Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

The front page of today’s Gazeta Wyborcza - apart from the strange claim that a 46.7% voter share for the left wing candidate in France’s presidential elections is a “crushing” defeat - re-runs the pensions time bomb scare story. The story is expanded on in the economics section and commented on by Witold Gadomski on page two, so it’s obviously Quite Serious. To recap: people aren’t screwing each other enough and they’re living too long so in a few years there will be no one left to support all the old folk. Poland’s population is predicted to fall to 30 million by 2030.

Unusually, the newspaper does mention the small matter of economic growth (or “increasing wealth”). However, rapid economic growth will not last and anyway it means that in a few years time there will be a shortage of workers in certain sectors. Are you following this? I amn’t. Something called the Institute for Structural Research says that increasing the length of time people spend with their noses to the grindstone is essential: the alternative is to raise taxes to pay for pensions. Given the choice, I’d pay more tax myself, but what the article does not mention is that it takes ever fewer workers to generate the same amount of wealth.

A trade union you may have heard of (Solidarity) commissioned a report sometime back from a French company. The report was titled “Niskie płace barierą rozwoju Polski” (Low pay is a barrier to Poland’s development). It is not referred to in GW. No trade union or anyone that might be reasonably said to represent working people is quoted in the article. The report found that from 1995 to 2000 “wydajność pracy” (literally, “work output”) increased by 58.3%. From 2000 to 2005 it increased by 19.5% (Nie 17-18/2007). That’s a lot of extra revenue to splash around on - oh, I don’t know - say, pensions for people who live longer than economists would like them to.

This week’s Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he’s no burden on society and he’s not in trouble with the law but you see the thing is he isn’t contributing enough to the Polish state. Sure he pays taxes and his employees’ social insurance and so on but it’s not enough. Again you can see the scorn Polish authorities have for the small deal.

Sometimes Poles grimly talk of the “American free for all” that it unfettered capitalism but I’m not sure the Americans would turn their noses up at someone who is making his own way — however unspectacularly. In this, as in many other cases, the Poles are far more cut throat (though counterproductively so) than their ideological masters and another phrase they use seems more appropriate: “the wild East.” Of course, libellous-minded people might be able to suggest another reason why the officials in question are making life so difficult for this Armenian business man.

Nie (”No”) is a weekly current affairs magazine. Its editor is Jerzy Urban, the mouthpiece of communist Poland in the 1980s. The editorial line is firmly anti-Catholic church and the present, right wing government is not in favour either. Its journalists try sometimes a little too hard to defend the legacy of the People’s Republic of Poland.

The magazine is known for its unparliamentary language and its attacks on “good taste”: they insist on carrying ads for sex toys and the like. The language is one of its strongest points, though. Reading the main daily newspapers here can be a real struggle. The younger journalists are palatable enough but have nothing to say. Legible but unreadable, you might say. In Nie there is life in the lines. Here is Nie on the subject of PiS (Law and “Justice”)’s TV ad campaign, which resembles Ronald Reagan’s from many years ago:

Smiech tez wywoluje emitowana w telewizjach reklamowka PiSuaru. Zerznieta z zamierzhlej reklamy Reagana….
Pisuar’s ad on the TVs is also getting a few laughs. Ripped off from ancient Reagan ads….

That doesn’t do justice to the original. “W telewizjach” (on telly) is difficult to translate: it is a little like the way some write “the internets” when they want to satirise a politican’s limited knowledge of the technology. (”Telewizja” means “television” and is not supposed to be used in the plural as it is in this case.)
Now here is the more “serious” Gazeta Wyborcza on the same subject:

Oba materialy maja niemal identyczna konstrukcje. Odwoluja sie do pracy, rodziny, milosci. W obu mozna obejrzec zadowolone rodziny wracajace z zakupow, szczesliwe mlode malzenstwa, rolnika pracujacego na traktorze, a nawet ludzi niosacych dywan….
The material in both cases has an almost identical construction. They refer to work, the family and love. In both one can see happy families returning with the shopping, happy young couples, a farmer working in his tractor and even people carrying a carpet….

It’s worth noting that the high brow, serious, weighty etc. GW gives this trivial item far more space (including six photos) than the scurrilous, low brow, commie etc. Nie.

The irony of all this is that Jerzy Urban was spokesman for a communist regime which was famous for “dretwa mowa” (”numb talk”) or, in other words, newspeak.

My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, is exercised by Irish politician Mary O’Rourke’s “working like blacks” comment.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: Come to Poland! Listen to these pearls of wisdom from Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samoobrona party, and a man not long ago considered a political pariah but now moving closer and closer to the centre of power:

“The most dangerous nation for the Poles is the Jewish nation. They are everywhere. They are plotting intrigues everywhere.” (Nowiny, 18th Dec. 1995)

“Samoobrona is the hammer of God for what is happening in Poland. It’s not enough that Balcerowicz must go; he must spend the rest of his days in a work camp.” (Samoobrona Congress, 7th April 2002)

Balcerowicz is a neoliberal technocrat like - as Beatroot points out - everyone in Europe’s central banks. And, to show that the markets even have the power to reign in a raging anti-semite, here’s a more recent quote from Lepper:

“He [Balcerowicz] doesn’t have to go at all. He does what the law says, and he does it well. Any economist would do the same in his place.” (Puls Biznesu, 18th Nov. 2005)

The above Lepper quotes were gathered together in Nie magazine, Jan 12th 2006.

Here’s a lazy one, lifted from Nie (”No”) magazine. In Warsaw central railway station they have opened a special “Service Point” for intercity train travellers (or “the rich”) where you can, as Nie says, have a coffee and send flowers to your wife or fancy woman but not buy an intercity train ticket - for that you have to queue with the other schmucks.

Actually, this is not such a lazy entry, as I can dilate on the trains in Poland, although since I know that as a subject it is nearly as boring as car-commuting I’ll keep it short and put something new up tomorrow. They’re going backwards. Total regress. You buy a ticket now and it might be valid but then again it might not. Depends on which company is running the train at the time you board. Following in the glorious footsteps of the English, Poland has split up and part-privatised its railways. The timetables in Warsaw central have biro-ed in corrections on them - if you’re lucky, that is. If you’re less lucky a thug in a shiny-elbowed suit will tell you your ticket’s no good and you�ll have to buy a new one from the conductor

It didn’t used to be like this.