Those who raid other people’s pockets

Fulfilling your work orders in a well timed method is absolutely the minimal requirement if you wish to hold your job. Parliament, whose job description is the safety of the folks’s pursuits, has began this yr by – for the primary time in virtually perpetually – nominally satisfying one in every of its customary yearly obligations by voting on the funds earlier than the top of January. 

However this theoretically commendable success of parliamentary accountability signifies nothing about its actual job: legislating a funds that can maintain and enhance the livelihoods of the folks. This isn’t, as many vested specialists know and state loudly, what the 2024 funds is about: at finest, it’s weak non permanent repair and a dead-end answer. 

It’s no shock that the institution continues defending a system that has been serving them for many years. One which took a lot effort and corruption to excellent. To know the workings and delusions of the powers that actually are in cost amongst Lebanon’s political class, my thoughts leaps again to a movie that was made within the heyday of enterprise capitalism and hostile takeovers in regards to the thrills and the perverse “romanticism” of being a company raider. 

Different Individuals’s Cash with Danny DeVito, Penelope Ann Miller, and Gregory Peck was a 1991 flick whose slick and obnoxious winner was “Larry the liquidator”. He acquired each the corporate (with the declared aim of tearing it aside), and (within the film’s concluding scene) a touch at additional romance with the good girl that had opposed him and misplaced. Similar to on this film, to me evidently there these in our political class who consider they’ll steal the folks’s cash, liquidate our nationwide property with impunity, and nonetheless have girl Lebanon fall for his or her oily allure. 

Ought to the folks adore their elected representatives for approving the funds for as soon as throughout the authorized deadline? Applaud the federal government for presenting a funds and not using a technique describing how the nation’s assets might be managed and with out clear financial efficiency indicators to carry its managers accountable for? 

Regardless of the funds’s passing, it stinks once more and the odor is so foul this time as a result of there may be so little left to steal. Steady enchancment can solely be achieved when everyone seems to be empowered to attain its accountability to guard the folks in an inclusive, clear and accountable method. Our authorities and its budgetary perpetrators can’t be permitted to proceed raiding our remaining, minimal monetary security by dipping, with out creating any prospect for actual development and structural reform, into what are different folks’s pockets.