Huawei targeted in new European Parliament corruption probe
ftm.eu
ftm.eu
If you’re interested in recent history or telecommunication development over the last 50 years it’s a great read. It’s not a technical deep dive nor a political hit piece, the author wrote for the Washington Post and it really reads like a long and in-depth article. Which is actually nice despite sometimes leaving me wanting for more, definitely made it a quick read.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721789/house-of-hua...
Edit: Washington Post, not New York Times
I wasn't actually aware they had an English-language .eu version but great for them! I found their "about us" page to be a bit obtuse (no names, no locations, making it very similar to the "about" pages of fake news sites and extreme-left/right associated magazines), so figured it might be nice to add this bit of context: In NL, FTM is generally considered a respected news organization and they're not particularly associated with any political angle.
Basically how it goes in NL is:
- FTM writes something
- A few nerds pick it up
- A day later, bigger news sites write the same story worse, sometimes even crediting FTM
- Scandal ensuesMine is Zyxel (Taiwan). There are others like Sagemcom (French), Fritzbox (German), not sure if microtik (Latvia) does end user stuff?
The current European Council president, took such a job directly after being forced to resign as Portuguese prime minister due a corruption scandal, where the Portuguese police found thousands of Euros in hard cash in the office of his assistants.
Even more ironic, Portugal got a new prime minister, who two days ago, had to resign due to a....yes...new corruption scandal. So I expect him to get an EU job also soon.
Are we clear?
Although I agree that with latest guys it won't be long before they also get a thought police.
Likewise if I lived in China, and I had to pick between being spied on by my state or someone half way around the world - I would welcome the CIA to listen in all day long.
Personally I'm less bothered by China. I need to do business in the US, I don't need to do business in China. The US government has a lot of leverage to fuck up my life, I would not care about the reach of the Chinese.
chinese expats are heavily under the surveillance of the CCP.
sometimes the CCP requires them to work for it to be spies and they can hardly say no
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/04/world/china-overseas-poli...
[1] "Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” said the official." https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ice-detention-of-a-columbia-stud...
And get a tariff raise in response?
Will there be issues? Of course, whenever money is involved there are issues but as usual: level and degree matter. It's not binary black-and-white.
Living in this black-and-white world where you expect absolutely no corruption is not helpful, von der Leyen has plenty to answer on the Pfizer case and as far as I know the case is still being looked upon so institutions are working, they might not be as fast as we would like to see a conclusion but that's how it works as of now.
I'd suggest you to play less into the shitstorming, it just creates even poorer discourse on the internet, the effects of such poor discourse can be seen on the political environment of the USA at the moment. I believe we can all agree that's not a path we would like to go to.
E.g. US corruption is at least mostly in plain sight, with EU who knows what's going on.
Humans just love control and predict future and not good at uncertainty that's how we ended up here.
Here is what I have learned from people who know the system very well and after working with it myself:
- The EU is designed to be influenced and run by lobbies. And it is in the open and assumed.
- The Parliament is a joke. And you can partially blame the member countries who really do not send their best there, because they know it is joke.
- It used to be that corruption was not a thing in the EU. Just because none of those Commission people would risk their career and benefits, and it was severely punished. So they wouldn't even accept a cup of coffee from you.
Now it does seem things got out of control, at least in the Parliament.
You can see how threatened they must feel by the amount of trolling they do
I also agree with you that whataboutism posters come out in droves whenever there is negative-sentiment news about a non-Western aligned entity.
If one doesn't know much about the industry that would indeed sound potentially abusive - especially with sufficiently leading framing, yet it's also the global standard. That doesn't mean it's right, but it also means that allegations against one specific entity for such are, at the minimum, misleading.
I would invite you to see for yourself because those EU institutions are quite open, you can actually lobby them yourself.
Lobbying by the way is not reserved to corporations, you can and should lobby as an individual/private citizen. You can send emails to those people they will usually answer you.
1. EU is the most aggressive when it comes to legislation far exceeding the US in terms of privacy law, competition law and setting strict minimums for labor conditions etc.
2. Being a candidate to run for Member of European Parliament is considered to be available only to the Member of National Parliaments with the most personal votes and/or most influential. It is definitely not a job given to the low-performers, particularly because only a few seats are available per country.
EU parliament has no actual power, EU is basically ran by EC and ECB.
As an institution, the EU parliament has real power. It's just that citizens are not particularly interested in what it does, and the media consequently does not report that much about it.
The core issue is that being a MEP looks like a career dead end to an invididual politician. While national MPs have less power, they enjoy more media attention. And if you are an MP for a major party, you have a real chance of becoming a minister. The same pathway does not work in the EU parliament, because commissioners are nominated by national governments rather than selected from MEPs.
The problem is in practice those big law and regulations end up benefiting the biggest actors with "Star Destroyers" type legal departments and lobbying.
I have witnessed it, 10 years ago GDPR pushed most European companies in one of the hyperscaler cloud. Exactly the opposite of what we were naively expecting. The EU Cyber resilience act is finishing up the job.
Funny how now just because Trump was elected, some European are waking up wondering why they are in this mess and welcome more EU regulation to get them out of there...
The European Parliament is not made of countries, nor it is meant to represent national interests. National governments don't "send their best there", because it is the doing of each party in each nation. Sometimes parties that are represented in the EU Parliament are not represented in a member country's parliament.