Which Is It?

Once again this newspaper presents the reader with different pieces of what adds up to the sorry spectacle Ukraine’s politics and economy. Valery Matviyenko deserves kudos for his insightful analysis of the forces impelling this country’s oligarchs toward a falling out among the thieves that have stolen and are still stealing this country blind. He also points out how many of them got so filthy rich: by ripping off the state for energy resources used to process metals then sold abroad, where the money usually remains. That Prosecutor General Potebenko has managed to find a few tens of millions of dollars that might be repatriated is little cause for jubilation: it might just mean that Western investigators are forcing the Ukrainian authorities to at least appear to be doing something with the information the West is awash in. Or it could mean that rival oligarchs are now using the prosecutors against each others. It most likely means a little of both. Add the sudden emergence of Ihor Bakai, former energy czar whose reputation for sticky fingers on a truly grandiose scale has earned him the status of persona non grata in the civilized world, as a legislative kingmaker. The whole spectacle begins to take on a surreal quality.

Meanwhile the mass of the people sink even more deeply into poverty. Investors advise the President that there is no investment because most people lack the money to buy the things the investors invest money to produce. And all the while real incomes and living standards continue to decline, not least because the name of the game is to suck wealth out and not to put anything back in. And now the taxmen are get set to dip even deeper into people’s pockets, which means pushing the economy further into the shadows and making it even harder to produce the goods and services that are the only real source of a nation’s wealth. If you want investment, you might want to leave some money in the economy to create at least some effective demand, but here is is just the opposite. Clearly, the people running this country are simply running it into the ground. On the eve of the Russian Revolution Pavel Miliukov ticked off the various misdeeds of the clearly incompetent regime of Nicholas II and asked rhetorically, “Is this stupidity, or is this treason?” Well, which is it now?