OUR ESTABLISHMENT was bitterly disappointed that our illustrious and enlightened comrade leader’s desperate calls for national unity fell on deaf ears.
Now, more than at any other time is unity a national imperative. The Cyprob is going through its most critical phase, since the last critical phase two months ago, our European partners are shafting us at every opportunity, public finances are heading for meltdown, Eroglu is set to win the pseudo-elections, the Archbishop is scheduled to meet Erdogan and tomatoes are selling for more than €3 per kilo.
If we cannot unite behind our comrade leader in these testing times and accept that his decisions are always correct (even when he is afraid to make a decision) and in our best interests, we might never be able to buy cheap tomatoes again. Is the DISY Fuhrer, who has launched some savage assaults on the comrade in the last week, willing to condemn us to a future of unaffordable tomatoes?
I would hope not, which is why we are praying that he will stop these silly, self-serving games and start to acknowledge the comrade’s infallibility. He does not have to publicly applaud him, but he must stop the constant doubting of his wisdom and good intentions, because he is doing a big disservice to the country. This is a democracy and in a democracy, the president is always right.
So let us all put our petty personal interests aside, unite behind our sainted comrade leader and follow him to wherever he decides to take us – tomatoes will cheaper there. The buses will be leaving from Eleftheria Square every half hour, from tomorrow.
THE BARBS about a Soviet mentality and arrogance, directed at the comrade by Nasty Nik were grossly unfair. You only have to look at how gentle he has been to the public parasites, ruling out the imposition of pay cuts and insisting that any measures to reduce the public payroll would be taken by consensus.
The consensus approach did not get off to a very good start. His idiotic idea to request that the highest earning state official voluntarily took a 10 per cent pay cut for two years has been a flop. Several ministry perm secs, who are on 100 grand a year, have declined to voluntarily sign the pay-cut form, sent to them by our good friend Charilaos, taking cover behind their union PASYDY.
You’d expect a perm sec in charge of an entire ministry to have the guts to decide what to do without passing the buck to his union, like some timid, lowly clerk. It was also very cowardly and cheap, considering that only last year the comrade gave them generous, tax-free pay rises by increasing their allowances.
But all is not lost. I hear the comrade now plans to send two of those steroid-enhanced MMAD muscle-men, with a pay-cut form, to every perm sec to help them sign voluntarily.
I AM SURPRISED that nobody has yet taken our state to the Supreme Court over the tax-free allowances that all the members of the cabinet, ministry perm secs, ambassadors and deputies are entitled to. Inland Revenue considers any expense allowance paid to employees of a private company as income and taxes it. It is blatant discrimination against people working in the private sector. But would the Supreme Court recognise this discrimination, considering our top judges are also entitled to a monthly, tax-free expense allowance from the state?
A SECRET meeting was held at the palazzo de popolo on Thursday between the comrade presidente and the hideous boss of public parasites union Glafcos Hadjipetrou. Very little was reported about the meeting, but no matter how many more meetings he has there is now way he would secure the desired consent of the parasites to suck less of our blood. Once deadlock is officially declared the hideous one will consent to all private sector workers giving 10 per cent of their monthly wage in aid of the reduction of the public deficit.
ARCHBISHOP Chrys will be meeting the Turkish PM in a few days. On Friday he met the comrade president who asked Chrys to take a message to Erdogan. After the meeting, the Archbishop made his intentions clear, regarding what he would tell the PM. “I do not know the language of diplomacy so I will speak the language of truth.” He certainly does not know the language of diplomacy, but he has never displayed a good command of the other language either. In fact, I have serious doubts he would convey the comrade’s message accurately to Erdogan. He may decide to modify it, as part of his ongoing effort for the re-positioning of the Cyprob,
EVERYONE loves to moan about profiteering shops, but when faced with an extortionate price for a product they want to buy, they just shut up and pay. Not so, in the case of an English woman who was shopping in one of the supermarkets that is constantly advertising its low prices.
She wanted to buy some frozen haddock and picked up an Iceland brand pack with a retail price of €14.50. After overcoming her shock, she peeled off the price sticker and below she saw the price for which the pack was being sold in UK, Iceland stores, which are well-known for their low prices. It was £4.50, which at the day’s exchange rate was equivalent to about €5.
She did not call up the Minister of Plafonds, who had urged consumers to report cases of profiteering to his office. Instead she demanded to see the manager whom she asked to explain the supermarket’s pricing policy. After giving him a good ear-bashing the manager agreed to sell the pack of frozen haddock at €8, which would still have given the company a healthy profit.
It was a small triumph of the consumer, showing that having the row is the only way to avoid being ripped off. I will not get too moralistic here, because eight days ago I bought a single, salted herring (renga, as we call it, to eat with my beans) from my grocer for €7.50, without protest.
I will confine myself to waxing lyrical about traditional, poor man’s food costing more than a sirloin steak or a cappuccino at Nicosia’s fashionable cafes, which specialise in ripping off customers.
SPEAKING about the capital’s trendy cafes, the big mystery is not so much the prices they charge but that they are always full. When you pass by at 11am on weekday they are packed, predominantly with 20-and 30-something men, in designer shades and preppy outfits and without a care in the world.
And you wonder: do all these guys not have a job to go to or are they all civil servants skiving off work? They couldn’t be unemployed (in the conventional sense) because they would not be able to afford the cafe prices, but they could be voluntarily unemployed, living off their parents or an inheritance.
The phenomenon justifies a sociological study. What is the social background of these males, do they work for a living, are they civil servants, how do they spend their time in the afternoons, how many pairs of sunglasses do they own etc.
REPORTS that it was now illegal to place your road-tax disc on your windscreen read like a belated April Fool’s story. But it was nothing of the sort as several people, in the last few days, reported being instructed by police to remove the tax disc from the windscreen.
After a brief grace period, drivers who do not comply with the new law would be fined. The rationale – if you could call it that – was that there should be nothing on the windscreen that could obscure the driver’s vision.
Yet even if you try your best to have your vision blocked by the tax disc, normally placed in the top or bottom left-hand corner of your windscreen, you will not succeed. The tax disc would not even obscure a blind driver’s optical field.
Had a woman driver ever claimed that she crashed because the tax disc prevented her seeing the car that stopped suddenly in front of her? No. The only plausible explanation is that some bright spark at the Road Transport Department, bored of doing Sudoku puzzles, decided it was time he did some work and came up with a new road safety measure that was guaranteed not to make the roads safer.
SEVERAL meetings, attended by officials from different government departments and police, discussed the tax disc threat to road safety and then the Legal Services were briefed so they could draft the unnecessary law, which was then discussed at a House committee, before going to the plenum for approval.
If all these officials normally did productive work, the preparation and drafting of the law would have been a monumental waste of resources. But under the circumstance it was useful as it allowed a few bureaucrats to engage in slightly meaningful mental activity for a few weeks.
Despite all the thought they put into the preparing the law there was a major omission. It did not ban worry beads, crucifixes, miniature icons, air freshener and other objects, dangling down from the interior mirrors of many cars. Such ornaments are right in front of the driver’s eyes but do not restrict his vision, like the tax disc.
THE TASS news agency’s Friday diary, noted that it would be covering a meeting between the EDEK leader Yiannakis Omirou and the pompously named Movement for the Salvation of Cyprus. The Movement comprises of old age pensioners who should be more concerned about the salvation of the soul than the salvation of Cyprus, but that is another matter. It was one of those meaningless meetings that would not have been reported by a normal news agency that evaluated the news, because there was nothing newsworthy to report. But Tass still managed to file a 1,300-word report about this colossal non-event, which is an even bigger waste of the taxpayer’s resources than drafting legislation about removing the tax disc from our windscreens.
HAS ANYONE noticed the pseudo-resemblance between the pseudo-favourite to win next Sunday’s pseudo elections for the pseudo-presidency of the pseudo-state, Dervis Eroglu and the great Harpo Marx? We have, which is why we have put their pictures next to each other. If the charmless Eroglu grew his hair, smiled a bit and wore an oversized coat he would be the spitting image of Harpo.
We would like to make it clear that this is not paid advertisement by the EU, the US or the UN, all of which have been doing their best to help the pseudo-election of Mehmet Ali Talat. Our establishment would like to see a fair pseudo-election in the north in which the pseudo-electorate freely exercises its democratic right to elect Harpoglu as its pseudo-president.
