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Dublin, Ireland

Former gardai staging a sit-in occupation at the force’s Fitzgibbon Street station may risk prison after deciding to defy a High Court order to vacate the building. Mr Justice Michael Peart heard the 45 former police officers had been told by their union that they needed to obey the court order to vacate the premises. However, they decided by a unanimous vote to continue their protest, which began last Friday.

The mainly female gardai are in dispute with the state over redundancy payments. The minister say that he is prepared to talk to the workers if they vacate the premises. The judge gave the gardai until 7pm to comply with the court order but he was told by counsel for their union, John Nolan, that they rejected the legal advice to end their occupation.

When they failed to comply, the judge issued an order for attachment and directed that members of the public arrest any gardai in the police station and bring them before him at 2pm tomorrow. Mr Justice Peart said “every reasonable opportunity” was given to the gardai to comply with the order.

Mr Justice Peart today made the interim order an interlocutory injunction, pending the outcome of the full hearing of the action. He said there was “no question” that the actions of the defendants were unlawful. He was satisfied that the individuals were aware of the terms of the order and the consequences of being in breach of it. Seeking the injunction, Mark Connaughton, SC for the minister, said the defendants had no right to be on the property, were trespassing, and were blatantly in breach of a court order. Counsel said that the state wanted “the matter to be brought to an end.”

The station in Fitzgibbon Street had been due to close at the end of this month but management decided on Friday to close it which led the gardai to stage a sit-in. Earlier today about 15 people staged a rally outside the Fitzgibbon Street station in support of the rozzers. At the protest, Lord Mayor Emer Costello, who knows some of the gardai, said she found the situation heartbreaking for police and their families.

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’.”

I’ve solved the economic crisis. After months of study and intensive thought I’ve finally cracked it. To be fair, I arrived at my earth-righting conclusion by standing on the shoulders of giants. I’ve been reading the newspapers, turning over in my mind the pronouncements of the experts, sifting through the policy initiatives of the finest political minds on the planet and tallying the melodious discourses of our leaders. The solution is this: we must all buy more cars. That will keep car manufacturers in business, which will keep people in jobs, which will mean they can afford to buy cars. Or wash each other’s linen – whatever.

You know… well, that crisis and all? It isn’t really all that bad. No. Not at all. It’s been hyped up out of all proportions. Yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza has the real deal. Page one’s main headline is about the cheerful sounds coming from the United States Federal Reserve (which GW clubbily refers to as “the Fed”) about how Mr. Bernanke thinks it will all be over by Christmas (2009). Bernanke knows what he’s on about, says GW’s man, and wouldn’t risk his good name without reason. (Sure he wouldn’t: he might lose his job if he got it wrong, just like all the other thousands of economists now seeking work after failing to spot this depression coming.) GW’s “My Business” supplement features a front page story about how a scooter manufacturer is doing fine despite this so-called, alleged “crisis.” Such supplements are usually dross even by the standards of the papers which they appear in so some may find it unfair that I even mention this story and the next, on page three of the same supplement: “You lost your job? Set up a Company.” I remember that fairy tale from the 80s in Ireland. We were told the failure of the economy was our fault because we weren’t entrepreneurial enough. Why weren’t we all selling each other stuff we had made? Back to the main paper, and page four’s headline: “Companies are Hiring Again,” accompanied by optimistic-looking graph and quotes from various companies about how they are hiring again. It’s just a thought, but if XYZ Bank claims it’s taking on 450 people this year, might that not be a marketing ploy? A way of persuading customers that XYZ Bank is a safe bet? Of putting the fear of God into competitors? It’s just a thought. Finally, for the day, there’s a story in the business pages headlined “Optimism returns to the Stock Market.”

This is part of a trend here recently. It’s to be seen on TV also, where guests are invited to demonstrate that there really is a crisis. “After all,” the thinking seems to be, “I haven’t lost my job yet. How serious can it be if highly paid TV presenters aren’t feeling the pinch?” It’s all so preposterous that even GW cannot avoid an obvious possibility: that this is all just “talking up the market”(or “lying”). They quote an economist called Petru on their front page about Bernanke’s happy meal prediction: Petru thinks Bernanke is just trying to spread optimism. “Like Gazeta Wyborcza,” no one adds. Messages are mixed, though. For all the patriotic duty of journalists to assure us that The System Works and There Is No Alternative, they cannot always resist the temptation to publish a scary sensationalist headline at least very now and again.

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.

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?