[Open-Legislation] some thoughts on the elections + ranking of merit
stef
s at ctrlc.hu
Tue May 20 09:08:13 UTC 2014
https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/ep_elections_2014.html
> ep elections 2014
> 2014-05-20
>
> (I have to take a short break from forging code to share my concerns
> regarding the important upcoming European elections:)
>
> Recent developments regarding the security of the internet show a striking
> resemblance to western societies apathy towards the crumbling of basic
> democratic values. Looking a little closer the seeds of the European Union
> started about the same time a bunch of Californian hippies worked for the
> military on the internet. The idealistic spirit of those times is a unique
> heritage, never before did we have a decentralized means of communication
> and never before did we have such a diverse representation in policy-making
> as in the European parliament. "United in diversity" - indeed. Let's avoid
> the sad corruption of the internet to a tool of oppression and keep the EP
> working in the idealistic spirit of its creators.
>
> Wins
>
> Besides legislating on the standard parameters of toothpaste-stripes there
> are few very important policy domains that point beyond the usual 5 year
> horizon of the average elected EP representative. The European Parliament
> has been fundamental in stopping ACTA just 2 years ago. A battle which
> started long before (thanks wikileaks) the current batch of members of the
> European Parliament (MEPs) took their seats. Stopping the attempt to install
> EU-wide censorship - disguised as a child porn filter - was also a success.
> We have a lot of hope in the recently revised data protection regulation and
> just this month the network neutrality regulation proposal got saved by a
> broad coalition against the intent and interests represented by the lead
> rapporteur.
>
> Losses
>
> We lost the unitary patent battle last year - and thus also the EU economy
> and competitiveness. We still have all kind of data sharing agreements with
> the US. The network neutrality and the data protection proposal by the EP
> will also probably go into a second round after the elections. But the
> council will be smart enough to wait for the results before committing
> itself to the next step (which seems to involve the UK to veto this in the
> name of censorship hidden behind the ragged excuse of child porn.) We also
> lost the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, an important initiative about the
> prospects of the radio frequencies freed up by switching to digital
> television. Instead of opening up parts of this liberated commons, it is
> auctioned away to telco companies. With good legislation we could have
> created a new industry that provides local radio-based internet services.
> Instead we fed the quasi-monopolies.
>
> Future
>
> Among the many outstanding issues, most importantly ACTA is back on steroids
> called Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), a classical FTA renamed
> to TTIP so it does not sound so scary. Another concerning agreement is the
> Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which seems to be coming out of the same
> corner as TTIP. Similar future challenges are the conclusions of the Data
> Protection and the Network Neutrality initiatives. Data retention has just
> been ruled unconstitutional by the European Court of Justice, this topic
> will surely come back in the next term. The world is copying our laws, let's
> make sure they are copying good stuff.
>
> We live in exciting times, on the global level Europe has a lot of merit.
> However the other global players are not interested in a strong Europe, thus
> Euro-skepticism and national politics plays into our global competitors
> hands. The NSA scandal is a great example of this, as it shows weak isolated
> inaction in the member-states. The only serious effort has been the more
> than dozen hearings on this issue in the Civil Liberties Committee of the
> EP.
>
> Euro-skeptics
>
> As with many populists movements, the root-causes of euro-skepticism are
> partly valid and quite interesting. The European institutions are overly
> bureaucratic, some useless or redundant (looking at EP in Strasbourg for
> example), non-transparent, undemocratic and quite corrupt. The answer of the
> euro-skeptics to the broken system is quite wrong, the tool is great we just
> need to take responsibility, fix it and learn to use it! We are not living
> in a small isolated town, Europe is a major player in a global competition.
> As such we must use our power in a concentrated way, we must fix the
> problems identified by the euro-skeptics and be a role-model for the whole
> world with positive action like the rejection of ACTA or a strong Data
> Protection regulation.
>
>
> I see however a chance to become a skeptic myself. As with any technology,
> the EP itself I believe it is neutral, what matters is who and how uses it.
> If we allow the EP to degenerate by staffing it with the corrupt political
> elite that fails us daily at home, then I see a reason for skepticism
> myself, but still not against the institution but its inhabitants and rules.
>
> Villains
>
> "United in diversity" - indeed. the European parliament has members from 28
> countries, between 170-190 parties, even if there are large political blocks
> - or groups as they're called in Brussels-speak - in the EP. There's no sign
> of a suffocating and anti-democratic majority dominating the parliament,
> there's almost always some dissenting splinter-group. Of course in such a
> diverse crowd there are also all kinds of interests represented, mostly
> narrow interests. Some are fully legitimate such as the narrow interests of
> Mediterranean fishers for example are not concerns shared by a polish miner,
> or less legit meddling of foreign, non-european interests like the tobacco
> industry, or the US State department, Hollywood, Monsanto, or the pharma
> industry, you name it. Of course the bulk of the parliament is from dumb
> populist parties that have no values but lots of closely controlled voters.
> But for every topic you have some kind of small core group of
> representatives that is deeply engaged and informed about the issue. Some of
> these core MEPs can be considered the villains representing narrow industry
> or interests external to Europe.
>
> Champions
>
> Some representatives have a strong interest to strategically serve the
> diverse European society. Issues like copyright, patents, data protection,
> network neutrality have been heroically fought over by a handful of few
> MEPs. These sound like quite technical matters, but they are very much
> defining our environment and our daily lives. One of the most heroic of all
> was Amelia Andersdotter the young Pirate MEP from Sweden. Who although
> started only at half-time of her term - due to the blocking of the french -
> she took on responsibility as some kind of rapporteur for 17 issues with
> quite hard topics. She also authored more than a 1000 amendments, putting
> her way ahead of most of her colleagues when it comes to hard work and
> representing European social interest. Other notable champions were
>
>
> Claude Moraes (NSA hearings),
> Jan Philip Albrecht (Data Protection),
> David Martin, Francoise Castex, Zuzana Roithová, Alexander Alvaro,
> Stavros Lambrinidis, Pawel Zalewski (ACTA)
> Carlo Casini (roll-call votes in committees)
>
> ...and lot's of others, see the following part:
>
> Ranking of MEPs
>
> The campaigns of the leading political groups are incredibly boring,
> promising populistic visions of "Jobs, Growth and Security". Let's not get
> into the statistics and history game about their merits in this regard.
> Instead let's look at some facts on long-term strategic positions affecting
> all our society. score-ep.org ranks all MEPs based on their voting behavior
> on Climate Change, Fracking, GM Crops, Arms Trade and LGBT Issues. The
> presentation of this data-set is beautiful. Much less visual, and
> overlapping in the Climate Change dataset I have also prepared such a
> scoreboard.
>
> Based on the input of four interests groups whose assessment of the MEPS was
> available to me, this is a ranking of all MEPs serving in the 7th (currently
> ending) term of the EP. The four data-sets I used came from:
>
> La Quadrature du Nets Memopol - and covers various internet and digital
> rights related topics.
> Lobbyplag created an assessment based on the amendments submitted in the
> civil liberties committee to the Data Protection Regulation.
> CAN Europe, Sandbag and WWF Europe rates MEPs based on votes related to
> climate change (this is overlapping with the ep-score.org data).
> Phillip Morris tried to influence the tobacco directive and some of its
> MEP assessments have leaked to the public and thus into this list ;)
>
> The results: eastern countries and conservatives have the least respect for
> civil liberties, long-term public good or social benefit. On the good side
> the official champion is Rui Tavares, he and his green fellows rank highest
> when it comes to representing the widest interests. Personally I was
> expecting someone else to come out on top, Amelia Andersdotter. Her problem,
> she was in the wrong committee - Industry instead of Civil Liberties - only
> members of the latter got scored by Lobbyplag. If not only the amendments of
> the civil liberties but also the Industry committee would have been rated
> she would've come out on top.
>
> The top 10 MEPs
> Total Score MEP Country Party
> 2.8888 Rui Tavares Portugal Bloco de Esquerda (Independente)
> 2.8809 Jean Lambert United Kingdom Green Party
> 2.7909 Mikael Gustafsson Sweden Vänsterpartiet
> 2.6472 Jan Philipp Albrecht Germany Bündnis 90/Die Grünen
> 2.6333 Pavel Poc Czech Republic Česká strana sociálně demokratická
> 2.6174 Tarja Cronberg Finland Vihreä liitto
> 2.6166 Cornelis De Jong Netherlands Socialistische Partij
> 2.6111 Marije Cornelissen Netherlands GroenLinks
> 2.6055 Bas Eickhout Netherlands GroenLinks
> 2.5681 Rebecca Taylor United Kingdom Liberal Democrats Party
>
> The bottom of this list is mostly populated by (french) conservatives.
>
> Ranking of countries according to the 4 criteria:
> rank country avg total
> 1 Denmark 0.729 10.206
> 2 Sweden 0.723 15.912
> 3 Netherlands 0.536 15.566
> 4 Estonia 0.458 2.751
> 5 Ireland 0.398 5.980
> 6 Belgium 0.349 8.725
> 7 Austria 0.325 6.825
> 8 Finland 0.297 5.056
> 9 Portugal 0.246 5.920
> 10 Cyprus 0.206 1.651
> 11 Malta 0.196 1.767
> 12 Greece 0.138 3.738
> 13 Slovenia 0.115 1.042
> 14 Germany 0.106 11.155
> 15 United Kingdom 0.052 4.073
> 16 France -0.003 -0.339
> 17 Lithuania -0.025 -0.333
> 18 Latvia -0.035 -0.318
> 19 Romania -0.044 -1.660
> 20 Spain -0.068 -4.104
> 21 Croatia -0.072 -0.875
> 22 Italy -0.142 -11.390
> 23 Slovakia -0.149 -1.938
> 24 Luxembourg -0.174 -1.049
> 25 Czech Republic -0.180 -4.324
> 26 Bulgaria -0.346 -7.622
> 27 Hungary -0.370 -9.634
> 28 Poland -0.730 -39.423
>
> You can download these datasets in a CSV format that you can load into your
> favorite spreadsheet editor: meps.csv, countries.csv, parties.csv.
>
> Conclusion
>
> So what I want to say is that, the EP is a powerful tool, there are a lot of
> important issues, there are a few good people in the parliament, they have
> been working hard, there's also a few corrupt people in the parliament that
> have vast industry support. And then we have the majority of the parliament
> who is so busy with other issues that they have no clue, they amount to
> about 90-95%. These masses follow either the champions or the villains. We
> must make sure that we have more champions and less villains and that the
> remaining masses are aligned with the Champs.
>
> So please look at the rankings, go and vote, express your skepticism of the
> people who brought us here, not the institutions that have been abused. It
> matters. Thank you.
--
otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt
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