U.S. Simulation Forecasts Perils of an Israeli Strike at Iran - NYTimes.com

March 19, 2012

By MARK MAZZETTI and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action — and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.

But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America’s arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program — if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.

The exercise was designed specifically to test internal military communications and coordination among battle staffs in the Pentagon, Tampa, Fla., where the headquarters of the Central Command is located, and in the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of an Israeli strike. But the exercise was written to assess a pressing, potential, real-world situation.

In the end, the war game reinforced to military officials the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of a strike by Israel, and a counterstrike by Iran, the officials said.

American and Israeli intelligence services broadly agree on the progress Iran has made to enrich uranium. But they disagree on how much time there would be to prevent Iran from building a weapon if leaders in Tehran decided to go ahead with one.

With the Israelis saying publicly that the window to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb is closing,  American officials see an Israeli attack on Iran within the next year as a  possibility. They have said privately that they believe that Israel would probably give the United States little or no warning should Israeli officials make the decision to strike Iranian nuclear sites.

Officials said that, under the chain of events in the war game, Iran believed that Israel and the United States were partners in any strike against Iranian nuclear sites and therefore considered American military forces in the Persian Gulf as complicit in the attack. Iranian jets chased Israeli warplanes after the attack, and Iranians launched missiles at an American warship in the Persian Gulf, viewed as an act of war that allowed an American retaliation.

Internal Look has long been one of Central Command’s most significant planning exercises, and is carried out about twice a year to assess how the headquarters, its staff and command posts in the region would respond to various real-world situations.

Over the years, it has been used to prepare for various wars in the Middle East. According to the defense Web site GlobalSecurity.org, military planners during the cold war used Internal Look to prepare for a move by the Soviet Union to seize Iranian oil fields. The American war plan at the time called for the Pentagon to march nearly six Army divisions north from the Persian Gulf to the Zagros Mountains of Iran to blunt a Soviet attack.

In December 2002, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who was the top officer at Central Command, used Internal Look to test the readiness of his units for the coming invasion of Iraq.

Many experts have predicted that Iran would try to carefully manage the escalation after an Israeli first strike in order to avoid giving the United States a rationale for attacking with its far superior forces. Thus, it might use proxies to set off car bombs in world capitals or funnel high explosives to insurgents in Afghanistan to attack American and NATO troops.

While using surrogates might, in the end, not be enough to hide Iran’s instigation of these attacks, the government in Tehran could at least publicly deny all responsibility.

Some military specialists in the United States and in Israel who have assessed the potential ramifications of an Israeli attack believe that the last thing Iran would want is a full-scale war on its territory. Thus, they argue that Iran would not directly strike American military targets, whether warships in the Persian Gulf or bases in the region.

Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior Iranian leadership, and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict.

Yet these specialists continue their work, saying that any insight on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis carry out a strike — and what the American position will be if they do.

Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

Wikio

Secret files reveal 9,000 Nazi war criminals fled to South America after WWII

• As many as 5,000 Nazis went to Argentina
• Between 1,500 and 2,000 ended up in Brazil
• Around 500 to 1,000 settled in Chile
• The rest started new lives in Paraguay and Uruguay

By ALLAN HALL

PUBLISHED: 14:07 GMT, 19 March 2012 


Nine thousand Nazi war criminals fled to South America after the Second World War, it has been revealed for the first time.

After receiving tip-offs, German prosecutors were recently granted access to secret files in Brazil and Chile that confirmed the true number of Third Reich immigrants.

According to the documents, an estimated 9,000 war criminals escaped to South America, including Croatians, Ukrainians, Russians and other western Europeans who aided the Nazi murder machine.

War criminals: Secret files have revealed that an estimated 9,000 Nazis, including Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann (left) and Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele (right), fled to South America in the aftermath of the Second World War

Most, perhaps as many as 5,000, went to Argentina; between 1,500 and 2,000 are thought to have made it to Brazil; around 500 to 1,000 to Chile; and the rest to Paraguay and Uruguay.

These numbers do not include several hundred more who fled to the safety of right-wing regimes in the Middle East.

Previous estimates as to how many Nazis fled to South America have varied wildly from 5,000 to 300,000.

More...

• Heil Hollywood: The Los Angeles bunker from which Hitler planned to run Nazi empire after the war
• Nazi death camp guard Demjanjuk convicted last year for killing 28,000 Jews dies, aged 91

The files also showed that during the war Argentine President General Juan Peron sold 10,000 blank Argentine passports to ODESSA – the organisation set up to protect former SS men in the event of defeat.

Kurt Schrimm, 62, head of the central war criminal authority in Germany, is among the legal team sifting through archives.

He said: 'These documents provide the hottest leads we have had for years.'

Mr Schrimm said a female historian provided the clues about the Nazis who got away, who included Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele and Treblinka death camp commander Franz Stangl.

During the war, Argentinian President Juan Peron, pictured with his wife Eva in Buenos Aires in 1950, sold 10,000 blank Argentine passports to ODESSA - the organisation set up to protect former SS men in the event of defeat

THE LEADING NAZIS WHO FLED TO SOUTH AMERICA

Adolf Eichmann hid under the alias of Ricardo Klement in Argentina as early as 1952. He raised his family and worked in a car plant.

During the war, Eichmann was the right-hand-man to SS chief Heinrich Himmler in the Third Reich -  who was responsible for the trains that carried millions to their deaths at extermination camps in Nazi occupied Poland. Eichmann was hanged in Israel in 1962.

Josef Mengele was known for his horrific genetic experiments in concentration camps including the dissection of live babies and injecting dye into the eyes of prisoners. He hid out in Argentina until his death in 1979.

Several others escaped to Chile. Walter Rauff a high-ranking SS officer who invented the 'Death Trucks' - with which 500,000 prisoners were murdered with lethal gas at Auschwitz - arrived in South America in 1950. He spent a short amount of time in jail and died in Santiago in 1984.

Paul Schaeffer began his career in the Hitler Youth before rising through the ranks and arrived in Chile in 1960. He was a known paedophile but was not locked up by Chilean authorities until 1996. He died in 2010.

There is also the hope that the mountain of documents may throw up a living fugitive.

But Mr Schrimm added: 'Each day that passes makes that less and less likely but I do not want people to say in the future that we did not try.'

Mr Schrimm and his colleague Uwe Steintz, 52, believe the archives may also provide clues to Nazis who sneaked back to the Fatherland to live out their days undetected.

Of particular interest to the hunters are details of the so-called 'rat lines' - the escape routes out of a shattered Europe after WW2 that allowed an estimated 800 murderers to escape on passports provided by the Vatican.

Since arriving in South America three weeks ago, Mr Schrimm and Mr Steintz have pored over the Arquivo Historico records in Rio de Janiero.

The Archivo Nacional is the repository for all immigration documents.

They show that 20,000 Germans settled in Brazil alone between 1945 and 1959.

Mr Schrimm said: 'Many are under a false name with a dark past.'

Many South American countries postwar were ruled by fascist-style military dictatorships that welcomed the brutal servants of Nazism with few questions asked.

Mr Steintz said: 'Already we see something of a pattern in the way these criminals operated. They almost always entered the country alone and sent for their families afterwards.

'And most entered on a passport of the International Red Cross. Eight hundred higher functionaries of the SS and Nazi state entered Argentina alone on such passports.'

The files show that the contact point for many was German Bishop Alois Hudal, priest-confessor to the German Catholic community in Rome.

Investigators hope that the files will yield up cross references to the secret services of Chile and Brazil detailing names of intelligence agents who helped the Nazi war criminals.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117093/Secret-files-reveal-9-000-Nazi-war-criminals-fled-South-America-WWII.html#ixzz1pd6jIuci


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Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs - NYTimes.com

March 14, 2012

By GREG SMITH

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Wikio

11 Reasons Why America Would Be A Better Place Without Goldman Sachs - BlackListedNews.com

March 14, 2012

By Michael Snyder
BlacklistedNews.com

Would America be a better place without Goldman Sachs?  Of course it would.  The "vampire squid" of Wall Street does not care about the future of America.  Sadly, Goldman Sachs apparently does not even care much about their own clients.  What Goldman Sachs is all about is making as much money as humanly possible.  In the end, there is nothing wrong with making money, but there are constructive ways to make money and there are destructive ways to make money.  Unfortunately, Goldman Sachs seems to find the destructive path almost irresistible.  Greg Smith, the head of the U.S. equity derivatives business for Goldman Sachs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa made headlines all over the world on Wednesday when he resigned publicly from Goldman Sachs in a scorching editorial in the New York Times.  Smith said that he could "honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it".  Considering what we know has gone on at Goldman over the past decade, that is very frightening to hear.  So could this be the beginning of the end for Goldman Sachs?  And if it is, will America be a better place when Goldman is gone?
You would think that at some point clients of Goldman would become so sick and tired of the stories of corruption coming out of the firm that they would simply walk away.
Unfortunately, corruption is so endemic on Wall Street that Goldman Sachs really does not seem out of place.  The truth is that a lot of the things that are said about Goldman could also be said about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.
But in recent years Goldman Sachs has truly become a national symbol of what is wrong with our financial system.  As the American people become fed up with institutions such as Goldman, hopefully we will start to see some of them disappear.
The following are 11 reasons why America would be a better place without Goldman Sachs....
#1 Even after all of the negative publicity we have seen in recent years, Goldman Sachs appears to not have learned any lessons.  The following is how Greg Smith described the three ways to get ahead at Goldman Sachs....

"What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym."

#2 Goldman Sachs is one of the too big to fail banks and those banks just keeping getting bigger than ever.  Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  So if we couldn't afford to let them fail back in 2008 because they were so big, why did we allow them to become even larger?
#3 The Federal Reserve shows great favoritism to big Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs.  For example, between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010 the Federal Reserve made 814 billion dollars in secret loans to Goldman Sachs.
#4 Goldman Sachs is at the heart of the derivatives bubble that threatens to throw the entire global financial system into chaos.  At this point, Goldman Sachs has over 53 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
According to the New York Times, the big Wall Street banks completely control derivatives trading.  In fact, the New York Times says that representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup hold a secretive meeting each month to coordinate their domination over the derivatives market....

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.
The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

#5 Goldman Sachs was at the very heart of the financial crisis of 2008 which plunged the entire global economy into a very deep recession.  In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, Goldman Sachs was putting together mortgage-backed securities that they knew were garbage and they marketed them to investors as AAA-rated investments.  On top of that, Goldman then often made huge bets against those exact same securities which turned out to be extremely profitable when those securities crashed and burned.
The following is how the New York Times described what was going on at the time....

"Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc."

Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, said at the time that he was absolutely shocked by what Goldman was doing....

"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen"

#6 Goldman Sachs played a huge role in getting Greece, Italy and several other European nations into so much debt.  The following is an excerpt from an article by Andrew Gavin Marshall....

In the same way that homeowners take out a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and other U.S. banks helped push government debt far into the future through the derivatives market. This was done in Greece, Italy, and likely several other euro-zone countries as well. In several dozen deals in Europe, “banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books.” Because the deals are not listed as loans, they are not listed as debt (liabilities), and so the true debt of Greece and other euro-zone countries was and likely to a large degree remains hidden. Greece effectively mortgaged its airports and highways to the major banks in order to get cash up-front and keep the loans off the books, classifying them as transactions.

#7 Goldman Sachs is working very hard to help state and local governments sell off our highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants to the highest bidder.  Much of the time foreigners are the highest bidders for these precious infrastructure assets.
The following is how Dylan Ratigan described what is going on....

On Wall Street, setting up and running “Infrastructure Funds” is big business, with over $140 billion run by such banks as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Australian infrastructure specialist Macquarie. Goldman’s 2010 SEC filing should give you some sense of the scope of the campaign. Goldman says it will be involved with “ownership and operation of public services, such as airports, toll roads and shipping ports, as well as power generation facilities, physical commodities and other commodities infrastructure components, both within and outside the United States.” While the bank sees increased opportunity in “distressed assets” (ie. Cities and states gone broke because of the financial crisis), the bank also recognizes “reputational concerns with the manner in which these assets are being operated or held.”

#8 At the same time that Goldman Sachs is causing all sorts of trouble for everyone else, their employees are making crazy amounts of money.  During 2010, employees of Goldman Sachs brought in more than 15 billion dollars in total compensation.
#9 Goldman Sachs has way too much influence over the federal government.  There is a reason why it is commonly referred to as "Government Sachs".  No matter who is the White House, people that used to work for Goldman and other big Wall Street banks always seem to be crawling around.
Last year, Michael Brenner wrote the following about the composition of the Obama administration....

Wall Street's takeover of the Obama administration is now complete. The mega-banks and their corporate allies control every economic policy position of consequence. Mr. Obama has moved rapidly since the November debacle to install business people where it counts most. Mr.William Daley from JP Morgan Chase as White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Gene Sperling from the Goldman Sachs payroll to be director of the National Economic Council. Eileen Rominger from Goldman Sachs named director of the SEC's Investment Management division. Even the National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon, was executive vice president for law and policy at the disgraced Fannie Mae after serving as a corporate lobbyist with O'Melveny & Roberts. The keystone of the business friendly team was put in place on Friday. General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt will serve as chair of the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

#10 Employees from Goldman Sachs pour way too much money into our national elections.  In 2008, donations from individuals and organizations affiliated with Goldman Sachs donated more than a million dollars to Barack Obama.  This time around they are pouring huge amounts of cash into Mitt Romney's campaign.
#11 Goldman Sachs is still a "vampire squid" as Matt Taibbi once so famously proclaimed in Rolling Stone....

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."

Once again, there is nothing wrong with making money.
And there is certainly nothing wrong with working in the financial system.
But there is a right way to do things and there is a wrong way to do things.
Goldman Sachs is doing things very much the wrong way, and America would be a better place without them.

Goldman Sachs

Matthieu Pigasse: We Must Invent a New World

Posted: 03/ 9/2012 6:39 pm

Today, all of Europe is living in doubt. For five centuries, our continent has been able to invent the ideas and the goods that have transformed the world, yet it seems to have lost the secret of their manufacture. It no longer knows if it is capable of inventing the world of tomorrow; it doesn't even know if it has a common future any more.

Of the two terms of Schumpeter's formula summarizing capitalism, «creative destruction», we have forgotten the former, that is to say, creation, leaving us only with the latter, destruction. For many, unemployment has become the norm. The hope of becoming a part of society through work has evaporated. Extreme ideologies bloom, though one sole look at the world would be enough to demonstrate the absurdity of all of them. Our societies thought they had built a balance in which every successive generation could legitimately hope that its progeny would have a better life. Today they are convinced that we can no longer keep this promise. Our systems of social negotiations have broken down, and our systems of social protection are threatened. Belief in progress has faded. Many perceive technical progress as a danger, economic progress as a lie, social progress as a mirage, democratic progress as an illusion.

We are living through a turning point, in great confusion. Nothing of what seemed obvious yesterday is evident today. Nor are there any signs to tell us what future certainties will be. The great points of reference -- the Nation, the State, Morality -- seem to have disappeared. The great hopes of tomorrow remain invisible.

We must struggle against this doubt, so devastating for a Europe whose history was built, precisely, upon progress.

When a majority of the population comes to the point of thinking that tomorrow may well be worse than today, the only possible strategy it can see becomes that of preserving what exists. Everyone wants things to remain frozen as they are as long as possible, in order to preserve his own interests, which leads to hampering, preventing, all change. Fear is the greatest ally of conservatives. It feeds the rise of egoism: the social egoism of those who can or believe they can succeed in spite of others or against others; ethnic egoism that rejects the other, whom they consider responsible for all ills; and the national egoism of each individual country persuaded it should prevail over its partners.

So how can one approach tomorrow in a new way?

We must invent a new world. We must recover the meaning of progress, not progress as an automatic reflex or an empty word, but as an act of will. We must return to the idea that it is possible to act in order to influence things. Never become resigned, never submit, never retreat. We must not see the market as a more effective means of coordinating individual actions. No society can organize itself simply by virtue of the market. Thus we must be wary of the liberal illusion of a society that has no need to think out its future or define its regulations. On the contrary, it is up to politics to reinvent itself, to define new rules and new institutions.

Many believe that in a so-called global and liberal economy, governments should have no power. They are mistaken. The crisis and reactions to the crisis demonstrate that this is a fallacy, that there exist good policies and bad ones, that there exist good and bad regulations.

We must act in three areas: 

1. Production, in other words, growth. We must tell ourselves that without growth, there can be no progress and no reduction of inequality.


2. Solidarity, which is a method as much as it is a necessity. There is no progress if it does not profit all and if it is not accepted by all. Solidarity in Europe is not only a part of our glorious past, it is the key to our tomorrow.


3. Public action, for the genius of Europe is first of all that of a collective project and a common destiny.

Production and growth, to begin with, to reach full employment. That may seem like a utopia, but actually it is not. The society of full employment we should strive for will not be that of the 60s. It will not be a society without unemployment. But it will be, or it should be, a society in which unemployment is only short-term. A mobile society in which every wage-earner can tell himself he will advance. The contrary of a society where everyone is pigeon-holed to remain in the same profession or at the same rank or level for decades. A society where all of us are perpetually learning or relearning. This implies a radical change in our relation to work and to our crafts and professions.

We must renew our solidarity. It is the distinctive feature of Europe and of European society. Those who carry the banner of individualism refuse to understand that, in the social contract, we Europeans have a concept much richer than theirs, founded upon the existence of a common good that cannot be reduced to the sum of individual interests. We should be proud of what we have built: adequate medical care available to all, an end to poverty for the aged, solidarity towards those who do not have jobs. An economy more vulnerable to technical change and the appearance of new competition is also harsher. So it demands that those who miss out because of progress can count on the solidarity of those who are benefiting from it.

Finally, we must reinvent public service, public action, that is to say, the role of the State. What counts is not the amount of taxes paid, it is the comparison between taxes and the quality of public goods and services offered in exchange: education, training, security, roads, railroads, communications infrastructure. It is the State's capacity to favor the creation of wealth, to ensure its just and efficient redistribution, to reduce inequality.

The key principle upon which this project must depend is that of equality. The rise of unprecedented inequality is characteristic of the present day. It is something new, and it has been with us over a sustained period. To borrow Necker's phrase, equality was the very idea of the Revolution. Yet today, the force that is affecting and transforming the world is the development of inequality. And it hasn't slowed down for decades. Inequality between countries, between regions of the world, between social classes, between generations, etc. The result is the dissolution of the feeling of belonging to a common world. A world henceforth undermined by social inequality, the secession of the wealthy, and a revolt of those who feel, conversely, forgotten, despised, rejected or abandoned. And whose sole weapon is their discontent and the power of their indignation.

We must revive what was once the revolutionary plan: equality, in other words, a manner of building society, of producing together, of living together and of breathing life anew into the common good. As Pierre Rosanvallon put it, it is a question of refounding a society of equals. A society in which everyone possesses the same rights, in which each of us is recognized and respected as being as important as the others. A society that allows each one to change his life.

We must also take into consideration the political crisis we are currently experiencing. It is marked not only by political disengagement, abstention, and the rise of extreme ideologies, but also by an institutional crisis. To be more precise, a crisis of the political model. The crisis of the political model is the extreme concentration of power, and in particular the extreme concentration of executive power in the hands of one man, the President of the Republic. The real power of a sole individual versus the actual power of all. It is marked as well by a crisis of decision and a weakened legitimacy of institutions, government, ministers and other authorities.

What is to be done? To undertake a program of institutional reform comparable in its breadth to that of 1958, at the establishment of the 5th Republic. With two main objectives.

To make political decisions more effective and, with this in mind, introduce a dose of proportional representation in elections in order to ensure the best representation possible; reduce by half the number of parliamentary representatives, and outlaw cumulative office; downsize the number of ministers to fifteen, each concentrating on lofty missions of State and thus avoiding the dispersion of public actions, thereby ridding ourselves of that French specificity consisting of incessantly inventing new ministries whose missions are vague but whose uselessness is certain.

Take up the challenge of democratic representation. The historic principle of representation, the idea according to which the people exercise real power through the intermediary of their elected representatives, can only function if we recognize that two principles have proven largely fictitious. The first is the view that a relative or absolute majority represents the opinion of all. The second is that the ballot represents the opinion of the citizen, whereas the rich diversity of an opinion cannot be reduced to the choice of one person at a given time. The result is a legitimate feeling of not being represented. The demand for better representation must be met with more participation, the submission of governments to intensified surveillance, to more frequent rendering of accounts, to new forms of inspection. It is not possible to keep an eye on every decision, but everyone must be entitled to participate in the collective power through a system of evaluation.

This is the price of the construction of a more just and meaningful society.

This post is excerpted from Matthieu Pigasse's new book, Révolutions.