personal problems. They exist, to some degree, everywhere. You get used to most of them around the central station in Riga (railroad stations attract the wacked-out and weird everywhere). The two one-legged dudes, one on crutches, the other in a wheelchair, prone to periodic bum-fights. The various dudes, so clueless about misery marketing as to wallow in one of the pedestrian tunnels with one or more dogs.
Don't get me wrong, the wretched (who are such for whatever reason) certainly deserve at least the companionship of a dog. Dogs seldom propose getting drunk or shooting heroin, so they may even be better companions than the kinds of pals one acquires by persistently being in lumpenproletarian circles. But for fuck's sake, don't bring the dog out to beg with you because it clearly says that any alms will be split with a)the seller of rotgut (krutka), for drugs (that should be decriminalized and available at maintenance clinics), for some kind of food, and for the dog??!!
But what disturbs me more is that there are able bodied beggars not showing many, sometimes even no outward signs of addiction, misery and depredation. These guys should quit begging when they have enough to buy a Ryanair ticket to the UK or Germany, where they might be able to find work.
One beggar stood out -- a young, cleanly-dressed woman (early or mid-twenties), showing none of the signs of decline of the other young women who claim to beg for their children. What is worrisome that she looks able-bodied in another sense, that is, potentially approachable by people wanting to buy sex. In other words, she is potentially one step from prostitution (which, with some qualms, should be legalized) and the risk of being trafficked. Why doesn't she simply get the hell out of here before some else arranges to have her taken to elsewhere in Europe.
Now to urban cattle. I am not talking about the urban cattle of India that one sees simply moving about cities in traffic, standing, wandering, stopping and flicking the flies with their tails (or so one sees them in TV documentaries). Maybe I am wrong, but the idea of cattle to me means --dumb. The urban cattle I see day to day in the streets of Riga are the folks blithely, cluelessly wandering into traffic, doing the most outrageous things.
Take one guy. He is standing halfway in a traffic lane. I am driving and slow down, gesture for him to cross. But what does Zork the Zombie do? Nothing. I drive around him and shout something like cross, for fuck's sake! (pises pāri! in Latvian). But there are more bizarre things ahead. I spot a guy standing on the white line in the middle of a major street (Avotu). This is a favorite grazing area for urban cattle who simply go out there and then dumbly watch the traffic, hoping to cross when the fancy strikes them. Is he one of them?
No, the dude, lets call him Meatface, is standing and talking on his mobile phone. OK... We drive on to a place nearby to look at a used office chair. This means -- park, climb five flights of stairs, talk to the seller, determine that the chair is not for us, politely say goodbye, walk back to car and drive back to the paid parking lot where we keep it passing the corner of Avots and Lācplēša and what do we see-- Meatface is still standing in the middle of the street, talking on the phone. WTF?
Then there are the more nimble cattle, the darters, who dash blindly into the path of traffic in one of those gaps in the flow of cars. Cars do slow and sometimes stop, so the darting cattle are not often removed from the gene pool.
Urban cattle, to be sure, are not a Latvian phenomenon. My "favorites" in Stockholm, on the subway system are the ones who wander up to the top or bottom of an escalator and simply stand and stare. Stå och stirrare - stand and starers, they could be called in Swedish. Simply unable to unfuck themselves and made a decision -- Down or Not Down (the strange Swedish way of labeling escalators Ned and Ej ned).
An so to the the assless anorexic. She was walking ahead of me in one of the pedestrian tunnels, like a large, ultrathin Barbie doll come to life. Instead of legs, she seemed to be walking on thin, flesh-colored stilts. No hints of any body under her skirt, where the stilts disappear. Assless.
Anorexia, like anywhere, is a problem in Latvia, little talked about with probably no medical and psychological resources to deal with it. It is a first-world ailment, Latvia is moving toward being its own version of third-world lite.

One reason I am looking for a Plan B jobwise

2011-07-01T00:43:00.000+03:00

I try not to take things to the level of personal issues, except when they reflect greater issues affecting Latvian society as a whole (such as street level observations of reckless bike driving, drunks, degenerates and wackos on the street). This case in point, however, illustrates how journalism is done in Latvia, both the deficiencies under which I consciously operate and the faults of the system by which news is processed.
One of the aspects of Latvian news agency work is sometimes covering events simply because they are happening and concern issues of possible interest. You simply sit through whatever it is and try to get some kind of readable angle on the event, often because stories are written simply to generate volume rather than quality (this is especially absurd in business journalism, where I believe a story has to a) move markets, which is not possible in Latvia or b) provide information that gives readers some form of business decision support). That is the way it should be, but to keep one's numbers up with those running the news machine, you sometimes write stuff based on ..well, WTF not? Just keep it accurate, if not meaningful.
I went to a meeting of broadcast-media related folks arranged by the Latvian National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP for short in Latvia) to discuss the preliminary stages of drafting a new model for public service electronic media in the country. Tim Suter, a British expert, led off the presentations, talking about issues related to public service media governance and the different media models it can apply to. Suter has worked as a radio and television journalist for the BBC, including "Newsnight", as an editor with the BBC, then with the British Department of Culture, Media and Sport, then with the British broadcast media oversight authority OFCOM, and as the founder of two private consulting companies with such media organizations as the BBC, BBC Trust, News Corporation, ITV, Five, Time Warner, The Newspaper Society, TwoFour54, UKTV, Federal National Media Council (UAE), Discovery, Microsoft, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, the Council of Europe, the European Commission.
As a preface to my description of the specific problem (how a so-so, but accurate and printable story got killed), suffice it to say that based on his background, Suter probably knows what he is talking about when in comes to European broadcast media and has some idea of what the budgets of European broadcast organizations are like. In addition, he was presumably briefed on the situation in Latvia by his host, the deputy chairperson of the NEPLP, who said how pleased she was to have met Suter while at EU-related events and had thought of bringing him to share his knowledge on public media governance issues with the audience in Riga,
Suter gave a common sense description of the issues, but nothing in the nature of run down the hall shouting "stop the presses" as one did back in the day. There was a second presentation of the possible models emerging, in general terms, from the fog of what do we do next? that was made by a lady from Ernst& Young. Again, there are just so many ways you can line up the ducks if you are given three ways to do it. Nothing that would have deserved any bells back when wire services ran on teletype machines (I remember those times),
Then there was a discussion where someone, I believe it was an executive from Latvian Television, asked what Suter thought of the funding level (i.e, budget) of the Latvian broadcast media. Suter said that he had seen Latvia's figures "in outline" and it seemed to him that such a level of funding was "unsustainable" and would present the public service media with very difficult and perhaps irreconcilable alternatives of fulfilling the public service mission or engaging in commercial activity to maintain adequate revenues.
Bang! There was the basis for a best-effort story. I headed back for the office as I didn't have all day to spend at the event and would be replaced covering the conference by another reporter from the agency. Of course, I had no chance to ask Suter in a one-on-one interview exactly why he had doubts that Latvian public service media funding was sustainable, but given the constraints of the situation, I considered his background and authority in the field sufficient basis for publishing his snap opinion and adding that the heads of Latvian TV and radio have complained in the past about inadequate funding from the state. So it was a real issue, seen not only by the British expert.
The best comparison I could make is watching a sports TV show where, for some reason, a famous sports doctor makes a comment that, after seeing some short videos of a tennis player's last match, he suspects that the player may be about to suffer an injury. The doctor's opinion, heard on TV, would make adequate agency news copy based on the doctor's experience and record. He need not say that the way X served indicates he is protecting arm muscle such and such because it hurts him. If the doc says it, it is news, and it may be best practice, but not always possible, to call the doc and get an explanation in detailed medical terms, of how what was seen in two or three video highlights tells an experienced medical eye that something is going wrong.
Well, what happened was that a news editor demanded and insisted that the story contain Suter's detailed reasoning for why Latvian public media financing was unsustainable, or it was unfit to run. Given other stories and work and practicalities, I didn't think it was worth the effort to try to find out and said, look, the guy is an authority, not an idiot, and the issue has been raised before. It is an adequate, debate stimulating story. In fact, it contains elements of the reporter generated "exclusive" where you call up side A to tell you that yes, they still believe white and do a follow up with side B saying, outrageous, we think black and a third story by a political commentator saying that the nation is yet again debating black vs white showing that political polarization is growing. I mean, why not, everyone does it and the point is, it suffices that these views are real (even if dormant when you make the call) and accurately reflected.
What it ended with was that I chopped everything Suter said and ran only what the Latvian consultant said (nothing special) and e-mailed the news editor -- as far as I am concerned, fuck it, kill the whole thing. Which apparently happened. An ignorance-based decision, IMHO.
Having said that, it is yet another reason to get out of a situation where I find myself doing half-assed journalism for an often half-assed news product. Any reasonable job offers will be considered -- preferably for English-language media outside Latvia, inside Latvia, or, all else failing, some other media in Latvia. Maybe IR needs someone to do telecoms and high tech?

Narcotic summer effect and a two-wheeled jolt to reality

2011-06-27T20:02:00.000+03:00

This is the time of year when Latvia, indeed, the entire Baltic-Nordic area blossoms into summer with long bright evenings and never-quite dark nights. The Midsummer or Jāņi festival is the pinnacle of "Latvianness" with its Līgo songs, beer, traditional cheese, bonfires and celebration. Everything looks rosy and this year, there was a long holiday weekend of four days to take a break from work.
With the sunny streets filled with tourists and the often glum population looking a little better, the summer in Riga can have a kind of narcotic effect, exaggerating the things that are good about life here and putting the deep, fundamental crises in the economy, politics and society in the background.
This evening I was shocked out of the mild euphoria when, while crossing at a green light (for pedestrians) on a one-way street, a burly man on a bike whizzed by narrowly missing me and turning into the street in the wrong direction. I was so startled that I yelled after him the Latvian equivalent of "watch where you are going, motherfucker!" (Skaties kur brauc, mauka! -- the English translation expresses the emotional gist and is not literal). Anyway, the dude actually circled around to mutter something at me, but that was the end of it.
I have written about reckless cycling earlier and how it brings out a lot of contradictions. On the one hand, bike riding is "green" and makes economic sense for those who don't want to pay upkeep on a car or public transport fares. A number of my work colleagues ride bikes and I would never wish them ill. I may have earlier written (after some near misses by two-wheeled assholes racing and weaving down sidewalks) that I regard news of bike riders being knocked down by cars as "one less" (temporarily or permanently). That is a bit harsh, and the irony is that the urban bike cowboys usually aren't the ones who get taken out by motorists, they are usually someone out in the country, alone on a dark dirt road who gets mowed down by the local shit-faced (lopā for my Latvian readers) country boozehound weaving down the road in a car.
There has been a campaign to alert drivers to the increasing numbers of bike riders and their "invisibility", but I would not risk anyone's life on the assumption a series of TV ads will change the generally savage (though less than some years ago) attitude of Latvian drivers. In any event, there is really no place for bike riders. There are few bike paths and the riders forced on to the sidewalk by traffic probably have no choice. They do have a choice about their speed and the possibility to use a warning bell to indicate they are approaching to pedestrians. Unfortunately Riga is not, in terms of infrastructure and societal behavior, nor will it be for decades, anything like Copenhagen or Amsterdam or even Stockholm, where there is a civilized order for both motor vehicles and bikes. Bike riders will continue to be a threat to the rest of us and some of the rest of us (in cars and trucks) will menace those on bikes. The low-intensity conflict will go on, with casualties on both sides.

A political weathervane and a fine, bland little gathering

2011-06-12T17:20:00.001+03:00

The first organized public reaction to the dismissal of the Saeima and subsequent “merriment” was a rally called by TV personality Viesturs Dūle and others on an isolated, semi-artificial island in the river Daugava. The idea was to protest against the oligarchs allegedly running Latvian politics and also to “bury the oligarch within each of us”.

The latter part very much put me off from the whole undertaking, because I don't feel a bit like wanting to make a great fortune by skimming tax funds and using other advantages derived from state capture. I have nothing against a great fortune, but please, let it come to me by my own efforts on a law-governed, free market.

If the message was that the citizenry of Latvia is also responsible for the dismal state of politics, then it has nothing to do with any oligarch in any of us. Instead, it is the inability to learn from past mistakes in voting, to hold politicians to their promises (at least the executable promises), and to be ready to organize a democratic, non-parliamentary opposition/resistance movement when one realizes that the whole system here in Latvia is, to put it precisely, fucked.

Aside from that and the fact that the whole event on June 8 can probably be best described by the Slavic-derived Latvian word balagāns, (a kind of cheapo, shallow but still entertaining little carnival), it was a weathervane event, since as many as 8 000 mostly young people gathered to listen to a few speeches and watch a huge wooden symbol of “corruption” set afire. The thought crossed my mind that something like that would have more impact if a real symbol of the oligarchs were burned, like a barn or toolshed belonging to one of them (naturally, harming no physical person, in the spirit of the 1960s German Gewalt gegen Sachen /Violence against objects/ debate within the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition/APO). But we are still a few steps away from something like that, which, for various reasons, I doubt would have any desirable effect.

Anyway, I hope that many of those on the AB Dambis island went away from the event committed to doing something more than just shooing away the oligarch within them and voting on hypothetical and real issues on an internet website. Heck, with a little help from some experts, I (or anyone else) could put up a website where we could vote on the merits of intergalactic flight or anything else. As far as the real oligarchs in Latvia are concerned, I am afraid that they best fit in with a bizarre Facebook event scheduled for exactly 10 days later, on June 18, National I Don't Give A Fuck Day. That is how the powers behind this country's bozo parliamentarians look at public opinion in Latvia, like it or not.

On an everyday basis, the social degeneration continues apace. I had to take a bus to the airport to retrieve the family car, since my wife had flown away to Sweden for a few days and left it in a long-term lot for me to pick up and use over the weekend. The first thing that happened on the good old No. 22 bus was that the traffic wardens or whatever you call them boarded the bus and checked everyone's electronic tickets. Then, knowing almost no English on the one bus route most frequented by foreigners, they hassled an air Baltic pilot (I think he did register his e-ticket) and got a LVL 5 pay-off from him. It was either that or delay his flight to Baku.

Next on board was a shirtless junkie who spent the whole trip up to the next to last stop before the airport nodding (actually bowing at times, almost to the floor) and leaning as he rocked back and forth on a young mother and her kid, or almost bumping into the already fleeced pilot standing across from him. The junkie was joined by two or three criminal looking friends at one of the last few stops before the airport, but then the whole lot proceeded to hop off at a stop in the middle of nowhere just before the airport. To what purpose, I don't know. Driving back in my car, I saw Joe the Junkie waiting for the bus back to town, still in his own quadrant of outer space.

Personally, I think you have to be pretty much a degenerate fuckwit to develop a heroin habit. Politically, I think they should legalize the stuff, register addicts, give them prescriptions, clean needles, shooting areas and decrease the crime rate from addiction related thefts, burglaries and robberies. None of this will happen in Latvia this century...

Another thing brought back to me at the anti-oligarch (but nice, please!) rally was the fact that even Latvians with some sense of purpose are unable to think through any issues that concern them. I don't think I am breaching any confidences by writing about someone who approached me as the rally was breaking up (a man of around 60, roughly my age) and wanted to talk abut some things. The core of it was that he wanted to set up an NGO for Latvian families. So I asked – fine, to what exact purpose? One of things bothering him was that ethnic Latvians had been given fewer opportunities to privatize their apartments than ethnic Russians (post-war migrants) who mainly lived in Soviet-era housing. Many Latvians lived in older buildings that were denationalized.

Assuming we cannot turn back the privatization or denationalization process, I then said that the issue was one of building housing. That didn't move the discussion ahead, as the person believes that there are ex-KGB and Communists everywhere whose specific purpose was to derail any such initiatives. I asked whether, perhaps, the former KGB, if still under control of Russian intelligence, might have other missions under present-day circumstances. Sabotaging initiatives to build housing for Latvian families did not seem to be at the top of the global priority list for anyone running stay-behind networks out of the Kremlin, IMHO. Neither did that move things anywhere.

I then suggested that some people could solve their family housing problems by working abroad, but then the person said that the people he was concerned about didn't even have 5 LVL to buy a cheap Ryanair tickets out of here. Well then, said I, the problem is really extreme poverty, which can have a number of personal and structural causes – lack of education, addiction/alcoholism, lack of jobs, etc. But that also didn't focus things. I am still not sure what this proposed NGO will do, how it will affect anything and how it will define the root problems that it wants society or the government to deal with. There seems to be a total lack of education in problem solving and the critical thought (what are the issues? what are the causes?) needed for it. To be sure, the person was sincere and not really a crackpot (not that public gatherings lack for those). But this is the level of things here. The ones who can get their heads around issues have already done the socio-economic math and are out of here. On that note, please look again at my video CV and spread it around, as I have serious doubts, very serious doubts, about staying on here: http://latviantelecoms.blogspot.com/2011/04/request-for-leads-tips-and-job-offers.html

"Dismiss the Saeima" - an even brighter false dawn?

2011-05-29T14:07:00.000+03:00

It finally happened. What has been chanted frequently in the street of Latvia's capital by larger or smaller crowds of demonstrators or picketers has at last been set in motion: Dismiss the Saeima(parliament)! Dismiss the Saeima!

After what can only be described as a partly depraved, largely cowardly “vote” by 37 abstentions to NOT lift the parliamentary immunity of oligarch Ainārs Šlesers so that a court authorized search of his residences could be conducted, President Valdis Zatlers probably did the right thing. It was the second major event after the January 13, 2009 riots that made the ruling elite wake up to “a new Latvia” the day after. Or so it seemed and seems.

The problem is that complete political depravity, incompetence, cluelessness etc. has become endemic to Latvia and one need not have a “wake-up call” event to discover that. It has been going on with various degrees of intensity for 20 years. That is long enough to conclude that the “symptoms” are not temporary, transitory (as in side effects of transition from the Soviet system) or even easily curable, if at all. The inability to rule itself with out massive self-plunder and waste of resources given in good faith by (starting with G-24 funds in the early 1990s, to EU Phare programs in some of which much was taught, little learned or applied, to EU funds the past few years) is no longer an anomaly of Latvia, it is a characteristic. It is what the anti-corruption police were fighting in their raids against the offices of the oligarchs Andris Šķēle and Aivars Lembergs and with the warrants to search Šlesers' residences.

I doubt that this gesture by President Zatlers, who concisely and mildly defined the problem in his televised speech, will do very much to solve the problem. By bringing about new elections (a Saeima trusted by 10% of the population is unlikely to get referendum support) Zatlers has at least opened a very thin crack (not a window, we have been missing “windows” through 20 years and five elections) of opportunity for some kind of change.

The question is, who will carry out those changes? We have seen false dawns of reform, starting with the founding of New Era (Jaunais Laiks/JL), one of the components of the present Vienotība (Unity) alliance. That brought us the “golden hands” of the corrupt surgeon/Minister of Health appointed by the loopy Prime Minister Einars Repše, who at least decided to serve not having collected LVL 1 million (around USD 2 million ) in contributions for a personal fortune that he asked for. Not being as rich as he wanted to be didn't keep Repše from making huge crackpot investments (a luxury yacht ride business, real estate in the middle of nowhere) and borrowing money like a sheik who had spend too much time at the water pipe.

The JL government fell, paving the way for the good old boys of Aigars Kalvitis and the “fat years” to run the Latvian economy (with a little help from Swedish banks and a population that never learned the difference between loans and gifts) into the ground, leading to the present years of depression, stagnation and mass emigration. Then, in a surge of hope for which there was little basis, the 2010 elections brought in Vienotība, the new amalgam around JL (JL2 or JL and New Friends, were it a band). The previous administration, which was effectively “re-elected” unter the Vienotība banner, had already done much to make spending cuts with an axe and in a manner that demoralized and depleted vital public services rather than making them more efficient, leaner and meaner. Hundreds left the ranks of the police, there was probably much “negative selectivity” among other bureaucracies, with those hit by salary cuts but able to sell their education and skills elsewhere willingly moving on, most likely, out of Latvia. The medical professions (doctors, nurses) started a major bleed-off to other EU countries. All in all, the catastrophe and demoralization continued.

Vienotība also got in bed with the puppet party of oligarch Aivars Lembergs, the Green and Farmer's Union, in order to form a government and keep both the pro-Russian Harmony Center and the radical nationalist “ All for Latvia” in opposition. Even without mentioning the disunity preventing a quick unification of “Unity” into a single party, Vienotība has failed most expectations raised in the election campaign. It deserves to be run out of town, but probably with fewer dogs and pitchfork waving citizens chasing it than the other parties.

So one the euphoria fades after Zatler's speech and historical decree number 2 starting dismissal of the Saeima, what happens next? I don't see a solution. Many of the best and brightest have simply left the country for places where their efforts result in a better quality of life and where rational (though often flawed) governance is not an issue. The political elite, like a drunk someone is trying to deal with, has gotten another loud slap with a towel soaked in ice-water, but as we know, this doesn't make anyone less drunk. It will be interesting to see what new chimerical political creatures will appear over the next few months to drag what is left of the electorate into new illusory traps.

Maybe I am wrong, I am not on the scene at the moment (visiting the US for personal reasons), but I am not placing any hopeful bets.