let me let me i want to let me ask you a question. here on this network is we're having a debate we have our night self. effacing this right to spank thing there to get here in the situation will be an ideal way to talk about surveillance. people don't understand is they don't understand how it's government they don't know who are the people who are running it but they know that they wouldn't

chosen by the people and so. when they see the results that 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. an entire industry operating in the shadow often secrecy and very confidential.

a. little bit this industry has to lobby industry. they are. going to see very. clearly heard the music of. a. certain city in the twenty years now i've been frightened to uncover. who are these people who are pulling the strings for the e.u. decisions. and how do they operate. and hoarded into the huge political. earning. her the. third heard her.

oh yes good evening. i'd like to speak to him please. note that no well listen i'd like to go to leave a message for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed. my name is mr kenny's best calculates kidney r m s. s from from the european services for. the s.s. this and we have a meeting tomorrow but i didn't get time today to to go as far as i wanted to. is it ok. thank you very much.

well dressed as a small city it's a. city but that's. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place and. this is where the business takes place this is where they just station is. there with the figure is around eighty percent of all its leaves. which are. touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus your 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 officers 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 lobby headquarters of large corporations to find industry lobby groups and their lobby operations being been orchestrated from offices in that area. two thousand five hundred lobby structures are based in brussels fifteen thousand lobbyists the second biggest industry in the world only washington d.c. has been here. so all of that european union legislation this is complicated it goes through all of the stages it always starts with the european commission they take a new initiatives from the for legislation for policies and then it goes through the institutions the parliaments the council of ministers. and from the moments of the european commission to. his very first steps in developing new illustration on new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

ministrations company. really want to have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what i will to sell it that's not small

. something for me. and then i just tell the business around it the open situation. i started. to feel over just. you know we. everybody believe the bat. so we'll make the institutions 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 tax depending on the interest of the people to push more. 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 the 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 was felt 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 that's how it started this.

one day in the summer of ninety ninety three i remember a fax came in on a fax machine in the office. 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 us a collage of cleave 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 trans european that works was the biggest

infrastructure projects in history with the estimated budget of four hundred billion euro. runs from sweden came up with another detail 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 year t. . 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 swallows a rather interesting. and we ordered this reports at the european there on to war 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 the 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. appear in these corridor. i go to the archives. of. the t.n. projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth.

striking similarity. projects are almost identical. mission seems to have copy paste of the year two proposals. 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 what 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 the line there's still a lot of snow out here and a good place for snowball fight. taking it is going to pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout much of in life nobody's allowed to be driving lessons from emergency vehicles there are exceptions.

admission free accreditation free comes for charges free maintenance free risk free skew type free. free broadcast quality video for your media projects and a free video don to our teeth dot com you. know 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 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 free cd i was. sure or more know there girl in 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. good enough i was to have a volvo a car producing company. and show me nor was the head a really honest as all 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 stunning was that these two sri 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 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 look to be an open east. europe. would. be i have worked. for a long time nine years and you can bank in for duration and i started also to discover. an additional work to europe which was. international trade. anything. 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 mind. that you came up to 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 a run this. 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 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 that time there were no academic studies to show to 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 unity. 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. 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 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. is priceless 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 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 a very neatly organized archive everything sort it's. so we decided to move to be fast and copy as much as possible. in those documents where letters from the year two and two months from the year to two european governments and to european commission and i would responses. and it

really showed the degree of access that they had an incredible influence and it was it was clear from those documents. to 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 among 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. but i found out through and through commissioner for industry the insufficient gone in with the commission.

the economy grow. richer existed and with the federal. issues of interest 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 cared vidyarthi so as to have the capacity to listen to the c.e.o.'s. there were and yelling who run the fia in italy who three said decker who rammed phillips in the netherlands. was paid guillen 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 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 jack do lol they find dillo is thinking in entirely the same tone. so why don't they get together poor 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 a little is. 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 word. it 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 engine companies the time when these 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 that we had found in december point is in a totally different direction. again a master plan behind it. like with the 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 was published and immediately after the european commission set up a working group with the iraqi on exactly this topic generated nine hundred eighty from. this is decker c.e.o. philips presents his europe in one thousand nine hundred and his action plan for the single market. later shocker lord 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 done to me in india. in june one thousand nine hundred five your coalfields vice president of the commission publishes the famous single market white paper a copy paste of the. world to the. audience technology innovation called the least of elements from around

russia we've got the future covered. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for a way 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. i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images cobol has been seeing from the streets of kenya that. operations are old today.

it was. coming up on our team when he ran for office back in two thousand.