arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)
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Corporate Masters by Maarten Van Hove Thursday December 13, 2001 at 05:59 PM |
Erik Wesselius from the Corporate Europe University guided us through Brussels for a quick peak into corporate lobby - a power that is invisible, but which shapes and influences our lives directly through European decision making. Always for the best of the multinationals and for the worst of the world.
They hold names like Transatlantic Business Dialogue, European Policy Center and the European Round Table of Investors: shady, low-profile lobby power behind the European throne. Their goal : to implement laws that increase the profits of big industry. Their networks are intertwined in such a way that no one can ever tell for sure how they work and whose pockets they fill.
Figures speak of at least 10000 different business lobby groups pushing and pulling the European decisions to favor the companies that fund them. For instance: in favor of privatisation of education and pensions, to the delay or preferably the dead stop of environment law proposals.
And they are winning. The European Commission is not such a large organisation. They need insights to make decisions, and they lack the manpower to research themselves. That is where the lobby groups come in : they ask the EU to do their homework for them, and then come up with a pro-business ‘neutral suggestion'.
Anybody is free to lobby and make suggestions, but labour unions and ngo's do not have the power, money or deviousness to compete with the corporate lobby.
Corporations also have lots of 'friends'. For instance: when Croatia, concerned about public health, wanted to ban ggo's, Corporate America asked their government to intervene. Then the US embassy in Croatia wrote a threat letter : ggo's are not proven to be bad and it is against free trade to ban them. Admit ggo's, or we will boycott your food trade. In corporate vocabulary, this reads : ‘if implemented, the proposed ban would severely disrupt Croatia's importation of food and feed, from all sources.' Or: the US government denied the rights of another country to protect the public health, saying that it was against free trade, then threatened to cut the country's food imports, forgetting its own free trade dogma…
EU ministers resigning and then becoming chairman of a corporation? Joint chairmanship and ministership ? Governments and corporations plotting together to ‘counter-research' ngo-studies? Media that agree to provide articles aiding the lobby groups?
It is done, invisibly, almost every day.
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lobbyist watching by ries baeten Friday January 18, 2002 at 05:58 PM |
| rbaeten@europarl.eu.int |
One more good thing about Mr Wesselius: his book will be reworked (updated) and published in Dutch later this year.
Let's keep our eyes open, because not only in the State of Denmark something rotten is going on.
Ries