FWIW I once summed up the various fines (anti-trust etc.) doled out by the EU by country/continent
I would be interested in seeing this analysis, but I'd also be interested in knowing two things:
1. When was it done?
2. Were you analysing fines by member states or fines by the Commission itself?
My very strong impression is that in recent years there's been a new phenomenon of the EU itself dishing out fines of vast new magnitude - not an EU member state, but the Commission. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but it feels like it's started in earnest now. Indeed GDPR and Vestager's time as anti-trust commissioner are relatively new.
Institutions such as the court system and, more generally, the rule of law, are the reason we (some of us) can enjoy life in peace, and shouldn't be torn down just by empty cynicism
Whilst I fully agree, there are some other factors at play here.
One is that EU level fines aren't levied by the court system. The EU bureaucracy acts as judge, jury and executioner. Fines simply ... appear. There is no right of defence. Fined firms may then appeal to the ECJ, but this takes a very long time and I don't know if there are any cases yet where an appeal went against the Commission.
This is not how normal justice works of course. Normally the government has to prove a firm guilty of criminal behaviour first, then punish it second. The EU reverses it. That's a fundamental change.
Secondly the ECJ is a corrupt court. It has a history of corrupt and ideologically motivated practices. For instance it has heard a case where the plaintiff didn't know they were part of a court case at all. When informed of this state of affairs by journalists, the ECJ ignored it and continued. There have been a long string of rulings where the ECJ openly and blatantly ignored what the written law of the treaties actually said, with Kafka-esque interpretations of language the treaty authors thought was bulletproof.
Why is the ECJ like that? Because like all EU institutions it is created and staffed by people who are ideologically committed to the furtherance of the EU project. They are not independent; they are fully bought into the Federalist agenda. That agenda is currently suffering due to member states not wishing to grant the EU more money, and because the UK is leaving (trying to leave), which will cause a large drop in budget. Endless vast fines against tech firms for violating laws so vague all sorts of ordinary behaviours could conceivably be illegal is a perfect vehicle for them to top up the bank balance ... because that's where fines go. Straight into the EU's own institutional pockets.
You last paragraph reads reallt badly:
"
Why is the US supreme court like that? Because like all US institutions it is created and staffed by people who are ideologically committed to the furtherance of the United States Government. They are not independent; they are fully bought into the Union agenda.
"
And you bit about budget is complete nonsense! Where did you even get this?
These fines are minuscule compared to the EU overall budget, they aren't there to cover some kind of budget shortfall.
You can't make that comparison because the Supreme Court is not dedicated to the agenda of the US Government, in fact, it's not even meaningful to say the US Government has any sort of long term agenda because what the USG wants to do tends to change every time a new President or Congress gets elected.
The EU is different because it has a long term overriding Federalist agenda independent of EU elections, which can't actually change anything.
As for the budgets, maybe you're running behind the times.
Let's take the UK's budget contribution to the EU in 2017, it's about £13 billion. That's a lot of money, the UK is one of the biggest budget contributors.
Just one single fine of one single company, the 2018 fine against Google, clocks in at $5 billion! Earlier in that year the EU fined Qualcomm $1 billion. In 2017 Google was fined $2.7 billion.
The fines against US tech firms alone are in the same range as the entire contribution of one of Europe's biggest economies. There is an absolutely vast conflict of interest there, on a scale never seen before.
I would be interested in seeing this analysis, but I'd also be interested in knowing two things:
1. When was it done?
2. Were you analysing fines by member states or fines by the Commission itself?
My very strong impression is that in recent years there's been a new phenomenon of the EU itself dishing out fines of vast new magnitude - not an EU member state, but the Commission. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but it feels like it's started in earnest now. Indeed GDPR and Vestager's time as anti-trust commissioner are relatively new.
Institutions such as the court system and, more generally, the rule of law, are the reason we (some of us) can enjoy life in peace, and shouldn't be torn down just by empty cynicism
Whilst I fully agree, there are some other factors at play here.
One is that EU level fines aren't levied by the court system. The EU bureaucracy acts as judge, jury and executioner. Fines simply ... appear. There is no right of defence. Fined firms may then appeal to the ECJ, but this takes a very long time and I don't know if there are any cases yet where an appeal went against the Commission.
This is not how normal justice works of course. Normally the government has to prove a firm guilty of criminal behaviour first, then punish it second. The EU reverses it. That's a fundamental change.
Secondly the ECJ is a corrupt court. It has a history of corrupt and ideologically motivated practices. For instance it has heard a case where the plaintiff didn't know they were part of a court case at all. When informed of this state of affairs by journalists, the ECJ ignored it and continued. There have been a long string of rulings where the ECJ openly and blatantly ignored what the written law of the treaties actually said, with Kafka-esque interpretations of language the treaty authors thought was bulletproof.
Why is the ECJ like that? Because like all EU institutions it is created and staffed by people who are ideologically committed to the furtherance of the EU project. They are not independent; they are fully bought into the Federalist agenda. That agenda is currently suffering due to member states not wishing to grant the EU more money, and because the UK is leaving (trying to leave), which will cause a large drop in budget. Endless vast fines against tech firms for violating laws so vague all sorts of ordinary behaviours could conceivably be illegal is a perfect vehicle for them to top up the bank balance ... because that's where fines go. Straight into the EU's own institutional pockets.