This is not more than the wild claims of some gas turbine lobbyist and focus mainly on the UK. The EU is currently trying hard to reduce the reliance on gas, that lobbyist won’t change that as it is a pretty fundamental strategic requirement.
Having to calculate your final price of your meal, is a hidden price. A transparent price is when you pay concrete prices for concrete services, without any x% surcharge on everything. Maybe you like it that way, but exactly that should be illegal in the EU because it serves no purpose other than making prices appear smaller than they are by having a smaller number there that is not the full price.
Because hiding prices in obscure surcharges is deliberately misleading customers. Given that they are surely having a special menu for the occasion they can easily print the true prices instead of fake prices. I would avoid shady places doing that. If they fool customers when it comes to paying who knows how the fool them in the kitchen.
I’d hope flat x % surcharges are a violation of price transperancy rules in the EU but it could be that it is possible like in the UK. But it shouldn’t.
Iran surely approves.
It wasn’t US propaganda though. At most it was Austrian propaganda. Maybe I am also colouring childhood memories as well. It was just the general sentiment that Czechoslovakia is a polluted heavy industrial place and it was not entirely wrong everywhere either. But then, same could be said about the Ruhrgebiet back in the days of West Germany.
The Iron Curtain was incredibly entrenched in many minds, in some minds it is to this very day, more than 35 years after it has fallen. The funny thing is that the Iron Curtain was not nearly the unsurmountable obstacle even while it existed, at least for Austrians. You could actually visit most of these places as tourist, in the case of Hungary even fairly easy but even where the Iron Curtain still a fairly serious installation.
That’s a great choice, where the urban layout allows for it, without feeling suicidal. I know also the US has places where this is perfectly feasible.
You always need a majority in Plenum but the people specialised on the topic arealso advising party colleagues. It is impossible to get into the details of every proposal. Therefore it depends a lot on how controversial a topic is. For high profile legislation MEPs in the plenum might have a closer look themselves and make up their own mind but on low profile stuff they might simply follow the recommendation of their own guy(s) in the comittee.
PS: Lobbying is not always bad and if it is bad depends also on what political views you have. NGOs and Unions are lobbyists as well. But in many cases lobbying is indeed bad, especially when lobbyists are trying to hide their true nature and their traces.
In any parliament that does more than just rubber stamping whatever the executive does, you have committees that focus on specific topics. Members of Parliament specialise on some of those. There they actually draft stuff that then the full assembly is voting on. That is the only way it can work as you need people with some understanding on the topic to draft stuff. No person can be specialist in everything.
So you might have a few to maybe a few dozen people sitting in a committee. A few from each party and usually you also have at least obe person per party in charge of the topic for respective party. The Committee can not control the vote in the assembly (so it needs to keep in mind what the plenum will find acceptable) but it controls what the Plenum will vote on.
This is of course a great target for lobbying. However it dies not help on controversial issues where the Plenum will is ready to vote everything down.
If you are asking specifically about the EU, there lobbying rules in place for Parliament, Commission and Council. Lobbyists who want to enter their premise are required to register in a public list where among others the purpose of their lobbying, who they are lobbying for etc has to be recorded. Reputable big lobbying firms do that. But of course one can also do lobbying outside of those buildings.
Also, there is ar least some law enforcement happening. See the Quatar scandal in the European Parliament. While Quatar is openly bribing US authorities, without consequences, Quatar’s secret bribing of MPEs has led to MEPs losing their office and facing prosecution for corruption. The EU has also strengthened its own means for prosecution by establishing the European Public Prossecutor Office which is fully independent from the Commission unlike OLAF from which it took over this job.
All in all, control of lobbying is vastly insufficient but the EU is still doing more than many nonetheless.
Not that far off. In Vienna for example petrol starts currently at 1.6 EUR/L (7.1 USD/gal) and Diesel is around 1.8 EUR/L (>8 USD/gal).
The US has a serious problem of being hooked on unsustainably cheap fuel due to oversized vehicles, spread out, car only, suburbia etc. Add to that the lagging trans transition to renewables (or rather the outright hostility of the US administration, actively preventing projects)
I remember the anti-communist images of soot ridden grey towns next to steel works in some school book.Turns out it was an image of the future from the US, apparently. Minus the steel works I guess but all those gas turbines next to Tech oligarch data centers are not much behind that in terms of pollution.
The prime purpose for those loans is spending on European defense products. That is also part of the loan criteria.
What a load of nonsense.
I mean he is not lying here for once. Orban was one of the EU leaders who was doing everything he could to undermine and prevent European sovereignty and make us all colonies to foreign powers, or further fortify that position. The US and Russian regime liked that.
My bad. That was obly Tiktok in the OS. So it is under Chinese control. Either way Russian propaganda is ever oresent there.
All three of them are controlled by US tech oligarchs that are closely aligned with the US regime which was heavily interfering in favour of Orban as well. As far as I know you were flooded in all three with Fidesz propaganda and disinformation. Never mind that Russian propaganda is strong in all three of those as well and it was doing the same.
Budapest shouts “Russians out”, in memory of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and against the Putin asset they ousted today.
Don’t worry. That story us about the Eurooean market. I think the US is safe from such probably communist concepts like markets with actual competition.