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A few days after I got warned by the government that I had to choose a pension fund or let the randomised computer choose for me (see last post) I got a letter (no stamp, but my name was on it) inviting me to contact a financial adviser. I rang up this guy and demanded to know how he knew about my private affairs. Well the letter sent to me was marked “ZUS” (the national insurance crowd) so it was an easy guess. But who was he speaking to in the Post Office that told him I had received the letter? “No one,” he said. So how did he know I had got the letter? “I’m your postman,” he replied.

Well why not take advice from the postman? He can’t be much worse than the bankers.

This week I received a stern letter from the guvmint telling me I had not yet chosen which Pension Fund to “invest” my pension contributions in. If I had not made up my mind which horse to back within ten days, the missive said, one would be chosen for me. Naturally it was too much trouble for the pen-pushers to provide me with a list of the horses starting in this race, or a breakdown of the commissions and fees charged by their managers, or a history of their past performances, so I had to look out myself for information about their form and breeding.

Only a couple of days later the earth was shaken by the unthinkable: Bernard Madoff, the respected financier, had in fact been running a cheap (50 billion dollar) Ponzi scheme. One of the marks he suckered into his scam was “Pioneer Alternative Investments” – they coughed up 280 million dollars. The news in Gazeta Wyborcza was reassuring, though: the nice lady from the Polish fund TFI Pioneer Pekao said that “the infected Pioneer Alternative Investments has nothing to do with out Pioneer apart from having the same owner.” So next time somebody steals the wallet from your left pocket – don’t worry! You haven’t really lost anything. The loose change and bits of fluff you keep in your other pocket will easily keep you solvent.

There’s a list of Open Pension Funds here. Second on it is AIG. Could it be that AIG? Doesn’t matter. The money they lost in the US has nothing to do with Poland. Tenth on the list is Pioneer, or, since names are so important here, “Pekao OFE (Pekao Pioneer PTE S.A.).” So who should I give my money to? Or should I let a computer decide which patch of mud to throw it into?

Gazeta Wyborcza’s man on Greece is Jacek Pawlicki. He has recovered somewhat from the shock of his interview on Wednesday with a Polish shopkeeper in Greece. Asked whether she feared for the safety of her shop the redoubtable lady said no, the rioters were only targeting the likes of multinational chains and banks. And your little shop is safe, he asked again. Yes, she repeated. Did she understand the rioters? Yes, was the simple answer. Could something like this happen in Poland? No, she said: Poles were too busy getting rich. It was the best - and certainly the pithiest - piece of social and political analysis I’ve seen in that newspaper in a long, long time.

In another article there is the following: “everybody thinks the government has pumped 28 billion euros into the banks and financial institutions instead of helping people.” It’s not absolutely clear whether this is Pawlicki’s opinion or that of the person he is talking to, a journalist on a “liberal” newspaper. Either way, it makes for strange reading as Gazeta Wyborcza reports as a fact that the Greek government has indeed pumped (that word again – does it just mean “given”?) 28 billion to the banks, that is, not to the people who earned that 28 billion.

In Friday’s article on the situation a chastened Pawlicki steers clear of unpredictable shopkeepers and tells it straight in an article headlined “Students - the Greek Untouchables.” He reports that attempts to reform education in Greece were defeated in 1991, 1992, 1995 and 2002. My understanding of democracy may be a little off here but I would have thought that this comprehensive and repeated expression of public antipathy to a political measure carried some weight in a democracy.* Apparently not. The government tried and failed again last year and Pawlicki writes “reform is essential.” The subhead reads - an amazing stretch of logic here - “If prime minister Karamanlis had succeeded in reforming higher education students would be studying for their examinations instead of burning police stations.” So according to the newspaper if reform were somehow forced on an unwilling populace there would be no law and order problems: cops could shoot children and there would be no violent outburst of anger.

Whatever about GW’s notorious hatred for any expression of public will going beyond a tick on a ballot paper, Pawlicki’s arguments, even on his own terms, are a little less than watertight. He starts off by sneering at “eternal students” who stay on and on in college rather than graduate to unemployment or life on 600 euros a month. (He also takes a typically Wyborczite anti-intellectual swipe at their lecturers with their “cushy numbers” (he means their jobs).) But Pawlicki finishes by saying that if private businesses were allowed to provide university education it would be the end of the brain drain: currently lots of students go abroad for their education but don’t come back, you see. But isn’t the problem - according to Pawlicki - that there are no jobs for graduates and so students prefer to stay in college? What difference would it make if their diploma came from the state or from a factory?

Pawlicki lashes out at students, teachers and the education system in general but also expects that same system to solve Greece’s political, social and economic problems.

* Mind you, Friday’s front page headline is “Lisbon Rises From the Dead” - for the third time at that: better than Jesus.

Apropos of nothing really, except that there are dioxins in Irish pork, which Poles have been known to eat. On state newscaster’s website there is a FAQ list, from which I note that “sauces with pork/ham content” are not affected. What, no pork?

Part of the government’s master plan, enthusiastically supported by Gazeta Wyborcza (boring the country where the main serious media agrees with the government), is to put an end to early retirement in Poland. Keep cracking the whip over the backs of aging proles: that’s the ticket. Perhaps, to give the neo-liberals their due, the system has been overly generous: miners and policemen could retire early on the justification that their jobs are particularly dangerous, but so too could journalists.

But although the state is saving money on pensions, there’s a slight problem, which no one – not even Alan Greenspan - could possibly have foreseen: where are all these old folks going to find work in a country with 8.8% unemployment? I mean, a million or two have packed up and left but it’s still a tough market out there. Who are you going to hire? Some oldie who, due to destructive, deeply-engrained habits, may expect to be treated like a human being? Someone who has maybe got used to living on meals not concocted by adding boiling water, who has a proper flat with real bills to pay, perhaps a few children still left to feed, clothe and educate? Somebody who, in short, needs a decent wage? Or some easily exploited young buck who lives with his parents and can therefore can devote all of his weekly pittance to nice shiny things? Some poor idiot straight out of school who thinks any wage is better than pocket money and has never heard of workers’ rights? The choice is clear for any capitalist, which is why the taxpayer has had to step in with cash to make employing old people realistic.

Hence the signs that have been appearing around Poland advertising, as usual, education as the answer to economic problems. One billboard advertises the “50+ manager” scheme to turn your ma into a key account manager or whatever they’re called nowadays. But my favourite so far is the free training (245 hours!) being offered to people over the age of 50 that want to become security guards. At last, something Donald Tusk and I can agree on: when we get caught shoplifting or smoking hash behind the bike sheds, neither of us wants some itchy-fingered teenage punk reaching for his baton to deal out some law and order.

I don’t know if yesterday was particularly black but look at the dates in this chart of the worst days on the FTSE 100.

It’s like, how much more black could this be? The answer is none – none more black. And only a few years ago the Onion was looking into even more precious metals for credit card designations.

“black monday” stock market: 230,000 Google hits

“black tuesday” stock market 57,000

“black wednesday” stock market 15,900

“black thursday” stock market 27,300

“black friday” stock market 934,000

In a glowing portrait of Gordon Brown (who appears to be doing something about the crisis other than make soothing noises) in the latest Nie, there is the following quotable quote: “…unemployment in Great Britain is expected to reach a terrifying 6%, which is regarded here [UK] as a catastrophe. In Poland 11% of people are unemployed and the talk is of wealth and an economic boom.” It’s true too. The mass emigration that was regarded and publicly derided as a gigantic failure of the state when it took place in Ireland is here accepted as something normal and healthy - often by the same people whining that there soon will be no young people to pay social insurance to support the old.