• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

WEEKLY ROUNDUP Autumn: The Time for Political Initiative

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

At long last, Parliament saw the beginning of a serious intrigue last week. Subject: retiring the Cabinet. The latter’s report was put off to a “later date,” probably to allow everyone concerned time to get well prepared. So far, the Presidential Administration looks prepared the best. Actually, the problem is not sending the government packing. Parliament can do that any moment. But who will have the nerve to take over? Over the years in office, President Kuchma’s Administration has provided all conditions to reduce the number of such volunteers to nil. The result: a typically Ukrainian vicious circle: the opposition cannot take part in a new government and leaving things the way they are is no longer possible.

Compared to the executive, Parliament often looks an embodiment of patriotism, abidance by the law, and decency. Which it is not, of course, as evidenced by last week’s developments. First, Verkhovna Rada refused the Cabinet’s almost humble request to allow it to submit the draft budget program a month later. Everyone realizes that drafting a budget program under current conditions is next to impossible, so why should the Solons wish to hear an openly fictitious document? If they plan to use it in their further verbal attacks on the Cabinet, the whole thing will backfire. Secondly, Parliament was at its best when debating the bill on the deregulation of business. This document has a clause necessitating the certification of imported goods already certified in the sending country. Now here is a case study in Ukrainian lobbying when not a specific bill is lobbied but clauses required by bureaucrats to facilitate their abuses of office. And the Left showed special activity (contrary to their much-advertised dedication to exposing and preventing every instance of government corruption) in pushing through this malfeasant bill. Actually, without their votes it would have never been enacted.

Finally, the good news. Information from Rivne has it that from now on every hospital and grade school will start baking bread to supply their own needs. A local factory will supply the required equipment on account of its debts to the budget. Flour will be provided by neighboring collective farms (by the same token). On second thought, this seems a reasonable approach in this country, because any settlements using money invariably end in this money vanishing into thin air. Remember your school history textbook? The story about a tribe that could make good axes, another one good at breeding cows. Both tribes started practicing barter deals, but then a third and a fourth tribe appeared, such deals became too complicated, so they came up with the idea of money. Maybe someday that idea will also catch on here.

 

Rubric: