I always found it interesting how the US media always characterizes foreign (especially slavic Easter European) business people as 'oligarchs' and uses the term to demean them. Yet they never use the same term for Western business people and politicians who engage in the exact same corrupt practices (and often times on a much greater scale). Fair has an article on this [1].
"Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed control over formerly state companies at discount prices.
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.
My understanding is that many of the oligarchs quite literally stole what they have during the 1990s free-for-all (Soviet collapse).
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!
Its because oligarch has a very specific meaning; someone who has a large share of a market and there are only a few other competitors.
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.
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.
The one I get a kick out of is "It's terrible that a foreign government would meddle in our elections" when that is literally what we have been doing all around the world for the last century.
Oligarchs are generally ex kgb and where heavily involved with the Russian mafia. Or were directly to apart of it and then outright stole the industry they were wanted as long as they didn't talk smack
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!
It never fails to infuriate me how deeply this type of corruption is present at every level of the EU.
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.
This is absolutely true. Popular European opinion is that the UK is insane to leave the EU. But a huge part of the EU is just swimming in bullshit. I knew many middle class Hungarians whose family friends scored them a nice EU grant to start some sort of business. Obviously 99% of those businesses went nowhere. Rinse and repeat. The irony is that is actually deters real investment because why risk €100k of your own money when the business next door will rip-off your idea with €200k of free EU money.
And that’s not to count the absolutely incredible mid and high level corruption that this article discusses.
1000x this. I live in Austria right now and most start-ups here are funded with EU or Government grants.
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.
While no doubt a lot of corruption is going on in countries like hungary or bulgaria, CAP subsidies were always used by politicians as a political carrot. That's why greece (the largest per capita subsidy recipient until recently) ends up still having ~13% farming population which produces very little. The system was always easy to game and there was too little regard for where the money is going. People would claim ownership of land that didn't exist, to the point where entire towns had to be moved on the map, because there just wasn't enough land to fit. Farm subsidies ended up being free vote subsidies for every politician, left and right.
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.
“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
That's not something new, that's how it is for decades and has nothing to do with agriculture production itself.
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.
While the article centers specifically on Hungary, this is true on other countries as well. In Spain for instance the biggest recipients of such subsidies are the House of Alba, a family connected to the nobility.
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.
On the other hand the EU commission wanted a trade and possibly even unification agreement with the Ukraine very badly, while being fully aware the country was defacto run by Oligarchs.
This goes two ways.
Note: I live in Europe, and as such have a good understanding of the politics around here.
In eastern EU I am sure that everyone that is rich is because of "connections," nothing works unless you kiss the ring. You can work all your life and die penniless, others will get to buy acres by the beach or lease them for 99 years for small change. Or get major contracts to build roads, infrastructure, health care etc. Unless you pay your overlords, your business will be shut down
You should come visit us in Africa. It will probably make you feel better. Some in Africa have become rich from NGO money meant for the poor. Working for an NGO is now actually a profession. I always had in it mind NGOs should be temporary, provide relief during a natural disaster. Donors do try set strict rules on how the money can be spent but there is always a way to game the system. The participants of a workshop will stay at a connected individual's lodge and pay inflated prices. Cars used to ferry people at a charge and so on.
These kind of comments make me sad. Yes,there are some people who made themselves extremely rich by exploiting their political connections, using dodgy deals with criminal world and etc. However,most made their money in legal ways working their socks off to make it work. Those may not be the usual zillionaires,but they are pretty rich. This is like saying that everyone in the US live like those in Bel Air.
EU is using taxpayer money to buy loyalty. Because EU has no political base of it own it has to create one.
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.
At least for my country, NYT is correct that a large portion of the subsidies goes to few companies but that's not the whole story. Quite a bit of those companies are renting the land from regular people - land ownership is very fragmented here. The companies amass vast areas of rented land and, yes, the subsidies benefit them but what I've noticed that as a result of competition, the rents increase to a point where most, if not all of the subsidy, goes to the land owner, rather than the company that farms the land.
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.
The opening paragraph from NYT: „CSAKVAR, Hungary — Under Communism, farmers labored in the fields that stretch for miles around this town west of Budapest, reaping wheat and corn for a government that had stolen their land.”
1. The Csákvár State Farm was originally the estate of Esterházy family (the biggest landowners in Hungary).
2. There was an agricultural cooperative in Csákvár, owned by the farmers. It was a rather successful venture. The state had not owned the land of the cooperatives in Hungary. They worked for themselves.
Is this a supposedly factual piece of quality journalism, or a cheap propaganda?
It is wrong in the sense that the peasants had never owned it, but right in the sense that collective ownership under communism was a sham. They should have had a chance to own it after communism, but Orban's fascists have stolen it.
Good for them. Perhaps the idea of funding the EU and taxation in general should be abandoned if you don't like it. I don't like it -- which is why I live in a place with almost no taxes. People always told me to leave if I didn't like it, so I did.
[+] [-] Jerry2|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://fair.org/home/russia-has-oligarchs-the-us-has-busine...
[+] [-] roywiggins|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PNWChris|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] klaudius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chapium|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TomMckenny|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] war1025|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disabled|6 years ago|reply
Oligarchy is basically what the US is.
[+] [-] paulie_a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] loriverkutya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttul|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] wrnr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlexMuir|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adlpz|6 years ago|reply
Not meaning to doubt you, but it all seems a little too good (or maybe bad) to be true, doesn't it?
[+] [-] raverbashing|6 years ago|reply
Or maybe incentives are corruption and the oil and corn businesses in the US are the worse offenders
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thewarrior|6 years ago|reply
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
[+] [-] angry_octet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] despera|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] xondono|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mindcrash|6 years ago|reply
This goes two ways.
Note: I live in Europe, and as such have a good understanding of the politics around here.
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmsimanga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markvdb|6 years ago|reply
One example from Latvia: MicroTik CTO Arnis Riekstiņš [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MikroTik
[+] [-] cosmodisk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krzyk|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pakitan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnyary|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry_octet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosege|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9c8675a8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamdumb|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] yourbandsucks|6 years ago|reply
William Jennings Bryant ain't happy.
[+] [-] jjaredsimpson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuesnayJr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|6 years ago|reply