wealthy british style old saying that's not right that's right. the. markets why not scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy in the kinds of reports on r t. is easy it's. easy. to me.

people don't understand what the european union is they don't understand how it's governed they don't know who are the people who are running it but they know that they were chosen by the people and so. when they see the result so less than perfect they say who do we blame. they don't know who to blame because they don't know who these people are. when i started out as a young environmental activist i had no idea that i should end up as a watchdog in the brussels machinery. but i was stunned to discover how fragile the political decision making process is and to realize how easily it

can be manipulated. there's a dark force behind this machinery an entire industry operating in the shadow often in secrecy and very confidential. it is a part of this industry is to lobby industry. when it comes. down to. it. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the decisions. and how do they operate. and how reading to the news political and.

religious belief. i'd like to speak to the police. i thought that well listen i'd like to. to leave a message for for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed . my name is mr kennedy's best calculates kidney r. and s. . yes from the from the european side this is for all e.s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get tired today to to go folks i want to that is it ok. thank you very much.

brussels is a small city it's a kind of provinces but that's on this earth. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place. this is where the business is taking place this is where they just station is da i think they were the figure is around eighty percent of all it's just places which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you did epicenter of political power in europe you see the

european commission on the one side next to the council of the e.u. . and all around that's where you find lobby offices most of them belonging to big multinational corporations you find them also in all of the side streets all over to the european parliament and beyond. who finds a good lobbyist for this of large corporations who find industry lobby groups and there are. lovely operations being you know orchestrated from offices in that area . two thousand five hundred lobby structures are based in brussels fifteen thousand lobbyists the second biggest blobby industry in the world only washington d.c. is bigger. so are there european union legislation this is complicated it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take. new initiatives for the for legislation for policies and then it goes to the

institutions the parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes its very first steps in developing new legislation or new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

ministrations and so when they want to have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what i went to i thought that that's on . something. and then i discovered. business around the youth institutions. are starting. to be lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. so we'll make those institutions and institutions in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but there is also. i know the word behind that which is how to influence the institutions to make a text to give a good idea to. propose amendments to trying to fine tune the text depending on the interest of the people when you're to push more. blubbing is it was originally envisioned is a good thing no lawmaker can be an expert in all the fields that he or she has to

deal with and so they rely on other people giving them advice. but lobbying went from their field of expertise into what is more properly called hired guns so you now have people who may not be an expert in anything they're dealing with but they're paid for by clients who want them to pursue specific. objectives what makes them so effective is many of these hired guns will be what what we call revolving door abusers and these will be people who were in governments then come out of government and are hired by the very same people that had business pending before them when they were in government and the mid ninety's we had come across so many examples of your policies that were basically captured by industry and industry lobbying we felt it was really

a fundamental problem here the influence of industries is excessive and we decided to set up a group to document examples and to start developing a strategy to roll back this excess of influence and that's how it started this. one day in the summer of one thousand nine hundred eighty. s. . and it came from the south of france. from the local environmental group. this group was fighting against a motorway that was planned to go through a valley in the area to live in the valley of us because you can very important to the area very beautiful area. the group if we knew more about the role

of the european union and and specifically the european commission in this motorway projects. so we started looking into this we discovered that this motorway project was part of something called the trans european networks. the trans european that works was the biggest infrastructure projects in history with the estimated budget of four hundred billion. euros. friends from sweden came up with another detail there was an influential lobby group behind this and they asked us you know about the iraqi the european round table of industrialists. i know. i started digging for more information about the iraqi. i went to our archive and i didn't find anything. i started diving into the alien world of the business press newspapers like the financial times the economist german business newspapers and we found

a reference to a new report that had been published shortly before called reshaping europe. but rather interesting and we ordered this report at the european the round table at quarters. i wrote on the request mentioning as the purpose of research. i did not believe i would get anything but a few days later a big brown envelope arrived in my letter box. please booklets are inside missing links missing networks and receiving your. i take the first two publications going through them something strange about them somehow they look so familiar. euro tunnel. scam link. peyronie's corridor. i go to the archive. at.

the t. and projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. what a striking similarity. the projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy paste. d.o.t. proposals. speak your language they will not advance. what news programs and documentaries and spanish matters to you breaking news a little turn to angles the stories. you hear.

that troy all teach spanish find out more visit eye to eye ball tito it's called.

ludeman. would know. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. meeting in doubling this mentioned forty five c.e.o.'s all from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turnover. companies like feel it's

a farce british petroleum kirkstall nestlé siemens shell unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book. the all source free cd or else. show more no girl in a hummer and this attacker. living in the netherlands a new vista decker he was the head of philips one of the largest companies in the country. and i was to have a volvo a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of lee honest as all very large french automotive national. so the authors of this report were three c.e.o.'s from some of the biggest companies in europe. it was a political manifesto written by decent industry leaders.

it was stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s would would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the to the face of europe. simply secure and so on. i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety decided that maybe suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started

to look to be located just. next. year. it would. be nice to be i have worked a. long time nine years in the open banking for duration and i started also to discover. an additional word to europe which was. international trade. commission. that will be here with me for her. thank you for freedom. but you see you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have. of contacts you probably find a figure of one hundred person which are really keep in mind. that you need to be very clear a commitment. i mean my job i describe it as

a network and as a fascinating time as an ambassador and from want to be an ambassador you have to know who you have to talk. to i can say that i will present around eighty percent of all services exporters and investors. as a turnover. let's say fifty percent of the g.d.p. of your opinion. i don't really believe in to check. it's part of it but most of the time you will provoke chants and then it's going to be up to you to see the opportunity when the chance that. in december one thousand nine hundred three the n.-g. o. network i worked for had its annual meeting and the meeting was to take place in brussels. we were very impressed by what we had found out about

a year to heat and its influence that time there were no academic studies to show to anything about the power of these large multinational companies on new policies . we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to call for attention on the role of teacher to. say. well we brainstormed about what to do and we decided to do something a little provoking. the night before we wrote a press release and in new york the morning we went to the ear to the office. one of us rang the doorbell and told the secretary that's here's a student looking for some documents and when the door opened we all ran up the stairs quickly and we all managed to get into the office that way. i remember very well i was at some meeting. in the morning so i think it was mid

morning i came into the office and found banners hanging around the office and lots of strange faces around so i said what's what's happening will somebody please tell me what's going on and they said oh we've come to occupy your building and. possibly they wanted a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police have the police come in through the mail but it didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally some reason but we had an office lunch so i took everybody my people out to lunch and left and then. we were surprised by the reaction that we got from the sea they went off into a room and talked about it apparently and decided to leave. and what we did was using the your t. is priceless we faxed the press release to the international media. we expected

that's the occupation of this very shadowy able to very powerful business lobby group which really interested media. but things went a little bit differently. i think we talked to one newspaper and there was a radio program that was interested before the rest that was silent. and that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. that's on the tables there were a position papers and reports lying around but it was also all very neatly organized archive everything sort it's. so we decided to move to be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and two months from the year to two european governments and to european commission and i would responses. and it really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence and it was

it was clear from those documents. when we tracked back the history of that your team we found that the start in the early ninety's. from the commission. the the member of the commission who was really keen was a man called a belgian called steve doesn't you know. he had diplomatic business background and he could see the need he said if i want to talk to european industry who do i talk to. but i found out the commissioner for industry the insufficient ground then with the commission. the economy grow. richer existed and with the fed. issues of interest

i would say i know for sure that but not at the level of the. sponsors for individual business and i felt that we were missing. and so we decided to set up. a group of industrious rich better be cared vidyarthi so as to have the capacity to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run the fia to newton a booth with the decker who rammed phillips in the no that i. was paid given how much who run volvo in sweden people from siemens and the big german chemical companies the french spaniards then the british. small number of people who ran. the biggest companies in europe and were ready to talk about

big policy issues with those people who were in charge of the european government. and then when they meet. a visionary president of the commission by the role they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same terms so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough read. i'm a facilitator that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being is the only way is. understood as a bit of a dirty word but it's just networking just contact between human beings.

and remake of the word. it is very small actually as a people we have to reach out actually at the end of the day it's becoming smaller and smaller if you know the right person actually you know it's going to be about a hundred person keep us and the rest are moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies are global. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine companies the taiwanese companies are actually my my allies we're working together for the same purpose which is to open up the market. in one thousand nine hundred three was the year when the european union was born. to us and have been sold as a political project. of these letters that we had found in

december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it. like with a t m projects. written by the iraqi. prefer the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. in. turn was amazingly jovial and informal. all that went on in complete secrecy. and the european commission worked hand in hand. and nine hundred eighty four missing links was published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the iraqi on exactly this topic generally in one thousand nine

hundred. this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe in one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single market. ten days later chuckle or new president of the european commission gives a speech about the single market in the european parliament which sounds like the echo of decker speech done to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five more cofield vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the ticker planned. i

never knew adam lanza in person but i was in the same high school as adam he was younger than me just a little bit younger. i always thought he was different i always intercity funny he rarely talks and you don't use a shy kid. i don't know anyone who is friends with and i also know of anyone who is particularly mean to the what i do know is that it was very clear that this person was not like everybody else. can imagine the level of mental illness that would be present to murder show. america's hero so when you go on news there would be an american behind every tree with a gun. for kids growing up in this environment is

good for them at an early age to least. see the gun and respect it because they need to know what kind of damage you can do. this is our first task as a society. keeping our children safe. this is how we will be judged.