Before you get too cocky, Mr President Elect, you might want to sit yourself down and listen to words of wisdom from “free” market ideologue Witold Gadomski. The man is free with his advice and it would pay you to listen and listen good. The fact is, Mr. Obama, you have carefully avoided saying where […]
On one of the few remaining broad footpaths that hasn’t been turned into a narrow carpark I have noticed a strange phenomenon more than a few times of late. A pedestrian approaches from behind (I of course am walking along minding my own business). The footsteps draw closer and closer until the walker overtakes me […]
How do you present arguments for and against something while making sure it’s plain the reader should be for? One way to do it is to present the arguments against as being, in fact, opinions held by, for example, politicians. This is a method that Dean Baker has drawn attention to on numerous occasions. For […]
There really is no such thing as a cloud without a silver lining. The crisis is now being used as a stick to beat Poles into accepting the euro as their national currency. “Look at Slovakia,” they say. They do not say: Slovakia’s central bank has surrendered its say in how to deal with the […]
Polish workers (among others) are required by law to play the stock market with at least part of their pension savings. I hardly need to go into what has happened to the stock markets of late. Gazeta Wyborcza had a cheerful lead story on Thursday: The Shares Slump is Devouring Pensioners (a very free translation […]
Here are translated (badly – the Polish language has changed and I don’t have a historical dictionary), edited snippets of a letter from Catherine II to her Polish – ahem – subjects in 1768 after the Bar Confederation. “…Our army in the Commonwealth of Poland, for the keeping of peace … Our friendly, allied nation […]
Witold Gadomski of Gazeta Wyborcza is beginning to sound desperate. Today’s front page story in his newspaper is that the crisis is at hand. Ukraine and Hungary are in serious trouble and for foreign investors there is really no difference between all those East – sorry – Central European statelets. They’ll pull their money out […]
Witold Gadomski is plainly relishing the opportunities the current financial troubles offer for a fight. Here he is in last weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza, telling us all to calm down, calm down. There is no cause for alarm. The system works. He quotes Stiglitz: “The fall of Wall Street has shown the world that a certain […]
Congratulations to Micahel Cronin and all at Routledge, who have put out Mr. Cronin’s book, Translation Goes to the Movies, bearing the date 2009. You can find it in bookshops already, three months before time. Then again, Cronin is so prolific it may have been a good idea to spread things out a little. Translation […]
Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the – so hard to avoid a cliche here – tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the […]
