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Comment by sunshine-o | Hacker News Reader

I believe people fundamentally misunderstand what the EU is and how it works.

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.

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This does not make sense to me. I question how much you have worked for the EU.

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.

I don't know where you are from, but at least in Slovenia if you see someone running for EU parliament you know he is basically retiring from politics.

EU parliament has no actual power, EU is basically ran by EC and ECB.

There has been plenty of movement between the EU parliament and the national parliament in Finland.

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.

I don't know why people expect EU to be some kind of strong do-it-all central government. Maybe it's a side effect of looking from far away like we look at China. But it was always a loose confederation with members retaining most of the power.

In the UK, before we (sadly) left, being an MEP was a bit of a joke, where being an MP was a much bigger deal. Maybe other countries are different, but nobody who wanted to rise through the ranks in the UK would opt to be an MEP over an MP, and I suspect that’s very similar in many other member countries.

> 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.

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 Parliament is a joke. And you can partially blame the member countries who really do not send their best 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.

You know the bots are out in full force, when the first comment on a China-critical post is what-about-posts about how bad EU is.

You can see how threatened they must feel by the amount of trolling they do

I tire of this internet trend of calling someone who disagrees with you a bot.

I also agree with you that whataboutism posters come out in droves whenever there is negative-sentiment news about a non-Western aligned entity.

In general I'd agree that whataboutism is a logical fallacy, since it is basically a form of ad hominem, but it can also demonstrate that an attack itself is unjustified. For instance imagine if a farm was attacked for having laborers pick fruit for pennies per pound.

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.

Actually my comment was not really negative (apart calling the Parliament a "Joke").

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.

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