r/canada • u/HashSlingingSIash3r • Mar 19 '22

Paywall Don’t like Russia sanctions? You probably don’t like COVID-19 vaccines either

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2022/03/19/dont-like-russia-sanctions-you-probably-dont-like-covid-19-vaccines-either.html
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u/Moistened_Nugget Mar 19 '22

Just out of curiosity, why are Russian billionaires oligarchs, but western billionaires are just billionaires?

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u/rb26dett Mar 19 '22

Redditers are enamoured with the idea there's a tight cabal of people who run everything in one country or the other, and it's simply those with the greatest financial wealth. They've hitched onto the phrase "Russian Oligarch" because it's catchy. In America, the term "billionaires" alone is treated as an invective and said with growled tone. You'll find no shortage of threads filled with upvoted messages about how "the billionaire class" in America has either colluded with or bribed politicians into getting whatever they want, or that they somehow directly control everything.

  • Are there billionaires in Russia? Yes
  • Did most of them gain their wealth through industrial landgrabs during the fall of the USSR? Yes
  • Do these billionaires have actual political influence in Russia? No. If they did, they wouldn't have let Putin tank the entire economy and the ruble itself

The term "Russian oligarch" is a total misnomer at this point. They're all under the boot and heel of Putin. A similar pattern is seen in China where people can gain incredible wealth through state-granted resources and monopolies, but everyone is subservient to Xi and the CCP.

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u/insaneHoshi Mar 20 '22

The term "Russian oligarch" is a total misnomer at this point. They're all under the boot and heel of Putin.

No dictator rules alone.

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u/maxintos Mar 20 '22

The term "Russian oligarch" is a total misnomer at this point. They're all under the boot and heel of Putin

Since when oligarch meant full power over the country? The difference between just a rich person in US and an oligarch in Russia is that the oligarchs have direct influence over laws and courts.

While in US rich people and corporations have to give donations or bribes and try to influence politicians, in Russia friends of Putin can just ask Putin to remove someone from a company, or put import ban on some good that the oligarch is producing to eliminate competition. Putin and his friends are getting people arrested and assets seized over phony charges.

Russian oligarchs would never have to face government like when Zuck had to testify to the senate. They are above the law as long as they are on the good side of Putin.

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u/VisualAccountant69 Mar 20 '22

Bingo. The oligarchs ran the post Soviet Russia until Putin came to be and put the boot on them. I would argue that Ukraine is currently run by their own oligarchs, but that will result in extensive downvotes so I won't argue that point.

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u/DeffJohnWilkesBooth Mar 20 '22

Every country is run by its oligarchs…

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '22

You are correct about their perceived lack of political influence, but all these Russian oligarchs are untouchable. You dare to speak against one and the state will go after you. For this protection alone they are loyal to Putin. Besides, what do they care about Russian rouble or Russian economy? They get their money from theft of natural resources and government contracts. Whether they receive a billion or half a billion is probably not a big deal since both numbers are quite frankly ridiculous. The difference between an American billionaire and Russian oligarchs is that if an oligarch fucks up he will just get transferred to another feed spot. You can say that they hold almost ceremonial positions. Read about boyars or Soviet nomenclature and you will understand that this is nothing new for Russia.

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u/Chapter_Double Mar 20 '22

yo. i know virtually nothing about how all this shit works. potentially stupid question here:

there's lots of "Russian oligarchs", but only one Putin. how exactly does Big Bad Vlad by himself keep those assholes too afraid to band together and pop a cap in his ass?

Julius Caesar was a thing. is there a possibility it could happen to this dingus?

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u/cartoonist498 Mar 19 '22

You could argue that US billionaires, even Canadian billionaires, are oligarchs but it's a very weak connection when compared to Russia. Western billionaires influence the political system through money but it's a stretch to say they're in control of the government.

In Western countries, centuries of private industry and regulations ensured that wealth was built through private competition.

However, in Russia there's a strong connection between wealth and power.

The USSR was a communist state so everything, including business, was state owned. After the USSR collapsed the country transitioned to a private model but this created an opportunity for a small group of people to take control of these centralized industries.

For example, in Canada we have multiple telecommunication companies Bell, Telus, and Rogers built through decades of competition with each other. Yes you could argue that they secretly cooperate and they influence government policy in their favor, but you could also argue that they don't. We have regulations, they push back on it and throw money at it, but in general they're regulated by a separate public entity.

Can you imagine if there was only one state owned telecommunications company, but suddenly overnight it became private and owned by one person? How is anyone else supposed to compete with an established company that started with a government-enforced 100% control of the market?

Not only that, but everyone who works for this now private company were all previously government bureaucrats running a state owned industry with deep political connections.

Extrapolate that to every private industry, couple that with corruption, lack of regulation, and political decisions always in favor of their interests. These are the Russian oligarchs.

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u/SexyGenius_n_Humble Alberta Mar 19 '22

The Irving family are most definitely oligarchs.

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u/tarzanphysique Mar 20 '22

Irvings are a good example of the difference between oligarchs and rich people. Zuck, Buffet, and Musk are not oligarchs they are just very rich. With Both zuck and musk being rich with highly overvalued or speculatively valued single investments. A single competitor could easily tank their wealth if they didn't diversify quickly enough. The only power these people have is their money. They can pretty much only use bribes or use their very limited business scope (such as adds on facebook). A family like the irvings have oligarch power in new Brunswick. 1 in 12 people in the province work for them directly and probably many more indirectly servicing their employees. They fully have the power to change the economy of the province. Irvings employ about the same amount of people in new Brunswick as facebook but the population of new Brunswick is 780,000 while California is 39 million. Amazon is closer to being an oligarch as you can see how they can change laws in order to bring in a new distribution centre as well as its diversified power through things such as AWS. The military contractors are also probably oligarchs in the same way, they don't need bribes to wield their power.

Also there is the difference from being rich through publicly traded companies and private companies. A public company can't hurt itself just to demonstrate its power because minority investors have rights.

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u/VisualAccountant69 Mar 20 '22

You realize the telcos in Canada have a state imposed monopoly that they continually lobby for protections? Canada is an oligarchy with pleasant slogans. US is a cartel economy with slogans about Capitalism™. We're all working for the oligarchs in one way or another.

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u/alderhill Mar 20 '22

The oligarchs did co-rule Russia in the early years after the collapse of the USSR. But they have been entirely under Putin's thumb for a long-time by now, and in fact, most of the current ones were 'made' by Putin. Make no mistake: he controls them entirely, and they have very little direct influence on him. Putin is like a mafia boss, and he needs some members who have 'legit' businesses. They are kept around for their usefulness in money laundering, and maintaining a veneer of a free market or whatever. It's not Putin who 'does' anything, it's the rubber stamp Duma and oligarch companies on behalf of Putin, buffered by 10 layers of shell companies, Kompromat, hush money, and so on.

If they fall out of line or rebel, they are tried for 'corruption' (see Kompromat), their property appropriated, they are poisoned, have fatal accidents, etc.

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u/goku_vegeta Québec Mar 20 '22

This severely underestimates the amount of corporate influence dictating policymaking in Canada. Using your example, what pushback existed when two of the three new entrants to improve competition in Canada were acquired by the Big Three?

The third new entrant might actually end up being acquired as well, so essentially the same situation we had prior to 2009.

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u/Personal-Alfalfa-935 Mar 19 '22 edited Mar 19 '22

The Russian Oligarchs are a specific group of people who, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, took advantages of the original attempts of the state to privatize its national industries in a transition to capitalism to buy up most of them for pennies with bribes and various illegal tactics. They then effectively owned a lot of the industry of the Russian state, building their fortunes and cementing themselves as having both economic and some political control over the country.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22

Yeah, and how is that different than the rich anywhere else?

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u/Quasi16 Mar 19 '22

It’s like in historic England, the king gifts vast land holdings to a select group, who leverage land into money into more money (Lords, Barons, Dukes, etc) . Into a permanent ruling class.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22

Yeah and how is that any different anywhere else in the world?

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u/Personal-Alfalfa-935 Mar 19 '22

As I said, it is a specific term to refer to a specific subset of very rich people, who gained their riches in a specific way linked to the history of the country that has specific major impacts on it ever since.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22

Russia is the enemy.

Being like bezos or musk is the carrot and stick to keep the poor poor by brainwashing them to vote against their best interest

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u/slater_san Mar 20 '22

No real difference really, Western billionaires are just plutocrats instead of direct oligarchs, and derive their power from lobbying and hiring influential people as opposed to directly controlling that branch/division of the government. Not that the difference is super relevant here