
The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/europe/eu-farm-subsidy-hungary.html
======
Jerry2
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].

[1] [https://fair.org/home/russia-has-oligarchs-the-us-has-
busine...](https://fair.org/home/russia-has-oligarchs-the-us-has-businessmen/)

~~~
roywiggins
"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.

~~~
freeflight
> "Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed
> control over formerly state companies at discount prices.

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].

[0] [https://fs.blog/2017/02/aristotles-
politics/](https://fs.blog/2017/02/aristotles-politics/)

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-
echochambers-27074746](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

~~~
clairity
maybe this plutocracy/oligarchy framing will break out and overtake the
identity politics so dominating the culture (in the US) right now (hoping, but
not hopeful).

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.

~~~
andrepd
Exactly. I believe the focus on identity politics, rather than class, to be a
big strategic mistake by the left. The emphasis should not be on race, sex,
sexual orientation, etc, because _although_ those are serious problems that
need to be tackled, they can NEVER be the priority over _class_ , which is and
remains _by far_ the greatest source of inequality in the world (again,
notwithstanding other factors also being sources of inequality).

It's such a bad job that I wonder how much of it is intentional misdirection,
distraction from the true issues.

~~~
Arbalest
I agree. For quite some time, I've told people that I no longer pay attention
to the social left, when it is the economic side of left politics that makes
the greatest difference, even to social issues. If you ensure that people who
are otherwise marginalised have money, they will have enough influence through
their buying power to effectively punish the classes who want them to remain
marginalised.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I see an obvious flaw in this plan.

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?

~~~
wsc981
To me it seems really stupid, from an economical perspective, to fire a
competent employee just because their religion, world-views, sexuality or
whatever doesn't align with your own. I'd hope such employees can find good
employment elsewhere. If that'd be true, I'd say eventually these issues
should work themselves out in the long run, since a more diverse company might
be able to outcompete a less diverse company.

~~~
newen
That is such a naive framing of this topic when you have structural forces at
work here. An example is say half a century ago when you have 99% of
businesses practicing racist hiring policies. You can talk about economical
inefficiencies all you want but what ends up happening is a segment of the
population who are left with no good employment and continuing their
generational poverty.

------
wrnr
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.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
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.

~~~
flosstop
No just startups, there are established companies who take enough of their
revenue from involvement in EU sponsored projects that it effectively become
the sole purpose of their business. I've been involved in a few of these
projects (for a fairly legitimate firm) but you encounter the same companies
over and over again.

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.

------
buboard
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.

------
thewarrior
“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.”

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

------
angry_octet
Great article. Now do one for the US.

------
despera
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.

Sadly it's all greek and no subtitles around but pictures will tell the story:
[https://youtu.be/o25DPfZeFxI](https://youtu.be/o25DPfZeFxI)

------
xondono
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.

------
mindcrash
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.

------
chewz
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.

------
onetimemanytime
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

~~~
mmsimanga
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.

~~~
buboard
i m seeing an opening for corruption-squashing technoloty, although i have no
idea how it would work

~~~
mmsimanga
I am guessing we need to move to a cryptocurrency which can be traced from
source.

~~~
buboard
Or we use deep learning to train a corruption classifier. I m sure we can find
a lot of data points for the one class ...

------
9c8675a8
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.

------
pakitan
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.

~~~
buboard
afaik the subsidies would go to the landowner, not the company who's renting
it, no?

~~~
pakitan
Renting the land essentially means you temporarily own it, along with all the
benefits you may get, including subsidies. Subsidies definitely don't go
directly to landowner. Only indirectly via the rent payments.

------
rosege
I wonder if the Brexiters will use this report - I would be if I was them.

~~~
smacktoward
Why bother? They've done pretty well so far just by making things up.

~~~
repolfx
That's the EU loyalist line but look at the comments in this thread. Tons of
people saying, yeah, old news, EU money is corrupt and distorting, why is this
suddenly in the NYT? But notice how they're all people reporting personal
experiences. They're not linking to investigative journalism. That's because
journalists largely refuse to report on this kind of thing ... except in the
UK where the EU is actually held to account by the press.

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...](https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-development-
fund-offers-aid-to-the-poorest-countries-in-forms-that-are-most-likely-to-
deliver-results-for-the-local-people/)

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-...](https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/cap-subsidies-are-they-out-of-
control-and-why-cant-the-ec-stop-th-efraud/)

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.

~~~
macawfish
That doesn't sounds like a wasteful grant at all. Wasteful spending is
spending on things like war and for profit insurance companies, things that
suck the life out of the world.

Whereas circus arts and coconut production give life.

~~~
repolfx
And yet Europe has massive youth unemployment throughout large regions, there
is poverty, there are problems. Why are they spending money on trivialities
like circus performers in Africa: a place Europeans don't live?

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.

~~~
macawfish
We all do better when we all do better.

------
mnyary
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?

~~~
angry_octet
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.

~~~
bonoboTP
They were liberals at the time and spoke for tolerance etc. (Not joking, Orbán
used to be a liberal, he even was the vice president of the Liberal
International up until 2000 or so). He became conservative in the mid 90s.

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.

~~~
angry_octet
Goes to show, you can never trust politicians, even when they seem nice at the
time.

It's a shame the opposition are so divided and inept. Obviously control of old
world media is still pretty important.

~~~
mnyary
The opposition just recently took back Budapest and several cities. So the
situation is changing.

~~~
bonoboTP
Budapest has been more left leaning for a long time. The 2010 elections were
special because people everywhere were very fed up with the previous socialist
government for various reasons: Corruption, some effects of the global crisis
were blamed on them (but they definitely contributed their own share of
mismanagement), and of course the "Őszöd speech" leak wherein the PM admitted
at a party meeting that they've been lying for years about the economy and
they haven't got anything of significance done over the years prior.

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.

------
yourbandsucks
Funny detail in our ongoing political shift: 'populist' apparently now codes
as 'bad guy' for a lot of the NYT reader base.

William Jennings Bryant ain't happy.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
More like used to code for anti-business, whereas presently codes for
nativist.

~~~
yourbandsucks
That's a good way of putting it.

I could write a book on the assumptions, stereotypes and missed opportunities
involved in buying into that shift.

------
StreamBright
It is just another proof that some government intervention creates a bad
outcome for the majority.

~~~
EliRivers
I feel we'd be remiss if we didn't also note that some government intervention
creates a good outcome for the majority.

