this is why you should care only dot com. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. download the official ati application to yourself choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorites. if you're away from your television just doesn't matter now with your mobile device you can watch ati anytime anywhere.

people don't understand what the european union is they don't understand how it's governed they don't know who 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. to. not. in twenty years now i've been fighting to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings of the you 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 kenny's best calculates kidney r. and s. . from the from the open services forum e.s.f. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go to the phones i want to that is it ok. thank you very much.

breast as is a small city it's a kind of province's 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 was the figure is around eighty percent of all it's just stations which are. touching direct life of european citizens has actually been issued to. us.

if you look at plus human 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. to finance a good lobbyist for the large corporations to find industry lobby groups and their . lobby operations being in 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 their european union legislation this is complicated as 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 as the two chanst a problem and it's the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes its very first steps in developing new illustration all new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

ministrations and so we want to 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 more. something for me. and then i just other. business around the open situation. to the lobbyists.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. so we'll make the same situations 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 they are 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 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 the flow 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 asp a clutch of cleave 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 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 reports at the european the round table at quarters. i wrote in 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.

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now i'm really curious reshaping europe. a 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 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 c.e.o.'s. show or 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 the head of volvo a car producing company. and showman nor was the head of lee honest or 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 this industry leaders. what was stunning was that these descry 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 the face of europe. for. the second experience. 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 below pianist. and there. would. be i have worked a. long time nine years in the open banking for duration and i started also to discover. an additional work to europe which was. international trade.

commission. the elite. anything classic to. thank you. but you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have a lot of contacts you probably find the figure of one hundred person which i will keep in my job. to. educate her for her 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 i have to know who you have. 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 european union. i don't really believe in to. 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 anything about the power of these large multinational companies on 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 in the early 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 wanted 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 long range 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 press lists we faxed the press release to the international media. what 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 that was silenced. or 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 would be foster and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and months from the year two to european governments and to the european commission and i went to responses. and it really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence and 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 steve. he had diplomatic business background and he could see the need he said if i want to talk to european industry. but i found out the commissioner for industry. and insufficient contact with the commission. the economy. the russian rich existed reservation with the fetish is of interest out there i would say unofficial. but not at the level of the. sponsor for individual business and i felt that through a missing us and so we decided to set up. a group of industrious rich to be guaranteed. so as to have the capacity to listen to

the c.e.o.'s. the wood and yelling who run the fia in yesterday if we said decker who ran phillips and another that. was paid to learn how to 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 need. a visionary president of the commission by the role they find shut down is thinking in entirely the same tone. 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 it only is. understood as a bit of a dirty word but it's just networking just contact between human beings. 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 are moving around in brussels talking about. the crazed companies and global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the engine 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 and have been sold as a political project. of these letters we had from the december point is in a totally different direction in the. west or again the master plan behind it. like with a t m projects. written by the iraqi. 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 work hand in hand. and nine hundred eighty four missing links is published in. immediately after the european commission sets up a working group with the unexpected this topic generally 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 the 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 he's done to me and indeed. 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 planned. i never knew adam lanza person but i was in the same high schools that he was younger than me just a little bit younger. i always thought he was different i always intercept funny he rarely talks and you don't he was a shy kid. i don't know if anyone was friends with him i also don't know of anyone who was 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 children. america's you know so many go on this there would be an

american bond every tree with a gun. i think 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. we are facing a lot of problems you know. because no one thought to drink no good school. mates when you feel part. of a local what's national five days a law in all community one a community l.n.g.

motion will be used. to give debt down for a match up artist i was fired about i must fight. i'll fight for. the right. choose your language. of holy week over the influential going to say still some of the. treatments the pews the concerns get to. choose the opinions that you think are great to. choose the stories that in time good night truth be access to your office.