On 12 July, President Dalia Grybauskaitė will celebrate the third anniversary of her presidency. Politicians and experts that were interviewed by the “Lietuvos Žinios” (“Lithuanian News”) amplified that the President was active, strong, and has respected the defined pursued directions writes delfi.lt
According to the sociologist Vladas Gaidys, during all three years of her presidency, the rating of D. Grybauskaitė remained very high.
“The President is supported by all population groups and the supporters of all parties,” – he said. The popularity of the President was slightly lower at the beginning of this year: in February it was 80 percent, in March and April – 70 percent, in May – 73 percent, in June – 67 percent (during the inauguration days she was supported by 85 percent of the respondents). V. Gaidys confessed to not to be able to tell exactly of why did this happened – it is possible to assume that it was influenced by the so-called Garliava story, risk factor – the favour of the President to the ruling coalition, who certainly cannot enjoy the public support.
According to the political scientist Algis Krupavičius, the third tenor year for D. Grybauskaitė were the most difficult and most complicated in all aspects.
In the main area of the responsibilities – foreign policy – there were no serious or positive changes. Rather the opposite. Relations with Poland have experienced new challenges; the tension in them has increased. Relations with other neighbours were quite passive as well, they lacked dynamics,” – said political scientist.
According to him, in the Europe issues, Lithuania has largely supported the initiative of the major euro area countries, but has not shown more initiative here either.
“One of the most serious achievements in the foreign defence policy – NATO’s commitment to ensure effective defence of Baltic countries. But, as the saying goes, one swallow does not bring spring,” – said A. Krupavičius. In his opinion, the President has manifested in the domestic politics quite actively, but this activity is controversial.
Translated by Monika Mikučionytė
DEJA VU: BACK TO 1930s
By Valdas Samonis
val@samonis.com
Europe’s continues its “existential” collapse at an increased rate, unfortunately. The disintegration of the Eurozone looks unstopabble in the Summer 2012. It will be a real epochal tragedy if Europe cannot stop disintegrating at my long proposed backstop: the creation of the Neuro and Seuro zones, to reflect hard to reduce productivity/competitiveness differentials in Europe. The deja vu of the 1930s is simply too costly for humanity: Great Depression Two, at least local wars, etc.
Rather than totally condemning any branch of economic thinking, this Global D(R)ecession is a product of Schumpeterian destruction of capitalism itself due to democratic deficit under the new conditions of the global knowledge economy. With such preeminence of knowledge in modern decision-making, the society at large, due to education and time demands, is simply unable to participate in the processes of ongoing financial-economic regulation (e.g. systemic risk monitoring and management, etc).
Thus, even under a normal democratic representative system that creates outward appearances of participatory democracy like in LT (far from the Swiss democracy yet!), classes/elites of high-level decision-makers develop (in banks, insurance agencies, justice systems, other intermediation institutions) that amass that powerful knowledge via clandestine and sometiumes criminal cronyism and they are strongly motivated to (ab)use it (insider trading, etc) to their advantage (principal-agent conflicts of interest, see A. Krueger). The prominent example is the LIBORgate; for more, see the writings of S. Johnson and A. Admati from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. There is lots of other evidence for this democratic deficit functioning in such destructive ways in Europe and other developed countries and emerging markets as well (e.g. hijacking of democratic and economic change by the former communist nomenklatura in CEE).
Such cronyism, nomenklatura, similar hijackings of the democratic process are modern manifestations of democratic deficit in action. In order to destroy or reduce the nomenklatura’s destructive power that is now in full swing, institutions need to be developed by the society that constantly interpret the rapid pace of knowledge and change to the society at large through monitoring/intelligence, analytical and broader publication efforts (education of the society at large). While part of this job is being done by universities, etc, it seems that modern societies need much more consistent efforts to close these dangerous knowledge gaps; otherwise insider elites (nomenklatura) will continue to destroy capitalism and democracy, eventually bringing a catastrophe like the Great Depression Two.
There is a substantial experiential learning accumulated in some countries (notably Canada) that will help guide building of such institutions. The June 2012 EU initiative to build the Single Regulators of Financial Institutions should make use of that knowledge, if there is some life left in the EU.