Reckoning

Monday 13 October 2008

by: Laurent Joffrin, Libération

"... violent, cruel and revealing, the financial crisis clearly reminds us where the legitimacy of our modern democracies is located. Most assuredly not - in any case - in the realm of the economy and finance, but in the realm of the political." (Art: Social Political Assemblage by John Robertson)

We still don't know how much the rescue plan discussed in a whirling water wheel of international meetings over the weekend will cost. Even less do we know whether it will suffice to return confidence to a banking system totally incapable of saving itself and the leaders of which seem dissolved in their own panic. But we do know one thing: violent, cruel and revealing, the financial crisis clearly reminds us where the legitimacy of our modern democracies is located. Most assuredly not - in any case - in the realm of the economy and finance, but in the realm of the political. Every day that goes by shows us that banking is much too serious a thing to be left to bankers. Haggard, disheveled, pale as death, the leaders of the global financial system desperately call for rescue from the very governments they so long affected to hold in suspicion, that they regarded with a barely disguised condescension as entities ineffective by their very nature. At the hour of the storm, only those in possession of democratic legitimacy are able to resolve the crisis, if they still can. Because they have the citizens' consent and - an important detail - because they can raise the additional taxes that the incompetence of the masters of finance will not fail to give rise to. The hour of reckoning will come later. The cost of this rescue is already numbering in the hundreds of billions: that is, in thousands of Euros for every European citizen. Such a drain, caused by banks' irresponsibility, cannot remain without consequences for their structure - or for their bosses.

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Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.

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