WE WOULD like to wish everyone a Happy New Year, even though we are afraid that some readers might take this the wrong way, and could accuse us of mocking them. We know this will be an unhappy New Year for smokers who were given, by law, the social status of heroin addicts from last Friday.
How much happiness can we look forward to, when dining out would involve spending half the night on a pavement outside the restaurant like some low-life looking for street action. The probability of us catching pneumonia will be higher than for the rest of the population, which seems a bit unfair, considering we are already more vulnerable to a host of smoking-related illnesses.
We would also have to engage in tediously boring conversations about the smoking ban with other smokers exiled to the pavement by the harsh new law, while being spat at by passing health-freak drivers disgusted by our filthy habit. This is the kind of year we nicotine addicts will have to endure, so happiness is not on the agenda.
IT WILL be fascinating to see how our smoker politicians cope with the ban, given their tendency to ignore the law. They have ensured that the House of Representatives would have a big smoking area, but what of the ministries?
Will Paphite health minister Christos Patsalides carry on smoking in his ministry? He ignored the existing law, which banned smoking in government buildings in the past, but will he comply with it now?
I doubt we will be seeing him puffing away on the pavement outside the Yiorkion, which is often occupied by Chinese working girls. Being a Paphite, Pats buys into the myth of the government minister as a special individual who does not have to obey the laws made for lesser mortals.
In this respect he is very similar to his big-shot buddy and mentor Marios Garoyian, who likes to advertise his importance by keeping plane-loads of passengers waiting for him to board. And when on the plane, from what we hear, Garoyian makes a habit of going into the cockpit and smoking a fag or two.
He does this only on Cyprus Airways flights, on which the pilots know who he is and feel embarrassed to stop him smoking. But there have been occasions when a captain has refused to allow Garoyian into the cockpit for a smoke, teaching him a much needed lesson in humility.
WE DO not know if Pats is still a smoker. Given his zealous promotion of the fascist law, which he described as a gift to citizens and our society, he may have joined the ranks of the insufferable former smokers. The new law, among other things, will make it easier for smokers to give up, said the wise Paphite.
Our good friend Charilaos will not be a happy bunny if smokers take advantage of this gift and start giving up en masse, as state tax revenue would decline further. We smokers contribute cash to state coffers every time we buy fags and the thank-you we get is to be banished to the pavements.
This is not the only danger posed to our society by the new law. Owners of bars and restaurants have warned that if their businesses are affected by the smoking ban, they will have to sack employees, which would swell unemployment figures and cost the state more in unemployment payments. In short, banning smoking could be very harmful to our economy’s health.
SPEAKING of the economy, our good friend Charilaos would have reacted like a smoker every time he was told ‘Happy New Year’ by well-wishers. He got a good indication of how happy 2010 would be for him several days before the arrival of the New Year, as politicians, businessmen and union bosses united in publicly rubbishing his proposed measures for reducing the budget deficit.
We will refrain from doing so even though we think his measures, which depend on the goodwill of Pasydy and on the public service upping its working tempo, will never yield the desired results.
Then there was the proposed adjustment of the valuation of real estate, which is taxed on 1980s prices, despite values being 30 times higher now. By making owners pay taxes on current valuations, Charilaos hoped to significantly increase the annual tax revenue collected from property owners. How naive he was.
Did he believe that the fabulously wealthy land-owners, developers and speculators would happily agree for the annual tax they pay on their real estate to increase by about 20 times? These guys have huge amounts of cash and enough political influence to get Charilaos sacked before the first week of the New Year is over.
FOR NOW, the big property-owners have limited themselves to orchestrating a viciously hostile campaign against the proposal, recruiting several deputies to the cause. But if the government insists on going ahead, it may have a full-blown, revolution on its hands, led by the mother of all land-owners – the Church.
Our friend would do well to start looking elsewhere for the €100 million he had hoped to raise from the re-adjusted values of real estate. Archbishop Chrysostomos is more likely to agree to a settlement based on the Annan plan than to pay many millions more in property tax every year.
THE PROPOSAL for adjusting real estate valuations gave Ethnarch Junior another excuse to attack the people-friendly Tofias government, with which his party is in alliance. He issued a statement slamming Charilaos’ proposal.
As chairman of the House Finance Committee, Junior had a moral obligation to speak out against this unjust proposal. Several developers and big landowners may be clients of his law office, but we know he was not thinking about their financial interests in expressing his vehement opposition to the scandalously unjust law.
Several of the 70 companies, which would be obliged, under the government’s new rules, to submit VAT returns on a monthly basis, were clients of his law office as well, but he did not defend their interests. He vehemently opposed that proposal as well, but his motives were entirely patriotic, fearing that monthly VAT returns would diminish the ability of big companies to resist an unfair settlement.
ANOTHER proposal that could possibly cause a revolution is the reduction of the government’s contribution to public servants’ pension funds. What chance is there of the Pasydy bosses agreeing to this attack on their members’ parasitic rights.
While this is a good idea – reducing the contribution of the state from 35 per cent to 20 per cent of pay – it does not go far enough. It should have cut the parasites’ pensions by 30 per cent and they would still be the wealthiest pensioners in the country.
It is outrageous that even after a public servant dies, his wife carries on collecting his pension in full until she passes away. Surely, when one of the couple has died, the other person needs only half the pension. There are public servants’ widows, collecting three grand a month.
When Charilaos was still capable of having a laugh, he would tell the joke about an unmarried senior executive at a semi-governmental organisation who is due to retire this year and will be collecting a pension of about €6,000 a month. “I urged him not to go and marry some 20-year-old, because we would end up paying his pension for another 60 years,” joked Charilaos.
COMRADE president, like his finance minister, finished the year on a low, giving his emotions a free ride as he moaned about the ‘lamentable domestic front’ and the relentless undermining of his position by his friends and allies. The guy just wants to be loved and cannot help expressing his disappointment when his feelings are hurt by us.
The wounded comrade explained his outburst: “I am a human being, as you understand, and, rightly or wrongly, emotional; I expressed myself with the great sincerity that characterises me, my feelings.” Normally his emotions are kept under control. “Of course, it is wrong for anyone to be guided by his emotions and feelings of disappointment that I expressed and I am not guided by these.”
ON THE DAY he spoke with the sincerity that characterises him, he also addressed the hacks and cameramen gathered at the palazzo. “Let me wish you sincerely, from the depths of my soul, Happy New Year, and assure you that, personally, I appreciate the role of the news media, but particularly the people who work for them, the people who execute orders from their conscience and from their mastorous (bosses) and contribute, naturally, to the development of dialogue in society”.
I sincerely hope and pray, with the insincerity that characterises me, the comrade had a good long rest over the holidays and that the part of his brain responsible for rational thought will be back in action soon.
FORMER Governor of the Central Bank Ttooulis of Avgorou, has re-invented himself as an authority in economics and has written a book to prove it. The book, titled The Economics of Federation, the Annan Plan and Imminent New Settlement Plan is primarily a work of pure propaganda against a settlement, but it has been received as a potential candidate for a Nobel prize, by the bash-patriotic camp.
Its most zealous promoter has been Lazarus who has been plugging the book regularly on his patriotic radio show. And this week we heard that the Archbishop was so impressed with Ttooulis’ short, economics masterpiece that he bought 10,000 copies and distributed them to churchgoers.
It is a pretty lousy book that reminds me of Dorothy Parker’s quote. “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
SAINTLY DISY MEP Dr Eleni Theocharous, would rather do the dance of Zalongo than join the harem of Ali Pasa, she told Phil in an interview last Sunday, in which she marketed her unrivalled courage, fearlessness, 24-carat patriotism, commitment to worthy causes, her compulsion for self-sacrifice and sense of humour.
Her metaphor needs a bit of an explanation and we thank Alecos Constantides for having provided it in Alithia. Zalongo is a mountain in Epirus from which Greek women jumped off, into the abyss with their children to avoid capture by the Turks. This act of self-sacrifice took place in December 1803, and it involved a dance, in a circle, before the women jumped off a rock to their deaths – hence the ‘dance of Zalongo’. Everyone knows what a harem is.
Dr Theocharous said: “The dance of Zalongo was the alternative to someone becoming a yiousoufaki at the harem of Ali Pasa,” indicating that she had confused her historical and literary references.
‘Yiousoufaki’ – a disparaging term she repeatedly used in the interview to describe people lacking her profound patriotism – is inappropriate in this context. A ‘yiousoufaki’ is a character from a Kazantzakis novel and was a male youth who satisfied the sexual desires of an older man. What place he would have in a harem, only the good doctor could tell us.
But even ignoring the ‘yiousoufaki’ reference, does Dr Theocharous, sincerely believe that she would have been in danger of being put in a harem if she was captured by the Turks or was she just showing us that her sense of humour extends to self-mockery?
She is old enough to accept that she is not harem material and would not have got into a third-rate harem, even if the chief eunuch was her uncle.
If I were Dr Eleni I would not bother learning the moves of the Zalongo dance, and instead stick to what I know best, like saving the world’s oppressed.
THE HUMILIATION of having to do a belly dance in front of Ali Pasa was not the only reason that would have made Dr Theocharous choose death. She said: “I tell you that if the implementation of the Annan plan depended exclusively on my personal ‘yes’, I would rather commit suicide.” Presumably she would do a brief Zalongo dance first.
The Phil interview featured a vote, via the paper’s web-site, in which readers were asked to give a positive or negative vote to Dr Theocharous. But the question that the paper should have asked its readers should have been: “Would you put this woman in your harem?”
