The Neoliberal Neocon Lovechild

There I was on Sunday skimming the latest from the New York Times when my eyes alighted upon the headline Poland Steels for Battle, Seeing Echoes of Cold War in Ukraine Crisis accompanied by, what else, a picture of camouflaged women crawling on what appeared to be a soccer field. Curiosity about what my hitherto believed to be apathetic hosts were up to naturally drew me in. Now, living in Poland has accustomed me to western exaggeration about my adopted country along with the natives inability to think rationally any time the word Russia is mentioned. History has scarred the land and imagination every bit as badly as religion and in fact created what the Times once called the Smolensk Religion which propagates the belief that the Russians assassinated Polish President Kaczyński along with 96 others on their way to mark the anniversary of the Katyń massacre. Anyway, the article had me chortling at its transparent cheerleading for war, just another Times propaganda piece pushing for armed conflict a la Iraq 2003, when my snickering was stifled by the sobering reality of this passage:

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz changed the law on who can be called up for service in case of “military maneuvers.” Previously, the armed forces could summon only current and former reservists, those with actual military training. Now, if necessary, they can call on almost any man in the country.

Wait. What? We've got a female prime minister? Ok, I knew that, but I didn't know she could call me up tomorrow to go running around the forest with a bunch of wannabe Rambos. Clearly the Anne Applebaums, Tom Friedmans and whoever the Polish version of a pro-war journalist is have pushed us too far, frogmarching us into another conflict. I've been reticent to comment on the situation in Ukraine for many reasons. First and foremost is how difficult it seems to get any reliable information, regardless of where you are. While back in Canada last summer I was treated to a constant Ukrainian-voter friendly barrage of tough talking politicians pandering to the public's bloodlust and the resultant steady stream of questions from friends and relatives concerned about my safety. Strangely, proximity to the happenings doesn't seem to help and in fact may hinder the truth from surfacing. While there's not a Russian or 'western' source I trust, the situation here in Poland is even worse. Despite Poles geographical contiguity to the festivities, there's nary a soul I've spoken to over the past year here with any idea of what's going on beyond the knee-jerk Putin is bad reaction. That's not to say that I've got it all sussed out, but let's just say I've reserved judgement on putting the good guy/bad guy labels anywhere.

Wait, check that, I do have a clue where to start at least, and as is so often the case, the clue comes from a headline from last week that's just a little bit off:

Ukraine to receive $17.5bn from IMF to save economy

Um, yeah, right. Here, let me try:

Ukraine to receive $17.5bn from IMF to enslave economy

There, fixed it. Just three letters short of the truth, a lot better than normal at least. It's amazing that even complex stories can be simplified if you just follow the money. If the press just spent a fraction of the time focusing on who stands to gain and lose financially as they do speculating about just how demonic/autistic/autocratic/narcissistic Vladimir Putin is, they'd begin to fulfil their role as a check on power. Of course if they did that they might also have to remind their flock why things kicked off in Kiev almost 16 months ago which might lead to uncomfortable questions taking shape in people's minds, so best to nip that in the bud.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

November 21, 2013, then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's cabinet announced they wouldn't be signing an EU association agreement the following week in Lithuania. That's about the last fact that we know; pretty much everything else, from the reasons for the decision to the repercussions of it, are subject to debate. That being the case, wouldn't it seem natural to want to know something about the agreement? Yet, little was said beyond that not signing represented a move away from Europe towards Russia; true to a point, but misleading in more ways than one. Most obviously, the agreement didn't mean EU ascension, but instead a vague future possibility and came with a number of strings attached ranging from the release of Julia Tymoshenko to a slew of austerity demands such as budget cuts and a 40% increase in natural gas bills. It also tied Ukraine to accepting, wait for it, an IMF loan worth $17 billion that didn't look quite as alluring to Yanukovych, probably both personally and for the nation, as a $15 billion gift from Russia that came with a 33% discount on natural gas. Yes, we in the west spend billions bailing out banks and then lending money to indebted countries to keep up their interest payments to those same banks, but can't lend a hand to start a real democracy. Just as debt peonage works to enslave students entering adulthood so it does for nations in that it manufactures consent by engendering conformity and enforcing compliance.

(Un)fortunately, one of the first moves of the newly installed government following the unconstitutional coup last February was the signing of the once rejected deal allowing us a closer look at what else was inside the loan agreement. Despite decades of debacles, and dozens of disasters, the IMF prescription for reform demanded in exchange for loans remains the dreaded structural adjustment program. A few highlights of the neoliberal nightmare visited upon Ukraine: raising excise and property taxes, reducing social income support expenditures for retirees and public employees, freezing minimum wage, and cutting public-sector wages; increasing natural gas and heating tariffs for consumers by 56 percent and 40 percent in 2014, respectively, and by 20 to 40 percent annually from 2015 to 2017 while cutting gas subsidies over two years. At the same time, as gas prices increase sharply, gas subsidies to end users will be completely ended over the next two year at a time when Russia was ceasing gas supplies as a result of a payment dispute; oh, and implementing a floating exchange rate for its national currency, the hryvnia, making it increasingly difficult to serve their dollar-denominated loans.

(Un)surprisingly, everything has gone according to script. A world of pain for the poor and elderly has paid for a bonanza for the oligarchs and western puppeteers. The currency has tanked (the hryvnia lost half its value in February alone), inflation has reached 272% while the economy has sharply contracted (down 15.2% year on year) at a time when war expenses are further draining the coffers. Less than a year on from the original loan, a new one was needed and approved last Wednesday but even IMF official admit it's not for Ukraine but the banks, as the bulk of the money is heading out the door to foreign lenders fast: $5 billion likely by the end of this week and another $5 billion in coming months. The Ukrainian oligarch-controlled banks will also syphon off about $4 billion so they can keep financing the war in the east. Even more contumelious, the IMF's own statutes prohibit lending to countries that don't have the ability to repay as that would be, you know, evil. One can only admire the audacity to pull of such a stunt, especially with Greece fresh in our minds, seems evil really is as evil does, again and again and again. Worse, they're also prohibited from giving money to nations at war. Makes sense, seems you wouldn't want to be remembered by history as having financed a government unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a European population, right? Nevertheless, once again the economic hitmen have done there job:

"The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age."
- Gustave Le Bon The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

While everyone was arguing about who was responsible for the sniper fire in Kiev that turned Maiden into a masacre, who shot down Flight MH17, whether or not Russia was justified in annexing Crimea and who killed Nemtsov, Ukraine gave up its sovereignty. We can debate how much of a role US Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria 'Fuck the EU' Nuland (neocon wife of neocon Robert Kagan) and her $5 billion played in fomenting the Maiden protests enabling her to put her man Yats (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) in the prime minister's office, or how much money George "give Ukraine $50 billion so I can have some" Soros and Pierre Omidyar pumped into USAID to help bring about regime change. Or, instead we could just notice how quickly the vice-president of the United States' son, Hunter Biden, was named to the board of Ukraine's largest private gas producer, Burisma Holdings, following the inauguration of the chocolate king, Petro Poroshenko, as Ukraine's president (weren't we supposed to disempower the oligarchs?). As long as there's shale gas to be fracked, you know the people's water table will be poisoned to profit American corporate interests.

We could spend our time arguing about how much of a role neo-nazis had in last year's coup, or better yet framing the openly white supremacist Ukrainian Azov battalion's use of the Wolfsangel symbol on their banner as "romantic" as the Washington Post does. That might explain away the Odessa massacre in which dozens of anti-Kiev protesters were burnt alive in a building set on fire by nationalists or clubbed to death when they jumped from windows. We could even wonder why former US presidential candidate and current senator John McCain met and stood alongside an openly pro-Nazi politician in December 2013. It's easier though to simply evaluate how well the new government has cleaned up the corruption that plagued the pro-Russian regime. President Poroshenko appointed former ING Bank Ukraine deputy head Valeriya Gontareva the National Bank (NBU) chief last June. As a respected member of the banking community, it was said she would inspire the confidence of the private sector and work closely with the IMF. Yet, according to charges brought against her in December, by August she was robbing the state by manipulating the currency. Ihor Bilous, another banker given the post of chief of the State Fiscal Service by the new government dove headlong into money laundering, bribery and corruption schemes from the get go. None if this makes for as good TV as corrupt presidential palaces though. Pity about all that Ukrainian gold.

Hypothesizing about why Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk would tell a German TV station that it was in fact the Soviet Union that invaded Germany in 1941 won't get us anywhere. Questioning Poland's deputy foreign minister, Grzegorz Schetyna's grasp on reality after crediting Ukrainians for liberating Auschwitz thus forgetting they only made up a part of the multinational Red Army history credits with the feat seems petty really. Poking the Russian bear is a spectator sport in these parts every bit as much as popular as ignoring the geopolitical reality that Frontline Ukraine author Richard Sakwa rightly calls a "fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence". Whether or not Bush the Elder promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand eastward following the dissolution of the USSR is irrelevant.

Actions speak louder than words and watching NATO swallow up 12 Eastern European countries in three rounds of enlargement would make any Russian leader nervous. Though portrayed as Putin's lapdog, Yanukovych extorted $45 billion from Russia to lease the Black Sea fleet bas in April 2010 causing Putin to exclaim "I would be willing to eat Yanukovych and his prime minister for that sort of money". Putin didn't even deign to meet him when he fled the Maiden protesters for Russia. It is in fact the Russian speaking public who voted for Yanukovych in 2010 in the contested east that Putin claims need protection, and many sources allege are the target of ethnic cleansing in order to guarantee a pro-western candidate wins the eventual next election in Ukraine. For those will to look beyond the tabloids and memes, much of the speculation surrounding Putin's 10-day public disappearing act concerned the powerful voices in the Kremlin who would like to see Russia take an active military role in Ukraine. Perhaps they're more sensitive to the sting of humiliation the west has heaped on the nation over the last 25 years, from the "shock therapy" pillaging of the economy to missile shields and NATO's promise of eventual membership to Ukraine in 2008. Yeah exactly what Russia fears about Ukraine's western pivot. Given the prospect of nuclear war, the old adage better the devil you know than the devil you don't seems more relevant than ever.

Stop me if you've heard this one, an American, a Lithuanian and a Georgian walk into a bar... No, it might sound like the set up for a joke, but it wouldn't be so funny if it were your country that had fast-tracked citizenship for the three in a bizarre ceremony making it legal to name them your Finance, Economy and Health ministers respectively just a few minutes later. The American, Natalie Jaresko, is a former US State Department official and investment banker with no experience with the convoluted Ukraine budget. Aivaras Abromavičius also unsurprisingly comes via the banking world with no previous experience while at least Aleksander Kvatashvili served in the same post in Tblisi, but unfortunately doesn't speak Ukrainian forcing meetings to be held in Russian, embarrassing given the first thing the new government did was to target the language by repealing the minority languages law. If this didn't give anyone pause, maybe when Abromavičius immediately named former Estonian Jaanika Merilo as his advisor on foreign investments did. No? Well, how about knowing the first thing she did in her new post was to tweet the pics you see above to the right?

At least Abromavičius was forthright about his country being bankrupt, declaring about the budget "[t]o expect that we are going to produce real as opposed to declarative incentive programs is unrealistic." Translation: the new Ukrainian budget is nothing but a piece of paper with the numbers wanted from the IMF in order to qualify for the loan. Again, Greece anyone? Seems to me that it's a bit counterproductive to incentivize corruption while claiming that the regime change was necessary to root it out. Oh, by law dual citizenship is not permitted for Ukrainian government officials, except when it is for, say the aforementioned trio or the oligarch governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who has three. Suppose that's what make him such a great banker, or more likely it's the fact that his bank, PrivatBank, that will be the biggest beneficiary of the IMF loan so he can continue to fund his private army fighting in eastern Ukraine. Throw in a few former warlords turned MPs such as Yuri Beryoza, Andrei Levus, assault rifle wielding Igor Mosiychuk (here he is shooting at Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's picture) and Dmytro Yarosh, who admitted to fondling a real hand grenade in his pocket while inside the Rada, and you might question if pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit has sure brought sunshine to the land.

Still no? Well, tell you what. We can ignore everything else except one word in one subsection of a single article in that EU agreement. Here's Article 404 (c);

promoting modern and sustainable agricultural production, respectful of the environment and of animal welfare, including extension of the use of organic production methods and the use of biotechnologies, inter alia through the implementation of best practices in those fields;

Yeah, I made it easy for you. Oh, c'mon, you can't think this whole mess was concocted just to plunder an economy that's soon to be half the size of the state of Indiana. Sure, a long term, low level war in eastern Ukraine is a bonanza for the military contractors' bottom lines on sales not just to the combatants but also the rest of the west who need to prepare for the sure to be coming Russian invasion, but it sure is hell isn't worth risking a nuclear confrontation. The wealth of Ukraine is in that rich black soil ideal for growing grains which has made it the world's third-largest exporter of cotton and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat, and according to a 2013 USDA forecast it is forecast to jump to the second biggest exporter in the world after the US having shipped over 30 million tonnes of grain out of the country last year.

Still, you might ask what's so nefarious about the word 'biotechnologies', after all, Ukraine, as the rest of the Europe, prohibits genetically modified crops. Selling the lie that GMO is the only answer to food security to a Rada full of parliamentarians inclined to listen to corporate interests shouldn't prove any more difficult than it was to convince them to open up selling land to foreign agribusinesses. Yes, that's right, as part of previous structural adjustment programs agreed to in exchange for debt, since 2002 over 1.6 million hectares of land have been snatched up by multinational companies since 2002. This includes over 405,000 hectares to a company listed in Luxembourg, 444,800 hectares to Cyprus-registered investors, 120,000 hectares to a French corporation, and 250,000 hectares to a Russian company. A now disputed deal brokered between China and Yanukovych prior to the political crisis granted Beijing control over some three million hectares of prime farmland in the east, an area about the size of Belgium or about five percent of Ukraine’s arable land. Something tells me something will overturn the deal and they'll be a willing American buyer waiting in the wings. I wonder who would be interested?

Though Monsanto's $140 million Ukrainian investment in 2013 was ostensibly for conventional seeds only, later that year six large Ukrainian agriculture associations happened to be pushing draft amendments for "creating, testing, transportation and use of GMOs" and the president of the Ukrainian Grain Association, Volodymyr Klymenko stated that "[w]e...have signed two letters to change the law on biosecurity, in which we proposed the legalization of the use of GM seeds". Strangely, both amendments mirrored the wording in the EU Association Agreement. Still not convinced a change is coming? Well, take a gander at this recent investor report regarding our old friend Monsanto which includes "The IMF and World Bank included a clause in their loan package to Ukraine to force the country to use GMOs as part of its loan package" as part of its recommendation to be long in Monsanto stocks. Oh, and I suppose that it was just a coincidence that Ukraine's US ambassador Olexander Motysk met with Brett D. Beggemann, Monsanto's President and COO on March 4th.

"There are only two peoples now. Russia is still barbarous, but it is great. The other young nation is America. The future is there between these two great worlds. Someday they will collide, and then we will see struggles of which the past can give no idea."
- Alexis de Tocqueville

While the neocons' rockets, missiles and bombs get all the headlines, it's the tender ministrations of the neoliberals that deserve the regime change accolades and therefore blame for the deformed offspring of the confluence of the two in Ukraine. Warmongers from Australia to Canada have taken the opportunity to portray themselves as tough guys, witness Prime Ministers Abbott and Harper's shirtfronting and confronting antics at last November's APEC meeting. In another reality they'd be called Abbott and Costello, playing both the court jesters and jousters to divert the public's attention from the goings on behind the curtain. The weapon of choice in this war is economic as round after round of sanctions against Russia prove. Yet, even here the true intent is murky as they serve the dual purpose of strangling both the Russian and European economies. For these latter 28 states, faced with the cost of breaking ties with an important trading partner, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) suddenly looks more appealing despite its decidedly anti-democratic nature. Meanwhile, the Russians have redoubled their push to implement and expand the Eurasian Economic Union in places like Egypt and even India.

So while the western and Russian propaganda machines have been working overtime to produce visceral fear to shut down our critical thinking, ironically usually involving casting the other as modern day Nazis. Putin's Crimea gambit to protect ethnic Russians is compared to that of Hitler's justification for annexing the Sudentland while the New York Times hides the fact that a few Ukrainian battalions, er, actually are on a crusade against what they see as the Semite-led Untermenschen. Yeah, that's right, I did it, I compared apples to oranges, but unless enough people wake up to the reality of what's happening 1,500 km to my east, the neoliberals could accidentally lead the neocons into a war that I'll have to take part in. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail to save my tail, either by imagining a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse or remembering how many times we've been hoodwinked into war, but what of the Ukrainians caught in a geoeconopolitical tug of war? Strangely, banging the war drum so fervently last week, this time for war on Iran, the neocons themselves may have offered a ray of hope for Ukraine as they reminded the world that no deal is ever etched in stone.

Thatcher's Poland

My mistake was not waiting to light my cigarette until after I'd passed the pawn shop. The lombard, as they call them here, opened only a few months ago but it's quickly become a favorite hangout for young and old alike. Bizarrely, you're just as likely to see a group of old fogies as a gang of kids ogling the phones in the window, dreaming of the day when they can afford to light up the screens with the slide of a fingertip to signal to the those around them they are worthy while sending and receiving signals from around the world.

As I hit the corner of the main drag, I suddenly remembered I needed cash. Lucky every other building is now a bank while the majority of those in between are oft-time ironically named cheque cashing joints like Happy Credit, mortgage brokers and aptly named kantors (foreign exchange) such as Joker Kantor, so cash was flowing free and easy. Well, apparently not for buddy who was on me like a fly on shit as I waited for the bank machine.

- "Daj mi papierosa" (Give me a cigarette) Came the predictable plea.
- "Jest moj ostatni" (It's my last) I tried to parry.
- "Give me cigarette"
Fuck. Something about my amazing (!?) accent had given me away making me both a prey and a mark.
- "Cigarette!" He barked.
My smoke was now the focus of both our attentions as I raised it to my lips and dropped it to my side. A couple of quick drags and I hand him the butt but he still doesn't budge.
- "One, two beer. How much?" Guess he's thirsty, too. After all it's almost noon.
- "I dunno, depends which" I answer, giving him a shoulder slap to his right shoulder while dodging to my right and slide into the bank machine as the previous customer walks out.

Cash in hand, smoke accoster nowhere in sight, I continued my walk towards first the train and then my work station beyond. As the flow of traffic peppered with the odd late model Porsche and communist era Polski Fiat 126p whizzed by I pass the Golden Arches just in time to see a herd of diabetic fat kids stream out the door, miraculously avoiding the two drunks splayed on the pavement leaning against each other for support as they dream of their next drink. Next up is the wheelchair beggar at his post just past the rail yard and in front of the trade center on the corner where I turn toward the university. Fortunately I'm shielded from his view as I pass by a gaggle of home decor/gardening/fashion enthusiasts clutching their conference bags filled with soon-to-be landfill waste and don't have to respond to his plea for the zloty (cash) he'd need to survive the next 24 hours.

Turning onto the bridge I walked past the newly completed portion of the train station, already covered in grime thanks to the pollution along with the road work and construction of the monstrous mall and even more ginormous parking garage that will be attached to the new Poznan train terminal. Wired gates control traffic at the end the bridge where the roadworks are most intense. Cars jockey for position from all sides as I emerged onto the zebra crossing with my usual contempt for motorized traffic. My second confrontation of the day comes when a car creeps up to my knee and we lock eyes, I point to the crossing and he starts yelling through his windscreen. Flipping him the bird I've already had two opportunities to fight and I haven't been out of the flat for 20 minutes.

That's when I found out Margaret Thatcher had died. I didn't have to wait to read about it in the obituaries or the newspaper, the words accompanied the beep that lit up my cellphone (fortunately I'm still holding onto my decade old Nokia brick and haven't yet needed to join the gawkers in front of the lombard).

"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

Having come from a British friend that's all that was needed to convey the news. The fraction of a second it took for the impulse to smile to travel from my brain was long enough to allow the guilt for having such a feeling to arrest the curl of my lips before they'd even crinkled. I had to stop and look around. Here I was in Poland about to walk into university to teach a group of students whose parents most likely believe the Iron Lady was at least in part to thank for causing Communist USSR to crumble. The knowledge was more likely than not passed to their offspring subconsciously, like the information transmission of DNA, the kids probably don't even know what they, well, know. The terms Thatcher's Britain and Thatcher's child took no time to enter the lexicon and then the OED, and now standing on the corner with a Beyonce for H&M billboard to my left commanding women to buy her swimsuit or suffer social ostracism, if one's different, one's bound to be lonely, and a Szybcy i Wsciekli 6 (Fast & the Furious 6) billboard to my right reminding me of Thatcher's possibly apocryphal quote "[a] man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure", I couldn't help wonder how much this was Thatcher's Poland.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
- Orwell, 1984

Upon noticing a book carried by one of my first Polish private students with Ronald Reagan on the cover, I was informed that Saint Ronnie along with John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were his heroes: the holy trinity of freedom, a triptych of Maggie, Ronnie and JP2 on the mantelpiece of every good home. It's one of those things everyone here just knows just as I knew at that moment that Thatcher's passing wasn't going to go quietly; an information war every bit as deadly as the shooting kind she loved so much was already under way to remake her legacy, reframe the perspective and retard the rest of us.

Had she been a man, Margaret Thatcher could easily have been called Iron Balls as she had conviction in her beliefs if she had anything. Instead, thanks to her power to make most shrink around her, she was ironically given the nickname she came to love by the system she loathed. Accusing her of trying to revive the cold war, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed the then leader of the opposition železnaja dama (the Iron Lady) in January of 1976.

Seems as with everything else about Lady Thatcher, measuring the impact of her role in the fall of the Soviet Union is too subjective to measure, a hagiographic effort at best. Sure, after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984 she declared "We can do business together" and shortly thereafter the official party policy of glasnost was adopted in the USSR. However a near identical phrase "I think they can do business together" had been uttered in February of the same year by the American Senate Majority Leader Howard H Baker Jr. in reference to Reagan's potential meeting with the then Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.

Her bold assertions that there was no alternative nor any such thing as society, delivered in a tone both boring and boring, made her seem so decisive and divisive but when examined in context become wishy-washy and banal. Should we celebrate the life or death of a lady who may have had a hand in bringing about a Brave New World order by bringing down the (iron) curtain on our 1984 future? How does one shed a tear for a woman who had no qualms about ordering the death of hundreds of 'Argies' sailing away from a fight, not only allowed the US to station nuclear tipped cruise missiles on British soil to up the Cold War ante but also to use British bases for bombing raids on Libya, and above all, taught us to be selfish and that the pain of others isn't our problem?

But did she help save the Poles and the rest from communism? Unanswerable and doubtful but Poland's neoliberal lackey foreign minister Radek Sikorski eulogized her as a "fearless champion of liberty". We can guess how the Argentinians feel about how she saved the Malvinas. Barack Obama trotted out the obligatory praise saying she was "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty". Why don't we ask a Chilean if she helped or hurt their struggle against her buddy Pinochet by thanking him for "bringing democracy to Chile" by murdering the people's elected representative. I'm sure the tens of thousands murdered, hundreds of thousands tortured and million plus forced to flee Chile under his dictatorship would disagree.

The Economist magazine, bringing the tru to Minitru and where 2+2=5, eulogized "[t]he essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom", thus doing their part to ensure her support of the South African apartheid regime is lost down the memory hole. Not only did she once refer to Nelson Mandela's ANC as a "typical terrorist organization" while her spokesman said it was "cloud-cuckoo land for anyone to believe" they could run the country, she somehow worked the doublethink trick of projecting opposition to the racist regime while befriending then Premier P.W. Botha. She celebrated her friendship with Indonesia's General Suharto calling hime "one of our very best and most valuable friends" for having killed 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia before moving on to invade East Timor in 1975 to massacre around 250,000 men, women and children on the island. Her government helped arm Saddam Hussein, lent a hand to Pol Pot and hailed General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq's work in Pakistan that laid the groundwork for the Islamic radicalization of a whole generation.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the woman was just that, she was a woman. In 1970, a week after becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science, she was asked if she would she like to become the first woman Prime Minister. "No," she answered emphatically, "there will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime—the male population is too prejudiced." Of the movement and activists which possibly did more to change the 20th century than any other and opened the door to 10 Downing to her, she reportedly told an adviser, "[t]he feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison." In 1982 she said "The battle for women's rights has largely been won" which explains why she never felt the need to speak out against domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse or harassment or how women earned about 60 cents to the dollar of men's wages. She gave the appearance of smashing the glass ceiling while in fact pulling up the ladder, famously promoting only a single woman to a cabinet position preferring instead to surround herself with vegetables. Is it sexist of me to wonder how a mother of two could also become Maggie Thatcher the milk-snatcher by taking away kids' milk? Despite her portrayal as a greengrocer's daughter who had to fight to the top, she seems to have been a daddy's girl who married well which allowed her the luxury to study and hire a nanny.

Apologists rose to Thatcher's defense to claim her actions were a product of the times, the ends justified the means and of course, war is peace. Her sales pitch to a roomful of Saudis, "I'll have one of those!" while stroking a gleaming missile, to seal the $80 billion Al Yamamah arms deal wasn't meant for public consumption as 'batting for Britain' really involved billions in black money to bribe Saudi princes and add to the bottom line of BAE. Poles have learned Thatcher's buddy system well, er, well, the politicians at least, lining up to sacrifice lives and zloty to the alter of American military hegemony. Polish may have recently become England's second language but Polish politicians speak Anglo-Saxon ass-kissing as good as any lapdog. Most Poles are oblivious to the fact they ranked number four on the 'coalition of the willing' casualty countdown and just last month saw their 39th soldier killed in Afghanistan, while four more stand trial for war crimes committed there. Meanwhile the billions to be spent on a useless missile shield that the majority of the people don't want will piss off the Russians and definitely won't end up in the pockets of the locals.

"Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature...are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Thanks to doublethink, the lady wasn't for turning and probably believed in what she was doing but the real trick was to convince not just the people but her own party of the myth that Thatcherism was good for 'ordinary' people and would emancipate the working classes. Attila the Hen found an ally in Rupert Murdoch; she helped him consolidate his media power while he helped her spread the gospel and get reelected twice. The two protestant 'outsiders' who attended Oxford railed against the establishment which they became a part of by helping each other; he by having his tabloid the Sun shift its traditional support for Labour to Thatcher's Tories with a front page editorial arguing Thatcher’s election would be better for the working classes, she by allowing his acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times to avoid scrutiny by the competition authorities thanks to a deal struck during lunch at Chequers. While Thatcherism was tearing the heart out of the industrial heartland and looting the commons to hand it over to a tiny elite of 'wealth creators' who would free up the market and rain wealth on the land, Murdoch helped make sure there would be astonishingly little protest or consciousness by blaming the poor, promoting war and of course giving the people want they really wanted, more football.

The strength of ignorance is both easily built and desperately needed here in Poland. Caught so often on the wrong side of history and geography, convincing the Poles that there is no alternative to the current course has been an easy sell. Football, vodka and the Catholic Church allow the people to imagine they'll get to a better place as long as they keep their head down and work hard. Sure, they have the right complain and the array of choices seems as diverse as anywhere but the media landscape ensures the discourse never strays far off course. German companies like Axel Springer AG spew IngSoc, er, tabloid trash and EU propaganda with their version of the Sun, Fakt, alongside Dziennik and Newsweek Polska, American movies continually revise the past while TV portrays seemingly  possible present from the west or a poor simulation thereof and Radio Maryja spews xenophobic hate cloaked in the hope of redemption. The closest Poland comes to Murdoch is Adam Michnik, editor of the ofttimes leading national daily Gazeta Wyborca who somehow managed the trick of undergoing a conversion from a fearless dissident into a hack propagandist heralding the evils of Islamofascism and convincing women to go shopping on cobblestone streets wearing high heels (er, a forced reference to his paper's women's magazine Wysokie Obcasy - High Heels)

Maggie may or may not have been instrumental in delivering Poland and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union but it was her amazing electoral success along with that of fellow cold war warrior Rotten Ronnie on the other side of the pond that sped the demise of democracy as we knew it. Yes, the unions they broke had too much influence on Labour and Democrat policy and no, it wasn't her or Raygun's fault those parties ran into the arms of Big Finance but there you are. Poland et al had the misfortune of gaining freedom just as the end of history arrived and democracy became nothing but a choice between  more or less measures of neocon and neoliberal, a lesser of two evil song and dance, a recipe repeated around the world from Ottawa to Warsaw. When asked about her greatest achievement, Thatcher simply replied, "New Labour" and Tony Blair. In Poland the answer would be the ruling Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) and the likes of Oxford educated, husband of Washington Post hack Anne Applebaum, current foreign minister Radek Sikorski (not only did he write this drivel after Thather's death he called for a statue to be erected here in her honour, maybe right next to Reagan's in Warsaw!). Politics have become subordinate to markets and labour to capital, society now serves the economy instead of the other way around.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

It's this last point which is probably the most important connection between Thatcher and life here in Poland, freedom is slavery. Sparked by the Powell Memo in 1971 and lent an aura of intellectual legitimacy by the Chicago Boys, a new economic ideology was propagated through institutional sponsorship: America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical think tanks with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Nigel Lawsen, Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer from '83 to '89 summarized their economic philosophy, "Economic planning was both impossible and unnecessary. . . . The price mechanism . . . was a much more efficient means of transmitting consumer wants and needs than the vast bureaucracies of Whitehall and the nationalized industries." Selfishness along with ostentation of power and status was in. Culture was ruled over by money, and the idea that those who win by making more of it do so because they are better was not just permitted but ordained.

Profit and capitalism were good while planning, government and taxes were bad. Conveniently this all worked together as in order to lower taxes, public spending had to be lowered which scaled back government by reducing public services, privatizing whatever was possible and deregulating the rest. Inconveniently most voters viewed the government as subsidizing essential public services, ensuring economic security and helping families in need. The trick therefore was to create a backlash against government waste, resentment against public subsidies to those who were less hard working than themselves and place the blame for inflation on greedy unions. Notice the success as the issue of benefit fraud, which costs the UK about £1.2 billion yearly is a far more emotive topic than tax avoidance, which costs about £70 billion a year. Voters also needed to be convinced that what was taken from the state was being given to them thus enhancing individual economic freedom and unshackling the wealth creators, allowing the wealth to trickle down on everyone. The only valid idealism was to destroy the state by, as Lawson continued, "elevating private actions above public direction and dismissing ‘social justice’ as both vague and arbitrary." Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Thatcher was swept into power on a perfect storm of global inflation emanating from the US pushing up world prices, IMF imposed austerity in exchange for loans to support the value of sterling after Britain's 1976 foreign exchange crisis which made it impossible to finance the modernization of public industries as it would increase the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement), and finally, well, strikes and weather, otherwise known as Britain's Winter of Discontent. Yes, a public sector strike during an unusually cold winter ground the country to a halt, literally, as roads went unsalted, hospital patients were denied treatment and garbage piled up in the streets. Labour, who had tied themselves to those striking unions, found themselves with their hands also tied behind their back. Thatcher picked and chose her battles with labour wisely and pursued a step-by-step program of trade union reform before ultimately crushing them in the '84-'85 coal miners' strike. There was indeed no alternative to the monetarist Thatcherism which created an employers' market by imposing chronic under-employment and shifting enterprise out of the unionized public sector to newly privatized, non-unionized enterprises; Marks and Spencer had triumphed over Marx and Engels.

Ironically, or perhaps just calculatingly mercenary, while destroying unions and solidarity at home she was lionized by Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland, actually being mobbed by dockworkers in Gdynia when she visited in 1988. If you've gotten this far in reading it hopefully means you realize I understand there was a difference between unions in the UK and Poland, after all, in Poland the military used to shoot striking miners dead. Given the trade unions' role in the democratization of Poland it is curious that Poland today has among the lowest unionization rates in Europe as from 1982 until 2005 membership fell from 80% to below 14% (only  2.4% for employees under the age of 25). There are myriad of factors at play here, from the many mistakes made by the unions themselves, a massive shift of the workforce from traditional industries and sectors such as mining and steel, and the privatization of many formerly public, union dominated industries, but it was the pernicious effects of Thatcherism on human psychology that seem the greatest factors. The transformation of the full-employment ideals of post-WWII society to an economic system based on chronic un- and underemployment has made many afraid of forming or joining a union along with the societal appeal to the narrowest self-interest of individuals having gained the upper hand over the feeling of brotherhood and the desire to work for the collective good.

Thatcherism also slowly shifted the balance of power from labour to capital through tax and monetary policy, privatization and deregulation. She managed to destroy more than 2 million jobs in two years, an astonishing figure considering unemployment only breached 1 million in 1978 before reaching 3.5 million by 1983. Her monetarism lowered everyone's taxes a bit and 'simplified' the fiscal system by regressively shifting taxes away from wealth onto consumers via sales taxes, excise taxes and the value-added tax. With public institutions being starved by austerity, privatization was the only way to modernize. "Popular capitalism", spreading ownership as widely as possible, would serve the double purpose of making it difficult to re-nationalize in the future plus giving the public skin in the game, giving workers a stake in preserving the value of the shares they held in these enterprises. The discipline of the market would make British industry more competitive but its effect along with deregulation of the financial industry, the 'Right to Buy' scheme of 1980 and the 'Big Bang' of 1986 simply handed over complete control of the British economy to the square mile in the heart of London, the City.

Privatization, which started tentatively in her first term with British Aerospace and Cable & Wireless, had reached fever pitch by her second reelection: Jaguar, British Telecom, Britoil, British Gas, British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways. Her fourth term (well, John Major's first) saw British Rail hit the auction block. By the time the Conservatives were voted out of office in 1997 by one of the largest margins in history it had become clear to the public that there were some side-effects to the medicine they were being forced to take. Prices hadn't declined along with productivity gains in some areas while they had jumped for essential services like water whose systems were breaking down or shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users in the case of electricity. Services had been cut back, privatized companies were engaging in monopoly practices and to add insult to injury economic inequality had widened with the shrinkage in the industrial labor force and stagnating real wages while profits soared for the privatized companies and the City fleeced the government for underwriting fees and began gambling in earnest thanks to the newfound market freedom. Thatchers reply? "Let us glory in our inequality."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Pity the Poles for having gained their freedom at the height of Thatcherism, imagine how different the future would look had it been in, say, 1968? As it was, having been tried and tested by Thatcher's buddy Pinochet in Chile, the Chicago Boys idea of "Shock Therapy" came to Poland in the person of Leszek Balcerowicz in 1989 under the guidance of Harvard's Jeffery Sachs backed by the muscle of the IMF. Doubtless, drastic measures were called for to make the huge transition that was complicated by the fact Poland was an economic basket case, with debt of $40 billion and inflation running at 600%. Also doubtless, the Balcerowicz plan was a success when compared to the results achieved in some other Eastern bloc nations. Forgotten though is the doublethink trick achieved of forcing a now 'free' democratic nation to trade off part of the debts incurred by a totalitarian regime it had never voted for in return for selling off state assets at discount prices for the benefit of foreigners and those highly place communists who were quick enough to convert to the new religion. Who cares if it was completely undemocratic, Balcerowicz termed it "extraordinary politics" while Michnik warned that the common people or "rank and file...irrational hotheads [were] incapable of recognizing the limits and realities of the real world". Those in position to do so stripped all the assets they could, a $1 billion stabilization loan (aren't numbers from the olden days quaint?) was arranged, large blocks of shares of privatized assets were placed in the hands of banks and Poland was absorbed into the global slavery debt trap.

The only goal of the IMF/Sachs/Balcerowicz policies was to ensure payments continued to flow west on the $40 billion in illegitimate foreign hard currency debt (what would be called odious debt today). Much of that debt had been incurred in 1979 when rates in London and New York increased 300% under the policies of, you guessed it, Margaret Thatcher and US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. By the end of '91, Polish unemployment had reached 2 million, industrial production was 66% of the '89 level at the end of '92 and as 1993 closed 2.8 million were unemployed and 50% of families with 3 or more children were living below the poverty line. Little wonder that elections held in September of 1993 saw the the pro-IMF government of Hanna Suchocka replaced by a raft of coalition parties with direct ties to the communist regime. Predictably, as inequality elsewhere surpasses levels unseen since the roaring '20s, the new grand bourgeoisie that has emerged here has combined old bureaucrats, new managers and a burgeoning entrepreneurial class; a situation reminiscent of Poland in the 1920s. Perhaps the best symbols of what Poland got in return for the misery, organized crime, and debt-based slavery brought by the 'reforms' are Galeria Mokotów (Mokotów Mall) in Warsaw and Stary Browar (Old Brewery). The former, a shopping center built in place of a demolished semiconductor factory, cuz, you know, who needs those in a modern economy when you can create another black hole to suck wealth out of the local economy, and the latter a mall built on bribery (Polish link) and murder involving the richest man in Poland.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lilly)

Ah yes, the riches and glory promised to Poland are coming but as in the rest of the world more and more disproportionately to those at the top of the income scale. It would take a figure  stronger than Thatcher to convince Poles they are on the wrong course though as they are pumped through the indoctrination centers that are the education system. They emerge believing they have free will and as unquestioning of the free-market god as their forefathers were in the Catholic one unaware that one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them; soma is simply Christianity without tears. The trains are slow, late and chaotic not because they're being sold off piecemeal on EU orders which is creating the disarray, but because it's not fully privatized like the UK's, who cares about their disastrous experience. The long waits at NFZ have nothing to do with it being underfunded, the public health care system isn't a blessing but a curse as promoting preventative medicine instead of the Americanized version of health for profit resulting in worse health outcomes and higher costs must be better as it's the path the Cameron government is choosing as they privatize the NHS by stealth. Oh, and don't worry Polish kids, it's only a matter of time until the course laid in leads to a completely privatized American-style college system of trillion dollar debt slavery before you've even entered the workforce. Just ask any 20-year-old Brit what it's like. 

Would the UK and Poland be much different if Thatcher had never been? Maybe not seeing as even the EU, the institution that most separates Maggie and Poland, has become nothing more than a glorified debt collector/pusher a fact not lost on most Poles as they become more disenchanted with the concept as their democracy ages just as Thatcher did. Even the Iron Lady, as she mentions in her autobiography, was caught off guard at how much she came to rely on the financial manipulators, how little she was able to control them and the scale of those bankers' greed; she convinced us to sell the family silver for the benefit of the rentiers who perceived the Thatchers and Friedmans as pawns, well-meaning promoters wrapping austerity economics in populist garb. Unfortunately, the deleterious social effects of the inequality caused by growing GDP through financialization of the economy, empowering those banks and other corporations to pursue profit without paying the price for wrongdoing and turning people into consumer zombies takes years to measure and decades to be felt. Trillions in wealth will continue to by siphoned out of the productive economy while we are forced to run faster and faster just to keep up and are convinced that our phone has somehow made us smarter. Yet while there is always time to get off the tracks before the train hits there's not much chance of heeding the warning the more we come to rely on those who profit from us being run over.

Polish Political Predictability

Here we go again. Poland goes to the poles October 9th to elect members of the lower (the Sejm) and upper (the Senate) houses of parliament. Owing much to the language barrier and the near-indecipherability of the alphabet soup that makes up the party system, I've learned more about politics in Afghanistan than in Poland over my five years of living here. But it's more than just words with five-letter consonant clusters ('Szczwana wieszczka wskrzesiła przechrztę' - More or less 'The crafty female prophet resurrected a convert') and letters decorated with diacritics (ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż) that makes it so hard to penetrate Polish politics, it's a society built on a long history of loss, upheaval, dashed hopes and survival that has created a poisonous political climate that turns many people off. With seven parties running candidates in every electoral district along with four others fielding a few, it would seem the voters are offered a wide spectrum of choice, true democracy, but scratch a little deeper and the particular dichotomies of Polish democracy are revealed.

I'd guesstimate that nearly the same percentage of Poles would profess their faith in democracy as to the Roman Catholic Church, around 95%. Coincidentally, somewhere about half of those eligible to vote will bother to cast a ballot come Sunday, about the same percentage who will join their flock for prayers in the pews during Sunday mass. Both numbers have fallen steadily since the fall of the wall, after all there's a plethora of new malls open on Sunday to which they prefer to make their pilgrimages to pray to the shinier gods of consumerism. Ballots and bibles pale in comparison to BMWs and iPhones making the outcome of Sunday's election a foregone conclusion, one determined by technocrats in Brussels and traders in London and New York instead of the people themselves. Donald Tusk will remain prime minister becoming the first since the fall of communism two decades ago to win two consecutive terms. (They did re-elect Aleksander Kwaśniewski as president, but in Poland the head of state holds little real power.)

Geology, geography and history haven't been overly kind to Poland. The curse of an abundant supply of carcinogenesis, climate change causing coal and neighbors on either side with occasional expansionist itchings have doomed the country to backwardness and suspicion. For every moment of historic glory like the Battle of Grunwald there's a Jedwabne, Katyń or Auschwitz to cast a shadow on Polish pride. It was partitioned three times in the 18th century, disappearing completely off the map for 123 years and the victim of both fascism and communism (well, Soviet totalitarianism) in the 20th century. Yet, since 1989, Poland has been held up as a model to the world of what democracy and capitalism can bring a nation. After all, Poland was the only OECD nation not to fall into recession following the 2008 financial crisis. It is these very rose-coloured glasses, however, that make it difficult for the average Pole to see the economic, political and environmental dangers that lurk around every corner.

It's easy to understand the average Poles basic economic math: Capitalism = Good; Socialism = Bad. After all, the nation's economy was left in ruins as a result of 45 years of Soviet domination. The Balcerowicz Plan, implemented in 1989, is held up as a success story of Shock Therapy, a neoliberal triumph, as market reforms have led to rising average incomes and inclusion in the European Union in 2004. Mix this myth making with that of the Catholic Church and it's little wonder that many Poles give thanks for their feeling of prosperity from car-filled streets and new technological gadgets to the holy trinity of Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. The reality though is 2004 simply formalized the need for market conformity created in 1989, the drive for eurozone membership institutionalized social cuts in the name of progress. Transition and ascension are part of the same pathology; the intensification of neoliberal restructuring of European social relations of production.

While the reforms of '89 tamed inflation and the budget deficit and made a market economy possible, Balcerowicz himself later admitted that he neglected to consider the element of human motivation in his calculations, while his adviser, Jeffrey Sachs, who also oversaw the transition to crony capitalism in Russia, has criticized his own advice as incorrect. Overnight, wealth was transferred from one elite to another as the people in nomenklatura positions in 1989 were able to convert their political capital into private economic wealth, while the prole Poles once again had to adjust to a new reality, trading one master for another. Ironically, the alteration of class forces saw those who had struggled the most to establish freedom and democracy come out as the biggest losers. Solidarity, a movement guided by the principles of worker self-government, self-management and the 'self-liberation' of civil society implemented the neoliberal economic shock therapy that has led to trade unions being virtually nonexistent in the private sector and on a clear path to complete extinction. It also created a political divide as those who were in the right place (and the right age) at the right time instantly became entrepreneurs and executives while those who were unconnected or too old fell by the wayside helping create today's populist political climate.

Both main parties in Poland today trace their roots to Solidarity, PiS (Law and Justice) may be the favoured among the more religious but it's the PO (Platform) that pushes the right buttons to appeal to today's god, finance. Instead of taking advantage of the growing class divide, PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczinski opts to play to the xenophobic fears of the semi-literate, while the prime minister gets a pass on policy problems, like pension reform, poverty and the ecoside of hydraulic fracturing. A perfect example took place this March when Kaczynski paid a PR visit to a local shop to spotlight the increasing burden of rising food prices and blurted "We didn’t go to Biedronka [a cheap supermarket chain] where the poorest people do their shopping but to a local shop". A perfect opportunity was wasted to point out that while there are more goods and services available today than ever, prices of those most basic, such as sugar and rice, have skyrocketed thanks to the pernicious influence of the financial markets which have also brought escalating job insecurity and decreases in real wages with particular sections of the population worst hit, for example the elderly and rural communities. Kaczynski, instead of the markets, was once again demonized in the press (Polish link). As the Washington Post put it, PO can count on the votes of many of the younger wine and cappuccino-drinking Poles in cities buoyed by the country’s growing wealth while PiS is popular among the less privileged, less educated and those outside the cities.

We may make fun of the American two-party system that cheers on the near-indistinguishable red and blue teams to determine who gets the chance to govern in the name of their corporate sponsors, but at least they represent American interests, albeit of the elite 1%. In Poland, what they say in the Vatican, Brussels and London determine the results and right now, the PO has the confidence of the latter two as they are more likely to follow the neoliberal policy handbook of privatization and deregulation. Meanwhile, the more reactionary PiS is portrayed as further to the right, which is true in terms of social policies but they are much to the left of PO in terms of economics. In this blackwhite world, stability is increasing economic dislocation, freeing the market is seen as the more stable course though it leads to perpetual upheaval, increasing political union with a failing EU is a victory while sacrifice in a perpetual war to aid an ally who has abandoned and humiliated you time and again is a moral duty.

As the Arab Spring turns to the American Autumn (or Fall as you prefer), most Poles are completely oblivious to the changes that are sweeping the globe. Willfully blindfolded, boxed in by their beliefs and their information sources, they believe things will continue to improve if they just toe the line and follow the Financial Times advice. The other ballot box choice may defend Polish economic sovereignty but also advocate an increased role for the church while persecuting anyone different and humiliate you in the eyes of that mythical west over and over again. A vote for PO is a vote for the least bad choice. The Polish political paradigm (hey what do you know, that's PPP, just like a right wingnut party) makes the conspiracy theorist the mainstream, in which Tusk collaborated with the Russians to bring down the presidential plane last year. This distraction gives a free pass to stealing pensions while hiding the fact that the retirement age will have to go up to align with EU standards, or using roadwork accounting tricks and selling state assets that can only be sold once in a vain attempt to fill budget gaps while advocating handing over economic decision making to Brussels and Berlin.

Russian conspiracies have always dominated Polish politics adding to the irrationality. Did Catherine the Great's influence on her former lover Stanislaw August Poniatowski the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lead to the partitions? Although Piłsudski pretty much won the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1919-21 it didn't stop his opponents from branding him as a Russian agent. Many still believe Lech Wałęsa was a Soviet agent so it's not surprising to see Kaczynski trying to play to the Polish fear of the Russian menace. Chasing ghosts however, allows real conspiracies to pass undetected. See, Poland seems to have lots of natural gas but unfortunately it's trapped in shale deep underground, possibly 5.3 trillion cubic meters, energy independence from Russia for decades. Back in 2005, as Vice President of the US, Dick Cheney got the Energy Act passed which exempted his former company Halliburton's method of extracting shale gas, hydraulic fracturing, from environmental laws. Now, despite obvious environmental and health problems to humans and animals that have mushroomed in the regions where 'fracking' has taken place, Poles are being sold on its safety by advertising how widely used it is in America. Meanwhile, the recent opening of the Northstream pipeline that cuts out Poland as gas is transported directly to Germany under the Baltic from Russia will mix in some minds with someone whispering that the Oscar nominated Gasland, which documented the harmful effects of fracking, was financed by Russian gas giant Gasprom, seriously, you can't make this fantasyland up.



Of course, the real winner will be big oil and the losers the Polish people. Foreign capital will flow in to provide, well, capital equipment, to pump the poison into the earth to release the gas to sell here and abroad, taking the profits and leaving the mess. The French revoking gas permits, the delay in issuing permits in Wales and the German report raising concerns about uncertainty over fracking are all thanks to Russian meddling too I'm sure. Nothing to do with the millions of gallons of water mixed with hundreds of chemicals, including known carcinogens, pumped through the water table, only some of which is recovered, dozens of times for each of the hundreds or thousands of wells. Another irony is to be found in the justification for fracking that the gas will lessen dependence on climate change causing coal, currently used in 95% of Polish energy production, even though most Poles will tell you that global warming is, well, a conspiracy. Donald Tusk's government has announced they will veto any move by the EU to ban or limit fracking and the ninety shale gas exploration permits that have been issued so far to energy companies such as Total and ExxonMobil will be pumping gas by 2014. Most of the public won't know what hit them as the propaganda machine of Polish Gas and Oil Mining Company (PGNiG) will propagate the benefits of shale gas with "The Flame of Hope" advertising campaign.

Neither the PO or PiS has a realistic shot at winning an outright majority of the seats with both polling around 30% and will therefore need to find allies to form a coalition government. The party that wins the most votes is charged with forming a government whose final makeup will depend not only on which party wins but by how much. In order to enter parliament, a party need to attain 5% of the vote, leaving only three other parties with a realistic shot. Presently the junior coalition partner is the PSL (Polish Peasants' Party), formerly a left-of-center-now centrist party with roots dating back to the inter-war period which under the guise of the United People's Party (ZSL) was officially recognized during communism, that now has a mainly rural and small town electoral base. However, their market-unfriendly ideas, including a referendum on whether to go ahead with Poland's nuclear power program along the five main themes of their manifesto, social security, food, economy, environmental safety and state have them on the outs. More troubling is their influence on EU farm subsidy allocation which has led to not only distortions in rural-urban migration but have seen an explosion of fraudulent-yet-legal organic farms.

While the government won't have any time for the EU if it wants to limit the destruction of the ecosystem, they're more than happy to sit down and talk about how much money they'll get. You see, it's thanks in no small part to Poland being the biggest recipient of cohesion funds from Brussels, currently worth more than 3% of GDP, that they have been able to achieve the largest GDP growth of the post-Soviet states. These EU cohesion funds, administered by local political agents, have become an important resource in local political exchange while a whole industry has popped up that specializes in funneling as much as possible to those with the means to navigate the Byzantine application process. Poles hate the bureaucracy they've created themselves by never fundamentally overhauling the system, instead, they built property rights onto Soviet foundations which had been tinkered with in the decade leading up to 1989 and have grafted EU policies post-2004 onto the constitution created in 1997. All of this has created a system bloated with inefficiencies and nurtured a thriving industry to navigate the nightmare which unproductively siphons off profit and time. While the rest of the world places bets on when the eurozone collapses, Poles will obliviously reelect a government bending over backwards to join it. Last September's Eurobarometer poll showed that across the EU, the proportion of people who said that their country had "benefited" from membership had fallen to 49%. In Poland, the same figure increased 3% over the previous year to 77%. Unsurprising really, considering it's true in the only way that counts, cash.

The other traditional party of power, SLD (Democratic Left Alliance) also has its roots in a former communist times party, PZPR (Polish United Workers Party). Their party manifesto reads like market wisdom heresy, hiking of tax levels for higher earners, as well as increasing benefits for families and raising the minimum wage (gasp!) at a time of exploding inequality between the haves and have-nots. For a democracy born from solidarity, Poland displays very little of the words characteristics with higher levels of child poverty than the US and twice the UK level, the country has a gap in life expectancy of 15 years between Warsaw's richest and poorest districts. Bizarrely, you'll hear more people arguing here for a flat tax than for making the taxation more progressive considering this situation is partially attributable to the most regressive taxation in the OECD (see graph on right). Not only do the SLD's policies offend the sensibilities of god-market, they also advocate the abolition of religious symbols from public institutions and signing of the EU’s Fundamental Charter of Human Rights, which Poland has so far opted out of, alongside the UK and Czech Republic. In other words, they don't have a chance.

While a series of political scandals were the official reason for the SLD slide, it's really their link with the Soviet era. This is of course the biggest conspiracy of all, that Poland lived under communist rule for 45 years, creating a distrust among many, especially the young who only heard the stories, for all things deemed socialist. Yet, no matter what you think about the USSR, it was not communist and by the transitive law, this means neither was Poland. It is important to know that the original thoughts of Marx and Engels were indeed the absolute opposite of Stalinism, Maoism etc. Russia managed to achieve socialism for a very short while immediately after the revolution. But this newly-fledged socialism was defeated in the most humiliating way. Not only did the counter-revolution win over the communists but it kept the name and the symbols to the overjoy of the capitalists of the rest of the world. Russian communism ceased to exist as soon as Stalin came to power. The most fitting description of the USSR and by extension Poland from 1945 to 1989 is State Capitalism. Simply, the state took on the role of the ultimate Capitalist and set about exploiting the workers. Some of the practices it had, like the suppression of individuality, the strict hierarchical spread of power and the like, are identical to the ones within a corporation, or for that matter, the EU. Others, like it’s inability to work efficiently or its large bureaucracy are problems that any sufficiently large corporation has as well. There hasn’t been a corporation of the sheer size of the Soviet Union of course so a direct comparison is impossible, but looking at the dinosauric movements of some of the biggest ones certainly points in that direction. As for the EU, well, most of us see where that's heading.

All this leaves an opening for a wildcard in a landscape normally reserved for serious, vacuous simpletons. Enter the biggest joker in Polish politics, former PO MP Janusz Palikot and his RP party (Palikot's Movement). Best known for stirring controversies with his antics, his anti-clerical message seems to be resonating as polls show his percentage of the decided vote has skyrocketed from 2.7%, under the threshold to enter the Sejm, to around 9% in a fortnight. During back-to-back press conferences in April 2007, he first appeared with a t-shirt that read "Jestem z SLD" (I'm from the SLD) on the front and "Jestem Gejem" (I am gay) on the back and then brandished a gun and a dildo a few days later. In the first case he claimed to be reminding his party (PO at the time) that they should be defending the rights of minorities, in the second the objects were in his opinion modern symbols of law and justice in Poland as it was a press conference to discuss a rape case involving police officers. He also committed a crime (Polish link) by calling former President Kaczynski "an oaf" (yes, an illegal act under Polish anti-defamation laws) but wasn't prosecuted, as well as questioning the sexuality of the President's twin brother (and former Prime Minister and current leader of PiS). With the PSL and SLD both hovering around 10% in the same poll, it seems likely that Palikot will overtake them and claim the right to be part of any governing coalition.

The electoral triumph of PiS back in 2005 turned into a disaster for Poland. The twin brother-prime minister-president-pair's pledge to end corruption and restore moral integrity to the country was sidetracked by scandal and extremism. The political forces that offered resistance to the neoliberal onslaught were also xenophobic and nationalistic. With allies such as LPR (League of Polish Families) and Andrzej Lepper's Samoobrona (Self Defense) there were high profile attacks on gay rights, movements to reintroduce the death penalty and demands for a complete ban on abortion. Not only did this have the negative effect of humiliating Poland on the international stage, they poisoned any anti-EU/neoliberal position due to their association with such a stance. So, although one needn't be a homophobic xenophobe who wants the US to build missiles to point at Russia to maintain a sober, take it slow approach with a faltering EU project, that is the public's perception. Mix this with their ties to the Catholic Church and increases to social benefits during their rule and we can easily see how resentment on the part of 'successful' Poles for the poor has been fertilized. Playing on these feelings along with the perpetual Polish inferiority complex is the PO playbook in matters such as health care, welfare, pensions and privatization.

Of course the health care system has problems, the devious scam the welfare system, the pension system is bankrupt and the trains are overcrowded and never on time. That's what happens when only 6.7% of GDP went to health care in 2009, well below levels elsewhere. This financial squeeze creates waiting lists up to 12 weeks to see a cardiac consultant manufacturing resentment for the public system, one in three believe the system is poor and since cash seems to guarantee speedier service, many believe they'd be better off with an American system. As baby steps are taken towards privatization no one mentions the fact that the US spends more any other country, 16% of GDP, and growing faster than anywhere else, for a system that consistently underperforms relative to other developed countries. Welfare doesn't help if you just pay people to get drunk like they do in Poland but instead of reforming the system, the elite are happy to see resentment build and thus justify the reduction and elimination of any kind of social safety net.

Instead of using the EU's clarification that what is owed to private pension funds counts as part of the government's liabilities as an opportunity to reform pensions by among other things allowing competition among government pension plans and admitting the retirement age will have to be raised to bring the system in line with EU standards the government chose sleight of hand. Shunting taxpayers' money from privately managed pension funds to government controlled 'ZUS managed' funds just makes the numbers look temporarily less terrifying, at least until after the election. As far as anyone can see any logical purpose behind this arrogantly arbitrary move, it is to temporarily and very marginally slow down the rapid rise of the budget deficit. Rather than irritate voters in an election year the government made a grab at future pensioners' savings, issuing unfunded IOUs in return. Rather than use EU funds earmarked for railway improvements it's more politically astute to divert some of that money to roads when the budget for the latter runs out, achieving the double goal of heightening public discontent with publicly owned trains and thus more willing to accept privatization as well as using creative accounting to stay below the budget cap.

The official name of Poland is Rzeczpospolita Polska, that difficult looking world means 'common cause'. While the last 20+ years have been good in many ways for much of the population, there is an increasing unwillingness to examine the direction of society and attempt to correct its course, away from the common cause of greed and graft, toward the common cause of a healthy society. The more distasteful side to Poland's 'successful' transition are massive permanent unemployment, widespread and continuing poverty and the removal of the historical layers of social protection. In an era of apparent increasing prosperity, a significant portion of the community is being left behind. Poland is increasingly marked by 'traditional' forms of poverty that have emerged since the collapse of traditional cradle-to-grave welfare provision but there are striking changes in the nature and shape of poverty. Many of the new poor are simply not represented in official statistics. The official unemployment rate is intentionally emphasized as the figure is distorted by considerable concealed unemployment, up to one third simply don't bother to register as benefits have declined over the transition period with further restrictions coming in 2002. One needs to be blind or be intentionally ignoring the legions of homeless people roaming from dumpster to dumpster or the surplus of twenty-something kurwa spewing (mostly) men with nothing better to do than scrounge up their next beer. Unemployment is concentrated in rural communities where there is a considerable surplus of labor resources, a problem temporarily allayed by mass migration following EU ascension but threatening to become a big problem now so many are returning following the perpetual economic crisis. Opportunity to those in the east are exemplified by a 2004 study that found only one in every 130 children from a peasant background reaches higher education.

Poles, even more than much of the west, have been duped into the belief that governments and not markets are to blame for the lingering economic hangover from the economic crisis. They somehow missed the part where deregulation and lower taxes created incentives to assume too much risk on the supply side while growing inequality created more need for credit to keep up with the cost of living on the demand side leading to the predictable catastrophe. Appearance is more important than substance, formality wins out over rationality and conformity crushes originality. Democracy doesn't offer a choice when it's determined by capital, where half the voters are more worried about updating their Facebook profiles to lament the loss of a slave owner and the other half are more concerned about their right to riot after Euro 2012 matches than the the real problems facing the country. Pity the poor Poles for a moment this Sunday as democracy here, as elsewhere, has become nothing but a symbolic exercise in futility.