with way. 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 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. and 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. and

a part of this industry has to lobby industry. to. put any truth. to. it. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the e.u. decisions. and how do they operate. and how reading to the news political and.

religious belief. i'd like to speak to a fighter planes. 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 kenny's best calculates kidney r. and s. . from from the european services for all the s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get tired today to to go to the phones i want to that is it ok. thank you very much. dresses is a small city it's a kind of province's but that's on this earth. when

you know a bit further about its brussels is really the place. this is where the business is taking place this is where legislation is taught i think there was the figure is around eighty percent of all it just places which are. touching direct life of europe in citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you money the 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 and you find them also in all of the side streets over to the european parliament and beyond. who finds

a good lobbyist for the 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. has been here. so that european union legislation this is complicated as it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take a new initiatives from the for legislation for policies and then it goes to the institutions the parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments the european commission takes his very first steps in developing new legislation on new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

ministrations i'm going so when i have the possibility to go and live. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what i went to i thought that that's

all. something for me. and then i just other. business around the open situation. started. to be lobbyists. you know we. everybody believe the bad. so will 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. another world 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 we are to push for. lobbying 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 which 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 rollback this excessive influence and that's how it started this.

one day and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred. ninety of this. 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 a collage you can very important to the area a very beautiful area. the group asked 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 transfer p and 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 of the tales there was an influential lobby group behind this and they asked us you know about the year it's in 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 follows a rather interesting and we all are to this reports 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. scanning. 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. 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 kids stories. that i'll teach spanish find out more visit eye to eye. teeth.

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the. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. the meeting in dublin has mentioned forty five c.e.o.'s all from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turnover. companies like fee it's a farce british petroleum. nestlé siemens shell unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book. the all source free cd i was. showing more no girl in a hummer and this attacker. living in the netherlands i knew vis a decker he was the head of philips one of the largest companies in the country. and i was the head of volvo

a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of really honest as a 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 these industry leaders. oh it was so stunning was that these two three c.e.o.'s boards would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the good mood the face of europe .

for. europe and so on. i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety decided that maybe set this place is actually where the money is so i went to europe in banking federation. and i started to look to be obese. next. year it. would. be i have worked it. a long time nine years and you can bank in for duration and i started also to discover. an additional word to europe which was. international trade. commission.

here very few current. thank you. but you see you know our industries. yeah i mean if you are lobbyist you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find the figure of five hundred person which are really cheap in my job. yes. you did you hear very clear a commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network that has 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 would present around eighty percent of all services exporters and investors. as a turnover. let's say fifty percent to sixty g.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 at 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 the year to. say. well we brainstormed about what to do and we decided to do something a little provoking. the night before we were at a press release and into your morning we went to the ear to the office. and 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 want to do a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police have the police come and throw them out but. didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally there was some reason but we had an office lunch

so i took everybody my people out to lunch and left them there. we were surprised by the reaction that we got from the unity they went off into a room and talked about it apparently and decided to leave. and what we did was using the press lists 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. so things went a little bit differently. i think we talked to one newspaper and there was a radio program that was interested in for the rest it was silent. we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. but it's all the tables there were a position papers and reports lying around but it was also all very neatly

organized archive everything sorted. so we decided to move to it be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and two months from the year two to european governments and to the european commission and i would responses. and it really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence that was it was clear from those documents. so when we tracked back the history of that your team we found that the start in the early days. from the commission. the the member of the commission who was really keen was a man called a belgian called so. t.v. 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 where there was an insufficient contact then read through the commission on the economy call for it. version rich existed reservation with the federations of interest out there i would say unofficial. but not at the level of the. sponsor for individual business and i felt that we were missing. and so we decided to set up. a group of industrious rich better be guaranteed. so as to have the capacity of to listen to the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run

fee out in italy booth with a decker who rammed phillips and another. pair gillan have 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 lol they find jet dillo is thinking in entirely the same terms so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough really. and

that's probably a good a good way to put me as a description not being isn't always. understood as a bit of a dirty word but it's just networking just contact between human beings. who make up the world 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. moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies are global. and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies you 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 had been sold as a political project. so these letters that we had found in december pointed in a totally different direction to. the west or again a master plan behind us. like we could t.m. projects. written by the iraqi. prefer the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. its . tone was amazingly

jovial and informal. ever all that went on in complete secrecy. and the european commission work 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 unexpected this topic generated nine hundred eighty five this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single markets. 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 is done to mean in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five your cofield vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the ticker. download

the official application to your cell phone choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorites. if you're away from your television well it just doesn't matter how would your mobile device if you could watch on t.v. anytime anywhere. i never knew adam lanza personally but i was in the same high school that 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 him i also don't 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't imagine the level of mental illness that would be present to murder children. america's you know so when you go on this 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 it can do. this is our first task as a society. keeping our children safe. this is how we will be judged.