On Mar 30, 2014, at 12:33 PM, Doug Henwood <[email protected]> wrote: > > “All of the oligarchs were financing the protests. European association suits > them well as it expands the metallurgical quota for Pinchuk and Akhmetov, > both of whom have already done so much to legalise their capital in the > west,” says Karasyov, who is also Ukraine’s best-known TV political pundit. > > http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1a06857a-ae60-11e3-aaa6-00144feab7de.html >
=========== “I’ll tell you, sometimes I feel like funding a revolution,” an exasperated oligarch in Southeast Asia told me. It was a classic expression of oligarchic power…spoken in late 2007. After a quick calculation, the oligarch realized it would only cost him about $20million to $30million to put 100,000 demonstrators on the streets of his capital for a month — a sum he considered cheap. In this instance, the oligarch did not rent a regime destabilizing crowd. He was merely venting his frustration… …A world audience was provided a glimpse in the Spring of 2010 of what happens when ruling oligarchs clash in the streets. Dramatic broadcast from Thailand showed government troops breaking through barricades and violently clearing thousands of “Red Shirt” demonstrators from Lumpini Park in the heart of Bangkok. Reporters explained that “Yellow Shirt” protestors were on the other side of the struggle…Missing from the story was the fact that this battle of the shirts was also a titanic fight involving Thailand’s most powerful oligarchs, including members of the royal family. [Winters, 2011; p. xiv] http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/resurgence/2009/224/world1.htm http://www.prachatai.com/english/node/2694 Benedict Anderson: Outsider view of Thai politics Fri, 05/08/2011 - 17:51 | by prachatai [snip] Crucial to a successful oligarchy is astute control of the electoral system. After Indonesia undertook its first ‘free elections’ following the fall of Suharto -- elections which were hailed as democratization in the Western press -- I ran into a senior American colleague who specializes in electoral systems, and, in fact, advised the Indonesian government. When I asked him his opinion, he shook his head and said “They have the worst electoral system I have ever experienced. This is not an accident, nor a sign of stupidity. The political leaders knew exactly what they were doing in framing the laws on elections.” You can spot oligarchies also by the hierarchical language they use to generate legitimacy. The key word to look out for is “give.” The kind-grandfather regime will “give’ the national grandchildren almost free education, subsidies for farmers, tsunami warning apparatuses, cheap loans, computers for elementary schools, blankets and seeds for ‘backward’ ethnic groups and so on. I am not a great admirer of either the US or the UK political system, but people in those two countries would find it odd and even insulting if the President or the Prime Minister talked about, say, ‘giving’ one million new jobs. I’m afraid that even the best Thai scholars do not yet pay enough detailed attention to the Thai oligarchy’s language. In Indonesia today, you will often find oligarchs complaining that the rakyat masih bodoh, which means the masses are still stupid/naïve. The phrase was coined in the period just after independence was achieved 60 years ago, when people thought this stupidity, created by the colonialists, would now soon disappear. Today the oligarchs without shame use the same language clearly meaning that the masses will always be stupid, and that is why the good-hearted fatherly oligarchy is necessary. It is not a matter of great surprise that this fascination with pseudofeudal hierarchy is quite visible among the aspiring middle classes, but at this level without the word ‘give.’ [snip] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
