Latvia: A drab, grey nation in midwinter

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.

Admitting a wasted vote in a failed state lite

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. 

On violence..and futility

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?

Latvia: Re-electing the "best" crew for the Titanic

The Latvian election has ended in victory for the current coalition and defeat for the attempt by Latvia's oligarchs under the banner of “For a Good Latvia” (Par labu Latviju-PLL), leaving them only eight seats in the 100-seat Saeima or Latvian parliament.

The sitting Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis' alliance “Unity” (Vienotība) will have 33 seats in the Saeima, the opposition Harmony Center (Saskaņas Centrs) 29, the current coalition member, the Greens/Farmers' Union (Zaļo un Zemnieku Savienība) 22 seats and the nationalist alliance All for Latvia/Fatherland & Freedom/Latvian National Independence Movement (Visu Latvijai/Tēvzemei & Brīvībai/LNNK) eight seats.

This looks good to a lot of people – continuity, stability and the like. However, one mustn't forget that some central issues were discussed very little or not at all, namely the economy, which is only showing some tentative green shoots of recovery. Exports and industrial production are up, consumer spending, too, from the bottom of a deep, depression-level pit. Economic indicators seemed to be bumping along the bottom, bouncing up a little. Second quarter seasonally-adjusted GDP was up 0.1 % from the first quarter, but still down 3.9 % from the second quarter of 2009, when the economy was already in free fall.

Non -financial investment, which sounds much like capital investments of the kind made in buildings and production facilities, fell just over 42 % in the first half of 2010 from a year ago. Investment of this kind is both a bet on the long term future based on current and recent past conditions, and the basis for the future expansion of production and economic activity.

That all would look bad enough, but it now looks like next year's budget cuts – between 350 million and 440 million LVL, depending on whose statistics you believe, will be at the top of the new government's agenda. These are spending cuts, which essentially means the government will transfer less money to someone, whether it be government employees (further salary cuts or dismissals), lower payments to pensioners and benefit receivers, or to those selling goods and services to the state (less public sector purchasing). Broadly speaking, these massive cuts amount to corresponding reductions and/or reallocations of purchasing power in society.

Simply put, police, teachers and other public sector employees facing another double-digit income cut or unemployment, meaning they will be reduced to subsistence spending on food and shelter. They will become minimalist consumers, which will impact on domestic demand for goods and services provided by the private sector, leading to revenue cuts for companies, lower profits or even losses, and possible staff and/or salary reductions in private companies. The vicious circle will continue.

As for Latvia's so-called export boom, it is great news for lumberjacks (tree harvester operators), sawmill staff, people in the food and metal-smelting industries. There is simply more demand for lumber in export markets and Latvia is supplying it. Not a value added product. Food? Someone has to stir the yoghurt vats. And yes, we import, melt, and re-export lots of junk metal as intermediate metal products, reinforcing rods and some metal gadgets. There are no real, innovative, high-value added Latvian products on global markets, at least not on a sufficient scale.

In order to create and sustain such innovative, high-value-added industries, the country needs productive, educated skilled labor. The pool of such labor is being depleted in at least two ways. First, skilled and educated people (not just country folk wanting to pick mushrooms for a better hourly rate) are leaving the country, frustrated and disgusted with politicians and the corrupt and incompetent system they have created. They are making the easy of choice of governance afforded by the European Union (EU). These emigrants have lost faith in and hope for Latvia, and they have the skills and willingness to learn and adapt, but also the possibility to come “ home” for the weekend for under 50 EUR. Their disillusionment is the product of 20 years of what, in some young adults, would be called “ a failure to launch” - the inability to find a place in life and get on one's own feet.

The pool of skilled labor will also be depleted by the underfinancing of an already dodgy educational system (teacher salaries cut, ageing university professors). The number of students able to afford a higher education (never mind whether they chose the right fields of specialization) will be decreased and those remaining may seek and education abroad and remain there.

The Dombrovskis government created none of these problems, but it took them over as a “fall guy” for the gross mistakes and folly of previous governments, namely, the governments formed by the politicians behind the PLL. That he was rewarded by re-election for not “falling” (bankrupting the country) doesn't mean that things are no longer falling.

On Twitter, I have called the win by Vienotība a re-election of the crew of the Titanic. To be more precise, instead of electing those who would have crashed the ship into a second iceberg, we now have people trying to run the economy who will at least let most of the lifeboats get lowered, then let the wreck drift for an undetermined period.

In other words, there were no choices with any good consequences in this election, just some with less disastrous ones. One thing that is not in the cards is any kind of recovery for several years, probably most of the decade. The Latvian economy will muddle along, stagnating, capital starved, bleeding brains and skills, barely able to pay off what it borrowed because of the folly of governments up until 2009. Chopping trees, melting junk into reinforcing rods and exporting food will not suffice to restore domestic demand, and further cuts in public spending, even if unavoidable (something I don't dispute), will lead to both increased pauperization of the population and emigration of those who refuse this fate. The hardest burdens will fall on those unable to avoid them by emigration – pensioners.

20 years of freedom and they put you on the sh*t list

Latvia celebrates 20 years since its formal declaration of renewed independence on May 4, 1990. That was a warm, sunny, almost summer day with foliage in full bloom -- at least judging from the videos of those events. I am writing on a grey, chilly day with buds just bursting. Eerily, the weather sums up what most of the population feel about their country. According to one poll, 70 % of Latvians aren't celebrating this anniversary. 
One reason could be that people don't like the idea of two independence days -- November 18, 1918, when the Republic of Latvia was first founded, and the second May 4 date, which has been the subject of argument -- some of it hair-splitting by ultranationalists --over the past 20 years. For some, the "4th of May republic"  has become a curse word, a symbol of how part of the old Soviet nomenklatura switched side but didn't change their basic nature. There is some truth to that, as I will discuss later.
Whatever one calls it, 20 years later, the processes that were already in motion on May 4, 1990, and were historically crystallized by the vote of the then Supreme Council, have led to a state of affairs that is a great disappointment, if not a complete betrayal of most of what the enthusiastic crowds of that May afternoon were hoping for. This is the second reason there is little enthusiasm for May 4. 
20 years is roughly one generation, 20 years is the time it takes to get a theoretically very good education -- 12 years, plus four years of university, plus some kind of post-graduate education or training.  20 years is the time it took a large society like the US to move from the conformity of the late 1940s to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. 20 years is the time it took a war-ravaged nation (Latvia) that had to fight a war of independence to rise to become a reasonably successful, though authoritarian European state in 1938, the last full year of peace. 
Certainly much has happened in 20 years, or more precisely, almost 19 years since Latvia actually regained its independence with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in August, 1991. The "face" of Riga has changed and it looks like almost any European city. The market economy has brought in goods and services and abundance unheard of in the crumbling planned economy of 1990. There have been incomparable opportunities for travel, education and enterprise for the population, especially for young people growing up since 1990/91.
Latvia is also a democratic country that largely respects the freedom of speech and the press (the idiotic activities of the Security Police against an economics lecturer and the attempts by the Riga authorities at restricting gatherings on March 16 and LBGT Pride events notwithstanding). So far, it seems, so good...
But things are far from as good as they should be or could have been. Unlike 1938, Latvia is at the bottom, not the top of European statistics. Unemployment hovers at over 20 %, salaries are falling, an unknown, but very large number of people have emigrated (if they had stayed on the labor market, the unemployment statistics would be much greater, even adjusted for those listed as unemployed in Latvia but actually working abroad but not reporting it in order to collect unemployment benefit or simply because they don't care). Around 90 % of the population, depending how one asks the question, distrust political institutions and politicians. The reputation of the democratically elected parliament, the Saeima,  hit a new low when many parliamentarians simply lied to the public about how they would vote on the re-confirmation of Prosecutor-General Jānis Maizitis (the post remains vacant). The Saeima pushed its rat-like reputation even lower when it refused to let Dainis Īvans, the first leader of the Latvian Popular Front  (Tautas Fronte), the movement that set the move to independence in motion, address the special session of the Saeima on May 4. 
The past 20 years have seen a series of often depraved corruption scandals that have resulted in very little in the way of prosecution and punishment. The criminal process against Aleksandrs Lavents, one of the bankers responsible for the collapse of the largely fraudulent Banka Baltija in 1995, was dragged out so long that the years of jail time (and endless illness) practically amounted to sufficient punishment (time served) when Lavents was finally convicted. A couple of years later, the wreck of a man moaning on his prison hospital stretcher was looking more than chipper at such Russian-speaking gliterati events as the "New Wave" music festival in Jūrmala. 
Aivars Lembergs, the almost perpetual mayor of Ventspils who has amassed several centuries of wealth (assuming he saved every santim of his mayor's salary) and faces compelling evidence of criminal corruption and embezzlement, remains a popular politician who spent a few months in pre-trial jail. 
Political parties seem to be universally involved in corruption and influence peddling. Politicians Ainārs Šlesers and Andris Šķēle, the partners of a AŠ2 election-alliance gimmick, were behind the attempt to buy votes on the Jūrmala city council. They remain unscathed, despite recordings of Škēle asking "who is the bigger cretin"  when presented with choices for mayor of the Riga suburb.
Nothing is sacred -- it appears that the Children's Hospital in Riga was used as a conduit for (and victim of) a corruption scheme siphoning funds from renovations and construction at health care facilities. This happened at the same time as a non-governmental organization Lielie (The Big Guys) was raising funds for improving the Children's Hospital to partly compensate drastic funding cuts for medical care.
Just after joining the European Union (EU), Latvia rushed headlong into overheating its economy with reckless borrowing and "pedal to the metal" politics against all better advice. Then everything crashed and, as things now look, nothing will recover for many years. 
Part of the reason for what happened is, indeed, Soviet legacy. People were conditioned by the system to see the state and state institutions as the enemy. Pilfering from the state was not seen as a crime and, indeed, the only form of "resistance" that could be undertaken with relative impunity compared to over political action. One could get away with stealing cloth from the factory, but not with running a Latvian flag up the factory flagpole (at least until the late 1980s). When the early independent Latvian governments faltered or failed to meet exaggerated expectations (pumping huge government subsidies to everything, a very "Soviet" expectation), the reaction -- pilferage, low level corruption, tax evasion -- was already known by force of habit. I remember saying, but maybe not writing (unless I go through a lot of old floppy disks), that changing the flag on the flagpole would not change the nature of the society that had been formed under the previous Soviet flag. That proved, to some extent, to be true. Certainly Soviet nomenklaturshik thinking unconsciously carried over into the way early (and even later) governments behaved, down to African-dictator-style motorcades with flashing blue lights in order to transport my favorite imaginary Minister of Canine Welfare (Suņu labturības ministrs) the few blocks from Government House to the Saeima in Riga.
As emigration takes a significant part of the "best and brightest", it seems that the the number of lumpenized individuals (the term urla, mostly applied to Russians but fitting many Latvians as well, is often applied).  Perhaps it is because I work near the Riga Central railway station, but it seems that the number of urlas is increasing, as well as the number of shit-faced staggering drunks one sees at "inappropriate" times of the day. It also seems that beggary and the public displays of misery associated with it are on the rise. Even among "ordinary folk" there seem to be more worn, desperate, despondent looking faces. This is -- and it is a subjective view-- a nation on the downslope, down and out and no place to go.
Maybe in another 20 years Latvia will have clawed its way to something close to a prosperous, democratic Western society. At the moment, one shouldn't bet on it, because in the past 20 years, the botched and missed opportunities outnumber the often visible surface accomplishments. As for me, I am doing the very contemporary 2010 Latvian thing of working on yet another Plan B, should the need arise... 

Finance Minister amazed by economic reality

The Latvian TV show Nekā personīga (Nothing Personal) showed the Minister of Finance Einārs Repše expressing surprise that total budget spending had not decreased despite sharp cuts in the basic state budget. The money, it turns out, was all being spent through the so-called social budget comprised of pension payments and unemployment benefits. The economic crisis and rising unemployment -- some of it fed by laid-off government and municipal employees -- was increasing demands on the social budget at the same time as lower wages and fewer employed are available to fund the social budget through so-called social contributions (another name for taxes).

"Surprisingly, and I was surprised by it too, our reduction in expenditure in the basic budget is almost precisely compensated by the increase in expenditure in the social budget. So the reduction and all that we have done with our combined efforts last year and this year has reduced the basic state budget, that is, the expenditures for state administration and related spending. But purely by chance, the social expenditures have grown by the same amount," Repše told the TV3 reporters.

What a surprise, especially for a Finance Minister one would expect to know a little economics! And didn't he say that that any downward spiral of tax revenues and rising social costs had been taken into account when making drastic budget cuts? So we only seem to have cut LVL 500 million and are back to square one. What else will surprise the Finance Minister next?

It is not f**king Copenhagen, dear Riga cyclists

Bad times and a bit of green consciousness are making more and more people in the Latvian capital ride bikes. At my workplace, the security guard, who is responsible for locking up bikes in a downstairs storeroom, says there are at least 25 and almost no room for them. Last year there were just a few. Two of my department colleagues ride to work. Good for them, sort of...

The problem is that most bike riders I encounter whizz by on the sidewalk, no bell, no horns, no warning. This is often scary, about one near miss every day Almost no one wears a helmet, so that a collision with a pedestrian would hurt both parties.

There is no other place for them to ride. Bike paths have been built here and there, for some ridiculous but typically Latvian price. They are still few and far between.

The street and the highway are no place to ride. A few years ago, the answer would have been simple. A great many Latvian drivers simply are animals. Period. Now, of course, the animal count has fallen, maybe due to self-elimination by fatal accidents (these have also declined). But the average driver is still a borderline asshole, talking on a mobile phone and driving with one hand while turning  a street corner  where pedestrians are crossing. Just a few days ago a big jeep tried to pass me on a curved access ramp and nearly collided with a car on the main highway. Typical. And one reason why I will feel some emotional satisfaction if and when social unrest expresses itself in the burning of SUVs. To quote the Bloodhound Gang : "burn, motherf**ker, burn!" 

To sum up, the main reason I have mixed feelings about the increase in cycling in Riga and Latvia generally is that this society is not civilized enough for this development to be safe and beneficial to all. Riga is not Copenhagen or Amsterdam. The society here is not the Dutch, it is a a semi-savage (when it comes to road habits), alienated, reckless rabble. And it is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. So cycle at your own risk and at risk to pedestrians (I have seen cyclists talking on their mobiles, weaving with one hand down a sidewalk with shopping bags on each of the handle bars)