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To: Rarebird who wrote (66097)	3/18/2001 11:25:44 PM
From: Follies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116922

That was a nice landslide win for Hillary, don't you think? I failed, I underestimated the ignorance of the american public once more.

To: Rarebird who wrote (66097)	3/19/2001 8:09:14 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116922

Socialist Europe Dictates to American Business NewsMax.com Monday, March 19, 2001 The Europe Union – the socialist-dominated governing organization for the continent – is now playing a major role in U.S. business activities, to the point of vetoing business transactionns between American companies. Sprouting in Brussels, the capital of the EU, is a European bureaucracy that can be even more worrisome to U.S. companies doing business in Europe than the Washington regulators who have been the bane of their existence. "Call it the rise of the borderless bureaucracy: In a networked world, the Eurocrats of Brussels hold as much sway over Richmond, Silicon Valley and Manhattan as their counterparts in Washington, D.C. – maybe more because they're more apt to exercise it," writes Frank Rose in the April 2001 issue of Wired magazine. An arm of the 15-member European Union, the European Commission is presided over by 20 commissioners, each empowered to oversee different facets of Europe’s commerce – a function they do not hesitate to exercise with enthusiasm. U.S. computer giant Microsoft has good reason to fear the Commission; already embroiled in a nasty confrontation with the U.S. Justice Department, which is seeking to break the company in two, Microsoft now faces a bureaucratic mandate that could force it to hand its Windows source code to Sun – a move not even the Clinton Justice Department would ever have contemplated. The Commission's rationale: force Microsoft to hand over the code to its competitor so all servers – not merely those running Windows – can work with PCs. As Wired commented, "It would be like making Coke hand over its secret formula to Pepsi." A Microsoft insider told Wired that if the Commission orders his company to give Sun the code "Microsoft might well pull out of the server business in Europe." The commissioners' aim is to prevent monopolies from taking root in the Euromarket, but in a number of cases it has stepped in and fought business concerns from merging even when competition would not be affected. The EU's Commission has already flexed its muscle. For example, its veto stopped Time Warner's and EMI's plans to combine their music operations cold – even though the merger would have left plenty of room for competition from the other four companies in the field. Each of the 20 commissioners is appointed by his or her home government. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK each pick two commissioners, the other 10 member nations get to pick one. Most worrisome to U.S. firms is the dominance of Europe's socialist governments in the European Community – a fact that does not bode well for companies accustomed to working under America's free enterprise system. Almost every country is Europe is governed by socialist governments, and their views are reflected in the policies of the European Commission. Although the stated aim of their anti-monopoly programs is to ensure free competition, the Eurocrats are the products of socialist governments and tend to adopt the coercive methods that are the modus operandi of Marxist regimes. Corruption, endemic in bureaucracies, is another problem: In 1999 the Commission was accused of fraud, nepotism and mismanagement. A 144-page report documented the charges, and the entire Commission got the boot. The report noted that one commissioner had put her dentist on the payroll as an AIDS researcher. "In Washington, there is some sense of accountability," a U.S. corporation executive told Wired. "But in Brussels you’re in a different world, playing by different rules. They're not beholden to anyone, and they really resent American dominance." newsmax.com