NationStates Jolt Archive

Bulgia Republic, advertising itself as the young republic's top indepentent media organisation (though it has never directly criticised President Grigore Istok, nor spoken ill of Prime Minister Costel Nechita's ruling Bulgian Socialist Worker's Party), breaks news this week of environmental legislation that is aimed at saving water for the nation's hard-working farmers and conserving energy reserves -such as the nation's significant tar-sands- for the long-term pursuit of Istok's much-vaunted Bulgian Advance, set to drag the nation from the dark ages.

But Bulgia Republic devotes precious few column inches and almost no air-time to domestic protests and major foreign protest.

Nechita, dashing leader of the BSWP, first elected government in Bulgian history, outlined a long list of legislative points in a laborious four-hour address to the Parliament.

One point making headlines abroad is the toilet-clause. Under the legislation, new homes must be fitted with dual-flush toilets and citizens encouraged to use the half-flush whenever possible.

This may seem a petty issue, espeically in a rain-soaked Eastern European nation, but Bulgia is a nation out of time, now on a massive development drive. Millions of homes are planned, and existing lodgings tend to rely on out-door facilities that are in need of replacement. Plumbing will be big business in modernising Bulgia!

Also indicated were waterless public urinals, sustainable/safe housing insulation, water-saving shower-heads, solar-tiles and mini-windturbines, double-glazing, new irrigation plans, new powerplants, and so forth.

So, why the complaints?

In recent months, firms in which the state has controlling stakes have taken-out a series of national patents. These have been regarding a strange range of technologies of relatively little concern to most investors. Many have been granted on technologies that were totally impractical in Bulgia due to restrictive legislation... now suddenly reversed by the new laws.

State-controlled firms own patents on dual-flush toilets, water-saving shower-heads, many types of housing insulation, solar-tile, wind-turbine, and irrigation lining and pumping technologies, which, thanks to the new legislation, are all suddenly the only option for state and privately-managed development projects alike.

Many claim that Istok is planning a return to state-control, and attempting a major power-grab at the expense of domestic and foreign business concerns alike. Nechita, on the other hand, is vaunted in western circles as a reformer, and widely credited with bringing capitalism to the former Soviet-aligned People's Republic.

How will the world react to the Bulgian Advance?

Istok and Nechita show no sign of letting-up, despite the protests.

Eprom, a major power company in which the government holds a controlling stake, today increased its share in the only factory in Bulgia producing the major components of energy-saving lightbulbs, and, as the full text of Nechita's new green legislation is released, it is no surprise to many to see that the sale of conventional bulbs will soon be outlawed.

A whole section of the new legal document, which anylists have not yet had time to read and assess in full, deals with vehicles, from family cars -a relatively new luxury to the general population- to ships and aircraft. One major point seems to be the increasing use of riverine, canal, and coastal transportation outlined in the laws, well explaining government interest in barges where there is little Bulgian history and there had been no telltale development of waterways and ports, until now.

Demonstrations in some towns, meanwhile, have resulted in several arrests, and, in two cases, the use of teargas and baton-rounds. Istok condemned demonstrators as un-Bulgian and of thinking of foreign businessmen before Bulgian workers.

What's a power-grab without the odd bump?

Foreign-owned powerstation receives order to halt operations as state hydro-plant comes on-line

The Shapka Valley coal-fired powerstation in western Bulgia, providing 20% of the region's power and operational since the late 1960s, has this week received notice of the state's intention to enforce its closure before the end of next month. PM Costel Nechita insists that the new dam project twelve kilometres from the plant is nearing completion, and will be operational within weeks, rendering the dirty, aged powerstation obsolete.

On the issue of compensation, President Istok spoke to the media, saying, "I do not understand this requirement for payment for a job badly done. The company [running the Shapka Valley plant] has allowed thirty year old technology to remain in place and continued to provide a dirty and out of date service. They should have upgraded the plant years ago if they wanted to continue taking money from the Bulgian people."

Suggestions that state-held patents and other controls made the implementation of such upgrades at best challenging have received little attention from the government, which only insists that the Shapka plant will be taken-over and demolished in coming weeks.

Nechita's reformist supporters claim that the Prime Minister's reforms are intended to be purely environmental and suggest that the President is abusing his government's progressive intentions.

OOC: Think of us as the COMECON or another political-economic organization. We offer money and development, but at a strategic cost. Vetalia wants to build its own strategic Bloc for international influence purposes.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a335/shaddamIV/VetalianBanner.jpg
Vetalian Ministry for Economic Development

To the nation of Bulgia:

We have heard via your national news services of your nation's economic development plans and we would be interested in coming to the aid of your government in its quest to become a modern nation. Although we are a more capitalist nation, we espouse a strong degree of public-private cooperation that enables us to aid our friends espouse more state-controlled as well as free-market economic systems. We offer the following, purchased from our companies and sold to you by our government through the Ministry for Economic Development over the next five to ten years:

$300 billion in equipment, construction machinery, infrastructure telecommunications and electronic supplies as well as engineers and contractors to aid your national development drive.

$700 billion in low-interest loans with a 2% per year interest rate.
$1 trillion in additional funds that can be borrowed at the Vetalian discount rate of 6.25%.

In addition, we can supply your nation with other supplies such as spare parts and fuel, with repayment negotiated for a time when you are economically ready to do so. We hope this offer is adequate and we hope that you join us in our continued drive for economic development and strategic cooperation.

Regards,
Proconsul Aleksander Tikhonov, Vetalian Ministry for Economic Development

In the Allanean White House

"So, what's your explanation of a random statist power grab in Bulgia? Symptoms: increasing regulations to ensure government monopolies on various production, bans on competing companies, general increasing government controls. Differential diagnosis, people."

"Errr, environmentalism?"

"What is it with you and environmentalists?"

"We've already covered environmentalism as a cause when we were discussing this yesterday."

"But what if environmentalism is not a cause? What if environmentalism is a symptom?"

"Of what?"

"Maybe it's just an excuse for a power-hungry government to grab money and authority? Maybe it's fascist power-hungry politicians that are the cause?"

At the tatty presidential palace, former meeting place of the Bulgian Supreme Soviet, Grigore Istok paces a worn-out rug imported decades ago from the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, and stops wringing his hands only to waggle a worried finger in the air as he talks at rather than two his friend and aide.

"Two trillion? Two trillion! I don't know, Marek, what will be the cost? Once we are in their debt and the world happens to run through a slow-down or a recession, will we find debt-relief conditional on reforms that undo our recent works? That's how they got Yugoslavia, Marek!"

Marek, still wearing his communist-era suit and the Poljot watch he'd received for a decade's loyal service to the Party he would shortly abandon, took Grigore's agitation as sign enough that it was time to prepare drinks, and headed to a small bureau on his right. The President's brief silence faltered.

"I am not sure that we want the foreign scrutiny that will come with so much investment. First they're dropping off cash, then they want to know how it's being spent, and, next, their people are asking questions about the political situation in their new allies' state."

Istok rolled his tongue around inside his mouth and gave a slight shake of his head, then accepted a glass of some unholy Bulgian spirit.

Meanwhile, not much more than twenty miles away, Prime Minister Costel Nechita was delivering a speech to Parliament in which he gave credit to the BSWP for securing a deal that would inject billions into the Republic's economy and set the advance in stone. Nechita was accepting three hundred billion dollars in equipment and skills, and seven hundred billion dollars in loans from Vetalia, and behaving almost as if his office held real power in Istok's Republic!

"Bulgia! Motherland! Socialism! Bulgia! Motherland! Socialism!"

Vapours rose in visual accompaniment of the passionate chant from a crowd that had marched through the frosty streets of the Bulgian capital to Republic Square, which they all called still The Square of the People.

Banners were jolting up and down. Red flags, images of Prime Minister Nechita crossed-out or defaced with dollar signs, angelic representations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, even Stalin, and the leaders andheroes of the defunct Bulgian People's Republic, and the hammer and sickle in black, red, and gold.

A woman was speaking, not just romantically of the past but critically of the present.

"Standards of living are now four times lower for ordinary Bulgians!" She said, firmly.

"Pyramid schemes and joint venture capital disasters have made a thousand oligarchs and half a billion paupers!" She went on a little more forcefully.

"More than forty percent of our children are born sick! Chomikal-Bluu charge eight months average salary for one year's supply of a drug proven to combat VOIDAS symptoms, a drug developed with public funds to fight the '61 flu!" She now added affirmative gestures with a closed left fist and jerks of her head.

"They say that the Communists needed walls to keep us in, and yet the new capitalist Republic bleeds twenty young people for every one exile who returns home or foreigner who comes to Bulgia! Ha! If the capitalists don't build a wall of their own, we Communists will soon be the only ones left!" Lubmila Kronyatensko, widow of Bulgia's last Communist Party Chairman before the nation's velvet revolution, finished her speech in a shrieking and indignat fury, half drowned for all its intensity by the rapture billowing forth from her supporters.

A Prime Ministerial election was coming, and Costel Nechita, incumbant at the head of the BSWP, '90s golden-boy who helped bring capitalism packaged as people-power, was staring down the wrong end of a 7% approval rating.

The Communists, it seemed, were coming back.

Bump as the election draws near.

Bulgia Republic reports on riots incited by the Communist Party, which, it says, is not even the official opposition (that honour falling on the almost completely supportless and apparently platformless National Union for Reform), as riot police enter the streets of the Republic's major cities and hundreds of arrests are made in a single week.

The vote may come within two months, and opinion polls conducted by independents continue to show incumbant BSWP leader Costel Nechita with a mountain to climb, and enough popular support behind assorted Communist candidates for Lubmila Kronyatensko to have the potential to form a government with an extremely strong mandate to roll-back market reforms and perhaps the parliamentary system itself.