or are. a way. every six months there was an e.u. summit and every six months to your team that's just a few days before. location and they were kept confidential the booking was made two years in advance. left behind was a clear message to the following you summit on the heads of governments a few days later. the single market the monetary union infrastructure projects a flexible labor market deregulation downsize public services austerity measures and so on and so on the whole be all liberal agenda for them basically our picture got confirmed by american scholar stepping into the topic maria green towels i was interested in doing something about europe and something about the european union i

started talking with some of the c.e.o.'s and in particular the corporate affairs managers of these firms to ask them what happened and everybody had a little piece of the story and then i met with keith richardson. keith and i would talk about different things and he would give me some ideas and i'd go and i'd talk with other individuals and then i'd come back with more questions and sometimes tease out the answers and sometimes they didn't and finally i believe it was on my seventh meeting with keith when i said to keith you know i can write about this i can have all these different interviews but i really want to see the pieces of paper and keith said to me well you know i have a bunch of cardboard boxes in the basement of the we haven't opened them they're from the earlier days we just we just put this material in the boxes and of course and you know in the back of my mind i was very excited thinking this is it.

maria green culson came across a telex. from visit decker see your phillips. in december nine hundred eighty five he wrote to the heads of state just before the signing of the single european act which started the process of the single market. the crux of the tallackson is as follows you know we don't know what you're going to do but we want you to act you can act one way or another if you choose not to have a single market program then you have given us no choice but perhaps take our business elsewhere. this was

a clear fred the year to year we presented sixty percent of western europe's industrial output this was blackmail. why did not a single government say anything about the deck or taylor hicks. or about the other frets that followed. they were elected representatives. but we felt that this was a betrayal and we wanted to do something about it it's important for a bigger public to know about this and we decided to publish a book. and besides collecting data we started to make interviews. and undercover interviews. and finally in spring one thousand and seven we assembled the results of our investigations and interviews and to report europe to.

reschedule the book launch for the big ego summit in them so that all the media would be there we were excited as. we. the book launch and half an hour before the first friends started arriving but. very little or no pressure showed up. so unfortunately our first public events was really not news is part of. the jump to the most ambitious mockery of being ruled by a key exercise the strengthening of the rule system of multilateral craig. and perhaps most important the establishment of a stronger broadly. brain organizer and.

i started to work on the financial services cats negotiations and that was really the time where i discovered this is we just like we'd like to do that. we've come to the end of the most far reaching trade negotiation ever. the negotiators of the hundred seventeen governments and i'm a cheap to make stuart recent sets. with your approval therefore my gavel the euro why rose could no. internal market that. was becoming a very important market reach market with a high g.d.p. per capita and that when the european union was going outside to negotiate as a bloc they had a real power because it was a biggest exporter the biggest importer the biggest foreign investor. but so in britain the trade commissioner through painting it was complaining that i was every

time he was going to negotiate with the united states in front of me we see these contests. here you have your office and gardener certificate for you and on his back he will house c.e.o.'s of big banks a big insurance company telling please do that for me please do that for us but winterland britain was turning his back to see where the support was he was actually having only some ministers saying don't do this don't do that and please do that it only but not more and he was really not very happy you know because we discovered that there is a whole world of lobbyists in washington to tell their government what they want in the trade. and we thought this is the way we have to go we have to do something like that the european institution is asking for it these institutions cannot only rely on the information given by the member state and the expert in the finance ministry is why they need to get information directly from the the banks at the

insurance company. you know so then at a point in time european commission a so in britain decided ok there was association and not really serious about this issue i am going to invite for dinner fourteen see you of the major services companies in europe so it's about big banks big telecom big insurance big decisions services big transport services big tourism companies when you take all the different sectors it is actually making about seventy percent of the g.d.p. in europe so we invited to bunch of forty of those. and. after the dinner he said well now that you've got some some food by the commission you only saw things you have to do something for me people sometimes think that the commission comes up with ideas out of the blue pushes them it's not a tool traditionally is thirsty for ideas from the actons to

hopeless to decide what to put food. this is where the idea of creating a network of association and companies pushing for the trade in service is used by the private sector came up i became managing director of the open services for. relief. in general to nine we had. eleven months to prepare seattle first every cio i mean it's your conference as a creation of this organization imagine at four and the idea was that this meeting is going to lounge the millenium brown that's so you know britain had so much push for. britain never got to see how to turn commission had to resign because of the massive fraud

several commissions were involved in. seattle the millennium round itself took a completely unexpected turn. i was based in the hotel and there's a conference was in the sheraton five hundred metres away and i have not been allowed to go out of the hotel because it was one protest looking to do it by lying on the ground and it was a police officer beside him and asking can i go outside please i would like to go and do my job. i was going to assist disallowance of the c.s. around so that we will enter into a new phase a negotiation is a libra zation of service. i remember that commissioner let me as been blocked i mean he has been able to enter he's caught but the car couldn't move because of those people they're just there and the policeman say please go away in five metres so that the v.i.p.'s here can do his job. many n.g.o.s say that yourself is

a secret secret organisation having secret meetings you can commission all the way everything is on their website. i mean i am doing my job by contacting the commission the officials responsible for my file if anybody else would like to do the same there's a fun number he's on the in the on the website i'm just doing my job and i don't have anything specific but is a commission has some relationship with yes if it is because it commission is willing to get some information from the services sectors before negotiating on their behalf because this is what we're talking about trade is done by companies not by n.g.o.s. b c c i knew a dinner at the french if you're a real she's really a very big russians organization look she also people from different countries different jobs different walks of life who do all interested in. how can europe develop how can we be right things to do wrong and how can i build

a little we've already done. i mean coolest thing trying to. think tanks in brussels are feeling a part of the vacuum that exists so that you would have thought that there was no european promptly to base. to syntax to step into that vacuum and the forums in which something like a debate happens inside the brussels bubble. there are national politicians here european politicians mysterious civil servant said the dreaded you know it creates a dear good diplomat strip businessman good professors from universities will soon see people wondering about bristles using to be like you really if you would be still want to know when i would actually be on the team the moderate my job is to keep in contact. think tanks are not themselves lobbyists but they are part of the landscape of lobbying because companies use them to transmit their demands from

their or their perspectives and all of these are heavily dependent on industry funding. several people are sponsoring it microsoft is one of american business is present in europe microsoft is one of the why not. will have had think tanks in the process that were directly from the by the oil industry and that we're working to sold out about whether to are such a thing as climate change and whether it's important for governments to x. to reduce c o two emissions. you can set up research institutes to provide you with. research that's kind of strengthens your position. you can launch message p.r. campaigns and flood the media with your information. what also happens is setting up fake n.g.o.s as happened in the big battle about the software patents law

suddenly there were these advertisements from an enduro that's said it was representing small and medium sized companies puts the financial backers of this n.g. over microsoft and the people. in the end it's all about money in the macross here it's one person one vote but in the brussels baseness it's one euro one fault the problem is we don't know about the money behind politics we don't know how much is being spent on multi and by whom and on which issues. we need to cut this on the democrats control it has to be made visible what's the role is of lobbying the decision making what is the role of a large company like monsanto or shell. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you

glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big. so one of my first testimony before the european commission was a very very awakening experience. i had one commissioner interrupt me and say well we understand you had

a problem in the united states with lobbying activities but he went on to say but you know this is brussels and this is europe we don't have that kind of activity going on here which just kind of floored me that anyone could be so naive. more that perhaps the fact of answer was ok all concede that a lot of these k. street lobbyists and the professional lobbyists here in the united states may be corrupt however i know every major k. street lobby shop also has a lobby shop in brussels and so we're in your bed europe don't you want to know if you think that we are so corruptible and so corrupting don't you want to know who we are and who's paying for us and what it is we're trying to get you to do for us.

we have to. higher to regulate lobbying for a long time. before the new commission came in and for the first time ten eastern european countries were part of. the first burnell commission started in autumn two thousand and four we wrote an open letter to the commission president. signed by over fifty n.g.o.s. i would just like to say thank you. that's a very sincere thank you for the confidence which you just voiced and invested in

me and i'd like to say to you that i understand this vote of confidence as also implying huge responsibility on my part and we are going to work hard give our all to serve europe to serve the institutions of the european union and to serve all our coast citizens of europe that. the response was a very short formal letter saying we received your letter sent you very interesting . no substantial response. so it was sent a signal to all the presidents of the commission. and suddenly towards the end of february we were contacted by the same color as commissioner from estonia. for administration in fighting us to come over.

so we went to mr collis office which was at the top of the building. we didn't know what we had to expect from this meeting we had never been approached by a commission so in that sense it was very exciting were welcomed by mr cullison himself and one of his cabinet members and in his hand is the colors of the brochure and that made us smile it was a lovely plan it got to brussels which was a tongue in cheek but a very critical look at industry lobbying in the u. written by eric and me in our our colleagues. when i started as a mistress and commission and i really souls at services so weak suspicion surrounding said decision making in european union. of course i. say established for myself a purpose to a little reduce the suspicions. told to step he was going to launch this european

transparency initiative and we immediately saw that its roots are because political opportunity. as an outsider to the process business he also had a clear sense for how the ordinary sense of brussels. and some colors to get on with the lobby in the street. european commission is going to it's that's activities of interest representatives are legitimate valuable input into the decision making process have to happen in a transparent manner the commission can see that that these important to know their interest representatives are what the interests they represent and against what financial background. of let's say efforts to do creates a speech or to make the speech. of course outlined main principles of transparency initiative which should be done and it was of course met

. with the excitement of controversial reactions and if you know without financial to. and parents will never find out who really is behind the campaigning stick. a little bit more control on ourselves wouldn't harm our reputation with our voters but it cannot be transparency must not for closer contact with real life with interest groups or groups without interest thank you commissioner callous and certainly understand best. when the european union was considering the european transparency initiative they were looking for some advice as to how some of these achievements happened in the us and as a result i was brought out about half a dozen different times to testify before the european commission in the european parliament to tell the truth i was very impressed with the same color so when i first started working with him in the european commission some callers helped really the whole significance of needing transparency.

he was very adamant at first about setting up a mandatory disclosure system full transparency but halfway through the process some callers came up against the political reality and. after four years of struggle and political fights and exhausted commissioner answered the stage to finally launch a lobby register a good. would moon moon or off and. so quite that remarkable moment today. three years ago i proposed to set up a register of lobbyists you know to do in hans transparency and and legitimacy and i want you to see him making process and. openness from today. so we proposed voluntary solution because i was i am comments

that cease would suit for all expect. since and i async said two days there is a very important moment of cultural change i am also an easy seven six aspect of this isn't making in european institutions. some colors introduced a voluntary system against all recommendations by n.g.o.s and experts this was the best he could get. we have tried for over two years now to find out who had blocked callouses or original intention. where it's other commissioners the commission secretary and the lobbyist themselves.

one month after the financial crisis started in october two thousand and eight. appointed the independent high level group on financial supervision. the group was to work our proposals for the regulation of the financial markets and to find a way out of the financial crisis. eight so-called wise men were appointed to this group. and i must say. i'm alluding my easing mccarty nashik culture over each to separate us from now on this and last nigga. we looked into the enda pendants of this independent group and we found some s. honestly thinks. the legacy is the co-chair of a financial lobby organization. linked to lehman brothers. greeting to citi group leasing to goldman sachs. mccarty

nuber and bunch of always are notorious deregulators. and paris fernand this works to. provide financial market intelligence to big banks. free of the eight were directly linked to american banks all of which were directly involved in causing the crisis. which in addition closely linked to american right wing think tanks like the cato institute was one of the closest advisors to the bush administration he was also involved in the earlier and think tanks in brussels and poland and the u.k. . all the single of these wise men was in favor of strict regulation another single one of them was really independence and the effect of these eight wise men on overcoming the financial crisis was zero the main thing that happened last a lot of public money was flowing to the banks. as if. this

whole affair has a horrible sense of deserve all the same financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayers' money i know making a fortune from greece's misfortune well those same taxpayers are paying the price in deep cuts to their salaries and social services. after twenty years of deregulation and liberalisation suddenly the european union herself was at the edge of being blown up. what is at stake is not only the european union but also democracy and the future of the values that we hold dear. was

a dis what we europeans had wanted. isn't really naive to have a european dream. to do this in the human nature and you have monica you always have about sign some. and we need to make sure that we keep only the good and therefore you need religion . when you live in a society you have groups because otherwise people are going too fast on the motorway because people have not respected elders because the stronger take this space this is this is human nature what we have done to go and make sure that we live together is by create images lynch events by creating an authority that everyone respect.

her mission free accreditation free transfer judges freek. the arrangements three risk free. to tide free. download free blow against cloning video for your media projects a free media dog hearty dot com. potentially deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast it's expected to hit stunning in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. but we're watching is the very heavy snow moving into boston proper earlier today it was very sticky you can see it start to become much more powdery down he said the bottom line there's still a lot of snow out here a good place for snowball fight. taking it is going to pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout what's been like nobody's luxury driving

lessons some emergency vehicles are exceptional. it's. so.