The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[1] https://fair.org/home/russia-has-oligarchs-the-us-has-busine...
Oligarchy is basically what the US is.
I think the distinction is that in Eastern Europe, the politics is literally corrupt. In the US, bags of money aren’t used. It’s actually legitimized by loose campaign finance laws, so wire transfers are just fine!
Meanwhile the speaker is on the '5-2' regime and printing off the agenda for their 9 o'clock.
This is opposed to many western business people who won by making better products and generally advancing our standard of living. Whether they deserve the astonishing wealth they have is up for debate (I believe in a wealth tax), but but at least they did something for it!
The Wikipedia page says roughly that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch
The Wikipedia for Gazprom has a great timeline of how one such business became an elaborate exercise in theft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazprom#History
Yeah well, it's not like people like Richard Branson didn't do the same (to this very day)...
Throughout the ages, wealth tends to be opportunistically accrued, to put it mildly. Steinbeck wrote something about that. It's just that we are somewhat closer to the age of "primary enrichment" when it comes to Russia, whereas we've kinda forgotten our own robber barons.
The value is such that no one could normally buy the infrastructure, yet such infrastructure is often sold for pennies.
Obviously people who are potential bidders in a market are heavily incentivized to downplay the value of what they're bidding on, so it's not clear to me why their metric of valuation should be privileged above all others. It's just like the idea that efficiency should be conceived of in terms of minimizing production cost, without regard to the effects of that approach on customer/employee retention or organizational resilience - partly because those second-order effects are a little harder to measure, partly because owners have an economic incentive to promote that particular definition above all others.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seisachtheia
"a set of laws instituted by the Athenian lawmaker Solon (c. 638 BC–558 BC) in order to rectify the widespread serfdom and slavery that had run rampant in Athens by the 6th century BC, by debt relief."
"The seisachtheia laws immediately cancelled all outstanding debts, retroactively emancipated all previously enslaved debtors, reinstated all confiscated serf property to the hektemoroi, and forbade the use of personal freedom as collateral in all future debts. The laws instituted a ceiling to maximum property size - regardless of the legality of its acquisition (i.e. by marriage), meant to prevent excessive accumulation of land by powerful families."
But totally compatible with how western business people got their start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.
I'm not talking about Bezos and Zuckerberg. I'm talking about how industrialists on the west got their start in the "good ole times".
Point being that post-Communist countries elites used the same methods that early western capitalism used, to bootstrap themselves into capitalism...
>2) The oligarchs literally stole money from the State. The robber barons, although accused of using unscrupulous methods, did not.
The oligarchs didn't have to have "stole money from the state" (not directly at least). Rather, much like western capitalists of yore and of modern day, they benefited from having "friends" in the state, legislators in their pockets, etc, to secure rents and monopolies, special deals, thwart competition, etc.
That’s a bold claim that I don’t believe holds up. Even setting aside specifically illegal business practices (bribery, violence, fraud) - the robber baron industrialists exploited the rules of capitalism to concentrate wealth and enrich themselves on the backs of their workers and society. They got ludicrously rich, and everybody else got... what? Less competition in the oil industry? In that sense they robbed us all.
Even if you believe that capitalism is the right system for the world, you have to see extreme concentration of wealth as a problem. Put simply, what is better for society: 1 billionaire, or 1,000 millionaires? I believe that it’s pretty clearly the latter.
Also, the whole “robber baron” thing is distorted: https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-b.... By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity. I suspect 50 or 100 years from now, you’ll read similar revisionist histories about the dawn of the Internet age. The proponents of central planning are already working on it.
But if we set illegal business practices aside, I still think it’s bold to say the massively wealthy industrialists didn’t do anything wrong because of the case i made in my comment (in short: the inherent immorality of large wealth accumulation).
> By and large they became wealthy because they provided an incredibly valuable new service that catalyzed vast amounts of new economic activity.
What was the new and valuable service consolidating the US oil industry provided? There were oil companies, that was already happening... what value was added by rolling it all into one ball? If you believe in capitalism you would agree that competition is good for an industry, so how is the thing that made rockafeller so rich (consolidation) good for anyone but him?
And i already believe that a lot of what has happened in the last 10-15 years of the internet age is actively bad for our society, no central planning needed - just open eyes.
> The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University
In what world is his being jewish relevant to the article, except to dog-whistle anti-semetic protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion conspiracy bs? Disgusting.
By that standard Bill Gates is a robber baron.
Oligarchs exist in eastern europe due to how industry was broken away from the state when the state released control over it. Selling off access to the industry ultimately resulted in a small number of powerful players in control.
There is no problem with NYT or other media outlets calling them exactly what they are.
Although I can see how someone could mistake the two, the former is far more obvious form of corruption, while the latter is wrapped in language like 'saving local x industries against foreign competition' or well intentioned liberal equalization that always somehow ends up benefiting the politically well connected over the wider society, trading one problem for worse ones.
https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/US-Territory...
They're not rich because they built a company and bought their way into political power (which is how many Western billionaires are made) but because they had political connections and used them to capture state assets. The result is that they are dependent on the government for their wealth- if they piss off the President, they'll get thrown in jail or slipped polonium. So they ended up becoming unofficial conduits of government power.
In the West, it can end up being the other way around, with governments becoming instruments of corporate power.
Whether it makes sense to call both kinds of wealthy people "oligarchs" is up to you, I guess.
Aristotle already pioneered the use of the term as meaning "rule by the rich for the rich" aka plutocracy [0].
That's why the US can also be considered an oligarchy [1].
the problem is not the color of your skin but the imbalance in power caused by many, many decades (5 centuries for some!) of intentional opportunity disparity, with wealth concentration as the metric.
a functioning democracy relies on dispersion of power, which is why we have separation of powers in the constitution in the first place.
the other critical component of a democracy is having an informed and active citizenry. the blame for the current dysfunction lies with all citizens, not just our plutocrats and politicians (although they certainly shoulder a larger proportion). sometimes we need to lean into adversity to maintain our freedoms, rather than hoping some hero will come along and shield us from it.
It's such a bad job that I wonder how much of it is intentional misdirection, distraction from the true issues.
How do you ensure the economic power of say, gay people, when they can be legally fired from their job for just being gay? When they can't even visit their dying loved ones in hospital because they're not allowed to be legally married, never mind get tax benefits or inherit pension benefits etc. How do you stop a majority from punishing them economically and punishing others who try to help them?
Can you talk me through how your approach would have worked for the civil rights movement in the 60s or how the various law currently being drafted that legally prevent people from boycotting specific countries would affect your plans if used against your suggestion?
Once we've got more class majority equality, we can switch back to more focused issues.
Referring to "the left" (or "the right", for that matter) is more of the same. The people who are more receptive to a certain style of thinking and the political club that exploits them are not a unified group.
...which is frequently deployed against people with a different skin color. Class-based analysis is great, but a) it is not an exact science, contrary to the claims of many of its proponents, and b) avoiding the empirical fact of racial discrimination does not make it go away, any more than ignoring the empirical facts of misogyny or any other flavor of discrimination has caused them to go away.
You can argue that these different forms of discrimination are just disguises for class-based discrimination, but it's equally arguable that discrimination against people on the basis of immutable characteristics is a highly effective class ordering mechanism.
When social mobility is near non-existent, then class has effectively become it's very own immutable characteristic. People can be born into wealth and poverty just as much as they can be born with colored skin.
The "American dream" is the anti-thesis to that, stipulating that everybody can elevate themselves out of their lower-class if they just pull those bootstraps hard enough.
But how realistic is that actually nowadays, particularly to elevate larger parts of the population?
the current prominence of immigration in political discussions, for example, makes it easy to divide on racial lines rather than on fairness or economics, as republicans have effectively exploited. it's led to an economically irrational willingness to sacrifice growth (and its resultant opportunities) in favor of limiting non-white immigration (we cheer 2-3% growth as amazing, while other countries have double-digit growth--like china, whose economy is similarly sized).
so support immigration on economic grounds rather than racial ones, because it can grow the pie more fairly than plutocracy can. most white folks can get behind more growth, but not all will get behind direct compassion and fairness for non-white folks (as bad as that sounds).
> Aristotle already pioneered the use of the term as meaning "rule by the rich for the rich" aka plutocracy [0].
"Original" is a dangerous term which roywiggins shouldn't have used in this case. But roy is right about how the term got used in the Eastern European context. And while things happen in the west too, people complain as much or more billionaires who made it big as outsiders who (initially) had no such connections to political power.
It's a word that came to be attached to post-Soviet kleptocrats, so that's why it ends up being used in that context and not in Western contexts, since it's taken on the meaning of wealth extracted from the state by pure cronyism.
Nobility. This concept is called nobility. History rhymes, again.
The distinction goes back to at least the Golden Age of Athens, in the 5th Century B.C. The Greek world was divided between cities ruled by the many and by the few, and every city had an internal struggle between elements favoring one or the other form of rule. If you favored democracy, you turned to Athens for help. Hoi oligoi turned to Sparta for help. It's a bit like the Cold War, with two superpowers with different ideologies vying for favor among the undecided states, and promoting internal factions favorable to one side or the other.
1)US corruption is as bad as Russia and the other Eastern European dictatorships and....
2)...this excuses the appalling autocratic behavior of Orban
I would like to see fans of a US leader who has been caught in some scandal try to say "but the Easten European dictators do it"
I suggest that these points are not only completely fallacious but actually the exact kind of distraction that oligarchs promulgate to keep their power: rather than discuss their own oppressive corruption, which the public might do something about, find something foreign to make people mad at.
And apparently it's trivial to push these intentional distractions to the top of discussions and prevent even the first steps of removing the Kleptarch's mob.
Are you an industrial pizza producer? Get 200.00 euro funding to bake patatos in the pizza ovens.
Want a digital agency to build you a new website? Just have the agency bill it as multi-language communication services, and get back 40%.
A public tenders for an IT security audit at a local municipality tailer made for a company with the political connections.
Over two million euro divided between industry partners to participate in research on "decentralised computing" but never install the software that was developed. Not that it mattered because the software didn't work. I worked as a subcontractor of a subcontractor on the project and was the only outside of academia to try it out and found some obvious errors.
Are you a student who attends university in a different city than your officially domicile and need to vote in the next election? Send an email with your ID and student card to get a rebate on the travel expenses.
You don't get cancer by just having one cell in your body multiply uncontrollably. It needs friends to trait hormones and enzymes with.
Or maybe incentives are corruption and the oil and corn businesses in the US are the worse offenders
https://www.imec-int.com/drupal/sites/default/files/inline-f...
That's really nice but the problem is most of them are designed to suck up as much of that free no-strings-attached grant money as possible rather than build a successful product.
One of the goals of these projects is often to do an initial development phase and then bring in a new tranche of companies to trial/expand what you have developed. There are groups of companies that have developed a symbiotic relationship where one of them gets into a particular project and then pulls in their fellows in the subsequent round. It is also common to see them tendering to diverse projects in the hope that one of them gets accepted and they all then pile into it.
The formal review meetings that I have attended have been extremely uncomfortable because I know that the people are on stage flat out lying about what they have achieved. Generally all they have done is some token development so provide a few screenshots for a presentation and then talk about how it has revolutionised their business whilst pocketing the vast majority of the cash.
How could you possible know that? Clearly you are making this up.
You are not thinking the right way. Machinery for writing good grant applications is a successful product.
This is why research universities are such great training grounds.
And that’s not to count the absolutely incredible mid and high level corruption that this article discusses.
Source: lived in Hungary for 5 years
Got any citations number on those observed numbers and any basis to claim it was EU that did it? Or is this just you deciding that EU is bad and then fitting things to your view?
Even look at this story. The NYT really wanted to go digging for dirt on Orban and Hungarian society in general, Orban being famous mostly for resisting EU integration and resettlement efforts, and being notoriously unpopular in Brussels. But they found they couldn't because the EU lacks even very basic levels of openness. You aren't going to read about EU corruption from them, that's for sure - the fact that they only just noticed this says they've been turning a blind eye for years.
For instance, go look at the stories in the UK about farmers being paid to not breed pigs. I'd like to get paid to not breed pigs! I think I'd be good at it!
You won't find many facts there.
Outside of the agricultural sector, the EU budget doesn't play that big a role. The main point of the EU is to facilitate the common market by setting common rules (business regulations, right of movement of people and goods, and so on) for the member states to follow.
1. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-budget/expendit...
2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/2018_Fed...
Not meaning to doubt you, but it all seems a little too good (or maybe bad) to be true, doesn't it?
https://www.vlaio.be/nl/subsidies-financiering/subsidiedatab...
I've already posted a link for another source in another comment.
Edit: This is how to get a refund for voting: https://vlaanderenkiest.be/faq/wanneer-krijgt-u-uw-reiskoste...
Why did you do that, the facts aren't hard to find and you may well learn something along the way.
The situation is not much different with other types of subsidies tbh. Economies are becoming too dependent on EU funding, and businesses adapt by creating a facade of productivity, in order to attract more and more EU funding. This is unsustainable and will not end well of course. But, considering how many votes are contingent to it, everyone pretends to look away.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
It has mostly been a way (among others) to raise, at least virtually, the purchasing power of smaller european countries and make this closed system work.
There is an 80s greek short film in form of documentary that shows how they used to discard all that production, subsidized by the EU, because there was simply no demand for it.
Sadly it's all greek and no subtitles around but pictures will tell the story: https://youtu.be/o25DPfZeFxI
It's also well known that a lot of farmers don't even produce much, since the subsidies are tied to how much land is planted, not how much is collected from it. With other countries having better economies of scale, most of spanish farming lives from the money gotten by subsidy and cut their losses when picking up the produce.
This goes two ways.
Note: I live in Europe, and as such have a good understanding of the politics around here.
One example from Latvia: MicroTik CTO Arnis Riekstiņš [0].
I don't see such things in Poland (which is in central Europe - Europs center is in the center of Poland, but some Westerners think it is in Eastern).
But economically speaking there is East and there is West. Grouping Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland etc. into a Central Europe surely makes us feel good, but economically it's ridiculous.
Romania
Macedonia
Albania
Serbia
Montenegro
Kosovo
All the EU administration staff who is loyal to abstract organisation because of generous perks and benefits not to mention early retirement. All the local politicians for whom EU financed projects are huge political win. All the anti-EU populists who get plenty of EU subsidies as farmers or parishes.
So, it's not as simple as the article makes it seem but even with that in mind, it's far from a perfect system, as it doesn't do much to increase the competitiveness/productivity/sustainability of the EU agriculture sector. It's just a transfer of tax money to land owners, be they oligarchs or regular people.
Orbán also fiercely condemned the style of Putin's rule while he was in opposition. He accused of the then PM (socialist) of going to Putin as the party leaders went to Moscow during communism. This was up until 2008 for sure. They also waved Tibet flags when Chinese diplomats visited etc. They turned around 180 degrees on many issues since they are in govt.
It's a shame the opposition are so divided and inept. Obviously control of old world media is still pretty important.
The point is, before this landslide victory of Orbán in 2010, Budapest used to be a socialist and left liberal bastion, along with a few other cities such as Szeged. Budapest's mayor was the same left winger (Demszky) for the 20 years between 1990 and 2010.
The divide between cities and the countryside is huge though. Orbán is still overwhelmingly popular among villagers and the poor.
The EU routinely claims any criticism of itself is a lie, a myth, made up etc. But it's not the case.
The Commission actually had a huge blog dedicated to rebutting the "myths" as they put it, from the British press. But if you examine the posts you'll see many of them admit the stories were actually true. They aren't myths at all - that is itself a lie!
For instance:
https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-developmen...
The attitude on display here sums up EU grant awards in a nutshell. A story about a wasteful grant to train trapeze artists in Africa (wtf) is described as "the press chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut production"! No, the press was ridiculing the EU. The rest of the answer to this "euromyth" is stating the funding did happen but it was all for a good cause so that's ok.
Or this one about agricultural grant budget going up and fraud levels being high.
https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/cap-subsidies-are-they-...
The story is primarily about fraud, asking why the EU can't stop it. The Commission's response to this "euromyth" is that it's not their job to ensure the subsidies aren't gamed, which is hardly a rebuttal.
There isn't much substance.
Whereas circus arts and coconut production give life.
If you can't see why many people would be upset by forcing taxpayers to cough up money and then spending it on that, I'm not sure what to say. Resources aren't free.
William Jennings Bryant ain't happy.
Blue bloods were always threatened by it of course, but they used to be split between liberals and northeastern Republicans.
I'd say using populist as an uncontroversial shorthand for bad is a pretty big change for a movement calling itself 'left'.
(This is to say nothing about Orban's merits or lack thereof, just noting the terminology)
I could write a book on the assumptions, stereotypes and missed opportunities involved in buying into that shift.