Among the characters in Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 2016 television series Servant of the People, his country’s oligarchs are one of the most intriguing.
Their dialogue is set against close up shots of beautifully-manicured hands peeling grapes and carefully selected fruits, immoral to the core amid golden corridors and sylvan magnificence.
The oligarchs themselves are out of frame, urbane, almost umbilically connected. Slyly combative, one aggrieved oligarch, late in the series, reveals that its owner had always thought Zelenskyy was running as a proxy for a rival oligarch and that all the neophyte president’s emphasis on improving the country and its finances for the common citizens had been an annoyingly successful camouflage.
Zelenskyy’s character runs rings round the cabal but it’s a game of whac-a-mole against the odds of insuperable money and webs of opportunity, wielded without consequence or even pleasure.
Until then, I’d had pegged oligarchs as opportunistic eastern Europeans who had profited from the break-up of state assets and bought up Mayfair in a reality monopoly game.
I was hunting to find a word for what newsfeeds frequently call ‘the elite’ in electoral terms, even by such precise wordsmiths as the Guardian. ‘Political elite’ would have been helpful, but since, when I looked it up, elite theory turned out to be a recent concept in philosophy, sociology, political science and economics that claims that a select few individuals – often policymakers and leaders – hold a majority of power and control the political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society.
Unhealthy for democracy but, in the event, oligarchy is a better fit. Consider all those odd, greedy kings and queens.
In real-time political life, a lot has changed on the northern hemisphere’s political landscape this last month, with Britain emerging from 14 years of what is now being described as Tory vandalism and coming to grips with the extent that the billionaire press barons generate the austerity narrative before the voting boxes are even packed away.
Meanwhile the US is gearing up for an election that now doesn’t have to be an unseemly bloodbath between two old men and can get down to substance and public policies rather than bombast and minutely–recorded ill temper.
Against that background, the extent to which money rules the roost has been coming clearer; that we have been spiralling into a world where entrenched, intergenerational wealth is held, literally, by a handful of individuals. Mostly sequestered offshore.
According to Guardian commentator George Monbiot, the wealth of billionaires in the UK has risen by a thousand percent since 1990. “The richest 1 percent possess more wealth than the poorest 70 percent.
“Why do they have so much? Because the state does not; they have not been sufficiently taxed,” he says.
“We are told: ‘There’s no money.” But there is plenty of money. It’s just not in the hands of the government.”
By taxing the rich hard, the incoming Labour government could easily end austerity but its ‘tax and spend’ promises are already being pushed behind the rival mantra of “growth, growth, growth, even though tax and spend is the foundation of a civilised society.”
He says the opposite, and the default position, is not redistribution and general welfare but a spiral of accumulation by the very rich. “Normal is a society in which might is right. Normal is oligarchy,” the veteran conservationist says.
“If you want a return to the rich nations’ “normality” of 1945 to 1975 – in other words, to redistribution, a shared sense of national purpose, robust public services and a strong economic safety net, high employment and good wages – and I think most people would, you need a politics that is not just abnormal, but unprecedented.”
To overcome this default, political parties would need to overcome their fear of economic power: of the newspaper barons, the property developers, the fossil fuel companies, hedge funds, private equity bosses and assorted oligarchs who now fund and influence our politics, Monbiot says.
“The longer we leave this confrontation, the more extreme and entrenched oligarchic power becomes.”
Which is sobering, given our own current state of political play. ‘Tax and spend’ feels like a pipe dream and hardly fits our current political landscape (except if you are a cashed up landlord), so the mantra of ‘growth, growth, growth’ is all we have in the absence of political appetite for levelling up and gruesome litany of ill-advised economies and rigid austerity narrative.
How do we give the city $31 million in rates and get to spend $7 million on the island, much of it on (city-side) staff wages, ‘grants’ and planning documents. Nothing for climate mitigation, conservation of our damaged waters, preservation of community values or plain maintenance.
But one thing is certain – The job needs to be started, and soon.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
