[timthelion]

Do you live in Poland? I live in Prague, and here, I'm surprised at how little people care about the foreign investment aspect of the privatization process. Even though almost everyone complains that it is corrupt, people here are mostly pro-west. The economy is strong here, and people don't see a big problem. Sure, we were among the richest countries in Europe pre WWII, but that was a long time ago, and people are now used to being relatively poor. But outside of Prague, especially on the Moravian side of the country I think opinions are very different, and many people actively say that "communism was better" and that the west has robbed the country. It is true, that heavy industry, like the car maker škoda auto (Now owned by VW), and the slevarny (metal making firms that are owned by the west), and the coal mines(owned by the Swiss) are all outside of Prague... Do Pols realise the extent that they were robbed?

[timthelion]

I just realised that my post comes across as pro-totalitarian communism. But that wasn't my point at all. My point wasn't that I think that things were "better during communism" my point was simply to try to present the opinions of those who do understand that the pro-western privitization process was unfair.

I just think that a more moderate, slower, and fairer privitization process would have been better for the citizens of the country, and not that we should have stayed totalitarian/communist.

[hiacynt]

More Poles realise this now, but they are often frowned upon by the mainstream media (surprise, surprise - they are mostly German-owned) and called regressive, nationalistic, etc. But the trends are rather positive, we now have a government that seems to support Polish industry, and peoples' attitudes have changed. For example, there's a very popular mobile app called Pola, which tells you how much a product is "Polish" (it computes a score based on where the owners are located, whether the company does R&D in Poland, and so on) based on barcodes. It's actually pretty trendy now, and it's not uncommon to see people scanning stuff with it in supermarkets. More about it here: https://growthengine.withgoogle.com/intl/en-eu/voices#card-s...

Interesting fact - some people responsible for the sell out to the west have been recently given prominent positions in Ukraine's government structures.

[lossolo]

@wowoc

Why you have created another account just to write that?

You wrote the same comment as wowoc and deleted it.

[timthelion]

Perhaps they don't want their normal screen name to be associated with pro-nationalistic views, as they are un-popular. I imagine that if I were a Pol working for a German software company, I would feel uncomfortable writing what OP just wrote under my normal screen name :P

[wowoc]

I don't have pro-nationalistic views, that's a purely economic issue to me - its result is a long-lasting drain of capital. I did feel somewhat weird after posting that though, and @lossolo caught me.

[tjelen]

On the other hand, I remember that there were lot of Czech companies that were privatized into Czech hands and most of them do not exist anymore, because they went bankrupt a long time ago.

At the time (during the 90s), most of those companies that had foreign investors/management grew and survived and those that didn't were often tunneled-out by a corrupt management and were closed down. There were definitely some pretty big cases in 90s. Also there was a big public discussion about this at the time, and many politicians were against the foreign investments in general.

So I simply don't think that it's so clear-cut issue and that it's not like most of Czech people are completely unaware of the problem.

[timthelion]

You are, of course right, that the privatization process wouldn't have ended up being magically perfect if foreign investment would have been banned. There is so much awfulness that happened around the privitization process... And I wonder, if škoda hadn't been bought, would it have simply gone bankrupt after having been tunneled.

But if škoda had gone bankrupt, then that wouldn't have been an end to the Kolín, Mladé Boleslav, Leipzig industrial triangle. Cars would still be made here, given the huge amount of equipment and expertise in the area. But with škoda owned by VW, it cements a market dominance which is hard to shake. In a way, capital ownership is perminant.

A worse case is that of the swiss owned coal mines in the north. We behave as though those are still state owned mines. We kick people out of their houses with the power of the law. But the profits flow across the border to the west. Personally, I think that the government should pass a law that would re-nationalize the mines, without paying anything for them. The Chinese would certainly re-nationalize their mines if they were in the same situation. Right now, we behave as if capitalism is absolute, and democracy is relative to capitalism. The people cannot vote to confiscate the mines, but the companies can certainly bribe elected officials into privatizing them. So privatization is a one way process which puts more power into the hands of capitalists and takes power from the voters.

And now the Chinese are buying assets in democratic countries, and we are sitting here with our hands folded, saying "well, capitalism must come first. Democracy must never be allowed to interfere with the needs of capitalism." Which will be the death of democracy, unless we learn to dissobey capitalism and vote for things that break the rules of absolute and perminant ownership.