see the bottom line there's still a lot of snow out here a good place for snowball fight. decent is bennett pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout what's been like bilbies like the drug the losses of emergency vehicles are exceptions. and 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 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 is to lobby industry. to. see any benefit. and i think. there's a. sense in twenty years now of confronting 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 the police. i thought that well listen i'd like to to leave a message for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed. name is mr kenny's best calculates kidney r. and s. . from the from the european side it's just. the s.f. yes and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get tired today to to go to those i want to that is it ok. thank you very much.

dressed as 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 just places which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you money 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 and 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 and find industry lobby groups and their lobby 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 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 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 i'm going so when i have the possibility to go. for the

private sector where i will decide myself. what i went to i thought that that's all . something for me. and then i just all the business around the open situation. to be obese. you know we. everybody believe the bad. so will make us into two things

and institutions in the european union is about the commission the council of ministers and the european parliament but there is also. another well 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 from. blabbing 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 affective is many of these hired guns will. the what what we call revolving door abusers and these will be people who were in governments then come out of government and 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 rollback this excessive 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 they lived in the valley of asp a clutch of cleaver 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 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. euro. funds from sweden came up with another of the town there was an influential lobby group behind. yes 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 is 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. here in these 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 pasted the unity proposals. more news today is once again flared up. these are the images cold world has been seeing from the streets of canada. showing corporations are all day. emission free accreditation free comes for charges free. range month three. free skew type free.

and free broadcast quality video for your media projects and a free media oh god our teeth dot com. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so poorly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. meeting and doubling is mentioned

forty five c.e.o.'s from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turnover. companies like fiat's. british petroleum. nestlé siemens show unit lever and many others all of them supporting what is in this book . the all source free see yours. show or more no. harm or visit decker. living in the netherlands a new vista deck or he was the head of philips one of the largest companies in the country. good enough i was to have a volvo a car producing company. and show me nor was the head. lunesta it's all very large french what a multinational. 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. it was stunning was that these days free c.e.o.'s words 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. and. the spirits are right i finish my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand.

and ninety decided that may be suppressed 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. because to 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. and. interfere with anything. thank you for reading. but you see you know our industries. yeah i mean if you obviously need to have

a lot of contacts you probably find figure out about hundred person which are really keep in mind. that you feel very secure 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 european union. i don't really believe in two. it's part of it but most of the time you will provoke a chance and then it's going to be up to you to seize the opportunity when the chance is there.

in december one thousand nine hundred three pm geo network i work 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 the year to. say. well we brainstorm 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. 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 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's press list 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 in for the rest it was silent. and that we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back. but it's on the tables 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 the 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 and it was clear from those documents. when we tracked back the history of that your teen with phones at the start in the early eighty's. 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 who do i talk to. the commissioner for industry

the insufficient conduct of the commission. the economy grow. richer existed and with. the fetish was over the years i would say i don't know for sure. 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 to listen to the c.e.o.'s. there were and yelling who run the fia finished in a booth with a deck or who rammed phillips and another that. was paid guillen 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 and were ready to talk about big policy issues with those people who would be in charge of the european government. and then when they need. 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. and the facilitate 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 that is 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 are global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies the taiwanese companies are actually my my allies we're working together for the same purpose which is to open up the market.

one thousand nine hundred three was the year when the european union was born. to us that have been sold as a political project. of these letters that we had from the december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it's. like with a t. and 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 work hand in hand. and nine hundred eighty four missing

links is published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the iraqi on exactly this topic generally not. eight hundred eighty five this is decker seal phillips 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 down to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five from your coal fields vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the. world

of. technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered. the worst for that was a flight out of a radio guy and for a minute. what. to do because you've never seen anything like this in color. let me let me i want to know what not let me ask you a question from. here on this network is where we're having a debate we have our knives out. but if you give the scientists a bad thing never get married a situation where the united way to talk about surveillance

a. u.s. senator rand paul's marathon filibuster.