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Yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza had an article about the decline of the Irish economy. It’s headlined “Womens’ Spendthriftery Caused The Crisis” and consists of quotable quotes from people affected by the depression in Ireland. Among them is one Newton Emerson, Irish Times columnist, who is quoted as saying “In the majority of marriages it’s the woman who decides about spending. Unlike men, they cannot stand saving and go shopping much more often than men. Their oestrogen runs wild. Women were the driving force leading to Ireland to its downfall. In my opinion sacking women would blunt the effects of the recession. It will reduce their appetite for spending and men will find work which will enable them to maintain families. And they will finally regain their wallets.”

Awful stuff, isn’t it? Too bad GW didn’t do a little background reading. Emerson is a satirist. He published this article way back in February, exciting quite some controversy at the time.
(I used my own translation from the Polish because the words quoted by the GW do not correspond with what is on-line at the Irish Times.)

Underwear in Poland is knotted up to all hell in connection with the upcoming 20th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of communism. Prime minister Tusk invited some other East – sorry central – European leaders to a shindig in Gdańsk, where it all began but the trade union spoilsports decided to hold a protest there on the same day so Tusk did the statesmanlike thing and turned tail, bolting to Kraków for fear that other East – sorry central – European leaders might be exposed to the shocking sight of workers protesting, which was supposed to have ended – oh – twenty years ago, all of which is being exploited by the opposition (PiS, not KOR), with primesident Kaczyński promising a visit to Gdańsk and an awfully awfully important debate on the telly tonight between Tusk and somebody else what with European elections coming up and Palikot and Pitera and Ziobro and Róża Thun and it’s all very complicated so I’ll get straight to the point:

They’ve invited Kylie Minogue to celebrate the anniversary. Minogue has – like Madonna and Spinal Tap – reinvented herself so often that it might be worth reminding younger readers what she sounded like around the time the Polish working class was overthrowing communism:

She’s appearing with the Scorpions (“The Winner Change”). I hate to be a snob but the Polish for classical music is “muzyka poważna,” which means literally “serious music.” Could they not have got something a little more poważna?

It’s old news now but still worth quoting:

Greece passed in January 2005 a ‘media transparency law’ that would have prevented 1% owners of media companies from participating in public sector contracts. In April 2005, the European Commission told Greece that the law violated EU law and threatened to freeze funds for Greek public works projects, leading eventually to Greece’s withdrawal of the law. [...] The story dramatically illustrates sensible, democratically needed legal reforms aimed at both preventing corruption of government and preserving the integrity of the media being sacrificed to supposed free trade principles.

(footnote 92, page 212 of C. Edwin Baker’s Media Concentration and Democracy, 2007.)

Baker is an American. Note: he writes the European Commission, not the parliament, which, according to Michael D. Higgins has tried to limit concentration of ownership: not very successfully, evidently, and yet we’re supposed to be interested in who gets elected to it.

Pretending that the crisis is a good thing, that is. Last weekend’s “High Heels” (Gazeta Wyborcza’s ladies’ supplement) has a subhead on page 37 (above an interview with Karolina Korwin-Piotrowska, a teevee journo) that reads “This crisis has its good sides. Perhaps we will start eating bread again and I won’t have to constantly hear ‘hey, let’s go for some sushi’.”