Chutzpah

Confounded nonsense!

With so many of us having relatives in New York, we might have heard the Yiddish expression “Chutzpah”– pronounced “hutz-pah”. It means “insolence”, “utter nerve”; “effrontery” as in: “During the budget debate, APNU and AFC had the chutzpah to act as if they had a lock on God and morality.” Well, Nigel Hughes, just demonstrated another bit of chutzpah in a letter to the Stabber.

You remember Nigel Hughes, don’t you? SC and top biller on the AFC ticket – much to Ramjattan’s consternation. The poor wanker Ramjattan had just breathed a sigh of relief at having finally gotten Trotman out of the way and here are his buddies Kissoon and Harripaul anointing Hughes as the new messiah! And from within his own party to boot.

Anyhow, Hughes complained that President Ramotar forgot he was president of all the people during his address to the nation on the budget. The man said the president’s speech was “short on hope and long on vitriol”. Imagine that! This is the man Kissoon boasts is “Rodneylike”? So the president is president of all the people – we accept that. And so did the president.

Even though the opposition followed up on all its putrid accusations that the president was condoning corruption on the Amaila Falls project – by completely axing it from the budget, the president still said he was open for dialogue. Aren’t accusations of corruption, vitriol? And the actions of spite and bitterness spoke of much louder than any word could.

It was not the president who threw so many young Guyanese onto the streets – it was the opposition. Aren’t these people Guyanese people? So the opposition is not supposed to be concerned about “all the people”? Even if they weren’t in the past – what about the ‘new dispensation’?

The president controls the Executive but doesn’t the opposition control the legislature? Hughes hoped “that anyone privileged to lead this dear country of ours would be blessed with creativity, flexibility, vision and a generous dose of inspiration”.

Sounds good – and President Ramotar has certainly fit the bill to open up to the opposition. But why does the opposition get a free pass? Cutting the budget just to gain “leverage” demonstrates “creativity, flexibility, vision and a generous dose of inspiration”? The AFC is just drowning with wankers!

Economic hogwash

APNU is not far behind in the kingdom of wankerdom. David Granger felt compelled to follow President Ramotar with a “speech to the nation”. And it was not just a lacklustre performance: it was riddled with inaccuracies. A leader should be simple but not simplistic.

Granger intoned gravely, “A budget is not a mysterious invention which only few are able to understand. It is simply a financial plan. It must project, as happens in any family or household, what it needs to earn and what it needs to spend. It must explain its priorities in ways which ordinary people can comprehend.” It is obvious that the budget was certainly too “mysterious” for Granger to understand.

The first fallacy one is disabused of when studying economics is that the ‘government’s budget’ is analogous to a family’s budget! It’s most certainly not – and we can now begin to see Granger’ utter and profound confusion over the budgetary process.

Take for instance the tools at a government’s disposal to control its macroeconomic environment such as inflation, etc through its Central Bank operations, for instance. These are not available to a family. We could go on at length – but what’s the use? We hope at the next tripartite talks President Ramotar shares some of his economics background with Granger.

Number 1!!!

Our very own Shivnarine Chanderpal who just joined the elite club of cricketers who’ve scored 10,000 runs – just 10 of them in the history of test cricket – also regained the title of “Number 1 test batsman in the world”! All hail!