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Gazeta Wyborcza continues its “Poland is no Country for Old People” series. The Onion was there first.

Back in September rumours spread in Ireland that one of the country’s biggest banks was close to going bust. Total nonsense, the experts said. Everything was A-OK. But the rumours persisted. On one radio talk show a caller pointed out that savings in the Post Office Bank were state-guaranteed in their entirety. Within hours millions of euros moved house from the banks to the post office. Next day the minister carpeted the (state) radio talk show for airing the ill-informed opinions of Joe Six-Pack without adding the sufficient balance of soothing expert voices telling us not to worry, to leave our money in the banks, which were totally safe. Three days or so later the government announced that all bank deposits were to be guaranteed by the ever-generous tax payer. It then became permissible to say that – yes, in fact – one of the big five or six banks was in serious trouble and action had to be taken to shore up the country’s financial system. Bank of Ireland shares are now trading at around one euro. In January 2008 they cost about ten. Anglo-Irish Bank shares are also at around a euro now, down from the region of 10 euros at the start of the year.

This, essentially, is why I am so worried by all the experts in Poland saying everything is fine and there is no cause for alarm. That’s what they said in Ireland, right up until the last lying minute. I suspect that Poland too will suddenly announce that although the banks are sound they are going to bail them all out – just in case. In fact, it might be happening already. Last Wednesday was set to be a disastrous day’s trading on the Warsaw stock exchange until at the very end of the day an international stock broking house suddenly started spending millions on Polish shares, driving the index up sharply in the last minutes of the day (an enquiry is supposedly underway). Perhaps someone got wind of a government plan to support financial institutions in Poland?

Dr. Grzegorz Makowski of the Institute for Public Affairs says that corruption is not the gigantic problem in Poland that everyone thinks it is. Among the reasons everyone thinks the problem is so bad is Transparency International. TI was a good idea but later “… TI began to sell it [its corruption index] as a universal measure of corruption. That’s not fair. TI consciously crossed a dangerous border between doing science and doing politics.” How true, how true. So why is it that the subhead of the interview with Makowski reads: “Corruption has been falling for twenty years in Poland. Because it has to – since the state is shrinking… says sociologist Grzegorz Makowski”? This in the same week that the EU fined a cartel of car glass manufacturers 1.38 billion euros for fixing prices, which they appear to have managed to do without state aid.

“Poland is no country for old people,” Gazeta Wyborcza announced on Friday, with much handwringing in a full page spread advertising an upcoming series of heartrending etc etc. The text continues:

“You humiliate us

You forbid us love and sex

Fast cars

You tell us to throw pots and make wall hangings

Look after your children

You disempower us

We are transparent to you

You treat us like a burden

You are waiting for us to die.”

Conspicuously absent from this list of indignities you (we?) visit upon the elderly is:

“You are shortening our retirement.”

This may be because the previous day in its positive assessment of the government’s social policies the same newspaper wrote: “Among the government’s successes are the draft plan to restrict entitlements to early retirement.” However, among the government’s failures is “There is no plan to raise the retirement age for all citizens.”

While still in school I and most of the other children realised that cog notes (okay, “crib” notes if you must) were not really much help even if it was common to brag about how much writing you could fit on the back of your tie. You can write “Famine: 1845-1849, million dead” on the ball of your thumb but that’s not going to be much use to you if the question is “To what extent can the famine of 1845 to 1849 and the ensuing deaths of a million Irish people be blamed on the laissez faire economic policy of the English?”

Yet in Poland we have a country that could not function without cogging (and its “legitimate” friend, rote-learning). I never could understand how such schoolboyish japes could last the course into the adulthood of modern Poles. Until I came across the official, state Polish as a foreign language exam, that is. Browsing through the grammar section of the most advanced level I came across the following pearls in a gap-filling exercise:

“Last weekend I and a few (friends) went to the (White Eagle). At one of the tables there sat a few (men), among which I recognised two (priest) (acquaintances) and one (judge)…”

I don’t hobnob much with Polish priests and judges (or dukes) and the reason is simple: they are highly irregular nouns. In fact, a brief perusal of the grammar paper shows that irregularities are virtually the only things examined. Elsewhere the correct conjugations of the following verbs are demanded: potłuc, podrzeć, zmiąć, pognieść and wedrzeć się. Every serious student will know and dread these words. The rather rare perfective form of the past participle (I think that’s what it’s called anyway: the –wszy form) is required and another section keeps asking about 15+ children, 9+ pupils and, strangely for Catholic Poland, 3+ parents. Again, all so difficult that real Poles usually avoid these forms, even going so far as to prefer the easily declined “osoby” (persons) to “ludzie” (people). Tell a Pole about the ways of the –oro number forms and watch the eyes glaze over… Another section examines how well you know the multifarious and various prefixes of the verb “paść” (fall – but knowing that is no help at all.)

In short, you could easily pass this part by rote learning or cheating but by merely knowing Polish? Much harder.

Witold Gadomski has a lengthy article on the crisis in Saturday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. It’s a tremendously boring article about the central bank, the bank oversight commission and some elected jerk who picks up a pay cheque for punching the clock at the ministry for finance every day. A big problem is that the important offices (the national bank and the oversight commission) are staffed by people who have not yet quite won the trust of the bankers. One of them (name forgotten) is a good solid worker but – again – he has not yet won the trust of the bankers. If he had won the trust of the bankers there would be no problem: banks would happily lend money to each other, just as they used to do when there was a man on the job who had won the trust of the bankers. It’s worse in the national bank. The man in charge there (Skrzypek) simply does not have the trust of the bankers. He is opposed to Poland changing its currency to the euro, or in other words, he does not have the trust of the bankers. He’s independent of the government but could he perhaps be just a little - a tiny bit - too independent – I mean after all, this is a man who doesn’t even have the trust of the bankers.

Yes, it is monotonous, isn’t it? Constantly being told in a not very well disguised way that the people who monitor and regulate the banking industry should be bankers. Because we all trust bankers, don’t we?

The papers the other day reported that the Baltic countries are in serious trouble. The crisis has hit them harder than it has Poland. Latvia’s economy contracted 4.2% in one quarter. I patiently await a rash of articles highly critical of the flat tax which the Baltic countries embraced in the 90s. Patiently waiting… Waiting patiently…

Their problems in the Baltic countries are not all that new. In 2007 they were worried about high inflation but there was little they could do because they had pegged their currencies to the euro and could not do anything about the interest rates in the eurozone, which are determined by Jean-Claude Trichet.

Before you get too cocky, Mr President Elect, you might want to sit yourself down and listen to words of wisdom from “free” market ideologue Witold Gadomski. The man is free with his advice and it would pay you to listen and listen good. The fact is, Mr. Obama, you have carefully avoided saying where the money will come from to fund your election promises. Sure, you spoke about raising taxes “but only” for the top 5% of American earners. You have avoided the question almost as carefully as Gadomski has: he provides no figures to show that taxing the top 5% would not cover the costs. In fact there is no analysis at all. There are figures, alright but no context. For instance, the budget deficit is 400 billion dollars. Is that a lot? What percentage of the budget is that? Obama’s plan to extend health care would cost 65 billion dollars a year. Well, it’s more than I earn, but is it a lot of money for the USA?

Taxes will have to be raised, Gadomski says, to pay for all this. And not just taxes for the rich, he adds without any attempt to justify his claim.

Mr. President Elect, should you not have warned Americans that they would have to tighten their belts? There’s a crisis going on, you know. You should tell people, Gadomski repeats later in the article (and in the sub-head), that they have to tighten their belts. Because they are stupid, you see. This is the first they’ve heard of a recession. Lehman Brothers? Nope, means nothing. Credit Crunch? Credit what? AIG? Still going strong, right? Americans are unaware that the deflation of a massive housing bubble is causing economic problems. They don’t know anything about it at all and have no idea why their mortgages cost so much more than their houses are worth. Tell them, Mr. Obama, tell them.

It’s not all bad news, though. The financial markets have reacted well to your election, “expecting [you] will quickly choose a responsible [code for right wing] team to take care of economic policy and formulate a realistic [code for right wing] programme.” How Gadomski knows that this is what the markets expect is left unexplained.

If that’s all too much to be reading in a doubtless busy week, Mr. President Elect, you could just pay heed to the headline: “Obama must forget about his election promises as quickly as possible.” And they wonder why so many voters are too cynical about politicians to vote.

On one of the few remaining broad footpaths that hasn’t been turned into a narrow carpark I have noticed a strange phenomenon more than a few times of late. A pedestrian approaches from behind (I of course am walking along minding my own business). The footsteps draw closer and closer until the walker overtakes me and then pulls in in front of me, sometimes slowing down after the exertion of accelerating to overtake so that I in turn have to overtake him. People definitely spend too much time in their cars.

Sitting on a bus one day I saw three different people reach for their pockets at the same time. This is usually a sign that inspectors have got on and I reached for my ticket. But there were no inspectors. The three people each took out a mobile phone. Mobile phone companies here constantly pester you with unbelievably bad special offers – I suspect that all three passengers were with the same network and received the same invitation to spend more money.

Maths has been made a compulsory subject in secondary school again. This is not the belated repair of some Communist era neglect. Maths was decompulsorised post 1989.

You should be very afraid. A poster campaign is currently advising us all to take AIDS tests. “Women cheat too,” the posters cheerfully remind us. Another set of posters urges us to take our flu vaccinations, helpfully pointing out that “the flu can kill too.”

And now for Saturday night at the movies. It’s well-known by now that non-Polish films are generally ruined by being accompanied by a voiceover (one voice does every character). But it’s worse than that. A quick survey of commercial TV channels last Saturday showed that Polsat devoted 22% of film time to ads and the lottery; TVN devoted 14% to ads; for TV4 the figure was 17% and on TVN7 it was 19%. This is why watching films on TV is such a marathon event. The most modest of films balloons to a two-hour plus epic. It’s especially tiring for the little kiddies: the 100 minute film “102 Dalmations” (Polsat) had 25 minutes of ads. On the other hand, if you’re watching late-night B-movie slashers things are a little better. TV4’s percentage of ads shown during films would be 21% if the horror film “Dorian” (2.10 am) were left out of the calculations. A cynic might even say that the presence of “Dorian” and its mere 6 minutes of ads makes the TV channel look good by bringing down that percentage. A cynic, that is. Just a cynic.