Issues 2003 - Life has never been easy for American lobbyists in Brussels, the capital of a unifying continent proud not to be like America. Nonetheless, representatives of a U.S. electronics trade group were taken aback when an official of the European Commission, the Continental bureaucracy, interrupted a meeting on how to dispose of used electronics with an attack on George Bush. Judging from Bush's stand on global warming, the official volunteered, "no American businesses cared about the environment." Says Michelle O'Neill, a Hewlett-Packard lobbyist who was there, "It stopped us in our tracks."