August 01, 2008 ... What have the Bulgarians ever done for us?.

A particularly scathing EU report has been recently published about rampant and blatant corruption in Bulgaria, and, as a result, Bulgaria has now had billions of Euros withheld until such times as it gets its bureaucratic procedures into compliance. Some have wondered if Bulgaria should be expelled from the EU, but if corruption was a metric by which to judge Bulgaria's continued admissibility into the EU, it would make similar sense to dissolve the EU immediately, since the EU is so mired in corruption that its accounts have not been signed off on for 13 years in a row, the MEPs have voted to keep the investigation a secret, and whistle blowers are publicly vilified, black-balled and sacked. To a reasonable mind this would suggest that Bulgaria is not so much guilty of corruption, but is guilty of not having properly hidden its corruption behind a screen of bureaucracy.

For example, the document 'Harmful content on the Internet and in video games' has just been published. As part of its many recommendations with regard to the supposed explosion of Internet crime and dissemination of vile and offensive material, the immediate establishment of committees overseen by ministers and other civil servants and appointed expert is a priority. In addition, content providers, such as Youtube, must fall into line with whatever recommendation that arise form this new tier of bureaucracy, even though Youtube and others are doing a better job about eliminating the availability of any such material, than the criminal investigation agencies are able or willing to do.

A particular complaint in the report was that, Youtube, for example, provide no means by way of which a criminal investigation agency can be alerted to such things as the much vaunted 'Gang Rape' video clip, or instances of child pornography. This is next to impossible because even the criminal investigation agencies make it as difficult as possible to contact them about anything. One does sympathise to the extent that the 999 emergency service, for instance, gets inundated with ridiculous calls from elderly women who have misplaced their glasses, or a gentleman calls to enquire about why there are so few buses on his route. Nevertheless, this simply demonstrates an inadequacy of the criminal investigation agencies which must be rectified without challenging the competence of private Internet media providers who have the incentive of losing advertisers and members if they do not ensure that their sites are free from vile, offensive and/or illegal material.

This is how Bulgaria should have approached its corruption problem. Find publicly acceptable bogeymen to attack: the rich, greedy energy companies, for example, are always a good bet. Run a sophisticated and persistent line of propaganda in order to have the public persuade themselves of the vital necessity to establish another tier, or tiers of bureaucracy into which their money, including the money they do not have, into the fight against these bogeymen without any accountability over why hundreds of millions of Euros are needed to tackle problems, which are already being tackled by the properly motivated private sector.