7 Reasons the Peasants Revolted

#1. Because You're Revolting

Here's an article by Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post that allows that maybe, just maybe, there are some semi-legitimate reasons why someone might not appreciate all the wonderful blessings provided by Big Brother the Euro-Blob.

I was shocked to see it on MSN, which is such a reliable house organ of the Ministry of Truth that Joseph Goebbels is jealous. It must have been the shock that made them publish this heresy, so I thought I'd better post it before it went back down the Memory Hole.

"7 reasons why some Europeans hate the E.U.

1. Pay for E.U. bureaucrats

Even as individual nations across Europe have had to impose grinding austerity measures, including slashing pay for government workers, most European Union employees get paid generous wages with special, minimal taxes. The Telegraph — an anti-E.U. newspaper — found in 2014 that many mid-level E.U. workers were taking home more money than British Prime Minister David Cameron.

2. Wasteful travel

By treaty, the European Parliament can only meet in full session in Strasbourg, France. But most of the E.U.’s operation is in Brussels. So one week a month, the whole apparatus — legislators, support staff, lobbyists, journalists and everyone else, 10,000 people in all — travels five hours to Strasbourg. It’s as though Congress could only pass laws one week a month — and it needed to do it in Cleveland. But this parliament has 751 members. Oh, and it can’t propose legislation — it can only approve legislation that comes from the non-elected European Commission. The cost of maintaining two parliamentary seats is estimated at $200 million a year.

3. Overreaching regulation

In Britain, the famous “bendy banana” came to be a symbol of Brussels regulatory overreach, when Brussels set guidelines that bananas should be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature.” Those advocating a British departure from the E.U. said Britons could decide for themselves how bent their bananas could be.

4. Lack of accountability

The big decisions in the E.U. get hammered out behind closed doors, whether it’s inside the European Commission or at meetings of E.U. leaders or ministers. Unlike lawmakers in national legislatures, where much of the sausage-making happens in the open, E.U. leaders bargain in private, then announce their decisions afterward, leaving journalists to play detective to figure out who advocated in the closed conclave.

5. Ignoring rejections from voters

The E.U. has a long history of absorbing national ballot-box defeats, then moving onward to achieve roughly the same result through other means. When voters in France and the Netherlands rejected an E.U. constitution in 2005, E.U. leaders came back two years later with something called the Lisbon Treaty, which implemented many of the same changes but through a different legal path that didn’t require checking with voters first.

6. A Babylon of costly translations

Depending on how you read it, you might find the E.U.’s tendency to translate nearly everything it does into all 24 of its official languages a testimony to its internationalist glory or a wasteful use of resources. By E.U. custom, all public E.U. documents are translated into every language. All high-level E.U. meetings are the same way. The European Commission says it employs 1,750 linguists, 600 full-time interpreters and 3,000 freelancers.

7. Unnecessary bureaucracy

Every E.U. member state gets to appoint a commissioner, whose job is a bit like a cabinet secretary in the United States — a politician charged with administering an agency. But as the E.U. expanded, it needed to dream up new cabinet agencies to match the number of members. So it has one commission for international cooperation and development, another for trade, another for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness, another for economic and financial affairs, and another for internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and small and medium businesses."................

This article barely covers the true stench of all the graft, corruption, grift, sleaze and tyranny, both monstrous and petty, of the thing. But it's something, I suppose.

This quote by the President of the European Parliament Martin Schultz captures the true democracy-loving spirit of the Crony-crats, though:

"The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate."

No, the Consent of the Governed is not the EU philosophy--which is why the Brits left.

Germans really, REALLY don't like giving back countries they've conquered, do they?