It is all too clear why the commoners across the globe have lost faith in the men and the institutions that are supposed to provide clarity, sound assurances and leadership during troubled times. Take the case of the European Union.
Debt-burned countries are imploding. The prescription of austerity and more austerity has failed to revive their dying economies – or at the very least nudge them into basic survival. Greece, the country where democracy first found its roots, is the shakiest country in the Union.
What happened to Greece is about to spread out to Italy, Europe’s third largest economy. Spain and Portugal, once rivals for the title of world’s greatest colonizer, are stuck in a milder form of economic malaise but clearly threatening. Ireland, trumpeted as an economic miracle just a few years back, is on that same leaking boat.
France is not safe from getting hit by these tsunami of financial troubles as well. In short, we have a Union that has only two options: do the right remedies, or perish.
Yet, as many observers have pointed out, Jean-Claude Trichet, who just resigned as European Central Bank president a few days ago, had refused to intervene to help the troubled economies stabilize their debts and their economies. It refused to carry out aggressive monetary easing and act as lender of last resort to the debt-burned economies.
Trichet saw his central banking role for the context of inflation-fighting and exclusively from what his critics called his “ monochromatic “ view of central banking. Much of Europe has been laid to financial waste by the policies of ECB under Trichet. And all the chaos and disarray in the Union right now–they are all a repudiation of Trichet’s obsession with fighting inflation.
Alan Greenspan, the failed “Maestro” did the same thing across the Atlantic. As head of the Federal Reserve, he failed to acknowledge the bad behavior and recklessness of the financial services sector. The efficient markets that he trusted so much were simply too much for the overweening greed and the impossible cluelessness of its supposed highly-credentialed quants and financial seers.
It is getting much worse. The Republican Party, which has a more than better chance of capturing the White House in next year’s presidential election, wants the country to go back to the time of Jefferson Davis and slavery.
Of course, today is the Great Reckoning in the Arab World. Gaddafi is dead and gone. Mubarak is on trial. The Assads of Syria will fall next. Even in the formerly immovable bastions of Wahabism, the kings and their potentates are beginning to relax their authoritarian regimes and slowly lifting the proverbial burqas.
No leader in the Arab world is in an oasis of peace. The mammoth palaces where the kings and the dictators live are now considered endangered areas.
The epic failure of leadership in many parts of the world – and the tumult and the turbulence that have resulted from it - does not make countries like ours, so far safe from the tremors, the new oasis of calm and political stability.
Ok, there is no OWS here that is laying siege to the financial capital. Armed rebel groups out to topple the government or out to secede their regions to create a new nation-state, are still too far from the capital. There is no financial meltdown to worry about. The president, according to the polling entities, still enjoys popular support. But the marginal status of rebel groups and the absence of the popular protests do not at all suggest that the people have a leadership they respect. And the institutions that will act as safe harbors during troubled times.
If you look at the distribution of wealth and income in the country, it is just unjust as the economic divide in the troubled countries. While the Philippine political leadership and the economic elite (which has been one and the same grouping from time immemorial), is not as isolated and loathed as in the political leadership and economic elite in the troubled countries, it is not a real presence in the lives of ordinary Filipinos.
The decent trust rating of the president is a rating for a president who has lived up to keep the integrity component of his campaign plank. Strip away the integrity factor, the current president is just like the others: the powerful but uncaring leader at the Palace.
Even the integrity component is not a life-changing thing. When less than 1 percent of the population has more than 30 percent of the yearly income (or even more), very little goes to the 99 percent and there is no real economic dynamism except in the realms and domains of the super wealthy. What keeps the peace at the community level is a core of industrious OFWs spread out in countries that hire overseas workers openly—and those that recruit illegally like work sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is their remittance that is pumping the economic veins of the country. It is their spending that further enriches the super rich, the interlocking conglomerates that own much of the country’s wealth and resources. The OFW families function as the center, in the absence of a genuine one.
In the areas where the government is totally absent and not reached by the dynamism of the OFW spending, there is nothing for the people. There are no NGOs, there are no CSR people either.
What they have are the likes of Fr. Fausto Tentorio, dedicated missionaries who spend their lives caring for those who cannot take care of themselves. But very often, the Fr. Tentorios of the world run into trouble with what stands for government: cold-blooded militias predisposed to kill, especially the men doing the noble work not done by the elite.
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