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?

Daimler bribed Riga City Council, Corruption Fighters Totally Clueless

The German company Daimler has paid bribes to the Riga City Council for ensuring that Mercedes busses would be purchased for the public transport agency Rigas Satiksme, according to an FBI investigation in the US. The payments in Latvia are apparently part of a wide ranging bribery campaign in a number of countries.
At least two Latvian television stations -- TV3  in its "Nothing Personal" (Nekā personīgi) and the LNT news -- disclosed that at least three payments of several hundred thousand lats were made to political parties sitting on the Riga City Council in the late 1990s and after the turn of the century. "Nothing Personal" interviewed the head of the Bureau to Combat and Prevent Corruption (Latvian acronym - KNAB) who was completely clueless about the matter. Wasn't he told? Weren't there any prior signals from the FBI? How can an American law enforcement agency know more about corruption in Latvia than KNAB, the institution specifically charged with investigating (not interstate crime, not kidnapping, not drug smugglers, not threats to national security etc. like the American FBI) nothing else but corruption.
Failed state or simply Fucked State?
And that is not all. It now seems that hundreds of valid-looking Latvian driver's licenses, that were confiscated by the police from Latvian drivers for various reasons (drunk driving, serious traffic violations) have been found to have come into the hands of criminal gangs and used for various frauds and scams, including renting cars and then selling them abroad. One case was discovered when a stranger attempted to buy a mobile phone on a leasing arrangement. He presented the confiscated driver's license of an acquaintance of the phone salesman refused the transaction.
It is not known how hundreds of confiscated driver's licenses (which normally should either be destroyed, then re-issued at the end of the suspension, or kept in a safe) made their way into the hands of criminal gangs, but it is a logical assumption that someone in the police sold the licenses to criminals knowing what they would be used for, and no one knew, or more likely, someone covered up their disappearance.
Failed state or simply Depraved State?

Limitless depravity -- Childrens' Hospital plundered

Latvia's Bureau to Prevent and Combat Corruption (KNAB) has arrested two officials of the Children's Clinical University Hospital (Children's Hospital) and three other persons in Riga for the embezzlement of at least LVL 700 000 in funds (more than USD 1.4 million) earmarked for renovations and improvements at the facility. Those arrested include a member of the hospital board. KNAB officers seized the funds, including LVL 500 000 in cash, in a series of raids and searches around Latvia.

The Children's Hospital has been the object of a number of charitable activities to raise funds for renovating its wards, and, while renovations have been made, it is reasonable to assume that some donated funds were also embezzled or used for bribes and kickbacks.

One of those arrested, Aivars Lisenko, a top administrator at the hospital, is also a member of and contributor to the Peoples' Party (Tautas Partija/TP), a member of the ruling coalition. With polls showing support for the TP well below 2 % ( 5 % is needed to be seated in the Parliament or Saeima), the party plans to bring back former Prime Minister Andris Šķēle in next year's elections. TP party officials are rushing to deny they knew anything of Lisenko's criminal activities, although his legally required state employee income declaration should have raised eyebrows -- he had huge cash and bank savings and had privately lent someone LVL 208 000. With official income of LVL 27 000 per year, it is hard to see how this accumulated money came from legitimate sources.

News of the Childrens' Hospital scandal has caused the usual temporary wave of public outrage. It remains to be seen if the accused will be convicted and what other similar scandals the KNAB will uncover in coming months. It appears that this kind of corruption, no matter how depraved, is endemic to Latvia.

The everyday Latvian Charlie Foxtrots* continue

Often it is not the high (low??) black comedy of Latvian politics that reminds one of how disfunctional some things are, but rather everyday occurences. Take, for example, two cases-- the bizarre waste of European Union funds in Carnikava, where my family has a summer cottage. Officially, there is a project funded by the EU Cohesion Fund to extent municipal water and sewerage to parts of the town, including some of the so-called summer cottage districts (land that was divided up for this purpose during the Soviet era and given, mainly, to people associated with the state hydrological and reclamation institutions, that is, engineers and technical staff who know something about water and sewerage systems).

As I noted in an earlier post (with video), "work" has been going on at a road crossing for several months, digging and refilling the same trench, moving and reburying pipes and culverts, keeping some kind of ancient-looking pumping machinery on site and basically totally or partly blocking access to whole communities. According to some of my summer neighbors, who know what they are talking about, the problem seems to be that whoever is doing the job cannot get one major sewer/water connection across a main road done right. Instead, the construction crew is conducting an endless series of experiments. This is not the Channel Tunnel, for f**k's sake! We are now getting close to the season when frosts and freezes are likely to ice up the water-filled trench and the mud-field surrounding it. What then? Where is the EU investigator demanding that these fuckwits explain the massive waste of funds (at least on a project level)?

Another daily WTF? is the pedestrian tunnel that has been dug, equipped and simply left empty, boarded up and fenced off at one of the busiest and nastiest crossings in Riga, between the Central Station and the Stockman/Forum Cinemas complex. There are pedestrian lights which seem to function in some random relationship to other traffic lights, leaving huge trolley-busses, busses and other traffic blocking the crosswalk or simply driving through the flow of pedestrians (this is Latvia, lights are merely suggestive). Partly to blame, apparently, is Finnish Stockmann, which promised to build a pedestrian tunnel at the same time as it built the department store and cinema multiplex, but one suspects that things may have been delayed for years because in this kind of public-private partnership, the "public" side had its hand out and the private side was expected to put something there before anything moved along.

Anyway, crossing to the department store and cinemas was a mess before any construction began, it was a worse mess while construction went on, and now little has changed while, for several weeks, there has been a finished tunnel (the workers are gone) boarded up on the Central Station side and fenced off on the Stockmann side. WTF??

There are reports in the media that the tunnel may actually open to pedestrians in the next couple of weeks, the reason for the delay being, again, as so often in Latvia, that some process has to unfuck itself over an agonizingly long time before anything happens. In this case, it is the formalities connected to delivering title to the tunnel from the builders (financed by Stockmann) to the municipality of Riga. Meanwhile, welcome to the Third World...?

*oh yes, the title contains a nice name for clusterfuck.

State Labor Inspectorate puts hands in the EU cookie jar

The head of Latvia's State Labor Inspectorate, Rita Elce and five other officials have been suspended pending corruption investigations by the Bureau to Prevent and Combat Corruption (KNAB in Latvian).
The Labor Inspectorate head and staff members are suspected of using European Union (EU) social and regional program funds to hire fictitious employees (apparently real persons who never worked a day at the government agency but funneled almost all of their salaries to the bank accounts of the alleged conspirators).
Elce told journalists she would cooperate with the investigation and denied that she had benefitted from the diversion of EU and other public funds.
The "fiddle" with EU funds seems to have been an internal one for the enrichment of those involved, but its alleged existence raises suspicions that the agency could have been (and still be) open to bribe-taking to cover up illegal, unsafe and unethical labor practices and the use of black and gray market labor (illegal aliens, legal residents paid in envelopes).
Events such as this indicate that the KNAB is keeping its earlier promise of "we will come for you" with regard to corrupt public servants, but it does little to diminish the image of Latvia as a state where corruption, incompetence or both are endemic to the structures of public administration.

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)

Billions in debt service well into the 2010s?

If anyone has any illusions about a recovery of the Latvian economy in the foreseeable future,  they should check out some figures obtained from the State Treasury (Valsts Kase) by a researcher for the popular TV discussion show Kas notiek Latvijā? (What is happening in Latvia?). The Latvian version is here. 

Without getting into a whole muddle of numbers, by 2014, even based on current state borrowing (and, as I understand it, excluding the 7.5 billion EUR the government has obtained from the IMF and the EU), Latvia will be paying at least 1 billion LVL per annum in credit servicing (interest and repayment of principle) costs. Adding in the foreign credits, these payments will be almost 10 billion LVL up to and including 2020.

With economic growth stagnating for any number of reasons -- higher taxes, poor productivity, corruption, confused and clueless policies -- the debt load will probably prevent Latvia from joining the euro zone (you must have government debt below 50 % of GDP) in the foreseeable future. At some point, too, the lat will have to be decoupled from its 1 % corridor against the euro. although with such a huge euro debt, a devaluation will have an even more devastating effect on the ability of the country to repay its international borrowing (as well as on all domestic and household borrowing in EUR).

Add to this the fact that it appears Latvia will not even get its next payment from international lenders, since the new Dombrovskis government has agreed to only less than 300 million LVL of the 700 million LVL budget cuts required by the lenders as a precondition to continued payouts. It is very unlikely that the EU and IMF will cut Latvia any slack on this, and the 700 million cut will probably end up reducing public services below some critical minimum. That is not to say that Latvian government could not be run much, much more efficiently, but there has been too little effort (none practically) to think in terms of smart government and of a very careful prioritizing of cost cuts.

Quite the opposite-- a recent story  (in Latvian) on the State Audit examination of the huge cost overruns on the so-called Southern Bridge in Riga, boosting its cost from an initial just over 108 million LVL to 570 million LVL. That is the kind of money that India is spending on its next Vikrant class aircraft carrier. Of this cost to the municipality of Riga, 264 million lats (or some 0.87 santims for every lat spend on actually building the bridge) constitute debt service (cost of borrowing). Indeed, the entire project is one gigantic clusterfuck of cost overruns and waste probably repeated on a smaller scale in the way other municipalities and government institutions do business. Indeed, one figure of 27 million LVL pissed away by the idiot city fathers amounts to the money scraped together recently for support to dairy farmers. This bridge boondoggle will also have to be paid off, along with the debt servicing mentioned above.

The bridge story fits in well here, because it is a story of how money is misspent through Latvia's third-world rathole level of corruption, incompetence and idiocy in government. The idea of lending Latvia some 7.5 billion EUR is that it will keep the institutions of governance funded so that the economy can start recovery (maybe not even drawing down the credit line in full).  However, 7.5 billion is also the largest embezzlement, waste and corrupt diversion of funds opportunity ever presented to Latvia's ruling elite. Looking at how this country builds bridges for the price of an aircraft carrier, and how it wasted the so-called G-24 loan of a few tens of millions, of how it cluelessly beggared itself rather than saving its tax surpluses as warnings of an economic downturn multiplied, it is likely--bordering on certain-- that the EU and IMF funds will also be wasted and decimated by corruption and mismanagement.

Why Failed State Latvia?

I have changed the name of this blog to Failed State Latvia? from its earlier title of Thoughts from Latvia in an attempt to bring it back to life and up to date. Instead of some rambling and very infrequent observations about what is happening here, I hope to chronicle what I am beginning to see as the failure to launch of Latvia’s almost 18 year old experiment with independence.
My thesis is that Latvia has become a failed state lite. It is nothing like Somalia or Zimbabwe, the infrastructure functions, the trains run, there is 24/7 electricity, telecommunications, internet, food, water, heat (unless the bills have not been paid).
The problem is political and societal, and, of late, economic along with the rest of the world. The Latvian ruling political elite has reduced its level of public support to single figures. The four-party coalition government of Ivars Godmanis has fallen, and the People’ s Party (Tautas Partija/TP) is desperately trying, with it 1.6 % rating, to form the core of the new government. The New Era (Jaunais Laiks/JL) is pushing its bright young Europarliamentarian Valdis Dombrovskis for Prime Minister.
The last time around, the JL failed to change much in Latvia’s corrupt-to-the-core political system. JL’ s founding leader, Einars Repše, bungled his chance to at least start some process of change back in 2002 and his only success was to get Latvia into the European Union (EU). JL split with some of its other charismatic figures (among them, Sandra Kalniete, the Iron Lady of the Popular Front/Tautas Fronte) went off to form a new party, the Civic Union (Pilsoniskā Savienība/PS). TP lost some of its members including ex-Foreign Minister Artis Pabriks and ex-Minister of Economics Aigars Stokenbergs who formed the party Society for Different Politics (Sabiedrība Citai Politika/SCP).
The so-called opposition is split, public cynicism about politics is at an all time high, and the economy has been let go so far that there are almost no options left. The official forecast is for a 12 % drop in GDP this year, I would guess 15 - 18 % is more likely. Unemployment will run into the mid-double digit figures. With unemployment insurance running out after six months, there is likely to be serious social unrest as soon as the weather turns warmer. Latvia already had one riot on a very cold night of January 13. Some say the reasons were economic, I say they were mixed, with the main reason being total frustration and anger at politicians. But for the efforts of a small contingent of police (apparently backed by a larger number of military police inside), the crowd would have stormed the parliament or Saeima building and probably ransacked it during a running battle with those inside.
The economic crisis is global, but it was not a total surprise. Several economists and analysts warned of it as early as the summer of 2007 and said there were ways that Latvia could prevent the overheating of its economy and the pernicious expansion of credit riding on a real-estate bubble. Wages were also spiraling far ahead of productivity, while productive workers had already left for Ireland years earlier, where they were paid fairly for their labor. Management of many Latvian businesses was short-term oriented and often ignorant of modern, progressive methods and good labor relations. In addition, small and medium businesses with a modicum of success faced capacity expansion problems and could not tool up to economies of scale.
It is now rumored that Latvia will need additional International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, on top of the 7.5 billion EUR it has already been promised by the IMF and other lenders (Sweden, the EU). It appears that, for all practical purposes, the government’s finances have fallen apart or are about to disintegrate and to top it off, there is no fully functional government. Had Latvia started saving for worse times in 2006 or 2007, had it privatized fixed network operator Lattelecom and mobile operator LMT when Sweden’s TeliaSonera offered to pay around 500 million LVL, the country would still have a potential budget deficit, but a much smaller one and a war chest of several hundreds of millions with which to avoid cutting salaries for police, health and education workers. Although, on the other hand, such a windfall revenue would probably have found its way into the pockets of the ruling elite or have been squandered in other ways. That is the way of failed state Latvia -- prosperity is to be stolen or squandered, poverty and austerity apportioned among those services most essential to sustaining a functioning civil society.
I am not a believer in big government spending, but education, public health and public safety are needed now more than ever, especially since affordable private alternatives or parallel structures have not been allowed to develop (i.e. insurance-based private medicine). Latvia will leave the crisis weaker and more prone to stagnation. The corrupt elite will find itself sucking juices from an increasingly dessicated economic corpse.