[7] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (4)

An apple tree axed and murdered.

The fantasy of infinity begins at home. Elaine Meinel, daughter of a famed astronomer http://www.osa.org/About_Osa/Newsroom/Obituaries/AdenMeinel.aspx , reflects on the obsessions of her father and the influence of the Zeitgeist of our times on him and us, writes: “Watching these elites struggle with the banking/trade mess which they carefully cultivated and grew is amazing.  That is, their desire for infinity has destroyed the entire system of commerce and trade which is now tremendously out of balance and out of kilter with reality and is now in full self-destruct mode.  The system is desperately trying to reset itself backwards from infinity and they are all trying desperately to push it back into the ‘grow to infinity’ mode.” –Elaine Supkis http://emsnews.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/nobel-prize-astronomers-save-the-world-from-the-great-attractor/#more-12949

And inevitably ‘they’ will fail, because a recalibration of the system or, failing that, a system’s failure—a burning out of all bearings—is what awaits our Deux ex mahina or matrix as we speak. That is how this writer sees the times ahead. Latvian are not excluded from this inevitability.s

Another angle of the apple tree corpse.

The Latvian politicians have been on their own “infinity” train for a very long time. What is so interesting about the political infinity of Latvian politicians is that their infinity does not have a straight line (some folks do), but goes off in all directions at once.

The vehicle of this penumbra of infinite conceit, a kind of shadow that embraces the entire globe of being, begins with the “democratic majority of Latvians” engaged in repressing all things populist. Among the repressed are not only dissenting Latvians (the alleged minority), the Latvian poor, all recent Latvian emigrants, Latvians who do not speak Latvian, and a myriad of other unmentionables. Actually 99% of Latvians are among the repressed. You guessed right if you understant that the “democratic majority” consists of but 1%.

While it is not possible to identify all the elements that go into making the 1% of elites, it is quite possiblel to name the Zugspitze or as Latvians are wont to call, the Rockets or Motors.

The face of the perpetrator and murdered.

The first Zug (puller of the rope of infinite growth) is of course President Andris Berzins. While his vision for Latvia is as obscure to Latvians as to himself, he is suspect of being a lobbyist for Swedish banks. The suspicion comes as a result of Berzins being a retired bank president of a Swedish affiliate.

The second Zug is Valdis Dombrovskis, the Latvian Prime Minister. He is said to have co-authored a book notoriously propagandistic in favor of banks. The actual author of the book http://books.google.com/books/about/How_Latvia_Came_Through_the_Financial_Cr.html?id=D-b6Zyhd2JEC is a Swedish liberal neo-capitalist by the name of Anders Aslund. When all is said and done, Dombrovskis is a sheep with Swedish wool over his eyes.

The third Zug is former President of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers, who is at the time of this writing trying to form a the next political coalition that runs the Latvian government. While Zatlers is a renown anti-populist and elitist (his professional life was that of a surgeon), he cannot be associated with any Swedish bank. Nevertheless, his financial advisor, Vjaceslav Dombrovskis http://www.baltic-course.com/eng/analytics/?doc=43882 an exponent of liberal neo-capitalist infinite growth philosophy.

The fourth Zug is the Latvian Minister of Finance, Andris Vilks http://www.mk.gov.lv/en/mk/sastavs/vilks/ , has a decade long work record for the Swedish SEB bank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandinaviska_Enskilda_Banken . One can not not suspect him of being a Swedish mole in Latvian government.

The fifth Zug is the President of the Latvian Bank, Ilmars Rimsevics http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/N5Cn-V-QLM8/0.jpg [BA, economics (Riga), MBA (Clarkson)]. His bio is illusive, not to say missing from the internet. He is known for his liberal neo-economist views, which includes infinite optimism and growth by way of the squirrel wheel for ever.

The Perpetrator caught with his Thing showing.

Needless to say, most of the oligarchs of Latvia are on the squirrel wheels made in Scandinavia and have little sense of what is good for Latvia (as a community that needs much healing and a plan for economic development) for the long term. Growth, infinite growth, is—so it seems—everyone’s favourite motto, including the populists’. How else could it be? All of Latvia’s poor (=99%) cannot but demand betterment of their dire economic condition. As it is, they are forced to cut down Latvia’s forests at the behest of Swedish banks.

What is the alternative?

Please, trees, do not do this to me!

The answer is, of course, creative thinking. However, not the kind of creative thinking that goes with cutting decorative flowers, but the kind that identifies with those at the bottom of the barrel, but with a will to live at almost any price. The ‘almost’ time is here for the Latvians.

Latvians must do what the desperate but determined to live must do: Do the unpopular, the dismissed, the unacceptable (never re-examined), all those jobs that are most unpopular, like undertaker, temple keepers of unpopular gods, those who collect, then hide excrement that others shit.

What the populists are in need of doing to resurrect themselves as the 99% that they are, is to enter in league with the forests. No more cutting of Latvian trees by Latvian populists.

How is this to be done?

Too late to cover up the shame.  For more click http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/

Before I write more, here is what is happening in America that surely finds an echo in Latvia. See what you think what applies: http://www.alternet.org/story/152651/11_facts_you_need_to_know_about_the_nation%E2%80%99s_biggest_banks?akid=7680.171186.obV8Ui&rd=1&t=18

(With photos at http://rigacapital.blogspot.com/  To be continued… )

[6] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (3)

The Backyard Theatre opens with "This is my birthday"

If the reader takes time to review “Meltdown” (click on link) http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/meltdown/2011/09/2011914105518615434.html , a series of four 40+ minute clips about the mindset and events on the cusp of the 2^nd to 3^rd millennium of “our era” on Wall Street, he-she should have a pretty good reference from which to reflect not only on the arrogance prevailing in the financial markets in America and the world, but be able to correlate it to and have a ‘feel’ for the arrogance of the political leadership of the Latvian government from the moment of its renewal in 1991 until its collapse in cynical amorality and financial disaster in 2008. The disaster is of course ongoing.

In a peculiar way, the events on Wall Street were echoed in Riga, Latvia, not to mention all over Europe.

I am queen for a day.

Strange as it may seem, during the first twenty years after the rebirth of Latvia as an independent nation, its government has been little more than a squirming bundle of former Soviet apparatchiks confessing the sins of a failed Soviet economic system by kowtowing to the alleged wisdom embodied by the Harvard Business School and its alumni, the ‘Harvard boys’ http://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia . No doubt, the hubris of Latvian-Americans smoothed the way of all things American slipping into Latvia without analysis of what the results of it could be.

Thus, like it or not, Latvian-Americans (and of course Latvian-Australians and Canadians et al) facilitated Latvian post-Soviet apparatchiks buying into the liberal neo-capitalist system. For their part, the apparatchiks did so not because they had any idea what the capitalist system was about, but because they were at the levers of power and, so it appeared, could leverage into their and friends accounts a great amount of unattached (not yet privatized) wealth.

My daughter-in-law is cook today.

The kolhoznic-apparatchics were left to their own devices. As a result of their acquisitiveness and lack of communitarianism http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/ (no less lacking in Latvians abroad, except as memory of utopia), something like 300,000 to 500,000 Latvians left Latvia and sought economic refuge in other countries. Large areas of Latvia now stand empty or half-empty of people as a result.

My husband is cook today.

As one who once worked in a brokerage house in Boston and noted the cynical behavior of people in the business as early as the mid-1960s, this writer is not astonished by the sense of Armageddon that now accompanies the system’s collapse. The amorality and prevalent cynicism that came with the free market system astounded the writer even then.

If World Wars 1 and 2 had destroyed millions of lives in Europe and Asia, America had gone largely unscathed by them. While soldiers returning home from the battlefields abroad brought their psychic traumas with them, the American population as a whole knew of the violence only by way of newsreels. When the “iron curtain”, the “cold war”, Senator McCarthy and his communist witch hunts, and prosperity all took hold of the consciousness of America at the same time, violence was forgotten and replaced by a “never again” philosophy for the holders of which violence became a rhetorical device. In short, America was no longer cognizant of violence in real terms, but as something that happened elsewhere to others.

Latvians who arrived in America as refugees of war, at the same time as they fled Soviet occupation of their country, soon joined the American rhetorical war against violence. Though the Latvians had seen and experienced the violence of war first hand, they soon took advantage of the American dilemma of being entrapped in a perception of violence as a vicarious phenomenon.

We make a nice couple, don't we?

The Latvian-Americans, too, were soon fans of cowboys and Indians ‘bang ‘em up’ movies. And though they did not forget their experiences of war or lost memory of their lost loved ones, the Latvians abroad relatively soon became former refugees, American (or other) citizens, and their countrymen under the Soviets increasingly became a fiction. Idealized as more than real, the Latvians in Latvia http://www.flickr.com/photos/58596345@N04/5382738196/  became to the Latvians abroad http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/events/werecommend/2011/08/wingman -brewers-beer-fest-at-pastiche-in-tacoma/uploads/articles/15291-banner-pastiche625.jpg  a pastiche, and also more virtual than real.

It was during this time that the Latvian “populists” were lost to view and were presumed to have gone out of existence. A contemporary Latvian populist, an antagonist of the corrupt government in existence in our day   https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmQTVLcoPbCri_piINHuzabAOB-RebagqcmCbIa3wYib6SzcsXitebnUpPkbnsRRm1BD1m1-SZwELMrvdjaULu3NDirWKbLpaHn7T3OGnEvdgPUhFcTzRqi_9Lp0TtZ4Oub9XTPL9u-Q/s1600/Riga19%252C2011+050.jpg is never shown but as a vandal or worse. That is to say, according to the Latvian media, government, and most Latvians abroad to be a populist is to be un-Latvian in Latvia. To agitate for the populists “not [to] vote” is condemned as unpatriotic. Populists are presumed not to exist. Just a few days ago some Latvians from the North  American continent were calling on all Latvians to do their “It’s a Latvian thang” as if there are no populists who would resist the call.

This is my day to enjoy. No one can say "no".

In spite of the ‘heavy’ opposition to them , the populists in Latvia have actually been not in the background, but very much in the foreground as émigrés to Ireland, England, China, and all kinds of countries the world over. For most part, these populists are the poor of Latvia.

My son thinks he was born in Argentina.

Is this why the populist Latvians do not exist? Or is it that they are populist antagonists to the Latvians abroad, the very ones who bring them the delights of the West in ways that literally chases the natives out of their country? Do the post-Soviet politicians and media deny populists because these are the true not-voters from day one?

Today the piggy is the queen's!

Which of course leaves the question: What is the validity of the political coalitions currently being formed to take over the Latvian government if it and they do not recognize, let alone represent populists?

[5] Darkness As Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (2)

Preelection appearance of politicians running for office,

When President Karlis Ulmanis vanished from the government in Latvia, Spidola did not jump after him into the Daugava River as she had done after Lachplesis.

As Menesnīca, impersonated moonlight that illumines night and is said to have once guided proto-Latvians in night-fighting tactics, Spīdola did not see Ulmanis as a reincarnation of her mythic lover, Lachplesis.

The failure of Ulmanis/Lachplesis to mate in the netherworld with Spidola [who among other things represents the subjective (re democratic and populist) nature of the psyche] is at the root of the political troubles of Latvians in 2011.

As noted in many earlier blogs (see http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/  among others), the word “populist” is belittled and repressed by all officials and media in Latvia.

The Latvian state rules as a rhetorical democracy, one which uses rhetoric not as proto-Latvians had it by putting the endearing word in the forefront of communication, but by using rhetoric as a persecutorial (vajāšana) device. A lie is no less persecutorial even by another name.

The tactics of the Latvian government are imitative of the tactics of persecution practiced by the neo-Christian (Catholic, later also Protestant/ fundamentalist) church. That is to say, the subjectivity of the individual and collective (populists created such subjective language as is represented by the endearing word) is repressed in favor of an official story, the ‘good news’.

The first line of control of the state is government rhetoric with regard to history—history not as actual, but as created by government. Thus, for example, the betrayal of the Latvian myth and state by Karlis Ulmanis is never mentioned, but the brutality of the Soviet authorities is. The failure to mention the failure of the Latvian myth results in a cultural stutter and a further weakening of communal bonds.

The right course to pursue is....

The second line of control is rule of the country by “parliamentary” democracy. The rhetoric of the government insists that ‘parliamentary’ is synonymous with ‘democratic’, even while the government is democratic only for the ruling elites. Latvians essentially have no idea (either suggested or taught) that the greatest degree of democracy is identified with populism, which stands for the people (right, left, or center).

Thus, President Andris Berzins was elected and put in office without the participation of the Latvian people. Though as a former banker (he receives the highest retirement benefits in Latvia), Berzins is compromised by suspicions that he is a proxy of Swedish banks. There is no mention of the latter fact in public space.

Insofar the Lachplesis character is reflected in the highest office of Latvia, President Karlis Ulmanis effectively reduced the President’s mythic role to one of empty rhetoric. Indeed, the authority of the President since Ulmanis has not been confirmed as anything other than make-believe because unrealizable. At the same time, any potential leader from the ranks of the populists has been suppressed

There is nothing strange about the repression of democracy, if we remember that Lacplesis died fighting with the enemy, while Karlis Ulmanis died of circumstances created by the outbreak of WW2.

For all of Ulmanis’ achievements in raising the state of economic well-being among Latvians in the 1930s, Spidola, the helpmate of Lacplesis, refused to recognize the former President of Latvia as representative of the Latvian community and to this day has not found any Latvian leader to warm her bed.

These circumstances leave the Latvian soul (foundation rhetoric here) enduring a tense, essentially intolerable time.

The soul of the community (nationalist or no) wants to know if it, too, is but government rhetoric or whether behind the rhetoric stand men and women, leaders, who are willing the certify their rhetoric as meaningful authority by giving example. The example must necessarily include very real sacrifice if government officials ask the public to sacrifice. At this time the level of sacrifice among Latvian government officials is not even that of a car driver in a car race in Tunisia.

If I remember right, a Korean teenager projected Lachplesis http://www.eurotales.eril.net/quiz2/lat8.jpg as a character in a comic book. This—though never admitted by political authority or mentioned in the news and information media—is an accurate projection of the character of today’s politicians in Latvia and other countries.

The audience and the empty screen.

However, as acute as the problem of democracy and equality is in a country of 1.9 million people, our civilization has reached a time when its governments are basically without authority in all countries.

For Latvia, the political and economic suffering was first brought it by the ‘Harvard boys’, the club of academic ideologues, who in the early 1990’s instituted in the Baltics the official ideology of the West, re liberal neo-capitalism. I am sad to say that this came about through Latvian “exiles”, who after nearly fifty years abroad had lost their culture as ‘natives’, and had become missionaries on behalf of the West. Therefore, the Latvian people were encumbered by, both, the laws of their first republic and the post-Soviet “victors”. To this day they see “no exit”.

The exits continue to be sought by the Latvian people, while the officials play games of mirrors and sleigh of hand. While these tactics are evidently successful in terms of keeping government in office, communal chaos is the real result. What can be done to avert extinction?

How is one to change the economic system and the anarchistic civilization encouraged by corporations with the right to act as individuals, a presumption it borrowed from the church http://procinwarn.com/whatchurch.htm ? While one may always hope that a church has the authority of sacrifice to back it up, the corporation has replaced sacrifice with money.

The hard question no one is willing to answer.

Who is producing the irresponsible individual? Is the Federal Reserve and similar institutions a corporate individual?

In some respects Latvija is not all that different from Greece.

See STRATFOR report http://www.youtube.com/user/STRATFORvideo#p/u/0/zDINQ6k9jYQ

Complete text of post at http://rigacapital.blogspot.com/



126 wild cranes circling above my house in Braslava on September 25, 2011



[3] Into the Tunnel without A Light; or

The Liberal Neo-capitalist Destruction of Latvia

It is unlikely that the political leadership of Latvia is unaware that its actions are destroying Latvia, because the destruction is occurring very visibly, not to say painfully, with lack of food causing ill health and often death being the logical result among all age groups, especially among the young and old.

This morning (Sunday) this email via my mobile phone:

“Good morning, Mr. A…. May I ask you for help? Can you lend me Ls 20 for food, because K. cannot at this time send me money? I also would like to know whether you are driving to V. on Thursday. I have to be at the court, and would like to go with you. In July, I submitted papers to have the father of my child provide support money. I will wait for your answer. Have a nice day (Jauku Jums dieniņu).”

I know the family for many years, thus, I have contacted the mother and will find the Ls 20. She also asked me to wait for her until the end of the court session, because the father of the child has said he would beat her up, but was not likely to do so if someone was with her.




It looks that the cranes are ligning up.

 

Be that as it may, after seventeen years in Latvia (after 46 in America), I am near broke. Living on a fixed income (SS from America) and a reserve from old family property sold during the ‘fat years’, the reserves have been depleted, both, due to some investments having urned ‘bad’ by the financial and economic fiasco in America and elsewhere and due to the great need among so-called lower economic classes in Latvia even during those ‘fat years’. I still have my shirt on and enough to find Ls 20 for the mother (if only because I know the family's circumstances personally), but this does not mean that I sleep easy. 

Needy families are in every corner of the Latvian countryside. The mother above is not the only one I know. Just a few weeks ago, I called and received help from a television program (“Without Tabu”) to monitor the progress of the renovation of a couple of mildewed rooms that a municipal government of a small town has assigned to a poor (trūcīga) mother and her three children (1.5, 4, & 8 years). The circle of people whom I help is a private and subjective one, but includes such mothers and children as above, alcoholics (believed by me to be rehabitable), not to mention occasional trips to take some kid to the hospital, and of course encouragement.

My tomato crop after a bath.

Why do I write about this? Some readers of my blogs may recall that I have called for the resignation of the President of Latvia Andris Berzins, one who receives the highest pension of anyone in Latvia, and one whose arrival to the office of the Presidency may be judged to be wholly illegal if one uses wholly honest (godigus) standards.

The way I see it: when the former President of Latvia Valdis Zatlers called for the dismissal of the Latvian Saeima on grounds of corruption, that same Saeima did not, as was to be expected, reelect Zatlers, but pulled out of the high hat of corruption one Andris Berzins. The Latvian people endorsed Zatlers’ judgment in a Referendum vote. However, the corrupt Saeima had already successfully projected itself forward through Berzins, a former bank president, who, though suspect of being a proxy of Swedish banks, is not questioned about it by the timid and the extreme right wing (i.e., almost the entire) Latvian media.

Among the people for whose resignation I have called is also the Minister of Finance Andris Vilks, another proxy of Swedish Banks. There are others who, given their liberal neo-capitalist views, should be resigning. The President of the Bank of Latvia Ilmārs Rimšēvičs should be given the boot. He is the first line enforcer of the “internal devaluation” program, which makes the Latvian lats an increasingly worthless piece of paper, not to say tool for pauperizing the Latvian people and facilitating the takeover of Latvia by Swedish/Scandinavian banks. At least one Norwegian politician has been caught using Riga as his house of prostitution.

An article in the Latvian newspaper “Diena” [(23.9.11) re ‘Latvijas veiksmes stāsts’ by Sandris Točs] brought my attention to an article in The Guardian by the economists Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Titled “Latvia and the disciples of ‘internal devaluation’”, the article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/16/latvia-anders-aslund-austerity bring to our attention the implicit complicity in the destruction of Latvia by PM Valdis Dombrovskis, who in collaboration with the liberal neo-capitalist Swedish ideologue Anders Aslund has authored a book called “How Latvia Came through the Political Crisis”. [Read the link to whiff the stink.]

We can only boo Aslund, but surely, PM Dombrovskis ought to be given the boot, too. Once a student of physics, he ought to bring up his perception of complexity to the level of instead of saying “abracadabra”, he will also know the meaning of cadabraabra or caradababra. The genee just may be hiding in the last two versions, because he surely is not with Dombrovskis.



Sunshine in the sink.



I do not deny that ideologically, I am opposed to liberal neo-capitalism and to the present Latvian government and those who constitute its leadership (ex-president Zatlers including). My opposition to the neo-liberal cabal of Latvian politicians and the media can be supported by economic and financial arguments. However, most convincing are the screams for help coming through the above cited letter from a poor mother on behalf of her child. I can assure the reader that such letters can be multiplied by the thousands—ultimately all of which testifies as to the physical and spiritual pains that come with the destruction of my nation.