Back to the good old days?
By Aleksander Nowacki
Gone are the days when the government told people who they should have dealings with and who to avoid. In this present freer age, individuals and businesses are left to do as they please, just so long as they respect the basic tenets of the civil society and the laws, such as they are.
Fortunately, there are some who have decided to put an end to this regrettable state of affairs. Jerzy Hausner, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy, Labor and Social Policy, has come to the fore of this push for a more reasonable, cleaner, more moral society with his surprise comments last week describing Myślenice-based telecom wires-maker Telefonika.
"Telefonika is untrustworthy and companies should reconsider doing business with them," Hausner said. The call for the company's boycott comes in the wake of the government's growing dissatisfaction with its negotiations over the grounds of Telefonika's plant in Ożarów, which was shut down amidst worker protests in May of this year. Since then, the government has sought to attract investors to the area, where a special economic zone was created, but has seen its efforts frustrated by the company's reluctance to give the property up without sufficient compensation. Telefonika's scandalous insistence that any deal should make business sense has rightly angered the minister, who discerned a plot by evil capitalists to frustrate the government's efforts to ensure full employment and general prosperity of the working masses.
Hausner's frustration is no doubt compounded by what he can see happening just across the border. Aleksander Małachowski, a government coalition deputy, gave a clue last week as to where we should be looking for examples to emulate. On a visit to Belarus as a member of the European Council delegation, he praised that country as full of "happy, well-dressed people," and said he found "many things to admire and even to envy," citing the unemployment rate of three percent in contrast to this country's 5 million jobless. In view of all these observations, it is hardly surprising that Belorussian opposition is "non-existent."
Admittedly, not everyone seems to share his enthusiasm for our neighbor's political system. A taxi driver, who had never been to Belarus, told this writer that perhaps the deputy looked for opposition in all the wrong places: take a stroll around the prisons, he said, and you'll find a lot of opposition activists. But then, taxi drivers are a notoriously opinionated and cheeky lot.
Meanwhile, public prosecutors are not waiting idly for Belorussian standards to travel across the border, and have already taken steps to ensure that those practices are adopted over here. After former president of Nowy Sącz-based hardware maker Optimus, Roman Kluska, was cleared of cheating the taxman by selling cheaper computers to schools - with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Education - prosecutors charged his legal advisers with obstructing the course of justice. The insolent lawyers had refused to testify against their employer, citing their professional obligation for confidentiality. It is to be hoped that they will receive the severe punishment they deserve for making it difficult to convict a wealthy, if innocent, man.
It is also, perhaps, worth mentioning that this country's future hangs in the balance, as negotiations are ongoing concerning the European Union Constitutional Treaty, its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and various other issues that will affect the economy's competitiveness against other EU member states. That, however, was hardly noticed by the media last week.
