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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.

Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank - I’m familiar with them all but it turns out that if you want real red in tooth and claw writing you should turn to the French. I’ve been reading Alain Bihr’s frankly Marxist Neoliberal Newspeak and it’s strong stuff. Essentially, any kind of exchange between people is exploitation. It’s quite frustrating to find out that all your life you’ve been both a helpless, pathetic pawn and a bloodsucking plutocrat. Marxists have the answer to everything: whatever way you turn you run into Marxism. In fact, its one-size-fits-all model is nearly as annoying as neoliberalism’s “There is no alternative.”

Some of Bihr’s theses are frankly ludicrous. For example, he claims that pension funds are a gigantic scam. According to Bihr, this rational and reasonable response to the demographic timebomb that is ticking away ever louder leads to greater inequality in society.

By an enormous fluke, I happen to be reading this book as the first wave of post-pension reform Poles retire to enjoy the fruits of the money they wisely invested in the pension funds that have been performing so handsomely lately. Plastered over the newspapers has been the news that the first pension paid out in this way amounted to just over 20 zloties a month (a pizza and a coke but the state is making up the difference). This twilight-years bonanza is being enjoyed by a woman who over the ten years in which the pension funds have been in operation managed to pay nearly 6,000 zloties into her fund. Gazeta Wyborcza - the same paper that admitted the pension funds have lost half of their value in the last few months - informs us with a straight face that if she had paid in 60,000 she would be in receipt of just over 200 zloties (one fifteenth of the alleged national average pay). Or in other words: if she were richer she would be richer.

You really don’t want to know what Bihr has to say about public debt…

That’s the headline in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza. They led with the same story yesterday, the one about British workers demanding jobs for British people. Yesterday’s front page article was surprising in that I was able to read it through without flinging the paper on the floor – and it was written by Jacek Pawlicki. Sure, he didn’t get to the heart of the story: are these foreign workers really undercutting local workers? Are they being paid less than locals doing the same work? Is a collectively bargained pay scale agreement being broken? How much do the workers earn in pounds and pence? But journalists rarely ever have the wherewithal to find out how much people earn when it comes to covering such disputes. It’s much easier to call the working class racist than to do the maths. (Even the Guardian, somewhat closer to the source, seems to have little or nothing about the money.) Also, Pawlicki, despite nearly twenty years of Polish experience with parliamentary democracy, still finds it strange that British workers do not share the views of their rulers:

The protests are all the more curious given that Great Britain has always been a bastion in the EU of the free market and a liberal approach to economics – in 2004 as it was one of the first countries to open its labour market to citizens of the new EU member states.

Still, it could have been worse. Today’s coverage, though, is a little harder to stomach. It’s accompanied by some comment on page 2 from Konrad Niklewicz. He points out the gigantic economic benefits of cheap labour, apparently unaware of the unreasonable desire of Neanderthal trade union types that some of those benefits accrue to workers. Niklewicz, then, openly supports the paying of Polish workers in Britain less than British workers in Britain and yet somehow it is the trade unions that are (see headline) the bigots.

It’s all quite depressing. No doubt some violence will befall emigrant workers, drawing condemnation from absolutely everyone – even God will break His silence – and the employers will laugh all the way to the bank on the moral high ground, as the exploited are again divided against each other.

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 view from Gdańsk of the Lisbon aftermath is not too different from that in Bologna and, at a guess, everywhere else in Europe. My fellow monkey reports that the President of Italy said: “you can’t think that the decision of little more than half of the electorate of a country that represents less than 1% of the population of the Union can halt the indispensable and at this stage impossible to delay, process of reform.” The same contempt for democracy is in evidence in Poland, though it does not reach quite so far up the political food chain as the president. I’m afraid, however, that I don’t have my fellow monkey’s dogged determination to chase down the quotes and reference them all here. Well, okay, here’s one: Jacek Saryusz-Wolski (chairman of the European Parliament foreign affairs committee and a PO party politician) blandly said that Ireland would have to vote again. The journalist raised the objection that the taoiseach had ruled out a repeat of the referendum beforehand, to which JS-W replied with a devastating use of logic that that was then and this is now: “Now we have a new situation and new solutions are required” (“Teraz mamy nową sytuację i potrzebne są nowe rozwiązania”)

The press reports the views of what in Poland are called without any irony, shame or embarassment the “elites” so it is inevitable that there will be much Sarkozy and JS-W and little of the 53.4% Irish against. It hardly needs to be said that any and every EU country had the right to sink the Lisbon treaty by not ratifying it.

The reaction in the press has been one of dismay and concern at the “crisis,” the “paralysis” etc. etc. that now faces Europe. Notwithstanding the paralytic crisis, the trains are still running here and people are still turning up at work. I have seen no panic buying. In fact, outside the august corridors of power, the reaction in Poland has been muted. The main story on all the TV stations after the deed was done concerned - as in Italy - a dubious decision by a referee, this time in a Poland match. The following morning on the radio I heard a debate which was carried on in rational, non-panicky tones and in which I distinctly heard one person say that forcing Ireland to vote again would not exactly be the height of democracy. The main story gripping Poland now is - in a return to the good ol’ witch huntin’ days of the bizarre Kaczyński government - whether Lech Wałęsa was a communist spy codenamed “Bolek.” This story has come up before and been disproved to the satisfaction of the courts but two clever young historians claim that yes, Wałęsa was a spy, it’s just that the files which would prove their case were destroyed. If Wałęsa was a communist spy (and he wasn’t) he was (although he wasn’t) an incredibly, spectacularly, world-historically bad one.

As it became apparent today that Irish voters had rejected the Lisbon treaty, France mobilised its army preparatory to invading the recalcitrant island. The action follows the warning given by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner that Ireland would be “the first victim” if the Lisbon treaty were rejected.

As of going to press, counting has not finished and the French soldiers are as a result only on orange alert.

In a straight news article it can sometimes be difficult to figure out where the reporter’s sympathies lie but for the careful observer there are a few clues. Take the article in today’s Dziennik about the decision to fund private third level colleges from public funds. The headline reads “Government to finance private colleges” (“Rząd dofinansuje uczelnie prywatne”). How very kind of the government (Donald Tusk and Co.). You can bet if the paper disapproved of this handover of public monies to private business the headline would read “Taxpayer to finance private colleges.” There are clues as to the sympathies of the newspaper within the article too. For instance “…as a result they [private colleges] will be able to reduce their fees” (“Dzięki temu będą mogły obniżyć czesne”). They could use the taxpayers’ money to reduce fees for the students, sure, or they could use it to increase dividends, buy walnut dashboards for the boss’s company car or just about anything really.

Stanisław Mocek, of the private school Collegium Civitas, has a wonderful comment to make on the matter: “…it’s time to end the stereotype of the division into public and non-public colleges and start dividing them into good and bad” (“…czas zerwać ze stereotypem podziału na uczelnie publiczne i niepubliczne, a zacząć je dzielic na dobre i złe.”) A stereotype? There is a difference between public and non-public colleges: the former are public and the latter are not. It’s not a stereotype. It’s a fact, not a terribly complicated one, I would have thought – but I’m not the pro-dean for didactics in a private university.

“Poles can pay less” is the cheering headline in April 4th’s Gazeta Wyborcza. This storyette, tucked away in the boring old business section, is about how a Polish building company operating in Germany has won the right to pay its workers less than the existing, collectively bargained industry rate in Germany. The European Court decided that if collective agreements were actually binding this would conflict with the freedom to provide services in the EU. The company pays its workers 47% of the agreed rate. It would be difficult indeed to find a clearer argument against the Lisbon constitution than this; hard to find more powerful ammunition for those kill-joys who say the purpose of opening up the EU to much more poorly paid workers was to reverse the gains made by workers in the west — so naturally the story is on page 28, while all the front page attention in Poland has been on inter-party haggling, gay marriages, phantom German repatriation claims and so forth.

Bad and all as it is for unionized workers in Western Europe, things will be much worse for Polish academics – or will be if professor Żylicz, chairman of the Polish Science Foundation, gets his way. He is quoted in Polityka (April 5th), saying that in order to attract heavy weight grants to universities, academic jobs will have to be filled by competition. Fair enough so far but the jobs will have to be “contractual in nature, and limited in time.” So no more permanent jobs for lecturers. One objection seems obvious: what price academic freedom if in three years time your GlaxoSmithklineWelcomePriceWaterhouseCoopersMicroBasf grant runs out and you have to go begging for another “grant.” But what amazes is the casual consignment of a whole group of workers to permanent stress and insecurity. You can bet Żylicz would not so calmly, barefacedly suggest that miners or nurses have their careers destroyed and family lives ruined.

Quoted in the same article is professor Andrzej Jaszczyk of the Mining Academy, who repeats the very modish idea that academics should take part in exchanges with other universities. Again, fair enough but he also says academics should be forbidden from working in the same university they did their PhDs in: “Academics should be on the move.” Goodbye job security, goodbye sweet old hometown…

Jacek Żakowski is what passes for a left winger here in Poland. In fact he’s regarded as practically a Bolshevik, while the organ he writes for, Polityka, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, is considered almost socialist. Despite his undeniably communistic credentials the final few sentences of a recent article about the politics of doing nothing in the aforementioned pinko rag are worth quoting in full:

But somehow it has come about that in a country which – it is ever clearer – is involved in a civilisational leap, everything public has for years been consistently pushed into deeper chaos. The point of this is obvious. When TVP [public television] broadcasts only dancing on ice and the speeches of chairman Kaczyński, when the quality of public education has fallen well below private education, and when a visit to a specialist in a public health clinic means a three year wait everyone will finally agree with the ideological thesis that all public services should be privatized

The health service was in such a jock here that they decided to have a so-called “white summit” of various interest groups – doctors, economists and so on. I can’t recall off hand the name of my representative there but anyway, they’ve come up with a plan to get the health service out of the jock. The chairman of the steering committee, Professor Marek Safjan (he’s not a politician or a doctor or a patient but a judge), has some interesting comments on the nature of the consultative process: “our document must be accepted in full or rejected in full. There is no other way.” Perhaps he hasn’t got out of the habit yet of instructing juries. Among the proposals that I must accept or reject en masse is the introduction of a symbolic fee for visiting doctors. Perhaps I should rephrase that in case children or people for whom money is no object are reading: Among the proposals that I must accept or reject en masse is the introduction of a “symbolic” fee for visiting doctors. People regularly kill each other over symbols. Another proposal I must accept or reject is that of giving people the right to pay for operations in public hospitals if they don’t want to wait their turn (more commonly known as “bribery”). Naturally you would only be allowed to skip the queue on condition that this does not happen at the cost of patients waiting in the queue. (All in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza.)

So it would seem that the white summit mountaineers have come up with the wonderful idea of formalising and legalising the existing jock.