DEBATE
We should not laugh at Stein Erik Hagen. He’s way too powerful for that.
GETS EXPENSIVE: It can be expensive to fly all of Rødt’s voters to Pyongyang. 145,000 people now say they want to vote Red. Dagbladet has calculated the case and found out that Hagen will have to pay 2.5 billion kroner if he is to be allowed to put everyone he does not agree with on the plane to the nearest North Korean death camp, the article author writes. Photo: Terje Pedersen / NTB
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External comments: This is a debate article. Analysis and position are the writer’s own.
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Published
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Mimir Kristjánsson. Photo: Terje Bendiksby / NTB
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Then he did it again, Stein Erik Hagen. It is not an election campaign until the West Bank’s own village idiot has stepped into the salad. Just a month after he called “navere” “lazy and work-shy”, Hagen now offers to buy a one-way ticket by plane to North Korea for all Rødt’s voters. The background is Rødt’s proposal to prohibit travel by private aircraft, a proposal that will be extra painful for Hagen as he usually flies back and forth to the cabin in Kragerø by seaplane (the stretch takes 2 hours and 26 minutes by car, speaking of “lazy and work cloud”).
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It can be expensive to fly all Red voters to Pyongyang. 145,000 people now say they want to vote Red. Dagbladet has rained on the case and found out that Hagen will have to pay NOK 2.5 billion if he is to be allowed to put everyone he does not agree with on the plane to the nearest North Korean death camp. The worst thing is that Hagen can afford it. During Erna Solberg’s reign, he has increased his values from 8 to 33 billion.
The chairman of everything
I repeat: Stein Erik Hagen has become NOK 25 billion richer in the last eight years. If he spends ten percent of this money on North Korea tickets to us who vote Red, he will still be Norway’s seventh richest man.
What is it really who bothers Stein Erik Hagen? Previously, he has meant himself “persecuted” by Jens Stoltenberg (who was hardly any Che Guevara). Hagen believed that Stoltenberg “picks out a group of a single person and a group he calls ‘rich’ and pursues them. That kind of persecution of individuals has been tried before in history. When I asked Hagen in an interview if he could elaborate, he compared billionaires to immigrants. Imagine if someone said as horrible things about immigrants as they say about billionaires! Then one would “probably have been caged inside”, he thought.
Vedum does not belong here
In other words, Hagen suffers from a far-reaching persecution frenzy, which he seems to have in common with many other Norwegian billionaires. In our society, there is probably no other group that complains and complains as much as the rich. In addition to Hagen, this election campaign has been marked by salmon billionaire Gustav Witzøes threats to flee the country unless the wealth tax of 0.85 per cent is removed.
Stein Erik Hagen never talks about the rich, always about the “so-called rich” or the “rich”. When Hagen puts the word “rich” in quotation marks (something both Civita chief Kristin Clemet and Conservative fisheries minister Odd Ingebrigtsen have also done this summer), it is because he “himself does not think I am rich”. We are talking about a man who is good for 33 billion kroner and who uses private planes to and from the cabin. But rich, “that’s not how I feel.”
Wealth and poverty are known to be just emotions. In that sense, it is ridiculous of the poor that they do not just feel a little richer, because then all their problems could be solved overnight. In the face of Hagen’s denial of his own wealth, it is difficult to make any other diagnosis here than petty madness.
Steers against infection chaos
Most people probably just shake their heads with laughter when Stein Erik Hagen enters the election campaign with a clown shoe and a red nose. On social media, many ask how much Rødt has paid Hagen to run an election campaign for us. But really we should not laugh at Stein Erik Hagen. He’s way too powerful for that.
It is well known that Stein Erik Hagen through his company Canica is the most important contributor to the bourgeois parties’ election campaign. This year alone, he spends NOK 7.5 million on sponsoring the Conservatives, the Greens, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats. Through this money, Hagen has helped secure a bourgeois majority for eight years (and huge tax cuts for himself). There is also no reason to believe that the Conservatives and the others are unaffected by the gifts they receive.
Although the money does not come with formal ties, no one bites the hand that feeds them. That is probably also why it is mouse-quiet from the Conservative Party when Hagen scolds Navere as “lazy and work-shy” or threatens to put all of Rødt’s voters on the plane to the world’s worst dictatorship.
Gets long, painful and difficult
The garden’s influence in Norwegian politics does not stop there. Hagen is also one of the owners behind the right-wing think tank Civita, where his daughter Camilla Hagen Sørli has also sat on the board. Civita has been at the forefront of the bourgeois intimidation campaign against Red that we have seen in recent weeks, among other things by comparing ourselves to Donald Trump and Viktor Orban. That Trump and Orban are on the right, it is not so careful.
The depressing truth is that Stein Erik Hagen, a man who apparently suffers from persecution madness and petty madness and who most of us just laugh at, is in reality one of those who decide the most in this country.
Conservative blackmail campaign
Usually, talkative politicians like Erna Solberg and Kristin Clemet become silent when Hagen steps on the piano, because Hagen pays their bills. Instead of laughing at Hagen, we should therefore take action to reduce him and other billionaires’ power in Norwegian politics. A good place to start is a new government that can tax big fortunes, big corporate profits, high incomes and big legacies properly.
Then Hagen would rather sit there in his seaplane on his way to Kragerø and laugh.
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