houston residents in terror called nine one one and scrambled for cover and even to schools put on lockdown as a military helicopters participate in a multi-agency training for ill in miami at night in the middle of downtown onlookers caught in video on their telephones of blackhawk helicopters pumping loud blank em all on to the people below and maybe even as i speak a flexibly scheduled military drill could be happening in jasper county south carolina you know when i was a kid they tell us about how that year old soviet union would parade their tanks around how there were soldiers all over their oppressed country even in one thousand nine hundred four all made it a point to describe our military helicopters would eternally be overhead and a dystopian nightmare world now we're living the nightmare the united states is a huge country there's plenty of room on remote army bases to do your training also last time i checked afghanistan evil which is don't look like downtown miami just who are you training to kill anyways knock off the terror trainings but that's just

my opinion. people don't understand what the european union is they don't understand how it's going and they don't know who the people who are running it but they know they would choose the people and so. when they see the results 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. for. this industry is to lobby industry. to.

see anything. and i think. it. is not. seen 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 hoarding to use political and. religious belief. elect 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 kenny's best calcuttans kidney r. and s. . from from the european services forum yes said this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go to those i want to that is it ok. thank you very much. breast this 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 this is taking place this is where legislation is dealt i think there with the figure is around eighty percent of all it's just stations which are. touching direct life of lupin citizens is actually delicious to hear just. if you look at plus you epicenter of political power in europe you see the european commission on the one side. you. and all the bum that's where you find robbie officers most of them belonging to big multinational corporations and you find them also in all of the side streets all over to the european parliament and beyond. to finance the lobby at borders of large corporations who find industry lobby groups and their lobby operations being in office traders 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 their european union let's listen this is complicated it goes through a lot of stages it always starts with the european commission they take a new initiatives for the for legislation for policies and then it goes through the institutions the parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes his very first steps in developing near this station on new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

i mean any situation so anything when i have the possibility to go and work. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what that we saw that much more on. something. and then i just all the business around the open situation.

started. to be lobbyists. you know we. everybody believe the bat. is a real makers 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 when you're to push more. loving is it was originally in vision is a good thing no lawmaker can be an expert in all the fields where he or she has to deal with and so they rely on other people giving them a voice. 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 governments 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 lobby 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 roll back this excess of influence and that's how it started. one day and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred three i remember

a fax came in on a fax machine in the office. and it came from the south of france and 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 asp a clutch of can be very important to the area a very beautiful area and. the group asked if we knew more about the role of the european union and and specifically the european commission in this motorway project. so we started looking into this we discovered that this motorway project was part of something called the trans european networks. the transfer paean that works was the biggest infrastructure projects in history with the estimated budget of four hundred billion euro. 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 a year to 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 altered this reports at the european their 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 resave in europe. may 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. the t.n. project by the commission. i go for the papers compare them back and forth. for the striking similarity. projects are almost identical. commissions seems to have copy paste a deity proposals. wealthy

british style but it's sometimes. hard. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy. headlines kaiser report.

claims.

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 fiat's the farce british petroleum kirkstall nestlé siemens shell unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book. the all source freeze c.e.o.'s. show mono girl and homer and this a decker. living in the netherlands i knew this 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 lee 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 a stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s woods would sit down and actually write. a report that was a detail set of recommendations for how to change the face of europe.

an experience that. i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety cited that may be suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to learn to be open just. used 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. the elite. anything. like your book

read them. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find a figure of one hundred person which i really keep in mind. you that you keep your thirty year commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network 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 would present around eighty percent of all services exporters and investors. as a turnover. let's say a fifty percent of the g.d.p. of european union. i don't really believe in to chat. 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 open. when chatting. 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 t. and its influence that time there were no academic studies to show 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. twelve we brace talked about what to do and we decided to do something a little provoking. the night before we wrote a press release and in the early 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 meat chain in the morning so i think it was mid morning i came into the office and found banners hung you 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 and 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 them there.

when i was 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 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 before the rest it was silent. and that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back for that's on the table as there were a position papers and reports lying around but it was also a very neatly organized archive everything sort it's. so we

decided to move to would be foster 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 i know what the response of . that is really showed the degree of access that they had a new incredible influence that. was clear from those documents. track back the history of the year two we found that the start is to be early this is. from the commission the the member of the commission who is really keen was a man called a belgian called steve it 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 but there was an insufficient contact then withdrew the commission. the economy. 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 or group of industrious rich or be guaranteed yesterday so as to have the capacity to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who run the fia in italy two three said decker who ran phillips in the netherlands. was paid

given how to run a 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 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 very. you know really president of the commission write the law to find do law is thinking in entirely the same terms so why don't we get together poor ideas that's a breakthrough read. i'm a fascinating that's probably a good a good word 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. and we're going to 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 keepers and the rest are moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies are global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies are 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 that had been sold as a political project. of these letters that we had found in december point is in a totally different direction. from. the west or again a master plan behind it's. like with a t. and projects. written by the ear ear to. the final showed that the year t. and the european commission meeting on a regular basis. only was amazingly jovial and informal. ever 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 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 down to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five your coal fields vice president of the commission published a famous single market white paper a copy paste of the day could land. it

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i lose. based on. how to sing the. phrase. today which is a big. thing. for. someone to stop the bloodshed. is there an absence of the team

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