Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

It’s not always politicians and economists that are the most convinced that privatization or at least commercialization are the answers to everything. Here’s an astounding piece of neo-liberal thinking from a Doctor Talarek that appeared in this week’s Polityka in an otherwise interesting article about the massive numbers of people who die – not just in Poland – of starvation after hospital visits (the sickness but also the treatment often depresses the appetite). Talarek works in a hospital that has not outsourced its catering and employs dieticians to oversee the food served up to patients but even still, every day about 20% of meals are sent back. “They eat what their families bring from home or they eat in the hospital cafeteria. Maybe if they had to pay for their meals they wouldn’t return so many of them?” Hmmm. Maybe. Or maybe if they closed their profitable little greasy spoon patients would eat what the dietician gave them. Or maybe if their patients weren’t sick they would have better appetites.

Could it not have occurred to Talarek that charging for meals for patients with appetites depressed as a result of treatment would result in more of the malnutrition problems the article describes?

The Eastern Europeans are at it again: getting all coy and mystical about The Meaning of Life and language’s inability to grasp it. Eastern European writers have the Big Questions tapped, you understand, but language can’t cut it. Yes, I’ve been reading Sandor Márai again, this time a collection of short stories called Magic, which does not seem to have been translated into English (what would be the point…?) or I would put this entry on the Book in this Blog page.

Here’s Marai up to his tricks in “The Mistake,” the story of a married couple who tire of their apartment, move into a more modern one, don’t like that either, and return to the original one, which still doesn’t satisfy them:

‘You know what kind of an apartment this is? It’s real.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said the woman.

‘But I understand,’ the man replied seriously. ‘I understand but I can’t say it any other way.’

How long can you continue stringing readers along with false promise of revelation only at the last moment to say that ‘you wouldn’t understand’? It’s like those dreams where you think you have discovered some important truth but can never recall it when you wake, even if every other detail is clear in your mind’s eye - you know, those really annoying dreams.

Another story is called “The Explanation.” As you should be able to guess by now, its title is wildly misleading. It’s about Danton, who realises What It’s All About on his way to the guillotine but, well:

He opened his swollen lips to cry out the explanation to the whole world. But then the drums rolled and the officer read out the list of the names of the condemned. So he fell silent, looked at the ground and smiled.

Even if he couldn’t find it in him to tell the world, he might at least have told the readers.

Out of the top corner of my eye, while sitting on a bar stool the other night, I saw the strapline on a Polish rolling news channel on the TV. It said “W Brukseli o kryzysie” or “In Brussels the crisis [is being discussed].” It got me wondering, and this is what I wondered: which crisis? The war on Gaza? The gas shortage in Europe? The general, world-wide depression? Interesting times.

Who’s to blame in each of the three crises? Israel or Hamas? Russia or Ukraine? The trade unions or the trade unions? Yes, you were mistaken if you thought the depression was caused by reckless lending, short term chasing of profit at all costs, poor financial regulation, ideologically blinded (but independent!) central banks, poor planning, bad business practices, the abdication by politicians of their responsibility for providing for the overall good. It says so right here in Gazeta Wyborcza and the usually more measured Polityka. Here’s the latter on the demise of the US car industry: “It was not the financial crisis that brought the Big Three to the edge of the precipice but … the trade unions.” The unions won such good pay and conditions for their members that the manufacturers could not compete with other countries like Japan, sweatshop of the world. (And why shouldn’t the workers of the richest most powerful country in the world not enjoy the best pay and conditions - is that not what being rich and powerful is all about?)

I would have thought that the job of the trade union was to - to simplify greatly - gain as much pay for as little work as possible. Management wants the inverse and so a happy medium should be found. The US unions, then, succeeded (if Polityka is to be believed) but management, sadly, was not up to the job. So who gets the blame? Not the jet-setting management, for failing miserably, but the unions, for succeeding admirably.

Meanwhile Gazeta Wyborcza acknowledged the economic disaster with its Friday (16th) headline: “It has Begun.” It reports on negotiations between employers, unions and the government, quoting one of the most-quoted people in the country, Jeremi Mordasewicz of the employers’ organisation Lewiatan, that if the unions’ demands are met it will destroy the country. Among those demands are pay raises, a raise in the minimum pay (currently 38% of the national average) a cut in VAT, especially on food, and a raise in income tax on the richest. Raising pay for the poorest puts money into the economy as that money is immediately spent on real goods and services. Giving it to the rich (by means of regressive taxes, for instance) means just that: giving it to the rich, unless you still cling to the trickledown theory, in which case hang in there. It can’t be long now before a kindly plutocrat offers you a dime to shine his shoes. You can give him some stock tips in return.

Elsewhere on the business pages in Poland is the amazing discovery that banks - cover your ears and eyes if you are of a nervous disposition - earn money on international currency dealing by selling, e.g., Swiss francs for more than they buy them. Lots of Poles took out mortgages in foreign currencies and are now crying foul because not only are those foreign currencies more expensive these days but the banks are not using the central bank’s exchange rate. No one less than me wants to be seen to seem to be on the banks’ side but have Poles never heard of “let the buyer beware”? But of course the banks set their own, usurious exchange rates.

Among the other hilarious items from the business pages these days in Poland is the discovery of foreign exchange options. Again, people are running around crying foul because of a basic failure to understand (or even read) their contracts. To avoid unpleasant surprises some export businesses bought guarantees from the bank that a certain rate of exchange would be honoured regardless of the actual exchange rate obtaining on the date of the deal. Everything was tickety boo when the zloty was strong and getting stronger but - what’s this? It turns out the zloty can go down as well as up. And down it has gone, like a brick. Who could have expected this? Aren’t markets always supposed to go up? The lure of options was so strong that some businesses went beyond merely protecting their bottom lines from currency fluctuations to the kind of full-on barrow-boy, hopeless gambler-with-a-system-syndrome playing of the system that brought down America’s economy. They are now going bankrupt.

Presumably some way of pinning this on the trade unions will be found. After all, this is a country where people say “liberal” and mean Friedmanite fundamentalist.