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May 31, 2007
Looking Out For Number One
Headline in last week's Polityka: "How to demand a pay-rise that will give you a good living and not bankrupt your employer." In the olden days employers were expected to look out for their own interests. Now it seems this burden is also to fall on the employee.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2007
Clever Lawyers
In the case against Dr. G, the doctor falsely and publicly accused by Poland’s minister for justice of murder, the prosecution intends calling on expert witnesses, from abroad if necessary. Marek Celej has this to say about it in last week’s Polityka
Nie bardzo sobie wyobrażam, jak taki biegły miałby zeznawać w sądzie. Przecież język sformułowań medycznych jest hermetyczny i pełen niuansów. Dla tłumacza to szalenie trudne zadanie, boję się, że niemożliwe.Yes, we are stupid, we translators. How could we possibly hope to understand the nuanced language of doctors? Celej could, even though he is not, as you might think, a doctor. No, he is a judge - a lawyer. Of course lawyers are clever enough to understand expert testimony – as is the jury of twelve average people – but a mere translator would be all at sea.
I can’t really imagine how an expert would testify in court. The language of medical formulations is hermetic and full of nuances. For a translator it is a very difficult task, one, which, I fear, is impossible.
Posted by hgrodsk at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2007
Poles Keep Digging
With hindsight, I suppose it was inevitable that the ruling establishment in Poland turn its guns on the teletubbies. Inevitable, too, that I would at least mention it, even though Beatroot already has too.
The Spokesperson for Children's Rights, Ewa Sowińska, thinks one or all of them is propogating homosexuality. She thinks they should be investigated. The best comment must be that of Leszek Miller, former Prime Minister, who suggested Sowińska call in the psychologists to examine her rather than the tubbies.
Posted by hgrodsk at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2007
Utopia
As chancellor it was his [Thomas More's] duty to enforce the laws against heretics [...] As he himself wrote in his "Apologia" (cap. 49) it was the vices of heretics that he hated, not their persons; and he never proceeded to extremities until he had made every effort to get those brought before him to recant. How successful he was in this is clear from the fact that only four persons suffered the supreme penalty for heresy during his whole term of office.(From the Catholic Encyclopaedia)
Or in other words, he only killed four people for disagreeing with him.
Posted by hgrodsk at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2007
Sleaze
I don’t have the heart to explain all the “lustration” shenanigans in Poland so I will just throw out a few comments for those who have been following it, but perhaps not that closely, and perhaps relying on English language sources. Unsurprisingly, the lustration law was found to be largely unconstitutional on Friday by the Constitutional Tribunal. Before it deliberated, Lechosław Kaczyński claimed that its members should themselves undergo lustration because they might be biased. Its members have undergone lustration, as Kaczyński well knows. In a last minute attempt to pervert the course of justice a PiS deputy, Mularczyk, dug up two files from the IPN archives which purported to show that two of the Tribunal’s judges had worked with the secret services. One of the judges was in the secret police files precisely because he had flatly refused to co-operate. The other’s entry dated from shortly after Poland overthrew communism. Mularczyk (who was acting on the orders of Ludwik Dorn) may face criminal charges. This single action is possibly the strongest argument against the lustration law: it is wide open to political manipulation and abuse. The two judges had to be removed from the proceedings.
Unusually, this attack on the judiciary was described by both Gazeta Wyborcza and Dziennik as an attack – normally one paper can be relied on to say the opposite of the other. Luckily for the government, the tabloids were more obedient. Fakt asked rhetorically: How can we trust the judges? GW responded with a survey showing the vast majority of Poles trust the Tribunal. Flunky government intellectuals have taken the opportunity to ask the question: what do we need a Constitutional Tribunal for anyway? failing to follow it through to its logical extent with: “what do we need a constitution for?”
Worryingly, the judges in the tribunal urged that there be no delay in publishing their decision. (It only becomes law when published in the “Dziennik Ustaw” or daybook of law.) Surely they did not think that the government would be so underhand as to delay publication? But that would be openly flouting the principle of separation of powers: an attack not just on individual, named judges, but upon democracy itself. They did think so and they were right to be worried. The government is delaying publication. It’s all a question of timing.
Dziennik and TVN (a television station) are saying that by May 15th you must state whether you worked with the secret services or not. This is untrue. The law requires that you comply within 30 days of being informed by your employer of your duty to do so. For some this period has already elapsed. Others used delaying tactics: you have to be informed by registered post and if you refuse to accept any registered post from the postman (instead collecting it within two weeks from the local post office after receiving a second notice of delivery) this can buy you quite a lot of extra time. So a friend of mine, for instance, has until May 23rd to comply but there is a good chance that despite the government’s abuse of democratic procedures the law will be definitively struck down before then. To such pathetic levels of civil disobedience has Poland been reduced by the Kaczyńskis’ spiteful paranoia.
No winged missive has issued from the nine mighty citadels of the Three Monkeys Empire HQ in the hills around Bologna yet so my thirty day clock has not even started ticking yet. Perhaps my editor, like the IPN, is biding his time...
This just in:
In the end they did publish the court's decision on May 15th. They needed reminding that such decisions take precedence over any other legislation in the queue for official publication. But it is to be expected that the Kaczyńskis would be somewhat ignorant of the law. (That's supposed to be ironic: one or both of them has a PhD in the subject.)
Posted by hgrodsk at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)
May 07, 2007
Scare Story
The front page of today's Gazeta Wyborcza - apart from the strange claim that a 46.7% voter share for the left wing candidate in France's presidential elections is a "crushing" defeat - re-runs the pensions time bomb scare story. The story is expanded on in the economics section and commented on by Witold Gadomski on page two, so it's obviously Quite Serious. To recap: people aren't screwing each other enough and they're living too long so in a few years there will be no one left to support all the old folk. Poland's population is predicted to fall to 30 million by 2030.
Unusually, the newspaper does mention the small matter of economic growth (or "increasing wealth"). However, rapid economic growth will not last and anyway it means that in a few years time there will be a shortage of workers in certain sectors. Are you following this? I amn't. Something called the institute for Structural Research says that increasing the length of time people spend with their noses to the grindstone is essential: the alternative is to raise taxes to pay for pensions. Given the choice, I'd pay more tax myself, but what the article does not mention is that it takes ever fewer workers to generate the same amount of wealth.
A trade union you may have heard of (Solidarity) commissioned a report sometime back from a French company. The report was titled "Niskie płace barierą rozwoju Polski" (Low pay is a barrier to Poland's development). It is not referred to in GW. No trade union or anyone that might be reasonably said to represent working people is quoted in the article. The report found that from 1995 to 2000 "wydajność pracy" (literally, "work output") increased by 58.3%. From 2000 to 2005 it increased by 19.5% (Nie 17-18/2007). That's a lot of extra revenue to splash around on - oh, I don't know - say, pensions for people who live longer than economists would like them to.
Posted by hgrodsk at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2007
Paperwork
It’s the time of year when Polish schoolchildren don suits and take school leaving exams, wrestling with the incompetence of Poland’s Ministry for Education bureaucrats. The reason they dress up like Little Lord Fauntleroys is that until very recently their own teachers examined them and pronounced them fit or unfit for further education, imprisonment, poverty or what-have-you. The whole idea of meritocracy is new to the Poles and only recently did they hit on the revolutionary idea of making final school examinations anonymous. I managed to sneak a peak at the instructions for school leavers and while I will not attempt to describe the intricacies of the instructions on how correctly to fill in the inevitable attendant paperwork I will say that anyone who does it correctly deserves to pass. One example of inept bureaucracy springs out from the page: pupils are required to fill in their PESEL (social security) number. The PESEL starts off with your date of birth so anonymity is straight away under threat, especially since there are also codes to be filled in that identify the school. (Data protection is also something of a novelty here: within days of getting a mobile phone, for instance, you will start receiving junk text messages.) Way down at the bottom of the form there is another field for the pupil to fill in: date of birth…
Posted by hgrodsk at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2007
Cosmic Irony
May 3rd is the day on which Poles celebrate the anniversary of their 1791 constitution, which is considered by some (mostly Poles) the most progressive in Europe of its day. Only the American constitution beats it, the national mythology goes. It did not liberate the peasants but it did take on some of the worst abuses of serfdom. The anniversary is celebrated with pomp and splendour. There are parades and speeches, buildings are bedecked with proudly flapping red and white standards of the Polish Republic, sitting on park benches around the country are old boys in their uniforms with the square caps…
So what a pity it was that Strasbourg chose yesterday, May 3rd, 216th anniversary of Europe’s most progressive constitution, to state the bleeding obvious: Lech Kaczyński acted illegally when he banned the “Equality Parade” in Warsaw in 2005. Freedom of expression is particularly important to the functioning of democracy, those eurofascists in Strasbourg said. 216 years is a long time to spend learning this elementary lesson but Kaczyński is a trained lawyer so no doubt he will have grasped the essence of the matter by now.
Posted by hgrodsk at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)