[12] Darkness Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (9)





On the list of lobyists in Latvian government who are suspect of collusion with Swedish banks now comes Zatler’s Reform Party with Daniels Pavluts, currently employed by Swedbank.

While the Swedish lobbyist (possible) President Andris Berzins put a sheet of celophane between Pavluts and himself by saying that he was not so certain about Pavluts, he did not say what the uncertainty was about. Avoiding mention of Pavļus Curriculum Vitae leads to such absurdities as wondering if the reason is the candidate's sex.

So much for a president who does not know that he is standing on a silver platter that shines like a mirror and projects doubles for the benefit of the public.

Nevertheless, how about coming to high office under the suspicion that one is a lobbyist for a foreign country? Surely that is a suspicion that should be closely examined, one that cannot be turned away by any maneuvre. This is why in democratic countries the presidency has several nominees, and they are closely examined and discussed by the media—unless it is in Latvia.

The Latvian media is as opposed to Russian bankers as it is in favor of Swedish banks and Swedish profits. The exploitable and underserving Latvians are not ever a corporation, but pushed in a pile under a blanket featuring the title--“populists”.

Cloud II

The Latvian media hangs populists out to dry by the means of the neet trick of referring to them without any suggestion what it is referring to. Even so, by a nose-down inuendo,“Populist” and “populism” are words that ryhme well with “evil” or “dirty hungry unemployed alcoholic” and worse. It should not be hard for the Latvian televised media to find every Latvian politician today denouce “populism” many times over.

In short, the parliamentary democracy practiced in Latvia is led by pure white washed directors of presumptions. The directors—the President, the Prime Minister, Ministers and other favorites—have their “fractions”, which word conveniently masks the absence of any political parties.

One “fraction” phenomenon is the ZZS (Greens and Farmers) solidarity party. The unique thing about this is that the Greens are completely subject to the Farmers. This is one reason why the forests of Latvia are being cut down with little sense of responsibility. There are no Greens in the Green fraction, and many farmers do not much care about forests if only because forests take land from those who mime the hunger of a goat.

Cloud III

The same applies to Latvian politicians and their fractions vs the Latvian populists, whoever they may be.

In any event, the nomination of Pavluts by the Zatler’s Reform Party is one of those awkward give-away hickups made by people who are heart and soul liberal neo-capitalists with a heart full of crocodile tears.

This is not to say the President Andris Berzins cannot make himself a hero by resigning (it would be a surprise and certainly trump former President Zatler’s Presidential Directive #2) and calling for direct elections of the President. Incidentally, it would be worth while for Latvia to hold Presidiantial Primaries as they are in the United States.

Cloud, south of Burtnieku lake, Friday, October 21, 2011 IV

It is past time to winnow from office those of suspect reliability, as they are suspect witnesses to office responsibilities. The evaluation of that responsibility is not for today’s political fractions, but for the populist eqivalencies currently being denied existence.

PS An interesting article from Stratfor, click here. Especially interesting and informative is the part relating to the Baltic countries toward the end of the article, re the new banking 'empires', Sweden including. Significant geopolitical observations.

[11] Darkness Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (8)

A mysterious ritual in Latvia. What is it about?

One of the most harmful assumptions of modern society is the idea that human communities form without any particular effort on the part of humans. In other words, society is the result of a natural drive to cluster together and, lo! we are a tribe, a kingdom, a nation, a city, whatever.

In the Western tradition, the seeds for spontaneous genesis of the community begin with the Bible. God creates Adam out of a clump of clay, then creates Eve from Adam’s rib, after which he is forced to chase both out of Paradise for allowing themselves to be tricked by a snake to eat an apple.

Having eaten the apple gives the human male and female their sex drive, they couple, and as a result of the coupling children are born. When the children are grown, they do as their parents did. As for the community, it springs from the descendants of the first human pair, all intuiting that they are related. In effect, how can related beings not come together in an intimate crowd of their own?

While the Bible leads to conclude that the community forms as spontaneously as suggested above, the background noise leaves evidence that those who wrote the Bible were not altogether convinced that all is all that simple. No sooner are the first children born, when the brothers, Cain and Abel, become jealous of each other, and Cain kills Abel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel .

A Latvian warlock leads the dance until it comes out right.

The traditional and biblical interpretation for this jealousy between the brothers is that the offering at the altar of one of the brother is more pleasing to God than that of the other.

A second guess, however, will inevitably suggest incest as a more likely motivating force for the jealousy. Of course, cultivators of naïve societies and proponents of spontaneous community formation have resisted acknowledging this possibility. Even so, times change, and what was rejected yesterday is permissible  today. Thus, it is possible that the real reason for the brotherly conflict was not the acceptability of the offering of one over that of the other, but jealousy arising out of a society where incest (even political incest) was still the norm.

If this is so, the first socially significant act after the murder of Abel is the institution of the so-called incest taboo. The purpose of the taboo is not to eliminate incestuous desires (which cannot be done), but to keep the next pair of brothers from getting into a deadly fight over a woman again.

It is possible to interpolate from the above that the incest taboo is a step necessary in community building if the community is to be a lasting and long lived one. The taboo does not eliminate murder altogether, but it certainly makes a great effort to eliminate what is perceived as one of its main causes.



Subsequent steps in community creation were the ten commandments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments . One may perceive the commandments as an elaboration of the incest taboo. Unfortunately, today many people under the influence of the ideology of liberal democracy ridicule the commandments by viewing them as just another list of “don’ts” imposed by authoritarian governments.

Black John, symbol of maimed forest, gives his blessing.

Be that as it may, even with the Ten Commandments, the killing has not stopped. Modern man has to but look around him- and herself and see that the whole of modern society—what we like to think of as a community—\has been built on a foundation of war.

Let us return here to our doubts that the human community is a matter of sponteneous creation. If our doubts are on mark, is the condemnation of the murder of Abel by Cain the first act in community building?



The Latvian miracle:
Over the murdered body of an apple tree new leaves unfold even in the fall.



If we answer in the positive, we may argue that the jealousy between the brothers, Cain and Abel, is one of the first signs of human consciousness.

Which raises the question: Is the arousal of jealousy then what distinguishes a human being from an animal?

Many anthropologists today (though not all) argue that consciousness is imbedded in acts of mimesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis . Indeed, every child learns by imitating his-her parents and other adults about them. One may go so far as to say that the children who learn quickest are the most jealous to be like their parents. As anthropologist Michael Taussig puts it: “I… am taken in by mimesis precisely because, as the sensate skin of the real, it is that moment of knowing which, in steeping itself in its object, to quote Hegel, ‘…breaks down and supercedes fixed and determinate thoughts’”.

In other words, a “fixed and determinate thought” is incest and violence.

Now, as I have argued before, the current Latvian government is (by design or circumstance) an incestuous institution. Though its object of desire is not a woman in the conventional sense, the deputies of the government (its elected and unelected officials) all desire to possess Latvia without sharing it with others. The result is a victimization of Latvia, that is, a creation of unstable coalitions, frequent betrayals of trust, and rape of the country, including the possibility of its demise.

At this point in time, there is no way for Latvia to escape being victimized by the government’s incestuous desires but one. To break free of what have become “fixed and determinate thoughts” of its leadership,  the community of Latvia  must go through an event, a sacrifice in the real, without permitting itself physical violence.

What is to be done?

I have suggested in a number of blogs, and I suggest here, that the “sacrifice in the real” may be satisfied by the resignation of the current President of Latvia, Andris Berzins.



Youths and children embrace Black John. In the background the straw man with the chainsaw burns in envy.



Though Berzins election to office appears to be juridicially pure, given his past service to foreign banking interests, and absent a winnowing process such as the American election primaries, the subjective consciousness of the nation is sent signals that its leadership seeks contact with it for the sake of an orgasm for itself, while denying similar pleasure to Latvia by treating like a rubber doll.

This afternoon President Berzins asks the PM Dombrovskis (author of a book favoring the policies of Swedish banks) to form a coalition to lead the Latvian government .

[10] Darkness Seen Through Tiresias’ Eyes (7)

The enemy is a straw doll with a chainsaw between its legs.

As this blogger has pointed out through a series of earlier blogs, the real dilemma of Latvia is not the Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs) and its alleged tilt toward Russia, especially Moscow and its premier politician, Vladimir Putin, but that The Great Northern War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_War is being fought surreptitiously all over again.

The current political horsetrading is said to be a matter of a coalition of Latvian nationalist parties entering their coalition in order to oppose the Harmony Centre. It has been amazing to watch how these “Latvian nationalists” are surrendering themselves to the West, which is lead by the capital of a not so certain European Union—Brussels.

The chief leaders of the “Latvian nationalist” drang nach West is yet another coalition called “Vienotība” (Solidarity). A fractitious group, Vienotība (V) has sought to ally itself with a number of political parties, the chief of which is led by a former President of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers. It is Zatlers who precipitated the dismissal of the 10^th Saeima by a People’s Referendum sanctioned by the Latvian Constitution.

The Zatlers’ Reform Party has just been demolished by six of its elected members (the so-called Olšteina Reform Group) abandoning the party and demanding from the “Latvian nationalist” coalition two ministerial posts to assure the nationalist coalition a majority vote in the Saeima. [One may presume that the ORG will—if successful—attempt to play the same role that the Likud plays in Israel.]

What are the “goodies” that are to accrue to the “Latvian nationalists West” for drumming and trumpeting the West?

The resurrection of Black John and the greening of Latvia.

Upon closer examination, we will discover that the West is a far more complex picture, more a collage than a picture. The reason for this is that in the case of Latvia, the real power of the West is possessed by and  expressed through Swedish banks.

Whether the Swedish banks operate in the interests of the Swedish goveranment is a question that cannot be answered without assigning it the role of “hidden hand”. This is not something this writer has the resources to answer in a definitive way. However, it is highly unlikely that the Swedish banks precipitated the handout of easy credit to the Latvians out of the purity and goodness of their hearts.

One may say that it was the great misfortune of Latvians, who having just (1991) escaped Soviet bondage and having no experience in capitalist markets, took the credit all too trustingly, believing it was all above board. Alas!

The “Latvian nationalists”—at least the current coalition-right, which likes to call itself such—make no mention of the actual powers that the West represents. There are no doubt many reasons why the “Latvian nationalists” are so secretive.

One recent reason for the secretiveness of the Latvian right wing coalition is that the truth might provoke a Latvian version of OWA or Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. In Latvia it could metamorphose into a movement called “Occupy Swedish Banks in Latvia” (OSBL), at the same time asking specifically for the resignation of the President of Latvia, Andris Berzins, who as a former bank president cannot escape the suspicion of being a lobbyist of Swedish bank interests.

[This writer wonders why the somewhat in your face news gathering organization that calls itself “Pietiek kampt” http://www.pietiek.com/ has not provided the Latvian public with research into the subject of Swedish banks.]

The chief point in making the above points is that there are two major interest groups (not one) contesting their influence over Latvia. One is the East through its affiliate, the Harmony Centre; the other is the West and Swedish (Scandinavian) banks through their affiliate the “Latvian nationalist block”.

Is it possible that the real interests of the Latvian people is actually not either of these direction signals, one that orientes them not with an arrow (>), but a sign that says here (X)?

If the Latvian people (this writer envisages them as an English language speaking equivalency that cultivates the language of its origins at home on the basis of free choice), chose an X or here location, then an altogether different geopolitical orientation emerges.

We have arisen, we are here, we are the X of Johns.

This is the reason why this blogger presents the argument that allows for the possibility of Riga becoming the future capital of Europe, replacing Brussels and the EU (European Union) with a United Europe (UE) as the geopolitical structure that the Latvians strive for. Such a United Europe would necessarily include what is now called the East and West. In other words, Latvia would then no longer be at the margins of the West as defined by Brussels, but at the centre of now and future geopolitical events.

P.S. About the photos: On October 15, 2011, "The Temple of Black Johns in Remembrance of Destroyed Forests" in Braslavas pagasts, Latvia, celebrated a "Remembrance Day for Trees". Major benefactors of the deforestation of Latvia are Swedish banks, because to cut down forests is the only way that most Latvian people can repay their debt to the banks and the oligarchs behind them.

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

Tiresias' eye over Tiresias' house.

The perfect Latvian lobby for Swedish bank interests:

Latvian President Andris Berzins

Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis

Latvian Speaker of the Saeima Valdis Zatlers

Latvia Bank President Ilmars Rimševics

Latvian Finance Minister Andris Vilks

Latvian Economic Minister Vjaceslav Dombrovskis; utt.

The above lobby is the dream team of Swedish banks. The qualifications of said as lobbyists have been written about in previous blogs.

The readers should also note that the above mentioned have their local headquarters in Riga. Their ‘far abroad’ headquarters are likely in Stockholm, Brussels, London, Washington, and not surprisingly other places, among which surprising other is Tallin, Estonia.

Tiresias in his car.

The latter emerged during the past week, when Tomass Ilvess, the newly elected President of Estonia, arrived in Riga for a visit with the Latvian President Andris Berzins a bare seventeen hours after he was elected for the second term to the office.

While the Estonian President insisted that he did not mess in Latvian internal politics, the themes that he brought up for discussion in the press proved anti-populist in the extreme http://www.diena.lv/diena-tv/politika/ilvess-velas-lai-latvijas-valdiba-stradatu-ar-skatu-uz-eiropu-13908597. In other words, I love the Latvian government and want to make sure it loves me, but only on the condition that the Latvian government does not play populist footsee with its people [which maybe contrary to the interests of the Estonian elite].

For one, President Ilvess told the Latvian President and the Latvian people (via the media) that the Estonians had the European Union and NATO dear to their hearts, and would be unpleasantly surprised if the Latvians were to begin to think otherwise http://www.delfi.lv/news/national/politics/ilvess-igaunijas-intereses-ir-latvijas-sadarbiba-ar-es.d?id=41122153 .

Ilvess also came to lobby for the Rail Baltic line, making no mention on the Riga-Moscow line http://bizness.delfi.lv/biznesa_vide/levitins-riga-maskava-projekts-nav-politisks-tam-ir-ekonomisks-pamatojums.d?id=37875151 , the latter which—an East-West orientation—is of greater economic importance for Latvia http://bizness.delfi.lv/biznesa_vide/igaunijas-prezidents-apliecina-rail-baltica-svarigumu-un-mudina-latviju-iesaistities-aktivak.d?id=41197953 .

Tiresias is not completely blind I.

While the Estonian President did not present himself as a messenger of Swedish interests in a direct manner, the message was clear in his elitist and  overtly anti-populist http://ltvzinas.lv/?n=video&id=5452 stance. In short, if the Latvian government does not follow his point of view, which is likely the Swedish point of view, then the Latvian government ought take an as anti-populist stance as his own.

At issue is of course the fact that an improved (fast) Riga-Moscow railway link is more important to the Latvian people than providing the Stockholm-Helsinki-Tallin trail an extension through Riga to Warsaw and the rest of Europe. At the expense of being crude: Surely the state of the Latvian peoples pocketbooks comes before that of Tallin.

The Latvian and Estonian, not to mention Swedish, elitist interest inroads into the interests of the populists of Latvia is what the current coalition forming among political parties is all  about.

President Ilvess of Estonia has many Latvian friends in the Latvian government and media in that they also are anti-populists in extreme.

Let me make a note here about the meaning of “populism”.

Tiresias is not completely blind II.

According to some political experts, the word ‘populism’ is fuzzy in the extreme in most circumstances (the Latvian politicians and media being a case in point in which the word takes on its ‘fuzzy’ meaning). On the other hand, the word takes on a precise meaning the moment its underlying fuzzy meaning connects with a budding or mature antagonism among various groups that may or may not make alliances among themselves as political equivalencies. These political equivalencies may be either right or left leaning. 

In the Latvian case, the establishmentarian anti-populist orientation is based on a fear of populism-left, while it is paradoxically bolstered by accusations of being populist-right by groups that are not ‘native’ to the land for anymore than two generations. Ipso facto, ‘populism’ becomes a word beat upon by the Latvian ‘elites’ rather than the ‘elites’ being criticised and opposed by Latvian populists.

Thus, the 1% of Latvian elites are able to repress 99% of Latvians, so to speak, without much trouble. One reason is that the majority of the 99% continues to identify with the ‘the natives’ who have inhabited Latvia for three generations or more.

Tiresias alive and murdered.

However, suddenly, there comes one President Tomass Ilvess of Estonia to tell the Latvian populists that Estonian-Swedish interests come before theirs; moreover, the Latvian government agrees with the Estonian President because it is oriented much like him. For proof, go to the beginning of the blog and read the list of direct and indirect Swedish lobyists in the Latvian government.

What in the world do the Latvian people do now? Are they not between a rock and a hard place? If they now turn from the ‘right’ where they are accused of being, do they not run into the no less false ‘left’ that has been assigned to the people who are in Latvia two generations or less?

May not the interests of the Latvian people demand an altogether different orientation than the one being pushed on them by Riga, Tallin, Stockholm, not to mention Brussels et al? And what about the pressures from Moscow?

The Destroyer of Forests on the rack.

Incidentally, Latvia has lost about 500,000 inhabitants since it became an independent country. The government’s policy in not encouraging motherhood, is not only a direct cause of suffering to mothers and their children today, but is a guarantee that the number of Latvians, whether right or left, whether one two or more generations in Latvia, will become 1.2 million in the next decade.

The house with the rainbow again.

Caught between the East and the West, must Latvians necessarily lean West? If the terminology keeps insisting in giving the “right” and “left” a traditional economic-sociological meaning, might not the Latvian populists find their own “left”, because at stake is not sociology but the survival of Latvians as a people, a culture?

# ...........................................

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

From the previous blog: “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 excrete.”

So, how are the Latvians—dying in spirit and body, but never yet admitting to being desperate—going to do the unpopular, the dismissed, and become undertakers and all that?

To this moment in time all evidence confirms that the Latvian government is active in leading the nation to and beyond a collapse of body and spirit. The last piece of evidence—the nail in the coffin, so to speak—is the attempt to create a coalition government by various superficial political fractions. Indeed, while the political fractions apply to themselves the name of “party”, twenty-one years into renewed independence, Latvia does not have a political party, but a government made up of political fractions.

One may argue that Latvians have already begun a successful career as their own undertakers.

In the previous blog I argued that the top echelons of the current Latvian government (from the President on down) are less government officials than lobbyists for foreign governments in Latvian government positions.

Being a lobbyist for a foreign government in one’s own country is surely an “undertaker’s” position.

Curiously though, the former Latvian President Zatlers, now leading a political fraction called “Zatler’s Reform Party”, is a former surgeon or in more colloquial terms a “doctor”. What is curious about the doctor is that “im Geist” (spiritually), he is far from being a man able to imagine how medicine could help Latvians improve their economic condition.

In brief, Zatler’s Reform Fraction has never yet imagined that the fraction could become a party by lobbying for laws that would enable the European people and others (Latvians only incidentally) to exit this world when old—with the help of medicines that makes dying easy.

As the case in Switzerland and The Netherlands have illustrated, easy ways of dying are in great demand, but due to archaic prejudices in short supply. One reason for the short supply is that old prejudices force people to think of death as a negative force, something to be avoided at all costs.

However, a nation that would facilitate this process—by way of tourist ‘rest’ centers in the midst of gracious and bountiful nature—and help people rather than persecute them, would necessarily develop many services associated with humanity’s mortality.

For one, the airlines would be kept flying by a steady in-and-out flow of live and dead passengers. The countryside tourist homes would provide the forest gardens in which the individuals about to depart our Earth would reconnect with the profounder aspects of nature, in effect, by being helped to realize the ultimate oneness of physical and organic matter.

Hospitals would be able to develop high-tech cryogenic facilities to preserve the genes of the departing for possible cloning in the future.

Hotels in major cities would benefit from housing the relatives and guests who came to visit those about to take leave. In a manner of speaking, the ‘good byes’ would be like the ‘consolamentums’ practiced by the former Latvian and French Cathars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism .

Along with death there necessarily comes also desire for life. The preservation of the genes of the departed (an industry undoubtedly in demand) would, in due course, encourage the birth of birthing households, that is to say, households that would become permanent “saimes” (formerly families) to those who return to again abide on Earth.

The “copy” industry would thrive. Each departing individual who hopes to return to Earth by way of rebirth would want to provide a record of him- or herself for his-her successor by way of a diary, blogs, photographs, videos, interviews, and so on. If we have ‘email’ today, the clone could have his-her library of ‘e-life’ of indestructible disks.

Cemetaries as we have known them in the past and until today would cease to exist, and cem-(rhymes with stem) libraries would take their place. The useless megabucks building, alleged to be a library, now being constructed in Riga on the shores of the Daugava River and called “crystal mountain” would indeed earn its name by providing housing for the records of clones and their generations.

Riga would become a major center for medical research. After all, cloning is not some crude form of resurrection, but involves a study of intelligent life and the limits of its perfectability in a physical body.

Riga would become a major center for Social Anthropology studies. The University of Riga, and no doubt many additional universities, would become centers for the study of social interaction in the newly introduced and developing ‘saimes’. Experiments will become necessary, for example, at what age it is best for a man or woman to clone his-her descendant Self. This writer can imagine raising his-her son- or daughter-self until the age of ten or twelve before departing from his-her physical body and allowing his-her psyche (soul) to transmigrate to the clone.

Not least, a ‘Peace and Rest’ industry in Latvia would preserve Latvia’s ‘green’ nature.

A ‘peace and rest’’industry would facilitate the creation of a world at peace with itself. For surely no man or woman would die easily—whatever the painlessness of their medications—if they felt that their clones could not be reborn with guarantees of a kind mother, loving upbringing, an excellent education, a meaningful career, a roof of a house overhead, healthy food, and, not least, a long life.

One may argue that the higher the suicide rate in a country, the higher the misery rate of its people. While a government may not be able to improve the economic conditions of an overpopulated country facing a collapse of resources, it is arguable that it is not standing for human rights when forcing its people to practice forms of death that make death an overtly painful and tortured experience. The Latvian government is among those not only most corrupt, but among such that ignore the right of a human being to die in relative peace.   http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/suicide-costs-russia-equivalent-of-large-city/445146.html

[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?