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talkpoliticsGreetings, my Lenin followers worshipers of freedom-dom & democracy-cy! An ongoing case here at the ass of the Balkans (which in turn is the ass of Europe) is causing a lot of discussions on the subject of private and public interests and their role in the state affairs. Is a sensible equilibrium even possible between them? And what's needed to maintain it? Not an easy question.
I don't watch much TV, but when I occasionally do, I always somehow happen to come across some weird folks fuming over political issues for hours and hours on. So a few days ago I saw this TV political talk-show host, with his greased hair and predatory look in the eyes, wanking all over his interlocutor who looked rather shy but intelligent well over the average level you might expect to see on such a show. The question was, "Aren't we returning to communism these days, now that the state has proposed to buy off the failed non-ferrous metal processing plant in the underdeveloped region of Kardzhali?" The other guy just gave the host an odd look, which prompted Mr Greasyhair to go on with his rant, "Is it commie times all over again? We're returning to September 9, 1944, right? We're effectively sliding back down with all this nationalization! Do you have anything to say on that, Sir?"
Frankly, I would've just stared at him and maybe burst into hysterical laughter, or something. Or just say, "Cheers, mate! To communism!" But the other guy obviously had nerves of steel, and quite some spare time on his hands, so he started to calmly explain that similar measures are often taken in some of the most developed democracies in the West, including in America and the "more normal" EU member states, and this isn't the same thing as the nationalization of entire sectors (like in Russia), but rather an effort to find a sensible balance between private and public interests, and obtain a structure of the economy that might actually work better. Of course the host would have none of it, and he interrupted the guy so many times that the latter just gave up eventually.
The thing is, there are still plenty of seniors around who've lived both through Sep 9, 1944 (the coming of communism here) and Nov 10, 1989 (the "explosion of Democracy"). They've seen both extremes and all the consequences that come from them. In one extreme, a total domination over property was granted to the state. On a personal level, my great-grandpa disappeared into one of the communist camps after his small safety-box producing workshop was seized and he was detained by the new government, just for being a "bourgeois".
For the first 11 years of my life I saw enough of what living under state totalitarianism was like. The state was everywhere, it occupied even people's last personal refuges, it invaded their private homes, their thoughts and the way they lived their lives. The state was literally unceremonious. The pub that a neighbor of ours had in my grandmother's village was just a small one-storey house, a very modest thing really. It was seized with no warning and no questions, and turned into a shoemaker's shop, and given to a guy who had been friends with the "partizani" (the commie resistance during WW2, part of which my other grandpa had been, by the way - a weird combination in my family indeed). So, the neighbor who had a pub on the previous day, next day turns up stripped of his property and declared an enemy of the state, and he had to report to the "Militsia" (police) station regularly for years. And some stranger was now sitting in his former pub, working as a shoemaker. Paying no rent, having a tax break. No questions asked, none answered. The government had just chosen that place and appropriated it, period.
And this is just one of millions of examples of what had happened after Sep 9, 1944. So, is the comparison between all the above -and- the state proposing to buy off a failed enterprise, anywhere near accurate? And what about the "we're back to communism now!!11" hysterics? In order to understand that, we have to look at what happened AFTER democracy exploded here in 1989, or what we call the Transition Period (some are still saying it hasn't ended yet).
After November 10, 1989, the private interest not just took precedence, it turned into obsession, under whose weight the last droplets of common sense disappeared from the head of the last remaining reasonable statesman. A fake sense was created that if the last remaining hectare of state-owned land was given to private hands, that would somehow be the ultimate recipe for a rapid growth and instantaneous enrichment of the population (or as we call it, "fixing the country"). It all happened in a frantic rush, amidst a huge chaos, and everyone and anyone was grabbing whatever they could snatch. Those were turbulent times, the epoch of the "Mutri" (literally: "mugs"; meaning: thugs), the Al Capone style. Many said we were living through the 1920s in the US. Hyperinflation, long queues in front of the bakery, pensioners gripping their last coupons and hoping to have some soup poured into their tin cans.
VS 
Meanwhile, the "democratic" governments were very busy, creating all sorts of "liquidation commitees" with the task to denationalize everything and sell it to the highest bidder (or rather, the guy with the biggest baseball bat). The liquidation committees became the symbol of ruin, the restitution law was applied very selectively, and the state became a departing evil step-mother for most, and a father-protector for some few. The Bulgarian people were completely unprepared for this total dismantling of their society - neither emotionally nor economically, least of all culturally. They didn't know what to do with their newly acquired "freedom", how to cope with the responsibilities of private property, and how to handle the appearing cracks between the emerging classes, and the huge gaps that were opening between various groups, and the staggering inequalities. You could see a donkey-pulled cart next to an S-class Bentley at the same traffic lights; you could see huts made of clay bricks nestled in the shadow of pompous super-palaces belonging to the parvenus of the day ("Never ask me about my first million, okay?") The latter architectural style was eventually called Mutro-Barok (Thug-o-Baroque).
VS 
The only function the state saw about itself was to retreat. It surrendered from its task to look after the public interest, but they went even further: they created and developed a business out of the re-distribution of property. For a decade or more after the beginning of the Transition Period, it seemed the only law of the land was the law of the jungle, and the greedy pillaging of everything and anything that had any value.
Literally in front of the bewildered eyes of my whole neighborhood, the backyard of the local kindergarten was sold off to a private "investor" who built a super-mastodon of an office building in its place, which hosted the new "businessmen" of the day (read: neo-thugs). The community library was also put on the list of places to be knocked down, and I remember my parents and other folks from the neighborhood running from one bureaucrat to another and filing petitions against the decision, forming community committees in an attempt to save the last place where their kids (i.e. me and my peers) could go read a book. But that effort was doomed to failure right from the start. The kids' playgrounds around the neighborhood started disappearing one after another, the mayor had signed some papers and allowed some new millionaires to build residential buildings there. Now we have just one playground corner within 2 km. Even the public sports arena in front of my block was knocked down and turned into a construction site (the company that started building went kaput a little bit, so the place remains unfinished and looks like a mine field, but yeah; we still don't have a place to play soccer or volleyball, unless we'd like to visit some private sports hall and pay 40 bucks per hour, how about that).
Some God-anointed "entrepreneurs" sent the diggers invading the older neighborhoods and villages, knocking down the brick houses of the pensioners and raising "kooperatsii" - the name is particularly ironic, since during commie times that was meant to indicate that a number of families had gathered their resources together to build a small residential block; but now there was nothing "cooperational" in these enterprises any more. Even some of the most emblematic buildings in town and symbols of our national culture weren't spared. The brightest example is the museum-house of Peyo Yavorov, one of our legendary writers and one of all those national heroes we claim to worship while neglecting their memory. The silent dismantling of the public property happened in muddy waters, with payments under the table, and faked bidding contests where "our guys" always won. That's how the biggest corporations were created, and they dominate the landscape now, being chaired by guys who've substituted the black sports outfit and the white fake Puma sneakers and woolen socks with a suit and a tie. Including the one where I'm employed. Multiple octopuses are casting their shade over the whole economy, usually carrying the word "Group" as part of their name (because it sounds so posh and intimidating, okay?)
Many of those newly built conglomerates have now crawled out of the grey economy, successfully laundering much of their money through building enormous properties on the seaside resorts. The place I work at, Sunny Beach has become the capital city of debauchery, the "concrete jungle" by the seaside, a former paradise now chopped into tiny plots of land and sold to whoever had the cash. Regardless of the origin of said cash. Money doesn't smell, after all. But it didn't work so well for all former state properties - after a series of restitutions and changes of ownership (from a garbage-collecting firm to a Masonic lodge), the museum-house of Yavorov is now in a wretched state, about to fall apart on the heads of the passers-by. That building has become the symbol of degradation due to reckless privatization, a stark reminder of the total neglect and spiritual banditism that has ravaged this society ever since "freedom" arrived like a tsunami. People have asked, would it be nationalization and communism if the state tries to buy that museum back?
VS 
And these are all just examples that represent crumbs of the pie, the visible tip of the iceberg. The REAL pie is much, much bigger, and much tastier. And it was being chopped to small pieces and sold out, too. To whom, how, and when it was sold for coins - we'll hardly ever learn the details. We know big pieces of the truth, but of course there's no proof. And even if there were, not that anyone would've moved a finger to do anything about it. It's a done deal already. We're talking of huge enterprises here, and even entire sectors of the economy, which, as of today, are on their knees, sold off, outsourced, moved to neighboring countries from which now we have to buy the very products we used to be so famous for. The Bulgarian fruits and vegetables, the rose oil, even electricity. Now we hardly produce anything useful, save for tobacco and alcohol. Now we have to buy tomatoes from Turkey and cucumbers from Hungary, and oil from Romania, and gas from Russia, and cheese from Greece, and clothes from China. What a shame. Bulgaria has become the example of how transition from communism to capitalism should NOT be done. Something like an experiment, to serve the historians of the future. And we're the mice in the lab. In fact there's such a song, Nine Million Mice. Except we're now 7 million, because many have fled.
And, since nothing of substance is being produced, in this case does the state have the right to interfere and control the large privatization and re-privatization deals of the big entrepreneurs who are otherwise unable to look after their enterprises properly? Like the biggest steel-processing factory on the Balkans, the one in Kremikovtzi, which for a long time was the biggest black-hole in the national budget. Well, both the answers YES or NO sound too extreme. Because each case is specific and it screams for a specific solution. As in the case with the non-ferrous metals processing plant in Kardzhali, where hundreds of workers and their families are doomed to life in misery and lack of any perspectives because of sloppy management by the private owner. A thing we're supposed to be used to seeing mostly in state enterprises, but is totally possible in private ones as well, as it turns out. And that region doesn't produce anything but tobacco, so if you shut down this enterprise, you're condemning the local people to a Stone Age existence. And because they're of an ethnic and religious minority (Muslim Turks), in such conditions there's a real risk of a Kosovo scenario in the long run. People tend to get all sorts of crazy ideas in their heads when they're desperate. But it'd be "communism" and "stomping on the freedom of the free market" if the state does something in an attempt to prevent all that, wouldn't it? It's a matter of principle - and principles are more important than people's destinies. Right?
The state should've never thrown its hands in the air and walked out of the room in the first place. The state shouldn't be just a sack with some holes in it, where you keep throwing tax money, and where the guys who are calling the shots can reach into and pull bank notes whenever they fucking like. Its intervention is compulsory for obtaining a sensible equilibrium between private and public interest, but not in the way it did during the last 20 years. Otherwise we'll never escape the sight of the ugly, dirty concrete jungles in our cities, with the kitsch Chalga-music nightclubs and casinos in the middle, or the sight of the devastated little towns and villages that look as if there's been a WW2 bombardment a week ago, as is the case with Vidin - a previously prosperous town on the river Danube, now turned into the poorest region in the poorest corner anywhere in the European Union. The place where a bridge was supposed to exist across the river, connecting us to the rest of Europe - but it was never finished.
VS 
As it stands, still more time and sacrifices will be necessary to achieve this equilibrium, if possible at all. And a fundamental (but this time GRADUAL!) change in the mentality of people. However I'm not sure people have the patience and inspiration to go through yet another "transition" like that. Or I don't know. It could happen naturally, despite ourselves and despite the state that's been more like an evil stepmother.
Either way, generations will have to pass for that to happen. Not a sudden "democratic" coup substituting the totalitarian regime where the old faces just rename themselves and become new faces overnight, like with a magic wand. Not the emergence of yet another, desired or undesired "strongman / Savior of the nation" like the current one who rode on the wave of people's hopes and desperation, and who came with the promise to save us from ourselves and "fix the country", whatever that's supposed to mean. The previous one even gave an exact deadline for that task: 800 days, no more no less - and of course that promise fell flat on its ass.
And, in any case, as much as we're similar to the Greeks who like talking and talking about problems over ahoriatiki shopska salad and a souvlaki shish-kebab with a tzatziki sauce yogurt and a glass of ouzo mastika (or tripe soup if you like), complaining and complaining endlessly, without moving a finger to amend them... honestly discussing these things wouldn't hurt - BUT rolling up the sleeves and actually working in the right direction is what would bring the real results.
I don't watch much TV, but when I occasionally do, I always somehow happen to come across some weird folks fuming over political issues for hours and hours on. So a few days ago I saw this TV political talk-show host, with his greased hair and predatory look in the eyes, wanking all over his interlocutor who looked rather shy but intelligent well over the average level you might expect to see on such a show. The question was, "Aren't we returning to communism these days, now that the state has proposed to buy off the failed non-ferrous metal processing plant in the underdeveloped region of Kardzhali?" The other guy just gave the host an odd look, which prompted Mr Greasyhair to go on with his rant, "Is it commie times all over again? We're returning to September 9, 1944, right? We're effectively sliding back down with all this nationalization! Do you have anything to say on that, Sir?"
Frankly, I would've just stared at him and maybe burst into hysterical laughter, or something. Or just say, "Cheers, mate! To communism!" But the other guy obviously had nerves of steel, and quite some spare time on his hands, so he started to calmly explain that similar measures are often taken in some of the most developed democracies in the West, including in America and the "more normal" EU member states, and this isn't the same thing as the nationalization of entire sectors (like in Russia), but rather an effort to find a sensible balance between private and public interests, and obtain a structure of the economy that might actually work better. Of course the host would have none of it, and he interrupted the guy so many times that the latter just gave up eventually.
The thing is, there are still plenty of seniors around who've lived both through Sep 9, 1944 (the coming of communism here) and Nov 10, 1989 (the "explosion of Democracy"). They've seen both extremes and all the consequences that come from them. In one extreme, a total domination over property was granted to the state. On a personal level, my great-grandpa disappeared into one of the communist camps after his small safety-box producing workshop was seized and he was detained by the new government, just for being a "bourgeois".
For the first 11 years of my life I saw enough of what living under state totalitarianism was like. The state was everywhere, it occupied even people's last personal refuges, it invaded their private homes, their thoughts and the way they lived their lives. The state was literally unceremonious. The pub that a neighbor of ours had in my grandmother's village was just a small one-storey house, a very modest thing really. It was seized with no warning and no questions, and turned into a shoemaker's shop, and given to a guy who had been friends with the "partizani" (the commie resistance during WW2, part of which my other grandpa had been, by the way - a weird combination in my family indeed). So, the neighbor who had a pub on the previous day, next day turns up stripped of his property and declared an enemy of the state, and he had to report to the "Militsia" (police) station regularly for years. And some stranger was now sitting in his former pub, working as a shoemaker. Paying no rent, having a tax break. No questions asked, none answered. The government had just chosen that place and appropriated it, period.
And this is just one of millions of examples of what had happened after Sep 9, 1944. So, is the comparison between all the above -and- the state proposing to buy off a failed enterprise, anywhere near accurate? And what about the "we're back to communism now!!11" hysterics? In order to understand that, we have to look at what happened AFTER democracy exploded here in 1989, or what we call the Transition Period (some are still saying it hasn't ended yet).
After November 10, 1989, the private interest not just took precedence, it turned into obsession, under whose weight the last droplets of common sense disappeared from the head of the last remaining reasonable statesman. A fake sense was created that if the last remaining hectare of state-owned land was given to private hands, that would somehow be the ultimate recipe for a rapid growth and instantaneous enrichment of the population (or as we call it, "fixing the country"). It all happened in a frantic rush, amidst a huge chaos, and everyone and anyone was grabbing whatever they could snatch. Those were turbulent times, the epoch of the "Mutri" (literally: "mugs"; meaning: thugs), the Al Capone style. Many said we were living through the 1920s in the US. Hyperinflation, long queues in front of the bakery, pensioners gripping their last coupons and hoping to have some soup poured into their tin cans.
Meanwhile, the "democratic" governments were very busy, creating all sorts of "liquidation commitees" with the task to denationalize everything and sell it to the highest bidder (or rather, the guy with the biggest baseball bat). The liquidation committees became the symbol of ruin, the restitution law was applied very selectively, and the state became a departing evil step-mother for most, and a father-protector for some few. The Bulgarian people were completely unprepared for this total dismantling of their society - neither emotionally nor economically, least of all culturally. They didn't know what to do with their newly acquired "freedom", how to cope with the responsibilities of private property, and how to handle the appearing cracks between the emerging classes, and the huge gaps that were opening between various groups, and the staggering inequalities. You could see a donkey-pulled cart next to an S-class Bentley at the same traffic lights; you could see huts made of clay bricks nestled in the shadow of pompous super-palaces belonging to the parvenus of the day ("Never ask me about my first million, okay?") The latter architectural style was eventually called Mutro-Barok (Thug-o-Baroque).
The only function the state saw about itself was to retreat. It surrendered from its task to look after the public interest, but they went even further: they created and developed a business out of the re-distribution of property. For a decade or more after the beginning of the Transition Period, it seemed the only law of the land was the law of the jungle, and the greedy pillaging of everything and anything that had any value.
Literally in front of the bewildered eyes of my whole neighborhood, the backyard of the local kindergarten was sold off to a private "investor" who built a super-mastodon of an office building in its place, which hosted the new "businessmen" of the day (read: neo-thugs). The community library was also put on the list of places to be knocked down, and I remember my parents and other folks from the neighborhood running from one bureaucrat to another and filing petitions against the decision, forming community committees in an attempt to save the last place where their kids (i.e. me and my peers) could go read a book. But that effort was doomed to failure right from the start. The kids' playgrounds around the neighborhood started disappearing one after another, the mayor had signed some papers and allowed some new millionaires to build residential buildings there. Now we have just one playground corner within 2 km. Even the public sports arena in front of my block was knocked down and turned into a construction site (the company that started building went kaput a little bit, so the place remains unfinished and looks like a mine field, but yeah; we still don't have a place to play soccer or volleyball, unless we'd like to visit some private sports hall and pay 40 bucks per hour, how about that).
Some God-anointed "entrepreneurs" sent the diggers invading the older neighborhoods and villages, knocking down the brick houses of the pensioners and raising "kooperatsii" - the name is particularly ironic, since during commie times that was meant to indicate that a number of families had gathered their resources together to build a small residential block; but now there was nothing "cooperational" in these enterprises any more. Even some of the most emblematic buildings in town and symbols of our national culture weren't spared. The brightest example is the museum-house of Peyo Yavorov, one of our legendary writers and one of all those national heroes we claim to worship while neglecting their memory. The silent dismantling of the public property happened in muddy waters, with payments under the table, and faked bidding contests where "our guys" always won. That's how the biggest corporations were created, and they dominate the landscape now, being chaired by guys who've substituted the black sports outfit and the white fake Puma sneakers and woolen socks with a suit and a tie. Including the one where I'm employed. Multiple octopuses are casting their shade over the whole economy, usually carrying the word "Group" as part of their name (because it sounds so posh and intimidating, okay?)
Many of those newly built conglomerates have now crawled out of the grey economy, successfully laundering much of their money through building enormous properties on the seaside resorts. The place I work at, Sunny Beach has become the capital city of debauchery, the "concrete jungle" by the seaside, a former paradise now chopped into tiny plots of land and sold to whoever had the cash. Regardless of the origin of said cash. Money doesn't smell, after all. But it didn't work so well for all former state properties - after a series of restitutions and changes of ownership (from a garbage-collecting firm to a Masonic lodge), the museum-house of Yavorov is now in a wretched state, about to fall apart on the heads of the passers-by. That building has become the symbol of degradation due to reckless privatization, a stark reminder of the total neglect and spiritual banditism that has ravaged this society ever since "freedom" arrived like a tsunami. People have asked, would it be nationalization and communism if the state tries to buy that museum back?
And these are all just examples that represent crumbs of the pie, the visible tip of the iceberg. The REAL pie is much, much bigger, and much tastier. And it was being chopped to small pieces and sold out, too. To whom, how, and when it was sold for coins - we'll hardly ever learn the details. We know big pieces of the truth, but of course there's no proof. And even if there were, not that anyone would've moved a finger to do anything about it. It's a done deal already. We're talking of huge enterprises here, and even entire sectors of the economy, which, as of today, are on their knees, sold off, outsourced, moved to neighboring countries from which now we have to buy the very products we used to be so famous for. The Bulgarian fruits and vegetables, the rose oil, even electricity. Now we hardly produce anything useful, save for tobacco and alcohol. Now we have to buy tomatoes from Turkey and cucumbers from Hungary, and oil from Romania, and gas from Russia, and cheese from Greece, and clothes from China. What a shame. Bulgaria has become the example of how transition from communism to capitalism should NOT be done. Something like an experiment, to serve the historians of the future. And we're the mice in the lab. In fact there's such a song, Nine Million Mice. Except we're now 7 million, because many have fled.
And, since nothing of substance is being produced, in this case does the state have the right to interfere and control the large privatization and re-privatization deals of the big entrepreneurs who are otherwise unable to look after their enterprises properly? Like the biggest steel-processing factory on the Balkans, the one in Kremikovtzi, which for a long time was the biggest black-hole in the national budget. Well, both the answers YES or NO sound too extreme. Because each case is specific and it screams for a specific solution. As in the case with the non-ferrous metals processing plant in Kardzhali, where hundreds of workers and their families are doomed to life in misery and lack of any perspectives because of sloppy management by the private owner. A thing we're supposed to be used to seeing mostly in state enterprises, but is totally possible in private ones as well, as it turns out. And that region doesn't produce anything but tobacco, so if you shut down this enterprise, you're condemning the local people to a Stone Age existence. And because they're of an ethnic and religious minority (Muslim Turks), in such conditions there's a real risk of a Kosovo scenario in the long run. People tend to get all sorts of crazy ideas in their heads when they're desperate. But it'd be "communism" and "stomping on the freedom of the free market" if the state does something in an attempt to prevent all that, wouldn't it? It's a matter of principle - and principles are more important than people's destinies. Right?
The state should've never thrown its hands in the air and walked out of the room in the first place. The state shouldn't be just a sack with some holes in it, where you keep throwing tax money, and where the guys who are calling the shots can reach into and pull bank notes whenever they fucking like. Its intervention is compulsory for obtaining a sensible equilibrium between private and public interest, but not in the way it did during the last 20 years. Otherwise we'll never escape the sight of the ugly, dirty concrete jungles in our cities, with the kitsch Chalga-music nightclubs and casinos in the middle, or the sight of the devastated little towns and villages that look as if there's been a WW2 bombardment a week ago, as is the case with Vidin - a previously prosperous town on the river Danube, now turned into the poorest region in the poorest corner anywhere in the European Union. The place where a bridge was supposed to exist across the river, connecting us to the rest of Europe - but it was never finished.
As it stands, still more time and sacrifices will be necessary to achieve this equilibrium, if possible at all. And a fundamental (but this time GRADUAL!) change in the mentality of people. However I'm not sure people have the patience and inspiration to go through yet another "transition" like that. Or I don't know. It could happen naturally, despite ourselves and despite the state that's been more like an evil stepmother.
Either way, generations will have to pass for that to happen. Not a sudden "democratic" coup substituting the totalitarian regime where the old faces just rename themselves and become new faces overnight, like with a magic wand. Not the emergence of yet another, desired or undesired "strongman / Savior of the nation" like the current one who rode on the wave of people's hopes and desperation, and who came with the promise to save us from ourselves and "fix the country", whatever that's supposed to mean. The previous one even gave an exact deadline for that task: 800 days, no more no less - and of course that promise fell flat on its ass.
And, in any case, as much as we're similar to the Greeks who like talking and talking about problems over a
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Date: 23/4/12 04:27 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 23/4/12 05:51 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 23/4/12 06:00 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 23/4/12 06:07 (UTC)