Saturday and Sunday are anticipated for rest. The best thing to do is go out of city, restaurant or café and a theater. Or the worst option would be to stay home and watch TV.
Although it’s hard to exactly persist that watching TV is an option of rest. The commercials that accurately or inaccurately interrupt the programs will remind you that you are not an “elite” but you can buy “exclusive” things at “unprecedented” prices. Or maybe your spoilt child may make you look for a globe in the middle of a rainy night. But the most and the best commercial is of course the lotteries. In order to win a car or a phone it’s necessary to only buy a ticket. It’s interesting to know why paradise is better than what we have right now. Commercial is also important but the most important thing is that they are trying to preach us that we are living in paradisiacal conditions, which is done by more serious sectors.
For example, the “360 degree” Sunday show of Public television. During the last program they were speaking about our economy for more than 20 minutes. They make us believe that our indices are so good that we should compare with Eastern European countries and not the CIS. Perhaps the staff of the show decided to slightly encourage the population. And the role of encouragers was submitted by the RA Minister of Trade and Economic Development, Karen Tchmarityan and an international woman representing the World Bank. Unfortunately before watching the show we didn’t think that so many bright ideas would be heard. That’s why we decided not to record it. However we’d like to generally introduce you to what’s been said.
Let’s start with Tchmarityan. In front of his notebook, which was showing the web page of the National Statistic Service (NSS), he was speaking about the great rates of our economy development, etc. Of course they also mentioned the economic freedom index of the “Freedom House”. According to the NSS the energy sector makes over 60% of our industry. In this case how does it happen that compared to the last year energy production has been decreased but instead the production of other industries, which use energy, has been increased? It’s a miracle. And if we don’t believe in miracles we should start to believe that those factories have started to use less energy and produce more.
Or another idea – the negative balance of the foreign trade has increased but it has not “exceeded” the permissible amount. They didn’t mention which the permissible amount is. Instead the following was mentioned that importation has increased, however most part of those products are either devices or raw material. So it turns out that people are importing new devices, increase raw material but the production rates are not increased. Why? We don’t even expect any answer to this question because they might say that the rates are increasing and that is only us, who don’t notice this increase. We already got used to this. Regarding the WB the situation is different. The WB has allocated a lot of money to Armenia and we cannot ignore that. However…
Imagine two families living next to each other in a small village. One of the families grows tomatoes and sells those. That family is doing OK, no complaints. They have a TV, satellite dish, DVD, recently bought a car. The only complaint is the neighboring family. That family is not able to grow neither tomatoes, not anything else because of different reasons. However, the father of the family hides all this and pretends that his family has a dual-digit economic growth. The actual situation is different though. During dinner the hungry children visit the neighbor and eat the leftovers from the table. Or sometimes they steal some wood or branches from the yard to take home to burn or some fruits from the trees. In the evenings the family is always arguing. What to do?
They decode to send one of the children to the house of the neighbor for a “survey”. He could go and ask for an axe. And it turns out that the family is extremely poor. They don’t even have money to buy food. And this directly threatens the prosperous family. The rich family starts to apply some cunning methods. They petition the family to be more democratic, not to steal and that it’s necessary to take the wife’s family to the market to sell in order to buy alcohol. The rich neighbor may even give some money to the poor neighbor, or some potato seeds, fertilizers. Or the family may advise the poor one how to survive with insufficient resources.
In other words, they pretend to be real caring to ensure that the neighbors at least survive. Let they not die of hunger. When helping the neighbor they make a condition saying that they cannot use the aid money to buy tomato seeds and plant those. Why? Because they will harm the rich family’s business. Thus, it’s more profitable to spend a few pennies on the neighbor and help to the extent when they won’t be able to grow their own tomatoes than keep that the poor family in miserable conditions. And when the 5 hens of the poor neighbor ever lay 10 eggs they are going to run to the rich neighbor and thank him for the dual-digit economic growth. The rich neighbor will hide his laughter and tap on the poor neighbor’s shoulder by saying, “you see when you want you can make it…” But when the rich one figures out that the hens are laying too many eggs he will harm the male dignity of the roosters just to stop this process. Or he might advise the neighbors not to buy the eggs. Thus the dream of the poor neighbor to have a small farm will never come true.
And now let’s frankly confess to what extent the behavior of our country differs from the behavior of this poor country and to what extent the attitude of the World Bank differs from tomato growers.
Or shall we blindly believe that the foreigners came to Armenia to sincerely help us to develop democracy in Armenia? It doesn’t happen that. And if we believe you we must think we live in a paradise and we don’t need help.