Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.
>Also Western billionaire versus Russian oligarch - even if the source of wealth is virtually identical and their political power probably higher in the West.
The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies.
I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".
Linguistic choices aside, the nature of power acquision is very different in russia and western countries. One of the best explainers is on Kamil Galeev's twitter/substack. Highly recommended read:
That is not the definition[0]. I can see how you think it might be, but oligarchy is for governments not monopolies -- even if some cases that line is blurred.
I've wondered that too, and from what I can understand, the distinction is that the Russian Oligarchs don't just have political influence, their wealth itself was a result of political connections with the ruling elites from the start.
American (immigrant) here who happens to think this is still the very best country all things considered. Disappointed in how things have declined over the past 40 years I’ve been here but still thank God for America as far I am concerned.
Not all American super wealthy are oligarch but some are very close to the mark. Borderline cases that are concerning: Elon Musk is an American oligarch. Bill Gates is an American oligarch.
Also can someone dump 4Gs of Google’s codebase somewhere?
I do think they don't use oligarch for all Russian billionaires. For example it isn't used for Tinkov or Durov. In 90s-00s there really were oligarchs, now they use it for the ones that are or were maybe affiliated with government, like the childhood friends of Putin or former KGB/St Petersburg mayor's office employees who all happen to be CEOs of huge companies
I've heard successive stories of oligarchs getting shaken down for money or outright purged by Putin that I don't think Russia is an oligarchy. That implies some collective decision making.
The Ukraine war is madness and reflects a ruler with absolute power.
Eh, while billionaires enjoy privilege in the West, oligarchs literally run gangs, murder people on the regular, and support Putin's attempted genocide of Ukraine. I would say that's definitely comparing grapes and oranges.
"Oligarchs" refer to underground Russian businessmen that cheaply bought up state assets after the USSR collapsed and sold it for exceedingly higher sums later.
It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.
In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently, and it's common for the process to be technically open, but practically exclude all but a handful of buyers.
It's also common for those buyers to make a lot of money from the assets before returning them to the state 20 years later, unmaintained and debt laden.
> Can you name off the top of your head the last 3 significant privatizations?
In the UK, privatisation of Network Rail arches (which will 'break even' for the buyers in about ten years), privatisation or TfL land in London at below-market prices to property developers, and the backdoor privatisation of NHS services through public-private partnerships.
Even further back: during Prime Minister Mulroney's tenure (which coincided with Reagan's and Thatcher's), quite a few public corporations were privatized. Here's a news article from that time period that gives an idea of the pressures faced in Canada at the time, and how what Thatcher was doing in the UK (producing a long list of public corporations and services to privatize) was affecting Canadian judgements: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1985/08/30/d...
And here's an analysis of how the privatization of Canada's medical isotopes business didn't save the government money, and instead only helped to cushion private owners from risk: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/chr.2019-0010
I asked you for the 3 most recent examples you could think of, and your recent examples were decades old.
You have now linked me to a paper discussing privatization happening in the 1980s and 1990s.
If you want to make the argument that this happens frequently in the west, you need to find examples actually happening this decade. I don't feel like this should be controversial.
If they were 'proper investors' they would cheaply buy up UK water companies, load them with debt, pay out 40 billion of dividends, and then enter talks with the government about insolvency.
Can someone explain this to me? America won the Cold War and had an influence on Russia's (the successor state) transition to a market-based economy. Then how can “we“ at the same time be mad about how the transition was handled?
Luxe Lifestyle was a recently-formed company with no staff. It was awarded £25 to buy protective equipment for Covid.
The very next day, on April 29, DHSC bought another 200 million face masks, this time contracting to pay £252.5 million to Ayanda Capital, a Tory party-linked firm also bumped into the VIP lane despite having no previous PPE experience. It is an investment company specialising in currency trading, offshore property and private equity.
To this day, no-one has been charged with any crime.
It sounds like that, but believe me, it was vastly worse than current times. Except if you were in lucky 0.1% that had those connections, and also had no conscience.
I think the frequent comparisons of GDP leads the West to heavily underestimate Russia.
While GDP may be lower than Italy and per capita is weak, a nation like Russia can probably accomplish an order of magnitude more large scale projects, and also sustain a certain economy climate for much much longer than we think.
So don't underestimate Russia, even though we'd like to think they're soon running out of steam to continue the war in Ukraine.
On the other side of the comparison, I think Italy is a lot more capable than many people give them credit for, so the comparison is not quite as damning as it may first seem.
On just one axis of consideration, Italy has a blue water navy with power projection capabilities roughly similar to Russia and India, surpassed only by the United States, the UK and France.
I think Italy also ranks higher than most anglosphere laypeople would estimate in terms of GDP and scientific output, although this is hard to pin down since I'm talking about layperson perception. Basically, I think Italy is more relevant and capable than people generally give it credit for.
GDP seems like a very questionable, and likely misleading, measure to me, even for Western nations.
For example, Canada's inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP has supposedly increased over time, yet for many Canadians, the standard of living is now noticeably lower than it was (or would have likely been) two or three decades ago.
In terms of production, Canadian businesses and governments generally don't seem to have become more capable and productive, and actually seem to struggle now with the sorts of fundamental work that they managed to pull off in the past. Many common services and products are noticeably worse now than in the past, in terms of cost, quality, reliability, delivery time, and so forth.
And very interesting to note that your name is VancouverMan. The other day I saw a YouTube video about an IT guy struggling in Vancouver and he mentioned one example of two immigrants - both doctors - having to stay in someone's basement as there was simply no way for them to afford a house (rent or buy).
My favourite tidbit for when someone brings 'less than Italy hur dur':
Italy: Size of the labor force from 2014 to 2024: ~23M
Number of pensioners in Russia from 2012 to 2022: ~44M
Italy population? ~58M
There are almost twice as many pensioners in Russia than people in the labour force in Italy and it's 2/3 of the whole Italy population. The whole GDP comparison here is moot.
Is that surprising for a resource oriented economy?
Aramco (Saudi Oil) is the second biggest company in the world, yet GDP of Saudi Arabia is about that of Poland
A GPD lower than that of Italy? Here's something better: per capita is lower than that of Bulgaria's. Perhaps Putin's plan is to lower the country's population to increase the per capita ratio?
They are giants as far as Russia is concerned...Yandex is the biggest tech company there. Gazprom is a Russian gas giant, Rosneft is an oil giant, etc..
Yeah but that term is just you know comical. “Giants”. As if meant to inflate one’s ego, cover insecurity, and project power, like those tom and jerry cartoon episodes where they’d call in their giant friends to save the day. It amuses me every time.
So quite similar to the US where oligarchs (oups, billionaires) are invited at the White House and companies provide algorithmic censorship favoring a particular political camp (obvious with Twitter before its recent purchase, YouTube actions against public free discourse on covid, Google removing pages related to a certain laptop, etc.)
> And lobbyists are not lobbyists, they are oligarchs.
???
No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all.
So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".
2. a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence (particularly with reference to individuals who benefited from the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union).
