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. letter to. this industry is to lobby industry to. twenty three terms in. the music. not. sitting in for twenty years now i've been trying to uncover. who are these

people who are pulling the strings how do you decisions. and how do they operate. and hoarding to their use politically for. her and her. skirt you. know yesterday evening. i'd like to speak to one side and please. note that no well listen i'd like to to leave a message for tomorrow i just wanted to confirm the meeting. that we have fixed i'm blaming mr kennedy's best i can't escape the r. and d. i s. . from from the european side a cease fire on. this and we have a meeting to my. i don't get time today to to go to those i want to. visit ok yeah

thank you very much. breast this is a small city it's a kind of provinces but that's on the side. when you know a bit further about it's brussels is really the place and. this is where the business is taking place this is where they just station is dot i think there was the figure is around eighty percent of all it just tastes which are.

touching direct life of european citizens is actually initiated here thus. if you look at plus you 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 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. who finds a good lobbyist for the large corporations who 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 lobby industry in the world only washington d.c. is bigger. so european union legislation this is

complicated 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 parliament the council of ministers. and from the moments that the european commission takes is very first steps in developing new illustration of new policies industry wants to be there to influence its.

i mean any solutions and so we want to have the possibility to go. for the private sector where i would decide myself. what the way to solve that that's on. something for me. and then i just all the business around the open situation. i started. to feel over this.

you know we. everybody believe the bad. 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 way 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.

lobbying 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 governments 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 and 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 as. one day and then the summer of one thousand nine hundred. and office and she 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 clutch 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 transfer p and 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. that 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 rather interesting and we ordered this reports at the european the 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. scam link. here in these corridor. i go to the archive. of. the t.n. projects by the commission. i go through the papers compare them back and forth. striking similarity. the projects are almost identical. commission seems to have copy paste a deity proposals. or a mission free accreditation free. for churches free. arrangement free this free. free.

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that this is why you should care only on altie dot com. now i'm really curious reshaping europe. meeting and doubling is mentioned forty five c.e.o.'s all from multinational companies representing billions of euros of turn over. 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. showroom or no. hummer and this a decker. 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 really 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 the synastry the us. eat. 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.

and experience that. i finished my job in the commission in april nineteenth one thousand. and ninety cited that maybe suppressed place is actually where the money is so i went to the open banking federation. and i started to look to be open east. and. used to be and 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. everything. 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 five hundred person which i will keep in mind. to make. sure that you gave me a very clear. commitment. i mean my job i describe it as a network as a facilitator and as an ambassador and from want to be an asset i have to know who you have to talk to and i can say that i would present around eighty percent of also. it's 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 chances that. in december one thousand nine hundred three the n.-g. o. 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 anything about the power of these large multinational companies on the new policies . we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to call for attention on the role of the year to. say. well we've raised talked 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 high new 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 and throw them out but. it didn't seem to be a good idea at all indeed finally there was some reason but we had an office lunch so i took everybody my people out to lunch and left them there.

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. 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. we didn't know when the t.v. stuff would come back for that's all 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 demands 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 a new incredible influence and to us 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 c. . t.v. 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 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 which led to a big air video. so as to have the capacity of to listen through the c.e.o. . there were the and yelling who ran the fia and yesterday. we said decker who rammed philips in the netherlands. was paid

given how much who 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 meet. a visionary president of the commission by the law all they find shuttle is thinking in entirely the same terms so why don't they get together and pool their ideas that's a breakthrough really. that's

probably a good a good way 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. who 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 keep us and the rest. moving around in brussels talking about. it's a crazed companies are global days and therefore the american companies the chinese companies the indian companies you 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. but these letters that we had found in december point is in a totally different direction and here. you. are again a master plan behind it's. like with a t m project. written by the your team. prefer the year t. and the european commission were meeting on a regular basis. the tone 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 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 market. 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 down to meet unity. 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 plan. download

the official application to your cell phone choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorites. if you're away from your television or it just doesn't work so now with your mobile device you can watch on t.v. anytime anywhere. i never knew adam lanza personally but i was in the same high school as adam he was younger than me just a little bit younger. i always thought he was different i always intercity funny he rarely talks and you don't use a shy kid. i don't know anyone who is friends with them i also don't know of anyone who is 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 show. america's so when you go on this there would be an american behind every tree with a gun. 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. new year's celebrations on the move without the traditional t.v. all festive food surprising meetings and new adventures stories of love found and

love lost our russians teach foreigners to celebrate them biggest holiday of the year for a must go to st petersburg by train museum there may be miracles. i've . been. lucky.