Age-old problem: reforming France

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When he was elected, Emmanuel Macron promised to sort out France's sort of tentacular, complicated pension system.

Sophie Petter is our Paris Bureau Chief.

42 different pension regimes, to simplify it, to make it transparent, to make it as fair for everybody, and at the same time, to put it on a sounder financial footing. And that is what he promised to do in two and a half years. Years later, that is what he's now going to try and put into place.

So why is this such a big policy goal for Mr. Macron?

Well, if you look at OECD countries, France actually has the lowest, one of the lowest retirement ages anywhere. People retire at the age of 62 legally, but in fact, in reality, they retire even younger. So you have people who live to a very good age in France. They have high longevity, but spend one of the longest periods in retirement. So it's extremely costly to the French state. Public pensions are generous. And President Macron has said this time and time again since he's been elected president.

This is a kind of reform that has, well, has unseated presidents and prime ministers before. How is Mr. Macron going about it differently?

Well, I think that he's found the whole Giles Jaune protest movement quite sobering in the sense that he can't just dictate a reform and expect the French to buy into it. So this time he's sitting down with each of the union bosses, or at least his prime minister is, and talking to them, putting a lot of options, different options on the table. At the moment, there is no guaranteed outcome, but the idea is to talk through, to talk to the different options about whether the pension aid should be raised or shouldn't be raised and how to go about doing that, including to people like the leader of the cfdt, which is one of the biggest unions in France and whose leader is Laurent Berger.

What is sure is that to set 64 at the age at which everyone can receive a full pension penalizes everyone who started working young. It penalizes people who might otherwise have retired with a full pension from 62 years old. It's unfair. It's unfair to set the same age for everyone.

You mentioned the Gilets Jean protests, which have clearly become the sort of defining feature of Mr. Macron's presidency. Do you think that sort of picking at this extremely sore topic among the French people can sort of re. Excite the animus that all of those protests represented?

Well, it's certainly a risk that there will be both union protests, strikes of some sort, but also possibly the sort of civil unrest that we saw a year ago with the Gillet Jean protests. At the same time, you know, the approach by President Macron this time is precisely a response to those protests. So it could be that by bringing in unions, talking, discussing, putting all the options on the table first, that that could be a way of defusing the protests and keeping at least a sort of a lid on the worst sort of unrest that we've seen in France.

But what chance do you think there is that this really sets off protests of the sort that we've seen late last year, early this year?

Well, there's clearly a risk of unrest at any time in France. France is a very theatrical country, and protests hold. Have a very tight hold on the French imagination. It was extraordinary, the scenes we witnessed at the end of last year, at the beginning of this year. At the same time, President Macron has changed his tone. He was very much perceived as sort of arrogant, imposing reform from the top a year ago, and now he's more willing to listen. He's trying to set things going by talking. So that could be a way in which he is able to at least sort of contain the protests and avoid a repeat of what we saw a year ago.

I mean, I don't know about you, Sophie, but I don't expect to be able to retire at 62 yet. This is very much a sore point for the French people. Why is it so hard to take on this issue in France?

Well, I think that, you know, the French state is a generous state. It's not just generous about pensions, it's generous about unemployment benefits. It's generous about provisions of nursery education. I mean, it's a state. And the French believes very strongly that that's what their state is for. It's part of French culture, it's tradition, it's French history. And therefore, the idea that suddenly you're going to take away what's considered a sort of a right to retire at 62 is considered an affront in some respects, I think. And if you look at polling, you'll find that the French really are against the idea by a large majority of raising the retirement age. So although the French have one of the longest ages or the longest periods spent in retirement because of longevity. The French don't want those pension age to be raised and find that very difficult to accept.

And so if he's going to tackle this sensitive topic, do you think he kind of gets a boost for his recent foreign successes or diplomacy successes? Do you think that counts towards some goodwill from the people?

I think you've seen a recent upturn in the President's fortunes in the polls partly because of success abroad. And the French like it when their President represents France well. But ultimately, you know, his success or otherwise will be determined by whether or not he can turn France round and give people a feeling that he's reforming France for the better. And that, in a way, is what we're really going to see tested this autumn in France.

Sophie, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Last month, billionaire industrialist David Koch, one of the famed Koch brothers, passed away. Together with his brother Charles, he built Koch Industries into the second largest private company in America. Their sprawling business interests encompass fossil fuels and chemicals, among other things. And they've used their vast wealth to influence American politics. Charles and David Koch are trying to buy America.

They have the money to try and do just that.

They launched the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and supported the Tea Party movement.

You didn't let big government loving professional politicians and the complicit left wing lamestream media tell you to sit down and shut up instead.

No, you didn't retreat. And they pushed the Republican Party ever farther to the right to pursue their libertarian agenda. Their political lobbying Network employs some 1200 people, three times the size of the Republican National Committee. One of their key causes was sowing doubt about the science behind climate change. Sea levels are rising and so are we. The Koch's want Americans to believe that.

Climate change is a conspiracy.

Despite the global scientific consensus that climate.

Change is caused by burning fossil fuels.

Why would they want to cast doubt on scientific fact? Because the Koch brothers sell and burn.

Fossil fuels for a living and they.

Believe protecting our environment is bad for their bottom line.

They're strongly against regulation, especially of their own industry, and they have become increasingly ambitious and aggressive in their political activity.

James Astell writes Lexington, our column about American affairs.

And they've also launched lots of sort of related political endeavors to push their ideas into the political mainstream. And that's especially evident in their now decades long campaign to spread climate skepticism in academia, the media, and especially in American politics.

So tell me about that campaign to spread climate skepticism. How have the Koch brothers shifted the course of the climate change debate over the years.

Let's take it back to the early 90s when there was a non controversial bipartisan consensus between Republicans and Democrats that mainstream climate science was persuasive, that this was a problem that needed a response, that the externalities that pollution in the form of greenhouse gases was not being addressed by the market and those externalities needed to be priced and paid for by the polluters. Very early on in 1991, when George Bush senior as president suggested that he would take steps to reduce Americans carbon emissions, the Koch brothers started organizing climate skeptical forums, think tanks, to inject doubt into the way that the political mainstream was digesting the scientific consensus on climate change. They proceeded to set up more and more and fund more and more climate change skeptical groups, think tanks, academics, and at the same time pressured individual politicians, especially through their campaign financing, to take extreme climate skeptical positions and to rule out any pricing of carbon emissions, any effort to mitigate carbon emissions. They are not solely responsible for the spread of climate change skepticism on the right in America. The nature of partisanship suggests that the consensus might have broken down anyway, as it has on most other issues. But it's fair to say that the Koch brothers were the single biggest accelerant of that process. They have done more to spread skepticism about climate change than certainly any other individuals in America.

Do you think it's possible to draw a direct line between the brothers themselves and the climate skeptics, for example, that are in the current Trump administration?

You can absolutely draw a straight line. The Koch brothers were the main architects of a lavishly corporate funded climate skeptical machine which the Trump administration absolutely reflects and represents the extent to which the Trump administration has simply put industrial lobbyists for energy firms in particular into running the Environmental Protection Agency with the single minded aim of dismantling the existing climate change regulation. American had reflects that. The Koch brothers have a mixed relationship with the Trump administration. It has broken with their agenda in certain ways, but when it comes to its environmental policy, it could have been written by the Koch brothers.

And more broadly than that, beyond the current administration. A big part of the Republican Party is in some sense an embodiment of the Koch brothers ideology. Do you think the two are kind of in inseparable now?

It's a complicated picture because what the Koch brothers did was move the Republican intelligentsia much further to the right on a range of anti government stands towards entitlement spending, for example, than Republican voters wanted their party to go. Donald Trump's single great insight Was this, this imbalance between the established Republican Party, the intelligentsia, the elected officials themselves, and most Republican voters who didn't want to lose their entitlements, which the Koch brothers had lobbied for.

But what about more broadly still about this dynamic that's going on, the influence of extremely rich people and their ability to kind of tip the scales of ideology. Is there a lesson to be drawn here about the way American democracy works?

Wealthy individuals have often played a very significant role in American democracy. American democracy is so enduringly tolerant of concentrations of power, is so blithe about extreme wealth. The economy is geared towards the amassing of fortunes and the democracy itself is so sort of diffuse and multi layered that there's tremendous amount of potential for rich people to play a political role in this way. Even if campaign finance reform happened, there would still be many, many opportunities for rich people to play a role in shaping policy or changing public op. So I think that to the degree that America is blighted by plutocracy, that will continue.

And I suppose it's worth remembering that there is still a surviving Koch brother. Do you believe that David's death will affect the influence that the family machinery now wields?

There is indeed a surviving Koch brother at Koch Industries. That's Charles Koch, David's elder brother. And Charles is really the mastermind of the enormous success of the family business, but also of the political campaigns that the brothers were architects of. Supporters of David, to a certain extent, was the most public face of that effort, but not the genius behind it. And I think it's absolutely clear that Charles Koch will continue with his political efforts. He's certainly unswerving in his political convictions.

Thank you very much for joining us, James.

Thank you very much.

Between 1966 and 1996, the French government conducted nearly 200 nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean, including on the atoll of Mororoa. In the 1980s, members of a fledgling organization called Greenpeace took to the seas in protest. Among them was Steve Sawyer, who would go on to lead and ultimately transform the group.

Steve Sawyer had gone on shore, this was on the 10th of July, 1985, went on shore because it was his birthday and he was going to have a celebration with the crew.

And Roe is a obituaries editor.

The Rainbow Warrior, his own boat, had gone to New Zealand in company of a lot of other little boats and they were all going to go out to Murawa to protest against the French nuclear testing. And it was when he was on shore at about 1am he suddenly heard the News that the Rainbow Warrior had been sunk. So he went back to the dock and found that a huge hole had been blown in the side of it. It was capsized in the water.

Explosives experts will today continue.

The bombs were sophisticated devices.

He heard that the ship's photographer had drowned, trying to go back and get his gear.

His body was later found in the hull of the boat. But right now they're still mourning for.

Their dead colleague who went down with the vessel.

He was in such a state of shock that he could hardly. This might have happened, but he began to piece things together. And then he recalled that there had been this chap on deck who he thought was a student, a rather short, slight guy with light blonde hair, who had seemed rather friendly and had wished him a good voyage and a great campaign and wished him a happy birthday. But then Steve Sawyer put two and two together and realized that this man had actually been helping to distract him while French Secret Service agents had been planting limpet bombs on the hull of the Rainbow Warrior. The first effect of it was total shock, obviously, for him and the crew, and he felt it was a great disaster. But then the next day, as he tried to get everything together, he found that everyone was treating him as a hero. And when he stood in line in the bank, people made sure he went to the front. And he realized what had happened was that this had got on the news, and people were so appalled by it that suddenly they wanted to help Greenpeace. And so the bombing, although it had seemed a disaster at the time, was actually the making of Greenpeace. His history with Greenpeace was quite strange, in a way. He'd come out of university, was just wondering what to do, and somebody knocked on the door. It turned out to be a canvasser from Greenpeace and said, would you give a donation? Steve Sawyer was a fairly impetuous chap, and he just said, I'll do more than give you a donation. I'll sign up.

I'm Steve Sawyer, and I've worked with Greenpeace out of the Boston office. I hail from New Hampshire. You are your brother's keeper. You have a moral obligation. When you see something your brother is doing which is not beneficial to him and the rest of society, then you have an obligation to confront him.

The reason he joined was partly that he liked their causes, Also the fact that they were working a lot with boats. He'd long enjoyed sailing, and so if he joined up, he would be able to take a boat out on the ocean and make trouble. His childhood Readings came into that too, because his favorite book of all, in fact it was his Bible, and he read it again all through every year, was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. He was very moved by the idea that a small band, not very rich, not perhaps very strong, could win great triumphs over all sorts of dark forces. They were moving through a hostile landscape, living purely by their wits. And he was thinking of himself as one of the band. In fact, his followers, rather than seeing him as a Hobbit, saw him more as Gandalf, because he was keeping everyone in line. And actually a towering. He was very tall, but a towering figure of authority to them all. The other effect of this sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was that it promoted him within Greenpeace, so that a year afterwards he was made the head of Greenpeace USA, and a year after that, 1988, he became the head of Greenpeace International. So he was in charge of the whole institution, the whole organization. This was exactly what Greenpeace needed, because up to that point it had been a rather hippie collection of individuals, rather anarchic in a way. The Greenpeace he left in 2007, when he stepped down, was a tremendously influential and well organized institution on the world stage and had managed to achieve all kinds of things. The end of nuclear testing, the end of toxic waste dumping. And then came perhaps the most important one of all, which was the antarctic protocol in 1991, which banned all mining and drilling in the continent for 50 years.

And I sincerely hope that future historians will identify this day as a turning point towards the development of a global awareness that we, as a species, we must go about the business of life on this planet as if there was a tomorrow to be concerned about. Ann ro on Steve Sawyer, who has died aged 63. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.