You sometimes see it when institutes are on their last legs. One last flare. One more loud growl, one last swipe with fingernails pulled out, one more time with the chest sucked full of air and the face on nothing, pretending that things should be the way they always have been, because that’s how we’ve been doing it here for years.
You see it in the patriarchy. Today it is Johan Derksen who thought he could dismiss the rape of an unconscious woman as a ‘youth sin’ with impunity in front of hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. Tomorrow, his imbecile neighing bystanders will also find out that they are standing on an ice floe in hot water.
Support for the morals of the elderly man who for a long time thought he was untouchable in his universe in which racism, homophobia and women abuse are things to joke about is rapidly dwindling. It takes a long time before all the ruins are cleared, perhaps too long, but if you zoom out you can see it. We are experiencing a revolution.
You see it in the wealthy class. For decades it has accepted in silent gratitude that the tax system is the legal act of the devil and the great hope, with countless escape clauses for big business. Jubilee barrels, countless tricks for entrepreneurs in box 2 and for the owning class in box 3, all kinds of possibilities for border traffic between those boxes.
At set times, a big mouth was raised if it unexpectedly threatened to go the other way. With one last big swipe, ‘too much’ paid tax on savings was recently raked back through the highest court. For the record: this is about people who have more than the tax-free rate of half a ton (more than a ton for married couples) in savings, proving once again that comfortably owning a lot does not offer a rock-solid guarantee for a life that is free. is of greed and of rancor against the state.
Now the tide has turned and the cabinet is investigating possibilities to tax entrepreneurial and private capital a little less lightly. Because the money for all the holes in the budget partly created by the war has to come from somewhere. Again: it takes a long time, too long for a country with what some consider to be a superior civilization, but still. It’s a small revolution.
You see it in large companies. For years they have been able to count on admiration and on throngs of applicants at the gate, and on a government that ‘how high?’ asked, when a CEO requested that the prime minister jump. They no longer enter the Torentje unseen, public anger regularly surges at misconduct, judges take corrective action when nitrogen and CO2 standards are exceeded. And when PostNL or KLM are caught indecency towards their lowest paid employees, there is little understanding. Milieudefensie now threatens to hold Shell board members personally liable for non-compliance with the climate judgment.
Here too, there is a counter-offensive with a lot of noise: CEOs who reward themselves more and more (average 5.3 million euros, an increase of 35 percent compared to 2020, it calculated. Financial Newspaper recently). The return of the bonuses. For example, Booking.com gives the CEO retroactively more than 50 million euros in bonuses over the years 2018 and 2019.
They are belch in a world where they are no longer on top of the monkey rock.