Word: polisher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first out of the gate; a New York Times best seller, the book has an impressive 170,000 copies in print after seven printings. The Mundy book proved Michelle Obama's international appeal; there are now 15 foreign-language editions of the book, including Arabic, Portuguese and Polish...
...Walesa, had gained international sympathy after the 1980 shipyard strikes in Gdansk. It would eventually gain huge popular support; 1.5 million Poles would claim membership in April 1989. However, the Communist regime felt threatened by the union and responded with force. In 1981, Wojciech Jaruzelski, the secretary of the Polish Communist Party, declared martial law, criminalized Solidarity, and imprisoned much of its leadership. For two years, Poland suffered under military rule...
...Turning Poland into a market economy, however, was a more complex and painful process than anyone could have imagined. In the early 1990s, the Polish government attempted to use “shock therapy” programs—championed by Jeffrey Sachs and other Western experts—to jumpstart the economy. This resulted in high inflation and unemployment for years. The Polish economy eventually revived, but the intervening years were painful for most of the country. Solidarity, which had championed shock therapy, soon paid the political price for backing the unpopular economic platform...
...Walesa, Solidarity emerged from the overthrow of Communism popularly viewed as the savior of the Polish nation but proved to be much less effective as a governing party. Just four years after the Round Table talks, the once-dominant coalition led by Solidarity had fragmented and lost power to its Social Democratic opposition, some of whom had served in the Communist government. This was not due simply to the economic climate; in the first truly free elections, the movement split violently when Walesa ran for president against Tadeusz Mazowiecki, another Solidarity politician who was then prime minister...
Economic problems, however, have also served as some disincentive to immigrants, who may rethink decisions to move to countries where prosperity has been fast evaporating. Thousands of Polish émigrés have left Britain for home over the past year, for instance, while the number of Mexicans moving to the United States has slowed from 14.6 per 1000 residents to 8.4 over the past two years...