Yesterday’s entry on Beata Sawicka’s corruption charges was a little hurried. Here, for those with strong stomachs, is the sleazy story in more detail. In January 2007 the CBA (Anti-Corruption Office) agent meets Sawicka on a training course. He poses as the representative of a western property developer. On October 1st Sawicka is arrested for […]
Where to begin? Beata Sawicka, an opposition party deputy was caught red-handed by the CBA (Anti-Corruption Office) a week or two ago accepting a bribe in connection with the sale of land. A CBA man had gone undercover as a developer and elicited the bribe from Sawicka in an operation that lasted months and months […]
Amid the coverage of Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize win for The Gathering (which I might get around to reading), it has been mentioned that this is the second time the prize has been awarded to an Irish woman, the first being Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea.An illuminating article by Murdoch […]
During my extensive discussion of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I mentioned how the author envisioned a new super-elite emerging from the wreckage of consensus capitalism. In such a scenario, “trickle-down” economics, first touted during the Reagan administration, amounts to creating a new servant class, scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from the top table. […]
Today, according to most of the centre-left newspapers, we’re witnessing a historic moment. The birth of a new party – the Partito Democratico, along with an american style primary to decide the leader of the party – which will be Rome’s mayor Walter Veltroni. On the official face of it, this is a new begining […]
Here’s Sławomir Sierakowski in the latest Polityka: In a country where according to official statistics more than half of Poles live below the social minimum but discussion of economics usually begins with the flat tax and always ends with lowering taxes populists are bound to win.
Gazeta Wyborcza has a regular feature in which they ask the same set of questions about tourism of various people. You know the type: “I left my heart in… [answer]”; “My best holidays were in… [answer]”; “My favourite hotel… [answer].” This week the respondent was a Daria Pawęda, described as a journalist and traveller. Her […]
(Continued from Tuesday.) Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the “body politic” to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual “patients” (and, later, torture victims) and the “shock therapy” acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how […]
Aleksander Wat was a precocious young fellah. He wrote “JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka” (I from one side and I from the other side of my little herring-iron oven) at the age of 14 and a short story “Lucifer Unemployed” in his early 20s. With a title like […]